I had known Sam Syme for only four days. I had come a great way to … have a look at him, and already he had summoned me to fight beside him. He was a great summoner of men. I knew then what had drawn Tom to him, a year or two before, and led him to resign a respectable life at an ordinary newspaper for the hard task of keeping in business a mad genius. Sam had the gift of turning his own affairs into questions of life, and he claimed us as a king would press into his army citizens defending their own small homes. After all, if Sam were right, the world under my feet would be transformed. The world around me was already taking its shape.
In a quiet moment after supper I sought the solitude of their porch, well fed and suffering from that curious loneliness that seems an echo to good humour and company and healthy spirits. Mrs Syme, to my surprise, came to join me, sat down beside me on the steps, hoisting her apron beneath her, and sighing and saying nothing.
‘A fine meal,’ I ventured at last, to break the silence. ‘I believe there is no happiness like the happiness of the …’ I hesitated over the word ‘stomach’, fearing it improper, and sought another in some anxiety. ‘Table,’ I concluded at last, in great relief.
‘I am glad you have come and to have met you,’ she said quickly, keeping her head down (like her son!), and embarking, it seemed, upon a long thought that had been unravelling for some length in her meditations. Then she looked up at me, and I noted the strange youth of her inner countenance (I can think of no better term), for she had a doll’s eyes and nose and lips, upon a broader, heavier head. Half a moon fell over the sharp snow and the path it left led deep and wavering into the beginning of the woods.
A confession: I have always had an indifferent way with mothers. They seem a strange species, and quite unlike the ordinary run of women. Indeed, there seems to me something strangely masculine in the breed, something practical and well worn, even when they preen themselves, as Mrs Syme undoubtedly did, pinching her cheeks, touching her lips, and keeping a weather eye on her figure, whenever her husband stepped in the room. ‘It has been’, I began, sounding the note of appreciation, and missing the proper pitch (I could hear this myself) by an octave or so, ‘a great –’ joy, I would have said, but she interrupted me.
‘I wished only to say to you,’ she broke in, ‘again’ (blushing slightly, so she looked both younger and older, a girl and a fussing grandmama, depending as the moonlight caught her pale hair and shone yellow or white), ‘how pleased I am – to meet you – and see my son in such – fine company – because – because – in short, Phidy’ – she stammered at my pet name, quite red-faced now – ‘I wish to tell you that I – call it a mother’s fancy if nothing better – that I DO NOT TRUST TOM JENKYNS.’
We could see a horse cantering some way up the road, a dark shape shouldering through the cold, with a heavy rider – and then hear him, the hoofs muffled in snow, the sharp and distant breaths. This seemed to spur Mrs Syme to conclude her surprising confidence. ‘I beg you, Phidy, not to mistake me and believe that I doubt Mr Tom’s good heart or … application; but I fear – I fear greatly – that he puffs my son – for his own purposes – puffs him with a great bellows – and my son, Herr Müllet, is just the man to be – led on by rumours of his own success – till he – till I fear he will – burst. That’s all. I mean to say that I am glad that he is in respectable hands. You seem to me, sir’ – and she sought the word her son had used, and found it again, strangely comforted by the term – ‘a good judge. That’s what Sam said. A good judge. And that’s a fine thing, Phidy, I believe.’
I had no time to answer her, for the horse clattered up to the foot of the porch, and Mrs Syme rose quickly beside me, as if discovered in some conspiracy, and seized a broom resting in the doorway, and began to sweep the dust of snow off the steps into the road.
The horseman proved to be Bubbles’ husband come to fetch her home. He was a butcher named Reuben, a bluff, sober, successful man, with hands as big as melons, one of which fairly crushed my own poor palm when he shook it. ‘I shan’t get snow on your fine carpets, Mrs Syme,’ he called, standing out in the cold. ‘I’ve only come for Barbara.’
