Elephant Man (15 page)

But the strain of holding himself up to the window was becoming intolerable. As the lights began to dim in the corridors he edged backward and began to grope for a way to lower himself to the floor. For a dreadful moment he feared he would lose his balance, fall back, and break his neck, but he managed to steady himself against the wall until first one foot, then the other, touched the floor. Almost at once he fell onto the bed. He was breathing hard but his eyes were triumphant.

He crawled into the comfort of the corner and nestled against the pillows. He felt as close to happiness as he ever had in his life. Treves was kind to him, Treves had promised that he should not be sent back to Bytes, and the other man—Mr. Carr-Gomm—the one Treves treated as important—had said he agreed. Merrick did not believe them; it was so long ago that he had lost hope. But he savored the words, and wondered how long he would be allowed to stay here.

The hospital was growing quiet around him. A distant, hollow clang announced the closing of the iron door that barred the rear. It was almost dark, but there was still enough light for him to do what he did every night when he knew himself securely alone. He strained his ears in the silence, and when he was sure no footsteps were approaching, slipped his left hand into the pockets of the baggy trousers, and brought out a small object he found there.

It was a photograph, battered and creased, but still discernible as the picture of a young woman of extraordinary beauty. From its style it had obviously been taken many years ago. Merrick held it propped
against his drawn up knees and stared desperately at the face of the woman he
knew
, beyond any shadow of doubt, to be his mother.

How he knew with such certainty was lost deep within him. The memories of his babyhood, vague and confused to begin with had, over the years, hardened into sharpness. Now they never varied. There was always the woman with the beautiful face, cradling her baby gently against her, loving him the more for his deformity, having to part with him (he never understood why, but he knew it was for a good reason), promising to return and claim him soon. And the picture that he had possessed as long as he could remember anything, his only pledge of that long-ago promise.

Many times he had tried to look back into the very beginning, to see his mother’s face as he must have seen it then—as though it were imprinted on his mind and by diligent searching he would uncover it. But no memory came to his aid. There was only the picture to remind him, and gradually the printed face had attached itself to his impressions, and when he remembered his mother now it was always with the clear features of the photograph.

He knew—again without knowing how he knew—that his mother had been tragically caught in the path of a stampeding elephant before his birth. She had escaped injury but the creature’s slimy trunk had slithered over her and her horror had been so great that it had communicated itself to the child within her, and he had been born with elephant characteristics. For some reason after that they had been forced to part, and this was a great puzzle to which he returned time and time again, for he knew his mother loved him very much and would not willingly have let him go.

Her failure to return for him he explained easily enough. Ugly as he had been as a child, he knew he had become uglier as he grew, until now he was of a monstrousness that far outstripped his baby deformity.
He knew too that somehow his repellent aspect must be a punishment for some great wickedness. What it had been he could not imagine, but it was so deeply ingrained in him that everybody saw it but himself. And his mother had heard of it, and perhaps blamed him. So she never came back. She was waiting for him to learn to be better. When the time came, she would find him somehow.

As the light failed the picture darkened to nothing, and he slipped it back into his pocket. He wondered if he dared let himself sleep, or if he would be visited again by the bully who had appeared on the two previous nights. He longed to tell Treves and beg that something should be done to protect him, but he did not dare. He trusted Treves, but he did not trust the world. If he mentioned what had happened to him then somehow—he did not exactly know how—somehow the bully would know, and would come for him when Treves was not there. He must just keep quiet and bear it, as he had kept quiet and borne so much in his life.

Within an hour he knew his worst fears were to be fulfilled. The footsteps were heavier this time and approached faster. Renshaw might have been coming on a leisurely sightseeing trip before, but this time he had a deadly purpose. He burst into the room and stood over Merrick, staring at him malevolently.

“I hear you’re ’aving some trouble sleeping,” he said. Then he moved quickly, grabbing Merrick by his thin hair and jerking his head back.

At once Merrick felt himself begin to choke as his supply of air was cut off. He grabbed uselessly at Renshaw with his left hand, wheezing and gasping noisily. Renshaw’s little eyes gleamed with sudden understanding.

