The Syme Papers

by Benjamin Markovits

  I do not think Sam slept; shadows from his guttering lamp played beneath his door as I returned, drunker and unhappier still, to my own bed at last.

  *

  A coach was ready in the morning, the horses steaming in the brisk dawn air, and I had only to stumble out of bed into a travelling sleep. A cold ache and a crooked neck awoke me at lunchtime. Then the coach rambled south through the soft afternoon, making the only stir in that windless perfect blue air. We spent the night with Cousin James – arriving in the thick, crackling evening, too sleepy to talk, or do anything but swallow crusts of old bread with fresh milk still warm from the long sun; leaving in the drenched morning, too sleepy to talk. James stood in the middle of the empty Main Street, neither waving nor moving till we were out of sight.

  The bright lake opened through a gap in the trees and vanished again, as the coach rumbled on. Sam brought his right hand to his snuffling nose and drew Tom to him with his left. ‘I heard your protestations, remember that‚’ he said kindly. ‘Do not think yourself ill-used – or ill-loved – simply because I abuse my own prospects. There is nothing more you can do for me – that’s what grieves you. And that you seemed to plead the more heartless cause. No one doubts your good heart. If I no longer need your good offices – it is not they that failed me – but I who failed them. We give ourselves to Ideas – as if they were not ours – and we serve them and sacrifice others to them – as we would be ashamed to do in our own cause. I have done as much for you. I would not add my mother (or my father even, rot him) to the list of my neglect. Not though I have Truth on my side – never doubt that, either. Never doubt it, Tom. But we haven’t such right to it as we pretend.’

  He drew Tom’s head beneath his own and kissed his hair. His own face was still thick and gentle with tears, and I have never seen such a tender paw for comfort as his hand. Tom said nothing, though I saw later that he wept. O comfort me, I thought. Sweet Sam, smelling of shaved wood and misery, comfort Phidy in your round arms. But he straightened again in the coach, snuffed his nose with a blue handkerchief and said, ‘If I talk fooleries, I am not myself now. ‘Tis only pomp that holds me up.’

  Days can be slow work. But my mind slipped its moorings and floated easy and unmoving over the passing hours like an idle boat letting the waves run beneath it. A night passed, and then a morning, and still we scarcely spoke with our heavy-desired home-coming. I feared an end, for my father called me home as Sam’s had done. I could see no cause to keep me. Sam’s ambition had dried up, our coffers were empty, and our company rode towards disbandment. I had no choice but to sail … have I not said home already, and can I in the space of a few lines use the word for so distant and different a destination? We did not ask what was to become of Sam.

  At length the low hills of Baltimore came into sight, and in their uninterested shadow we reached the town. Our long-hated, travelling, unchanging, cramped abode grew suddenly dear to us. What strange reluctance we felt to leave those indifferent quarters. For how many times on the long road had we thought of a quiet, unmoving day, with the freedom to walk ten paces to the left if we chose in the morning? We did not want it now it came, and sat in the still carriage while the horses sweated in harness. ‘A word before we go,’ Tom said. He looked at Sam and then at me and descended for once from his high perch. ‘Kitty and I are going to be married. She has accepted me.’ He held up a letter from the same pile that brought Sam’s darker news. ‘As this business seems finished, I may return to the Southern Courier in the fall.’

  Then the driver cried, ‘Get off with you, lads, the horses need tending.’ Our long, companionable, silent journey was broken up. We stretched our stiff knees and propped our hands beneath our backsides and yawned.

  ‘I am pleased for you, Tom‚’ Sam said gallantly. ‘She is a sweet bun.’

  *

  Edward greeted us in tears. He embraced Sam long and silently, but even in his son’s arms peered across his shoulder and saw company. He was led astray by his charm as a child is led by the ear. ‘I am sorry to intrude a private grief on your welcome,’ he said, stretching his arm from Sam’s clasp and taking Tom by the hand. ‘But I have only one son.’ He smiled sweetly, but I should have preferred a ruder, warmer greeting.

