The Chemistry of Tears (21 page)

S
UMPER AND I DEPARTED
the village with the heavy brass drum strapped between two poles. Such was the weight we were in a hurry to reach our destination, speeding through the fog across the square, down the lanes to the brook, across the footbridge to the fields, stumbling dangerously in furrows at whose furthest extent the sawmill awaited us. Now the leaves had fallen and nature was revealed, like an old man whose beard has been shaved off to show what cruel tricks time had played on him. Dear Pater.

Such was our speed and so uneven was the field that I feared Frau Helga, charging from the flank, would cause a spill. She passed me at a gallop and rounded on Herr Sumper while somehow trotting backwards, bravely waving letters in the air.

“On,” cried Sumper. “On.”

“No, it is from England.”

“On.”

I thought, Percy! But I was tied to Herr Sumper in every sense, so “on” I must and “on” I did, although together we almost ran the woman down.

I thought, it is from Binns. My boy could not endure the wait. Dead and lonely and I did not kiss his lips. Then we reached the river path, and the Holy Child burst from the bushes with a savage yell. His
eyes were bright, his cry too high. He shook a murdered rabbit before his mother’s face before setting off ahead, gambolling and hobbling, shaking his keys in his left hand.

We sped onwards. Dear God, I am a mighty fool, please let him live. In the freezing summer workshop above the river, we laid our burden down.

I took the letter and saw my brother’s hand.

“What news?” asked Helga.

Carl was also waiting, dripping rabbit blood onto his feet.

Thank God, thank Jesus, I will join you soon.

But no—my brother was set to delay me further. Two months previously, the spider wrote, he had
been appointed my trustee
and now possessed the power to decide, at his own discretion, what sums would be made available to me at whatever intervals he might deem appropriate, the snivelling little wretch.

He claimed our father had “lost his wits.”

Of course it was not totally impossible that the paternal mind had collapsed at exactly the moment I walked out of the door, but my brother’s assertion that our father was no longer “sensible” was what the pater would have called a “hoot.” He had never been “sensible” in any way at all.

Red-nosed Douglas had had him declared
Non compos mentis
. That was Douglas, worse than Douglas. To quote: “What you do not sufficiently appreciate, Henry, is I am a man of business, and there is a great deal more to business than railway tracks.”

He was not a man of any type at all, and what was cloaked by all his ghastly bumph was that he had invested in the Bank of Ohio. I ask you: who had lost their wits? It was Doug the Thug who had placed Brandling and Sons in an “awkward situation.” Now he regretted to advise me, as my trustee—imagine—that I might draw no more funds until the “panic in America” was sorted out.

Sumper turned his back. I could not see his face, only his shoulder, his green coat, his large white hand which he ran regretfully along the flat of the spring, as if it were his fresh-caught trout.

“Bad news, Herr Brandling?”

He took it well, Frau Helga less so. She ran weeping across the bridge to the house and Carl went hotfoot after her, dripping blood across the floor.

“Dig potatoes,” Sumper called.

Then he turned to me, and without particular expression, made the following speech: “The trouble with the rich is that they rarely have the patience for great things.”

I assumed he was finding fault with me. I apologized, as well I might, but he waved all that away. “When it is their own business,” he said, “they know what to do.”

“Who do you mean, Sir?”

“When they abandon their counting house or factory, when they must have a portrait painted, they turn into idiots. What a state they are in. They go to their club where they seek out other idiots for their opinion. ‘I am having my portrait done,’ they will say, ‘and the fellow is using a lot of blue. What do you think? I’m worried about that damned blue.’ ”

So then I saw what he was saying and, for once, I totally agreed. It was
intolerable
that a fool like Douglas should play with life and death.

“They are in charge. It is their only skill. It is exactly the same with your Queen of England, German of course, and completely ignorant of where she is. It was she, Mrs. Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who disgraced England and my own country by cutting off the funding for the most extraordinary machine. That is the reason that I later came to visit Prince Albert at Buckingham Palace.”

“I see,” I said. I thought, he can only talk about himself.

“You do not look at all surprised?”

