The Giant, O'Brien

  “Gaze your fill,” Hunter said pleasantly; it was an effort to be pleasant, but it would gain him his end.

  “So what … so what are you going to do?”

  “I will demonstrate,” Hunter said. He reached behind him and picked up the lancet from the table. “Now watch.” He rolled back his foreskin, bringing the instrument a whisker from his flesh—indicating with it. “I will just give you a tiny touch, right there. A man of vigour, such as yourself, you’ll not feel it. Then you may button up, and I will give you sixpence.”

  “Eightpence,” the pauper said.

  Hunter breathed freely. “Eightpence,” he said.

  The pauper straightened himself a little from the wall, but his shoulders were still hunched protectively as he began to undo his buttons. He had no underwear whatsoever, and smelled rank. Hunter reached forward and seized his pale, shrivelled organ. The pauper yelped. “Get off me!”

  “Calm yourself, man. I must examine you, to see are you healthy.”

  “Am I?” The pauper’s voice shook.

  Hunter pushed back the foreskin with his thumb, as if he were shucking peel.

  “Looks all right to me.”

  Absorbed, he hardly noticed that his own organs were swinging freely, until a sharp draught from the window caught him. Would have been more professional to button up, he thought, more workmanlike—if Wullie could see him now—but what the hell. He took a firm grip on the pauper. “Hold still now.” He pulled forward the man’s foreskin, jabbed it. In a split second, he slicked it back, then jabbed the head of the organ.

  The pauper gave a yelp of horrified surprise. “All done,” John Hunter said. But not—not all done—not—good grief, what was this? The pauper was snarling like a diseased dog, drool running from his mouth and his eyes blank. “Take a hold of yourself,” Hunter shouted. “You act like you’ve taken a mortal wound.”

  The man’s wrist shot out. His hand was splayed to a claw. It was starved, but it was sinewy. He grasped Hunter’s wrist, his right wrist. His other hand closed over the knuckle. He drove Hunter’s arm down, down and in, slamming it towards his body. The lancet, trapped in the great man’s fingers, drove hard into the flesh, and ripped a trail of blood from his organ—blood shockingly brighter than the sanguine flesh it sprang from.

  With a whoop, the pauper relaxed his grip. The lancet fell to the floor.

  Hunter stared down at himself. He moved slowly, reaching for a cloth and dabbing.

  The pauper, who seemed to have grown a foot taller, was buttoning himself up with an almost jaunty air. “Now I’ll have my eightpence,” he said.

  Ah well, Hunter said to himself. Perhaps it is a happy accident, after all. I should have needed to keep the man under observation, and he did not seem a very reliable pauper; perhaps he would have run away or got transported or hanged, and I should have lost the chance of observing his symptoms as they arise. And without a doubt, every time I asked him to appear before me he would have wanted money. Well, here I am, and within two or three weeks I will have the pox myself, and what could be more convenient? I can make my observations and recordings from the comfort of my own armchair. And I won’t send myself a bill either.

  seven

  The experiment had taken place on a Friday. Saturday, nothing. Sunday, a teasing itch. The itch gone by Tuesday. But then the hard chancre: a cause of rejoicing. His theories soon to be proved, on his own flesh.

  He holds his pen as if it were a surgical tool. He begins to record, knowing what he can now expect: the attack upon the glans and urethra, the discharge of many colours, the bleeding, the irritation and swelling of the testicles, the muscle spasm which causes the urine to be voided by jerks; suppuration, fistula in perineo, pains in thighs, vomiting, abdominal pain, and colic. His handwriting is small—to save paper costs—but always legible. After the valerian, musk, camphor, cold bath, hot bath, electricity, and opium it will be the mercury cure. But not for three years yet. A man must have time to make his observations. Physician, heal thyself; this saying also applies to surgeons.

  Meanwhile, experimentation continues. He becomes interested in the venereal blotches that break out on the skin. He inoculates a pocky pauper with matter from another person’s chancre, and is interested to find that chancres form. To be sure it is not a fluke, he does the experiment again and again. He inoculates another pauper with matter from an ulcerous tonsil—with no result—and with a gonorrhoeal discharge: this latter produces a chancre. Theories whizz around and around in his head. He takes out his organ and stares at it. The mysteries of the universe are here.

