‘The trouble is’, Mr Scotch complained, ‘that some among us attempt to bring our faith to bear upon our practical affairs. Trusting, as you might say, to luck, and never doubting the upshot of it all. Of – these – am – I,’ he confessed slowly, tasting the painful words upon his tongue. ‘As you can see, somewhat down-at-heels, perhaps. Idle, yes. Shiftless, yes. Sunk, yes. Never doubting from daybreak today’s end … the position of my affairs. Quite secure in that knowledge, at least – though I shouldn’t mind, from time to time, a dram of Doubt, about This or That – otherwise known as – Hope. Do me good.’ And here he unpocketed and unscrewed and, tilting his head, unfilled a dram of something slightly sharper, which likewise seemed to do him – good.
Bucked by new spirit, he proceeded. ‘Yet I believe my state of affairs to be downright providential compared with them – that tries to bring their practical talents to bear upon the articles of their faith. That tries to climb, by the skill of their hands, to the stars. That tries to puzzle the way from America to Heaven – just as they might direct a fellow along the best road out of Pactaw, knowing the terrain you see like the back of their hand. For that’s the sin of your great American fools – of which we have plenty enough. The prophets and the preachers; the frontier folks; even some of our business tycoons, and the worst kind of soldier. Not knowing what can be solved by a good heart and head – and what can’t. The trouble, as I say, all beginning in the lack of Doubt, of one kind or another; though we grow pretty much everything else we can from the old countries, on native soil – and bigger, and better, too.’
Struck, and I confess somewhat downheartened by what seemed to me the aptness of this last remark – given the object of my present journey – I observed the first signs of an approaching settlement. The road broadened into fields, covered in snow stippled by the stubble beneath, white and sparkling in the icy sunshine. At the side of the road a heap of rotting vegetables and picked bones, tattered cloth and occasional shoes, strangely sad and softened by their burial in fresh snow, announced the presence of mankind. At length, as my silver watch told three o’clock in the red palm of my hand, we reached a row of scattered houses (which could only loosely be described as a street, a desultory, irregular arrangement) – low wooden dwellings puffing bravely against the winter through their brick snouts. I heard the last shouts of the men as they shut up their wares for the day, bellowing against the cold of the lengthening shadows to keep their hearts and throats warm. And then I saw the market square itself, dirty with many feet and the remains of the day: loose rice and trampled flour, discarded corn-meal loaves, dried strips of beef, and the thick white skins of cheese.
I thanked Mr Scotch for his conveyance, and, clutching my portmanteau, stumbled into the square on bloodless legs. Mr Scotch himself, quickly and quietly, engaged a number of the departing farmers in small talk, pressing this small bottle or that from the little stock he transported in his cart into their frozen and grateful hands. He glanced at me once as I made my way, lifting an eyebrow and a small jar of some warm honey-coloured liquid in the air – as if to say, ‘Might I tempt you in a dram of This, or That, otherwise known, I believe, as Hope?” – but I declined his offer, and ventured into Pactaw itself, the home of Professor Samuel Highgate Syme, Napoleon of the New Science, and the end of one long journey, and the beginning of the next.
A bell rang, once, bright and light in the chill air, and I thought how hungry I was. The market lay in a bend of the river, and there were houses scattered along the bank on which I stood in some confusion – here or there as the fancy of the builder took him. Yet they offered a cheerful prospect to the traveller, suggesting solitude and neighbourhood in equal measure. They reminded me of nothing so much as a handful of gulls on a sandbank – an impression conveyed in part by their white wooden walls, and the plumes of grey smoke that drifted from their chimneys. Across the water, on the verge almost of the crumbling banks, stood a somewhat larger edifice – painted brown, boasting several chimneys, and an occasionally elaborated gable, to distinguish it from its fellows across the Potomac. A narrow bridge stretched and trembled from the market square to its side; and a low wooden dock broke the water at the foot of the front porch; a rowing boat, loosely moored, knocked against its post. Looking up, I saw a perfect fury of smoke pouring from the rooftops and blowing downriver, tearing into thick strips before it vanished on the wind.
