The Syme Papers (36 page)

‘It
is
very close in here‚’ I said, and moved to let in fresh air.

But he turned to the door, and said more heartily, ‘Shall we make
a proper visit? A few days at least? Pack your portmanteau, and we
can catch the mail together. You shall have the finest guest chamber
– the floor will do for Tom. Good, that’s settled – at eleven sharp.
You will like my father – all
strangers
do.’

With that he shambled out, in his muscular way – stooping once
briskly to examine some irregularity in the floor, then stomping on.
Pondering over the unhappy suggestion of Syme’s parting word, I
began to pack my things.

At eleven accordingly the three of us set off by coach on the road
to Baltimore. Tom and I set forth in aflutter of high spirits, and
even Syme caught something of our merriment. He held up his
briefcase to me.
‘I
have brought you some of my papers to look over‚’
he shouted against the clatter of the wheels and the driver’s calls.
We stopped for lunch at a tavern, the Apple Cart, perched between
road and river. Trickles of dripping snow, along breast and back,
teased us into shivers as we trudged through wheel ruts to the door.
Mugs of steaming cider arrived and we held our hands around them
till they seemed to melt away. When the brew burned its sweet cinnamon path down my throat and into the coursing of my blood I
knew I had reached a noble land. Syme stood in front of the fire and
struggled out of his greatcoat, arising from it like Neptune from the
sea, steaming and roaring, as it dripped and drooped to his feet in a
cold puddle. For the first time he seemed to belong to our youth.
And he talked! How he could talk when the spirit was in him.

‘I
looked over this morning
‚’
said Syme, ‘when I woke early and
could not sleep again for the cold, that final and magnificent passage
of the
Phaedo.
You are acquainted with the
Phaedo?’

‘I confess …’ I said, blushing, a proper schoolboy.

‘I thought, Tom
‚’
the Professor interrupted, raising an enquiring 
brow at his friend, and thumbing his lips in contemplative fashion,
‘he said he was a doctor – a German doctor?’

‘I heard him‚’ Tom replied, ill at ease, checking his pockets, as if
the answer might lie there. ‘Don’t tell me I didn’t hear him.’

‘Perhaps we have the wrong fellow‚’ Mr Syme said, relieved at a
possible solution. ‘Perhaps that’s it. Educated gentleman
–
wasn’t
he – the one we want?’

‘I
might have seen one – you know how it is in Pactaw, one
minute not a soul in sight, and the next can’t squeeze through the
road, for doctors.’

‘Tall fellow‚’ Syme asked in his gruff staccato, ‘glum face? Looks
like he’s trying to see the tip of his nose – but can’t quite?
Determined not to believe a word he hears? Won’t trust – the time –
if one tells him?’

‘Only in
translation …’
I finished at last in a brief pause and
puffed a fat cloud at them from one of my occasional cigars. How
they fell mum at that, and looked at each other, and glanced at their
boots. Perhaps they expected me to laugh or lighten, but I did not –
the Greek is a serious matter, and I would not give way to their
teasing. (I could hear the eaves drip in the silence, and suddenly saw
myself from a vast distance, a speck caught in a corner, that corner
itself a speck and so on.)

‘Herr Mooler,’ Tom said at last, ‘don’t take on so – we only jest. I
beg you not to look so glum, so Teutonically sincere. Our expedition
(for it is nothing less) begins in joy.’

I blushed again and said nothing. At last, Mr Syme cleared his
throat.

‘You recall – the final dream of Socrates
–
testament in the phrase
of your mad poet
–
Herr Müller
–
that the wise in the end prefer the
beautiful. I am waiting
–
believe me, gentlemen
–
for that end. If
only beauty would return the preference. In that great
dream
(long
held to be nothing
more –
yet what more could one wish?) the logic
melts
–
suddenly dissolves
–
leaks and dries away as our snow will
–
in a few days
–
but he teaches
–
in those final words
–’
Syme stabbed
the air with his pipe, as if to prick the bubble of each phrase as it blew
away, ‘that the great end of all philosophy
–
natural and metaphysical
–
is the
myth of creation.
This has been my text
–
my Grail. To
begin with
–
Beginnings
–
and finish with them, too
–
if I dare.’

For all his pomp, or perhaps because of it, Syme had a charm no
drab witch of common sense could dispel. There was something
pathetic in these boasts
–
the talk (as I knew even then) of the self-educated man, who believes each unfamiliar book to be an undiscov
ered country, a new world proudly claimed by the possessor. I heard
the braggadocio of naivety in his voice, of course I did
–
I am an
educated gentleman, well travelled on the roads of learning. And yet
when he asked me, ‘Would you like, Phaedon, to hear the tale of cre
ation?’
–
it was all I could do not to answer, ‘Yes, please.’

The sunshine drifted white with winter over the floorboards; I
heard the tick of dripping from the lintels. A little pool of snow and
dirt had formed about our feet, and Tom scraped the toe of his boot
in it while his master spoke. ‘We are born in fire
–
shaped by the
death of that fire.’ This was a characteristic confusion of Syme’s
–
a
conflation of the race and the planet. ‘Then worn smooth (I now
believe) in the black current of the
via lactea –
like pebbles in a
stream
–
smooth and round, of course, since the planets spin. Let us
perch upon the moon and look down. A brilliant ball lies at our feet
–
for indeed the very hollows, full of water and mist, present a
colour of their own as they shine (a perfect rainbow, indeed, or
worldbow, rather). With the hands of Atlas, we stoop and lift its
shell
–
opening up crown upon nested crown of burnished black.
(Believe me, all our hearts are black at the core. It is only the shell
that shines.) Let me write their names for you.’ Syme cried for quill
and ink and scribbled them on a piece of old manuscript from his
portmanteau: Washington (Syme was a true republican), Caesar,
Cassandra, name after curious name, a mad mythology. Syme gave
me the slip and went on. ‘After the sun cast us off
–
the fires died
slowly within us. We burned away
–
like silver in a crucible
–
and
cooled into
–
though this is only speculation
–
seven layers of metallic crust
–
separated according to their composition
–
think of oil
and water
–
over a thousand years or so.’

