The Smell of Telescopes

by Hughes, Rhys

  Thus the reader may be fully assured of Mr Humphrey’s indolence. He is not even willing to pursue his chosen hobby with a minimum of genuine effort, but must find a short-cut to compulsion. While his brothers take the trouble to build up an accumulation of appetising heirlooms, sparing no pains in learning the locations of secret auctions, roving far afield in the quest for a Clarice Cliff or a Chesterfield, our sullen Humphrey simply casts his eye for a house already crammed with such treasures and promptly moves in. Then he sets to work licking each article raw, garret to basement, much as a conventional gourmand passes over soups and pasta to the pudding. But the building is vast, and a dilettante is languorous in matters of motion, so that by the time our tale begins, though he has occupied the manse for a full decade, our hero has only just reached the end of the hall where the sable timepiece nestles in a recess like a bad odour. Humphrey’s suspense as he approached the clock I need not attempt to describe. His senses were overwound.

  Reaching the base of the chronometer, he applied tongue to wood and continued in a single fluid motion upward. At first, all went as well as he hoped. In a rather exciting instant he had the full tang: iron pipes, puddles splashed by freckled girls, soot, roots, gears of a second-hand bicycle, crumbly cheese, apples, wine mulled with a rusty poker, feather dusters, earlobes. He was astonished at the range of savours to be found in this unique antique. When he stretched on tiptoe to lap the numerals and spidery hands, his pleasure was interrupted by a chilling event. The clock actually seemed to laugh at him; more a cynical snarl than a true expression of mirth. And then the mechanism—which had always operated as smoothly as a nun’s thigh—stopped dead.

  Our hero abandoned his repast and slumped to the floor. His tongue burned, as if it had been singed by a very small explosion. The baroque dial now mockingly indicated the exact hour at which his palate had met its match. Humphrey dined at eight. Placing his ear to what he presumed must be the pendulum case, he struggled to catch further examples of the vulgar guffaw. But the clock was utterly silent. During the minutes that followed the relinquishing of luncheon, the dilettante staggered to the nearest chair—a Chippendale with a gadrooned square apron in laggard style, and carved tassle and ruffle in pierced vase-shaped splat—and perspired quietly in the consciousness that he had somehow spoiled his dessert. Cuisine is the art of good timing.

  Since Humphrey had taken over the residence, the chronometer— like a real grandfather—had minded its own business, and the dilettante had never troubled himself about its maintenance. As he thought about it, it seemed peculiar that not once had he ever wound the thing up. Somehow it coped perfectly well without human intervention. Mechanics was a mystery to our hero—he had a dim notion that Archimedes was a chap who lounged in the bath—and he was quite incapable of grasping the finer points of a clock’s anatomy. But he was sure they needed regular attention, of the circular sort, in the same way that a schoolboy must have an arm twisted to operate at maximum potential.

  With a finger on the wood, he felt each side of the machine; but no key or hole did he discover. How then was the device to be rewound? More than this: the frame seemed to be quivering, as if stifling more laughs. “Odd!” said Mr Humphrey. “Now I can hardly bear my hand on it. Better to call in professional advice, I think.”

  Moving to his candlestick telephone, he made his first call in ten years. In Quinn worked a jeweller who knew most of what there was to know about timepieces. Mr Humphrey summoned him to the house and soothed his nerves while waiting by nibbling the marquetry off a small Jean Francois Oeben cabinet. Eating between meals was always his problem; he was ruining his health with an irregular diet.

  Not that this much concerned the jeweller when he arrived. A chubby American with a Yale education, he was skilled at picking locks, but the dark grandfather defeated him. The thing that caught his attention right away were brackets fixed on the top, twisted as if something, possibly bells, had been torn off them. But there was no way of winding up the device; he did not think this indicated that it was weight-driven. Was Humphrey quite sure it had been running continuously since he bought the manse? If this were the case, then it must be an atmospheric clock.

  Grimacing unpleasantly, the dilettante said: “I should be deceiving you, and that to no good purpose, if I laid claim to possessing information on that topic. What exactly do you mean by this?”

