‘Fine country, this,’ I ventured in timid experiment upon my unfamiliar tongue. And bitterly cold, I added to myself, as the wind blew about our ears, delighting, it seemed, in the scope of its playing fields.
‘So ‘tis, so ‘tis,’ he replied, staring out behind, as the darkening road lost itself in snow and woodland.
‘Somewhat large, perhaps?’ I queried. The road itself rattled the carriage considerably and ran through forest and broad fields, up and down the low, awkward hills, deep into the vast continent. The sense of profligate space, of excess, of inhuman abundance, almost overwhelmed me; and we often passed several miles before spotting the next glow of a cosy window, or breathing the sweet dry smoke of a chimney fire. The dark had fallen astonishingly swift and full, and there was no moon to light the road, just the glow of the carriage lanterns amid the thousand shuddering shadows that attended them. Only the eerie suggestion of endless snow illuminated the bulk of the land we drove through.
‘Room for us all, room for us all,’ he repeated, though, in point of fact, he left little for his neighbours to either side of him, squeezed out by the swell of his paunch.
‘You haven’t’, I cried above the rumble of the wheels, getting straight to the point, ‘by any chance … heard of a fellow … by the name of Syme? You see, I’ve come rather a long way to have a look at him.’
“The Professor?’ says he, and my heart leapt – perhaps this American was greater than I knew.
‘Yes,’ I stammered, ‘yes, yes. The exact same.’
‘Well, I say Professor,’ the fat man continued, ‘but I don’t know that he’s anything like, to be honest. We all call him the Professor, because it pleases him – and there’s no harm in a fellow being pleased with himself So far as I can see. Sometimes I’ve heard him called better; sometimes worse. The “wizard”, for one – though if that’s better or worse, I can’t say. Then there’s “bluebell”, on account of that devilish lantern he carries about with him, always digging and burning infields and what-not. I’ve had him round my farm a dozen times. A great one for talking on the job, as they say – still, no harm in that, to my way of thinking, and I don’t mind taking a sip of whiskey with any man, even if it is my own. Not that I’d trust him an inch with my daughter, or the slaves, for that matter; too clever with words by half, if you ask me. Still, he’s clever with his hands, too – I can’t deny it. And as I always says, the hands don’t lie; any fellow good with his hands got some good in him. It’s in the nature of things, you see. And he’s done me a good turn or two in the past. Wonderful way with manure, he has – spent a pretty penny on his “experiments”, he calls ‘em, and I’ve never been the loser by it. Wonderful stuff – well, as you can imagine, some of his nicknames come from, that; but this being mixed company, I won’t discuss ‘em. Still, I don’t mind letting him loose on my land – has a way of finding something I’ve walked by a hundred times, and, like as not, it’ll make me money. And as I say, there’s no harm in that …’ This phrase seemed to be his motto, and carried him through life in amiable if selfish complacency, perfectly content with anything that ‘did no harm’.
Well, I cannot say if I was cheered or cast down by this account; but I resolved to question no one else, for fear of the answers I might turn up. The rest of the journey through the white land passed in sleep or a wakefulness so near it that the only difference between them was a dim awareness that the rumbling clatter of the horses gave the rhythm to my dreams. I remember the dreams, too – for they haunted me several days, as dreams do, like shadows following me at every step, dragging behind me, rich and awful shadows thick enough to catch and tangle in my feet.
I saw my father, flushed with wine, turning towards me, caught in some lascivious embrace; and myrmidons and medusas, hags and harlots, sweet pink lasses and glittering ladies flitted before me in awful pageant, each bending their painted lips to my father’s face and lingering lewdly in his arms before the dream passed on. His wig had been tugged loosely from his dishevelled grey hairs and lay about his neck; his shirt stained with wine had been torn open to the heart, the buttons scattered; his spectacles (and this in particular struck me as horrible and shameful) were cracked and dangling useless from one ear; and only then did I discern how his bleared eyes blinked miserably into the dark, and turned with fear to the next pale form that folded him in its insistent arms. Then the dream shifted and the women faded like ghosts at dawn and I crawled into his empty bed. When I rolled over to find a patch of warmth under the thick white blankets, I began to sink, and I knew the bed was a white sea, and I fell terribly slowly down until-infinitely gentle – my soft cheek struck the bottom and lay against the hard rock, nodding a little in the echo of the waves that reached the sea-floor, nodding, nodding.
