The Syme Papers (80 page)

 
I wept, little guessing till then how much my father’s fate had
oppressed my heart; I wept, simply at the thought of home and plum
brandy on the long, flat nights of a northern summer; and I longed
to return. Even the excitement at hand, the triple eclipse, heralded 
an ending of a land, and the months after 23 March, that famous
day, were an empty space. I trusted at once to these conflicting
thoughts: that Sam would triumph and need me no longer; and that
he would fail and his cause would be lost. Both convictions with an
equal weight pulled me home (the push had come when Sam
declared,
‘Enough’).
My hopes lay at odds and ends. I had come
over a year before to test a geognostic revolutionary. And then he
had won my love but never my faith. Now we stood at the edge of a
discovery – a small one about a man or a great one about a world. I
felt as one might at the foot of a lover’s grave, wishing for a miracu
lous rebirth and fearful at the same time of the rending and terror of
that transformation.

I feared for the first time: what if it all were true?

Sam was an April day of changing weather. At work he was
sunny and brisk with a head for a thousand things at once and
hands that could attend to each in its turn. But at other times a blue
funk would fall upon him, like a cold drenching, and he would sit
and be miserable, his fire doused and nothing left but a stinking
smoke. Then he could turn savage and I learned to fly to Mrs
Simmons when the first cloud appeared.

A boil came up in the middle of his back and he was always at a
stretch to rub it. Without heeding, he often twisted awry to get at it.
This grew into a familiar posture, his thick shoulders bunched
together and his strong hand searching blind for the spot. I offered
to treat it and every night he sat shirtless in the parlour with his
back to the stove, while I dropped hot wax upon it. He never
flinched or cried out. It was an ugly red welt on his mottled skin,
but it grew hard and black. Then I rubbed an ointment on his back
which steamed against the fire. We talked little enough in those
weeks with one thought in our heads and still less at those times
when I stood above him with my left side hot against the stove. But
his back and my hands grew companionable, like children who get
along quite happily when their mother and father cannot think what
to say to each other.

By some miracle of invention we got Sam’s beloved double-com
pression piston to the spot at last – the dank, sweaty, bruising labour 
of two days and nights. He had the notion of transporting the great
beast by water – a slender, leaf-choked tributary of the Potomac ran
from the foot of the Boathouse to within a mile of Tyler’s Farm. ‘The
secret of every enterprise’, Sam declared, on setting forth, lies in
beginning – stopping when you can’t go on – then beginning again
– when you can.’ I’m afraid poor Easy and I suffered most of the
beginnings. It took four horses, heavy-flanked, whip-sore brutes,
simply to drag the device to the river’s edge. We hired a river-boat,
broad at the beam and shallow-bottomed, which lay slapping lightly
against the banks for five hours, as the dark grew round us, and Sam
tried to rig up a winch to lower the iron darling of his imagination to
the water. It got so we could not bear the bang-bang-bang of the prow
against the water, and the flap of the mooring against the post; so we
paid a boy just to take the rope in hand and hold the vessel quiet.
The sun set behind him and it got so cold we could hear his shiver
ing, sneezing at last, a short blue figure stuck in the muddy bank,
never daring to move. A dollar seemed cheap for such dedication;
and you may guess we heard an earful from his mother, Mrs
Scutching, who kept the Boathouse Saloon, in the morning.

The best I can say for the river journey is this: we did not
drown. The Potomac drifts into flat rocky stretches, the current
encumbered by weeds and broken trees, and though the winter
swelling eased our passage, several times we stood thigh-deep in
icy waters, shifting rocks, lifting and pushing and wheezing,
kicking and cursing that damned machine, till our hands grew
too cold and numb to mind the cut of rock and splinter of wood,
and we heaved the vessel into the next deep flood at last. Only at
moonrise did the nose of that stubborn boat nudge the spruce tree
at the bank below Tyler’s Farm; and we left boat and mechanical
beast alone together, to sink or rust or rot as they desired, and
slept among the hay of Tyler’s barn. Good Frau Tyler roused us
at noon the next day, sleepless, stiff in back and neck, filthy and
stinking and scratching loose stalks of hay from our collars, for a
late breakfast, hot cups of coffee and chops fried in onions; and
thus fortified we tackled the weight of Sam’s tireless imagination
once again.

