The Anatomist - Bill Hayes [45]
“Perhaps [I] ought then to be content with a lower station,” he tells himself, “yet, and here seems the rub, my ambition is but just enough raised to cause inquiet…. This is the poison.” And the poison paralyzes.
He has, however, set into play a possible escape plan. Just prior to leaving for Paris, he had made a number of discreet inquiries about becoming a surgeon aboard a “packet,” or small cargo ship, traveling back and forth between England and India. The colony had become a major market for English goods, and hundreds of companies were operating vessels with fully staffed crews. In fact, one of the surgeons at St. George’s had promised Carter help in getting a “surgency” with an outfit called the General Screw Steamship Company. Such a job must have sounded far more exciting to him than hanging out his shingle back in London or Scarborough.
That the idea of leading a more adventurous life would have appealed to the twenty-one-year-old is reinforced by a rather large clue he left behind. It comes on the very first page of his new daily diary, bought and begun in Paris. On an otherwise blank page, Carter affixed an elegant calling card bearing only a name:
J. BELLOT, LIEUTENANT DE VAISSEAU
It meant nothing to me until I returned to his first letter to Lily. Of course! Bellot was the name of one of the fellows who had taken Carter out on his first night in Paris, “a Naval English-looking young officer,” he’d told his sister. In point of fact, Bellot was not English, as Carter soon discovered. But that was the least of it. After dinner and a good many glasses of wine, the men began discussing the latest news on Arctic exploration, and, as H.V. explained to Lily, “I burst into admiration of a French officer who accompanied the last expedition.” This man’s story had been in all the papers back home; he had become a hero to the people of England by volunteering in the search for Sir John Franklin, a celebrated English explorer and sea captain who had disappeared in the polar regions.
As Carter told his sister, he’d gushed and gushed about this brave French officer till, finally, “my friend stopped me and said he could not hear himself so praised—he was the very man,” Joseph René Bellot! (the “Bellot of the Papers,” as Carter would call him)—but so modest that no one would ever have guessed. “And we found him out by chance.”
Next morning, Carter and Bellot breakfasted together, then spent the day walking around Paris—the Tuileries, Place de la Concorde, and other sights—till, finally, the two parted ways, Bellot having his own journey to complete. The young adventurer left behind an indelible memory and a calling card that Carter would later put to use when starting his new diary on New Year’s Day. The name on the card would serve, in effect, as the epigraph for the next phase of his story—The Life of Henry Vandyke Carter, Volume 2—setting a bold tone for what was to come.
PART TWO THE ARTIST
Man is only man at the surface.
Remove the skin, dissect,
and immediately you come to “machinery.”
—Paul Valéry (1871-1945)
Eight
SOMEDAY I MAY WONDER WHERE I FOUND THE NERVE TO DO this. It is just one hour after morning coffee, and I am helping to perform what is awfully close to a decapitation. We have turned our cadaver onto its stomach and have propped the chest on a block so that the head nods down, leaving the neck a clean downward slope. This is whiplash terrain, the thick, powerful muscles that help support the head, and I slice right through the three main ones: the longissimus