Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

by Jane Austen; Ben H. Winters

  At breakfast Marianne neither ate nor attempted to eat anything; her packets of tea powder and scone-and-jam-flavoured food loaf sat unopened on the table before her. They were just setting themselves in, after breakfast, round the common working table, when a letter was delivered to Marianne, which she eagerly caught from the servant, and, turning of a death-like paleness, instantly ran out of the room. Elinor knew that it must come from Willoughby, and she felt immediately such a sickness at heart as made her hardly able to hold up her head, and sat in such a general tremor as made her fear it impossible to escape Mrs. Jennings’s notice. But that good lady, much distracted by Elinor’s detailed description of the mutant lobsters who had set upon them at Hydra-Z, saw only that Marianne had received a letter from Willoughby, which appeared to her a very good joke, and which she treated accordingly, by hoping, with a laugh, that she would find it to her liking.

  “Upon my word, I never saw a young woman so desperately in love in my life! My girls were foolish enough, running after this or that young princeling or shaman, until the day when Sir John’s adventuring party dragged us all away in sacks.” Here she laughed and then sighed with amused nostalgia before picking up the thread of her comment. “But as for Miss Marianne, she is quite an altered creature. I hope, from the bottom of my heart, he won’t keep her waiting much longer, for it is quite grievous to see her look so ill and forlorn. Pray, when are they to be married?”

  Elinor, though never less disposed to speak than at that moment, obliged herself to answer. “And have you really, Ma’am, talked yourself into a persuasion of my sister’s being engaged to Mr. Willoughby? I thought it had been only a joke, but so serious a question seems to imply more. I do assure you that nothing would surprise me more than to hear of their going to be married. If you had told me yesterday that monster-lobsters would rise from their pool and attempt to slay everyone present, I could not have found the notion more surprising—though obviously today I know differently.”

  “For shame, for shame, Miss Dashwood! How can you talk so? Don’t we all know that it must be a match, that they were in love with each other from the first moment they met? Did not I see them together in Devonshire every day, and all day long, dancing jigs and singing shanties and carrying on? And did not I know that your sister came to the Sub-Station with me on purpose to buy wedding clothes at the Retail Embankment’s most fashionable shops? Come, come, this won’t do. Because you are so sly about it yourself, you think nobody else has any senses; but it is no such thing, I can tell you, for it has been known all over the Station ever so long. I tell every body of it and so does Charlotte.”

  “Indeed, Ma’am,” said Elinor, very seriously, “you are mistaken. Indeed, you are doing a very unkind thing in spreading the report.”

  Mrs. Jennings laughed again, but Elinor had not spirits to say more, and eager at all events to know what Willoughby had written, hurried away to their room, where, on opening the door, she saw Marianne stretched on the bed, almost choked by grief, one letter in her hand, and two or three others laying by her. Elinor drew near, but without saying a word; and seating herself on the bed, took her hand, kissed her affectionately several times, and then gave way to a burst of tears, which at first was scarcely less violent than Marianne’s. The latter, though unable to speak, put all the letters into Elinor’s hands; and then covering her face with her handkerchief, almost screamed with agony. A school of minnows observed her pitilessly from the other side of the glass. Elinor watched by her till this excess of suffering had somewhat spent itself, and then turning eagerly to Willoughby’s letter, read as follows:

  Bond Causeway, January.

  MY DEAR MADAM,

  I have just had the honour of receiving your letter, for which I beg to return my sincere acknowledgments. I trust that you and your sister survived the crustaceous uprising unharmed, and are safely returned to your docking. I am much concerned to find there was anything in my behaviour last night that did not meet your approbation; if I should have offered you some measure of protection from the clawing onslaught, I regret that in the panic I was unable to do so. I shall never reflect on my former acquaintance with your family off the coast of Devonshire without the most grateful pleasure. My esteem for your whole family is very sincere; but if I have been so unfortunate as to give rise to a belief of more than I felt, or meant to express, I shall reproach myself for not having been more guarded in my professions of that esteem. That I should ever have meant more you will allow to be impossible, when you understand that my affections have been long engaged elsewhere, and it will not be many weeks, I believe, before this engagement is fulfilled. This treasure hunter has found that treasure which is most sought, and soon I am to dig it up. It is with great regret that I obey your commands in returning the letters with which I have been honoured from you, and the lock of hair, which you so obligingly bestowed on me.