This rock was the farmer’s shoulder, which, upon waking, I discovered had cushioned my sleepy head without stirring, on the principle, I suppose, that there was ‘no harm done’. I shook myself, suddenly clear-eyed in the sharp, cold air, and thanked him (to which he grunted, as I had expected …). In truth, I was glad, for the second time that day, of a human touch, though a brisk application of my handkerchief removed any trace of his dirty collar. How vast the loneliness of an uninhabited country late at night, careless of the tiny creatures who travel through it! We huddle together in towns, puffed up by brick and mortar, towers and minarets and steeples, to shrink the sky above our heads lest we suspect the huge indifference that surrounds us. In the open country there is no mistaking the scale of our pretensions, six feet high in a waste of empty miles. I had a new vision of my mission: the insignificant come to investigate the obscure.
The carriage dragged up a slow hill, bordered by thick brush netted with snow. A line of birch trees, pale as consumption, stretched on either side, and shivered from time to time their powdered necks. A cold wind opened a crack in the clouds and I saw my first stars in the New World: remarkably like the constellations, I must confess, that glittered above the Prince’s balcony. I felt them daring me to journey beyond their glance. This seemed perfectly far enough, thank you – though if Professor Syme is in the right, we shall dig to the hollows below and escape them, after all. The snow had stopped; the night had grown almost too cold to breathe in. At last, the sweating horses staggered to the top, snuffing the sharp air in misty snorts; and as I craned my neck round the side of the carriage, a clutter of lights appeared below.
‘Not long now,’ the farmer muttered, almost tender, strangely softened towards me in my sleep.
‘What town is that?’ I asked, my tongue stupid with the cold.
‘Newton,’ he said, in a muffled grunt. And I thought again of de Crevecoeur and his comfortable promise to the European: ‘he perpetually hears the names of families and towns with which he is acquainted …’ Yes, I considered, he is in the right. ‘They’ll give you a bed at the Grapes,’ the fat man continued, ‘if you mention my name – O’Day, that is.’
It was then for the first time I realized how easily I could make myself again, in a world of strangers. My every step and word ventured forth without history, declared itself alone, a bright new flag of its author’s disposition. The snow itself lay untouched over the barren plains no purer than I – a recent snowfall as it were had covered my rutted lanes and presented a virgin landscape to the eye. For the first time I knew what it meant to have reached America. (Only later considering even Neuburg had once been a new town.)
I discovered the Grapes with little difficulty; indeed, the carriage tumbled us straight into its white lap, a high bank of snow shunted from the roof into the road. Weariness and cold battled in my exhausted frame to determine which should carry the day – the stiffness of the former or the shivers of the latter – and several skirmishes resulted in a divided field. In short, my teeth chattered and my leg slept. I stumbled in a mincing, huddled manner towards the glow within, hugging my portmanteau to my breast. Drawing my watch with clumsy fingers from its fob (a difficult manoeuvre, encumbered as I was), I was
astonished to discover the hour had only just turned nine – whereupon a peal of frosty bells rang out from some darkened church, a cheerful and welcome reminder of comfort and home, that saddened me none the less in the wide silence that followed. ‘Remember,’ called the fat man, doffing his dirty hat and shaking the flakes from it, ‘just mention O’Day, no harm in that.’ Well, I thought, the Frenchman was right again – they are a hospitable people. (A fact about which I soon had cause for complaint.)
