The Syme Papers (81 page)

And yet he did not touch that patch ten feet from the chapel door
where the flame had burned bluest. Like a loose brick discovered by a
child for hiding secrets, he kept it to himself. I sat and waited, too
cold to care. There were small heaps of earth all about like draughts 
on a board. Only when the sun had set and the moon risen, just
waned from the full, though I had to look twice to be sure – only then did he turn his caked spade to that lucky ground. We had not lit a lantern for Sam did not wish to concede the day was spent. I
could scarcely see him in the twilight, saw only a dark glow, but I
heard his cry of joy as the spade struck something and I ran towards
him. He dug deeper in great chunks and already a heavy mass lay at
his feet. Then the earth loosened and fell away and the spade cut
more easily in the soft ground.

My heart caught in my throat; I could scarce breathe. And yet,
and yet, the thought formed, half-finished, echoing in my head, the
silly great man has been been Spot On first to last – first to last. The
old mad tingling fluttered up my legs, the blood of joy. The ground
opened up at a great rate; he stood already knee-deep. Sam was
clear
– the strange word rang in my thoughts like a touched glass; no
crack ran through him after all. Then the spade struck a soft hump
in the earth and we looked down.

It was a litter of drowned kittens, slumped all ahoo in the early
moonshine, and they stank of the grave.

I lost all hope. (It is worth remembering that our doubts are often
as whimsical as our faiths. We dote on such slight evidence, such
poor proofs, to found our
unbelief.)
Sam himself stood wrinkling
his eyes against the stink; the poor creatures lay blind as worms
entangled upon each other, lightly furred by streaks of mud and
crumbled earth; their poor pink snouts mischievously suggesting
the urge to sneeze, by the black dust that trembled on their whiskers;
their eyes shut tightly against the great black world that had
devoured their senses.

‘They belonged to the girl, I suppose,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ Then he added, in a curious turn of phrase, ‘Can’t be
helped. Come on, Phidy – bear a hand with the compression piston.’

I did not mean to ignore him; only I had got so cold, grown so
weary of the battle of faith and doubt, that in its sudden silence I
could barely stir; stood stock still, observing the scene as if from a
great distance. Sam’s face was muffled by the dark: the broad chin a
shadow of stubbornness, his cheeks a rounded silhouette, empty of 
feature, his noble brow blank, cipher of a thousand thoughts; only
his eyes sharp, slight as the glint off a penny.

‘Come on, Phidy
‚’
Sam repeated, then bent his back to the beast
himself.

I can give no clearer conception of the simple
hunger
of Sam’s
faith than by the image of his darkened shape heaving the metal
brute from its muddy birth, and shifting it, perhaps an inch, from
its sucking bed, downhill towards the hole left by the cats’ grave –
what had taken four horses to drag up the slope. ‘Come on!’ he
roared now, in the brute anger of physical frustration. ‘Phidy! Come
on!’ And, shaken at last from my reverie, I stumbled to help beside
him, pressing my shoulder against his, and breathing the steam of
his sour sweat, as we laboured together.

The first inch proved to be the hardest. Gathering reluctant speed,
the jolting iron engine shuddered slowly towards the grave; and
when at last the edge of the wheel rucked into the dip of Sam’s
spade-work, it was all we could do to keep the rest of the machine
from toppling over after it. We stood now, with our hands propped
against our knees, heaving sighs whose cold gusts pinched our
lungs at every breath. And Sam looked up, sharp at me, with a
white grin in the dark.

At first, I confess, I was grateful for the warmth. Sam hauled a
shovel of coal from the chapel doorway, and fed the clattering mouth
of the black machine. He huddled over to strike a flame, then lit a
handful of loose twigs and broke them over the coals. For the first
time in hours, I could see his face by the uneven light: black with
dirt, and streaked by sweat run dry and cold against his skin. I had
never seen him so fatigued; his eyes wore that wrinkled,
crackling
look that speaks of an anxiety that cannot exhaust itself. No doubt I
looked his brother. And we fed the blaze and fanned our hands
against it, a minute or two or ten, simply to rouse the cold blood
stopped inside our veins, until our numb fingers blushed and loosened in the heat.

Perhaps a half-hour passed thus – while we built the flame to a
crashing roar, and fanned ourselves against the wave of heat and
shimmering light that issued from the black gut of the machine. 
‘Shall we make a beginning?’ Sam said, never turning his fine
countenance, browned by the hot beams, from the glare of the fur
nace. How sweet, I thought, even the calm before imminent catas
trophe stretches away! I would not break its spell for the world –
such companionable warmth we shared in the sharpening starlight,
two old friends huddled together by a smoking stove after a bitter-
cold day, before a bitter night. A lesson
–
that the great gift of man
lies in postponements, delays, prevarications, in that tireless spirit
of
neglect
of our irremediable fate that sweetens our journey to the
grave. Another quarter-hour passed peacefully, though the dead kit
tens lay soft-backed at our feet, almost squinting it seemed against
the unaccustomed light. ‘Shall we make a beginning?’ Sam said
again, and again I did not answer him.

‘Come then
‚’
he said (being a brave man), waking suddenly to a
sense of his decision, in the abrupt way a fellow lifts his first foot out
of bed in the morning, rousing himself. I stepped back instinctively
as Sam pressed a lever beside the great iron wheel circling the piston
above the furnace; a cog slipped into place and the black dragon
cracked and creaked into life at last, a slumbering, shuddering, rough
mechanical awakening. Sam paused beside it a moment, to observe
the free action of its parts: the piston pumped happily now, shining
in the reflected glow of its own heart, in the fire that powered it;
the wheel, gathering pace, spun sweet and sweeter, as the force of
habit acquired a smoother flow. The racking groan of its inception
gave way to a low whistling hum, like the cry of wind in the rigging
of a flying ship.

