The Syme Papers (34 page)

‘What if I were right this time?’ I said, quietly, across the little private corridor of evening air between our faces, three feet long, a head wide, above the pebbled cement of the driveway, in the broad expanse of night. ‘What if Pitt made good?’

‘Maybe‚’ she answers, quite calm and cold and matter of fact, pushing the loose net of the screen door with the flat of her small hand, and going inside, ‘I don’t want you to make good this time. I want you to make
bad.
I want to go home and give up. Maybe’, she repeats, ‘that’s what I want this time.’

And yet Pitt is an optimist, as I said before – Pitt is brave, redoubtable, a wonderful word that means nothing less than the ability to suffer doubt and faith in equal replaceable measures, again, again. And as I climbed the ivory tower towards Bunyon’s corner office, my heart rose once more at every step. How grand a thing is possibility, simpler and sweeter in its way even than triumph. For triumph brings with it a world of complications and fresh puzzles, but possibility is plain as a die or a coin, sharp-edged, straight-sided, offering the prospect of a single answer: yes. The hint and hope of a yes at every spin or turn. (Or, in my case, laborious submission of a phonebook-thick wedge of manuscript; but the principle, I insist, remains the same.) I had come to revise my opinions of – well, since Susie has broached the word, I may as well follow suit – Syme’s hopelessness:

The door
I
beat at
was
answered, by a bellowed ‘Enter’, and I shouldered my way, briefcase first, into the room. Bunyon sat as I had imagined him, with his New Balance sneakers propped upon the desk, left over right, in a leaning tower pointing impossibly high at the stippled cardboard ceiling. A collared shirt fell unbuttoned at his neck, whence a tuft of grey hairs bristled, suggesting by some curious association the overwhelming urge of the man to
scratch
himself.
‘Pitt, my dear Pitt‚’ he cried, swinging himself to his feet to impress upon me once again the undeniable fact of his great, his superior, height, and took me wildly by the hand. ‘Have a seat.’

Pitt looked about him. There were three chairs in the room, and by some acrobatic feat Bunyon had now managed to occupy two of them, one by bottom, another by a draped leg. The third, a little wicker seat, stood across the desk, heaped to its frail arms with manuscript, whose title page bore the unmistakable blocks of meaningless lettering that promise such horrible repetition on the pages beneath. Pitt removed, by delicate operation, these pages. Pitt perched.

‘I have read’, Bunyon began, advancing at once into the academic arena, and prowling about, ‘your delightful, your exquisite little account of Captain Syme’s
discoveries.
(Is that what we should call them? I defer.
Captain
,
by the by, was his final rank, I believe, having looked into the matter some time ago myself.) A terrific piece of historical legerdemain – I congratulate you, Pitt,
warmly
,
Pitt. A wonderful stroke of luck, this Müller fellow, though a bit of a limp handshake, I think you’ll agree, on his own
terms. Still, a real old-fashioned, stuck-in-the-stove-pipe treasure. Simply, a joy.’

Bunyon had a remarkable ability to damn not by faint but by enthusiastic praise. I knew his way, of course, foresaw the stinger waggling in the tail – yet I could not prevent in myself a slight swelling, out of that pride we all possess, which believes the most exuberant flattery to be in fact the plainest common sense, and wonders more that it should be so rare than that it has come at last. Pitt murmured a little, of course, and blushed – though, to be honest, Pitt struggles both with murmur and blush, the former often exploding into growls, the latter lost in native rosiness. However, Pitt’s blushes soon soured, mottled too deep for pleasure; and the growls came naturally.

‘A great pity’, Bunyon continued, without the least check in his stride, ‘that this will never do. No,
it
will
not
do.’

He lifted a heap of papers from the floor and dropped them heavily and dustily upon the green leather of his Civil War desk. I recognized them at once – even the shapes of paragraphs and the riddle of lettering too small to read grow familiar as a face, as the lines of a face, to an author. Only these were now scored by red ink, squiggled and desperate marks, evidence of a bloody battle. I rather feared that I – that Syme and I and Müller – had been defeated.

‘The trouble with you’, Bunyon continued, in his affectionate, intimate way, as if I had asked him, in all honesty, out of friendship, to tell me what it was, ‘is that you have always been interested in – conception. Conception, I know, is a blessing, but as Pitt conceives – friend, look to it. We, at the Department of History, University of Texas, Sub-department of Science – the little body under my special charge and care – deal in Ideas. By which I mean’, he declared, in a rough breath, warming to his theme, and winching his legs heavily to the ground, ‘an idea is simply what happens to a conception when the paint dries – until then, I’m afraid, it’s off limits. Can’t be sat on, leaned against, used or sold – can’t be touched, I’m afraid, Pitt. Them’s the rules. You have presented me here with a wonderful – if slightly dubious (
you
know it, Pitt,
I
know it – we must be cruel to be kind, even with
ourselves,
especially
with ourselves) –
moment
of
conception.
A
fascinating thing, no doubt – when the brush is dipped and touches the blank canvas. But we don’t deal in moments of conception, you and I. Wrong trade. We deal in the history of ideas.’