Idly conjecturing as to the nature of its occupants, I wandered into the heart of town. There I discovered at last what I took to be the High Street: a somewhat more orderly row of houses, some few of which hung from their eaves gaudily painted wooden signs, ridged by snow and creaking in the wind that swept down the broad road. These indicated: several general stores (‘McSweeney’s Foods etc.’, ‘Jacks Corner’); an apothecary’s; a junk-shop, ‘Simmons’; the offices of at least three lawyers (much to my surprise, each bearing the wonderfully optimistic motto ‘Legal Solutions’); the derelict windowless shell of what seems to have housed the Pactaw Racing Times, portrayed by a bright red horse flying over a pot of gold; and, at last, the Dewdrop Inn, displaying upon its frontispiece a drop of a very different nature than the example in its name.
To this last I directed my weary steps, and pushed clattering (beating my snow-crusted shoes against the step) through the front door into the grateful warmth of the parlour, where the concentrated heat of an old fire settled and crashed in the grate. A somewhat elderly gentleman rose from his seat by the blaze, and, leaning upon a cane, enquired my business.
‘Dr Müller,’ I replied, ‘come from Norfolk. I believe my box has been sent on.’
Mine host, Mr Barnaby Rusk – a truly fine specimen of old age, as tall nearly as myself, and though slightly hunched, nevertheless suggesting, by the breadth of jaw and shoulder, the shadow of a once powerful physique – insisted upon accompanying me to my room, and, moreover, bearing my fat portmanteau up the stairs, which, in combination with his walking stick, made for a very slow journey indeed. His fine pink face, mottled with age and completely hairless (barring the nose), grew bright red at my proffered assistance, and I was forced to succumb to his help. I halted beside him – as he – stepped – and stepped – and banged his stick – and wheezed – and stepped – and banged – up the first flight, though I was by this time eager to be on my way and encounter the object of my enquiry, the great Syme, without delay.
‘I was,’ Mr Rusk sighed, pausing for a minute on the fourth step, ‘you may be surprised to hear, a boxer in my youth – in Camberwell, outside London.’
‘Indeed?’ I declared, nudging him from behind and shifting the foot of his cane, an inch, towards the next stair.
‘Fought – and bested – in the eighty-fourth round,’ he grunted, at the landing, ‘George Jackson, who died, the next day, from excessive bleeding. Whereupon,’ he resumed, after a brief foray down the hall, ‘I took flight – and sailed to Virginia. Whereupon, two years later, I fought – and bested – the British at …’A fit of coughing, though obscuring the name of the battle, greatly suggested the memory of its violence and the heat of human conflict – upon which description he subsided, and led me on.
At last we had reached my room, a spacious chamber sparsely furnished, containing only the necessary bed, a rude chest of drawers, and a low table, pushed against the window overlooking the main thoroughfare. No fire had been lit, and my breath left little feathers upon the air. My chest stood at the foot of the bed, upon which Mr Barnaby Brawler (as he led me to believe his fighting name had been) deposited, with a sigh, my portmanteau.
‘Have you know,’ my guide explained, when he had recovered his wind and limped towards the door, ‘moved the box up myself. This morning. Fought and bested it, you know – two hours. Don’t worry about me,’ he grunted, snorting through his thin, bent nose – as if a grave concern for his future had brought me to his doorstep in the first place. Stepping and wheezing and banging down the hallway, he muttered more to himself than his new tenant. ‘
Don’t worry about me, that’s all.’
Left to myself at last, I effected a rapid change of dress, donning a cream lace shirt, a rich blue coat and a pair of yellow breeches. The clothes make the man, after all, and I hoped to impress Professor Syme by the refinement of my manners, believing that a touch of the gentleman could persuade even – or rather, particularly – in a society conspicuous for their absence. ‘To impress Professor Syme’ – the phrase ran through my thoughts inadvertently, and I realized the fever of anticipation that long delay had roused in my blood. I flew through the parlour and into the dripping road, clattering the door behind me.
