Pride and Prometheus

by John Kessel

  From that day on she began to notice how nobody in the family listened to the things she said. When she discoursed on morality, the likely response was silence or a hasty move to some other subject. Even Lizzy and Jane, the kindest of her sisters, never engaged with her. Lydia, who never listened to anyone longer than half a minute anyway, did not bother to hide her indifference, and Kitty had always followed Lydia’s lead.

  Looking back on those moments, Mary felt the justice of their indifference. Any person of sense would discount her store of shopworn quotations and banal advice. To think of how smugly she had pronounced on any number of matters that she in truth knew nothing about filled her with shame. Mary discovered herself to be a great ungainly goose, putting herself forward too much, unaware of how other people took her. In reaction she withdrew into her books, her piety, and lately her fossils. Better to hide one’s thoughts than risk making a fool of oneself. At home, after Lydia, Jane, and Lizzy were gone with husbands and families of their own, she had only Kitty to depend on.

  Over the last ten years Mary had imagined that she and Kitty had found some bond in their approaching spinsterhood, but here, at the least sign of advantage, Kitty had cut her to the quick. As Mary dressed for dinner, all she could think about was that she was alone, had always been alone, and unless Mr. Woodleigh made her an offer, always would be.

  When they descended to meet Woodleigh, they found the inn in some turmoil. A young woman who had stopped there the day before with a party of visitors from Uppercross had fallen from the Cobb. Witnesses of the accident said she had lain as if dead. She was being attended to in the home of Captain Harville, only recently settled in Lyme. Rumor had it she was engaged to be married; now, if she were to survive, she would likely be an invalid for the rest of her life.

  At supper, Mrs. Bennet expounded upon the risks taken by young women who moved outside their proper sphere.

  “Mother,” Kitty said, “this girl hurt herself because her fiancé failed to catch her when she jumped from the Cobb.”

  “No well-bred young lady should trust a man to catch her if she goes leaping from public landmarks. Such pastimes, my dear, are inappropriate. I hope you will not be jumping off things anytime soon.”

  “Until I have a fiancé, Mother,” Kitty said morosely, “I will avoid every instance of jumping.”

  Kitty saw no prospects on the horizon. At twenty-two she had been proposed to by Mr. Jonathan Clarke, the prosperous owner of a butcher’s shop and rendering works in Matlock, not far from Pemberley, Darcy’s estate. But Mr. Clarke, though personable, was a tradesman, and he took snuff. Kitty had declined his offer. She’d never gotten another. Mr. Clarke’s business had prospered: he was now a man of considerable import in Derbyshire. Every spring, when she invariably encountered Clarke and his wife in London, and then again every summer at Pemberley, Kitty was reminded of her mistake.

  “Mr. Woodleigh, are there dangers to your fossil hunting?” asked Mrs. Bennet.

  “There are rock slides. The Undercliff itself is the result of a collapse all along the line between Lyme and Axmouth. And of course we must beware of the tides; people have been washed away to sea.”

  “Washed to sea!” Mrs. Bennet exclaimed. “Mary, I forbid you to go back there. I had rather see you with your nose in a book than out in this foul weather waiting for a landslide, with me unable to think for fear that I shall never see you again.”

  Mary said, “I am a cautious person, Mother.”

  Mrs. Bennet sailed on regardless. “Of course, Mr. Woodleigh, this does not mean that you and Mary may not study your bones together in some proper drawing room. Mary is an accomplished performer, you know.”

  “Is that so?” Woodleigh said brightly. “Delightful. In her modesty she has said nothing of it. I confess, I have never met a young lady who takes such an interest in natural philosophy. Has Mr. Bennet schooled all his daughters in the sciences?”

  “Mr. Bennet spends his days among his books,” said Mrs. Bennet. “He has left the education of the girls to me.”

  “Mary is the queen of the library,” said Kitty.

  “Father lets me read from his collection,” Mary said. “And when we are in London, I buy many books.”