  The jeweller than launched into a turgid lecture on an arcane field of clock design, which had involved attempts to create a pseudoperpetual motion device, resulting in James Cox’s remarkable machine of 1760. As I assume the reader knows, it is impossible to obtain more energy from the output of a system than is delivered to its input—the rules of physics are very strict about ensuring a loss of energy in any apparatus with moving parts. This has something to do with Thermodynamics and equations which resemble rococo ornamentation.

  Cox managed to cheat these laws, at least to the satisfaction of an ignorant public, by utilising barometric pressure to prime his clock. An elaborate winding arrangement was constructed which depended on separate reservoirs of mercury—some 150lbs of the expensive liquid—which, kept in a state of unstable equilibrium, amplified pressure differences via a set of levers: a force which was applied to raising a weight which drove the actual clock mechanism. This ingenious contraption was improved by a French engineer, Jean Leon Reutter, in the 1920s, using a liquefied gas and a saturated vapour as well as mercury.

  Mr Humphrey yawned, vexed and ashamed at the fiasco of the lecture, which the jeweller was delivering for his benefit alone. “That is all very well,” he replied; “but can you open it?”

  “Not without cutting it in two,” answered the expert; “but it would be a shame to damage such an unusual machine. There is no way of getting inside; I cannot pick a lock which has no keyhole. Perhaps the case-door can be forced. Be patient and pass me my chisel.”

  “Certainly, certainly, here it is. If you succeed, I shall pay your fee with a fine wrought-iron Torchère.”

  “I would rather the Hepplewhite commode I passed in the corridor. I cannot see it very well from this distance; but it is not unsightly. You must also throw in a few appropriate stools.”

  That evening brought an hour’s hard work to the jeweller, who found it a difficult task even to insert the blade of his tool in the gap made by the frame and door. At last he gave it up; he admitted defeat, adding he had never encountered a clock remotely like this one before. In final desperation, he lifted a stethoscope from his box and probed the sternum of the thing. Listening intently, he frowned. “I am ashamed to say,” said he, “that I can hear breathing.”

  “Now this is unexpected,” commented Mr Humphrey; “though I did read an article in the paper about a toad which took up residence in a cello. Might there be an animal of some sort within?”

  The jeweller pursed his lips. “I should prefer to think the mercury is sighing. But look at this: the maker’s name on the faceplate has been eroded almost to nothing. Pass me my mirror.”

  It had not occurred to Mr Humphrey to seek writing on the device: a clock is not a book. Nonetheless, complying with the jeweller’s request, he watched in fascination as the fellow angled the mirror at the base of the dial and shone an electric torch on the brass. A pale name shimmered into sight. Struggling to pronounce the reversed letters, the dilettante whispered the maker’s name and city—Mortice d’Arthur, Chaud-Mellé—in tones of instinctive respect. But he immediately added that he had heard of neither; nor did he believe his friends capable of helping him in the matter. Did the jeweller know anything relevant?

  “No, I am sorry to say I do not,” said the expert. “It seems rather alpine, from what I can judge by the syllables. Swiss, I would guess. Perhaps the respiration is due to some kind of cuckoo? Mountain craftsmen are an idiosyncratic breed. In some valleys they are obsessed with automata. My dog is Swiss—I lubricate his cogs with brandy.”

  Mr Humphrey was still tired. He rubbed his eyes and pandiculated.
I imagine that at this point the jeweller made ready to depart. Before he had packed away all his equipment, the dilettante offered him a glass of wine and a pinch of Regency snuff. This was the sum of his payment, due to his manifest failure with the clock. Wine was accepted, but snuff was refused with a horrified expression. Mr Humphrey could see that the chap was struggling with some superstition which clung about the offer like a damp silk scarf. At last he had the reason—with an uneasy shrug of his shoulders, the expert revealed his quaint fears.

  “Snuff? Ah no, it is not that I object to, so much as the resultant sneeze. I am wary of the legend which is attached to the dunes outside. A bishop once blew his nose in chapel. He was divinely punished by being buried under tons of sand; and there he will stay until as many sneezes as the grains which cover him are loosed in the vicinity. When this number is reached, the final sneezer will have to take his place.”

