The Syme Papers (39 page)
Authors: Benjamin Markovits
My dear father,
I have arrived safely in America after a somewhat solitary
journey, in the course of which I had a great deal of time
–
and, as
the sea swept by us,
room –
to examine the disposition of my
character which has brought me here; and which has, in some
measure I know, disappointed you
…
My first impressions of
this new world can be confined to two words: such distance and
such cheapness! Distances are not considered in this country as
in Europe
–
an American thinks nothing of travelling a hundred
miles for a day or two; and indeed, even now, I am writing from
Baltimore, under the roof of the Professor
’
s father
–
though we
return to Pactaw, a long day’s coach-ride to the south, in the
morning. Food there is in plenty, fine meats, and thick cheeses,
and sweet ales
–
indeed, I have dined well in this new world, with
a freshened appetite, and begin, I believe, to grow plump. There is
plenty of everything, in fact: of dirt and squalor and poverty and
riches, of low and high, of broad and narrow, of the genteel and
the coarse, the proper and the improper. Plenty of everything, that
is, except, as one American put the case to me, of doubts: ‘an
American doubts of nothing’. I have known a great while that
doubts are a kind of infection, and may be caught from one man
to the next; but I did not suspect until now that the reverse is also
true, and that their absence is equally contagious, and may be
passed, from hand to hand.
A natural gift for
doubting,
I
believe, Father, is among the rea
sons that I have baulked at those political ideals on which you have
spent the capital of your heart. Any Idea (no matter how great or
good) that involves the disposition of men is bound to slip into a
thousand little errors, growing and compounding each other, until
that seed of truth, from which it rose, is strangled and buried in a
kind of undergrowth. And yet
–
I have begun a great many
thoughts in my short stay in America with that phrase
–
and yet,
among the attractions this enterprise affords me, the chief of these is
the company of the men (or rather man) I have stumbled upon. ‘Do
not be taken in,’ you warned me; well, I confess, I have been taken
in, in the kindest fashion, by my hosts; and for the first time in my
life, perhaps, begin to feel at ease among my
–
well, I hardly dare
say it now, though I should have been appalled at such humility
two months ago
–
my equals. Before I left home, you desired me to
return with something, you did not care what, that should be
exclusively
American,
something which could not be procurable
anywhere else. When I saw Sam Syme I longed to pack him up, and
direct him, per next packet from Baltimore, to you
–
for he was the
first article I met with that could not by any possibility have been
picked up out of the United States.
Such fire as glows and boils within him! I believe the phrase
‘fearless in thought’ could be construed as damning, the mark of
someone hesitant in the field of
fact,
and brave only in the bar
racks of his contemplation. And yet how few of us are truly
fearless in thought! Syme clambers up the branches of his
imagination, certain at each turn, that his foot shall find a limb,
his hand a hold, wherever he reaches
–
and in that certainty I
follow; and, it may please you to know, have even guided him
once, this very evening, towards his next ascent!
I apologize, dear Father, for the uncharacteristic
enthusiasm
of
this letter
–
I will endeavour to correct it in future, it is quite
unlike me. Only you must consider how cold my chamber is now
–
the ice glistening against the pane, like the tooth of some winter
animal waiting to creep in; the fire dead in the hearth; and the
pan cooling in the bed. It is the only warmth left me tonight
–
but
such warmth – the smouldering remnant from the fire of this
afternoon’s … inspiration, which I hope will prove a great, a sig
nal advance, in our discoveries. In short, I wish to say that
Syme’s theories are by no means as visionary as we supposed;
that I believe I have some (and by no means insignificant part) to
play in their development; and that, if exploited properly, they
could be of rare service and honour to the German nation. Surely,
this is what we hoped. To this end, I require a slight addition to
the funds we agreed upon. Unfortunately, Syme’s experiments
are costly and mine in probing his are no less so
…
Believe me ever, etc. your dutiful son,
Friedrich
I fell asleep in Bubbles’ bed, to the sigh and click of the wind in the
icicles in the eaves, less lonely than I had ever been since coming to
America. Naturally, I took this step fully conscious of my own equivocations.
‘Syme’s theories are by no means as visionary as we sup
posed,’ I wrote
–
an interesting choice of words! Of course, I knew
that I had joined them after a fashion, but comforted myself with the
thought that
what fashion
remained to be seen. Yet equivocations
are subtle and fluid creatures and rarely survive the processes of life.
*
We returned to Pactaw the following morning. I promptly shifted
my slight gear to Syme’s house, and ensconced myself in a small
box-like room looking over the river and the market square. I
explained my change of plans to Mr Barnaby Rusk, as Tom came to
help me with my chest. ‘I
shall lodge’, I said, ‘with Mr Syme, a gentleman who lives across the river, and with whom I am engaged
upon
–
some business.’
Mr Rusk considered the matter a moment and said, ‘The same gentleman, I believe, who came to see you at breakfast the other day? A broad, low fellow with a swagger? Yes, yes,’ he added, scratching a lonely loose grey hair that curled from his pink chin. ‘I remember him well – he should have been a fine – he should have been a fine’ – Barnaby occasionally required several swings at a sentence, just as he needed to rock once or twice to lift himself from a chair – ‘pugilist, I believe. I should have been glad to take him on … in my day. He could go a few rounds, I think. The chest of a – chaffinch, sir; that’s the clue. Never mistake it.’
