Mason & Dixon

by Thomas Pynchon

  Somehow this fearlessly independent Girl had then gone on to marry the ill-famed, the drooling and sneering, multiply-bepoxed Lord Lepton, an insatiate Gamester who failed to pay his losses, forever a-twittering, even as he tumbled to ruin in one of the period’s more extravagant Stock-Bubbles, summarily ejected from Clubs high and low, advised by friend and enemy that his only decent course would be to step off the Edge of the World.— Thinking they meant, “go to America,” resolutely chirpy, he donn’d his sturdiest coat and breeches, took a false name and a public conveyance to the Docks, there indentured himself to a North Riding iron-master, and in good time sailed away (being kept with the other Slaves for the duration of the crossing, well below the ship’s water-line) to far and fever-clouded Chesapeake, where he was brought up-country, to dig and blast in the earth, fetch and stoke in the service of the perpetual Fires, smell unriddably of Sulfur, drive the African slaves as basely as a creature of his Sort might be expected to do, be one day trusted with blasting-Powder,— an event that, given the state of his soul, counted as a major leap of Redemption,— and after three of these trans-Stygian Years, become Journeyman, and in two more, by then his own Master, make his next Fortune, returning to England but once more, not to the Mansions that had spurned him but to dark-skied Durham, to carry back to America the Woman who, mysteriously having allowed it to happen, stands here now, Chatelaine of Lepton Castle, almost as Dixon might remember her upon one of the old battered towers of Raby, pretending yet, surveying below the intricate Deployment not of fancied men and horses of long ago, but of present-tense Brussels Lace and Mignonette, of Brocades and flower’d Gauzes and unkempt rainbows of Satin across her own Ladyship’s Parquetry, as the music complains inconsolably of loves at worst Hard-Labor, at best, impossible.

  “. . . raving Lunatick of course,” his Lordship fixing the Astronomers with a gleaming stare, “whatwhat?”

  “Oh, aye,” Dixon enthusiastically nodding whilst trying to kick Mason under cover of her Ladyship’s Gown, whose elaborate Hem has somehow crept closer to his Person than he imagin’d etiquette to allow.

  “Imbecile,” Mason, he thinks amiably, suggests.

  Lord Lepton reacts as though knifed. “Exactly the word he used,— or was it ‘Idiot’? You, Dasp,— you were there, which was it?”

  “If memory serves, My Lord, ’twas My Lord, that called him both of those.” He pronounces each word separately, in a way that strikes the listener as unarguably foreign, tho’ what strange Tongue may lie back of his English must remain a Mystery. He is gazing at Mason, and Dixon, too, so as to leave no doubt that this will be the last uncompensated Favor,— henceforth the Astronomers, unless the price be agreeable, are on their own.

  “Tho’, I say, look here,” Lord Lepton has meantime been rattling, “everyone on about it, ‘Great Chain of Being this, Great Chain of Being that,’— well frankly I’m first to say jolly good,— but,— now you see you have this rather lengthy Chain, don’t you, and,— well damme, what’s it for? Eh? What’s it do? Is there something for example hanging?— dangling from its bottom end? Well! what happens if that something fails to hold on? Obviously it falls, but where, don’t you know, and,— and how far?”

  “Perhaps,” Captain Dasp sibilantly entering the Game, “it is not a straight vertical line at all. Perhaps it is a Helixxx,” gesturing in the air for Lord L.’s benefit, “and wound about something,— keeping it, let us say . . . chain’d in? Something not part of the Great Chain itself, but fully as enormous, something that must be kept in restraint. Which we pray may be only sleeping when, throughout the Chain’s vast length, it is felt now and then . . . to stir.”

  “Yes!” cries his Lordship with a strange shiver, “flexing, writhing, perhaps beginning to snarl a bit, as one might suppose, deep within its Breast. . . .”

  “Well, ’tis a horizontal Chain for me,” Dixon beamingly raising his Punch-cup in Lord L.’s direction, drawing from his Partner a quick turn of the head,— Why do you assist in this idiot’s Folly?— “such as Surveyors use. Which shall go before, I wonder, and which follow,— aye and which direction shall it point in?” A newcomer might have imagined he was talking about the Line, and that the answer was West. But the Nabob was feeling personally assaulted.

  “You sound like one of these Leveler chaps,” he mutters.

