Of what? He did not mean, I think, another stroll beneath the hanging lamp, but a different exercise, also of faith, perhaps.
A famous night. But in the morning my bruised head could not but fear the touch of madness in our game, like the liquor in old honey. In his blind high spirits, Sam would have walked against a wall to boast his wit. For a few weeks thereafter, I drifted leeward of him. We spent less time together, for he was busy in Easy’s company, talking of sales and critics and his father’s money. It was a happy night, but happiness may make men shy as well as anything.
Doldrums followed the grand excitement of our first issue. A heap of the New Platonist lay stacked in the hallway – Bull Harcourt wished to glance one over, before his men collected them and sent them to ‘every corner of the republic’. Easy left a few around Pactaw, for the locals to stare at – in ale-houses and inns, even the white church north of Main Street. The weather grew warmer, and the snow that had come to us in clouds left us in streams and puddles. Sam now took Easy with him on his early expeditions with the fluvia. He wished to become ‘better acquainted with the business from every angle’. I felt a pang at first to see them go in the morning. I still woke at dawn and heard them clattering on the stairs and in the parlour. Easy often spent a hard night on Sam’s floor before their forays. When I heard the front door bang, I rose and walked barefoot to the window, where I could see them, two dark figures with their heads bent from cold and lack of sleep. But the dawns were growing warmer, and I felt on my skin the first prick of spring and envied them their journey.
As I had stood in for Tom, now Easy did for me. Sam loved to explain, and Tom and I knew all his explanations. Still I would have followed him at dawn across field and fence to hear and help him. Or perhaps I would not, as I did not.
It was only later I discovered their true purpose. Sam had got in his head the thought that ‘something might yet be made of that visionary device – of such promise, both to miner and geognosist – in short, the double-compression piston itself.’ Easy himself had some training as an engineer, and the two of them spent many dark weeks locked in the barn behind the Boathouse tinkering with the irreparable, dabbling with the impossible, reconstructing that shapeless heap of disjunct and fantastical conceptions. And drinking whiskey, I believe, to keep warm. Somehow Sam knew this would upset me – as it had upset Tom – and so the pair of them snuck away before dawn and returned after moon set, to practise their secret, hopeless machinations. I can’t say why the thought of that device made me despair. Something in the terrible proliferation of problem and solution it created – a joint here, broken, a wheel there, fixed – seemed to prove the futility of Sam’s speculation; offered mechanical evidence of the fact that his thoughts could never escape the terrible cycle of inspiration and confutation.
But I never guessed their business till Sam came home one afternoon, early, as the low sun glittered off the frozen grass, and declared the double compression to be ‘finally and fantastically – fixed and finished. Reborn. I – that is, Easy and I – have done it.’ He stood swaying arm in arm with Easy on the windy porch, and I ushered them in, and boiled a pot of tea for their frozen fingers and parched throats; and we lifted hot mugs and drank a toast ‘to Digging, as the farmer said’. But I didn’t have the heart to test him, prove him right or wrong again – and did not guess and did not care which outcome would have disappointed me, pleased me more.
Meanwhile, I began to fall in with Mrs Simmons. Every Thursday evening I took her light-boned arm – the arm, where Youth and Beauty linger last and sweetest! – and walked her home, after a party of whist with Mr Fawlkes (a bookseller) and his mother. Sometimes we peered up and down the street, and I snuck in for a glass of sherry by her fire.
‘Will Sam mind us, do you think?’ I said to her one evening.
‘Leaving him to his work? No, that’s the best of him.’
‘No, that is not what I meant, I think.’
‘He is not a passionate man. Does that surprise you, Phidy?’ she answered, considering. ‘And a woman of … forty or so needs company. A young man is always pleasant. Sam and I are like in that as well, taking young men to us. There was an Alcibiades before you, but he was a mouthful so we called him Alley.’
‘Tom has always been Tom.’
‘And now there is Easy‚’ she said. ‘Though he is a sad young man, and I should not have chosen him. Easy is a sweet name for him, though cruel. Tom has a sharp tongue for all his courtesy and a name for everything. Such a lovely boy, but he never liked me, more’s the pity.’
‘Why not?’
