‘If he says’, Mankins carried on, admitting for the first time by this repetition, however slight, the existence of any interruption, ‘he can build a double-compression piston to dig out a vein of rock, then what he’ll do is build a double-compression piston. And why will he do it, gentlemen? Only for this: to dig out that vein of rock. If he declares the earth is flat, something’ll come and flatten it for him; if he declares the ocean’s filled with tea, you may as well get the kettle cooking. Seeing that, without doubt, if he set his mind to it, if he were a feller with any ambitions whatsoever, he could have been the finest miner in the history of the Virginia Mining Corporation. Hands down.’
Whereupon the gentleman with the hot toddy whispered pungently in my ear, ‘It’s a hoax, God help us. And which of them is the greater loon – Syme or Mankins? – I don’t know. Though, to be fair, that feller had a nose for the land I’d give my eye for.’
‘As it is,’ Mankins concluded, mostly to himself, ‘God knows what he has become.’
Well, I thought, having retired at last to the comfort of my room – the fire freshly laid, the cat asleep upon my bed – perhaps I shall find out in the morning. There was some consolation in the fact that, whatever his other qualities, Professor Samuel Highgate Syme could not – quite – be charged with obscurity. He had made a name for himself; and who knows, I thought, perhaps I shall make mine, in following him.
This was my first night in America. How enormous the heart of loneliness becomes, swelling as it were into the night, until the darkened country – clicking with snow, gleaming in the lantern light – seems touched by my solitude; and the most casual stranger may enter intimately into my thoughts. Yes, even the unknown gentleman I had heard so much about and come such a long way to find.
*
I awoke in the morning considerably refreshed and eager to be on my way. A glance in the mirror revealed, so it seemed to me, a brighter eye and ruddier cheek; perhaps today, I thought, I shall forgo a powdered beauty. My coat and cravat both hung dry in front of the dead fire. The cat had kept me warm in the night, and refused now to venture from the bed into the sharp cool of the room, through which odd gusts of wind whistled from the chimney; well, let them whistle, I thought, half in a mind to whistle myself, despite the cold, carpetless floorboards and the chill in my toes. I had a dim sense of such great things to be done – such miles to journey, such fortunes to be made – that I couldn’t possibly, not for an instant, consider lingering in bed for another minute.
The room was darkened by paper blinds, of the kind to be rolled up, and fastened by a great perplexity of string to their window frames. These, after a truly philosophical enquiry I at length unbound, and lifted as it were the lid off the morning. A blue sky poured in, whitened only by the puff of my sharp breath and a faint crumble of clouds in the far air. Such excess of heaven astonished me; the sky swooped over the low valley, conveying to my impressionable mind an idea of great speed, as if the stir of the planet itself accounted for the whirl of white in its depths. The day was so clear I could have threaded a long skein through the eye of a pinetree needle etched against the blue sky at the top of the bluff.
In truth, I almost wept at the … lust of life that had crept into my breast, sudden and almost terrifying in its … unfamiliarity. How long had the course of my life run dry?
I called for a basin of water – and, to the great astonishment of a boy tending the horses below, threw wide the window and prepared my toilette in the open air: tossing my hair over my head and running a dripping (and ice-cold!) hand through the loose locks. The chill of the morning struck me like a loving blow, a faint ringing headache ensued, almost pleasant in the delicacy of eye and temple it suggested; and after fixing the tortoiseshell clasp at the back of my neck, I turned to the much graver decisions of my dress. A powder-blue cravat, I thought, would nicely suggest the glory of the day (this I rustled from the depths of my portmanteau); and I could do no better, for an air of cheerfulness not unmixed with gallantry, than the fine red coat hung dry before the fire. (The rich crimson would soften the eye against the snow, offer a resting-place from the general brilliance.) Today, after all, I hoped I would meet Syme.
Bright and brisk, accordingly, I ventured from my room to the hall below. The fire blazed in the hearth, a wicked conflagration leaping off the fresh logs – but the tables were deserted, except for the stacked remains of a hasty breakfast. The Virginia Mining Corporation had sped on their way, it appeared, and I was eager to do the same. Summoning the landlady, I paid the reckoning – studiously avoiding any suggestion of ‘spitting mumbo-jumbo’ – and enquired after the next coach to Pactaw.