“Head’s too heavy, eh?” he said. He leaned forward, pulling his victim all the way down to the bed so that the constriction in Merrick’s throat increased and he had to fight for breath. Renshaw kept on talking in a monotone.

“And I heard a nasty rumor about you. I heard you can talk. But you can’t, can you—?” He jerked again on the hair. “Can you—can you?”

“Nooooo—” Merrick managed to gasp.

Renshaw looked at him in surprise. Despite the rumors he had heard he had not seriously expected the Elephant Man to be able to understand and answer him. He gave a wolfish grin of pleasure at his victim’s desperation.

“No—no you can’t. Because one word about me out of that stinking cakehole—just
one
word, and you’ll ’ave no trouble sleeping. No trouble at all. You understand me?
Do
you?”

“Yyyee-ess,” Merrick managed to croak. He felt blackness descending on him. Just in time Renshaw let him go and strolled casually to the door. There he turned to enjoy the sight of his victim gulping in huge breaths.

“Don’t forget,” he said. “Just—don’t forget.”

Then he was gone.

It took time to persuade the Elephant Man to speak about himself, and even longer for the story to come out. He protected himself from the horrors of his past by locking them away behind an iron door. Any attempt to throw open that door reduced him to the deepest distress, turning him again into a babbling, confused creature, incapable of any communication save a moan of misery. At last Treves decided that it was cruelty to press him, and left off.

But then one morning, about four days after Carr-Gomm’s visit, Treves was examining the hip whose disease or injury caused Merrick to limp, and he asked,

“How did this happen, John? Do you remember?”

“Somebody kicked me—” A tense silence followed these words, and Merrick seemed to be holding himself stiff. “—in the workhouse,” he added at last.

“I see.” Treves kept his voice casual, but excitement was taking hold of him. This was the first time Merrick had ever volunteered the word “workhouse.” “And did it hurt a lot after that kick?”

“Yes. For a long time—I couldn’t walk properly. So they sent me to hospital.”

“What did the hospital say about it? Can you remember?”

“They said it was cracked—I think. But it was too late to treat it. The crack had got diseased.”

Tubercular complications, Treves thought mechanically, following a neglected injury.

“Do you know how old you were then?”

“The—workhouse people said I was seven. I’d been there five years. I was two when my mother left me.”

“Do you remember your mother?”

“Oh yes!” Merrick’s face was incapable of expression. Nonetheless it seemed to Treves that a great light broke across it at the mention of his mother. “She was very beautiful. She could not help leaving me there, you must not think badly of her. She didn’t know how it would be …” Merrick choked suddenly as though he were weeping. “… she didn’t know … or she’d never …”

“John, you don’t have to talk about the workhouse,” said Treves quickly. “It’s all over.”

Merrick looked at him. “But you wanted to know,” he said simply. “You asked me many times to tell you …”

“Yes, but not if it’s going to distress you so much.”

They left it there, but the following day Merrick again brought up the subject, although Treves could tell it was an effort. But Merrick seemed determined to force himself, as though he had decided to refuse his benefactor nothing, whatever the cost to himself. The story took several days to come out, not merely because Merrick constantly grew too upset to continue but his difficulty in speaking made it a slow process.

Treves, listening attentively, found himself being drawn into Merrick’s nightmare world as though it was his own. He had the sympathetic imagination to put himself in his patient’s place and see things through his eyes, and now it was as though his own safe, happy world had flown apart into a thousand pieces, to be replaced by the unending hell of deformity and life as a public spectacle.

There was the grief of abandonment, the freezing sense of being alone in a hostile world. There was food, never quite enough and never appetizing; clothes that were passed on as others grew out of them, clothes that were falling to bits, crawling with lice.

