‘Where are we going?’ Aaron enquired at last. ‘Where are we going?’ he said again.
‘To finish an experiment‚’ his father answered.
Joe was out when they rolled on to the pebbles – engine in neutral, drifting quiet – of his drive. Joe and the Fräulein both. At least the house stood curtained and dark; and no one stirred when Pitt muddled with the garage key, clicked and rumbled the iron shutters into the roof at last.
‘Should we be doing this?’ Aaron asked, brave enough in his way, but naturally respectful of property and propriety.
Pitt stopped short, considered the question. ‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t think we should be doing this.’
(Pitt should disabuse his son of such conventions. Though, I must confess, he felt like a thief in the night himself – from a different guilt, however, obscure to him then, but growing clearer by the minute.)
‘No, probably not‚’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
He set the tub of ice – a fine sluggish slush now, slow to sway in the sway of the bucket, tinkling and crunching lightly – in the shadow of the Headless Bicycle cast by the street-lamp. Then he rummaged for the light-switch, found it, and blinked in the sudden illumination that filled the garage.
‘What the –’ Aaron muttered, ‘what the –’ as the full wonder of ‘the fantastical device’ struck his gaze. He stared at it, sucking the knuckle of his thumb between pressed lips (a family gesture), emitting faint windy squeaks of perplexity. ‘You know what‚’ he declared at last, his mind made up. ‘I think I’ll stop asking questions.’
‘Syme made it‚’ his father answered, somewhat hurt – that particular guilt from which he suffered now welling up, growing clearer all the time. ‘Two hundred years ago, nearly. To test how the world was made. Don’t you see, Son? He tried to make the world himself. Such splendid –’
‘Delusion.’
‘Ambition, I would have said. Come on; help me get the fire going.’
Aaron found the matches at last under a brow-stained baseball cap, which also covered a sandwich bag full of dry and wrinkled grass. The boy kept mum – a child can learn too much at once about how a father lives. Pitt opened the lid of the world, struck the matches on the rough clay side, and dropped them burning in. The crumbled white sticks caught first, glowing furtively along their shiny edges – a low, faint flame like the bright shadow of true fire. Strange how great, how various, the degrees of conflagration are! Burning is never burning simply. The act must always be qualified by the heat involved: like the human passions (like inspiration), brightest when forcibly compressed, over time. He shut the lid; and waited for the glow to swell.
There was nowhere to sit, except the Headless Bicycle, and the boy perched there, in a collared open shirt, forgetful of the tie around his neck, letting his legs dangle. He looked silly and touching upon it; or, rather, the crazy-thing appeared to be an overgrown toy between Aaron’s bony knees, a boy’s device, simply multiplied in scale to suit adulthood. Once he stretched to reach the pedals, half-slipping from his seat, and spun them, again, again, rising on his haunches to muster weight. The world shuddered briefly and began to whirl, swinging a long loop towards his father’s head; but a sharp word from Pitt cut short boy and world. Still, Aaron looked upon the strange machine with some slight … curiosity, afterwards; as if his father, for once, had invented a game worth playing.
You could almost hear the fire when it began to tell – a rich concentration of silence that drew the ear to it. The artificial glare of the garage grew imperceptibly softer, bleached of colour, as the slow smoke filled the space. Pitt lifted the lid on the globe and saw the beginnings of inferno: a churning mash of coal, orange valleys streaked by translucence amid black hills of unconsumed lumps. He shut the globe again by its wooden handle, and touched a finger to his plump, sweating cheek to feel its heat.
‘Come on, boy‚’ he said. ‘Let me get up there and take a turn at the wheel.’
Aaron scrambled off, a figure of comic dishevelment, open-necked, shirt-tails hanging free – a miniature of after-work ease.
‘Watch your head‚’ his father said. Pitt struggled up and began to pump, slowly at first, already sucking wind. (Was it nerves only, or the first blows of failure – Susie’s sudden ‘for God’s sake’ – hitting home at last, in the belly?) The arm creaked awkwardly round. ‘Watch your head‚’ he said again, so Aaron squatted, lay back (how lightly children touch bottom!), resting his head against the concrete floor, while the smoking planet swung above him, once, twice, in great elaborate arcs.
