‘I am a scientist‚’ said Sam. ‘A doctor.’
‘Ah‚’ said Mr Tyler. ‘No doctor.’
‘And I wish …’ Sam said, and began tapping on the table with his thumb.
‘I am not a doctor!’ said the farmer. ‘Er denkt ick bin ahn Ars oder vat?’
Easy looked shocked.
‘I want to poke a hole in your field to see if there is something there‚’ Sam said quickly.
‘What you looking for?’
‘I just want to make a hole‚’ said Sam, avoiding the question.
‘What you want to find?’ said Mr Tyler in a big voice.
Sam hesitated. ‘I have an idea the earth is hollow, you see. That there is nothing there.’ He looked downcast and sheepish.
Mr Tyler looked at his wife. ‘Er denkt da ist gahnit da.’
‘No‚’ he said in Sam’s ear. ‘Is mud. All the way down is mud.’
Easy grew red in the face. ‘This has nothing to do with mud,’ he said. ‘It is a theory.’
I was suddenly sad and sick at heart and wanted to go.
Then Sam took Mrs Tyler’s hands in his own. ‘Please‚’ he said, and made a cup of them. ‘It is hard, you see. Nothing can get through.’ Then he put his little finger in the crack between her thumbs. ‘But inside there is nothing there.’ Mrs Tyler was shy and pleased and kept her hands together even when Sam let them go. ‘Do you have an egg?’ he said. She rose quickly and brought him one and put it on the table, where it made a rolling echo. ‘Can you break it?’ he said and she laughed. ‘No, but like this‚’ and he opened her palm and put it in her fist. She squeezed her eyes as she squeezed her hand but she could not.
‘Mostly, the ground is like an egg‚’ Sam said. ‘There are no holes in it and nothing comes out.’ Then he took her hands again and cupped them. And he smoothed out the dark fingers of her husband’s big hands and laid them in a cup around her own, ‘Underneath‚’ he said, ‘there is not one circle, but many. Like an egg around an egg around an egg, and so on, all turning different ways.’ Husband and wife sat hands in hands beside him. ‘The circles have holes in them – but since they don’t overlap, nothing comes out.’ He poked a finger through a gap in Mr Tyler’s hands and ran into the back of her hand. ‘But sometimes the holes come together‚’ and he shifted their hands so their thumbs lay overreach other, then wriggled his small finger through the gap and tickled Mrs Tyler till she laughed. ‘That is what will happen at the bottom of your hill.’
‘How do you know?’ said Mr Tyler.
‘Because inside the shells there is a special air – quite unlike what we breathe. Do you have any salt, Mrs Tyler?’ She got up in a bustle and brought him a small dish of it with a little spoon. ‘When the holes come together – the air leaks out and burns blue if you light it. Like this.’ He opened the stove door and threw a pinch on the fire, which cracked and hissed in blue spurts. Mrs Tyler flinched when she saw it, then took a whole spoonful and threw it in the oven and stood back grinning.
‘I know this‚’ she said. ‘We did this for games on Christmas Day.’
A girl came to the kitchen door with a wooden spoon in her hand. ‘Can I have honey?’ she said.
‘This is business‚’ said Mrs Tyler.
‘Oh, business‚’ said the girl and went away.
‘What will be when the holes come together?’ said Mrs Tyler. ‘Will we fall in?’
‘I don’t know‚’ said Sam. ‘That’s what we’d like to discover.’
Husband and wife looked at each other. Not much made sense to them in this strange land. One more thing could do no harm. Herr Tyler scratched heftily at his ear and observed the results. ‘Na ja‚’ he said at last. ‘We don’t mind.’
His wife cut in quickly, shyly. ‘We like a show, you see.’
So we came back the next day – blue and wet after the storm – and found the chapel. Frau Tyler wrapped herself in her husband’s greatcoat and carried a stool to the top of the hill. There, as we began to take our measurements, she sat watching: a curious bundle of cowhide and thick wool that grew dark when the sun set behind her. That was Tuesday – the eclipse was two weeks away.
Every morning we set off for Tyler’s Farm, flu’ in hand. Frau Tyler gave us breakfast, which we gobbled in the dark. Herr Tyler had found his shoes again and teased us. ‘Did you find gold yesterday?’ he called out, before he closed the back door behind us, bent on his ordinary tasks. The snow had gone and he was right before. We found only mud.
