The Syme Papers (67 page)

Dear, dear Kitty – practical, and sweet, and blasphemous to the end. ‘A sweet bun,’ she was and seems to have remained. And there it sits, upon my sunning lap, our proud firstborn, the
New Platonist.
How it hurts my heart now to note Tom’s name missing from the front page, there, beneath my own, a gap of white, as humble as himself, as free from stain.

I am going home. The fact is that I have known some time now that I am dying. ‘He knew it as it came, you see,’ Kitty wrote and so do I. The red clot at the bottom of my morning’s bowl announces it. And I will not die here, among these people. Even Tom’s death has cut a string in my mind, which had bound me by some strange logic, to this city – a reminder perhaps of my second setting forth, a reminder that I had only stopped, midway, upon a journey that I shall not now complete. And when I die, I suppose, that will be the end of it at last. We will all have found the only hollow space below there ever was, a square of earth five feet deep, soon to be filled again. No one will remember our great revolution, our wandering summer, nor think again of those shining spheres, revolving always and endlessly beneath us (and so quietly).

I have just had a most unusual and unsuspected encounter, which has left me in a flutter of nervous spirits and quite incapable of sleep. Passing on my return through Hamburg, a short day’s travel from home, I dashed into a roadside inn to avoid a violent shower of summer rain. It had been threatening all afternoon, from a black, lowering, miserable sky, the air so thick it could scarce be breathed. Thus, drenched to the bones, I undraped before the warm fire and called for a glass of hot rum to chase the cough out of my lungs. Spreading these papers on the table before me to dry – the rain had come so sudden and so fierce that even my portmanteau, clutched beneath my cloak, grew wet as a rat – I turned again to that long-ago morning, the day of the great eclipse, when even I the doubter half-hoped, half-
feared we stood on the verge of something grand. Busily poring over the dripping pages, I did not look up, when the hot dose was set at my elbow with a sharp rap.

‘I see you are an author,’ said a voice, in the high, uncertain, fluting tones of old age, far too elegant to have fallen from the lips of a mere servant. I glanced up to see who had addressed me, whereupon I found his voice belied my interlocutor, for the fellow at my elbow, dressed in soaking yellow breeches and a pink cravat, was quite a young man still, scarce thirty. He possessed one of those eternally youthful countenances (and voices) which suggest such wonderful innocence and promise in a boy, and such idleness and neglected fortunes in a man: pink cheeks, a little puffed with exertion, startling blue eyes, dim almost as glass, golden, thinning hair pulled back from his forehead, a dirty neck.

‘I was once an author,’ I replied, ‘but these’ – I gestured over the drying pages – ‘belong to a private matter.’

‘Memoirs?’ he queried, drawing up a chair and burying his nose in his own glass of hot grog. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, mopping a drop of the brew from his pink nose, ‘I have had a cold these … three years,’ he added, ‘and this is purely medicinal.’

‘Memoirs of a kind, besides an old journal, a recent inheritance,’ I answered, to my own surprise; for had I not kept these things under such lock and key, that even now I felt the blood flutter in my veins to speak of them again, and blinked, as though unaccustomed to the light? ‘They refer rather to a matter of science.’

‘Ah,’ he said, drinking another long draught and summoning more. ‘Now we come upon my particular province. Peter Wegener,’ he added, stretching forth his hand, ‘Inventor.’

‘Phidy – Friedrich Müller,’ I replied, and cast a querying glance at him. ‘Might I have come across any of your devices, do you think?’

‘Not likely,’ he said, tapping his forehead. ‘I’m no such fool. Keep them locked up, in here. Now,’ he added, rolling up his sleeves and setting his elbows on the table, ‘let’s hear the business.’

Why did I not turn him away at once? For I had reckoned now what manner of man he was. I had seen them before, in my time. A younger son, perhaps, supporting a meagre income with some grand illusion, some wonderful ambition, never realized, never attempted, yet colourful enough to accompany him on his travels. Too poor to marry, too idle to get on, they spend a perpetual youth on one hopeless goose-chase after the next; and die, as like as not, in the Debtors’ Prison, among a class of men they have had every chance to grow accustomed to. Often quite clever gentlemen, more’s the pity, only lacking the necessary fire.