Pushing through the front door, I entered a low room, thick with smoke and cluttered with chairs and tables circled round the central hearth. A broad crackling blaze leapt up from the grate, and an assortment of gentlemanly articles hung from a low fender surrounding it: boots, vests, shawls, coats and even, to my surprise, a single stocking steamed and reeked in the fiery glow. An assortment of gentlemen – I honoured them with the benefit of my doubts – camped around the fender, fluttering their fingers in the grateful warmth: mostly thickset dirty fellows with ham fists and a week’s growth of beard. (I confess that the first examples of American manhood I had encountered did not impress me by their native looks or the natural dignities of their freedom. They seemed a squat, dark, bustling race, energetic rather than elegant, gruff not graceful – a plain-spoken people, fashioned for use not beauty.) From time to time, one of the crowd would clasp his burned hands to his knees and let out a hissing sigh of agony and delight as the hot fabric pressed against his skin. They muttered among themselves, though I caught little of their speech, deducing only that they all seemed in business together, of a mechanical nature.
Mr O’Day‘s name, as promised, assured me of a room for the night. ‘We’re full up, so it is,’ said the matronly creature I had accosted as she bore an empty pitcher to the kitchens, ‘but my daughter squeeze into bed with us very happy. One moment, and I prepare her rooms. Sit you down and the good girl bring you your supper so forth.’
The strange turn of her phrases alerted me to her origins, and I addressed her now in our native tongue. ‘I have thought it,’ she said, ‘as soon as you come in. We get no gentleman here, in the old way, you understand.’
Shy of the men huddled about the fire, I asked to take my supper in my rooms, and she assured me she would attend to it herself. ‘Their ways are not our ways,’ she whispered, touching me on the elbow, ‘I understand. But we gets used, you know, we gets used to anything.’ So I dripped gently at the fringes of the hearth until I could venture upstairs.
There a small red fire and a large black cat greeted my arrival; and I stripped my dank garments – my fine red coat and soaked cravat – from my shivering limbs and hung them sodden from the edges of the mantle. Setting a three-legged stool in front of the blaze, I perched upon it and summoned the cat with a cold red hand to my lap, where it sat upon my wriggling thawing fingers and fell asleep. I have made a bad start, I thought, in some obscure way, disheartened by my shyness in front of the rough circle of men. My vows to remake myself seemed to have melted already, disappeared as quickly as the caked ice from my boots propped against the grate. I must begin again, I thought, again, again.
The cat had fallen heavily asleep on my leg, and I believe I had joined it, nodding in the grateful warmth – day-dreaming of the many ways in which I might fashion myself from scratch. The extent of the fictions I could practise upon an unsuspecting people spread before me in giddy array – until, in dozy shame, I realized that nothing betrays our true natures so well as the manner in which we hope to fashion ourselves anew. I could do no better than to bide my time – begin in silence and grow gently out of it. The cat himself seemed to concur, purring and stretching his fine limbs towards the shrinking fire, when a sharp rap at the door awoke both of us, with a start on my part and sharp yawl and scratching leap on his.
‘Are you ill?’ demanded a lanky, hatchet-faced gentleman at the door, tightly packaged in a dirty apron upon which he rubbed the red of his knuckles.
‘I beg your pardon?’ I answered sleepily.
‘Quarantined, perhaps? Or drunk already, and unfit for company?’ He batted a fly from his hollow cheek, stippled by pock-marks like a patch of sand in the rain.
‘Not at all, not at all, I assure you. Quite the contrary. I had only just sat down from a long …’
‘Then, sir,’ he broke in, ‘I must tell you that I cannot accommodate you on these terms; we have no private suppers here – you may dine with myself or my guests. We are an open people; our company, I believe, is good enough for ourselves, and quite sufficient for any strangers – so I have been told, at any rate, and see no cause to dispute.’
‘I deeply regret causing offence; only you see, the long journey had greatly fatigued me. I confess I was ignorant of the manners of the country, else …’
‘Our manners, I believe, are very good manners. We don’t wish for lessons, thank you. Your supper has been laid out below. I’ll ask you not to trouble my wife any more with that mumbo-jumbo you folks like to spit about.’
And so the insistence of mine host accomplished what my own good resolutions could not. After carefully accoutring myself in a sky-blue smoking jacket, still dry, drawn from the depths of my portmanteau, tidying my long hair (my particular pride) and lighting a small cigar in the remains of the fire, I ventured below.
