The Syme Papers (35 page)

Silence hung like cinnamon in the air, until Tom broke it,
pushing a blast of cold through the door and kicking the snow from
his boots. The exercise seemed to have restored his pink good
humour, as he dropped an armful of fresh split logs beside the
hearth. (Tom, as I soon discovered, always recovered easily, dipping
and rising again, dry as a feather, like a duck in a pond.) He began
to construct a second blaze from the wreck of the first, while the
flames spat and hissed at the cold limbs of their new bedfellows.

‘We should leave him to his work, Dr Müller‚’ Tom declared, and I
confess I felt at once peevish and grateful for this interruption.
Grateful in that the company of men (or I should say of man, in the
worm and powerful concentration of the
singular)
has always ren
dered me
…
uneasy; peevish in that I suspected Tom (already!) of
jealously guarding his little ‘geognostic treasure’ – for all his proud
petitions to the world and windy endeavours to broadcast Syme’s the
ories beyond the bend in the Potomac River where we found ourselves.

‘Yes‚’ the Professor said, rising briskly, and striding to the bay
window, ‘to my work.’ He lifted to his eye the black shard Tom had
discovered that morning, and lost himself in the contemplation of
the charred and dusty fragment, which formed a curious contrast to
the milk-white ray of the winter sun that fell upon them.

‘Why of course,’ Tom said, clapping his hands in that sudden joy
which was his peculiar gift, ‘I know just the thing – a tour of the
town. Splendid, splendid.’

Tom and I, like schoolboys released, tramped out into the snow,
hugging our shoulders until the heat of beating hearts suffused even
our fingertips. We scrambled, wet-footed and wet-handed, back
along the trail to the little footbridge that led across this narrow
reach of the Potomac to the market square.

‘I
have something to show you‚’ said Tom at last, for we had
begun in silence, natural enough I suppose in the chill air, almost
too cold and dense to breathe
–
though I suspected already that some
unspoken contest between us thickened our tongues. Tom guided me
along the central thoroughfare to the old junk shop
–
indicated by
the sign picturing a somewhat blue ship under a rather green sea,
and a decidedly elderly mermaid sorting through the wreckage.
‘Simmons’ was painted broad and red above the door. Various con
traptions in various degrees of disrepair graced the front window,
leather rubbed black by long use, silver greened and mottled in the
sea of time.

Tom led me inside, stamping his snowy shoes in the doorway. A
bell tinkled, and a woman in what is gently termed ‘her middle ages’
– just turned forty, perhaps –
rose to greet us. I recognized her at
once as the fading beauty present at the great experiment. She wore
a wine-red dress, pressed flush against the tender white of neck and
bosom, like the plumage of a cardinal against the snow. There was
an easy gallantry in her carriage, and she seemed indeed to allow the
room to shift around her, rather than exert herself, in moving from
here to there. Her figure perhaps revealed a touch of the years – a
certain twist of the long dress against her full hips. But in her face
was nothing old. The rose of her lips and the ivory of chin and cheek 
had not felt the hand of time – which had brushed instead, lovingly,
against her hair, red-gold and rich once, now thinner and fallen into
the yellow leaf Tom took her hand and gave it a smacking kiss, as if
deliberately to mock her perfect dignity. ‘Mrs Simmons‚’ he said, ‘I
have brought you a countryman.’

She nodded at me and clapped her hands together once. ‘Was it
not very wonderful?’ she said. ‘Last evening? (Though you did
make a stew of it, I believe, Mr Jenkyns.) But to think such great
experiments cobbled together from my own – perhaps, Herr Müller’
– and here she turned the great blue of her wide eyes upon me –
‘you
could discover for me the English of
Unrat?’

‘Rubbish, I think‚’ I replied, blushing at the tease in her look.

‘Oh, that is unkind, Herr Müller,’ she answered, smiling. ‘I had
hoped for bric-a-brac, perhaps.’

Just then a broad young fellow with chapped hands clattered in
the shop, saving me from further embarrassment. He asked for ‘old
horseshoes, which he might’, he added, wrinkling and scratching his
nose, ‘turn to some account – by boltin’ them to a loose door …’
And as she attended to him, I had a chance to look about me.

The floor was bare wood and there was a great shine of brass in
the shop, glinting off knick-knacks, telescopes, old plaques, spectacles, burnished carriage wheels. I felt as if I stood in a sailor’s cabin,
shipwrecked at the bottom of the sea. Mariners’ tools collected on the
wood like barnacles. I picked up an old octant and peered through it,
squeezing one eye shut, and allowing the other to roam at will
through the gloom of the shop, until it lit, by chance, upon Mrs
Simmons. She swayed gently in the swish of her dress, a mermaid
past the first blush of youth, yet more elegant in age than the sharp
young ladies I had known, always fretting themselves, and busy
about their looks. I did not guess how long my eye fixed upon her,
until – to my considerable astonishment and confusion – I observed
her, through the thick lens, turn a sly eye upon me, and smile.

‘She is Bavarian
‚’
Tom whispered in my ear. ‘Married an
American merchant captain and came here. Her husband volunteered against the British in 1812; died soon after at Fort McHenry;
not much mourned, far as I can see. The shop is full of things useful 
to Sam. He has a bit of a fancy for her, you know. (The
Muses
speak
to him through her, you know.) I don’t.’

This was the first unkind word Tom had uttered, and I guessed
then the great delight of Tom’s heart – gossip – which, in the largest
sense I believe, is what drew him to the Professor in the first place.
For Syme, as I had seen myself,
gossiped
with the gods more light
ly than any man I had ever known; and was himself the object of
more human curiosity. I guessed something else, as well: that per
haps Tom’s envy extended even to the affairs of his master’s heart.