  A woman of twenty-five comes into St. Georges’ Hospital with florid skin symptoms, and he detains her till he has found a person with buboes who has not been treated by mercury, and in whom he can be pretty sure that the buboes are venereal and not scrofulous. He injects matter from the buboes into the skin of the woman of twenty-five, and for good measure injects her with fluid from her own ulcers. He writes up his case notes.

  He has become used now to the thick, snuffling voices of those who are affected in the throat. Unfortunately for them, their lesions don’t scab over, as the act of swallowing keeps the parts always moist. Deafness is frequent, with suppuration of the ear. Effects on the whole constitution are to be anticipated; a couple of years on, the deep ache inside begins, the pain that seems to bloom out of the bones. Nights, it’s worse. He lies awake thinking of experiments he might make. The question of the drowned persons haunts him. They used to roll them over a barrel, or hang them up by their heels, thinking the water would drain out. He turns over and over in his bed—his solitary bed. The spaniels yap, the mastiff growls, the leopards roar beneath the moon.

  He is satisfied the venereal plague cannot be spread by saliva. He has tried his best and failed. It is not, then, like the bite of a mad dog. Some say it stays in the blood, year upon year. He cannot see this. How it can be. There are those who have too much imagination, its findings unbuttressed by results.

  That summer the Giant grew rich. He washed in Castile soap, and made the purchase of some decanters. His followers ate green peas and strawberries. Joe Vance played with the writing set, and Pybus, Claffey, and Jankin haunted the skittle alleys, the cockfighting, the prize-fighting, the dog-fighting, and the bull-baiting. “If we go on so,” said Claffey, grinning, “we will have tamboured waistcoats like the quality, and silver buckles to our shoes.”

  “What do you mean, if we go on so? I am not likely to shrink.”

  “You’re of a testy temper these days,” Joe observed, glancing up from his calligraphy.

  The Giant, by evening, was often tired from exhibiting, and they woke him with their drunken stumbles on the stair. Gin and water was their only tipple now, and they brought it back for Bitch Mary.

  When the patron’s half-crown was given over—the price of viewing the Giant—Joe Vance would give back a tin token; this was the system favoured by all the best shows and spectacles. Select groups of ten or a dozen a time were admitted, and they came in a steady stream all through June and July: through those months when the streets steamed and the poisoned water trickled from the pumps and London shit baked in the ditches, when milk turned and fish stank and the blinded birds in their prisons of gilt were stunned and silent in the heat. Sometimes, a smaller party would be admitted: ladies, rustling, faces glowing, frou-frou of petticoats and scent of musk and powder and cut flowers dying. Often they asked to converse with the Giant—this he did very easy, very civil—and they not only paid their half-crown but left a handsome tip on top of it. He dreamed of their tiny feet on London staircases, skittering like the feet of mice.

  “I don’t think he should have his percentage on the tip,” Claffey said, nodding towards Joe Vance. “After all, it’s not earnings, it’s a token of esteem, more a sort of prize or reward to Charlie for being tall.”

  “So Charlie should have it in his own pocket,” said Pybus.

  Joe’s eyebrows shot up. “You want your nose punc
hed out of the back of your head?” he offered. “You want me to press on your cheeks so your eyes zing out of your skull and go bouncing about the room?”

  August: sunlight slipped like rancid butter down the walls. Joe returned to the book he was reading, frowning and gnawing his lip. It was a book about a prince, and Jankin was waiting for him to finish and tell stories out of it. “He that writ the book is called McEvilly,” Jankin said. “Joe Vance’s grandad knew his grandad.”

  The Giant looked up, smiling. “That’s right, Jankin. Weren’t they both turf boys together to the O’Donaghues of Glen Flesk?”

  The horizon was bright, these evenings, with the pearl-like shiver of noctilucent clouds. But dark at last fell; blood-red Antares blazed over the city.

  “For all the prodigies of nature, there’s an awful lot of blawflum,” said Hunter to Howison, his trusted operative. “Do you remember Mary Toft?”

