The Syme Papers

by Benjamin Markovits

  At ten o’clock, the two entered, Sam’s anger was spent, and he sat down quietly as if abashed by his former violence – his eyes seemed thick but with that curiously sleepy look of a victor. ‘I would like to call to order a council of war,’ Tom began, in a dry voice, as if pressed to a reluctant duty. Nevertheless, my heart thrilled at being included in the debate. ‘Phidy, I have a question to put to you, that may touch somewhat near the bone. I am sorry if it does, but this cannot be helped.’

  ‘There is a time for tender feelings later,’ I answered proudly. ‘Do not consider it.’

  “Thank you, Phidy, I am glad. You can guess your father’s situation better than we. Is there any chance he will recover his influence soon and restore our funds?’

  ‘As to his influence, I cannot answer for it. But he would not have written unless he had done all in his power to maintain our grant. Only when he had failed finally in that respect would he have informed me of it.’

  The plates and glasses of our meal lay unwashed on the table. We had shifted our seats since supper. Sam and I sat by the fire, I on tip-toes with my hands on my knees, Sam slumped in his chair, leaning back and resting it against the arch of the hearth, as if the heat had gone out of his blood and he needed the warm blaze beside him. Tom took up the leftovers of my glass of red wine and drained them.

  ‘Well then,’ Tom continued, ‘our choices lie at hand. The simplest and easiest is to admit defeat; and perhaps this is also for the best. I have no doubt that Sam’s father would employ him in his school. The editor of my old paper, Mr McClanaghan, has assured me that I can return to my former job when I wish. You, Phidy, have a father who needs you. And have perhaps the most pressing and particular reasons for – desisting.’

  There was a short silence and I suddenly had the sense of some fate in the making. Most decisions, like fields of grass, grow over time and circumstance, but others have a clean birth, and we have a hand in their first breath. I was filled with the delight of a surgeon peering in at the processes of life, and I was very near to giggling with simple joy at the world around us and the power we have to alter it. Yet my stake in that world had just been withdrawn. My father had summoned me; my mission was over; and my service (or rather, for I must be honest, my father’s) to that small band had died at its source.

  ‘I would be sorry to have come all this way to watch over the death of a great scientific revolution,’ I answered at last, with a spice of irony I could not measure myself.

  ‘Just as I told you, Tom,’ Sam said in reviving good humour with his eyes shut. ‘A true – geognosist – could not abandon – such a chase – such a prize.’

  ‘Well, as for that,’ Tom began, peevishly, ‘he has had little chase in him, these past months, and less geognosy; but let it go. As for the prize, we shall see. Of course, our second road’, Tom related, ‘is the steep and thorny way to Heaven, but may be just passable – with good legs.’ And he gave me a sharp look, then paused to settle his ideas. After a deep breath, he began again, staring at the fire, and listed his thoughts in a bored way, an argument over-rehearsed; but he gradually warmed to his theme, in spite of himself, and his voice rang a little (with some sadness, it should be said) by the end. ‘We need money and we need an audience, and both can be won through a – magazine. Here is the plan. We start a publication to broadcast … our discoveries to the world, and collect a handful of silver in our way. I have talked to McClanaghan of this before now, and he may grant us the loan of one of his presses, for a sum, of course. If we want it to float, though, we need subscribers. A thousand at least, at three cents an issue. We want names, and the only way to get them is to beg for them, on foot, town by town and even door by door. This is not for the faint of heart – or limb. We are beggars truly and will very soon be homeless when this place is sold to set us up and on our way. We could call the magazine “The New Platonist”, or something in that line; a weekly paper covering the science of the times. Your new researches will be delayed, Sam – but there is no help for that. This is a chance to play a hand in public affairs. More than that, it is a chance for fame.’

