Elephant Man (24 page)

“Oh no, no—I’m fine. Please—I mean, thank you—” She floundered to a standstill.

“I don’t get out as often as I’d like to, for some people do find my appearance disturbing. Of course, I can’t fault them,” he went on. “People are often frightened by what they don’t understand. And it is hard to understand, even for myself, for you see, Mother was so very beautiful.”

“When you’re ready to leave,” Mothershead told the couple, “Mrs. Treves would like to speak to you.”

“Oh yes—well—perhaps it is time we were going—” The young man jumped to his feet and the girl followed suit. Their relief was palpable. Merrick made his farewells in the same courteous, gentle tone in which he had greeted them, and if their replies were a little hurried he did not seem to notice.

Mothershead delivered the Waddingtons into Treves’ care, glad to do so before she forgot her manners. She returned to her desk in the Receiving Room, relieved to have them out of her sight. But they reappeared about ten minutes later as Treves ushered them out of the front entrance and said goodbye on the step.

“I regret that I must leave you here, M’Lord and M’Lady,” Mothershead heard him say. “Thank you so much for coming. It was an act of the greatest charity.”

Now Lady Waddington was all ease and graciousness. “Oh no, Mr. Treves. The pleasure was all ours. Good day.”

From her desk Mothershead watched the whole scene with undisguised annoyance. She had a clear view of the Waddingtons’ faces as they turned away, and the speed with which their smiles slipped to reveal the disgust beneath drew from her the muttered comment, “Watery-headed bunch!”

She wondered how far Treves was aware of the truth behind these visits. Did he know that what he called kindness was no more than a society version of the very life from which he had rescued Merrick? “Ogling the animals in the zoo” was Mothershead’s contemptuous verdict, and in her stern judgment Treves was either ignorant or had willfully blinded himself. She respected him for the brilliant doctor she knew him to be, but she considered that he had no more common sense than men usually had, and his first words as he approached her, after seeing off the Waddingtons, confirmed it.

“Incredible, isn’t it?” he said cheerfully. “Well, I must be off, Mothershead. I’ve got a lecture at the college.”

She rose as he prepared to pass on. “Excuse me, sir, I’d like to have a word with you.”

“Oh? Well, quickly please, Mothershead. I’m overdue.”

She moved closer and lowered her voice. “I can’t understand why you let these people go in there, sir.”

“Now Mothershead, you have to understand that this is very good for John. He relishes contact with people outside the hospital …”

“But you saw them, sir,” she interrupted him, urgency making her ignore etiquette. “They couldn’t hide their disgust. They don’t care anything for John. They’re just trying to impress their friends.”

“Aren’t you being just a little harsh, Mothershead? You yourself hardly treated John with much loving kindness when he first arrived.”

She faced him squarely. “I bathed him, didn’t I? I fed him and cleaned up after him! If loving kindness can be called care and practical concern, then yes, I did treat him with loving kindness, and I’m not ashamed to say it.”

“You’re right, Mothershead, please forgive me. Of course I appreciate everything you’ve done for John, and I’m glad that you are concerned about his welfare. But I’m the physician in charge and I must do what
I think best,” he hurried on before she could interrupt again. “I’m also very late, so please excuse me.”

He started to go, but she moved quickly and placed herself in front of him. “If you ask me, sir, he’s just being stared at all over again.”

He gave her an astonished look. “You really must excuse me, Mothershead. I can’t discuss this any further.”

He went to his office and collected the things he needed for the lecture. The college adjoined the hospital and he contrived to go across without passing again through the Receiving Room. He was irritated and annoyed. He had had his judgment disputed before but not by nurses, and never on the subject of Merrick, about whom everyone now deferred to him as the uncontested expert.

He delivered his lecture with the upper part of his mind only, while the rest dwelt on the injustice of Mothershead’s accusations. He remembered Merrick’s room as he had seen it last, crowded with mementoes of his society visitors. The mantelpiece was now overflowing with photographs of the ladies who had followed Mrs. Kendal’s example. The atmosphere of the room had been gay, clean, and cheerful, a cosy little home over which its imprisoned monarch could reign happily. How different from the circumstances in which he had found the Elephant Man.

