The Syme Papers (18 page)

More and more, I relied upon my cushions to ease the tender weight of my life. Pleasures here or there, loved faces, even familiar lines: the bend of Fischersallee, street of my birth; the low arc of a diminishing sun over the line of the hill at sunset; the wrinkles of familiar hands, and the tendons and knotted veins running over their backs; the angles of noses (an idiosyncrasy from which I have always taken peculiar solace, particularly, I confess, from the plump, veined proboscis, bridged by glinting spectacles, of my father). The demands of comfort (both to my soul and body) grew and grew, clamoured like any petitioners for their cause, until I could scarcely step from the house without a host of fears nipping at my heels. The least interruption or surprise prompted in me agonies of doubt, as if the course of the earth had faltered in its journey and not the plans for a picnic in the gardens on a sunny afternoon. Yet even my comforts, my plump cushions, my pleasures and quiet moments, had begun to pall. I suffocated in feathers.

Since setting forth from Hamburg, on that short, cold day three weeks ago, the cushions have been removed. Now every step and glance strike unsoftened ground; here, my every nerve and thought 
seem exposed to the fresh, cold air. I had stepped into the very gap in my nature I had dreaded for so long, and come to look about me.

I am an incurious man, a fearful man. This is a difficult thought to bring into clear relief, for all of us have suffered now and then from a want of spirit, an inclination to turn away. But I suspect myself of something worse, a flaw less human, darker, more criminal – a sin against life and love. Indeed, my association with the Prince (that fount of careless joy, shining and running over with the beauty of its own excess) increasingly tender, increasingly dear to me, had begun to carry with it a growing apprehension by contrast of my own stark deficiency. I fear I cannot make myself clear; and so I begin again, from another vantage.

We are all of us creatures of appetite, prompted at each step by some desire. And I confess to my fair share of pleasures: the tinkle of the piano running down the hillside, as Hespe batters the keys and I linger in the gardens below, observing the glitter of the dancers above; the laughter of my sister Ruth, as I brush the tip of a feather over the soft sole of her foot, and she doubles over with the ache of joy; the roasted honeyed pork, a speciality of our province, at Sunday lunch; a glass now and then of Rhenish; an occasional cigar; the cut of a fine piece of cloth; a new cravat. And yet I cannot conceal from myself an appalling absence where the heart of life should be, which I can dub by no clearer name than
incuriosity,
though that light word does no justice to the awful void it attempts to suggest.

As a boy I was known as a ‘curious child’ – my mother in particular complaining of this fact, as my first forays into the long, narrow garden behind our house, its gooseberries and rose-hips, its red – and blackcurrants, plums and dwarf apple trees, its thick, clumped beds of potatoes and cabbages, and the sandy mottled patches of rhubarb, covered my childish frock in stains of every description: blue and black and purple juices, green streaks of leaf and grass, rich black cakes of mud and the dust of lighter soils. And later, after her death, I sought further fields and greener pastures, chased the hillside streams to their rocky sources, filled my pockets with clacking stones: grey pumice, rough granite that left the dry palm red in winter, geometric clusters of quartz, smooth, brownbacked
crystals; and, on all-too-rare occasions, that treasure of treasures, the small, blunted, flinty head of some lost medieval arrow. These I cleaned till my hands bled, rinsing them in the bubble of the beck as it dashed towards the river. And I recall delighting particularly in the purity of the crystals, utterly at ease, at home in the flow of clear water, like frozen shards from some forgotten winter. I sorted tirelessly: storing my collection in mismatched wooden boxes (some rudely cobbled together, some stolen, the chess pieces they once held wickedly discarded) in constantly refreshed arrangements of colour, weight, sharpness and fragility.

And yet – and yet – what drew me chiefly to these delights (and I guessed as much even at the time) was their
solitude,
the quiet of the hills, the hidden recesses of the turning streams. The play of my school-fellows, their chatter and rough ways, appalled me, over-whelmed me with an enormous sense of some mystery at work, from whose secrets I alone had been excluded; and though I confess the strangeness of my fellow creatures, their violent joys, pleased and tempted me upon occasion to
mix in,
I refrained always from the satisfaction of these yearnings, preferring instead the familiar comforts of my own mind and my exploratory excursions, preferring the cold varieties of stone to the growing, breathing, unpredictable specimens of humanity around me. So I repeat, these rambles proceeded from an
absence
of true curiosity, from the fear of it. Gradually, over time, as I grew increasingly accustomed to solitude, the organ (for such I suppose it to be) of fellow-feeling atrophied within me. And I became conscious that some vital appetite had died, some necessary joy, leaving behind it, dried and choked, the most indispensable well-spring of the soul and source of continual replenishment – curiosity in the workings of the human heart.

