Elephant Man - Christine Sparks [33]
He moved cautiously toward the bed, noting how the Elephant Man drew back from him, and flinched from his hand. Renshaw’s nervousness was gone now. He was in control, the only way he liked to be.
“So this is the Elephant Man,” he said with a grin. “I ain’t never seen nothing like you before. What the bleedin’ ’ell ’appened to you?”
The creature’s silent cowering into the farthest corner increased Renshaw’s confidence yet more.
“Oh—dumb eh?” He took a long swig of the gin and smiled. “Good, I like people what can keep quiet.”
He moved quickly, offering the bottle to the Elephant Man in a movement that was almost a jab, grinning in a satisfied way as the thing tried to press himself into the far wall. “Like a drink? Go on—go on have some. No? You should try being more sociable, mate. You’ll get yourself disliked.”
His eyes fixed onto the hanging growths on the Elephant Man’s chest. Tentatively he pressed the cold bottle up against one of them. When nothing happened he began to feel the misshapen body with his fingers. The man made small, whimpering sounds and put up a protesting hand, but did not dare to try to push Renshaw away.
“You and I are going to be good friends, we are,” Renshaw told him softly. “I’ve got lots of friends who I know would like to meet you. And they will, mate—they will.”
He pulled back abruptly and went to the door. He paused and looked back at his victim, raising the gin bottle to him in salute.
“Welcome to the London.”
He closed the door softly behind him and made his way down the stairs. He could hear his brass-heeled boots clicking triumphantly as he went. The sound cheered him. Life was fun again.
Chapter 7
“Good morning, Mr. Treves. If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, with your early habits, you’d ’a made a fine milkman.”
“Good morning, Charley. I’ll keep that in mind.”
Treves dodged the milkman’s horse, who would also have greeted him in its own fashion, and went into the front entrance of the hospital. Already he had forgotten the milkman he’d met at the door. It was the kind of cheerful encounter he made a dozen times a day while his mind was on something else. And people smiled and said how ready Dr. Treves always was to exchange a friendly word, and never knew that he had barely seen or heard them.
Fast as he had traveled, his mind had raced ahead of him. Indeed it had never been away. He had been forced to leave the hospital early the previous day and spend a boring afternoon in his consulting rooms at 6 Wimpole Street, dealing with the routine ailments he encountered in his increasingly prosperous private practice. He disliked these afternoons but forced himself to go on with them, partly through his ambition, which told him that no doctor ever made a name through hospital practice alone, and partly in fulfillment of the promise he had made to Alfred and Elizabeth Mason, thirteen years ago, when his one thought had been to convince them that he was fit to marry their daughter Anne. A solid private practice with which to keep their daughter he had promised them, and he had been as good as his word. The Masons, had they still been alive, could have had no quarrel with the consulting rooms, or the home in Wimpole Street. As for Treves, he bent his head to the necessary yoke, but his mind lived at the hospital.
He had been forced to leave the Elephant Man in Mothershead’s care. He knew she would be competent, even kindly in an impersonal way. But she could not be everywhere, and the minor uproar caused by Merrick’s arrival had convinced Treves that his patient needed constant protection. There was no one to provide it.
He had left the strictest instructions that no one but Mothershead herself was to approach the Isolation Ward, and he counted on the ripple of fear he had detected in the hospital to ensure that those instructions were obeyed. But he could not be easy in his mind, and on the day following Merrick’s admission