Frankenstein Unbound (6 page)

I stood forth.

“Who are you, and what do you want with me? Are you from the court?”

“Herr Frankenstein, my name is Bodenland, Joseph Bodenland. We met at the hotel yesterday. I apologize for intruding upon you.”

“No matter, if you have news. Is a verdict out yet?”

“Yes.” I had recovered myself by now. “Justine has been condemned to death. The verdict was the inevitable one in view of your silence.”

“What do you know of my affairs? Who sent you here?”

“I am here on my own account. And I know little of your affairs, except the one crucial thing which nobody else seems to know—the central secret of your life!”

He was still confronting me in a pugnacious attitude, but at this he took a step back.

“Are you another phantom sent to plague me? A product of my imagination?”

“You are sick, man! Because of your sickness, an innocent woman is going to die, and your fair Elizabeth is going to be plunged into misery.”

“Whoever or whatever you are, you speak truth. Unhappy wretch that I am, I left my native fireside and alienated my home to seek strange truths in undiscovered lands. My responsibility is too great, too great!”

“Then you must yield some of it to others. Go before the syndics of Geneva and declare your error. They will then do their best to right what has gone wrong: at the least, they can set Justine free. It’s useless to come up here and luxuriate in your sins!”

He had been wringing his hands. Now he looked up angrily. “Who are you to charge me with that? Luxuriate, you say! What do you know of my inner torment? Rendered all the worse by the high hopes I once had, the desire to wrest from Mother Nature some of her deepest secrets, however dark the passage down which I might tread. What cared I for myself? Truth was everything to me! I wanted to improve the world, to deliver into man’s hands some of those powers which had hitherto been ascribed to a sniveling and fictitious God! I made my bed in charnels and on coffins, that a new Promethean fire might be lit! What man ever achieved what I have achieved? And you speak of my
sins!
”

“Why not? Isn’t your ambition itself a sin? You admitted your own guilt, didn’t you?”

His manner became less wild. Almost contemplatively, he said, “Since I am an atheist and do not believe in God, I do not believe in sin in the sense you intend the word. Nor do I believe that the zeal of discovery is a cause for shame. But guilt I believe in, oh yes! I sometimes think that guilt is a permanent condition with me and, possibly, with all men in their secret hearts. Perhaps religions have been invented to try to exorcise that condition. It is guilt, not age or misunderstanding, that withers cheeks and drives friends and lovers apart.

“Yet why should this condition be? Whence does it come? Is it a modern thing? From now onwards, are all generations to feel guilty? Because man’s powers grow, generation by generation. So much have we achieved, so much more is there to achieve. Must that achievement always carry the maggot of guilt in it?

“Or perhaps guilt has always been a condition of man, since the early days of the world, before time rolled out like a long slumber across the universe. Perhaps it is to do with the nature of his conception, and with the lustful coming together of man and woman.”

“Why do you suppose that?”

“Because that intense pleasure which procreation gives is the moment when human beings shed their humanity and become as the animals, mindless, sniffing, licking, grunting, copulating... My new creation was to be free of all that. No animal origins, no guilt...”

With his hand, he covered his eyes and his brow.

“You have a singularly repulsive view of humanity,” I said. “Is this perhaps why you will do nothing to save Justine?”

“I cannot go to the syndics. I cannot!”

“At least tell the woman whom you love. There must be trust between you!”

“Tell Elizabeth? I would die of shame! I have not even confided in Henry, and he was a student with me at Ingoldstadt, when I began my experiments! No, what I have done myself, I must undo myself. Leave me now, whoever or whatever you are. I have said things to you, Bodenland, which I have said to no man; see that they repose in you as securely as in a grave. I am discomposed, or I would not speak as I have. I mean to arm myself from this day on—be warned, lest you are tempted to trespass on my confidence. Now, I pray, leave me.”

“Very well. If you will confide in nobody else, then you know what you must do.”

“Leave me, I asked you! You know nothing of my problems!—Wait, one commission you could do for me!”

“Ask me!”

