Quicksilver (17 page)

Wilkins was nodding impatiently. “The capsulate herbs, not campanulate, and the bacciferous sempervirent shrubs,” he said. “Somehow it must have gotten mixed up with the glandiferous and the nuciferous trees.”

“So, the Philosophical Language is some sort of botanical—”

“Look at me, I’m shuddering. Shuddering at the
thought.
Botany! Please, Daniel, try to collect your wits. In this stack we have all of the animals, from the belly-worm to the tyger. Here, the terms of Euclidean geometry, relating to time, space, and juxtaposition. There, a classification of diseases: pustules, boils, wens, and scabs on up to splenetic hypochondriacal vapours, iliac passion, and suffocation.”

“Is suffocation a disease?”

“Excellent question—get to work and answer it!” Wilkins thundered.

Daniel, meanwhile, had rescued another sheet from the floor: “Yard, Johnson, dick…”

“Synonyms for ‘penis,’” Wilkins said impatiently.

“Rogue, mendicant, shake-rag…”

“Synonyms for ‘beggar.’ In the Philosophical Language there will only be one word for penises, one for beggars. Quick, Daniel, is there a distinction between groaning and grumbling?”

“I should say so, but—”

“On the other hand—may we lump genuflection together with curtseying, and give them one name?”

“I—I cannot say, Doctor!”

“Then, I say, there is work to be done! At the moment, I am bogged down in an
endless
digression on the Ark.”

“Of the Covenant? Or—”

“The other one.”

“How does that enter into the Philosophical Language?”

“Obviously the P.L. must contain one and only one word for every type of animal. Each animal’s word must reflect its classification—that is, the words for
perch
and
bream
should be noticeably similar, as should the words for
robin
and
thrush.
But bird-words should be quite different from fish-words.”

“It strikes me as, er,
ambitious…
”

“Half of Oxford is sending me tedious lists. My—
our
—task is to organize them—to draw up a table of every type of bird and beast in the world. I have entabulated the animals troublesome to other animals—the louse, the flea. Those designed for further
transmutation—the caterpillar, the maggot. One-horned sheathed winged insects. Testaceous turbinated exanguious animals—and before you ask, I have subdivided them into those with, and without, spiral convolutions. Squamous river fish, phytivorous birds of long wings, rapacious beasts of the cat-kind—anyway, as I drew up all of these lists and tables, it occurred to me that (going back to Genesis, sixth chapter, verses fifteen through twenty-two) Noah must have found a way to fit all of these creatures into one gopher-wood tub three hundred cubits long! I became concerned that certain
Continental
savants, of an
atheistical
bent, might
misuse
my list to suggest that the events related in Genesis could not have happened—”

“One could also imagine certain Jesuits turning it against you—holding it up as proof that you harbored atheistical notions of your own, Dr. Wilkins.”

“Just so! Daniel! Which makes it imperative that I include, in a separate chapter, a complete plan of Noah’s Ark—demonstrating not only where each of the beasts was berthed, but also the fodder for the herbivorous beasts, and live cattle for the carnivorous ones, and
more
fodder yet to keep the cattle alive, long enough to be eaten by the carnivores—where, I say, ’twas all stowed.”

“Fresh water must have been wanted, too,” Daniel reflected.

Wilkins—who tended to draw closer and closer to people when he was talking to them, until they had to edge backwards—grabbed a sheaf of paper off a stack and bopped Daniel on the head with it. “Tend to your Bible, foolish young man! It rained the entire time!”

“Of course, of course—they could’ve drunk rainwater,” Daniel said, profoundly mortified.

“I have had to take some liberties with the definition of ‘cubit,’” Wilkins said, as if betraying a secret, “but I think he could have done it with eighteen hundred and twenty-five sheep. To feed the carnivores, I mean.”

“The sheep must’ve taken up a whole deck!?”

“It’s not the space they take up, it’s all the manure, and the labor of throwing it overboard,” Wilkins said. “At any rate—as you can well imagine—this Ark business has stopped all progress cold on the P.L. front. I need you to get on with the Terms of Abuse.”