I took Syme’s petition out of my breast pocket and looked it over in the declining light. Two months before, beside another sunny river (now how distant!), I had lifted it from the envelope and marvelled at his braggadocio. Now that I stood in Virginia I read it for the address at its head: the Boathouse, Pactaw. The street stood mostly deserted, aside from the few stray animals that scavenged the rubbish in the snow; and a horse tethered at the door of the apothecary’s. A young boy sat on the door-stoop next to the harness post, and I called to him: ‘Can you tell me where the Boathouse lies, if you please?’
He looked at me a little queerly and pocketed the coin he had been projecting with his thumb into the air, to the faint ping of glasses chiming.
‘Boathouse,’ he repeated, ruminating, as if he had heard the name before, liked it sufficient, but was about to think of a better one. ‘Boat-house,’ he added, emphasizing a world of new meaning in each syllable in case I had missed an ounce of its significance before. ‘I’ll do one better,’ he condescended to explain at last, crossing his legs at the knee. ‘I’ll give you a piece of advice. I wouldn’t bother with the Boathouse.’
‘Why ever not?’ I declared, exasperated and suddenly heart-sore, having come so far precisely to bother with the Boathouse. Perhaps I should have adopted a brisker tone with the boy, but the worst of being a stranger is this: part of you trusts everyone.
‘Why ever not?’ he echoed, mincing his words in a horrible fashion, and blowing them, as it were, into the air like bubbles – in some imitation of myself, I supposed. ‘I’ll tell you why not,’ he declared, swinging his leg to the ground and leaning both elbows confidentially upon his knees. ‘Because the folks at the Boathouse is all cracked up, you get me? Because there’s always a bang and flash at the Boathouse, and stinks coming over the river; because the Professor wanders round town with pistols in his pockets, taking pot-shots at the trees; because he’s got green hands most of the time, and when they’re not green, they’re blue; because they say he’s diggin’ a hole at the back of his house what’ll take him to China; because the river runs red when it goes by the Boathouse; because some folks say he can witch yer into thinking anythink he wants yer to think, and, contrariwise, bring you to disbelieve what you know for a fact to be true; because he casts spells on young men in particular, till they don’t come home no more, and never gets out of the Boathouse, and when they do, all the cry is, “The earth is hollow, mind where you step”; because – and this I seen with my own eye – they keep a metal dragon back there, clanking and hissing, and ready to swallow whatever come its way; because it’s my belief they’ll burn the town down before they through (folks is glad, I can tell you, they live over the water); because moreover and beyond anything else I’ve said, it’s gone four o’clock already and you’re too late.’
Frankly astonished by the burden of his little speech, nevertheless I gleaned from this tirade the particulars I desired. Thanking the boy – who directed his attention once more at projecting a coin off his thumbnail, while chewing the left portion of his lip – I made my way (considerably puzzled by the import of his last remark) to the market square. There the slender footbridge bore me over the icy flood. I stood at the middle and watched the water hurrying below me, East towards the Chesapeake and thence into the broad tide of the Atlantic – in which perhaps, a drop or two might carry even to Hamburg and lose itself in the spill of the Elbe running cold and clear from Neuburg. There are few things that suggest … regret so clearly as a fleet river – which can reproach us equally for the places we have not seen and the distance we have travelled from home. I was glad, for once, to suffer from the latter reflection; and, dropping a bon-bon upon my sour tongue, made my way to the brown house on the far shore.
The bridge ran into a muddy path, considerably trampled and dripping with the remains of the snowfall. Only by clambering up the side (awkwardly, at one point, upon cold hands and knees), where a bank of snow had been packed hard by someone’s spade, could I avoid the gleaming puddles. Thus with considerable difficulty I approached unsullied the back of the house, which appeared on closer inspection to be in an advanced state of dilapidation: shutters dangling off the hinge, windows cracked, curtains pressed to the leaking pane, then fluttering free. But a bright glow fell from somewhere on to the snow in the yard and suggested occupation. The porch I mounted (heart beating quick) groaned beneath my steps; the boards had been warped by the damp, and the brown paint covered in a wrinkling spread of mildew. A clatter and bustle were audible inside, and I strained my ear to catch the murmur of voices – low, expectant, the shifting, reverberant hum of a church before the pastor comes. The close heat of a full house seeped through the wooden boards and drew me in. I knocked once, briskly, and waited.
