The Syme Papers (20 page)

As we sailed towards the harbour, gently cutting the sleek water like brown silk on either side of us, I leaned tenderly against the rigging, so as not to disturb the careful line of my red coat. The cording was damp, of course, and I quickly withdrew. Lifting a handkerchief from my breast pocket, I covered my hand and gingerly clasped a knot of rope to steady myself – then looked towards this ‘New World, shining’, as our poet has said, ‘like the bottom of a chimpanzee’.

Norfolk, as the ship’s boy had declared, was a shabby little hole: the docks stretched hesitantly forth from the shore, as if they did not quite trust their wooden steps; the few ships themselves looked rather knocked-about. Most of the craft ducking and shivering in the brisk morning were fishing smacks, riverboats, jollies. A few small steamers, curious monsters like floating stoves, shed their black plumes on the cold air. To be fair, I noted a healthy bustle ashore,
and stretched my gaze to determine any peculiar dignity in the activity of these ‘free men’ – but across the water, the dark figures, loading and unloading, swabbing, scrubbing, hammering, binding, barking orders, directions, good wishes, good humour, declaring their wares and their misfortunes, appeared no bigger to my eye than the length of my finger, no grander than any men should be, bent upon their business, in the bleak and the chill of the winter day.

The stench of the harbour blew across the face of the ship, and I stood in considerable perplexity, whether to suffer the noxious gale or loosen my grip upon the rigging, and stand uncertainly, applying the handkerchief to my nose. At such times I draw on a concoction of my own preparation, lemon bon-bons dipped in rosewater and a bath, surprisingly, of parsley. These dainty lozenges, no bigger between thumb and finger than a single redcurrant, sweeten the exhalation wonderfully, and drench even the most inadvertent sigh in balmy melancholy. I keep a small tin upon my person always, and tapped it tenderly now, in the breast pocket of my red coat. I consider it also a harmless vanity that the pucker of citron in the pocket of my cheek lends a contemplative, brooding air to my slightest expressions, conveys a certain ruminative dignity. I slipped a hand to the box above my heart and filched a powdered candy and dropped it upon my tongue, whose secretions produced a soothing syrup that stilled my fluttered nerves.

A sudden gust – a flurry of white steps across the crests of the river – tipped the vessel
on
its heels, and nearly knocked me
off
my own. I steadied myself just in time upon the nearest shoulder I could find, and looked down surprised to see the mottled face of the ship’s boy smiling up at me. And so I clutched him still, as under that freshened impetus we turned into the breeze, backed sail and cast anchor in the flowing harbour – reflecting on the great mystery of propinquity, and how much of our hearts we give to what is at hand; for I confess the touch of the boy was a great comfort to me as we rode at anchor in those strange waters. We are never utterly alone where a touch of man or boy may soothe us. But I had come thus far to rid myself of comforts.

I released him at last with great reluctance and a groschen of silver – which he accepted swiftly and disappeared. After a considerable and, it seemed to me, quite fruitless fuss, the crew lowered the long-boat against the skittering waves, and into that first our boxes and the packets of mail were deposited, and then ourselves – a handful of passengers, most of them sorry specimens of German manhood, dark-skinned and dirty from the voyage, and reeking of schnapps, singing raucously as the oars beat steadily to the docks. The full ice of my elegance had been necessary to separate myself from them over the long voyage, and I plumed myself at least on the thought that no one could fail to distinguish among us upon arrival. But a fine cold spray blew across our faces from the disturbed and wintry waters, interrupted only by heavier doses when the blades caught the fat of a wave. And by the time I took my turn to clamber awkwardly out of the boat on to the wooden pier, I was soaked through, from the bilge and the spray and the still colder waters of loneliness.

The wind was as chill as bones as I took my first unsteady steps on
terra firma.
The sun had dipped under a white cloud, and though the air, sharp and clear, promised a suspension from the soft and heavenly assaults of winter, a week’s worth of snow lay already on the ground – trampled and muddied by a hundred passing feet. My heart shrank and froze as I thought of the great country before me. The Atlantic is no doubt daunting, but its blank space is a fit canvas for a lonely imagination, and I could murmur Byron and be content. Only when I saw the angles and corners of my destination did I suspect my insignificance. A row of low wooden houses ran along the harbour over an earthen road, foul with refuse caught in perpetual alternation between freeze and thaw. Here, half-eaten joints of meat and rotted vegetables lay caught in a bank of brown ice; there, the passage of horses left a muddy pool of discarded custard for the dogs to lick at. I had reached America.

