The Chemistry of Tears (8 page)

“He does not purchase,” she said, cupping the back of his head with her hand. “He makes. In the night.” How she loved him—she was alight with it—but given the dexterity of the manufacturer and the ingeniousness of the invention, I had to make clear my scepticism.

“You wrong him,” she said, all respect now vanished. “He made it. He cut himself and he will be punished for his carelessness.”

He was clearly a very serious boy and he wore a white bandage on his forearm. Indeed his unwavering gaze defeated me and I retreated to the contents of the envelope, a very calligraphic English—“Herr Brandling, we will make the duck. A coach we have prepared to take you to the clockmaker.”

“There is no cost to you,” the woman said hurriedly. “We will take you to Furtwangen and there your duck will be constructed as you wish.”

What could I do but laugh at her?

“Why would I lie to you, Sir? You would put me in prison if I cheated you. I would be ruined. Please, Sir, do come. You cannot have a fine machine constructed by a common shopkeeper.”

“How could one manufacture such a thing
without
a shop?”

“You will meet him. He is Herr Sumper.”

“It is Mr. Sumper has robbed me?”

“No, he is gone to Furtwangen to await you.”

Since my first day at Harrow my trusting nature has been a source of amusement, and it is curious to me that these judgements have inevitably been passed by those who are untrustworthy—why be so boastful about your own appalling character?

But consider a moment. Would you, in my place, have refused to go with the thieves? Then what injury you would have caused your son. What an extraordinary journey you would have missed, one such as many have trouble crediting, and the very first stage of it, south along the Rhine, was both aesthetic and pacific. That is, I gave charge of my life to a child and his mother, and permitted myself—a rather dull chap really—to be transported, nay, elevated into the Black Forest which I had previously known only from the Brothers Cruel, as my mater called them. A great deal of my journey—which I experienced alone inside the coach while my little gang sat on top, often singing at the tops of their voices—was rather lonely but so much more peaceful than the previous two years during which I had dreaded the appearance of blood stains on the nursery pillow.

The first inn was hospitable although not clean. I called for candles and wrote to Percy, telling him all about the clever crippled boy, his luminous invention, the adventure that would take me into Ali Baba’s cave. By previous arrangement I sent this letter to my friend George Binns who had agreed to come and read to Percy on Saturday and Thursday afternoons.

On the second day we journeyed deep into the Schwarzwald. The forest road was picturesque, although very steep. All was particularly un-Grimm. Everywhere was beauty and delight—dark green forests, bright meadows, the well-kept gardens, an extraordinary abundance
of mountain streams, brooks and rills, not to mention the quaint houses with their heavy overhanging roofs, bright rows of glittering windows, carved verandahs, and their inmates—a distinct and peculiar race of people—the women with bodices and bright skirts, aprons, neat little pointed caps from which dropped those massive plaits it was their husbands’ privilege to see set free. I wished I were once again a husband in that private sense.

So, sad sometimes, often lonely too, but never in my entire life had I essayed a real adventure and I thought a great deal about my automaton and how, before it had been brought to life, it had already proved its power to realign the stars.

The swaying coach continued upwards until the sunlight showed that melancholy whiteness distinctive of the very highest altitudes. Then we were in country which forbade all growth except of grass and shrubs. Silence reigned upon the roof and I began to fear that the landscape of our destination might be in no way like that of the journey. Now the grass was blighted. We were in a land of peat, although as far as I could see the inhabitants had found no use for it. The timber houses were bleached like bones. And in the queer white light I became my own worst enemy, my own best hope, one of those unstable Brandlings who would always be in the market for a miracle.

IT WAS ONCE SAID:
“Brandling would see the glass half full even when it lay in shards around his feet.” Ha ha, indeed. But has no one bothered to observe that the optimistic view is commonly correct? That is why our fearful prayers are so often “answered.” That is why, when we descend from one of life’s barren mountain tops, we almost always enter a pleasant valley where there is an inn, very clean and white-washed, its window boxes filled with flowers in bloom.

