The Elephant Keeper. Christopher Nicholson

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СКАЧАТЬ told him.—‘And what is your father’s name? Ah yes—he is the father of the Elephant keeper, is he not? Well, let us hope he is not ill with the dreaded Elephant Fever. I cannot come now, young man, but I shall come to him later.’

      My brother returning home, gave this message to my mother: ‘Dr. Chisholm is coming later.’—‘But could he not come at once?’—‘No, he is at table, but he will come later. He says that Father may have Elephant Fever.’ My mother, very frightened, cried out, ‘What is that?’ Upon which my brother told her, that it was a special disease which human beings caught from Elephants.

      Since I had stayed the night at the cart-house, I knew none of this; however, shortly before day-break, Jim appeared, and told me that I must come home at once, bringing a piece of one of Timothy’s tusks. It seems that Mrs. Perry now believed my father would only be saved if he were given a medicinal potion made of powdered tusk. This was utter folly, I did not believe a word of it; even if it were true, Timothy would not have stood idly by and allowed me to saw off his tusk. Jim then mentioned that, as he had returned through the snow from Gillerton, he had been followed by a light. I asked, what sort of light; he did not know, but it was a dancing light, like a will o’ the wisp. I said to myself, it is probably no more than the frozen crust of snow glistening in the light of the young moon; but I knew that Jim believed it to be an omen of our father’s death.

      I hurried home. My father lay in the icy bed-room, and while my mother moaned and shook, Mrs. Perry held sway, muttering spells and incantations. ‘I knew it would happen. The Elephants! The Elephants! Where is the tusk?’ When I said that I had not brought any tusk, my mother begged me to run back and fetch some, for my father’s life hung by a thread. I told her that I could not do so, that the Elephant was the property of Mr. Harrington; whereupon she cried out that I must ask Mr. Harrington. I did what I could to calm her and then attended to my father, who was burning hot, and in the absence of Dr. Chisholm, who had still not visited, I resolved to bleed him. Having fetched a knife, I laid bare his arm. ‘It will do no good!’ cried Mrs. Perry, ‘he has Elephant Fever!’ and my mother wailed that I was not a doctor, that we must wait for the doctor. ‘For how long? We cannot wait,’ I said.—‘We must wait!’—‘But if we wait—the longer we wait—we cannot wait.’

      We waited a few minutes, during which I felt my father’s pulse, which was running very fast and intermittent, and I then said that I did not think we should delay any longer, that he must be bled, and I stretched out his arm. However, my mother cried out, ‘O! I hear him! O! He is come!’ running to the window and scratching at the frost flakes; but she was mistaken. ‘O Tom you must go and fetch him!’—‘But Jim has been!’—‘Then where is he? Why has he not come? Why? O! O!’ for my poor father had given a kind of low groan, and she flung herself in agonies over the bed. ‘O! Timothy! You must not leave me! You must not!’ As I stood back, knife in hand, I noticed Jim’s wan face and wondered whether, when he had spoken to Dr. Chisholm, he had conveyed with sufficient force the desperate nature of my father’s condition. Yet there was another suspicion which crossed my mind, that the doctor had decided to ignore my father’s illness, on account of what had happened with the Elephants when he was hunting. However, this may be to do Dr. Chisholm an injustice, for he did indeed arrive at the cottage about noon, though by then it was too late. It seems that he had been urgently called to attend to a gentleman by the name of Mr. Rogers, who had slipped in the snow and bruised an ankle.

      I will pass over the melancholy details of my father’s death. His burial had to be delayed for two weeks, the ground being as hard as stone, even a pick would not penetrate it; during this period he lay stiff and frozen in his bed. My poor mother was greatly distracted and would not enter the room on any account; nor would she allow a single fire to be lit in the cottage, despite the extreme cold, and when Jim and I came to carry him down the stairs, she cried, ‘O, do not hurt him!’ After the burial, she begged me not to go on working any longer with the Elephants, for fear that I would catch the same deadly Elephant Fever. Indeed, she was certain that I would catch it. She said, through her tears, that she had known from the beginning that the Elephants were dangerous and that no good would come of them; for an angel had warned Mrs. Perry in a dream, and Mrs. Perry had warned my mother, and my mother had warned me and my father, but neither of us would pay any heed, and now the best husband anyone had ever had was dead and cold, and I would die too, that was all but certain, and she would be left with Jim, who was no help to anyone, and she did not know what she would do. I attempted to reassure her; but she was deaf to all consolation, crying out that it did not matter what happened to her, since she would not be alive for much longer.

      The story that the Elephants had been the cause of my father’s death was quickly spread by wagging tongues; chiefly, no doubt, that belonging to Mrs. Perry, but by others too; so that for a time it was generally believed that even to go near the Elephants was dangerous, while to breathe in a single particle of their breaths (which, in the frosty air, billowed from their mouths in clouds) was fatal. They were seen as walking contagions, and shunned by everyone but me; indeed I was also widely shunned, with people saying that, if I had only cut off a piece of Timothy’s tusk, my father would still be alive, and that I could not have loved him enough. This was a most unjust charge, for I had loved my father as faithfully as any son could have done. I was greatly troubled on my own account, but also on that of the Elephants: when I looked at them and indeed, when they looked at me, with their sad, wrinkled eyes, I felt a kind of horror. How will you survive, I thought, with such a deadly reputation? At the same time, there was something that made me doubt—not that Elephant Fever existed, but that it could have led to my father’s death. I questioned my brother Jim, who repeated to me the exact words used by Dr. Chisholm: ‘Let us hope he is not ill with the dreaded Elephant Fever.’ I said to Jim, ‘Then we do not know for certain that he died of Elephant Fever.’ Jim agreed that we did not know for certain.

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