Tom quickly took Sam’s place at the pulpit and began banging. ‘For those of you who would like to read more of the great Doctor,’ he cried, ‘he is producing a pioneering journal, the New Platonist, for only threepence an issue. My associate, Mr Mooler, is available at the punchbowl with a list for names and addresses.’
Mr Cooling soon noticed Syme’s departure and enquired after him. He nodded his head in great loops at Tom’s apologies. The churchmen were a stony bunch, no ground for talk. All except Henry, who tugged at his father’s thumb and asked him from time to time when ‘they was going to begin the – Volcanoes’.
There would be no volcanoes, the father explained.
‘That’s science’, the boy said, considering, ‘all over.’
Tom had a sickness brewing and could not even summon up a smile. My heart hurt for Syme. Only the old man had been attentive, mentioned that he had speculated as much, suggested the same to his wife, God rest her soul – she wouldn’t have none. Explained a great deal: how could a man walk steady with all them crowns gyrasticating down there below him, and him only with two good feet? Vacuii, too, that was a thought. All seven of them ever been in a row? That would give old Widder Thompson her Doomsday, ha!
And my heart rose a little. I remember leaving, looking back at the bowl of punch. The heavy ladle lay in a shallow pool, could dip no further. They stood around it with empty cups, none of them daring to lift the bowl and effect a more complete evacuation. None of them leaving while there was still punch in the bowl. Three men signed the list. Henry’s father, a Mr Irving, by way of apology, I believe; the old man; and Mr Cooling, by necessity.
Tom and I walked back through the white streets to the cabin behind Mrs Bevington’s house. ‘His aunt’s lodgings were Mr Cooling’s springboard to high office in the Oceanic Society,’ Tom mocked in a quavering voice. He shook already with fever. He had been calm and assured during Syme’s talk, as he needed to be. Now that it was over he was free to wheeze and shiver. The afternoon’s speech was a hard event now and could be dislodged. Harder things were to come. We returned to the cabin, whence Syme had preceded us, and I collapsed on a long draped ottoman in the swimming air. I could see Syme through the open door, writing at his desk. Tom, as was his wont after a lecture and despite his overcrowing illness, entered his chamber and leaned his back against the open door. I was shut out for the second time.
And gladly, too. I heard only a few words of Tom’s early conversation, including his favourite dictum, ‘Simplicity, brevity and Fires.’ But I knew that Sam had not spoken. ‘Volcanoes’ also slipped through the keyhole and made its escape to me. Just in time, too. For by now Sam had risen and I could hear his voice growing and dwindling as he paced from desk to door: ‘To be prodded and pricked like … come this way to preach at a watering-hole … the less intelligent bison … Harcourt will promise nothing … why did he come do I suppose? … a liaison with Mrs Cumberland … perhaps Cooling’s aunt … do not talk tome of … what do you suppose my sacrifices have been? … to exchange your bed for a baker’s fortune … with a baker’s looks … that needs no explanation … I am on the verge of great discoveries and you bring me to Middletown … I WILL NOT BE BESTED BY ANY MAN.’ He stopped there. ‘I WILL NOT BE BESTED … airs? what airs? I have never given myself – airs … Phidy has nothing to do with it … nothing to do with us, I should say … do not talk to me of my heat or the temper … yes, it’s true, it’s true … of course it’s a strain, who set the pace? … I will not have you pecking around me … if I need physic, Phidy will attend to it … I am done with you … I WILL NOT BE BESTED BY ANY …’
I could bear it no longer. Tom’s quiet, assured responses, running just too low for me to hear, chilled me as much as Syme’s clamour, which hurt me palpably, as if I were a child still who overheard a father’s rage. So I fled, into the shimmering streets.
When I returned, Sam sat reading on the ottoman. He looked up and said, ‘Tom fainted. I had to carry him to bed. He is properly – soaked. Take a look at him, will you – there’s a good Phidy?’
I knocked and entered. Tom lay swathed in sheets like a beast in seaweed. There was no comfort to be found anywhere. His every position seemed to neglect a leg or an arm or the neck. His skin looked chafed and his feet were swollen. But he did not complain, did as I told him; drank deep of the potion I prepared, breathed the spirit of camphor through a laden cloth. As ever he was patient and detached. Nothing could touch him in his fever, neither Syme’s anger nor my good offices. He was unreachable, dwindling into the distance like an object seen at the wrong end of a telescope. The nearer I peered, the farther he seemed to perch, a small, neat soul at a great height.