77°9’33” W by 38°22’57” N. We took fallen branches and cut them down and stuck them in the ground to mark the spot. A second measures about thirty yards. Then we borrowed rope from Mr Tyler and tied it around the posts to make a square, thirty yards by thirty yards. The chapel stood inside it.
At first the size of the ground daunted us, I confess. We could not possibly dig up nine hundred square yards at the hard foot of a hill. Unless, of course, we applied the mechanical vigour of the double-compression piston, that treasure of Sam’s heart – though the puzzle of how to haul that impossible beast fifteen miles up and down the hills appeared insoluble. The cordon itself proved to be a great comfort. Each time we stepped inside the hole (as we came to call it, though it was none) we must raise our foot over a taut line of dirty, dripping hemp. The square grew fixed in our imaginations: the ground afoot outside the line and just within seemed seas apart. Inside the land was magicked and in our thoughts burned blue.
Yet – as Sam repeatedly reminded us – his measurements were rough and all our faith in the map of Perry, a surveyor with his eye fixed on a brighter, warmer star than the heavens possessed, yellow-haired withal and somewhat nearer the ground. I borrowed a sextant from Mrs Simmons one day and Sam took a sighting at noon. The numbers tallied near enough, though they told us only the distance north. None of us cared much for the result, either way, and we did not check again. Having ventured so deep, we had resigned ourselves to faith.
And trusted to the flu’, for we had never known such fervent and blue indications. Day after day the lamp burned with a throbbing flame as clear and bright as dawn. The readings proved strongest at the heart of the hole, a patch of ground three yards from the chapel door. The flu’ cast a blue glow at our feet that shimmered and shifted like the azure flutter of a hummingbird’s wing.
We had reached the middle of March and the air was pricked with spring – as if the sun could lay its seeds, those first shoots of summer warmth, in that sweet transparency. A letter came from my father, brimming with extraordinary good news. It seemed to bless our own enterprise and usher in a season of general prosperity by one of those strange conjunctions to whose power Sam attributed all luck.
My dear boy [my father wrote],
I hardly know where to begin, and shall doubtless forget where to conclude, so drunk on good fortune am I (and a glass or two of brandy I confess, lifted in honour of our new republic, but I outrun myself). Two nights ago, I lay on my dank pallet in the Prince’s cursed, miasmal, rheumatic, calciferous cellar, waiting for the day of my trial – endlessly delayed, as the fools from Berlin sought to trace a great web of Liberal menace from that poor spider, your father, whose only fault had been a curious intellect, a free table, an attentive ear, and perhaps – there seems no harm in writing it, now that all’s well – a loose tongue, and, upon occasion, a spirit of generosity not confined shall we say by its own resources.
When morn and even pass undistinguished from each other (believe me, my boy), days, weeks, months slip unnoticed into the general sea of time – a great flat gleaming wasteland, unruffled by nows and thens, an endless becalmed never and for ever, at once. (A touch of the headache is ringing at my temple now, a faint bell, an almost delicious echo of the night’s joy. Excuse, in short, the purple in my prose – a happy stain from the flow of Burgundy in my blood.) I cannot tell you if the clamour awoke me – if I had been sleeping or daydreaming – or merely thinking, so little separates these three occupations in the pri
soner’s mind – when the dull rumour of crowds and song and trampling feel met my ear. Perhaps an hour passed, or only a few minutes. The clamour grew loud and soft by turns, but louder, and louder in the general run of time. And I saw, through the keyhole, against the walls of the corridor outside, the flicker of torchlight in procession.
Certain it is that when the tread of feet echoed along the passage outside my door, when the key jingled on the chain and scraped into the rusted lock, and began to turn; when the door swung open – I had the sense of being woken, of rising from a heavy sleep, that thicks the eyes with remembered clouds of dreams. I could scarce speak or stand or listen to the kind men, my confidants and conspirators, who took me by shoulder and arm and led me out, trembling in heart and step, out, out, along the dark passages, glittering in the torchlight, and up the narrow stairs, to the kitchens and thence, issuing, it seemed, like a growing river, to the courtyards thronging with our happy countrymen, who sang and danced and drank, to my release. Below us, along the river, armadas of little burning boats (newspaper hats, no doubt, upturned) streamed over the water, a pretty scattering of dying glows, in honour of our new republic, the great state of Neuburg-on-the-Elbe!
