Elephant Man (17 page)

Into the general rumble of agreement round the table Treves’ voice broke passionately.

“Gentlemen, John Merrick is not an animal. He is a man, fully aware of his condition. An intelligent, sensitive, literate man, with an intimate knowledge of the Bible. His horrible infirmities do not reduce him to anything less than what he is, a man; and it would be criminal if we of the London Hospital, his final refuge, the last place on earth where this man can find peace, were to cast him out.”

From his chair at the head of the table Carr-Gomm pounded with his gavel. All eyes swiveled to him. Some were resentful, blaming him for allowing things to go so far. Others beamed to him their expectation that he would put a stop to this nonsense.

“Gentlemen,” he began in his silky voice, “may I make a suggestion? There are two small rooms off Bedstead Square that are no longer in use and would be admirably suited to Mr. Merrick’s needs. I also propose to write a letter to the
Times
, appealing to their readers for assistance. Knowing the generosity of the British public, I feel we would have little trouble
in raising the funds for his maintenance. Indeed, this hospital’s rules do preclude the admission of incurables, but if ever there was an exception to the rule, it is this patient. So therefore, I propose, if Mr. Treves is finished, that we put it to a vote. All those in favor of keeping Mr. Merrick here?”

Without waiting for their reaction he raised his own hand. Treves, not being a Committee member, had no vote, and only one man around the table dared to join Carr-Gomm in lifting his hand. Broadneck glared at the man and began to fight back.

“One moment, Mr. Chairman.” He waved one of the pictures of Merrick and looked round the table. “As far as I’m concerned, this creature has no business being in our hospital.” He glared at Carr-Gomm. “I think your letter would be an excellent idea, and when you appeal for funds, I think you should appeal for a more appropriate place for him as well. I agree that the British public is generous, and I’m sure that somewhere this creature will find a happy and permanent home.
But not here!
”

One of the members mumbled, “I quite agree.” Carr-Gomm scowled.

“I see,” he said quietly. “All, then, that move we keep Mr. Merrick here?”

Again he raised his own hand, but this time he was alone. He gave an intimidatory look at the one man who had supported him before. The man looked away, ashamed, but kept his hand stubbornly beneath the table. Carr-Gomm exchanged an angry, hopeless glance with Treves.

“All those opposed?” he said formally.

In a moment it seemed that a forest of hands had grown round the table. Treves turned away to hide his contempt. Carr-Gomm remained imperturbable, although his voice had gained a chilly edge.

“I see,” was all he said.

Broadneck was triumphant. “Well then,” he squealed. “In the meantime, of course, he needn’t be
turned out. He may stay in the rooms off Bedstead Square until such time as more suitable arrangements can be made, thus freeing the Isolation Ward for more deserving patients.” He looked round the table as a rumble of assent enveloped him. “Well then, Mr. Chairman, if there is nothing further to discuss, I move that we adjourn this meeting and all go about our normal business.”

In a voice filled with disgust Carr-Gomm recited, “I second the motion gentlemen. This meeting is adjourned.”

Coughs and shuffles filled the room, chairs were scraped hastily back, papers were rustled noisily to put up a good front for departure. Of the men who filed hastily out only one could look Carr-Gomm in the eye. And that one was Broadneck. As the door closed behind him Treves slowly released his hands, which had balled into fists at the look on Broadneck’s face. He felt filled with despair. He had meant to do so much and he had done nothing. Carr-Gomm had achieved a very little, a short breathing space for Merrick, but he himself had stood there useless. His eloquence had gone for nothing. They hadn’t even listened, these sleek, well-fed men.

Sullenly he picked up one of the photographs. It was lying face downward, having been slammed down in that position by Broadneck. Turn it over, Treves thought with bitterness, hide it away, pretend it isn’t there. He looked at the hideous face whose eyes now seemed, to his guilty imagination, to be offering him their trust. Then he put it in his pocket. He too could not bear to look at it just now.

