Frankenstein's Bride (20 page)

“But these men, Mr. Goodall, involved themselves in this matter desiring some personal satisfaction. Alone among them, you
did not. Let me tell you, nothing concerning Maria Clementi is without criminality, or frenzy, or lust. She is a magnet for
men with empty pockets or fevered brains or bodies. She may not be entirely to blame. After what we heard this evening, whatever
the real truth, it appears at least that she has been very ill-used.

“But you, Mr. Goodall—Jonathan—are innocent. You must withdraw from this matter before it overwhelms you. You have, I know,
a worm of curiosity in your brain, a desire to know more, a feeling truths can be discovered which will transform the world.
The light of reason, you think, can be induced to play over the world; all will be transformed; we shall live in Paradise.

“Well, my dear, I am older than you and have seen the world transformed twice, once by revolution in France and then by the
Emperor Napoleon, and this second transformation widowed me. I have no love for transformers and no desire to see a world
transformed again. Leave things as they are, Mr. Goodall. Leave them alone. Go down to the country, live with your good young
woman and your family, look to your land and care for the families who tend it for you. In short, cultivate your garden, that
is the best a man can do. Do not lose your grip on the good and the real, I beg you.”

After Mrs. Jacoby had retired to bed I was very thoughtful. She had told me forcibly what I knew, gave me the advice I gave
myself. Maria had gone; I did not think she would return. I determined I would visit Victor next day to see how he did (revealing
nothing of today's transactions even if he were in a state to understand what was told) and then go swiftly back to Kittering
before I lost everything I held dear.

S I X T E E N

NEXT DAY, EARLY, Mrs. Jacoby and I parted with all good will. I secured a place on a coach leaving for Nottingham at eleven
that morning and went to pay a visit to Victor before my departure.

Mrs. Frankenstein was greatly distressed when I arrived, and not very welcoming either, for she and Victor's father had seen
me getting Maria from the room at the Royal Society and discovered from the men calling at the house that she had escaped.
She thought me to be Maria's accomplice. Maria must be found, Victor's mother insisted, and forced to confess the dreadful
allegations she had made against Victor were false.

However, the poor woman had greater cares even than that. Victor, she told me, had the day before gone into a high fever:
the doctor despaired of him, saying that during the attack vital organs must have been penetrated which were now mortifying.
Little could be done, said Victor's unhappy mother, stricken with grief at the approaching death of her son—and deeply bewildered
also. Apparently at three the previous morning he had called for pens, paper and ink which his nurse had been afraid to refuse
him. Since then he had been propped up in his bed, dreadfully ill, writing furiously. His mother had not discovered all this
until daylight broke when she went in to see him. Finding out what he was doing she had pleaded with him to stop. He would
not; she dared not force him to do so, even though she knew this exercise could only weaken him further. He was still there,
she told me, leaning against his pillows, scribbling, the bed strewn with written-over sheets of paper.

“He cannot be writing an account of his attack,” she said. “For why would he write so much? He gave me the keys to his desk,
also, and insisted I bring certain papers to him. When I refused he became so agitated I was forced to comply. Please,” she
urged, “please, Mr. Goodall, will you go to him, try to calm him, persuade him to rest?”

I agreed I would do this and went upstairs to Victor's room. The situation was exactly as Mrs. Frankenstein had described.
Victor lay propped up, yellow-faced and indescribably thin. There was a roofing fire, a nurse sitting by it but doing nothing,
for there was nothing to do. As I came in she gave me an anxious look, then rose to her feet. Around Victor's head was a bandage
badly stained. I guessed even there his wounds were not healing. As I approached I saw his face was beaded with sweat. In
his hand was a pen, spluttering ink as his hand moved rapidly across a tablet of paper propped on a writing desk he had against
his slightly raised knees. His position looked painful; his whole face and attitude spoke of agony. The entire expanse of
the bed was covered with sheets of paper, some written, others containing diagrams and chemical formulae. As I went to him
the nurse intercepted me, saying, in an undertone, “Can you persuade him to cease this frantic work?”