At the Academy of Freiberg (which I confess I attended too young, this being my first act of courage, my first filial disobedience) I was known, by my fellow students, as ‘little Dr Werther’, for my melancholy manner and my solitary pursuits in the chemical laboratory. It was generally jested (and the joke, believe me, was well kept and cared for) that I concocted in my tireless experiments some elixir of passion designed to restore to me the heart of
 
an estranged maiden, thus hoping by the wonder of science to achieve what the sweetness of Goethe’s poetry had failed to effect. Indeed, my colleagues’ humour revealed more of their own inclinations than of mine – for they spent, it seemed to me, much of their purses and most of their thoughts on this harmless (and I believe often unsuspecting) maid or that, wasting in flowers and poetry the sweat of their brows, neglecting their studies, and consoling themselves only at some tavern through the exchange of ever drunker and more fanciful boasts. And though I desired neither their company nor their lewd confidences, their
contempt
led me to suspect a deep flaw in my nature – an absence of common humanity perhaps, or some perversion in the course of my youth. Suspicions which – despite the kindly interest of Dr Werner himself, and those tender afternoons when, too ill to teach, he insisted I read to him in his study, from whose window the valley stretched forth, into the thick-wooded hills and tumbling gorges he had done so much to explain – have grown into certainties over the years.

When he died at last, a wisp of a man, quite burned away by the fire of his intelligence and the insistent restlessness of his hand and foot and eye, nothing could console me. The little stack of books I had read to him – a curious collection, of his own choosing, the tales of Grillparzer and of Grimm, travel anecdotes, and books of paternal advice, such as the letters of Lord Shaftesbury to his son – became a kind of shrine to me. I dipped into them, again and again, less for their own sake than the recollection of those afternoons: when a glass of sunshine poured into the window and covered in gold the floorboards and the little rug at his feet, swaddled against the cold of old age in thick green stockings rising up to his knees; when I heard my own voice, high, fluting, almost shrill, echoed by his nods and sighs, the scratching of his whiskered lip with a solitary finger, and the sudden squeezing shut of his eyes when pleasure took him at some particular passage. I have read and reread since the little shelf of books with this proviso: that I never advance beyond the last page I had declaimed to him from Shaftesbury’s excellent letters, as if Dr Werner’s death had sealed up even those in forgetfulness, like the unwritten tablets of his own wonderful brain.

Nevertheless, his death awoke in me a sense of how far I had strayed from the common paths of my own age-mates. And I determined at last, as far as was possible, to remake myself – if not in their image, then at least in such fashion as to remove my manners and dress from the sphere of their abuse. A single greatcoat – stained variously by the overflow of sulphur and chloride, potash and magnesia, from countless botched experiments; burned here and there by dropped crucibles and sudden flares and fires; reeking from the tireless pursuit, downriver or up-mountain, of this vein of mineral or that – had formed my sole accoutrement since my arrival at the Academy. I vowed to reform myself. And if perhaps I have taken these fancies too far, this owes less to any faith in their cosmetic effects than to the sudden light in which they reveal me to myself – a new suit of clothes, the altered plume of a hat, an adjusted cravat or refreshed buttonhole may surprise in us a stranger’s view into our own soul. Narcissus, I am convinced, lingered over his image in the swelling pool less out of love for his own beauty than out of an appalled suspicion that there was some fatal flaw in it.

When at last I set forth for the house of my father, a young doctor in the new science of geognosy, I looked the part of the prodigal returned, in yellow garters, a cream linen suit and a pink cravat; yet my ambitions had fallen into bankruptcy at Werner’s death, and only my father’s insistence established me at the brand-new university at Neuburg as a lecturer. (I might have tried my fortunes at Berlin or Vienna, but I did not – I scuttled home to my father.) Only his insistence directed me to the education of the young Prince. And, by my father’s insistence, I had grown – happy at last, pleasant, elegant, neither idle nor spent, sufficiently at ease in the company of men to assuage the pressing fear of their mysterious ways that still beset me; indeed, almost comfortable in the presence of my Prince, aware for the first time of that
curiosity
in our fellow creatures that seems to sustain so much of the world. For all of this I had only my father to thank. From all of this I have effectively banished myself, spurred, like a belated traveller, by fear of the darkness rising over his shoulder. Prompted to seek new worlds in whose expanse my deficiences in the old may shrink to insignificance.

