‘But they have all been burned, Bunyon, lost, you know that – in time, by time; in moments of frustration, great disappointment, betrayal, theft. In the bombing of the Second World War. All that’s left is the moment of conception – that hasn’t been touched, can’t be touched. There isn’t anything else.’
He said nothing to this at first, but grinned, in the manner of someone who assumes a nervous air because it makes him seem a little more human. Outside, the leaves trembled in the blue breeze; the fountain rose and fell and shattered and collected again; the students, trailing backpacks over easy shoulders, walked to and fro. And I realized for the first time how great a darkener of life is a book, which shuts out, with paper curtains, the common light of day – of days. Ink, I reflected, is black for a reason.
‘You remind me’, Bunyon declared at last, leaning back and picking at his yellow fingernails, ‘of a man who strikes his hands together – not because he knows where the damned mosquito is, but because he wishes to kill it. Bring me, Pitt, a copy of the New Platonist – and we will talk again, Pitt.’
With that mosquito buzzing in my ear, I left him, clutched my (empty) briefcase and descended from the ivory, air-conditioned tower. The fat heat of day was a relief; even the sweat that warmed the cold of my hands was a relief; even the glare and ache of my squinting eyes.
Well, Susie was right.
Perhaps Bunyon was right, in his way.
I had learned the first lesson of the true believer: that acknowledgement is as rare, as wonderful, a thing as the miracle itself. Syme had known something of this, in his day.
Well.
Pitt was bloody, but unbowed.
PART III
•Persuasion•
In the morning, I was awoken by a knock at the door. A clop-clop, a cheerful step, and Tom Jenkyns was in my room, fussing and chuckling over me to get me up. ‘I have brought you tea,’ he said, bearing a hot dish delicately in his burned fingers. ‘I never rise up without it.’
‘Thank you,’ I answered through a thick tongue, greatly embarrassed at being discovered in considerable undress, hair askew over the pillow, the stink of sleep upon me-a slug-a-bed, when there seemed, in a general way, so much to do (though I could not for the life of me have declared exactly what – in such fashion do our appetites outrun our purposes). Yet I was glad on my first morning in Pactaw to encounter a known face. I sat up to receive my tea, and from that awkward perch could look out of the window. A fresh fall of snow had drifted through the night, and the window steamed with the heat of our bodies and the teapot.
‘If you permit me two minutes,’ I said to Tom, ‘I am your man.’
I dressed before him – with remarkable and quite uncharacteristic haste, urged by his presence to a rapid toilet, while he peered outside with easy unconcern. Indeed, it was only my awkwardness that offered a slight access to intimacy. Tom was above all a fellow’s fellow, and never thought twice of a great many things that habitually preyed upon my mind. I put on my lavender shawl, wrapped it thrice around, and generally stuffed myself, till I resembled nothing so much as a taxidermist’s bear. Then we stomped out into the world together.
Snowdrifts lay knee-deep along the broad thoroughfare, broken here or there by this leg or that. The fountain of each tree had flung itself upwards, curving to the top, and paused, white and silent. O, they were beautiful! Perfect, as though frozen in the pale amber stone of the early winter morning. Snow had choked the road six weeks before, as I travelled to the port at Hamburg. And the ship lay in the harbour there, the sea muffled with snow. Now it seemed another life.
Tom Jenkyns, like a boy, had no sense of ceremony with the snow. He raced and leapt into the drifts, banged his cold fist against the frozen signs, till they squeaked and squealed and loosened at last – laughing his high, bird-like laughter which rang even thinner on the bright, cold air. I was glad to see such irreverence in the face of great Nature. I had read so much of this New World, and looked on it still with fear and awe. It was a comfort to find the snow there as well as in Neuburg could be moulded by cold hands into balls. Tom caught my scarf by the end, like reins, and we galloped down the street, falling and pushing in turn. I was only twenty-eight, and Tom had the gift of energy. Pleasure flew from him in a shower of sparks and caught and burned in me as well.
