The Syme Papers (48 page)

Her engagement fell on a terribly windy day at the end of May, when the rain drove through a crack in the window and positively soaked her father’s papers so that she had to dry them on a line before the hearth; and Hespe, bless him, had the most awful cold and looked absolutely pitiful, huddled before the fire in the barrack room (as Ferdinand called it), quite shrunk in figure and bloated in face. He could barely speak the precious words, for the swelling in his already
fattening
nose (she mustn’t tease him so cruelly, but how
plump
he has got, and so
quick
): Would you, Ruth?
Might
you, possibly, consent …?’

Their son was conceived on the sweet summer night when (a world away) the rains crashed down on the barn-like church in Perkins, Virginia. But only the moonlight splashed across the Elbe, in a corner of which Ruth and Hespe (on a broad calico cloth she had brought along specially and spread, with Hespe’s clumsy help, over the grassy bank) first made love. For she was (in the family way) an unconventional girl, and surprised in herself an
insistence
of passion that absolutely astonished poor trembling Hespe, in whom the event reproduced many of the symptoms of that terrible cold: a flushed fever in the face, shaking hands, runny nose, including the sense of mental and physical prostration that induced him to propose to her in the first place. She was, as I said, in the family way; and due to be married that summer.

A week before the wedding, Ferdinand Müller was arrested, on the charge of embezzlement (and suspicion of insurrection) at what turned out to be Hespe’s information. He had begged the authorities, it should be said, to delay a fortnight. They never married. Regardless, Hespe profited at the high price such betrayal demands, becoming Primary Assistant Deputy First Minister to the Prince. If only he had shown his colours before Ruth pledged her heart, young Roland Müller (as he came to be known) would never have struggled on to the scene. To be raised – in some embarrassment (or vestige of pity, or shame, or love) – out of the purse of the Prince’s new right-hand man. For Ruth, utterly pitiless, and unashamed, and loveless, turned an old flame to her son’s account without a second thought. Roland, to do him justice, shared a great many qualities with his grandfather, even a few ambitions, as we shall see. His talent for getting on, however, he must have owed to Hespe.

Ferdinand Müller had once declared to the Parliamentary Society, before Friedrich sailed for Virginia, before Hespe danced with Ruth, at a particularly hopeless stage in the progress of his revolutionary
Gesellschaft
(and a characteristically
enthusiastic
stage of his liberal ambitions), that:

Is it kind or cruel of history that twenty years on the Prince who imprisoned him led the way and his grandson followed?

In 1842, Henri Castro (a French speculator) founded the Adelsverein (
‘zum
Schutze
deutscher
Einwanderer’
– also known as the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas) in Biebrich on the Rhine, and could convince nobody but our poor old Prince Carl of Kolwitz-Kreminghausen to serve as its titular head. Castro negotiated with the Texas government to set up a colony of six hundred families on a plot of land he had never seen (‘laid out along the Guadalupe River fifteen miles above Seguin’) and could scarcely imagine, and then he began to sell. The only trouble was that, unlike Phidy, Kreminghausen suffered on those shores no second spring. ‘He appeared’, as a fellow pioneer declared, ‘to be an amiable fool, aping among log cabins the nonsense of medieval courts. Our manners are a little rough here, but plain and just, and we get the measure of a man pretty quick.’ In the course of a year he was laughed out of the country. But he left behind Roland Müller.

Ruth, unsurprisingly, had been against her son’s venture from the start, out of personal, that is, and not principled reasons. She did not trust Prince Carl, for one thing; and she doted on her boy for another. She recognized the first as a fair, and the second as an unfair, ground for dissuasion; half-doubting herself, she could not dissuade. Roland, for his part, knew more of his grandfather’s politics than of his father; he was tired of life in a narrow principality, as his uncle had been before him; he was tired (it should be said)
of his mother. He wished to get on with things; he liked a little grand talk for its own sake, but suspected all the nonsense of a liberal state ‘seeded from the best of Germany and potted in Texas soil’. He suspected even the promise of commercial prosperity, but guessed that for a fellow who could figure his way, Texas might be a good bet. So he made it.

Here’s an early record of Phidy’s nephew, from the diaries of the great pioneer Herman Seele, among the founders of New Braunfels, Texas:

He did indeed seem to walk in grace – acquired a fortune in cattle,
lost it and began again; won it back ten times over in railway speculations; had a bank named after him in New Braunfels (where he kept his money), and a school (where he sent his only son, born late to him, a child, as it happens, of the French mistress, who never survived his birth). He died, at the well-pickled old age of eighty-eight, just before Wilson sent the boys ‘over there’ to fight against his beloved homeland, a curious conclusion to his grandfather’s dream of establishing ‘a true, a
German
state [in North America] which shall itself become a model for the new Republic, and an inspiration to Europe’. (Pitt wonders how his own boys will suffer from Pitt’s ambitions. Or carry them forward?) Roland’s will was written in German. He bequeathed to his son his fortune (which was squandered), and his home, a relatively humble, white, weatherboard house, with a wind porch for the cool of summer evenings, off Seguin Street in New Braunfels. This remained, and was bequeathed in turn to a single granddaughter.

