Yet there remains to the Wedge an Unseen World, beyond Resolution, of transactions never recorded,— upon Creeksides and beneath Hedges, in Barns, Lofts, and Spring-houses, in the long Summer Maize fields, where one may be lost within minutes of entering the vast unforgiving Thickets of Stalks,— indeed, all manner of secret paths and clearings and alcoves are defin’d,— push’d over or stamp’d into being, roofless as Ruins, for but a few fugitive weeks of lull before autumnal responsibilities come again looming. The sun burns, the gravid short Forests beckon. The Soil, when enough is reveal’d, becomes another sand Arena. Anybody may be in there, from clandestine lovers to smugglers of weapons, some hawking contraband,— buckles, lockets, tea, laces from France,— some marking off “Lots” for use in some future piece of Land-Jobbery. Insect pests are almost intimidated into leaving, but sooner or later come back.
Nearby, withal, is Iron Hill, a famous and semi-magical Magnetick Anomaly, known to Elf Communities near and far, into which riskers of other peoples’ Capital have been itching for years to dig,— but being reluctant to reward more than one set of Provincial Officials at a time, are waiting until the legal status of the Wedge becomes clear. Is it part of Pennsylvania? Maryland? or of the new entity “Delaware”?— which on paper at least belongs to Pennsylvania, William Penn’s having leas’d it from the Duke for a term of ten thousand years,— tho’ it has enjoy’d, for fifty of these, its own Legislature and Executive Council.
’Tis no one’s, for the moment. A small geographick Anomaly, a-bustle with Appetites high and low, their offerings and acceptances.
The North Line quickly completed, the Surveyors are order’d back to Susquehanna, this time to continue the West Line “as far as the Country is inhabited.” Legally this suggests as far as the Proclamation Line, at the Crest of the Alleghenies. Even before the Party reaches the River,— as if ’twere a Fate neither could avoid,— Darby and Cope are pretending to be Mason and Dixon, tho’ not always respectively. It begins when someone having observ’d the Chain, assumes the obvious,— “Mr. Mason! a-and this must be Mr. Dixon!”
“Not exactly,” says Cope.
“He means,” Darby hastily puts in, “that he’s Mason, and I’m Dixon, isn’t that right, ‘Mason’?”
“I’d prefer to be Dixon,” hisses Cope.
“Next time, all right?” The Links of the Chain cak’d with dried Dirt, and squeaking almost painfully. . . .
“You’ll want to take care,” they’re eventually warn’d by a friendly Tapster, “there’re a couple of Lads about, pretending to be you two.”
“Get on,” says Darby.
“Why should anyone wish to be us?” wonders Cope.
Maidens in varying ratios of Indignation to Curiosity show up in camp, demanding to see Mason or Dixon, or both. Upon meeting the real Surveyors, “Well, but you’re not him,—” “— nor you the other.”
“Of course not,” reply Mason and Dixon. When they have a moment to talk about it together, “It must be someone in camp,” Mason suggests, “My guess is, ’tis Darby and Cope.”
“How, then?”
“Well, they’re never about, are they, when all these folk show up to complain? And their Names, like ours, are usually spoken together. . . . Yet you know more of Chain-men than I,— what think ye?”
“The Chain-man’s Sorrows,” it seems to Dixon, “all proceed from being forbidden, but upon sufferance of the Party-Chief, so much as to touch any Instrument, excepting the Chain,— with centuries of that word’s poetic Associations adding to its Weight. Farmers in Durham aren’t the only ones who call it the D——l’s Guts. . . . Chain-men bear it, they hate it, they tend it carefully, their feelings ever in a muddle . . . they cannot keep from sliding queer covetous glances at the other Instruments. They understand the Surveyor’s Injunction, yet touch they must, and will,— some honestly wishing to learn more of the Arts, others merely to fiddle with the Equipment. That Messieurs Darby and Cope, being, here in America, Surveyors fully competent with all Instruments, should now toil as Chain-men . . . ?— under British supervision withal . . . ?— invidious Situations arise, d’tha see.”
“Then shall we break with Tradition, perhaps allow them to use our Surveying Instruments?— Or yours, rather, as I possess none of my own.”
“Eeh! What,— My Circumferentor . . . ? Why, ’tis another of my very Senses . . . ? ’Twould be like letting someone else do my Smelling for me . . . ?”