  “Yet it is more common, I believe,” Woodleigh said, “for young ladies to study the foibles of their neighbors than natural philosophy.”

  Mary found herself unable to hold her tongue. “Miss Wollstonecraft wrote that it is only because women are allowed no scientific study that they concern themselves with rules of behavior. In my youth I was one such, intent on propriety. I find I can better spend my time studying nature. Perhaps someday, through science, we shall understand the first causes of our behavior.”

  “Yes,” Kitty said. “I am sure that the soul lies hidden inside some rock.”

  “Miss Wollstonecraft?” Woodleigh said. “Wasn’t she married to that Jacobin, Godwin? When I worked in Mr. Pitt’s government, Godwin’s traitorous pamphlets caused us no end of trouble. Propriety is not something she, with her natural children, ever took account of. Miss Bennet, I hope you have not taken anything that atheist wrote to heart.”

  “I am no atheist,” Mary said. “I find the hand of God everywhere in nature. Do you not?”

  Mrs. Bennet, out of her depth, nonetheless understood a challenge to her domestic authority. “We have no atheists in the Bennet family, Mr. Woodleigh.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “And Mary, that’s enough talk of women radicals.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother.”

  Mrs. Bennet smoothed her napkin. “I forgive you, my dear. And you as well, Mr. Woodleigh. Now where is that servant? We called for a pudding, and have seen no sign of it.”

  The rest of the dinner proceeded in subdued spirits. Woodleigh, as if abashed that he had scolded her, attempted to conciliate Mary. Mary appreciated his effort, but as she sat there, she considered how a day that had dawned so auspiciously, her mind engaged and her heart light, off to explore the Blue Lias cliffs with a man who seemed to appreciate her, had since the moment she had discovered her fossils become a series of blows to her heart.

  At the end of the meal Woodleigh excused himself, saying that he needed to make an early night of it in preparation for his return to Exeter. He insisted that they allow him to pay for the dinner. He thanked them for their excellent company and promised Mary, if she might allow it, to write her. And with that he was gone.

  The three women retreated to their rooms.

  Mary felt confused by the contradictions between Woodleigh’s thoughtfulness and his callousness. Life was a mystery, and the content of another’s heart a riddle. She wished Kitty were right, and the soul might be discovered by breaking open some rock.

  Erasmus Darwin, in The Temple of Nature, asserted that life arose spontaneously all the time, and rather than an affront to God, this was a tribute to him as the Cause of all Causes. Every day dead matter gave birth to living things, and every day living creatures surrendered the spirit that animated them to again become dull matter. The border between life and death was permeable in both directions.

  Mary was alive. She had been alive since the moment her father and mother had animated her substance and God charged it with a soul. But one day her soul would depart and her body decay. Her flesh would fall away, and her bones would harden into stone. Perhaps someone might crack open a mass of shale a thousand years hence to find her and explain the meaning of her existence.

  Back in the room that Mary and Kitty shared, as they let down their hair and brushed it out, Kitty apologized to Mary for calling back the contretemps at Netherfield. “The moment I said it I could see that I had hurt you deeply. I have been so cross lately, and you do not deserve such treatment. Please forgive me, Mary. I hope you will forgive me.”

  Mary said that it would be unchristian for her not to forgive.

  Kitty embraced her. “You are the best of sisters. I am sorry that Woodleigh is leaving so soon.”

&nb
sp; Mary said that men would do as they pleased.

  “Do you wish to continue here in Lyme without him? Aunt Gardiner would be so happy to see us in London, even if we were to come sooner than planned. If you think it is right, we might ask Mother about it tomorrow.”

  “Why wait for tomorrow?” said Mary. “Mother is not yet asleep. You should go to her now.”

  “Oh, do you think so? I shall!”

  The look of joy that crossed Kitty’s face raised such contradictory emotions in Mary’s breast that she was glad Kitty rushed from the room before her expression betrayed them. Assuming that Kitty would notice at all.