  The last word struck an odd note in my ear and echoed in my thoughts. I had wondered before what drew Tom to Sam’s mad enterprise, but should never have guessed the answer was ‘fame’. Tom had seemed curiously free of ambitions, happy to suspend his own in a greater cause – and yet … But I had lost the thread, and shelved these suppositions to chase down the rest of his speech: they were to begin at once, with as full a purse as they could muster; settle with a steamship company which had long sought a purchase on this reach of the Potomac, and hoped to restore the house to its former uses; then shift to Baltimore and Sams father before they set off. Tom needed a week or two to arrange their affairs, plan their engagements and lodgings and so forth. As he spoke, I began to wonder for the first time whether they included me in these arrangements. Until Sam broke in at last, and enquired, hooding his eyes in a bemused fashion, ‘Will you join us, Phidy?’

  Tom glanced up at Sam and bit his finger. I said nothing, while the fire flapped against the hearth, and Sam shut his eyes altogether as if in sleep. I wondered what prompted them to ask me. Torn, I could tell, hoped I would decline, shifted in his seat, crossed and uncrossed his legs, and frowned, in his peculiar way, till little wrinkles ran across his high brow like the ripples of a sandbar. He wanted Sam to himself again, which means it must have been Sam who wanted me. I blushed, bursting to break the silence, not daring to answer.

  Perhaps, I reasoned to cool my blood, Sam felt in some way more broadly countenanced by my presence, seeing I’d come straight from the horse’s mouth (in a manner of speaking), from Werner himself, the founder of geognosy, regarded even at that late date as one of the leading lights in our field. I mattered to him precisely because I was a scientist, and had not dismissed him at once, out of hand – because I had remained so long at his side – because, while I looked on, he could say to himself that he practised his science not in utter but merely relative obscurity – and there is great consolation, believe me, in the difference. Perhaps …

  ‘We have agreed, Sam,’ Tom broke in at last, through pinched lips that suppressed a something like delight, ‘that – Dr Müller – should not accompany us, without he knows the full … state of our affairs, I think they call it, when there is something unpleasant to reveal.’

  ‘Well, Tom,’ Sam said, waking up and sighing, ‘you made that bed; but regardless, I suppose I must lie in it. Come on, Phidy; I have something to show you.’

  And with that he settled in his chair (to a loud bump) and stood up, rubbing his hands against his warm trousers. Tom never stirred, smiling in a thin way, as if his lips had stuck and he could not open them wider. ‘Put your coat on, Phidy,’ Sam said. ‘I suspect we’ll both be a little cold, before we’re – satisfied.’ He lifted a burning twig from the fire, and with it lit the wick of the lantern that hung from a hook above the hearth. The swelling glow caught at once and cast a strange shadow of Sam against the wall, all angles and quavering gestures of mysterious intent. Then we tramped outside.

  The night was cold and full of stars, a windy spring evening that blew the last of the winter from the north. Away from the house and the river stood a small barn, which I had supposed gave shelter to such implements as had fallen into disuse with the surrounding fields: ploughs and hooks and harnesses that had come with the place, and not been touched. I had never seen Tom or Sam go in it, though I heard once a great banging late at night, had supposed Sam could not sleep, and had crept outside so as not to wake us, while he tinkered with the flu’ or constructed some other intricate device for the creation of the world. I suppose it argues a certain want of curiosity in me, that I had dwelt so long in that house and never looked in. There was a great deal more, of course, that I had never explored – cupboards and closets no one touched, passages that seemed to lead nowhere, and darkened windows observed from without that gave on to rooms I could not quite place within.
We dwelt after all in a grand old river-inn, far more extensive than anything we could require. And I had in point of fact given the barn-gate a rattle once, only to discover that, though hanging loose on rusted hinges, it was demonstrably locked, without a key in sight. You may have guessed before now that I am not the sort of gentleman to trouble himself greatly over locked doors, shying as I do even from the open kind.

  Sam bade me hold the lantern, and lifted a large brawn key from his pocket. After a short struggle we heard the click, and the key turned; but I had to set down the lantern in the grass and bear a hand in lifting the loose door above the mud that had swelled around it through the long winter before we could push it, scraping and squeaking, swinging wide and inwards. A thick smell of rot and dust filled our nostrils. Then Sam took up the lantern himself again and stepped in.

