The Syme Papers (17 page)

The house soon stank of sleep – we all stank of sleep, the odour of life in stasis, unrefreshed, bent for ever on a single object – an odd fact, indeed, considering how little we slept. Two round cups of steaming coffee were required each morning to prop our wedged eyes open, by some sympathy, it seemed, with the ‘O’ of the mug’s rim. Our lives had been confined to the prisons of our minds, the bars formed of the neglected pages of Friedrich’s manuscript – only the key to them could release us at last into the world. And yet, and yet … we both had a sense, Benjamin and I, sleeping on scattered pages, waking to work at them afresh, breaking off only to spoon
half-heated tins of ravioli into mouths that seemed almost to have forgotten their primary purposes, devoted as they were to the secondary function of language – we both had the sense of life deeply lived, of time burning brightly in the crucible of our skulls, of true vocation. We seemed to shed at last our bodies, useless lumps – or rather, recline upon them idly, as we might on sacks. We lived on the flame, while the dull, hot wax of the candle accumulated at the bottom – upon our bottoms. Even young Dr Karding, ladder of bones that he seemed, developed a derrière – overfed by canned pasta and that peculiarity of the English I had acquired over the year, baked beans on toast, washed down by milky tea.

I almost grew accustomed to Benjamin’s techno banging through the house, setting on edge the thin, old glass of the windows till they fairly pinged their displeasure. The aching beat of it suggested after a time the echo of a mechanical heart, in a hollow space, pumping lava blood through rocky arteries. I imagined the iron and nickel crowns of Syme’s imagination revolving to such enormous rhythms, the true music of the spheres, vast and technical and indifferent, grindingly ugly and yet alluring, like devastation. And under its spell we worked, pawing and poring over a dead man’s memories, comparing, correcting, collating, translating – deepening by our following steps the path of his life, till it broadened into a road, till it led, smoother and plainer by the day, to Alfred Wegener.

The manuscript, as I said, suffered from the confusions of its author’s life. (Above all, this is a record of lives lived, not simply thoughts thought.) In the first place, Müller composed ‘on the trot’ (as the English have it), and his papers bore the marks of makeshift accommodations: spilt ink, coffee stains, even sea stains rendered parts of the text nearly unintelligible. Those final excited scratchings, scribbled overleaf on the last few pages, record his chance meeting with Peter Wegener (uncle of Alfred, a man of many parts, but fewer scruples) and bear evidence of his increasing physical distress. Müller’s hand had changed greatly over the years: the free-flowing ink of his youth had hardened into the crabbed joints and messy, irregular lines of sick old age. He suffered, Benjamin
believed, from a cancer of the colon – a weakness hereditary to the family – and had travelled in some haste and discomfort from Paris when he ran into Peter. Müller had come home to die.

Peter Wegener himself plays a crucial if
mediate
role in the story (a conduit of history). He was, as Charles Lamb ventured of Coleridge, a great borrower of books; and it is a curious irony of fate that he has left his final mark on the world by
bequeathing
one of them (though pilfered), upon his death, to his brother: the
New
Platonist
itself, as Friedrich Müller’s manuscript conclusively proves, together with the conjunction of dates that mark its entry into the library on Friedrichsgracht. I should like, at some point, to undertake a history (and this, I promise, shall be the final revision of my academic ambitions) of the
odysseys of manuscripts:
the idle preoccupation that led T.E. Lawrence to neglect the single copy of
The
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
on the seat of a train and the cold night that led Carlyle’s
History of the French Revolution
to be fed to the cottage fire. I shall count the wet day that brought Peter Wegener and Friedrich Müller into the comfort of a tavern fire as among the luckier chances of history – an incident in which the cottage fire redeems itself somewhat from its consumption of Carlyle’s masterpiece.

Of course, the coincidence is only lucky when seen
back to front.
When Wegener pinched Syme’s journal, Alfred still waited his turn at the revolving door of birth, and the thought of continental drift had died stillborn in the press of Syme’s other projects. It might never have been revived, in the shape we now know it, but for Peter’s light fingers; but at the time, as Müller’s misery attests, the theft of Syme’s journal, signed by its author, and a token, in its way, of forgiveness, seemed a piece of very bad luck indeed. And who knows what other course the journal might have taken but for Peter; who knows if Alfred would have died to prove Syme’s point, between two skis stuck upwards in the ice, to guide those coming after to his body? Peter played his part. As Milton notes – they also serve who only stand and wait; and those who pinch and run serve, too: serve entropy, I suppose, in the end, another word for the
dissemination of ideas.
We shall come to Peter’s theft, and Müller’s death, in time.