I held my soiled handkerchief against the nib of my nose to muffle the fetid air, and called for a man, any man, please! any kind soul – bending my tongue with great difficulty to pierce the cold in the unaccustomed words – to help me with my box. This I directed 
to be sent by the next mail packet, up the Potomac, to the Dewdrop Inn, at Pactaw, the home of that ‘meteor of American science’ (according, at least, to his petition) the great Professor Syme. And, having attended to these details, I bent my steps, halting, half-drunk from long disuse, into the town, such as it was – with my overstuffed portmanteau clutched in the crook of my elbow so that my delicate hands might stay warm in their thick pockets. ‘What has brought me here?’ I murmured, as I dropped another bon-bon upon my tongue to sweeten the taste of loneliness in my mouth. ‘To what pass have I come?’

Over the course of the long voyage I had dipped into those delightful
Sketches of American Life
by the Frenchman de Crevecoeur – and felt, I confess, considerably cheered by the prospects he described. ‘No sooner’, he wrote, ‘does a European arrive, no matter of what condition, than his eyes are opened upon fair vistas; he hears his language spoke, he retraces many of his own country manners, he perpetually hears the names of families and towns with which he is acquainted; he sees happiness and prosperity in all places disseminated; he meets with hospitality, kindness and plenty everywhere.’ Well, I thought – I have arrived. And I have met as yet only squalor and obscurity; the marks of enduring labour and hasty pleasures; houses erected in a week; neighbourhoods cobbled together in a month; roads left to themselves and the seasons in appalling disrepair; filth everywhere, minded only by loose pigs grubbing and grunting through the streets, even in the thick of winter; and the people themselves – hearty enough, I suppose, and bearing a rough dignity – dwarfed by the scale of the country in which they found themselves. Not a word of comfort from my mother tongue; not a name familar to my ear; and plenty only of snow and sky and forest and the broad stretch of that enormous river. Little enough, I found, of the beauties of home.

I discovered myself, in the midst of these musings, at the coachhouse; and, determined to put some part of the way between me and Pactaw behind me before nightfall, and sick to my heart of the water, I leapt in at the back of a packed coach and squeezed into a space on the bench. At first the brisk pace of the carriage and the 
comfortable feel of the ground beneath our wheels inspired in me a new hope and I turned, surprised at my own curiosity, to my neighbour – a heavily built farmer, I supposed, by his beefy hands and thick, mud-caked boots, returning from business in town. He wore a squashed hat over his dirty yellow and grey hairs, and crossed his arms comfortably over the protuberance of his considerable belly, as if the stomach had extended for the express purpose of providing a convenient rest for his limbs. In a word (or two), a short, fat man with a broad look of contentment about him.

‘Fine country, this,’ I ventured in timid experiment upon my unfamiliar tongue. And bitterly cold, I added to myself, as the wind blew about our ears, delighting, it seemed, in the scope of its playing fields.

‘So ‘tis, so ‘tis,’ he replied, staring out behind, as the darkening road lost itself in snow and woodland.

‘Somewhat large, perhaps?’ I queried. The road itself rattled the carriage considerably and ran through forest and broad fields, up and down the low, awkward hills, deep into the vast continent. The sense of profligate space, of excess, of inhuman abundance, almost overwhelmed me; and we often passed several miles before spotting the next glow of a cosy window, or breathing the sweet dry smoke of a chimney fire. The dark had fallen astonishingly swift and full, and there was no moon to light the road, just the glow of the carriage lanterns amid the thousand shuddering shadows that attended them. Only the eerie suggestion of endless snow illuminated the bulk of the land we drove through.

‘Room for us all, room for us all,’ he repeated, though, in point of fact, he left little for his neighbours to either side of him, squeezed out by the swell of his paunch.

‘You haven’t’, I cried above the rumble of the wheels, getting straight to the point, ‘by any chance … heard of a fellow …
by the name of Syme? You see, I’ve come rather a long way to have a look at him.’

“The Professor?’ says he, and my heart leapt – perhaps this American was greater than I knew.

‘Yes,’ I stammered, ‘yes, yes. The exact same.’

