Now what seems odd to Dixon, is that ten years ago, in Mechanics, or, The Doctrine of Motion, Emerson express’d himself clearly and pessimistickally as to any Hopes for building a Watch that might ever keep time at Sea, whose “ten thousand irregular motions” would defeat the regularity of any Time-Piece, whether Spring- or Pendulum-Driven. Whyever then this dubious loan of a time-keeper even less hopeful? Their history in Durham together has been one of many such Messages, not necessarily clear or even verbal, which Dixon keeps failing to understand. He knows, to the Eye-Blink, how implausible Emerson is, as the source of the Watch. Meaning he is an intermediary. For whom? Who in the World possesses the advanc’d Arts, and enjoys the liberal Funding, requir’d for the building of such an Instrument? Eeh,— who indeed?
On the Falmouth Packet coming over, alone with the Enigma at last, he inspects it at length, but is unable to find any provision for winding it,— yet one must be hidden someplace. . . .“Damme,” he mutters into the Wind down from Black Head,” ’tis Popish Plots again, thick as Mushrooms ’round the Grave of Merriment.” Here they are, these Jezzies, being expell’d from one Kingdom after another,— whence any spare Time to devote to expensive Toys like this? He is a Newtonian. He wants all Loans of Energy paid back, and ev’ry Equation in Balance. Perpetual Motion is a direct Affront. If this Watch be a message, why, it does not seem a kind one.
At last, red-eyed and by now as anxiously seeking, as seeking to avoid, any proof, he delivers the Watch to Captain Falconer, for safekeeping inside the Ship’s strong-box, till the end of the Voyage,— finding the Time-Piece, upon arrival in Philadelphia, ticking away briskly as ever,— and the counter-rhythms of the Remontoire falling precisely as the Steps of a Spanish dancer. He hopes it might be confiding to him, that its Effect of perfect Fidelity, like that of a clever Woman, is an elaborate and careful Illusion, and no more,— to be believ’d in at his Peril.
“Like to listen?” Dixon offers, one day when he and Mason are out upon the Tangent Line.
“It’s all right, I believe you.” Mason’s eyebrows bouncing up and down politely.
“Mason, it’s true! I never have to wind it! Do you ever see me winding it?”
Mason shrugs. “You might be winding it while I’m asleep, or when screen’d, as we so often are one from the other, by Trees,— you might be engaging one of these Rusticks, keeping well out of my sight, to wind it regularly.— Do I have to go on?”
“Friend. Would I quiz with you ’pon something this serious? All our assumptions about the Conservation of Energy, the Principia, eeh . . . ? our very Faith, as modern Men, suddenly in question like thah’ . . . ?”
“Had I tuppence for ev’ry approach made to Bradley upon the Topick of Perpetual-Motion, I should be elsewhere than this,— recumbent I imagine upon some sand beach of the Friendly Isles, strumming my Eukalely, and attended by local Maidens, whom I may even sometimes allow to strum it for me.”
“Eeh, you are fair suspicious . . . ? Listen to it, at least . . . ?”
Watch to his ear, frown growing playful, Mason after a bit begins to sing,
“Ay, Señorit-ta, it
Can’t, be sweet-ter, what
Shall-we, do?
What a Fies-ta, not
Much Sies-ta, do you
Think-so, too?
Look ye, the, Moon-is ascend-ding,
You no comprehend ing-
Glés, it’s just as well,—
For, I’m-in-your-Spell, what’s
That-can’t-you-tell? Ay, Seen-
Yo-ree-tah!
“Yes amusing little rhythm device,— not loud enough for ensemble work of course,— ”
“Forgive me, Friend, I’ve again presum’d our Minds running before the same Wind. My deep Error.”
Mason in reply begins to wag his Head, as at some unfortunate event in the Street, whilst Dixon grows further annoy’d. “Do tha fancy I’ve an easy time of it? With the evidence before me, gathering each day I doahn’t wind the blasted Watch,— even so, I can’t believe in it . . . ? I know thah’ old man’s idea of Merriment! I am thrown into a Vor-tex of Doubts.”
