Peter Ackroyd - The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

I did not approach these sights with any levity, but I did not feel the least repulsion; my principal feeling was one of fascination for the curious stillness of the bodies. Once the principle of life had left them they became vacant rooms, more devoid of animation than any waxwork or mannequin. You could imagine a waxwork to be capable of breath and movement, but no act of sympathetic imagination could grant these cold limbs life. I was looking at objects that would never be able to return my look.

In another partition I found the body of an elderly man who had no mark upon him at all. I could tell from his curled boots, placed beside him, that he was an artisan or labourer. There was a curious feature about him, however. I noticed a slight wetness about his eyes, and what seemed to be a tear had settled upon his cheek. The residue of emotion, on what was now an empty visage, affected me in the strangest way. I turned to leave, and was caught momentarily in the crowd clustering around. I glanced towards the open door, at the far end of the low room, and for a moment caught sight of an elderly man standing beside it. He seemed to be exactly the man I had just seen behind the glass, as if by some intervention of the black arts he had brushed away the tear and come alive. Then he smiled at me. I knew all this to be a momentary illusion, but it did not lessen my horror. I walked slowly towards the door, where the official of the Morgue held out his hand for a pourboire , but the figure of the old man had gone. I was relieved to find myself in the open air of the street, and tried to dismiss the incident from my mind, but it lingered with me even as I climbed the stair to the chamber in the inn.

My fellow traveller, Armitage, was lying on his bed fully clothed. Fresh as I was from the sights of the Morgue, for a moment he startled me. “Now, Mr. Frankenstein,” he said. “Will you sup with me? The wine here is very cheap.” He had a low, deep voice that for no reason at all irritated me.

“An early night for me, I am afraid. The coach for Dijon leaves at daybreak. It will be a hard journey.”

“So you need sustenance.” He was older than me, at the age of thirty or thereabouts, but he had an indefinably ancient manner. “You gentlemen of Oxford have been known to starve.”

“How do you know that I am from Oxford?”

“It is printed on your luggage. Eyes, you see. Good eyes.” I had already become aware that he was a salesman of optical goods. “The eye is a tender organism.” He spoke slowly, and with great emphasis. “It swims in a sea of water.”

“I beg your pardon. It does not.”

“Oh?”

“It has roots and tendrils. It is like a trailing plant connected to the soil of the brain.”

“Can we say that it is like a lily? It swims on the surface.”

“You may say that, Mr. Armitage.”

He smiled broadly, having settled the matter to his satisfaction, and clapped me on the back as if he were congratulating me for agreeing with him. “We must get you bread. And meat. And wine.”

Over the rough meal, which the chambermaid brought to us, we exchanged the usual remarks. He lived in Friday Street, off Cheapside, with his father; his father manufactured the lenses and the spectacles, in a workshop on the ground floor of their property, while he acted as a commercial traveller. He had taken advantage of the peace to sail to France, with specimens of his father’s latest work. “You will not find lenses more finely ground,” he said. “You can pick out a distant spire by moonlight.”

“Does he build microscopes?”

“Of course he does. At the moment he has in hand a design that has cylindrical eyes, so to speak, that will make the smallest object clear.”

“I would be very interested in that.”

“You would? What is your study at Oxford, Mr. Frankenstein?”

“I am concerned with the workings of human life.”

“Is that all?” He smiled at me. I could not imagine him breaking into laughter.

“That is how I learned of the nervous fibres of the eye.”

“You are an anatomist then?” He suddenly became very grave, as if I had trespassed upon some private pursuit.

“Not exactly. Not essentially. I cannot claim any great proficiency.”

“Do you know how long the eye survives when it is released from its casing?”

“I have no idea. Minutes, perhaps-”

“Thirty-four seconds. Before its light is extinguished for ever.”

“How do you know this?”

“They dry very quickly, when they have left the socket. Do not ask me how I know.”

“But if they were kept in an aqueous solution, what then?”

“Then, Mr. Frankenstein, you would be considered to ask too much.” He began to eat, very slowly, the meat and bread upon his plate.

I remembered the phrase from Terence. “Nothing human is alien to me, Mr. Armitage.”

He did not answer but continued chewing on his meat. It was veal, as I remember, coated in breadcrumbs in the manner of my compatriots. I had very little appetite for it. Occasionally he would look up at me, with no particular expression in his eye beyond that of calm observation. Eventually he spoke. “My father had an interesting apprenticeship. From the age of fourteen he worked for Dr. John Hunter. Do you know that name?”

“Indeed. Very well.” Hunter’s reputation as a surgeon and anatomist had reached me even in Geneva, where his Natural History of Teeth had been translated into French.

“Dr. Hunter was a great observer of the body, Mr. Frankenstein. He made it his profession.”

“So I have read.”

“His surgical work was second to none. My father has known him to remove a bladder stone in less than three minutes.”

“Truly?”

“And the patient did not die.” Armitage concentrated once more upon his plate, where he was now very deliberately mopping up the crumbs with a portion of bread soaked in wine. “My father still has the stone.”

“The patient did not want it?”

“No. Dr. Hunter called it treasure-trove.”

“But what happened to the eyes?”

“I told you. The patient was still alive. Much to his surprise.”

“Not his. The other eyes that were preserved in water. I presume that they were taken from the bodies of the less fortunate.”

Armitage stared at me with the same curiously dispassionate gaze. “If the patient has died in the operating theatre, then to whom does he belong?” I said nothing, believing that I had already said too much. “Dr. Hunter took the view that, having been entrusted into his care, the body was his responsibility. It became, in a sense, his property.”

“I would not disagree.”

“Excellent. I am speaking to you now in the utmost harmony of good companionship. These facts are not widely known beyond the confines of the medical schools.” My mouth had become dry, and I swallowed a glassful of the wine. “Dr. Hunter believed that the limbs and organs of the deceased patient were of more value to his students than to the soil in which they would otherwise lie. There was a young man, one of Dr. Hunter’s assistants, who had a particular interest in the spleen. So-” Armitage stopped, and surprised me with a broad smile. “As we say in Cheapside, Mr. Frankenstein, it passed under the counter.”

“And your father had a particular interest in eyes?”

“He had always possessed perfect eyesight. It was remarked of him at a very early age. He became interested in the subject, as boys do. I do not know if you have in your country the travelling telescope?” I shook my head. “They are set up in the thoroughfare, and for a small sum you can purchase their use for five minutes. There was always one in the Strand. As a boy, my father loved it. So by degrees he became interested in the relationship between the lens and the eye. Do you know that the eye has its own lens, as permeable as a gas bubble?”