Peter Ackroyd - The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

Bysshe looked around with satisfaction as the pit filled to its margins, while the seats behind us and the boxes around us were soon fully occupied. I had never before witnessed a London crowd, if I may call it that, and I must say that I was somewhat in fear of it. Despite the laughter, and the general mood of animation, it resembled some restless creature in search of prey. Could many lives make up one life?

The orchestra struck up an air, a melody no doubt composed for the occasion, and the curtains were drawn apart to reveal a landscape of ice and rock and mountain. “Do you recognise it?” Bysshe whispered to me. “We are in Switzerland.” Then there came upon the stage a hooded figure, accoutred all in black; he walked forward with a quick step like that of some wild creature, so odd and so menacing that it reduced the audience to silence. “Immortal Heaven, what is man?” he exclaimed in an unnaturally loud voice. “A being with the ignorance, but not the instinct, of the feeblest animal!”

“This is Nugent,” Bysshe murmured. “Very accomplished actor.”

The figure then turned to the audience, and removed his hood. There was an involuntary exclamation of surprise, or dismay, at his pale and sunken features-emaciated, ravaged, and tremulous.

“The cosmetic artists have been busy,” Bysshe said.

Yet I scarcely heeded him. There was something so woeful, so awful, about this figure that he commanded my attention. “There is an oak beside the froth-clad pool where in old time, as I have often heard, a woman desperate, a wretch like me, ended her woes. Her woes were not like mine. And mine will never end.” He seemed to be looking around the auditorium, searching out every face and every eye, and I had a most irrational fear that he would find mine! “I have committed the great angelic sin-pride and intellectual glorying. Now I am doomed to wander. Melmoth has become Cain, outcast upon the face of the earth!” I had no notion, then, of why these words so powerfully affected me. “The secret of my destiny rests with myself. If all that fear has invented, and incredulity believe of me to be true, to what does it amount? That if my crimes have exceeded those of mortality, so will my punishment. I have been on earth a terror-”

Someone called out “ Liverpool!,” then prime minister, and the people around me broke into laughter.

Nugent seemed for a moment startled but, with his hand upon his breast and his gaze directed towards the scene of distant mountains, he waited for the uproar to subside. Then he was Melmoth once more. “I go cursing, and to curse. I go conquering, and to conquer.” I had never before witnessed the art of personation at close quarters, and I was astonished at the apparent ease with which Nugent had assumed the identity of Melmoth; he was the more vivid for being two people, himself and the desperate man. It was as if he had acquired twice the power of any single human being. “I go condemned by every human heart, yet untouched by one human hand. There is the ruin.” He pointed with trembling hand at the pile of rocks on the side of the stage. “And there beyond it is the chapel where I will marry my chosen bride.”

I was struck by the acting and the spectacle rather than the plot. I had never before seen so large a stage or so lavish a production, and I had scarcely become habituated to the particular brightness of the gas lamps. The effect of the intense shadows, the richness of the colours, and the symmetry of the composition upon the stage, combined to form an image more real than reality itself. I was reminded of the book of illuminations that was kept in the sacristy of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford; it could be seen on presenting a letter from a fellow of the college, and I had spent a delightful morning in turning over the pages of blue and gold, decorated with the burnished images of saints and devils. So it was at Drury Lane that evening. This was like no mountainous region in my own country, but a wonderfully heightened vision of barren desolation. There were some real stones and gravel, as far as I could tell, but I noticed that the larger rocks were made out of stretched canvas that had been painted grey and blue. The stream that ran behind was no stream of water, but a long strip of silver paper that was being agitated by unseen hands.

It was the end of the first act. The little orchestra struck up a melody, as Bysshe put his arm around my shoulders. “This is the true thing,” he said with great animation. “This is the full sublime!” I said nothing. “The outcast-the wanderer over the face of the earth-there we all tread! Only the exile has a tongue of fire! The imagination can form a thousand different men and worlds. It is the creator. It is the seed of new life.”

“It can do so much?”

“Of course. The imagination is the divine spark leaping across chaos.”

“The stream was made of silver paper.”

“Oh, that is nothing. Mortal men make up the scene, but the vision-” He stopped to purchase a bottled beer, and drank it down without a pause. Then he wiped his hand across his mouth.

The musical interlude had stopped, and the second act began in the setting of the ruined chapel. Yet once more I was distracted. There was someone speaking to a companion, immediately behind me, his voice quite audible. “I wonder if the monster lives or dies? I wonder if he feels remorse for what he has done? What is your opinion?” There was silence for a few moments. “Who created him, do you think? What man and woman gave him birth?” He paused again. “I could never forgive the person who created such a being.” I could feel the hot breath of the man upon my neck. “I could never condone the making of a blighted life. It would deserve dire and condign punishment. Punishment without end.” I turned round but those closest to me seemed to be enthralled in the drama and not to have spoken. The acoustics of the theatre were no doubt peculiar.

The curtains were pulled for a short interval, and then drawn back to reveal a pool or what the Scottish people call a tarn on the summit of a mountain. Melmoth now stood against a fading perspective of mountain tops and crevasses, as he grasped by her wrists the reluctant bride. “The seed of such a creature will be barren.” It was the same voice again, speaking distinctly behind me. “By his own account he has aged more than a century. Yet if he has risen above the confines of ordinary life, well, who is to say?” The girl broke away from his restraining hold, and flung herself into the water. I had been expecting a splash, or some movement in the water, but instead she descended slowly with her arms raised above her head. Of course it was part of the mechanics of the stage.

Bysshe clutched my arm, and whispered to me. “I cannot endure this. It is too disturbing. Too tremendous.”

“Do you wish to leave?”

“Yes. I am in a fearful fright.” I had always believed that Bysshe was too sensitive to endure the buffets of the world, and this sign of his tremulous nature did not wholly surprise me.

“Let us go then,” I said. “If we can make our way through this crowd.”

When we came out into the vestibule he stopped and, taking my arm again, he laughed. “I am a fool,” he said. “Forgive me. I was seized by some panic fear. Now it has passed. You look surprised.”

“I am curious.”

“When the girl threw herself into the lake, and lifted her arms above her head. That seized me with a frightful rush of terror. I am at a loss to explain why.”

“Shall we go back?”

“I have seen enough. Unless you, Victor-”

“Oh, no.”

We had reached the street, when all at once we heard someone calling out, “Mr. Shelley! Mr. Shelley!” It was Daniel Westbrook, running towards us. “Thank God I am in time!”