Breathless at last, we marched through the broad market square, now deserted, except for a few stray dogs slumped about a pile of rotting potatoes dirty in the snow. We stepped on to the delicate footbridge and stood above that glittering sweep of the Potomac, while the long, cold wind streamed through us from the west and blew away to the ocean behind. I paused here every morning on the way to Sam, meditating each time upon the same reflection – that I stood at a midway point between two ends, loitering on some bridge – before crossing towards the grand and solitary house on the far shore, and slipping along the ill-kept muddy path that led to his door.
Sam had seen us and let us in, shod in his sandals and smoking what I learned to be his customary pipe. The corridor was chill and dark, but a broad fire blazed in the old tap room, and thither we quickly bent our steps. ‘I pray you – do not worry – shan’t rain‚’ Sam said, in his customary brisk chatter, waving his hand at the clouds of smoke gathered from pipe and lamp and the steaming sodden logs in the draughty fireplace. A proper breakfast lay on the table, honeyed ham and bread and milk so cold and fresh that shards of white ice still floated in it. We sat down with a click and pushed our chairs, bottomwise, under the table. Then began to eat in a munching silence – that disturbed only me, it appears, for they did not break it.
The silent meal was curiously intimate – there is nothing after all like the animal within to help us rub along together in a genial fashion. Our appetites were conversation enough, though the tacit assumption (as it seemed to me) of my inclusion in their little troupe both flattered and discomfited me. I learned later that Sam relished quiet repasts, and greatly disliked to have any less material business intrude upon the pleasures of the table; and indeed in this slight circumstance there was a strong indication of the sharp divide in his nature between the grossly physical and the purely, wonderfully rational. Tom himself seemed to go along with his master’s whims, and on the few occasions I ventured to interrupt, with some pleasantry or other, I received only a grunt from the great geognosist, and a shame-faced little nod from his associate. The two of them, by the by, seemed to have recovered their good humour; and Tom attended Syme’s muttered requests for ‘another wedge of bread, cut of ham, swallow of good milk’ with tender promptitude.
When he pushed away his plate at last, there was some confusion as to how we should proceed – regarding the best means of satisfying my curiosity, and resolving the unusual business that had brought the three of us together. Syme at length decided to ‘take me through’ those experiments and researches that occupied him at the moment. ‘It is always best – I believe‚’ he said, ‘to begin with particulars and – travel outwards – seeing that no matter the journey – we always set forth from and – arrive – at a very small spot.’ Generally, he worked in a kind of garret at the top of the ramshackle inn. There he kept no more than a desk pushed up against a tiny window, from whence he could gaze across the glittering Potomac, the untidy network of houses, and the low white hills beyond – this vast expanse confined to a small round of glass no bigger than the bottom of a pot. ‘The mind – at least my own –’ he said to me, with half a smile, ‘is among those elements – that expand – in the cold. But I am not without – mercy. And seeing as the fire is laid on – below – we may get to business – here. Tom‚’ he added in a sharpened tone.
‘Tom’, I soon discovered, was less an appellation than a term of command, that could denote anything from ‘clear these dishes’ to ‘fetch my papers from the attic’. And in fact the word possessed such homonymical properties that it usually indicated several distinct ideas at once. All of which, it should be said, Mr Jenkyns seemed to understand;
and none of which he hesitated to realize.
And yet – as Professor Syme and I pored over his scattered notes, field logs, records of experiments, journals, speculations, all spread pell-mell across the table in rustling array (the papers beautifully combining sudden scratched phrases, revelations, injunctions, meticulously observed detail, jumbled calculations, and, indeed, some evidence of the paths he had travelled, blue-stained leaves and muddy fingerprints), while he muttered a low commentary that wove together these extraordinary, disparate facts (and disparate kinds of facts) into a glistening, delicately coherent spider’s web – I sensed Tom’s growing fussing disquiet around us.
