At the top we found the mill stretching itself across the plateau, a muddle of high-pitched deep-eaved roofs. The air was unseasonably damp here, and green and mouldy. On the shadowed fascias were visible many carvings, a clear evocation of the cuckoo clock and, in this sense, encouraging to the seeker.
“Sumpy,” the boy cried.
Although it was now early summer and therefore past the season for logs to be floated to the bigger rivers, we found abandoned fir trunks stacked untidily. In the deep shadow between mill and dwelling everything was sour and damp. Piles of old grey sawdust and freshly murdered logs sometimes blocked the path. Copper cables, like guy ropes, ran from the peak of the mill house to the surrounding earth at which point they were enclosed in wooden boxes. Not everyone, I realize, would be comforted by this unscientific mess, but to me it was further evidence that my thieves might be angels in disguise.
“Sumpy, Sumpy.” The boy’s eyes were bright with expectation. I thought, how wise I had been to accept this new adventure. I felt like G. L. Sanderson:
When life was all but over,
so this silver seam began.
We opened a bright black door and, without so much as an elephant’s foot or coat rack to prevent our immediate arrival at the heart of things, stepped inside a cavernous kitchen with a low ceiling and small deep windows. It was the middle of the afternoon but two candles and a lamp were already burning. Various pots steamed on the stove and I detected the very welcome aroma of baking apples.
“Sumpy!”
At a large square table beneath a window, sat two men, one as small as a pixie and the other—well, it was, of course, the big thick-necked fellow from the hotel, he who espoused the romantic doctrine of the Karlsruhe wheel. That improbable creature, with his bumpy bald head gleaming in the candlelight, was the object of Carl’s love. I adjusted. It was my character to do so.
Then off, hey, ho, and up the stairs, the pair of them, man and boy, in a great rush together, like chums reunited at the start of term.
No one had cared to introduce me to the delicate man in lederhosen, so I did the honours myself. I presumed him a clockmaker, and his high-pitched precise way of speaking was exactly what one might expect—one does not anticipate wonders to be made by men with gardener’s hands. He said his name was Arnaud.
Henry, I thought, you have arrived at a place you could never have pictured. I began to mentally compose another letter to my son.
A balmy breeze flowed through the open shutters. One could hear the hissing of the apples, the persistent river, the unrelenting echoing conversation between Herr Sumper and the adoring child.
The coachman delivered my trunk somewhere or other. I tipped him and he set off. Frau Helga busied herself around the kitchen and I sat at table to play host to myself.
The small Huguenot—as he let himself be known—spoke an excellent English in which he informed me that a fierce and peculiar race of men lived in these mountains. If he thought to frighten me, he did not succeed. Fierce and peculiar was what the doctor ordered. For now, however, the air smelled of chaff and mellow pipe tobacco.
It was a good half hour before Herr Sumper and Carl descended the stairs, hand in hand, clearly happy to be reunited.
“Well, Herr Brandling,” said Herr Sumper finally, “you and I have a spot of business to discuss.”
Spot of business, spot of business. How strange to find the cockney intonation pleasing. I asked the German why he spoke my mother tongue this way, and I do not doubt he answered me sincerely but he was already charging back up the stairs.
When I caught up with him he was striding along a windowless corridor. The floor inclined downwards like the murderous chute of the Brandling Railway Co.’s gravel crusher but if this was an omen I was very far from seeing it. At the lower end awaited my true destination, a sturdy pine door fastened with three quite different locks. Of course, of course, it must be locked. I would be the last to disagree.
With a fortune of one’s own, I belatedly realized, a chap could travel into any realm he dreamed. How peculiar I never thought of this before. Here I was—inside the sanctus sanctorum, the vision made concrete, and every small detail of the workshop’s physical existence, its concrete fact, stood at the service of Hippocrates. I saw machines, of course, as I had dreamed, but I had never had the wit to anticipate that the workshop might somehow hang above a wild chasm whose stream would provide the engines’ motive force. Everything was exceptionally clean and ordered, a number of shining lathes, for instance, one quite large, the others of the size traditionally used by clockmakers. The smallest lathe had a canvas belt attached to a spinning cylinder and this, in turn, was connected by a wider belt to the spring-wheel of the sawmill.
To my ear, we were behind a waterfall, against a rock.
I called out to say that Vaucanson had invented a lathe almost identical to this pygmy version.
Herr Sumper glared at me.
I thought, my goodness, do not offend him now.
Then, in an instant, as if his own drive belt had slipped onto a faster wheel, he was grinning and gesturing at the wall behind my back.
“This is the only Vaucanson we need.”
And, you have guessed already—here were the Two Friends’ plans, tacked onto the wall.
In the roar of water I heard the voices of my father and brother, in chorus, shouting that I must not give family money to this rogue.
But I was not their creature. And when Herr Sumper showed me exactly how much he would require for materials, I was so far removed from Low Hall that I praised the thoroughness of a shopping list I could not read. Confused and jubilant in the roar of water, I paid him every Gulden and Vereinsthaler he required.
With each coin I placed inside his deeply lined palm I was closer to the object that the supercilious Masini had called the “clockwork Grail.” So let it be a grail. I emptied my purse. And it was triumph I felt as I strode back up the sloping chute, thence to a half-way landing where I was to make my bed. With what joy I entered my lodging, so SPARTAN, so much superior to my own home which had been redecorated by the youngest daughter of a family of brewers. God forgive me, that is an ugly unworthy way to think. It is enough to say that henceforth I would require no oils, no pastels, no Turkey rug, no artistic clutter, no dresser, no cupboard, no commode, only this extraordinary fretwork bed and a series of ten black wooden pegs—I counted—driven in a line across one wall.
I swung open the shutters and what a violent shock it was after the gloomy green light of the kitchen—the azure sky, the dry goat paths like chalk lines through the landscape, the bluish granite which contained the stream, the harvesters still swinging sweetly on their scythes as if it required no effort in the world.
I asked my clockmaker, “When will it be done?”
But he had already vanished. I descended the stair with some happy trepidation, grasping the rail in order not to fall.
More candles had been lit and the males were at table, the boy’s hair filled with golden flame.
“Are you hungry, Herr Brandling?” Sumper asked.