The Syme Papers (54 page)

‘Pull,
you damn
fool,’
he cried, ‘I’m not a fish!’

He disappeared again. The water rippled, shimmered above him,
and I could feel the strain on his back as he dug his knees into the
river mud and heaved. The boat stirred, lifted, sank, but only
skimmed the mud, and then rose. I hauled it to the bank, where it
lay pointing at the sky, half-submerged like a dead fish. Sam joined
me then, streaked with thick, dark mud, like paint, which rendered
him almost decent in a pagan way, and we brought up the damned
thing. Its boards lay reeking and drying in the sun. I fetched Sam
the white sheet from our bed and, classically draped, he lay beside
the river. I secured one corner of the cloth and went so far as to take
off my shoes and stockings. I sat coolly and sedately, never quite at
peace, but always happy, letting my feet settle below the cool water,
stroked by swaying weed from time to time.

But Sam could not sit still. Within a few hours, the excess of his
high spirits returns, and he must again be busying himself with
something. I marvelled at his fresh forces, wondered at how much
they had to do with Tom’s prostration, his absent shadow. Now Sam
could diffuse his enormous energies over smaller and happier
things. I marvelled, but Sam’s energy so nearly matched my own
inward high spirits, my restless, stirring, ineffectual delight, like the
motion of a tree’s shadow in the wind, that it seemed but the intoxi
cation of the air, the fine day, and I did not puzzle more over it at
the time. I was again sent
fetching
–
to Mrs
Bevington for
a carpen
ter’s kit.

Sam set to work immediately, tipped the boat on its belly so that
the rump stood open to his inspection. He caulked a minor flaw
between two boards with a mixture of his own preparation. But he
found that it would not do: the weakness was too general and the rot
had proceeded too far for such patchwork remedies. We found some
old boards in a shed and Mrs Bevington consented that they be
translated to a lighter, aqueous bliss.

‘I never noticed them till after my husband died, Mr
Phidy, and I 
never could think how they got there, till it hits me once. They was
left over from his coffin.’

Mrs Bevington was added to our little gathering and watched the
transformation with a somewhat sentimental curiosity. Sam, now
dressed and almost decent, was glad of the audience. All afternoon
he kept at it, hacking and ripping and sanding and nailing and
boarding and a great many other operations, no doubt, all of which
he explained to me very thoroughly, though I scarcely heeded him,
too happy to sit in the shade with my back against the willow and
listen to the companionable unsteady din. By early evening the boat
had been repaired, swum light and high, and with two newly fash
ioned oars we could begin our explorations of the river. Mrs
Bevington brought us a bottle of wine for the launch, but we drank
it instead and waited for the morning.

Tom rose the next day, late and weak, sipped tea with us under a
garden awning. The sky was another perfect blue shell, with that
peculiar swept, deserted air of a fine spring morning. But it was
high summer, though a little cooler than the day before. We left him
sitting warmly wrapped by the bird-bath and took the boat, newly
christened
Punch,
upriver towards Richmond. It was a weary pull.
The current was slow but contrary, and the sun lay very hot on the
water. My face grew quite red by day’s end, a crack-skinned berry.
We alternated at the oars and raced for pace. Sam never flagged. His
broad, deep strokes brought a fine bow-wave surging past and both
our spirits surged with it, stirred to a crest of joy by the simple
motion of the blades in the water and the self-made wind tugging
our hair and cooling our ears and faces. But the old sticky heat
returned late in the afternoon. It settled on us like a fallen cobweb or
a glaring cloud, and soon I surrendered my stroke entirely to the
indefatigable Sam, who pulled us to a riverside inn.

We sat in the window overlooking the broad current and ordered
tall pots
of porter. ‘Have you ever
fought a –
duel?’
he said to me, as
we dipped our noses in the thick brews.

‘No.’

He touched a loose hair that had caught on his tongue with his fin
gertip, looked at it briefly, and rubbed his hands together. ‘They make 
a curious entertainment. It is a great and common mistake’, he con
tinued, ‘to contest them in the morning. Viz: men dragged from their
beds
will kill
each other through
sheer muddle-headed
sleepiness
–
who might, in brighter moods, render or accept a pardon. Midnight
is no better. Anyone may
kill
at midnight
–
darkness has the effect of
strong drink. No, if you wish to avoid a scrape
–
suggest teatime.
Nothing is easier than to reconcile
–
at teatime.’

Sam drank deep, rubbed a knuckle against his nose, and said,
‘I
fought one once. Just such a filthy day
as this. I had been in
–
a
terrible temper
–
all afternoon. It seemed the only thing
to do.
’

He sat back in his seat and lifted the catch of the window, and
pushed open the glass with a squeak and a scrape. A grateful wind
ruffled the river and blew into our faces, and Sam closed his eyes
against it. ‘At the time,’
he said, returning to his pot
of porter,
‘
I
confess, I shouldn’t have minded
an –
an honourable grave. Only
think what
thoughts would have remained
–
unthought!
–
had a
plug
of iron strayed
–
an inch
inside my tunic! Though there was
in the event little question of that. The chief feature that struck me
about the whole affair (apart from the fact that I felt a hot
fool …
most of the night,
and a chilly fool
…
in
the morning) was this:
how
little capable we are of
–
taking a life. Not in
the particular, of
course. Nothing could be easier: a click and a spark and a puff of
very pleasing powder, I must say, and there’s an end of it. But in
the proper weight and consequence of the act
–
it is entirely
beyond us.
We commit the gravest and the lightest deeds
–
in
the
same spirit
–
relying as it were on the connections between the
slight and the great
–
to achieve our ends
–
between an inch
of
iron and this globe of thoughts.’ Here he held his own globe in his
two hands, and rubbed these across his eyes till they held his nose,
and he breathed once, deeply, between his palms.