“Hum, so . . . You and this . . . Instrument are . . . quite close, then? D’ye have a Name, that you call it by?”
“Mason, the thought of either Darby’s or Cope’s Eye-ball dripping fluids all over the Lenses of my Old Circ,— ”
“Ha! ‘Old Circ’! How charming you people are, how child-like in your Attachments.”
“Perhaps if the Tools of thy Trade had ever belong’d to thee, instead of to the King, tha might at least once have felt this simple, sentimental Bond,— quite common among the People in fact, though scarcely, I guess, among all those great Publick Zenith-Sectors and Telescopes and so forth, up there but a footfall from the Highest in the Land . . . ?”
Mason drops his head in false apology. “Yet another Flaw! how many more, before my Character’s too riddl’d for it to matter? Dixon, I know I am not worthy, to carry your esteem’d Instrument. Blessing upon you both, and much joy of your Relationship.”
“Thankee, Mason, I mean that sincerely. As to our Chain-men,— they being qualified Lensfolk, might we not allow them some time with the Sector . . . ? neither of us actually owning it.”
“Fine with me, I’ve but its Custodians to report to. You must answer to its Maker.”
“John Bird would do the same, I’m certain . . . ?”
“Deferring as ever in matters of character,” Mason making mock-French flourishes in the Air with his Hat.
“Why here are the Gents themselves, a Miracle, fetch me the Jesuit Telegraph, for I must report it to the Pope,— how now Boys,— ”
“Far too truculent,” mutters Mason. “Mr. Cope, Mr. Darby, well met.”
“We prefer ‘Darby and Cope,’ actually,” says Darby.
“He being the Head and all,” adds Cope.
“Of course that’s only east to west,—”
“Depending who ends up with the Stobs, really,— ”
Going on to describe, in foul-copy Stichomythia, their Practice of exchanging ten small wood stakes, to keep the Chain-Count accurate, tho’ between Mr. Darby’s habit of keeping Stobs ev’rywhere about him, including in his Belt, Leggings, and Hat, and Mr. Cope’s Forgetfulness in counting, they have grown so fearful of Stob-Loss, as to have begun Exchanging Stobs after eleven Chains instead of ten, with Mr. Cope then passing back only nine of his, and keeping one. Yet now one and now the other will forget, and revert to the old ten-Chain Method. . . .
“We may be miles off by now,” Dixon’s eyes having grown very round.
“Save that thro’ some dark miracle of Mathesis,” says Darby, “our Errors have ever exactly cancel’d out.”
“Else Susquehanna measur’d to Potowmack, Might haply ’maze the Trav’ler loxodromick,— ”
“With phantom Leagues, too many or too few,— As if a very Hole in Space ’twere, too.”
A pause. Not a mischievous Dimple ’pon either Phiz. “All content otherwise?” Mason as he imagines smoothly.
“Go easy, Mason, don’t upset them . . . ?— ”
“ ’Twas him made me do it!” screams Mr. Cope, as if yielding before a sudden Stress.
“Booby!” ejaculates Mr. Darby.” ’Twas you began it!”
“Yet Head Ev’rything must you ever be, mustn’t you, leaving poor, miserable Cope to shift as he may,—”
“Made thee do what?” inquires Dixon.
“Aha! You see?” cries Mason, “— now are they co
nfessing.”
Actually, the Chain-men are fallen rather to thumping one the other, as Mason and Dixon look on. “Then again,” confides Mason behind his Hand, “a turn at the Sector mightn’t be such a good idea, not just now. . . .”
There is Commotion up the Visto. A delegation of newly hir’d Axmen come marching in. “Here are the very Subjects!” cries one of these.
“Now then ye heathen, hold, ’tis not how we Christians settle our differences.”
“Yet they seem like white men,— ”
“Cleverly indeed fiendishly disguis’d, tho’ ‘Darby’ and ‘Cope’ are not quite British Names, are they?”
“Why, they are as British as anyone here . . . ?” Dixon points out.
“Not according to your pay-List,— see here, it reads, ‘Darby and Cope, Chinamen.’ ”
“Thah’s . . . ’Chain-men’ . . . ?”
“Ah.”
“Not the same,— ”
“Oh dear.”
“Is Mr. Barnes but fun-mongering, and we the Gulls?”
“Pity, really. None of us has seen a Chinaman before.”
