Our magazine was to be called the New Platonist Sam settled on that. He wished at first to call it the Phaedon, ‘to please you, Friedrich’, he said. My cheek burned and my heart glowed but I declined. So it became the New Platonist. The first issue was to be a declaration of our intentions, and Sam had got up the high phrases in which to ring it out. ‘A new Science, like a discovered Ocean, has “swum into our ken” and so on – only, Phidy, be sure to call it a new American Science …’ And all the time the snow fell as though the tender lips of God blew white glass, shattering and remoulding it, as He had in the month of my first arrival. Only now there was no Tom.
Though he did come for a weekend to help us with the press. The four of us, Tom, Easy, Sam and I, played Atlas and hauled that little world up to the attic in Whippet Lane. Sam and Easy had business afterwards, over Mr Harcourt’s accounts, so Tom and I took ourselves to the Dewdrop for a glass or two. He had grown as distant as the Pole, for now that we had no business together, I could scarce touch him where he lived. I did ask after Kitty and ‘your translation to conjugal bliss, Tom’ and he smiled and I knew him happy, as I know that a fish is cold. He returned that night to Richmond, but said before going, ‘Be careful of Sam, Phidy, will you? As I can’t, any longer’ – which I forgot and only remembered afterwards.
Fearing that Sam and Easy would still be huddled over their papers, I paid a visit to Mrs Simmons. I stood at her shop-window a few minutes before knocking at the green door beside it. I was half-fearful, or perhaps only shy, for we had neglected her of late, but I still could not account for my hesitation. I nearly turned away. The brass and glass of her instruments lay in shadow and I watched them for some time, then knocked and made to go, before I saw the slow light of her lantern answered by their gleams. The door opened and she stood in the doorway, wrapped in a shawl red as wine.
‘Guten Abend, Frau Simmons, I am sorry to call on you so late.’
‘Nonsense, Friedrich, it’s just gone eight. It’s too cold to stand fussing, so come in.’
I followed her slow steps through the shop to the back room where she lived. She moved always with such deliberation that she required the courtesy we give usually to the old or beautiful, though strictly speaking she was neither. I counted her steps to the door, then stooped into a green room with a cold fire in it.
‘Sit down,’ she said, but I stood, from that damn shyness, and looked at the pictures on her walls. ‘Mr Simmons painted them‚’ she said, ‘he was in the shipping trade.’ Most were of storms and ships, the usual scenes. But one, above the fire, was the picture of a ship’s deck, cluttered with cargo, without men. ‘Yes, that is my favourite too‚’ said Mrs Simmons. ‘His business was goods and he knew it best.’ She came to me with a glass of sherry in her hand and then I took it and sat down.
‘We have always talked in the shop,’ I said, ‘I cannot recall being in your back room without Sam, and then I am mostly silent.’
‘Nonsense again, Phidy‚’ she said, ‘I have never known someone with such a clattering tongue as yours.’ She laughed and we were away. I thought then how our laughter grows old before us. It often surprises us into a new reckoning of our age. Hers was deep and foolish, unlike her, and I loved her for it.
I sat on a stool by the fire with a third glass of sherry, dry as wood, in my hand, and wondered what had brought me there. Envy for Ezekiel perhaps, deep in business with Sam. His father had supplanted mine as financier, only on a much grander scale, and that brought with it other sad reflections. Sadness also at seeing Tom, who had delighted me so often, go. His faith in Sam had been so great that I felt lonely now without it. Yet he had married and found a proper business to engage in, while I, a half-believer only, remained. No, I was more than that, for had not the tide of Sam’s fortunes turned, and had not …? Perhaps I was a little drunk, and only sick for home. And Mrs Simmons knew the language of it.
When I steered myself home at last, I found Sam and Easy on the doorstep. To my surprise, there were tears in Easy’s eyes and his face looked puffed. I did not like the man, but for that, his grief touched me more nearly. It was so unexpected. He shaded his wet eyes with his damp hand as I walked past into the house. I did not greet them. Sam followed me soon after into the parlour. He looked at the clock. It was midnight. ‘Tom will not be back tonight,’ he said. ‘Kitty won’t like it’ I said nothing and we both went to bed.
