Elephant Man (5 page)

Treves stared at him, feeling desperately uncomfortable. But he was saved from having to offer some response by two sharp raps on the door. The Elephant Man flinched perceptibly.

Fox’s head appeared round the door.

“Freddie, what are you doing for—” He wrinkled his nose in disgust. “I say, do open a window in here or …” For the first time he noticed the Elephant Man. “Oh, I’m dreadfully sorry. I had no idea that … I say!” His voice died away in embarrassment.

Treves crossed the room in two strides, seized Fox by the arm, and bundled him forcibly into the corridor, closing the door behind them. Fox blew out hard.

“Good Lord, Freddie, what have you got in there?”

“You’ll know presently. At the meeting of the society. But until then, I beg of you, Fox, keep it to yourself.”

“Certainly, if you insist. You must have quite a find there.”

“I don’t know what I’ve got.”

Fox gave him a cynical glance. “Nothing of any importance, eh?” he repeated.

Treves turned to re-enter his office but looked back at the last minute.

“Keep it to yourself, Fox, please.” He went in and shut the door firmly behind him, turning the key in the lock. Then his eyes swept the room in dismay. The Elephant Man had gone.

It was impossible. There was no way out except by the door—unless the wretched creature had contrived to throw himself out of the window. For a terrible moment he half believed it, then a faint movement caught his attention and he breathed again.

In a far corner stood a glass display case filled with specimens, each one neatly labeled. There was just enough space between the end of the case and the wall for a man to stand, and there he was. Even through the enveloping cloak Treves could see that he was shaking.

“Come and sit down,” he said gently.

The Elephant Man’s only reply was to press himself further back against the wall as though he would vanish into it. To the stench of his body was added that of his terror.

For a moment Treves wondered if it was all worth it; wouldn’t it be better if he simply packed this thing up into a cab and returned him to where he came from? But the meeting of the Pathological Society of London was only two weeks away and he had nothing better than this to introduce. Nor would anyone else have.

He went to stand in front of the man, taking the left hand firmly in his own. Slowly and without wrenching him, he drew him away from the wall until they had reached the chair.

“Sit down,” he said, keeping his voice quiet and friendly. He had seen enough the night before to be
certain that whatever the original state of Merrick’s mind he must now be half-crazed with terror and ill-treatment. Overcoming that would be half the battle. As if in confirmation the man made no further resistance but sat down.

Treves found himself at a loss. There was plainly no point in asking further questions of someone who seemed unable to understand or reply. With relief he decided to put that part of it off.

“I think I’ll examine you now,” he said. “I’ll save the questions for later. Will you take off your hat now please?” The Elephant Man did nothing, and Treves tried to make his voice more reassuring. “Don’t be frightened, I simply want to look at you. Do you understand?”

As he reached out his hand the man leaned his head back at what seemed a dangerous angle, considering its weight. He seemed to be looking at Treves, but as Treves could not make out the eye he had an odd sensation of being spied on. He put one hand on each side of the grey flannel curtain and began to lift it out of the cloak, all the while muttering words of reassurance just as he had done long ago to the horses he had ridden on his grandfather’s farm.

“That’s right, don’t be frightened, don’t be frightened.”

He had thought himself partly prepared for the shock of that head, but he was wrong. He wondered if any familiarity could subdue the initial impression of horror the face gave, or would it be ghastly all over again with each new viewing?

In the light thrown by the window he saw every piteous deformity with a clarity denied him in the cellar the afternoon before. The protrusions of bone seemed bigger now, the distortion of the mouth more marked, the cauliflower growths more loathsome. How could any human being be born imprisoned in this monster’s shape? If there was a merciful God in heaven, how could he permit it?

He managed to undress the Elephant Man without further trouble. The smell was appalling, the growths revolting to the touch, but he persevered and began to make notes as he saw more clearly the extent of the deformity.

When the creature stood naked before him he could see that one hip was noticeably higher than the other; the explanation of the limp. But what drew Treves’ horrified attention was the fact that the Elephant Man’s sexual organs were normal. It was as though Nature had tossed a cynical jeer at her distorted creation.