We hauled it out at last and up
–
behind four horses strapped to
their burden by a contraption rigged from the harness of a plough.
The beast had wheels, of a fashion, I confess; though we cursed these
most of all, as they seem determined always on
returning whence they came,
and never adventuring, in true pioneer spirit, across
fresh woods and pastures new. In short, they liked the bottom of
every hill, the rut of every track, the ditch of every field; and Easy
and I scrambled desperately behind, to prop the wheels with logs,
whenever the horses, steaming, foaming in the cold, began to slip in
the mud; or sat back on their haunches, in equine protest, utterly
spent. Sam drove on before; and I’m afraid the pair of us behind
looked somewhat ungratefully upon his inspirations – both mechan
ical and oratorical – as he urged us on.

Easy indeed lost his temper at last. The long-boat we (or, rather,
his father) had hired, while not entirely sunk by our exertions,
required certain decorative improvements – in the manner of
cross-benches, tiller-ropes, rowlocks and such – before we could
return it; and Easy resented for once the imposition upon his
father’s generosity. The fact was Easy was an indolent young man,
unaccustomed to the pure
drudgery
of geognostic exploration, and
grew, as well he might, peevish and snappish at the cold and the
muck, at our chapped and bloodied hands, bruised and aching knees,
wet feet, dry throats, sore heads. ‘Haul the damn’d thing yourself!’
he cried once, when Sam called one of our brief respites to an end.
‘When you know yourself, as a matter of fact
‚’
he muttered on, ‘that
she can’t dig deeper than a grave, without exploding, in mud and
fire.’ I, for one, felt glad of his outburst, relieving as it did my own
pent-up frustrations, and drawing, as I guessed it would, Sam clos
er to me again.

Well, we got the beast up in the end, as the sun set over the
hill; and even found time and spirit enough to rumble a barrowful of Tyler’s coal to the spot – which we stored inside the chapel door, in case we wanted it on the great day, to clear whatever passage to the earth’s core Nature and that eclipse of the internal spheres would quarry out. The journey home, in a leaky, knock
about way, passed astonishingly swift; the moon glittered over 
the water, and we pulled ourselves along its bright chain, till the
boat eased against the low pier beneath the Boathouse at the
stroke often – just in time for us to stagger up the bank and swallow a hot, sharp glass of grog, as we stared out of the familiar bay
window, before turning to bed. We were too tired for hope or mis
ery or any such luxuries of the human heart; too tired even to
recall the labour that exhausted our limbs and emptied our
thoughts; too tired to dream of those whistling internal spheres,
spinning away below us, towards terrible conjunction in a day
and a half.

Sam was in a black rage on the eve of the eclipse and I’m afraid poor Easy suffered for it. The nights were still cold and the moon promised frost – round and bright as a brass gong with a mist at the edges – when Sam lit his pipe after supper.

‘Is anyone to come tomorrow?’ Easy asked. ‘You know, as my
father said.’

‘No.’

‘I do not mean a crowd and toffee apples …’ Easy went on, though I wished he would not.

‘It is not a circus.’

‘Exactly, but I thought perhaps your old Professor Silliman; or
that man from the museum in Philadelphia
–
of natural histories
and technologies and such
–
who mentioned you kindly.’

‘I never guessed I was a cause for charity.’

‘No, of course not, but as the Bull says, a community of …’

‘Because Mr Harcourt pays the bills, does not mean I must attend
to each whim of his son.’

‘That was unkindly said,’ replied Easy, for I kept silent, though I
should not have.

‘I
did
wish to say, though, Easy‚’ Sam continued in a cold voice,
‘that I don’t expect you to bother with us tomorrow. There should be
little to do
–
and much of it may be long and dull.’