The following morning, with the press installed, Sam and I could scarce leave the house for happiness. Tom had explained its workings to us, but we could not recall his instructions and were compelled to experiment. All day we spent in drafting and printing nonsense then scuttling out in the cold and pasting them broadsheet at every convenient post in Pactaw:
The Races Have Returned!
Two Year Old Mares
Two O’clock
The End of Whippet Lane
But we grew tired of jokes. And by the close of the short afternoon we printed again and again, with growing fear and excitement of spirits:
The New Platonist
A journal establishing the
REVOLUTIONARY AMERICAN SCIENCE
It may change the Course of History
COMING SOON
Edited by
Professor Samuel Syme
I recall looking out of our high window at the end of the light and seeing two old men in cloth caps, one with a stick in hand, the other with a single sheet of paper, walking slowly to the tracks down Whippet Lane. They seemed not at all puzzled by the silence around them. And though I lingered by the cold window to mark their return, they lingered longer, and I did not see them come back.
The next fortnight was spent in a fever of work. We rose early in the heavy dark before dawn, flu’ in hand, to catch the faint emissions through the snow pricked by the first sun. It was a cold and miserable business, but it gave us an appetite for breakfast, gobbled quickly, from frozen hand to mouth. Then I remained in the parlour with its steaming windows and wrote down the morning’s findings in the fat book, while Sam scrambled like a boy upstairs to run himself warm, before he sat down at the long table to write in that cold room. I often heard his large feet above me, jumping to keep the blood flowing, but he said the cold kept his brain sharp and I believe it did. He spent day and night over some ‘fresh speculation’, as he called it – begun that foul day in Perkins, when Tom fell sick. ‘A gesture only’, he said, ‘at a wonderful possibility.’ In the afternoons I turned to my own composition, ‘On the Use of Hot Wax in Bandaging Opened Wounds’, which Sam promised me would sit in pride of place at the end of the first issue. Sam wrote and wrote.
It was at this time that I noted the first signs of nervous disorder in my companion. He himself called me in to view his discharges, flecked with bright pink spots of blood. His hair had thinned as well, and I often found evidence of this on my own clothes. I would brush them with my thumb over my fingers into the wood stove’s fire and watch them suddenly change colour and glow and rise like a strand of smoke. He cut easily in that time as well, though this awed in part to his dry hands, chapped from the cold. But often, on fumbling with a key or bringing wood for the fire, he would turn his palm up to me, showing a beautiful bright spot of red.
These were the tokens of nervous joy as well as fear. The day of the first printing approached quickly. We had become inseparable. That morning when the first thaw came, and a frozen world cracked and dripped around us, he tumbled downstairs to read me ‘Our Declaration’. There was a great deal of pomp and bluster in it: ‘a new planet has swum into our ken; it is our own …, plain as the ground beneath our feet; a new science, an American science …’
Sam read it to me breathless from first to last. Outside tinkled the happy torrents of a melting winter. My heart lightened and I laughed at the last stroke.
‘Bull Harcourt will be pleased!’
‘A piece of my father’s chicanery!’
We printed it directly and posted it all over the house, on the front d
oor, at our bedside windows. We rushed into the running streets and nailed it to wet trees and benches. We came back to the steaming parlour red-faced and hungry. ‘We have our declaration,’ I said. Only a worm of doubt in the fresh apple stirred its head. What would be the end of such games? I wondered, and Sam felt it nibble at him, too. ‘There is a grain of truth in it, too‚’ he said to me after we had eaten. ‘More than a grain?’ he asked me.
I nodded; and then at last declared what had cluttered my thoughts and burdened my conscience since that first long-ago morning in the snow when Sam explained the world to me. At last I gave a voice (plaintive and hesitant, too weak to carry doubt, which needs a stronger, subtler tone than conviction) to my heavy fears; perhaps only when it was all too late, and our course set. ‘Sam,’ I said, taking him by the hand, ‘perhaps …’
‘Yes?’ he answered, withdrawing, leaning against the edge of the table and waiting patiently.
