The Syme Papers (38 page)

‘There, you see,’ Bubbles broke in. ‘I suppose you are always asking him questions? I bet he doesn’t tell you. What do you ask him, perhaps I can help?’

‘I should like to ask him what he is investigating at present. What work is there to be done and what do you still hope to learn?’

‘I’m sorry, Phidy,’ he said, in his curious interrupted manner, a flow of words like a frozen river breaking into ice. ‘You have come in the middle of – a barren season. I am looking for a hole or a crack – in the first crown, you see, under Virginia. Something we could poke our noses into. The only clue we have is escaped fluvia – the gas between the crowns. We reckon that if it leaked – it would make its way through earth or water – into plants or the ground or the air. So we test them in the spring – with a lantern-like contraption of my own devising. Fluvia burns blue. But under all this snow, nothing can get out, so we have – little enough to do.’

‘What have you discovered so far?’

‘Traces here and there, of course. Branches of birch – burning like a blue heaven. Odd ponds with strange plants in them. But nothing yet substantial enough – to suggest a real fissure in the crown.’

‘Is there a pattern to them?’ I asked. Sam looked puzzled. ‘I mean do the traces follow a particular pattern?’

‘You understand, Phidy,’ Sam said, sighing I suppose over my misdirected curiosity, ‘that in theory at least the gases escape through aberrations – random cracks that develop in the first crown, which does not move. Each year the traces should be found over the same cracks – unless a new one develops. But beyond that there need be no – consistency – to our readings.

‘Unless,’ he continued, then stopped still as a gravestone. ‘Unless,’ he said again and we all fell silent. ‘Not a word for a minute!’ he cried, almost angrily, though we had not spoken. We sat foolishly in our chairs and did not dare to eat. Anne coughed. Only Bubbles took a piece of ham to her mouth with a sly look. The ham was arrested in mid-air as Sam spoke again.

‘Phidy,’ he said at last, looking into his plate (and did not Tom
flinch, as if a blow had struck him, when Sam called
my
name), 
‘suppose there was a pattern. Suppose
–
the traces in a particular
spot
–
grew weak and strong, not only from season to season, but
from year to year. What would you interpret from that fact?’

‘Either that the path fluvia followed to the outer air was blocked
or irregular, or that the source of fluvia itself was blocked or irregular.’ I was in a curious spot, describing a man’s madness to himself
in terms as crazy as his own. Did I believe it now
–
him,
now?

‘Exactly,’ he said, scarcely heeding me. ‘I
had assumed the path
–
was blocked; but suppose the source itself was irregular
–
or, rather,
that it followed a fluctuating and
regular
pattern. Then I thought
–
what could account for those fluctuations? And the answer came
as soon as the question. What if not the rotations of the crowns
themselves? Suppose again
–
that the gaps in two crowns over
lapped in a kind of negative eclipse
–
would not the resulting stream
of fluvia be doubly powerful? And stronger still for a triple eclipse?
Could we not deduce
–
from the strength of those traces
–
the
motions of the crowns themselves
–
and even the regions of their
imperfections?’

Sam was away, in a flight of fancy as improbable as it was
enchanting. Yet was there not some cold, sober good sense to his
reasoning, an air of matter of fact? The meal was broken up at once,
and I shall not soon forget Anne’s delight declaring itself to any
who would listen.

‘Have I not said, Sam,’ she cried, ‘Father, you have heard me, that
he needs the company of men such as himself? Phidy, I have told
him often enough, he needs colleagues.’ Poor Tom, I thought. ‘No
wisdom can grow entirely in loneliness, I have learned that myself.
Bubbles, is it not a treat to see your brother thinking before us, reasoning aloud?’

She was always somehow a motionless woman, but now pride
sang from her straightened back and could barely be contained by
her still hands held against the front of her dress. ‘For once, I have
you all to witness, and you see that I am not such a fool. I was right,
wasn’t I, Father?’