Sam and I spent the remainder of the evening in the adjoining room. Mrs Bevington brought us our supper, chops and potatoes, speaking shrilly and tiptoeing like a shadow (a heavy shadow with a propensity for knocking over cabinets), so as not to disturb ‘Dr Phidy Miller’s patient, poor dear Tom’. (All ladies ‘of a certain age’ instantly took to Tom, loved and fretted over him at once.) Sam read and wrote. I thought, happy enough in the summer-loud silence, having ample material for contemplation: the lecture and the mysterious Harcourt; our present plans; Tom’s illness, no doubt brought on by yesterday’s gentle shipwreck; that more spiritual leak in our little vessel, the rift between Tom and Sam … I delighted with the curious inward satisfaction that feeds quite happily on any serious event, sustained equally by fortune and misfortune.
Sam’s throat hurt him from the hot weather, the lecture, the argument with Tom and the late night. It had been a filthy day. The air was soaked but no rain came, and the evening did not fall, but stick. On such nights we sprout thoughts and desires, like roots coming out of a broken flowerpot. At last, nightfall brought a more delicious air. When I saw a curtain shiver, then belly with wind, like a woman’s dress; collapse and sag again, like loose skin; then billow – my heart rose with it. I removed my jacket and shirt and sat in my undershirt in the grateful breeze. Syme wore only his pantaloons. His feet were bare, in easy fellowship with his bare chest and hanging arms. Tom lay ill and feverish in the bedroom next door, for once the object and not the engine of our cares. But we are never like our styles in the end, thank God. The lot of sickness should by right have fallen to me. But I was only hot and hoarse and happy, sitting beside Sam’s work table.
‘How could you begin?’ I asked, with a rare though over-earnest pluck. ‘What courage you must have needed. Settled in the army, well placed to satisfy an ordinary ambition. What did your mother think? How could you desert a solid world and decent prospects for such bottomless fantasies and a life like this?’
‘Most ideas’, he said, going over old ground, ‘begin as the answer to an unimportant problem – soon forgotten – a stone washed away once the stream is crossed. So it was with me. A simple calculation to occupy an idle hour led me to a quite different question – a question of mass and Newton. My breath stopped, as at a blow to the stomach. So true it is that we are at the mercy of our own … inspiration – that is too grand a word, which means nothing more than the ability to begin in idleness and end in faith.’
He paused and began again – some new thought had teased him from the repetition. ‘I believe greatly in profusion, in … You may wonder at the labour of it – how hard I work at dull connections and tedious proofs. But, for me, precision is only one kind of abundance. Such colours, such magnificent explosions! Is not the magnesium torch glorious? The endless turning of these intricate spheres? Am I not fertile ground? Was anything ever born without heat and accident?’
I waited on his word, leg bent over the arm of the chair, long chin cupped in the heat of my palm. ‘There are always a dozen answers to any question,’ he said at last, ‘and then the question changes. We want … satiety, more than satisfaction. We wish to be sated from time to time – to desire nothing. I suppose I began in search of that. I suppose I will find it – that is one consolation. We all do. I earned my dish
onourable discharge within the month.
‘Tom is a different creature altogether,’ Sam added after a short pause, touching my knee lightly and winking his eye at the sick room. How I thrilled at the confidence! ‘He has only temperament – a fine thing, certainly, and very useful. But it leaves no room for temptation – and what comes after temptation. You and I have character – a more unhappy gift.’
There were only two beds in the cabin, and Tom and I had shared one the night before. ‘You should not disturb the patient, Phidy,’ Sam said. ‘Come to bed with me.’ We undressed together and stepped into the rough cold sheets. I babbled beside him, happy with talk and ‘the whispered thoughts of hearts allied’. But Sam soon fell asleep, with that great weariness that can be quenched as readily as thirst. Then I lay restless and awkward at his side deep into the night. I could not turn my thoughts to anything else with Sam so close, and at last, unconsciously, began to count the soft breaths from the still figure beside me.