This particular specimen of the breed, I soon discovered, was quite exceptionally clever – quick as a terrier on his wits’ feet, he nipped at my heels through the long, dark afternoon, and would not let an old man sleep. And before I could say yea or nay I had begun the whole mad thing from the first. Would you credit it, the half-forgotten thoughts – ideas I had believed long rusted and out of use – flew from my lips as bright as the day they were coined, made of such shadowy stuff time could not touch them? Sam himself could not have explained them better; his words had such a renaissance in my heart, I almost wept, an old foolish man, at the recollections they aroused.

‘It all began’, I said for the hundredth time, but the first in nearly half a century, ‘with a question of mass.’ And the sad fool called for quill and paper and quibbled and scribbled through all that dark, thunderous afternoon, pausing only to wet his lips and call for more grog. Only once Herr Wegener stopped, pointing with childish delicacy and delight, to a small robin, much bedraggled, so dirty with
rain and weather his breast scarce blushed, who had hopped on a broken leg through the door as a traveller swept past him towards the fire. ‘Now, now,’ said the landlord, a short, squat gentleman with a great head of hair, ‘we’ll have none of you,’ and plucked him from the ground and, cupping the delicate bird in his great hands, tossed him light as ashes into the windy night, where we saw him flutter up against the lines of rain and away.

And so through supper we threshed the matter out, gesticulating bone in hand and diagramming wildly in butter, setting the salt here and the pepper there, explaining the world away with potatoes and a sliced fresh onion we called for from the landlord. Deep into the night, as drunk as lords we talked, until the flushed pink face before me gave way in my mind’s eye to other faces in other times; and the landlord sent us up to bed at last, lest we demand our breakfast next. And here I am, a drunk old man on his knees in bed, with a foolish fire in his heart, searching desperate and happy through a white and crackling world of loose pages.

There is nothing reminds a man of his age so much as sudden happiness. For it begets in him a kind of worry, a feeble trepidation, a weakness of heart and knee, a sleeplessness, an ache, the whole condition as much like joy, as a young man’s longing resembles love. All this wants thinking on.

And so the morning comes, and, as I have a thousand times in youth, I wonder at my foolishness of the night before. My head rings like a cracked bell; my eyes blink aching against the sun which shines bright as new in the forgiving heavens; and the pain in my stomach is such that twice this morning I could not breathe for as long as a boy might count to fifty, the air comes in so sharp and bitterly. It took me the best part of an hour to collect these scattered pages, and only then did I realize my great loss.

I summoned the landlord at once, and tried to keep an old man’s petulance from my voice. ‘I possessed, you see, a certain journal, an old battered thing, a keepsake, title of
New Platonist,
with a man’s name scribbled inside. Not my own. It was of no earthly use to any man living apart from myself; but I would like it back. I would very much like it back.’ How I hated the quaver, high pitched, fretful and lost, which echoed in my ears like the voice of a stranger, a tiresome, meddlesome stranger, who will not keep quiet and will not leave.

‘Who do you suspect took … it?’ the landlord asked, grimacing at the end, nodding his great head on his short neck, and leaning conspiratorially forwards. He had a terrible habit of keeping the last word back and using it only when nothing else would do, as some men save the icing of a chocolate cake for the final bite.

‘Why, man,’ I answered, already in a temper, ‘I should have thought that was plain. That inventor fellow, I mean the young man, Wegener, who kept us up so late. I wish you to summon him at once.’

The landlord nodded his great head again. ‘That’, he said, ‘is where you and I … agree. That’s precisely what I wish, too. The fact is’, he added, as one considering a delicate matter, ‘THAT man has Took Off. Without paying neither. Which roughly puts you and me, sir, in one and the same … boat.’

So there was nothing I could do but settle the bill and have him bring my luggage to the door. I cannot think what such a fellow would want with such a thing. I suppose men like that get in a habit of stealing, as certain birds are said to lard their nests with food they will never touch. They take what comes their way, never guessing what will serve their purpose in the end, they have such wandering intentions. Pinch it for luck, they say to themselves;
and like as not forget it at once, or discard their prize, acquired at such risk, negligently by the road, whenever their burden becomes too heavy. Else it lingers so long with them, tucked in some out-of-the-way pocket, they cannot bear to part with it at last; and keep the thing, forgetful of the day they stole it or the reason therefore – as a kind of charm.

Sam you are dead now indeed, when such a man as he has got you in his hands. And now the last journey home.

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