The Syme Papers (57 page)

‘Yes,’ Sam replied, wrinkling his brows and briefly touching the
bridge of his nose with his left forefinger, as though a fly had perched
there
–
a nervous habit. ‘Of course,
digging is part of the work,
a sig
nificant part, but there are other things that want attending, such as
…’
And he was nearly away again, sails spread before the wind.

‘As a farmer,’ Mr Corkney assured him, leaning forward confi
dentially, and resting his slight weight on his small elbow, ‘I can
assure you, Professor, that a great deal might be done
–
in
short, a
great deal might be achieved
–
in
a new way
–
by digging.’

But he was ready company and curious, too
–
a firm,
upright
man of little weight. Though he was much troubled to consider the
matter any further than it involved his great passion for, nay his
conviction in, as a farmer, nothing less, well, in short, what might
be achieved by … Sam in
a rare generous temper sat
late over his
wine, talking to him. Mr Corkney was glad of the talk, come fresh
from the university to his father’s farm. He had not yet learned the
tricks of loneliness.

We had an early start the next day, so Tom and I withdrew. Sam
turned towards us as we left, with that characteristic murmur in his 
jowls, to bid
us
an unintelligible ‘good night’.
Then he turned back
to the lamp on the table, and I lost his face in the light. The sky had
been low all day, more misty than clouded. But the day cleared at
sunset and the sky soared with evening, and we felt we had a space
for breath again. Tom had a sudden burst of spirits and
hooted like an owl over the fields down the hill. Only the crickets
answered and rubbed his clear fine note to rags between their legs.
Tom clambered up the ladder behind me, nipping my heels, and
wrestled me for the nearest bed, scattering straw. ‘You asked me
that question,’ Tom said after a sleepless half-hour,
lying on his back
and gazing up. ‘Why
I follow him as I do
–
and the answer is that,
wherever he goes, I half-expect the ground to give way and the world to change.’

Yes,
I thought; that is an answer.

From stagecoach to bed, from bed to stagecoach again; from town to
town; from city hall to college lecture rooms; from inn to aunt to
servants’ quarters; from Oceanic Societies to Ladies’ Societies for
the Promulgation of Thought to the Star Club, a gentlemen’s astro
nomical organization; from university to university; from atheist
gatherings to Quaker educational meetings to lonely churches with
a renegade pastor. From the first weeks of June to its burning,
drowning end, into a sweet July, cleared of clouds and miasmal airs,
so that each sky and day rose so perfect and pure you felt it would
chime if you rung it.

At first my infant intimacy still walked on hesitant steps,
doubting the ground and its young legs. I bounded between Tom
and Sam, now hanging back, now prancing ahead, bubbling with
talk and affectionate spirits, now lagging a pace behind, deferring
with a downcast head under the shadow of my own thoughts. But
even Sam was attuned to these brown studies now, practised at
teasing me from them, generous in his notice. I talked too, brimmed
and fell and rose with talk like a burst lock, after six months of
dammed waters.

From time to time I noted the oblique exchange of glances
between Tom and Sam at my high spirits. For once I did not draw 
up at those imaginary lines but swelled on. Instead, Tom withdrew
slowly into his endless reserves
–
I
was winning. He barricaded
himself in Sam’s work, where he remained unapproachable and
unapproached. I had never seen him work so hard. He wrote to
colleges and clubs, publishers and newspapers; announced our pres
ence in villages and cities; secured engagements and lodgings from
night to night. He took us from stagecoach to bed, from bed to stage
coach again; from town to town; from week to week.

