Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

by Jane Austen; Ben H. Winters

  THE LEVIATHAN LOOKED THIS WAY AND THAT, ITS GARGANTUAN EYES ROLLING WILDLY.

  The whole fearsome head lifted itself from the water, and a pair of huge rolling eyes, surveyed the horizon line; two barbed and scaly claws, each as big as a battleship, set to thrashing about in the water. The Leviathan looked this way and that, its gargantuan eyes rolling wildly, as a blast of steam shot upwards from the blowhole on the very crest of its head—what Elinor now realised they had called Mount Margaret for all these many months. The whole head was dotted here and there with flexing, viscous gill-like slits and holes; it was one such gill-set, she thought, where she and Marianne had sat and talked last of Willoughby, where she had watched the mist roll in and out of the pond, one minute facet of the massive operation of the Thing’s respiratory system. The pool had not seemed to breathe, it did breathe.

  As she watched, the Leviathan brought one gigantic claw down into the water, scooped up a school of monstrous tuna, each one as big as a cow, and tossed them into its maw like peanuts.

  The island was awake, and it was hungry.

  Elinor swam. She swam as fast as she could, kicking and paddling, setting her eyes for Allenham, the next island in the chain, though she knew it to be four miles, and too far a swim for her to make; and could not she hope to outswim the creature that, simply by outstretching its gigantic front claw, could scoop her up in an instant.

  Where were her mother and Marianne? Had the Leviathan already consumed them, like it had those tuna? And where was her dearest Edward?

  On she swam, banishing all thoughts, thinking only of breathing, of swimming—of survival.

  What a rapid turn of events this day had wrought! First, that great change which a few hours had wrought in the minds and the happiness of the Dashwoods! And now this—a race for life, to stay ahead of the sleep-hungered Leviathan that once had been her home.

  On she swam, until her arms grew tired and her head grew heavy; the impossibility of her task weighed on her as much as her heavy woolen frock; she would never make it. With despair she began to feel a powerful tidal pull beneath her—though there was no undertow, not out here, miles from shore. Glancing back over her shoulder she confirmed her fear: The monster had brought its snout down to the water line and opened its mouth, and was simply sucking in sea-water. The water was rushing into its insatiable mouth, and dragging Elinor with it. She fought the undertow with all her ability; she kicked furiously, battling the tidal force with all the strength in her body.

  “That’s it!” shouted a voice. “Those are the calves I love!”

  She turned her head, raised it from the water, and beheld her dear Edward, swimming beside her. He held out his hand to her, and she hers to him; just by touching, their energies combined, and each felt their individual power increase. They swam that way, as one swimmer, stroking simultaneous, towards the safety of the schooner.

  A schooner? Indeed—for here was Mr. Benbow, with the familiar scowling face and feathers tied in his beard, calling from the prow of the Rusted Nail!

  “Ahoy!” he called, as his mates appeared; there was Mr. Palmer and One-Eyed Peter and Two-Eyed Scotty and gentle Billy Rafferty—and even Mrs. Palmer, laughing cheerily with babe in arms. The crew lustily cheered Elinor and Edward forward, urging them on with foulmouthed piratic exhortations. In a moment the pair pulled free of the monster’s tidal force; in another instant they were climbing the ropes and ladder tossed from the bow, and were aboard the schooner.

  “Hard to port, Peter!” called Mr. Benbow. “Hard to port and steady as you go. We must escape this island-turned-fiend, or we’ll all be swimming in its dank digestive juices by sunset!”

  Marianne, Mrs. Dashwood, and the rest had already been plucked from the sea, and in a quarter hour’s time, they had sailed clear of the Devonshire coast and the Leviathan. All were wrapped in blankets, seated with cups of hot grog on the fo’c’sle of the Rusted Nail, listening to Mr. Palmer’s solemn-voice explanation of what they had just witnessed.

  “What my wife insists on calling drollery,” said he, “and what others call bitterness or dyspepsia, I can call what it is in truth: The kind of desperate soul-deep melancholia that comes from having looked into the dark eye of time and seen the darkest secrets of the earth.