And yet – such is the perversion of the human spirit that I must say, standing there in the cold, I felt some considerable confusion regarding my imminent acquaintance with the object of my long journey. We always hesitate at the door of belief – aware of the great change between the outside and the in. And yes, I knew as I stood there that I had come so far to be persuaded of a new faith – or, rather, for the two go hand in hand, to become a new and less fearful man. Of course, a part of me wished to believe that the obscure and arrogant Professor on the far side of the door, had stumbled upon a great and shining truth, a revolutionary truth, as wonderful as Galileo’s vision of the earth – and that I should serve that truth and, perhaps, make a name for myself and my country in the process that would ring through the ages. That such service would entail a more private revolution within me goes without saying. That I should learn to face bravely and, which is the greater skill, with a free and open heart the company of my – yes, my equals; that I should learn never to shrink from the world, never to doubt my place in it, never to give way to that shameful fear of life that had shadowed my youth. Of course, I felt all these things, as I waited at the door.
And yet – I confess that a part of the excitement I felt at the thought of meeting Professor Samuel Highgate Syme was that of – an uncovering, the unveiling of a fraud. Perhaps, I thought, I would shortly discover a man of some irony – a man who lied with exuberance about his theories, with colour, and with that touch of rebellion that makes all his lies seem deeper and truer than the great swarm of mediocrity that comes to prove him wrong. Perhaps I would take him by the shoulder and say, ‘Come, come, among equals, you know, there is no need for pretence.’ Or better still, I considered, I would marshal the full force of my considerable expertise, hold as it were the mirror up to Syme – in which he would recognize the empty bubble of this hollow world, and turn at last to a more fruitful line of enquiry. Perhaps, then, in some condescension, I would grant him the virtues of the double-compression piston; refine it a little, and bring it home in triumph to my father.
A scramble of steps; a pause, as of a gentleman arranging his attire, catching his breath; and the door, at last, creaked upon its hinges. A thin fellow of medium height with a bird-like cock to his head answered my summons. I noted his features: a broad, high brow above a narrow face, a strong-backed nose and fine, restless lips that sucked upon the stem of a pipe, which stank and smoked, having just gone out. He wore a morning suit, somewhat the worse for wear – covered in gleaming dust, of ash and (unlikely as it sounds) coal, and thin about the knees and elbows. It was also too large for him, and sugges
ted, by this combination of wear and girth, that it may have outgrown him with age, while the gentleman within remained unchanged.
‘Professor Syme?’ I ventured, somewhat disappointed.
He looked me up and down, and seemed if anything unimpressed by this investigation. He took the pipe from his mouth and smacked his lips. ‘You’re almost too late,’ he declared at last, and slapped his pockets. ‘Have you brought fifty cents? Oh, never mind, come in. We’ll see about that later. Come on.’
Then I heard a roar from within, a deep, throaty bellow, like a bear in a humour. ‘Tom, damn you!’ the roar roared. ‘Where have you got to? Blast him!’ The murmur of voices ceased suddenly; a frightened silence followed, and I could hear the creak of a floorboard where someone nervously shifted upon his feet.
‘Damn yourself, Sam!’ the gentleman before me called out cheerfully, and, turning to me, lifted the left corner of his lip and the left arch of his eyebrow – as if to say, ‘There’s more of this smile when you need it.’ Then he cried, ‘I’ve brought another. Coming directly.’
‘The world’s about to stop, that’s all,’ came the somewhat mollified reply.
Tom, thus appealed to, led me along the dark corridor and then up a short flight of steps. A stout door stood ajar, a beam of flickering light glowing beneath it, whence a thin mist of smoke likewise escaped. Tom turned gracefully upon his heel, and, crooking his elbow behind his back around the edge of the door, whispered to me: ‘Don’t mind the smoke, sir; we’re only making the world from scratch, that’s all.’ Then he swung into the room and I followed.
The Syme Papers Page 19
