Elephant Man (3 page)

Treves wasted no words. He pulled a purse from his coat, extracted a shilling, and held it out.

“I’d pay handsomely for a private showing. Are you the proprietor?”

“Handsomely?” Bytes’ eyes gleamed on the shilling, and into his face came the first hint of recognition. He
stared at Treves, who was beginning to fall into place as the busybody in the tent. “Who sent you?”

“Pardon me?” said Treves.

Bytes threw caution to the wind and snatched the shilling.

“Never mind. I’m the owner.”

From a capacious pocket on the inside of his coat, he produced a key and fumbled at the padlock on the door. It took him some time to unlock it, as drink had seriously impaired his aim. Treves tried not to show his impatience.

At last the padlock clicked open, and the three of them entered the shop. It was almost totally dark inside because of the huge canvas poster that obscured all the windows. Bytes scrambled around in the darkness and managed to light an oil lamp, which cast little light owing to the poor state of the wick and the fact that the glass was thick with dust. When Tony shut the outer door, Treves had to peer hard to make out anything in the gloom.

The shop was empty and gray with dust. Some old tins and a few shriveled potatoes occupied a shelf, and some vague vegetable refuse was piled up against one of the windows. The stench of the place was appalling, and its cold dank atmosphere added to the general air of gloom.

“This way,” said Bytes, leading him to a door at the back of the shop.

By keeping the oil lamp in view, Treves managed to follow Bytes down a flight of rickety steps to a lower floor that he took to be the cellar. From what he could see, it looked as if it might have been used as a coal hole. His eyes were now growing more used to the gloom, and he could make out the way the end of the cellar was blocked off by a curtain suspended from a cord by a few rings. As he approached it, Treves became convinced that this was the true source of the smell that had been growing stronger as he descended, and which was now almost overpowering.

Bytes led the way to the curtain.

“Here we are, sir. My treasure.” He began to recite as though sleepwalking. “Life is full of surprises. Ladies and gentlemen, consider the fate of this creature’s poor mother. In the fourth month of her maternal condition, she was struck down by a wild elephant.” Bytes leered. “Struck down, if you take my meaning, on an uncharted African isle. The result is plain to see, ladies and gentlemen—
the terrible Elephant Man
.”

With a flourish he rattled back the curtain to reveal a bent figure erouching on a stool, its body almost entirely covered by a dirty brown blanket. It seemed to be trying to draw warmth from a large brick that stood on a tripod in front of it, heated from below by a Bunsen burner. The head was turned away toward the far wall so that beyond a general impression of massiveness, Treves could form no clear idea of it. The only part of the creature that he could see well was its left arm, which protruded from the blanket to warm itself over the brick. The arm was perfectly normal.

The thing gave no sign of having heard Bytes’ voice or the rattling of the curtain rings, but remained silent and immobile, with the settled look of one who had been so for many weary hours. To Treves the hunched figure, locked eternally in the freezing solitude of this cellar, seemed the embodiment of loneliness. He did not normally consider himself an imaginative man, but there was something about the terrible despairing silence of this creature that made him think of a captive in a cavern, or a wizard, waiting thousands of years for some unholy manifestation. In the street above the air was cool and fresh. Treves could hear a tune whistled by an errand boy, the companionable hum of traffic in the road, and the footsteps of a world going about its business, unconscious of this dank, smelly cellar and the figure that waited in dreadful isolation.

He stepped closer, unpleasantly aware that Bytes was watching his every move and leering at him in a disgusting conspiratorial manner. Suddenly Bytes
banged his riding whip against the wall and yelled at the crouched thing as if speaking to a dog.

“
Stand up!
”

“
Stand up!
” shrieked Tony in nervous imitation, dancing about just behind Bytes.

Like a dog, the creature obeyed the tone of command, rising to its feet and letting the blanket fall to the ground as it turned to face Treves.

Accustomed as he was to all kinds of deformities from both disease and mutilation, Treves could not repress an appalled gasp. Nor, for the life of him, could he have prevented himself from stepping backward in an instinctive movement of self-preservation. Never in all his days had he seen anything so hideous, so monstrous, so piteous.

