‘She is Bavarian‚’ Tom whispered in my ear. ‘Married an American merchant captain and came here. Her husband volunteered against the British in 1812; died soon after at Fort McHenry; not much mourned, far as I can see. The shop is full of things useful to Sam. He has a bit of a fancy for her, you know. (The Muses speak to him through her, you know.) I don’t.’
This was the first unkind word Tom had uttered, and I guessed then the great delight of Tom’s heart – gossip – which, in the largest sense I believe, is what drew him to the Professor in the first place. For Syme, as I had seen myself, gossiped with the gods more lightly than any man I had ever known; and was himself the object of more human curiosity. I guessed something else, as well: that perhaps Tom’s envy extended even to the affairs of his master’s heart.
Summoning my courage, I ventured a few words to Mrs Simmons in our native tongue, polite and awkward. How quickly the familiar becomes strange! For I felt a greater stranger, conversing in these native phrases, than I had since coming an alien to these shores. I picked up a few things – the hasp of a door, a brass knob – and set them down again.
Mrs Simmons touched me on the elbow, as some people do, with an intimate slight bump. ‘How long have you been here?’ she asked in grave and gentle English again.
‘I arrived only yesterday,’ I answered in German once more, determined to overcome my natural shyness – so great as to be palpable, a blush of the brow hot to the touch. I feared that in discoursing thus, in our mother tongue, I had claimed a privilege to which I had no right. But I persisted, and enquired in turn about Professor Syme.
‘He has been kind in all ways to me and purchases a number of bits and pieces. For a shop like this is slow work, of course. And a lady needs occupation – I believe they call it.’ She looked at me quite mischievously, with the smile that gleams on a glass of wine struck by candlelight.
‘I will come again, if I may. It would be a comfort to hear my mother tongue.’
She nodded and we left.
Tom and I walked out into all the whiteness, so different from the precise shop-room shadows, their degrees of darkness and overlap, the shine of the brass, the small feet of the tables, and the gilt of the cloths laid over them. I guessed already the heavy loveliness of Mrs Simmons, which drowned everything in the honey of her sweetness.
‘I thought you might like to meet Sam’s mistress‚’ Tom said, in a flat voice, unlike his customary chirp. Something appeared to have saddened him – perhaps himself.
‘I did like it.’
We walked, deep as our boots in snow, down the heart of the road, while the silence spread between us, and the ice of the eaves shone till our eyes smarted.
Tom took me now through the loose and empty streets past a bright brick church and the newspaper office and the racing course. All directions still lay tangled in my mind like a cat’s ball of string; and I could not have wound up our path again for love or money. We dined together and the hours rang out three times over our ale. Tom knew the tricks of winning strangers; and he practised them that afternoon. He always had the air of someone imparting confidences – he could make a guilty secret of the weather – and bound men to him by little conspiracies. Only when we split ways and I walked back alone to Mr Barnaby Rusk and my cold room (the fire decayed to dead soft ashes on the bricks) did I wonder suddenly if they supposed I had joined them and become a new member of Syme’s salon.
*
I have accused my homesickness of softening me and leading me into a more mysterious and satisfying view of Syme than I had anticipated on setting forth. That burning planet, spinning, smoking, a device both rough and intricate, brave and disastrous, glittered in my memory. I dreamed of Syme that second night as I had seen him, flushed with the effort of creation, talking, talking, consumed by his thoughts as the globe was by its liquid fire – except that in my dream the words themselves shone and exploded as he spoke, burned away upon the air, and fell in scatterings of ash upon the floor. When I awoke to a brisk knock and heavy tread, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to discover that the Professor himself had entered the room, unbuttoned his greatcoat and draped it over my chair; and stood now, rubbing his brawny arms with either hand.
