The Syme Papers (72 page)

He drew Tom’s head beneath his own and kissed his hair. His own face was still thick and gentle with tears, and I have never seen such a tender paw for comfort as his hand. Tom said nothing, though I saw later that he wept. O comfort me, I thought. Sweet Sam, smelling of shaved wood and misery, comfort Phidy in your round arms. But he straightened again in the coach, snuffed his nose with a blue handkerchief and said, ‘If I talk fooleries, I am not myself now. ‘Tis only pomp that holds me up.’

Days can be slow work. But my mind slipped its moorings and
floated easy and unmoving over the passing hours like an idle boat
letting the waves run beneath it. A night passed, and then a 
morning, and still we scarcely spoke with our heavy-desired home-coming. I feared an end, for my father called me home as Sam’s had
done. I could see no cause to keep me. Sam’s ambition had dried up,
our coffers were empty, and our company rode towards disbandment. I had no choice but to sail … have I not said home already,
and can I in the space of a few lines use the word for so distant and
different a destination? We did not ask what was to become of Sam.

At length the low hills of Baltimore came into sight, and in their
uninterested shadow we reached the town. Our long-hated, travel
ling, unchanging, cramped abode grew suddenly dear to us. What
strange reluctance we felt to leave those indifferent quarters. For
how many times on the long road had we thought of a quiet,
unmoving day, with the freedom to walk ten paces to the left if we
chose in the morning? We did not want it now it came, and sat in
the still carriage while the horses sweated in harness. ‘A word before
we go,’ Tom said. He looked at Sam and then at me and descended
for once from his high perch. ‘Kitty and I are going
to be married. She has accepted me.’ He held up a letter from the
same pile that brought Sam’s darker news. ‘As this business seems
finished, I may return to the
Southern Courier
in the fall.’

Then the driver cried, ‘Get off with you, lads, the horses need
tending.’ Our long, companionable, silent journey was broken up.
We stretched our stiff knees and propped our hands beneath our
backsides and yawned.

‘I
am pleased for you, Tom
‚
’ Sam said gallantly. ‘She is a sweet
bun.’

Edward greeted us in tears. He embraced Sam long and silently, but
even in his son’s arms peered across his shoulder and saw
company. He was led astray by his charm as a child is led by the ear.
‘I
am sorry to intrude a private grief on your welcome,’ he said,
stretching his arm from Sam’s clasp and taking Tom by the hand.
‘But I have only one son.’ He smiled sweetly, but I should have
preferred a ruder, warmer greeting.

They were slow weeks that followed. Though we were often idle
that summer, it had been an ever-shifting idleness, of travel or talk, 
company or scenery. Suddenly there was nothing to do. I stayed
with Sam in Baltimore for a time, at a loose end. Tom left for
Pactaw to see Kitty and arrange his affairs with the
Southern Courier.
Our enterprise had spent its force. I do not know how
much I was to blame, if blame can be assigned to a shift in intima
cies. I believe it can. At least I had done myself little good. I had no
employment, no home, no purpose.

Yet I was reluctant to leave. Home was a changed prospect to me
now. My thoughts of Neuburg had grown weak indeed. Only a duty
called me back. A grave duty, true, towards a much-loved, worthy
father, imprisoned in the Prince’s wine cellar, awaiting trial. But I
was young, and Sam was a much-loved, worthy friend, in equal need.
He stood at hand, in plain colours, in full form and flesh. He did not
call to me from those thin bones, dressed in niggardly black ink, lying
in that bare graveyard of the page, rattling, ‘Come.’ So I trailed the
coats of Sam’s grief and found in it a most welcome misery.

I have always been drawn to the first flush of grief, like the fall of
a storm. That great ranting and breaking calleth to me. Look, look, I
cry, like a child at lightning. The sudden landscape of night is illu
minated and dark things like love and misery grow clear as day, but
without the bustle of activity that hides them then. Grief calls to me.
But I have never been able to abide its duration. I have no ship for
those seas, only a skiff that seeks the harbour after the first great
wind. Heavy fortune, like a heavy sky, soon palls unless it lightens
and flickers.

