Frankenstein
The creature lay on his straw, reviewing the day. The gentle manners of the cottagers had struck him; he longed to join them but dared not, the memory of the villagers’ blows too fresh. He resolved to stay quietly in his hovel, watching.
The cottagers—De Lacey, Felix, and Agatha—arose before the sun. After the first meal Felix departed; the pattern held: Felix laboring outdoors, Agatha within, the blind old man on his instrument. The younger pair revered him with every little office of affection.
Yet they were not happy. Often Felix and Agatha withdrew to weep. The creature, deeply moved, wondered why. Time and patient attention solved many riddles.
Poverty was one cause. They lived on garden vegetables and a single cow’s milk, scant in winter. The young ones sometimes set food before the father while reserving none for themselves. The trait moved the creature; he ceased stealing their store, living on berries and roots.
He found a way to help. Felix gathered firewood; by night the creature took the tools and returned with fuel for days. When Agatha opened the door upon a great pile of wood, she cried out, and Felix stayed home to mend the cottage.
His greater discovery was language—articulate sounds conveying pleasure or pain. After several moon-cycles he mastered familiar words—fire, milk, bread, wood—and the cottagers’ names: Felix (son or brother); Agatha (sister); the old man (father). Other words—good, dearest, unhappy—he distinguished but could not yet apply.
Winter passed in close sympathy. Felix cleared Agatha’s path before dawn, brought the first white flower through the snow, found the wood mysteriously replenished. Inside, the father encouraged his children; Felix bore deeper sorrow but spoke more cheerfully to him.
The creature persisted in mastering their tongue, hoping eloquence might outweigh his monstrous form. Then he saw his reflection in a transparent pool—and recoiled in disbelief, then despondency.
As snow vanished, hardship lifted. The creature kept to his hovel, watching by day, gathering food by moonlit night, performing unseen offices that drew from them the words good spirit, wonderful. Spring’s beauty exalted him; hope gilded the future.
Then came the moving part of his story. A lady arrived on horseback, dark-clad and veiled. At the name Felix, in a sweet foreign accent, he sprang to meet her. She raised her veil to reveal an angelic face—raven hair, dark gentle eyes, fair complexion flushed with pink. His sorrow vanished in ecstatic joy; he called her his sweet Arabian—her name was Safie.
They shared no language; her presence dispersed their sorrow like sun dispersing mist. Seeing her repeat the cottagers’ sounds, the creature resolved to learn alongside her. That night Felix kissed her hand—good night, sweet Safie. Next morning she played the old man’s guitar so entrancingly that tears were drawn. Within two months the creature understood nearly all his protectors’ speech, improving more rapidly than Safie.
He also learned letters through Felix’s instruction. The book was Volney’s Ruins of Empires, opening history: the slothful Asiatics, the brilliant Grecians, the early Romans, chivalry, Christianity, kings, the discovery of America. How could man be at once so godlike and so base?
Felix explained society—wealth and squalor, rank, descent, noble blood. These words turned the creature upon himself: no money, friends, or property; a figure hideously deformed; not even of the same nature as man. He had no father, no mother; his earliest memory was his present form; he had never seen any like himself.
He paused to return to the cottagers, whose story ended in deeper love for those he called, with innocent self-deceit, his protectors.
De Lacey was of a good French family; Felix had served his country, Agatha had ranked with ladies of the highest distinction. Months before they had lived in Paris, surrounded by friends.
The father of Safie, a Turkish merchant long in Paris, was made obnoxious to the government on unknown grounds; seized the very day Safie arrived from Constantinople, he was tried and condemned—a sentence Paris held the product of his religion and wealth, not his crime.
Felix, accidentally at the trial, vowed to save him. He found a grated window lighting the dungeon and by night revealed his plan. The prisoner fired Felix’s zeal with promises—until Felix saw the lovely Safie expressing gratitude. The captive possessed, the youth owned, a treasure. The Turk offered her hand; Felix, too delicate to accept, looked forward to that happiness. Before the escape he received from Safie letters—written by a French-speaking servant of her father—thanking him and gently grieving her fate.
The execution was fixed, but on its eve the Turk quit his prison; by morning he was leagues from Paris. Felix led the fugitives to Lyons, across Mont Cenis to Leghorn, where the merchant meant to await passage to Turkey.
Safie stayed with her father; he renewed his promise of marriage while secretly planning to deceive Felix and take Safie when he left. The French government, enraged, soon uncovered Felix’s plot; De Lacey and Agatha were cast into prison. Tortured by the thought of his blind father and gentle sister in a noisome dungeon, Felix arranged for Safie to stay at a Leghorn convent should the merchant escape first, and hastened to Paris to surrender—failing to free them. Five months’ confinement ended in stripped fortune and perpetual exile.
In Germany, Felix learnt that the treacherous Turk, finding him ruined, had quit Italy with his daughter, insultingly sending money. Yet Safie, learning of Felix’s ruin, defied her father. Quitting Italy with an attendant, she reached a town twenty leagues from the cottage, where her attendant died. The woman of the house, knowing their destination, saw Safie safely to her lover’s cottage.
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