“Soon,” promises the oracular Squire Haligast, in a Voice so charg’d with passion that immediately all but the most desperate of the Axmen believe him.
By the twenty-second of June they are back below the Peach Bottom Ferry,— another Saturday Night,— ready to start West again. There rushes the River,— both Surveyors understanding by now ’tis not only a River, being as well the Boundary to another Country. Next day, they measure southward about forty-five feet to correct their error in Latitude,” . . . and there placed a mark, and in the direction of this, and the Mark on the East Side of the River, . . . we proceeded to run the Line.”
Just before they cross Susquehanna, a Parcel arrives for them by way of a lather’d Youth riding Express upon a black Barb, neither showing any sign of tiring,— with a terrible “Yee-hah!” the Youth sweeps off his Tricorne, wheels, and has gallop’d back into the Brush. In the Package is Fr. Boscovich’s Book, De Solis et Lunæ Defectibus, publish’d at last, dispatch’d Transatlantickally by Maskelyne, who in the Jobation accompanying, invites their Attention to a great Variety of Data within, including a Warning as to the Attraction of Mountains,— “In Italy ’twas establish’d, that the Umbrian Appenines caus’d a very considerable deviation of the Plumb-line Northward, as the party, moving in that direction, drew ever closer.”
“First the Iron-Lodes disable my Needle,” moans Dixon, “now the Mountains are about to throw off my Plummet?”
“Obliging us, as Maskelyne and me at St. Helena, to take symmetrickal readings on the opposite sides of the Crests, and hope that the two errors will cancel out. I pray the Western Slopes of Allegheny may prove less distressing than the Windward side of that wretched Island. . . .”
49
To Appearance, Trans-Susquehanna is peaceful enough,— Farm-houses, a School-house, a Road to York. At the third ten-minute segment of Arc, they calculate their probable error, change direction by an R.P.H. to the Northward, and continue to their next stopping-place, which once again shall place them conveniently,— this time beside the great inland Road between York and Baltimore, more real than any imaginary Line any would run athwart it. The earth hereabouts is red, the tone of a new Brick Wall in the Shadow, due to a high ratio of iron,— and if till’d in exactly the right way, it becomes magnetized, too, so that at Harvest-time, ’tis necessary only to pass along the Rows any large Container of Iron, and the Vegetables will fly up out of the ground, and stick to it.
Ahead of them in the next ten minutes of Arc lie a dozen Streams falling into Gunpowder Creek, which runs roughly parallel to the Visto, and about a mile south of it. The last of these Branches being close enough to another ten minutes West, upon crossing it, they need only calculate their error as before, and aim slightly north, so as to fall in again with their proper Latitude, ten minutes west of that . . . in such easy Hops thro’ the summer fields and the German cooking, do they progress, Susquehanna to the Allegheny Mountain. Some mornings they awake and can believe that they traverse an Eden, unbearably fair in the Dawn, squandering all its Beauty, day after day unseen, bearing them fruits, presenting them Game, bringing them a fugitive moment of Peace,— how, for days at a time, can they not, dizzy with it, believe themselves pass’d permanently into Dream . . . ?
Summer takes hold, manifold sweet odors of the Fields, and presently the Forest, become routine, and one night the Surveyors sit in their Tent, in the Dark, and watch Fire-flies, millions of them blinking ev’rywhere,— Dixon engineering plans for lighting the Camp-site with them, recalling how his brother George back home, ran Coal-Gas through reed piping along the Orchard wall. Jeremiah will lead the Fire-flies to stream continuously through the Tent in a narrow band, here and there to gather in glass Globes, concentrating their light to the Yellow of a new-risen Moon.
“And when we move to where there are none of these tiny Linkmen?”
“We take ’em with huz . . . ? Lifetime Employment!”
“But how long do they live?”
“Ensign Cheer.”
