The Syme Papers (76 page)

He smiled then, big as a cigar. Which in turn he handed out, and
Easy opened a bottle of champagne, which tasted very cold in front
of the fire and brought us back to ourselves. We smoked the cigars
and drank another bottle, four grown men happy and standing
straight. We did not know what to say to one another, but Sam took
each of our hands in turn and shook them. The Bull laughed, and
smiled as big as a glass of brandy, which in turn he handed out. I
remember mainly how quiet we all were.

In the morning we rode back to Pactaw and began work.

The next month was among the happiest of my stay, a renaissance of
the joy of my arrival. Sam took to prosperity like a duck in water.
He preened himself and glistened in it and swam lightly. I could not
then have guessed how soon I should be going.

Sam and I slept, ate, read, worked and wrote together, often side
by side on the long table in the attic with his strong left arm flat on
the wood and his cheek in his hand. The sour-sweet smell of his pipe 
hung in a cloud above us. Snow fell in heaps that week, stuck and
froze. Children cluttered the track with makeshift sleds, falling and
pulling one another till the rope cut and burned their hands in the
cold. Once again that round field was streaked with races.

‘The cold is good for business‚’ said Sam, with the warm stem of his pipe in his mouth, but the smoke cold and sweet. ‘Can you not hear – the prickings and stirring of the gases underground – caught in snow piles and the frozen channels of stiff roots? A great eclipse is coming – very near indeed. I had not mentioned it before, Phidy, when my purpose seemed dying. No volcano, to be sure. We could hardly hope for such in Virginia. But still a great eclipse near Pactaw, the biggest in my time – so that a man well placed and well informed – might with a little digging – have a glimpse inside.’

Our magazine was to be called the
New Platonist
Sam settled
on that. He wished at first to call it the
Phaedon,
‘to please you,
Friedrich’, he said. My cheek burned and my heart glowed but I
declined. So it became the
New Platonist.
The first issue was to be
a declaration of our intentions, and Sam had got up the high phrases
in which to ring it out. ‘A new Science, like a discovered Ocean, has
“swum into our ken” and so on
–
only, Phidy, be sure to call it
a new American Science …’
And all the time the snow fell as
though the tender lips of God blew white glass, shattering and
remoulding it, as He had in the month of my first arrival. Only now
there was no Tom.

Though he did come for a weekend to help us with the press.
The four of us, Tom, Easy, Sam and I, played Atlas and hauled that
little world up to the attic in Whippet Lane. Sam and Easy had
business afterwards, over Mr Harcourt’s accounts, so Tom and I
took ourselves to the Dewdrop for a glass or two. He had grown as
distant as the Pole, for now that we had no business together, I
could scarce touch him where he lived. I did ask after Kitty and
‘your translation to conjugal bliss, Tom’ and he smiled and I knew
him happy, as I know that a fish is cold. He returned that night to
Richmond, but said before going, ‘Be careful of Sam, Phidy, will
you? As I can’t, any longer’
–
which I forgot and only remembered
afterwards.

Fearing that Sam and Easy would still be huddled over their
papers, I paid a visit to Mrs Simmons. I stood at her shop-window a
few minutes before knocking at the green door beside it. I was half-fearful, or perhaps only shy, for we had neglected her of late, but I still could not account for my hesitation. I nearly turned away. The brass and glass of her instruments lay in shadow and I watched them for some time, then knocked and made to go, before I saw the slow light of her lantern answered by their gleams. The door opened and she stood in the doorway, wrapped in a shawl red as wine.

‘Guten Abend,
Frau Simmons, I am sorry to call on you so late.’

‘Nonsense, Friedrich, it’s just gone eight. It’s too cold to stand
fussing, so come in.’

I followed her slow steps through the shop to the back room where she lived. She moved always with such deliberation that she required the courtesy we give usually to the old or beautiful, though strictly speaking she was neither. I counted her steps to the door, then stooped into a green room with a cold fire in it.

‘Sit down,’ she said, but I stood, from that damn shyness, and looked at the pictures on her walls. ‘Mr Simmons painted them‚’ she said, ‘he was in the shipping trade.’ Most were of storms and ships, the usual scenes. But one, above the fire, was the picture of a ship’s deck, cluttered with cargo, without men. ‘Yes, that is my favourite too‚’ said Mrs Simmons. ‘His business was goods and he knew it best.’ She came to me with a glass of sherry in her hand and then I took it and sat down.

‘We have always talked in the shop,’ I said, ‘I cannot recall being
in your back room without Sam, and then I am mostly silent.’

‘Nonsense again, Phidy‚’ she said, ‘I have never known someone
with such a clattering tongue as yours.’ She laughed and we were
away. I thought then how our laughter grows old before us. It often
surprises us into a new reckoning of our age. Hers was deep and
foolish, unlike her, and I loved her for it.