I nodded and went to the bedside. Victor looked at me and smiled, a mere rictus, yet somehow, his sunken eyes were more peaceful
than they had been for many months. I was happy to see it, yet I grieved.

“Jonathan,” he whispered in a rasping voice—he had much trouble breathing and as I came closer I heard his breath sawing in
and out—”Jonathan, I am glad to see you. Will you take my papers?”

“Of course I will, Victor,” I answered.

“There are also some notes of my work.”

I nodded again.

“Do not let my parents see this,” he said, gesturing with the pen at what he had been writing. “They must never see it.”

“I will make sure of it. But Victor, you must cease writing. It is doing you damage.”

“I know, but I have finished now,” he said. “Jonathan, there's no help for me. It is over, and I am glad it is. For I have
made my world a hell and I can live in it no longer. These papers are my testament and my confession. Preserve them, and preserve
the scientific papers also. I have made advances, scientific advances in a way no man should have, but the knowledge, Jonathan,
the knowledge—” And as he said these last trailing words it was in the tone of a man who speaks the name of a lover. Then
he gasped, “Gather them up. Hide them. Take them with you when you go.”

I could do no more for him than relieve his mind of anxiety, so I gathered the papers roughly in a bundle and put the weighty
document into the inside pocket of my coat. I removed the pen from his hand and the desk from his knees as he shut his eyes,
unutterably exhausted.

As I went about my business with the papers and the desk I tried to speak levelly to him, but kept my eyes from him, for they
were full of tears. “Victor,” I said, “whatever you have done you have repented and repented bitterly. There is a God who
will forgive you. May I not send for a clergyman now, to whom you can unburden yourself and who will assure you of that forgiveness?”

He sighed. Each word, as he spoke, gave him pain. “No churchman could—no priest could give me absolution for what I have done.
God himself could not forgive. I have abrogated His rights, done what no man should do—I have tried to make myself a god.”

“Victor,” I groaned, weeping openly now, “this stern Lutheran conscience—this self-punishment—it cannot be right.” I fell
to my knees beside his bed.

“Jonathan,” he said, “I cannot truly repent unless I destroy my work, the work from which so much evil has come. And that
I cannot—no—
will
not, do. Read my pages—read them.”

“I will,” I said. “Of course I will.”

His eyes closed again, and “Farewell,” he whispered, His breathing became harsher, more labored. In his physical struggle
he forgot me, then, I saw, lapsed into unconsciousness. So, “Farewell, Victor,” I said and kissed his brow and left, weeping.

I descended the stairs. At the bottom, Mrs. Frankenstein awaited me. I must not show her the papers, the writing of which
had cost her son so dear, yet I knew she would think she had a right to them. Reaching the bottom tread, I wiped the tears
from my eyes, looked at her anxious face and saw it change as she realized from my expression that I, too, believed her son
would die.

I told her Victor had finished writing and had given me his papers to put in order. I would take them to the country to do
so. Mercifully she did not ask me then for copies. Her first—her only thought—was for Victor, whom she, bidding me a hasty
farewell, went up stairs to tend.

Later I received a letter from Victor's father asking for his son's last testimony. I replied telling him that as he knew
his son had been in a high fever when he wrote, the pages, alas, were rambling and incomprehensible, the diagrams and formulae
appeared meaningless. I had therefore, I said, taken the liberty of burning the pages, which would have brought no further
credit to his name. The work he had done and the feelings of his friends and family for him would remain his best memorial.
Mr. Frankenstein did not reply to this letter.

It gave me no joy to refuse the request of the bereaved father but I had promised Victor I would keep his papers from his
family. And had I broken that promise, what consolation would they have brought? Certainly, possession of the last testament
of Victor Frankenstein over the years I have held it, has brought me no peace of mind.