  I am, dear Madam,

  Your most obedient

  humble servant,

  JOHN WILLOUGHBY.

  It may be imagined with what indignation this letter was read by Miss Dashwood. Though aware, before she began it, that it must confirm their separation forever, she was not aware that such language could be suffered to announce it; nor could she have supposed Willoughby capable of departing so far from the appearance of every honourable and delicate feeling—so far from the common decorum of a gentleman, as to send a letter so impudently cruel: a letter which acknowledged no breach of faith, denied all peculiar affection whatever—a letter of which every line was an insult, and which proclaimed its writer to be deep in hardened villainy.

  She paused over it for some time with indignant astonishment; then read it again and again; but every perusal only served to increase her abhorrence of the man. She dared not trust herself to speak, lest she might wound Marianne still deeper by treating their disengagement, not as a loss to her of any possible good but as an escape from the worst and most irremediable of all evils. To have been engaged to such a man was like falling under a curse more grave even than the one afflicting Colonel Brandon; to have the engagement broken was to see the curse lifted in a stroke.

  On hearing the splash of oars outside, Elinor went to the front window to see who could be coming so unreasonably early. She was astonished to perceive Mrs. Jennings’s regal, swan-drawn gondola being made ready, though she knew it had not been ordered till one. Determined not to quit Marianne, though hopeless of contributing to her ease, she hurried away to excuse herself from attending Mrs. Jennings, on account of her sister being indisposed; she explained that Marianne had an aeroembolism, as the excuse most likely to be believed. Mrs. Jennings, with a thoroughly good-humoured disbelief in the origin of Marianne’s indisposition, admitted the excuse most readily; and Elinor, after seeing her safe off, returned to Marianne, whom she found attempting to rise from the bed, and whom she reached just in time to prevent her from falling on the floor, faint and giddy from a long want of proper rest and food. A glass of lukewarm water, mixed with a wine flavouring packet, which Elinor procured for her directly, made her more comfortable, and she was at last able to express some sense of her kindness.

  “Poor Elinor!” she said. “How unhappy I make you!”

  “I only wish,” replied her sister, “there were anything I could do, which might be of comfort to you.”

  Marianne could only exclaim, “Oh! Elinor, I am miserable, indeed,” before her voice was entirely lost in sobs.

  Just then the minnows which had been silently observing Marianne’s grief from outside the glass were consumed in one gulp by a passing marlin.

  “Exert yourself, dear Marianne,” Elinor cried. “Think of your mother; think of her misery while you suffer. For her sake you must exert yourself.”

  “I cannot, I cannot!” cried Marianne. “Leave me, leave me, if I distress you; leave me, hate me, forget me! Drown me in the all-consuming sea! Let my bones calcify with the passing centuries and be turned to coral! But do not torture me so. Happy, happy Elin
or, you cannot have an idea of what I suffer.”

  “Have you no comforts? No friends? Is your loss such as leaves no opening for consolation? Much as you suffer now, think of what you would have suffered if the discovery of his character had been delayed to a later period—if your engagement had been carried on for months and months, as it might have been, before he chose to put an end to it. Every additional day of unhappy confidence, on your side, would have made the blow more dreadful.”

  “Engagement!” cried Marianne. “There has been no engagement.”

  “No engagement!”

  “No, he is not so unworthy as you believe him. He has broken no faith with me.”

  “But he told you that he loved you.”

  “Yes—no—never. It was every day implied, but never professedly declared. Sometimes I thought it had been—but it never was.”