‘Well, I say Professor,’ the fat man continued, ‘but I don’t know that he’s anything like, to be honest. We all call him the Professor, because it pleases him – and there’s no harm in a fellow being pleased with himself So far as I can see. Sometimes I’ve heard him called better; sometimes worse. The “wizard”, for one – though if that’s better or worse, I can’t say. Then there’s “bluebell”, on account of that devilish lantern he carries about with him, always digging and burning infields and what-not. I’ve had him round my farm a dozen times. A great one for talking on the job, as they say – still, no harm in that, to my way of thinking, and I don’t mind taking a sip of whiskey with any man, even if it is my own. Not that I’d trust him an inch with my daughter, or the slaves, for that matter; too clever with words by half, if you ask me. Still, he’s clever with his hands, too – I can’t deny it. And as I always says, the hands don’t lie; any fellow good with his hands got some good in him. It’s in the nature of things, you see. And he’s done me a good turn or two in the past. Wonderful way with manure, he has – spent a pretty penny on his “experiments”, he calls ‘em, and I’ve never been the loser by it. Wonderful stuff – well, as you can imagine, some of his nicknames come from, that; but this being mixed company, I won’t discuss ‘em. Still, I don’t mind letting him loose on my land – has a way of finding something I’ve walked by a hundred times, and, like as not, it’ll make me money. And as I say, there’s no harm in that …’ This phrase seemed to be his motto, and carried him through life in amiable if selfish complacency, perfectly content with anything that ‘did no harm’.

Well, I cannot say if I was cheered or cast down by this account; but I resolved to question no one else, for fear of the answers I might turn up. The rest of the journey through the white land passed in sleep or a wakefulness so near it that the only difference between them was a dim awareness that the rumbling clatter of the horses gave the rhythm to my dreams. I remember the dreams, too – for they haunted me several days, as dreams do, like shadows following me at every step, dragging behind me, rich and awful shadows thick enough to catch and tangle in my feet.

I saw my father, flushed with wine, turning towards me, caught in some lascivious embrace; and myrmidons and medusas, hags
 
and harlots, sweet pink lasses and glittering ladies flitted before me in awful pageant, each bending their painted lips to my father’s face and lingering lewdly in his arms before the dream passed on. His wig had been tugged loosely from his dishevelled grey hairs and lay about his neck; his shirt stained with wine had been torn open to the heart, the buttons scattered; his spectacles (and this in particular struck me as horrible and shameful) were cracked and dangling useless from one ear; and only then did I discern how his bleared eyes blinked miserably into the dark, and turned with fear to the next pale form that folded him in its insistent arms. Then the dream shifted and the women faded like ghosts at dawn and I crawled into his empty bed. When I rolled over to find a patch of warmth under the thick white blankets, I began to sink, and I knew the bed was a white sea, and I fell terribly slowly down until-infinitely gentle – my soft cheek struck the bottom and lay against the hard rock, nodding a little in the echo of the waves that reached the sea-floor, nodding, nodding.

This rock was the farmer’s shoulder, which, upon waking, I discovered had cushioned my sleepy head without stirring, on the principle, I suppose, that there was ‘no harm done’. I shook myself, suddenly clear-eyed in the sharp, cold air, and thanked him (to which he grunted, as I had expected …). In truth, I was glad, for the second time that day, of a human touch, though a brisk application of my handkerchief removed any trace of his dirty collar. How vast the loneliness of an uninhabited country late at night, careless of the tiny creatures who travel through it! We huddle together in towns, puffed up by brick and mortar, towers and minarets and steeples, to shrink the sky above our heads lest we suspect the huge indifference that surrounds us. In the open country there is no mistaking the scale of our pretensions, six feet high in a waste of empty miles. I had a new vision of my mission: the insignificant come to investigate the obscure.

The carriage dragged up a slow hill, bordered by thick brush netted with snow. A line of birch trees, pale as consumption, stretched on either side, and shivered from time to time their powdered necks. A cold wind opened a crack in the clouds and I saw my first stars in
 
the New World: remarkably like the constellations, I must confess, that glittered above the Prince’s balcony. I felt them daring me to journey beyond their glance. This seemed perfectly far enough, thank you – though if Professor Syme is in the right, we shall dig to the hollows below and escape them, after all. The snow had stopped; the night had grown almost too cold to breathe in. At last, the sweating horses staggered to the top, snuffing the sharp air in misty snorts; and as I craned my neck round the side of the carriage, a clutter of lights appeared below.