The Syme Papers (43 page)

‘There is a time for tender feelings later,’ I answered proudly. ‘Do
not consider it.’

“Thank you, Phidy, I am glad. You can guess your father’s situation better than we. Is there any chance he will recover his influence
soon and restore our funds?’

‘As to his influence, I cannot answer for it. But he would not
have written unless he had done all in his power to maintain our 
grant. Only when he had failed finally in that respect would he have
informed me of it.’

The plates and glasses of our meal lay unwashed on the table. We
had shifted our seats since supper. Sam and I sat by the fire, I on tip-toes with my hands on my knees, Sam slumped in his chair, leaning
back and resting it against the arch of the hearth, as if the heat had
gone out of his blood and he needed the warm blaze beside him. Tom
took up the leftovers of my glass of red wine and drained them.

‘Well then,’ Tom continued, ‘our choices lie at hand. The simplest
and easiest is to admit defeat; and perhaps this is also for the best. I
have no doubt that Sam’s father would employ him in his school.
The editor of my old paper, Mr McClanaghan, has assured me that I
can return to my former job when I wish. You, Phidy, have a father
who needs you. And have perhaps the most pressing and particular
reasons for – desisting.’

There was a short silence and I suddenly had the sense of some
fate in the making. Most decisions, like fields of grass, grow over
time and circumstance, but others have a clean birth, and we have a
hand in their first breath. I was filled with the delight of a surgeon
peering in at the processes of life, and I was very near to giggling
with simple joy at the world around us and the power we have to
alter it. Yet my stake in that world had just been withdrawn. My
father had summoned me; my mission was over; and my service (or
rather, for I must be honest, my
father’s)
to that small band had
died at its source.

‘I
would be sorry to have come all this way to watch over the death of a great scientific revolution,’ I answered at last, with a
spice of irony I could not measure myself.

‘Just as I told you, Tom,’ Sam said in reviving good humour with
his eyes shut. ‘A true – geognosist
–
could not abandon
–
such a
chase – such a prize.’

‘Well, as for that,’ Tom began, peevishly, ‘he has had little
chase
in him, these past months, and less geognosy; but let it go. As for
the prize, we shall see. Of course, our second road’, Tom related, ‘is
the steep and thorny way to Heaven, but may be just passable –
with good legs.’ And he gave me a sharp look, then paused to settle 
his ideas. After a deep breath, he began again, staring at the fire, and
listed his thoughts in a bored way, an argument over-rehearsed; but
he gradually warmed to his theme, in spite of himself, and his voice
rang a little (with some sadness, it should be said) by the end. ‘We
need money and we need an audience, and both can be won through
a – magazine. Here is the plan. We start a publication to broadcast
… our discoveries to the world, and collect a handful of
silver in our way. I have talked to McClanaghan of this before now,
and he may grant us the loan of one of his presses, for a sum, of
course. If we want it to float, though, we need subscribers. A thousand at least, at three cents an issue. We want names, and the only
way to get them is to beg for them, on foot, town by town and even
door by door. This is
not
for the faint of heart – or limb. We are
beggars truly and will very soon be
homeless
when this place is
sold to set us up and on our way. We could call the magazine “The
New Platonist”, or something in that line; a weekly paper covering
the science of the times. Your new researches will be delayed, Sam
– but there is no help for that. This is a chance to play a hand in
public affairs. More than that, it is a chance for fame.’

The last word struck an odd note in my ear and echoed in my
thoughts. I had wondered before what drew Tom to Sam’s mad
enterprise, but should never have guessed the answer was ‘fame’.
Tom had seemed curiously free of ambitions, happy to suspend his
own in a greater cause – and yet … But I had lost the thread, and
shelved these suppositions to chase down the rest of his speech: they
were to begin at once, with as full a purse as they could muster; set
tle with a steamship company which had long sought a purchase on
this reach of the Potomac, and hoped to restore the house to its for
mer uses; then shift to Baltimore and Sams father before they set
off. Tom needed a week or two to arrange their affairs, plan their
engagements and lodgings and so forth. As he spoke, I began to
wonder for the first time whether they included me in these arrangements. Until Sam broke in at last, and enquired, hooding his eyes in
a bemused fashion, ‘Will you join us, Phidy?’

Tom glanced up at Sam and bit his finger. I said nothing, while the
fire flapped against the hearth, and Sam shut his eyes altogether as if in 
sleep. I wondered what prompted them to ask me. Torn, I could tell,
hoped I would decline, shifted in his seat, crossed and uncrossed his
legs, and frowned, in his peculiar way, till little wrinkles ran across his
high brow like the ripples of a sandbar. He wanted Sam to himself
again, which means it must have been Sam who wanted
me.
I blushed, bursting to break the silence, not daring to answer.

Perhaps, I reasoned to cool my blood, Sam felt in some way more
broadly countenanced by my presence, seeing I’d come straight from
the horse’s mouth (in a manner of speaking), from Werner himself,
the founder of geognosy, regarded even at that late date as one of the
leading lights in our field. I mattered to him precisely because I was
a scientist, and had not dismissed him at once, out of hand – because
I had remained so long at his side
–
because, while I looked on, he
could say to himself that he practised his science not in utter but
merely relative obscurity
–
and there is great consolation, believe
me, in the difference. Perhaps
…

‘We have agreed, Sam,’ Tom broke in at last, through pinched lips
that suppressed a
something
like delight, ‘that
–
Dr Müller
–
should
not accompany us, without he knows the full
…
state of our affairs, I
think they call it, when there is something unpleasant to reveal.’

