Elephant Man - Christine Sparks [51]
He was dumped, and the paupers’ hospital took him in because it had no choice.
In the hospital there was a voice that, if not kind, was not actually hostile. It came from a tall, cadaverous man with grey cheeks and despairing eyes, who stared at him and said, “You look the way I feel inside.”
This was Mr. Donner, the clergyman whose drinking and scandalous behavior had caused him to be unfrocked. Without a livelihood Donner had taken to the road. From time to time he tried to make a new life for himself as a teacher, for he was a man of considerable learning. But as soon as he got two shillings to rub together he turned them into whisky. He had been sacked from job after job. He was dying now, of drink and despair.
He seemed to find Merrick’s very deformity endearing. He was the first to talk to him and discover the quick, responsive brain that the stumbling speech had hidden. He protected him, taught him to read, taught him to write with his left hand. Above all he taught him his own simple, shining faith, which had survived unscathed amid the destruction of his life.
One night Donner had given the misshapen little boy his own Bible.
“You have it now,” was all he said. “I’ll not need it.”
When Merrick went to find his friend the next morning Donner’s bed was empty. Somebody thought he’d died in the night. Nobody seemed to know where he might have been taken.
From the hospital Merrick was taken to the workhouse—another workhouse this time, run by a man called Cossins. It was Cossins who first showed him a mirror and made him look into it. He was old enough then to understand the difference between himself and others, and he had cried at the sight, till someone slapped him for being a pest.
Then the nightmare of his life really began. Before he had been merely rejected; now he was actively persecuted. He could do nothing right for Cossins. Whenever they met (and it was strangely often) Cossins would fault him for moving too fast or too slow, making too much noise or sitting in “sullen” silence, for being too greedy or for leaving his food.
The punishment varied. One of Cossins’ favorites was to make his victim stand in a prominent place in a corridor, beneath a notice that labeled him “The Fruit of Evil,” and anyone who passed by was free to knock some of the evil out of the sinner. Cossins, who was much given to pious exhortations, was fond of declaring that only great deformity of soul could account for such deformity of body, and that it was the duty of a good man to “drive the devil out” by such methods as might suggest themselves. And the methods that suggested themselves to Cossins’ sadistic mind were increasingly ingenious.
He would force the little boy to lie down flat on the floor, knowing that the weight of his head would force his neck back till his windpipe was constricted and he was choking. Cossins would wait until the last moment before allowing Merrick up, then seize the semiconscious child and tell him that that was what it felt like to die, and he should remember it and mend his ways.
Cossins permitted no brawling among the inmates of his workhouse, but anyone was free to attack Merrick. If it was discovered, Merrick would be thrashed by Cossins as a punishment for “starting a fight.” Once the child attempted to hide, hoping that when darkness fell he could creep out and run away. But when his absence was discovered (as it soon was, there being little else to make life interesting) the hunt was up. Every man, woman, and child in the building searched for him, and when he was discovered Cossins thrashed him as a troublemaker.
When Merrick was sixteen Cossins died of apoplexy. His place was taken by a man who lacked the inclination to torment, but whose wife insisted that the “monster” be got off the premises. Merrick was duly sold to a down-at-heel traveling showman whose dancing