All men, like apiece of music, have a scale according to which their variations are played. Once they have understood themselves, they can never be persuaded from their beliefs. How can one scale argue with another? I knew myself in part, but often stared into the distance to avoid the sharp, dismal edges of my convictions. In Germany we call this belonging to ‘the Romantic school’. Sam, as no other man I ever met, knew his mind. To talk with Sam was like looking at a night sky and seeing the stars lifted clear into their shining constellations. I had been accustomed to thinking of the world, at least my particular patch on the sphere, as a collection of a few lonely objects. These drew me like candles with their solitary, flickering flames. I loved to fasten my look upon a thing till it grew misty. So I was the more natural lover, but I lost my sense of proportion too easily. To me the number one always seemed much greater than the number two. Three and four shrank into inconsequence like unwanted children. Sam knew better than any man that two was twice one, that four was twice two. How much I learned from him; how little I was able to teach.
I began to note the changes in the country as we proceeded north. The cities grew more familiar, the accent quicker. The crops, like a season, shifted. The labourers, too, of course. Germans began to appear in patches like clover in a field. At first, I noted only the churches, the clean, whitewashed chapels, the pastors’ names Ludwigson and Peterson and Roseneck. Then the shops. Strings of sausages, flecked with clean white bits of fat in their thick dark meat, hung in the street-windows. The bakers heaped their counters with big grey sour breads and steaming black breads, soft and yielding as a hot pudding when they come out of the oven. Then there were the music-shops. My curious eyes shone in shy reflections from the upright pianos, standing above tiny covered stools, with the name Mendelsohn & Son woven in Gothic script into their green velvet. The beer changed, grew dark, like man with age, and I could taste the thick, soft liquor of my own native ground upon my tongue again.
Our tour had taken us as far as New Haven in a roundabout fashion, past Philadelphia, the site of Sam’s crowning lecture-to-be at Independence Hall. Now our wandering purposes drew to their source, and we sailed south with fewer tributary excursions. Each day’s journey brought us nearer. Our little band was in earnest now, and our nerves grew sharp like the air before a storm. Sam felt the burden of our destination the most, and every night receded inwards a little deeper. We would set forth in the mornings with a sunshiny vigour, but by the time we turned to our beds Sam’s anchor had caught in some tangle of his own thoughts. Tom would beckon me to leave him with a finger on his lips. But even from that dim hole, Sam found a trick to lighten our journey; and while he was at it pricked me to question my own doubts, with all the passion we usually reserve for our deepest faith.
*
In the first week of August we reached New York, bustling with the traffic that poured in from the brand-new aqueous highway, the Erie Canal. We sailed along the Sound at first dusk, that gentle hour when the light calls no envious shadows from the ground. Out of some kindness to me, perhaps, Tom engaged us to speak at the German Club on Amsterdam Avenue. A coach took us to the door, a grand dark building in the sombre Prussian style. I had come home, after a fashion. Like most homecomings, the visit was a test of my affections. Through Sam’s chicanery, I gave my ‘maiden’ speech that night and took my place for ever, sealed by a crowd of witnesses, among the New Platonists.
Die Zweivierziger, the club was called – or the Two-forties, in English. It served as the refuge for German radicals and intellectuals, who wished to breathe the heavy atmosphere of their native tongue and thought, when the lighter, quicker air of their American home failed to sustain them. Travellers, priests, soldiers, statesmen, bankers, philosophers, artists, lecturers, some resident, some itinerant, all heavy-hearted, heavy-winged, heavy-featured, all German. They brought their wives. The club was named after the recent Prussian legislation that required all volumes under the length of 240 pages to be submitted to the knife of the censor, whereas all works that swelled beyond that mystical margin could be published and distributed freely. The name was typical of German radicalism, as I saw it after a year of American vigour. We believed not in true extremism, but in the intellectual daring of Balance. We poised on the edge of the Permitted, neither so coarse as to venture into the passionate Faith beyond it, nor so commonplace as to mix with the middle-class respectability within. A perch from which we could survey everything and claim nothing. The shock of familiarity and then the tang of wilful estrangement drew me towards Tom and Sam with the force of a fresh decision, as we entered the grand apartments of the wealthy club and began to assess their contents.