Barbara called for ‘a minute, my dear’ and flew about the house in a tiny tempest. We gathered on the porch to see her go. She embraced Sam long and cried, ‘I am so glad, there is nothing like a geognostic revolution to cheer a Sunday night.’ She kissed Tom and then ran to fetch her small bag, then ran out and in again and took me by the hands. She pecked me on the cheek and said, ‘Beware of my brother, Phidy.’ A blush of warm shame spread over my face, welcome in the cold wind of the clear night. ‘I shouldn’t listen to a word he says.’ She was gone before I could protest, lost in Reuben’s great cloak as the horse disappeared into the snow.
*
That night Tom made me his proposition. We were all tired as dogs and I at least was more than half-asleep. Sam’s parents had gone to bed and the three of us sat before the grey end of a fire. I held a brandy in my hand and the flame of our cigars made up for the ebbing warmth of the embers in the grate. Sam smoked on his back, stretched out on the hot tiles beside the fireplace. ‘There is a great deal of work to be done,’ he said, not for the first time that day. ‘We need another man,’
‘We need more than that, Sam,’ Tom said, a trifle peevish still. ‘We need money. That old lantern for testing flu’ won’t do any more, that’s all It is time to bring in Galileo; we want precision now. This is not the first time the matter has come up, but I think it is the first time, Sam, that you will own I am in the right.’
I sat among them and could not guess whether they spoke thus openly out of indifference to me or because they had assumed my complicity. I did not remain long in silence or in doubt.
Tom turned to me, with a practical air, and said, ‘This report you mentioned, Phidy, what goes in it? If you want to get to the bottom of our enterprise, you may have to go with us a little way. We cannot have you along as a free passenger, you see that, Phidy, don’t you? We must all carry the weight. Don’t that tally with your ideas of the mission?’
I could not tell whose mission he meant. When I said ‘yes’ to Tom I did not suspect my answer mattered very much. An answer is often the easiest thing to give. I comforted myself with the reflection that most of our decisions have been made by the time the question comes. If we have lingered long enough to hear it, our answer is probably assured. That night by candlelight I composed my first ‘report’.
My dear father,
I have arrived safely in America after a somewhat solitary journey, in the course of which I had a great deal of time – and, as the sea swept by us, room – to examine the disposition of my character which has brought me here; and which has, in some measure I know, disappointed you … My first impressions of this new world can be confined to two words: such distance and such cheapness! Distances are not considered in this country as in Europe – an American thinks nothing of travelling a hundred miles for a day or two; and indeed, even now, I am writing from Baltimore, under the roof of the Professor’s father – though we return to Pactaw, a long day’s coach-ride to the south, in the morning. Food there is in plenty, fine meats, and thick cheeses, and sweet ales – indeed, I have dined well in this new world, with a freshened appetite, and begin, I believe, to grow plump. There is plenty of everything, in fact: of dirt and squalor and poverty and riches, of low and high, of broad and narrow, of the genteel and the coarse, the proper and the improper. Plenty of everything, that is, except, as one American put the case to me, of doubts: ‘an American doubts of nothing’. I have known a great while that doubts are a kind of infection, and may be caught from one man to the next; but I did not suspect until now that the reverse is also true, and that their absence is equally contagious, and may be passed, from hand to hand.
A natural gift for doubting, I believe, Father, is among the reasons that I have baulked at those political ideals on which you have spent the capital of your heart. Any Idea (no matter how great or good) that
involves the disposition of men is bound to slip into a thousand little errors, growing and compounding each other, until that seed of truth, from which it rose, is strangled and buried in a kind of undergrowth. And yet – I have begun a great many thoughts in my short stay in America with that phrase – and yet, among the attractions this enterprise affords me, the chief of these is the company of the men (or rather man) I have stumbled upon. ‘Do not be taken in,’ you warned me; well, I confess, I have been taken in, in the kindest fashion, by my hosts; and for the first time in my life, perhaps, begin to feel at ease among my – well, I hardly dare say it now, though I should have been appalled at such humility two months ago – my equals. Before I left home, you desired me to return with something, you did not care what, that should be exclusively American, something which could not be procurable anywhere else. When I saw Sam Syme I longed to pack him up, and direct him, per next packet from Baltimore, to you – for he was the first article I met with that could not by any possibility have been picked up out of the United States.