  They were slow weeks that followed. Though we were often idle that summer, it had been an ever-shifting idleness, of travel or talk, company or scenery. Suddenly there was nothing to do. I stayed with Sam in Baltimore for a time, at a loose end. Tom left for Pactaw to see Kitty and arrange his affairs with the Southern Courier. Our enterprise had spent its force. I do not know how much I was to blame, if blame can be assigned to a shift in intimacies. I believe it can. At least I had done myself little good. I had no employment, no home, no purpose.

  Yet I was reluctant to leave. Home was a changed prospect to me now. My thoughts of Neuburg had grown weak indeed. Only a duty called me back. A grave duty, true, towards a much-loved, worthy father, imprisoned in the Prince’s wine cellar, awaiting trial. But I was young, and Sam was a much-loved, worthy friend, in equal need. He stood at hand, in plain colours, in full form and flesh. He did not call to me from those thin bones, dressed in niggardly black ink, lying in that bare graveyard of the page, rattling, ‘Come.’ So I trailed the coats of Sam’s grief and found in it a most welcome misery.

  I have always been drawn to the first flush of grief, like the fall of a storm. That great ranting and breaking calleth to me. Look, look, I cry, like a child at lightning. The sudden landscape of night is illuminated and dark things like love and misery grow clear as day, but without the bustle of activity that hides them then. Grief calls to me. But I have never been able to abide its duration. I have no ship for those seas, only a skiff that seeks the harbour after the first great wind. Heavy fortune, like a heavy sky, soon palls unless it lightens and flickers.

  Sam’s own misery grew hard to watch. He moved meekly about the house in his father’s shadow. For the first weeks, at least, even his temper deserted him. We awoke late most mornings and sat long over breakfast. Then Sam and I took it in turns to bring the day another hour or so along. We visited the church where Anne was buried, and forgot the flowers Sam wished to strew on her grave. So we sought out some wild bunch, a good hour spent among the woods. Even as we laid those plucked stems down, brittle against her gravestone, in spite of his true grief the thought rose up, What shall we do next? Sam had no answer.

  A week passed and another. Edward was chastened by Anne’s death. But he had not the stomach for hard grief and ate only the sweets of it. Sam bent under the load. He wished to spend more and more time alone. He slept much of the day and read much of the night, perched in the consoling hollow of a lamp’s light, bright as a star in the general darkness. Yet he was gentler in company than before, with a sweet tongue and a listening ear. In the first flush of humility, he grew attentive, if not loving, to his father. Edward had seen Anne die, and he was rich in circumstances, like a soldier on St Crispin’s Day. At first, Sam urged me to his company, as an excuse perhaps for his solitary grief. ‘Make a note of him‚’ he said, knowing I kept a journal. ‘He is worth the study.’

  School had not yet returned to session, and Edward and I spent much of our days together. At first we talked of Sam, but he led us, even in absence, to a broader intimacy. Edward had an attentive nature and asked after my travels and plans, with a curiosity that was beneath his son. We explored Baltimore together, and Edward showed me its humble beauties – poky cobbled side-streets, running betwixt sweet red brick – with a mixed pride. ‘A country of barbarians,’ he said, ‘in a palace of Nature.’ We walked around the harbour, climbed the low hill on which MacPherson stood his ground in 1812, swept our eyes along the throat of the Chesapeake, stretching forth towards the Atlantic; visited the Indian ruins near by. Then he took me to his school, a white-boarded house with three rooms. I sat on one of the tiny stools in his classroom, dusty with summer, and looked out, feeling like a boy again, wondering at and waiting for the w
orld. Trees waved and scratched a blue sky.

  When sorrows come they come not single spies, but brothers. If I spent so much of my time in Edward’s company, my fears for my own father may have led me to look kindly on Sam’s. The trial was fixed for the new year – Prussian agents wished to track the flood of revolution to its source, before determining my father’s fate. They would not credit the fountainhead poured from a smoky basement in Fischersallee, where an old bureaucrat entertained such students and soldiers who liked to talk fantasies and prophecies in their cups. The time for decision was at hand. My official purpose in America had been over since the spring. The burst of activity that followed through the summer had also finished. I would have to go.

  I planned to sail as soon as Tom married, a final celebration to send me to my old life again. ‘You may have Bubbles’ room in the meantime‚’ Edward said.

