But I was on a nervous edge of happiness and could not have slept for the world. Nor did Sam consent, and in his generosity questioned me concerning my youth: the death of my mother at Ruth’s birth; my sister’s ripening charms and sly flirtations (alas Sam sighed, smiling); the whims of my Prince, and his little palace on the hill, where I attended such delightful musical evenings to escape the babbling barrack of revolutionary drunks my father kept in the basement (himself how much gentler, richer in true faith than his companions!). The night grew quiet and tiny noises began to emerge like insects in the clear air: the noise of branches unbending beneath their load; the patient hollow echo of wood-doves; the electric twitterings of titmice; and the thousandfold shattering drops of poised beads of water and their endless rebirth. Sam rose from the hay and walked over to the great barn door. Opened it wide and stood in the sudden wind, looking out over the vast grey air and the wet grass-blades, stirring and vibrating like the wires of a swept harp, as wind and water bent and unbent them with mechanical precision. The sky began to crack like a shell with dawn emerging. The horses snuffled, shimmied and neighed as they roused their stiff great bodies. Sam shut the large door, leaving us in a thick grey light. Without another word we all slept.
I awoke before my companions with an almost guilty air, as if a secret had been confessed. There is to my mind something shameful in talk, a crude undressing. But Sam and Tom noticed nothing amiss, as they roused themselves straw-haired and stumbled out under the perfect blue shell of morning. And the air, after that hard summer rain, was so clear and joyous as we set out that we felt we could taste the champagne bubbles on our tongue from the rising sunny atmosphere.
*
Next we stopped in Golden, Virginia, a small town scarcely bigger than Perkins. Mr Corkney, the local schoolmaster, commissioned Sam to speak for the older pupils at his school. For he instructed children of nearly every age together, from five years onwards till they were fit for the plough, and he feared that he neglected the older students in such a mix. He taught in a one-room cabin built on the sloped edge of his fields, for he was a farmer, too. And he seemed truly delighted to ‘entertain the celebrated geonomist’, as Sam had begun to call himself, so I took to him at once.
We brought our gear to the barn and dropped it happily in the hay. Sam said, ‘I should like a walk – don’t follow,’ and left with a sheaf of notes stuck under his arm in the humid weather, thick as soup. He often took an hour to himself to gather his thoughts and strength for the coming talk. Perhaps he wished to jostle the two of us together again, for Tom and I had been distant of late. We stood awkwardly now, as silent as a reunion, and I thought how rare had been the spells of our recent good fellowship, or even our solitary company. Sam in a measure had come between us.
Then Tom said, ‘Are you thirsty, by chance?’
We found our way to the public house, the Sword and Plough, at the foot of the hill. We sat deep in cracked leather, too low to see anything but the brown clouds of summer through the window, flung wide. ‘Good afternoon, sirs,’ said the barmaid in a white frock and a voice just gone sharp with her trade, ‘what’s your pleasure?’ She was a brimming miss, scarce fifteen years old, with short straw hair, soft, downward cheeks and upturned bright eyes.
‘Two pints of ale.’
She brought us our cups running over, and Tom in his easy way caught her by the hand as she set them down. ‘What’s your name?’ he said, in those fluting bird-like tones that women adored, and let her go.
‘Kate,’ she answered and then pursed her lips. ‘Miss Benton,’
‘Kate Benton,’ Tom said, pinching his bottom lip, and considering. ‘Do you see the gentleman beside me? Look as much as you like, he won’t understand us. He don’t speak, you see, at least not what we would call language.’ Indeed, I was speechless and sat as tongue-tied as a fish. ‘He’s a prince, though,’ Tom went on steadily, ‘a German prince.’ Kate Benton did stare at me then, but a farmer by the door called to her, and she blushed and fled.
I began to protest loudly at both our treatments, but Tom hushed me to a murmur. ‘How can you hope to win her,’ he urged, ‘if you are not a proper silent German prince?’