  “It was on a sea journey, some half dozen years after I left His Majesty’s service to go adventuring with Sir John and his crew, in search of whatever tribal curse it was that affected the Alteration. We ran aground on a patch of rock several hundred nautical miles north-northwest of the Tasmanian shore. There we lived for fourteen terrible months, sacked out on rocks, under makeshift tents we stitched from pieces of our ravaged sail; by day we wandered, hunting wolves and apes for food; at night we slept, at constant peril from the lash of the wind and the sting of a thousand different species of mosquito and night crawler.

  “One day I found a cave; from within its depths, I saw a pair of gleaming eyes inside, and heard a queer chanting. Wearied by tedium of our island life, and certain regardless that my life would soon be meeting its end, I saw no risk in venturing after the source of the mystery. And so I decided to explore the cavern—how bitterly I have wished, every subsequent day, that I had decided otherwise!

  “After travelling only a few yards within the cave, I was seized all at once by what felt like a thousand grasping hands and pulled to the dirt floor. The things that assaulted man—for things I was certain they were, merciless beasts, though later I would find that they were men—chanted as they dragged me into the cave-floor, chanted with one horrible voice: K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah! K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah!

  “All the hair was shaved from my body; with bits of flint they filed my teeth to sharpened points. At last I was left alone, naked, trembling and bleeding, with one that acted as the leader. I need not tell you how startled I was when he began to speak in English, though his voice was raspy as if out of practice.”

  Palmer explained that the man was a member of a tribe of subterranean cave-men, who had once dwelt above ground like other human races, but now lived in caverns below the earth’s surface, and worshipped a pantheon of cruel and hidden monster-gods called the K’yaloh. The K’yaloh were an ancient race, older than man, older than beast, older than the Alteration, older than time itself. They laid in slumber, waiting for the day of waking. When they woke, all that we know would be destroyed.

  “K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah,” the leader told Palmer. “Leviathan slumbers, but day will come of wakening.”

  “The tale of my escape, and of my journey home, is long,” Palmer concluded. “But it is not a tale worth telling, because, well, because nothing is worth anything. If I am quiet—if I am droll—it is because since that day, life has held little interest. For how could it—what purpose is there in pursuing the trivial amusements of man?”

  “K’yaloh D’argesh F’ah,” he repeated slowly. “Day will come of wakening.”

  He glanced backwards at their churning wake, back towards the swirling waters where once Pestilent Isle had sat. “Day has come.”

  * * *

  It must be that there is something in the hearts of human beings, some natural fluid perhaps, that insists on happiness, even confronted with the most powerful arguments against it. For having heard Mr. Palmer’s tale, and not doubting its veracity, the Dashwoods continued in their happy excitement at the engagement that had unfolded, just before the Leviathan woke from its ageless slumber. Indeed, Mrs. Dashwood, too happy to be comfortable (and additionally sleeping on One-Eyed Peter’s bunk, which he had gallantly ceded to her) knew not how to love Edward nor praise Elinor enough, how to be enough thankful for his release without wounding his delicacy, nor how at once to give them leisure for unrestrained conversation together, and yet enjoy, as she wished, the sight and society of both.

  Marianne could speak her happiness only by tears. Comparisons would occur—regrets would arise—and her joy, though sincere as her love for her sister, was of a kind to give her neither spir
its nor language. “Arrrgh,” she could only say, taking inspiration from the pirates that surrounded her. “Arrgh.”

  But Elinor—how are her feelings to be described, as she sat on the rear deck of the Rusted Nail, staring back at the open horizon where her home had once been? From the moment of learning that Lucy was married to another, that Edward was free, to the moment when she plunged into the ocean and had to swim as fast as ever she had to keep from becoming monster-food, she was everything by turns but tranquil.

