He lays down the book. Takes up tourniquet, his lancet. The instrument punctures the skin. Tender swollen vessels. Draw off a little ounce or five. Never miss it. As he bleeds his recalcitrant apes, to make them quiet; subdue the animal excitement as it rises inside. Like garnet lava, like molten jewels, it slides down the sides of the china basin. His lamp gutters. A draught lifts the papers on his desk, their fibres oppressed by the weight of his writing.
Pybus, going out to piss in the yard, found Bitch Mary crouching by the wall. When she lifted her head, he saw a dark patch around her mouth. “Get me a rag,” she said.
He tried to raise her to her feet. “A rag to staunch,” she said.
“Never mind,” he said. “Come indoors.”
“I need a rag to wipe the blood from between my legs. I do not want a man such as the Giant to see how his countrywomen are reduced.”
Wm Harvey, having observed the pulsating heart of the chick in a fertilised egg, misunderstood what he had seen, and reported that the blood had its life, its own quivering beat. Its vitality lasted so long as it was not shed. Once it was shed, the living principle escaped. The blood separated then into its dead constituents, some serous, some fibrous; into parts that had no existence in living blood. Its nature was transformed by death: corrupted, he said, resolved.
Mary was shaking with cold. Her hair was cropped, hacked off in patches, shorn above her ears. Her money was gone; not a halfpenny to bless herself with. The month was now November, and the moon small and peevish: a copper coin lightly silvered, a counterfeit light.
nine
Mary said, through her bruised mouth, “It was not Bride. Indeed not.” Her eyes were cried to slits. She told a tale of being locked in a cellar.
Said Claffey, “Bride Caskey is the cellar queen.”
But Mary said, no, she was in a cellar by herself. Till she was starved two days, and would then beg food from anybody. Of what next occurred, she would not speak. Only of a swat in the mouth for insolence, and that came later. She had lost her grip on the passage of hours and days, a faculty that the men had always envied in her, and she seemed to have forgotten certain words and common expressions of her native tongue, so that they were forced to speak to her in a mixture of two languages, which stuck in their throats and blocked the flow of their thoughts.
Howison comes banging in. What a noisy brute he is! Is it a general rule that the man who has strength and gall to handle the deadweight corpse has not the consideration to tread soft among the living? For now it is always night, it is always night at Earl’s Court. Hunter is walking with his taper, up and down the storeys, the animal complaints deafening his ears, and replaying in his head the days of heroic experimentation, heroic anger.
Wullie is poorly, they say. Well, let him. All our family have rotten bones.
“So what is it?” he barks at Howison, his man. “What futility have you brought in now, to stop up my ears with trash?”
“You told me, reverence, to bring you in news of the Giant, Charles O’Brien.”
“Him? So what’s new?”
“Mr. Harry Graham, who is exhibiting—”
“Cut it short, I know all about that mountebank.”
“Mr. Harry Graham has offered O’Brien a go on his Celestial Bed, conception assured. With first-time partner of his choice. Free and gratis, whereas the normal rate—”
“Oh, do away with yourself, Howison. I know the rate. I know the rate for charlatans. I’ll tell you, shall I, what it is about Mr. Graham’s Celestial Bed that produces its results? ‘Tis not the naked nymphs playing string instruments, ’tis not the scented odours of incense nor the ostrich feather fans—”
“Really?” Howison looks keen. “I had not heard of the ostrich feather fans.”
Perhaps I embroider, thinks John Hunter: can it be that I, a man bound to fact and observation, embroider the tale?
“It is not either the ostrich feather fans,” he says, so loudly as to defeat his own qualms. “It is not crushed roses and strewn petals—there’s but one way to put a child into a woman’s belly, and that is to deliver the vital fluid to her at the right angle, and keep the jilt with her legs up and resting on her back while nature takes its chance. Now to that first point, the tilting mechanism of Mr. Graham’s bed explains its own success, and the second effect—the woman’s continued posture—is explained by the soporific odours and the sweet music.”
