Sam was in a black rage on the eve of the eclipse and I’m afraid poor Easy suffered for it. The nights were still cold and the moon promised frost – round and bright as a brass gong with a mist at the edges – when Sam lit his pipe after supper.
‘Is anyone to come tomorrow?’ Easy asked. ‘You know, as my father said.’
‘No.’
‘I do not mean a crowd and toffee apples …’ Easy went on, though I wished he would not.
‘It is not a circus.’
‘Exactly, but I thought perhaps your old Professor Silliman; or that man from the museum in Philadelphia – of natural histories and technologies and such – who mentioned you kindly.’
‘I never guessed I was a cause for charity.’
‘No, of course not, but as the Bull says, a community of …’
‘Because Mr Harcourt pays the bills, does not mean I must attend to each whim of his son.’
‘That was unkindly said,’ replied Easy, for I kept silent, though I should not have.
‘I did wish to say, though, Easy‚’ Sam continued in a cold voice, ‘that I don’t expect you to bother with us tomorrow. There should be little to do – and much of it may be long and dull.’
‘I should like to come.’
‘I would prefer you did not.’
Easy was silent a moment, then he said, ‘I may look a fool to you. And you call me Easy though I am not. A year ago, Phidy, you were just such a one as I and Tom before us no doubt, though he had the sense to leave in time. Does it concern you, Professor, that you attract only hopeless young men with little else to do?’ He could be small when he chose. Sam was only cold and quiet. Easy then left without a ‘good night’ or ‘good luck’.
He had left us the carriage, though, and his boy had the horses ready before dawn. Sam was in sunny spirits in the dark morning and said, as the horses jostled in the quiet, ‘It is a shame about Easy, though. It is only that he is so awkward – and then everything is such a bore.’ My eyes were gummed with sleep and my tongue thick in my mouth, so I said nothing. But Sam would talk. ‘It is a queer thought – but we may be riding quite happily towards some disaster. Some fire or great trembling, perhaps, and fallen trees. I really cannot guess.’ I was again silent, then he said: ‘I should expect at least a strange fog.’ He mused for a while at that and then the dawn broke on a pale blue day and my heart rose happily beside his.
Mrs Tyler had tea ready for us at the farmhouse. She knew it was the Great Morning. Her poor hands, thick and brown for such a tiny woman, trembled as she poured. ‘It will be all right, Herr Müllet?’ she said to me in German.
I looked at her, queerly – curiously pleased. ‘I really couldn’t say.’ Even my doubt partly comforted her.
The ground had frozen overnight in dry cracks and the grass crackled underfoot as we walked down to the hole. The morning began ordinary enough. We waited till the sun rose over the low wood and the mists came. Then we tested the softening earth in the flu’, which again burned bright and blue, and brightest just before the chapel. Then we waited. The sun burned away the mists and then the dew.
At noon Mr Tyler came with bread and hard cheese and I ate, though Sam could not. He asked us happily, ‘Any gold yet?’ but we did not answer. We saw Mrs Tyler come down the hill with a flask of tea in her hand, but she would not approach and stood and looked at us thirty feet from the rope. ‘Is it all right yet?’ she called, and I thought the question hurt Sam so I fetched it from her. ‘Is it all right?’ she asked again.
‘Not yet‚’ I said and took the tea.
I explored the wood for a time and came back and found that Sam had not stirred. It was a beautiful day, the air trembling with spring and birdsong and the sky flushed deep blue. The heavens had none of that winter pallor, like thin milk. Sam sat at the foot of the woods on a fallen trunk. I took his hand and he let me and it was cold as stone. ‘Come,’ I said, ‘let’s rummage about the chapel.’ He said nothing but he did follow.
It was still colder in there, but I lit some of the candles in front of the crumbling Christ and we warmed our hands on them. There was a nest at His neck, of jay or titmouse perhaps, and though it was muddy there was something tender in it, crackling, stirring softly. I pried at it gently with a stick, simply to pass the time before apocalypse; then desisted, having lost the heart for such cruel meddling, in sympathy with Sam, utterly at the mercy of those tremendous powers, who tease our senses with intimations of the universe. We had seen the child’s tin of rocks before, and the mouse; and there was nothing else except the game of draughts so we sat on the pew and played that.