  But when she found every doubt, every solicitude removed, compared her situation with what so lately it had been—saw him honourably released from his former engagement, saw him instantly profiting by the release, to address herself and declare an affection as tender, as constant as she had ever supposed it to be—and then saw how both of them, together, outswam and survived an ancient beast that was as big, literally, as some island nations—she was oppressed, she was overcome by her own felicity— it required several hours to give sedateness to her spirits, or any degree of tranquility to her heart.

  They were aboard the Rusted Nail for a week, in sorting out the details of what would come next for them all, which was felicitous from Elinor’s perspective—for whatever other claims might be made on him, it was impossible that less than a week should be given up to the enjoyment of Elinor’s company, or suffice to say half that was to be said of the past, the present, and the future—for though a very few hours spent in the hard labour of incessant talking will dispatch more subjects than can really be in common between any two rational creatures, yet with lovers it is different. Between them no subject is finished, no communication is even made, till it has been made at least twenty times over. They spoke of the various pirates with whom they were surrounded, they watched the minnows trail happily behind the boat, they wondered at how long the Thing had slumbered, and where it would next lie its massive head, and for how long; when these topics had been exhausted, they began upon them again.

  It was shortly thereafter that Colonel Brandon arrived, swimming swiftly alongside the Rusted Nail and hailing to be allowed aboard, which permission was most expeditiously granted. Edward was delighted, as he really wished not only to be better acquainted with him, but to have an opportunity of convincing him that he no longer resented his giving him the living of Delaford. “Which, at present,” said he, “after thanks so un-graciously delivered as mine were on the occasion, he must think I have never forgiven him for offering.”

  Now he felt astonished himself that he had never yet been to the place. But so little interest had been taken in the matter, that he owed all his knowledge of the lake, the village, and the monsters that menaced it, to Elinor herself, who had heard so much of it from Colonel Brandon, and heard it with so much attention, as to be entirely mistress of the subject.

  One question after this only remained undecided, between them, one difficulty only was to be overcome. They were brought together by mutual affection, with the warmest approbation of their real friends; their intimate knowledge of each other seemed to make their happiness certain—and they only wanted something to live upon. Edward had two thousand pounds, and Elinor one, which, with the Delaford lighthouse, was all that they could call their own; for it was impossible that Mrs. Dashwood should advance anything; and they were neither of them quite enough in love to think that three hundred and fifty pounds a year would supply them with the comforts of life. Edward was not entirely without hopes of some favourable change in his mother towards him; and on that he rested for the residue of their income.

  As for Colonel Brandon, he generally swam alongside the ship for most of the day; and clambered aboard in the morning, early enough to interrupt the lovers’ first tête-à-tête before breakfast.

  A three weeks’ residence at Delaford, where, in his evening hours at least, he had little to do but to calculate the disproportion between six and thirty and seventeen, had brought him aboard the Rusted Nail in a temper of mind which needed all the improvement in Marianne’s looks, all the kindness of her welcome, and all the encouragement of her mother’s language, to make it cheerful.

  It would be needless to say, that the gentlemen advanced in the good opinion of each other, as they advanced in each other’s acquaintance, for it could not be otherwise. Their resemblance in good principles and good sense, in disposition and manner of thinking, would probably have been sufficient to unite them in friendship, without any other attraction; but their being in love with two sisters, and two sisters fond of each other, made that mutual regard inevitable and immediate, which might otherwise have waited the effect of time and judgment. Edward had no judgment against Brandon’s bizarre appearance; he considered it merely an outward affliction analogous to his own inward affliction, that is, his shyness of manner; some are marked within, he reflected, and some without.

  A letter from town, which a few days before would have made every nerve in Elinor’s body thrill with transport, now arrived to be read with less emotion than mirth. Mr. Dashwood’s strains were solemn. Mrs. Ferrars was the most unfortunate of women—poor Fanny had suffered agonies of sensibility—and he considered the existence of each, under such a blow, with grateful wonder. Robert had been consumed bodily on their wedding night. When they had come to the honeymoon suite the morning after the wedding, they had found no Robert whatsoever, only a pile of bones, each cracked in two, with the marrow utterly sucked out. And Lucy sitting atop the gruesome pile, gorged and sated, her eyes glazed with animal delight, cackling lightly to herself; her skin had returned to its original colour, a thorough-going and revolting sea green.