Did I believe a word of it? I saw it all before me like a schoolboy’s
alchemy, except that, in Syme’s glass vials, earths and suns lay 
stoppered. I loved nothing so much as the last ‘or so’, for when
Syme erred a thousand years burned away like a fly in the flame,
scarcely to be reckoned. ‘Though this is only speculation
’
– I knew
not whether to laugh at the absurdity or the grandeur of him; but
Tom was right, there was a kind of joy in it all, a sense of wings
stretched at last. ‘Haw are the layers arranged?’ I questioned, to
prompt him further.

‘Like Russian dolls, if you like, growing smaller and smaller
–
stacked on top of one another. I call them
crowns –
though they are
in point of fact
–
a sequence of concentric rotating spheres
–
jointed
by a tightly packed metallic gas
–
known as
fluvia.
It is found
mainly beneath the earth’s surface
–
though it escapes occasionally
–
through volcanoes, of course
–
and smaller cracks. It is breathable
–
eminently breathable, I’d swear my life on it
–
and allows for the
free independent rotation of each of the seven crowns
–
though there
is occasional friction
–
between Calliope, the second crown, and
Cassandra, the first. Strike your hands together with cupped palms
–
feel the smooth socket of air
–
keeping the palms apart.’

He did so, I followed him, Tom, too
–
the three of us laughing
openly now, a curious convocation, much
admired (I
believe is the
term) by the common punters. ‘That is something like fluvia,’ the
Professor continued, rubbing his hands now. ‘At sea, I believe
–
sailors see it in the sunset on hot days. The sun sucks it through the
ocean
–
in huge bubbles to tlie air
–
where it burns red like gold.’

We all fell silent at the thought, lost in wonder at the strange
world shimmering and swelling around us
–
until the bubbles, one
by one, were pricked and dispelled by ordinary
day:
by the clatter
of cups; talk of men; our wet feet. Then Syme said, in a kind of
glorious regret, ‘We stand on the
roof,
you see. If only we could dis
cover a
crack –
on a nearby farm
–
a village street
–
under a humble
lake
–
we might climb into the
house –
down the chimney like a
thief into the heart of Nature.’

I could not say a word to this. But he needed no answers, caught
in such fine flow; and I would gladly have listened to him talk for
days, as I had listened to Werner, in the sweet
honesty
of awe. For I
have always been a listener at heart, and a follower, a natural 
admirer of the world, shy of my own steps in it, eager to hear the
passage forced by greater men than I.

‘Kepler was the first
‚’
Syme said, ‘perhaps till now
–
the
only
scientist
–
in the sense in which the word will be used
–
in a
decade’s time perhaps
–
if we succeed.’ (Did not that ‘we succeed’
ring in my ears and both unsettle and delight me?) ‘Because of a
discrepancy
–
eight minutes of arc
–
between the path of orbit
according to accepted theories
–
and the path of orbit according to
the finest observational data of the time
–
eight minutes, you under
stand
–
he overthrew a system of cosmology
–
that had ruled our
thoughts for two thousand years. A nice destruction with so small
an instrument! A true scientist. Eight minutes on this earth mea
sures a distance of eight miles – so slight indeed that on a clear day
–
the errant navigator of a ship
–
may see by the naked eye the mark
he has failed to hit.’

I ventured to interrupt him, anxious now to prove my own
abilities, but Sam anticipated me. In truth, I was happy to keep
silent, and I swallowed my question in the bitter-sweet dregs of my
cup of cider.

‘Naturally the term cuts a far greater arc in the more distant sky
–
but the image serves to illustrate the
nicety
of the calculations. A
faith in precision is the first requisite of the modern scientist
–
a
faith not so distinct from a man’s religious faith. Let me explain.
The scientist trusts
–
in the organization of details
–
despite a world
of unexplained phenomena. The Godly man trusts in the Cause
–
of
such organization
–
despite the mass that is unintelligible and per
verse. Both faiths require the
fisherman’s
instinct: beliefs survive
only
–
at certain depths
–
like fish
–
they must be left to their natural habitats
–
if they are to stay active and potent. They should seek
neither to rise too high
–
nor dip too deep
–
nor consort with other
fish
–
at different plummets. Kepler understood this better
–
per
haps
–
than any man.’

The landlord called round for more orders. Tom gave me a canny
look. ‘Are you thirsty?’ he asked. ‘Sam will talk us all dry yet.’

‘Hush‚’ I
told him, ‘you will break the spell. Surely I have found
an American Mesmer, a new magnetism.’

‘You flatter him
‚’
said Tom, but saw that Sam had fallen dark, as
if a cloud passed over him. He took a long draft and turned his back
to the fire blazing in the grate.

I asked, ‘What do you make of Baconianism?’ and sunshine broke
upon him again.

‘The herd that follow Bacon’, he mocked, ‘have isolated one of
Kepler’s gifts
–
not precision itself but rather
–
a kind of humility
that accompanies precision. A vile and gross, slyly boastful,
ignorant, arrogant
humility.
A kind of wilful American pride in
saying
–
I do not know
–
1 cannot guess. Baconianism has led us
directly into the bog
–
where we now find ourselves
–
which but for
Kepler’s braggadocio
–
we should never know to escape. For
Precision is a deep fish, to be sure
–
but it cannot plumb every
depth. In the end we must explain this world
–
by its
causes –
not
by the measurement of its actions.’