My father’s house has always been full of young men, and perhaps his grace with them accounts in no small part for my diffidence. Young men: students, soldiers, idle gentlemen, lounging at ease in the front hall, exchanging insults, jests and theories, forever advancing, without stirring an inch from their posteriors, the history of the world one notion at a time. At first I believe my father courted such company and their talk, hoping to soften in some fashion the unbreakable silence in our house that followed my mother’s death. But after a time the thing took on a life of its own; and no matter what hour of day or night I stumbled home from my duties, I was sure to find some collection of lounging fellows, tossing apple-cores in the fire, reeking of whiskey and tobacco, engaged with all the fierceness of youth in questions of liberty, literature and whist. ‘It’s old Müller!’ they chanted, whenever I flitted through the door, ‘Grandfather Müller!’– for it was their standing joke that I was indeed my father’s father, too old and grand to share in their excitements. Their disruptions had driven me increasingly into the company at court; and when at last I determined to press my father for the right to pursue this American’s magical theories, I had considerable difficulty in ushering him from the heat of debate into the relative quiet of his study upstairs, where I closed the door behind me, leaning against it for good measure.

I urged my case with a passion that surprised even myself, inspired by my sense of how lightly I could be turned aside. My father sat in the angle of his study, feet propped upon the desk, a quill in his hand idly tickling the pink of his chin.

‘I have given some thought to this extraordinary petition, sir,’ I began, hoping to convey an air of studied gravity.

‘The business with –’ he prompted, rocking back on his chair and then swinging his legs to the ground with a brisk thump.

‘Yes, the business with – Syme, Professor Syme.’ If only I could stand at ease! One leg placed elegantly before the other, my hands loosely content at my sides. Instead of this exhausting restlessness, sudden swoops and perches, against side-tables or window sills, upon a chair (sensibly and briefly), upon the edge of my father’s desk, where I leaned now, flourishing Syme’s declaration like a poniard.

‘The fellow who thought he could get to the bottom of the earth, I believe,’ my father queried, lifting his brows until one might have dropped a penny for luck in the horseshoe of wrinkles that furrowed between them.

‘Precisely. I have given the matter some thought. These speculations are by no means as whimsical as we had supposed. There is nothing, strictly, in Hutton to discount them – and though Werner won’t tally … Still, Werner, dear man, has had his day perhaps and I – we – Geognosy – must stagger on as we may with out him.’

The feather tickled my father’s chin, lightly, pensively, till I almost felt myself the tiny touch of pleasure upon him, endlessly renewed, bristling against his loose soft skin. Yes, the feather whispered, perhaps, perhaps.

‘I could not convince the council on the strength of such uncertainties, I fear,’ my father ventured, leaning back, extending the operation of the quill to this cheek and that, then to the slight furrow beneath his nose, upon which he sneezed, once, heartily. ‘You must appeal to their common sense.’

‘Damn the council!’ I cried suddenly, as a roar from below greeted some jest or turn of play at cards, and I rattled off my reasons above the clamour. ‘And all sober, sensible reservations! The great revolutions of science have all begun in absurdity. When a man talks to me of common sense, I know he is far gone. Our common senses teach us to eat and grow fat and step out of the way in a shower of rain; and, when the day comes, to die without fuss or fame. It is our
uncommon
senses to which I appeal – our unshakeable conviction that
common
explanations must fall short of the wonder of Creation. Whatever we understand at a first glance
must
be wrong. This fellow Syme seems to have the measure of that. And, to do him justice, no one has gone far into the heart of the earth; he is breaking difficult and unfamiliar ground, and his account seems no less likely, to a clear mind, than a hundred others. The great test is this: imagine the impossible to be true, and proceed from there. How quickly does the rest of the world fall into place around it! What could be more natural, in the end, simpler, plainer even to our
 
common sense, than the fact that the ground beneath our feet is hollow, fashioned by a thrifty Creator who lets nothing run to waste? Consider how much of life surrounds an empty core: our very bones, the quill in your hand, are founded upon air.’ Upon which, my contentions ran dry of the very matter at their heart, and I was forced to draw breath.