by Stoker, Bram
“Good God, Professor!” I said, starting up. “Do you mean to tell me that Lucy was bitten by such a bat, and that such a thing is here in London in the nineteenth century?”
He waved his hand for silence, and went on, “Can you tell me why the tortoise lives more long than generations of men, why the elephant goes on and on till he have sees dynasties, and why the parrot never die only of bite of cat of dog or other complaint? Can you tell me why men believe in all ages and places that there are men and women who cannot die? We all know, because science has vouched for the fact, that there have been toads shut up in rocks for thousands of years, shut in one so small hole that only hold him since the youth of the world. Can you tell me how the Indian fakir can make himself to die and have been buried, and his grave sealed and corn sowed on it, and the corn reaped and be cut and sown and reaped and cut again, and then men come and take away the unbroken seal and that there lie the Indian fakir, not dead, but that rise up and walk amongst them as before?”
Here I interrupted him. I was getting bewildered. He so crowded on my mind his list of nature’s eccentricities and possible impossibilities that my imagination was getting fired. I had a dim idea that he was teaching me some lesson, as long ago he used to do in his study at Amsterdam. But he used them to tell me the thing, so that I could have the object of thought in mind all the time.
But now I was without his help, yet I wanted to follow him, so I said, “Professor, let me be your pet student again. Tell me the thesis, so that I may apply your knowledge as you go on. At present I am going in my mind from point to point as a madman, and not a sane one, follows an idea. I feel like a novice lumbering through a bog in a midst, jumping from one tussock to another in the mere blind effort to move on without knowing where I am going.”
“That is a good image,” he said. “Well, I shall tell you. My thesis is this, I want you to believe.”
“To believe what?”
“To believe in things that you cannot. Let me illustrate. I heard once of an American who so defined faith, ‘that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.’ For one, I follow that man. He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of the big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value him, but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe.”
“Then you want me not to let some previous conviction inure the receptivity of my mind with regard to some strange matter. Do I read your lesson aright?”
“Ah, you are my favourite pupil still. It is worth to teach you. Now that you are willing to understand, you have taken the first step to understand. You think then that those so small holes in the children’s throats were made by the same that made the holes in Miss Lucy?”
“I suppose so.”
He stood up and said solemnly, “Then you are wrong. Oh, would it were so! But alas! No. It is worse, far, far worse.”
“In God’s name, Professor Van Helsing, what do you mean?” I cried.
He threw himself with a despairing gesture into a chair, and placed his elbows on the table, covering his face with his hands as he spoke.
“They were made by Miss Lucy!”
We know, of course, the account Mina reads. We know how deep her love is for Jonathan. And so we might be tempted to ask, “How can she question his account of the Transylvanian horrors?”
Except we know Mina (Murray) Harker. She is stalwart, loving—and realistic. That means that no matter her feelings for her husband, she cannot willingly accept what seems impossible “just because my hubby says so.”
Stoker provides us well-rounded characters, and because Mina is the most fully developed (human) of any of Dracula’s cast, we can accept her questioning Jonathan’s account without seeing her as anyone other than his loving wife. In addition, Harker had a brain fever, so Mina is right to suspect Jonathan’s view as quite possibly not rational.
This is the practical and loving Mina we have come to know.
Van Helsing is a doctor and a lawyer and, with his great love of secrets, hardly a master of human relations. Too often, what he arranges to keep concealed causes problems for “the good guys.” Is Van Helsing meant to show “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions,” or is he simply so arrogant that he thinks he can ladle out knowledge to his “intellectual inferiors” when they can best process it, or … something else? In any event, Van Helsing, like other important characters, is not a simple, one-dimensional creation.
Don’t worry, dear Mina, Van Helsing has no problems with secrets.
By setting this diary entry after Mina has had time to reflect on her encounter with Van Helsing, Stoker gives Mina time to more objectively consider what has transpired.
Stoker the psychologist is getting it absolutely right. We cannot evaluate any experience while we are in the middle of the experience. It is only later that we can articulate the experience and begin to understand it.
To paraphrase William Wordsworth, “Poetry is powerful emotion … recollected in tranquility.”
Recollection + distance = understanding.
Okay, she is working too hard at describing Van Helsing. She isn’t giving us a mental picture, she’s taking inventory. But Mina has told us she is more or less “pretending” to be a newspaper reporter, and if she has not yet gotten the idea of “selected meaningful detail,” well, she has defined herself as an amateur and we accept it.
Perhaps not previously mentioned, but the epistolary format enables a character to share information with any character at any time she chooses! Did Stoker do right in using the epistolary format?
I think I’ve made a case for Stoker’s sense of humor … but let’s agree that this is not an example of it.
He’s got that right, doesn’t he? Of all the characters in the novel, Mina acts with the most consistent intelligence.
