The Syme Papers (41 page)

Of course, my suspicions were aroused, but I had little heart
for suspicions at this time (for once in my life), and I recognized also
that my mission had changed – subtly at first, until, as the winter died
in its spring grave, altogether, so that I could scarcely distinguish my
aim from Tom’s. We were in the business of … revolution, and revo
lutions always sacrifice a number of doubts along the way. And suddenly it seemed we had no other cares but the duties of world
discovery, and very pleasant duties they were. Like an enchanted
cloud, my father never failed to answer our calls in golden rain. By
April the three of us were entirely supported by those regular drafts on
the German bank. We learned to doubt his bounty as little as we feared
that the sun would fail us on the morrow, though I at least did wonder
how it was managed, and worry a little.

Though my own role in that strange crew remained uncertain, I
learned a great deal about the company I kept. The contentment of
others is among my favourite studies, the resource of all solitaries,
misfits and constitutional misanthropes (a role I once took pride in,
though I was rapidly growing to doubt my natural claims). I believe
I have a gift in that way, though I am neither pleasing nor easy in
company, and it is a difficult subject. For I know no deeper nativity
than the way we are happy. It is as recognizable as the way we walk
and as awkward to imitate. Our joy is a country of one. Friends
learn to speak its language as a foreign tongue, but do we not mark
the trace of accent, the hint of translation? No, this is how I live, we
feel like roaring. I love searching for that key in another man’s char
acter that opens on a happiness they would not share or exchange if 
they could. I loved looking into Sam’s heart, though I envied and
feared him, and I asked myself perpetually, Should I trade fates with
him if I could?

Syme’s contentment was obvious. It resembled hunger. It fed on
anything and everything and could live only so long as it was never
satisfied. His sensual, intellectual, political, personal appetites
demanded not only their food, but his perfect right to it, his superior
right. He found it as obvious that his joy was greater than yours, as
it was that his arm was stronger than yours. With a quite impersonal
belief in the value of
mass,
he was willing to sacrifice your tastes.
A man’s friendship with Syme began with the task of rendering
palatable his own inferiority. So it was with me, as it was with Tom
Jenkyns. We fed on his scraps; but they fell from the plate of so
gigantic an ambition that they were richer than the food on another
man’s table.

Tom Jenkyns knew his ground in our strange fellowship. He kept
shop among everyday and business matters, petitioned the government for funds, posted propaganda, wrote to editors and journals,
arranged lectures, and, to conclude this worthy list, persuaded me
to draw on my father’s kindness. He was tireless and painstaking
and faithful in Sam’s service. He was an able man; and I reasoned
that in some secret chamber of his bosom, he must have scorned
Syme’s weakness. For in his way Tom was an ordinary fellow, just
the kind to marry and mock a desperate ambition such as Sam’s. I
watched him and could not help but wonder, How much does he
believe? But Tom’s rare flights of the absurd made him an eccentric,
and so fitting company for a bird of Sam’s feather. This is the man
ner in which Tom adapted himself to Syme, and under his care
Syme grew fatter and fatter among the clouds.

The perfect winter continued to thaw into a miserable spring –
endless drizzles and bleak, middling-warm afternoons. The sea of
snow retreated, leaving a kind of brown weed behind, draped on
brown lawns, the sides of buildings, the edges of streets. Syme’s
great experimental season had begun. In the mud and damp of a
slow spring he saw nothing but golden exhalations and the bare-bosomed earth breathing freely again.

In such a long, hard winter, Sam reckoned, a wealth of escaped
fluvia must have gathered in the frozen turf beneath its snowy blan
kets. For Sam the dank thaw promised an ethereal but tremendous
harvest. ‘The harvest of a century,’ he called it. We burned heaped
piles of branches and leaves in lonely forests. Sam approached farm
ers, and with a charm Mesmer would have envied convinced them
that their sodden pasture might contain a rare and refined element,
‘the fumes of gold’, he said. They often stood at a distance, silent in
their heavy boots, while Sam lit bonfires in their fields.

We must have made a romantic picture, huddled in our coats,
stooped low to the cold ground, selecting crumbs of earth or a twig
or leaf, and carefully marking the specimen and location in our
heavy notebooks. We peered down caves and pushed through
undergrowth, summoning those enchanted azure sprites wherever
we went. Sam dripped a concoction of his own into ordinary street
puddles and set fire to them, calling forth their blue ghosts. We
were like spirits from
The Tempest
or Goethe’s devil, or the
alchemists themselves about their business, searching for that
oldest of New Worlds, the earth’s core. We left a trail of blackened
turf across much of Pactaw County. We were foot-sore, backweary, hand-chapped and heart-full. We were, as I told myself
repeatedly, pioneers of a kind; and we slept easy at night, and
woke brisk in the morning.

Of course, just as the crop was ripe and the greatest work to be
done, I fell ill. Snifflingly ill at first, so that I trudged beside the eager
steps of Tom and Sam, as they chased those magical breaths into the
glass flu’. Then well and truly ill, until Tom said (not unhappily, I
must say, with a wicked sympathy and exaggerated concern), ‘You
have discovered quite another flu’, Phidy, and should go to bed.’

I spent countless days by my bedside window, watching the slow
hours, and the river carry broken ice and driftwood to the south.
Sam evinced a particular dread of all illness, being a confessed
hypochondriac, though paradoxically indifferent to all physical
discomforts in others, which he dismissed as a kind of moral and
intellectual weakness. I saw little and less of him; and though Tom
for his part proved a skilful, if somewhat
enthusiastic,
nurse, he 
insisted always that I must not tire myself (nor, it goes without say
ing, intrude upon them). In short, they were
busy,
and I could not
help but suspect that some old order between them had been
restored, as they trooped day after day across the breathing land. I
began to repent my coming. I sneezed at the country, at Syme’s the
ories, at Tom’s ‘hypocrisies’ – I simply sneezed.