And to that inn I surely came, and my natural “naïve” spirits were immediately restored. And from that inn’s airy stables the wall-eyed coachman would soon set off, carrying my trunk on his broad back.
First, however, he joined us around a bowl of moist ham hocks and mugs of creamy beer. There were no fearful intimations, no mortal shadows; every leaf of privet was bright and green and barbered.

Not even the weight of a Harris tweed suit could distract one from the pretty harvest scene through which our little party strolled and stumbled. And who could not be affected by the mood of one’s companions, particularly the boy who ran and limped and gambolled and called to the harvesters? They knew him—Carl.

We were now on our way to the place where a powerful cure might be constructed. I was a-tingle with impatience yet also, paradoxically, much elevated by the delays. Who would not be happy to see a much-loved boy have his weight guessed? When he performed a clever tumble, he never once pitied himself his crippled leg. Yes, I felt the absence of my own son—an awful ache—but only love provides the lucky man such symptoms.

As for the German mother? Who would ever imagine that distant figure in the wheat field to have poor hard hands, red elbows, and a mouth that did not dare hope for very much at all?

In the winter (as was apparently well known to everyone but me) the Furtwangen men all worked on their cuckoo clocks, and in the summer they laboured beside their wives. They were Alemannians and Celts and they were large and strong and showed a bright and cheerful speech and temperament. I liked them even when they clearly did not give a fig for me.

Our path soon joined a brook and young Carl paused by the muddy bank to once more display his wooden trick; the leap of red and yellow produced the desired effect; the performer said goodbye; and we followed the brook as it traversed two pathless valleys and a cool ravine where the black needles of the tall silver firs massed in whole mountains or sometimes mingled with the brighter green of oak and beech. A narrow path then led us down a cliff at which point the gentle stream soon revealed its secret nature as a roaring beast, rushing, and foaming, and hurling itself into a deep cleft, where it
spun the high wheel of a mill. From here we followed steps cut in the living rock.

At the top we found the mill stretching itself across the plateau, a muddle of high-pitched deep-eaved roofs. The air was unseasonably damp here, and green and mouldy. On the shadowed fascias were visible many carvings, a clear evocation of the cuckoo clock and, in this sense, encouraging to the seeker.

“Sumpy,” the boy cried.

Although it was now early summer and therefore past the season for logs to be floated to the bigger rivers, we found abandoned fir trunks stacked untidily. In the deep shadow between mill and dwelling everything was sour and damp. Piles of old grey sawdust and freshly murdered logs sometimes blocked the path. Copper cables, like guy ropes, ran from the peak of the mill house to the surrounding earth at which point they were enclosed in wooden boxes. Not everyone, I realize, would be comforted by this unscientific mess, but to me it was further evidence that my thieves might be angels in disguise.

“Sumpy, Sumpy.” The boy’s eyes were bright with expectation. I thought, how wise I had been to accept this new adventure. I felt like G. L. Sanderson:

We opened a bright black door and, without so much as an elephant’s foot or coat rack to prevent our immediate arrival at the heart of things, stepped inside a cavernous kitchen with a low ceiling and small deep windows. It was the middle of the afternoon but two candles and a lamp were already burning. Various pots steamed on the stove and I detected the very welcome aroma of baking apples.

“Sumpy!”

At a large square table beneath a window, sat two men, one as
small as a pixie and the other—well, it was, of course, the big thick-necked fellow from the hotel, he who espoused the romantic doctrine of the Karlsruhe wheel. That improbable creature, with his bumpy bald head gleaming in the candlelight, was the object of Carl’s love. I adjusted. It was my character to do so.

Then off, hey, ho, and up the stairs, the pair of them, man and boy, in a great rush together, like chums reunited at the start of term.

No one had cared to introduce me to the delicate man in lederhosen, so I did the honours myself. I presumed him a clockmaker, and his high-pitched precise way of speaking was exactly what one might expect—one does not anticipate wonders to be made by men with gardener’s hands. He said his name was Arnaud.