The Watch ticks complexly on,— to Dixon, sworn not to let it out of his sight, a Burden whose weight increases with each nontorsionary day. At last, at some Station ankle-deep in a classically awful Lower Counties Bog, he is able to face the possibility he’s been curs’d,— Emerson, long adept at curses, having found himself, he once confess’d to Dixon, using the gift, as he grows older, in the service less of blunt and hot-headed revenge, than of elaborate and mirthful Sport,— directed at any he imagines have wrong’d him. Has Dixon finally made this List? Did he one day cross some Line, perhaps during a conversation he’s forgotten but Emerson has ever since been brooding upon, perhaps in detail? Eeh! ev’ry-one’s nightmare in these times,— an unremember’d Slight, aveng’d with no warning. “What did I do?” confronting his teacher at last in a Dream, “to merit such harsh reprisal? Had I been that wicked to thee, I’d surely remember . . . ?”
“You violated your Contract,” Emerson producing a sheaf of legal Paper, each Page emboss’d with some intricate Seal, which if not read properly will bring consequences Dixon cannot voice, but whose Terror he knows. . . .”Where would you like to begin, Plutonian?”
’Tis now Dixon recalls the advice given Mason at the Cape, by the Negrito Toko,— ever vigorously to engage an Enemy who appears in a dream. He knows that to be drawn into Emerson’s propos’d Exercise, is to fight at a fatal disadvantage upon his Enemy’s ground. His only course is to destroy the Document at once,— by Fire, preferably,— tho’ the nearest Hearth is in the next room, too far to seize the papers and run with them. . . . Emerson is reading his Thoughts. “Lo, a Fire-Sign who cannot make Fire.” The contempt is overwhelming. Dixon feels Defeat rise up around him. It seems the Watch wishes to speak, but it only struggles, with the paralyz’d voice of the troubl’d Dreamer. Nonetheless, Dixon’s Salvation lies in understanding the Message. Whereupon, he awakes, feeling cross.
Tho’ sworn to guarantee the Watch’s safety, he soon finds his only Thoughts are of ways to rid himself of it. In its day-lit Ticking, the Voice so clogg’d and cryptick in his Dream has begun to grow clearer. Drinking will not send it away. “When you accept me into your life,” whispering as it assumes a Shape that slowly grows indisputably Vegetable,— as it lies within its open’d traveling-case of counterfeit Shagreen, glimmering, yes a sinister Vegetable he cannot name, nor perhaps even great Linnaeus,— its Surface meanwhile passing thro’ a number of pleasing colors, as its implied Commands are deliver’d percussively, fatally, “— you will accept me . . . into your Stomach.”
“Eeeeh . . . ,” a-tremble, and Phiz far from ruddy, he shows up at the Tent of the camp naturalist, Prof. Voam,— who advises that, “as the Fate of Vegetables is to be eaten,— as success and Reputation in the Vegetable Realm must hence be measured by how many are eaten,— it behooves each kind of Vegetable to look as appetizing as possible, doesn’t it, or risk dying where it grew, not to mention having then to lie there, listening to the obloquy and complaint of its neighbors. But, dear me,— as to objects of Artifice,— Watches and so forth . . .”
“Tell me, with all Honesty, Sir, regarding this Watch,— does it not seek to project an Appearance, not only appetizing, but also,— eeh! . . . Ah can’t say it . . . ?”
“Vegetables don’t tick,” the Professor gently reminds Dixon.
“Why aye, those that be only Vegetables don’t. We speak now of a higher form of life,— a Vegetable with a Pulse-beat!”
“Beyond me. Try asking R.C., he enjoys puzzles.”
Beyond R.C.,— a local land-surveyor employ’d upon the Tangent Enigma,— as well,— tho’ he’s not about to say so. From the Instant he sees the Watch, the Mens Rea is upon him. He covets it.— He dreams of it,— never calling it “the Watc
h” but “the Chronometer,”— in his mind conflating it with the marvelous Timepiece of Mr. Harrison, thus flexibly has the Story reach’d America of the Rivalry between the Harrisons and Maskelyne, to secure the Longitude,— and as much prize money as may be had from Longitude’s Board.
“If a man had a Chronometer such as this,” R.C. asks Dixon, “mightn’t it be worth something to those Gentlemen?”
“A tight-fisted Bunch, according to Mason,— tha must open their Grip upon it with a Prying-Bar . . . ?”
“Must be why they call it ‘Prize’ money,” says R.C., “— I’ll bet you find it temptin’, tho’, don’t ye?”
“I’m not sure whose this is,” Dixon replies carefully. “I’m keeping it for someone.”