‘No, no‚’ Pitt said. ‘I need you. Don’t get up. I said don’t get up NOW. Roll out of the way first. That’s it. ALL the way out. What I want you to do. Is this. Push the wooden bar as the world comes round. Just enough to set it spinning. That’s it. Lightly. We don’t want it toppling on your head. Just enough. To set it. Spinning.’
The world swung easier now with the weight of its speed. (Pitt should know, the first revolution is always the hardest!) It trailed a flag of smoke behind it, which tore into strips when Aaron touched the bar, spinning, just at the height of his eye. Pitt’s legs pulled swifter now, stronger; he rose on his hams to bring the last ounce of his vital mass to bear upon the pedals. There is joy in the mere fact of pace, in the brisk flow of things; and Pitt tasted some of it, in the thrust of his blood, in the sweep of the planet. Such swift years passed around his head! Decades flew by in minutes. Centuries spun round in the hot wind like a weather-cock in spring gusts.
How short the space of time since Sam himself strode the world along its orbit, since Tom touched it into night and day, dressed, like Pitt’s son, in neglected finery. Aaron, for his part, seemed to have entered into the spirit of the thing (and that spirit was joy!):
He performed this task with great nonchalance, standing idly by in his black suit, only touching from time to time, with the tip of his finger, the flying handle … Fresh gasps of fear attended the perilous launch – it is the only appropriate image – of each new day. In short, all was confusion and terror and delight – and none of us could suppress a powerful sense of imminent and enormous and wonderful disaster, of conflagration and world’s end.
Pitt saw the beam of a car’s lights swing into the road, heard the hum of an engine easing home. Then the light drifted by and the noise faded. He wished to make an end of things before Joe got back and – saw him, thus. It occurred to Pitt then that Joe might read a certain desperation into the experiment; and the word itself arrested his thoughts (though never his legs). Not so much for the misery of it, but the shadow of some former hope the word suggested. Sat upon that strange device, sweating and pumping away, Pitt – more curious than anything – could not for the life of him recall what he had hoped at first to prove. Well, the reason would come back to him, no doubt – only a momentary blank. Strange, he thought, how much of what we manage to do involves forgetfulness.
‘Now‚’ he told the boy, ‘I want you to get the bucket of ice.’
*
Fact is – and I see that now – Aaron was just too small to lift it. So much came light and easy to the boy, Pitt had forgotten he was only nine: a strapping nine, king among his classmates, broad-shouldered and long-armed, but unfleshed by age, a creature getting by on bones and sugar. ‘Tip it over the world‚’ Pitt said, slowing slightly, ‘as it comes by. Lift it over your head – high as she goes. And tip.’ (Of course, Pitt thought suddenly: the cooling of the earth. Syme posited an end to the perpetual modifications of Hutton’s internal fires. He wished to test the shape of it. That’s what this is all about.)
The shock of what happened obscured – for a minute perhaps, or a second – what happened. In the smoke and hiss of warring Nature, Pluto and Neptune set at odds again, I could not distinguish bad from worst. Aaron had staggered, stoop-shouldered, into the path of the world. Globe struck bucket balanced on head, and both (though not, thank God, all three) tumbled down, a furious spitting e
xplosion of ice and fire. The clay split and shattered across the concrete floor. A loose burning shard caught Aaron in the smooth of his cheek, raising a puffed, hot inch of skin – perhaps the lightest scar he would bear from his father’s obsessions. (Pitt crying out meanwhile the familiar declension – you go too far, you have gone too far, you are too far gone.) Sodden smouldering ash lay everywhere in ruins, among glowing splinters of shaved iron and nickel. Icy waters slopped over the floor, soaking the poor boy’s shiny best shoes.
He began to cry; mostly at the fright of it, no doubt, and the noise – only now the coal unclenched its teeth, and the hissing sighed away – and the smoke, so thick that our eyes ran anyway. Partly, I suppose, at the disappointment of his father. At having failed. Pitt wept, too; first at the sting of fumes; then freely, as he climbed off the crazy-thing and shuffled through the burning slush into the clear night, holding his boy. His guilt grew clear at last, welling up; the obscure sense of wrongdoing that had troubled him: the guilt of someone who chases his solitary imagination and begins to … bump into others along the way, bruising what he cannot see, and stumbling on. (‘Not though I have Truth on my side‚’ Syme said, ‘never doubt that, either. Never doubt it, Tom. But we haven’t such right to it as we pretend.’)
