The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

5

I RETURNED TO OXFORD two days before the beginning of the Hilary term; Bysshe urged me to stay in London, citing the radical enterprise with which he had become associated and remonstrating with me about my lack of fervour for the cause (as he put it). But in truth I was eager to renew my own studies. I had seen and heard much in London, but nothing had impressed me so profoundly as the electrical demonstrations of Mr. Davy. I burned with impatience to consult all the volumes of physical science, ancient and modern, thereby to discover the secret springs of life; I wished to dedicate myself to this pursuit, to the exclusion of all else, and I believed that no power on earth could divert me from my purpose.

When I entered the college I greeted the porters as old companions, although their welcome for me was slightly subdued; I was still too much associated with Bysshe to be wholly accepted. Yet my college servant seemed genuinely pleased by my return. “Oh, Mr. Frankenlime,” she said, “not a moment too soon.” She had much difficulty in pronouncing my last name, and would try several different expedients in the course of one conversation. “I had ever so much trouble with your bottles.”

“I would hate to put you to any inconvenience, Florence.”

“Them bottles were filled, half-filled and not filled at all. I didn’t know where to put them in the general clean.”

She was referring to the experimental laboratory I had set up in my bedroom. It was a modest affair-some crucibles, tubes, and a portable burner-but she had a nervous dread of anything she called “medicinal.” For some reason it reminded her of her husband’s untimely death, an event which she took much pleasure in describing to me in all its detail. “I left them where they was,” she said. “I did not touch them, Mr. Frankentine.”

“That was very good of you.”

“I never touch my gentlemen’s properties. Oh, no. Did you have a good journey from Old Smokey?” She was a Londoner by birth, as she never ceased to inform me, but she had married the short-lived Oxford man and had never moved away. “I suppose there was a good fog.”

“Much rain, Florence, I’m afraid.”

“I am sorry to hear that.” She seemed delighted that the city continued to suffer from bad weather. “But it clears the fog, you see.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “How is Mr. Shelley?”

“He is very well. He flourishes in London.”

“He is often spoken of here.” She was still whispering, although there was no one to overhear us. “He is considered wild.”

“He is not savage, Florence. He is very thoughtful.”

“Is that what you call it? Well.” She took my trunk, and hauled it into the bedroom where she began to unpack my shirts and general linen. “Whatever is this?” I heard the question, and knew at once what she meant. I had placed for safekeeping among my linen a small model of vitreous clay; it was a simulacrum of the human brain, perfect in all of its details, that I had purchased from an apothecary in Dean Street. He had told me that it was a copy of the brain of one Davy Morgan, a notorious highwayman who had been hanged a few months before.

“It is nothing, Florence. Leave it on the table.”

“I will not touch it, Mr. Frankenline. It is worm-eaten.”

I went into the bedroom, and picked up the model. “These are not worms. These are the fibres of the brain. Do you see? They are like the channels and currents of the ocean.” How slight was the knowledge of the human organism! There was not one person in a thousand-a hundred thousand-who had stopped to consider the workings of the mind or of the body.

“It isn’t natural,” she said.

“It is nature itself, Florence. I believe that to be the optic lobe.”

“It is no good telling me things like that, sir.” She looked at me in horror. “I want nothing to do with it.”

“If we could stimulate that area, then we might see for many miles. Would that not be an advantage?”

“It would not. With your eyes popping out of your head? Oh dear, no.”

I put the model on the work-table I had set up by the window of the room. “I am afraid that you will remain in ignorance, Florence.”

“At least, sir, I will be happy.”

