The Syme Papers (22 page)

The room was darkened by paper blinds, of the kind to be rolled up, and fastened by a great perplexity of string to their window frames. These, after a truly philosophical enquiry I at length unbound, and lifted as it were the lid off the morning. A blue sky poured in, whitened only by the puff of my sharp breath and a faint
crumble of clouds in the far air. Such excess of heaven astonished me; the sky swooped over the low valley, conveying to my impressionable mind an idea of great
speed,
as if the stir of the planet itself accounted for the whirl of white in its depths. The day was so clear I could have threaded a long skein through the eye of a pinetree needle etched against the blue sky at the top of the bluff.

In truth, I almost wept at the …
lust
of life that had crept into my breast, sudden and almost terrifying in its … unfamiliarity. How long had the course of my life run dry?

I called for a basin of water – and, to the great astonishment of a boy tending the horses below, threw wide the window and prepared my toilette in the open air: tossing my hair over my head and running a dripping (and ice-cold!) hand through the loose locks. The chill of the morning struck me like a loving blow, a faint ringing headache ensued, almost pleasant in the delicacy of eye and temple it suggested; and after fixing the tortoiseshell clasp at the back of my neck, I turned to the much graver decisions of my dress. A powder-blue cravat, I thought, would nicely suggest the glory of the day (this I rustled from the depths of my portmanteau); and I could do no better, for an air of cheerfulness not unmixed with gallantry, than the fine red coat hung dry before the fire. (The rich crimson would soften the eye against the snow, offer a resting-place from the general brilliance.) Today, after all, I hoped I would meet Syme.

Bright and brisk, accordingly, I ventured from my room to the hall below. The fire blazed in the hearth, a wicked conflagration leaping off the fresh logs – but the tables were deserted, except for the stacked remains of a hasty breakfast. The Virginia Mining Corporation had sped on their way, it appeared, and I was eager to do the same. Summoning the landlady, I paid the reckoning – studiously avoiding any suggestion of ‘spitting mumbo-jumbo’ – and enquired after the next coach to Pactaw.

‘Oh, my sir!” she cried, in a fluster. ‘That’s all gone this morning. Nothing going to Pactaw so late – it’s market day, know you, everything’s up and gone about. There’s a coach coming back, but that’s no good to ye, is it, seen rightly? “Everything always the other 
way” – that’s my mother’s wisdom, know you, and it isn’t half-true. Nothing to be done but sitting down and eating the good bread and cold beef; nothing to be done but that. Take a spot by the fire – there now – a thin fellow like you and he thinks he’s going forth without a bite to eat!’

I did as I was told and picked forlornly at the plate of cold beef, sipped morosely at the cup of hot tea, and practised a great many other adverbs, beginning in misery and ending nowhere. I have always been – how shall I call it? – a quick fire, given to sudden enthusiasms, flares, that burn out in stink and smoke. The only thing I ever practised in my life with great dedication is solitude (and its associated crafts: chemical experimentations, rambling surveys, mineral collections, and the like) – at this, I seldom flag, and it seemed I would be able to devote another empty afternoon to the fine art. The fire at least practised its chosen profession as resolutely as I, and the two of us, flame and man, gazed at each other, attempting to stare the other out of countenance. The fire, a great advocate of heat, and myself, expert in cold, wrangled and disputed our ground into the afternoon, waxing and waning, thawing and freezing by turns.

But things are never as bad as they first appear, nor good things as good for that matter (a very miserable state of affairs in its own right, I believe); and shortly after one a rather diminutive gentleman, with fair, close-cropped hair and a snub nose, appeared at the door. ‘Oh, that’ll be Scotch,’ the landlady cried, making a great fuss over him, and hastily assembling the materials for a hearty tea: hung beef, chipped up raw (a delicacy much favoured by the Americans, it appeared), and divers sweetmeats of a sugary brown, beside the fresh-brewed pot.

Scotch, if this was his name, blinked his watery blue eyes in gratitude, and lowered himself slowly – and with an air of extreme delicacy and gentlemanly condescension – upon a chair by the fire. ‘Perhaps,’ he said quietly, ‘it wouldn’t trouble you to let the air out a bit, Mrs Grapes, before you talk – a deep breath should do – you’ll find, I believe, it reduces the bellowing.’