‘Oh, my sir!” she cried, in a fluster. ‘That’s all gone this morning. Nothing going to Pactaw so late – it’s market day, know you, everything’s up and gone about. There’s a coach coming back, but that’s no good to ye, is it, seen rightly? “Everything always the other
way” – that’s my mother’s wisdom, know you, and it isn’t half-true. Nothing to be done but sitting down and eating the good bread and cold beef; nothing to be done but that. Take a spot by the fire – there now – a thin fellow like you and he thinks he’s going forth without a bite to eat!’
I did as I was told and picked forlornly at the plate of cold beef, sipped morosely at the cup of hot tea, and practised a great many other adverbs, beginning in misery and ending nowhere. I have always been – how shall I call it? – a quick fire, given to sudden enthusiasms, flares, that burn out in stink and smoke. The only thing I ever practised in my life with great dedication is solitude (and its associated crafts: chemical experimentations, rambling surveys, mineral collections, and the like) – at this, I seldom flag, and it seemed I would be able to devote another empty afternoon to the fine art. The fire at least practised its chosen profession as resolutely as I, and the two of us, flame and man, gazed at each other, attempting to stare the other out of countenance. The fire, a great advocate of heat, and myself, expert in cold, wrangled and disputed our ground into the afternoon, waxing and waning, thawing and freezing by turns.
But things are never as bad as they first appear, nor good things as good for that matter (a very miserable state of affairs in its own right, I believe); and shortly after one a rather diminutive gentleman, with fair, close-cropped hair and a snub nose, appeared at the door. ‘Oh, that’ll be Scotch,’ the landlady cried, making a great fuss over him, and hastily assembling the materials for a hearty tea: hung beef, chipped up raw (a delicacy much favoured by the Americans, it appeared), and divers sweetmeats of a sugary brown, beside the fresh-brewed pot.
Scotch, if this was his name, blinked his watery blue eyes in gratitude, and lowered himself slowly – and with an air of extreme delicacy and gentlemanly condescension – upon a chair by the fire. ‘Perhaps,’ he said quietly, ‘it wouldn’t trouble you to let the air out a bit, Mrs Grapes, before you talk – a deep breath should do – you’ll find, I believe, it reduces the bellowing.’
“The thing is,’ she whispered to me, in piercing windy tones, ‘Scotch from time to time is given to thirst; he suffers greatly from thirst; it is, he says, the curse of his bones, but he bears up, he bears up.’
‘I believe the trouble’, the little fellow began, turning towards me, in a stiff, very upright sort of way, ‘is that I can’t get drunk. That, I reckon, is the root of the matter.’ He continued in a quite impersonal manner, like a lecturer discoursing on a familiar topic in which he happens to be expert, and whose niceties, even after all this time, continue to interest him. I’ve got nothing against getting drunk, not at all. I believe it can be done – what’s more I’ve seen it done, and have every reason to credit the performances in that line I’ve had the pleasure to witness. Several of them, I don’t mind saying, delivered not far from this spot.’ And he pointed, gingerly, at his feet, so I could be in no misapprehension regarding the spot in question.
‘You’re too good, Mr Scotch,’ demurred mine hostess, ‘too kind.’
‘Not at all, Mrs Grapes, not at all. Much deserved. I’ll go further,’ he resumed, addressing me again, ‘I wouldn’t mind – for once – getting drunk myself. A highly pleasurable experience, it appears, enjoyed all round – greatly tending towards the liveliness of discourse, and, as I’ve heard the poets call it, the free flow of the soul. A consummation – to take up that vein – greatly to be’ – he seemed to have lost his way – ‘well, greatly to be consumed, to say the least. No, I’ve got nothing against getting drunk – on principle. Known several highly respectable gentlemen particularly proficient in that area – esteemed gentlemen. No, the trouble, as I see it – to return to my original point – and I believe Mrs Grapes will have the goodness to support my observations –’
‘Much too kind, Mr Scotch,’ she murmured again.