  TWO

  When I saw the ocean for the first time, I despaired. How was I to cross it? It was too vast. It had existed for eons before my creation, and would exist long after my dissolution.

  For weeks after Victor had agreed to create a bride for me, he had lingered at his family’s home in Geneva. I lurked outside the Frankenstein villa. I would creep silently below their window, careful not to alert their dog. Through a gap in their drapes I watched his aged father, his remaining brother. I studied his beautiful cousin, a woman so fair that simply watching her move broke my heart. His Elizabeth. My hearing is finer than theirs, so even when I could not see them, I heard her comfort Victor on the death of his little brother William, the disgrace and execution of their servant Justine Moritz. Through gloom that their eyes could not penetrate, I read his father’s careworn expression.

  In the month and a half after Victor and I met on that mountainside above the glacier, as far as I could tell, he did not touch the scientific apparatus locked away in trunks in their attic.

  I remember sprawling below a tree one August night, impatient for him to begin constructing my companion; inside me anger warred with melancholy. Moonlight broke through the clouds. I smelled the earth of the forest floor. The leaves above rustled, and I heard the whooo of an owl. The summer air felt the way I imagined a caress might feel. Fit habitation for gods. In these woods I had strangled William. The locket I had found encircling his neck, containing the picture of another beautiful woman, I placed into the apron of Justine, a third lovely woman, thereby assuring her death for the murder of the boy.

  In my wooden darkness I brooded over Elizabeth’s figure in my mind. She was hardly larger than a child, but she was no child. Her shoulders and neck stirred something in me that I could not explain. Her hair curled around her face in ringlets, pulled back behind one ear by a comb.

  In one of the books that I read while lying last winter in the hovel beside the De Laceys’ cottage, there was a description of Eve, the first woman:

  She, as a veil, down to the slender waist

  Her unadorned golden tresses wore

  Disheveled, but in wanton ringlets waved

  As the vine curls her tendrils, which implied

  Subjection, but required with gentle sway,

  And by her yielded, by him best received,

  Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,

  And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.

  I would have been content to sit and watch his Elizabeth for the rest of my life, should she allow me to do so. I did not think I could survive being permitted to touch her.

  But of course that could never happen. Long before I could have put any of these emotions into words, I’d had that proven to me many times over. The sheer mass of my body frightens them, to be sure, but other men tower over their fellows and still find a place in the world. I have studied my reflection in still water. There is no obvious flaw in my countenance. My hair is thick and luxuriant, my brow noble. One might object to my cloudy eyes, my pale skin, or my dark lips—but I believe the trouble lies not in my difference from men, but in the too slight distance between them and myself. The very fact that I look so like them, when clearly by some token of my bearing, my expression, the way my lips or eyebrows move, I am not human, damns me. They look, and they see that something is wrong. I am some demonic semblance of a man. A monster.

  Despite what I could observe of all that went on inside the Villa Frankenstein, I could not read what went on inside Victor’s mind. With all his intellect, and despite his vow to me, he yet struggles to do me justice. Within the space of a few moments on the mountain, after I had told him my story, I saw him twice vacillate between sympathy and hatred. Who knew what he might be planning or not planning, how faithful he was to his pledge? It no doubt depended on the last person to whom he had spoken.

  I was considering how I might remind him of his promise when, with a great fuss, Victor left the villa in a coach loaded down with those trunks of scientific equipment. Eavesdropping at the stables, I discovered that he was bound for England by way of Strasbourg, where his friend Henry Clerval would join him. I determined to follow.

  And so I had pursued Victor all the way down the Rhine. This trip, which took him a month, making leisurely stops to visit the towns along the way, had taken me three.

  It was near the end of November, in the middle of the night, that I stood despairing on that verge of the sea. The moon’s silver light glittered on the ocean swells that advanced, growing until each wave crested and broke. Black and white and gray. The sound, continuous, rose and fell. I smelled salt and sea wrack.