*
It was two days before Tom was well enough to travel. Sam and I both nursed him, though he required little. They were significant days to me. One swallow doth not a summer make, they say in this strange tongue; and that night of close companionship in the close air with Tom so close at hand was only the first appearance of the swallow. The next two days ushered in summer. Sam and I delighted in our new freedom. We spent two long days by the cabin, as idle and busy as children. ‘What shall we do after breakfast, Sam?’ I asked, still awkward in our young intimacy.
‘Go to the water,’ he said, with a broad smile on his face.
That morning, we dredged the sunk boat from the bottom of the river. Syme stripped completely and dived in with a rope round his waist, while I held the other end from the shore, well hedged in shirt and waistcoat, tie and coat, all white in that white heat. Sam proved a strong swimmer in the event, a second Byron, exuberant in the water, like water itself, a strong fountain leaping and pushing away its own kind in a white shower. Down he went and pulled the boat from where it lay sucking in the mud, a titanic effort, and attached the rope to the cross-benches. He shot up for breath, a suddenly young man, sweeping wet hair from his forehead.
‘Pull, you damn fool,’ he cried, ‘I’m not a fish!’
He disappeared again. The water rippled, shimmered above him, and I could feel the strain on his back as he dug his knees into the river mud and heaved. The boat stirred, lifted, sank, but only skimmed the mud, and then rose. I hauled it to the bank, where it lay pointing at the sky, half-submerged like a dead fish. Sam joined me then, streaked with thick, dark mud, like paint, which rendered him almost decent in a pagan way, and we brought up the damned thing. Its boards lay reeking and drying in the sun. I fetched Sam the white sheet from our bed and, classically draped, he lay beside the river. I secured one corner of the cloth and went so far as to take off my shoes and stockings. I sat coolly and sedately, never quite at peace, but always happy, letting my feet settle below the cool water, stroked by swaying weed from time to time.
But Sam could not sit still. Within a few hours, the excess of his high spirits returns, and he must again be busying himself with something. I marvelled at his fresh forces, wondered at how much they had to do with Tom’s prostration, his absent shadow. Now Sam could diffuse his enormous energies over smaller and happier things. I marvelled, but Sam’s energy so nearly matched my own inward high spirits, my restless, stirring, ineffectual delight, like the motion of a tree’s shadow in the wind, that it seemed but the intoxication of the air, the fine day, and I did not puzzle more over it at the time. I was again sent fetching – to Mrs Bevington for a carpenter’s kit.
Sam set to work immediately, tipped the boat on its belly so that the rump stood open to his inspection. He caulked a minor flaw between two boards with a mixture of his own preparation. But he found that it would not do: the weakness was too general and the rot had proceeded too far for such patchwork remedies. We found some old boards in a shed and Mrs Bevington consented that they be translated to a lighter, aqueous bliss.
‘I never noticed them till after my husband died, Mr Phidy, and I never could think how they got there, till it hits me once. They was left over from his coffin.’
Mrs Bevington was added to our little gathering and watched the transformation with a somewhat sentimental curiosity. Sam, now dressed and almost decent, was glad of the audience. All afternoon he kept at it, hacking and ripping and sanding and nailing and boarding and a great many other operations, no doubt, all of which he explained to me very thoroughly, though I scarcely heeded him, too happy to sit in the shade with my back against the willow and listen to the companionable unsteady din. By early evening the boat had been repaired, swum light and high, and with two newly fashioned oars we could begin our explorations of the river. Mrs Bevington brought us a bottle of wine for the launch, but we drank it instead and waited for the morning.
Tom rose the next day, late and weak, sipped tea with us under a garden awning. The sky was another perfect blue shell, with that peculiar swept, deserted air of a fine spring morning. But it was high summer, though a little cooler than the day before. We left him sitting warmly wrapped by the bird-bath and took the boat, newly christened Punch, upriver towards Richmond. It was a weary pull. The current was slow but contrary, and the sun lay very hot on the water. My face grew quite red by day’s end, a crack-skinned berry. We alternated at the oars and raced for pace. Sam never flagged. His broad, deep strokes brought a fine bow-wave surging past and both our spirits surged with it, stirred to a crest of joy by the simple motion of the blades in the water and the self-made wind tugging our hair and cooling our ears and faces. But the old sticky heat returned late in the afternoon. It settled on us like a fallen cobweb or a glaring cloud, and soon I surrendered my stroke entirely to the indefatigable Sam, who pulled us to a riverside inn.