There was “the difference”; the child’s mind, clear and sharp in its dreadful prison, soon became aware
that other children survived by banding together and giving each other the care others would not give. But none of these rough-hewn little families wanted him. If he approached he was driven off with jeers and blows. Even in the workhouse children played—but not with him. At meal times he would find himself alone at one end of the table as the others drew away. Often he would have nothing to eat, for the others snatched his food and he was too clumsy to defend himself. He was “different,” but he did not know why. There were no mirrors.

He knew he was ugly, because they said so, although he didn’t know what ugly meant. But he heard it so often that eventually the word “ugly” became a name to which he would respond. Then they would howl with laughter.

There was the kick—indistinguishable at first from other kicks, but the pain did not stop. At the hospital he encountered people who were seeing him for the first time. Some of them screamed. There was a woman yelling, “You’re not bringing that thing in here,” and the man from the workhouse retorting, “And I’m not taking him back either. I’ve got my orders.”

He was dumped, and the paupers’ hospital took him in because it had no choice.

In the hospital there was a voice that, if not kind, was not actually hostile. It came from a tall, cadaverous man with grey cheeks and despairing eyes, who stared at him and said, “You look the way I feel inside.”

This was Mr. Donner, the clergyman whose drinking and scandalous behavior had caused him to be unfrocked. Without a livelihood Donner had taken to the road. From time to time he tried to make a new life for himself as a teacher, for he was a man of considerable learning. But as soon as he got two shillings to rub together he turned them into whisky. He had been sacked from job after job. He was dying now, of drink and despair.

He seemed to find Merrick’s very deformity endearing. He was the first to talk to him and discover the quick, responsive brain that the stumbling speech had hidden. He protected him, taught him to read, taught him to write with his left hand. Above all he taught him his own simple, shining faith, which had survived unscathed amid the destruction of his life.

One night Donner had given the misshapen little boy his own Bible.

“You have it now,” was all he said. “I’ll not need it.”

When Merrick went to find his friend the next morning Donner’s bed was empty. Somebody thought he’d died in the night. Nobody seemed to know where he might have been taken.

From the hospital Merrick was taken to the workhouse—another workhouse this time, run by a man called Cossins. It was Cossins who first showed him a mirror and made him look into it. He was old enough then to understand the difference between himself and others, and he had cried at the sight, till someone slapped him for being a pest.

Then the nightmare of his life really began. Before he had been merely rejected; now he was actively persecuted. He could do nothing right for Cossins. Whenever they met (and it was strangely often) Cossins would fault him for moving too fast or too slow, making too much noise or sitting in “sullen” silence, for being too greedy or for leaving his food.

The punishment varied. One of Cossins’ favorites was to make his victim stand in a prominent place in a corridor, beneath a notice that labeled him “The Fruit of Evil,” and anyone who passed by was free to knock some of the evil out of the sinner. Cossins, who was much given to pious exhortations, was fond of declaring that only great deformity of soul could account for such deformity of body, and that it was the duty of a good man to “drive the devil out” by such methods as might suggest themselves. And the
methods that suggested themselves to Cossins’ sadistic mind were increasingly ingenious.

He would force the little boy to lie down flat on the floor, knowing that the weight of his head would force his neck back till his windpipe was constricted and he was choking. Cossins would wait until the last moment before allowing Merrick up, then seize the semiconscious child and tell him that that was what it felt like to die, and he should remember it and mend his ways.

Cossins permitted no brawling among the inmates of his workhouse, but anyone was free to attack Merrick. If it was discovered, Merrick would be thrashed by Cossins as a punishment for “starting a fight.” Once the child attempted to hide, hoping that when darkness fell he could creep out and run away. But when his absence was discovered (as it soon was, there being little else to make life interesting) the hunt was up. Every man, woman, and child in the building searched for him, and when he was discovered Cossins thrashed him as a troublemaker.

When Merrick was sixteen Cossins died of apoplexy. His place was taken by a man who lacked the inclination to torment, but whose wife insisted that the “monster” be got off the premises. Merrick was duly sold to a down-at-heel traveling showman whose dancing dog had just died. Because of the extraordinary nature of his deformity he fetched the relatively high price of £ 1.15.0.