The evidence before you is, of course, circumstantial. I can show that Wegener knew of Syme, quotes him specifically in his introduction to
On the Origin of Continents and Oceans;
I can show that no other published piece of Syme’s writing includes the phrase, so suggestive of continental drift, describing those ‘segments of the earth’s crust which float on the revolving core’; I can show that, rummaging through his father’s library, Wegener
might
have stumbled upon that neglected gem of geognostic science, the
New
Platonist,
for I can prove that the journal was
there,
even pinpoint its spot upon the shelf – if the library itself had not tumbled into the canal, struck by a bomb in 1942. But I
cannot
prove that the final essay of Syme’s
New Platonist,
‘Speculations: a curious coincidence’, contains an attempt to account for the coastal alignments of Africa and South America through his theory of a cracked revolving outer sphere – though there is ample suggestion of such a line of thought in the pages of the following memoir. As Wegener himself declared in his introduction to the great theory:

I offer motive, means, and opportunity – even the smoke from the gun, though the gun itself is lost to history. I leave history to decide.

I had misread Syme’s arrogance, believing him careless of posterity, cold to contemporary fame. He seemed too far removed from the clamour of the great world (as I, perhaps, am too close) to love it much – both the clamour and the world. Where he sought flattery, the praise of prince and pauper (of Silliman and the village postman) pleased him equally. He lived, I thought, indifferently, in both senses of the word – and suffered for that indifference. It never occurred to me to call him an optimist: something too faithful to life seems suggested by the word, and such conviction as he possessed appeared to lie only in himself, and nearly died with him. But these memoirs shall prove, if nothing else, that his arrogance at heart was both grander and fonder than I had reckoned‚
more closely tied to the glories of creation, himself an example only of that glory. For Syme lived full of faith, not in his own virtues simply but in the hope that the world would bend, courteous and loving, to his understanding in the end, and honour him, as he had honoured it; for he was an optimist. As am I.

So I set forth for America, as Friedrich Müller had, almost two hundred years before me; caught an hour of sunshine over the runways from the windowed walls of Reykjavik airport, the polar light green and gleaming like the scales of a fish; ‘kipped’ (how I shall miss the poky jumble of the English tongue, the odd patched furniture of their slang!) in D.C. for an awkward hour, looped under and over three successive seats, my eyes blinded in the nook of my elbow, my ears half-soothed by the murmur of CNN; and turned, bum-weary but light-hearted, towards Austin, Texas, at last, towards the loving comforts of my plump pretty polly and our two chicks – confident and determined to Make a Name, for the dead, the great, the long-forgotten Syme, if not for myself.

I glanced in the mirror, the cracked glass hanging just above the canvas basin in the low cabin. Certainly, a refined face, I thought – if not pretty, and on the whole rather sad. Well, I shall make the best of it. I tucked the cream cravat into the neck of my richest red coat – soft wool buttoned to the breast with fat gold buttons, round as mushrooms. Then loosened the clasp (tortoiseshell, inlaid with silver) in my hair and shook the long brown locks out with closed eyes till they tickled my nape. A breath of the sea blew through the opened porthole, and I sighed once, heavily, and again, more lightly; tidied my hair into a smooth flaxen and fixed it once more at my neck. I must prepare myself, I thought, for the dignity of arrival in a rough new world.

Cries of ‘helm alee!’, ‘back sail!’ and other spells from the hocus-pocus of nautical nonsense filtered below, followed by a flap and a creak and a tramp of feet above my head. I could feel the turn of the ship by the turn of my stomach. Then the heel of the floor relented and we entered gentler waters. I sensed the loom of the land, a physical presence, like a wall in the dark at the edge of my forehead: an apt image
that,
of my journey ahead, of my American adventure. I was fair sick of the sea by now and could not repress, for all my Old World weariness, my studied languor, a flutter of excitement at the thought of landfall in this new world, at the thought of my mission – into the depths of the earth, as it were, through the mind’s eye.

A ray of the sun, bright and cold with winter, shot through the cabin on this new tack (as I believe they call it); and by some trick of sea-borne light caught a fragment of the looking-glass. I bent to flutter the lines of my cravat – and nearly drew back at the curious shimmering illusion. A rounder, sunnier face peered back at me from the shard: the plump cheeks of my boyhood, the snubbed nose and fair, shining hair of fourteen. And I recalled with sudden tears 
the words of the great Werner, when I first appeared at the Academy in Freiburg at the front row of the dusty lecture hall, and overheard him, glancing my way – ‘what pretty creature is that? I did not know they came to us so young …’ But a cloud covered the ray and the ship darkened and my older face slid into the shadow: long and thin, split by a long, thin nose; the cheeks hollowed and dry, bright only with a fine snow of powder delicately applied; the hair brown; and that foolishness of a chin, retreating, slight enough to be pinched between thumb and forefinger, still touching. A young man no longer, already twenty-eight, set forth at last out of my father’s shadow.