  Humphrey was aware of this tale, but he regarded it with a sardonic smile. “In that case, be sure not to catch cold.”

  Later, alone again, the dilettante mused on the mysterious clock. A search through his extensive library revealed no volumes about breathing chronometers; one atlas alone showed Chaud-Mellé, which turned out to be a tiny republic some thirteen castles south of Liechtenstein. As for the maker, Mortice d’Arthur, information was as scanty as flourishes in that style of decoration known as Desornamentado, popularised by Herrera. But I am not writing a history of fashion. Mr Humphrey, who had travelled no further afield than his own county, started to conjure up visions of this hilly state, doubtless an ordered, neat sort of town. There would be houses in many bright colours; girls with mittens and chocolate kisses; bankers in smart suits; teeth without plaque; alpenhorns.

  Unable to confirm such assumptions with his available books, he was encouraged to make his first independent purchase. There were many tomes to be browsed in the antique shop in Abell—he resolved to make his way there on the morrow. He knew the address; it was staring at him from the piece of paper he picked from the floor of his passage. Since moving in, he had been snowed under by these advertisements, all of which he fed to the stove in his parlour. At last, he was going to respond to one—such belated victory makes my job worthwhile. Persistence with leaflets is an essential quality for a salesman. Now I was delighted for Herr Fluchen, who had never doubted my ability to snare good customers. But I am being disingenuous—the proprietor in question is myself. A futile attempt at suspense has kept me from revealing this fact.

  Lest my readers also accuse me of missing key descriptive passages, I shall take the opportunity to belatedly delineate the house in which our Humphrey and his furniture dwell. It was a large edifice, a folly whose Gothic appearance was due more to crumbling stonework than architectural intent. A web of cracks covered the exterior plaster, turning the grubby façade into a spider’s lair. Broken chimneys resembled rearing gargoyles or half-finished sculptures; the gutters had sagged, so that the black pipes now frowned over the myopic windows like brows. It seemed, owing to its height, to deliberate wings—bat’s or griffin’s—but there were none. The dilettante cared naught for making repairs and had allowed the wooden balconies to rot to powder and blow away.

  After deciding on a rare course of action, Humphrey took to his bed with alacrity and slept soundly for a while, clutching the leaflet under his pillow. Before dawn, he was troubled by dreams of a sensational, but rather confused, nature: the clock was calling to him. Inside, snug as a wasp in an apple, or an insult in a compliment, a skeletal figure coaxed him, again and again: “Let me out, sir, let me out!” This thing was more than just bone, of course; it had a tongue and larynx with which to call him, but the skin was stretched so tight over the frame that it appeared more like a fleshy paint on the ribs and limbs. “Let me out, sir!” There was no great malice in the tone; rather it was sad and cynical, suffused with an ineffable jealousy. Humphrey compared the voice to that of a man whose girlfriend, having spurned him, still fusses his cat. Finally, the sibilant plea broke into a choking laugh—half ecstatic, half terrified—which made the dilettante sit bolt upright.

  Naturally, when fully awake, the voice was no longer to be heard. A ghost or bugaboo has a knack of keeping in the margins of the senses. So Humphrey was easily persuaded of the insubstantiality of his experience; he put it down to hallucinations occasioned by gastroenteritis, which in turn had been brought on by licking an unsterilised timepiece. Dressing, he made an early breakfast and, for the first time in his life, observed a sunrise. The speed with which the solar disc climbed over the horizon surprised him. He closely studied the leaflet he had taken to bed; there were precise directions on how to find the antique shop in Abell. As has been stated, Herr Fluchen was very eager for customers to cross his threshold. Humphrey, unaware of the ridiculous myth which surrounded the proprietor, had no fears about entering the shop. Had he known, it would have altered nothing—the dilettante was a sceptic.