‘He thinks I draw Sam from his purpose. He is jealous, too.’
‘Would it upset you if he stopped all this nonsense for you?’
‘Why should it?’
‘As a matter of principle.’
‘You are a great one for asking questions, Phidy. You imagine yourself so shy and silent, but all the while no one can hush you for love or money. If it comes to that, I have my own principles.’
‘What are they, if you will pardon another question?’
‘That everyone can find a reason to be unhappy and that most can find a reason to be happy. That should answer you as far as Sam goes. It has got me across an ocean and through the death of poor Mr Simmons – and pushes me out of bed in the morning, when I would much rather sleep.’
‘Would you like to sleep now?’ I asked, hopeful and afraid.
‘Not quite‚’ she said, laughing at me in her eyes, with such shyness as looks like daring.
Then I stood up and heard my knees creak; they hurt me as I knelt with my elbow against the armrest of her chair. I stooped to her dry, soft lips and my blood raced, with two thoughts. With the intimate thick thought of her before me, and the second tiny whisper in my head that I was following Sam. We kissed, gently and then longer. Then she sat back, content and not at all surprised. She was too comfortable in her soul to deny me a resting-place there, though I knew Sam was her great and only love. ‘A young man is always pleasant’ echoed in my thoughts, but in fact she said, ‘You make a lady wait.’
Here I dwell, I thought, even in the house of your love. Mrs Simmons held the key to his back door, and I might come with her to his very heart of hearts, when he would turn me from the parlour on my own. ‘Enough‚’ he said to me that night, and left me with a breast overcharged with his love. Is it any wonder I should give it to the heart closest his own?
But if Sam stood behind my thoughts, Mrs Simmons lay before my eyes. She had nursed me in the spring, and time passed easily with us. Even the slight wrinkles of her neck gathered sweetness in them, as the veins of a leaf drink dew. Her hair was thin and old, but the tenderer for it; and her eyes were cut from a wonderful blue stone time could not touch. She had her own charms: long, thin arms and a curving side.
It was well past midnight before I turned to my own bed.
*
The doldrums gave way to a hurricane. I returned one night late from Mrs Simmons to find Easy in our parlour and a great fuss in the air. Easy shook a letter in his hand with furious indignation. He turned to me as I entered. ‘Bull Harcourt, as you call him, Phidy‚’ he said, ‘is a bull, a bull-headed, thick-skulled tyrant with all the fineness and sensitivity of a butcher. He is a bully, a bull.’
Sam laughed, ‘Don’t take on so, Easy. He is plum right.’
I had never seen Easy in such a state. His blood boiled and his hair stood on end and he paced up and down in a storm, Sam was calm as cream beside him, but had he known what was to come, he should have burned that letter and never spoken of it again.
‘Settle yourself, Easy, and tell me what’s the matter,’ I said.
‘“Dear Dr Syme‚’” he read in a squeak and squall. ‘“I have lately had the pleasure of looking over your first instalment, the outcome of our association.” Pompous fool, it is the outcome of his genius and your bullion, you bull, butcher.’
‘Carry on,’ I said, and Sam and I looked at each
other, smiling.
‘There is more of such stuff, but I pass over it. Here, no, here, he says, yes, here it is. “I am a practical-minded man. As you no doubt recall from our discussion, among the conditions to our arrangement, was the agreement that you justify your discoveries, either with the acknowledgement of a community of scientists, or with the dramatic proof of a demonstration of some kind. Though Mesmer was turned out of Paris, he had a crowd of witnesses behind him. You have two, an outcast German physician” – I am sorry Phidy – “and my son.”’
‘He knows nothing of Tom‚’ I said.
‘A down-at-heels newspaperman‚’ said Sam, laughing.
‘Is there more?’ I asked.
‘Is that not enough?’ said Easy.
‘No, there is more‚’ said Sam. ‘Read it.’
‘“In case I appear an insensitive critic, my dear Doctor, let me observe that, towards the end of your essay ‘What it Means to Pactaw’, you furnish ample material for such a demonstration. Unless I am mistaken, the calculations on page thirty-seven reveal that no less than a triple eclipse is predicted within the next month not thirty miles from Pactaw itself.”’