As the Visto has grown longer behind them, the Philadelphiaward Fringe of the nightly Encampment has lengthen’d to a suburbs dedicated to high (as some would say, low) living. Gaming, corn whiskey, Women able to put up with a heap of uncompensated overtime, Stages knock’d together each nightfall and lanthorn’d into view, to a Murmur as of a great Crowd in Motion, only to be struck again each dawn,— as those for whom it is cheaper to follow than to abandon the Party for business elsewhere, groaning with the Night just past, hoping for a chance to sleep sometime during the Journey, prepare to follow the Axmen through another day. The fast-and-loose artist, the Quartz-scryer, the Vásquez Brothers’ Marimba Quartet, who often play back-up for the Torpedo, to whom it is the musick of his Youth, his home Waters. The marimbas, in great towering Structure assembl’d each evening just outside of camp, pulse along, Chords and Arpeggiations swaying upward to their sharp’d versions, then back down again, sets of Hammers, Hands, and Sleeves all moving together along the rank’d wood Notes, nocturnal, energetic, remembrancing, warning, impelling. . . . The Anthem of the Expedition, as it moves into the Unknown, is “Pepinazos,”— marching, and rolling, but wishing rather to dance.
Pepinazos, nunca
Abrazos, Si me
Quieras, Sí
De Veras,
¡Oigamé!—
Déjaté,
Los Pe-pi-naa-zos!
All summer they labor in the service of the Line, over Codorus, Conewago,— pausing to set up the Sector, dodging inch-and-a-half hailstones, calculating Off-sets, changing Direction,— ’cross Piney Run and Monocacy Road, and the Creeks beyond, till just past Middle Creek, figuring they are about in their Latitude, without bothering to set up the Sector, the Surveyors turn off the Angle calculated to put them another ten minutes on,— at the South Mountain, in among all the ghosts already thick in those parts.
“We are Fools,” proposes Dixon one night. The wind has shifted at about sundown to the SSE, heightening even minor stresses among the Company. “We shouldn’t be runnin’ this Line . . . ?”
Mason regards his Cup of Claret. “Bit late for that, isn’t it?”
“Why aye. I’ll carry it through, Friend, fear not. But something invisible’s going on, tha must feel it, smell it . . . ?”
Mason shrugs. “American Politics.”
“Just so. We’re being us’d again. It doesn’t alarm thee . . . ?”
An accident of the late Light has fill’d Mason’s Orbits with color’d shadows. “Resign? They would bring up the Letter. Immediately. Then?”
Dixon nods glumly, and Mason keeps on, more than he has to. “Tho’ we’re in this together, yet is it easier for you, being the Quaker and not expected to prove combative, t
han for me, who must accordingly bear double the burden of Bravery. Splendid. Did they team us up together like this deliberately? Are you my Penalty, precise to the Groat, for enjoying a Command of my own? For not having seconded Maskelyne at the Transit? Now I have to be Eyre Coote?”
“Bit steep, isn’t i’ . . . ?”
Mason begins fiddling with his Queue, bringing it first over one Shoulder, then the other. “If it were all true,— ev’ry unkind suspicion, ev’ry phantastickal rendering,— would we, knowing all, nonetheless go on? Do what’s clearly our Duty?”
“We sign’d an Agreement.”
“If it meant our Destruction?”
“The ancient matter of the Seahorse must ever prevent us from Resigning. We’ve no choice, but to go on with it, as far as we may.”
“Then as we’ve no choice, I may speak freely and share with you some of my darker Sentiments. Suppose Maskelyne’s a French Spy. Suppose a secret force of Jesuits, receives each Day a summary of Observations made at Greenwich, and transcalculates it according to a system known to the Kabbalists of the Second Century as Gematria, whereby Messages may be extracted from lines of Text sacred and otherwise, a Knowledge preserv’d by various Custodians over the centuries, and since the Last, possess’d by Jesuit and Freemason alike. The Dispute over Bradley’s Obs, then, as over Flamsteed’s before him, would keep ever as their unspoken intention that the Numbers nocturnally obtain’d be set side by side, and arrang’d into Lines, like those of a Text, manipulated till a Message be reveal’d.”
“Bit sophisticated for me. Tho’ I don’t mind a likely Conspiracy, I prefer it be form’d in the interests of Trade,— the mystickal sort you fancy is fair beyond me, I’m but a simple son of the Pit.”
“ ‘Trade.’— Aha. You heard me mention Jesuits,— so now you’re making veil’d allusions to the East India Company, in response,— I do see, yes . . . Drivel, of course.”
“Come, Sir, can you not sense here, there, just ’round the corner, the pattering feet and swift Hands of John Company, the Lanthorns of the East . . . ? the scent of fresh Coriander, the whisper of a Sarong . . . ?”
Mason & Dixon Page 53
