“I am sure you will tell me.”
“Yes, London is the jewel of heaven,” Herr Sumper said to me, his voice now soft as velvet. “Of this I had no idea. When I left Furtwangen I did not seek a noble fate. I fled my destiny, which was to become a patricide. Walk with me,” he said, passing me his handkerchief. “I am not Vaucanson. Thank Jesus we have agreed on that.”
Dear Percy, forgive me.
PARADOXICALLY, AS A RESULT of our two conflicts, a greater intimacy was established between us, and we developed the habit of walking together in the melancholy dusk. That he had little curiosity about my own life, I truly did not mind. Frankly I preferred that. Also his talk was hardly boring. For instance, it was on one such walk, on the edge of a ravine, that he revealed that he had planned to murder his father, by causing a tree to crash onto his bed. Alas (his word) a pulley jammed and the tree fell on the wrong room. This, he realized now, was the first truly original machine he had devised. It was in this peculiar way that he spoke to me, showing no remorse, but a detached admiration for his own genius.
As it was a genius that I required I dared not judge him.
When he failed to murder his parents—for of course they would both have died if the plan had succeeded—he jumped aboard the raft of logs and danced away. “I had no clue that I was floating towards another constellation.”
In the gloom a German goat was doddering up a bare and rocky hill. “Has not my entire life been a wonder?” he said.
He admitted a “typical peasant prejudice” against the English until he met an English woman in Avignon and followed her to London. And when she showed him what his valley had hidden from him, he could have sent a flood and washed all the Schwarzwald into the sea.
I could hear the plaintive bleat of the goat. I could see no more than the palest chalk mark of the road.
But Sumper, Sumper was in London, already in the future of the world. Miracles surrounded him, he told me so. Did I have any idea what a barometer was? Had I seen a hot-air balloon? No one in Furtwangen had ever seen a balloon, he said. If he had floated over them, they would not have seen him. They were like the savages in New South Wales who did not even see the English ships, because they did not know that such things existed.
Had it ever occurred to me, he wished to know, that I too might suffer from this blindness? What if I walked along this road and it was suddenly illuminated by blazing sea horses? Would I be able to see what I judged impossible?
In the distance Frau Helga rang her bell for dinner. This caused Sumper to say he would not make false digestive systems. He was not a cheat. He tried to persuade me to touch his own stomach where he said he had a scar caused by an incision through which he had received direct Instruction.
I pretended to misunderstand him and he was forced to hurry after me towards the ringing bell.
FORTUNATELY WE DID NOT return to the subject of the scar that night, but when the meal was over and Carl and Frau Helga had retired, he produced what I took to be a joint of meat wrapped in a cloth, perhaps a leg of goat, a bone to give a dog.
I was writing. He sat without invitation and threw onto my page a little silver leaf. I admired it with some trepidation, hoping it was nothing to do with me.
“Perhaps this is more pleasing,” he said, slowly unwrapping the large object he had kept resting on his lap. It was not a bone at all, but five gleaming steel sections, articulated at their junctions.
“Neck,” he said. “For your boy.”
But this was not the neck of any duck. I’m afraid I rather panicked.
“Please, my patron”—he ensnared my hand—“you must be happy. You must celebrate your good fortune.”
For myself I could have cried.
“Think, Sir,” he purred, “how unlikely it is that you would wander into a second-rate hotel in Karlsruhe, and end up with this?”
“But this is not a duck.”
I could not shame him. He made a snakelike dance with his arm and hand, extraordinarily sinuous, and deft, moving down to pick up the salt shaker and then, with a fast flick, letting it slip down his sleeve. In the face of his own fraudulence and theft he stood triumphant.
“The neck is too long,” I insisted. “You must agree.”
First came the deep coarse laughter and then a curious bright-eyed solemnity.
“As in the case of the male member, that is impossible.”
Perhaps I groaned. In any case, I was the victim of my own considerable emotions.
“I am a rough fellow, yes, please examine the fine work that your money has provided. Here is a tolerance of half one-thousandth of an inch. Consider that. See how the parts move within each other, how they turn.”
“What is this thing, Sir?”
“Herr Brandling, this will be the most extraordinary swan.”
“Damn you man, are you not human? No one gives a swan to a child.”
“You will be the first to do so.”
“You cannot make a swan serve as a toy.”
“But I would never make a toy.”
“Swans break bones. They kill, man.”
“Herr Brandling, what you say may be correct but swans also make love to young ladies. This swan will do no such thing. It is made to be a child’s enchanter. It will be beautiful and friendly. No one will be hurt. Nothing shall die. Even the fish it eats will rise up from the dead and swim again.”
“A miracle,” I said.
“You are sarcastic?”
No, I was furious. But then, in the middle of my temper, I glimpsed the half-full glass. Sumper was both coarse and conceited, but might not this other creature do exactly what I had expected of the duck? Might not this incite magnetic agitations just as well? Why not?
“The English are always sarcastic,” said Sumper, “but when you say ‘miracle’ I say yes, yes it is. And as a miracle placed you in Frau Beck’s inn in Karlsruhe, so a miracle placed me in Bowling Green Lane in London. No, sit. Please remain. You are angry. You feel powerless, but you are the patron, and you have no idea of what you make possible. Your power is so much greater than you know.
“Henry, I had seven words of English: ‘I am a very good Swiss clockmaker.’ This lie had done me no good, and by the time I got to Bowling Green Lane I had only two coins remaining. Do you know the name Thigpen?”
The pater had a fob watch from Thigpen & Thwaite.
“It is someone who is begging for coin. I was a cold and hungry Thigpen, and I stopped at the window of Thigpen & Co. only because it had my name on it, in gold leaf like a tobacconist’s. Behind the glass was displayed an instrument unknown to all in Furtwangen. A barometer, in fact.
“Through the door I found a young Englishman with a leather apron. I told him my usual lie about being Swiss. What did he do? Ask me what he did.”
There was no need.
“Why, Herr Brandling, he fetched Herr Thigpen, as Schwarzwalder as you could get and the minute I opened my mouth he decided I was some useless cuckoo man. But,” Sumper said, holding my wrist as if I would escape him, “but, Herr Brandling, I had been so pleased to hear my native tongue, I begged him let me labour for one week without wages.”
What Thigpen needed was a vise and lathe man in his instruments factory.
Sumper immediately claimed he was that very thing.
Thigpen seems to have been a shrewd old fellow, with keen blue eyes beneath tremendous eyebrows and his grey hair swept back and tied with a ribbon.
“You were a Swiss?” he sneered at Sumper. “Now you are a vise and lathe man?”
He demanded the young man show his hands. These hands had already been judged too big for the English clock trade.
“You like your hands?” Thigpen asked. “You think you can keep your hands attached?” He frightened Sumper, naturally, for the only lathes he knew were tiny, used by clockmakers.