It did not occur to me then that Florence ’s words expressed some instinctive truth; the natural sentiments of mankind, however coarsely expressed, have a justice of their own. But I had already separated myself for ever from the ordinary pursuits of men. My mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. I wished to achieve more, far more, than those around me and I fully believed that I would pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

I read widely in the libraries of Oxford, straying very far from the directions of my moral tutor who seemed to know nothing beyond Galen and Aristotle. Once a week I climbed the stairs to Professor Saville’s rooms, across the quadrangle from my own, where I always found him sitting in a high-backed chair with a tumbler of brandy and cold water by his side. My early education in Geneva had given me a sufficiency of Greek and Latin, so that the weekly requirements of translation caused no difficulties for me. I had already informed him that my interest lay in the growth and development of the human frame, at which he seemed genuinely astonished.

“It is not a pursuit,” he said, “that I associate with gentlemen.”

“But if gentlemen do not venture upon it, sir, who will?”

“Are there not anatomists in the world?”

“I am concerned with the workings of human life. What subject is of more importance?”

“Surely Galen and Avicenna have informed us on all such matters?” Saville had a habit of rising from his seat, after delivering an opinion, and then walking around the room before resuming his position. Only then would he take a sip from the tumbler.

“I believe, sir, that Galen used the anatomy of a Barbary ape?”

“Quite satisfactory.” He took another tour of the room. “You are not suggesting that we defile the human temple?”

“How else can we learn from where the principle of life proceeds?”

“You need only open your Bible, Mr. Frankenstein, to be assured on these matters.”

“I know the Bible well, sir-”

“I very much hope so.”

“But I confess myself ignorant of the actual mechanism.”

“Mechanism? Whatever do you mean?”

“We learn in Genesis, sir, that God formed man out of the dust of the ground and then breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.”

“What of it?”

“My question is, of what did that breath consist?”

“You have been too much in the company of Mr. Shelley.” He began another perambulation of the room and, on his return to his chair, swallowed a large portion of brandy and water. “You are beginning to doubt Holy Scripture.”

“I am simply curious.”

“Never be curious. It is the path to perdition. Now, shall we turn to the subject at hand?” He began to examine my translation into Greek of an editorial from The Times, on the prospects for Dalmatian independence, and I left his chambers soon after.

SO THERE WAS TO BE NO ENLIGHTENMENT for me at Oxford. I had already determined to study enough to attain my degree, principally for the sake of my father, but like a pilgrim I prepared myself for another journey. The mind that is ambitious makes itself. I found a small barn outside Oxford, in the little village of Headington; I rented this from a farmer for an inconsiderable sum, on the understanding that I was a student of medicine who was mixing noxious chemicals and combinations that needed to be prepared away from the haunts of men. The barn was surrounded by open fields, but had the advantage of a small track leading towards it. It was, as I told him, ideal for my purposes. And so it proved.

I began my experiments on the animal kingdom without, I hope, inflicting unnecessary or excessive pain. I had learned, from my studies of Priestley and Davy, the effectiveness of nitrous oxide as a means of anaesthesia; and I already knew the sedative effect of henbane when administered in large quantities. Yet I began with the smallest creatures. Even the humble worm, and the water-beetle, are objects of wonder to the student of Nature. Under the microscope the fly became a chamber of delights: the vessels of the eye were lustrous and brimming with life, crystals with manifold gleamings. How complex, and yet how vulnerable! All was held in such delicate poise and balance that the breadth of a hair separated life and brightness from darkness and nonentity.

I purchased turtle doves and other birds in the market off Corn Street and, when I felt the quick breathing warmth beneath my fingers, I sensed the elusive pulse of life. Was it the same warmth that suffused the mechanism of the voltaic batteries? Warmth meant motion and excitation, and movement visible or invisible was the condition of life itself. I believed that I was on the edge of a great discovery. If I could create movement, would it not then reproduce itself in sequence just as the waves beating against the shore rise up in harmonious array? The world followed one dance.

