Elephant Man - Christine Sparks [83]
He would have said more but she broke in, unable to bear his self-laceration any longer. “Oh no, Frederick, that’s all wrong! John is happier and more fulfilled now than he ever has been in his entire life. And that is completely due to you.”
“Yes, it is. And what did I do? I opened a door and let a condemned man see paradise, knowing that his chains would never let him cross the threshold. How could I do it? What was all this for?”
“Frederick, just what is it that you’re saying?”
“Am I a good man or am I a bad man?”
“Oh Frederick.” She put her arms round him, trying to reach him with her love, knowing that there was a grief inside him she could not touch.
“You’re a good man, a very good man.”
He said, so softly that she barely heard it, “I feel so ugly.”
Chapter 15
Medically, Merrick needed little help these days. His wounds had healed, his bronchitis had disappeared with good nursing, and the damage to his hip that caused him to limp would never be any better. Keeping him clean, fed, and warm was a job that could have been left to the nurses with Treves dropping in once a week, but he continued his daily visits, knowing that John would miss them. Treves now felt a deep sense of guilty responsibility for the life he had taken over for his own purposes and changed in a way that might not be for the better.
He remembered reading somewhere that in ancient China, if one man saved another’s life, the one he had saved became his property and his responsibility. He knew now how that burden must have felt. John had given himself trustingly into his hands, and Treves had no doubt that he would have been amazed to learn of his benefactor’s sense of guilt. He was, as Anne had said, happier than he had ever been before in his life. But the guilt was real nonetheless.
He had another reason for his daily visits. He had become honestly fond of the gentle, sensitive man he had discovered beneath the shell of the monster. When he looked at John he no longer saw his shape.
Because Merrick’s medical needs were now slight, and they must talk of something, Treves drew him out to discuss the books he had read. He discovered that Merrick had gone through the whole of Shakespeare in an astonishingly short time.
“I like the sonnets best though,” he said one day. “I think poetry is so beautiful.”
That evening Treves went on a hunt through his bookshelves at home and discovered two volumes of poetry. They belonged to Anne, who offered them willingly enough when she knew whom they were for.
Treves made a point of mentioning that Anne had sent them when he handed them over the next day, knowing that any attention from a pretty woman charmed Merrick.
They read the poems together. Despite his thick speech Merrick had a natural gift for the feel of a verse, which would often lead him into its heart while Treves was still puzzling over its meaning.
That morning he returned several times to the same poem, as though sensing that it had a significance for him that it would only yield up with study.
“When will the stream be aweary,” he read, “of flowing under my eye?
When will the wind be aweary of blowing over the sky?
When will the clouds be aweary of fleeting?
When will the heart be aweary of beating, and nature to die?”
Treves took up the refrain:
“Never, oh never, nothing will die.
The stream flows, the wind blows,
The cloud fleets, the heart beats,
Nothing will die.”
They were silent for a moment. Treves waited to see if Merrick wanted to read anything else, but he closed the book with a small sound that might have been a sigh. His eyes passed over the room and came to rest on the picture of the child sleeping. He gazed at it for a long time.
“I wish I could sleep like normal people,” he said quietly. Before Treves could think of a reply he turned and looked at him levelly, “Mr. Treves, there is something I’ve been meaning to ask you for some time …” he seemed not to know how to go on.
“Yes, John,