The Syme Papers (56 page)

Tom broke the silence again. ‘You know my father, Sam, what
do you think?’ Then he turned to me. ‘You do not.’
Tom had often
puzzled me, a patient, secret, playful creature, easily upset and
easily consoled
–
as it turned out, quite unlike his father, who was a
preacher; a distant and correct man. ‘Jeb followed the family calling;
only I strayed,’
Tom said, smiling.
‘I
think my mother minded,
but
my father did not. He is the happiest man
I have ever
met.’

‘Just so,’
Sam answered, smiling. ‘He knows the propriety behind
each thing
–
a perfect gentleman. He is spotless. In his manners at
table
–
entertaining a lady
–
advising wealthy parishioners
–
con
ducting himself among the poor. Yet I scarcely know so improper a
man. I believe (Tom, is this true?) that he has surrendered all faith in
the scriptures
–
if he ever
possessed any.
But, like a well-made
clock,
the mechanism continues faultlessly
–
the rituals tick
and chime at
the appropriate moment He has a watchmaker’s delight in these
things, I fancy. It is his only approachable delight.’

‘There is nothing like him,’
Tom agreed.

‘And your mother?’ I asked.

Sam answered again, ‘A perfect dear.’

‘She is,’
Tom said. ‘She was –
a farmer’s daughter, one of my
father’s flock.’

I met her later: a large, sensible, happy woman, scarce twenty
when she married. She was perpetually puzzled at the good fortune
of her match, like a girl who had found a plover’s egg and could not
guess what it was. Happy and puzzled at once. She had a gift for
noisy joy, an easy gait, ran often in the hurry of high spirits, or to
catch a child in her arms and swing. Tricks with which Tom
delighted me at my arrival, and could still delight me if he chose.

‘Have you a sister or brother?’ I asked.

‘A sister,’ Tom said and glanced laughingly at Sam, though I
never knew why.

Sam and Tom seemed by then to have regained their ordinary
good spirits, thawed, grown merely tired and contented. I had not
and still sat frozen in perfect solemn joy. Or rather, not frozen at
all, for I felt it then, yes then as the bell struck three through the
thrashing, shredded rain, felt joy well within me, like a spring;
swelling and growing clearer and closer from below, till it struck me
sharp and I fell back in the hay as at a blow to release its power as it
swept past me. I yawned to let its diminishing echoes escape. Who
has not felt such intimations, such uncontrolled, almost unwanted,
uprisings of delight, when a moment arrives in its full weight: item,
a young man (myself), reclined (slightly cold) in a barn in Perkins,
with, item two, Tom Jenkyns, now curled beneath his greatcoat with
only an ear cocked, to listen to, item three, Sam Syme, perhaps the
noblest, highest man I was ever to know; and, item four, youth, and,
item five, the recollection of an evening’s prank; and, items six
through twenty-seven, horses, and, item twenty-eight, splendid
hope, and all so far
from home. To all of which Tom replied, ‘It is
late, Phidy. Perhaps we had best sleep.’

But I was on a nervous edge of happiness and could not have
slept for the world. Nor did Sam consent, and in his generosity
questioned me concerning my youth: the death of my mother at
Ruth’s birth; my sister’s ripening charms and sly flirtations (alas
Sam sighed, smiling); the whims of my Prince, and his little palace
on the hill, where I attended such delightful musical evenings to
escape the babbling barrack of revolutionary drunks my father kept
in the basement (himself how much gentler, richer in true faith than
his companions!). The night grew quiet and tiny noises began to
emerge like insects in the clear air: the noise of branches unbending
beneath their load; the patient hollow echo of wood-doves; the elec
tric twitterings of titmice; and the thousandfold shattering drops of
poised beads of water and their endless rebirth. Sam rose from the
hay and walked over to the great barn door. Opened it wide and
stood in the sudden wind, looking out over the vast grey air and the
wet grass-blades, stirring and vibrating like the wires of a swept
harp, as wind and water bent and unbent them with mechanical
precision. The sky began to crack like a shell with dawn emerging.
The horses snuffled, shimmied and neighed as they roused their stiff
great bodies. Sam shut the large door, leaving us in a thick grey 
light. Without another word we all slept.

I awoke before my companions with an almost guilty air, as if a
secret had been confessed. There is to my mind something shameful in
talk, a crude undressing. But Sam and Tom noticed nothing amiss, as
they roused themselves straw-haired and stumbled out under the per
fect blue shell of morning. And the air, after that hard summer rain,
was so clear and joyous as we set out that we felt we could taste the
champagne bubbles on our tongue from the rising sunny atmosphere.

Next we stopped in Golden, Virginia, a small town scarcely bigger
than Perkins. Mr Corkney, the local schoolmaster, commissioned
Sam to speak for the older pupils at his school. For he instructed
children of nearly every age together, from five years onwards till
they were fit for the plough, and he feared that he neglected the older
students in such a mix. He taught in a one-room cabin built on the
sloped edge of his fields, for he was a farmer, too. And he seemed
truly delighted to ‘entertain the celebrated geonomist’, as Sam had
begun to call himself, so I took to him at once.

We brought our gear to the barn and dropped it happily in the
hay.
Sam said, ‘I should like a walk
–
don’t follow,’
and left
with a
sheaf of notes stuck under his arm in the humid weather, thick as
soup. He often took an hour to himself to gather his thoughts and
strength for the coming talk. Perhaps he wished to jostle the two of
us together again, for Tom and I had been distant of late. We stood
awkwardly now, as silent as a reunion, and I thought how rare had
been the spells of our recent good fellowship, or even our solitary
company. Sam in a measure had come between us.

Then Tom said, ‘Are you thirsty, by chance?’

