The Syme Papers (21 page)

‘Not long now,’ the farmer muttered, almost tender, strangely softened towards me in my sleep.

‘What
town
is
that?’
I
asked,
my
tongue
stupid
with
the
cold.

‘Newton,’ he said, in a muffled grunt. And I thought again of de Crevecoeur and his comfortable promise to the European: ‘he perpetually hears the names of families and towns with which he is acquainted …’ Yes, I considered, he is in the right. ‘They’ll give you a bed at the Grapes,’ the fat man continued, ‘if you mention my name – O’Day, that is.’

It was then for the first time I realized how easily I could make myself again, in a world of strangers. My every step and word ventured forth without history, declared itself alone, a bright new flag of its author’s disposition. The snow itself lay untouched over the barren plains no purer than I – a recent snowfall as it were had covered my rutted lanes and presented a virgin landscape to the eye. For the first time I knew what it meant to have reached America. (Only later considering even
Neuburg
had once been a
new town.)

I
discovered the Grapes with little difficulty; indeed, the carriage tumbled us straight into its white lap, a high bank of snow shunted from the roof into the road. Weariness and cold battled in my exhausted frame to determine which should carry the day – the stiffness of the former or the shivers of the latter – and several skirmishes resulted in a divided field. In short, my teeth chattered and my leg slept. I stumbled in a mincing, huddled manner towards the glow within, hugging my portmanteau to my breast. Drawing my watch with clumsy fingers from its fob (a difficult manoeuvre, encumbered as I was), I was astonished to discover the hour had only just turned nine – whereupon
a peal of frosty bells rang out from some darkened church, a cheerful and welcome reminder of comfort and home, that saddened me none the less in the wide silence that followed. ‘Remember,’ called the fat man, doffing his dirty hat and shaking the flakes from it, ‘just mention O’Day, no harm in that.’ Well, I thought, the Frenchman was right again – they are a hospitable people. (A fact about which I soon had cause for complaint.)

Pushing through the front door, I entered a low room, thick with smoke and cluttered with chairs and tables circled round the central hearth. A broad crackling blaze leapt up from the grate, and an assortment of gentlemanly articles hung from a low fender surrounding it: boots, vests, shawls, coats and even, to my surprise, a single stocking steamed and reeked in the fiery glow. An assortment of gentlemen – I honoured them with the benefit of my doubts – camped around the fender, fluttering their fingers in the grateful warmth: mostly thickset dirty fellows with ham fists and a week’s growth of beard. (I confess that the first examples of American manhood I had encountered did not impress me by their native looks or the natural dignities of their freedom. They seemed a squat, dark, bustling race, energetic rather than elegant, gruff not graceful – a plain-spoken people, fashioned for use not beauty.) From time to time, one of the crowd would clasp his burned hands to his knees and let out a hissing sigh of agony and delight as the hot fabric pressed against his skin. They muttered among themselves, though I caught little of their speech, deducing only that they all seemed in business together, of a mechanical nature.

Mr O’Day‘s name, as promised, assured me of a room for the night. ‘We’re full up, so it is,’ said the matronly creature I had accosted as she bore an empty pitcher to the kitchens, ‘but my daughter squeeze into bed with us very happy. One moment, and I prepare her rooms. Sit you down and the good girl bring you your supper so forth.’

The strange turn of her phrases alerted me to her origins, and I addressed her now in our native tongue. ‘I have thought it,’ she said, ‘as soon as you come in. We get no gentleman here, in the old way, you understand.’

Shy of the men huddled about the fire, I asked to take my supper in my rooms, and she assured me she would attend to it herself. ‘Their ways are not our ways,’ she whispered, touching me on the elbow, ‘I understand. But we gets used, you know, we gets used to anything.’ So I dripped gently at the fringes of the hearth until I could venture upstairs.

There a small red fire and a large black cat greeted my arrival; and I stripped my dank garments – my fine red coat and soaked cravat – from my shivering limbs and hung them sodden from the edges of the mantle. Setting a three-legged stool in front of the blaze, I perched upon it and summoned the cat with a cold red hand to my lap, where it sat upon my wriggling thawing fingers and fell asleep. I have made a bad start, I thought, in some obscure way, disheartened by my shyness in front of the rough circle of men. My vows to remake myself seemed to have melted already, disappeared as quickly as the caked ice from my boots propped against the grate. I must begin again, I thought, again, again.

