The city of dr moreau, p.23
The City of Dr Moreau, page 23
The manager murmured something to his employee, who slunk obediently away, and walked to Edgington’s side. They both stood now upon the pavement; evidently, there was no possibility of Roderick being allowed so much as a toe across the threshold.
“Alex? What’s going on?”
The manager stepped very close to him, speaking sotto voce, like a mourner at a graveside approaching the bereaved. “I’m terribly sorry, Mr Edgington, but we really are full. There’s been… some confusion. Entirely our fault and all on our side. But I’m afraid that we just won’t be able to accommodate the three of you today.” At this, he glanced over towards Albert and the girl who still stood a few feet away watching the scene play out. “Of course, if you wanted to dine today alone then… yes… I do believe we could come to some arrangement.”
Roderick glared. “Is this about my brother?” he asked. “Or the woman he’s with? Or both?”
The manager smiled blandly. “Now, now, Mr Edgington,” he said. “Please make no insinuations of this kind. We have always been a broad church here at Creedles and we turn none away. Not even the most… colourful of controversialists.”
Roderick wanted to say more but he felt a hand touch his shoulder. The voice of his brother: “There’s really no issue. Let’s leave it, Roddy. It’s such a fine day. Why don’t we walk instead? There’s so much to see and it would do us good to stroll around awhile, instead of staying cooped up indoors.”
The second Edgington brother opened his mouth to refuse this request and insist that they stay and fight. But Albert merely smiled, giving Roderick cause to consider how much he seemed to have grown up in the months since he had seen him last.
“Very well,” he said. “If that’s what you like.”
The manager of Creedles melted back into the restaurant. The girl approached them, also smiling. “I’m Coral,” she said. “It’s very nice to meet you.”
“Likewise,” said Roderick vaguely. “Yes, of course.” “So then,” Albert interjected, “shall we stroll? There’s bound to be some food and drink on the way. Besides, I expect you’ve some questions for me.”
“Just one or two,” Roderick said, his face a picture of puzzlement. “Yes, I do believe there are one or two matters which I should be most grateful if you could clear up.”
And so off they went, the three of them, into the whirl and dash of the metropolis.
III
“So what did he say?”
This was Roderick’s wife, Diana, when he returned home that evening. She was a thin-faced woman inclined to meanness though this emerged (he suspected) largely from frustration at a life which involved little more than overseeing the house and accompanying her husband. Were there any way to measure intellectual capacity he had no doubt that she would score more highly than he; yet the disparate circumstances of their birth had arranged it so that his was the life of garlands and bustle while her lot was to walk forever three paces behind. She chafed at it and he could not blame her, though, of course, he had never formulated these thoughts in any actual conversation with her.
“He had rather a lot to say, my dear. I confess it was hard to keep track of it all.”
“Well, try.”
Diana had been waiting for him in the drawing room of their home in Maida Vale. She had been leafing through a novel (a fresh adventure from Mr Scott) which she cast aside immediately upon her husband’s weary arrival.
“I need to fix myself a drink, darling,” he said. “Might I get something for you?”
She held up her hand. “Just tell me what your brother said.”
He went to the drinks cabinet and made himself up a glass. When he looked back, Diana was gazing at him still more frostily than usual. “Oh it was quite a story, my dear. Long and involved. Outwardly fantastic, of course, but Albert swore that every word of it was true.”
“And Silas?”
Roderick settled himself onto his usual chair. He sipped from his glass and swallowed. “It would seem that the newspaper reports were accurate.”
“Poor man.”
Roderick must have looked more sceptical than he had intended at this remark as Diana said quickly: “I know I never cared for him, but there’s very few who deserve to die as he did.”
“Quite so, my dear. Quite so.”
She looked evenly at him. “And who’s this young woman he’s been stepping out with? I take it she was there too?”
“Coral,” Roderick said with careful formality. “That’s her name. And she seems to me to be a young woman of singular determination. I think she’ll be rather the making of young Albert.”
“But she’s… surely, some sort of revolutionary?”
Roderick drank again, to fortify himself, perhaps. “It sounds as though she simply saw a flagrant injustice, my dear, and set her shoulder to the wheel in her efforts to reverse it.”
Diana sniffed. “And it would seem a great many people have lost their lives as a result of that reversal.”
“Well, yes,” Roderick murmured. “That’s maybe true. But such is the way of things. Don’t you think? ‘These violent delights have violent ends…’ All of that.”
“Were any of them there? Any of those… creatures?”
“No, no. Of course not. Far too soon, I’d wager, for that.”
Diana looked appalled. “You make it sound like an inevitability. That one day they’ll come here.”
“Well, it probably is,” Roderick murmured, gaining courage from his drink. “In the end. I dare say they’ll be everywhere. Rather exciting in a way. A whole new species in our midst.”
At this point it became apparent to Roderick that Diana was having to work quite hard simply in order to keep her temper. Her hands, formerly flat upon her knees, were beginning to clench. Her face was very pale. There was in her voice to be heard the faintest suggestion of a tremor. The calmer and more reasonable he seemed the more secretly furious she’d become, a pattern which had grown by no means unfamiliar over the course of their marriage.