“A Gratuitous Bailment,— of course.” R.C. trying his best not to look mean. As a Transit-Fellow, Dixon recognizes R.C.’s Complaint but too well,— the many years pass’d among combatants unremitting, unable by one’s Honor to take sides however much over the Brim Emotions might run, assaulted soon or late by all Parties, falling at last into a moral Stuporousness as to the claims of Law,— in fact, perilously close oneself to being mistaken for a Lawyer, a bonny gone-on.
“Mmm-mm! Did ye see that, boys? Good enough to eat.” Axmanly Wit at the Watch’s expense, causes R.C. to glower and approach, often to fractions of an inch away.
“What’re you in my Phiz for now, R.C.?”
“You don’t want to be offending the wrong Folks,” R.C. advises. No one knows what this means, but his point,— that he is too insane for ev’ryone else’s good,— is made.
One midnight there is an uproar. Dogs bark. Axmen request Silence. The Surveyors are out of their Tents, up the Track somewhere taking Zenith observations. There is a crowd in front of Dixon’s Tent. R.C. is caught in the light of Nathe McClean’s Tallow-Dip, just as the last bit of Gold Chain, suck’d between his Lips like a Chinese Noodle, disappears.
“R.C., may be you’re gittin’ too mean to think straight any more?”
“I thought I heard someone coming.”
“That was us. Shouldn’t you’ve set it down someplace, ’stead of swallerin’ it?”
“There wasn’t Time.”
“Now ye’ve more than ye know what to do with,” quips Moses Barnes, to the Glee of his Companions.
“Don’t you know what it is you swallow’d, R.C.?” Arch McClean slowly reciprocating his Head in wonder. “That’s sixty Years of Longitude down there, all the Work ’at’s come and gone, upon that one Problem, since Sir Cloudsley Shovell lost his Fleet and his Life ’pon the cruel Rocks of Scilly.”
“What were my Choices?” R.C. nearly breathless. The thing was either bewitch’d, by Country Women in the middle of the night,— Fire, monthly Blood, Names of Power,— or perfected, as might any Watch be, over years, small bit by bit, to its present mechanickal State, by Men, in work-Shops, and in the Daytime. That was the sexual Choice the Moment presented,— between those two sorts of Magic. “I had less than one of the Creature’s Ticks to decide. So I took it, and I gobbl’d it right down.” His pink fists swing truculently, and he has begun to pout. “Any of you have a Problem with this?”
“As the Arm of Discipline here, I certainly do,” declares Mr. Barnes, the Overseer of the Axmen, “for in an expedition into the Country, as upon a ship at sea, nothing destroys morale like Theft. Which, legally speaking, is what this is.”
“Yet anyone may put an ear to his Stomach. The Watch is sensibly there, nor’s he making a Secret of it. . . . We might more accurately say, an Act of Sequestration, its owner being denied the use of— ”
“Aye, yet absent a Conversion to personal Use,— ”
“O Philadelphia!” thunders Mr. Barnes, “have thy Barristers poison’d Discourse e’en unto the Rude who dwell in this Desert? What ever shall we do?” The Utterance being Mr. Barnes’s cryptic way of requesting it, stone Silence falls over the Company. “Has anyone consider’d where we are?” All know that he means, “where just at the Tangent Point, strange lights appear at Night, figures not quite human emerge from and disappear into it, and in the Daytime, Farm animals who stray too close, vanish and do not re-emerge,— and why should anyone find it strange, that one Man has swallow’d the Watch of another?” Some style this place “the Delaware Triangle,” but Surveyors know it as “The Wedge.”
To be born and rear’d in the Wedge is to occupy a singular location in an emerging moral Geometry. Indeed, the oddness of Demarcation here, the inscriptions made upon the body of the Earth, primitive as Designs prick’d by an Iroquois, with a Thorn and a supply of Soot, upon his human body,— a compulsion, withal, supported by the most advanc’d scientifick instruments of their Day,— present to Lawyers enough Litigation upon matters of Property within the Wedge, to becoach-and-six a small Pack of them, one generation upon another, yea unto the year 1900, and beyond.