  “Yet you wrote to him?”

  “Yes—could that be wrong after all that had passed?”

  Elinor turned again to the three letters and directly ran over the contents of all. The first, which was what her sister had sent him on their arrival in town, was to this effect:

  Berkeley Causeway, January.

  How surprised you will be, Willoughby, on receiving this; and I think you will feel something more than surprise, when you know that I have Descended into the Station. An opportunity of coming hither, though with Mrs. Jennings, was a temptation we could not resist. I wish you may receive this in time to come here to-night, but I will not depend on it. At any rate I shall expect you to-morrow. For the present, adieu.

  M. D.

  Her second note, which had been written on the morning after the pirate-themed amusement at the Middletons’, was in these words:

  I cannot express my disappointment in having missed you the day before yesterday, nor my astonishment at not having received any answer to a note which I sent you above a week ago. I have been expecting to hear from you, and still more to see you, every hour of the day. Pray call again as soon as possible, and explain the reason of my having expected this in vain. Such is the behaviour not of a gentleman, but of a rank scallywag. I have been told that you were asked to be of the pirate party, and Sir John even would have lent you a cutlass and pegleg for adornment. But could it be so? You must be very much altered indeed since we parted, if that could be the case, and you not there. But I will not suppose this possible, and I hope very soon to receive your personal assurance of its being otherwise.

  M. D.

  The contents of her last note to him were these:

  What am I to imagine, Willoughby, by your behaviour last night? Again I demand an explanation of it, and I will not accept the lobster attack as an excuse. I was prepared to meet you with the pleasure which our separation naturally produced, with the familiarity which our intimacy at Barton Cottage appeared to me to justify. I was repulsed indeed! I have passed a wretched night in endeavouring to excuse a conduct which can scarcely be called less than insulting; but though I have not yet been able to form any reasonable apology for your behaviour, I am perfectly ready to hear your justification of it. It would grieve me indeed to think ill of you; but if I am to do it, if I am to learn that your behaviour to me was intended only to deceive, let it be told as soon as possible. I wish to acquit you, but certainty on either side will be ease to what I now suffer. If your sentiments are no longer what they were, you will return my notes, and the lock of my hair which is in your possession.

  M. D.

  Elinor lowered the letter and reflected on its contents, whilst a swordfish began to tap softly against the Dome-glass. She would have been unwilling to believe that such letters, so full of affection and confidence, could have been answered as Willoughby had done.

  “I felt myself,” Marianne said, “to be solemnly engaged to him, as if the strictest legal covenant had bound us to each other.”

  “I can believe it,” said Elinor, “but unfortunately he did not feel the same.”

  “He did feel the same, Elinor—for weeks and weeks he felt it. I know he did!” The swordfish rapped ardently, punctuating the passion of Marianne’s outburst. “Have you forgotten the last evening of our being together at Barton Cottage? The morning that we parted too! When he told me that it might be many weeks before we met again—his distress— can I ever forget his distress? The shocked and saddened expression behind the portcullis of his diving helmet!”

  For a moment or two Marianne could say no more; but when this emotion had passed away, she added, in a firmer tone, “I have been cruelly used, but not by Willoughby.”

  “Dearest Marianne, who but himself? By whom can he have been instigated?”

  “By all the world! I would rather believe every creature of my acquaintance leagued together to ruin me in his opinion, than believe his nature capable of such cruelty. This woman of whom he writes—whoever she be—must have somehow ensorcelled him—to alter his inclinations and turn his affection from me.”

  Again they were both silent. Elinor paced back and forth, watching idly as a cod gobbled up a mass of cockles, and then was consumed in its turn by an orca; all the while, the swordfish tapped continually against the glass. For some reason, its persistent presence connected itself in Elinor’s mind with the rampaging lobsters—but, before she could ponder what association there might be, Marianne again took up Willoughby’s letter and exclaimed, “I must go home. I must go and comfort Mama. Can we not Ascend to-morrow and hire some convenient submersible or submarine to take us home?”