“They’re animals,” she said.
“Hardly that,” said Roderick mildly. “Sounds like they’re doing everything they can to make a proper state out of that place. Seems they’ve all kinds of plans for the future. And you can’t say they’re not following the international rule of law now. Why, the long trial to which they’re subjecting that fellow, Vaughan…”
Diana shook her head in a single savage motion. “Animals,” she said again. A long pause ensued. Then she added: “And you, Roddy, you’re a born fool.”
Roderick drained his glass and set it aside. Without saying more, he got to his feet and left the room. He knew without having to ask that he would sleep in one of the guest rooms that night. This was usually by far the best solution when life threw up some petty disagreement between them. Diana had generally forgotten all about it by morning and everything proceeded afterwards just as it had before.
He was surprised, then, when, at long past midnight, a soft tapping came at his door and Diana, in her nightdress, stepped into his room and slid into bed beside him. Even in the gloom, he could tell that she had been crying.
“Diana? Whatever’s the matter?”
“You don’t see, do you? You don’t understand.”
He reached for her hand, feeling a tenderness which he had not experienced in relation to her for years. “Darling, what do you mean?”
“That this is the beginning of the end of it all…”
“What?”
“It’s the start of the downfall of mankind.”
She clung to him then, as though she really believed her words. He responded in kind and they did not speak again till morning.
10TH AUGUST, 1902
THE CITY
I
In the course of the long, strange year which had passed since the fall of the City and its reconstruction under the command of the Beast Folk, time had become for Mr Vaughan a slippery and treacherous thing. Past and present seemed mingled together in ways which were to him almost impossible to disentangle.
He received many visitors – some human, there to check that he was being well and fairly treated, but mostly creatures (a combination of gaolers, the merely curious and those who wished to make a record of his words). The most frequent visitor of all was a great, shambling creature whom many would have thought grotesque, half-bear and half-man, furred and sinister. He was, Mr Vaughan came gradually to realise, intended as some sort of advocate on his behalf for the trial which, he dimly apprehended was approaching.
The prisoner had to admit that the bear-man had showed exemplary patience, respectful in his questions and courteous in how he talked about the case, displaying a level of decency which Mr Vaughan was not certain that he deserved. Certainly, he thought in his more lucid moments, he would never have given the same respect to Brunor (that was his name) had their situations somehow been reversed.
Brunor spoke often to him of strategies and lines of arguments. He did his utmost to tie him down to dates and times, places and people, the exact order of events which led up to the founding of the City and the precise means of its operation. He also (for reasons which Mr Vaughan found opaque, being, as he had ever been, a person of thought and conceit rather than of practicality) was interested to the point of fixation on exactly how the place had been funded, the complex streams of donors and investors, the web of interested parties, all the dodges and sleights of hand, the hidden wellsprings of income and profit.
Somewhat to his surprise, Mr Vaughan found that he answered these questions as honestly as he was able. But, more and more as the weeks went by, he found it increasingly difficult to remember very much at all, the parade of financiers and eager capitalists starting to coalesce in his mind until he found it impossible to separate one from the other.
Although Brunor kept well hidden his frustration at the increasing frictionlessness of the old man’s recall, Vaughan could sense it. There were times when his questioning grew more urgent, as though the creature feared that the memories would run out altogether, trickling away until they were irrecoverable. Still, Brunor never showed any sign of doubting the alienist’s worsening condition and never once suggested, even in anger, that the forgetfulness and imprecision might be any sort of ruse or abdication. On his good days, Mr Vaughan realised that he respected the bear-man a great deal for this.
Sometimes, as he received his visitors in his little house by the sea like a ruined king in exile, Mr Vaughan noticed that the guests seemed to shift their appearance altogether. Their features and voices were altered and he seemed not to be conversing with some human functionary or messenger from the Beast Folk but people he had known, long ago and in a different place.
There were days when he saw before him Edward Prendick, the man who had first brought him news of the Island and of what had become of the doctor. He seemed much as he had in life, outwardly robust but inwardly fragile. His expression seemed more sorrowful than angry. “Do you know,” he would say, sitting opposite Mr Vaughan on an uncomfortable chair as the waves seethed outside, “I think you may be even worse than him. He at least had the excuse of madness. But you’re not, are you? Till now, at least, I think you’ve always been entirely sane.”
At other times he saw before him poor Mr Berry, he who, with his wrecked face and flexible morality, had last been heard of in rural France, having failed to kill the Reverend Woodgrove. The valet said nothing at all but only glared at his old employer with eyes that spoke of a deep, ill-focused resentment. The fire in the boarding house, Mr Vaughan reflected, had somehow rearranged his nose and eyes, making him resemble, a child’s scribble come to unhappy life.
Once he was even visited by a little girl, not more than ten, dressed in the fashions of the old century. Through the mists that were afflicting his consciousness it took him some minutes even to recognise her. They had been, he realised, playmates together once, at school in a village far from here in a time before any of this had been thought of. Her name danced at the edges of his thoughts.
“Louisa,” he said. “Louie.”