But my poor spring of spirits was lost in Sam’s great tide. For he
was in flood those summer months and overflowed the canal of my
excavated happiness like a sea. He carried all waters before him,
tributary and river, lake and pond in his endless sweep. He swelled
high enough to reach even Tom in his lonely preparations, and he
prospered, too. All men rely on the alignment of planets. No matter
how we reason our lives, pare them down to their proper agents, and
take those agents in
hand
–
the prick of our temperament and action
remains obscure and uncrackable, like a seed in its kernel until it
decides to come out. We rely on the good luck not of any heavenly
constellations but of our own natures: on the setting and rising, the
seasons and phases, of internal moons and suns, as powerful and
strange to us as those grander burning patterns above. Who has not
felt such influences? The evening of talk that like a sudden rain
revives a friendship; the unlooked-for confluence of thoughts, an
eclipse of sorts, that brings the shape and size of an idea into sharp
relief; the day of happiness in an otherwise dry season. Sam’s star
was ascendant that summer, a full three months of rising fortune.
Like the greater man he was, the alignment of his planets brought
weather and prosperity to all around him, as if he burned in a much
higher sphere.

Such a sweep of America we crossed together, as large as Spain,
though it formed but a corner of the New World. What towns and
men we saw! Small river villages, clustered like barnacles around a
fisherman’s post. Farms as great as Berlin, packed with orderly
citizens of grain, ruled by a lonely family. Then new cities, with all
the big-boned awkwardness of youth, like Baltimore, Richmond,
Washington. What pages of names we took! We seemed to pass 
through America like recording angels, marking those fit for scien
tific heaven, at threepence an issue, we thank you. Cooling,
Hutchinson, Marks, the list goes, each stroke of the pen recalling a
line of the face, the slant of an eye, the trick of a tongue. Corkney
from Ireland, Wiseman from Germany, Maclean from the islands of
Scotland, Billingtons from an English hamlet had all ventured
across oceans to find their way to a battered and inky sheet of paper
that promised to provide them with that magnificent pioneering
journal, as it would be, the
New Platonist.

Though we were gallant knights, we had no dragons to battle,
only the vast obscurity of our purpose and the ordinary delays of
travellers. I could not have wished to share my insignificance with
two finer men. Of what was our talk? The role of the western
provinces; the appeal of possibility over fact; the progress of
climates; the differing capacities of different men to deal with
extremes of weather; from there to pain;
then by way
of the
French
to the best location for a bakery in
a small town
–
‘Give heed,
Tom,
this touches you nearly’; the role of Society in such towns; the way
to wear a cravat; other fundamental differences between nations and
peoples; shared mythologies; the errors of Bonaparte and grounds of
his collapse; the hatred of waiting; necessary developments in trans
port in a spreading nation; the relation of practical need to the
progress of science; the virtues of democracy (it surprised me in
such an aristocratic temperament, but Syme was a passionate
republican); the importance of newspapers; the relation of thought
to language; the dialect of Golden as distinct from Perkins, Virginia;
local cussedness, stupidity; the benefits of public hangings. He had a
mind like a pack, which swarmed and divided and consumed any
sustenance it found. He took the measure of all things. Of what was
our talk?

The theories of Kuypen;
his influence on Kepler; the features of
Galileo; physical causes of mental constitutions; the ugliness of the
members of the Oxford School; the nose of Barnaby,
fixed in
rain-
swept stone, surviving his beliefs; relation between Barnaby
’
s nose
and Phidy’s, on the evidence; Phidy’s nose set in stone, as a subject
for contemplation; the deed accomplished, number of pigeons, on 
conservative estimate, scientifically calculated, who could perch on
said sculpture; the benefits of art
…
the nose of Newton; relations
of feature and voice; the accent of Leibniz (here I triumphed);
discovery of the calculus; the independence of a man from his time;
the dependence; the role of observation in scientific thought; the
tower of Pisa; the genius of precision, of doggedness; the longitude
question; the story of the chronometer and the hard usage of John
Harrison; the genius of complexity and the moons of Saturn; the
role of luck in rationality. Of what was our talk?