The cat had fallen heavily asleep on my leg, and I believe I had joined it, nodding in the grateful warmth – day-dreaming of the many ways in which I might fashion myself from scratch. The extent of the fictions I could practise upon an unsuspecting people spread before me in giddy array – until, in dozy shame, I realized that nothing betrays our true natures so well as the manner in which we hope to fashion ourselves anew. I could do no better than to bide my time – begin in silence and grow gently out of it. The cat himself seemed to concur, purring and stretching his fine limbs towards the shrinking fire, when a sharp rap at the door awoke both of us, with a start on my part and sharp yawl and scratching leap on his.

‘Are you ill?’ demanded a lanky, hatchet-faced gentleman at the door, tightly packaged in a dirty apron upon which he rubbed the red of his knuckles.

‘I beg your pardon?’ I answered sleepily.

‘Quarantined, perhaps? Or drunk already, and unfit for company?’ He batted a fly from his hollow cheek, stippled by pock-marks like a patch of sand in the rain.

‘Not at all, not at all, I assure you. Quite the contrary. I had only just sat down from a long
…’

‘Then, sir,’ he broke in, ‘I must tell you that I cannot accommodate you on these terms; we have no private suppers here – you may dine with myself or my guests. We are an open people; our company, I believe, is good enough for ourselves, and quite sufficient for any strangers – so I have been told, at any rate, and see no cause to dispute.’

‘I deeply regret causing offence; only you see, the long journey had greatly fatigued me. I confess I was ignorant of the manners of the country, else …’

‘Our manners, I believe, are very good manners. We don’t wish for lessons, thank you. Your supper has been laid out below. I’ll ask you not to trouble my wife any more with that mumbo-jumbo you folks like to spit about.’

And so the insistence of mine host accomplished what my own good resolutions could not. After carefully accoutring myself in a sky-blue smoking jacket, still dry, drawn from the depths of my portmanteau, tidying my long hair (my particular pride) and lighting a small cigar in the remains of the fire, I ventured below.

A long table had been laid athwart the hearth, and here the company had assembled, still steaming from their attentions to the fire. I gathered then that the gentlemen I had the honour to dine with belonged to a branch of the Virginia Mining Corporation – which had lately been scouting the valley in whose heart lay Newton itself for coal, manganese and other useful and profitable blessings of the earth. My countrywoman at length brought in quick succession several covered dishes, revealing beautiful red rows of sliced beef, spilling their juices on to the table; these were followed by an equal number of platters containing mashed potatoes and a further cargo of loaves of bread, bending under the weight of their freshness. To all of which the men helped themselves freely, and only my most resolved determination secured for me a portion of the plenty of which I had so lately been dreaming. The company’s leader, as I supposed him to be, Mr Mankins – a powerfully built young man with a perfectly pink scalp, somewhat chapped by the cold, a tuft of 
hair to warm each of his ears, and a muscular jaw, resembling nothing so much as the prow of some mighty ship – addressed himself to the grace. After which, I confess, the silence was general

At length, the first clamour of hunger had been assuaged, and a low muttered talk passed along the table between mouthfuls: concerning excavations, locations, concentrations and other mysteries of the mining science, not to mention more humorous accounts of pit-falls, floods, snowstorms, collapsed shafts, Indian attacks and such light-hearted tribulations of the trade. To none of which Mr Mankins contributed his views, preferring to confine the operations of his formidable jaws to the nourishment before him. But when at length I plucked up the courage to address the table, I gestured towards his place at the end and raised my voice as loud as I dared.

‘Tell me,’ I began, gathering breath, ‘for I am unfamiliar with the latest American developments in this noble science (forgive me, I could not help overhearing the business you have come upon) – have you ever encountered in your work a device known, I believe, as the “double-compression” piston?’

Mr Mankins brought his masticatory efforts to a slow halt; swallowed slowly; and paused. ‘You’re looking for Sam, I suppose,’ he said at last. The table had fallen quiet.

‘In point of fact, I
am
looking for a certain gentleman; known commonly, I hear, as the Professor.’

‘Sam,’ Mankins corrected. ‘Neither more nor less. Though I won’t object to calling him the Lieutenant; which – in point of fact – is what he is.’