Syme was never easy at close quarters. He would duck his head and speak into his clasped hands; stride hither and thither, twitch at the curtains, peer out; turn suddenly and briskly the full sun of his attention upon his interlocutor, then darken at once, eclipsed by some cloud of preoccupation. ‘Come on, Müller‚’ he cried, in his rough voice, I’ve been busy since six – upon a new planet – an imaginary planet – formed let us suppose by – erosion – as a pebble in a stream – only consider – for an instant – such a powerful stream.’ He sat down at my feet, squeezing them together; and, still half-asleep, I considered this curious proposition for an increasingly uncomfortable minute. Then he rose briskly, leaned upon the splay of both hands against the window sill and stared out, utterly absorbed by the view of a tethered horse slowly scratching clear a foot of snow. ‘Never say’, he muttered, ‘that the animals – are incapable of – concentration.’ Then louder, once more, ‘Come on.’
He looked at me now and I looked at him, my hair spread out over the pillow, my fingertips pinching the covers closer to my bosom (to expose the least quantity of hand), my eyes dim and blinking with sleep. I could scarcely speak – my English tongue loosened last after waking, and the best I could manage in reply was a grunted, ‘Morning.’ So deep in dreams had I lain that I suffered a peculiar shock in discovering that Syme could see me – this above all seemed miraculous and strange, that Syme saw me, that I had stepped so far from the haven of my own thoughts as to embark on the sea of his. Slowly the morning hardened around me, and the world grew sensible to my touch, and ceased to shimmer with dreams. Syme turned away and stooped to the ash in the hearth, as I stepped from my bed.
‘Wonderfully clean, ash‚’ he said, as I began to dress, ‘far superior – in many respects to – soap.’ He lightly rubbed a pinch of the grey dust between thumb and finger, then brushed them clean again. For once, I omitted some of the niceties of my toilet, slung a pink cravat about my neck and left my long hair to tumble freely over my shoulders. Dressed and ready, I declared to his crouched back, ‘I am your man.’
Sam rose awkwardly, turned on one leg, and looked at me. ‘Good‚’ he growled. ‘Better. You have come such a long way, I must trouble you to come a little farther. Can we offer you a real democratic Sunday roast at my father’s table? In Baltimore, I’m afraid. Tom and I leave by coach at eleven.’
I accepted happily and stretched forth my hand to seal the offer. His own was cold and wet to the touch, for he had pressed it against the window pane while looking out.
‘It is very close in here‚’ I said, and moved to let in fresh air.
But he turned to the door, and said more heartily, ‘Shall we make a proper visit? A few days at least? Pack your portmanteau, and we can catch the mail together. You shall have the finest guest chamber – the floor will do for Tom. Good, that’s settled – at eleven sharp. You will like my father – all strangers do.’
With that he shambled out, in his muscular way – stooping once briskly to examine some irregularity in the floor, then stomping on. Pondering over the unhappy suggestion of Syme’s parting word, I began to pack my things.
At eleven accordingly the three of us set off by coach on the road to Baltimore. Tom and I set forth in aflutter of high spirits, and even Syme caught something of our merriment. He held up his briefcase to me. ‘I have brought you some of my papers to look over‚’ he shouted against the clatter of the wheels and the driver’s calls. We stopped for lunch at a tavern, the Apple Cart, perched between road and river. Trickles of dripping snow, along breast and back, teased us into shivers as we trudged through wheel ruts to the door. Mugs of steaming cider arrived and we held our hands around them till they seemed to melt away. When the brew burned its sweet cinnamon path down m
y throat and into the coursing of my blood I knew I had reached a noble land. Syme stood in front of the fire and struggled out of his greatcoat, arising from it like Neptune from the sea, steaming and roaring, as it dripped and drooped to his feet in a cold puddle. For the first time he seemed to belong to our youth. And he talked! How he could talk when the spirit was in him.
‘I looked over this morning‚’ said Syme, ‘when I woke early and could not sleep again for the cold, that final and magnificent passage of the Phaedo. You are acquainted with the Phaedo?’
‘I confess …’ I said, blushing, a proper schoolboy.
‘I thought, Tom‚’ the Professor interrupted, raising an enquiring brow at his friend, and thumbing his lips in contemplative fashion, ‘he said he was a doctor – a German doctor?’