Treves worked for an hour before sending the man home. As he saw him into the cab he thrust a letter into his left hand. It was a note to Bytes telling him that the cab would call again for him in two days.

Promptly at 10
A.M.
two mornings later, the Elephant Man reappeared in the Receiving Room. This time Tony was with him.

“For the shilling,” he said, extending a grubby hand.

This same performance was repeated seven times over the next fortnight. As the meeting of the Pathological Society neared, Treves’ excitement grew. He was well prepared. He had had a series of photographs taken showing the Elephant Man’s deformity from several different angles, and his notebook was now full.

It was hard to form theories with a patient who could tell you nothing of his past history, but within those limits Treves was confident of his diagnosis. The elephant charge theory he discounted completely. He was convinced the man’s condition could be accounted for by spontaneous mutation. The growths that covered him were the result of fibrous tumors that had developed under his skin and round his nerves. To Treves’ eyes they had the appearance of things that had grown with the years, meaning that the Elephant Man had become worse as he grew older, not that he could ever have been anything but hideous.

Everything Treves required of him he performed
docilely and without response. Occasionally he made noises that were gibberish, but mostly he sat in silence broken only by the wheezing of his chest.

The meeting of the Society was to take place in the lecture hall of the College of Anatomy, which was immediately next door to the London Hospital, and attached to it. That morning Tony brought the Elephant Man as usual, and found Treves waiting for him by the Hospital entrance. He stared as Treves dropped two shillings into his hand.

“That’s because I shall need him for a lot longer today,” Treves told him. “I’ll send him back when I’ve finished with him.”

“When d’you want him again?”

“I don’t know. Not for a week or so.”

“
How
long?” Tony was dismayed. “But you ’ave ’im most days.”

“I know. But I shan’t be needing him nearly so much in the future. I’ll let you know.”

He steered the Elephant Man into the College and gave him into the hands of the two assistants who were to display him to the audience. When he was sure they understood their instructions he left them and went to his room to take a last look at his notes. When he had read them through completely he took a deep breath. He would no longer need notes to help him. He had every inch of the Elephant Man’s body imprinted on his memory. He had done all he could this last two weeks with the chance that had been offered him. He wouldn’t fail now.

He advanced on the Lecture Hall with a feeling of tension that had nothing in it of fear. Rather it was an anxiety to begin, a straining at the leash.

It was early yet but the hall was already filling up, and he was pleased to see that several names of considerable eminence had placed themselves prominently along the front rows. No doubt some rumors had got around. The comings and goings of a shrouded figure for the last fortnight must have attracted attention.
Good. Treves smiled inwardly. This was his moment at last, the moment that always came to you if you were sufficiently determined that it should, if you spent your life watching for it. He had worked for it, he had a right to it, and he was going to take it.

He made a last check with his assistants, who had brought the Elephant Man to sit behind a curtained stall from where he could be produced quickly. The man, wearing nothing except a loose loin cloth, sat silent and motionless as he always did. The smell from his body was overpowering.

When the hall was full Treves took up his pointer stick, advanced to the front of the podium on which he was standing, and tapped the stick against the small raised desk to indicate that he was ready to begin. The noise of many male voices died down, but a murmuring hum still came from several parts of the hall. Treves ignored it. He would soon have their attention.

He began by a brief introduction of himself, and a carefully censored version of how he had happened to run across the Elephant Man.

“He is English, he is twenty-one years of age, and his name is John Merrick,” he told them. “Gentlemen, in the course of my profession I have come upon lamentable deformities of the face, due to injury or disease, as well as mutilations and contortions of the body, depending on like causes; but at no time have I met with such a degraded or perverted version of a human being as this man.”

The moment had come. Treves signaled to his assistants, who opened the front doors of the stall. The low mutter in the Lecture Hall became a startled roar, then died away completely. Treves could hear his own footsteps as he went to the stall, ready to indicate various parts of his specimen with the stick. He felt excited and gratified. He had them now.