I was suffused with such hope and enthusiasm, in those Oxford days, that I would often run through the fields beside the barn in sheer overabundance of energy. I could look up at the clouds rolling above me and see within them the patterns I discerned in the pearly iridescence of a fly’s wing or the shifting colours in the eye of an expiring dove. I considered myself to be a liberator of mankind, freeing the world from the mechanical philosophy of Newton and of Locke. If I could find one single principle from the observation of all types of organism, if in the study of cells and tissues I could detect one presiding element, then I might be able to formulate the general physiology of all living things. There is one life, one way to live, one energetic spirit.

Yet there were periods of my existence when, in the last reaches of the night, I awoke with horror. The first hours of the day provoked in me alarm, and I would rise from my bed and pace through the dark streets as if they were my prison. On the first faint appearance of dawn, however, I became calm. The low and even light, across the water meadows, filled me with a sensation akin to courage. I needed it more than ever. I had begun my anatomy of dogs and cats, purchased at small expense from the poorer people of Oxford. I told them separately that I needed the creature to catch the mice and rats in my lodging, and they parted with it willingly enough. It was easy to sedate the animal with nitrous oxide, and I calculated that the heart would beat for thirty minutes before it relapsed into a painless death. In those few minutes I began the process of dissection, turning the floor of my experimental theatre into a pool of blood. But I persevered in my course. I wished to prove that the organs of the creature were not distinct entities, but depended for their efficacy upon the interdependence of them all. Thus if I hindered the workings of one, then the others would be harmed or damaged in some fashion. And so it proved. I was making such strides in my experimental philosophy that I could see all difficulties falling away.

IN THE WEEK BEFORE THE END of that term I received a letter from my father in Geneva, informing me that my sister had become gravely ill. Elizabeth was my twin in all but name. We had grown up in each other’s company. We had played together from infancy and, although we had not studied together, I had acquainted her with the import of my schoolbooks. We were said to resemble each other in features, too, and both possessed the same nervous and restless temperament.

I made plans to return home immediately. There was a packet boat leaving for Le Havre from London Bridge on the Monday following, and I travelled to London two nights before to arrange my ticket. I had hoped to see Bysshe, of course. He had not communicated with me since my departure from the city, and I was eager to learn of his adventures in my absence. I walked into Poland Street soon after my arrival, but there was no light at his window. I called up to him, but no answer came.

I had hired a small cabin on the boat to Le Havre, but it smelled so strongly of brandy and camphor that I was happy to spend much of the voyage on the open deck. The journey downriver was uneventful enough, apart from the sight of the great number of vessels that seemed like a forest of masts slowly moving past, but I was much struck by the flat marshes of the estuary near the mouth of the Thames. The isolation and loneliness of this region (which, as a passenger told me, was shunned because of the ague), stirred my spirit. I think that even then I had some faint intimations of my future labours, and of the necessity for secret and silent work far beyond the haunts of men. Had I not begun that course in the fields outside Oxford? Yet as I sailed away from England, I did not foresee that I was destined to become the most wretched of human beings.

My journey took me overland by coach from Le Havre to Paris; from there I travelled on to Dijon, and so to Geneva. I was impatient to see my sister, but was obliged to change horses and rest overnight in Paris. I arrived in the early evening at an inn along the Rue St. Sulpice and, after the recent interdiction of travel between France and England, the proprietor was delighted to receive my English companions. He called together a small number of musicians, who played in the courtyard, while his wife and daughters danced a Polish mazurka before us. Such is the warmth of Gallic hospitality, about which so many libels are spread in neighbouring countries. I was to share my chamber with an Englishman travelling on business, Mr. Armitage. He was selling spectacles, lenses and such like. He was the one who had warned me of the ague upon the estuary, and he had already regaled me with several stories concerning the trade in optical goods before I decided to take the air.

I walked outside where my attention was drawn at once to a line of Parisians standing and shuffling their feet outside a pair of folding gates. Some were obviously poor, some affluent, and some of that mixed nature known to the English as shabby genteel. But their variety interested me. They stood nervously and uncertainly before the gates, speaking not at all and keeping their eyes averted from one another. I asked the proprietor, who was standing in the porch of the inn, what this signified. “Ah, monsieur, we do not talk of it.” Why did they not speak of it? “It is bad fortune for the inn. C’est la maison des morts. La Morgue.”

