The Chemistry of Tears

Henry

SUMPER AND I DEPARTED the village with the heavy brass drum strapped between two poles. Such was the weight we were in a hurry to reach our destination, speeding through the fog across the square, down the lanes to the brook, across the footbridge to the fields, stumbling dangerously in furrows at whose furthest extent the sawmill awaited us. Now the leaves had fallen and nature was revealed, like an old man whose beard has been shaved off to show what cruel tricks time had played on him. Dear Pater.

Such was our speed and so uneven was the field that I feared Frau Helga, charging from the flank, would cause a spill. She passed me at a gallop and rounded on Herr Sumper while somehow trotting backwards, bravely waving letters in the air.

“On,” cried Sumper. “On.”

“No, it is from England.”

“On.”

I thought, Percy! But I was tied to Herr Sumper in every sense, so “on” I must and “on” I did, although together we almost ran the woman down.

I thought, it is from Binns. My boy could not endure the wait. Dead and lonely and I did not kiss his lips. Then we reached the river path, and the Holy Child burst from the bushes with a savage yell. His eyes were bright, his cry too high. He shook a murdered rabbit before his mother’s face before setting off ahead, gambolling and hobbling, shaking his keys in his left hand.

We sped onwards. Dear God, I am a mighty fool, please let him live. In the freezing summer workshop above the river, we laid our burden down.

I took the letter and saw my brother’s hand.

“What news?” asked Helga.

Carl was also waiting, dripping rabbit blood onto his feet.

Thank God, thank Jesus, I will join you soon.

But no—my brother was set to delay me further. Two months previously, the spider wrote, he had been appointed my trustee and now possessed the power to decide, at his own discretion, what sums would be made available to me at whatever intervals he might deem appropriate, the snivelling little wretch.

He claimed our father had “lost his wits.”

Of course it was not totally impossible that the paternal mind had collapsed at exactly the moment I walked out of the door, but my brother’s assertion that our father was no longer “sensible” was what the pater would have called a “hoot.” He had never been “sensible” in any way at all.

Red-nosed Douglas had had him declared Non compos mentis. That was Douglas, worse than Douglas. To quote: “What you do not sufficiently appreciate, Henry, is I am a man of business, and there is a great deal more to business than railway tracks.”

He was not a man of any type at all, and what was cloaked by all his ghastly bumph was that he had invested in the Bank of Ohio. I ask you: who had lost their wits? It was Doug the Thug who had placed Brandling and Sons in an “awkward situation.” Now he regretted to advise me, as my trustee—imagine—that I might draw no more funds until the “panic in America” was sorted out.

Sumper turned his back. I could not see his face, only his shoulder, his green coat, his large white hand which he ran regretfully along the flat of the spring, as if it were his fresh-caught trout.

“Bad news, Herr Brandling?”

He took it well, Frau Helga less so. She ran weeping across the bridge to the house and Carl went hotfoot after her, dripping blood across the floor.

“Dig potatoes,” Sumper called.

Then he turned to me, and without particular expression, made the following speech: “The trouble with the rich is that they rarely have the patience for great things.”

I assumed he was finding fault with me. I apologized, as well I might, but he waved all that away. “When it is their own business,” he said, “they know what to do.”

“Who do you mean, Sir?”

“When they abandon their counting house or factory, when they must have a portrait painted, they turn into idiots. What a state they are in. They go to their club where they seek out other idiots for their opinion. ‘I am having my portrait done,’ they will say, ‘and the fellow is using a lot of blue. What do you think? I’m worried about that damned blue.’ ”

So then I saw what he was saying and, for once, I totally agreed. It was intolerable that a fool like Douglas should play with life and death.

“They are in charge. It is their only skill. It is exactly the same with your Queen of England, German of course, and completely ignorant of where she is. It was she, Mrs. Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who disgraced England and my own country by cutting off the funding for the most extraordinary machine. That is the reason that I later came to visit Prince Albert at Buckingham Palace.”

“I see,” I said. I thought, he can only talk about himself.

“You do not look at all surprised?”

