I puzzled a great deal over our encounter later. It struck me as odd even then. There I stood, defining and defending with such assurance ideas in which I believed myself to have so little faith. There he sat, attacking with such disrespectful ardour theories in which he had placed all of his. For the first time, I felt a … conspirator in their plans. No matter what belief I attached to Sam’s work, I had shown at least that I was proficient in it, a suitable apprentice. I could no longer claim the clarity of detached ignorance. Any knowledge involves you in its object, any truly detailed imaginative knowledge. One cannot, quite, know and disbelieve at once. Perhaps Sam suspected something of the sort. His prank may have been directed at my reticence, to smoke it out of hiding. But I was not exposed alone. We had both shown something of our colours. Doubt, too, like a ripe blackberry, cannot be tasted or touched without it stain you. There is always some blood of it left on the fingers. Sam had hunted out my distrust, then turned and watched himself from my corner. The view did not shake him for a moment, but I felt strangely … acknowledged. Failure had occurred to him, like any idea.
The sensibility that could record such nice perceptions may seem too precise, too quick an observer, to have played a living role at such a meeting. Ordinarily, I would suspect it myself. Yet it was not so. I have failed to convey the happiness of the whole. The company of my countrymen; my new assurance in such familiar surroundings; the wine of dinner and the cognac afterwards, in whose fumes the pride of my performance glowed. The simple joy of having talked so much and been looked at – all these fed my bluff, blunt good spirits. If I kept a sharp eye for new distinctions, I looked from the top of happiness on a clear fine night. I felt that I had regained my sharp edges, my curiosity, scope, loose tongue, without losing my admiration for Sam or his protection. And there is nothing so seductive as giving pleasure.
Tom collected subscriptions for our journal, as Sam and I drank our digestifs, and I read the latest German newspapers. ‘We have five hundred‚’ Tom declared at last, sitting down, with a heaviness rare in him. ‘A toast‚’ he cried, through a pressed and peevish smile, ‘to the half of our goal. We turn south tomorrow towards Philadelphia.’
This was the last night we could afford to be light-hearted. President Golding came slowly towards us, stooping from chair to chair. He offered me a cigar (which Sam pinched, brazenly accepting on my ‘behalf), bowed at us all, thanked me again, and smiled in an odd, sweet manner, like a clown smiling behind smiling paint. He asked me a few questions. I answered them. Then he drew out his pocket-watch, a great ticking silver engine of time, and mulled over it. It appeared to satisfy him, and he took his leave, observing, ‘The short man in the purple frock, you see, will show you to your chambers. I hope you will be comfortable. Yes, I do hope you will be comfortable.’ The last word echoed On like the rumble of wheels. He bowed again, smiled again, bade us good night and left a faint perfume of smiling behind him.
We took our signal and rose to go.
I awoke the next morning clear-headed as a drained glass, wakeful and empty. I have taken my place, I thought. We had early business, though the fair day was still grey outside. Tom and Sam rose sharp as well, and we met in the hall by some common instinct, about to knock on one another’s door. After a quick breakfast, in that peculiar silence of early mornings, distended like an image in a spoon, we sought the road, companionably enough if only in the shared concentration of spirits. Philadelphia approached, Tom’s crowning engagement of the summer tour. Independence Hall would be filled, professors, publishers and even government representatives promised attendance. Sam had an hour and a half in which to make his fortune.
‘I am confident of three hundred subscriptions at the least‚’ Tom said on the barge from New York. ‘You must charm the other two hundred from them. That would tally our thousand, and we could begin our proper business, the magazine.’ A summer shower blew us indoors, where we found a large old gentleman looking for a game of whist. Tom loved the water, for it tied him to idleness, and we played deep into the afternoon. Such hands the old man had, big as roots.
He caught me staring, and answered my thought. ‘I was a boxer in my youth. Gentleman George, they called me. What have you got there?’
A broadsheet announcing the Philadelphia engagement peeped from Tom’s portmanteau. ‘Sam Syme, The Illustrious Geonomist, Independence Hall, August 17,’ etc. Jackson took it and held it to the sunset cast out to sea.