He looked somewhat shame-faced. “For good reasons which you may or may not understand, I desire to remain here in the wilderness, away from those to whom I may inadvertently bring catastrophe. Take, I beg you, a word of explanation to Elizabeth Lavenza, my betrothed.”

All his movements were impatient. Without waiting for my assent, he pulled writing materials from his cloak, where I saw he had several notebooks. He ripped a page from one of them. Turning, he leaned against a rock and scribbled a few sentences—with the air of a man signing his own death warrant, I thought.

“There!” He folded it. “I can trust you to deliver it unread?”

“Most certainly.” I hesitated, but he turned away. His mind was already elsewhere.

I went on foot to the house of the Frankensteins. It was an imposing mansion standing in one of Geneva’s central streets and overlooking the Rhone. When I asked to speak for a moment with Miss Lavenza, a manservant showed me into a living room and asked me to wait.

To be there! Victor was right to wonder what I was. I no longer knew myself. My identity was becoming more and more tenuous. It would be the way of our century to say that I was suffering from time shock, no doubt; since our personality is largely built and buttressed by our environment and the assumptions environment and society force upon us, one has but to tip away that buttress and at once the personality is threatened with dissolution. Now that I actually stood in the house of Victor Frankenstein, I felt myself no more than a character in a fantastic film. It was not a displeasing sensation.

The furniture was light and cheerful. I could hear voices somewhere as I looked around, studying the portraits, examining the marquetry of the chairs and tables, all of which were ranged formally about the walls. A peculiar light seemed shed over everything, by dint of it being
that
house and no other!

I crossed to the window to look more closely at a portrait of Victor’s mother. Long casement windows were opened into a side garden laid with neat, symmetrical paths. I heard a woman’s voice somewhere above me say sharply, “Please do not mention the subject again!”

I had no scruples about eavesdropping.

A man’s voice replied, “Elizabeth, dearest Elizabeth, you must have thought of these things fully as much as I! I beg you, let us discuss them! Secrecy will be the undoing of the Frankensteins!”

“Henry, I cannot let you say a word against Victor. Silence must be our policy! You are his dearest friend, and must act accordingly.”

A tantalizing snatch of conversation!

Peeping cautiously, I could see that there was a balcony overlooking the garden. It belonged to a room on the first floor, where possibly Elizabeth had her own sitting room. That it was she, and talking to Henry Clerval, I now had no doubt.

He said, “I’ve told you how secretive Victor was in Ingoldstadt. At first, I thought he was mentally deranged. And then those months of what he chose to call nervous fever... He kept babbling then about some fiend that had taken possession of him. He seemed to get over it, but he behaved in the same alarming manner in court this morning. As an old friend—as more than friend—I beg you not to contemplate marriage with him—”

“Henry, you must say no more or we shall quarrel! You know Victor and I are to be married. I admit Victor is evasive at times, but we have known each other since early childhood, we are as close as brother and sister—” She checked what she was saying and then went on in an altered tone. “Victor is a scientist. We must respect his moods of abstraction.” She was going on to add something more, when a cold voice behind me said, “What may you be after?”

I turned. It was a bad moment.

Ernest Frankenstein stood there. The anger on his brow made him look uncommonly like a younger version of his brother. He was dressed all in black.

“I am being kept waiting with a message for Miss Lavenza.”

“I see you put your waiting to good use. Who are you?”

“My name, sir, since you inquire so civilly, is Bodenland. I come with word from Mr. Victor Frankenstein. He is your brother, is he not?”

“Didn’t I see you in court this morning?”

“Whom did you not see in court this morning?”

“Give me the message. I will deliver it to my cousin.” I hesitated. “I would prefer to deliver it direct.”

As he put out his hand, Elizabeth entered behind him. Perhaps she had heard our voices and used them as an excuse to break away from Henry Clerval.

Her entry gave me the chance to ignore Ernest and present her with Victor’s note myself, which I did. As she read it, I was able to study her.