“The
thing
is,’
she
whispered
to
me,
in
piercing
windy
tones, 
‘Scotch from time to time is given to thirst; he suffers greatly from thirst; it is, he says, the curse of his bones, but he bears up, he bears up.’

‘I believe the trouble’, the little fellow began, turning towards me, in a stiff, very upright sort of way, ‘is that I can’t get drunk. That, I reckon, is the root of the matter.’ He continued in a quite impersonal manner, like a lecturer discoursing on a familiar topic in which he happens to be expert, and whose niceties, even after all this time, continue to interest him. I’ve got nothing
against
getting drunk, not at all. I believe it can be done – what’s more I’ve seen it done, and have every reason to credit the performances in that line I’ve had the pleasure to witness. Several of them, I don’t mind saying, delivered not far from this spot.’ And he pointed, gingerly, at his feet, so I could be in no misapprehension regarding the spot in question.

‘You’re
too
good,
Mr
Scotch,’
demurred
mine
hostess,
‘too
kind.’

‘Not at all, Mrs Grapes, not at all. Much deserved. I’ll go further,’ he resumed, addressing me again, ‘I wouldn’t mind – for once
– getting drunk myself. A highly pleasurable experience, it appears, enjoyed all round – greatly tending towards the liveliness of discourse, and, as I’ve heard the poets call it, the free flow of the soul. A consummation – to take up that vein – greatly to be’ – he seemed to have lost his way – ‘well, greatly to be consumed, to say the least. No, I’ve got nothing against getting drunk – on
principle.
Known several highly respectable gentlemen particularly proficient in that area – esteemed gentlemen. No, the trouble, as I see it – to return to my original point – and I believe Mrs Grapes will have the goodness to support my observations –’

‘Much
too
kind,
Mr
Scotch,’
she
murmured
again.

‘Not at all, Mrs Grapes, not at all. Much deserved. The trouble
is
that I
can’t
do it. There you have it, sir, in a nutshell. And I don’t say I haven’t tried. Ask anyone about this place – Mrs Grapes’ll do – and they’ll tell you, with the best will in the world, that I’ve
tried.
What’s more, they’ve seen me do it; night after night; but it’s my belief, and I don’t mind sharing it, that some things can’t be learned. There’s some things – either you’re born to it or you’re not, 
like poetry, as they say. That’s my opinion, anyway. But I keep trying, sir; it’s the American way.’ Upon which reflection he peered into the hot mug in his small fist, as if it, too, might choose to fail him.

It transpired eventually that Mr Scotch, barring his great deficiency, was to have ventured to Pactaw only that morning; and had no objection to setting forth, belated, as soon as his ‘stomach had settled’.

‘The trouble is all this tea about,’ he explained to me, as we eventually piled ourselves into his little trap; and he gestured vaguely at the heavens above and the snowy fields below to indicate the extent of the problem. ‘A terrible affliction to a man’s stomach – most unnatural. I’ve heard of men who drink nothing but water – heard of them, only, mind – and fall dead of the dropsy at thirty-five. Walk on!’ he barked sharply, this to the piebald horse, an aged creature with a long, long-suffering face, who seemed to share many of the suspicions of his master, and looked disconsolately at the great road before him, dripping in the bright sunshine with rutfuls of the offending liquid. Slowly, he bent one leg, as if to test it – and then the next – and, suitably reassured, began to experiment with different gaits, a loping stride, a sudden flailing burst, a limping amble, hoping perhaps to enliven the journey by way of variety. In this determination, all I can say is that he succeeded.

Mr Scotch, accustomed doubtless by habit to these experiments, continued his disquisition unperturbed. ‘It’s my belief – and I’ve read a thing or two along these lines – that if we could only banish water from our drink, we should feel the benefits at once. Only, you see, the difficulty is this: water is a sly devil – and slips in when you least suspect it. Milk, for example, a harmless potation, you believe?’

I
nodded
my
assent.

‘Perfectly filthy with water, I assure you – reeks of it. I never touch the stuff any more – not a drop. Pure poison – rather drink wormwood. Or gall,’ he added, upon reflection.