The house of the dead? I believed I knew to what he was referring. It was an institution well known in the city, where the unidentified bodies of the dead were put on display at certain fixed points of the day so that they might be recognised by friends or relatives. There are no doubt some who consider it to be an unpleasing spectacle, but I was delighted by the good fortune that had put it in my way. I could see nothing to loathe in nature. Just as there are some who love to walk in ruins, savouring the traces and sensations of old time, so I saw no objection to walking among the dead and the decomposed. The human frame is in a continual state of decomposition, day by day; its tissues and its fibres wear away, even as we use them, and I saw nothing to be feared in the close observation of that process. If I were to be practised in the art and method of anatomy, I must also observe the natural corruption of the human body.

So I joined the waiting Parisians and, when the folding gates were unlocked by an official, I moved forward into the Morgue. I became at once aware of a peculiar and not unpleasing odour, much like that of damp umbrellas or of the wet straw generally to be found on the floor of a hansom cab. The air was humid, as if a coal fire had been introduced into the room. It was a long low chamber with small-paned windows, much like the interior of a London coffee-house. Where the seats and boxes might have been there were several shallow partitions, with sloping platforms fixed in them. On these the bodies of the dead had been placed, with their clothes hanging above them as a further means of identification. Each was protected from the inquisitive throng by a sheet of plate glass, just as if they were lying in the window of a shop. There were five on the occasion of my visit, three males and two females, and it was a nice calculation to determine the causes of their deaths. One middle-aged man, thickset with a heavy jaw and shaved head, appeared to have been burned; but the livid red bruising, and the swollen limbs, convinced me that he had been drowned. My guess was confirmed when I noticed the pool of water seeping below the body. The face of an adjacent female was almost unrecognisable, looking like nothing so much as a bunch of bruised and overripe grapes: I could fathom no reason for the savage pulping of her visage, unless it were some frightful accident. Yet she interested me. The rest of her body was quite untouched, apart from some streaks of blood and dirt, and it occurred to me that with a new head she might have been an object of lust. She could be identified now only by a lover, or perhaps by a parent.

I did not approach these sights with any levity, but I did not feel the least repulsion; my principal feeling was one of fascination for the curious stillness of the bodies. Once the principle of life had left them they became vacant rooms, more devoid of animation than any waxwork or mannequin. You could imagine a waxwork to be capable of breath and movement, but no act of sympathetic imagination could grant these cold limbs life. I was looking at objects that would never be able to return my look.

In another partition I found the body of an elderly man who had no mark upon him at all. I could tell from his curled boots, placed beside him, that he was an artisan or labourer. There was a curious feature about him, however. I noticed a slight wetness about his eyes, and what seemed to be a tear had settled upon his cheek. The residue of emotion, on what was now an empty visage, affected me in the strangest way. I turned to leave, and was caught momentarily in the crowd clustering around. I glanced towards the open door, at the far end of the low room, and for a moment caught sight of an elderly man standing beside it. He seemed to be exactly the man I had just seen behind the glass, as if by some intervention of the black arts he had brushed away the tear and come alive. Then he smiled at me. I knew all this to be a momentary illusion, but it did not lessen my horror. I walked slowly towards the door, where the official of the Morgue held out his hand for a pourboire, but the figure of the old man had gone. I was relieved to find myself in the open air of the street, and tried to dismiss the incident from my mind, but it lingered with me even as I climbed the stair to the chamber in the inn.

My fellow traveller, Armitage, was lying on his bed fully clothed. Fresh as I was from the sights of the Morgue, for a moment he startled me. “Now, Mr. Frankenstein,” he said. “Will you sup with me? The wine here is very cheap.” He had a low, deep voice that for no reason at all irritated me.