I did not look surprised because I did not believe him for a second. It was impossible in every way.

That evening I wrote to Percy concerning what I referred to as “our secret.” I promised that in spite of his uncle and his mother’s “difficulties” I would return as promised and that if he would only eat his grains and be a brave boy with his hydrotherapy, I would soon make him completely well.

If that was a risk, I did not see it. My blood was up and I would keep my word.

HERR SUMPER SAYS HE first mistook the Genius, Albert Cruickshank, for a common tramp, and was mightily offended that this beggar was permitted to walk freely through the door from Bowling Green Lane. The visitor’s trouser cuffs dragged on the machine-room floor. His grey hair was long and stringy. His jaw was clenched, his mouth set straight. The author of Mysterium Tremendum (for it was he) carried beneath his arm a rectangular board which Sumper assumed to be one of those complaining placards which he had seen mad people display outside the English parliament.

The visitor was allowed to wander freely, “like a Hindoo Cow,” between the lathes and presses of that enormous industrial cathedral. Not a drill slowed, not a canvas belt was shifted from its drive, certainly no worker prevented the intruder from approaching, along an aisle of lathes, the place where an altar might be expected in a church. But never was Christian altar built to the scale of that enormous engine. Sumper compared it variously to an elephant, a locomotive, a series of vertical columns of circular discs, all these so contradictory that a chap was left with—what?—a notion of a very large mechanism, yes, but one that was somehow spectral, golden, intricate as clockwork. I knew my clockmaker was in the habit of lying (about Prince Albert most recently) but such were his powers of persuasion that I had no difficulty in picturing how the interlinking parts of steel and brass caught the light, much like, surely, the gold frames on the high walls of my family’s home could contain the flame of a single candle set on a table fifteen feet below. I found myself wishing I could have seen the wonder too.

During his first week at Thigpen & Co., despite the demands of his pre-set lathe (which he boasted he had mastered while complaining of its danger), Sumper seems to have been a most effective spy.

The draughting tables had been set to one side of the altar, and here, in the place where the choir stalls would normally be, he had glimpsed the large stooped Thigpen and his senior mechanics poring over plans.

He learned that only the firm’s most respected tradesmen served the engine and that there were still ten thousand more individual parts to be produced. Not one of these ten thousand could be commenced until a very detailed drawing had been made, and as each new drawing was examined, great discussions (and some fierce arguments) took place. He was able to make me see this in a rather comic way, as if the engine was an Idol and the men were its demonic votaries.

“They thought they were all great fellows,” Sumper told me, “but not one of them, not even Thigpen, knew that the machine was at imminent risk of being broken down and sold for scrap.”

Of course he couldn’t have known it either. He knew less than anyone and had been astonished to see the tramp shake Herr Thigpen’s hand and to realize that the “placard” was a draughtsman’s folio from which drawings were extracted, reverently, one by one.

An Englishman would likely have deduced that the old man was the designer of the machine, and probably rather grand, but Sumper had assumed the tramp was selling stolen goods.

So it is to be a foreigner.

For Sumper in England, the situation seems worse than mine in Germany—the English workers were allegedly angry he had agreed to man the pre-set lathe. He may (or may not) have been physically attacked outside his own boarding house. He may (or may not) have made cat’s meat of them as he claimed. He was a boastful bragging man but it would fit his character for him to be bewitched by the sight of the dignitaries who visited the draughting table—“wigs of ivory,” he said, “coats like jewels.”

His own work was possibly boring, requiring “less brain than a cuckoo clock.” As a result of that inattention which is the constant companion of tedium, he twice came close to amputation, and it was after the second of these near misses—just when he knew he must find another job—that the factory whistle blew three times. Thank God, he thought, but the day was not over yet.

There were always a great number of trolleys and steel tables trundling across the dark slate floor, and it was one of these that the men, walking in disorderly procession, like cows at milking time, now followed deeper into the factory.

They were preceded by that grey-haired giant, their master. When he had his mechanics gathered about him, old Thigpen removed a dust cloth from the trolley and there revealed a brass and steel device. He spoke. Sumper’s translation was that the device was “the seed of the great idea we serve.” This is consistent with what follows.