“Somehow I don’t think they quite understand.” Carr-Gomm sounded sad and resigned, which was rare for him. Years in the law had taught him not to be too perturbed by the outcome of any decision, as there was usually as much to be said for one side as the other. Now, confronted with a situation in which he could see right on only one side, he began to regard this attitude as dreadful cynicism.

Driving home alone that night in a cab, Treves found himself thinking unexpectedly of his elder brother William. Ten years his senior, William had supplied much of the affection he had never received from his father. A good man, William Treves the elder, but dour and withdrawn, especially after his wife’s death—much involved in his upholstery business and undemonstrative to his children. To William Treves the younger had fallen the task of being a father to the other children, and with none of them was this more true than with the baby of the family, Frederick.

Steady, solid William had kept the younger boy in check when his violent enthusiasms threatened to carry him away entirely.

“You’ve got to think, old chap,” he’d said a thousand times in his slow way. “You always dash along without thinking.”

He’d said it when the fourteen-year-old Frederick had wanted to leave their home in Dorchester and go and live on their grandfather’s farm nearby. William understood his brother’s yearning to escape the chilly atmosphere of home, but he made it plain that was no reason to take up a farming career he wasn’t suited for.

“You haven’t stopped to think, Freddie. All you see is what’s in front of you at the moment. But what’ll you do in ten years’ time with your brain going to waste while you walk behind a couple of horses?”

He was right. Already in his heart the young Frederick knew that what he really wanted to do was follow William into medicine. He stuck out the next four years somehow, and at eighteen had become a student at the London Hospital, blessing William for saving him from a disastrous mistake. He loved the life at once, though it was the practical rather than the scientific aspects of medicine that appealed to him. It was said of him even then that he had “clever hands” and that he would be a surgeon.

After four years of study he qualified as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, and after a
brief period as a house surgeon at the London he left to widen his experience by joining William, who was an honorary surgeon at the Royal National Hospital for Scrofula in Margate. He had it in his mind that he would make a name for himself in research, and William agreed with him that scrofula, about which little was known, was a good subject.

They had their first and only real quarrel a year later when Frederick threw it all up to become a general practitioner in Derbyshire.

“It’s the only way,” he’d argued. “I can’t afford to marry Anne unless I’ve got a proper practice.”

“Then throw Anne over,” William had said brutally. “Dammit, Freddie, you’re twenty-four. That’s much too young to be tossing away a career for marriage. But that’s always the trouble with you. You rush ahead without thinking.”

On this one occasion, Brother William had been wrong, Treves reflected. He was happy in his marriage, and it had not harmed his career. By studying in the evenings he passed further exams for the Royal College, and became a fellow of that august establishment. Two years after going into general practice in Derbyshire he was back at the London as a surgical registrar. He had progressed rapidly through assistant surgeon to full surgeon at the age of thirty-one. William had been generous enough to admit he’d been mistaken.

But about one thing he had not been mistaken, and even now Treves’ brow darkened when he thought of it. He’d continued his research into scrofula after he left Margate, certain that he was on the right track. At twenty-nine he’d been ready with his book on the subject,
Scrofula and its Gland Diseases
. He had confidently expected this to be the first step toward the making of his name, but William had advised against publication.

“Don’t be hasty, Freddie. You’ve missed something.”

“Such as what?”

“I don’t know. If I did, I’d write a book about it myself. But there’s something wrong; I feel it. You’ve done it in too much of a rush.”

“A rush? I’ve spent years on it.”

“But you’ve rushed it recently, I know. You’re too impatient.”

“Don’t be an old woman,” Treves had told him amiably. “This book will make me.”

So he had gone ahead and published. And three months later a German bacteriologist called Robert Koch demonstrated that scrofula was due to the action of a bacillus. Treves, not an expert in bacteriology, had missed the significance of certain little signs that had spoken loudly to Koch. His book had sunk without a trace in the vast wash created by Koch’s.

He had written other books since, successful books that had brought him the serious attention he wanted. There was
The Anatomy of the Intestinal Canal and Peritoneum
, which had been called the best work on the subject so far. There was
The Pathology, Diagnosis and Treatment of Obstruction of the Intestine
, for which the Royal College of Surgeons had awarded him the Jacksonian prize.