Sweet music. His Anne has composed certain verses: “My mother bids me bind my hair.” He had heard the song sung. Come home late, his hands stinging from scrubbing, his eyes stinging from lack of sleep. Coming in, a man to his own hearthside, to find the room a-twitter with excitement at some air set down by a foreigner and interpreted by his own spouse: “Get out! Get away to your own beds! I gave no permission for this kick-up.”
The falling silent of the instrument, as if a tense string had snapped. The faces only slightly dismayed; the social smiles, the smiles at odds with the eyes, the hurried removal, the sudden silence, and the cowed servants clearing glasses. Crystal’s embarrassed chink; remnants of jellies and mousses scraped quickly away. Anne’s head dropped: Anne dumb with suffering. Suffering? What did she know about it? Suppose she had a fistula? Suppose she had an abcess under a molar?
Heroic anger. Heroic experiments. “You remember the grocer’s wife?”
Grocer’s wife of the City: could not get a child. The woman herself seemingly free from disease, broad in the hip, her complexion bright and fresh, no hint of the dragging backache and the pinched yellow-grey that marks the face of the woman whose ovaries are diseased. Her tongue free too, with a frank account of the marital bed. “From which I deduced, Howison, that the man was not what you’d call a going concern. He’d hardly get within a foot of her without spilling on the linen, her thigh was the nearest—”
“You told me before,” Howison said.
“So I spooned in the fluid, man. I spooned it in.”
“So you said.”
“The child was healthy, and thrives to this day.”
“I wonder, did you not … . were you not tempted …”
It took him a moment to grasp the man’s implication. “No, sir,” he said calmly. “I am a man as we all are, but I would do nothing to introduce experimental error.”
But Howison’s very question—for suppose others had been asking it, snorting behind their hands?—had reduced him, when the man went out, to a rocking, silent, temple-bursting fury, his short nails driven into his palms, and rock, rock, rock in his chair, his life at the mercy of any imbecile who cared to taunt him … for yes, some men would have been tempted, seeing her brown eyes and flushed cheeks; some would no doubt have thought, there is a shorter way and more natural, and if this consultation did not do it, a man might take a guinea for the next, and soon the result would be achieved, for a man would know from the very handling of her, the plushness of her skin, her firmess of her limbs … but no. It is all very well to put yourself in your own experiment—it is inevitable, reatly—but it is unforgivable to bypass the proper procedure to get the required result. The child of the grocer’s wife was the child of the grocer, and not in any way—as people can see for themselves—sandy, freckled, or short. The gratification from the experimental process far exceeded that from the sexual act. Yet he remembered the question, and the rage: a little something bursting there, in his left temple.
These rages may be brought on by thwarting: or by the mention of low dirty foreigners who come to Britain on purpose to defame its institutions. “What, you don’t like this country, sir? Then quit its shores.” Never again, for instance, does he wish to endure the purple throbbing agonies that possessed his forehead (both sides) when a colleague of his remarked that “Dr. Jean-Paul Marat, the noted Swiss savant who calls each day at Slaughter’s Coffee House … Dr. Marat expresses a desire to see your specimens.”
“He does, does he?”
“He will wait on you, sir. At any convenient hour.”
> “Will he so? Marat? See my specimens? I’ll shred ’em first. I’ll burn down the whole—burn, I say, live and dead—rather than let that damned Wilkite into my premises.”
Because he is establishing order. Night by night: skull arrangement. He is beginning to understand hierarchy; and these democrats will play the Devil with it. And especially a man like Jean-Paul Marat, with his five different names, his silver tongue in seven languages, his embossed certificates, his academic cavils and his snarling quibbles and his slick fingers—what might the man carry away?
“John Hunter, your rages will kill you,” his colleague said, expressing a simple truth.
“Yes. And when I am dead, you will not soon meet with another John Hunter.”
So: Bitch Mary’s tale.
“They had left me the exact time till I was hungry beyond bearing. Another few hours, and I would have been beyond it, God’s mercy would have numbed me. I was reduced to meekness and weeping by that hunger, it was agony in itself, but I knew from experience it is a pain which passes. Yet, one may have a piece of knowledge, and be unable to act on it. They plucked me out of the cellar the very moment when my strength was lowest and my need greatest.”