And such is my foolish nature that I sat mum, while Tom had the wind of me for the best part of an hour. How he prattled to my mute amusement, speculating over Kate Benton’s age, the number and fierceness of her early lovers, and the recommended means of pressing my suit. I could remonstrate only in whispers, or splutter loudly in my mother tongue while he watched me with crinkling eyes. But we laughed shamefully and got on very well. Kate called to me as we left and snuck out of the door behind us, shutting it with her hand behind her back. ‘Come here, Your Highness,’ she said and kissed me on the chin, then disappeared. O, I was everyone’s fool.
We returned to the barn to prepare our couches for the night. Sam had accepted the hospitality of the spare bed, but Tom and I were happy to sleep like dogs in the leftover hay of the schoolmaster’s barn. A something lingered in the air that I did not wish to see blown out – a question stood on the tip of my tongue. I feared Tom would slap his thighs and climb into the loft to arrange the thatch before I could ask it. But he lingered too, and answered my question as if the thought grew naturally out of our talk of Kate. Perhaps we had both been dwelling on it. ‘Tom,’ I said, ‘why do you work so hard for Sam? Does it not strike you as a fool’s errand?’
Tom sat on the bottom rung of the ladder with his knees tucked into his chin. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is a question.’
‘You neglect your own ambitions,’ I added, growing braver. ‘Even ordinary hopes, you neglect them, too. You know to what I refer, Tom. Your life seems all neglect but for this one man. You seem happy enough, but if he should fail?’
‘Do you see, Phidy, that Sam is easily’ – and Tom did not hesitate but waited for the word – ‘spilled. Do you see that, Phidy? If you do not give him peace, real quiet, he goes everywhere, but to waste. He must be held quite still. And don’t smile at me when I say it, Phidy, Phidy-if-I-may, for it’s true I think, though you won’t credit it, but l am a very … still sort of fellow. And I think I do him good.’ I did smile, though with a different doubt. Tom went on. ‘There is something else. Sam has no head for this world,’ and before I could protest, he added, ‘Wait till I finish, Phidy. I know you think along a different line.’
He summoned his thoughts for a minute, then continued. ‘He has no eye for present fortunes and would not eat unless we fed him. It is my task to keep him fed, but, more than that, I must not let him bury himself too deep in his own purposes. I tell him, “You cannot win eternity until you win the world. And you cannot win the world until you win the admiration of Virginia or Pactaw or something more than the love of a young doctor who misses his father and a down-at-heels newspaperman.” He don’t see it, and I love him for that, too. For though Sam craves our every thought, and I know he does, he does not reckon our poor respect any lower than Ben Franklin’s or the King of England’s. He is a true democrat in that. But he must speak from some eminence to be heard. I love him so that I wish every city would raise a statue to him or call their streets after him. But as yet they cannot, for they do not know his name. I have battled him all the way on these travels, as you must have guessed. Now at last he has taken the reins in his own hands. He knows there will be a time for his investigations.’
‘I could not keep him from his own task for all the world.’
‘Perhaps you might, Phidy. But yours is a different faith.’
There was some puzzle and doubt in those last words that eluded me, but I could not mistake the tone. Tom wished to persuade me of something – of what I could not guess nor to what end. He wished to enlist my belief. And I noted then, as one would mark the face of a tossed coin, that he did not have it, for all my present glowing spirits and enthusiasm. Strange how little it disturbed me, as I stood there idly, and Tom’s shadowed face looked up with a curious eye that I could no more answer
than water can support a footstep. Or perhaps I misread him?
Sam spoke that night and we took another list of subscriptions for our prospective journal: mostly from young men still ambitious of a city life and a few of their fathers. Afterwards we dined with Mr Corkney, a short, cocky thumb of a man, of Irish stock, with something of an Irish tongue. He was a young man himself, just learning to wear his father’s thoughts as his own. ‘Excuse me, sir’, he said once, not quite attending, for Sam was launched on the seas of one of his speeches, ‘but I have always thought a great deal might be done by-digging.’
‘Yes,’ Sam replied, wrinkling his brows and briefly touching the bridge of his nose with his left forefinger, as though a fly had perched there – a nervous habit. ‘Of course, digging is part of the work, a significant part, but there are other things that want attending, such as …’ And he was nearly away again, sails spread before the wind.