  “She that gave birth to fifteen rabbits?”

  “She that did not.”

  “And yet the court itself, sir—did not the prince of Wales send his surgeon down to Godalming?”

  “What? There was a procession of them, man, rode down to Surrey to view the tomfoolery. And did the fools not fetch her up to town, and lodge her handsome? The woman had a vast distended belly, to be sure, and plenty of activity inside it, but that hardly diagnoses rabbits.” Hunter snorted: for sometimes people do snort. “It’s fairy tales, that’s what it is—fairy tales, and rabbit skins and scraps smuggled under the skirts and groaning and moaning from the lass while the coins are chinking into a basin. Sir Richard Manningham had the right of it, he threatened her with an operation to relieve her condition—aye, he showed her the knife.” John Hunter chuckled: for people do chuckle. “I tell you, her belly soon deflated. No, Howison, I wouldn’t give you threepence for a woman pregnant with rabbits. I wouldn’t cross the street to see it—no more would I ride out over wild heathland where I might have my purse taken.”

  “Ah, sir, you might have your purse taken any fine night in Bond Street.”

  “Not that ought is in it,” Hunter said, sighing, and scratching himself a little. “I am the greatest surgeon in Europe, Howison, it is acknowledged, and I frequently find myself as poor as when I was a raggedy scamp with a snivel nose and a hole in my breeks.”

  It is a pity he has not got a hole in his breeks now, Howison thought, it would be convenient for him to ease his itch. “You have laid out so much in experimentation, sir,” he said, “and in the purchase of specimens.”

  “And on Mrs. Hunter! Do you have any idea, Howison, what that woman costs me per annum in sheet music alone?”

  “I have no claim on gentility,” said Howison. “The women I know will open their legs for oysters and gin.”

  “Stick to your own kind, that’s my advice. If I had not the damned expense of her minims and her crotchets, not to mention her nightcaps—she must have lace, Howison, on her nightcaps—I would be able to purchase a savage.”

  “I could get you a black, easy. Dead or alive or anywhere in between.”

  Hunter wrinkled his nose. “Your London blacks have lost their virtue. They are bronchitic and gone slack. No, I want a free savage, the dust of the bush still upon him, his wanton yodel rattling through the clear pipes of his chest, his tribal scars still raw, his cheeks and ribs fresh scored, his parts swinging and unfettered …” Unlike mine, he thought, breaking off in a sulk, for it had become necessary for him to resort to a suspensory bandage.

  Howison did not like to be worsted by circumstance. Hunter employed him for his resource as well as his brute strength and steady hand. He knew his master was mean as well as skint, but he knew also that he could find ways of laying his hands on funds if the right subject for experimentation came along. As if reading his thought, Hunter said, “I cannot just purchase from a seaman—for then my savage will have been spoiled, its sweating body swaddled in a tail-coat and its guts churning with weevil-biscuits and porridge. Oh, I know what you will say—go out to savage realms, and choose for yourself. But then, I am advanced in years, and the pepper of my temper as a Scotchman makes me unsuited to a voyage in the torrid zones of this world.”

  Howison hoped that John Hunter was not hinting that he should go in person, off to Patagonia or Guinea, in search of some cicatrised wailer with webbed feet and his head under his arm. He, Howison, had got his feet under the table at the Dog and Duck in St. George’s Fields, and had hopes of confluence with the landlady’s god-daughter at the Swan with Two Necks: at least, she was supposed to be her god-daughter, and he had never heard of her charging anybody, not so far. Howison, for luck, turned his money over in his pocket; it was the night of the new moon.

  Jankin had come home at dusk, inhumanly excited: “We have been to see Dr. Katterfelter’s magic show. He appeared a black kitten in a man’s pocket, he did, Charlie, so he did!”

  Joe didn’t bother to look up from his book. “Katterfelter is a common conjuror.”

  Claffey and Pybus came in, shouting, “Here, Bitch Mary!”

  The girl came, from the corner where she rested from her labours; in this corner she settled herself on rags, like a dog’s wife scraping a nest for whelps.

