*
Such hours we used to spend in those wonderful labyrinths, the Prince and I, heads bent to our studies on sunny mornings, when the dew lay thick as rain on the grass. A blackbird drank greedily beside us from a pool in the toes of Aphrodite, who stood dripping and chilly in a loose dress of Portland stone, flecked here and there by calcareous streaks, in a gesture of frozen welcome. The paths fell away before us in such a profusion of lanes and hedgerows, such a confusion of trees – oak, ash and scattered birch – that we seemed never to wander the same way twice. Here, a marbled cave set in the hillside called us into the shade; there a tiny cupola offered a dry spot in a brisk spring shower, from which to observe the slow Elbe white in a misty patter. At the foot of the hill a low cultivated maze, cut from sharp yew – muddy most of the time and gleaming with black rainwater – tempted our wanderings further. And when at last we surrendered hope of ever finding the green core and the quiet bench at the centre, we had only to step high and light, giggling and steadying each other by hand and shoulder, across the prickly barriers; and by this leap of faith surmounting every obscurity of path and purpose straight to the secret heart.
In these gardens, on a bright, cold, sunshiny afternoon, I took my leave of him. Snow had fallen in the night and covered the hedgerows in chilly blossoms. The paths trailed away in softness, which our footsteps pressed into hard white bricks as we walked along. I had determined to continue our lessons, even in this, our farewell interview; and so we rambled wet and dirty to the dancing beck running down the far side of the hill. This was the subject of one of our geological experiments. We had thrust a heavy rock in the flow of the water to observe the results. (The Prince’s burgeoning strength had played no small part in this manoeuvre, and I still remember the fine white steam rising off his pink neck after the heat of these exertions.) Now we stood, in the ruins of a checked stream, to mark the changes.
The Prince, a creature of prodigious appetites, had always upon his person some assortment of chocolates or sweetmeats or nuts, mostly collected in the depths of his trouser pockets; and from these he drew forth a continuous supply of treats, which filled the flushed corner of his cheek, and lent to his voice a curious grumbling quality, like the mutterings of a much older man. He seemed, visibly, to sprout before me – such fierce nourishment did he draw from the life around him, in every swallow and breath – and had grown (in his broader, swaggering, big-boned fashion) by the tender age of fifteen till the top of his head almost nudged the tip of my negligible chin. Something had clouded his spirits that day; and he munched in a sullen, ferocious, hungerless fashion, as if he bore the chocolates between his strong white teeth some personal and particular grudge.
‘Observe,’ I said, perched on a high piece of rock to prevent my shoes from soaking through, ‘the effects of long constriction. The choked stream has swelled, outward and downward. The brisk flow now lies stagnant; the sodden soil offers no hope for the new year’s seedlings; the ground itself shudders underfoot. New streams have formed, to right and left, tiny trickles that dissipate over the unfamiliar ground, leaving only a trail of slickness in the snow. On the far side of the rock the ground remains dry, somewhat firmer underfoot; and here and there a film of ice has formed across the stones, though higher up no frost could sink its teeth into the stream.’
The Prince, usually attentive and eager to please (if not to learn), scarcely looked my way as I spoke; and wandered, heedless of his boots, into the soaked turf, splashing as he went. He spat from time to time a mouthful of pistachio shells, then filled his fist with a fresh handful and cracked and chewed. I fell silent at his inattention, in a cold huff. The short day set in frosty blazon on the far side of the hill; we observed only the shadows lengthen and the chill deepen, and a faint glow, as of coal fires, seeping around the edges of the sky.
‘I say,’ he said at last, climbing through the middle of the stream to the rock we had taken such pains to shift, ‘I shall be quite different when you come back. I have decided. Everything will be quite different.’ And he spat again. The dark fell quickly, and soon his crouched figure took on a dusky glow.
‘How sharp the cold makes everything you say,’ I observed, turning aside from his last remark. A fresh fall of snow had begun, and a hundred chilly kisses alighted upon my face and hands. ‘Quite astonishingly clear. I can scarcely see you – perhaps a dozen feet away, a huddled shape – but your voice rings out something astonishing. Even a whisper would carry like a bell.’ And my own voice rang across the bleak hillside, into the night.