The Elephant Man was naked to the waist, below which he wore a pair of shabby trousers that had been cut from the dress suit of a very fat man. His rootlike, knobby feet were bare. From the picture outside Treves had imagined him to be of gigantic size, but this was a smallish man, of below average height, and made to seem more so by the bowing of his back.

His head was enormous and misshapen, its circumference as big as a man’s waist. From the brow there projected a huge bony mass, almost obscuring the right eye, and the nose was a lump of flesh, recognizable only from its position.

From the upper jaw projected another mass of bone that protruded from the mouth like a stump, turning the upper lip inside out, making the mouth little but a slobbering aperture. It was this that had been exaggerated in the painting to make it appear to be a rudimentary trunk.

The head was almost bald, except for a handful of lank, black hair at the top. At the back of the head hung a bag of spongy skin, resembling cauliflower.

His right arm was enormous and shapeless, the hand like a knot of tuberous roots. Indeed it could barely be called a hand; it was more like a fin or a paddle, with the back and palm being exactly alike. The left arm
was not only normal, but delicately shaped with fine skin. It was a hand that a woman might have envied.

From the chest hung another bag of flesh, like the dewlap of a lizard, and the whole body gave off a stench that made Treves gag.

Bytes had made some effort to trick his exhibit out Behind it were two crudely constructed palm trees. As Treves stood there, speechless with horror and disbelief, Bytes rapped the wall again and yelled, “Turn around.”

“Turn around, turn around,” Tony echoed in malicious glee.

Slowly the Elephant Man turned, revealing other loathsome cauliflower growths on his back, some of which hung down to the middle of his thighs. He came to rest in his original position. His head was turned toward Treves, who found himself unwillingly searching the eyes for the accusation that should have been there. All was blank. The face was devoid of expression and incapable of it. But as Treves gazed on him, the Elephant Man closed his eyes.

The words of the man in the tent came back to Treves. “A wicked birth … monstrous.” More monstrous than the worst nightmare brain could conceive. But even as pity and disgust warred in him, ambition rose up and joined them. This was it, the thing he had been looking for, the spectacular specimen that would turn all heads his way.

“I’ve seen all I can—” he said to Bytes, “—down here.”

The rings rattled, the curtain fell back into place. Doubtless behind it the Elephant Man had reseated himself to wait for the next gawking visitor. Bytes began to lead the way out.

“Down here?” he queried.

“I’m a doctor, Mr. Bytes. I work at the London Hospital, where I also lecture in anatomy. A man like that could be—very interesting to medical science.”

“He’s not for sale,” said Bytes at once.

“I don’t want to buy him from you. Just—hire?”

They had reached the shop. Bytes held the lamp closer to Treves’ face. “For how long?”

“A few hours. I just want to examine him and make some notes. Later I might want him back again.”

“At a good price?”

“Of course,” said Treves in disgust.

They settled on a shilling for every visit, and Bytes agreed to have the Elephant Man ready when a cab called the next day.

“Now what can you tell me about him?” said Treves.

Bytes shrugged. “Only what his last owner told me. He’s English and his name’s John Merrick.”

It came as a small shock to discover that the creature had a human name like any other man.

“Any idea how old he is?”

“About twenty-one, I think,” said Bytes. “But how could anyone tell?”

“Is anything known about his parentage? Where in England was he born?”

Bytes shrugged again. “The last bloke said he was born in Leicester, but I don’t know how he knew that. He didn’t seem to know anything else.”

“But his mother and father—were they deformed in any way?”

“Search me. No idea.”

“Well if so little is known about his parents,” said Treves impatiently, “why are you so sure his mother was knocked down by an elephant ‘on an African island’?”

Bytes gave a ginny chuckle and nudged Treves knowingly. “Come, my friend, I don’t have to pretend with you. The public likes a little drama—a little showmanship—with its exhibits.”

“Then I can assume that this elephant story is a total invention?”

“It’s as good a story as any,” said Bytes. “Look at that bit of bone coming out of his mouth, like a trunk. He
looks
like an elephant.”