Why does Roland trouble Pitt and occupy his thoughts? What part, if any, does he play in the business of Samuel Highgate Syme? None, I suppose – except, Pitt says, rubbing the dry of his palms together, for this. Some time after the failed revolutions of ‘48 and the death of her brother Phidy, and some time before the collapse of her son’s first fortune, Ruth Müller left the family home in Fischersallee (in great disarray, taking what she thought of, including a handful of her brother’s journals and such letters as seemed to bear on the great question of a trip to the New World, including an edited version, as I discovered, of ‘The Syme Papers’, titled
Amerikareise)
to a cousin (grandfather of my old friend Benjamin Karding, many times great) and sailed partly (breathe, Pitt, breathe) and partly steamed to TEXAS. Where she lived with her son (and, briefly, her daughter-in-law) in the house between Seguin and Market in New Braunfels, which he saved from ruin while Ruth lived, and kept from affection when Ruth died; and where, to this day, a
Fräulein
by the name of Inge Muller runs a bookshop.

As I said, if I could begin my career from scratch, I would begin with immigrants (if only my wife would follow).

Pitt had decided to undertake that experiment known as ‘a family outing’. He was tired of the loneliness of his business,
what
business is dear, as huffy Henry would say, ‘a cornering’. (This despite the fact that loneliness had tempted him into it in the first place). He wanted company, pitched just right – like the buzz of television and assembled guests in the room next door, loud enough to remind the solitary Pitt of
ordinary
happiness,
quiet enough to suggest
they
kept
him
in
mind,
and did not wish to disturb what they could not comprehend, his Great Work. He wanted, even, a little understanding. There can be too much understanding, and too little.

Pitt, without doubt, suffered from the latter.

The trick, he knew, was to get Susie on board. Then the boys would follow.

Pitt’s father was an
enthusiastic
man, full of schemes and theories, a great reader and rustler of newspapers (of the low kind), quoter of experts, pursuer of private notions, speculator. Despite his great, his natural, his abundant humility, Pitt Snr had
projects.
Of the ordinary American kind: to fix pipes, and tile bathrooms, and clear out garages, mend cars, plan yard sales, sweep gutters, etc. He undertook in the evenings (as they say, a wonderful phrase, suggestive of gas fires and quiet) a history of scaffolding, for which he prepared a series of notes, and wasted a great many hours in the San Diego Public Library. ‘I came to the business by chance,’ he used to say. ‘What counts, Son, is that I stuck to it by choice.’ He argued, for instance, as I believe I have mentioned, that scaffolding itself could do with an overhaul, and hoped to provide the theoretical scaffolding (as it were) from which to tinker with the practical. In the course of which he invented a number of curious devices, which he pressed upon his bosses, and then his co-workers, and at last, in an unhappy episode, attempted to sell to the local paper. ‘There is always more work to be done,’ he said; ‘that’s what I’ve learned. The hard part is … to do it.’ He possessed the kind of enthusiasm that charms where it does not persuade – and this in its way was the tragedy of his life.

Susie, however, like my father a creature of enthusiasms,
per
suades;
eminently, easily persuades.

I have puzzled over this difference many times, and come to various conclusions. The first of which is this: that it helps, undoubtedly, to be pretty and pink in the face, rather than heavy and red; to wear skirts that swish, and shoes that click, instead of boots and trousers; to possess stockings, in addition to enthusiasms, which may be pulled up, above the knee; and hair-bands, of pale blue, tucked behind the ears. (I should say now that I do not believe my father would prosper any better with such ploys.) But there is more. My father and I, Pitts both, approach our pleasures as if they were rare and out of the way. ‘A little known fact,’ he used to say, ‘want to hear it?’ We take just such delights as we trust have never been taken before, eclectic delights, abstruse, pernickety, uncommon, singular – lonely. A Pitt would shame himself to suffer ordinary joy.

While Susie has the gift of making the strangest pleasures seem common. Her joy is – I can think of no better word –
plain.
She never doubts that the world delights
with
her; and so it seems to, and delights
in
her. She presumes that her good luck is of the standard variety, and consequently
enviable.
(Pitt has never been envied.) What pleases her, she seems to suggest by her high spirits, would please
anybody;
and so, by the power of her conviction, tends to please
everybody.
Her enthusiasms move lightly from private to public. Projects seem never to originate in her; she has only taken them up in her way, and we all follow along in her way.

Pitt, then, must learn to interest his wife.

This proved easier in the event than I had supposed. It was simply a question of fellow-feeling among immigrants.

Hubert G.H. Wilhelm’s excellent treatise on ‘Organized German settlement and its effects on the frontier of south-central Texas’ offers this curious account of the first settlers’ attempt to make a home out of the dry country they discovered.

(‘Thank God, at least,’ said Susie, ‘or German paradoxes, that we live in the hill-country.’)

Ruth brought her piano when she came, uncertain of the rough world her son had made his home. It landed at Indianola among her other belongings, and was eventually hauled by oxen to New Braunfels, a hundred and fifty miles from the coast. She was not the first German lady to come bearing music. Valeska from Roeder arrived in Texas in 1833, with three brothers and her father, and a piano to come. She died, however, of starvation in Cat Spring before it got to her; and her sister Rosa Kleberg inherited the box of sheet music and the little upright that followed Valeska’s funeral. It proved to be a great, if short-lived, success. There are records of dances held at the Klebergs’ home in Harrisburg in 1835. But me instrument, alas, was burned to ashes a year later in the Texas Revolution.