‘I don’t understand‚’ said someone, who seemed to have borrowed the voice of Pitt, and made it squeak. (How terrible are the habits of humility, how deep ingrained. Christ has a great deal to answer for in praising the meek. Pitt’s mother was meek, by name and nature. Pitt’s father dined happily on humble pie, and ate up the crumbs. Pitt in the packed arena of his own skull is a champion equal to a thousand lions; but step for once out of that noble theatre and he flinches and ducks his head. His heart sinks to his boots and he steps on it. How much of misery begins not in true cowardice but the show of it.)

‘I don’t say it’s hopeless‚’ Bunyon assured me, delighted at his own condescension and general bonhomie. ‘I don’t say that.’

‘But words are things‚’ Pitt spluttered, roused at last to resistance by a memory of the distinctly
reified
words of Dr Edith Karpenhammer, which she spat out (slightly stained by lipstick) at a meeting of the Blue-stocking Society convened upon the question of ‘The Power of Language’. ‘And a small drop of ink‚’ I continued, heartened as always by the fibre of quotation, ‘falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands – perhaps millions – think.’

‘That’s just it‚’ Bunyon said, suddenly brisk, indicating by a change in the weather, a touch of the north in the wind of his speech, that it was time for me to go. ‘Exactly so. Show me the
ink.
Show me
evidence
of the revolutionary geognostic theory that inspired Wegener. Show me Syme’s conception with the paint dried – the
idea.
Show me, in short – for nothing else will do – a copy of the
New
Platonist.’

‘But they have all been burned, Bunyon,
lost,
you know that – in time,
by
time; in moments of frustration, great disappointment, betrayal, theft. In the bombing of the Second World War. All that’s left is the moment of conception –
that
hasn’t been touched, can’t be touched. There isn’t anything else.’

He said nothing to this at first, but grinned, in the manner of someone who assumes a nervous air because it makes him seem a little more human. Outside, the leaves trembled in the blue breeze; the fountain rose and fell and shattered and collected again; the students, trailing backpacks over easy shoulders, walked to and fro. And I realized for the first time how great a darkener of life is a book, which shuts out, with paper curtains, the common light of day – of
days.
Ink, I reflected, is black for a reason.

‘You remind me’, Bunyon declared at last, leaning back and picking at his yellow fingernails, ‘of a man who strikes his hands together – not because he
knows
where the damned mosquito is, but because he
wishes
to kill it. Bring me, Pitt, a copy of the
New
Platonist
– and we will talk again, Pitt.’

With that mosquito buzzing in my ear, I left him, clutched my (empty) briefcase and descended from the ivory, air-conditioned tower. The fat heat of day was a relief; even the sweat that warmed the cold of my hands was a relief; even the glare and ache of my squinting eyes.

Well, Susie was right.

Perhaps Bunyon was right, in his way.

I had learned the first lesson of the true believer: that acknowledgement is as rare, as wonderful, a thing as the miracle itself. Syme had known something of this, in his day.

Well.

Pitt was bloody, but unbowed.

In the morning, I was awoken by a knock at the door. A clop-clop, a cheerful step, and Tom Jenkyns was in my room, fussing and chuckling over me to get me up. ‘I have brought you tea,’ he said, bearing a hot dish delicately in his burned fingers. ‘I never rise up without it.’

‘Thank you,’ I answered through a thick tongue, greatly embarrassed at being discovered in considerable undress, hair askew over the pillow, the stink of sleep upon me-a slug-a-bed, when there seemed, in a general way,
so much to do
(though I could not for
the life of me have declared exactly
what –
in such fashion do our
appetites outrun our purposes). Yet I was glad on my first morning
in Pactaw to encounter a known face. I sat up to receive my tea, and
from that awkward perch could look out of the window. A fresh fall
of snow had drifted through the night, and the window steamed
with the heat of our bodies and the teapot.

‘
If you permit me two minutes,’ I said to Tom, ‘I am your man.’

I dressed before him – with remarkable and quite uncharacteristic
haste,
urged by his presence to a rapid toilet, while he peered out
side with easy unconcern. Indeed, it was only
my
awkwardness that
offered a slight access to intimacy. Tom was above all a fellow’s fellow, and never thought twice of a great many things that habitually
preyed upon my mind. I put on my lavender shawl, wrapped it
thrice around, and generally stuffed myself, till I resembled nothing
so much as a taxidermist’s bear. Then we stomped out into the
world together.