These
prejudices
aside,
Mr
Scotch
(nicknamed
after
a
Scottish 
uncle who, in point of fact, when pressed, the gentleman conceded to be Irish) was an amusing companion, and an instructive example of his countrymen. He had thought a great deal, he declared to me, of the ‘American question’; and as the miles rolled by (shuddered, perhaps, would be a more appropriate term), he touched on several of his views.

In America, he explained, I should encounter almost no ignorance of any kind. The average farmer (a term of praise, he considered, rather than belittlement) read avidly from ‘his youth upwards’ – a phrase that seemed to include, in Mr Scotch’s opinion, no outward limit, but suggested a steady and inexorable and gigantic trajectory of ‘self-improvement’. Both boys and girls were seldom seen without a book of some kind in their hands, and were equally ready to discourse upon the arts, the sciences or the latest political matter. ‘I should’, he furthermore assured me, ‘find no evidence either of those sins that beset life in the “old countries”, where the lengthy concentration of men in a single place in pursuit of similar objects has produced in the people a kind of – well, if I say ferment, I believe you will understand me.’ By these sins he meant: envy, covetousness, shame, pretension, and, in general, all the evils that attend ‘getting on’. In America, he explained, ‘We get on, as it were, naturally. Our friends congratulate us and themselves, in their choice of friends; our neighbours applaud us, fired by our example to similar ambitions; even our enemies consider, perhaps, they have mistaken our characters, and rejoice. I say all this’, he confided in me, ‘without prejudice or fear of contradiction – in that I tell you frankly, I have never got on in life, never shall get on in life, never hope to get on in life. I speak impartially upon a subject of common interest.

‘Likewise,’ he resumed – after a brief and it seemed satisfactory inspection of a small silver flask he kept in his trousers (to discover, I suppose, whether it contained any water or not, in which fear he was gratefully disappointed) – ‘we offer in this country none of that abuse heaped upon honest poverty, which is viewed here rather as one stepping-stone (or, in my case, sitting-stone) in a general ascent than as a condition in itself.’

We
had
reached
by
this
stage
the
banks
of
the
Potomac
and 
cantered gently along its side. The prospect afforded that peculiar pleasure in which the best of winter and summer appear to be combined: the clear blue sky and honeyed sun spread sweetly over the sharp browns and glittering whites of February; and now the river multiplied these effects by mingling both equally in its icy bosom. The flow of water – both astonishingly flat and swift – sped against our road and suggested a strangely delightful urgency in Nature contrasted by our own ambling complacence.

Our prospects appeared to inspire my companion to new heights of national eulogy; and I confess I was not unmoved by the picture of American life he proceeded to draw. ‘The foreigner, upon his arrival,’ he declared, in the jaunty, awkward tones occasioned by his unsteady horse, ‘begins to feel the effects of a sort of resurrection. Hitherto, he realizes, he had not lived – only vegetated. Hitherto, he had not breathed – only sighed. Hitherto’ – and these mounted in vigour and significance at each step – ‘he had not dreamed – only slept. Now, for the first time, he feels himself a man – because he is treated as such. The laws of his own country had overlooked him in his insignificance; the laws of this cover him – cover him’ – and he hesitated over the
mot juste –
‘cover him like a bedspread.’

It was cold and the land about us wild and wide. Yet I confess that, after a brief recourse to Mr Scotch’s silver hip-flask (after the careful application of my handkerchief to the nozzle), upon which I performed a similar experiment to his own – as the liquid burned its path to my toes and my fingers’ tips – I was not sorry to travel through such scenes with a curious companion who, despite his many failures and vanities, seemed at least conscious of them both. This prompted me to my next question, inspired by the swell of his recent praise.

‘And’, I said, turning towards him now, this slight man at my elbow, resting the reins in small hands upon his lap, ‘is there no serpent in this Paradise, no worm within this apple?’

‘Well,’ he answered, and then considered again, ‘well.’ His fair hair shone almost translucent in the winter sun, and he raised his watery blue eyes, both clear and weak, to me. ‘Well,’ he repeated, ‘there may be a certain – there may be a kind of – poverty or scarcity
of – in short – there may be too little – well,’ he broke off once more, before finally rousing himself to his confession. “There may be a dearth of – of  – Doubt,’ he declared at last. ‘There may be too little – Doubt.’