The rooms truly were gorgeous. Floor, ceiling and walls seemed carved out of deep, subtly shining wood. Halls opened through archways and via steps upon halls. Heavy, common paintings of common-looking men hung over the marble mantles of fireplaces. I noted their protruding or receding chins, pinched or protuberant noses, flat eyes, awkward mouths, thinning hair. The air was thick with the smoke of cigars – I could scarcely breathe the fat, brown atmosphere, silvered and shining with glassed reflections, from the heavy, wide mirrors hung opposite the gold-framed portraits. Each angle seemed to reveal another recess of room or image, of hall, or the mirrored many-legged crowd. Tom and Sam, neither of whom spoke more than a dozen words of my native tongue, walked arm in arm together, happily mimicking what they perceived to be the ugly, guttural accents of German speech.
‘Verstenken sie mit Kraeuterbrunken verkaufter Kinderwurst?’ Sam asked.
Tom shook his head gravely and answered, ‘Nebel und Dunstbecken kann man nur staunen.’
Perhaps you will not believe it of their dignity, but we were all young men. Even Sam was little past his thirtieth year. It was easy and rich to be light-hearted in that thick gloom.
This was my element, for once – and Tom and Sam had never seen me in it. Suddenly, I seemed presented with a choice, not of word or deed – though those accompanied it – but of loyalties. I observed everything from a certain height. This came naturally to me, who stood a tall head above them all, noting the amused faces of Tom Jenkyns and Sam Syme among my countrymen (milling and muttering around me). I felt that both my German and my American roots lay plucked and clean in my hand, and I must choose which to plant and there abide. Of course, I baulked at the easy mockery, the thoughtless high spirits of my fellow ‘pioneers’. They were blind to these people as I could not be and I resented it But I saw the faults of my countrymen as well, their heavy-winged, weak-clawed intellects. Sam in Reason alone, in massive force, was worth the lot of them: the halls and rich mirrors, the dusty galleries of painted men, the whole Zweivierziger.
I stood under an archway – talking to a man who had known Franklin in Paris – and observed Sam at a distance, as he strolled with Tom in prim, dainty steps, a German sniff to his nose. Ashes scattered from the exaggerations of his pipe. ‘Und weltversmet-zung kann vogelhaftweise nurnoch exponieren, verstanden?’ My heart warmed to him for the first time as an equal, or, rather, from my slightly higher vantage. And I joined them in their mockery. It was a choice of momentary sensibility, nothing else. But such choices are often the flags of our deeper dispositions, and I came to know mine clearly. I walked towards them.
Sam’s lecture was not the only occasion. Three papers were to be given that night (in English for the nonce), after dinner in the great low-roofed dining hall. Sam’s was the last. I scarcely ate or drank all evening, though plates and drink vanished before me. A lady sat opposite me, an old schoolgirlish dame with dull, iron-rimmed spectacles, and her long silver hair bound by a flowery cotton knot. She talked incessantly of her ‘pilgrimages’ to Brunswick and the grave of ‘Gottie, as I knew him once, sir, when he was my mother’s lover. I sat on his lap and he played the piano (Bach, as I grew to know and dimly understand), while my mother wove a flower-crown from a bunch of cut daisies lying in her broad dress. I turned to her and said, piping in my shrill voic
e, “Mama, it sounds like that creaking gate at the back of the garden!” Mother began to scold me for a dullard, but Gotthold, dear lovely man, said without the least air of condescension, “An honest ear is Nature’s noblest work,” and shushed my mama quite silent. I have always treasured that remark. You would know him as G.E. Lessing, and recall no doubt his beautiful Emilia. I trust I have not lost the virtue of my ears?’
How could I help but stare? Yet I nodded, and she continued. ‘I compose poems, or rather Rosenkränze, woven out of Nature. Is not the chime of words as natural as a creaking door! I am a gatherer, sir, not an artist And every five years (I measure my life by that season), I return across the sea and lay one at the foot of his dear small tomb.’