‘As I say,’ the Prince persisted, with a thick tongue, ‘I have so many plans. All I need is time. Riding, for a start; I’ve fallen woefully behind. Hespe says a prince who cannot ride is like a woman who cannot dance. There is so much to learn of things that matter, you know. They all say I am growing fat.’
Then with a sudden fierce burst of spirits he bent his back to the great rock he’d sat upon and laboured to shift it from the stream. ‘There was …’ he huffed, ‘nothing wrong … here,’ he grunted, ‘until you … began to meddle. Come on, Müller, bear a hand.’ (There is always a push, as well as a pull, whenever we leave.)
I stepped gingerly through the growing night and the freezing wet. ‘You are the worst kind of fool,’ I muttered to myself, picking my way, ‘a child’s plaything – and a muddy one at that.’ But as I stood soaked to the ankles and bent my back at the shoulder of my puffing Prince, a sudden and careless elation swelled within me – whether at the prospects before me or the noble youth beside me, I could not judge. Together we heaved the great rock from the sucking mud and sent it tumbling down the darkened hill, only a faint crash here and there to speak of its violent journey. But the loosened stream had lain dormant too long, and no fresh flow sprung up in the sodden turf.
‘As I said,’ the Prince repeated, as we strode back through the thickening snow, ‘everything will be different when you come back. I don’t suppose you shall recognize me at all.’
And so I took my leave of him.
*
And so I had come, in considerable confusion of spirits, upon my journey, three weeks before. I kissed my sister Ruth farewell in the bright doorway in Fischersallee at dawn. She stood, ghostly and light as a cobweb in a white dressing-gown, her anxious twining fingers bloodless in my palm, only her face hot and pink in the cold morning. She swayed a-tiptoe on her left foot, kicking her right leg behind – to balance her chin and lips to my face above her, though I stood on the cobbled street below the doorstep. Dear Ruth, both child and mother to me, for she came bawling into the world through the dark portal of our mother’s death. And the terror and cracked misery of her first tender weeks seemed the voice of the mourning which her birth occasioned, as if in those natal corridors she had been privy to the great secrets of chance and fate, whose whispers we spend our lives attending – and these she cried horrible and loud into the world. Now, plump and rosy cheeked at nineteen, long necked, she wet my face with tears, repressing the sniffles of her snub nose with a delicate finger, poked against its tip. ‘You shall smudge me,’ I whispered, ‘see, oh look, the powder has run upon your chin. Be careful of my complexion. You are an armful of damp, of cold and damp.’
‘I shall mind your Prince for you,’ she promised, her eyes bright with the dew of broken sleep.
‘Not too near,’ I teased, sobbing freely now in the light bones of her arms. But the knock of my father’s stick – clip, clip on the roof of the carriage – and the following crack of the coachman’s whip broke the spell of departure. I suffered the lapse of her embrace and fled into the morning.
My father accompanied me to Hamburg, where the snow fell upon the docks and disappeared in the endless thirst of the sea as quick as footsteps vanish behind waltzing feet. We had been silent over much of the long coach-ride, a silence which I attributed on his part to a widower’s loneliness – how heavy the absence of his children weighed on him.
‘Ruth is blooming, Father – don’t you
think?’ I said once, to turn his thoughts to the child left him.
‘Perhaps she shall be married when you return’ was all he said.
My silence, I confess, was rooted in fear – at the thought of the scope and reach of the world outside my father’s shadow. A sailor had lowered my box into the jolly-boat and his oars slapped against the pier in the swell of the wave, as he waited for his passenger, to row him out to the Leipzig, dipping and kicking in the blow coming over the North Sea.
My father’s words to me then rang now in my ears, as I fastened my overstuffed portmanteau (packed with quills and papers, unguents, powders, garments of every nicety and description, a pouch of varied bolus against the sea-sickness, against insomnia, against all manners of discomforts and disquiets) – and waited for landfall, in that empty sleeplessness only a traveller knows.
‘Beware of American women,’ he said, smiling and looking up, touching me lightly at the elbow. ‘And do not be lightly taken in.’