‘Not at all, Mrs Grapes, not at all. Much deserved. The trouble is that I can’t do it. There you have it, sir, in a nutshell. And I don’t say I haven’t tried. Ask anyone about this place – Mrs Grapes’ll do – and they’ll tell you, with the best will in the world, that I’ve tried. What’s more, they’ve seen me do it; night after night; but it’s my belief, and I don’t mind sharing it, that some things can’t be learned. There’s some things – either you’re born to it or you’re not, like poetry, as they say. That’s my opinion, anyway. But I keep trying, sir; it’s the American way.’ Upon which reflection he peered into the hot mug in his small fist, as if it, too, might choose to fail him.
It transpired eventually that Mr Scotch, barring his great deficiency, was to have ventured to Pactaw only that morning; and had no objection to setting forth, belated, as soon as his ‘stomach had settled’.
‘The trouble is all this tea about,’ he explained to me, as we eventually piled ourselves into his little trap; and he gestured vaguely at the heavens above and the snowy fields below to indicate the extent of the problem. ‘A terrible affliction to a man’s stomach – most unnatural. I’ve heard of men who drink nothing but water – heard of them, only, mind – and fall dead of the dropsy at thirty-five. Walk on!’ he barked sharply, this to the piebald horse, an aged creature with a long, long-suffering face, who seemed to share many of the suspicions of his master, and looked disconsolately at the great road before him, dripping in the bright sunshine with rutfuls of the offending liquid. Slowly, he bent one leg, as if to test it – and then the next – and, suitably reassured, began to experiment with different gaits, a loping stride, a sudden flailing burst, a limping amble, hoping perhaps to enliven the journey by way of variety. In this determination, all I can say is that he succeeded.
Mr Scotch, accustomed doubtless by habit to these experiments, continued his disquisition unperturbed. ‘It’s my belief – and I’ve read a thing or two along these lines – that if we could only banish water from our drink, we should feel the benefits at once. Only, you see, the difficulty is this: water is a sly devil – and slips in when you least suspect it. Milk, for example, a harmless potation, you believe?’
I nodded my assent.
‘Perfectly filthy with water, I assure you – reeks of it. I never touch the stuff any more – not a drop. Pure poison – rather drink wormwood. Or gall,’ he added, upon reflection.
These prejudices aside, Mr Scotch (nicknamed after a Scottish uncle who, in point of fact, when pressed, the gentleman conceded to be Irish) was an amusing companion, and an instructive example of his countrymen. He had thought a great deal, he declared to me, of the ‘American question’; and as the miles rolled by (shuddered, perhaps, would be a more appropriate term), he touched on several of his views.
In America, he explained, I should encounter almost no ignorance of any kind. The average farmer (a term of praise, he considered, rather than belittlement) read avidly from ‘his youth upwards’ – a phrase that seemed to include, in Mr Scotch’s opinion, no outward limit, but suggested a steady and inexorable and gigantic trajectory of ‘self-improvement’. Both boys and girls were seldom seen without a book of some kind in their hands, and were equally ready to discourse upon the arts, the sciences or the latest political matter. ‘I should’, he furthermore assured me, ‘find no evidence either of those sins that beset life in the “old countries”, where the lengthy concentration of men in a single place in pursuit of similar objects has produced in the people a kind of – well, if I say ferment, I believe you will understand me.’ By these sins he meant: envy, covetousness, shame, pretension, and, in general, all the evils that attend ‘getting on’. In America, he explained, ‘We get on, as it were, naturally. Our friends congratulate us and themselves, in their choice of friends; our neighbours applaud us, fired by our example to similar ambitions; even our enemies consider, perhaps, they have mistaken our characters, and rejoice. I say all this’, he confided in me, ‘without prejudice or fear of contradiction – in that I tell you frankly, I have never got on in life, never shall get on in life, never hope to get on in life. I speak impartially upon a subject of common interest.
‘Likewise,’ he resumed – after a brief and it seemed satisfactory inspection of a small silver flask he kept in his trousers (to discover, I suppose, whether it contained any water or not, in which fear he was gratefully disappointed) – ‘we offer in this country none of that abuse heaped upon honest poverty, which is viewed here rather as one stepping-stone (or, in my case, sitting-stone) in a general ascent than as a condition in itself.’