‘I speak out of love, not doubt. You see …’ I paused again, puzzled to proceed, until my tongue found its thought, and poured forth a year’s worth of hesitations in a single torrent. ‘You see … there is such force to your early calculations, the question of mass, I mean, the doubts you cast, rather than the … rather than the … which are only after all speculations
‘Faint heart,’ he said, looking me full in the face.
‘Not at all, not at all,’ I answered, perhaps too quickly, my heart on my lips, and I uncertain whether my laves or my doubts would come tumbling forth. ‘There is such virtue in clearing the ground, razing old errors and letting the grass grow beneath them again. You have done that, Sam, brilliantly; we need not supply their place.’
‘You are a critic‚’ Sam replied, in a precise, cold voice, ‘by trade and inclination. You delight in pruning, Phidy.’ And then he smiled and said with the sweet breath that replenishes a sigh, ‘I grow and grow and grow – and time will sort the ruins.’
‘Not at all, not at all,’ I stammered again, to nothing and everything at once. ‘Only …’ But ‘only’ died on my lips, for then an extraordinary thing began to happen. Sam began to dance, an odd jig beginning at the feet, shivering from his knees to his elbows, strangely slow and moving and wonderfully happy, in time to nothing and no one but the flaws and starts of his own delight.
‘In for a penny‚’ he chanted, smiling, lifting his knee to his elbow, again, again, ‘in for a pound.’ I could not help but smile back at him, warmed by the fire of his own joy, delighted at the sudden conflagration. ‘Hanged for a horse as a …’
‘Sheep,’ I answered, joining in, fetching his hands again and swinging together across the ice-cold parlour, upsetting chairs and rattling the pots on their hooks, making such music as if the spheres themselves sang fitfully to our dance.
‘We go to press‚’ he declared at last, resting his hands on his hips and gasping forth white, chill air.
Yes, I thought, we will set down in stone such gossamer tissues that one strong gust will see them dispersed to the winds.
*
Tom came to town to see it done. The business took all Saturday, and we grew smudged and inky ourselves, like characters running on a wet page. Sam had a smear of black under one eye that made him look more than ever like a navvy. Fifty pages lay in afresh heap on the long table, with the ink still shining like molasses and looking just as sweet. ‘The New Platonist: an American Science’ stood big and black on the first page. Edited by Professor Samuel Highgate Syme, for Sam was proud of his middle name, a rare gift from his father. I turned the page, delicate as china, and there stood the declaration in pride of place. It looked to me now, after printing, like a jumble of letters, all correct but without sense, like the bright black spots on lucky dice:
Contents
I. Aristotle and the New Science, by Prof. Syme
II. Inventions: The Fluvia and its Uses, by Prof. Syme
III. The Inverted Cosmos: A Primer, by Prof. Syme
IV. What It Means to Pactaw County: Local Predictions, by Prof. Syme
V. The New Medicine: Wax!, by Dr Friedrich Müller
VI. Speculations: a curious coincidence
Our special Appreciation to Mr Harcourt, Esq. of Richmond, Virginia, who may properly be termed the Medici of the New Science, our Prince and Patron
Not a word in it to Tom Jenkyns who now stands above the soft pile and takes Easy by the hand and says, ‘Come, I believe you owe us supper!’
It was a famous night. The three of us were together once more, and though Easy stood somewhat in the shade, he seemed content there; at least he did not murmur. He ordered champagne for us at the grand new Boathouse Hotel, and we poured it down cold as rain with our heads in the cloud. Chops followed, and, bone in hand, Sam was at his finest, at bay against the three of us, keen in dispute. The contest was over Faith and Knowledge, and Sam (to my surprise) took the part of the former, crying out, ‘Faith! I will buckler thee against a million!’ For once Tom stood against him, but we were no match for Sam in his heyday, and we fled the field in ruins. In my youth, before the shyness set in, I used to clamber up behind the farmers’ carts, full of apples or pigs, going to market. Some of the farmers took a stick to me, but I remember only the swaying and the shouts and bumps and laughter. That night we were drunk as lords and I remember the same scrambling joy. Only when Tom – of all people you, Tom! – said, ‘What follows, Sam?’ did we fall quiet, and then Easy, stout-hearted, raised a meek voice and piped, ‘Another,’ and then Sam said, ‘Another!’ and I cried, ‘ANOTHER!’ and soon we were chanting, and another bottle came. Tom left soon after, almost sober, tenderly dislodging himself from our embraces, and I never saw him again. Easy followed behind, and then Sam and I, blind drunk, staggered home, across the familiar footbridge and the roaring wintry river.