Tom gave me a sly look, and we giggled shamefully when hauling
the chest towards the bridge. ‘Hush‚’ I
cried, ‘he shall hear us
–
Mr
Rusk sets great store by his dignity.’ But this only set off Tom
afresh, and I confess that I followed
–
strangely cheered nevertheless
by this surprising confirmation of Sam’s … endurance.
The house suffered greatly from damp, and my bedchamber was
cold as a cow’s nose each night, for it had no fireplace and lay far
from the kitchen. I needed no other excuse to linger late with Tom
and Sam, drinking rum and tea beside the tavern fire and warming
our shoes against the grate.
Sam, with his boundless energy for devices large and small,
jury-rigged a line on which we might drape our night-gowns every
evening without singeing them. ‘We shall go to sleep warm at least‚’
he said, ‘though we awake as cold as in our grave-beds.’ The hang
ing garments themselves had the air of the cemetery about them and
we often talked deep into the morning in the company of those pale
ghosts.
My new role sat uneasily on my conscience, and I reasoned to
myself that a man might follow a preacher and not a faith
–
for I
could not yet happily describe myself as ‘a believer’. I was enthralled
by the man, and it was in his company that I felt the fulfilment of
my project.
The snow, however, delayed much of our experimental work,
though we had time in abundance to complete the adjustment to
Syme’s theories begun at that fateful dinner. Sam designed an
improvement upon the
magic lantern,
his first invention, whose
small flame was a blue eye peering into the hollows of the earth. It
was called the
magnesium match,
a thin, flammable wire trapped
in a crystal prism and suspended from the inside of a glass hood. We
held this lantern above afire of leaves or twigs or the alcohol solu
tion of loose earth or pond water. Then we lit the match and a thin
blue spirit of light appeared in the smoke and danced high or low
upon the lantern’s glass walls. The position of this gay faerie
depended on the content of fluvia in the smoke, and we etched a fine
web of reckonings against the glass to chart her. We could now mea
sure such niceties of blue as would suffice an angel in tracking the
depths of Heaven. Tom playfully named this lantern the flu’, and so
we called it. But snow still barred us from the Pearly Gates. We ate
and wrote and talked and slept under that roof, often days on end
without venturing forth. It was Tom’s task to keep our bodies and
souls together, an ungrateful job
–
until my father could answer my
call for greater funds. For our souls could eat the air, crammed with
visions and calculations, but our bodies grew often so chilled they
nearly forgot their material selves.
But there were parties, too, and weeks spent free of all thoughts of
this hollow earth. An old clap-up piano landed in the shop of Frau
Simmons one day, and Sam declared he must have it, though the
keys rattled like spit on a hot pan and the pedals squealed at every
foot and the back panel bellied forth like a sail in the wind. ‘I
must
compose
–
music!
’
he declared, over Tom’s high-pitched protestations. We could not lift it across the narrow footbridge, so Sam
rigged a pulley to a willow branch and lowered the piano on to the
frozen river, with a handful of boys recruited, to steady her as she
came. A swarm of townsfolk, like flies, followed everything we did
–
though in a general way we were disapproved of, and the boys I fear
received something of a hiding for lending a hand to ‘the cracked
wizard across the water’, as Sam was sometimes called. Haw sweet
ly she slid across the ice, the keys smiling like a mouthful of broken
teeth, at the brisk air and the exercise; while Tom chased after her
and banged half a song into the cold afternoon along the river
–
for
he was just the sort of fellow to give in with a good heart, and go
along with anything when the time came. I can tell you she was not
so light to lift again upon the other bank.
When we finally installed her in the tavern room, and Sam had
spent a hot week in shirt-sleeves, the fire roaring to fill the hearth,
while he repaired her (such a dismal banging and groaning and tinkling as Tom and I endured!), Sam insisted on having a
‘musical
experiment’, as he called it, and invited a handful of the locals across
the river to celebrate
–
often the same fellows who attended the first
catastrophic display I had stumbled upon the previous month. The
ladies came, of course, wives and widows, and nervous young things,
bonneted and blushing, and among the latter two: Frau Simmons in
a green dress that glittered silver in the light, till she did indeed
resemble the elegant mermaid swimming through the gloom of her
shop sign; and Kitty Thomas, the baker’s daughter, whose sharp
tongue and stubborn insistence on
what she knew
and
did not know
greatly amused Tom, who minded neither them nor the pock
marks marring her pretty face. I brewed a special pot of
Glühwein
over the fire
–
cheap claret, costly oranges, sticks of cinnamon a finger thick, and brandy
–
and thought, If only you could see me,
Father, and how easy it is
to get along
when everyone who knows
me better and my dour spirit is half a world away. Though I confess
to feeling a slight heartache at the imposition of the ladies, and their
claims upon my companions’ affections.
In the event this mattered little, for Sam spent much of the
evening at the piano, happy and red in his fine face, quite drunk,
banging away; and he insisted, definitely, drunkenly,
insisted,
that
I take the hand of ‘fair
Frau
Simmons’ (as he said it), while he was
thus engaged. And so my compatriot and I
…
exchanged a look
…
and ventured a step, and, whispering a kind of apology – ‘I’m
afraid,’ I murmured, ‘Quite so,’ she replied, and added,‘We must
obey him since everyone
…
have you not seen?
…
does as he says’
– took each other by the hand. And away we whirled! How happily I
cannot say, till I remember thinking, at a hot and breathless pause
in the music, Do not glance in a mirror, Phidy, for you shall not
recognize the joyful gentleman peering out.