“Sir!”

“Have you felt, Daniel, a certain annoyance, when one of your semi-educated Londoners speaks of ‘a vile rascal’ or ‘a miserable caitiff’ or ‘crafty knave,’ ‘idle truant,’ or ‘flattering parasite’?”

“Depends upon who is calling whom what…”

“No, no, no! Let’s try an easy one: ‘fornicating whore.’ ”

“It is redundant. Hence, annoying to the cultivated listener.”

“‘Senseless fop.’ ”

“Again, redundant—as are ‘flattering parasite’ and the others.”

“So, clearly, in the Philosophical Language, we needn’t have separate adjectives and nouns in such cases.”

“How about ’filthy sloven?”

“Excellent! Write it down, Daniel!”

“‘Licentious blade’…‘facetious wag’…‘perfidious traitor’…” As Daniel continued in this vein, Wilkins bustled over to the writing-desk, withdrew a quill from an inkwell, shook off redundant ink, and then came over to Daniel; wrapped his fingers around the pen; and guided him over to the desk.

And so to work. Daniel exhausted the Terms of Abuse in a few short hours, then moved on to Virtues (intellectual, moral, and homiletical), Colors, Sounds, Tastes and Smells, Professions, Operations (viz. carpentry, sewing, alchemy), and so on. Days began passing. Wilkins became fretful if Daniel, or anyone, worked too hard, and so there were frequent “seminars” and “symposia” in the kitchen—they used honey from Christopher Wren’s Gothic apiary to make flip. Frequently Charles Comstock, the fifteen-year-old son of their noble host, came to visit, and to hear Wilkins or Hooke talk. Charles tended to bring with him letters addressed to the Royal Society from Huygens, Leeuwenhoek, Swammerdam, Spinoza. Frequently these turned out to contain new concepts that Daniel had to fit into the Philosophical Language’s tables.

Daniel was hard at work compiling a list of all the things in the world that a person could own (aquæducts, axle-trees, palaces, hinges) when Wilkins called him down urgently. Daniel came down to find the Rev. holding a grand-looking Letter, and Charles Comstock clearing the decks for action: rolling up large diagrams of the Ark, and feeding-schedules for the eighteen hundred and twenty-five sheep, and stowing them out of the way to make room for more important affairs. Charles II, by the Grace of God of England King, had sent them this letter: His Majesty had noticed that ant eggs were bigger than ants, and demanded to know how
that
was possible.

Daniel ran out and sacked an ant-nest. He returned in triumph carrying the nucleus of an anthill on the flat of a shovel. In the front room Wilkins had begun dictating, and Charles Comstock scribbling, a letter back to the King—not the substantive part (as they didn’t have an answer yet), but the lengthy paragraphs of apologies and profuse flattery that had to open it: “With your brilliance you illuminate the places that have long, er, languished in, er—”

“Sounds more like a Sun King allusion, Reverend,” Charles warned him.

“Strike it, then! Sharp lad. Read the entire mess back to me.”

Daniel slowed before the door to Hooke’s laboratory, gathering his courage to knock. But Hooke had heard him approaching, and opened it for him. With an outstretched hand he beckoned Daniel in, and aimed him at a profoundly stained table, cleared for action. Daniel entered the room, upended the ant-nest, set the shovel down, and only then worked up the courage to inhale. Hooke’s laboratory didn’t smell as bad as he’d always assumed it would.

Hooke ran his hands back through his hair, pulling it away from his face, and tied it back behind his neck with a wisp of twine. Daniel was perpetually surprised that Hooke was only ten years older than he. Hooke just turned thirty a few weeks ago, in June, at about the same time that Daniel and Isaac had fled plaguey Cambridge for their respective homes.

