For Maria Clementi was dumb. She could sing most beautifully in several languages, yet she had no other power of communication at all. Report had it that she could generally understand what was said to her, though when she could not, a sweet yet uncomprehending smile would cross her face. There was apparently no organic reason for her silence. At one time some had claimed she pretended to be dumb for reasons of her own. But this ceased after a performance when she had come too close to the flaring lamps at the foot of the stage and flames had caught the gauzy dress she wore. Then, for moments, as the orchestra ceased to play and screams and cries arose in the audience, the graceful figure of Maria Clementi stood there engulfed in fire, and though her face bore an expression of the utmost terror and her two hands grasped at her throat, no sound, no scream or plea for help came from her lips. The figure was only seconds later smothered by a cloak fetched from the side of the stage. Miss Clementi was mercifully largely unhurt. But all knew then that if she had been capable of making any sound, that would have been the moment she must have done so.
Whether because of her affliction or merely as a result of her own temperament, the singer had an excellent personal reputation. Our stage was then, as The Journal put it, “tinsel.” At the time we had in England no dramatists worth the name, and, while on the Continent they had their Webers, Rossinis, Bellinis, musicians of the utmost genius, we had few composers either. We had instead performances of Macbeth with mimes and dances between the acts, the spectacle of Master Betty “the infant Roscius” and his tribe playing Hamlets and Ophelias at the age of nine before audiences of such unparalleled noisiness and coarseness that foreigners turned away in horror.
Oh, those Columbinas, Lucindas and Aphrodites—more prized for their bosoms and legs than their talent—Oh, those Romeos and Juliets, played as ballet-burlettas, those King Lears acted by children! We pined for the days of dramas played by men such as Garrick, for musical performances, grave—or gay—which a man could watch without the interruptions of a ballet, a clog-dance, a hornpipe, a low comedian or an exhibition of whistling, put on as if for children needing constant variety without meaning.
Plainly, in this atmosphere of folly and craving for novelty, a young, beautiful and adulated actress might lose her head. Yet Miss Clementi contrived in such a poor environment to bring some inspiration, some artistry, to the London stage.
By all accounts she lived quietly with a loyal lady companion and attended church regularly, though never going to the same church twice, since any church she might attend regularly would be mobbed by her admirers. She steered clear of society, in the main, took no lovers and stayed away from those haunts some actresses love to visit—the race courses, prize fights, gambling-houses, places no decent woman would frequent. Perhaps her affliction protected her from these follies.
Hearing Victor mention Miss Clementi's name at first surprised me. Then I thought I understood his reasons and asked, “Do you wish to try to restore her voice?”
“Restore it or perhaps produce a voice she has never had,” he answered. “Yes—that is my ambition. If successful the attempt would of course greatly benefit Miss Clementi, enabling her to lead a normal life among her fellows. But there is more—and this is why I would wish you to join me in my efforts, Jonathan. Imagine—just imagine—the information to be gained from studying a hitherto voiceless person (except when she sings the words of others on the stage) slowly gaining the power of speech. What might we not learn of grammar, of the meanings of words and their implications, simply by being present as the mute woman began to speak? Imagine studying an adult person who would be able to tell us all that passed in her mind as she achieved speech! Such a chance might arrive only once in a lifetime.”
“As scientific experiments go,” Hugo said robustly, “it would be by no means unpleasant, a good deal less nasty then cutting up an eyeball or playing with noxious gases, for example. Many a man would pay guineas for the chance of sitting in a room with Miss Clementi for any reason. You are a bachelor, Jonathan. I advise you strongly to take up this burden.”
I assured him I knew my duty; if my studies compelled me to enter the society of one of London's most beautiful and admired women, I would not shirk it. I then turned to Victor and asked him how the attempt to find Miss Clementi's voice had come about.