I set off for Gray's Inn Road, where I would pack my small bag and go to the coach, but I had not gone very far on the frosty
road, under a laden, yellow sky, when the first snowflakes began to blow in my face. Before I reached home I was walking half-blind
through the snowstorm and there was an inch of snow on the ground beneath my feet. I suspected the coach might not set out
in such conditions and this proved to be the case. When I arrived with my bag in the City, the coachman was well muffled on
his seat atop the vehicle, six coach-horses in their traces. Then he began to clamber down again, passengers put their heads
out of the coach windows, demanding to know what was going on. The coachman shouted that reports from further up the road
told of snow having started early in the morning, and roads already half-blocked. To proceed would be folly.

I was sorely tempted to hire a horse or a private carriage and blunder my way through to Nottingham. But a moment's consideration
made me realize this would have been madness. Cordelia, given any choice, would prefer a delayed husband-to-be to a frozen
corpse by the wayside. I returned to Gray's Inn Road, frustrated and melancholy.

It was therefore in Cordelia Downey's little parlor that I sat alone before a roaring fire and, putting the pages of drawings
and scientific information aside (and I have not looked at them since), I began to read the account Victor Frankenstein had
scrawled that day, from what was to prove his deathbed.

S E V E N T E E N

I
know myself to be a dying man, killed by that beautiful
creature I created. I know I am irrevocably doomed for I
have committed the unforgivable sin, the ultimate blasphemy.
I have usurped my Maker, and made life. I made a new
Adam and a new Eve. They are wicked; they have proved my punishment.
Oh, my poor wife and my little son, innocent even of the
knowledge of what I had done, now both dead, dead as if by my
own hand.

“But I must be as brief as I can for I have little strength or
time left to me. I dread being unable to finish this, my account of
my life, of my sins.

“The first creature I made as a young man was a brute, though
whether I created a brute or turned my creation into one, I cannot
say. However, it was that creature which turned against me,
which destroyed my life and, made it a waste. He taught me what
I had never known before, bitterness, loss of hope, self-contempt.

“After this occurred I would not learn the lesson it taught me.
A wiser man, a less ambitious man would have felt remorse—as I
did—then, never meddled again in such business. But I, arrogantly,
thought I could put right what I had done—by going further.
It came to me that the softening effect on my creature of one
of his own kind, but a woman, might render him harmless and
thus decrease my guilt. And he wanted one, a bride, as he called
it, moaning, ‘My bride, get my bride,' in his strangled tongue until
I was forced to lock him up to get him away from me or I would
have killed him.

“His nature was not all savage. His fits of bestiality would
come on him at random, or when he became disturbed about
some matter, big or small. Sometimes, God help him, he was
pleading and gentle enough, whining, asking questions and
demanding little playthings which I would sometimes supply.
Seeing that grisly, monstrous figure in his jail-room, playing like
a child with a little wooden horse and cart I had given him,
knowing I had created this perversion, this freak of nature—
I cannot describe to you the rage and self-disgust I felt. Yet I had
brought this awful thing into the world and pride, evil pride, forbade
me to do what should have been done—destroy it.

“It was pride made me think I could solve the hideous problem
I had created by making a woman for my monster. In my
arrogance I supposed I could correct my first error by further
effort, by making a woman for my man, a Frankenstein's Eve to
match that abortion, Frankenstein's Adam.

“Pride, all pride. Fatal pride, which killed my wife and son
and now kills me.

“‘Make my bride, my bride, my bride.' As I lie here that mumbling
grating voice still rings in my ears, as if he were in the room
with me. And he might be, for he is still at large, the villain, and
will outlive his creator. Does he know it? I think he does.

“In the Orkneys, then, with only the backward inhabitants of
that poor little fishing village, a people ignorant, degenerate and
barbarous as any Mohican or Apache in America, I thought to
hide my beast and make for him his beastly bride.