‘There is nothing like a real crowd,’ he said, ‘and youth.’
Sam turned a green face to him, for he took a sea swell badly. I have kept the placard of that event as well – and hang it proudly in the sitting room, a record of one brief, clear triumph.
*
The weeks till his great speech turned into counted days. Because of our wandering lives, mail had not reached us for several months. Tom often journeyed a day in advance to fix our schedule, but no post could chase us down. All the news issued from our little band. Sam wrote to Mrs Simmons once a week. Tom wrote to his ‘sweet bun’ (as Sam called Kitty, the baker’s daughter) nearly every day. I wrote to … Ruth once, and never to my father.
We reached Pottstown, a village outside Philadelphia, on 14 August. It was an old, poor settlement, not so much a village as a few wide thoroughfares connecting busier towns. We walked down Main Street, a line of dust, broken only by the post office, an apothecary’s shop and the tavern. But it lay among riches, like a beggar outside a castle, indifferent to his abode. Pottstown stood in a valley. High straight woods surrounded it, clean and smooth as something built by man, but nothing by man could look so old and free of history. A lake lay a few miles away, the only clear opening in the land, as surprising as blue eyes in a bearded face.
The afternoons held on long in the town. They stretched even longer around the lake, as the water kept the sun. Summer children rowed and splashed late into the light evening, their calls and oars slapping the soft billows and coming to the land like echoes. What wealth the town could boast sat at the shoreline, a few gentlemen’s summer cottages, a stone’s throw from the bank. Tom’s cousin lived in one of these.
‘My cousin James’, Tom told us, amid the clack and clatter of our steps on the stony footpath, ‘is a gentleman, or, rather, he is rich enough for idleness, if nothing more. He is lay-preacher at the white-boarded church to which the main street rises. He writes, too – histories, of Indian traditions, folk tales, the growth and slow decay of the early settlements, like Pottstown. He is a dear man and a good friend.’
Tom approached the cottage eagerly, thinking no doubt of the two months’ accumulation of a lover’s news (and glad perhaps of a cousin’s company to break the increasing closeness of our little band). We walked along the road by the lake, where thick dry roots tore up the parched brown bank to stretch their hot toes in the water’s edge. It was a stumbling, up and down amble. We bent our heads down to watch the broken ground and shield our eyes and open nostrils from the swarms of midges that passed in clouds. The evening was already cooling, though the blue sky still fell bright on the lake. We turned from the shore and rose up the pebbled path to the porch. A thick figure sat on the steps, in the loneliness at the end of a lovely afternoon.
James greeted us mopping a wet brow with a wet handkerchief, and extending a newly dried hand. A fine light sweat still pricked from the skin. It had been a hot day. And the evening was still hot inside, though no lamps were lit, nor curtains drawn, and the windows were flung wide. The air was still light, but grey without the sun to watch it. We were very tired. A heap of letters lay on the plain wood dining table, in expectation of our arrival. James brought a jug of lemonade and set it down beside them. He came back with three glasses held in the fingers of one hand and set them down awkwardly. I looked in the other hand and he held a pipe, newly lit. Then I smelted it come like a dog in the thick air. We sat down.
Tom turned to the letters with a quick hand.
Sam said, ‘Not tonight, Tom’
‘Not tonight.’
Tom stopped looking. Sam had been quiet all day, taut with the prospect of his speech in Philadelphia. It was altogether an affair of a different mass than the other lectures. He braced himself against the weight.
James poured the lemonade, and the three of us sat companion ably enough, used to one another’s silences. I reflected on the fourth. He was a kindly, sweating man. His hair was always moist and his hand always damp. He ran to fat, too, like Jeb; but James’s spreading waist seemed accretions of hesitant contentment, too polite to form actions or words. He was still a young man, though he would not be long. I watched him rise again, return to the kitchen, and bring a glass for himself. He sweated silently.