He told me, “I visited a performance by Miss Clementi some months ago. It was a piece based on a theme from the Commedia dell'arte, vulgarly done and redeemed only by Miss Clementi's performance. I knew of course of the dreadful incident of the fire at the theater and of Miss Clementi's complete inability to make any sound, even when in extreme pain and danger. It came to me that her being unable to speak did not merely shut her out from communication with her fellow creatures, but could imperil her in situations where she could not appeal for help. I was seized with pity for this poor young creature, who, for all her gifts and beauty, lacks that one faculty we all possess, use daily and take completely for granted.
“Consequently I wrote to her, saying that I understood she had sought help from many sources and that whatever advice or treatment she had received had proved useless, but that I thought and hoped I might be able to help her, train her, to learn to speak.
“I said I would be more than happy to arrange some meetings between us to make the attempt, if she would do me the honor of agreeing. There was a silence at first, until some ten days later when her companion, a respectable woman of about forty, the widow of a captain who fought against Napoleon, I heard, called at my house. She told me that since the fire the lady, Miss Clementi, had been afflicted with melancholy. At first when asked its cause she had refused to respond in the manner she used, but the sadness persisted and in the end her companion asked her if her dumbness was the cause. Then she sighed and nodded her head, pointing sadly at her throat. The companion, Mrs. Jacoby, rediscovered my letter and asked Miss Clementi if she would like help in finding a voice. Receiving her approval she came to visit me. It emerged they had both attended a lecture I had given on the structure of languages and the relationships between one tongue and another.”
“At the Royal Society in June,” I interjected. “I read of it. It was a most excellent occasion, was it not; the room packed with the most brilliant men and women in London, both eminent scientists and the fashionable? I believe the King himself attended, Victor. Is that not so?”
“His Majesty did me that honor,” Victor agreed.
“And have you met Miss Clementi?” I asked.
Victor was rueful. “I have, on one occasion, but we made little progress. This is my reason for asking for your help, Jonathan. I should dearly like someone with your gifts and knowledge to help me.”
“What is Miss Clementi like?” demanded Hugo.
“Very beautiful,” Victor said. “And refined, quietly dressed and beautifully mannered. She has so far visited me only once and then, alas, in spite of all my best efforts, she only sighed, tried to speak, sighed, made another, unsuccessful attempt. In the end, she looked at me with such an air of sadness and failure it was quite heartbreaking. She gazed at me as if I held the key to some door she could not open for herself. If you could attend our meetings, Jonathan, study them, and reveal your observations to me, I would be most happy.”
Flattered and full of enthusiasm, I agreed whole-heartedly to Victor's suggestion and we settled that the next time Miss Clementi visited him in London I would be present. Two months, however, elapsed before our first encounter took place.
During August I stayed with my family in Nottingham. It was said that Miss Clementi and her companion were at a spa in Germany, where she was resting after the strains of her earlier season in London and before a Continental tour. I returned to London in late September, but by that time Miss Clementi had begun her visits to Austria, Germany and Italy, where she was rapturously received.
Back in London I continued to work quietly on my dictionary of the Aramaic tongue, that vast and demanding task I had begun with all the en
thusiasm of youth some five years before and which now, many years after its inception, was nearing completion and eagerly awaited by Mr. Hathaway, who would publish it.
It was during this period of quiet study that I mentioned to Mrs. Downey Victor's suggestion of helping him find a cure for Maria Clementi. I must explain I had dwelt in her narrow house in Gray's Inn Road for two years, occupying a pair of rooms on the floor immediately below the servants' bedrooms. It was a modest household. I was the only lodger; Mrs. Downey and her seven-year-old daughter Flora had their bedrooms on the floor below my own, and we sat and took our meals together in the rooms on the ground floor. Mrs. Downey, the widow of a solicitor, was herself twenty-eight years old, only a year younger than myself, and this put us on confidential terms.
