“Yes. It is wretched enough.” Bysshe seemed very tired.
“Wretched? It is monstrous. And it will create monsters. Have you ever seen such squalor?”
Bysshe had murmured something in reply, but I had not listened. “What was that?”
“I said, did you see the father?”
“He was on the stairs. He is no threat.”
“Threat?”
“Forgive me,” I replied. “My mind is wandering.” Yet I believed that Mr. Westbrook considered me to be his family’s enemy.
I ATTENDED LESSONS EVERY MORNING at the dissecting room of St. Thomas ’s Hospital. I gained admission, as a voluntary student, by paying a trifling fee for a course of lectures I never attended. I wanted only the practical work of cutting. Theory and conjecture were not sufficient for me. The only road to knowledge lay in the examinations of the dead. I was obliged to observe, and to experiment, before I arrived at any reasonable opinion.
The dissecting room was not a place for the fearful or the faint of heart. The corpses were placed on the dissection tables, in the middle of the room, with six or seven students intent upon rummaging about their bones and entrails. Some concentrated on an arm, others on a leg or bowel. Many of the bodies had been laid out several days before burial, and many had been dug out of the ground in a state of partial decay. Yet, if the flesh was infirm, the bones were generally still sound.
There were glass cases ranged along the walls with bodily specimens of every conceivable kind. In a large fireplace, on one side of the room, stood a copper pan that was used for boiling the bodies when the work of the knife became too slow. The bones could then be wrenched from the boiled flesh with ease. I had not yet grown accustomed to the smell of rotten or rotting flesh, but its savour did not offend me. When mixed with the smell of the preservative it had a piquant aroma that lingered on the hands, the arms, and even the clothes of the dissectionists, long after the class was over. There were some who shunned the smell, when they detected it upon our frock-coats. There were some, entering the dissection room for the first time, who fainted dead away. Others retched violently, and left the content of their stomachs on the floor among the entrails and faeces of the dead. The stench of death is equivalent to death itself. It is the darkness of fear, the unknown agency, the dissolution of hope. Yet if I were able to conquer death, what then? The stench of death might then become a wonderful perfume!
Among my fellow dissectionists was a young man of bright eye and ruddy complexion. I gathered from his speech that he was a London boy, but he had given up his trade as an ostler on the City Road to become an apprentice surgeon. “I am used to the stink of horses and of London inns,” he told me. “The dead don’t bother me.” We would drink together in the local public house where the other dissectionists congregated; the bar consequently smelled of the charnel house, and was not patronised by many other visitors. Jack Keat and I would sit at a low wooden table, and converse on the events of the day.
“You were holding in your hand, Victor, a very good cancer.”
“Of the bowel. Extraordinary corruption. It was difficult to hold secure.”
“You have to use your thumb and forefinger. Like so. You may get something stuck beneath your nail. But it will wash out.”
“You were in a very good humour.”
“I found a tumour eating its way through a brain. It was oozing. I cleaned it out and kept it.” He patted his pocket.
He was short enough, and one or two drinks would send him, as he put it, “up the Monument.” He would declaim lectures and speeches he had read. He recited passages from the poetry he most admired. I remember that he had an especial passion for Shakespeare. “This is where the future is being made,” he said one evening. “Here. In the dissection room. This is where we will find improvement. Progress. This is where we can alleviate human suffering and disease. You and I, and all our fellows, must work with ardour for the common cause! We must be energetic, Victor. We must be confident.” And then he broke down in a fit of coughing.
5
I RETURNED TO OXFORD two days before the beginning of the Hilary term; Bysshe urged me to stay in London, citing the radical enterprise with which he had become associated and remonstrating with me about my lack of fervour for the cause (as he put it). But in truth I was eager to renew my own studies. I had seen and heard much in London, but nothing had impressed me so profoundly as the electrical demonstrations of Mr. Davy. I burned with impatience to consult all the volumes of physical science, ancient and modern, thereby to discover the secret springs of life; I wished to dedicate myself to this pursuit, to the exclusion of all else, and I believed that no power on earth could divert me from my purpose.
When I entered the college I greeted the porters as old companions, although their welcome for me was slightly subdued; I was still too much associated with Bysshe to be wholly accepted. Yet my college servant seemed genuinely pleased by my return. “Oh, Mr. Frankenlime,” she said, “not a moment too soon.” She had much difficulty in pronouncing my last name, and would try several different expedients in the course of one conversation. “I had ever so much trouble with your bottles.”
“I would hate to put you to any inconvenience, Florence.”
“Them bottles were filled, half-filled and not filled at all. I didn’t know where to put them in the general clean.”
She was referring to the experimental laboratory I had set up in my bedroom. It was a modest affair-some crucibles, tubes, and a portable burner-but she had a nervous dread of anything she called “medicinal.” For some reason it reminded her of her husband’s untimely death, an event which she took much pleasure in describing to me in all its detail. “I left them where they was,” she said. “I did not touch them, Mr. Frankentine.”
“That was very good of you.”
“I never touch my gentlemen’s properties. Oh, no. Did you have a good journey from Old Smokey?” She was a Londoner by birth, as she never ceased to inform me, but she had married the short-lived Oxford man and had never moved away. “I suppose there was a good fog.”
“Much rain, Florence, I’m afraid.”
“I am sorry to hear that.” She seemed delighted that the city continued to suffer from bad weather. “But it clears the fog, you see.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “How is Mr. Shelley?”
“He is very well. He flourishes in London.”
“He is often spoken of here.” She was still whispering, although there was no one to overhear us. “He is considered wild.”
“He is not savage, Florence. He is very thoughtful.”
“Is that what you call it? Well.” She took my trunk, and hauled it into the bedroom where she began to unpack my shirts and general linen. “Whatever is this?” I heard the question, and knew at once what she meant. I had placed for safekeeping among my linen a small model of vitreous clay; it was a simulacrum of the human brain, perfect in all of its details, that I had purchased from an apothecary in Dean Street. He had told me that it was a copy of the brain of one Davy Morgan, a notorious highwayman who had been hanged a few months before.
“It is nothing, Florence. Leave it on the table.”
“I will not touch it, Mr. Frankenline. It is worm-eaten.”
I went into the bedroom, and picked up the model. “These are not worms. These are the fibres of the brain. Do you see? They are like the channels and currents of the ocean.” How slight was the knowledge of the human organism! There was not one person in a thousand-a hundred thousand-who had stopped to consider the workings of the mind or of the body.
“It isn’t natural,” she said.
“It is nature itself, Florence. I believe that to be the optic lobe.”
“It is no good telling me things like that, sir.” She looked at me in horror. “I want nothing to do with it.”