Frankenstein; or, the modern prometheus

Chapter 22

The voyage ended at last, and Victor Frankenstein stepped ashore in Paris, his body broken and his mind more shattered still. He begged his father to let him withdraw from society, for he could not bear the faces of his fellow creatures knowing what he had unleashed among them. In a moment of raw confession, he told the old man that he was the true murderer of William, Justine, and Henry, that he had shed blood drop by drop in his soul though not with his hands. His father, half-convinced his son was mad, changed the subject and strove to bury the Irish horrors beneath a wall of silence. By slow effort Victor schooled himself into a calmer surface, though misery still kept her dwelling in his heart.

In Paris a letter arrived from Elizabeth, written from Geneva with tender hope and quiet fear. She confessed her love but asked whether Victor’s heart belonged to another, fearing that his misery of the previous autumn might have been born of a sense of honour rather than true affection. Reading her words, Victor remembered the Creature’s dread sentence — “I will be with you on your wedding-night!” — and understood that the daemon had determined to consummate his crimes with Victor’s death. He wrestled with himself, weighing whether to postpone the marriage or to hasten it. Death, he reasoned, was no evil if balanced by the loss of Elizabeth; and if he delayed, the fiend might invent some still more terrible revenge. So he wrote back, calm and affectionate, promising to reveal his dreadful secret the day after their wedding, and begged her to ask no questions until then.

A week later they returned to Geneva. Elizabeth welcomed him with tears at the sight of his emaciated frame, and Victor saw that she too had grown thinner, her once bright vivacity softened into something more fit for one so blasted as he. His father spoke of the immediate marriage, and Victor, with a countenance of feigned contentment, agreed that the ceremony should take place in ten days. Even as he consented, the Creature’s threat gnawed at him; but he shut up the anxiety in his heart and entered with seeming earnestness into the plans of preparation. A small possession on the shores of Como had been restored to Elizabeth, and it was agreed that after the wedding they would journey by water to Villa Lavenza, sleeping that night at Evian.

Victor armed himself with pistols and a dagger, ever on watch, and as the day approached the threat seemed almost a delusion, so tangible did the promised happiness appear. Elizabeth was happy; his calm demeanour soothed her. Yet on the morning of the wedding she was melancholy, haunted by some presentiment of evil and perhaps by thoughts of the secret Victor had sworn to reveal on the morrow.

After the ceremony a large party gathered at his father’s house, and Victor and Elizabeth set off across the bright water under a favourable wind. Those were the last moments in which Victor knew the feeling of happiness. They glided past Mont Salêve and Montalègre, the mighty Mont Blanc towering above all, while Elizabeth tried to charm away his sorrow, pointing out the clear waters, the swimming fish, the divine beauty of the day. Her temper, though, kept drifting between joy and reverie.

The sun sank as they passed the river Drance and approached Evian, its spire shining amid woods and overhung mountains. The wind died to a soft breeze that brought the scent of flowers and hay from the shore. As Victor touched the landing, those cares and fears which had long slept in him revived at once, ready to clasp him and cling to him for ever.

Chapter 24

Fury swallowed every other thought. Revenge alone gave Victor Frankenstein strength and a terrible, calculating calm. He gathered his mother’s jewels and a purse of money, and fled Geneva, the city that had once been dear now grown hateful. At the cemetery where William, Elizabeth, and his father lay buried, he knelt in the darkness and swore by the sacred earth and the shades of his murdered loved ones to pursue the daemon until one of them perished. No sooner had he finished his oath than a fiendish laugh rang through the night, and the creature’s whisper reached him: I am satisfied, miserable wretch! You have determined to live. The moon lit the monster’s ghastly shape as it fled, and Victor gave chase.

For months he pursued him — down the Rhone, across the Mediterranean, onto a ship bound for the Black Sea, and then through the wilds of Tartary and Russia. The creature left mocking inscriptions carved in bark and stone: My reign is not yet over… Follow me; I seek the everlasting ices of the north. The cold grew monstrous; the peasants shut themselves away; the rivers froze. Yet Victor pressed on, trading his land-sledge for one built for the frozen sea, exchanging money and game with villagers for fire and food. Sleep was his only mercy, for in dreams he held Elizabeth and Clerval again.

At last he sighted the creature’s sledge across the endless white. Hope blazed in him; he was gaining ground. But when he was within a mile of his quarry, a ground sea split the ice between them with a thunderous crack, stranding Victor on a shrinking floe. His dogs died around him. He had nearly surrendered when he saw Walton’s ship riding at anchor. Too weak to do more than fashion oars from his broken sledge, he steered his raft toward the vessel, where the crew hauled him aboard.

When Walton pressed him for the particulars of his creature’s making, Victor recoiled. Are you mad? Would you also create for yourself a demoniacal enemy? He consented only to correct and augment Walton’s notes, so that posterity might read his story whole and not mutilated. In quieter hours, he spoke of the man he had been — a youth who believed himself destined for some great enterprise, possessed of profound feeling and a coolness of judgment fit for illustrious achievements. Now he likens himself to the archangel who aspired to omnipotence and is chained in an eternal hell. No new tie, he tells Walton, can ever replace Clerval or Elizabeth; the companions of one’s childhood possess a power over the mind that no later friend can obtain. Only one thing still persuades him to cling to life: the destruction of the being to whom he gave existence.

Meanwhile Walton’s own situation turns desperate. Mountains of ice close around the ship; the sailors grow mutinous. A deputation demands that Walton solemnly swear to steer southward if a passage opens. Victor, though half-dead, rouses himself and delivers an impassioned speech, urging the men to be steady as a rock, to return not with disgrace upon their brows but as heroes who have fought and conquered. The sailors are moved — but only for a moment. Walton, unable to lead them unwillingly into destruction, consents to return to England.

Victor will not. His mission, he swears, is assigned him by Heaven. He tries to rise from his sickbed and falls back in a faint; the surgeon tells Walton that his friend has only hours to live. In his final lucid moments, Victor renounces the burning hatred he once expressed, yet still justifies desiring the creature’s death and renews his plea that Walton undertake the task. He counsels his new friend to seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even the apparently innocent one of distinguishing himself in science and discoveries. He presses Walton’s hand. A gentle smile passes over his lips. He is gone.

Walton, writing by midnight, hears a hoarse sound from the cabin and finds the creature himself — gigantic, distorted, weeping over his creator’s corpse. The monster cries that Victor is his last victim, that his miserable series is wound to its close, and pours out a confession of guilt, envy, and unquenchable longing for the love he was denied. He vows to quit the vessel on the ice raft, seek the most northern extremity of the globe, build his funeral pile, and reduce this miserable frame to ashes. Farewell, he says, and springs from the cabin-window into the darkness, borne away upon the waves and lost to sight.