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Down in the wretched teeming dark, Caliban sits with his loneliness and his pride and thinks of sunlight slanting through windows and women who sit and smile, their skin flush with the evidence of life. It is not so here. Here, down in the underground where Caliban is forced to hide, the lack of light turns everything to black and white, reducing even the most rosy-cheeked to silhouettes, just as he is. He had such hopes of freedom before, such dreams of finding something new and beautiful, and yet he returns over and over again to the deepest places as if drawn by invisible strings.
He is not surprised that the Cholera Hospital took him in; this wretched place suits his wretched form. Here, down in the dark, all are alone, all are abandoned, all are afraid. They huddle around fires, and attempt to warm their trembling hands, and whisper promises to each other that rarely come true. Caliban tried, at first, to make conversation, but even the sick recoil from his deathly form, frightened by the premonition of their own death they see in his face. One man, and one man only, gave him the courtesy of a conversation, and that man was blind with age and not long for the world. Caliban has seen so many slip from this world, and yet he continues, unmoved by the predations of disease. Sometimes he fears that he may live forever like this, and curses Frankenstein for the cruelty of his design, and sometimes he imagines Frankenstein’s own death, and is glad of it.
There are no days under the earth, only a solemn and eternal twilight, but Caliban thinks it is morning when she comes to visit.
There are many different nurses who attend the sick down here: some old, some young, some kind, many cruel. There is something about the human spirit which hates suffering, and recoils from those who suffer. But not her. She walks among the rows of the dying with a straight-necked calm, as if this graveyard were nothing more than a park, and administers food and water with kindness and patience. There is no hurry in her.
Her name is Vanessa Ives, and she is pale, so pale, such that Caliban thought she was also a dead thing at first glance.
“Mr. Clare,” she calls him, and her voice is warm. If only his intended would speak to him with such kindness!
“Mrs. Ives,” he says. His body is deadly sensitive to rejection, all his nerves always on the lookout for any twitch, any flinch, any hardening of the gaze, but Vanessa looks on him with such simple warmth. He oversteps his boundaries again, in calling her Vanessa, in clutching the intimacy of such a name in his heart, but he is always overstepping. Everything he does is an offense.
“You seem vexed today,” he says, and she is. There is more determination in her than usual. She is holding back a tremble, and has been since she arrived at the clinic, though she hides it better than most. Caliban is grateful that it does not increase when she sits by his bedside, and gratified to see that it diminishes. It is more than he thought he might have, to extend his hand in friendship to another. In his dreams, she sits close to him and rests her head on his shoulder, but those are only dreams. Here and now, she sits in her usual spot, neither closer nor further than usual, and gazes pensively into the dark.
“I may have to go away for some time,” she laments. “I have left some things undone too long, and must visit an old teacher once more.” It grieves Caliban to think that Vanessa too is haunted, Vanessa, the most beautiful thing under the earth. And yet, some spiteful part of him is glad for her company.
“Will you at least have someone to go with you?” he asks, and Vanessa smiles at him, though he can feel the fine edge of her sadness. The men of the world above are beasts if they do not recognize her worth.
“I will,” she says, and the corner of her mouth tilts a little. In the moment, Caliban is wretchedly jealous of whatever companion has brought such joy to Vanessa’s face, but he says nothing. He will not ruin Vanessa’s life by entangling himself with it, though he dreams of lurching to the upper world to threaten whatever force has brought sadness to her face.
“Good,” he says, and casts about for some other, better words to bring her stronger cheer. A poem comes to him, one that he rejected bitterly on first reading, but remembers now, and he begins to recite.
“O pusillanimous Heart, be comforted,—
And, like a cheerful traveller, take the road—
Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread
Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod
To meet the flints?—At least it may be said,
“Because the way is short , I thank thee, God!”
He finishes, feeling a little awkward and at odds with his subject matter, and looks at Vanessa expectantly. She laughs, but not at him, thank God. He is often ready to believe he is being mocked, but not by Vanessa. In her he places a sincere faith.
“You are always ready with a poem,” she says, and seems to be cheered. “There are so many books in this world, and I am glad of the scholars who read them, for otherwise they would lay unused.”
“You speak as if you did not read yourself, and yet I know you to be well-versed in poetry,” Caliban replies, surprised.
“I have been troubled by words as of late,” Vanessa replies, and the shadow returns to her face. “But, perhaps I am seeking the wrong book.” She leans forward, resting her hands on her knees, and Caliban is struck by the quiet intimacy of the gesture. She is comfortable enough to unbend around him, and the implied trust of that little gesture staggers him.
“Vanessa,” he says, boldly speaking her name. “I wish you the best.”
“I know you do,” she says. “I wish I did as well.” Caliban is little talented with words, and so they sit in silence as he searches his brain for the correct verse, for the right string to make her feel as he does. At last, a line comes to him, and he lets himself speak.
“All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by.”
There are tears in Vanessa’s eyes. She does not inhale loudly. The swell of her chest does not heave. She is terribly still, and only the silent, unremarkable path of her tears suggests her sadness.
“I hope so,” she says quietly. “I know — you know it too — it has been granted me
Not to die wholly, not to be all enslaved- I feel it in this hour. The numbing cloud Mounts off my soul; I feel it, I breathe free.”
Someone is calling her name, and she sighs and lifts her head. Caliban offers her a handkerchief, and trembling brushes away the last evidence of her tears. His thumb gazes her face. Caiban will always remember her Madonna smile.
“I must go now,” she says.
“Let us meet again,” Caliban says.
“Yes, though it may be a long way from now,” Vanessa says. She approaches and lays a delicate kiss on his cheek, then turns away into the long dark. Caliban will think of her that way, as an intercessor for one badly in need of a little mercy. He will blame himself, as well, for not knowing her better, for not seeing beyond his own sadness. But his self-awareness is a dim lamp, and soon it fades, and with it her image. He remembers sometimes, though he cannot be certain- but sometimes he thinks that she wept, as she turned away from him for the last time.