“I got information from the mainland (a man with money can
buy anything he desires if he can find one base enough to supply
it) that over in France they could obtain for me the body of a
young woman, only nineteen years old. They told me she was a
country girl who had come to Paris to sing and dance, had been
seduced, was with child—had killed herself. To this day I do not
know whether it was suicide or murder. Knowing me to be willing
to pay, having found the girl, my villainous associates might well
have taken matters into their own hands and caused her death
themselves. I asked no questions then, desperate to continue my
experiments, find some way of controlling the monster I had
made—and improve on him. I had made a man, yes, but a maimed
and horrid figure of a man. I thought, if I am to create afresh, let
my new creation do me credit. So, using a man desperate for gold
as my boatman, I sailed to France and came back with the corpse,
a beautiful young woman, whole and undamaged. I needed not
fashion her, like the last, merely use the technique I had found of
giving life to animate her corpse, thus bringing the dead to life
again. I did not this time blasphemously create man like God, as I
had done before, but blasphemously mocked Our Lord Jesus
Christ, who brought Lazarus back to life. Yet, one might ask, what
harm is there in restoring life to one of God's creatures? Is that not
only one step further on from what a doctor, bound by sacred oath,
must do? That was what I said then to myself.”

“Ill-luck dogged me. I shall be glad to leave this cruel world. For
who could have guessed that seven years after I left Orkney Donald
Gilmore, son of the owner of the fishing-boat I used to transport the
girl, would be in London, in the very doorway I was entering? That
he would recognize me, that he would tell all he knew?”

“There on Orkney I had my brute locked up in his barn,
roaring and yelling, while I made his partner (first removing
all traces of the child she was to bear). Soon I had, living and
breathing, the bride, the wife for my monster. She was so beautiful,
soft-haired, smooth-skinned—so beautiful. And, because
her mind was wiped clear of all memory, she was so innocent,
primally innocent. Even as she awoke from her unconscious
state she looked into my eyes—mine was the first face she saw
in her new life—and smiled such an innocent smile, the smile
of a baby.

“At that moment it came to me, with some vast pang which
tore through my body, that I could not give over this angel to that
beast. For all I knew then, he would kill her. If he did not he
would brutalize her, make her, for all her beauty, as foul as he was.
She was mine, I thought. Not his—but mine. Thus, one sin gave
birth to another.

“In his barn, knowing my work proceeded, the beast grew
more noisy and importunate. I had to send the men in to quieten
him, but even then he would not be still. And all the while I contemplated
teaching my woman—my blasphemously titled Eve—
to speak, to teach her what she must know to be my consort. And
yet, within days, even before she understood anything, she
yearned to go to where he lay on straw in his barn. At night I was
forced to lock the doors, for otherwise she would creep out at
night and be found outside the door of the barn at morning, half-frozen
and completely ignorant of what she had done. When he
cried and called out she would gaze towards where the cries came
from, rise and try to escape, to be with him.

“I could not, would not, give her to him.

“Yet, while he, that accursed creature, was there to distract
her, I knew she would never be able to love me properly. So, I concluded—
I must get rid of my maimed Adam and, when he was
gone she, my Eve, would be truly mine. I was employing madman's
logic, and like a madman, I did not know it.

“I might have killed him, but the villagers in that primitive
place were becoming suspicious. They suspected me of magic—
and even Gilmore might have balked at helping me dispose of the
corpse at sea. And—in any case—I made him. The creature was
mine. Something prevented me from destroying my own creation
with my own hands. I had attempted it before many years before.
God help me, the result was that he as good as killed me.

“I therefore took him to Dublin, drugged and crated, and
released him. Describing him as my manservant, I accused him of
the theft of my watch and had him searched. The watch was on
his person, of course, for I had put it there. I handed him, and his
future, over to the authorities there, to let them decide whether to
hang or imprison him. I scarcely cared which, only to get rid of
the creature. He did not understand what he was supposed to
have done, nor what was happening, and stood in the dock when
he was tried, blubbering mumbling and grimacing.