I have not come seeking Syme, whoever he may be, I told myself, for the hundredth time; I have only answered his petition. He is the supplicant; I, the prince. And I puffed my chest and straightened my long back in simulated pride, only to knock the tender top of my head against a tarred cross-beam, supporting the deck; and cursed again a world unfit for a man of any stature to dwell in. I thought of my true prince, the plump, tearing, young Kreminghausen, who had so lately been my chief charge and care; now given over to the ministrations of my father, the First Minister of Kolwitz-Kreminghausen, Herr Doktor Ferdinand Müller. My dear father I should have said, sole author, I must confess, of this expedition, so necessary (as I had urged him) to my spiritual renewal.

A tap at the door, and then a crack, a smudged nose poking round it, purpled from eye to lip with the mark of its birth. ‘Captain’s compliments; says, if you’d like a look, best come now. Norfolk coming up. Shouldn’t trouble myself. Dirty little hole, if you ask me. See more than you like, before you’re through.’

‘I shall’, I uttered, still tripping over the unfamiliar tongue, ‘attend directly – as soon as I have completed my toilette, which, as you see … involves … certain preparations …’ But the door had shut and a new cry was raised, in lusty sing-song, echoing above my head: ‘when we poor sailors/go skipping to the tops …’ And I reflected, diverted in my thought, for the hundredth time, on the broader preparations that had involved me in this plot.

It had pained my father, I knew, when I sought my fortune in geognosy, abandoning politics and his great dream of a German republic. But he relented at last (he has always relented to every wind, a man stiff and proud as a reed) and sent me forth to study at the Freiberg Academy. And then, at the ripe old age of twenty-one, I published that trail-breaking piece ‘On the Convexity of the Seas, and Its Relation to the Internal Architecture of the Earth’ (a good, a breathless title, no?); on the strength of which my father managed to set me up again – at the new university he had persuaded the young Prince to found in our little capital at Neuburg (upon certain conditions). And there I had settled (subsided, perhaps, is the better word) in a hum-drum, careless fashion, into the pleasures of a life without ambition.

I had resented at first my duties regarding the Prince – a thoughtless scaramouch, plump in face and foot, a swelling, lusty, joyous creature, with flushed red cheeks and an exaggerated chin, bright blue eyes and sandy hair, a child of his appetites, good natured, as far as his appetites directed him to please. ‘He has no interest in these matters,’ I told my father, who answered with a prim, brief smile and a glint of his lowered spectacles: ‘Interest him.’ (The First Minister can assume the sternest of countenances, possessing a nose and brow of truly
bureaucratic
beauty. It is only the first touch, the first breath of dissent, that reveals the softness of the man; but we are cut from the same cloth, my father and I, and I conceded.)

And yet, I confess, the Prince got on – the Prince and I – got on. He was as naturally sharp as he was cheerful, and often picked up lightly what I had once been at great pains to con. My life settled into a pleasing routine. Mornings at the ‘court’ – a bright pink cake of a house at the tip of a low hill, grand only in the slope and scope of the gardens running to the river below. Afternoons at the newly built university, where I lectured in dozy complacency in front of a handful of dozy young men, while the slow river eased its massive brown bulk along its bed outside the window. Evenings we danced in the Prince’s drawing room – from whence the doors opened on to a narrow balcony and the sunset and the glimmer of twilight and the first stars above and the first flickering lights below. We had 
pushed an old pianoforte into the corner, and Hespe (a sallow, humourless pupil of mine, but clever, particularly with his fingers, which seemed lighter, happier, than himself) rattled out, from time to time, a somewhat cracked but none the less very pleasing waltz. The Prince loved music; but, despite his native ebullience, he lacked companions after the death of his father (from the gout) in the late wars; and I confess that our little balls and my little lectures often revolved around the same cluster of lazy young men.

(Haw far I am now, I thought, from those gay scenes: such cultivated sunsets and tidy rivers and pleasant valleys, lightly cobbled with pretty streets. The cabin stank of the bilge and old beef, of sodden stockings and cramped sleep. And a rough young beast of a country lay before me.)

Occasionally, on those bright evenings, a note came to call me away on business: I had earned some little renown as a doctor in Neuburg, mostly for the refinement and delicacy of my professional enquiries. The old ladies, in particular, when taken with the stomachache from heavy suppers of roast pork and potatoes, required the services of
‘der kleine Herr Müller’
or the ‘little minister’ – for though they had no great faith in medicine, they believed in class. And sometimes, I confess, I was not sorry to be called away – preferring the quiet of a princely tête-à-tête to these boisterous occasions. I suffer greatly from the demands of solitude, and to mount my horse in the cool of the hilltop evening and canter briskly down the pebbled road into town offered me a rare pleasure. Even upon my return, properly cold now, the horse breathing clouds of chill vapour lit briefly by the moonlight, I sometimes lingered below the glowing balcony, watched the Prince whirling away in the arms of this bright beauty or that, easily replaced – and marvelled, happily, at his gift for happiness, delighting more in the spectacle at one remove, as it were, than I should have in the heat and clamour of the ballroom itself.