Sam’s own misery grew hard to watch. He moved meekly about
the house in his father’s shadow. For the first weeks, at least, even
his temper deserted him. We awoke late most mornings and sat long
over breakfast. Then Sam and I took it in turns to bring the day
another hour or so along. We visited the church where Anne was
buried, and forgot the flowers Sam wished to strew on her grave. So
we sought out some wild bunch, a good hour spent among the
woods. Even as we laid those plucked stems down,
brittle against her gravestone, in spite of his true grief the thought
rose up, What shall we do next? Sam had no answer.

A week passed and another. Edward was chastened by Anne’s 
death. But he had not the stomach for hard grief and ate only the
sweets of it. Sam bent under the load. He wished to spend more and
more time alone. He slept much of the day and read much of the
night, perched in the consoling hollow of a lamp’s light, bright as a
star in the general darkness. Yet he was gentler in company than
before, with a sweet tongue and a listening ear. In the first flush of
humility, he grew attentive, if not loving, to his father. Edward had
seen Anne die, and he was rich in circumstances, like a soldier on St
Crispin’s Day. At first, Sam urged me to his company, as an excuse
perhaps for his solitary grief. ‘Make a note of him‚’ he said, knowing
I kept a journal. ‘He is worth the study.’

School had not yet returned to session, and Edward and I spent
much of our days together. At first we talked of Sam, but he led us,
even in absence, to a broader intimacy. Edward had an attentive
nature and asked after my travels and plans, with a curiosity that
was beneath his son. We explored Baltimore together, and Edward showed me its humble beauties – poky cobbled side-streets, running betwixt sweet red brick – with a mixed pride. ‘A country of barbarians,’ he said, ‘in a palace of Nature.’ We walked around the
harbour, climbed the low hill on which MacPherson stood his
ground in 1812, swept our eyes along the throat of the Chesapeake,
stretching forth towards the Atlantic; visited the Indian ruins
near by. Then he took me to his school, a white-boarded house with
three rooms. I sat on one of the tiny stools in his classroom, dusty
with summer, and looked out, feeling like a boy again, wondering
at and waiting for the world. Trees waved and scratched a blue
sky.

When sorrows come they come not single spies, but brothers. If I
spent so much of my time in Edward’s company, my fears for my
own father may have led me to look kindly on Sam’s. The trial was
fixed for the new year
–
Prussian agents wished to track the flood of
revolution to its source, before determining my father’s fate. They
would not credit the fountainhead poured from a smoky basement in
Fischersallee, where an old bureaucrat entertained such students
and soldiers who liked to talk fantasies and prophecies in their cups.
The time for decision was at hand. My official purpose in America 
had been over since the spring. The burst of activity that followed
through the summer had also finished. I would have to go.

I planned to sail as soon as Tom married, a final celebration to
send me to my old life again. ‘You may have Bubbles’ room in the
meantime
‚
’ Edward said.

‘It may be as long as two months.’

‘All the better. I need footsteps in the house, you see.’

I grew close to Edward then, as Sam had wished. He was a
charming man, attentive to all guests. And I was a gentleman from
the Old World, the ‘little minister’, with an accent and occupation
that ennobled me in the eyes of an outcast Englishman.

The home I dwelt in had changed greatly since my first visit. Edward had the run of it now and hired a cook, Mary Quinn, a big, young girl with plain tastes. She loved a clean house and often chased Edward’s dusty shoes from the kitchen. ‘Peace, Mary‚’ he cried, fleeing her dust-pan and laughing. ‘I will not endure it. I hide in fear in my own house and tiptoe through the very door.’ She was an indifferent cook, who burned the meat and left potatoes hard as apples in the pot. But she had a gift for cakes, and Edward loved her company, though she was a big-boned lady, as Anne had been. Bubbles took to her at once, and the two often spent the afternoon baking and sweating themselves into a state. Plum-cakes and custard-tarts and cherry-pies, sprinkled with cinnamon, were forged in that great furnace of a kitchen, and emerged bright with juice and steaming for our tea.