  Dixon has about decided to reply, “Circumferentor, actually,” when Lady Lepton interposes, sighing, “Ah, yet do recollect that Chain, more imprisoning than the Captain’s, more relentlessly fiduciary than Mr. Dixon’s.” Her gaze fixing each, as she speaks his name,— then, meaningfully, Lord Lepton, but to no avail,— the object of her insinuation only continuing to nitter-natter . . . with a strange pointedness toward Dixon. “There’s Coal out where you’re going, you see. Already a brisk trade by way of the Indians, though they can’t bring it in in volume, poor chaps. Pretty, magickal black Stone, for all they know of it. Yet we’re not all Charcoal Hearths here, we’ve Coke as well. Produce our own,— Chambers and all here upon the Plantation. . . .”

  Life for her in these forests has never prov’d altogether exhilarating, her Face, even with its Complexion still pale as a summer Moon just risen above the Staithes, having with the years form’d itself into an aspect of permanent disappointment. Thus, altho’ like her husband she may laugh at anything, yet is the pitch of her voice as low, and its every inflection as bitterly preconsidered, as those of Milord are high and carelessly unrestrained. Sounding together, the two make a curious sort of Duetto.

  ’Twas alleged by wits of the day that she’d married him for his Membership in that infamous Medmenham Circle known as the Hellfire Club, resting thereby assured at least of a lively Bed-chamber. But as evidence that Milord’s Tastes run to nothing much out of the ordinary, the Eye alert to the stirrings of a Gown, and adept at translating these into the true movements beneath the expensive surface and intervening Petticoats, may detect a Rhythm, a Damask Pulse, that speaks of Desires to cross into the forbidden.

  It is difficult, in these days of closer-fitting Attire, to imagine the enormous volumes of unoccupied Space that once lay between a Skirt’s outer Envelope, and the woman’s body far within. “Why, there may be anything!” Capt. Dasp as if genuinely alarmed, “stash’d in there,— contraband Tea, the fruits of Espionage, the coded fates of Nations, a moderate-sized Lover, a Bomb.”

  “Yet the present-day bodice,” remarks Lady Lepton, “can conceal secrets only with difficulty. A single key, perhaps, or the briefest of love-notes. Indeed, ’tis but an ephemeral Surface, rising out of the Spaces that billow ambiguously below the waist, till above melting . . . here, into bare décolletage, producing an effect, do you mark, of someone trying to ascend into her natural undrap’d State, out of a Chrysalis spun of the same invisible Silk as the Social Web, kept from emerging into her true wing’d Self,— perhaps then to fly away,— by the gravity of her gown.”

  “Oh, pishtush,” comments her Husband, “Pshaw. Bodices are for ripping, and there is an end upon it.”

  The servants in the hall tonight are whitely-wigged black slaves in livery of a certain grade of satin and refinement of lace,— black Major-domos and black Soubrettes. One of the latter now passes by with a tray of drinks. “Milord’s own punch receipt,” advises the pretty Bondmaiden, gazing at Dixon intently. “Knock you on your white ass.”

  “Why, Ah would have brought me blahck one, but no one told me . . . ?” She seems to know him. For a frightening moment, he seems to know her.

  “Yes lovely isn’t she, purchas’d her my last time thro’ Quebec, of the Widows of Christ, a Convent quite well known in certain Circles, devoted altogether to the World,— helping its Novices descend, into ever more exact forms of carnal Mortality, through training as,— how to call them?— not ordinary Whores, though as Whores they must be quite gifted, but as eager practitioners of all Sins. Lust is but one of their Sacraments. So are Murder and Gl
uttony. Indeed, these two are combin’d most loathsomely in their Ritual of Holy Communion.”

  “Rest tha content with the way he’s talking . . . ?” Dixon whispers loudly into Mason’s ear, and moistly as well.

  “An Otick Catarrh was not in my day’s Plan, Dixon?”

  “Oh. Why, bonny. See if I confide anything to thee, anymore.”

  “Pray continue, Sir,— ’tis but his Idiocy again, recurs like an Ague, harmless, really. . . . And,” Mason believes he must ask, “do they get . . . fat?”

  “Fat? Ah,” Captain Dasp assures him, “violent, greedy, treacherous. Needless to say, Men without number fall in love with them, pay them repeatedly enormous sums, becoming ruin’d in the process, whilst Las Viudas de Cristo continue to bloom and prosper.”