She was small, delicately made, and yet not fragile. Her hair was the most beautiful thing about her. True, her face was perfect of feature, but I thought I saw a coldness there, a pinched look about the mouth, which a younger man might have missed.

She read the note without changing her expression. “Thank you,” she said. I was dismissed in the phrase. She looked haughtily at me, waiting for me to leave. I gazed at her, thinking that if she had appeared gentler I might have ventured to say something to her on Victor’s behalf. As it was, I nodded and made for the door; she looked the sort of woman who won protracted lawsuits.

I went back to the car.

Whatever the time was, it was later than I wished. I still hoped to aid Justine—or rather to correct the course of justice, feeling, in some vague and entirely unwarrantable way, that I was more civilized than these Genevese, having a two-century evolutionary lead over them!

My diversion with the Frankensteins had gained me nothing. Or perhaps it had. Understanding. I certainly understood more about the explosive nature of Frankenstein’s situation; hell hath no fury like a reformer who wishes to remake the world and finds the world prefers its irredeemable self. And his complex emotional relationship with Elizabeth, which I had but glimpsed, made the situation that much more precarious.

These matters rolled round and round my brain, like a thunderstorm, like clothes in a tumble-dryer. As I drove along the edge of the lake eastwards, I was hardly conscious of the beautiful and placid scenery. A steady rain began to fall. Perhaps it prevented me from noting how rapidly the season seemed to have advanced. The trees were now heavy with dark-green foliage. The corn was already ripening and the vines were in full leaf, with bunches of grapes hanging thickly.

My own world was forgotten. It had been displaced by my new personality, by what I believe I called earlier my superior self. The fact was that all sorts of strange gearshifts were taking place within my psyche, and I was eaten up by the morbid drama of Frankenstein. Once more I tried to recall what was to happen, as recounted in Mary Shelley’s book, but what little returned was too vague to be of use.

Certainly Frankenstein had gone away to study—to Ingoldstadt, I now knew—and there spent some years researching into the nature of life. Eventually he had built a new being from dismembered corpses, and had reanimated it. How he had overcome all the complex problems of graft rejection, septicemia, and so on—not to mention the central problem of bestowing life—was beyond me, although I took it that fortune had favored his researches. He had then been horrified by what he had done, and had turned against the creature to which he stood as God stood to Adam—that sounded like the baffled reformer again to me! In the end (or in the present future) the creature had overcome him. Or had he overcome it? Anyhow, something dreadful in the way of retribution had occurred, in the nature of things.

In the nature of things? Why should something dreadful come of good intentions?

It seemed an immensely important question, and not only when applied to Frankenstein. Frankenstein was no Faust, exchanging his immortal soul for power. Frankenstein wanted only knowledge—was, if you like, only doing a bit of research. He wanted to put the world to rights. He wanted a few answers to a few riddles.

That made him more like Oedipus than Faust. Oedipus was the world’s first scientist. Then Frankenstein was the first R & D man. Oedipus had received a lot of dusty answers to his researches too.

I broke off that silly line of thought and retraced my mental steps.

Whatever previous generations made of it, Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
was regarded by the twenty-first century as the first novel of the Scientific Revolution and, incidentally, as the first novel of science fiction. Her novel had remained relevant over two centuries simply because Frankenstein was the archetype of the scientist whose research, pursued in the sacred name of increasing knowledge, takes on a life of its own and causes untold misery before being brought under control.

How many of the ills of the modern world were not due precisely to Frankenstein’s folly! And that included the most overwhelming problem of all, a world too full of people. That had led to the war, and to untold misery before that, for several generations. And what had caused the overpopulation? Why, basically, those purely benevolent intentions of medical gentlemen who had introduced and applied theories of hygiene, of infection, of vaccination, and of inoculation, thereby managing to reduce the appalling infant mortality rate!

Was there some immutable cosmic law which decreed that man’s good intentions should always thunder back about his head, like slates from a roof?

My dim recollection was that there was discussion of such questions in Mary Shelley’s novel. I needed desperately to get hold of a copy of the book. But when had it first been published? I could not recall. Was it a mid-Victorian novel?