  ‘It may be as long as two months.’

  ‘All the better. I need footsteps in the house, you see.’

  I grew close to Edward then, as Sam had wished. He was a charming man, attentive to all guests. And I was a gentleman from the Old World, the ‘little minister’, with an accent and occupation that ennobled me in the eyes of an outcast Englishman.

  The home I dwelt in had changed greatly since my first visit. Edward had the run of it now and hired a cook, Mary Quinn, a big, young girl with plain tastes. She loved a clean house and often chased Edward’s dusty shoes from the kitchen. ‘Peace, Mary‚’ he cried, fleeing her dust-pan and laughing. ‘I will not endure it. I hide in fear in my own house and tiptoe through the very door.’ She was an indifferent cook, who burned the meat and left potatoes hard as apples in the pot. But she had a gift for cakes, and Edward loved her company, though she was a big-boned lady, as Anne had been. Bubbles took to her at once, and the two often spent the afternoon baking and sweating themselves into a state. Plum-cakes and custard-tarts and cherry-pies, sprinkled with cinnamon, were forged in that great furnace of a kitchen, and emerged bright with juice and steaming for our tea.

  Sam could not abide her. He had changed. His mourning entered a new season, and he found his temper. Edward took the brunt of it, after his brief grace. ‘I will not stay to hear you giggling with Mary, a week after Mother was put in the ground. We did not have cakes when she could eat them.’

  ‘She did not make them, Sam‚’ Edward cried.

  ‘Two months have passed, Sam,’ I added. ‘We cannot live in a church.’ Perhaps I should have kept my tongue.

  ‘He would not call a doctor till the end, Phidy. Bubbles told me. Even then, he wished to bring the apothecary’s son, fussing with some nonsense of a root called pipsissiway, till she stopped him. “He’s a clever lad,” he said, “who studies hard. We are not such who can afford to be bled for the head-ache.” Though all the while he thinks himself the King of England, I suppose, with his air and his education and damned refinements in this “barbarous” land. Have you not marked, Phidy, that his speech grows daintier with each passing day as he hears you speak it …’ I turned my head in shame. Edward could not see for tears. Great fearless Mary hid her face in her apron. Sam was the only one she heeded. Even she looked bright when the ‘young master’ came into the room, if he did not glare at her.

  I turned from him a little in those weeks, when perhaps he needed my companionship the most. But he abused it when he had it. Perhaps he desired my loyalty to run so deep that it would not split nor turn aside, break and chafe it as he would. I do not think I owed him that debt. He wished to have things sure ‘despite all considerations’. He was suspicious of Edward now and desired me to ‘be wary of him’, with an eye long practised in its jealousy. He all but desired me to avoid him. Then he did desire it. I would not. ‘Despite all considerations’ he wished us to love him, considerations such as his kindness or the virtue of his enterprise or his deserts. He had no right to it.

  After the first few weeks, Sam spent more and more time in Pactaw, visiting Tom and Mrs Simmons. To my surprise, I did not wish to join them. I was happy in Baltimore and had no part in their lovers’ lives. I had grown tired of the company of young men, too, was glad to return to a fixed home and ordinary prospects. ‘Will you come for once?’ Sam said, when the first north wind blew upon us in October. ‘Tom misses you sorely, he says, fears some coldness lies between you.’

  ‘I have no business there, Sam.’

  ‘You have none here‚’ he said, smiling, and smiles were rare between us then.

  ‘I am a cuckoo in your nest. Your father grows lonely without you.’

  ‘I will answer to my own father, Phidy, as you may to yours. I did not think you would forget my wishes so soon.’

  ‘Sam, you thrust us together. “Make a note of him” you said, “if you love me. He holds a key to my heart, and you may peer in the hole.”’

  ‘He has lost it, Phidy. Come once with me‚’ he said, in a gentler tone, ‘bring all the old band together. Tom is to be married soon.’

  No, I said again, for I could be as stubborn as Sam. I could not fathom my awn reluctance, but my blood was up and I would not give in. This was my first betrayal of Sam. A small one, but just of the kind that rankles: that I gave his father so much of my time and talk.