  “To-morrow, Marianne!”

  “Why should I stay here? I came only for Willoughby’s sake—and now who cares for me? Who regards me?”

  “It would be impossible to go to-morrow. Civility of the commonest kind must prevent such a hasty removal as that.”

  “Well then, another day or two, perhaps; but I cannot stay here long, I cannot stay to endure the questions and remarks of all these people. The Middletons and Palmers—how am I to bear their pity?”

  Elinor advised Marianne to lie down again, and for a moment she did so; but no attitude could give her ease; and in restless pain of mind and body she moved from one posture to another, till growing more and more hysterical, her sister could with difficulty keep her on the bed at all. Neither, absorbed in Marianne’s grief, noticed the tiny crack in the glass that had been the fruit of the swordfish’s relentless exertions, nor the tiny cartilaginous grin it wore as it swam away.

  CHAPTER 30

  MRS. JENNINGS CAME IMMEDIATELY to their room on her return.

  “How do you do, my dear?” said she in a voice of great compassion to Marianne, who turned away her face without answering. “Rashes? Joint pain? Itching?” she inquired, naming some of the symptoms often attending to aeroembolism—though she knew well that Marianne’s trouble was one of the heart, not one caused by the precipitation of dissolved bubbles within the body accompanying rapid compression or decompression.

  “Poor thing!” Mrs. Jennings continued. “She looks very bad. No wonder. Aye, it is but too true. He is to be married very soon—a good-for-nothing scoundrel! I have no patience with him. Mrs. Taylor told me of it half an hour ago, and she was told it by a particular friend of Miss Grey herself, else I am sure I should not have believed it. I wish with all my soul his wife may be like a tapeworm to him: May she dwell symbiotically in the digestive tract of his existence, consuming all joy, causing him writhing pain at odd intervals, until she is finally defecated out. And so I shall always say, my dear, you may depend on it; I love to repeat a parasite metaphor, once I first have invented it. But there is one comfort, my dear Miss Marianne; he is not the only young man in the world; and with your pretty face, strong back, and noticeable lung capacity, you will never want admirers.”

  She then went away, walking on tiptoe out of the room, as if she supposed her young friend’s affliction could be increased by noise.

  Marianne, to the surprise of her sister, determined on dining that night with Mrs. Jennings and her guests. When t
here, though looking most wretchedly, she managed to choke down several cubes of rack-of-lamb paste, and was calmer than Elinor had expected. Mrs. Jennings saw that Marianne was unhappy, and felt that everything was due to her which might make her less so. She treated her with all the indulgent fondness of a parent towards a favourite child on the last day of its holidays. Marianne was to have the best seat, looking right out at the Dome-glass, and to be amused by the relation of all the news of the day. There had been news of a particularly dramatic shipwreck, in which a fully outfitted French frigate was beset by a tempest and capsized in the shark-infested waters off eastern Tasmania; Mrs. Jennings relayed the tale to Marianne with particular zest, acting out the terrified “mon dieu!”s and “aidez-moi!”s of the sailors as they were surrounded by the befinned man-consumers. But soon Marianne could stay no longer. With a sign to her sister not to follow her, she directly got up and hurried out of the room.

  “Poor soul!” cried Mrs. Jennings, as soon as she was gone, “Never have I known of spirits so low they could not be raised by hearing of a Frenchman eaten by a shark! I am sure if I knew of anything she would like, I would send all over the Sub-Marine Station for it. And this weekend brings new exhibits at the Aqua-Museo-Quarium: Harbour seals that have been made to grow sideburns! Clownfish dancing the tarantella! But it seems nothing will cheer her! Well, it is the oddest thing to me, that a man should use such a pretty girl so ill! But when there is plenty of money on one side, and next to none on the other, Lord bless you! They care no more about such things!”