We had reached by this stage the banks of the Potomac and cantered gently along its side. The prospect afforded that peculiar pleasure in which the best of winter and summer appear to be combined: the clear blue sky and honeyed sun spread sweetly over the sharp browns and glittering whites of February; and now the river multiplied these effects by mingling both equally in its icy bosom. The flow of water – both astonishingly flat and swift – sped against our road and suggested a strangely delightful urgency in Nature contrasted by our own ambling complacence.
Our prospects appeared to inspire my companion to new heights of national eulogy; and I confess I was not unmoved by the picture of American life he proceeded to draw. ‘The foreigner, upon his arrival,’ he declared, in the jaunty, awkward tones occasioned by his unsteady horse, ‘begins to feel the effects of a sort of resurrection. Hitherto, he realizes, he had not lived – only vegetated. Hitherto, he had not breathed – only sighed. Hitherto’ – and these mounted in vigour and significance at each step – ‘he had not dreamed – only slept. Now, for the first time, he feels himself a man – because he is treated as such. The laws of his own country had overlooked him in his insignificance; the laws of this cover him – cover him’ – and he hesitated over the mot juste – ‘cover him like a bedspread.’
It was cold and the land about us wild and wide. Yet I confess that, after a brief recourse to Mr Scotch’s silver hip-flask (after the careful application of my handkerchief to the nozzle), upon which I performed a similar experiment to his own – as the liquid burned its path to my toes and my fingers’ tips – I was not sorry to travel through such scenes with a curious companion who, despite his many failures and vanities, seemed at least conscious of them both. This prompted me to my next question, inspired by the swell of his recent praise.
‘And’, I said, turning towards him now, this slight man at my elbow, resting the reins in small hands upon his lap, ‘is there no serpent in this Paradise, no worm within this apple?’
‘Well,’ he answered, and then considered again, ‘well.’ His fair hair shone almost translucent in the winter sun, and he raised his watery blue eyes, both clear and weak, to me. ‘Well,’ he repeated, ‘there may be a certain – there may be a kind of – poverty or scarcity of – in short – there may be too little – well,’ he broke off once more, before finally rousing himself to his confession. “There may be a dearth of – of – Doubt,’ he declared at last. ‘There may be too little – Doubt.’
This admission appeared to loosen his tongue, for he continued now in a kind of steady ramble, looking at the road b
efore him as if entirely consumed by the experiments his horse attempted upon the four-legged gait. ‘I believe I myself would benefit now and then from a dose of Doubt.’ He spoke the word as a heathen might utter the name of some god, in whom he could summon no faith, yet to whom he did not wish to appear disrespectful. ‘Though, as for that, there is little enough in my circumstances to warrant such … seeing as I am what I am – a gentleman-farmer come down in the world – living upon what remains of his – inheritance – and his – luck. Some are born … idle, I believe, others have it thrust upon them … and a few achieve it, after much … deliberation.
‘No,’ he began again, rousing himself. ‘There is too little Doubt in this country, though much of what we have achieved is founded upon its absence. You see, sir – we are both a practical people and a faithful people, a powerful combination of attributes, both proceeding from our want of Doubt. The practical fellow has no use for Doubt. He sees a job to be done – knows quite well he can do it – and sets about it. If he don’t know how to begin with it, he reckons, he’ll figure it out upon the way. A great deal can be managed in this fashion – and, believe me, Mr Müller – we have managed a great deal. (Though I, for my own small part, have done my best to – as you might say – maintain the average.) Likewise, we are a faithful people – great believers in this and that – Gods and galvanism, sir – Progress and Persuasions. We approach the Great and the Small, equally, without Doubt. Only, you see, sir – sometimes between the two – our practicality and our faith – we come a cropper, as the saying is. When our practicality gets tangled up in the legs of faith – and we aim at the moon – upon small steps and – end up in the Mud.’
Indeed, as the sun beat upon the snow crusted in the ruts and the road grew wet and thick with the slop of winter we seemed to have strayed into the very difficulties Mr Scotch described. A fine spray of mud flew from the horse’s hoofs to the passengers in his charge; and imagine my despair at the brown mottle of drying flakes that appeared upon the shine of my shoes and the loose hem of my trouser legs. Still, I reckoned (to use Mr Scotch’s fine, manly word), for once, that I was a traveller in a far country – and a little mud – now and then, here or there – could only add to my Romantic … qualifications.
The Syme Papers Page 18