  A thousand shadows danced away at once, flickering across the high walls of the barn and losing themselves in the dark corners above the roof-beams. The first thing I noted upon entering was a pile of coal at my feet – a great black heap that spilled a few hard nuggets over the packed earth and sat in a drift of its own soft sable dust. Behind it, rusting slightly, in a dozen pieces and accumulations of pieces, resting awry at every angle, lay what appeared to me like nothing so much as one of those wrecks the imagination leaves behind when the tide of sleep draws out again in the morning. A kind of stove lay at the heart of it, drawn no doubt from some early steam-engine, and choked on the ash of an old coal fire. From this a series of pistons and levers and gears and wheels extended, like a hydra’s tentacles from the central head, sprawled across the packed earth of the barn floor and gleaming, here and there, at the joints when the lamplight fell upon them. The most substantial of these limbs terminated in what can best be described as an enormous claw, a seven-pronged shovel whose fingers curved inward and dug, even now, into the dust. This hand (to pursue the analogy) had been entirely severed from the body of the mechanical beast, as if some valiant St George had cut it away in slaying the rusting monster; but it seemed to have maintained a life of its own, and I half-expected it, at any moment, to revive itself, and, with a will of its own, begin to dig. The whole contraption conveyed at once the contradictory impressions of great violence and miserable decay. I felt somehow as if I had stumbled upon a former field of battle, which by its very stillness evoked some measure of the storm that had led to such a calm. At the same time the fantastical device smacked of a more intimate and solitary defeat, suggested in some indescribable fashion the mechanical workings of a most particular imagination, which had overreached itself and become entangled in its own proliferation.

  ‘The trouble, of course,’ said Sam, setting the lantern on the floor, ‘is that it cannot – swallow itself.’

  I had no answer to this; and so we stood there, in the thinning must of the old barn, while the shadows played upwards from the ground and seemed to engulf the ceiling in black flames. I felt strangely sick at heart, though in some respects my admiration, or rather the awe in which I held the gentleman beside me, had only increased. His future, however, or, to put it another way, the result of that experiment he had practised upon his life, seemed at the moment quite clear – and heartbreaking.

  ‘As for the double-compression piston,’ Sam continued, in a kind of apologetic and forlorn boastfulness, ‘that – section of the machine – there – running from the engine – and fed upon itself: it is, as they say, as good as – advertised. I have achieved – unheard-of compressions, equal to the force of forty atmospheres – and proved beyond doubt – the elasticity of water – by effecting a reduction in volume of thirty parts out of the thousand – many times greater than had been supposed possible by the natural philosophers.’

  I said nothing, looked at the wreck before me, and thought, Was it for this I had journeyed so far, to learn its principles, and apply them to that vein of bituminous coal in the princely gardens? Which piece of this extravagant dilapidation should I return with as evidence of Syme’s ingenuity? (Though in its way I could think of no more expressive emblem of his genius.) What shall I tell them when I arrive home? That I was deceived? Is there any hope for Sam, beyond such fantastical convolution and ruin? And yet, as I stood beside him in the sweetening chill of a spring evening, my reply to these questions grew only clearer.

  ‘The trouble, as I said,’ Sam repeated, lost in his own thoughts, ‘is that it cannot – swallow itself Observe the little – pit, as deep as a grave – dug in the corner of the barn. A moment’s work, I assure you, Phidy, what should have taken several men – an hour to perform. The trouble is that at a certain depth – six feet, in fact – the sweeping action of the spade – is starved by its own success. It scrapes the air. What we need’, he added, rousing himself, ‘is a more direct device – that bores a hole as straight as any plummet – and then, when it comes to an end, as all things must – swallows itself, and begins from – scratch at the new depth. I have not despaired,’ he said, his voice ringing shrill in the great barn, ‘I promise you that much at least. All of this’ – and he gestured widely with his arm, so the shadow raced around the wall – ‘is not so hopeless as it seems. We are only a step or a – thought – from triumph – or, rather, the next step and – the next thought.’

  Then he stooped and lifted the lantern again, and said, reaching a hand to my shoulder, ‘Come, Phidy – I believe you have seen enough.’