  In the instant, Mason later avow’d, he knew that the Captain was a French spy. The Peace of Paris has left a number of these adrift, the reduction of Canada having forced many of them South and West, to the Illinois and beyond. There are sightings of Pépé d’Escaubitte, and 2-A Lagoo, Iron-Mask Marthioly and the Boys from Presque Isle, too. Few but the foolhardy,— however admirably so,— have stay’d in Pennsylvania, and those ever within galloping distance of Maryland, with its Web of Catholic houses of Asylum,— not that anyone there looks forward to being ask’d.— “What, that bloody Frog again?”

  “Chauncey, not in front of the C-H-I-L-D!”

  “Oh Mamma, is that funny-talking man coming to visit again?”

  “Yes but not a word or God will nail you where you stand, and probably with your Mouth open just like that.”

  “We promise! and shall he cook for us?” Upon such frail expectations, fugitive as the smell of a Roast through an open window, do the lives of these Renegadoes often depend.

  Somewhere beyond the curve of a great staircase, Gongs, each tun’d to a different Pitch, are being bash’d. “At last,” mumble several of the Guests as they make speed toward yet another Wing of Castle Lepton, converging at the entrance to a great dom’d room, the Roof being a single stupendously siz’d Hemisphere of Glass, taken from a Bubble, blown first to the size of a Barn by an ingenious air-pump of Jesuit invention, then carefully let cool, and saw’d in half. The sister Hemisphere is somewhere out in America, tho’ where exactly, neither Lord nor Lady is eager to say. As no one at the moment has anything but Gaming of one sort or another in mind, the Topick is soon let go of.

  Here is a Paradise of Chance,— an E-O Wheel big as a Roundabout, Lottery Balls in Cages ever a-spin, Billiards and Baccarat, Bezique and Games whose Knaves and Queens live,— over Flemish Carpets, among perfect imported Chippendale Gaming-Tables, beneath Chandeliers secretly, cunningly faceted so as to amplify the candle-light within, they might be Children playing in miniature at Men of Enterprise, whose Table is the wide World, lands and seas, and the Sums they wager too often, when the Gaming has halted at last, to be reckon’d in tears. . . .

  42

  “Many Christians,” comments the Revd, “believe Gaming to be a sin. Among Scholars, serious questions arise as to Predestination and the Will of God,— Who notes each detail of each life in a sort of divine Ledger, allotting Fortune bad and good, to each individually, even as He raiseth the storm at sea, lendeth the Weather-gage to the dark Dromonds of Piracy, provoketh the Mohawk against the Trader’s Post. For He is Lord of All Danger. Yet others safe at home wager upon His Will, as express’d thro’ the doings of these Enterprisers, exactly as upon a fall of Cards, or a Roll of Dice.”

  “Why, Wicks. You see us as no more than common ‘Spielers’? Parasites upon the Fortunes of those willing to Risk all? Pray you, setting aside whose Hearth you are ever welcome at, tell me all.”

  “What alarms me most, Wade,” proceeds Revd Cherrycoke, “is the possibility of acquiring such vast sums so quickly. If a sailor may kill a Bully over a sixpence, then what disproportionate mischief, including Global War, may not attend the safekeeping of Fortunes of millions of pounds Sterling?”

  “You’re asking the wrong Merchant. I’m lucky if I clear’d a Thousand, this Year.”

  “Happen they all reach a point where they can’t trust their Luck any more . . . ? So they cheat.”

  “Bold as you please.” Later, in their Rooms, too late the Gamer’s Remorse, Mason working himself up, “He mark’d the cards. The Dice were of cunningly lacquer’d Iron, the playing-surface magnetickally fiddl’d,— Damme, he owes us twenty pounds,— more! what are we suppos’d to do, live upon Roots? ’twas the Royal Society’s, belay that, the King’s own money,— hey? right out of G. Rex’s Purse it came, and don’t it make a true Englishman boil!” ’Tis an Insult to Mason that cannot pass unanswer’d,— this runny-nos’d, titl’d Savage, tossing their Expeditionary Funds as airy Gratuities to the Slaves who stood all night with Coals kept ever a-glow, and with Bellows clear’d the immediate Air of smoke, that a player might see what Cards he held.

  Insupportable. “We must take something worth twenty pounds, then . . . ? Let the Rascal pursue huz . . . ?” Dixon adjusts the Angle of his Hat. “Let’s have a look. Here upon the wall, this Etching,— what’s it suppos’d to be? Turkish Scene or something. . . . Wait,— Mason, it’s people fucking . . . ? Eeh! And look at thah’ . . . ? . . . Well,— we can’t sell that in Philadelphia. What’s this? Chamber-pot? Perhaps not. How about the Bed?”