  Accordingly, he ventured out into the morning, carefully locked the door of his abode and trotted down the road toward the village. The tall dunes blocked the rays of the low sun; it was still as chill as night in their lumpy shadows. Mr Humphrey was not a fast walker: he reached Abell after Herr Fluchen—a conventional riser—opened shop. There is little need to queue in this store; the dealer was delighted to welcome the one customer he thought he would never entice through his portals. After the standard period of browsing, the dilettante turned to him and cautiously inquired as to the comprehensiveness of his stock of books. Herr Fluchen led him into a side-room, with a sagging ceiling whose rafters were held up by pillars of tomes, and gestured at the scene.

  “What exactly did you have in mind?” he asked, with a note of pride in his voice. “My collection is extensive.”

  “Yes, indeed, I am sure,” said Mr Humphrey heartily, “and I note an impressive column of atlases. But, tell me, as you are a foreign fellow, and knocked about in Central Europe during your youth, I would be gratified to know if you have ever heard of Chaud-Mellé?”

  “Often,” answered the proprietor; “but it appears to belong to that category of places which exist more in the geography of memory than in a concrete form. Other examples might be quoted—Mirenburg, Binscombe, Dalkey, Lladloh. Do not all these towns have a familiar ring to them? Yet I challenge you to locate them on any map.”

  “Perhaps you are right; only, looking at a clock last night, I came across the name being used as the home address of the designer who built it, so you will understand my eagerness to learn more. Have you a volume printed in Chaud-Mellé, for instance? I can afford to reward you well; I can exchange a brace of Churriguera desks.”

  “Excuse me,” cried Herr Fluchen, “but my upbringing in Berlin means I can appreciate only furniture conceived in the Jugendstil style. Yet I will see what I can do for you—there are some dusty missals written in Romansch here. Yes, this may be of use: a work discussing the quality of pâtisseries. Chaud-Mellé had a very good one.”

  The reader must be informed that, although true, this statement did not help Humphrey. The book in question had a whole chapter missing; the very one they sought. Muttering about mice, Herr Fluchen searched among the columns for less edible tomes. There was nothing actually published in Chaud-Mellé, but a few texts composed in neighbouring states held the occasional snippet of gossip. In Janez Vajkard Valvasor’s Die Ehre Des Herzogthums Crain, the dilettante learned that Chaud-Mellé was crammed with clock-towers, so many that there was an hour for every citizen; in the depths of Thomas Ariel’s Kruptos: the Micropaedia, he was pleased to discover that most of these timepieces had been designed by one man, Mortice d’Arthur; in Papus Levi’s Arcane Enabler, a manual devoted to extending mortal longevity, the collector was intrigued by the writer’s claim that d’Arthur had achieved a lifespan of over three centuries. Mr Humphrey felt a picture was gradually emerging.

  He was shocked, it must be admitted, to find that his vision of the tiny republic was almost completely wrong. H
ere was no jovial town awash with melting snow and vibrating to the rhythms of yodellers. Chaud-Mellé was an urban pit more gloomy than Ipswich—a chaotic place with a maze of narrow streets, an ineffectual government and a morbid populace. With houses packed so tightly together that daylight never filtered into the thoroughfares, it was a metropolis which bred villainy and vice at every corner. Devilish was the word which jumped into Mr Humphrey’s mind. Even the cable-cars went down, rather than up: into yawning fissures where no mortal could be expected to ski. As for chocolates and alpenhorns, there were murderous cartels controlling both; mittens were banned outright. In short, the city was not a tourist destination.

  Turning the pages of other tomes, and breathing that bookish fungus which makes bibliophilia such a heady pastime, Humphrey at last stumbled on an account of the clock-maker. Mortice d’Arthur had gathered one myth about his shoulders. Here was a book called The Ingolstadt Legends, by a Bavarian scholar, Pastor Rowlands, and it told the tale in verse. This is a standard satirical technique, but Mr Humphrey suspected it operated less on an allegorical level than might be supposed. With the linguistic aid of Herr Fluchen, the dilettante was soon thrilling over the impudent cantos, lush stanzas and mock-ghastly rhymes.