I stooped to him now, with a wet hand against the fat of his cheek – curious, how our bodies teach us pity and love, simply, while our difficult thoughts must scramble to con the lesson – and kissed his brow. Then the swiftness of things removed me, after a clumsy, murky fall, into the bottom of the boat, and the waves receded against his receding steps, and both bore us away. The large damp snow did truly glitter in the shine of my weeping eyes, till I hardened my heart anew at the thought of the journey before me – as if my father had cast me off, and I had not clamoured to be sent. I sat low and dejected in the boat, nursing with tender hands a bruised knee, a bruised heart.
Well, I thought now, mounting the dank companion ladder upon legs not so much used to the vicissitudes of the sea as numbed to them: my father shall see how little good I am to anyone. And I determined then and there, in the full stubbornness of youthful inconsistency: to begin afresh in a new world, a new man, unfettered by fathers, and to champion this strange prophet of a hollowed earth to the ringing skies, never to return.
And then, considerably heartsick, and at a loss for misery or hope, as one may be at a loss for words, I lifted my head into the wind of the sea, and, stepping on deck, glanced across the confusion of sail and rigging at America, this New World, up the fat of the Chesapeake River – bordered by green threshing banks of trees, their roots crumbling into the muddy waters – towards Norfolk.
As we sailed towards the harbour, gently cutting the sleek water like brown silk on either side of us, I leaned tenderly against the rigging, so as not to disturb the careful line of my red coat. The cording was damp, of course, and I quickly withdrew. Lifting a handkerchief from my breast pocket, I covered my hand and gingerly clasped a knot of rope to steady myself – then looked towards this ‘New World, shining’, as our poet has said, ‘like the bottom of a chimpanzee’.
Norfolk, as the ship’s boy had declared, was a shabby little hole: the docks stretched hesitantly forth from the shore, as if they did not quite trust their wooden steps; the few ships themselves looked rather knocked-about. Most of the craft ducking and shivering in the brisk morning were fishing smacks, riverboats, jollies. A few small steamers, curious monsters like floating stoves, shed their black plumes on the cold air. To be fair, I noted a healthy bustle ashore, and stretched my gaze to determine any peculiar dignity in the activity of these ‘free men’ – but across the water, the dark figures, loading and unloading, swabbing, scrubbing, hammering, binding, barking orders, directions, good wishes, good humour, declaring their wares and their misfortunes, appeared no bigger to my eye than the length of my finger, no grander than any men should be, bent upon their business, in the bleak and the chill of the winter day.
The stench of the harbour blew across the face of the ship, and I stood in considerable perplexity, whether to suffer the noxious gale or loosen my grip upon the rigging, and stand uncertainly, applying the handkerchief to my nose. At such times I draw on a concoction of my own preparation, lemon bon-bons dipped in rosewater and a bath, surprisingly, of parsley. These dainty lozenges, no bigger between thumb and finger than a single redcurrant, sweeten the exhalation wonderfully, and drench even the most inadvertent sigh in balmy melancholy. I keep a small tin upon my person always, and tapped it tenderly now, in the breast pocket of my red coat. I consider it also a harmless vanity that the pucker of citron in the pocket of my cheek lends a contemplative, brooding air to my slightest expressions, conveys a certain ruminative dignity. I slipped a hand to the box above my heart and filched a powdered candy and dropped it upon my tongue, whose secretions produced a soothing syrup that stilled my fluttered nerves.
A sudden gust – a flurry of white steps across the crests of the river – tipped the vessel on its heels, and nearly knocked me off my own. I steadied myself just in time upon the nearest shoulder I could find, and looked down surprised to see the mottled face of the ship’s boy smiling up at me. And so I clutched him still, as under that freshened impetus we turned into the breeze, backed sail and cast anchor in the flowing harbour – reflecting on the great mystery of propinquity, and how much of our hearts we give to what is at hand; for I confess the touch of the boy was a great comfort to me as we rode at anchor in those strange waters. We are never utterly alone where a touch of man or boy may soothe us. But I had come thus far to rid myself of comforts.