Such fire as glows and boils within him! I believe the phrase ‘fearless in thought’ could be construed as damning, the mark of someone hesitant in the field of fact, and brave only in the barracks of his contemplation. And yet how few of us are truly fearless in thought! Syme clambers up the branches of his imagination, certain at each turn, that his foot shall find a limb, his hand a hold, wherever he reaches – and in that certainty I follow; and, it may please you to know, have even guided him once, this very evening, towards his next ascent!
I apologize, dear Father, for the uncharacteristic enthusiasm of this letter – I will endeavour to correct it in future, it is quite unlike me. Only you must consider how cold my chamber is now – the ice glistening against the pane, like the tooth of some winter animal waiting to creep in; the fire dead in the hearth; and the pan cooling in the bed. It is the only warmth left me tonight – but such warmth – the smouldering remnant from the fire of this afternoon’s … inspiration, which I hope will prove a great, a signal advance, in our discoveries. In short, I wish to say that Syme’s theories are by no means as visionary as we supposed; that I believe I have some (and by no means insignificant part) to play in their development; and that, if exploited properly, they could be of rare service and honour to the German nation. Surely, this is what we hoped. To this end, I require a slight addition to the funds we agreed upon. Unfortunately, Syme’s experiments are costly and mine in probing his are no less so …
Believe me ever, etc. your dutiful son,
Friedrich
I fell asleep in Bubbles’ bed, to the sigh and click of the wind in the icicles in the eaves, less lonely than I had ever been since coming to America. Naturally, I took this step fully conscious of my own equivocations.
‘Syme’s theories are by no means as visionary as we supposed,’ I wrote – an interesting choice of words! Of course, I knew that I had joined them after a fashion, but comforted myself with the thought that what fashion remained to be seen. Yet equivocations are subtle and fluid creatures and rarely survive the processes of life.
*
We returned to Pactaw the following morning. I promptly shifted my slight gear to Syme’s house, and ensconced myself in a small box-like room looking over the river and the market square. I explained my change of plans to Mr Barnaby Rusk, as Tom came to help me with my chest. ‘I shall lodge’, I said, ‘with Mr Syme, a gentleman who lives across the river, and with whom I am engaged upon – some business.’
Mr Rusk considered the matter a moment and said, ‘The same gentleman, I believe, who came to see you at breakfast the other day? A broad, low fellow with a swagger? Yes, yes,’ he added, scratching a lonely loose grey hair that curled from his pink chin. ‘I remember him well – he should have been a fine – he should have been a fine’ – Barnaby occasionally required several swings at a sentence, just as he needed to rock once or twice to lift himself from a chair – ‘pugilist, I believe. I should have been glad to take him on … in my day. He could go a few rounds, I think. The chest of a – chaffinch, sir; that’s the clue. Never mistake it.’
Tom gave me a sly look, and we giggled shamefully when hauling the chest towards the bridge. ‘Hush‚’ I cried, ‘he shall hear us – Mr Rusk sets great store by his dignity.’ But this only set off Tom afresh, and I confess that I followed – strangely cheered nevertheless by this surprising confirmation of Sam’s … endurance.
The house suffered greatly from damp, and my bedchamber was cold as a cow’s nose each night, for it had no fireplace and lay far from the kitchen. I needed no other excuse to linger late with Tom and Sam, drinking rum and tea beside the tavern fire and warming our shoes against the grate.
Sam, with his boundless energy for devices large and small, jury-rigged a line on which we might drape our night-gowns every evening without singeing them. ‘We shall go to sleep warm at least‚’ he said, ‘though we awake as cold as in our grave-beds.’ The hanging garments themselves had the air of the cemetery about them and we often talked deep into the morning in the company of those pale ghosts.
My new role sat uneasily on my conscience, and I reasoned to myself that a man might follow a preacher and not a faith – for I could not yet happily describe myself as ‘a believer’. I was enthralled by the man, and it was in his company that I felt the fulfilment of my project.