We turned early to bed. The cottage had two bedrooms and the cousins shared one of them. I heard James laughing through the wall, louder than I would have guessed, with the loose tongue of a young man. They talked deep into the night. Sam and I still said not a word, accustomed to each other’s well-worn presence; or, rather, to speak plainly, rendered perhaps a little shy of each other by the cousins’ easy fellowship. I listened to our neighbours happily enough, and followed their chatter into sleep. Before I drifted off, I remembered the letters on the dinner table, as one might pause on a staircase some night before knocking on a door. I had a sense of postponement, but postponement of what I could not imagine at the time. The world felt far from me that night. Tom’s laughter, ringing through the wooden wall, seemed as alien as the tune of the rubbing insects in the dry grass outside.
I expected to awake with a lighter heart. Sam sat in the dining room, still in his undershirt, when I shook myself out of bed and came in. James was fussing over breakfast. He seemed more cheerful and prated to me with a sudden confidence, a sweet trust, while busying himself with bread, plates, cups and a pail of fat fresh milk from a nearby farm, hauled in a surging unsteadiness through the warm dawn.
He said, ‘I have always been an early riser. It is the saviour of an idle man. Tom, as you see, needs no saviour,’ he added, laughing.
Tom still lay a-bed, spent with the night’s talk and making a sabbath of Sam’s preparations. He had done his part. Perhaps he idled now with a wilful luxury to let us know it.
Sam tossed me a pair of letters, neatly bound by James. They were from my father.
My dear boy,
The bailiffs have come today. Ruth was beside herself and I had to hold her from them, whereupon she turned her fury on me. The neighbours stared openly from the window and watched, drinking their coffee. Hespe has been useful enough, in his way, but he skulks about in such shameful fashion, I can’t bear to look at him – as if he does not wish to know us any more, and would not, but for Ruth. She adjures me to be kind to him, and says, of all people, I should have no eye for finding fault. This is unfair, but I have no heart to argue the point any more – the old point, or rather cause, on which I have wasted my life, or whatever is left of it, after the sum I have spent on both of you. But now is not the time.
They have rifled your mother’s jewels …
He stood accused of embezzlement, of a rather moderate sum. The crime was treason in our court, and by law he stood a bankrupt in our country’s eyes. Even our house was forfeit to the crown, though as yet he had been spared imprisonment – that would come. I tore open the next letter, dropping the last at my feet.
Well, it has all come out now, as they say, and I confess a part of me is not sorry at the turn of events. Hespe, it seems, has played the spy, and betrayed me to our Prince – first in the trifling matter of our accounts, and now regarding what he calls the ‘den of revolutionary brigands’ I maintained in our very sitting room! – in short, the rather silly, extremely drunk en coterie of discharged soldiers and idle students who used to crash about the parlour, whether I would or no. The best of it is that we are quit of him at last; and Ruth won’t speak ‘another word to him, as long as he lives’ – or of him, it seems, to me.
I must say I am surprised to see how she’s taking the news; and sometimes I wonder whether she grieves more over a ruined father or a lost lover – but this is the way of things, I suppose, and I must bear it, consoling myself with the thought of a dear son who shall soon return to me. She says only, in her cryptic way, that there ‘are things a father don’t know’ – and don’t wish to, either, I suppose – and in that at least she is in the right.
Bad and worse, I’m afraid, is all I have to tell. They have ‘locked me up’ until the trial – the Prince, I must say, is proving himself a proper stubborn fool and a willing ear to the wildest improbabilities. It seems lama regular Karl von Moor, and a threat to civic Peace, and the honour of German womanhood to boot, I make no doubt. Thank God they have granted me paper and a pen, and as far as they go I am happy – and the two, as you know, go far. They have put me, as a matter of state dignity, in the palace wine cellar, mostly because the wine had all been drunk by French soldiers years before, so it was sitting empty. An ordinary prison, it seems, won’t do for men as desperate as your father.
Hespe has been declared Primary Assistant Deputy First Minister by way of reward – no one yet has been able to explain to me what that means, except to say that his special duties involve military security (God have mercy upon us), for which he has been promoted to General, second class.
