The Syme Papers (15 page)

Syme applied through the American Minister at the Court of Copenhagen for permission to explore the aftermath (the site, Syme believed, of an eruption of internal gas, of fluvia) – a request readily granted by the Chancellor, Count Nichsotieff, who nevertheless refused Syme’s bid for a ‘proper outfit, of men & machinery’ to attempt the expedition; and the want of means prevented Sam in the end from setting forth. (I could not help but wonder – had he flinched again?)

At this point, increasingly desperate, Tom turned his attention
to even the slightest of the European states in the hope that an ambitious but insignificant young prince might support a rather ‘visionary’ expedition in order to make a name for himself and his little kingdom. I discovered among Sam’s papers an almost endless stream of denials, both equivocal and unequivocal; interested denials and uninterested denials; formal and informal denials, in pure and broken English; refusing funds, government cooperation, access to records, machinery, venues for lectures and demonstrations, employment, publication – all faithfully preserved by a father who seemed to consider even the proof of rejection as some evidence of the esteem in which his son was held, some indication of the circles in which he moved. I, on the other hand, could not repress a kind of frustration – not unmixed with pity and admiration – at the …
stupidity,
I wish to say, but soften it to
insensitivity,
of a man who beats his fist so long against an unanswered door.

Of course, a slight tributary of partial triumphs ran into the stream of his failures: evidence of lectures held, demonstrations attended, fields surveyed. And within this trickle I discovered the following note, written in an elegant if somewhat elaborate hand, the loops of each ‘I’ and ‘S’ richly curled, the vertebrae of high-backed ‘d’s austerely straightened, the feet of ‘m’s and ‘n’s daintily propped upon the rigid, imagined line:

Even after such long
disuse,
the letter agitated in me a slight tremor of the
joy of acceptance,
the quiet
yes
that, like a cracked bottle, inaugurates a voyage – a borrowed joy, it is true, but one I hoped to turn into my own. I guessed at once the importance of this letter, for not only did it suggest the eventual success of Syme’s petition, but it carried him across the waters, to Germany at last, or, rather, at first – a journey from which, I hoped to prove, so much resulted. Surely, I thought, it is reasonable to trace a line from the University of Kolwitz-Kreminghausen (a tiny, long-forgotten principality on the banks of the Elbe upriver from Hamburg) to the University of Marburg eighty years later, to which Wegener was appointed (on his first return from Greenland) as a lecturer in astronomy and meteorology – and at which, he maintained, the thought of continental drift first crossed his mind. I could not, however, guess then the
windfall
this letter would lead to. It is perhaps unsurprising that a memoir was written; it is only surprising
that it was written by a young doctor from Kolwitz-Kreminghausen.

The letter from the Finance Minister suggested a number of things, but an unqualified
faith
in Syme’s theories was not among them. It was a
suspicious
letter, deeply suspicious, in both senses of the word – proceeding from, and producing in turn, suspicion. Herr Ferdinand Müller implied rather a faith in
possibility
than a faith in Syme; the letter arches its eyebrows several times; it teases; it whispers, at best, only
perhaps.
Perhaps what? I thought, as Syme himself must have done; perhaps the earth is hollow, formed of nested concentric spheres and empty at the core? Or was there some other, more practical doubt (doubt, I mean, as a step
towards,
not away from, belief) that moved Herr Müller to answer the strange, fabulous, petition?

The more I thought of Müller’s letter, the curiouser it became. I pressed my thumb to the thought-provoking divot between nose and brow. (My hands meanwhile felt easier than they had in months; each finger separate and alive, the thumb itself rearing freely upon its mound of flesh like a horse shedding its rider.) Why had the Finance Minister answered the petition? And deferred to his prince only towards the end, over the matter of the compression piston? How much could be read into the suggestive fact that the geologist sent to evaluate Syme’s theories was himself the son of the minister responsible for the expedition?

I began to form a picture of the
kind
of interest Syme had attracted. There was the strong suggestion of what we call a ‘job for the boys’. Believe me, I have known such ‘boys’ in my day, their skin glowing with healthy bank accounts, their hair coiffed and delicate, in the faith, in the certainty, that no wind or cloud
pertained
to them; ineffectual men, on the whole, who spend the fortunes of their lives
too
easily. (Did I not declare, from the outset, that this seemed to me a story of fathers?) It would not have been the first time a young man was sent across the world on a government mission to investigate, chiefly, his own curiosity; but there was more to it than that. A minister overreaching himself, perhaps? A genuine concern for scientific progress, or, to
put it another way, for the honour of a small German state hoping to make a name for itself? Something of each, I suppose, was at work; but the strongest consideration seemed to me, even then, the possibility that the compression piston might make somebody (and particularly the Finance Minister of a small state heavily veined with mineral deposits)
rich.

You know when you know;
and I knew at once the scent was strong – like a curl of cigarette smoke in an empty room, drifting into a question, asking, who was here? Someone was coming to take a look at Syme and opening his wallet as he came. That night, in the ‘quiet roar’ of my studio flat in King’s Cross, the
shackles
came off my wrists, those blue wraps binding thumb and finger in an impotent clutch. Now the prisoned digits stretched free, walked tiptoe over tabletops and window panes, pattered the bubbles of a hot bath, popping like rain – two months of pent-up force released at last. And then the rains themselves came down over the city (outside the window over the tub). A cloud sagging low over the train station gave up the burden of itself at last, just as my hands had – forgetting the constriction of their own strength, easy in themselves again. Stepping out, dripping, on to the sudden cool of bathroom tiles, the air of an English summer evening cold as white wine through the window, a towel bound across rump and belly (distended somewhat by English
ale
)
–
I realized another shackle had burst, and it was time to write.