‘As a farmer,’ Mr Corkney assured him, leaning forward confidentially, and resting his slight weight on his small elbow, ‘I can assure you, Professor, that a great deal might be done – in short, a great deal might be achieved – in a new way – by digging.’
But he was ready company and curious, too – a firm, upright man of little weight. Though he was much troubled to consider the matter any further than it involved his great passion for, nay his conviction in, as a farmer, nothing less, well, in short, what might be achieved by … Sam in a rare generous temper sat late over his wine, talking to him. Mr Corkney was glad of the talk, come fresh from the university to his father’s farm. He had not yet learned the tricks of loneliness.
We had an early start the next day, so Tom and I withdrew. Sam turned towards us as we left, with that characteristic murmur in his jowls, to bid us an unintelligible ‘good night’. Then he turned back to the lamp on the table, and I lost his face in the light. The sky had been low all day, more misty than clouded. But the day cleared at sunset and the sky soared with evening, and we felt we had a space for breath again. Tom had a sudden burst of spirits and hooted like an owl over the fields down the hill. Only the crickets answered and rubbed his clear fine note to rags between their legs. Tom clambered up the ladder behind me, nipping my heels, and wrestled me for the nearest bed, scattering straw. ‘You asked me that question,’ Tom said after a sleepless half-hour, lying on his back and gazing up. ‘Why I follow him as I do – and the answer is that, wherever he goes, I half-expect the ground to give way and the world to change.’
Yes, I thought; that is an answer.
*
From stagecoach to bed, from bed to stagecoach again; from town to town; from city hall to college lecture rooms; from inn to aunt to servants’ quarters; from Oceanic Societies to Ladies’ Societies for the Promulgation of Thought to the Star Club, a gentlemen’s astronomical organization; from university to university; from atheist gatherings to Quaker educational meetings to lonely churches with a renegade pastor. From the first weeks of June to its burning, drowning end, into a sweet July, cleared of clouds and miasmal airs, so that each sky and day rose so perfect and pure you felt it would chime if you rung it.
At first my infant intimacy still walked on hesitant steps, doubting the ground and its young legs. I bounded between Tom and Sam, now hanging back, now prancing ahead, bubbling with talk and affectionate spirits, now lagging a pace behind, deferring with a downcast head under the shadow of my own thoughts. But even Sam was attuned to these brown studies now, practised at teasing me from them, generous in his notice. I talked too, brimmed and fell and rose with talk like a burst lock, after six months of dammed waters.
From time to time I noted the oblique exchange of glances between Tom and Sam at my high spirits. For once I did not draw up at those imaginary lines but swelled on. Instead, Tom withdrew slowly into his endless reserves – I was winning. He barricaded himself in Sam’s work, where he remained unapproachable and unapproached. I had never seen him work so hard. He wrote to colleges and clubs, publishers and newspapers; announced our presence in villages and cities; secured engagements and lodgings from night to night. He took us from stagecoach to bed, from bed to stagecoach again; from town to town; from week to week.
But my poor spring of spirits was lost in Sam’s great tide. For he was in flood those summer months and overflowed the canal of my excavated happiness like a sea. He carried all waters before him, tributary and river, lake and pond in his endless sweep. He swelled high enough to reach even Tom in his lonely preparations, and he prospered, too. All men rely on the alignment of planets. No matter how we reason our lives, pare them down to their proper agents, and take those agents in hand – the prick of our temperament and action remains obscure and uncrackable, like a seed in its kernel until it decides to come out. We rely on the good luck not of any heavenly constellations but of our own natures: on the setting and rising, the seasons and phases, of internal moons and suns, as powerful and strange to us as those grander burning patterns above. Who has not felt such influences? The evening of talk that like a sudden rain revives a friendship; the unlooked-for confluence of thoughts, an eclipse of sorts, that brings the shape and size of an idea into sharp relief; the day of happiness in an otherwise dry season. Sam’s star was ascendant that summer, a full three months of rising fortune. Like the greater man he was, the alignment of his planets brought weather and prosperity to all around him, as if he burned in a much higher sphere.
