The world was void, the waves were dead, the tides
Were stranded since the moon, their mistress, fled.
One mighty city only...
Darkness became the Universe...
I sat for a long while, clutching the unfinished poem, gazing beyond it. I cannot say what I saw there.
At last I realized that the voices of the Shelley party had faded long since. My room was on the landward side of Chapuis, so in any case I could not have watched the schooner depart. Emptiness filled me. From the depths of my patchy education, I recalled that Shelley had drowned in a storm on a lake. This lake? This day? How urgently I hoped not!
Folding the poem, I laid it on the table. All was silence, except for the creaking tick of a clock. At length I stirred myself. In melancholy mood, I went downstairs. There sat Mary, by the empty grate!
She was perched on the end of a bench. Beside her was a wooden cradle, from which she had taken her baby. She held the child in her arms, having undone the ribbon of her blouse and put a small breast to his mouth. She was rocking him gently as he fed and gazing in abstraction at the far corner of the room.
When she saw me, she smiled and put a finger to her lips, motioning silence. She made no attempt to conceal her appealing expanse of breast. Uncertain about Regency conventions, I was both embarrassed and charmed, but she gestured that I was to stay.
The baby fell asleep at its feed. The nipple popped wetly from its mouth. She tied up her ribbons and laid William gently in the cradle before saying, “I think he will sleep now. The poor little mite has the colic, but I have dosed him up with laudanum.”
“I thought you had sailed on the schooner with the others.”
“I stayed because little Willmouse is unwell, and he will have trouble enough when we are on our way back to England. I also stayed because I understand you wished to speak with me.”
“That was very considerate of you!”
“It was not so much consideration as intuition, for something tells me that you visit me with some strange intelligence.”
“Mary—if I may call you that—yes, I have indeed some strange intelligence. But I know you are a girl with a great deal of intuition as well as consideration, and what you say makes my difficult task easier...”
I was head and shoulders taller than she, my head knocking against the low rafters. What I could not say was that, as we two stood in the shadowy parlor, I felt considerably under her spell.
The room was almost bare of possessions, apart from their preparations for departure. On the table lay remains of a frugal breakfast; I noticed nothing but bread and tea and some fruit. A German folio lay open at Shelley’s place, with a little duodecimo on it. The subdued light made Mary appear pale. Her hair was fair, so that I thought for a moment of the other woman I had met recently, Elizabeth Lavenza. But Elizabeth’s presence had been chilling; Mary’s presence was of a different quality. Her eyes were gray, her whole expression animated and a little skittish—or so I thought—from the moment she observed me admiring her breast. With me she had none of the shyness she had exhibited in Byron’s company the evening before.
Impulsively, I said, “You spoke little during our talk last night. Yet I know you had much to contribute.”
“It was my place to listen. And I wished to listen. Shelley was not at his best, yet he always talks so beautifully.”
“Yes. He’s very optimistic about the future.”
“Perhaps he makes it appear so.”
A silence fell between us. The baby slept by her feet. Large intangible sensations seemed to rise round us. I could hear the clock ticking again, and the beat of my heart.
“Come and sit by the window with me,” she said. “Tell me what it is you wish to say. Is it something about Shelley?... No, it is something touching on our conversation last night. You don’t know it, but my hair stood on end when you spoke of the future as you did. You conjured up for me the legions of the unborn, and I found them as grisly a sight as the legions of the dead. Although, like Shelley, I am not a believer in the Christian religion— as no intelligent person can be in our day—I do give strong credence to spirits. Until you enlighten me, and perhaps even after that, I shall regard you as some kind of spirit.”
“That might be the best way to look at it! Maybe I can never convince you that I am other than a spirit, for what I have to tell you is this: that I have come from two hundred years in the future to speak to you—to sit here by this window and talk as we talk now!”
I could not resist letting flattery creep into my tone. Seen in the soft green light of the window, speaking with her serious calm air, Mary Shelley was beautiful to behold. There might be a melancholy here, but there was none of Shelley’s madness, none of Byron’s moodiness. She seemed like a being apart, a very sane but extraordinary young woman, and a slumbering thing in my breast woke and opened to her.
She said, with a half-laugh. “You must have documents to prove your claim, to show at whatever unlikely temporal frontier post you came through on your way here!”
“Of course I do, and better than documents. But the document that most interests me is your novel: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.”
“About that, you will have to give me more details,” she said calmly, gazing at my face. “How you have heard of my story I do not know, for it lies unfinished upstairs, although I began it in May. Indeed, I may never complete it, now that we have to move back to England to sort out our difficulties there.”
“You will finish it! You will! I know as much. For I come from a time when your novel is generally acknowledged as a masterpiece of literature and prophetic insight, a time when Frankenstein is as familiar a name to the literate as Gulliver or Robinson Crusoe is to you!”
Her eyes were sparkling and her cheeks flushed.
“My story is famous?”
“It is famous, and your name is honored.”
She put a hand to her forehead.
“Mr. Bodenland, Joe—let’s go and walk by the water’s edge! I need some physical activity to prove I am not dreaming.”