“An early night for me, I am afraid. The coach for Dijon leaves at daybreak. It will be a hard journey.”

“So you need sustenance.” He was older than me, at the age of thirty or thereabouts, but he had an indefinably ancient manner. “You gentlemen of Oxford have been known to starve.”

“How do you know that I am from Oxford?”

“It is printed on your luggage. Eyes, you see. Good eyes.” I had already become aware that he was a salesman of optical goods. “The eye is a tender organism.” He spoke slowly, and with great emphasis. “It swims in a sea of water.”

“I beg your pardon. It does not.”

“Oh?”

“It has roots and tendrils. It is like a trailing plant connected to the soil of the brain.”

“Can we say that it is like a lily? It swims on the surface.”

“You may say that, Mr. Armitage.”

He smiled broadly, having settled the matter to his satisfaction, and clapped me on the back as if he were congratulating me for agreeing with him. “We must get you bread. And meat. And wine.”

Over the rough meal, which the chambermaid brought to us, we exchanged the usual remarks. He lived in Friday Street, off Cheapside, with his father; his father manufactured the lenses and the spectacles, in a workshop on the ground floor of their property, while he acted as a commercial traveller. He had taken advantage of the peace to sail to France, with specimens of his father’s latest work. “You will not find lenses more finely ground,” he said. “You can pick out a distant spire by moonlight.”

“Does he build microscopes?”

“Of course he does. At the moment he has in hand a design that has cylindrical eyes, so to speak, that will make the smallest object clear.”

“I would be very interested in that.”

“You would? What is your study at Oxford, Mr. Frankenstein?”

“I am concerned with the workings of human life.”

“Is that all?” He smiled at me. I could not imagine him breaking into laughter.

“That is how I learned of the nervous fibres of the eye.”

“You are an anatomist then?” He suddenly became very grave, as if I had trespassed upon some private pursuit.

“Not exactly. Not essentially. I cannot claim any great proficiency.”

“Do you know how long the eye survives when it is released from its casing?”

“I have no idea. Minutes, perhaps-”

“Thirty-four seconds. Before its light is extinguished for ever.”

“How do you know this?”

“They dry very quickly, when they have left the socket. Do not ask me how I know.”

“But if they were kept in an aqueous solution, what then?”

“Then, Mr. Frankenstein, you would be considered to ask too much.” He began to eat, very slowly, the meat and bread upon his plate.

I remembered the phrase from Terence. “Nothing human is alien to me, Mr. Armitage.”

He did not answer but continued chewing on his meat. It was veal, as I remember, coated in breadcrumbs in the manner of my compatriots. I had very little appetite for it. Occasionally he would look up at me, with no particular expression in his eye beyond that of calm observation. Eventually he spoke. “My father had an interesting apprenticeship. From the age of fourteen he worked for Dr. John Hunter. Do you know that name?”

“Indeed. Very well.” Hunter’s reputation as a surgeon and anatomist had reached me even in Geneva, where his Natural History of Teeth had been translated into French.

“Dr. Hunter was a great observer of the body, Mr. Frankenstein. He made it his profession.”

“So I have read.”

“His surgical work was second to none. My father has known him to remove a bladder stone in less than three minutes.”

“Truly?”

“And the patient did not die.” Armitage concentrated once more upon his plate, where he was now very deliberately mopping up the crumbs with a portion of bread soaked in wine. “My father still has the stone.”

“The patient did not want it?”

“No. Dr. Hunter called it treasure-trove.”

“But what happened to the eyes?”

“I told you. The patient was still alive. Much to his surprise.”

“Not his. The other eyes that were preserved in water. I presume that they were taken from the bodies of the less fortunate.”

Armitage stared at me with the same curiously dispassionate gaze. “If the patient has died in the operating theatre, then to whom does he belong?” I said nothing, believing that I had already said too much. “Dr. Hunter took the view that, having been entrusted into his care, the body was his responsibility. It became, in a sense, his property.”