Snowdrifts lay knee-deep along the broad thoroughfare, broken
here or there by this leg or that. The fountain of each tree had flung
itself upwards, curving to the top, and paused, white and silent. O,
they were beautiful! Perfect, as though frozen in the pale amber
stone of the early winter morning. Snow had choked the road six
weeks before, as I travelled to the port at Hamburg. And the ship lay
 
in the harbour there, the sea muffled with snow. Now it seemed
another life.

Tom Jenkyns, like a boy, had no sense of ceremony with the snow.
He raced and leapt into the drifts, banged his cold fist against the
frozen signs, till they squeaked and squealed and loosened at last
–
laughing his high, bird-like laughter which rang even thinner on the
bright, cold air. I was glad to see such irreverence in the face of great
Nature. I had read so much of this New World, and looked on it still
with fear and awe. It was a comfort to find the snow there as well as
in Neuburg could be moulded by cold hands into balls. Tom caught
my scarf by the end, like reins, and we galloped down the street,
falling and pushing in turn. I was only twenty-eight, and Tom had
the gift of energy. Pleasure flew from him in a shower of sparks and
caught and burned in me as well.

Breathless at last, we marched through the broad market square,
now deserted, except for a few stray dogs slumped about a pile of rot
ting potatoes dirty in the snow. We stepped on to the delicate foot
bridge and stood above that glittering sweep of the Potomac, while
the long, cold wind streamed through us from the west and blew
away to the ocean behind. I paused here every morning on the way to
Sam, meditating each time upon the same reflection
–
that I stood at
a midway point between two ends, loitering on some bridge
–
before
crossing towards the grand and solitary house on the far shore, and
slipping along the ill-kept muddy path that led to his door.

Sam had seen us and let us in, shod in his sandals and smoking
what I learned to be his customary pipe. The corridor was chill and
dark, but a broad fire blazed in the old tap room, and thither we
quickly bent our steps. ‘I pray you – do not worry – shan’t rain‚’
Sam said, in his customary brisk chatter, waving his hand at the
clouds of smoke gathered from pipe and lamp and the steaming sod
den logs in the draughty fireplace. A proper breakfast lay on the
table, honeyed ham and bread and milk so cold and fresh that shards
of white ice still floated in it. We sat down with a click and pushed
our chairs, bottomwise, under the table. Then began to eat in a
munching silence – that disturbed only me, it appears, for they did
not break it.

The silent meal was curiously intimate – there is nothing after all
like the animal within to help us rub along together in a genial fashion. Our appetites were conversation enough, though the tacit
assumption (as it seemed to me) of my inclusion in their little
troupe both flattered and discomfited me. I learned later that Sam
relished quiet repasts, and greatly disliked to have any less material
business intrude upon the pleasures of the table; and indeed in this
slight circumstance there was a strong indication of the sharp divide
in his nature between the grossly physical and the purely, wonder
fully rational. Tom himself seemed to go along with his master’s
whims, and on the few occasions I ventured to interrupt, with some
pleasantry or other, I received only a grunt from the great geogno
sist, and a shame-faced little nod from his associate. The two of
them, by the by, seemed to have recovered their good humour; and
Tom attended Syme’s muttered requests for ‘another wedge of
bread, cut of ham, swallow of good milk’ with tender promptitude.

When he pushed away his plate at last, there was some confusion
as to how we should proceed – regarding the best means of satisfying my curiosity, and resolving the unusual business that had
brought the three of us together. Syme at length decided to ‘take me
through’ those experiments and researches that occupied him at the
moment. ‘It is always best
–
I believe
‚’
he said, ‘to begin with partic
ulars and – travel outwards – seeing that no matter the journey
–
we always set forth from and – arrive –
at a very small spot.’
Generally, he worked in a kind of garret at the top of the ramshackle
inn. There he kept no more than a desk pushed up against a tiny
window, from whence he could gaze across the glittering Potomac,
the untidy network of houses, and the low white hills beyond – this
vast expanse confined to a small round of glass no bigger than the
bottom of a pot. ‘The mind – at least my own –’ he said to me, with
half a smile, ‘is among those elements – that expand – in the cold.
But I am not without – mercy. And seeing as the fire is laid on –
below – we may get to business – here.
Tom‚’
he added in a
sharpened tone.

‘Tom’, I soon discovered, was less an appellation than a term of
command, that could denote anything from ‘clear these dishes’ to 
‘fetch my papers from the attic’. And in fact the word possessed
such homonymical properties that it usually indicated several dis
tinct ideas at once. All of which, it should be said, Mr Jenkyns
seemed to understand; and none of which he hesitated to realize.

