Pride and Prometheus

by John Kessel

  “We must not abandon her into the world.”

  “I bought her a dress, and shoes.”

  “And I will see that she learns how to wear them.”

  “Cannot we leave her education to the care of the Creature?”

  “I will not see her educated by the mercies of the cruel world, and without any notion of God.”

  Victor considered what she said. “You are a difficult woman, Miss Bennet. Very well. I shall watch over you, for your own sake. I could not bear to see you come to harm as a result of anything I have done.”

  As the time approached when his companion might be vivified, it became increasingly evident that Adam’s spirit was wrought. The day before Victor decided he would bring the female to life, Adam said to Mary, “He works at creating her only out of compulsion. His every move shows his hatred of what he does. What can I do to assure that he completes his task?”

  Mary did not think telling Adam of Victor’s warnings would serve any purpose. “I will do all in my power to see that he completes her. Victor values my good opinion. He has brought your bride to the brink of life. Have patience. God has us in his hands, and with his guidance, by this time next week you will hold her hand in yours.”

  His voice was almost a whisper. “If she will have me.”

  “That will depend on your treatment of her. Do not let fear rule your heart.”

  On the day that Victor chose for the bride’s birth, they spent the daytime preparing the electrical equipment. Night had come before Victor was ready to assay her awakening. He drained the bath of fluid, exposing her body. When he struggled to lift her, Adam took her in his arms, and Mary helped Victor clear the table.

  She had prepared herself for cleaning the body, but in the event she found herself able to do so only by telling herself that this being was not Kitty. She washed it head to toe and dried it carefully. Only then did she allow herself to study its face. The large birthmark, ugly purple, made it hard to judge her features. The patches of coarse hair on her abdomen and thigh were repulsive, and other areas of her skin were raw and red. The unblemished portions were fairer and finer than Kitty’s had ever been, as flawless as Adam’s. The high forehead, the cheekbones, were familiar.

  “She looks like Kitty,” Mary said.

  From behind her came Adam’s voice. “She does not.”

  But he had not lived his life with Kitty. It unnerved Mary to see her lying naked there before these men. She supposed that modesty did not rule in the laboratory any more than it did in the surgery, but it gave her pause.

  Victor affixed his disks and wires to the female’s body. He warned Mary and Adam to keep away while the electricity was coursing through it, then closed the switch.

  On the third try the body on the table jerked upright and coughed explosively, gasped for air, coughed again. Her eyelids flew open and her pale eyes stared.

  “She cannot breathe!” Mary said.

  Adam and Mary rushed to her. Victor at last came forward and, while Mary held her head, helped her to cough up the remaining fluid from her lungs. They laid her back on the table. Burn marks stood out on her chest where the electricity had entered her body. Victor stood by as if in a trance. When Mary glanced at his face, she saw a look of such dismay that she almost stopped and went to him. He was reluctant to touch the female until, at Mary’s urging, he tested her reflexes and listened to her heart.

  “We must clothe her.” Mary said. Victor removed the disks, and Mary struggled to fit the female into a dress. Adam stood suspended, as if afraid to help. Victor busied himself in disconnecting the batteries. He had Adam carry equipment out to the shed. Adam did not want to leave the room, but he obeyed Victor’s orders. His face held an expression of disbelief.

  The female’s progress toward physical self-control was swift. Her chest rose and fell regularly. Her fingers twitched. Within an hour, when Mary held her hand above the female’s face her eyes adjusted to focus on it. She lifted a shaky hand to touch Mary’s. She opened her mouth and made small sounds.

  Victor moved himself to listen to her heart every hour, and warned them not to leave her alone, but otherwise seemed unnerved to be in the same room with her. At three in the morning he put on his greatcoat and told them he would be walking around the island until the dawn. Mary and Adam helped the female from the laboratory into Mary’s room. With their aid, she was able to walk, shuffling, under her own control.

  “May I sit here and watch her?” Adam asked.