Treves grunted, satisfied. He had never placed any
reliance on the too-convenient story of an elephant charge, and it was useful to know that Bytes had no evidence for it. The trunklike protuberance of bone on the face was sufficient explanation of how the story had started.

They had reached the street by now, and as soon as they stepped outside Treves began to drink in the fresh air. It was like wine after the atmosphere of the cellar. He tried frantically to clear his brain. As soon as he produced his purse, Bytes thrust out his hand for the coins Treves dropped into them.

“There’s the shilling in advance for tomorrow. I’ll send a cab at 10
A.M.
”

“He’ll be ready.”

“Here is my card.”

Bytes pocketed the card, then seized Treves’ hand in a greasy shake.

“Now we’ve got a deal. We understand each other—my friend. We understand each other completely.”

He gave him the look of a conspirator that made Treves long to wrench himself away. Instead he bid a polite goodbye and turned down the street.

The afternoon had passed silently into dusk while he had been in the shop. The ale houses were open, spilling their light onto the glistening streets outside. Treves found one that he knew to be more salubrious than most and entered. He was pleased to find it still almost empty. He wanted a quiet moment alone.

He took his drink and settled in a dark corner where he was unlikely to be disturbed. His brain was reeling with the triumph of discovery. If he had been a superstitious man, he would have pinched himself to make sure the afternoon’s events had not been a dream.

He had it—the thing he had been searching for; the thing that would make his name. It had happened as he had always known it would, if he looked long enough and hard enough. He had the subject for a lecture that would create a sensation.

It was a hard business to make a name for yourself when London was thronged with young doctors all trying to do the same. It was not enough to be a good doctor; you also had to be something of a showman, and your show had to be stranger and more startling than anyone else’s.

The staff at the London Hospital was constantly alert for the new intake of patients that might prove to contain “the one”—the one who might have that rare disease that they alone could diagnose and cure, that unknown condition by which they could cast new light on a hitherto obscure area. Members of the governing committee—Ebenezer Broadneck for one—had been known to remark that it was a scandal the way wretched patients were descended on by throngs of ambitious surgeons and physicians, to be pulled and pummeled and examined hopefully, and then discarded when their conditions revealed nothing that was not already common knowledge.

Other doctors, equally scandalous in Broadneck’s oft-voiced opinion, did not wait for Mohammed to come to the mountain. They went out searching for him like the man in the Bible who scoured the highways and byways to provide guests for the feast. Treves was one of the latter kind.

He knew the arguments against what he was doing, and he could counter every one of them with an argument in favor.

“How does Broadneck expect medical science to progress if we’re only able to investigate what has been investigated before?” he had demanded one evening of Fox, whom he had taken to his own home for dinner. Fox had made no answer, rightly divining that his role in this instance was to listen while Treves got it off his chest. But he had glanced at Anne and received an understanding smile. Anne too knew her role as a sounding board.

“Anatomy has always progressed in the teeth of orthodox opinion,” Treves went on. “And if it hadn’t
continually flouted that opinion, we’d still be living in the days of Hippocrates. Leonardo da Vinci used to descend into crypts at dead of night to dissect cadavers.”

“Good Lord, Freddie,” said Fox, revolted. “I believe you’d have bought bodies from Burke and Hare.”

Treves’ eyes flashed humorously. “The name of the doctor who did that was Fox, wasn’t it?” he enquired, all innocence.

Fox scowled. “It was Knox and you know it, Freddie.”

Fortunately Anne had intervened at that moment and restored the atmosphere by serving Fox a large glass of brandy.

Sitting in the ale house now, Treves remembered his discussion with Fox and silently repeated to himself that no doctor made progress if he were too delicate to soil his hands. It meant going to stinking holes like the one he had visited today. It meant dealing with crawling insects like Bytes.

He tried to put Bytes out of his mind, but the “owner” would not be so easily dismissed. He stood there, dirty, ginny, leering at the man who had come to do business with him. In memory Treves could still see his face, and it made him shudder. Behind the incongruously cultured voice and the slimy bonhomie, Bytes was a mean and pitiless man. Half an hour’s acquaintance had been enough to tell Treves that.