It was five o’clock before we began to dig.
This was next to impossible for the ground was still hard after a muddy foot and anyhow there was far too much of it. Sam began at the north rope and when he could not any more I dug. Soon there was a soft heap of earth along the cordon, no bigger than a mole might make. That took us over an hour. Sam began digging at random in the middle and along the chapel walls. He dug afoot or two and then turned to the next patch, as one might dig for potatoes. I helped for a time, then gave up and sat down, but I grew too cold so I joined him again, all the while saying, ‘Sam, there is nothing‚’ though he did not heed me. Then I gave up again and went for a walk and when I came back he was still digging. ‘Sam, there is nothing.’
And yet he did not touch that patch ten feet from the chapel door where the flame had burned bluest. Like a loose brick discovered by a child for hiding secrets, he kept it to himself. I sat and waited, too cold to care. There were small heaps of earth all about like draughts on a board. Only when the sun had set and the moon risen, just waned from the full, though I had to look twice to be sure – only then did he turn his caked spade to that lucky ground. We had not lit a lantern for Sam did not wish to concede the day was spent. I could scarcely see him in the twilight, saw only a dark glow, but I heard his cry of joy as the spade struck something and I ran towards him. He dug deeper in great chunks and already a heavy mass lay at his feet. Then the earth loosened and fell away and the spade cut more easily in the soft ground.
My heart caught in my throat; I could scarce breathe. And yet, and yet, the thought formed, half-finished, echoing in my head, the silly great man has been been Spot On first to last – first to last. The old mad tingling fluttered up my legs, the blood of joy. The ground opened up at a great rate; he stood already knee-deep. Sam was clear – the strange word rang in my thoughts like a touched glass; no crack ran through him after all. Then the spade struck a soft hump in the earth and we looked down.
It was a litter of drowned kittens, slumped all ahoo in the early moonshine, and they stank of the grave.
I lost all hope. (It is worth remembering that our doubts are often as whimsical as our faiths. We dote on such slight evidence, such poor proofs, to found our unbelief.) Sam himself stood wrinkling his eyes against the stink; the poor creatures lay blind as worms entangled upon each other, lightly furred by streaks of mud and crumbled earth; their poor pink snouts mischievously suggesting the urge to sneeze, by the black dust that trembled on their whiskers; their eyes shut tightly against the great black world that had devoured their senses.
‘They belonged to the girl, I suppose,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ Then he added, in a curious turn of phrase, ‘Can’t be helped. Come on, Phidy – bear a hand with the compression piston.’
I did not mean to ignore him; only I had got so cold, grown so weary of the battle of faith and doubt, that in its sudden silence I could barely stir; stood stock still, observing the scene as if from a great distance. Sam’s face was muffled by the dark: the broad chin a shadow of stubbornness, his cheeks a rounded silhouette, empty of feature, his noble brow blank, cipher of a thousand thoughts; only his eyes sharp, slight as the glint off a penny.
‘Come on, Phidy‚’ Sam repeated, then bent his back to the beast himself.
I can give no clearer conception of the simple hunger of Sam’s faith than by
the image of his darkened shape heaving the metal brute from its muddy birth, and shifting it, perhaps an inch, from its sucking bed, downhill towards the hole left by the cats’ grave – what had taken four horses to drag up the slope. ‘Come on!’ he roared now, in the brute anger of physical frustration. ‘Phidy! Come on!’ And, shaken at last from my reverie, I stumbled to help beside him, pressing my shoulder against his, and breathing the steam of his sour sweat, as we laboured together.
The first inch proved to be the hardest. Gathering reluctant speed, the jolting iron engine shuddered slowly towards the grave; and when at last the edge of the wheel rucked into the dip of Sam’s spade-work, it was all we could do to keep the rest of the machine from toppling over after it. We stood now, with our hands propped against our knees, heaving sighs whose cold gusts pinched our lungs at every breath. And Sam looked up, sharp at me, with a white grin in the dark.
