Elephant Man - Christine Sparks [3]
Jenny had not spoken since they had caught up with him. She was not a chatterbox, but a child who seldom opened her mouth unless she had something definite to say. It was a habit that had gotten her branded as sullen except by her father, who had been exactly the same. Now she stood doggedly by his side and pointed to the freak tent.
“I want to go in there with Father,” she said.
“Well you can’t,” retorted Anne in a sharper voice than Treves had ever heard her use before.
Treves shook his head at Jenny. She was his pet to whom normally he could refuse nothing. But he would refuse her this.
“No, you can’t” he agreed. “I’ve already been in there.”
“But why can’t we go again?” she persisted.
“Because you’d be frightened,” he explained, talking to her seriously.
“Why?”
“Because the people in there are horribly ugly.” Treves knew as soon as he’d said this, that it was a mistake. Jenny was not the little girl to be put off by the idea of horrors. On the contrary, she was as ghoulish a child as a medical father had ever produced, and she had inherited his own delight in the rare and strange. Not for the first time Treves wished she was a boy. Already she showed signs of the chilly, hard-bitten mind a scientist needed. What on earth would a woman do with such a mind?
He knew that the sensible course would be to exert his fatherly authority, to tell Jenny to be silent and obey her parents. But as always he yielded to a desire to know what her argumentative powers, which were already considerable, would produce next.
“Are ugly people frightening?” she challenged him.
He bit back a desire to retort, “Of course they are, you cold-blooded little monster. That’s why you want to go in there.” Instead he settled for, “Most people find them so.”
“Then why do they go to see them?” Jenny’s sharp eyes had flickered to the tent’s entrance where a steady stream of people were passing through.
“Because they like being frightened, I suppose,” he said lamely.
“What about you, Father? Do you like being frightened?”
“They don’t frighten me,” he replied, seeing too late where she was leading him.
“Then why do you go to see them?”
Before he could think of an answer, Anne intervened to put an end to what struck her as a totally improper conversation. The readiness of her elder daughter to take her father up on any point that came into her head horrified Anne almost as much as Treves’ willingness to let his daughter lead him into these arguments. She flung him a look of reproach.
“It’s getting late,” she said. “I think we’d all better be going home, unless—” She looked at her husband doubtfully, “—unless you have something else to do here?”
“No.” He fell into step beside her. “Let’s go home now. I’ve seen all I want to.”
“Did you find whatever it is you’re looking for?”
He was silent so long that she looked at him. He was walking with his head down, studying the ground intently.
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “But I shall—soon.”
Chapter 2
The London Hospital stood at the eastern end of Whitechapel Road, bordering on the slums and light industrial factories from which it drew many of its patients. It was a massive, ugly, and relatively modern building, governed by a committee that was justifiably proud of the hospital’s up-to-date equipment and high quality of medicine.
As a surgeon at the London, Treves was more exposed than most to the ravages of industry. It fell to him to operate on the huge sweaty men who were brought in with their bodies gashed open by heedless machines. He hated this part of the business. It was at these moments that his boyhood in Dorset, much of it spent on his grandfather’s farm, came back most strongly. There was something human and comprehensible about a kick from a horse, even if it broke your neck.