Elephant Man - Christine Sparks [82]
He let himself quietly into the house and went directly into the sitting room. It seemed to him now that almost no time had passed since Merrick had been in this very room, overcome with emotion at Anne’s friendly greeting, the pretty smile on her face. The words came back to Treves—“I’m not used to such kindness from a beautiful woman”—and he wondered how he could have missed the danger that stared him in the face.
Automatically he went to Anne’s, bookshelf and began hunting through it. It gave him something for his hands and mind to do, and he needed that now to still the fear within him. After a few minutes he had a small pile of books on the table. The last one that came to hand he quickly replaced on the shelf. It was The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
There was a soft movement behind him and Anne appeared in the doorway, dressed for bed.
“I thought I heard you come in. I’ve been waiting for you upstairs,” she said. She smiled when she saw what he was doing. She never grudged the time he gave to Merrick now. “More romances for John?”
“Hmmmm?” He only half-heard her. She came further into the room and studied his face.
“Freddie, what’s the matter? You look half dead. Was the lecture very tiring?”
“No, it isn’t that. I’ve just been thinking about something—about Bytes.”
“Oh Freddie, what put that wretched vampire into your head?”
“Something I—” He made himself stop. He could not tell Anne the implications of what he had seen earlier that night. But he had to tell her some of what was churning in his mind or he would go distracted. “I’m beginning to think I’m very little different from him.”
“Bytes! Oh, that’s absurd.” She began to poke the fire into life again.
He sat down feeling deathly tired. “Is it? Mothershead said much the same thing.”
“She said you were getting like Bytes? I don’t believe it.”
“She implied it—that I’ve set John up as a curiosity all over again, except that this time he’s in a hospital, with all the accoutrements of science rather than a carnival. But still the people come to stare. At least, that’s what Mothershead thinks. Oh, they don’t pay a tuppence admission any more. No, now it’s pictures, curios, and precious books. All for a chance to see the terrible Elephant Man.”
She ceased working on the fire. She had been listening to him only superficially, sure that he was using her as a sounding board as he often did, without expecting any response. More often than not there was no response she could give for many of the things he “discussed” with her were above her head. But now it was suddenly borne in on her that her husband was not talking as a doctor or a scientist, but as a man in trouble, and that he was asking her help. There was an unhappiness in his voice that she had never heard there before when he was talking about a medical problem. She laid down the poker and came beside him on the sofa.
“But it’s all to make John happy,” she reminded him. “It’s not as if you’re getting anything out of it.”
There was the dreadful bitterness of self-knowledge in his voice as he replied, “Oh no. I’m not getting anything out of it. My name is constantly in the papers. Carr-Gomm praises me to the heavens. Patients have begun asking expressly for me.”
“Frederick, now you are being absurd. You’re an extremely talented man. Of course the patients ask for you. And as for John …”
“Yes. John Merrick would still be crouching in filthy shops and broken-down circuses if I hadn’t happened along that day and seen what a splendid paragraph my diagnosis would make in the journal. And it paid off, didn’t it? All I had to do was say, ‘Step right up, ladies and gentlemen. Step right up and see your worst nightmares personified, your worst fears made flesh! Turn him around! See the horror of London, the terror that I, the good doctor, bring you.