The faces of Merrick’s visitors floated before Treves’ eyes as he talked on and on in the lecture hall. They were not the faces he himself would have chosen for companionship. Beautiful as many of them were, their aristocratic, well-fed complacency would have bored and infuriated him. They were so familiar they might have come out of one mould; all with a high-nosed air about them, the inevitable result of the tension they felt.

With a sense of dismay Treves confronted the thought he had been edging closer to without knowing it. Their tension was caused by their reaction to John and the effort to control it. “You saw their disgust,”
Mothershead had accused him, and it was true. He had been aware of it many times, but discounted it for the sake of the benefit that John could take from these visits. And he believed with total conviction, that John was unaware of the way his visitors regarded him. Many folk in the past had been horrified by his appearance, and he had grown used to seeing them scream and run away. People whose breeding (or whose curiosity?) demanded that they control their feelings and present an appearance of smiling complacency were outside his experience, and he accepted their politeness at its face value.

It seemed to Treves that several weeks cocooned in his mirrorless rooms were making Merrick forget that he was different from other men, and this was the effect that gave him the most satisfaction.

Was it not better to allow him to continue in this happy ignorance, even at the cost of a small deception? Treves knew what Mothershead would say, but Mothershead did not know John as he did himself. Just the same, by the end of the evening he was admitting to himself that her challenge had disturbed him.

He was far from proceeding to an actual admission that she might have been right, but before he went home for the night he slipped back to the hospital and made his way to John’s rooms. Like a mother hen guarding her chicks, he wanted to look in and see for himself that John was settled and happy. He might stop for a chat, hear about that afternoon’s visitors and admire their gifts. Then the nagging little voice within him would be stilled.

Before he reached Merrick’s door he could hear the sound of a low, plaintive murmur coming from inside. Probably another nightmare he thought, although it was quite different from any sound Merrick had ever made before. Quietly he opened the door.

Merrick was not in bed, but seated at the window with his back to the door. In his hands was a large, white pillow, which he grasped tightly to his chest.
Part of it was brushing against his cheek, and as he rubbed his face against its softness he whispered urgent words. Treves could make none of them out, but the tone reached him clearly enough. It held a melancholy, a yearning for delights once known and lost forever. It was the voice of a lover.

Beside him was the table on which the portraits of Mrs. Kendal and Merrick’s mother occupied the place of honor. But the mother’s picture had been turned face down. Only Mrs. Kendal remained, her dark, sweet eyes gazing on Merrick in the darkness.

For a long time Treves stood there, frozen with shock, his mind refusing to take in the implications of what he was seeing. When he could force himself to move, it was to close the door and turn quietly away.

He left the hospital as unnoticed as he had entered it. He tried to believe that the storm inside him was not his conscience, only the tiring effects of a very long day. But the honesty that lay at the bottom of his character would not permit this escape, and on the long walk home in the darkness he faced the fact that it might take all his life for him to find forgiveness for what he had inadvertently done.

He let himself quietly into the house and went directly into the sitting room. It seemed to him now that almost no time had passed since Merrick had been in this very room, overcome with emotion at Anne’s friendly greeting, the pretty smile on her face. The words came back to Treves—“I’m not used to such kindness from a beautiful woman”—and he wondered how he could have missed the danger that stared him in the face.

Automatically he went to Anne’s, bookshelf and began hunting through it. It gave him something for his hands and mind to do, and he needed that now to still the fear within him. After a few minutes he had a small pile of books on the table. The last one that
came to hand he quickly replaced on the shelf. It was
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
.

There was a soft movement behind him and Anne appeared in the doorway, dressed for bed.

“I thought I heard you come in. I’ve been waiting for you upstairs,” she said. She smiled when she saw what he was doing. She never grudged the time he gave to Merrick now. “More romances for John?”

“Hmmmm?” He only half-heard her. She came further into the room and studied his face.