At first, I confess, I was grateful for the warmth. Sam hauled a shovel of coal from the chapel doorway, and fed the clattering mouth of the black machine. He huddled over to strike a flame, then lit a handful of loose twigs and broke them over the coals. For the first time in hours, I could see his face by the uneven light: black with dirt, and streaked by sweat run dry and cold against his skin. I had never seen him so fatigued; his eyes wore that wrinkled, crackling look that speaks of an anxiety that cannot exhaust itself. No doubt I looked his brother. And we fed the blaze and fanned our hands against it, a minute or two or ten, simply to rouse the cold blood stopped inside our veins, until our numb fingers blushed and loosened in the heat.
Perhaps a half-hour passed thus – while we built the flame to a crashing roar, and fanned ourselves against the wave of heat and shimmering light that issued from the black gut of the machine. ‘Shall we make a beginning?’ Sam said, never turning his fine countenance, browned by the hot beams, from the glare of the furnace. How sweet, I thought, even the calm before imminent catastrophe stretches away! I would not break its spell for the world – such companionable warmth we shared in the sharpening starlight, two old friends huddled together by a smoking stove after a bitter-cold day, before a bitter night. A lesson – that the great gift of man lies in postponements, delays, prevarications, in that tireless spirit of neglect of our irremediable fate that sweetens our journey to the grave. Another quarter-hour passed peacefully, though the dead kittens lay soft-backed at our feet, almost squinting it seemed against the unaccustomed light. ‘Shall we make a beginning?’ Sam said again, and again I did not answer him.
‘Come then‚’ he said (being a brave man), waking suddenly to a sense of his decision, in the abrupt way a fellow lifts his first foot out of bed in the morning, rousing himself. I stepped back instinctively as Sam pressed a lever beside the great iron wheel circling the piston above the furnace; a cog slipped into place and the black dragon cracked and creaked into life at last, a slumbering, shuddering, rough mechanical awakening. Sam paused beside it a moment, to observe the free action of its parts: the piston pumped happily now, shining in the reflected glow of its own heart, in the fire that powered it; the wheel, gathering pace, spun sweet and sweeter, as the force of habit acquired a smoother flow. The racking groan of its inception gave way to a low whistling hum, like the cry of wind in the rigging of a flying ship.
‘Come now‚’ Sam cried, striking his hands together – so true it is that the exercise of force, simply and of itself, begets delight. Even I stood roused – if not to hope then to a pleasure near allied – at the burning spectacle of Sam’s imagination thus embodied: a powerful compressed explosion of inner heat driving a swift and shining complexity of interlocking outward parts. Perhaps, I thought, it was merely the long cold that had sapped our spirits; a touch of fire only was required to quicken the blood. ‘Shall we have a look’, Sam said, ‘below?’ and dipped another lever, till a cog shifted, and a second wheel began to spin.
On the instant, a kind of drill or spear thumped into the cold turf, raising a shock of dust, and echoing against the low hill in the clear night. Boom – boom – boom, rang out to the stars, as Sam attempted to batter his way to the planet’s heart. The drill retracted as the wheel came round, lingered at the top when the joint spun through the flat of its arc, then shot to ground, producing a violent percussion of iron upon earth, as that strange hammer of human conception struck the immutable anvil of the world.
It is true, some progress resulted, a certain degree of excavation, as the turf softened at these repeated blows and dissolved into a thick black cloud that surged around the double-compression piston, sputtered as it drifted into the open furnace, and enveloped Sam himself in a smoking pail.
