Elephant Man - Christine Sparks [113]
When the lights dimmed Merrick gave a sharp intake of breath. Then he fell silent again, and carefully lifted the Princess’s opera glasses to his eyes. After that he never moved.
When the overture had finished, brilliant light flooded the stage for the first scene—a lakeside setting, with Puss in Boots standing by the water, giving his master instructions. The scene proceeded at a fast pace, the young master pretended to be drowning, the king’s carriage came by, the young master was rescued and passed himself off as the Marquis of Carrabus. The Princess fell in love with the Marquis at first sight, and Puss brought the curtain down by inviting the entire assembled company to dine at his master’s castle. Princess Alexandra led the applause as the act finished.
Merrick replaced the opera glasses in his lap with a happy sigh.
“Puss in Boots is terribly clever,” he said.
A look of understanding dawned in Princess Alexandra’s eyes. She did not need more than this to tell her that Merrick was not watching actors, but real people. He witnessed their antics with the unconstrained delight of a child, and he believed in their reality as totally as a child would have done.
Even Treves, who had half-expected it to happen, was momentarily disconcerted by the extent to which Merrick took the performance seriously. After all, the Elephant Man had read the plays of Shakespeare, had acted a scene with Madge Kendal. Yet all that seemed to desert him now, and Treves realized that reading printed lines in his own room was a million years away from the lights and music and color that now struck Merrick’s consciousness with the force of a blow. Once again he marveled at the way the different strands of Merrick’s character lay together, how the man with the maturity to be generous to his persecutors interwove with the child whose eyes shone as he gazed at the stage, and who sometimes could not stop himself from leaning forward and panting in excitement.
Long years as a Princess had made Alexandra a mistress of the art of meaningless talk. Having seen into Merrick’s heart she set herself to entertain him in the way that would please him most. Treves listened, diverted, as she launched into a discussion of the rest of the story, pretending not to know its outcome, and asking Merrick with apparent seriousness, his opinion as to Puss’s motives, and the next stage of the plot. Merrick gave the matter his full attention, and the interval passed happily.
During the next act it began to occur to Treves that there might be disadvantages in Merrick’s total involvement in what he saw. The plot was held up by a group of clowns who put on a slapstick display knocking each other flat with hefty blows and kicking each other around the stage. The audience howled with laughter, but Treves noticed that Merrick had quietly laid down the opera glasses as though he did not wish to see too much.
“They’re not really hurting each other, John,” said Treves quietly. “They’re only pretending—to make us laugh.”
Merrick inclined his head politely but said nothing, and Treves prayed that the episode would be over soon. For he realized that the Elephant Man, who had suffered so many blows and kicks in his life, could not believe in pretended injury.
But the next moment Merrick had made a noise that might have been a laugh, and once again the glasses were at his eyes. Looking at the stage Treves saw that a large