Peter Ackroyd - The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

“I went back to my barn, and lay me down to sleep. I had come to anticipate and enjoy the early rising of the labourer and his daughter; her childish prattle was my music, and I listened eagerly to the slightest and most inconsequential discourse between them. I felt emboldened by my new garments, too, and when I saw them working in the distant fields I entered their little cottage and surveyed the setting of their lives. It was humble enough, with a plain table and chairs, and two easy-chairs beside a stone fireplace; but it was neat and clean, with an indescribable air of comfort. I envisaged what it might mean to share their life with them; but that was as yet out of my power. Then I noticed the shelf of books. Out of curiosity I took one of them down from the shelf, and left the cottage.

“I had come upon a treasure in Robinson Crusoe. I saw words at first through a veil; they were all familiar to me, but they seemed to be written in an unknown language. Yet, as with sound and speech, I felt a world forming itself around me; the power of the words seemed to rise up within my own being, so that I recognised myself in the same moment as I recognised phrases and sentences. I spoke the words out loud, and one seemed to follow another in the utmost harmony; each one seemed complementary to the next, and all joined in the great music of meaning. In my previous state I believe that I must have been an ardent reader, because I took so eagerly to the perusal of the pages before me. I became so enthralled by the adventures of the castaway on the desert island that I did not note the declension of the sun or the emergence of the moon. I read as if for life. And life it was for me-to enter the state of another existence, to look with newly awakened eyes on an unfamiliar landscape, was a form of bliss. I chanted the words of the book again, and I noticed that there had grown a melody in my voice. I was being nurtured by words. I have told you that the mind is a creative power, and I believed in my innocence that I could now learn the instinctive expression of human passion. If I were a natural man, then I must be naturally benevolent.

“From the remarks that the labourer and his daughter passed to one another when they were engaged in their work, I learned that the girl’s mother had died from the ague, a common sickness in this region, and that she was buried in a little churchyard two miles away across the flats, as they called the fields. They worked hard for their bare subsistence, but I learned how to help them. In the deep of the night I would uproot turnips and other bulbs for them, leaving them in the shed from which I had once taken their food. With my great strength, too, I was able to provide them with firewood and dry logs that I left beyond their little garden. They were astonished by these gifts, but I heard the father extol the ‘good spirits’ and ‘sprites’ of the neighbourhood as the possible cause of the bounty.

“The girl of course could receive no proper schooling, but her father tried to instruct her in the basic materials of knowledge. In the evening he must have taught her to read and to write, because in the morning she would recite to him in her clear voice the passages she had learned. Through her agency, indeed, I first became aware of the power of poetry to assuage the troubled spirit and to lift the mind towards thoughts of eternity:

“I confess that I remember no more. Her father used to instruct her, too, in the history of their country-of all the great events that had passed over this estuarial land without disturbing its quietness. I learned then of battles long ago, of the ruins of ancient civilisations, of the Romans and the Saxons and the Normans who sailed along the great river. I shared the girl’s wonder, too, at the stories of Creation, of Adam and Eve, of the angel with the flaming sword. It was her father’s intention to read to her the chapters in the Bible so that she might be fully acquainted with what he described to her as the holiest book in the world. I admit that I held it in the same reverence, after listening to the first sentences he recited to her, and I looked forward eagerly to the next day’s lesson.

“I would have been content, I think, to have spent my time thus; I wandered at night among the flat lands of the estuary, singing to the wind and holding communion with the earth. I lay upon the ground and whispered the words, and perceptions, I had learned. I was as free as the sun, and as lonely as the sun. Where rose the tide and the billowing waters of the river, there was my home; where dwelled the owls and the foxes, there were my friends and roamers of the night. There is a pleasure in the pathless and solitary fields; there is a rapture in the lonely shore. I sat quite still and observed the heavens revolving above my head, and wondered if they were the origin of my being. Or had I come from the creeping waters of the river? Or from the mild earth that nurtured all the plants and flowers of the world? When at first light a wood pigeon came before me, I took part in its existence and pecked upon the ground; when a gull flew above my head I shared its soaring form; when I watched an otter upon the bank, I could feel the sleekness of its limbs. In all creatures now I felt the force of one life, a life I shared, of which the principles were energy and joy.

“I might have continued in this blessed state, if I had not become aware of my true being. You look away, do you? I had no memory of what I was, and yet my instinct for speech and my understanding of words assured me that I had existed here before in some altered shape. Then I recalled the papers that I had taken from your desk, and put at random in the capacious pockets of your cloak. I had had no use for them before. But now that I had discovered within myself the gift of understanding, I could look upon them with different eyes. You know well enough that I found your journal of the weeks that had preceded my creation, and of the odious circumstances in which I was found and delivered to you. Here they are, the proof of your handiwork. You saved me from the blank of death without my knowing that I had died; you lifted me out of the grave and led me once more into the light and the air where new springs of thought and feeling have emerged in me. Do you believe me to be grateful? I now know that I was a young man with the marks of consumption upon me: I believe that you mention me to have been a student of medicine in a London hospital. I had a sister, had I not, who cared for me until I died? Oh, if only my death had endured for ever! For I soon learned that to live again is to be frightful to all those who beheld me. My renewed form is a more odious type of yours, more loathsome even from the resemblance. I soon learned, too, that I would have to hide myself and cover my face from every living eye-to start if I heard a human step, and seek out some dark and silent corner. How do you think I learned these lessons?

“I was taught them in the most searing and shameful manner. I had grown so accustomed to the voices of father and daughter that I almost believed myself to be a part of their little society; I fully imagined a time when I would be accepted by them, and might even be welcomed into their cottage as a friend and guest. Then, one morning, I heard her father discoursing upon the effect of the moon on the tides-and of the high tide some years before that had completely covered the fields of the vicinity.

“‘Oh,’ I said aloud, ‘the moon is a great enchanter.’

“I scarcely knew that I had spoken so openly, and I was greeted with silence. ‘Who is in there?’ the father called out, with something like fear in his voice. ‘Come out!’