  “I think that it is better that we should have privacy,” Mary said.

  “I have gone through what she goes through now. I can tell you what she must be thinking.”

  “Tomorrow will be soon enough to begin.”

  “As you wish,” Adam said. His eyes lingered on the female as he left the room.

  The wind rattled the windowpanes and a draft shot in below the door. Mary fed the fire. The bride sat on Mary’s bed and fixed her eyes on the flames.

  Mary sat opposite her. The flickering firelight played across the bride’s discolored skin, her eyes that looked blind except that they darted about. The feeling that Mary was looking into the face of her dead sister made her look away.

  “Sit there, now,” Mary said. She felt the bride’s hands. “You are cold. Here, let me warm you.”

  The bride’s eyes watched Mary’s face. Her slack mouth opened and closed soundlessly, imitating Mary’s own. She looked brutally animalistic, as if a cow or fish had taken the shape of a woman. Mary felt nauseated, full of anxiety. What was she doing here, with this—this thing?

  Mary pulled the blanket from the bed and wrapped it about the bride’s shoulders. “There, that’s better.”

  The bride moved toward the fire, overbalanced, and fell to one knee. Mary got down next to her and tried to help her up. The bride thrust her hands toward the flames.

  “No!” Mary said, and pulled her back. They both fell clumsily to the floor.

  Mary embraced her, holding her arms to her sides. She recalled holding Kitty in the woods on the day that she had told Mary of her affair. This same body.

  “You mustn’t put your hands into the fire,” Mary said.

  She did not fight, but let herself be guided back onto the bed. Mary made her lie down with her arms at her sides and covered her with the blanket, tucking it tightly around her to restrain her. The bride’s eyes followed Mary’s every movement.

  Mary returned to her chair. The bride’s depthless eyes remained open, but she did not try to move. Fatigue washed over Mary, the exhaustion of weeks of overstrained nerves. She wondered how her father and mother were, and felt a pang of regret for how she had abandoned them. As the bride lay quietly, Mary began to feel calmer. Perhaps she would survive this terrifying moment in her life and return at last to her home and her books.

  After a while Mary looked up to see Adam peering in at the window, a ghastly grin wrinkling his dark lips. It sent a shiver down her spine, and she shook her head, waving him away. Adam’s face withdrew, and a moment later Mary heard heated words between him and Victor outside the window. She could not make out what they said over the sound of the wind, but soon afterward the door to the laboratory opened and Victor poked his head into the room.

  “Miss Bennet, are you all right?” he asked.

  Mary looked up from her chair. “I am fine.”

  “I caught the demon spying on you. I told him to leave you in peace.”

  “Thank you.”

  “This one hasn’t tried to harm you?”

  “She is gentle as an infant,” Mary said.

  Victor shook his head slowly. “I beg you not to make that assumption.”

  “Thank you for your concern,” Mary said. “You should go to sleep. It will be daylight soon enough. I shall take care.”

  “I will be in the next room,” Victor said. “Call on me and I will come in an instant.”

  “Very well,” Mary said.

  Victor left and she heard him settle down on his pa
llet. She assumed that Adam was either roaming the seashore or had crawled into his shed. The image of his grinning face at the window lingered in her mind.

  The bride lay without moving, and eventually her eyes closed. Mary wondered what thoughts passed through her mind. Did she recognize anything of the world, or was she as blank as a newborn? She had already learned to walk, to use her hands, to focus her eyes on Mary’s face. She did not seem afraid; if anything were evident in her eyes, it was of a mind trying to grasp what she was and where she found herself. Mary wondered if her dreams might be of things that had happened to Kitty. Might Mary appear in them? Might some echo of Kitty’s soul linger?

  Mary sat watching for a time, and then, quietly, crawled onto the bed beside her. She lay on her side and wrapped her arms around the bride, just as she had slept with Kitty many times, her face inches away from this uncanny, inhuman thing that had once been her sister. Eventually she slept.