Yet nothing could quite wipe out the pain of that earlier piece of clumsiness, or obliterate William’s melancholy voice saying, “You rushed it, Freddie. You didn’t look where you were going. You never do. You rush in and never give a thought to the consequences.”

That all came back to him now as he drove home through the quiet streets and the darkness.

Carr-Gomm’s letter to the
Times
was written the next morning and delivered by hand. It appeared the following day, featured with gratifying prominence, and was read in many of those homes that might be expected to contain persons of influence. It was read by judges and barristers, by city men and “men of affairs,” by statesmen and royalty, by Lords and Ladies,
by those who were rich and titled, and by those who were merely one or the other.

It was read also by William Kendal as he sat in his dressing room at the Apollo Theatre waiting to go on as Orsino in Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
. He had already played his early scenes, and now there was a gap before he would be needed again. Orsino was not a long part and it gave him some time to himself.

Mostly he used that time dealing with the numerous affairs that needed his attention as the Apollo’s manager as well as its leading actor. There were many who wondered why he chose to put on and appear in plays in which his own roles were often so small, and his wife’s so large. But William Kendal was an astute man. He knew that it was Madge’s stunning beauty and equally stunning acting ability that the town came to see, and he chose plays that would show her to an advantage rather than himself. It was good for business, and William liked good business.

Between them he and Madge had brought a certain amount of social respectability to a world that was known for its tawdriness and tinsel glitter. Since Madge Kendal was so obviously a lady, it was possible for a lady to be an actress. And since she was too elegant to act in the mannered declamatory style that was usual, she adopted her own natural style, and soon other actresses began to copy her.

When the final curtain had fallen they changed together in the dressing room they shared, commenting on the play, the audience, the state of the box office, in the casual affectionate way of people who have been happily married and engaged in the same business for twenty years.

He finished first and went off to put some final touches to essential paperwork, leaving her to put out the lights. She yawned and stretched, feeling desperately tired. It had been a long evening and Viola was a demanding role. She made a mental resolution that after this season she would never play it again. After all, she was thirty-nine, and whatever William might
say, she could see the lines creeping across her lovely face. She leaned closer to the mirror, examining her complexion nervously.

As she did so, her eye fell on the copy of the
Times
that her husband had left lying there. She dropped into a chair and began to read casually. William would get involved in his paperwork and keep her waiting a long time. By the time she was halfway down the letter page she had become very still.

“Terrible though his appearance is,” she read, “so terrible indeed that women and nervous persons fly in terror from the sight of him, and that he is debarred from seeking to earn his livelihood in any ordinary way, yet he is superior in intelligence, can read and write, is quiet, gentle, not to say refined in his mind.”

After a moment she fumbled in her bag and took out a pencil and a little notebook. She cast her eyes back over the letter, searching for a name. When she had found it she wrote neatly in the book, John Merrick.

“I’d very much like to meet that gentleman,” she said to herself. “He sounds almost … Shakespearean.”

It would take two weeks for the rooms off Bedstead Square to be ready for Merrick’s occupation. In the meantime it was tacitly agreed that he would stay where he was—which was as much as to say that Carr-Gomm was determined to leave him there and if Broadneck found out and objected, Carr-Gomm would cross that bridge when he came to it.

Treves decided to leave it to the last minute before telling Merrick, whom he knew was beginning to feel at home in the Isolation Ward. The wounds on his body were healing, and with repeated baths his smell became less noticeable. He was even more relaxed in the presence of Mrs. Mothershead. Sensing that he had achieved a moral victory in the matter of the reading, he took pleasure in making the most of it.

He would accept the morning paper from her with grave courtesy, inquire about her health, and mention something that had particularly interested him in the previous day’s news. Treves wondered if Merrick guessed that Mothershead never had time to read the paper, and consequently felt herself at a disadvantage in these conversations. After a few mornings he became certain that he did. It dawned on Treves with a shock that there was more than intelligence in that great head, there was also a lurking humor. It made him wonder for the thousandth time what sort of man nature had intended Merrick to be.