We sat in the window overlooking the broad current and ordered tall pots of porter. ‘Have you ever fought a – duel?’ he said to me, as we dipped our noses in the thick brews.
‘No.’
He touched a loose hair that had caught on his tongue with his fingertip, looked at it briefly, and rubbed his hands together. ‘They make a curious entertainment. It is a great and common mistake’, he continued, ‘to contest them in the morning. Viz: men dragged from their beds will kill each other through sheer muddle-headed sleepiness – who might, in brighter moods, render or accept a pardon. Midnight is no better. Anyone may kill at midnight – darkness has the effect of strong drink. No, if you wish to avoid a scrape – suggest teatime. Nothing is easier than to reconcile – at teatime.’
Sam drank deep, rubbed a knuckle against his nose, and said, ‘I fought one once. Just such a filthy day as this. I had been in – a terrible temper – all afternoon. It seemed the only thing to do.’
He sat back in his seat and lifted the catch of the window, and pushed open the glass with a squeak and a scrape. A grateful wind ruffled the river and blew into our faces, and Sam closed his eyes against it. ‘At the time,’ he said, returning to his pot of porter, ‘I confess, I shouldn’t have minded an – an honourable grave. Only think what thoughts would have remained – unthought! – had a plug of iron strayed – an inch inside my tunic! Though there was in the event little question of that. The chief feature that struck me about the whole affair (apart from the fact that I felt a hot fool … most of the night, and a chilly fool … in the morning) was this: how little capable we are of – taking a life. Not in the particular, of course. Nothing could be easier: a click and a spark and a puff of very pleasing powder, I must say, and there’s an end of it. But in the proper weight and consequence of the act – it is entirely beyond us. We commit the gravest and the lightest deeds – in the same spirit – relying as it were on the connections between the slight and the great – to achieve our ends – between an inch of iron and this globe of thoughts.’ Here he held his own globe in his two hands, and rubbed these across his eyes till they held his nose, and he br
eathed once, deeply, between his palms.
‘The trick, by the by,’ he added, on a lighter note, ‘should you ever need it, Phidy – is this: aim at the hip as you raise the gun. It will bear first and throw him off his shot. Fire once in the air after he misses you, and both sides may retire with honour. There is a lesson in that – a man with partial objectives will always triumph over a man with a more – complete sense of purpose. A lesson, it seems, Phidy, that I have unlearned.’ Then he saw my nodding, sunburned countenance and took pity; hauled me up with both hands under my armpits and made his farewells to the clamour of good wishes and invitations that followed him to Punch and echoed long after us down the long, echoing water. We returned to Middletown easily with a lazy surprise: the current must have been stronger than suspected. And Sam rowed us in, gently nosing the small pier just as the sun set, sad and full, and Tom came out to greet us, with a lighter step, dressed, though still a little pale.
We shouldered our packs and departed the next day, whither only Tom knew. The sky was that brown-grey, low-hung miserable drapery of unsettled summer days. But my summer had begun. For if ever I belonged in America, if ever I lent my weight to this enterprise, it was then. Tom’s sickness was the beginning; the past two days were the first happy steps. So I left that town with a light step, in fledgling good spirits, though the air hung still around us as if a bell tolled in it.
*
Even after this respite, our little band had not yet found its gait. I had won a place in Sam’s esteem for the first time; but the quarrel between Tom and Sam was postponed and not resolved, had prompted indeed a slight stiffness between Tom and me. I felt as if Sam must ‘forgive Tom’ before we could prosper, though for what I could not guess, unless it were Sam’s own dependence. His spirits had lightened after our dip in Punch, but his heart for the enterprise still lay in the balance. Sam was always happiest when he shied from his own purpose. Tom feared that the dry work in Middletown might turn him from the harvest. After a week of travels our list of subscriptions could be enclosed in the white field of a page. ‘He is such a stubborn ass,’ Tom told me one night, to breach our awkwardness and deflect his own despair, ‘and would make himself miserable out of a philosophical conviction.’
The Syme Papers Page 42