The snow, however, delayed much of our experimental work, though we had time in abundance to complete the adjustment to Syme’s theories begun at that fateful dinner. Sam designed an improvement upon the magic lantern, his first invention, whose small flame was a blue eye peering into the hollows of the earth. It was called the magnesium match, a thin, flammable wire trapped in a crystal prism and suspended from the inside of a glass hood. We held this lantern above afire of leaves or twigs or the alcohol solution of loose earth or pond water. Then we lit the match and a thin blue spirit of light appeared in the smoke and danced high or low upon the lantern’s glass walls. The position of this gay faerie depended on the content of fluvia in the smoke, and we etched a fine web of reckonings against the glass to chart her. We could now measure such niceties of blue as would suffice an angel in tracking the depths of Heaven. Tom playfully named this lantern the flu’, and so we called it. But snow still barred us from the Pearly Gates. We ate and wrote and talked and slept under that roof, often days on end without venturing forth. It was Tom’s task to keep our bodies and souls together, an ungrateful job – until my father could answer my call for greater funds. For our souls could eat the air, crammed with visions and calculations, but our bodies grew often so chilled they nearly forgot their material selves.
But there were parties, too, and weeks spent free of all thoughts of this hollow earth. An old clap-up piano landed in the shop of Frau Simmons one day, and Sam declared he must have it, though the keys rattled like spit on a hot pan and the pedals squealed at every foot and the back panel bellied forth like a sail in the wind. ‘I must compose – music!’ he declared, over Tom’s high-pitched protestations. We could not lift it across the narrow footbridge, so Sam rigged a pulley to a willow branch and lowered the piano on to the frozen river, with a handful of boys recruited, to steady her as she came. A swarm of townsfolk, like flies, followed everything we did – though in a general way we were disapproved of, and the boys I fear received something of a hiding for lending a hand to ‘the cracked wizard across the water’, as Sam was sometimes called. Haw sweetly she slid across the ice, the keys smiling like a mouthful of broken teeth, at the brisk air and the exercise; while Tom chased after her and banged half a song into the cold afternoon along the river – for he was just the sort of fellow to give in with a good heart, and go along with anything when the time came. I can tell you she was not so light to lift again upon the other bank.
When we finally installed her in the tavern room, and Sam had spent a hot week in shirt-sleeves, the fire roaring to fill the hearth, while he repaired her (such a dismal banging and groaning and
tinkling as Tom and I endured!), Sam insisted on having a ‘musical experiment’, as he called it, and invited a handful of the locals across the river to celebrate – often the same fellows who attended the first catastrophic display I had stumbled upon the previous month. The ladies came, of course, wives and widows, and nervous young things, bonneted and blushing, and among the latter two: Frau Simmons in a green dress that glittered silver in the light, till she did indeed resemble the elegant mermaid swimming through the gloom of her shop sign; and Kitty Thomas, the baker’s daughter, whose sharp tongue and stubborn insistence on what she knew and did not know greatly amused Tom, who minded neither them nor the pockmarks marring her pretty face. I brewed a special pot of Glühwein over the fire – cheap claret, costly oranges, sticks of cinnamon a finger thick, and brandy – and thought, If only you could see me, Father, and how easy it is to get along when everyone who knows me better and my dour spirit is half a world away. Though I confess to feeling a slight heartache at the imposition of the ladies, and their claims upon my companions’ affections.
In the event this mattered little, for Sam spent much of the evening at the piano, happy and red in his fine face, quite drunk, banging away; and he insisted, definitely, drunkenly, insisted, that I take the hand of ‘fair Frau Simmons’ (as he said it), while he was thus engaged. And so my compatriot and I … exchanged a look … and ventured a step, and, whispering a kind of apology – ‘I’m afraid,’ I murmured, ‘Quite so,’ she replied, and added,‘We must obey him since everyone … have you not seen? … does as he says’ – took each other by the hand. And away we whirled! How happily I cannot say, till I remember thinking, at a hot and breathless pause in the music, Do not glance in a mirror, Phidy, for you shall not recognize the joyful gentleman peering out.
The Syme Papers Page 31