  The next day she taught the bride to sit, and stand, and practice walking. Mary sat her at the table and fed her porridge from a pewter spoon. The bride tasted it, and her eyes opened wide. Porridge dribbled from her lips, but soon she had learned to swallow. Her blemished, waxen face showed a type of pleasure.

  Mary wiped the bride’s mouth and chin. She helped her to drink water from a cup. The bride’s ability to control her limbs progressed at an astonishing rate. By the end of the morning she could walk, sit, hold a cup, and drink without aid. In imitation of the conversation between Mary and Victor, she began making sounds.

  Victor did not seem as eager to have her gone as he at first had been, but he did not help in any of this instruction. He repeatedly warned Mary not to lower her guard.

  Adam, on the contrary, was eager to help, and in the afternoon Mary allowed him to join her in trying to teach the bride to speak. He seemed at first wary—perhaps fearing that the female might find him as repulsive as humans had. But the bride did not recoil from him. She watched him, and seemed fascinated with his appearance, his low voice, his bulk.

  Mary and the Creature took turns speaking to her, pointing at objects, encouraging her to repeat the sounds they made. “Hand. Arm. Finger. Foot. Face. Nose. Mouth. Chin. Neck. Eye.”

  “Bed. Chair. Spoon. Cup. Table. Door. Hearth.”

  Adam’s patience seemed infinite. Mary observed his expressions as all through the day into the evening he sat with the bride. She saw written there interest, amusement, surprise, wonder. He smiled. His attitude was one of awe that the bride attended so closely to everything he did and said.

  Though she showed nothing that would indicate that any of the character of Kitty was written on her mind, she learned quickly. The sounds she produced were at first no more than nonsense, unbroken by distinction between one syllable and the next; by the end of the day she had spoken several intelligible words.

  “Adam,” the Creature said, touching his hand to his breast.

  “A-dam,” the bride said.

  “Eve,” he said, gesturing gently toward her.

  “Eeef,” she said.

  “Eve,” he said.

  “Eeef.”

  Adam’s dead face creased in a grin. “That’s right,” he said. “Eeef.” He touched his own breast again. “Adam.”

  “Adam,” she said.

  Mary noted that, unlike Adam, Eve did not get to choose her own name. She considered the novelty of their situation: a woman created fully grown, innocent as a child, as the intended companion for the only other being of her kind. Though these circumstances were unlike any since the creation of the first Eve, destined to marry the first Adam, Mary had known women who were promised to men even before their births. It was not an unheard-of circumstance among the gentle families of England. Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Darcy’s mother had vowed, while their children were yet infants, that Darcy and Lady de Bourgh’s daughter Anne would marry when they came of age. In the end this had not come to pass, as Darcy fell in love with Lizzy, to Lady Catherine’s chagrin.

  Falling in love. Such a strange phrase. Mary supposed that “falling” most definitely applied to the Bible’s Adam and Eve. From a higher state into a lower one, though to hear her mother and all the world speak, it was the opposite. Marriage was supposed to be an exaltation.

  Eve in the Garden never considered not marrying Adam. They seemed to have a fundamental sympathy, which Mary supposed was a good thing. Although perhaps they were not so well mated as God had intended, else Eve would not have disobeyed Adam (to say nothing of God) and eaten of the apple. And then, worse, she had tempted Adam into eating of it, when she well knew what trouble this would bring him. That was not a very generous attitude to take toward one’s husband.

  But as far as Mary could tell, it was a common one. The Church said that such differences between husband and wife existed because we were born with original sin. Thus the necessity of religion and churches, to provide a hope of salvation in the next world and some rules of behavior for this one. Radicals like Byron and Godwin pointed out that this was a very convenient circumstance for churches and the kings they served, but to Mary history provided ample evidence that human beings should follow rules of morality rather than trust conscience—or whatever the German writers were calling it nowadays.