I sat on a stool by the fire with a third glass of sherry, dry as
wood, in my hand, and wondered what had brought me there.
Envy for Ezekiel perhaps, deep in business with Sam. His father
had supplanted mine as financier, only on a much grander scale, 
and that brought with it other sad reflections. Sadness also at see
ing Tom, who had delighted me so often, go. His faith in Sam had
been so great that I felt lonely now without it. Yet he had married
and found a proper business to engage in, while I, a half-believer
only, remained. No, I was more than that, for had not the tide of
Sam’s fortunes turned, and had not …? Perhaps I was a little
drunk, and only sick for home. And Mrs Simmons knew the lan
guage of it.

When I steered myself home at last, I found Sam and Easy on the
doorstep. To my surprise, there were tears in Easy’s eyes and his
face looked puffed. I did not like the man, but for that, his grief
touched me more nearly. It was so unexpected. He shaded his wet
eyes with his damp hand as I walked past into the house. I did not
greet them. Sam followed me soon after into the parlour. He looked
at the clock. It was midnight. ‘Tom will not be back tonight,’ he
said. ‘Kitty won’t like it’ I said nothing and we both went to bed.

The following morning, with the press installed, Sam and I
could scarce leave the house for happiness. Tom had explained its
workings to us, but we could not recall his instructions and were
compelled to experiment. All day we spent in drafting and printing
nonsense then scuttling out in the cold and pasting them broadsheet
at every convenient post in Pactaw:

But we grew tired of jokes. And by the close of the short afternoon
we printed again and again, with growing fear and excitement of
spirits:

I recall looking out of our high window at the end of the light and
seeing two old men in cloth caps, one with a stick in hand, the other
with a single sheet of paper, walking slowly to the tracks down
Whippet Lane. They seemed not at all puzzled by the silence around
them. And though I lingered by the cold window to mark their
return, they lingered longer, and I did not see them come back.

The next fortnight was spent in a fever of work. We rose early
in the heavy dark before dawn, flu’ in hand, to catch the faint
emissions through the snow pricked by the first sun. It was a cold
and miserable business, but it gave us an appetite for breakfast,
gobbled quickly, from frozen hand to mouth. Then I remained in
the parlour with its steaming windows and wrote down the morn
ing’s findings in the fat book, while Sam scrambled like a boy
upstairs to run himself warm, before he sat down at the long table
to write in that cold room. I often heard his large feet above me,
jumping to keep the blood flowing, but he said the cold kept his
brain sharp and I believe it did. He spent day and night over some ‘fresh speculation’, as he called it – begun that foul day in Perkins, when Tom fell sick. ‘A gesture only’, he said, ‘at a wonderful pos
sibility.’ In the afternoons I turned to my own composition, ‘On
the Use of Hot Wax in Bandaging Opened Wounds’, which Sam 
promised me would sit in pride of place at the end of the first
issue. Sam wrote and wrote.

It was at this time that I noted the first signs of nervous disorder
in my companion. He himself called me in to view his discharges,
flecked with bright pink spots of blood. His hair had thinned as well,
and I often found evidence of this on my own clothes. I would brush
them with my thumb over my fingers into the wood stove’s fire and
watch them suddenly change colour and glow and rise like a strand
of smoke. He cut easily in that time as well, though this awed in
part to his dry hands, chapped from the cold. But often, on fumbling
with a key or bringing wood for the fire, he would turn his palm up
to me, showing a beautiful bright spot of red.

These were the tokens of nervous joy as well as fear. The day of
the first printing approached quickly. We had become inseparable.
That morning when the first thaw came, and a frozen world
cracked and dripped around us, he tumbled downstairs to read
me ‘Our Declaration’. There was a great deal of pomp and bluster
in it: ‘a new planet has swum into our ken; it is our
own …, 
plain as the ground beneath our feet; a new science, an
American
science …’

Sam read it to me breathless from first to last. Outside tinkled the
happy torrents of a melting winter. My heart lightened and I
laughed at the last stroke.

‘Bull Harcourt will be pleased!’

‘A piece of my father’s chicanery!’

We printed it directly and posted it all over the house, on the
front door, at our bedside windows. We rushed into the running
streets and nailed it to wet trees and benches. We came back to the
steaming parlour red-faced and hungry. ‘We have our declaration,’ I
said. Only a worm of doubt in the fresh apple stirred its head. What
would be the end of such games? I wondered, and Sam felt it nibble
at him, too. ‘There is a grain of truth in it, too‚’ he said to me after
we had eaten. ‘More than a grain?’ he asked me.

I nodded; and then at last declared what had cluttered my
thoughts and burdened my conscience since that first long-ago
morning in the snow when Sam explained the world to me. At last I
 
gave a voice (plaintive and hesitant, too weak to carry doubt, which
needs a stronger, subtler tone than conviction) to my heavy fears;
perhaps only when it was all too late, and our course set. ‘Sam,’ I
said, taking him by the hand, ‘perhaps
…
’