Henry, I thought, you have arrived at a place you could never have pictured. I began to mentally compose another letter to my son.

A balmy breeze flowed through the open shutters. One could hear the hissing of the apples, the persistent river, the unrelenting echoing conversation between Herr Sumper and the adoring child.

The coachman delivered my trunk somewhere or other. I tipped him and he set off. Frau Helga busied herself around the kitchen and I sat at table to play host to myself.

The small Huguenot—as he let himself be known—spoke an excellent English in which he informed me that a fierce and peculiar race of men lived in these mountains. If he thought to frighten me, he did not succeed. Fierce and peculiar was what the doctor ordered. For now, however, the air smelled of chaff and mellow pipe tobacco.

It was a good half hour before Herr Sumper and Carl descended the stairs, hand in hand, clearly happy to be reunited.

“Well, Herr Brandling,” said Herr Sumper finally, “you and I have a spot of business to discuss.”

Spot of business, spot of business
. How strange to find the cockney intonation pleasing. I asked the German why he spoke my mother tongue this way, and I do not doubt he answered me sincerely but he was already charging back up the stairs.

When I caught up with him he was striding along a windowless corridor. The floor inclined downwards like the murderous chute of the Brandling Railway Co.’s gravel crusher but if this was an omen I was very far from seeing it. At the lower end awaited my true destination, a sturdy pine door fastened with three quite different locks. Of course, of course,
it must be locked
. I would be the last to disagree.

With a fortune of one’s own, I belatedly realized, a chap could travel into any realm he dreamed. How peculiar I never thought of this before. Here I was—inside the sanctus sanctorum, the vision made concrete, and every small detail of the workshop’s physical existence, its concrete fact, stood at the service of Hippocrates. I saw machines, of course, as I had dreamed, but I had never had the wit to anticipate that the workshop might somehow hang above a wild chasm whose stream would provide the engines’ motive force. Everything was exceptionally clean and ordered, a number of shining lathes, for instance, one quite large, the others of the size traditionally used by clockmakers. The smallest lathe had a canvas belt attached to a spinning cylinder and this, in turn, was connected by a wider belt to the spring-wheel of the sawmill.

To my ear, we were behind a waterfall, against a rock.

I called out to say that Vaucanson had invented a lathe almost identical to this pygmy version.

Herr Sumper glared at me.

I thought, my goodness, do not offend him now.

Then, in an instant, as if his own drive belt had slipped onto a faster wheel, he was grinning and gesturing at the wall behind my back.

“This is the only Vaucanson we need.”

And, you have guessed already—here were the Two Friends’ plans, tacked onto the wall.

In the roar of water I heard the voices of my father and brother, in chorus, shouting that I must not give family money to this rogue.

But I was not their creature. And when Herr Sumper showed
me exactly how much he would require for materials, I was so far removed from Low Hall that I praised the thoroughness of a shopping list I could not read. Confused and jubilant in the roar of water, I paid him every Gulden and Vereinsthaler he required.

With each coin I placed inside his deeply lined palm I was closer to the object that the supercilious Masini had called the “clockwork Grail.” So let it be a grail. I emptied my purse. And it was triumph I felt as I strode back up the sloping chute, thence to a half-way landing where I was to make my bed. With what joy I entered my lodging, so SPARTAN, so much superior to my own home which had been redecorated by the youngest daughter of a family of brewers. God forgive me, that is an ugly unworthy way to think. It is enough to say that henceforth I would require no oils, no pastels, no Turkey rug, no artistic clutter, no dresser, no cupboard, no commode, only this extraordinary fretwork bed and a series of ten black wooden pegs—I counted—driven in a line across one wall.

I swung open the shutters and what a violent shock it was after the gloomy green light of the kitchen—the azure sky, the dry goat paths like chalk lines through the landscape, the bluish granite which contained the stream, the harvesters still swinging sweetly on their scythes as if it required no effort in the world.

I asked my clockmaker, “When will it be done?”

But he had already vanished. I descended the stair with some happy trepidation, grasping the rail in order not to fall.