  I was hungry. There was no nearby orchard or vineyard to raid, and in this flat, featureless landscape no woods where I might surprise a rabbit, raid a nest, or find nuts, ferns, or snails.

  I skirted the shoreline until I found a road. At a crossroads, a signpost told me I was headed toward Rotterdam, and some miles on I came to an inn with a dock. All the windows were dark. Beside the inn was a ramshackle stable where the horses stood sleeping in their stalls. One of them smelled me, lifted his head, and nickered. When I touched his forehead between his eyes, he shook away my hand and stepped back. The feed trough was empty. My stomach ground against my backbone.

  At the end of the row of stalls I found a room full of riding gear: saddles, bridles, and halters hanging from pegs. Nothing to eat; however, from one of the pegs I took a great brimmed black leather hat.

  I continued along the river. More buildings arose, closer together, and soon I was in the city. I reached the waterfront. I had seen boats on Lake Geneva, and on the way down the Rhine, but nothing like the great wooden ships that towered over the quayside, water gently lapping their sides. The smell of rotting vegetables led me to a refuse heap beside a bake house, where I made my repast from carrots too far gone for them, but not for me. A scrawny dog nosed its way into the alley, stood watching long enough for me to take five breaths, then walked away.

  My encounter with old, blind De Lacey in the cottage had shown me that, if they could not see me, men might converse with me on a basis of mutuality, even sympathy. In the time since, I had avoided human beings, but in order to find Victor I would have to interact with them. So my work would be to make sure that they could not see me clearly.

  I might trust my new hat to obscure my face, but the rags I wore were inadequate: I needed clothing that would make me appear at least plausibly human. I would also have to obtain some of the copper and silver pieces that I had come to realize were the foundation of civilized human interaction.

  Farther into the twisting waterfront streets, past warehouses and pens full of livestock, I came upon a district where people were still abroad. Light shone out the dirty windows of a tavern, and music drifted from the door. Through the window I spied men and a few women sitting and drinking while an old fellow played an instrument, squeezing it back and forth between his hands as he sang in German or Dutch, neither of which I understood.

  I withdrew to an alley. I waited. Over the course of some time a number of people passed, none suitable to my purpose. Finally, as I could detect the faint signs of morning, a large man came staggering down the street. I took one step from the alley and yanked him into the shadows. Before he could even yelp, I knocked his head against the wall and he dropped to the filthy pavement.

  His
chest still rose and fell. I stripped off his clothing, put it on, and left my stinking rags across his prostrate form. His trousers strained at my thighs. His boots were just large enough for my feet. His greatcoat, pinched at the shoulders, would serve. In his pocket I found a purse containing some coins, and even more valuable, a pair of large gloves and a muffler.

  It was unlikely that Victor, even if he had come this way, was still here. By now he and Henry must be in England. It was my task to pass that impassable ocean. But men had been crossing such seas for millennia, and I was a man—or if I were to make that crossing, I must pass for one.

  Wandering through the waterfront, I came upon a building with words written in gilt on a dark red sign. Sailors and citizens passed in and out. Travelers with trunks and servants, ladies with maids carrying their hatboxes. Men loaded the trunks onto a cart to take to their ship.

  Posted on a large board outside this building I saw a list of names, cities I recognized from the geography lessons Felix had given Safie. There, among the others, was the word London, followed by some numbers and the name of a ship. As I lurked at a corner, I heard a man and woman conversing, travelers about to depart, in French.

  I wrapped the muffler around my lower face and pulled the hat low over my eyes. I let my black hair flow over my coat collar. I entered the building, approached the clerk behind the counter, and addressed him in French.

  “My good man, I would like to book a passage to London.”

  The man looked at me warily and replied in Dutch. I shook my head. “Does no one here speak French?”

  The clerk called over a second man. “Bonjour.”

  “Bonjour.” I repeated my request for a ticket to London.

  “The Prince William departs with the morning tide. Which class, monsieur?”