  “Might as well be taking that Tub over there,” indicating a giant Bathing-tub with Feet, Bear Feet in fact, cast at the Lepton Foundry from local Iron.

  “Why aye, that’s it! The Tub!”

  “Dixon, it’s half a Ton if it’s a Dram, we’re not going to move it . . . ? Even if we could, where would we move it to? And once there,— ”

  Dixon, a-mumble, is over examining the Tub. “Laws of Leverage . . . William Emerson taught things no one else in England knows. Secret techniques of mechanickal Art, rescued from the Library at Alexandria, circa 390 A.D., before rampaging Christians could quite destroy it all, jealously guarded thereafter, solemnly handed down the Centuries from Master to Pupil.”

  Mason’s squint appears. “You shouldn’t be showing these ‘Secrets’ to me, then, should you? No more than that Watch.”

  “Oh, thou would have to swear the somewhat ominous ‘Oath of Silence,’ of course, but we can do thah’ later,— here, look thee.” Dixon seems scarcely to touch the pond’rous Fixture,— yet suddenly, as if by Levitation, one end has rotated upward, and the great Tub now stands precariously balanced upon a sort of lip or Flange at its other end.

  “That’s amazing!” cries Mason.

  “Simple matters of balance,— Centers of Gravity true and virtual,— Moments of Inertia,— ”

  “Have ’em all the time,— ”

  “— estimated Mass,— ”

  “— the Priest having enjoy’d a merry night before?” tho’ yet a-squint. “What’s this,— shan’t I hear ‘Magnetism,’ as well? some deliberate omission?”

  Dixon doesn’t answer immediately, nor, as it will prove, at all, focus’d as he has become upon gently but fluently tweaking the giant iron Concavity across the room and toward the door,— through which it is not immediately clear how the Tub is going to, actually, fit. So sure is his touch that the floorboards barely creak. “Ah very nice, very nice indeed . . . ? now I’ll just have a look out at the stairs. And if thoo don’t mind,— ”

  “Um,— ?” inquires Mason.

  “This,—” indicating the looming Mass above them, “needs to be held at exactly the Angle it’s at,— not just the Angle off the floor, do tha see, but also this exact Angle of Rotation about the long Axis? Try not to think of this as two separate Angles, but as One? Thou’re following this?”

  “I,— you want me to,— wait,— no, why not just lean it against the Wall, here?”

  “Thah’ Wall? eeh! eeh! it’ll go through thah’ Wall! No,— all I ask, is thah’ th
oo hold the Tub up, but for a minute, whilst I go reconnoitre.”

  “That’s one minute,— you promise.”

  “Two minutes. At most. It’s perfectly stable, so long as tha don’t shift it about too much. . . . Good fellow, just slip in here, yes and thy hands go . . . there,— a unique resting-place for everything, Friend,— behold the Tub, perfectly quiescent, ’s it not . . . ? in maximum self-alignment, and quietly gathering Power. ’Twill see us free of this place,— eeh. Ideal. Now,— don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

  He vanishes, leaving Mason ’neath the Tub. Soon Mason detects the smell of Pipe-Tobacco,— Dixon’s blend, indisputably. He’s out there having a leisurely Smoke whilst Mason, squinting upward nervously, struggles to keep the Tub upon its Axes. After a while, as if to himself, lightly vocalizing, “It’s gone two minutes and thirty-one seconds.” The words gong loudly back and forth, painfully seeming to enter one ear, pass through his head, and depart out the other ear. In the after-hum he fancies he can hear Dixon’s voice, and then another,— Lady Lepton’s if he is not mistaken, tho’ Words soon lapse, whilst Sounds continue. An overturn’d chair. Sighs. Fabric tearing. A merry Squeal. All at once, in chiming two-part Harmony and unnaturally accelerating Tempo, unmistakably, “O Ruddier than the Cherry.” ’Tis the infamous Musickal Bodice, devis’d by an instrument-maker of London, wherein Quills sewn into its fastening, when this is pull’d apart, will set a-vibrating, one after another, a row of bell-metal Reeds, each tun’d to a specifick Note,— the more force applied, the louder the notes. “Ripping Tune!” Mason calls out. He has no idea how to disengage from Dixon’s blasted Tub, tho’ now would hardly seem the best time to do so, unless,— now that he’s listening,— there no longer seems to be . . . hmm, quite as much sound from out there . . .