  Much of the time I spent reading, alone, and slept in the shortening afternoons. I finished Waverley at last, one crisp evening, then stared at the growing dark. A single bell tolled. Edward stood always on the balls of his feet, and so he entered now, lightly, with something under his arm. He flung his coat beside me on the settee, then perched on the piano stool with his back to the keys. I had to turn my head to look at him, but he was gone again. ‘A moment, sir‚’ he cried and left for the kitchen. ‘Aren’t they lovely,’ I heard Mary say, then someone clattered outdoors and the creak and clang of the pump began. What could he be about, I wondered?

  He came in slowly now, with a brown jug held between his hands from which flowers bloomed. Two roses and a sprig of white buds scattered like stars around their heavier planets. ‘I filled it too high‚’ he said. ‘It is a task for the girls, d’you see, but they must have their drink.’ I saw the source of Sam’s impracticality, whose deficiencies Tom had worked so hard to supply. The water trembled at the jug’s rim and he set it down on the polished top of the piano. He quickly saw his error and took a sheaf of songs from the stand and now set the jug upon it. The water lipped over and darkened a patch of music. I laughed and rose to help him, stooped and drank quickly from the jug, to both our surprise, then lifted it slowly and left. ‘He is a child‚’ Mary said when she saw me. I poured half out of the kitchen window, then returned and set it on a newspaper. I joined Edward on the settee.

  ‘I bought the vase over lunch‚’ he said. ‘Gypsies came round the school with bits and bobs for the children and I took this for myself. Anne liked flowers, you see. I set young Timothy to pick some for me after school. He sleeps, poor dim child, and does not attend, but it is cruel to punish him sorely. The other boys don’t take to it either, though you would not credit it. He is their pet, poor lamb, but he won’t learn; nor can he, I fear. Still, we can make his school days gentle. They are lovely, no?’

  Anne had died just over two months earlier. He mourned her still, but with a light heart. His was a pretty grief. ‘Anne liked pretty things, and flowers, roses especially, and the piano. So there we have them all together for her sake.’

  ‘Sam cannot take it so lightly, sir. I fear for him. He does not attend to me, which I don’t take amiss at such a time. But he neglects himself and that grieves me. He needs some occupation, or purpose at least, something beyond mourning.’ We are never proud of the tone we take with our elders, but my worries were real enough.

  ‘Has he not these theories he attends to? Don’t that occupy him? I recall he made much of certain calculations concerning masses and orbits and so on, though they don’t signify to me. Sam is cleverer than his father, Phidy, I’m afraid. But won’t they serve?’

  ‘Has he n
ot said? He broke off his last engagement to return home, as much for you, I think, as Anne. Besides, he was in no state to continue. I could not say what he plans now. All that seems to be over, though he gave so much of himself to the cause, that’s so.’

  ‘What do you consider he should do, Phidy? What do you make of these theories?’

  Before I could reply, Edward broke in, and on hearing him my answer swiftly changed. ‘It has always seemed to me’, he said, ‘a madcap business. Hollows and spheres and gases, conjured out of … He’s a bright boy, Phidy, but a strange one. Scarce another man thinks as he does. There is something else, too.’ He paused to consider.

  ‘Were I to tell a story, I should put more faces in it. Were I to explain what goes on below, like a myth, I should have people in it for a start and maybe caves. All these implosions and numbers and rotations seem dry to me. They smell of the abacus and the lecture hall and great big dusty geometrical tomes with cracked spines. One needs one’s spectacles to see them.’ He was joking partly, but he meant it, too. ‘I should have a bit of colour down there. Goblins and spooks and little dancing creatures. Fires and smells, you understand. Great stony monsters beating away with great hammers, and sparks all ahoo, and a dreadful noise. And sinners repenting their sins, or being boiled to pieces. And lots of shadows. Creatures with huge hands and tiny faces, girls with deep voices. Men and women confused and monsters with two heads. And dainty things, like tea and tables, stretched and pinched as if you saw them in a spoon. A horror of a place, to be sure. But with some life in it, a few faces. I could not give myself to all those numbers without a few shapes I knew what to make of. Though I dare say I’m talking hocus-pocus and my son all the time a perfect Newton. Still, I shouldn’t have spent so much time on it without faces.’