Summoning my courage, I ventured a few words to Mrs
Simmons in our native tongue, polite and awkward. How quickly
the familiar becomes strange! For I felt a greater stranger, convers
ing in these native phrases, than I had since coming an alien to
these shores. I picked up a few things – the hasp of a door, a brass
knob – and set them down again.

Mrs Simmons touched me on the elbow, as some people do, with
an intimate slight bump. ‘How long have you been here?’ she asked
in grave and gentle English again.

‘I
arrived only yesterday,’ I answered in German once more,
determined to overcome my natural shyness – so great as to be
palpable, a blush of the brow hot to the touch. I feared that in
discoursing thus, in our mother tongue, I had claimed a privilege
to which I had no right. But I persisted, and enquired in turn about
Professor Syme.

‘He has been kind in all ways to me and purchases a number of
bits and pieces. For a shop like this is slow work, of course. And a
lady needs occupation – I believe they call it.’ She looked at me quite
mischievously, with the smile that gleams on a glass of wine struck
by candlelight.

‘I will come again, if I may. It would be a comfort to hear my
mother tongue.’

She nodded and we left.

Tom and I walked out into all the whiteness, so different from the
precise shop-room shadows, their degrees of darkness and overlap, the
shine of the brass, the small feet of the tables, and the gilt of the cloths
laid over them. I guessed already the heavy loveliness of Mrs 
Simmons, which drowned everything in the honey of her sweetness.

‘I thought you might like to meet Sam’s mistress‚’ Tom said, in a
flat voice, unlike his customary chirp. Something appeared to have
saddened him – perhaps himself.

‘I did like it.’

We walked, deep as our boots in snow, down the heart of the road,
while the silence spread between us, and the ice of the eaves shone
till our eyes smarted.

Tom took me now through the loose and empty streets past a bright
brick church and the newspaper office and the racing course. All
directions still lay tangled in my mind like a cat’s ball of string; and I
could not have wound up our path again for love or money. We dined
together and the hours rang out three times over our ale. Tom knew
the tricks of winning strangers; and he practised them that afternoon.
He always had the air of someone
imparting confidences
–
he could
make a guilty secret of the weather –
and bound men to him by little
conspiracies. Only when we split ways and I walked back alone to Mr
Barnaby Rusk and my cold room (the fire decayed to dead soft ashes
on the bricks) did I wonder suddenly if they supposed I had joined
them and become a new member of Syme’s salon.

I have accused my homesickness of softening me and leading me into
a more mysterious and satisfying view of Syme than I had anticipat
ed on setting forth. That burning planet, spinning, smoking, a device
both rough and intricate, brave and disastrous, glittered in my memory. I dreamed of Syme that second night as I had seen him, flushed
with the effort of creation, talking, talking, consumed by his thoughts
as the globe was by its liquid fire – except that in my dream the words
themselves shone and exploded as he spoke, burned away upon the
air, and fell in scatterings of ash upon the floor. When I awoke to a
brisk knock and heavy tread, it seemed the most natural thing in the
world to discover that the Professor himself had entered the room,
unbuttoned his greatcoat and draped it over my chair; and stood
now, rubbing his brawny arms with either hand.

Syme was never easy at close quarters. He would duck his head
and speak into his clasped hands; stride hither and thither, twitch at 
the curtains, peer out; turn suddenly and briskly the full sun of his
attention upon his interlocutor, then darken at once, eclipsed by
some cloud of preoccupation. ‘Come on, Müller‚’ he cried, in his
rough voice, I’ve been busy since six – upon a new planet – an
imaginary
planet – formed let us suppose by – erosion – as a pebble
in a stream – only
consider
– for an instant – such a
powerful
stream.’ He sat down at my feet, squeezing them together; and, still
half-asleep, I considered this curious proposition for an increasingly
uncomfortable minute. Then he rose briskly, leaned upon the splay
of both hands against the window sill and stared out, utterly
absorbed by the view of a tethered horse slowly scratching clear a
foot of snow. ‘Never say’, he muttered, ‘that the animals – are
incapable of –
concentration.’
Then louder, once more, ‘Come
on.’

He looked at me now and I looked at him, my hair spread out over
the pillow, my fingertips pinching the covers closer to my bosom (to
expose the least quantity of hand), my eyes dim and blinking with
sleep. I could scarcely speak
–
my English tongue loosened last after
waking, and the best I could manage in reply was a grunted,
‘Morning.’ So deep in dreams had I lain that I suffered a peculiar
shock in discovering that Syme could see me
–
this above all seemed
miraculous and strange, that Syme
saw me,
that I had stepped so
far from the haven of my own thoughts as to embark on the sea of
his.
Slowly the morning hardened around me, and the world grew
sensible to my touch, and ceased to shimmer with dreams. Syme
turned away and stooped to the ash in the hearth, as I stepped from
my bed.

‘Wonderfully clean, ash‚’ he said, as I began to dress, ‘far superior
–
in many respects to
–
soap.’ He lightly rubbed a pinch of the grey
dust between thumb and finger, then brushed them clean again. For
once, I omitted some of the niceties of my toilet, slung a pink cravat
about my neck and left my long hair to tumble freely over my shoul
ders. Dressed and ready, I declared to his crouched back, ‘I am your
man.’

Sam rose awkwardly, turned on one leg, and looked at me.
‘Good
‚’
he growled. ‘Better. You have come such a long way,
I must trouble you to come a little farther. Can we offer you a real 
democratic Sunday roast at my father’s table? In Baltimore, I’m
afraid. Tom and I leave by coach at eleven.’

I accepted happily and stretched forth my hand to seal the offer.
His own was cold and wet to the touch, for he had pressed it against
the window pane while looking out.