‘Let’s go home‚’ Pitt called gently, from his miserable depths.
‘Should we clear this up?’ Aaron snuffed his nose on the palm of his hand.
Pitt looked at the mess, a scattering of damp grey, only a few glints of the old fire remaining. In his hurry, he had tipped over the Headless Bicycle, which now lay awkwardly on the floor, resting on a cracked arm. ‘Whatever you do‚’ my father told me, ‘make things that last. That’s the great trick. Sticking.’ It could take an hour or more to sweep what I had made clean. Joe might come upon them, in Pitt’s shame. ‘Look‚’ Aaron said, lifting the shard that struck his cheek from the ice and ash at his feet. ‘Like Texas.’ So it was – that inimitable shape, a slight protrusion from a ragged triangle, unevenly split.
‘Keep that‚’ Pitt said. (If only he had guessed it: the final clue.) ‘We’ll leave the rest for Joe.’
And then Joe appeared. It needed only that. Woken no doubt by the crash, he came from the back door, stood in the light of his laundry room, blinking, his face blurred from an early sleep, his eyes pinched, his nose thick with ‘flu. He looked at the litter of ice and ash; the toppled contraption propped on a broken arm; the smoke; the wet stink; the crying boy and man. Gingerly, he stepped into the mess, wearing loose moccasins; stood in the middle of the garage, surveying the ruins of his workshop.
‘Seems’, Joe said, shaking his head awake, ‘that history does – repeat itself.’ (The hollow spheres keep spinning, the cracks overlap, producing: disaster.) Bianca peered round the door-frame, gangly in her long T-shirt, all arms and legs – astonishingly young. She looked at me, at Aaron, hiding from his father’s humiliation in his father’s arms. ‘Na ja‚’ she muttered. ‘I see it did not come off, as they say. It came off so it did not come off. As they say.’
Pitt, for once, had no answer for her quibblings.
I had made myself ridiculous enough.
PART V
•The•Great•Eclipse•
So we came to Philadelphia, a red town in a green valley, and the sun tipped its hat over the trees in setting as our carriage rattled on to Chestnut Street. Stiff of knee and heart, we emerged, and propped our backs on our hands and looked up at the great clock tower, calm with time, of Independence Hall.
‘Come,’ said Tom. ‘Tomorrow is our great day. A bite of one thing and a swallow of something else and then bed. Sam needs his sleep.’ He took Sam’s bag and his own, and strode towards the Liberty Hotel under the fat green leaves. The Liberty was a fine, square-cut Georgian establishment, with tall, bright windows rounded at the top, scattering the chestnut trees in their shimmering glass. This was the smartest roof I had known in the New World.
Sam followed without a word, through the great doors.
I slept like a king in a deep bed and could not prevent curiosity and joy, those sly tempters, from stirring in my blood as I awoke. I walked to the window, pushed it open with elbows scraping the sill, and looked out. The sweet air was too thick to come in, and I must needs poke my head and naked shoulders into the street to snuff it. I looked at the great red forehead of Independence Hall and thought of those sweating men, almost a half-century before, dropping blood with ink, and spelling a new country with the compound. Now a different revolution would be born within its halls. Who could not hope there, where so much had been hoped for and won? For all my earnest, decent protestations to the contrary, THIS, I thought, was too rare a chance to have missed – to see Sam dressed in clothes as grand as himself, walking upon rich carpets, under high ceilings. I had come for this, not the squalor of race-tracks and barns and agricultural lectures.
I dressed and ran to breakfast.
In the morning, Sam sat for Charles Peale, the painter, and a naturalist in his own right. ‘What do you think of my museum?’ he asked proudly, in his thin, strained voice, like a reed in sand. I visited the museum, too; an odd collection of devices, natural and artificial, shells and telescopes, on the second floor. ‘If I had such a library‚’ Sam said, ‘I should not look for books.’ That always surprised me in Sam, that he could flatter when he pleased and when it suited. Indeed, it suited now; for he owed his engagement at the hall to Peak, a generous and curious man, as well as just and proud, who had founded his Museum of Natural History and Technologies some years before.
