It was all the more horrible coming from the mouth of an innocent boy. I knew the lines at once, since they came from one of Mr. Coleridge’s poems, but I do not remember being particularly impressed by them at the time of reading them. They must have been in the air around me, as I lay in a fever.
I was able to bathe, and dress, myself on the following morning. The one subject of course oppressed and haunted me like some giant despair. My enforced retirement had also left me restless and fretfuclass="underline" I could not keep still. I hailed a cab in Jermyn Street, and was taken to Limehouse where I leapt out and all but ran along the path towards my workshop. As soon as I came close to it I knew that he had returned: the door facing the river had been smashed by the giant blow he had delivered on first gaining his freedom; but now part of the brick wall beside it had been dislodged, and there were pieces of broken glass on the muddy ground that led to the jetty. I slowed my pace, and my immediate impulse was to flee or at least to conceal myself. But some graver sense-of responsibility, or of submission, I do not know which-overcame me. I walked towards the workshop, and entered through the gaping hole which he had left. The place was in ruinous disorder: the great electrical columns had been overturned and lay smashed upon the floor, and my experimental apparatus had been systematically destroyed. My notes and papers, as well as some bills of lading for the electrical equipment, had been removed from my desk; the cloak and hat that I had left behind, on that dreadful night, were also gone. He had taken some kind of revenge, and had then left the scene of his rebirth.
I was placed in a state of fearful indecision. The records of all my experiments had been taken by him, and the equipment had been destroyed by his hand, but what possible use could any of it now possess? My work had come to an end-or, rather, it had been usurped by the emergence of a living being. There was no more to be done. I decided then to leave the workshop, never to return. I was happy to imagine it falling into ruin, the home of scavengers and of seabirds, rather than to see any new dwellings built upon its accursed ground. It would be for me a place of mournful and never-ending remembrance.
I walked back through streets, familiar and unfamiliar, with a general apprehension that he did indeed “somewhere behind me tread;” there were moments when my own shadow alarmed me, and I looked back with dread on several occasions. There was often the echo of a footfall in the alleys and along the quieter streets, and again I would glance around in fear. Eventually I found myself in Jermyn Street, and the expression on Fred’s face was enough to tell me that I had sustained a great anxiety. “You look like you was touched by Old Nick,” he said.
“No. Not touched.”
“The gentleman came to see you.”
“Gentleman? What gentleman?” For a moment I believed him to be referring to the creature.
Fred seemed genuinely alarmed by my response. “No need to disturb yourself, sir. It was only him.”
He handed me a card on which Bysshe had scrawled a note to the effect that he and Harriet were intending to visit me early that evening: We have something, or someone, to show you.
I prepared myself for their arrival as best I could. I took a spoonful of laudanum to calm myself, having become acquainted with the merits of that preparation by Mrs. Shoeberry who seems to have dosed me liberally during my confinement. “There is nothing like it,” she had said just before leaving me. “It is safer than the drink, and more soothing to the soul.” I had indeed found it a palliative for wounded nerves, and had regained a measure of composure when Fred announced the arrival of Bysshe and Harriet. I had not seen Harriet since the days before the elopement to the Lakes, and she seemed to be much improved by marriage. She had more vitality and assurance than I remembered, assisted no doubt by the infant she was carrying in her arms. “This is Eliza,” she said. “Eliza Ianthe.”
“Not the first of my productions, Victor, but the finest.” There was so wide a difference, between Bysshe’s creation and my own, that I felt like weeping. A young woman followed them up the stairs, to whom I was not introduced; I took her to be the wet-nurse, and indeed Harriet gave her the baby after a moment’s petting.
“You look changed,” Harriet said to me as I took them into the drawing room. “You have become more serious. You are no longer a young man.”
“I have experienced much since I last saw you.”
“Oh?”
“But nothing of any consequence. Tell me, Bysshe, what is the news?”
“The usual record of crimes and miseries. You do not read the public prints?” I shook my head. “Then you know nothing of the outrages.”
“I lead a retired existence.”
“We are advertising a subscription for the families of the frame-makers.” I must have looked puzzled. “You should begin to live in the world, Victor. Fourteen frame-makers were executed at York last week. For the crime of wishing employment.” He then went on to inveigh against the undue respect that men paid to property, and began to enlist the history of Greece for the sake of his argument. Harriet and the wet-nurse sat exchanging remarks about the infant. His soliloquy reminded me of our evenings in Oxford, and I was curiously reassured by it. “So Harriet is not my property,” he began to inform me. “Eliza is not my property. Love is free. Its very essence is liberty, Victor, not compatible with obedience or jealousy or fear.”
“I am sure your wife will be pleased to hear it.”
“Harriet understands me perfectly well. We are in unity. No. We are a trinity now. The infant child is our saviour.” He continued in the same fanciful vein for a little longer, but the events of the day soon began to render me weary. With his quick sympathy he realised that I was no longer in a suitable frame of mind to enjoy his society, and he rose to leave with good grace. “Victor must rest,” he told Harriet. “His spirits need restoring.”
“Will you not stay for supper?”
“No. Your need is greater. You look as if all the cares of the world had fallen upon you.”
“I have not slept. That is all.”
“Then sleep. Sleep is the balm for woe.”
They took their leave, with many professions of friendship, and I watched them as they made their way out of Jermyn Street in search of a carriage. The crowd surrounded them instantly and I felt a curious anxiety or fear on their behalf. It was a momentary sensation, but it left me more wretched than before. For the rest of the evening, I walked through the city. I do not know how I passed the succeeding days.
12
IT WAS A MORNING in November. The light of dawn filtered through an opening in the shutters, and I could discern the outlines of my shirt and jacket that Fred had folded; in the half-light they looked curiously alive, as if they had been waiting expectantly for me to awake. I slumbered again for a few minutes, in a blissful state of non-consciousness, before being aroused by the sound of horses in the street outside. I rose from my bed, and threw open the shutters. That is when I saw him, standing on the corner and looking fixedly up at my window. Yet at first I did not see him. He seemed to be part of a wooden porch there, wood upon wood, until he stepped forward. He was wearing my cloak, and my broad-brimmed hat, but I could not mistake him for a moment; the face was white, seemingly curved and crumpled like a sheet of paper, with the same blank eyes that had stared at me from the table in my workshop. He must have taken my address from the bills of exchange he had purloined, and now he had tracked me down. He stood quite still, and made no attempt to claim my attention. He simply looked up without expression. And then, very suddenly, he turned and walked away.
I was in a state of astonishment and fearfulness not to be expressed. I ran into the kitchen, where Fred was frying a veal chop for my breakfast. “Stop what you are doing,” I said, “and leave.”