  Even with what occurred, Mrs. Ferrars could not forgive Robert his offense; she only had trouble deciding which sinner to condemn more thoroughly—her son, for marrying a woman with no independent means, or the woman, for eating him. Neither of them were ever again to be mentioned to Mrs. Ferrars; and even, if she might hereafter be induced to forgive her son, his wife should never be acknowledged as his widow, which would prove to be an easy directive with which to comply, for the following day she returned to her undersea cavern, somewhere deep below the Pacific Ocean.

  John concluded that “Mrs. Ferrars has never yet mentioned Edward’s name,” and seemed to suggest, further, that Mrs. Ferrars, now that her eldest had been so horribly dispatched, was inclined to feel a renewed sympathy towards her youngest, who had been so poorly used. This determined Edward to attempt a reconciliation.

  Thus Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon quitted the Rusted Nail together at the coast of Somersetshire. They were to go immediately to Delaford, that Edward might have some personal knowledge of his future home, and assist his patron and friend in deciding on what improvements were needed to it; and from thence, after staying there a couple of nights, he was to proceed on his journey to town.

  CHAPTER 50

  AFTER A PROPER RESISTANCE on the part of Mrs. Ferrars, just so violent and so steady as to preserve her from the reproach of being too amiable, Edward was admitted to her presence and pronounced to be again her son. Her family had of late been exceedingly fluctuating. For many years of her life she had had two sons; but the crime and annihilation of Edward a few weeks ago, had robbed her of one; the literal annihilation of Robert had left her for a fortnight without any; and now, by the resuscitation of Edward, she had one again. Any further resuscitation of Robert was impossible; he was a bag full of broken bones, and even the bag his mother refused to acknowledge.

  In spite of his being allowed once more to live, however, Edward did not feel the continuance of his existence secure, till he had revealed his present engagement; for the publication of that circumstance, he feared, might give a sudden turn to his constitution, and carry him off as rapidly as before. With apprehensive caution, therefore, it was revealed, and he was listened to with unexpected calmness. Mrs. Ferrars at first reasonably endeavoured to dissuade him from marrying Miss Dashwood, by every argument in her power—she told him, that in Miss Morton he would have a woman of higher rank a
nd larger fortune; and enforced the assertion, by observing that Miss Morton was the daughter of a great engineer with thirty thousand pounds, while Miss Dashwood was only the daughter of a private gentleman who had been eaten by a shark; but when she found that, though perfectly admitting the truth of her representation, he was by no means inclined to be guided by it, she judged it wisest, from the experience of the past, to submit—and therefore, after such an ungracious delay as she owed to her own dignity, she issued her decree of consent to the marriage of Edward and Elinor.

  With an income quite sufficient to their wants thus secured to them, they had nothing to wait for after Edward was in possession of the lighthouse; the ceremony took place in the church on Deadwind Island early in the autumn. It was a lovely affair, with a penguin theme; Sir John hosted ably, apologising to the guests for the absence of his wife—whom he so wished might one day come back, that he was known to sit up nights, a cup of rum in hand, staring out the window of the estate, watching the sea for her return.

  Edward and Elinor were visited on their first settling by almost all their relations and friends. Mrs. Ferrars came to inspect the happiness which she was almost ashamed of having authorized; and even the Dashwoods were at the expense of a journey from Sussex to do them honour.

  THE CEREMONY TOOK PLACE ON THE SHORES OF DEADWOOD ISLAND EARLY IN THE AUTUMN.

  “I will not say that I am disappointed, my dear sister,” said John, popping a grub worm in his mouth from the small dirt-filled bag in which he carried them. “That would be saying too much, for certainly you have been one of the most fortunate young women in the world, as it is. But, I confess, it would give me great pleasure to call Colonel Brandon brother. His property here, his place, his house, everything is in such respectable and excellent condition!”