She had married a banker, who was now involved in land speculations in the West. She was enormously rich and talked endlessly. So when Sam, in a spirit of prank and pity, turned to me and whispered, ‘You may parade as myself tonight – if you wish to flee the nymph,’ I accepted greedily, before I could reckon the consequences. He slipped a sheaf of notes to me under the table, and I excused myself to prepare ‘my lecture’.
Public speaking was nothing new to me – especially before so Teutonic an audience. I recalled morning lectures at the university in Neuburg, and the handful of sleepy young men who glanced longingly at the sun on the river whenever I checked my notes. There is, of course, a little flutter in the fingers, a catch of breath, a certain constriction about the throat and temples; but I felt my old German self again as hundreds of white knuckles rapped the table among dirty napkins and half-empty wineglasses to welcome me. ‘Let me begin with a detail,’ I announced, and so began. I knew Sam’s lectures too well to falter, even when his notes were unclear, and I occasionally rendered a knottier passage into its native German.
An audience is a kind of cave. A voice reverberates in it. We can tell by the tone sent back whether the matter is good. An interesting and necessary experiment to test the truth of any proposition is to speak it out loud, broadcast to a silent group. Indeed, one need not wait for the echo. The virtue of one’s thoughts, their subtlety or falsehood, grows clear as the very medium bends or baulks at the message. If the supple air proves pliable to our speech, we sense the life if not the truth of our words. Nothing can commend an idea that dies, like a stillborn child, at the touch of air. Some thoughts bruise themselves on Space. There I stood, addressing the glint of wine-cups and men’s spectacles, the shine of dark wood, the awkward bored legs of chairs, the angles of elbows rested on the tables (for I could scarcely distinguish a face or feature in the mass of listening men), and uttered the theories to which Sam had given his life, and I – a year. They soared.
At every sentence, Sam’s gallant voice ran through my head, as I had heard it – ages ago, it seemed – on that cold, sunny morning in the Apple Cart: ‘would you like, Phaedon, to hear the tale of creation?’ That is the tale I told. Werner’s innovations and the drenching in which he gave birth to the world. Hutton’s theory of fire that dried up the German. The continual modification to which the Scotsman subjected all earthly things – to which Syme posited an end, a burning away, a cooling off, and a polishing. There was such satisfaction in his every thought. The unanswerable quality of his calculations, his dispute not of Newton’s laws but the precision of their application; the glory of his Machinery, his glowing crowns, vacuii, fluvia. The confidence with which he stepped from stars to stones, and the delicate shimmering chains of cause and effect by which he bound them. I could not tell you if I believed a word of it. But the air filled and glowed with his thoughts like dust in sunlight, and the applause that met me as I concluded seemed to drown me in hands. It was a peculiar sensation. I felt like an actor given a part to play, as distant to the role, in his way, as the audience. Like the audience, I cheered.
The discussion that followed was warm and mostly laudatory. The only exception came from a short, powerfully built man in his early thirties, sitting beside a grey-haired woman in iron-rimmed spectacles. Sam attacked his own theories with venom. He banged his hand on the table, raised it in one exasperated motion. ‘If I may be permitted to speak. Have you all taken leave of your senses? If the lot of you had risen as one man – to denounce the speculations of this Mr Soame – I would willingly, indeed bravely, have added my leaven of commendation – for the undoubted ingenuity of his conjectures. But I will not sit quiet while praise echoes praise – while “still they cried and still the wonder grew, that one small head could harbour all he knew”.’ Sam aped the tones of a ‘practical’ man, driven to outraged petulance by a series of absurdities.
‘I’m a reasonable man‚’ he began again, ‘but hang me if I see how you can weave a web of such gossamer connections – and call it a science. They look pretty, sir, I grant you that. They are wonderfully symmetric and the dew sits brightly on them. But not one of your reasons will survive the brush of simple COMMON SENSE. Have you got anything to say?’
Trying to catch the tone of superior patience Sam adopted for such occasions, I replied that I ‘awaited humbly the substance of his remarks’.
It was an odd contest.