  “You see this water?” Claffey said. “You see this water in this bottle? It is no ordinary water. This water has been blessed by His Holiness the Pope and specifically magnetised under license by Monsieur Mesmer, the sage of Vienna and Paris. Its name is called Olympic Dew. The queen of France bathes in it every day.”

  “Ah well,” Bitch Mary said. “Not enough for a bath, more a little facial splash—but I thank you, gentlemen.”

  “But look here,” Claffey said. His fierce freckles were glowing; his peel-nailed finger went dart, stab at the bottle’s label. “See just here the cross, that means His Holiness, and here’s the painted eye within a triangle that means Monsieur Mesmer has blessed it himself with the animal spirits—”

  “You sure he didn’t piss it?” Joe inquired.

  “Or the pope piss it?” said Mary.

  “For shame,” Jankin said. “His Holiness does certainly never piss.”

  “His water is drawn off by angels,” the Giant said, “without pain or embarrassment, of course. What would you say that we all stay in tonight and I tell you a story?”

  He hardly dared to raise his head.

  Jankin said, “The dwarves with duck-feet, is it?”

  “I hope if you met them, Jankin, you would not be so impolite as to mention their duck-feet.”

  “Small chance of that,” Claffey said. “You claim that they occur in Switzerland. We could not prove you wrong.”

  “And I could not prove me right,” the Giant said. “But at the mere breath of scepticism, I fall silent. What interest have I, Claffey, what possible interest could I have, in convincing you of the existence of web-footed Alpines of diminutive habit?”

  Claffey gaped at him. He could not understand the question. His face flushed up to the hair-roots. He felt his big moment with Bitch Mary had been spoiled.

  “Besides,” the Giant said. “You know I do not like dwarf tales. They are too sad. I do not like them.”

  At nine-thirty that evening it was still light, but it had begun to drizzle. Bitch Mary, crouching by the window, made a squeak of surprise; they all swarmed—except the Giant—to see what it was, and within seconds Claffey, Pybus, and Jankin were down the stairs and out.

  “What was it?” said the Giant. He felt disinclined to move; his legs ached.

  “It was an Englishman,” Bitch Mary said. “Walking beneath a canopy on a stick.”

  “Umbrella,” Joe said, bored. “The apprentices are always turning out against them. It’s a fact that they are easy prey because carried by their clergymen and the more fussy and nervous type of old fellow.”

  “Such as,” Bitch Mary said, “those who think rain will run through their skins and thin their blood.”

  “The boys like to throw stones after, then chase the fel
lows and collapse the tent on their heads, making them sopping.”

  “Ah well,” said the Giant. He yawned. “I’m sure they wish they had such a lively time in Dublin.”

  That night the three followers came back battered and bruised. Pybus, in particular, was shockingly mangled. They were cheerful and brimming with gin, and had hardly stepped over the threshold when Claffey demanded, “Give us Prince Hackball, the beggar chief!”

  “Hackball?” the Giant said. “I remember when you yearned for stories of the deeds of kings.”

  Joe had brought him a flask of spirits, the necessary sort. His head was clear and ringing, his speech precise and tending to echo in his own ears: as hero’s speech should do.

  “Hackball,” the lads chanted. “We want Hackball.”

  “Hackball was prince of beggars,” Claffey said. “Two dogs drew his cart.”

  “For God’s sake.” Joe looked up in irritation from his prince book. “I think you confuse him with Billy Bowl, a man with no legs, who went along through the city in a wood basin with an iron skiddy under it, and his arms propelled him forwards. One day there were two women provoking him and calling him deformity, and did he not flail the flea-bitten she-cats? For which he was brought up—Charlie, was he not, support me here—”

  “For which he was brought up before the justices, and—his bowl and skiddy being damaged in the fracas—he was brought to court in a wheelbarrow, and sentenced to hard labour for life.”

  The Giant put his head in his hands. The bones there seemed to pulse, as if bones were living, as if they were fighting. The skin at his temples seemed frail, and he wondered if inner provocation would break it. Pybus and Claffey went away to bathe their contusions. The Giant was afraid that, under the new moon, his followers had got a taste for riot, and he wondered what they would do when the nights were lighter and the moon was full.