‘Faith and Knowledge’ was still the cry as we walked arm in arm up the porch-steps. I was in a happy rage. To prove his point, Sam proposed an experiment. The house opened into a narrow hallway that led to the staircase, with a door to the parlour left of the stairs. A low lamp hung from the hall ceiling. We often struck our skulls against the bright brass, until we learned the habit of sailing past, like a ship on a leeward tack, leaning. Sam ran to the parlour and came back with a thick cloth, which he asked me to bind around his temples, obscuring his eyes. I did so. His cheeks were hot with joy.
‘Stand in the parlour‚’ he commanded. ‘I will come in blindfolded and drunk. Mark if I hesitate – even the flutter of a step – before I reach the stairs.’
My high spirits had laughed at everything all night, and in their ebb I was apt to giggle long, and to myself. I giggled now, leaning against the parlour door. Sam opened the front door, stood in the entrance while a man might count to five, then with five straight, bold steps, ducking like a pope on the third beneath the bright brass lamp, he reached the stairs beside me and strode up them two at a time. As he reached the landing, he tore the blindfold from him, crying out in triumph, ‘That is faith, Phidy.’
Then he danced on the stairs, kicking up his knees. I stood beneath him. He caught his breath and cried, ‘Knowledge, viz. – that there are thirteen feet to the door – and six before you must stoop for the lamp – will only bring you on hands and knees to these steps.’ I giggled again.
‘Sheer luck,’ I said when I stopped.
‘Nonsense‚’ Sam declared, then he came down. ‘Good fortune can look like knowledge – never like faith. With luck you could guess the number of steps – but never stride them. Now‚’ he said, throwing the warm cloth in my face, ‘let’s see the colour of your faith.’
So I stood in the opened doorway. A cloudy midnight had warmed the cold, clear day and I heard the snow drip down the porch-steps. I measured the distance stride for stride with my eyes open. I rehearsed the quick nod of the head in the middle beneath the lamp. But when Sam bound the cloth over my forehead and led me by hand to the front of the hall and directed me towards the stairs, I was at sea.
‘Two s
teps, duck, then three more‚’ I repeated over and over, swaying drunk with the soft darkness in my eyes. I could not. I took a bold step forward, but my courage failed. Then a mincing half-step and I put forth a searching hand. I felt the heat of the lamp above me, but it seemed distant as the sun and I could not touch it. I swayed to the side, and caught at the wall, then edged forward, just past the lamp as I supposed, until I fell straight into Syme’s arms, where he stood in the parlour door.
‘Ha!’ he shouted and I giggled again.
‘Once more, once more,’ I cried. And again he bound the cloth lovingly across my eyes and tied it at the back in my dank hair. This time I took two bold steps with the blood pressing against my eyes and stopped dead. I edged forward with my head bowed low to the ground in exaggerated dignity. Then I strode ahead and heard the ring of the brass as it struck my skull before I felt the first hot pain. I fell back, more shocked than hurt, but Sam caught me and I brought him dawn and we lay on the bare floor in a tender heap, crying with laughter.
‘Oh, oh,’ I hooted, still blind, feeling for the angry line the brass had cut in my scalp.
‘You fool‚’ Sam said, ‘you faithless fool.’
I lay across Sam’s legs and he lay on his back. The hairs of his neck stood on end where my hand held him. The wine on his sweet breath stunk to my very eyes.
‘Enough‚’ he said, as I looked into his – blue and bright, as his pupils shrunk against the lamplight. I still looked – my lips parted to let the breath ease in and out – until his eyes blurred into a blue shimmer, and his face grew hot and red to the touch of my hand. ‘Enough‚’ he said again, sighing.
The Syme Papers Page 59