‘Come now
‚’
Sam cried, striking his hands together – so true it is
that the exercise of force, simply and of itself, begets delight. Even I
stood
roused
–
if not to hope then to a pleasure near allied – at the
burning spectacle of Sam’s imagination thus embodied: a powerful
compressed explosion of inner heat driving a swift and shining com
plexity of interlocking outward parts. Perhaps, I thought, it was
merely the long cold that had sapped our spirits; a touch of fire only
was required to quicken the blood. ‘Shall we have a look’, Sam said,
‘below?’ and dipped another lever, till a cog shifted, and a second
wheel began to spin.

On the instant, a kind of drill or spear thumped into the cold turf,
raising a shock of dust, and echoing against the low hill in the clear
night. Boom – boom – boom, rang out to the stars, as Sam attempted to batter his way to the planet’s heart. The drill retracted as the
wheel came round, lingered at the top when the joint spun through
the flat of its arc, then shot to ground, producing a violent percus
sion of iron upon earth, as that strange hammer of human concep
tion struck the immutable anvil of the world.

It is true, some progress resulted, a certain degree of excavation,
as the turf softened at these repeated blows and dissolved into a
thick black cloud that surged around the double-compression piston,
sputtered as it drifted into the open furnace, and enveloped Sam
himself in a smoking pail.

By this point, I had retreated some way up the rise of the hill,
where the fumes of his experiment could not choke the sweet spring
air. Sam shifted like a blackened shadow against the glow of the fire,
as he fed the red heart of the machine with scraping shovelfuls of
coal from the heap in the chapel doorway. ‘Sam,’ I cried, above the roar of combustion and the banging of that earthen drum, ‘Sam!’ – calling out for no other reason than an awful sense of overpowering futility. But Sam could not or would not hear; and when the spitting blaze began to overflow its iron cell, torn to red rags in the wind of its own creation, he pressed a third and final lever, releasing within the hollow of the pounding drill another, sharper auger – as if, in Sam’s wonderful phrase, the device had managed to ‘swallow itself, and thereby perpetuated its downward assault upon the world.

Easy was right – he could dig no deeper than a grave, six feet perhaps of fractured soil, before the battering instrument began to turn
upon itself. Or rather, it seemed to my smarting eye – as the thick compound of smoke, ash and dust began to drift across the fields – that the double-compression piston itself sought to bury its body in the reluctant ground. The shuddering machine heaved its full frame against the stubborn turf, as if the drill were only a hook by which it hoped to reel itself earthwards at last, consumed by the mass it strove to penetrate. Sam had passed the point of all his purposes. The furnace lit his streaked and blackened face, shining in 
the heat of his exertion. There was a kind of frantic joy to his
desperation, as if the fury of failure itself offered some violent relief
to his great disappointments; as if disaster proved its own reward in
the end. ‘Sam!’ I cried again, pushing through the black cloud to
seize him by the arm. He shouldered me away and fed another clat
ter of coals into the fire, which consumed them at once, unsatisfied,
and roared for more. I took his head fiercely in my hands, by the ash
and sweat of his blackened hair, and screamed into his blinking eye.
The machine had begun to break itself apart, inwardly consumed,
outwardly dissipated, by its own desires. The wheels caught and
slipped in the violence of their endeavours; drill and auger jolted
and shook as they struck home, stuck in bedrock, and could not
shake free. The body of the whole began to heave and shudder as if it
sought relief from its own intentions. Sam broke free of my hand
and scooped another bellyful of coal into the fire.

‘Sam,’ I cried again, past all patience (and faith, at last), ‘for
God’s sake, Sam; don’t make yourself ridiculous!’

This, as I well knew, was the charge, the choice of word, for
which he could never forgive me; but it brought us free at last, into
the higher air, and the ordinary chill of a spring night, while our
ambitions slowly consumed themselves away below us and with
out us.

It was ten at night before we reached home. Easy waited for us in
the parlour. He stood up quickly when he saw us and his hands
sweated so he put them in his pockets. He could not think what to
say so he said, ‘I
heard nothing here. You cannot think how jealous I
have been. Was it grand – was it very grand?’

‘No
‚’
said Sam, ‘no‚’ and pushed past him up the stairs.

‘We are only very cold, Easy‚’ I said, ‘and it has been such a long
and dull disappointment.’ Then I whispered in his ear, ‘He is sorry for
what he said, Easy. Can you manage him? I fear I angered him today.’

And in truth Sam had little heart to face the friend who had called
his ‘ridiculous’ endeavours to an end.

I fled to Mrs Simmons. She fed me soup before the fire, and then I
crouched on my knees at the foot of it, for I was cold to the bone and 
in the heart. I looked at her husband’s painting of the laden ship and
said, ‘A trade is best. I love your markets. None of this lonely dig
ging‚’

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘Very little. Only we waited a long time and did not talk. And
then Sam brought some strange device to bear – on which he had
spent his life – fired it and watched it break apart.’

‘Is it for the best?’ she asked, holding a glass of sherry to her lips,
and pausing.

‘I could not say. Do you think it is for the best?’

‘Yes,’ she said, drinking. ‘No.’

Then, later, she asked, ‘Do you admire him less?’

I thought a minute – a good long minute, chin in hand – biting,
kissing my finger in gentle abstraction. But nothing came to mind,
nothing at all. ‘Yes,’ I said, at last, in such careless fashion I knew it
to be true.

‘Just as well‚’ she whispered, ‘fool.’ But it made her unhappy.

We were both so cold at heart that passion itself could give us but
a dim light and warmth, as a candle cupped from the wind glows
through the red blood. Even such warmth was good to us and eased
us into sleep.