There are those who might question the propriety of a young widow, alone but for the child and the servants, taking a bachelor of her own age as a lodger. Indeed, at the time there were those who criticized our arrangement. Nevertheless, it suited us very well. Mrs. Downey, though poor, was of a good family notorious since Elizabeth's time for going its own way without concern for the opinions of others. In our household there was no need to state that men and women were honorable by nature, needing no duennas, chaperones or magistrates to guide their conduct. This assertion of freedom was characteristic perhaps of the age we lived in, which still had vestiges of the old libertarian thinking of the previous century. The narrow-minded and suspicious might have said I should not have spent so many evenings alone with Mrs. Downey in her comfortable parlor at the back of the house—the dining-room being the room closer to the street. But as a man with loving sisters I was accustomed to and enjoyed the company of women, for, if less weighty and informed, it is often more lively and civilized than that of men. Indeed, we often joked of being like brother and sister. To put it bluntly I believe I was lonely and so, I think, was she. Thus we drifted into the habit, when neither had other plans for the evening, into sitting together while she sewed or mended and I read.
At the time of which I speak it was late summer. We had both but recently returned to London, I having been in Nottingham and she having spent August with her sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Frazer, in Scotland. So one evening when we were together I mentioned my expectation that now I was back in London a meeting between Miss Maria Clementi and Victor Frankenstein might take place and that I might be present. I explained the reasons for this meeting but instead of expressing interest Mrs. Downey raised her head from a little dress she was making for her daughter and gravely said to me, “Perhaps I should not take the liberty of commenting, but if you will allow me, Mr. Goodall, to speak to you as a sister might, I must admit this affair makes me uneasy on your behalf. I do not wish to impugn Mr. Frankenstein, for I have never heard anything but good of him from your lips or those of others. Miss Clementi is also reputed to be a most excellent woman. But I am afraid this scientific attempt to restore Miss Clementi's speech alarms me, though I do not know why. Please be cautious and forgive me for producing warnings, like Cassandra, with no reasons for them.”
I answered, smiling, “Then, addressing you as a brother might, Mrs. Downey, I think you should find some.”
She sighed, let her sewing fall into her lap and gazed at me earnestly, frowning. “Well then,” she said, “and risking your disapproval, I will say I do not altogether trust Miss Clementi's mute tongue.”
“You heard of the occasion when her dress caught fire and she was still not able to speak or cry out,” I pointed out.
“I did,” she agreed, and here her tone took on the tone of a lawyer, perhaps that of her late husband, “but you will not deny I'm sure that a sudden shock may strike some people dumb, just as some people instinctively shout and cry out. Nevertheless, that is not what perturbs me. I merely wonder if she is willfully dumb; if she does not understand our language and does not wish that to be known; if indeed, she is truly mute.”
“That may be so,” I said, “but if by chance she could speak, but will not, is that any reason for your anxiety—which I much appreciate—on my account?”
“There are no reasons I can express,” she told me. “I feel only you may be entering deep waters.”
“Men enter deep waters in pursuit of knowledge and truth,” I replied—too lightly, too arrogantly, I now know. “If we all stayed perpetually in the shallows, near the shore, few discoveries would be made.”
My landlady picked up her sewing again, but only looked at it with a puzzled frown. She said, to the little red dress she was making, rather than to me, “I am a little surprised by what you told me of Mr. Frankenstein spending such a long time on his knees in the church after you had all attended the service. Some twenty minutes I think you said he spent alone in the church.”
“An unusual criticism to make of a man,” I responded, “that he spent too long praying in a church.”
“Not a criticism,” she said, “but to me that indicates a heavy conscience.”
“Oh!” I think I exclaimed, and I believe I threw myself back in my chair impatiently, as if I were truly arguing with one of my sisters. “How you women twist a man's behavior—put in a bad light anything which removes itself from the narrow well-trodden track. What you not know you fear. While we men must live to extend the boundaries, explore, discover—”
Cordelia replied, with restraint, “Perhaps you are right, Mr. Goodall. I am sorry if my comments have offended you.” And she began to sew again, diligently this time, and, noting that my further attempts at conversation were not well met, I took myself off to bed.