  Tom wore the same thin smile when we clattered in again; he had shifted his seat to the fire, and spent the time companionably, it seemed, prodding and stirring it to life. He looked up at our entrance, and stretched his lips perhaps, an eighth of an inch on each side, as far as they would go without parting. ‘Well?’ he said at last, as I hung my coat upon the hook. ‘What did you think? Or, rather, what do you think?’

  I did not reply, only knelt beside him in front of the fire, and rubbed my hands against the thick heat. Sam stood in the doorway still, neither in nor out, as if he had forgotten something, and could not turn to look for it till he remembered what. We could hear the river, flush with spring, surging past the bay window towards the south and east, into the Chesapeake and thence to the Atlantic, till it met, several thousand miles later, the Elbe again, which ran past my home.

  ‘Well, Phidy,’ Tom said again, over the crack of the flames. ‘Are you with us?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered, without looking up.

  *

  I suppose I should explain myself, but I must confess that I equally would like to hear a lucid account of my motives at this point. To be certain, my faith in Sam – not only in his ingenuity, but in his honesty, for I had come over the course of these months to persuade myself beyond doubt that at the least he was no charlatan – had taken a heavy blow; and perhaps, stunned and robbed of wind, I was too weak to turn from him then, in the same manner that a physical attack (and this felt not unlike) enervates the very faculties that should remove us from a second assault. Yes, this much is true – that my faith in Sam, thus enfeebled, sought strength and consolation in Sam – and I felt obscurely that I must abide by him now. There was also the consideration that my so doing would disappoint Tom, and insinuate me further between them. This thought perhaps played no small part in my decision to stay, though I could cast a kinder light on … myself, and argue that I unshed only to prove Tom’s vague suspicions of me false (which I signally failed to do) and justify Sam’s … interest in me. Then there was Mrs Syme’s confession – that she did not trust Tom Jenkyns – and her consequent delight in my association with her son. I thought of all these things.

  And, strange to tell, the wreck of the double-compression piston itself pointed my course forwards, forwards, to follow the road with Tom and Sam. Considered thus: without any prize to return with, I

  had no cause to return. That rusting creature, the mutilated iron hydra that seemed to have turned upon and slain itself, symbol of the extravagance and futility of Sam’s imagination (this above all impressed me in the barn, the fact that S
am’s profusion of thought and fancy resolved nothing and led nowhere and could never be untangled), charmed me, indeed, by the very hopelessness of Sam’s cause. It is sometimes easier to venture forth with a whole doubt than half a hope. And I believe that in my heart of hearts I had guessed already the upshot of all this … speculation.

  The fact that my father’s fortunes had clearly suffered some reversal; the fact that he called me to his side; the fact that my sister had fallen in with a fool; the fact that my country seemed to be running to ruination, that my once-loved Prince led the way – these likewise persuaded me to remain, for I had no stomach for such contemplations, have always been most particularly discomfited by the vicissitudes visited upon my home. So I tore up my father’s account of them, and dropped them in the grate, and watched them singe and flare and crackle and rise in ash and smoke – and then I turned, considerably relieved, expectant almost, to the world before me, and my second home, and my new companions.

  *

  I awoke in the morning and straightway wrote a letter to my father. I told him that I would come ‘soon, very soon, but not yet’. That I was too deep in the business before me to withdraw at this point, without a clearer reckoning of its possibilities. I told him to write at once, to a cousin of Tom, our only fixed station in the travels ahead. For the rest, I knew no more than himself what bed would hold me from night to night. I was too tired and dull at heart to hear or heed my own words as I wrote them, but the breath of love lay in them, as plain and good as the air that passes our lips despite our notice. I sat on my knees and composed this letter on top of my trunk in a grey, wet dawn that hung over the trees like linen.

  Such a bustle and fever I have never known. From that milky dawn through a grey afternoon and into a pale, dank evening that never quite fell to night, we worked. We dismantled our home on the river until a houseful of things had shrunk squarely into three large wooden boxes and two trunks, my own among them. Afterwards, Sam perched on top of one of the boxes with dirty hands and dusty knees and remarked in a rare flight of whimsy, It is like sitting on top of a year – a very small year.’