By early Youth, R.C. had become the kind of mean, ornery cuss his neighbors associated with years of Maturity. “Here comes old R.C., and don’t he look sour’d today.” ’Twas his Profession did it to him. As a young Surveyor, from the rude shocks attending his first boundary-dispute, he understood that he must exercise his Art among the most litigious people on Earth,— Pennsylvanians of all faiths, but most intensely the Presbyterians, hauling each other before Justices of the Peace, Sheriffs, Church Courts, Village Quidnuncs, anyone who’d listen, even pretend to, at an unbelievable clip, seeking recompense for ill treatment grand and petty. If he wish’d to pursue this line of Work, he would have to recognize the country-wide jostle of Polygons as a form of madness, by which, if he kept to a Fiduciary Edge of Right Procedure, he might profit, whilst retaining his Sanity. He infuriated the more bookish surveyors with his Approach, which includ’d avoiding Paper-work, walking the Terrain, and making noninstrumental guesses. “Looks about eighty-eight-thirty to me. Here,—” Eyes shut, Arms straight out to his sides, then swept together till the fingertips touch’d, Eyes open,— “That’s it.”
“How so?”
“By Eye,” he twinkl’d sourly. “Most of these out here ’round the Wedge, ye can do by Eye,” pronouncing it “Bah-ahy.” By the time he turn’d his hand to the Problem of the Tangent Line, it seem’d but an accustom’d Madness, in a different form,— the geometrick Whimsicality of Kings, this time, and Kings-to-be.
In the months, and then the years, after he swallows the Watch, as the days of ceaseless pulsation pass one by one, R.C. learns that a small volume within him is, and shall be, immortal. His wife moves to another Bed, and soon into another room altogether, after persuading him first to build it onto the House. “Snoring’s one thing, R.C., I can always do something about that,” brandishing her Elbow, “— but that Ticking . . .”
“Kept me awake, too, at first, Phœbe,— but now, it rocks me to sleep.”
“Best Wishes, R.C.”
“Oh, suit yourself.” R.C. can act as sentimental as the next young Husband, but his public Rôles require him to be distant and disagreeable. Besides, since he swallow’d the Watch, she’s been noticeably less merry with him, as if cautious in its presence.
“Do you imagine it cares what we’re doing out here, in the world outside? Say, Phœb, do be a Peach and come— ”
“But R.C., it might be— ”
“What?” his voice beginning to pitch higher. “Listening?”
“Taking it all down, somehow.”
“You’re the girl I married, damme ’f you’re not.” He knows she never quite sees what this means, and being none too sure himself, he never offers to explain it.
“ ’Tis a national Treasure,” declares Mr. Shippen,—” and whoever may first remove it from its present location, shall enter most briskly upon the Stage of World Business, there, will-he nill-he, to play his part.— All at the price of your own Life, R.C., of course, Chirurgickal Extraction and all, but,— tha
t’s Business, as they say in Philadelphia.”
“I’ll chuck it up, why don’t I do that?” putting his finger down his Throat.
“Oh, may we watch?” cry the Children.
“Never say ‘Watch’ to your Father,” advises Mrs. R.C.
“Ahhrrhh!” the Finger comes out bleeding. “Something bit me!”
“Likely trying to protect its Territory,” his eldest Son assures him.
“How could it bite me? ’tis in my Stomach. ’Tis a Watch.”
“Alter its shape, maybe? Who knows what’s happening to it in there?”
“Where all is a-drip, disgusting and mushy with chew’d-up food,— ”
“And acid and bile and it smells ever of Vomit,— ”
“Eeeooo!”
“Enjoy yourselves, children, even at the expense of your poor suff’ring old Father if you’re that desperate for merriment, no matter, go, mock, too soon will equal Inconvenience befall ye, ev’ry one, ’tis Life.”
“We’ll not go swallowing Watches, thankee.”
“Not if you want to sneak up on an Indian someday, you won’t.”
“Hadn’t plann’d on it, Pa.”
“Figures he’ll cash in on Longitude, instead he eats the Chronometer, some zany Dreamer I married.”
Of course Dixon has to tell Emerson. For weeks after the Express has curvetted away, he mopes about, as gloomy as anyone’s ever seen him. “I was suppos’d to look after it . . . ?”
“You wish’d release from your Promise,” Mason reminds him. “Think of R.C. as Force Majeure.”
The Letter, in reply, proves to be from Mrs. Emerson. “When he receiv’d your News, Mr. Emerson was quite transform’d, and whooping with high amusement, attempted whilst in his Workroom to dance a sort of Jig, by error stepping upon a wheel’d Apparatus that was there, the result being that he has taken to his Bed, where, inches from my Quill, he nevertheless wishes me to say, ‘Felicitations, Fool, for it hath work’d to Perfection.’
Mason & Dixon Page 36