We found our way to the public house, the Sword and Plough, at
the foot of the hill. We sat deep in cracked leather, too low to see
anything but the brown clouds of summer through the window,
flung wide. ‘Good afternoon, sirs,’
said the barmaid in
a white frock
and a voice just gone sharp with her trade, ‘what’s your pleasure?’
She was a brimming miss, scarce fifteen years old, with short straw
hair, soft, downward cheeks and upturned bright eyes.

‘Two pints of ale.’

She brought us our cups running over, and Tom in his easy way
caught her by the hand as she set them down. ‘What’s your name?’
he said, in those fluting bird-like tones that women adored, and let
her go.

‘Kate,’
she answered and then pursed her lips. ‘Miss
Benton
,’

‘Kate
Benton
,’
Tom said, pinching his bottom lip,
and consider
ing. ‘Do you see the gentleman beside me? Look as much as you like,
he won’t understand us. He don’t speak, you see, at least not what
we would call language.’ Indeed, I was speechless and sat as tongue-
tied
as a fish.
‘He’s a prince, though
,’
Tom went on steadily, ‘a
German
prince
.’
Kate
Benton did stare at me then, but a farmer by
the door called to her, and she blushed and fled.

I began to protest loudly at both our treatments, but Tom hushed
me to a murmur. ‘How can you hope to win
her
,’
he urged, ‘if you
are not a proper silent German prince?’

And such is my foolish nature that I sat mum, while Tom had
the wind of me for the best part of an hour. How he prattled to my
mute amusement, speculating over Kate Benton’s age, the number
and fierceness of her early lovers, and the recommended means of
pressing my suit. I could remonstrate only in whispers, or splutter
loudly in my mother tongue while he watched me with crinkling
eyes. But we laughed shamefully and got on very well. Kate called
to me as we left and snuck out of the door behind us, shutting it
with her hand behind her back. ‘Come here, Your Highness
,’
she
said and kissed me on the chin, then disappeared. O, I was every
one’s fool.

We returned to the barn to prepare our couches for the night.
Sam had accepted the hospitality of the spare bed, but Tom and I
were happy to sleep like dogs in the leftover hay of the schoolmaster’s
barn. A something lingered in the air that I did not wish to see
blown out
–
a question stood on the tip
of my tongue. I feared Tom
would slap his thighs and climb into the loft to arrange the thatch
before I could ask it. But he lingered too, and answered my question
as if the thought grew naturally out of our talk of Kate. Perhaps we
had both been dwelling on it. ‘Tom
,’ I
said, ‘why
do you work
so
hard for Sam? Does it not strike you as a fool’s errand?’

Tom sat on the bottom rung of the ladder with his knees tucked
into his chin. ‘Yes,’
he said, ‘it is a question.’

‘You neglect your own ambitions,’ I added, growing braver.
‘Even ordinary hopes, you neglect them, too. You know to what I
refer, Tom. Your life seems all neglect but for this one man. You
seem happy enough, but if he should fail?’

‘Do you see, Phidy, that Sam is easily’ –
and Tom did not hesitate
but waited for the word –
‘spilled. Do you see that, Phidy? If you do
not give him peace, real quiet, he goes everywhere, but to waste. He
must be held quite still. And don’t smile at me when I say it, Phidy,
Phidy-if-I-may, for
it’s
true I think, though you won’t
credit it, but
l
am a
very
…
still sort
of fellow. And I think I do him good.’ I did
smile, though with a different doubt. Tom went on. ‘There is some
thing else. Sam has no head for this world,’ and before I could
protest, he added, ‘Wait till I finish, Phidy. I know you think along a
different line.’

He summoned his thoughts for a minute, then continued. ‘He has
no eye for present fortunes and would not eat unless we fed him. It
is my task to keep him fed, but, more than that, I must not let him
bury himself too deep in his own purposes. I tell him, “You cannot
win eternity until you win the world. And you cannot win the
world until you win the admiration of Virginia or Pactaw or some
thing more than the love of a young doctor who misses his father
and a down-at-heels newspaperman.” He don’t see it, and I love him
for that, too. For though Sam craves our every thought, and I know
he does, he does not reckon our poor respect any lower than Ben
Franklin’s or the King of England’s. He is a true democrat in that.
But he must speak from some eminence to be heard. I love him so
that I wish every city would raise a statue to him or call their streets
after him. But as yet they cannot, for they do not know his name. I
have battled him all the way on these travels, as you must have
guessed. Now at last he has taken the reins in his own hands. He
knows there will be a time for his investigations.’

‘I
could not keep him from his own task
for all the world.’

‘Perhaps you might, Phidy. But yours is a different faith.’

There was some puzzle and doubt in those last words that eluded 
me, but I could not mistake the tone. Tom wished to persuade me of
something
–
of what
I could not guess nor
to what
end.
He wished
to enlist my belief. And I noted then, as one would mark the face of a
tossed coin, that he did not have it, for all my present glowing spir
its and enthusiasm. Strange how little it disturbed me, as I stood
there idly, and Tom’s shadowed face looked up with a curious eye
that I could no more answer than water can support a footstep. Or
perhaps I misread him?

Sam spoke that night and we took another list of subscriptions for
our prospective journal: mostly from young men still ambitious of a
city life and a few of their fathers. Afterwards we dined with Mr
Corkney, a short, cocky thumb of a man, of Irish stock, with some
thing of an Irish tongue. He was a young man himself, just learning
to wear his father’s thoughts as his own. ‘Excuse me, sir’, he said
once, not quite attending, for Sam was launched on the seas of one
of his speeches, ‘but
I
have always thought a great deal might be
done by-digging.’