The Urfeist’s friends came to dinner, and clustered by the score around his table, where servants waited on them dressed in fancy livery, with ridiculous white wigs on their heads. Gob helped them set the table, taking as his job the setting of place cards above the plates: Mr. and Mrs. Lohman; Mr. Vanderbilt; Mr. Burns. Gob was not invited to dinner, but he would watch from just within the kitchen, and listen to the conversation.
Gob might have been lonely, except he had his studies to keep him occupied — there was always another book to read. And occasionally there were other children in the house. They would pass through, when the Urfeist began to feel old and melancholy. He told Gob he brought them to cheer his soul, but Gob felt certain he was eating them and hanging their bones to dry in the basement. They arrived, fetched from one of the charitable institutions of the city, and most of them were very happy to have stepped from the sad orphanage into a mansion. For a few days they stuffed at the Urfeist’s big table, and rolled hoops with Gob down the long halls of the house. Gob would show them his workroom, his books and his drawings, but these rarely provoked any interest. “What’s behind there?” they would ask, pointing at the iron door outside Gob’s room.
“The green room,” Gob said, and would not say any more about it, because it was into that room that the Urfeist retired when he wanted to put on his kilt and his hat and his skin chemise. It was filled with plants and carpeted with grass. The ceiling was all glass. At night the moon shone down on the skillfully potted ferns and roses and palms, and it did not take much imagining to think yourself lost in the wilderness. There was even a small cave built into a wall, where the Urfeist slept sometimes on a pile of leaves. Gob said nothing of the room, but the Urfeist told the children of it, saying he would take them in if they were good and show them that beautiful place, where birds sang under the glass roof, and where candy trees flourished, aching for children’s hands to pick their heavy fruit. The children all went in there, after a few days of feasting and playing, of sleeping in crisp white sheets in big beds. They passed through the iron door, hand in hand with the Urfeist, and Gob did not see them again, but after they were gone the Urfeist would declare himself filled with a youthful energy, and for a time all his melancholy would be departed from him.
* * *
“Unhappiness is the lot of spirits. They are denied bodily delight, but they are creatures of desire. Desire is all that’s left to them. They want to live again! They want to be with you, all you desolate millions. How will you live without them? How will they continue without you? What sort of heaven can there be when brothers are apart? My dumb one, my little boy, my ugly poodle, just poke a hole in the wall and the desire of spirits might pour through and tear the wall apart. Do you see how your work is small? Just a tiny hole through which you might drag your brother. A tiny hole, but it may as well be big as the whole earth, if you stay lazy and stupid, if I cannot reform your base, contrary soul. You may as well bring down the moon to touch the seas, smash the crystalline firmament and let down a rain of stars. Why did you come to bother me? Why, now, do you even try?”
“When I beat you I make you smarter,” the Urfeist told Gob. “When I love you I make you more tender.”
Gob felt no more tender than when he had first visited the Urfeist. He was not even sure what his teacher meant with that word, and he was not inclined to ask. He associated tenderness with girlishness. Girls were tender towards their dolls and their mamas. Girls had tender white flesh that gave when you poked it with your finger. If anything, Gob felt heavier and denser than before. Back in Homer, when his grandmother fell to reminiscing about her “terrible master,” she’d say, “Ach he put the worm in me!” She’d say how the worm was still in her, and run a hand down her front and declare, “He is there, in a coil around my backbone. Oh, he never leaves me alone!” Gob could never tell if she thought that was a good thing, or a bad. He considered his heaviness and wondered if what he was feeling was not the extra weight of Anna’s worm.
Gob did feel smarter, though. He felt very much smarter than before. The hickory paddle was decorated on one side with multiplication tables and on the other with the alphabet. He already knew his multiplication tables, of course, but now the Urfeist was teaching him better math, powerful geometry. For months Gob saw triangles everywhere. Houses were roofed in triangles. Pine trees in the park were simple triangle shapes. Staring at the faces of strangers on the street, he could make their features dissolve into a grand association of triangles.
Gob began to measure time by the books he read. The winter of 1864 was all Latin and Greek primers. The spring was Aristotle. The Urfeist knew his Aristotle intimately, and he tested Gob’s retention of his reading, paddle in hand. He knew his Aristotle so well that Gob thought sometimes that he was Aristotle, soured by the centuries into a finger-kilt-and-blood-cap-wearing madman. Plato and Euclid, Archimedes, Ctesibius, Archytas of Tarentum — sometimes Gob’s eyes felt weak, but he loved what he read. He would rather sit with a book than with the Urfeist. His favorite thing was to sit in his room with a giant dusty book in his lap, some whiskey in one hand and a brick of sweet chocolate in the other, partaking of whiskey, knowledge, and chocolate in succession. He stole the whiskey from the pantry, and usually when the Urfeist smelled it on his breath he beat him, but sometimes he rewarded understanding with some sort of powerful liquor.
Often, Gob would get a shock of recognition as he read. A picture of the aeolipile of Hero raised the hair on the back of his neck. Here, surely, was a part or a piece of his own machine. “The aeolipile,” said the Urfeist. “Is it a spiritous or self-propelling machine?” It was spiritous, Gob said, and he proceeded to build an aeolipile of his own, working with scraps of metal from a basement room full of such scraps. It was not pretty, when he’d finished, but it functioned. Gob filled it with water, and lit a fire under it. Steam rose through the support tubes, then shot from the engine tubes, and the sphere began to rotate, and kept rotating for as long as there was water and fire to make steam. Such was a spiritous machine, one that moved by the power of air or steam, whereas a self-propelling machine moved by means of wheels and pulleys and weights. When the aeolipile provoked no beatings he copied other machines — the miraculous altar and the magic amphora and the fire pump.
“Toys!” said the Urfeist. Such science as was familiar to the Alexandrian engineers seemed to annoy him. He forbade Gob any more copying of Hero, and said he was ready for stranger and more powerful knowledge. Gob thought that meant he would at last be allowed to put his little hands on the Principia, which lay in the library under a glass case the unlocking of which Gob could not figure. But the Urfeist introduced him, instead, to the Renaissance Magi: Paracelsus and Nettesheim and Della Porta, Albertus Magnus and Mirandola and Dr. Dee. Gob wanted to try making a homunculus, but the recipe called for semen, something he could not yet manufacture. “Everything in time,” said the Urfeist, in a tone that might have been gentle and avuncular coming from another mouth. He taught Gob herbs. Asafetida has a horrid odor and is useful for exorcisms. Lilies keep away unwelcome visitors. The scent of mandrake will put a person to sleep. Elm protects from lightning. Gob wanted to know, if that was true, why was there a lightning-struck elm not fifty feet from the house? In answer he got a beating.