‘The trick, by the by,’ he added, on a lighter note, ‘should you
ever
need it, Phidy
–
is this: aim
at the hip
as you raise the gun.
It
will bear first and throw him off his shot. Fire once in the air after he
misses you, and both sides may retire with honour. There is a lesson
in
that
–
a man
with partial objectives will always triumph over a
man
with a more
–
complete sense of purpose. A lesson, it seems, 
Phidy, that I have unlearned.’ Then he saw my nodding, sunburned
countenance and took pity; hauled me up with both hands under my
armpits and made his farewells to the clamour of good wishes and
invitations that followed him to
Punch
and echoed long after us
down the long, echoing water. We returned to Middletown easily
with a lazy surprise: the current must have been stronger than sus
pected. And Sam rowed us in, gently nosing the small pier just as
the sun set, sad and full, and Tom came out to greet us, with a
lighter step, dressed, though still a little pale.

We shouldered our packs and departed the next day, whither only
Tom knew. The sky was that brown-grey, low-hung miserable drap
ery of unsettled summer days. But my summer had begun. For if
ever I belonged in America, if ever I lent my weight to this enter
prise, it was then. Tom’s sickness was the beginning; the past two
days were the first happy steps. So I left that town with a light step,
in fledgling good spirits, though the air hung still around us as if a
bell tolled in it.

Even after this respite, our little band had not yet found its gait. I
had won a place in Sam’s esteem for the first time; but the quarrel
between Tom and Sam was postponed and not resolved, had
prompted indeed a slight stiffness between Tom and me. I felt as if
Sam must ‘
forgive Tom’ before we could prosper, though for what
I
could not guess, unless it were Sam’s own dependence. His spirits
had lightened after our dip in
Punch,
but his heart for the enter
prise still lay in the balance. Sam was always happiest when he
shied from his own purpose. Tom feared that the dry work in
Middletown might turn him from the harvest. After a week of
travels our list of subscriptions could be enclosed in the white field
of a page. ‘He is such a stubborn ass,’
Tom told me one night,
to
breach our awkwardness and deflect his own despair, ‘and would
make himself miserable out of a philosophical conviction.’

‘You cannot follow him when he lags
two paces behind,’ I
answered, half-guiltily, for I often lingered with Sam in the rear. We
bided Sam’s time, for he held our courage as well as our
purpose in his hand.

A week after the Middletown adventure we came to Perkins, a
tiny town, with a tiny wooden one-roomed church, whose chaplain
was a cousin of Tom’s. Tom was at his wits’ end and could think of
nowhere else to turn, though we had scant hope of an audience in
such a place. It was a weary walk. The glass had been rising all day
and no coach ran to Perkins. The mail came only once a week, else
we would have been among the postman’s deliveries. Our only
transport was our own six feet, strung out along the road like the
legs of some dragging insect, now close together, now staggering
apart. We journeyed from Somerville, the nearest town, with our
backs bent under all our gear. A heavy, weary walk in the drowning
heat. We all felt we must soon go under. I am afraid that Sam and I
looked a little unkindly on Tom, as the afternoon wore on through
brimming flies and flat, dried cow-pats on the stony road. But Sam
said nothing, and Tom and I laboured as much through his silence
as through that rain-soaked air.

We arrived at sunset. The cross of the church stood dark as
charred wood in the burning light. Like us, the atmosphere seemed
oppressed by an intolerable burden, but ours was not so much a
burden of weight as of distance, remoteness. Only Syme could
maintain a sense of immensity in the face, or, rather, in the corners,
of such obscurity, and he had withdrawn. Tom, for all his efficient
bustle, lacked the gift of scale; and we both felt little better than
tramps, shoes caked in dung, loafing through a village too small to
deny us charity. Worse than tramps, indeed, unsupported by their
easy purposelessness.

And a barn is what we got when we arrived. After a sustained
banging on the door, Tom’s cousin greeted us. Jeb was a sour-faced,
unpleasant young man, already running to fat, so unlike Tom. He
reeked of early intimacy, like an ugly smell that he could not keep to
himself. ‘I’ve only got
a spare room,
I’m sorry to say, Tom. The dogs
must make do in
the barn
 
You don’t mind that, Phidy? There’s just
the one bed, and that goes to the wizard. We must have you clean at
least, if you speak to the congregation. Not like your fine cities, here,
sir. Watch out for them, that’s all. Might ruffle your feathers, but
won’t do any harm, sir, that’s my opinion.’ And he showed us the 
barn, thick with the smell of horses, comforting none the less, with
their subterranean snufflings and stirrings. We pitched our bags on
to the hay and came in to supper.

A comfortless meal, though God knows we had the hunger for it.
Syme barely spoke, pinched and withdrawn into reflections like a
tight corner. Tom and I picked and gnawed our way through cold
beef and old cheese and left a litter of bones and dried fat on the
dirty plates. Who could be hungry long in such heat or who could
talk? Except for Jeb, who made the most of his stony companions,
like a thistle on a rock. Called to the Church by family tradition,
he had the worst of its professional airs without the least of its
humility or faith. The air rang with the litany of his grievances.