I did not look surprised because I did not believe him for a second. It was impossible in every way.

That evening I wrote to Percy concerning what I referred to as “our secret.” I promised that in spite of his uncle and his mother’s “difficulties” I would return as promised and that if he would only
eat his grains and be a brave boy with his hydrotherapy, I would soon make him completely well.

If that was a risk, I did not see it. My blood was up and I would keep my word.

HERR SUMPER SAYS HE
first mistook the Genius, Albert Cruickshank, for a common tramp, and was mightily offended that this beggar was permitted to walk freely through the door from Bowling Green Lane. The visitor’s trouser cuffs dragged on the machine-room floor. His grey hair was long and stringy. His jaw was clenched, his mouth set straight. The author of
Mysterium Tremendum
(for it was he) carried beneath his arm a rectangular board which Sumper assumed to be one of those complaining placards which he had seen mad people display outside the English parliament.

The visitor was allowed to wander freely, “like a Hindoo Cow,” between the lathes and presses of that enormous industrial cathedral. Not a drill slowed, not a canvas belt was shifted from its drive, certainly no worker prevented the intruder from approaching, along an aisle of lathes, the place where an altar might be expected in a church. But never was Christian altar built to the scale of that enormous engine. Sumper compared it variously to an elephant, a locomotive, a series of vertical columns of circular discs, all these so contradictory that a chap was left with—what?—a notion of a very large mechanism, yes, but one that was somehow spectral, golden, intricate as clockwork. I knew my clockmaker was in the habit of lying (about Prince Albert most recently) but such were his powers of persuasion that I had no difficulty in picturing how the interlinking parts of steel and brass caught the light, much like, surely, the gold frames on the high walls of my family’s home could contain the flame of a single candle set on a table fifteen feet below. I found myself wishing I could have seen the wonder too.

During his first week at Thigpen & Co., despite the demands of
his pre-set lathe (which he boasted he had mastered while complaining of its danger), Sumper seems to have been a most effective spy.

The draughting tables had been set to one side of the altar, and here, in the place where the choir stalls would normally be, he had glimpsed the large stooped Thigpen and his senior mechanics poring over plans.

He learned that only the firm’s most respected tradesmen served the engine and that there were still ten thousand more individual parts to be produced. Not one of these ten thousand could be commenced until a very detailed drawing had been made, and as each new drawing was examined, great discussions (and some fierce arguments) took place. He was able to make me see this in a rather comic way, as if the engine was an Idol and the men were its demonic votaries.

“They thought they were all great fellows,” Sumper told me, “but not one of them, not even Thigpen, knew that the machine was at imminent risk of being broken down and sold for scrap.”

Of course he couldn’t have known it either. He knew less than anyone and had been astonished to see the tramp shake Herr Thigpen’s hand and to realize that the “placard” was a draughtsman’s folio from which drawings were extracted, reverently, one by one.

An Englishman would likely have deduced that the old man was the designer of the machine, and probably rather grand, but Sumper had assumed the tramp was selling stolen goods.

So it is to be a foreigner.

For Sumper in England, the situation seems worse than mine in Germany—the English workers were allegedly angry he had agreed to man the pre-set lathe. He may (or may not) have been physically attacked outside his own boarding house. He may (or may not) have made cat’s meat of them as he claimed. He was a boastful bragging man but it would fit his character for him to be bewitched by the sight of the dignitaries who visited the draughting table—“wigs of ivory,” he said, “coats like jewels.”

His own work was possibly boring, requiring “less brain than a
cuckoo clock.” As a result of that inattention which is the constant companion of tedium, he twice came close to amputation, and it was after the second of these near misses—just when he knew he must find another job—that the factory whistle blew three times. Thank God, he thought, but the day was not over yet.

There were always a great number of trolleys and steel tables trundling across the dark slate floor, and it was one of these that the men, walking in disorderly procession, like cows at milking time, now followed deeper into the factory.

They were preceded by that grey-haired giant, their master. When he had his mechanics gathered about him, old Thigpen removed a dust cloth from the trolley and there revealed a brass and steel device. He spoke. Sumper’s translation was that the device was “the seed of the great idea we serve.” This is consistent with what follows.