You know when you know,
I thought, lying down that night in the peculiar sleepiness that dreams already of the morning and the business of the next day. Love and truth declare
themselves.
I was on the trail at last. Only when the first fogs of sleep descended on me did a small thought, like the glow of a torchlight, disturb my peace – for Sam himself, among the clutter of his inspiration, when the single shining truth appeared before him,
had not known.

In the morning I began to write, slowly at first, punching stubborn fingers against the keyboard, thick, heavy words like the first drops of rain; and then steadily; and then all at once, in a torrent of explanation. Words took me through the day like breaths, like ticks of the
clock; I lived by the word; I stepped words and stumbled words; I inhaled them and sighed them; the slightest, least durable of my motions, the flutter of my fingers, trailed a history behind it. I ate words and swallowed them; saying ‘fish’ to myself as I placed a forkful on the palate, and whispering ‘chew’ as the teeth ground over the white flesh; and
‘digest’,
as the dull lump squeezed and slid towards the stomach. I had lost the patience for academic prose; my fingers chased their fancies; the blood in them flowed rich through the veins, kicking with life, as it were, from a dose of sea air.

And as I wrote, I
read,
living two lives, the beginning and the end at once. As the first dim forays of Sam’s genius stumbled beneath my pen, the curious history of the principality of Kolwitz-Kreminghausen unfolded before my eyes: a history as strange and wonderful, in its way, as the life of Syme himself, to my great good fortune. This was nearly the last of my strokes of luck – that Ferdinand Müller turned out to be such a
character
after all, involved in a history as remarkable as Sam’s, worthy in itself of historical investigation. But when you reckon the extent of my good fortune, consider the world of revelations I might have missed, walking blindly by, in the dark of history …

Kolwitz-Kreminghausen had been restored to its rightful, if inconsiderable, place along the Elbe after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the Congress of Vienna – between Holstein (and Hamburg) to the west, and Brandenburg (and Berlin) to the east. The capital was Neuburg – a small market town built around the river, which enjoyed a brief period of prosperity in the Middle Ages, before the expansion of trade to the Indias and Americas rendered its own cosy little spot along the Elbe less advantageous than before. It refused to die out, however, neither growing nor fading; and eventually became the seat of one of the remoter branches of the Hohenzollern family, the Kreminghausens – a connection that probably accounts for the restoration of statehood at the end of the French Revolution, when the Congress reduced the number of German states to thirty-eight.

Naturally, the territorial distribution of the Congress angered many. Aside from the conservative regimes that replaced the
Napoleonic Code (which, despite its parasitical nature, had offered at least a
taste
of republican liberties), the Congress had prevented the formation of a united Germany, the dream of a new breed of German patriot. The Burschenschaften – the student political societies begun in Jena in 1815 – were growing up, and the
Burschen
wished to play some part in German affairs. KK, however, had the advantage of returning to an established family. (Many of the new states had to fabricate a royal history to persuade their people of legitimacy.) Unfortunately, the old prince had died, not in the war, but during its protraction. The new prince had barely turned twelve when the state was restored.

This left KK in the hands of a growing rank of bureaucrats, swelled, increasingly, by members of the nobility themselves. Napoleon had left his mark on Germany. The swiftness with which his armies had overrun the Holy Roman Empire taught the new nations a lesson in efficiency, never mind republicanism. Ambition turned now to the bureaucracy, which reflected a new meritocratic spirit. Which brings us to Kolwitz-Kreminghausen, governed by a young prince and a rising class of political officials. Which brings us, at last, to Ferdinand Müller, an intelligent and ambitious gentleman, of liberal and nationalistic tendencies, who discovered himself suddenly in a position of some (admittedly local) power.

Syme must have caught Müller in a patch of princely sunshine. Müller successfully persuaded the young prince (now growing up quickly) that a scientist such as Syme, if proven correct, could do for Neuburg what Werner had done for Freiberg only twenty years before: put them on the map. The compression piston
alone
could pay for the experiment ten times over, if successfully adapted and applied to the veins of coal recently discovered south of the Elbe. The KK mines, Müller whispered in the princely ear, could yield enough to rival Britain itself (which currently controlled over 90 per cent of the market) in supplying Holstein and Brandenburg with coal. The little princedom would grow rich.

The little princedom was not the only thing growing rich. For the good minister, so zealous for the honour of Kolwitz-Kreminghausen, so assiduous on its behalf – initiating in his
tenure dozens of state schemes, from the university to the mines, and setting in progress the miracle of engineering that would eventually produce, almost forty years after his death, the Nord-Ostsee Canal – had begun to lick the fingers stuck in all those pies. Thank God, in a way, that he did. For perhaps I should never have known a thing about Ferdinand Müller had he not hanged himself from ‘a hook above his study door’ a little over a year after composing the turgid, oddly teasing letter that promised such hope to Syme (and such hope to me).