My only comfort was the strange Mrs Simmons, the lady from the
nautical shop, and (so Tom insinuated) Sam’s mistress. She came
from time to time and sat at the foot of my bed, bringing steaming
pots of lemon soup to smoke and sour the cold out of my eyes and
nose. ‘You need light,’ she said, ‘anything alive needs light, even if it
is only grey and wet and the sun don’t show his head.’ Then she
looked at me and added coyly, ‘Perhaps you are not alive.’ But when
I was well enough to be shifted, she bade Sam build a kind of divan
for me in the old tavern room, and once settled there before the fire I
never moved. Our growing acquaintance induced her at last to speak
to me in our native tongue, and we spent many cheerful afternoons
talking of nothing and watching the sun and rain in their spring
duet upon the window. My heart beat more busily when she came,
for she surprised in me a latent longing for home, which had been
buried, like Sam’s gases, beneath the beautiful snow.

I had time then to reflect on the strange nature of their attachment. Mrs Simmons must have been a lovely girl once, and she was
lovely still after a fashion, with a curious underwater quality, a
melodious slowness. But she was odd company for a man of Syme’s
youth on the one hand and energy on the other. I think her self-reliance drew him to her in the first place. For though Sam could
concentrate with a fury, he often preferred to spend his strength on
more restless and trivial affairs. The confidence of others attracted
his powers as a bed of earth draws weeds to it. Especially when, as
in Mrs Simmons’ case, there seemed so little cause for assurance: a
middle-aged widow in a foreign land, keeping a trinket shop, to put
it unkindly. She had few friends. She once explained to me that
friendship involved too much
fudging,
and I laughed at first but
puzzled over the word for some time. When Sam began to do
business at her shop, and carped at prices and mishaps and delays, 
he must have sensed her
poise.
She seemed as untouched by his
complaints as an underwater swimmer by rain. (An unhappy
thought.) Her indifference tempted Sam as a red rag maddens a bull.

That is one account of their odd love. Perhaps I have painted
Syme too grand for the second. He possessed an enormous sense of
certainty, regardless of the matter at hand. It was undeniable,
unavoidable, like a monument. Beside his, an ordinary confidence
looked as big as a house at the foot of a palace. Yet in which would
you choose to dwell? His confidence was magnificent, true, but it
required endless repairs and small jobs. It required more work than
common faithlessness and doubt, for Syme was the most faithful of
men. It sapped his strength and robbed him of sleep. If he turned to
Tom, Tom only pricked him to new efforts. But Mrs Simmons was a
natural Penelope, a waiter. She made even homecoming seem unimportant beside her waiting. She accepted Syme to her bed and heart,
and refused to worry over him. Even Syme came, as we all do, like a
lover to his insignificance.

‘Have you ever woken
Sam,’
Tom once asked me in his wicked
way, as he brought me a cup of tea one morning before they set
forth, ‘so fond of waking men himself? Snuck upon them when he
sleeps late in his mistress’s bed?’ He perched a minute, at the edge
of my head, and looked out of the window. ‘How he
clasps
her,’ he
continued, staring at the river, ‘snuggles in the crook of her back,
and
swallows
her with his arms, as if he might
fall off
should he
let go. While she wriggles to escape and cannot and consigns herself
to a late morning; until you appear, and she gives you a
grateful look, and prods him till he stirs.’ But Sam called him
then, and Tom left me to another lonely morning, free to ponder
what prompted this strange confidence.

Perhaps I have dwelt too long on the strange Mrs Simmons, but I
found her a fascinating creature and a keyhole into Sam’s heart. She
meant the world to him, I fancy, even more than Tom did. When I
grew well enough to go out, I visited her in the gleaming shop and
she put a chair for me by the window. She called it ‘your perch,
Phidy’. From there I watched the customers move silently among
telescopes and chronometers, their faces reflected brassily at every 
angle, with distended noses and enormous hats. I watched the sun
shine longer and brighter on the street outside. We grew intimate
after a fashion – what fashion remained to be seen. She was a most
consoling woman. And I grew well, slowly at first, and then well
enough; then well altogether, just as summer, like a circus, began to
pitch its tents in Virginia.

“This is no season for commerce, Frau Simmons‚’ I declared one
day, proud and preening myself, in a fine red coat and a sky-blue
cravat. ‘Shut up your shop and come play, for these are the rites of
spring!’ – taking her hands, you see, and spinning round.

‘I am an old fool‚’ she said, laughing and gasping, ‘and you are a
young one, Herr Müller.’

There was an awkward moment when we tumbled over a chair,
a thin-legged, elderly, mahogany creature on velvet tiptoes. We
landed plump on the settee, arm in arm, and her hair fell thick as
grapes over my face. We untangled each other, rather slowly, and
sat there quite demurely after that, all laughter fled, a presage of the
awkwardness to come.

And so I sat on the porch steps one fine afternoon in May, waiting
for Tom and Sam to return. On my left, the fields fell away from the
river. Even across the water the land lay green again, clothed in
woods that surrounded the loose streets, except where the highway
cut a muddy brown through their swathe. In the market, ladies
strolled in twos and threes under the jaunty haloes of their parasols,
dipping their heads now and then, and inspecting. Birds tumbled
about the air like boys in afresh lake, scattering and screaming in
the sky. I noted a tremble in my gaze and looked round to see the
postman crossing the footbridge – a thin, upright shape bobbing
above the river – before he walked up our path with a lengthened
stride, knocking his bag against his knees, a tall, sweating gentle
man in high boots.