Ushered from the press of drunken happiness towards the Prince’s balcony, I stood in the brisk spring night – so sweet to my liberated nose, long clotted by damp and the chalk of the cellar – to address the crowds, who, to be fair, seemed too much overjoyed by the great events to attend any discourse on their significance, so I contented myself with raising a rabbling cry of ‘Freedom, Faith, Fraternity’, which a chorus of revellers took up, and on the sweet tide of that song I came in triumph down the hill to my own dear town and my own dear street and the tender embrace of my own dear daughter again.
Of course, there is a great deal to be done – a great deal of plain hard work. For even liberty – especially liberty, perhaps – requires a certain attention to tedious detail. The widest freedoms depend on precisions of the law. A great deal has been done. The Prince, Hespe, a handful of faithful retainers, as I believe the phrase is, have been locked up – in the very cellars where I lay so long confined. No harm shall come to them, of course, barring a fright, and such reprisals as they commit upon one another. I have not slept these two days. I would not sleep, I could not sleep, for the world. I have lain long enough in slumber, at various times, of various kinds – and have never felt so bright and wide awake, almost painfully conscious, indeed, of the passing minutes, and the honour of our opportunities. Tor we have begun to draft – that great thing – a Constitution – sat up late in the palace dining room, over coffee and cognac and cigars, squabbling, quibbling, screaming at one another; for liberty is almost an angry delight, and one cannot raise republics, fashion parliaments, without a certain bloodshed of ideas.
The great thing – our abiding hope – is that our little town proves too slight for troubling over; that no bully from Berlin or Vienna will come to restore a throne he hardly knew existed; that we shall be given leave – to experiment – with Freedom; and might succeed in a small way, where we could not on the grand scale. Come home, Son, soon – surely to have a hand in such beginnings is worth the sacrifice of any speculative enterprise. We shall talk politics as the evenings stretch away, and awake to find our lightest thought made Fact.
Your free & loving –
Father
I wept, little guessing till then how much my father’s fate had oppressed my heart; I wept, simply at the thought of home and plum brandy on the long, flat nights of a northern summer; and I longed to return. Even the excitement at hand, the triple eclipse, heralded an ending of a land, and the months after 23 March, that famous day, were an empty space. I trusted at once to these conflicting thoughts: that Sam would triumph and need me no longer; and that he would fail and his cause would be lost. Both convictions with an equal weight pulled me home (the push had come when Sam declared, ‘Enough’). My hopes lay at odds and ends. I had come over a year before to test a geognostic revolutionary. And then he had won my love but never my faith. Now we stood at the edge of a discovery – a small one about a man or a great one about a world. I felt as one might at the foot of a lover’s grave, wishing for a miraculous rebirth and fearful at the same time of the rending and terror of that transformation.
I feared for the first time: what if it all were true?
Sam was an April day of changing weather. At work he was sunny and brisk with a head for a thousand things at once and hands that could attend to each in its turn. But at other times a blue funk would fall upon him, like a cold drenching, and he would sit and be miserable, his fire doused and nothing left but a stinking smoke. Then he could turn savage and I learned to fly to Mrs Simmons when the first cloud appeared.
A boil came up in the middle of his back and he was always at a stretch to rub it. Without heeding, he often twisted awry to get at it. This grew into a familiar posture, his thick shoulders bunched together and his strong hand searching blind for the spot. I offered to treat it and every night he sat shirtless in the parlour with his back to the stove, while I dropped hot wax upon it. He never flinched or cried out. It was an ugly red welt on his mottled skin, but it grew hard and black. Then I rubbed an ointment on his back which steamed against the fire. We talked little enough in those weeks with one thought in our heads and still less at those times when I stood above him with my left side hot against the stove. But his back and my hands grew companionable, like children who get along quite happily when their mother and father cannot think what to say to each other.