‘I heard him‚’ Tom replied, ill at ease, checking his pockets, as if the answer might lie there. ‘Don’t tell me I didn’t hear him.’
‘Perhaps we have the wrong fellow‚’ Mr Syme said, relieved at a possible solution. ‘Perhaps that’s it. Educated gentleman – wasn’t he – the one we want?’
‘I might have seen one – you know how it is in Pactaw, one minute not a soul in sight, and the next can’t squeeze through the road, for doctors.’
‘Tall fellow‚’ Syme asked in his gruff staccato, ‘glum face? Looks like he’s trying to see the tip of his nose – but can’t quite? Determined not to believe a word he hears? Won’t trust – the time – if one tells him?’
‘Only in translation …’ I finished at last in a brief pause and puffed a fat cloud at them from one of my occasional cigars. How they fell mum at that, and looked at each other, and glanced at their boots. Perhaps they expected me to laugh or lighten, but I did not – the Greek is a serious matter, and I would not give way to their teasing. (I could hear the eaves drip in the silence, and suddenly saw myself from a vast distance, a speck caught in a corner, that corner itself a speck and so on.)
‘Herr Mooler,’ Tom said at last, ‘don’t take on so – we only jest. I beg you not to look so glum, so Teutonically sincere. Our expedition (for it is nothing less) begins in joy.’
I blushed again and said nothing. At last, Mr Syme cleared his throat.
‘You recall – the final dream of Socrates – testament in the phrase of your mad poet – Herr Müller – that the wise in the end prefer the beautiful. I am waiting – believe me, gentlemen – for that end. If only beauty would return the preference. In that great dream (long held to be nothing more – yet what more could one wish?) the logic melts – suddenly dissolves – leaks and dries away as our snow will – in a few days – but he teaches – in those final words –’ Syme stabbed the air with his pipe, as if to prick the bubble of each phrase as it blew away, ‘that the great end of all philosophy – natural and metaphysical – is the myth of creation. This has been my text – my Grail. To begin with – Beginnings – and finish with them, too – if I dare.’
For all his pomp, or perhaps because of it, Syme had a charm no drab witch of common sense could dispel. There was something pathetic in these boasts – the talk (as I knew even then) of the self-educated man, who believes each unfamiliar book to be an undiscovered country, a new world proudly claimed by the possessor. I heard the braggadocio of naivety in his voice, of course I did – I am an educated gentleman, well travelled on the roads of learning. And yet when he asked me, ‘Would you like, Phaedon, to hear the tale of creation?’ – it was all I could do not to answer, ‘Yes, please.’
The sunshine drifted white with winter over the floorboards; I heard the tick of dripping from the lintels. A little pool of snow and dirt had formed about our feet, and Tom scraped the toe of his boot in it while his master spoke. ‘We are born in fire – shaped by the death of that fire.’ This was a characteristic confusion of Syme’s – a conflation of the race and the planet. ‘Then worn smooth (I now believe) in the black current of the via lactea – like pebbles in a stream – smooth and round, of course, since the planets spin. Let us perch upon the moon and look down. A brilliant ball lies at our feet – for indeed the very hollows, full of water and mist, present a colour of their own as they shine (a perfect rainbow, indeed, or worldbow, rather). With the hands of Atlas, we stoop and lift its shell – opening up crown upon nested crown of burnished black. (Believe me, all our hearts are black at the core. It is only the shell that shines.) Let me write their names for you.’ Syme cried for quill and ink and scribbled them on a piece of old manuscript from his portmanteau: Washington (Syme was a true republican), Caesar, Cassandra, name after curious name, a mad mythology. Syme gave me the slip and went on. ‘After the sun cast us off – the fires died slowly within us. We burned away – like silver in a crucible – and cooled into – though this is only speculation – seven layers of metallic crust – separated according to their composition – think of oil and water – over a thousand years or so.’