Mostly I wish for the trial to come. (And go.) Till then there is nothing to be done.
Your loving, etc.
Tom came in, wearing his long night’s sleep as a young man wears wet hair, coming out after a swim. He began tearing thick pieces of bread and dipping them in the milk jug without sitting down. He glanced over my shoulder. Still chewing, he gathered his pile of letters in one hand and sat down contented in the high-backed rocking chair by the window. Sam did not look up. He had turned to the small heap of correspondence that had gathered through our travels, like a pile of leaves in autumn. He pushed one to me across the table.
I recognized the quaint, archaic script of Edward and skimmed through it.
Dear Son,
Your mother bade me pen a line to you, as she … nothing to alarm you, just a sudden weakness, brought on, as I told her it would be, from her excessive spirits of the night before. She wished to dance, you know, with her infirmity and already that evening complained of the Headache … She could scarce stand when she awoke, so we brought her a-bed again, and put her feet in bowls of water, for it is damnation hot … and you will have guessed the truth, won’t you, that it is nothing but heat, for your mother has always taken the heat most fearfully, and worry, for you, my Son, in your long silence. In this I share her Affliction, but trust you are well and thinking kindly of your
loving Mother &
Father
A dust of powdered ink marked the top of the page, shaped after the side of his hand. I recall noting that his father wrote left-handed. Before I had well finished, the next note came, written on small, thick paper from a sharp, thin quill a little choked with the summer heat.
My grief was swallowed by a nearer and stronger grief – but then, everything that happened to Sam seemed greater than my own affairs. I put my letter aside and read on.
Dearest Son,
Your mother continues poorly, though the doctor is hopeful, and indeed she looks almost well today … we all think she Mends, except the poor victim herself, who moans as if strapped to Ixion’s wheel, in this heat too … Bubbles has seen her, and agrees with me entirely, that it is only a Ploy to starve her Figure, by keeping a-bed and refusing even Tea, drinking only boiled water and biscuits … though she do seem to suffer hard from her Digestion, which is hardly to be wondered at, and she could not keep down the last real Food we pressed upon her, though the doctor is convinced it is sheer wilfulness … but that she desires it, and is grown Implacable in her requests, I would not trouble you, my Son, knowing her ways and your too tender Fears. So consider this note to bring the expected Relief, and know that sh
e herself will compose the next sweet emissary of her recovered Health. Believe me then,
your loving Scribe
(& Father)
The next note came, with a swift rasp, as regular as a clock. The miracle of ink absorbed us, two young men across a table, deep in the world scratched so lightly on the pages before us that a gust of summer wind could scatter it. And yet it was a world, somewhere, as hard and unchangeable as the ground beneath us; indeed, further and harder, frozen as it was by passed time.
Dear etc.…
We are all grown quite vext with her. Even Bubbles can scarcely keep her Temper. We believe it is all wilfulness. I think she has begun drinking on the Sly, we can scarce enter the Room for Stink, though she does seem to be in great Pain, poor thing … the Doctor has begun to suspect her Liver, and we have already sent Betsy to her mother, for though she was just a girl, she was a smuggler of Liquors as brazen as any on the Cornish Coast … she would not confess, but cried a great deal, and desir’d to be excused, which we did, silly child that she was, though she was the only girl as could manage Annie’s temper of an evening and now we know Why …
And the next came, while Tom looked on, sensing the drama playing out beneath our fingers – yet too far from us, by the space of an opened doorway, to look on. A purely material gap that a single stride could mend – but did not; and it grew harder to bridge when the moment passed without him. I, for an hour at least (but such an hour!), had taken Tom’s place.
She continues Obstinate. Her sister Beth has come to us, quite distress’d at the Change, though we scarce note it now. But Annie will not hear a word from her, has grown Petulant and if I ask you to return, soon, my Son, though only if it be convenient, it is because you have always had a way with her, not because there is any Cause for Alarm.
The Syme Papers Page 46