“When they led him away—the verdict was transportation to
Australia for the rest of his life—he held his arms out to me, tears
running down his vile face, blubbering, ‘Master—master.' Even as
they hauled him, struggling, down the passageways to the place of
imprisonment I heard him calling out again and again those fatal
words, ‘Master—my bride, my bride.'

“I quit Dublin, thinking soon he would be taken away to live
out his life in chains on the other side of the world, and if he did
not die there, in that inhospitable land, then certainly he could
never more return to Europe. Alas, ugly, feeble-minded, misbegotten
as he was, he was strong. He survived that life of cruelty,
that fierce climate, the deprivations, the beatings. He survived
and somehow contrived to return here, still seeking his bride.

“Even before I returned from Dublin my Eve—Marie had been
her name, while she lived—had begun to deteriorate horribly, not
in her body, which was beautiful as ever, but in her mind. Once I
was gone with the creature she at first wept, then enticed both my
guards. When I returned to my house the first sight I saw was the
woman with my guards at my table. There was a bottle of brandy
in front of them, my Eve was sitting on the knee of one, bare to the
waist, as he fondled her and she laughed. The other guard stood
before the seated couple and the woman—my woman—had her
head buried in his waist. The men were terrified when they saw me
and fled. I took her, my angel, and beat her black and blue. At first
she screamed and tried to escape, then began to fight me tigrishly,
biting, scratching and kicking. When I had done with the beating
I let her go and she went and sat in a corner, her eyes following
me—but when I looked at her, when I bent down and tried to reason
with her and tell her what she had done was wrong, she would
not meet my eyes. When I put my hand upon her she flung it off.

“But the next day she was miraculously changed, an angel,
and I praised her. The day after that she was good, and the next.
But the following night she ran away. Next morning, from dawn
on, we searched and found her on the hillside only two miles off,
exhausted, for she had run and run frantically, not knowing
where she was going, hither and thither round in circles. Tired as
she was, though, she fought to get away from us. She bit my hand
to the bone. That taught me she had learned cunning. She had
pretended to love me, to be good in order to disarm me and put
me off guard so that she could make her escape. Before, she had
been licentious and violent in her behavior—now she was cunning!
She had learned guile in the space of a week! And they say
man is innately virtuous! Jonathan, he is not. He is bad from his
moment of creation. And woman worse—that I know.

“From that point forward she was the most evil creature in the
world—cruel, dishonest, needing continual watching and guarding.
She shrank, spat, flinched from me, growled like an animal
when I came near her.

“Yet—I loved her! But she hated me, that was the truth of it.
She would run vainly to the barn all the time, if she got the
chance, to look round its now-empty space and howl. She refused
food, would not come to the table, would not wash or be washed,
sat on the floor in a corner, glaring at me through her matted hair,
that hair I had found so beautiful. The lovely face was smeared.
She grew thin. In my despair I became angry. What could I do
with her? She was no fit bride for me now. Now she was only fit
for that other hideous creature for whom I had created her.

“She was mad. I, too, became mad, prowled the house at night,
fell sobbing on my knees to her in the corner where she lay. Where
was the beautiful creature I had brought to life? I did not want
this filthy, hating, hateful woman, if woman she was. I wanted my
beauty, my creation—but she would not return. I wept to her and
tried to lay my head on her angry breast. Then I did, alas, it is
bitter to confess, what I had never done to any woman before, nor
ever thought I would. I took the creature, raped her while she
loathed me and I was sickened by her. We lay together on the floor
after that awful, bestial act—and she smiled at me—such a smile!
Such a devilish smile. Then she became affectionate, as it seemed,
clung to me, followed me, would not have me out of her sight—
and smiled and smiled—that indescribable smile.

“I could not truly believe she had come to love me for my brutality.
I thought this smiling guise was a deceit, that she feigned
love now as once she had feigned obedience, to put me off my
guard. And this time, I feared, instead of running away as she
had before—this time her plan would be to kill me! For I thought
she hated me and knew some pan of myself now hated her.