Frankenstein

Back in the living room I sat down at the table with the wildest thoughts racing through my mind. As Franken­stein sat down opposite me he looked in the lamplight even thinner and paler than before. His eyes still shone in an unnatural way, and his hands would not keep still. Was he mad? Was the man in the bath someone he had killed? For the first time in my life, I think, I feared him.
Then he began to speak, in sudden flows of words which stopped, and then started again. I began to understand two things: first, that he had hardly spoken to anyone for months; and secondly, that there was only one subject which he was able to think about. He spoke at first of his studies at the university, of his early experiments, and how little by little he found himself spending more time in his own rooms than listening to his teachers. But it was clear that he could hardly wait to pass on to the one subject that filled his mind.
"... and so, the science of living bodies became my chief study, the science of life, and the science of death. It seemed wrong to me that we knew so much about all those activities of the human body that make up life; and yet we did not know how those activities can be set in movement. To me a human body is like a clock. Sometimes a clock stops; the spring has not run down, and all the little wheels are there. But it stops. What do we do? We pick it up and shake it, and nearly always it starts again. So I asked myself two questions: first, how does one make a human body, and secondly, how does one 'shake' it into life?"
"You mean, create life?" I said.
"Yes, create life." Frankenstein looked at me with a kind of smile. "That is an idea which does not please you, I see."
"No, it does not please me," I replied. "It is not for man to create life. There are things which man should not try to know or do. Man has his proper place in nature, and it is better that he should not try to move out of it," I said.
"My dear Henri," Frankenstein replied, "if man had always believed that, there would today be no science, no learning. Have you never thought of the great difference between what man could be and what he is? Have you never looked at man in the streets and then looked at man in the paintings of the great artists? If you had the power to create, would you not want to create the perfect man?"
"If?" I cried, thinking of the body in the bath. "You know quite well that you have already created a body. Do you think you have the power to give it life?"
Frankenstein did not answer. He got up and walked to the window and opened it. It had been a hot day, and there was no air in the room. In the distance could be heard the sound of thunder.
"This is our season of storms," he said, and looked out of the window for some minutes. Then he turned and went on speaking: "The man of science has no more power than any other man. Any power more than his own must be taken from nature. In the next few days you will see what nature and I can do." He looked hard at me. "You could even help me."
Help him? Was he asking me to help him create life? Although I felt horror at his suggestion I also knew that my friend was offering me part of the honour which success could bring. But would the experiment succeed? And more important: did I really want it to succeed? As I watched Frankenstein's shaking hand and the sudden, strange movements of his face, I wondered again if he was just a little mad. I felt a wish to leave Ingolstadt at once, until I remembered that I had been sent there by his father to look after him. It was my duty to stay.

In the days that followed, the more I thought about the experiment the more it seemed a kind of madness. Could I really join Frankenstein in an act that was against nature, God and man?
I could, and did. My reasons for doing so were quite simple. This mad plan of his could not possibly succeed. And when it failed, as it certainly would fail, it would be my duty to look after my friend, and help him in his sorrow. I moved into Frankenstein's rooms, and the first thing I did was to create order and cleanliness, and to make sure that he ate meals at the proper times. Next, I did my best to understand the nature of his discoveries. This was hard, since I was not, like him, a man of science; and if I had been, it might still have been difficult. Even I could see that he had gone far beyond what was known to science at that time. He tried to tell me, but I never did understand, and I ended up simply doing what he told me to do.
It was not, in fact, understanding that I needed most in my work for Frankenstein, but strength of mind. I had to work in a room filled with jars containing every part of the human body: arms, legs, hearts, everything. This was quite disgusting to me, but Frankenstein seemed quite untroubled by it, and picked up these human parts as coolly as a woman in the kitchen picks up a piece of meat.
"In order to get what I need for my work," he said, "I have had to go to hospital, the prison, and even the place dead bodies are put into the ground. To create life I have had to live side by side with death."
But it was not the eye-balls which stared at me from inside the jar as I entered the room; or the brain lying in its clear liquid like some strange sea-creature; or the, carefully cut off hands waiting for something to get hold of that really troubled me. It was the centre of it all, the long, white bath where "he" lay.
I often used to think as we worked that "he" was asleep, and that we and our doings were part of his dream. Or was it that I was asleep, and that he and Frankenstein and that room were part of mine? At first it was all so strange. But as the days passed I began to lose my fear of him. After all, this was to be the perfect man, and Frankenstein had chosen his parts well. Certainly he had strength and beauty. More than two metres tall, and with that long, golden hair, he appeared more than human. Of the brain that slept behind those closed eyes I knew nothing, but Frankenstein was quite sure that its powers would be no less than the strength of his body.
I had only one doubt.
"So," I said one day, while we were sitting eating in the living room, "strength, beauty and cleverness will be his. But what about goodness? Does that perfection which you plan for him go so far?".
"It is all prepared," said Frankenstein in reply. 'I have plans to take him to live in a place far from the spoiling example of man, where training will bring out his natural goodness. Man is always born good. Evil can only come from man's bad treatment of man. Treat him justly and he will be good."
I could not answer this. It was what I, too, believed, and for the first time my mind began to enter the world of Frankenstein's hopes and dreams. Suppose, after all, that the dream came true. The body was complete. Could the life-force be made to enter into it?
As if he knew my unspoken thoughts, Frankenstein then spoke: "I am now ready. I am only waiting for the right conditions." He went across to the window and opened it. Again I heard the sound of thunder.
"We shall not have long to wait," he said.

Source: Longman Classics