‘I
am sorry, Mrs Syme,’ I began, ‘to have been the innocent cause
of ending such a happy meal
…’

Sam had cleared a space before him, and plates of ham and jugs of
ale and a dish of butter and spilled cups and dirty knives lay all in a
heap, thrust together and puzzled at one another’s company. Sam
shouted at Bubbles to bring it all away, and Mr Syme stood aside
and said quietly to no one, ‘Scientific discovery seems very unset
tling to the digestion,’ and left. Tom laughed (unhappy and shrill)
and spurred Bubbles on with the carving knife.

‘Nonsense, Phidy,’ Anne said, and Sam took up the word: ‘Phidy,
we must go into this at once
–
while the mind is hot, so to speak. We
need space, Mother
–
a tableful of space. Fetch the papers with me,
Phidy.
Tom,
quit fooling for once
–
see to it that we have some
elbow-room to work when we return.’

There was a great deal to be done. Sam and I sat long poring over
charts of figures, comparing them, combining them, mapping them
on to larger charts until my brain grew numb against the cold
obstruction of numbers. Tom drowned among them and stared helplessly out of the window, fighting his feet and hands to keep still,
lest he rouse Sam’s sharp tongue. In the end, Tom settled on the
task of making tea, which he accomplished admirably and miserably
and to great honour. The day grew grey without us, and then black.
Still we worked, until a bell somewhere tolled eight times and Anne
said, absolutely, she must have the table clear for supper. Sam and I
looked up, spent, and knew in each other’s eyes that after five long
hours of calculations, we had discovered that grand thing, a possibility.

I had known Sam Syme for only four days. I had come a great
way to … have a look
at
him, and already he had summoned me to
fight
beside
him. He was a great summoner of men. I knew then
what had drawn Tom to him, a year or two before, and led him to
resign a respectable life at an ordinary newspaper for the hard task
of keeping in business a mad genius. Sam had the gift of turning his
own affairs into questions of life, and he claimed us as a king would
press into his army citizens defending their own small homes. After
all, if Sam were right, the world under my feet would be trans
formed. The world around me was already taking its shape.

In a quiet moment after supper I sought the solitude of their
porch, well fed and suffering from that curious loneliness that
seems an echo to good humour and company and healthy spirits.
Mrs Syme, to my surprise, came to join me, sat down beside me
on the steps, hoisting her apron beneath her, and sighing and say
ing nothing.

‘A fine meal,’ I ventured at last, to break the silence. ‘I believe
there is no happiness like the happiness of the …’ I hesitated over
the word ‘stomach’, fearing it improper, and sought another in some
anxiety. ‘Table,’ I concluded at last, in great relief.

‘I
am glad you have come and to have met you,’ she said quickly,
keeping her head down (like her son!), and embarking, it seemed,
upon a long thought that had been unravelling for some length in
her meditations. Then she looked up at me, and I noted the strange
youth of her inner
countenance (
I
can think of no better term), for
she had a doll’s eyes and nose and lips, upon a broader, heavier
head. Half a moon fell over the sharp snow and the path it left led
deep and wavering into the beginning of the woods.

A confession: I have always had an indifferent way with
mothers.
They seem a strange species, and quite unlike the ordinary run of
women. Indeed, there seems to me something strangely
masculine
in the breed, something practical and well worn, even when they
preen themselves, as Mrs Syme undoubtedly did, pinching her
cheeks, touching her lips, and keeping a weather eye on her figure,
whenever her husband stepped in the room. ‘It has been’, I began,
sounding the note of appreciation, and missing the proper pitch (I
could hear this myself) by an octave or so, ‘a great –’ joy, I would
have said, but she interrupted me.