Sam could not abide her. He had changed. His mourning entered
a new season, and he found his temper. Edward took the brunt of it,
after his brief grace. ‘I will not stay to hear you giggling with Mary,
a week after Mother was put in the ground. We did not have cakes
when she could eat them.’

‘She did not make them, Sam‚’ Edward cried.

‘Two months have passed, Sam,’ I added. ‘We cannot live in a
church.’ Perhaps I should have kept my tongue.

‘He would not call a doctor till the end, Phidy. Bubbles told me.
Even then, he wished to bring the apothecary’s son, fussing with
some nonsense of a root called
pipsissiway,
till she stopped him.
“He’s a clever lad,” he said, “who studies hard. We are not such
who can afford to be bled for the head-ache.” Though all the while he
thinks himself the King of England, I suppose, with his air and his
education and damned refinements in this “barbarous” land. Have
you not marked, Phidy, that his speech grows daintier with each
passing day as he hears you speak it …’ I turned my head in shame.
Edward could not see for tears. Great fearless Mary hid her face in
her apron. Sam was the only one she heeded. Even she looked bright
when the ‘young master’ came into the room, if he did not glare at
her.

I turned from him a little in those weeks, when perhaps he needed
my companionship the most. But he abused it when he had it.
Perhaps he desired my loyalty to run so deep that it would not split
nor turn aside, break and chafe it as he would. I do not think I owed
him that debt. He wished to have things sure ‘despite all considera
tions’. He was suspicious of Edward now and desired me to ‘be
wary of him’, with an eye long practised in its jealousy. He all but
desired me to avoid him. Then he
did
desire it. I would not. ‘Despite
all considerations’ he wished us to love him, considerations such as
his kindness or the virtue of his enterprise or his deserts. He had no
right to it.

After the first few weeks, Sam spent more and more time in
Pactaw, visiting Tom and Mrs Simmons. To my surprise, I did not
wish to join them. I was happy in Baltimore and had no part in their
lovers’ lives. I had grown tired of the company of young men, too,
was glad to return to a fixed home and ordinary prospects. ‘Will
you come for once?’ Sam said, when the first north wind blew upon
us in October. ‘Tom misses you sorely, he says, fears some coldness
lies between you.’

‘I have no business there, Sam.’

‘You have none here‚’ he said, smiling, and smiles were rare between us then.

‘I am a cuckoo in your nest. Your father grows lonely without you.’

‘I will answer to my own father, Phidy, as you may to yours. I did not think you would forget my wishes so soon.’

‘Sam, you thrust us together. “Make a note of him” you said, “if
you love me. He holds a key to my heart, and you may peer in the
hole.”’

‘He has lost it, Phidy. Come once with me‚’ he said, in a gentler
tone, ‘bring all the old band together. Tom is to be married soon.’

No, I said again, for I could be as stubborn as Sam. I could not
fathom my awn reluctance, but my blood was up and I would not give
in. This was my first betrayal of Sam. A small one, but just of the kind
that rankles: that I gave his father so much of my time and talk.

Much of the time I spent reading, alone, and slept in the shorten
ing afternoons. I finished
Waverley
at last, one crisp evening, then
stared at the growing dark. A single bell tolled. Edward stood
always on the balls of his feet, and so he entered now, lightly, with
something under his arm. He flung his coat beside me on the settee,
then perched on the piano stool with his back to the keys. I had to
turn my head to look at him, but he was gone again. ‘A moment,
sir‚’ he cried and left for the kitchen. ‘Aren’t they lovely,’ I heard
Mary say, then someone clattered outdoors and the creak and clang
of the pump began. What could he be about, I wondered?