Deep characters: Is she “hysterical” or does Mina, she of the pragmatic mind, realize that an emotional appeal to the narcissistic and paternalistic Van Helsing will serve as the quickest route to helping her husband—and perhaps to answering some of the questions growing in her mind?
Dracula was and is a popular novel. And by the complexity of its characters and its serious philosophical concerns, it is equally a literary novel. Of course, it was created before publishers’ marketing departments and Oprah’s imprimatur created and differentiated such genres!
Does Mina know how to play Van Helsing or does she? Yes, said the turn-of-the-century feminist, that’s how you’d play this arrogant chump …
Just a thought.
It might be that Seward actually has no clue. Or it might as easily be that he recognizes Van Helsing’s need to lecture and offers his old friend, mentor, and often stodgy blusterer an opportunity to pontificate, which, in the end, will mean Seward learns what he hopes to learn more quickly.
How does one deal with a Van Helsing? We are finding again and again that the best way is to humor him. Smart characters (i.e., smart authors) will learn how to handle the various quirks and traits within a collective in order to move the plot, action, and humor along in the right direction. And differing personalities thrown together in survival mode always bring out the best, worst, and oddest of traits in people—writing under such circumstances is one of the joys of writing horror fiction!
And so, Van Helsing gives us his lecture in medical babble-gobble. It would have taken him longer had Seward not declared (feigned?) ignorance.
Because Van Helsing is Über-bombastic, Seward could not have asked this question earlier. He needed to get out his mushy philosophical analogies and metaphysical diatribes.
And now Seward says, “What you talking ’bout?”
Wham! Miss Lucy is a vampire! Just like all modern best-selling thriller writers have learned to do, Stoker knew how to end a chapter with a bang. But note how cleverly Stoker has put off giving us this simple and horrible sta
tement.
Chapter 15
DR. SEWARD’S DIARY—CONT.
For a while sheer anger mastered me. It was as if he had during her life struck Lucy on the face. I smote the table hard and rose up as I said to him, “Dr. Van Helsing, are you mad?”
He raised his head and looked at me, and somehow the tenderness of his face calmed me at once. “Would I were!” he said. “Madness were easy to bear compared with truth like this. Oh, my friend, why, think you, did I go so far round, why take so long to tell so simple a thing? Was it because I hate you and have hated you all my life? Was it because I wished to give you pain? Was it that I wanted, now so late, revenge for that time when you saved my life, and from a fearful death? Ah no!”
“Forgive me,” said I.
He went on, “My friend, it was because I wished to be gentle in the breaking to you, for I know you have loved that so sweet lady. But even yet I do not expect you to believe. It is so hard to accept at once any abstract truth, that we may doubt such to be possible when we have always believed the ‘no’ of it. It is more hard still to accept so sad a concrete truth, and of such a one as Miss Lucy. Tonight I go to prove it. Dare you come with me?”
This staggered me. A man does not like to prove such a truth, Byron excepted from the category, jealousy.
“And prove the very truth he most abhorred.”
He saw my hesitation, and spoke, “The logic is simple, no madman’s logic this time, jumping from tussock to tussock in a misty bog. If it not be true, then proof will be relief. At worst it will not harm. If it be true! Ah, there is the dread. Yet every dread should help my cause, for in it is some need of belief. Come, I tell you what I propose. First, that we go off now and see that child in the hospital. Dr. Vincent, of the North Hospital, where the papers say the child is, is a friend of mine, and I think of yours since you were in class at Amsterdam. He will let two scientists see his case, if he will not let two friends. We shall tell him nothing, but only that we wish to learn. And then …”
“And then?”
He took a key from his pocket and held it up. “And then we spend the night, you and I, in the churchyard where Lucy lies. This is the key that lock the tomb. I had it from the coffin man to give to Arthur.” My heart sank within me, for I felt that there was some fearful ordeal before us. I could do nothing, however, so I plucked up what heart I could and said that we had better hasten, as the afternoon was passing.
We found the child awake. It had had a sleep and taken some food, and altogether was going on well. Dr. Vincent took the bandage from its throat, and showed us the punctures. There was no mistaking the similarity to those which had been on Lucy’s throat. They were smaller, and the edges looked fresher, that was all. We asked Vincent to what he attributed them, and he replied that it must have been a bite of some animal, perhaps a rat, but for his own part, he was inclined to think it was one of the bats which are so numerous on the northern heights of London. “Out of so many harmless ones,” he said, “there may be some wild specimen from the South of a more malignant species. Some sailor may have brought one home, and it managed to escape, or even from the Zoological Gardens a young one may have got loose, or one be bred there from a vampire. These things do occur, you, know. Only ten days ago a wolf got out, and was, I believe, traced up in this direction. For a week after, the children were playing nothing but Red Riding Hood on the Heath and in every alley in the place until this ‘bloofer lady’ scare came along, since then it has been quite a gala time with them. Even this poor little mite, when he woke up today, asked the nurse if he might go away. When she asked him why he wanted to go, he said he wanted to play with the ‘bloofer lady’.”