He poked at the fire, peered at it, sneezed in the smoking damp, struck a smouldering log a sharp blow till it split, then prodded the green blackening wound in the wood – appearing meanwhile distinctly (and audibly) dissatisfied with some obscure state of affairs to which he alone was privy. Next he turned his attention to a slight draught whistling through a flaw in one of the squares of the wide bay window. He sighed at it, as if to snuff it up altogether; then tapped the pane, listened to it, looked suspiciously outside, as if some deliberate mischief in the broad winter wind had occasioned it. He spent a good ten minutes tearing and rustling and compacting a plug out of a discarded sheet of parchment, which he then applied, with an air of considerable and noisy expertise, to the glass. ‘Tom‚’ the Professor muttered at last, and Tom sat down upon a chair pushed into the bay and stared dismally along the river; then stood up just as suddenly to examine a fragment of the clay world that had escaped his attentions the night before, and lodged itself in a crack of the floorboards. He scraped down upon his hands and knees to determine whether there were other loose shards lurking about, and made a great show of dusting off his trousers when he stood up, as if to say, ‘Finito‚’ with the smack of each palm on his pantaloons. ‘TOM,’ the Professor repeated, never looking away; and Tom desisted, stood stock still as a deer for an instant, as if struck by some profound and unshakeable conception. I glanced up then and noted his broad, handsome brow, the high, strong nose – only his thin lips, somewhat peevish, effeminate, pursed, displeased. He began to dally with the loose glowing locks of the chandelier above his head.
It occurred to me then, for the first time, that Tom was … envious of me, of my new-found place at the Professor’s shoulder, of my geognostic eye. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that I was enviable – and, by some natural extension of the logic, that a spot at Syme’s side was in itself a place of some distinction – never mind the damp fire smoking into the room and the obscure little corner of the Potomac in which we found ourselves. My subsequent reflection was less happy – for I had always considered myself a conceited young fellow in my way, and to have thus plainly demonstrated the prior absence of any real pretensions to enviability quite shocked – yes, shocked me, there is no other word. I had always possessed a number of certainties regarding myself – in my uncommon intelligence, air of gentility, of grace, etc., etc. – and never known that I was equally certain of the fact that not a soul would exchange his place in the world for mine. Until, for that moment at least, I saw Tom, fretting to peer over my shoulder, and observe the little notes I made on Syme’s calculations.
‘WILL YOU QUIT FUSSING,’ roared the Professor suddenly, when the glass beads began to tinkle and shimmer in Tom’s hand, ‘and sit STILL. If you can’t do that – fetch another log for the fire – make yourself useful – in the small matters that concern you.’
Tom, in a purse-lipped huff, strode out at once, clattering the door behind him; and we soon heard him briskly stomping through the snowdrifts into the yard. Then the biting knock of his angry axe against a stump of wood.
The Professor never said a word.
Regarding the marvellous tale of the planet’s birth, Syme unfolded before me a tale of fires and frosts and spinning, intricate, meticulous devices – to say he was not mad would be perhaps the greatest condemnation I could offer, for no sublunar reason could connect the wonderful links of logic Syme forged. So I withheld my judgement, a dangerous postponement, as I suspected even then.
I grew suddenly aware, in Tom’s absence, of our physical proximity, my negligible chin propped in the nook of his shoulder, my downward eyes travelling along his powerful, crooked arm to the papers spread across the table. We were alone for the first time. The faint sweet smell of shaved wood filled my breath. And I realized then that the most powerful intimacy of which a man is capable often involves the details of those conjectures, convictions, that seem to touch least of all upon his private affairs. A theory, in short, passionately held, when … undressed (as it were) may expose a true maiden shyness, and offer the mental equivalent of that violence of discovery that so startled Diana in the woods.
The Professor seemed to fall into a kind of blushing consternation at the naked spread of his papers across the table, at the sudden revelation he conferred upon me. Having sent Tom out of the way, he now harked after him. He attended each stomp of foot and crack of axe with a cocked ear, allowing these wintry concussions to interrupt his arguments more and more until their diminished flow slipped through his fingers altogether; and he fell, hunching his shoulders about his neck, perfectly quiet, not so much lost in thought as in the absence of it.
Silence hung like cinnamon in the air, until Tom broke it, pushing a blast of cold through the door and kicking the snow from his boots. The exercise seemed to have restored his pink good humour, as he dropped an armful of fresh split logs beside the hearth. (Tom, as I soon discovered, always recovered easily, dipping and rising again, dry as a feather, like a duck in a pond.) He began to construct a second blaze from the wreck of the first, while the flames spat and hissed at the cold limbs of their new bedfellows.