He was past eighty then – the famous dry face and leather hands. ‘I have only got the patience for a sketch‚’ he said, drawing forth a case of pencils. ‘I do not like to start anything I can’t finish, and at this age, I have no faith in finishing anything.’ I watched them, painter’s hand and Sam’s face, as the former drew the latter to itself, in lines as sharp and bare as the green veins over its knuckles. The delicate temples and too big eyes, the face sad, inward, except for the butting, jutting chin, stubborn and strong above the white cravat; the hair thinning over the large forehead. Later, he added colours, and the tip of a brush darkened the eye with blue and the cheek with red. But the sketch was truer; and caught without keeping, as only a pencil can that does not hide her strokes, the face in time, fluid, aware that the next stroke or moment could mean another line, an altered look.
In the afternoon came the speech in the great hall. The mayor was there, a pink man in a green suit, along with the lady mayoress, taller, with a sharp nose. A geologist from Harvard had come down, quite a young man, with tiny, restless feet. Name of Potts, I believe – he mentioned it often enough in shame-faced asides, ‘poor Potts’, foolish Potts’, ‘hopeless Potts’, and the like. He hopped about like a wren, looking perhaps to pick up scraps of preferment round the feet of the great Dr Benjamin Silliman himself – a proud, pompous creature he proved to be, fat-cheeked, red-breasted in a silken waistcoat, fonder of politics than geology, it seemed, and a ‘particular friend’ of the lady mayoress. Then another specimen from Yale, tall and loud, with swinging elbows and a sharp cane, Mr Polidori. His tongue stuck in his cheek as he spoke, his words came out half-chewed. He could be heard lecturing over a circle of littler men. The Pennsylvania University had sent its delegates, too, a row of comfortable old locals, sitting down from the first, gossiping. The elegance of Philadelphia was also on hand – gentlemen in black leading a perfect rainbow of ladies. The hall rang with well-bred echoes; chairs scraped the floor in a hushed tone. The sun still shone through broad windows, flung open against the thick air. Its beams were stopped short, here and there, caught by necklaces and diamond studs, trapped in the flat silver of watches, glittering in the dust of shining shoes.
A different species lined the galleries at the back. Shy youths, the sons of mechanical men, came with notepads and blunt quills, cut too often. For them this was not only an Occasion, but a lecture ‘On the Structure & Composition of the E
arth’s Core – a New Answer to an Old Question’, advertised in the Inquirer. Wives with scraped thick-fingered hands had come from their chores, perhaps for the relief of a spare afternoon in the shade, but Sam’s ‘news’ had a deeper spell as well. ‘The Earth is Hollow! The Earth is Hollow!’ the newspaper cried, mostly in mockery, as it announced Sam’s visit today on the front page. ‘The Seas are seeping through. We must arrive in Boats to the Lecture!’ Some had come hoping for a hoax, to be sure; but there were others, and many indeed among the jokers, who had come because a man stood there telling us that we were all wrong, and somewhere we desire this to be true, and partly believe it as well. Lastly, as always, came the Doomsday set, hoping for any kind of hopelessness, believing that an empty earth would do as well as anything. I had long grown accustomed to them, and saddened that such flies buzzed about my Sam, louder, more faithful, than any other. For once there were brighter creatures to obscure them. Sam rose up to speak, with a sheaf of notes clasped between elbow and rib.
O Sam! My heart dwelt in his fingertips, lest he should drop those papers, and my heart fluttered with the papers, too. Tom gossiped with a gaggle of newspapermen, old friends, from the Inquirer, but I could scarcely look up.
‘I have often wondered’, he began, in a voice slower and lighter than usual, but broken up into his familiar staccatos, ‘why we place such trust in our feet.’ No one had expected this, and there was a great shuffle of the appendage in question, and the vast settling sigh of a mass of mankind.
‘We question every matter of this’, he continued, touching his heart, ‘and that‚’ touching his head. ‘Whatever flies above us – puzzles us to perplexity. We stare and stare. Stars, moons, suns, involve us in fierce disputes, fiery faiths, passionate doubts. We argue for centuries.
The Syme Papers Page 54