She was shaking. I took her arm as we passed through the door. She closed it and leaned against it, looking up at me in an unconsciously provocative attitude.
“Can it really be as you say, that fame—that vicarious life in another’s breath—will be mine in the years to come? And Shelley’s? I’m sure his fame can never die!”
“Shelley’s fame has always been secure, and his name forever linked with Lord Byron’s.” I could see that did not particularly please her, so I added, “But your fame ranks with Shelley’s. He is regarded as one of the foremost poets of science, and you as the first novelist of science.”
“Shall I live to write more than one novel, then?”
“Yes, you will.”
“And when shall I die? And dear Shelley? Shall we die young?”
“You will not die before your names are known.”
“And will we marry? You know he pursues other women, in his ever-questing way.” She was fiddling absently with the ribbons at her bosom.
“You will marry. Your name goes down into the future as Mary Shelley.”
She closed her eyes. Tears welled behind her eyelids and trickled down her cheeks. Her whole frame shook. I put my arms about her, and we remained half leaning against the sun-blistered door.
Of what followed I cannot tell in detail—I dare not put it into words. For we were seized up into a kind of ritual which seemed afterwards to have its formal cadences like a dance. Still crying, she laughed. She clung to me, and then she ran away; she dashed through the flowers in the long grass, she twirled around a tree and sent lizards scuttling, she skipped along a sandy path. She invited me to pursue. I ran after her, caught her hand.
She laughed and cried. “I don’t believe it!” she said.
She began to talk rapturously, pouring out speculations about the future, all mixed in with details of her life, which she claimed was deeply unhappy, un
der a permanent cloud because her mother had died giving birth to her.
“But if I am to achieve such merit as wins fame, then my life has not been so unworthy an exchange for hers as I always feared!”
Again she laughed and cried, and I laughed with her. There was a union, a chemical bond, between us, which Nature seemed to acknowledge and conspire with, for the wind dropped and the sun blazed forth, and the great hills with their snowy caps shone forth in magnificence. Without conscious intention, I took her in my arms and kissed her.
Her lips were warm and sweet.
She responded before breaking away. Indirectly she revealed what was in her mind—and mine—by saying, “You know why we must return to England so soon after finding this peaceful sanctuary? Because our dear Claire is with child by Byron. That was no marriage of true minds! But today is our own, so let’s keep the thought of them out! Come, my messenger, who brings me such reason for deep happiness, we will swim in the lake. You know Shelley cannot swim? I swim here with Byron because I dread to swim alone, and tolerate all his impudent remarks. The water’s deep and cold as a grave here! Do you mind? We will turn our backs to each other, and so be polite while we strip.”
What man would be feeble enough to resist such a suggestion, or to quarrel with such an arrangement? We were at a little secluded cove, with large boulders strewn about, the debris of some long-past hillslide. I could see how clear and pure the water was, how full of fish. There were darting birds in the willow tree overhead. Bees buzzed in the clover. And Mary Shelley’s lithe figure was revealed by my side.
She entered the water with a small cry at its chill. Splashing her limbs to get used to the cold, she turned and looked at me with a hint of mischief as I stood naked staring at her. Our gaze met and became an eternal thing. That is how I see her now, turning to look over a white shoulder, with the placid expanse of lake about her. I ran forward and dashed myself into the water with a skimming dive.
After our swim, we ran back to the little villa, laughing and clutching our clothes. She found me a towel upstairs. I did not use it, nor she hers. Instead, we lay on the bed together, embracing, mouth to mouth. Time and the great day fluttered round our bodies.
There was a moment later when I found a willow leaf stuck to her still-moist haunches. “I shall keep it, since it comes from enchanted ground!”
I set it carefully on the edition of Sophocles by her bed, intending to retrieve it later.
“Enchanted indeed! You and I are under an enchantment, Joe. We do not exist in the same world! Both of us are spirits, though you kiss my flesh. And we are swallowed up from the world, carried in this room to a glade of an enchanted forest, magnificent and unbounded, where stand groves of pine and walnut and chestnut. Nothing can harm us here. The forests are infinite. They go on to the end of the world and the end of eternity. The sun will never swing away from that casement window, for we have abolished time at a stroke, my dearest spirit! I wonder what it would be like if you were the last man in the world, and I the last woman? Unknown to fame, we would see the whole world turn back into an Eden about us... But I would be afraid you might die. I’m always so fearful, you know. Only your good news banished my cares for a while. I had a child that died. Flesh is so frail—except yours, Joe! And I fear for Shelley. He’s so wild sometimes. You see what a creature of air and light he is, and yet he has his dark side, just like the moon. Oh, my spirit, my other self, make love to me again, if you can! Let your sunlight and my moonlight mingle!”
Ah, Mary, Mary Shelley, how dear you were and are, beyond all women—and yet what was possible then was only possible because we were mere phantoms in the world, or so we saw it, and scarcely less than phantoms to each other. But the solid Swiss world was no phantom, nor would the solar system cease forging steadily through interstellar space: the sun did swing away from our casement, for all that Mary said, for all our forgetting of time, and the baby awoke and cried, so that Mary, giving me a languorous look, dressed herself carelessly and descended the stairs. I remember how her dress lit the stairwell, reflecting onto the wall the sunbeams that fell on it as she descended.
