take the woman by carriage to a local hospital that would be unlikely
28 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
to treat her properly even if it could be reached, or race forward as fast
as the tracks could be cleared to Philippopolis, where an ambulance
would be waiting. Her own last words, before she lapsed into fevered
nonsense, were a plea that they not put her off into the forest and the
night, and though that could be discounted, no one—the conductors,
the porters, the medical student found on board who had diagnosed
her burst appendix—felt capable of contradicting her. She died just as
the brakes were applied at the station approach, the cry of steel on steel
and the gasp of escaping steam accompanying her passing spirit. The
two boys, who had been put in another compartment after kissing
their mother’s hot wet cheeks, awoke at the sound.
It seemed somehow appropriate to them, in the years that followed,
that their education in motion stopped with their mother’s death. They
began then to be enrolled in stationary schools, where they studied the
same things every day along with other boys. There were no more Ber-
liner discs delivered to their train compartment or waiting for them at
the desks of hotels; their father’s letters became less frequent though
not less loving, as he spent more and more time resting at resorts and
spas where nothing ever happened. The boys began their studies
together, both committed to science and engineering, but soon drifted
apart; Jules the better scholar of the two, chewing through difficult
curricula at great speed and asking for more, Hendryk preferring
friendships, sports, reading parties in the mountains.
Then in 1904 Jules went to Germany to study energetics with the
great Boltzmann at the University of Vienna. Hendryk left school and
took up his father’s enterprises, trying (he understood later) to reawaken
his father’s passions by asking to be educated in his business, insofar as
it could be learned—Eudoxe Van Damme had apparently continually
flouted in his actual dealings the principles he tried to teach his son,
indeed this seemed to be the greatest lesson, but one that could only be
grasped after all the others had been learned. Still merry, still beauti-
fully appointed, Eudoxe Van Damme resisted his son’s attempts to
interest him in new adventures: his heart had died on that station plat-
form in Bulgaria and would not be awakened.
Jules worshiped Herr Professor Doktor Boltzmann, fighting to be
admitted to his classes, never missing one of his public lectures. He
wrote to Hendryk: “B. says the problem of flight will not be solved by
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 29
endless experiments, nor will it be solved by work in theoretical
mechanics—the problem’s just too hard. He says it will be solved by a
clear statement of principles, and a new formulation of what is at stake.
But that’s as far as I follow him.”
Perhaps to fend off Hendryk’s attempts to bring him back into the
world, Eudoxe Van Damme decided that his older son too needed more
mechanical and technical training, and found a place for him at the
University of Manchester. Hendryk agreed to go, if he could work in
one way or another on the problems of heavier-than-air flight. The solu-
tion to the problem—which in Hendryk’s mind would, when found, lift
his father’s heart as well as the world’s—was about to be reached in
America, in fact in the boys’ dimly remembered home state, though for
a long time Europe didn’t hear about it, and when told of it wasn’t con-
vinced. At Manchester the engineering course was both practical and
theoretical, there were both workshops and seminars, everyone talked
physics and machine tools equally, and in the summers you could go up
to the kite-flying station at Glossop on the coast and build huge kites to
sail the cold sea winds. The great topic was how to power a man-bearing
kite with an engine, and there was much discussion of the pretty little
French Gnome engine—those were the days when engines, like flying
machines, were so different from one another they went by names.
There were Americans and Germans at Glossop, flying the kites devel-
oped by the American westerner and naturalized Britisher Samuel Cody,
a kinsman (so he asserted) of Buffalo Bill. A German-speaking young
man whom Hendryk befriended flew Cody-type kites by day and
worked on the equations for a new propeller design by night. “He is
called Ludwig,” Hendryk wrote to Jules. “Though it seems his family
call him Lucky, so I do too, though it annoys him. In fact he is Austrian
not German, a family of rich Jews. He too wanted to study with
Boltzmann. He’s told me he envies you. How strange that you have gone
to Vienna to study while I befriend a Viennese here! We talk about
flight, language, mathematics—he talks and I listen. He has two broth-
ers—no—he had two brothers, who both committed suicide. Imagine.
He told me this after many glasses of beer and has not since spoken of
it. Write to me, Jules, and tell me how you are.”
That summer the Wrights brought their flier to France, and after
that there could be no longer any doubt. The great race of the nations
30 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
had been won by the least likely of them, the one whose government
and armed forces had invested next to nothing; won by two bicycle
builders without university degrees. At Glossop the students and pro-
fessors pored over the report and the photographs in L’Aérophile, but
Hendryk’s new friend Lucky seemed to lose interest in the pursuit of
further advances; Hendryk worried for him. It was as though he felt an
equation had been solved once and for all. He put aside his kite models
and his propeller design. He told Hendryk that on an impulse he had
written to Bertrand Russell at Cambridge to ask if perhaps he could
study philosophy there. If he was accepted, he said, he would be a phi-
losopher; if he proved to be an idiot, he would become an aeronaut.
Hendryk got him to apply for a patent on his propeller design, thinking
he might put some Van Damme money into its development; he shook
Lucky’s hand farewell at the train station.
What the young Austrian had seen as a conclusion, Hendryk Van
Damme knew to be a beginning: he felt that sensation of elation and
danger and glee that comes when an incoming sea wave, vast heavy
and potent, lifts you off your feet and tosses you shoreward. He had
had no letter in months from his brother, not even in response to the
Wright news; then came word at the university that the great Boltzmann
had committed suicide, no one knew why. Still no letter for Hendryk
from Jules. Hendryk left Manchester the next week, caught the boat-
train from London, thinking of the pilots of the purple twilight cross-
ing the narrow seas one day soon, surely soon now, and in Paris
boarded the express for Vienna. At the last address he had for his
brother he ran up the stairs and knocked on the door, but the concierge
below called up after him to say that the young Dutchman was gone.
Just as Lucky had never after spoken of his brothers, Henry and
Julius never after spoke of the succeeding days. How Hendryk searched
the city for his brother, growing more alarmed; sat in the Schönbrun
park fanning himself with his hat (he was already running to fat and
worried about his heart) and thinking where to look next; tracing,
from the bank his brother used and the engineering students at the