“Freddie, what’s the matter? You look half dead. Was the lecture very tiring?”

“No, it isn’t that. I’ve just been thinking about something—about Bytes.”

“Oh Freddie, what put that wretched vampire into your head?”

“Something I—” He made himself stop. He could not tell Anne the implications of what he had seen earlier that night. But he had to tell her some of what was churning in his mind or he would go distracted. “I’m beginning to think I’m very little different from him.”

“Bytes! Oh, that’s absurd.” She began to poke the fire into life again.

He sat down feeling deathly tired. “Is it? Mothershead said much the same thing.”

“She said you were getting like Bytes? I don’t believe it.”

“She implied it—that I’ve set John up as a curiosity all over again, except that this time he’s in a hospital, with all the accoutrements of science rather than a carnival. But still the people come to stare. At least, that’s what Mothershead thinks. Oh, they don’t pay a tuppence admission any more. No, now it’s pictures, curios, and precious books. All for a chance to see the terrible Elephant Man.”

She ceased working on the fire. She had been listening to him only superficially, sure that he was using her as a sounding board as he often did, without expecting any response. More often than not there was
no response she could give for many of the things he “discussed” with her were above her head. But now it was suddenly borne in on her that her husband was not talking as a doctor or a scientist, but as a man in trouble, and that he was asking her help. There was an unhappiness in his voice that she had never heard there before when he was talking about a medical problem. She laid down the poker and came beside him on the sofa.

“But it’s all to make John happy,” she reminded him. “It’s not as if you’re getting anything out of it.”

There was the dreadful bitterness of self-knowledge in his voice as he replied, “Oh no. I’m not getting anything out of it. My name is constantly in the papers. Carr-Gomm praises me to the heavens. Patients have begun asking expressly for me.”

“Frederick, now you are being absurd. You’re an extremely talented man. Of course the patients ask for you. And as for John …”

“Yes. John Merrick
would
still be crouching in filthy shops and broken-down circuses if I hadn’t happened along that day and seen what a splendid paragraph my diagnosis would make in the journal. And it paid off, didn’t it? All I had to do was say, ‘Step right up, ladies and gentlemen. Step right up and see your worst nightmares personified, your worst fears made flesh! Turn him around! See the horror of London, the terror that I, the good doctor, bring you. Turn him around, the terrible Elephant Man! See the monster made fashionable, see the outcast. See the freak!’ ”

He would have said more but she broke in, unable to bear his self-laceration any longer. “Oh no, Frederick, that’s all wrong! John is happier and more fulfilled now than he ever has been in his entire life. And that is completely due to you.”

“Yes, it is. And what did I do? I opened a door and let a condemned man see paradise, knowing that his chains would never let him cross the threshold. How could I do it? What was all this for?”

“Frederick, just what is it that you’re saying?”

“Am I a good man or am I a bad man?”

“Oh Frederick.” She put her arms round him, trying to reach him with her love, knowing that there was a grief inside him she could not touch.

“You’re a good man, a very good man.”

He said, so softly that she barely heard it, “I feel so ugly.”

Medically, Merrick needed little help these days. His wounds had healed, his bronchitis had disappeared with good nursing, and the damage to his hip that caused him to limp would never be any better. Keeping him clean, fed, and warm was a job that could have been left to the nurses with Treves dropping in once a week, but he continued his daily visits, knowing that John would miss them. Treves now felt a deep sense of guilty responsibility for the life he had taken over for his own purposes and changed in a way that might not be for the better.

He remembered reading somewhere that in ancient China, if one man saved another’s life, the one he had saved became his property and his responsibility. He knew now how that burden must have felt. John had given himself trustingly into his hands, and Treves had no doubt that he would have been amazed to learn of his benefactor’s sense of guilt. He was, as Anne had said, happier than he had ever been before in his life. But the guilt was real nonetheless.

He had another reason for his daily visits. He had become honestly fond of the gentle, sensitive man he had discovered beneath the shell of the monster. When he looked at John he no longer saw his shape.