He spoke both names back to her, remembering them as he did so. With this came a rush of memories, long repressed, glimpses of happiness in the summer of '47. Laughter in the sunshine.
At the recollection that she had died in an accident, a tragedy, Vaughan felt briefly like some credulous character in an old tale, though he felt not shock or fear but only a warming sense of recognition.
“Not long now,” Louisa said, though she surely had not drawn breath for more than half a century and was by now just dust and bones. “Not long now till we’ll walk together again.”
Vaughan smiled at the thought of it and, to lull and comfort himself, rocked to and fro in his chair. When he looked again at his visitor, the girl had gone and it was only the bear-man, frowning at him, a pad of paper open on his lap, a piece of charcoal held like an ink pen in his ungainly paw.
Months had gone by in this fashion and each day Mr Vaughan had sunk a little lower, his occasional outbreaks of panic becoming more and more infrequent as his dream-world came slowly to dominate his waking hours.
Until, at last, and with no particular fanfare that Vaughan was able to recall, Brunor walked into his cell one morning and declared, with a business-like sort of gravity: “It’s time now. Your trial is about to begin.”
II
The weeks that had followed had succeeded only in worsening Mr Vaughan’s confusion. Often, he felt almost detached from his own body, as though he were floating some feet from the ground.
Brought into a great spherical room with dozens (hundreds?) of chairs and placed in a dock before a panel of judges (all Beast Folk), he was hauled out of his state of quiet isolation and thrust firmly in the public gaze. There were human spectators there too, either emissaries from various governments or gentlemen of the press, but they were outnumbered by far by the peoples of the City. The atmosphere was furious, febrile. The judges had to ask often for silence, attention and respect.
On the second day, it occurred to Mr Vaughan that the room in which they were all sitting had once been a restaurant, thought it was now greatly expanded. Dimly, he remembered having seen the plans.
On the third day, he tried counting all of the different species of Beast Folk which seemed to be present but he kept losing count after fifty-four.
On the fourth day, he became convinced that there were dead people sitting amongst the crowd, grinning and beckoning to him.
By the end of the first week, he had become all but oblivious to the pageant that was being played out before him, to the long line of those who arrived to give evidence against him and who pushed their own guilt onto him, the questions from the prosecution (a scholarly creature with the look about her of the water rat) and the objections of his own counsel, the bear-man. He hardly seemed to notice the glowering looks of the judges nor the gawping faces of the newspapermen.
For a time, he drifted, almost contentedly, through the waters of the past. When it was the turn of the Beast Folk to give their evidence against him, he kept forgetting why they were so angry with him, why they snarled and spat and shouted their accusations across the courtroom. He merely smiled benignly and struggled to remember their names.
Once, before he remembered, he grew concerned: would Mr Berry be giving evidence against him? Would Mr Bufford? Or Dr Bright? How curious, he thought, how very curious: he seemed to have spent a great deal of time with men whose names began with B. He giggled at the thought, only to see Brunor looking down at him, a realisation which very nearly sent him spiralling into full laughter. It had been only with some considerable effort that he had contained himself.
And so the dance went on around him, the trial of this new century, with a man at the heart of it who could feel himself (and the sensation was by no means exclusively an unpleasant one) fading, simply fading away.
III
It ended too soon, a week before the verdict, while Brunor was still presenting the case for the defence.
On the day in question, the court had adjourned early due to the oppressive heat and Mr Vaughan had been returned to his cell, Brunor by his side as usual.
There was a strong sense in the mind of the alienist that the events which they had witnessed had some great personal significance, though he found he could not identify them easily. He was sitting back in his little room, on his bed, his feet rocking to and fro, as though he were a child again.
Brunor stood at the door, stern and with arms folded, like a visitor from a fairy story. “I’m doing the best I can,” he said, in answer to a question which Mr Vaughan had already forgotten having asked. “I think our best hope now is to ask for a sentence which takes into account your illness. Perhaps you could even stay here?”
Mr Vaughan spoke then the most lucid sentence he had managed for weeks. “They’ll want the death penalty, don’t you think?” He smiled.
Brunor rocked back upon his paws. “That does seem likely. But, you know, the City authorities will wish to show the world we’re capable of mercy. That we’re not animals.”
Vaughan looked vaguely at the creature before him. “Should’ve got me a human, then,” he said. “Not a bear.”
Brunor, sighing, rubbed his snout. “You ought to get some rest if you can. I’ll see you tomorrow. Another day.”
Mr Vaughan sank back onto his bed. “Another day,” he echoed. He closed his eyes and listened as the bear-man stamped from the room. The slam of the door, the sliding across of bolt and chain, and he was caged again, like an animal. The notion of irony had by this point rather trickled from the consciousness of Mr Vaughan but something of it must still have remained because at this stray thought he loosed a single peal of laughter.
This done, he lay quietly and waited for sleep to come. Instead, he became gradually aware that there was someone else in the room. Someone standing beside him.
“Bear-man?” he said, though no answer came. “Is that you?”
He heard footsteps as the person approached his bed. He had the sudden conviction then that the visitor was human and also that they were dead. In fact, he was almost certain who it must be. For who was the one person, from all of his life, not to have visited him yet?