‘Well, Tom,’ Sam said, waking up and sighing, ‘you made that
bed; but regardless, I suppose I must
lie
in it. Come on, Phidy; I
have something to show you.’

And with that he settled in his chair (to a loud bump) and stood
up, rubbing his hands against his warm trousers. Tom never stirred,
smiling in a thin way, as if his lips had stuck and he could not open
them wider. ‘Put your coat on, Phidy,’ Sam said. 
‘
I
suspect we’ll
both be a little cold, before we’re
–
satisfied.’ He lifted a burning twig
from the fire, and with it lit the wick of the lantern that hung from a
hook above the hearth. The swelling glow caught at once and cast a
strange shadow of Sam against the wall, all angles and quavering
gestures of mysterious intent. Then we tramped outside.

The night was cold and full of stars, a windy spring evening that
blew the last of the winter from the north. Away from the house and
the river stood a small barn, which I had supposed gave shelter to
such implements as had fallen into disuse with the surrounding 
fields: ploughs and hooks and harnesses that had come with the
place, and not been touched. I had never seen Tom or Sam go in it,
though I heard once a great banging late at night, had supposed
Sam could not sleep, and had crept outside so as not to wake us,
while he tinkered with the flu’ or constructed some other intricate
device for the creation of the world. I suppose it argues a certain
want of curiosity in me, that I had dwelt so long in that house and
never looked in. There was a great deal more, of course, that I had
never explored – cupboards and closets no one touched, passages
that seemed to lead nowhere, and darkened windows observed from
without
that gave on to rooms I could not quite place
within.
We
dwelt after all in a grand old river-inn, far more extensive than anything we could require. And I had in point of fact given the barn-gate a rattle once, only to discover that, though hanging loose on
rusted hinges, it was demonstrably locked, without a key in sight.
You may have guessed before now that I am not the sort of gentleman to trouble himself greatly over
locked doors,
shying as I do
even from the open kind.

Sam bade me hold the lantern, and lifted a large brawn key from
his pocket. After a short struggle we heard the click, and the key
turned; but I had to set down the lantern in the grass and bear a
hand in lifting the loose door above the mud that had swelled
around it through the long winter before we could push it, scraping
and squeaking, swinging wide and inwards. A thick smell of rot and
dust filled our nostrils. Then Sam took up the lantern himself again
and stepped in.

A thousand shadows danced away at once, flickering across the
high walls of the barn and losing themselves in the dark corners
above the roof-beams. The first thing I noted upon entering was a
pile of coal at my feet – a great black heap that spilled a few hard
nuggets over the packed earth and sat in a drift of its own soft sable
dust. Behind it, rusting slightly, in a dozen pieces and accumula
tions of pieces, resting awry at every angle, lay what appeared to me
like nothing so much as one of those wrecks the imagination leaves
behind when the tide of sleep draws out again in the morning. A kind
of stove lay at the heart of it, drawn no doubt from some early 
steam-engine, and choked on the ash of an old coal fire. From this a
series of pistons and levers and gears and wheels extended, like a
hydra’s tentacles from the central head, sprawled across the packed
earth of the barn floor and gleaming, here and there, at the joints
when the lamplight fell upon them. The most substantial
of these limbs terminated in what can best be described as an
enormous claw, a seven-pronged shovel whose fingers curved
inward and dug, even now, into the dust. This
hand
(to pursue the
analogy) had been entirely severed from the body of the mechanical
beast, as if some valiant St George had cut it away in slaying the
rusting monster; but it seemed to have maintained a life of its own,
and I half-expected it, at any moment, to revive itself, and, with a
will of its own,
begin to dig.
The whole contraption conveyed at
once the contradictory impressions of great violence and miserable
decay. I felt somehow as if I had stumbled upon a former field of bat
tle, which by its very stillness evoked some measure of the storm
that had led to such a calm. At the same time the fantastical device
smacked of a more intimate and solitary defeat, suggested in some
indescribable fashion the mechanical workings of a most particular
imagination, which had overreached itself and become entangled in
its own proliferation.

‘The trouble, of course,’ said Sam, setting the lantern on the floor,
‘is that it cannot
–
swallow itself.’

I had no answer to this; and so we stood there, in the thinning
must of the old barn, while the shadows played upwards from the
ground and seemed to engulf the ceiling in black flames. I felt
strangely sick at heart, though in some respects my admiration, or
rather the awe in which I held the gentleman beside me, had only
increased. His future, however, or, to put it another way, the result
of that experiment he had practised upon his life, seemed at the
moment quite clear
–
and heartbreaking.

‘As for the double-compression piston,’ Sam continued, in a kind
of apologetic and forlorn
boastfulness,
‘that – section of the
machine
–
there – running from the engine – and fed upon itself: it
is, as they say, as good as – advertised. I have achieved – unheard-of
compressions, equal to the force of forty atmospheres – and proved 
beyond doubt – the elasticity of water – by effecting a reduction in
volume of thirty parts out of the thousand – many times greater
than had been supposed possible by the natural philosophers.’

I said nothing, looked at the wreck before me, and thought, Was it
for
this
I had journeyed so far, to learn its principles, and apply
them to that vein of bituminous coal in the princely gardens? Which
piece of this extravagant dilapidation should I return with as evi
dence of Syme’s ingenuity? (Though in its way I could think of no
more expressive emblem of his genius.) What shall I tell them when
I arrive home? That I was deceived? Is there any hope for Sam,
beyond such fantastical convolution and ruin? And yet, as I stood
beside him in the sweetening chill of a spring evening, my reply to
these questions grew only clearer.