Elephant Man - Christine Sparks [72]
“Oh, but how will you finish it? You haven’t any more cardboard.”
“I’ll have to find some more.” He shrugged, at a loss. The movement of his shoulders made Nora aware of his body, and she drew back. He was the Elephant Man again.
“Yes, well—” She felt suddenly uncomfortable. “Good day, Mr. Merrick.”
She hastened from the room, forgetting the towel and blanket which she had left on the table. Merrick made as if to call after her but thought better of it With difficulty he scooped them up himself and took them into the bathroom. He arranged the towel neatly over the back of the bath, and the blanket over the back of a chair. Then he stood back to admire his work. There wasn’t a line out of place.
He was becoming adept now at eating. His meals always arrived already cut for him so that he could manage them easily with just a spoon or fork in his left hand. Today he got through his breakfast quickly, anxious to resume work as soon as possible on the cathedral. As he ate he gazed out of the window on the original. This was his favorite time of day for looking at it, the moment when the morning sun climbed the spire till it seemed like one glowing finger pointing upward. Watching it he felt part of that glow, part of the eternal hope to which it aspired. As the day wore on and the sun moved away he would give a faint sigh of regret, and count the hours till he would be given his vision again.
He wondered if Nora would return for his breakfast things. He hoped so. For a moment as they talked that morning he had looked up into her face and known that she had forgotten his ugliness in the interest of their conversation. It gave him a chance to study her features, which were not turned away from him but open and friendly, and he had thought how pretty she was. He would have sat there all day, watching the movement of her lips, the soft, peachlike color of her complexion, and the flickering movements of her dark eyes, had she let him. But their moment of communication had passed almost as soon as it had begun. He had seen the awareness of him creep back into her eyes, and hoped he had concealed his hurt.
His pain had caught him unaware, it was so long now he had thought himself inured to it. That wound had been inflicted so often during his life that it seemed like a natural part of himself. But now—his mind ran back over the weeks he had spent in the hospital—he’d been protected and cared for long enough for the wound to begin to heal, and any new infliction hurt as bitterly as that first pain, long ago in his childhood, when the truth about himself had begun to dawn.
It was easy in this room without mirrors to forget what he was, and think that a pretty girl might talk to him at her ease, might smile and laugh, and that he might see reflected in her friendly eyes the image of the man he longed to be. For the moment that hope was crushed. All over the hospital—all over the world—there were pretty girls like the one who had fled him this morning; as they would all flee him, no matter how hard they tried to pretend, and in fleeing they would force him back into hell.
With a desperate intensity that took his breath away he yearned for beauty to feed his senses, which had been starved since the moment of his birth. Why, he thought—what was he? Ears that had heard no music, eyes that had seen no loveliness, hands that had touched no softness, a heart that had known no love, save once so long ago that it seemed a dream. There was beauty all around him in the world—and it fled from him.
He rose and moved over to the window. There was a constriction in his heart that was like a choking pain. He would have wept if weeping were easier. He stood by the window a long time, gazing out on the spire glittering in the sun, until the ache in his throat had subsided. At last he went back to the table and sat down again to his