‘Is this true?’ I asked, of a sudden fearful. That word ‘calculations’ had rung a bell in my memory. Tom had dreaded the proof of certain ‘calculations’ before me. Now I had inherited Tom’s … hesitations.
‘I have looked at it and it is.’
‘Had you known it?’
‘Perhaps I had.’
‘What does Mr Harcourt say to it?’
‘There is not much left. Finish reading, Easy.’
‘“Surely such an event would proclaim itself in some dramatic, or at the least observable, fashion. Could not a crowd surround the spot, as at some entertainment? Or, if that is impractical, a few fellow geonomists could be alerted and brought to witness. As I have said, I am a practical man, and you may rely on me for any assistance you require to bring it off. Your servant, Bull Harcourt.’”
Easy had grown quiet and dull and the joke fell flat. Again his father had trod upon his toy, and he feared it would not mend. Sam said nothing, though he cocked a cheerful and enquiring eye at me.
I could still hear him in my head, loud as on that happy night, ‘You faithless fool.’
*
My last month in America was upon me. We stared at Sam’s calculations night after night to be sure of them, until the numbers grew like leaves in our eyes, scattered at hazard in a storm, and we could as little understand their order. Seventy-seven degrees nine minutes thirty-three seconds west of Greenwich, thirty-eight degrees twenty-two minutes fifty-seven seconds north of the Meridian.
Sam had a friend in Richmond from army days, Tippy Adams. He was a surveyor still in the 53rd Infantry. So we set off for Richmond one day, over a landscape the sharp snow had scraped dark and bare as it retreated. The army offices were bright red brick with a high, bright flag stuck from a pole above the entrance in a happy flutter of nerves. The sky was thinnest blue at lunchtime, but all else was brown and slop, the grass outside deep in mud and the hallways streaked with it and smelling of the stables.
Tippy was a mild, tall man with iron-coloured hair and a plain face that had been handsomer and happier in his youth. He wore spectacles that glinted over the pupils of his eyes, and he had grown fat round the middle for the first time in his life. He looked as if he knew his dry business; and he loved Sam.
He laughed to see him and then stood blinking at us. ‘Come to lunch with the boys‚’ he said at last. So we followed him into the mess hall where the tinkle and roar of a hundred voices and the sour smell of boiled water reminded me of my own days at Werner’s academy. ‘Fellas!’ he shouted, as we came in. ‘Look what I’ve brought!’ And a hundred faces turned to Sam who smiled like a pumpkin and I heard cries of ‘Moonie!’ and ‘Old Moon-Eyes!’ and the slap of a dozen hands on his strong back. He was at home as I had never seen him, and when we sat down with stiff straight backs at the end of the law bench, Tippy said, ‘So, Doctor, are you still poking for holes?’
‘I’ve got a rag out,’ said Sam.
‘Hell,’ said Tippy, smiling.
‘The New Platonist. I’m here on business, really.’
‘Let’s eat and then talk‚’ said Tippy, and that’s what we did. For dinner came and Tippy ate and said not a dozen words between mouthfuls. He had a thick jaw and looked at us and smiled each time he brought a napkin across his thin mouth. He was like a schoolboy gone grey and still gobbled.
After dinner Tippy took us to the officers’ room, with a brown carpet underfoot, and brawn chairs and odd brown tables, and brown paintings of men from the 53rd with white faces at their brown oars on the brown Potomac against the brawn walls. The brass grate was slick as honey and the fire glowed orange on it and the sky outside the cold window was blue and thin as blown glass and empty for the wind to play in. We could hear it down the chimney deep in our broom chairs.
‘What’s this business then?’ said Tippy.
‘I’m at my old loons‚’ said Sam, in a voice I scarcely recognized – rough, quick, utterly at ease. ‘Fella I know put up some money for a magazine. But he is a thick-sighted old mole – would doubt a rock till it had struck him in the nose. As it happens, I know where the rock is, but I need a map.’ Sam had fallen into his old gait.
‘Where away?’
‘Pactaw County. Can you help us?’