I should have been a good, a
useful,
doctor, in a small way. Perhaps I should have been content at that. But I was conscious – ever more so – of a hole, growing as it were in the heart of my life, both wonderful and appalling, like a crack in the ice widening with returning spring. Into that breach I have sprung.

When my father first read that absurd and rather wonderful petition from Virginia signed ‘Professor Samuel Highgate Syme’, I was originally no more than charmed. Such vast and greedy promises seemed out of keeping with the narrow, elegant comforts to which I had confined myself. So I remarked, in the lightness of the moment, that these rather ‘new-fangled theories’ deserved ‘a first or second look. A curious solution’, I added carelessly, stooping my head in my father’s study to peer on to the tall, narrow street, ‘to the puzzle of planetary mass – this notion of a hollowed earth, of nested spheres. And there might be some more practical application to his “double-compression” piston, I suppose.’

‘I suppose there might,’ he replied, tickling the grey and pink of his soft cheek with the feather of his white quill.

‘Might I – I beg – retain the copy of this, for a second glance at leisure?’ I asked casually, as a young boy raced a barrowful of cabbages disastrously along the cobbled street. And there the matter rested. (How lightly we acquire the passports of our fate.) But the seed was sown; and in the quiet intervals of my increasingly perfunctory duties I returned to Syme’s petition, tended his brazen thought, nurtured the slight green shoots of envy and ambition they awoke in me:

I have pledged my life in support of so little, I reflected, promenading along the river towards the tiny grandeur of the university, and returned sighing Syme’s petition to the pocket of my lemon-coloured coat. The first bright sun of autumn slipped over the quiet river, glimmering here and there, strangely suggestive of the cold to come – ‘the cold to come’, I repeated sourly, ever more conscious of that growing hollow within my own life, and loath to spend another constricting winter at home. Perhaps it is time I
 
explored
that hollow, I
thought, rather than veins of dull rock in green hills – and attended to one great thought with the full thrust of the soul. But instead I turned into the lecture hall, woke with a sharp step my slumbrous charges, and glanced once out of the window towards the river (that slow promise of greener pastures elsewhere), before commencing, with half a heart, the morning’s discourse. (On the
third
decline of the universal ocean, and the rocks it precipitated. Perhaps I guessed even then that Werner’s great revolution had spent itself, rolled on like dying waves under a still wind.)

With half a heart – I have done so much with half a heart, consoling myself always with the thought that so copious a
vessel
may carry a great deal of passion despite being filled only partway with true desire. With half a heart. And as I bowed now beneath the low deck (curious that our physical
attitudes
impinge so powerfully on their mental equivalents), I promised myself, as I had in Neuburg setting forth, that, should some true cause appear, I would offer it the full stretch of my passion. What I desired above all was Purity. This has always been the brunt of my geognostic explorations, and I have excavated and precipitated and eroded countless innocent quarries and their contents in search of the purest elements, the originary rocks. (I believe now such researches touched only the metaphoric crust, as it were, of the Purity I sought within – and in a sense Syme’s hollowed earth offered the final and necessary evolution of my desire, a world whose heart had been refined away to nothing. But all this by the by.) I sought a Cause unalloyed by circumstance or private faction, which I might serve – unshaken by cross-purposes, unpolluted by the least drop of personal considerations. Once called upon, I knew I could offer the noblest sacrifice: of the troubled soul to a greater Sum in which it has no part, which it cannot stain by its own ineradicable sins and confusions. If only such a cause would present itself to me, free me from half-measures, and their leaven of doubt and irony (those terrible corrosions of the soul).

But I believe I must go still further back to explain myself, and account in some part for the mixture of terror and expectation (I
 
would almost say hope) that drove me forward now, as powerfully as the wind backing our sails. A word on the curious creature I was becoming,
had
become: more and more, I managed to keep my soul in place only by the zealous and careful arrangement, as it were, of
cushions.
The least upset sent me shivering by the hour, like a blown leaf. An unpleasant exchange with the Prince, even a moment’s inattention in the course of his studies, appeared to me the gravest of slights. (How deeply I mourned breaches in our intimacy so subtle the Prince never noticed them before they were resolved again and everything wonderful once more.) The disruptions of my students, joyous, light-hearted, the outbursts of ordinary youth (as I knew in my heart, as I knew full well), awoke in me such trembling anger I would turn aside to let the great wave pass, a flood of blood to my face and hands, ringing in my ears. And then curse myself inwardly for the mild misery of the countenance I turned towards them again – for I was a coward, frightened even at the echo of my own anger.