nine
Mary said, through her bruised mouth, “It was not Bride. Indeed not.” Her eyes were cried to slits. She told a tale of being locked in a cellar.
Said Claffey, “Bride Caskey is the cellar queen.”
But Mary said, no, she was in a cellar by herself. Till she was starved two days, and would then beg food from anybody. Of what next occurred, she would not speak. Only of a swat in the mouth for insolence, and that came later. She had lost her grip on the passage of hours and days, a faculty that the men had always envied in her, and she seemed to have forgotten certain words and common expressions of her native tongue, so that they were forced to speak to her in a mixture of two languages, which stuck in their throats and blocked the flow of their thoughts.
Howison comes banging in. What a noisy brute he is! Is it a general rule that the man who has strength and gall to handle the deadweight corpse has not the consideration to tread soft among the living? For now it is always night, it is always night at Earl’s Court. Hunter is walking with his taper, up and down the storeys, the animal complaints deafening his ears, and replaying in his head the days of heroic experimentation, heroic anger.
“So what is it?” he barks at Howison, his man. “What futility have you brought in now, to stop up my ears with trash?”
“You told me, reverence, to bring you in news of the Giant, Charles O’Brien.”
“Him? So what’s new?”
“Mr. Harry Graham, who is exhibiting—”
“Cut it short, I know all about that mountebank.”
“Mr. Harry Graham has offered O’Brien a go on his Celestial Bed, conception assured. With first-time partner of his choice. Free and gratis, whereas the normal rate—”
“Oh, do away with yourself, Howison. I know the rate. I know the rate for charlatans. I’ll tell you, shall I, what it is about Mr. Graham’s Celestial Bed that produces its results? ‘Tis not the naked nymphs playing string instruments, ’tis not the scented odours of incense nor the ostrich feather fans—”
“Really?” Howison looks keen. “I had not heard of the ostrich feather fans.”
Perhaps I embroider, thinks John Hunter: can it be that I, a man bound to fact and observation, embroider the tale?
“It is
Sweet music. His Anne has composed certain verses: “My mother bids me bind my hair.” He had heard the song sung. Come home late, his hands stinging from scrubbing, his eyes stinging from lack of sleep. Coming in, a man to his own hearthside, to find the room a-twitter with excitement at some air set down by a foreigner and interpreted by his own spouse: “Get out! Get away to your own beds! I gave no permission for this kick-up.”
The falling silent of the instrument, as if a tense string had snapped. The faces only slightly dismayed; the social smiles, the smiles at odds with the eyes, the hurried removal, the sudden silence, and the cowed servants clearing glasses. Crystal’s embarrassed chink; remnants of jellies and mousses scraped quickly away. Anne’s head dropped: Anne dumb with suffering. Suffering? What did she know about it? Suppose she had a fistula? Suppose she had an abcess under a molar?
Heroic anger. Heroic experiments. “You remember the grocer’s wife?”
Grocer’s wife of the City: could not get a child. The woman herself seemingly free from disease, broad in the hip, her complexion bright and fresh, no hint of the dragging backache and the pinched yellow-grey that marks the face of the woman whose ovaries are diseased. Her tongue free too, with a frank account of the marital bed. “From which I deduced, Howison, that the man was not what you’d call a going concern. He’d hardly get within a foot of her without spilling on the linen, her thigh was the nearest—”
“You told me before,” Howison said.
“So I spooned in the fluid, man. I spooned it in.”
“So you said.”
“The child was healthy, and thrives to this day.”
“I wonder, did you not … . were you not tempted …”
It took him a moment to grasp the man’s implication. “No, sir,” he said calmly. “I am a man as we all are, but I would do nothing to introduce experimental error.”
But Howison’s very question—for suppose others had been asking it, snorting behind their hands?—had reduced him, when the man went out, to a rocking, silent, temple-bursting fury, his short nails driven into his palms, and rock, rock, rock in his chair, his life at the mercy of any imbecile who cared to taunt him … for yes, some men would have been tempted, seeing her brown eyes and flushed cheeks; some would no doubt have thought, there is a shorter way and more natural, and if this consultation did not do it, a man might take a guinea for the next, and soon the result would be achieved, for a man would know from the very handling of her, the plushness of her skin, her firmess of her limbs … but no. It is all very well to put yourself in your own experiment—it is inevitable, reatly —but it is unforgivable to bypass the proper procedure to get the required result. The child of the grocer’s wife was the child of the grocer, and not in any way—as people can see for themselves—sandy, freckled, or short. The gratification from the experimental process far exceeded that from the sexual act. Yet he remembered the question, and the rage: a little something bursting there, in his left temple.
These rages may be brought on by thwarting: or by the mention of low dirty foreigners who come to Britain on purpose to defame its institutions. “What, you don’t like this country, sir? Then quit its shores.” Never again, for instance, does he wish to endure the purple throbbing agonies that possessed his forehead (both sides) when a colleague of his remarked that “Dr. Jean-Paul Marat, the noted Swiss savant who calls each day at Slaughter’s Coffee House … Dr. Marat expresses a desire to see your specimens.”