“That is how I know it was Bride,” Claffey said. “For what nation is more tutored than ours, in the art of hunger and in its science?”
“Ah well,” said Joe Vance, “be that as it may, tonight we have men to dine. Mary, my love, I know your clothes are gone, but can you not wrap yourself in a blanket for decency, and then busy yourself? And if you prove yourself useful in putting the place to rights, then tomorrow you will have a skirt and shawl.”
“Dress me out of Monmouth Street, would you, Joe? Send the boy Pybus running to the rag-seller, so I can go out again for your purposes?”
“There is some very respectable clothes sold in Monmouth Street,” Joe said. “My waistcoat was got there, and you must admit it’s very fine.”
“Stolen.”
“Stolen, so? I bought it in good faith, I will claim my title to this waistcoat in any court in the land. Less of your lip, bitch. The only friends you have are under this roof. Be mindful of it.”
The Giant roused from his sleep in the corner. Their speech, he thought, is now a compound of vileness. We abandon our own language because we need extra words, for things we had never imagined; and because there are superfluous words in it, for things we cannot imagine any more. “What men?” he asked. “What men to dine?”
“Slig,” said Joe. “You remember hearty Slig?”
“And my brother,” Claffey said eagerly. “Constantine Claffey, as he is known at Clement’s Inn. Which is where he lodges.”
“Which is a midden,” said the Giant. “Have I not been all about those parts? It is a midden and a criminal haunt and packed to the gills each split-up low deceiving house and alley with footpads and coiners and runners of poor women, with uncertificated pox-doctors and cat-gut spinners, with tripe-merchants and rumour-mongers and rabbit-breeders and slaughterers of the peace of the Lord. Why must your brother lodge there, Claffey? Could he not come here to us at Cockspur Street?”
“He may do that yet,” Claffey said.
“As for the man you call Slig—does he not keep that infamous cellar where we lodged when we were freshly arrived?”
“By the dripping blood of Christ!” Vance said. “I am sick of your verbiage. Slig is a sworn brother of mine. Slig gave you straw and a shelter for fourpence. Infamous cellar? It was a usual kind of cellar. I tell you, O’Brien—it was good, of its kind.”
“Sick of my verbiage?” the Giant said. “Sick of my stories, also?”
“I leave them to the brutes that want soothing.”
“Sick of my person, perhaps, tired of my height?”
“Well,” said Vance, sneering, “it doesn’t seem as if your height is very remarkable after all. Considering the new intelligence from Cork, communicated to me only this day and then by Slig himself, which is that Patrick O’Brien is now nine feet tall and will be here inside a fortnight.”
“And lodge in Slig’s cellar?”
“I doubt it. Slig is taken over as his agent now. He will be finding him a good address and a dozen plump virgins to be shaking out the feather beds. He will be getting a pagoda, which I said all along was what we should have, but oh no, you would set your face against it, advised by some rustic—”
The Giant turned his face away. He closed his ears to Joe. Mary said, “When I was walking the streets, and I no longer knew where I was, nor had I known for some hours, I found myself on a wide square that I thought I should recognise. While I was looking about it, to know where I was—it being then broad morning, and I so ashamed of my state, my rags scarcely covering me—then a carriage came, and a lady called out to me from it. She called to me to run after, and I should have sixpence and my breakfast.”
Pybus sucked his teeth. “You should not have so.”
“I know I should not,” Bitch Mary said. “But can you not recollect, Pybus, that I had been many days without a breakfast, and that the thought of sixpence made me summon my last reserves of strength so I could do her will and trot?”
“Joe commands us,” the Giant said, “to cut the verbiage.” He imagines words hacked down, like shoots in a tangled thicket: slash and cut, cut and burn.
“And so I will,” Mary said. “For I have little more to relate. I came to a great house, and anticipated that I would be ushered into a hall, with candles blazing.”
“What, in broad day?” said the Giant.