Such a sweep of America we crossed together, as large as Spain, though it formed but a corner of the New World. What towns and men we saw! Small river villages, clustered like barnacles around a fisherman’s post. Farms as great as Berlin, packed with orderly citizens of grain, ruled by a lonely family. Then new cities, with all the big-boned awkwardness of youth, like Baltimore, Richmond, Washington. What pages of names we took! We seemed to pass through America like recording angels, marking those fit for scientific heaven, at threepence an issue, we thank you. Cooling, Hutchinson, Marks, the list goes, each stroke of the pen recalling a line of the face, the slant of an eye, the trick of a tongue. Corkney from Ireland, Wiseman from Germany, Maclean from the islands of Scotland, Billingtons from an English hamlet had all ventured across oceans to find their way to a battered and inky sheet of paper that promised to provide them with that magnificent pioneering journal, as it would be, the New Platonist.
Though we were gallant knights, we had no dragons to battle, only the vast obscurity of our purpose and the ordinary delays of travellers. I could not have wished to share my insignificance with two finer men. Of what was our talk? The role of the western provinces; the appeal of possibility over fact; the progress of climates; the differing capacities of different men to deal with extremes of weather; from there to pain; then by way of the French to the best location for a bakery in a small town – ‘Give heed, Tom, this touches you nearly’; the role of Society in such towns; the way to wear a cravat; other fundamental differences between nations and peoples; shared mythologies; the errors of Bonaparte and grounds of his collapse; the hatred of waiting; necessary developments in transport in a spreading nation; the relation of practical need to the progress of science; the virtues of democracy (it surprised me in such an aristocratic temperament, but Syme was a passionate republican); the importance of newspapers; the relation of thought to language; the dialect of Golden as distinct from Perkins, Virginia; local cussedness, stupidity; the benefits of public hangings. He had a mind like a pack, which swarmed and divided and consumed any sustenance it found. He took the measure of all things. Of what was our talk?
The theories of Kuypen; his influence on Kepler; the features of Galileo; physical causes of mental constitutions; the ugliness of the members of the Oxford School; the nose of Barnaby, fixed in rain-swept stone, surviving his beliefs; relation between Barnaby’s nose and Phidy’s, on the evidence; Phidy’s nose set in stone, as a subject for contemplation; the deed accomplished, number of pigeons, on conservative estimate, scientifically calculated, who could perch on said sculpture; the
benefits of art … the nose of Newton; relations of feature and voice; the accent of Leibniz (here I triumphed); discovery of the calculus; the independence of a man from his time; the dependence; the role of observation in scientific thought; the tower of Pisa; the genius of precision, of doggedness; the longitude question; the story of the chronometer and the hard usage of John Harrison; the genius of complexity and the moons of Saturn; the role of luck in rationality. Of what was our talk?
The bloody heat; the best beer in Virginia; Tom’s lechery; youth and beauty; Kate Benton of Golden, Virginia; the Maid of Athens; the Maid of Perkins; sleeping to the noise of horses; Tom’s family; Tom as a Man of God; Tom’s lechery again; the relation of shagginess and lechery; Phidy’s hair; Hölderlin; Germany and madness; the Romantic school; Phidy’s nails; Phidy’s fledgling beard; Phidy’s elongated height; Phidy’s pallor; Phidy’s trembling shyness before Kate; the love epistles Phidy composed daily to Kate in his spare hours; his fear of sending them; his fear of Mrs Benton; her relation to Mrs Bevington; Phidy’s stout denial of all these allegations; Phidy’s anger; the colour of Phidy’s nose; Phidy’s troop of pining lovers left behind in Neuburg; Phidy’s constancy; Mrs Simmons; Phidy as Werther; Mrs Simmons; Phidy as ‘Lotte; Phidy’s grey hairs in spite of Phidy’s youth; the burden of Experience; Mrs Simmons; Mrs Simmons; Mrs Simmons; Phidy’s desperate retreat behind the flag of Mrs Simmons; the impossibility of embarrassing Syme; Phidy’s fascination with Mrs Simmons; Phidy’s love for Mrs Simmons; Phidy’s inconstancy to Kate Benton; Phidy’s retreat, withdrawal, ultimate humiliation.
The Syme Papers Page 44