Hooke was now staring at the mound of living dirt on his table-top. His eyes were always focused on a narrow target, as if he peered out at the world through a hollow reed. When he was out in the broad world, or even in the house’s front room, that seemed strange, but it made sense when he was looking at a small world on a tabletop—ants scurrying this way and that, carrying egg-cases out of the wreckage, establishing a defensive perimeter. Daniel stood opposite and
looked at,
but apparently did not
see,
the same things.

Within a few minutes Daniel had seen most of what he was going to see among the ants, within five minutes he was bored, within ten he had given up all pretenses and begun wandering round Hooke’s laboratory, looking at the remnants of everything that had passed beneath the microscope: shards of porous stone, bits of moldy shoe-leather, a small glass jar labelled
WILKINS URINE,
splinters of petrified wood, countless tiny envelopes of seeds, insects in jars, scraps of various fabrics, tiny pots labelled
SNAILS TEETH
and
VIPERS FANGS.
Shoved back into a corner, a heap of dusty, rusty sharp things: knife-blades, needles, razors. There was probably a cruel witticism to be made here: given a razor, Hooke would sooner put it under his microscope than shave with it.

As the wait went on, and on, and on, Daniel decided that he might as well be improving himself. So with care he reached into the sharp-things pile, drew out a needle, and carried it over to a table where sun was pouring in (Hooke had grabbed all of the south-facing rooms in the cottage, to own the light). There, mounted to a little stand, was a tube, about the dimensions of a piece of writing-paper rolled up, with a lens at the top for looking through, and a much smaller one—hardly bigger than a chick’s eye—at the bottom, aimed at a little stand that was strongly illuminated by the
sunlight. Daniel put the needle on the stand and peered through the Microscope.

He expected to see a gleaming, mirrorlike shaft, but it was a gnawed stick instead. The needle’s sharp point turned out to be a rounded and pitted slag-heap.

“Mr. Waterhouse,” Hooke said, “when you are finished with whatever you are doing, I will consult my faithful Mercury.”

Daniel stood up and turned around. He thought for a moment that Hooke was asking him to fetch some quicksilver (Hooke drank it from time to time, as a remedy for headaches, vertigo, and other complaints). But Hooke’s giant eyes were focused on the Microscope instead.

“Of course!” Daniel said. Mercury, the Messenger of the Gods—bringer of information.

“What think you now of needles?” Hooke asked.

Daniel plucked the needle away and held it up before the window, viewing it in a new light. “Its appearance is almost physically disgusting,” he said.

“A razor looks worse. It is all kinds of shapes, except what it should be,” Hooke said. “That is why I never use the Microscope any more to look at things that were made by men—the rudeness and bungling of Art is painful to view. And yet things that one would
expect
to look disgusting become beautiful when magnified—you may look at my drawings while I satisfy the King’s curiosity.”
Hooke gestured to a stack of papers, then carried a sample ant-egg over to the microscope as Daniel began to page through them.

“Sir. I did not know that you were an artist,” Daniel said.

“When my father died, I was apprenticed to a portrait-painter,” Hooke said.

“Your master taught you well—”

“The ass taught me
nothing,
” Hooke said. “Anyone who is not a half-wit can learn all there is to know of painting, by standing in front of paintings and
looking
at them. What was the use, then, of being an apprentice?”

“This flea is a magnificent piece of—”

“It is not
art
but a higher form of
bungling,
” Hooke demurred. “When I viewed that flea under the microscope, I could see, in its eye, a complete and perfect reflection of John Comstock’s gardens and manor-house—the blossoms on his flowers, the curtains billowing in his windows.”

“It’s magnificent to me,” Daniel said. He was sincere—not trying to be a Flattering Parasite or Crafty Knave.

But Hooke only became irritated. “I tell you again. True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent.”

Wilkins had asked Daniel which he preferred: Wren’s glass apiary, or the bees’ honeycomb inside of it. Then he had warned Daniel that Hooke was coming into earshot. Now Daniel understood why: for Hooke there could only be one answer.

“I defer to you, sir.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“But without seeming to be a Cavilling Jesuit, I should like to know whether Wilkins’s urine is a product of Art or Nature.”