Did I believe a word of it? I saw it all before me like a schoolboy’s alchemy, except that, in Syme’s glass vials, earths and suns lay stoppered. I loved nothing so much as the last ‘or so’, for when Syme erred a thousand years burned away like a fly in the flame, scarcely to be reckoned. ‘Though this is only speculation’ – I knew not whether to laugh at the absurdity or the grandeur of him; but Tom was right, there was a kind of joy in it all, a sense of wings stretched at last. ‘Haw are the layers arranged?’ I questioned, to prompt him further.
‘Like Russian dolls, if you like, growing smaller and smaller – stacked on top of one another. I call them crowns – though they are in point of fact – a sequence of concentric rotating spheres – jointed by a tightly packed metallic gas – known as fluvia. It is found mainly beneath the earth’s surface – though it escapes occasionally – through volcanoes, of course – and smaller cracks. It is breathable – eminently breathable, I’d swear my life on it – and allows for the free independent rotation of each of the seven crowns – though there is occasional friction – between Calliope, the second crown, and Cassandra, the first. Strike your hands together with cupped palms – feel the smooth socket of air – keeping the palms apart.’
He did so, I followed him, Tom, too – the three of us laughing openly now, a curious convocation, much admired (I believe is the term) by the common punters. ‘That is something like fluvia,’ the Professor continued, rubbing his hands now. ‘At sea, I believe – sailors see it in the sunset on hot days. The sun sucks it through the ocean – in huge bubbles to tlie air – where it burns red like gold.’
We all fell silent at the thought, lost in wonder at the strange world shimmering and swelling around us – until the bubbles, one by one, were pricked and dispelled by ordinary day: by the clatter of cups; talk of men; our wet feet. Then Syme said, in a kind of glorious regret, ‘We stand on the roof, you see. If only we could discover a crack – on a nearby farm – a village street – under a humble lake – we might climb into the house – down the chimney like a thief into the heart of Nature.’
I could not say a word to this. But he needed no answers, caught in such fine flow; and I would gladly have listened to him talk for days, as I had listened to Werner, in the sweet honesty of awe. For I have always been a listener at heart, and a follower, a natural admirer of the world, shy of my own steps in it, eager to hear the passage forced by greater men than I.
‘Kepler was the first‚’ Syme said, ‘perhaps till now – the only scientist – in the sense in which the word will be used – in a decade’s time perhaps – if we succeed.’ (Did not that ‘we succeed’ ring in my ears and both unsettle and delight me?) ‘Because of a discrepancy – eight minutes of arc – between the path of orbit according to accepted theories – and the path of orbit according to the finest observational data of the time – eight minutes, you understand – he overthrew a system of cosmology – that had ruled our thoughts for two thousand years. A nice destruction with so small an instrument! A true scientist. Eight minutes on this earth measures a distance of eight miles �
� so slight indeed that on a clear day – the errant navigator of a ship – may see by the naked eye the mark he has failed to hit.’
I ventured to interrupt him, anxious now to prove my own abilities, but Sam anticipated me. In truth, I was happy to keep silent, and I swallowed my question in the bitter-sweet dregs of my cup of cider.
‘Naturally the term cuts a far greater arc in the more distant sky – but the image serves to illustrate the nicety of the calculations. A faith in precision is the first requisite of the modern scientist – a faith not so distinct from a man’s religious faith. Let me explain. The scientist trusts – in the organization of details – despite a world of unexplained phenomena. The Godly man trusts in the Cause – of such organization – despite the mass that is unintelligible and per verse. Both faiths require the fisherman’s instinct: beliefs survive only – at certain depths – like fish – they must be left to their natural habitats – if they are to stay active and potent. They should seek neither to rise too high – nor dip too deep – nor consort with other fish – at different plummets. Kepler understood this better – per haps – than any man.’
The landlord called round for more orders. Tom gave me a canny look. ‘Are you thirsty?’ he asked. ‘Sam will talk us all dry yet.’
‘Hush‚’ I told him, ‘you will break the spell. Surely I have found an American Mesmer, a new magnetism.’
The Syme Papers Page 29