  Here was another Eve, the first woman born since the Garden who might be said to face the original Eve’s situation. Mary saw the Creature’s naming himself Adam in a different light. Neither he nor Victor seemed to have considered how Eve might regard what was being asked of her, or what she was being offered.

  The female was a child. Was it right to give a child into the keeping of the man who planned to marry her? Again, this was something Mary had seen done in her world and never questioned. How could those girls know what other possibilities life might offer? How could they ever become other than that thing their owner—for that was what he amounted to, even if one called him a guardian—wanted? And if, at some later period in their lives, these women understood the unfairness of their situation, would that promote a happy union?

  Mary had seen some marriages of this sort, and based on the very little she had observed, she did not think them happy ones.

  Yet she could not imagine Adam for a very long time forbearing from presenting his affections to Eve. There was no answer for it: Mary would have to teach Eve as much as she could in the few days before Eve and Adam left, and—if Adam was sincere in his professions—Eve never saw a human being again.

  A day later Mary, having left the two of them while she spoke with Victor on the beach, returned to find them nowhere in the cottage. It was a blessedly mild day for October, the sky devoid of clouds, the wind more a breeze than a gale. Mary feared Adam might have drawn Eve away in order to take advantage of her; she searched this end of the island and came upon them sitting in the circle of stones near the brink of the cliff.

  Unaware of Mary, they sat face-to-face in the slanting sunlight, their hair stirred by the light wind. Adam was saying something to her, holding his hand to her lips. Mary moved close enough to hear, hiding behind the one standing stone.

  “Make this sound, like this,” he said. He opened his mouth and sang a steady note, slightly off-key. It was a C.

  Eve, eyes intent on him, sang a C. Her voice was steady and sweet.

  Adam sang with her until she held the note, then switched to an E. The primitive harmony was carried off on the wind. They sang it until they ran out of breath; Adam coughed, and laughed. Eve laughed too. Mary was startled to hear how much her laugh sounded like Kitty’s.

  Adam saw Mary beside the standing stone, and stopped. “What do you want?”

  “I was worried.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about.” Adam’s voice was defensive. Then he paused, and looking at Eve said again, in an entirely different tone, “There’s nothing to worry about.” His face was solemn, but if anything, relaxed.

  “Let me show you how it is with a third voice,” Mary said.

  Eve looked at Mary,
a little uncertain. Her terrible skin shone in the sun. Mary sat beside her.

  The three of them returned at sunset to find Victor waiting. As soon as Adam had left and Mary had laid Eve down on her bed to rest, Victor asked, “What were they about?”

  “They were singing,” Mary said.

  Victor looked unhappy. “The fiend is a thing of appetites. I have seen him touch her, little caresses when he thinks no one is looking. He intends to use her in the most vile ways.”

  “When I found them together he was doing nothing untoward. He knows that she is little more than an infant.”

  “Once he takes her away, where no civilized person might object, he will make her his concubine. She’ll have no choice—how might she have a choice, knowing no other man, and in complete ignorance of humane behavior?”

  Having contemplated the same possibility, Mary could not with reason claim that it was impossible.

  “We shall have to keep them here as long as we can,” she said, “so that we might educate her—educate both of them, for he is as ignorant of the proprieties as she.”

  “No proprieties will exist between them the moment that they are away. And consider—one of the first results of those sympathies for which the demon thirsts will be children. A race of devils may be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of man precarious and full of terror.”

  Mary had a troubling thought. “Victor, you have mastered every detail of human physiology. I would hazard that you know more about this than any man who has ever lived. When you performed your surgeries on Kitty’s body, could you not have assured that she would never bear children?”

  Victor was silent for a moment. “Unfortunately, I never thought of this possibility. Would that I had.”

  The question raised another in Mary’s mind. “Might you . . . Did you by chance discover whether Kitty, when she died, was with child?”

  “She was with child?” Victor studied her calmly.