‘I wished only to say to you,’ she broke in, ‘again’ (blushing
slightly, so she looked both younger and older, a girl and a fussing
grandmama, depending as the moonlight caught her pale hair and
shone yellow or white), ‘how pleased I am
–
to meet you
–
and see
my son in such
–
fine company
–
because
–
because
–
in short,
Phidy’ –
she stammered at my pet name, quite red-faced now
–
‘I
wish to tell you that I
–
call it a mother’s fancy if nothing better
–
that I DO NOT TRUST TOM JENKYNS.’

We could see a horse cantering some way up the road, a dark shape
shouldering through the cold, with a heavy rider
–
and then hear him,
the hoofs muffled in snow, the sharp and distant breaths. This seemed
to spur Mrs Syme to conclude her surprising confidence. ‘I beg you,
Phidy, not to mistake me and believe that I doubt Mr Tom’s good
heart or … application; but I fear
–
I fear greatly
–
that he puffs my
son
–
for his own purposes
–
puffs him with a great bellows
–
and my
son, Herr Müllet, is just the man to be
–
led on by rumours of his
own success
–
till he
–
till I fear he will
–
burst. That’s all. I mean to
say that I am glad that he is in respectable hands. You seem to me, sir’
–
and she sought the word her son had used, and found it again,
strangely comforted by the term
–
‘a good judge. That’s what Sam
said. A good judge. And that’s a fine thing, Phidy, I believe.’

I had no time to answer her, for the horse clattered up to the foot
of the porch, and Mrs Syme rose quickly beside me, as if discovered
in some conspiracy, and seized a broom resting in the doorway, and
began to sweep the dust of snow off the steps into the road.

The horseman proved to be Bubbles’ husband come to fetch her
home. He was a butcher named Reuben, a bluff, sober, successful
man, with hands as big as melons, one of which fairly crushed my
own poor palm when he shook it. ‘I shan’t get snow on your fine
carpets, Mrs Syme,’ he called, standing out in the cold. ‘I’ve only
come for Barbara.’

Barbara called for ‘a minute, my dear’ and flew about the house in a tiny tempest. We gathered on the porch to see her go. She embraced Sam long and cried, ‘I am so glad, there is nothing like a geognostic revolution to cheer a Sunday night.’ She kissed Tom and then ran to fetch her small bag, then ran out and in again and took me by the hands. She pecked me on the cheek and said, ‘Beware of my brother, Phidy.’ A blush of warm shame spread over my face, welcome in the cold wind of the clear night. ‘I shouldn’t listen to a word he says.’ She was gone before I could protest, lost in Reuben’s great cloak as the horse disappeared into the snow.

That night Tom made me his proposition. We were all tired as dogs
and I at least was more than half-asleep. Sam’s parents had gone to 
bed and the three of us sat before the grey end of a fire. I held a
brandy in my hand and the flame of our cigars made up for the
ebbing warmth of the embers in the grate. Sam smoked on his back,
stretched out on the hot tiles beside the fireplace. ‘There is a great
deal of work to be done,’ he said, not for the first time that day. ‘We
need another man,’

‘We need more than that, Sam,’ Tom said, a trifle peevish still.
‘We need
money.
That old lantern for testing flu’ won’t do any
more, that’s all It is time to bring in Galileo; we want precision
now. This is not the first time the matter has come up, but I think it
is the first time, Sam, that you will own I am in the right.’

I sat among them and could not guess whether they spoke thus
openly out of indifference to me or because they had assumed my
complicity. I did not remain long in silence or in doubt.

Tom turned to me, with a practical air, and said, ‘This report you
mentioned, Phidy, what goes in it? If you want to get to the bottom
of our enterprise, you may have to go with us a little way. We can
not have you along as a free passenger, you see that, Phidy, don’t
you? We must all carry the weight. Don’t that tally with your ideas
of the mission?’

I could not tell whose mission he meant. When I said ‘yes’ to Tom
I did not suspect my answer mattered very much. An answer is
often the easiest thing to give. I comforted myself with the reflection
that most of our decisions have been made by the time the question
comes. If we have lingered long enough to hear it, our answer is
probably assured. That night by candlelight I composed my first
‘report’.