I followed her down. Our movements were like a formal dance, always related to each other. She got William some milk in a ladle from the kitchen. He drank it, she dandled him on her knee; presently his eyes closed and he slept again, so that Mary could return him to his cradle. Then she turned the full beam of her attention on me. Holding each other’s hands, we spoke the name that had united us: Frankenstein.
X
* * *
This is what she said when I asked her how she came to write the novel.
“It began as a horror story in the mode of Mrs. Radcliffe. One evening in Diodati, Polly—Dr. Polidori, whom you saw at his worst last night—brought us a collection of ghostly tales and read the most gory bits aloud to us. It needs very little provocation to start Shelley off on such topics, or Albé either—he particularly enjoys vampire stories. I do no more than listen to them talking. I can’t decide whether Albé likes me, or merely puts up with me for Shelley’s sake...
“Polidori decided that we should have a competition, and each write a macabre tale. The three men began on something, although Shelley has little patience with prose. I alone could not start. I suppose I was too shy.
“Or perhaps I was too ambitious. I was impatient of inventing little frights, like Polidori. What I desired was a grand conception, one which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature. I have always suffered from nightmares, and at first I thought to press one of them into service, believing that dreams speak from some inner truth, and that in their very unlikelihood lies something more plausible to our inner beings than the most prosaic diurnal life.
“But I was finally inspired by the talk between the poets. I am certain that you know and revere the name of Dr. Erasmus Darwin in your day. His Zoonomia must ever be cherished for its poetic delights as well as its remarkable meditations on the origins of things. Shelley has always acknowledged his debt to the late doctor. He and Byron were discussing Darwin’s experiments and speculations on the future, and on the likely possibility of revivifying corpses by electric-shock treatments, provided mortification had not set in. Byron said that a number of small machines would be used to set each vital organ going at the same time: one machine for the brain, another a heart machine, another a kidney machine, and so on. And Shelley then said that one big engine with various outlets of varying capacities according to the needs of each organ might be used. So they went on developing the idea, and I retired to my bed with those notions in my head.
“I had listened to them spellbound, just as I once, as a small girl, hid behind my father’s sofa and heard Samuel Coleridge recite his ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ There was a nightmare awaiting me that night!
“I could see how the notion of raiding charnel houses for the secrets of life had always been present in Shelley’s thought; but these horrid machine speculations were new.
“I slept. I dreamed—and in that dream Frankenstein was born. I saw the engine powerfully at work, its wires running to a monstrous figure, about which the scientist flitted in nervous excitement. Presently the figure sat up in its bandages. At that, the scientist who had played God was dismayed with his handiwork, as was God with our general ancestor, Adam, though with less reason. He goes away, rejecting the power he has assumed, hoping the creation will fall back into decay. But that night, when he is asleep, the creature enters his chamber and rips back his curtain—so!—so that he wakes up with a start to find its dreadful gaze upon him, and its hand outstretched for his throat!
“I also started out of my sleep, as you may imagine. Next day, I set myself to writing out my dream, as Horace Walpole did with his dream of Otranto. When I showed my few pages to Shelley, he urged me to develop the story at greater length, and to underline the main idea more powerfully.
“That I have been doing, at the same time infusing some of my illustrious father’s principle
s of conduct into the narrative. Indeed, I suppose I owe a great deal to his novel, Caleb Williams, which I have read several times with a daughter’s care. My poor creature, you see, is not like all the other grim shades who have preceded him. He has an inner life, and his most telling statement of his ills is embodied in a Godwinian phrase, ‘I am malicious because I am miserable.’
“Those are some of the effects which prompted me to write. But greater than they is a sort of compulsion which comes on me, so that when I invent I scarcely know what I am inventing. The story seems to possess me. Such power made me uneasy, and that is why I have laid the manuscript by for some days.”
She lay back, looking up at the little discolored ceiling. “It is a strange feeling, one on which I have known no author remark. Perhaps it stems from a sensation that I am in some way making a prediction of awful catastrophe, and not just telling a story. If you are from the future, then you must tell me honestly, Joe, if such a catastrophe will take place.”
I hesitated before replying.
“You do have true presentiments of doom, Mary. In that way, you are ahead of your age: I come from a civilization long hypnotized by the idea of its nemesis. But to answer your question. The fame of your novel—when you finish it—will rest in part on its power of allegory. That allegory is complex, but seems mainly concerned with the way in which Frankenstein, standing for science in general, wishes to remold the world for the better, and instead leaves it a worse place than he finds it. Man has power to invent, but not to control. In that respect, the tale of your modern Prometheus is prophetic, but not in any personal way.
“What makes me curious is this. Do you know that there is a real Victor Frankenstein, son of a distinguished syndic of Geneva?”
She looked very frightened, and clung to me.
“I can’t bear it if you alarm me! You know my story is an invention; I have told you so! Besides, I set my tale in the last century and not today, because that is a convention which readers like.”
Frankenstein Unbound Page 8