And yet – as Professor Syme and I pored over his scattered notes,
field logs, records of experiments, journals, speculations, all spread
pell-mell across the table in rustling array (the papers beautifully
combining sudden scratched phrases, revelations, injunctions,
meticulously observed detail, jumbled calculations, and, indeed,
some evidence of the paths he had travelled, blue-stained leaves and
muddy fingerprints), while he muttered a low commentary that
wove together these extraordinary, disparate facts (and disparate
kinds
of facts) into a glistening, delicately coherent spider’s web – I sensed Tom’s growing fussing disquiet around us.

He poked at the fire, peered at it, sneezed in the smoking damp,
struck a smouldering log a sharp blow till it split, then prodded the
green blackening wound in the wood – appearing meanwhile distinctly (and audibly) dissatisfied with some obscure state of affairs
to which he alone was privy. Next he turned his attention to a slight
draught whistling through a flaw in one of the squares of the wide
bay window. He sighed at it, as if to snuff it up altogether; then
tapped the pane, listened to it, looked suspiciously outside, as if
some deliberate mischief in the broad winter wind had occasioned it.
He spent a good ten minutes tearing and rustling and compacting a
plug out of a discarded sheet of parchment, which he then applied,
with an air of considerable and noisy expertise, to the glass. ‘Tom‚’
the Professor muttered at last, and Tom sat down upon a chair
pushed into the bay and stared dismally along the river; then stood
up just as suddenly to examine a fragment of the clay world that
had escaped his attentions the night before, and lodged itself in a
crack of the floorboards. He scraped down upon his hands and knees
to determine whether there were other loose shards lurking about,
and made a great show of dusting off his trousers when he stood up,
as if to say,
‘Finito‚’
with the smack of each palm on his pantaloons.
‘TOM,’ the Professor repeated, never looking away; and Tom desisted, stood stock still as a deer for an instant, as if struck by some profound 
and unshakeable conception. I glanced up then and noted his
broad, handsome brow, the high, strong nose
–
only his thin lips,
somewhat peevish, effeminate, pursed, displeased. He began to dally
with the loose glowing locks of the chandelier above his head.

It occurred to me then, for the first time, that Tom was
… envious
of me, of my new-found place at the Professor’s shoulder,
of my geognostic eye. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that I
was
enviable –
and, by some natural extension of the logic, that a
spot at Syme’s side was in itself a place of some distinction
–
never
mind the damp fire smoking into the room and the obscure little cor
ner of the Potomac in which we found ourselves. My subsequent
reflection was less happy
–
for I had always considered myself a con
ceited young fellow in my way, and to have thus plainly demon
strated the prior absence of any real pretensions to
enviability
quite shocked
–
yes, shocked me, there is no other word. I had
always possessed a number of certainties regarding myself
–
in my
uncommon intelligence, air of gentility, of grace, etc., etc. – and
never known that I was equally certain of the fact that not a soul
would exchange his place in the world for mine. Until, for that
moment at least, I saw Tom, fretting to peer over my shoulder, and
observe the little notes I made on Syme’s calculations.

‘WILL YOU QUIT FUSSING,’ roared the Professor suddenly,
when the glass beads began to tinkle and shimmer in Tom’s hand,
‘and sit STILL. If you can’t do that
–
fetch another log for the fire
–
make yourself useful
–
in the small matters that concern you.’

Tom, in a purse-lipped huff, strode out at once, clattering the
door behind him; and we soon heard him briskly stomping through
the snowdrifts into the yard. Then the biting knock of his angry axe
against a stump of wood.

The Professor never said a word.

Regarding the marvellous tale of the planet’s birth, Syme unfolded
before me a tale of fires and frosts and spinning, intricate, meticulous
devices –
to say he was
not
mad would be perhaps the greatest con
demnation I could offer, for no sublunar reason could connect the
wonderful links of logic Syme forged. So I withheld my judgement, a
dangerous postponement, as I suspected even then.

I grew suddenly aware, in Tom’s absence, of our physical proximity, my negligible chin propped in the nook of his shoulder, my
downward eyes travelling along his powerful, crooked arm to the
papers spread across the table. We were alone for the first time. The
faint sweet smell of shaved wood filled my breath. And I realized
then that the most powerful intimacy of which a man is capable
often involves the details of those conjectures,
convictions,
that
seem to touch least of all upon his private affairs. A
theory,
in
short, passionately held, when … undressed
(
as it were
)
may
expose a true maiden shyness, and offer the mental equivalent of
that
violence
of discovery that so startled Diana in the woods.

The Professor seemed to fall into a kind of blushing consternation
at the naked spread of his papers across the table, at the sudden reve
lation he conferred upon me. Having sent Tom out of the way, he
now harked after him. He attended each stomp of foot and crack of
axe with a cocked ear, allowing these wintry concussions to inter
rupt his arguments more and more until their diminished flow
slipped through his fingers altogether; and he fell, hunching his
shoulders about his neck, perfectly quiet, not so much lost in
thought as in the absence of it.