‘Ach, all that trouble over the steam shovel again,’ cried a small, red-faced gentleman at my elbow, while blowing on a fresh hot toddy the landlord had set at his side. ‘It’s a hoax, I tell ye, from first to last.’

‘He’s
a
crank,’
came
a
call.

‘A
loon,’
came
another.

‘Can’t be done!’ continued the fellow with the toddy. ‘It’s a mere question of geometry, so it is. You – Cannot – Build – A – Ting – What’ll – Swaller – Itself Can’t be done, gentlemen; God’s own law. Simple human nature. And without dat, de device is No Good,
 
to man nor beast. It’ll dig a few feet, sure, and do’t well; then it goes phtt, and starts diggin’ the air. It’s a hoax, I tell ye. El Dorado stuff. Geometry’s agin it; and you can’t fight geometry.’

‘Likewise,’ Mankins went on, as if there had been no interruption, ‘I won’t hear a word spoken against him, being, as he is, without doubt, the finest surveyor in the honourable history of the Virginia Mining Corporation, bar none.’

‘It’s a pipe dream, Mankins,’ shouted a gruff, white-bearded old man, ‘and what’s more, you know it.’

‘Don’t mind a pipe myself, now and then,’ ventured another, a thick-necked, round-armed giant, hunched over his plate, knocking his knees against the table, ‘so long as I don’t have to break my back for it; which, according to present practice, is just what I do.’

‘Seeing,’ Mankins continued, unperturbed, ‘that if Sam says a thing can be done, it can be done; and, what’s more,’ he added, raising his voice to drive home the point, ‘he’ll do it himself. If he says there’s coal in that valley, you can bet a dollar to a nickel that what you’ll find in that valley is coal, only coal, and nothing but coal, so help you God. If there’d been anything else, Sam would have said so; seeing as he didn’t say so, there ain’t anything else. If he says –’

‘Knock it off, Mankins,’ the gruff white-beard declared. ‘Let’s have a look at this steam shovel of his, if it’s so damn’d hot.’

‘If he says’, Mankins carried on, admitting for the first time by this repetition, however slight, the existence of any interruption, ‘he can build a double-compression piston to dig out a vein of rock, then what he’ll do is build a double-compression piston. And why will he do it, gentlemen? Only for this: to dig out that vein of rock. If he declares the earth is flat, something’ll come and flatten it for him; if he declares the ocean’s filled with tea, you may as well get the kettle cooking. Seeing that, without doubt, if he set his mind to it, if he were a feller with any ambitions whatsoever, he could have been the finest miner in the history of the Virginia Mining Corporation. Hands down.’

Whereupon the gentleman with the hot toddy whispered pungently in my ear, ‘It’s a hoax, God help us. And which of them is the
greater loon – Syme or Mankins? – I don’t know. Though, to be fair, that feller had a nose for the land I’d give my eye for.’

‘As it is,’ Mankins concluded, mostly to himself, ‘God knows what he
has
become.’

Well, I thought, having retired at last to the comfort of my room – the fire freshly laid, the cat asleep upon my bed – perhaps I shall find out in the morning. There was some consolation in the fact that, whatever his other qualities, Professor Samuel Highgate Syme could not – quite – be charged with obscurity. He had made a name for himself; and who knows, I thought, perhaps I shall make mine, in following him.

This was my first night in America. How enormous the heart of loneliness becomes, swelling as it were into the night, until the darkened country – clicking with snow, gleaming in the lantern light – seems touched by my solitude; and the most casual stranger may enter intimately into my thoughts. Yes, even the unknown gentleman I had heard so much about and come such a long way to find.

I awoke in the morning considerably refreshed and eager to be on my way. A glance in the mirror revealed, so it seemed to me, a brighter eye and ruddier cheek; perhaps today, I thought, I shall forgo a powdered beauty. My coat and cravat both hung dry in front of the dead fire. The cat had kept me warm in the night, and refused now to venture from the bed into the sharp cool of the room, through which odd gusts of wind whistled from the chimney; well, let them whistle, I thought, half in a mind to whistle myself, despite the cold, carpetless floorboards and the chill in my toes. I had a dim sense of such great things to be done – such miles to journey, such fortunes to be made – that I couldn’t possibly, not for an instant, consider lingering in bed for another minute.