‘I could begin where you please‚’ he said. ‘The crowns, for example. Have you conjured them out of thin air? Is this a boy’s tale or a theory?’
‘It is a piece of both – a model. In other words, an explanation. These crowns are not evident to the sense, no. We lack the sense to observe them. I ask instead: what does my theory have to recommend it? Unlike previous models, it fits established laws: the laws of gravitation (which I trust you will not dispute), according to which the elliptical path of the earth’s orbit is the product of the attraction of two balls of mass, the earth’s and the sun’s. The path is known. The forces are known. The masses should follow. The necessary mass of the earth cannot be accounted for without a porous, if not actually hollow, interior. That is not speculation. It is calculation. If I may be allowed to continue,’ I added, as Sam made an impatient gesture.
‘A porous interior could not remain stable long. Dismissing for the moment the revolution of the planet itself, the earth’s daily rotation would, in the first instance, upset the consistency of any vacuous interior. In the second, it would naturally itself be upset by it. A porous, shifting internal mass would necessarily result in an inconstant gravitational centre, an inconstant rotation, a jagged, uncertain orbit. This will not do. Grooved internal spheres alone can account for the stability of season and day. These grooves must themselves be of a lighter substance than the crowns, else we have the whole business to do again – the problem of mass. Hence, the speculated existence, since verified in laboratory work, of fluvia.
‘This model alone matches undisputed physical laws. Thus far conjecture. But I have not rested there. Does the model fit, or seem to fit, ordinary rules of Nature, of motion? The crowns revive an ancient favourite established by the Greeks: circular or spherical motion, inherited as a birthright by every scientist until the modern age. Copernicus swore by it, made it the foundation of his own revolution in science, Kepler dismissed it only reluctantly, against a weight of observational data. Galileo was the first to discard it, too lightly as it happens. For far too long, the science of the father has been visited on the sons. My theories restore the crown to circular motion, where it belongs.’ Again I silenced Sam, who drank, noisily, instead.
‘If I may be allowed to finish. Having shown that my theory fits both established facts and traditional natural laws, I enquire at last: does my model offer any new explanations? If true, a host of effects must follow such a cause. Can these crowns account for any as yet unaccounted phenomena? Earthquakes, volcanoes, whirlpools, even atmospheric disturbances such as hurricanes and tornadoes, can be explained by the eclipses of vacuii. Subtler shifts in continents and seas, consistent both with aery legend and hard fossilized deposits, follow likewise, though now I venture into the frontiers of my science, and I hesitate as yet to stake any claims. The number and nature of the crowns and vacui
i have been calculated according to well-known eruptions. As with the movement of moon and star, I account for their number and motions by the pattern of their effects. If such a method suffice for the heavenly fields, why should we doubt its more earthly application?’ Sam himself might have spoken those last words.
Sensing perhaps that his audience had wearied of the debate, the President of the Zweivierziger, Mr Golding, interceded gently and Germanically. ‘I trust now’, he said, ‘that Mr Soames has answered to their satisfaction even the most fastidious doubts.’
Sam rose and bowed. ‘I submit’, he answered, ‘to the General Madness – not its truth,’ and sat down.
Herr Golding, a smooth-faced, stooping, smiling, surprisingly young man, thanked his speakers and closed the meeting of the Zweivierziger Club. ‘Those who wish’, he added, ‘may join me in the Newspaper Room for a less rigorous, more human company over cognac. Members will direct your step, gentlemen.’
A hum followed. A scrape (of chairs) succeeded the hum, and the sea of dim faces grew clear, carried by sharp legs and well-cut suits out of the great-hall door. I joined Sam in a buzz of high spirits, which he shared. ‘Wonderful, Phidy‚’ he said, crooking his arm about my neck. ‘You cannot guess the pleasure you have granted me – to hear my own words again – as if they lived out side my thoughts – outside the loneliness of my thoughts.’ How strong the arm that bent my neck to his shoulder! Briefly, though long enough for me to catch the thick warmth of him, burning all the hotter I believe for rare joy. Only Tom had a pinched red look about him, like that of a boy who has been left too long in the cold.
The Syme Papers Page 45