“It was a dark morning. I anticipated Bruges hangings, and Turkey carpets, and Antwerp silver, but what lay before me was London steel. For instead of any of these things, I saw the stone shelves of a pantry, and my head slammed down, and my hair sheared off, and a penny in my hand, and a crust, and out into the cold among the railings in a yard, and Why, why? And they said, To shore up milady’s wig. And I said sixpence and they said yes, sixpence: one penny for you and five pennies for us. We’re English and we’re entitled, and be glad we’ve not pulled out your teeth.”
Constantine Claffey was such a dandy as you would never think to come out of a thieves’ kennel like Clement’s Inn. His hair was powdered with a strange bluish powder, so his face looked very very white. His bad teeth were painted, and his large front pasted with fine embroidery and one stain from a dripped boiled egg.
“So you’ve got an interestin’ pig?” he said to his brother, in English. “Shall I see it?”
“Ah,” Claffey said. “The pig is only a rumour as yet. It is a topic amongst us. It is under discussion.”
Constantine sneered. “So you brought me all the way to Cockspur Street to view a pig under discussion?”
“It’s scarcely a half-mile.”
“Yes, yes,” Constantine said tetchily. “But I have left projects unsupervised. This is what you don’t seem to understand, bro. Time and tide wait for no man. Not at Clement’s Inn.”
Slig, who had got a couple of drinks in him, seemed less anxious to be away. “Isn’t there some story promised?” he said. “Your idiot Jankin was giving out there’s some story you don’t like to tell, about dwarves. Have you heard of Count Buruvalski? Your man’s exhibiting here, less than three foot high. Have you seen him, Charles?”
“May I correct you?” The Giant brought his eyes to focus on Slig. “The count is not a dwarf. He is a midget. That is different. He is, moreover, a thoroughgoing professional in his line of business. He comes from the land called Poland, where snow is deep and small men are honest. If—Joe Vance—if I should decide to dispense with your services—the count is the man to manage me.”
“I said, have you seen him?”
“I have seen him, I have bought him a drink. I have sat him on the counter to drink it, the count and I are”—the Giant overlapped his fingers—“like that.”
“Oh dear, oh dear,” said Vance. “It’s the first I have heard of this, Charlie. I was aware, of course, that the midget was
sniffing around.”
“But look,” said Slig, “I would be obliged if you would get ahead with the story nevertheless, because I always want stories. Any spare you have, O’Brien, I can cost them out, and sell them to Punch and Judy. So, I can give you a shilling for each guinea you make me.”
“Formerly my portion,” Joe Vance said. He sniggered. “How are the mighty fallen.”
“I don’t know, how are they?” the Giant said.
“I’m going to have to bring your viewing fee down to a shilling, Charlie, or maybe a ninepence is realistic. Unless trade picks up, or we get Mester Goss’s pig over sharpish, or we pitch you into prize-fighting, which you seem to resist. You know yourself, nobody comes to see you regular, these days, except that Scotchman, short feller, the animal-trainer—”
“Hunter,” said the Giant. “He wrote down his name for me. He said I should send to him if I was sick. But he says physic is not his line, so I don’t know why.”
Hunter: he had been twice in the last week. “I know that man,” Claffey had said, frowning from the back of the exhibition room. “I seem to recognise the swivel on his nose at the tip there, and his pale eyes. A Scot, unless I am much mistaken.” Claffey was always looking for a fight. He would have thrown out any client who he thought gave offence. But the Scot gave none. “Too mean to spare an insult,” Claffey said. “But that’s his nation.”
He looked sideways at the Giant: didn’t he say his father came out of Scotland?
“The fellow is mannerly enough,” O’Brien said. “So far as it is in him. It is clear that he is gruff, unlettered, rude, whereas I am learned, poetical, and fond of civil company.”
Besides, the Giant thought, he is the only one who asks after my health, and listens to the answer. Yesterday, silent and attentive as ever, he had been among the audience, his odd eyes set on Charlie’s face, looking looking looking. Afterwards, he stepped up. “How do you, sir?”
The Giant, O'Brien: A Novel Page 12
