Elephant Man - Christine Sparks [47]
“Can you imagine what his life has been like?” he said.
“Yes, I think I can.”
Carr-Gomm swung round. “No, you can’t!” he said with quiet savagery. “You can’t begin to know. No one can.”
“No.”
Carr-Gomm rose and faced him. “You’re quite right, Treves. This is an exceptional case. And I agree that the Committee should see Mr. Merrick—no!” At once Carr-Gomm held up a hand to correct himself. “Not that way. Broadneck and the others don’t like to deal with patients directly. It makes them queasy. Do you have any photographs of Mr. Merrick?”
“Well, yes.”
“Excellent. We shall present them, along with the other particulars of the case to the Committee. I want them to see exactly how horribly his body has been deformed. You and I shall vouch for his inner qualities.”
“Do you think they’ll go along with us?”
“Of course they will. They’re reasonable men.”
Before leaving the hospital that evening Treves sought out Mrs. Mothershead and had private word with her. What he told her and what he requested of her afforded him enormous satisfaction. He would have felt slightly less complacent had he been able to see her after his departure.
Mothershead sat for a long time, her face marked by a frown which seemed to deepen the longer she thought. Finally she rose and began to climb the stairs to the top of the hospital.
Merrick, dozing gently off, his head against his knees, was startled into wakefulness by Mothershead’s abrupt entry. He looked at her apprehensively. She had never been actively unkind to him, but he knew she disapproved of him.
She walked over to the bed and took up the Bible, allowing it to fall open where it would. She handed it to Merrick.
“Read it,” she said.
Slowly his eyes focused on one paragraph and he began to read.
“Thou heardest my voice; hide not thine ear at my breathing, at my cry.”
He realized that she was no longer there. She had begun to back toward the door, a disturbed, almost frightened, look on her face.
“Credit where credit is due,” she said at last. “You’ll have the paper every morning at breakfast.”
She departed quickly. Merrick waited a moment in case she should come back. When he had heard her footsteps fading down the stairs he looked back at the Bible in his hands. He had been reading from Lamentations.
He sat very still for a long time after she had gone, wondering if anyone else would burst in on him. He strained each nerve to catch the most distant noise. Now and then footsteps would approach the little flight of stairs that led up to the Isolation Ward, but always they passed on, and at last he began to relax.
Darkness was falling outside, and all around him he could hear the sounds of a large building closing down for the night. He listened, trying to place them, but his experience was too limited for him to put names to everything he heard. Footsteps he knew, and doors shutting heavily in the distance. All these were familiar from his days in the workhouse. But the voices puzzled him. There were male voices—sober sometimes with responsibility, but always with an undertow of cheerful confidence that held nothing brutal in it. Such voices were totally outside his experience.
Strangest of all was the ripple of chatter from the nurses going off duty. Their voices were young and lighthearted, dispersing sometimes into laughter. In the whole of his life he had never heard such a thing before. He had encountered few young women—sluts in the workhouse, girls hired for an hour or two by Bytes or his other owners, goggling spectators who paid their twopence to see him and then flung themselves into the arms of their accompanying men when he was revealed—this was his experience of the female sex before he came into the hospital. Since then there had been Nora, who screamed when she saw him, and Mothershead with her stern, unyielding