‘We should leave him to his work, Dr Müller‚’ Tom declared, and I confess I felt at once peevish and grateful for this interruption. Grateful in that the company of men (or I should say of man, in the worm and powerful concentration of the singular) has always rendered me … uneasy; peevish in that I suspected Tom (already!) of jealously guarding his little ‘geognostic treasure’ – for all his proud petitions to the world and windy endeavours to broadcast Syme’s theories beyond the bend in the Potomac River where we found ourselves.
‘Yes‚’ the Professor said, rising briskly, and striding to the bay window, ‘to my work.’ He lifted to his eye the black shard Tom had discovered that morning, and lost himself in the contemplation of the charred and dusty fragment, which formed a curious contrast to the milk-white ray of the winter sun that fell upon them.
‘Why of course,’ Tom said, clapping his hands in that sudden joy which was his peculiar gift, ‘I know just the thing – a tour of the town. Splendid, splendid.’
*
Tom and I, like schoolboys released, tramped out into the snow, hugging our shoulders until the heat of beating hearts suffused even our fingertips. We scrambled, wet-footed and wet-handed, back along the trail to the little footbridge that led across this narrow reach of the Potomac to the market square.
‘I have something to show you‚’ said Tom at last, for we had begun in silence, natural enough I suppose in the chill air, almost too cold and dense to breathe – though I suspected already that some unspoken contest between us thickened our tongues. Tom guided me along the central thoroughfare to the old junk shop – indicated by the sign picturing a somewhat blue ship under a rather green sea, and a decidedly elderly mermaid sorting through the wreckage. ‘Simmons’ was painted broad and red above the door. Various contraptions in various degrees of disrepair graced the front window, leather rubbed black by long use, silver greened and mottled in the sea of time.
Tom led me inside, stamping his snowy shoes in the doorway. A bell tinkled, and a woman in what is gently termed ‘her middle ages’ – just turned forty, perhaps – rose to greet us. I recognized her at once as the fading beauty present at the great experiment. She wore a wine-red dress, pressed flush against t
he tender white of neck and bosom, like the plumage of a cardinal against the snow. There was an easy gallantry in her carriage, and she seemed indeed to allow the room to shift around her, rather than exert herself, in moving from here to there. Her figure perhaps revealed a touch of the years – a certain twist of the long dress against her full hips. But in her face was nothing old. The rose of her lips and the ivory of chin and cheek had not felt the hand of time – which had brushed instead, lovingly, against her hair, red-gold and rich once, now thinner and fallen into the yellow leaf Tom took her hand and gave it a smacking kiss, as if deliberately to mock her perfect dignity. ‘Mrs Simmons‚’ he said, ‘I have brought you a countryman.’
She nodded at me and clapped her hands together once. ‘Was it not very wonderful?’ she said. ‘Last evening? (Though you did make a stew of it, I believe, Mr Jenkyns.) But to think such great experiments cobbled together from my own – perhaps, Herr Müller’ – and here she turned the great blue of her wide eyes upon me – ‘you could discover for me the English of Unrat?’
‘Rubbish, I think‚’ I replied, blushing at the tease in her look.
‘Oh, that is unkind, Herr Müller,’ she answered, smiling. ‘I had hoped for bric-a-brac, perhaps.’
Just then a broad young fellow with chapped hands clattered in the shop, saving me from further embarrassment. He asked for ‘old horseshoes, which he might’, he added, wrinkling and scratching his nose, ‘turn to some account – by boltin’ them to a loose door …’ And as she attended to him, I had a chance to look about me.
The floor was bare wood and there was a great shine of brass in the shop, glinting off knick-knacks, telescopes, old plaques, spectacles, burnished carriage wheels. I felt as if I stood in a sailor’s cabin, shipwrecked at the bottom of the sea. Mariners’ tools collected on the wood like barnacles. I picked up an old octant and peered through it, squeezing one eye shut, and allowing the other to roam at will through the gloom of the shop, until it lit, by chance, upon Mrs Simmons. She swayed gently in the swish of her dress, a mermaid past the first blush of youth, yet more elegant in age than the sharp young ladies I had known, always fretting themselves, and busy about their looks. I did not guess how long my eye fixed upon her, until – to my considerable astonishment and confusion – I observed her, through the thick lens, turn a sly eye upon me, and smile.
The Syme Papers Page 28