“I wish to draw your attention to the insidious conditions affecting this patient. Note, if you will, the
extreme enlargement of the skull …” He pointed with the stick, “and upper limb, which is totally useless. The alarming curvature of the spine … turn him, please …” It took several moments to get Merrick positioned to his satisfaction. “… the looseness of the skin, and the varying fibrous tumors that cover 90% of the body.”

A faint air of discomfiture that he had first sensed in his audience had vanished. The attention of each man there was riveted.

“And there is every indication that these afflictions have been in existence, and have progressed rapidly, since birth. The patient also suffers from chronic bronchitis. As an interesting side note, in spite of the aforementioned anomalies, the patient’s genitals remain entirely intact and unaffected.”

The assistants untied the knot of the loincloth which dropped to the floor. The Elephant Man stared straight ahead. Nothing that was happening seemed to penetrate his consciousness, for which Treves felt a twinge of guilty relief. He moved the stick up and down the patient’s body, talking all the while.

The lecture lasted nearly an hour. By the end of it his audience were leaning forward, anxious not to miss a word, and Treves was experiencing the rising sense of exhilaration that success always brought him.

“So then, gentlemen, owing to this series of deformities: the congenital exostoses of the skull; extensive papillomatous growths and large pendulous masses in connection with the skin; the great enlargement of the right upper limb, involving all the bones; the massive distortion of the head; and the extensive areas covered by papillomatous growth, the patient has been called ‘the Elephant Man.’ ”

At a signal the curtains closed round the stall. Treves laid down his stick with an air of finality. The applause was thunderous. At the last minute Treves had to restrain himself from yielding to an instinct to bow. That would have been a crass touch of theatricality.

He wondered if the entire talk had been a mite too theatrical. He knew his lectures to students at the hospital were popular because of their witty racy style, so different from the dry assertions of fact favored by other lecturers. He’d tried to keep that aspect of things muted this afternoon. The men of the Pathological Society were distinguished doctors who would have marked him down at once as a mountebank had they detected any whiff of the footlights. Treves was glad of the hour of questions and discussion that followed his talk. It served to calm the atmosphere down.

Afterward he could hardly get through the corridors, which seemed to be packed with men wishing to congratulate him. But he escaped from them at last and made his way back to his office, where he’d given instructions that the Elephant Man was to be waiting for him.

He found him there, shrouded in his all-enveloping disguise. Merrick made no sound or movement of recognition as he came in and Treves realized for the first time that this blankness was something he was coming to rely on. It made it possible to maintain the necessary attitude of scientific detachment if you had a patient who displayed no more awareness than a stone or a tree. Some of the terms he had used that afternoon—“perverted” and “degraded,” for instance—would have been impossible in the hearing of a man who understood what was being said about him.

He took out his notebook on the Elephant Man (he was now on his second) and began to enter into it points that had arisen out of the discussion. He had enough now, he decided, to start writing the paper that would consolidate this afternoon’s work. He wrote on and on as things came back to him, hastening to get it all down while it was still fresh in his mind.

“Hmm?” Treves looked up, recalled to the present by a vaguely heard noise. He was alone except for the statue-like creature in the chair before him.

“What?” he said inquiringly, wondering if the noise had really come from that quarter, and if it would be repeated.

But there was silence. What he had heard—if anything—had been no more than a sigh. Of weariness possibly.

“It’s been a long day for everyone,” Treves agreed.

He closed his notebook and rose. “You’ll need a cab. Stay here.”

As soon as he was alone a change seemed to come over the Elephant Man. With his left arm he grasped the arm of the chair and levered himself upright. When he was on his feet indecision shook him and he looked round, first in one direction, then the other. At last he began to shuffle tentatively round the room. He lingered a long time by the wall, where hung the various certificates that proclaimed Treves to be a member of various learned societies, and reached up a hand to touch them. The cold feel of the glass seemed to puzzle and repel him.