A long table had been laid athwart the hearth, and here the company had assembled, still steaming from their attentions to the fire. I gathered then that the gentlemen I had the honour to dine with belonged to a branch of the Virginia Mining Corporation – which had lately been scouting the valley in whose heart lay Newton itself for coal, manganese and other useful and profitable blessings of the earth. My countrywoman at length brought in quick succession several covered dishes, revealing beautiful red rows of sliced beef, spilling their juices on to the table; these were followed by an equal number of platters containing mashed potatoes and a further cargo of loaves of bread, bending under the weight of their freshness. To all of which the men helped themselves freely, and only my most resolved determination secured for me a portion of the plenty of which I had so lately been dreaming. The company’s leader, as I supposed him to be, Mr Mankins – a powerfully built young man with a perfectly pink scalp, somewhat chapped by the cold, a tuft of hair to warm each of his ears, and a muscular jaw, resembling nothing so much as the prow of some mighty ship – addressed himself to the grace. After which, I confess, the silence was general
At length, the first clamour of hunger had been assuaged, and a low muttered talk passed along the table between mouthfuls: concerning excavations, locations, concentrations and other mysteries of the mining science, not to mention more humorous accounts of pit-falls, floods, snowstorms, collapsed shafts, Indian attacks and such light-hearted tribulations of the trade. To none of which Mr Mankins contributed his views, preferring to confine the operations of his formidable jaws to the nourishment before him. But when at length I plucked up the courage to address the table, I gestured towards his place at the end and raised my voice as loud as I dared.
‘Tell me,’ I began, gathering breath, ‘for I am unfamiliar with the latest American developments in this noble science (forgive me, I could not help overhearing the business you have come upon) – have you ever encountered in your work a device known, I believe, as the “double-compression” piston?’
Mr Mankins brought his masticatory efforts to a slow halt; swallowed slowly; and paused. ‘You’re looking for Sam, I suppose,’ he said at last. The table had fallen quiet.
‘In point of fact, I am looking for a certain gentleman; known commonly, I hear, as the Professor.’
‘Sam,’ Mankins corrected. ‘Neither more nor less. Though I won’t object to calling him the Lieutenant; which – in point of fact – is what he is.’
‘Ach, all that trouble over the steam shovel again,’ cried a small, red-faced gentleman at my elbow, while blowing on a fresh hot toddy the landlord had set at his side. ‘It’s a hoax, I tell ye, from first to last.’
‘He
’s a crank,’ came a call.
‘A loon,’ came another.
‘Can’t be done!’ continued the fellow with the toddy. ‘It’s a mere question of geometry, so it is. You – Cannot – Build – A – Ting – What’ll – Swaller – Itself Can’t be done, gentlemen; God’s own law. Simple human nature. And without dat, de device is No Good, to man nor beast. It’ll dig a few feet, sure, and do’t well; then it goes phtt, and starts diggin’ the air. It’s a hoax, I tell ye. El Dorado stuff. Geometry’s agin it; and you can’t fight geometry.’
‘Likewise,’ Mankins went on, as if there had been no interruption, ‘I won’t hear a word spoken against him, being, as he is, without doubt, the finest surveyor in the honourable history of the Virginia Mining Corporation, bar none.’
‘It’s a pipe dream, Mankins,’ shouted a gruff, white-bearded old man, ‘and what’s more, you know it.’
‘Don’t mind a pipe myself, now and then,’ ventured another, a thick-necked, round-armed giant, hunched over his plate, knocking his knees against the table, ‘so long as I don’t have to break my back for it; which, according to present practice, is just what I do.’
‘Seeing,’ Mankins continued, unperturbed, ‘that if Sam says a thing can be done, it can be done; and, what’s more,’ he added, raising his voice to drive home the point, ‘he’ll do it himself. If he says there’s coal in that valley, you can bet a dollar to a nickel that what you’ll find in that valley is coal, only coal, and nothing but coal, so help you God. If there’d been anything else, Sam would have said so; seeing as he didn’t say so, there ain’t anything else. If he says –’
‘Knock it off, Mankins,’ the gruff white-beard declared. ‘Let’s have a look at this steam shovel of his, if it’s so damn’d hot.’
The Syme Papers Page 17