Sumper compared the device to an abacus. I wrote this down.

“It was not like an abacus at all,” Sumper told me later. “You will miss the point if you go on like this.” Tiresome man. He also said that the machine was precise, ingenious, and strange. It was an automaton whose purpose was addition.

Then the “tramp” spoke. His voice was deep and mellifluous. No Englishman would be surprised to learn he was the third son of the Duke of Cumbria. He said: “Men, I am to show you an impossibility.”

The fierce little tradesmen were like greyhounds straining on their leash. They pushed insistently towards the heart of the device—two brass wheels engraved with numerals.

Cruickshank asked Mr. Thigpen to set the first of these brass wheels so the number 2 was aligned with the V-shaped cleft. He told the men that the value of this wheel would now be added to the value of the second.

The mechanics’ bodies were sour with weariness and sweat but they pushed against each other, nosing forward, watching closely as a volunteer turned the crank through one rotation.

And what did they see? Why, that 2 + 0 = 2.

That was the great idea they served? The tramp was certainly not embarrassed. He called each worker to turn the handle. One after the other. They were employees. They had no choice. One by one they came. They turned the first wheel (2) and added it to the increasing value of the second wheel.

And the great machine performed no better than a schoolboy.

Cruickshank greeted each answer with ridiculous astonishment. The men became sullen and resistant, slower and slower to answer their names. It was an insubordinate dye-maker named “Spud” Coutts who added the number 2 to the number 102.

The answer was 171.

Someone dared a cat-call. Herr Thigpen scowled.

Cruickshank clapped his hands together and cried, “Huzza.”

And Sumper smiled with pleasure.

“Only as a child smiles,” he told me, “with no understanding of anything. Of course the Genius noticed me. I was the largest man in the room, and the only one not scowling at him.”

It is not known what Cruickshank had previously told Thigpen or how Cruickshank expected his demonstration to be understood, but if it was intended to lift morale it was a failure. The owner of the works stormed to his office.

“This,” said Cruickshank, as the master’s door was heard to slam. “This is what we should call a miracle.”

There was uneasy laughter.

“What you have all witnessed,” Cruickshank said, smiling, “must appear to be a violation of the law of adding two. It must seem unnatural to you, even to your master.”

At the word “master,” by design or accident, Thigpen blew the whistle. A moment later the men were swarming towards the door, leaving a few uncertain fellows hesitating.

“I am not your master,” Cruickshank coaxed, “but I am the programmer. If you leave now you will never know that I programmed the machine so that after fifty-one additions it would perform the miracle I programmed—after fifty-one additions it would do something discontinuous.”

The word “miracle” had a violent physical effect on one of the remaining workers. He spat, shook his fist, and headed for the door.

“And for me, Jim, that is not a violation of law. It is a manifestation of higher law, known to me, but not to you, Fred.”

But it was hopeless. He could not hold them.

“You expect two plus 102 to equal 104, but I wrote a new law that 102 plus two would equal 171. As a result,” Cruickshank told his sole remaining listener, “as a result of a decision
beyond your knowledge
, a certain lever clicked into place. You saw two plus 102 equals 171. In nature this is what we call a miracle and I, who predicted it, would be called a prophet.”

Thus the Genius confirmed that Furtwangen’s ideas of God were puny and pathetic, that there were mechanisms beyond human knowledge, that there might be, within our sight but beyond our ken, systems we could never know, worlds we had seen and forgotten. There, in Bowling Green Lane, Sumper recalled thoughts he had had as a child when he wished with all his being that he could know what it was to be the dragonfly in all three stages, as a grub beneath the soil, as an animal living in the water, as an insect flying in the air. Would the dragonfly in its last stage have any memory of its experience of the first? Might he be a dragonfly at last, and if so how would he understand the world? “
Mysterium Tremendum
,” he told me. The awe and wonder of the universe. Not for a moment did he doubt that Cruickshank was a Genius, perhaps even a Superior Being with a completely different nature. Why not? We believe Jesus walked upon the water.