I released him at last with great reluctance and a groschen of silver – which he accepted swiftly and disappeared. After a considerable and, it seemed to me, quite fruitless fuss, the crew lowered the long-boat against the skittering waves, and into that first our boxes and the packets of mail were deposited, and then ourselves – a handful of passengers, most of them sorry specimens of German manhood, dark-skinned and dirty from the voyage, and reeking of schnapps, singing raucously as the oars beat steadily to the docks. The full ice of my elegance had been necessary to separate myself from them over the long voyage, and I plumed myself at least on the thought that no one could fail to distinguish among us upon arrival. But a fine cold spray blew across our faces from the disturbed and wintry waters, interrupted only by heavier doses when the blades caught the fat of a wave. And by the time I took my turn to clamber awkwardly out of the boat on to the wooden pier, I was soaked through, from the bilge and the spray and the still colder waters of loneliness.
The wind was as chill as bones as I took my first unsteady steps on terra firma. The sun had dipped under a white cloud, and though the air, sharp and clear, promised a suspension from the soft and heavenly assaults of winter, a week’s worth of snow lay already on the ground – trampled and muddied by a hundred passing feet. My heart shrank and froze as I thought of the great country before me. The Atlantic is no doubt daunting, but its blank space is a fit canvas for a lonely imagination, and I could murmur Byron and be content. Only when I saw the angles and corners of my destination did I suspect my insignificance. A row of low wooden houses ran along the harbour over an earthen road, foul with refuse caught in perpetual alternation between freeze and thaw. Here, half-eaten joints of meat and rotted vegetables lay caught in a bank of brown ice; there, the passage of horses left a muddy pool of discarded custard for the dogs to lick at. I had reached America.
I held my soiled handkerchief against the nib of my nose to muffle the fetid air, and called for a man, any man, please! any kind soul – bending my tongue with great difficulty to pierce the cold in the unaccustomed words – to help me with my box. This I directed to be sent by the next mail packet, up the Potomac, to the Dewdrop Inn, at Pactaw, the home of that ‘meteor of American science’ (according, at least, to his petition) the great Professor Syme. And, having attended to these details, I bent my steps, halting, half-drunk from long disuse, into the town, such as it was – with my overstuffed portmanteau clutched in the crook of my elbow so that my delicate hands might stay warm in their thick pockets. ‘What has brought me here?’ I murmured, as I dropped another bon-bon upon my tongue to sweeten the taste of loneliness in my mouth. ‘To what pass have I come?’
> Over the course of the long voyage I had dipped into those delightful Sketches of American Life by the Frenchman de Crevecoeur – and felt, I confess, considerably cheered by the prospects he described. ‘No sooner’, he wrote, ‘does a European arrive, no matter of what condition, than his eyes are opened upon fair vistas; he hears his language spoke, he retraces many of his own country manners, he perpetually hears the names of families and towns with which he is acquainted; he sees happiness and prosperity in all places disseminated; he meets with hospitality, kindness and plenty everywhere.’ Well, I thought – I have arrived. And I have met as yet only squalor and obscurity; the marks of enduring labour and hasty pleasures; houses erected in a week; neighbourhoods cobbled together in a month; roads left to themselves and the seasons in appalling disrepair; filth everywhere, minded only by loose pigs grubbing and grunting through the streets, even in the thick of winter; and the people themselves – hearty enough, I suppose, and bearing a rough dignity – dwarfed by the scale of the country in which they found themselves. Not a word of comfort from my mother tongue; not a name familar to my ear; and plenty only of snow and sky and forest and the broad stretch of that enormous river. Little enough, I found, of the beauties of home.
I discovered myself, in the midst of these musings, at the coachhouse; and, determined to put some part of the way between me and Pactaw behind me before nightfall, and sick to my heart of the water, I leapt in at the back of a packed coach and squeezed into a space on the bench. At first the brisk pace of the carriage and the comfortable feel of the ground beneath our wheels inspired in me a new hope and I turned, surprised at my own curiosity, to my neighbour – a heavily built farmer, I supposed, by his beefy hands and thick, mud-caked boots, returning from business in town. He wore a squashed hat over his dirty yellow and grey hairs, and crossed his arms comfortably over the protuberance of his considerable belly, as if the stomach had extended for the express purpose of providing a convenient rest for his limbs. In a word (or two), a short, fat man with a broad look of contentment about him.
The Syme Papers Page 16