“I hope,” said Van Helsing, “that when you are sending the child home you will caution its parents to keep strict watch over it. These fancies to stray are most dangerous, and if the child were to remain out another night, it would probably be fatal. But in any case I suppose you will not let it away for some days?”
“Certainly not, not for a week at least, longer if the wound is not healed.”
Our visit to the hospital took more time than we had reckoned on, and the sun had dipped before we came out. When Van Helsing saw how dark it was, he said, “There is not hurry. It is more late than I thought. Come, let us seek somewhere that we may eat, and then we shall go on our way.”
We dined at ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’ along with a little crowd of bicyclists and others who were genially noisy. About ten o’clock we started from the inn. It was then very dark, and the scattered lamps made the darkness greater when we were once outside their individual radius. The Professor had evidently noted the road we were to go, for he went on unhesitatingly, but, as for me, I was in quite a mixup as to locality. As we went further, we met fewer and fewer people, till at last we were somewhat surprised when we met even the patrol of horse police going their usual suburban round. At last we reached the wall of the churchyard, which we climbed over. With some little difficulty, for it was very dark, and the whole place seemed so strange to us, we found the Westenra tomb. The Professor took the key, opened the creaky door, and standing back, politely, but quite unconsciously, motioned me to precede him. There was a delicious irony in the offer, in the courtliness of giving preference on such a ghastly occasion. My companion followed me quickly, and cautiously drew the door to, after carefully ascertaining that the lock was a falling, and not a spring one. In the latter case we should have been in a bad plight. Then he fumbled in his bag, and taking out a matchbox and a piece of candle, proceeded to make a light. The tomb in the daytime, and when wreathed with fresh flowers, had looked grim and gruesome enough, but now, some days afterwards, when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns, when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance, when the time-discoloured stone, and dust-encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass, and clouded silver-plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined. It conveyed irresistibly the idea that life, animal life, was not the only thing which could pass away.
Van Helsing went about his work systematically. Holding his candle so that he could read the coffin plates, and so holding it that the sperm dropped in white patches which congealed as they touched the metal, he made assurance of Lucy’s coffin. Another search in his bag, and he took out a turnscrew.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“To open the coffin. You shall yet be convinced.”
Straightway he began taking out the screws, and finally lifted off the lid, showing the casing of lead beneath. The sight was almost too much for me. It seemed to be as much an affront to the dead as it would have been to have stripped off her clothing in her sleep whilst living. I actually took hold of his hand to stop him. He only said, “You shall see,” and again fumbling in his bag took out a tiny fret saw. Striking the turnscrew through the lead with a swift downward stab, which made me wince, he made a small hole, which was, however, big enough to admit the point of the saw. I had expected a rush of gas from the week-old corpse. We doctors, who have had to study our dangers, have to become accustomed to such things, and I drew back towards the door. But the Professor never stopped for a moment. He sawed down a couple of feet along one side of the lead coffin, and then across, and down the other side. Taking the edge of the loose flange, he bent it back towards the foot of the coffin, and holding up the candle into the aperture, motioned to me to look.
I drew near and looked. The coffin was empty.
It was certainly a surprise to me, and gave me a considerable shock, but Van Helsing was unmoved. He was now more sure than ever of his ground, and so emboldened to proceed in his task. “Are you satisfied now, friend John?” he asked.
I felt all the dogged argumentativeness of my nature awake within me as I answered him, “I am satisfied that Lucy’s body is not in that coffin, but that only proves one thing.”
“And w
hat is that, friend John?”
“That it is not there.”
“That is good logic,” he said, “so far as it goes. But how do you, how can you, account for it not being there?”
“Perhaps a body-snatcher,” I suggested. “Some of the undertaker’s people may have stolen it.” I felt that I was speaking folly, and yet it was the only real cause which I could suggest.
The Professor sighed. “Ah well!” he said, “we must have more proof. Come with me.”
He put on the coffin lid again, gathered up all his things and placed them in the bag, blew out the light, and placed the candle also in the bag. We opened the door, and went out. Behind us he closed the door and locked it. He handed me the key, saying, “Will you keep it? You had better be assured.” I laughed, it was not a very cheerful laugh, I am bound to say, as I motioned him to keep it. “A key is nothing,” I said, “there are many duplicates, and anyhow it is not difficult to pick a lock of this kind.” He said nothing, but put the key in his pocket. Then he told me to watch at one side of the churchyard whilst he would watch at the other. I took up my place behind a yew tree, and I saw his dark figure move until the intervening headstones and trees hid it from my sight.