The bloody heat; the best beer in Virginia; Tom’s lechery; youth
and beauty; Kate Benton of Golden, Virginia; the Maid of Athens;
the Maid of Perkins; sleeping to the noise of horses; Tom’s family;
Tom as a Man of God; Tom’s lechery again; the relation of shaggi
ness
and lechery; Phidy’s hair; Hölderlin;
Germany
and madness;
the Romantic school; Phidy’s nails; Phidy’s fledgling beard; Phidy’s
elongated height; Phidy’s pallor; Phidy’s trembling shyness before
Kate; the love epistles Phidy composed daily to Kate in his spare
hours; his fear of sending them; his fear of Mrs Benton; her relation
to Mrs Bevington; Phidy’s stout denial of all these allegations;
Phidy’s anger; the colour of Phidy’s nose; Phidy’s troop of pining
lovers left behind in Neuburg; Phidy’s constancy; Mrs Simmons;
Phidy as Werther; Mrs Simmons; Phidy as ‘Lotte; Phidy’s grey
hairs in spite of Phidy’s youth; the burden of Experience; Mrs
Simmons; Mrs Simmons; Mrs Simmons; Phidy’s desperate retreat
behind the flag of Mrs Simmons; the impossibility of embarrassing
Syme; Phidy’s fascination with Mrs Simmons; Phidy’s love for Mrs
Simmons; Phidy’s inconstancy to Kate Benton; Phidy’s retreat,
withdrawal, ultimate humiliation.

All men, like apiece of music, have a scale according to which
their variations are played. Once they have understood them
selves, they can never be persuaded from their beliefs. How can
one scale argue with another? I knew myself in part, but often
stared into the distance to avoid the sharp, dismal edges of my
convictions. In Germany we call this belonging to ‘the Romantic
school’. Sam, as no other man I ever met, knew his mind. To talk
with Sam was like looking at a night sky and seeing the stars lifted 
clear into their shining constellations. I had been accustomed to
thinking of the world, at least my particular patch on the sphere,
as a collection of a few lonely objects. These drew me like candles
with their solitary, flickering flames. I loved to fasten my look
upon a thing till it grew misty. So I was the more natural lover,
but I lost my sense of proportion too easily. To me the number one
always seemed much greater than the number two. Three
and four shrank into inconsequence like unwanted children. Sam
knew better than any man that two was twice one, that four was
twice two. How much I learned from him; how little I was able
to teach.

I began to note the changes in the country as we proceeded north.
The cities grew more familiar, the accent quicker. The crops, like a
season, shifted. The labourers, too, of course. Germans began to
appear in
patches like clover in
a field. At first, I noted only the
churches, the clean, whitewashed chapels, the pastors’ names
Ludwigson and Peterson and Roseneck. Then the shops. Strings of
sausages, flecked with clean white bits of fat in their thick dark meat,
hung in the street-windows. The bakers heaped their counters with
big grey sour breads and steaming black breads, soft and yielding as
a hot pudding when they come out of the oven. Then there were the
music-shops. My curious eyes shone in shy reflections from the
upright pianos, standing above tiny covered stools, with the name
Mendelsohn & Son woven in Gothic script into their green velvet.
The beer changed, grew dark, like man with age, and I could taste
the thick, soft liquor of my own native ground upon my tongue
again.

Our tour had taken us as far as New Haven in a roundabout
fashion, past Philadelphia, the site of Sam’s crowning lecture-to-be
at Independence Hall. Now our wandering purposes drew to their
source, and we sailed south with fewer tributary excursions. Each
day’s journey brought us nearer. Our little band was in earnest
now, and our nerves grew sharp like the air before a storm. Sam felt
the burden of our destination the most, and every night receded
inwards a little deeper. We would set forth in the mornings with a
sunshiny vigour, but by the time we turned to our beds Sam’s 
anchor had caught in some tangle of his own thoughts. Tom would
beckon me to leave him with a finger on his lips. But even from that
dim hole, Sam found a trick to lighten our journey; and while he
was at it pricked me to question my o
wn
doubts, with all the passion
we usually reserve for our deepest faith.