“I would not disagree.”

“Excellent. I am speaking to you now in the utmost harmony of good companionship. These facts are not widely known beyond the confines of the medical schools.” My mouth had become dry, and I swallowed a glassful of the wine. “Dr. Hunter believed that the limbs and organs of the deceased patient were of more value to his students than to the soil in which they would otherwise lie. There was a young man, one of Dr. Hunter’s assistants, who had a particular interest in the spleen. So-” Armitage stopped, and surprised me with a broad smile. “As we say in Cheapside, Mr. Frankenstein, it passed under the counter.”

“And your father had a particular interest in eyes?”

“He had always possessed perfect eyesight. It was remarked of him at a very early age. He became interested in the subject, as boys do. I do not know if you have in your country the travelling telescope?” I shook my head. “They are set up in the thoroughfare, and for a small sum you can purchase their use for five minutes. There was always one in the Strand. As a boy, my father loved it. So by degrees he became interested in the relationship between the lens and the eye. Do you know that the eye has its own lens, as permeable as a gas bubble?”

“I was aware of it.”

“It is covered by an exceedingly thin and fine film of transparent substance that my father has named the orb tissue.”

“Your father is an experimentalist, then?”

“I do not know if that is the word, Mr. Frankenstein.” Armitage poured us both another glass of wine. “I will tell you another secret. There were occasions when the patient did not die, of course. That was a source of great satisfaction to Dr. Hunter. But it posed another problem.”

“Of what nature?”

“Scarcity, sir.”

“I believe I understand you. Scarcity of corpses. The readies.”

“It is not a subject that normally arises in conversation. But it was a constant topic among Dr. Hunter and his assistants.”

“How did it resolve itself?”

“You have heard of the resurrectionists, I suppose?”

“Only by report.”

“They are not much mentioned in the public prints these days. But they operate still.”

I was acquainted with the activities of these grave-robbers, or “resurrection men” as they were more generally known. There had been occasional reports of their activity even in Oxford, but there had been no sensations. They were more active in London, where they dug up the fresh bodies of the lately dead and sold them for large sums to the medical schools. “Dr. Hunter was obliged to use their services?”

Armitage nodded. “Reluctantly. He told my father that if these purloined bodies helped to restore life to others, then he could not wholly regret their use.”

“Life for death is a good bargain.”

“You would be welcome on Cheapside, Mr. Frankenstein. My father agreed with you, and helped to negotiate with the men of the resurrectionist profession. He came to know them very well. He said that not one of them was ever sober.”

“You say that they work still?”

“Of course. It is a family trade. They frequent certain inns, where they can be persuaded to-” He raised his hand to his lips, in a gesture of drinking. “Unfortunately there was a trial of one of them, for the theft of a silver crucifix from one of the bodies. He blabbed out the name of Dr. Hunter.”

“And then?”

“It passed over quickly enough. But there was a pamphlet with his name linked to the vampire. You have heard of this entity, Mr. Frankenstein?”

“It is a Magyar superstition. Of no interest.”

“I am glad to hear it. It concerned Dr. Hunter at the time, but his work carried him forward.”

“His work was his life.”

“Yes, indeed. You are very perceptive, if I may say so.” He took some more wine. “You said that you were studying the workings of human life. May I ask what particular aspect interests you?”

I believe that I hesitated for a moment. “I am concerned with the structure of all animals endued with life.”

“To what purpose?”

“I mean to discover the source of that life.”

“But this would include the human frame?”

“I am determined to proceed by degrees, Mr. Armitage.”

“In such a vast undertaking, that is proper. I believe that only a young man could conceive such a scheme. It is tremendous. I would very much like to introduce you to my father.”

“Certainly. I would like to see his eyes.”

He laughed aloud at this, and clapped me upon the back again as if I were the best fellow in the world. “And so you shall. But beware. His look is very keen.”