By some miracle of invention we got Sam’s beloved double-compression piston to the spot at last – the dank, sweaty, bruising labour of two days and nights. He had the notion of transporting the great beast by water – a slender, leaf-choked tributary of the Potomac ran from the foot of the Boathouse to within a mile of Tyler’s Farm. ‘The secret of every enterprise’, Sam declared, on setting forth, lies in beginning – stopping when you can’t go on – then beginning again – when you can.’ I’m afraid poor Easy and I suffered most of the beginnings. It took four horses, heavy-flanked, whip-sore brutes, simply to drag the device to the river’s edge. We hired a river-boat, broad at the beam and shallow-bottomed, which lay slapping lightly against the banks for five hours, as the dark grew round us, and Sam tried to rig up a winch to lower the iron darling of his imagination to the water. It got so we could not bear the bang-bang-bang of the prow against the water, and the flap of the mooring against the post; so we paid a boy just to take the rope in hand and hold the vessel quiet. The sun set behind him and it got so cold we could hear his shivering, sneezing at last, a short blue figure stuck in the muddy bank, never daring to move. A dollar seemed cheap for such dedication; and you may guess we heard an earful from his mother, Mrs Scutching, who kept the Boathouse Saloon, in the morning.
The best I can say for the river journey is this: we did not drown. The Potomac drifts into flat rocky stretches, the current encumbered by weeds and broken trees, and though the winter swelling eased our passage, several times we stood thigh-deep in icy waters, shifting rocks, lifting and pushing and wheezing, kicking and cursing that damned machine, till our hands grew too cold and numb to mind the cut of rock and splinter of wood, and we heaved the vessel into the next deep flood at last. Only at moonrise did the nose of that stubborn boat nudge the spruce tree at the bank below Tyler’s Farm; and we left boat and mechanical beast alone together, to sink or rust or rot as they desired, and slept among the hay of Tyler’s barn. Good Frau Tyler roused us at noon the next day, sleepless, stiff in back and neck, filthy and stinking and scratching loose stalks of hay from our collars, for a late breakfast, hot cups of coffee and chops fried in onions; and thus fortified we tackled the weight of Sam’s tireless imagination once again.
We hauled it out at last and up – behind four horses strapped to their burden by a contraption rigged from the harness of a plough. The beast had wheels, of a fashion, I confess; though we cursed these most of
all, as they seem determined always on returning whence they came, and never adventuring, in true pioneer spirit, across fresh woods and pastures new. In short, they liked the bottom of every hill, the rut of every track, the ditch of every field; and Easy and I scrambled desperately behind, to prop the wheels with logs, whenever the horses, steaming, foaming in the cold, began to slip in the mud; or sat back on their haunches, in equine protest, utterly spent. Sam drove on before; and I’m afraid the pair of us behind looked somewhat ungratefully upon his inspirations – both mechanical and oratorical – as he urged us on.
Easy indeed lost his temper at last. The long-boat we (or, rather, his father) had hired, while not entirely sunk by our exertions, required certain decorative improvements – in the manner of cross-benches, tiller-ropes, rowlocks and such – before we could return it; and Easy resented for once the imposition upon his father’s generosity. The fact was Easy was an indolent young man, unaccustomed to the pure drudgery of geognostic exploration, and grew, as well he might, peevish and snappish at the cold and the muck, at our chapped and bloodied hands, bruised and aching knees, wet feet, dry throats, sore heads. ‘Haul the damn’d thing yourself!’ he cried once, when Sam called one of our brief respites to an end. ‘When you know yourself, as a matter of fact‚’ he muttered on, ‘that she can’t dig deeper than a grave, without exploding, in mud and fire.’ I, for one, felt glad of his outburst, relieving as it did my own pent-up frustrations, and drawing, as I guessed it would, Sam closer to me again.
Well, we got the beast up in the end, as the sun set over the hill; and even found time and spirit enough to rumble a barrowful of Tyler’s coal to the spot – which we stored inside the chapel door, in case we wanted it on the great day, to clear whatever passage to the earth’s core Nature and that eclipse of the internal spheres would quarry out. The journey home, in a leaky, knockabout way, passed astonishingly swift; the moon glittered over the water, and we pulled ourselves along its bright chain, till the boat eased against the low pier beneath the Boathouse at the stroke often – just in time for us to stagger up the bank and swallow a hot, sharp glass of grog, as we stared out of the familiar bay window, before turning to bed. We were too tired for hope or misery or any such luxuries of the human heart; too tired even to recall the labour that exhausted our limbs and emptied our thoughts; too tired to dream of those whistling internal spheres, spinning away below us, towards terrible conjunction in a day and a half.
The Syme Papers Page 61