By this point, I had retreated some way up the rise of the hill, where the fumes of his experiment could not choke the sweet spring air. Sam shifted like a blackened shadow against the glow of the fire, as he fed the red heart of the machine with scraping shovelfuls of coal from the heap in the chapel doorway. ‘Sam,’ I cried, above the roar of combustion and the banging of that earthen drum, ‘Sam!’ – calling out for no other reason than an awful sense of overpowering futility. But Sam could not or would not hear; and when the spitting blaze began to overflow its iron cell, torn to red rags in the wind of its own creation, he pressed a third and final lever, releasing within the hollow of the pounding drill another, sharper auger – as if, in Sam’s wonderful phrase, the device had managed to ‘swallow itself, and thereby perpetuated its downward assault upon the world.
Easy was right – he could dig no deeper than a grave, six feet perhaps of fractured soil, before the battering instrument began to turn upon itself. Or rather, it seemed to my smarting eye – as the thick compound of smoke, ash and dust began to drift across the fields – that the double-compression piston itself sought to bury its body in the reluctant ground. The shuddering machine heaved its full frame against the stubborn turf, as if the drill were only a hook by which it hoped to reel itself earthwards at last, consumed by the mass it strove to penetrate. Sam had passed the point of all his purposes. The furnace lit his streaked and blackened face, shining in the heat of his exertion. There was a kind of frantic joy to his desperation, as if the fury of failure itself offered some violent relief to his great disappointments; as if disaster proved its own reward in the end. ‘Sam!’ I cried again, pushing through the black cloud to seize him by the arm. He shouldered me away and fed another clatter of coals into the fire, which consumed them at once, unsatisfied, and roared for more. I took his head fiercely in my hands, by the ash and sweat of his blackened hair, and screamed into his blinking eye. The machine had begun to break itself apart, inwardly consumed, outwardly dissipated, by its own desires. The wheels caught and slipped in the violence of their endeavours; drill and auger jolted and shook as they struck home, stuck in bedrock, and could not shake free. The body of the whole began to heave and shudder as if it sought relief from its own intentions. Sam broke free of my hand and scooped another bellyful of coal into the fire.
‘Sam,’ I cried again, past all patience (and faith, at last), ‘for God’s sake, Sam; don’t make yourself ridiculous!’
This, as I well knew, was the charge, the choice of word, for which he could never forgive me; but it brought us free at last, into the higher air, and the ordinary chill of a spring night, while our ambitions slowly consumed themselves away below us and without us.
*
It was ten at night before we reached home. Easy waited for us in the parlour. He stood up quickly when he saw us and his hands sweated so he put them in his pockets. He could not think what to say so he said, ‘I heard nothing here. You cannot think how jealous I have been. Was it grand – was it very grand?’
‘No‚’ said Sam, ‘no‚’ and pushed past him up the stairs.
‘We are only very cold, Easy‚’ I said, ‘and it has been such a long and dull disappointment.’ Then I whispered in his ear, ‘He is sorry for what he said, Easy. Can you manage him? I fear I angered him today.’
And in truth Sam h
ad little heart to face the friend who had called his ‘ridiculous’ endeavours to an end.
I fled to Mrs Simmons. She fed me soup before the fire, and then I crouched on my knees at the foot of it, for I was cold to the bone and in the heart. I looked at her husband’s painting of the laden ship and said, ‘A trade is best. I love your markets. None of this lonely digging‚’
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘Very little. Only we waited a long time and did not talk. And then Sam brought some strange device to bear – on which he had spent his life – fired it and watched it break apart.’
‘Is it for the best?’ she asked, holding a glass of sherry to her lips, and pausing.
‘I could not say. Do you think it is for the best?’
‘Yes,’ she said, drinking. ‘No.’
Then, later, she asked, ‘Do you admire him less?’
I thought a minute – a good long minute, chin in hand – biting, kissing my finger in gentle abstraction. But nothing came to mind, nothing at all. ‘Yes,’ I said, at last, in such careless fashion I knew it to be true.
‘Just as well‚’ she whispered, ‘fool.’ But it made her unhappy.
We were both so cold at heart that passion itself could give us but a dim light and warmth, as a candle cupped from the wind glows through the red blood. Even such warmth was good to us and eased us into sleep.
The Syme Papers Page 62