Tippy laughed, quiet and at the back of his throat, nothing so like the sound of someone chewing nuts. ‘Did you know Perry?’ he said. Sam shook his head. ‘Literary fella. Wrote jokes about us, rhyming things, you know, like “gun” and “fun”. He had a girl – “yellow-haired nymph” was her name, I think – in Pactaw. He says to me, “Ain’t there something to do in Pactaw? Shoot Injuns or something?” No Indians in Pactaw, but I let him chart the place. So I do have a map, if that’s what you want.’
‘It is.’
‘Stay put. I’ll rummage later.’
He said nothing and I was quiet as a mouse. Sam’s thoughts were all on the map, but then he did turn and ask Tippy how he was keeping.
‘Well stuck in, you know me’ was all the answer, but he had waited for this question and grew content; and soon after he rose on stiff knees with his right hand on his new belly and took us to the chart room. We spread the map flat on a table in a rustle of paper like the slap of sails, and in an instant we had tacked down the Potomac to Pactaw County with its low hills pricked with thin ink. Bull Harcourt was right. The spot lay in ‘Tyler’s Farm’, not fifteen miles from the Races.
Tippy gave us the map and said, ‘Bring it back when you come and see me.’
‘I will, Tippy.’
‘You would have been captain by now, do you think of that?’ He looked at me then, as if I had the same sad thought at my heart, which I did.
‘I was an old hothead‚’ Sam said.‘Should’ve got killed somehow or other – long before now.’ Perhaps it was true.
‘What happened to the nymph?’ I shouted as we left.
‘They were married,’ Tippy called across the windy day.
*
The visit to Tyler’s Farm was the last happy piece of nonsense I met in America. It rained like the great flood so Easy came with us and we took his carriage. The rain shouted at us all the way, and the close air under the trembling roof tasted sour on the tongue, like metal. Our spirits were electric and the three of us could scarcely speak for wonder and joy at all the banging. ‘Mr Tyler’s Farm’ proved to be a brown, bedraggled hump of a hill with a bright cloud behind it and sparks of rain above it. It ran over to the valley under that cloud, and there our business lay, before the copse at the foot of the hill. There was a small building marked ‘Shed’ on the map near the magic spot, though we later found it to be a tiny chapel. It had a single pew in front of our crumbling Saviour, with an odd iron tree of candles before it, with cracked black paint. We also found a game of draughts under the pew and a child’s collection o
f rocks, with one dead mouse among them. The Tylers were Catholics.
The farmhouse was low and wooden, though backed against the sky by taller barns. The long drive up to the farm had dissolved into a stream, and the stones in the road glinted clean and shining in its current. They cracked and crunched under our wheels, and we left a path of brown mud behind us. The yard was a black puddle with two chickens in it, and a rusted plough and a heap of flat rocks in a corner for building walls. The hour had just gone two but the day was dark as suppertime except for the big, bright cloud over the hill. I knocked with a heavy fist against all the noise.
A tiny staring woman opened the door. ‘Is it te Inglish?’ she asked.
‘No, Mrs Tyler …’ Sam began.
‘Where has they got to?’
‘No, Mrs Tyler. May we come in? We are all wet as fish out here.’
‘Henrik!’ she called. ‘They are coming in!’ Her head was cocked up to see us, like a wren’s. Her nose was red, and she took a handkerchief and pinched the end of it. ‘Take off your boots!’ she said. ‘You want tea, I guess, if it’s te Inglish?’
We sat with Mr Tyler around the kitchen table. He sat by the stove with his boots off and leaned back against the wall with his feet in wet wool socks against the stove. ‘Ah!’ he said, and snatched them away and came down in a clatter. He rubbed his toes then leaned back again carefully and put his feet back on the hot iron. ‘I just come from the bottom of the hill‚’ he said. ‘Wet.’
‘We have come on rather odd business, I fear‚’ Sam said.
‘Just say what it is, but all we got right now is chickens‚’ said the man.
‘No‚’ Sam said. ‘We don’t want chickens.’
We all sat silent, puzzled how to begin. ‘Leepshen‚’ said Mrs Tyler from the kettle, ‘haben zee vat im Kopf?’ The kettle whistled and she brought us tea and we held our red hands around the mugs. They were Germans, but I kept my tongue, for I did not wish to explain.
The Syme Papers Page 60
