Henry
Twentieth of June, 1854
NO MATTER WHAT CIRCUMSTANCE might require a man to travel abroad, it will always be pleasant to be awakened by the morning sun and to find, in the chamber of a German hotel, say, safe on the chair beside you, a portmanteau and sac de nuit, and your pleasure will be so much the deeper when you recall that you have survived the inspection of a customs agent who had it in his great German block-head that you were smuggling plans for what exactly? A very comic instrument of war?
Blessed morning.
I had crossed into Germany with the full assurance of my family that all but the peasants spoke perfect English. Having endured the customs agent I understood that the peasants were very widely distributed and I therefore procured a German Grammar at the railway station.
As I walked about my quiet white-washed chamber next morning, I had a good go at learning German. This was not my métier exactly, but never mind—I was a Brandling and even if I must converse in dumb-show like a circus clown, I was determined to return home carrying that trophy I had come to find.
My son had been in the dumps with his hydrotherapy. It was awful to hear the little fellow’s shrieks and know the cold wet sheets were being wrapped around his fevered body and another day of treatment had begun.
From the first bronchial event, two years before, my wife had been waiting for the worst. Our firstborn’s death had exacted a dreadful toll on her so that now, in all her wary relations with Percy, it was clear as day, she dared not love the little chap. And I? I acted like myself; I could not help it. I persisted with my optimism with the awful consequence that the dear girl who had loved me with all her heart became first irritable and then angry. Finally she established her own separate bedroom on the gloomy north side of the house.
I made every effort to please her. Indeed it was I who commissioned Mr. Masini to paint her portrait and encouraged him to bring his assistant and whatever entertaining friends he wished. I was not wrong in this and the library was soon a regular salon and during all that chatter the portrait did indeed progress. Hermione is a handsome woman.
But I would not abandon my son to pessimism. I had the hydrotherapeutic cistern constructed and employed the Irish girl and gave up my office at the works and slept on a campaign bed in the nursery where, according to the recommendations of Dr. Kneipp, we kept the windows open throughout the fiercest storms.
Each morning when the hydrotherapy was complete and the nursery floor had been mopped dry, Percy and I sat together with our fruit and grains and planned our “Adventures of the Two True Friends.” In the village, apparently, I was thought to have become “potty” because I had been seen to climb an oak with my sick son in my arms. Potty, perhaps. But I was the one who witnessed dear Percy’s face as he beheld the four pale eggs of the Great Spotted Woodpecker.
Dr. Kneipp was in Malvern but we were in constant correspondence, and there was never an instance when he did not judge my instincts sound. And I specifically include those cases which were reported as “insane”—for instance, carrying the naked invalid across the raging River Race. “Always remember,” Kneipp wrote, “that almost any treatment is safer than the condition you are treating.”
I was slow to understand that, in spite of her portrait and her new amusing friends, my optimism was worse than torture to my wife. Only when it was too late, when I had alienated her completely, did I appreciate what damage had been done. But I am who I am. I would not give up, and I still cherished the hope that, when Hermione finally trusted we would not lose our son, her heart would burst with happiness and she would love us, both of us, again.
I made definite progress with his cure although it often seemed that only Kneipp and I could see the signs. Then, quite by accident, I came across the plans. They had been already a century old when they were published by the London Illustrated News but I immediately saw their possibility and I had one of my brother’s draughtsmen draw them afresh and by the time he was finished with the transverse sections and so on, it might have been part of the offering plan for the new Brandling railway.
When my little fellow saw the design for M. Vaucanson’s ingenious duck, a great shout—huzza—went up from him. It was a tonic to see the colour in his cheeks, the life brimming in his eyes where I observed the force of what Dr. Kneipp calls “magnetic agitation” which is a highly elevated form of curiosity or desire.
I thought, dear Lord, we have turned the corner.
The ten sheets of plans covered his bed. “Oh Papa,” he said, “it is a wonder.”
Then I knew that he would live. How alert he was when I explained that, by following the precise instructions on the plans, a clever soul-less creature would be made to flap its wings, drink water, digest grain, and defecate, this last operation being the one that most amused my son and would offend his mother, who, even as she was outraged by the duck’s vulgarity, could not help but see the good result.
The consequence of this was not exactly as I had wished and I must say that for a day or two I did not quite understand what had happened to me. In Hermione’s mind, however, there was no question that I had guaranteed Percy I would have the duck constructed.
“You don’t know you have made your son a promise?”
“No.”
“Then you were just teasing him. Could you ever be so cruel?”
“But Hermione, I would have to go abroad.”
“I am sure you know best how it should be done.”
She was a Lyall which is to say, she was driven by a hot engine. This seemed to be a family characteristic, as if the heat of the Lyalls’ bodies was part of the fermentation process that underwrote their Newcastle ventures. Now, at a lonely dinner I will never forget, I understood that this heat was being applied like a blow torch to encourage my departure from my own household.
NEXT MORNING AT THE Two True Friends’ breakfast table, my son asked me, “When will you leave, Papa?”
So his mother had been at him already.
“Would you not be sad to see your papa gone?” I asked him.
“You should not be sad, Papa,” he said and in his frown I saw the risk that he might glimpse the dire state of his parents’ marriage. I had never lied to him before but now I was a jovial clown, so much so that, by the time I poured his cocoa, he believed I could not wait to start my quest.
“Huzza,” he cried. “What an adventure you will have.”
Of course I did not depart until I had made complete arrangements for his proper care. That is, I acquitted myself with character, although my wife, being a Lyall, would not accept her victory graciously. She refused to understand why, if I was so keen on M. Vaucanson’s invention, I would not travel to the nation of which Vaucanson had been a citizen—there was no question in her new friends’ minds that the French were in every way superior to the Germans—but I had had enough of them and their opinions. Quite sensibly, my chosen destination was in the Schwarzwald or Black Forest south of Karlsruhe, where the cuckoo clock had been invented. Deep in the Breg Valley there nestled tiny farms—or so I learned in the encyclopedia—for all the world like dolls’ houses set in children’s plantations and apparently inaccessible save by climbing down rope ladders from the heights above. Here lived a mighty race of clockmakers, notorious not only for their physical strength but the dexterity of their fingers and the unexpected ingenuity of their peasant minds. Here were enough brains and fingers, an embarrassment of riches, any set of which might make my duck.