I own, and I am ashamed to admit it now, that I entertained the half-pleased thought that what my dear Mrs. Cordelia Downey most feared about my future meeting with Miss Clementi was the effect the other lady's beauty and charm might have on me—that though, in sport, we referred to each other as brother and sister, the delightful Mrs. Downey was, in fact, jealous! Fool that I was, retiring in vanity to my bed! Jealous or no, Mrs. Downey's impression that involvement with Victor Frankenstein and Maria Clementi might prove dangerous to me was to prove all too true.
As I write this memoir I sometimes forget how young we all were at the time. Neither Hugo, Victor nor I had yet reached thirty; Cordelia was twenty-eight and Maria Clementi only twenty-four. Not only were we young (though old enough to know better, I admit), but we were still tainted with the spirit of the Bastille and all the new thought which had swept over Europe since. Crowns and kingdoms and all established order had toppled during the Napoleonic era. Scepter and crown had come tumbling down so why should we not throw overboard all we did not like and make our world anew, in the light of pure reason? Why could we not discover more, understand more and change the world according to our new-found knowledge? Let us, we thought, treat our world like an old house—tear down the ancient hangings, brush away the cobwebs, fling wide the windows, allow in the pure air of truth and knowledge. That was the thinking, I believe, which led me to ignore Mrs. Downey's warnings. She was no philosophical reasoner, no student of her times or any other, merely a young woman of some natural intelligence and more greatness of heart, sobered early by a marriage not altogether happy, followed by widowhood, and the care of a young daughter. I, a man with a good fortune and good health, had met little hardship in my life; she, younger than myself, had been made cautious by bereavement and rearing a young child in straitened circumstance—that was the difference between us.
F O U R
AND SO CAME THE AFTERNOON in mid-October when, following a message from Victor, I set out for Chelsea to meet Maria Clementi for the first time. (This was not the occasion I mentioned earlier, when I encountered that frightening ogreish man.)
I walked from Gray's Inn Road on a pleasant bright autumn afternoon. As I got down to Chelsea the tide was coming in, lapping at the mud, shingle and stone of the shore. Craft of every kind had come upriver with the tide—there were barges, wher-ries, even a great sailing ship springing and bounding upriver, wind filling its
sails. In those days no walk could have been more pleasant. On one side lay the river, unbanked, with all its interest, on the other, the fields and market gardens.
I was excited at the thought of joining Victor in his attempt to solve the mystery of Miss Clementi's muteness. I rejoiced at the prospect of the wider learning which might be open to us as a result of this experience. For a scholar there is no joy to equal that of joining his mind with that of another like mind, with the intention of widening the boundaries of knowledge. Nor, I must confess, as I mounted the steps of Victor's imposing house in Cheyne Walk, was I altogether reluctant to make the acquaintance of that ornament of the stage, Maria Clementi.
Victor himself answered my knock. He let me in, his fine eyes alive with excitement and interest. I had been punctual, Maria Clementi more than punctual. “She's here,” Victor told me and led me with his lithe, agile step through the hall, lofty and tiled in marble, up a handsome curved staircase to a small drawing-room with tall windows looking out over the road and the river.
Maria was seated in a low brocaded chair close to where a fire burned brightly in its ornate marble fireplace. She was small and very dark with a head of black curls worn quite short, almost à la victime or à la guillotine, as the women of the French Revolution named their mannish hair arrangements, though she had a small knot of curls simply dressed with red ribbons on top of her head. The tendrils framed her face, half-covering small, pretty ears. She had very dark eyes, framed with thick, dark lashes, an oval face, small straight nose and a charming, rosy mouth, curved now in a smile. She wore a simple bonnet in pale grey and a loose woolen dress in the same color, a lace fichu lying over her shoulders and tied in a knot over her bosom. Had it not been for a posture indicating, even in repose, the strong musculature and physical control of a dancer, one might have taken her for any charming young married woman of the middle class.
Frankenstein's Bride Page 4