‘I should like to come.’

‘I would prefer you did not.’

Easy was silent a moment, then he said, ‘I may look a fool to you.
And you call me Easy though I am not. A year ago, Phidy, you were 
just such a one as I and Tom before us no doubt, though he had the
sense to leave in time. Does it concern you,
Professor,
that you
attract only hopeless young men with little else to do?’ He could be
small when he chose. Sam was only cold and quiet. Easy then left
without a ‘good night’ or ‘good luck’.

He had left us the carriage, though, and his boy had the horses
ready before dawn. Sam was in sunny spirits in the dark morning
and said, as the horses jostled in the quiet, ‘It is a shame about Easy,
though. It is only that he is so awkward – and then everything is
such a bore.’ My eyes were gummed with sleep and my tongue thick
in my mouth, so I said nothing. But Sam would talk. ‘It is a queer
thought – but we may be riding quite happily towards some disaster.
Some fire or great trembling, perhaps, and fallen trees. I really can
not guess.’ I was again silent, then he said: ‘I should expect at least a
strange fog.’ He mused for a while at that and then the dawn broke
on a pale blue day and my heart rose happily beside his.

Mrs Tyler had tea ready for us at the farmhouse. She knew it was
the Great Morning. Her poor hands, thick and brown for such a
tiny woman, trembled as she poured. ‘It will be all right, Herr
Müllet?’ she said to me in German.

I looked at her, queerly – curiously pleased. ‘I really couldn’t say.’
Even my doubt partly comforted her.

The ground had frozen overnight in dry cracks and the grass
crackled underfoot as we walked down to the hole. The morning
began ordinary enough. We waited till the sun rose over the low
wood and the mists came. Then we tested the softening earth in the
flu’, which again burned bright and blue, and brightest just before
the chapel. Then we waited. The sun burned away the mists and
then the dew.

At noon Mr Tyler came with bread and hard cheese and I ate,
though Sam could not. He asked us happily, ‘Any gold yet?’ but we
did not answer. We saw Mrs Tyler come down the hill with a flask
of tea in her hand, but she would not approach and stood and looked
at us thirty feet from the rope. ‘Is it all right yet?’ she called, and I
thought the question hurt Sam so I fetched it from her. ‘Is it all
right?’ she asked again.

‘Not yet‚’ I said and took the tea.

I explored the wood for a time and came back and found that Sam
had not stirred. It was a beautiful day, the air trembling with spring
and birdsong and the sky flushed deep blue. The heavens had none of
that winter pallor, like thin milk. Sam sat at the foot of the woods on
a fallen trunk. I took his hand and he let me and it was cold as stone.
‘Come,’ I said, ‘let’s rummage about the chapel.’ He said nothing
but he did follow.

It was still colder in there, but I lit some of the candles in front of
the crumbling Christ and we warmed our hands on them. There was
a nest at His neck, of jay or titmouse perhaps, and though it was
muddy there was something tender in it, crackling, stirring softly. I
pried at it gently with a stick, simply to pass the time before apoca
lypse; then desisted, having lost the heart for such cruel meddling,
in sympathy with Sam, utterly at the mercy of those tremendous
powers, who tease our senses with intimations of the universe. We
had seen the child’s tin of rocks before, and the mouse; and there was
nothing else except the game of draughts so we sat on the pew and
played that.

It was five o’clock before we began to dig.

This was next to impossible for the ground was still hard after a
muddy foot and anyhow there was far too much of it. Sam began at
the north rope and when he could not any more I dug. Soon there
was a soft heap of earth along the cordon, no bigger than a mole
might make. That took us over an hour. Sam began digging at ran
dom in the middle and along the chapel walls. He dug afoot or two
and then turned to the next patch, as one might dig for potatoes. I
helped for a time, then gave up and sat down, but I grew too cold so
I joined him again, all the while saying, ‘Sam, there is nothing‚’
though he did not heed me. Then I gave up again and went for a
walk and when I came back he was still digging. ‘Sam, there is noth
ing.’