Sumper compared the device to an abacus. I wrote this down.

“It was not like an abacus at all,” Sumper told me later. “You will miss the point if you go on like this.” Tiresome man. He also said that the machine was precise, ingenious, and strange. It was an automaton whose purpose was addition.

Then the “tramp” spoke. His voice was deep and mellifluous. No Englishman would be surprised to learn he was the third son of the Duke of Cumbria. He said: “Men, I am to show you an impossibility.”

The fierce little tradesmen were like greyhounds straining on their leash. They pushed insistently towards the heart of the device—two brass wheels engraved with numerals.

Cruickshank asked Mr. Thigpen to set the first of these brass wheels so the number 2 was aligned with the V-shaped cleft. He told the men that the value of this wheel would now be added to the value of the second.

The mechanics’ bodies were sour with weariness and sweat but they pushed against each other, nosing forward, watching closely as a volunteer turned the crank through one rotation.

And what did they see? Why, that 2 + 0 = 2.

That was the great idea they served? The tramp was certainly not embarrassed. He called each worker to turn the handle. One after the other. They were employees. They had no choice. One by one they came. They turned the first wheel (2) and added it to the increasing value of the second wheel.

And the great machine performed no better than a schoolboy.

2 + 2 = 4

2 + 4 = 6

2 + 6 = 8

2 + 8 = 10

Cruickshank greeted each answer with ridiculous astonishment. The men became sullen and resistant, slower and slower to answer their names. It was an insubordinate dye-maker named “Spud” Coutts who added the number 2 to the number 102.

The answer was 171.

Someone dared a cat-call. Herr Thigpen scowled.

Cruickshank clapped his hands together and cried, “Huzza.”

And Sumper smiled with pleasure.

“Only as a child smiles,” he told me, “with no understanding of anything. Of course the Genius noticed me. I was the largest man in the room, and the only one not scowling at him.”

It is not known what Cruickshank had previously told Thigpen or how Cruickshank expected his demonstration to be understood, but if it was intended to lift morale it was a failure. The owner of the works stormed to his office.

“This,” said Cruickshank, as the master’s door was heard to slam. “This is what we should call a miracle.”

There was uneasy laughter.

“What you have all witnessed,” Cruickshank said, smiling, “must appear to be a violation of the law of adding two. It must seem unnatural to you, even to your master.”

At the word “master,” by design or accident, Thigpen blew the whistle. A moment later the men were swarming towards the door, leaving a few uncertain fellows hesitating.

“I am not your master,” Cruickshank coaxed, “but I am the programmer. If you leave now you will never know that I programmed the machine so that after fifty-one additions it would perform the miracle I programmed—after fifty-one additions it would do something discontinuous.”

The word “miracle” had a violent physical effect on one of the remaining workers. He spat, shook his fist, and headed for the door.

“And for me, Jim, that is not a violation of law. It is a manifestation of higher law, known to me, but not to you, Fred.”

But it was hopeless. He could not hold them.

“You expect two plus 102 to equal 104, but I wrote a new law that 102 plus two would equal 171. As a result,” Cruickshank told his sole remaining listener, “as a result of a decision beyond your knowledge, a certain lever clicked into place. You saw two plus 102 equals 171. In nature this is what we call a miracle and I, who predicted it, would be called a prophet.”

Thus the Genius confirmed that Furtwangen’s ideas of God were puny and pathetic, that there were mechanisms beyond human knowledge, that there might be, within our sight but beyond our ken, systems we could never know, worlds we had seen and forgotten. There, in Bowling Green Lane, Sumper recalled thoughts he had had as a child when he wished with all his being that he could know what it was to be the dragonfly in all three stages, as a grub beneath the soil, as an animal living in the water, as an insect flying in the air. Would the dragonfly in its last stage have any memory of its experience of the first? Might he be a dragonfly at last, and if so how would he understand the world? “Mysterium Tremendum,” he told me. The awe and wonder of the universe. Not for a moment did he doubt that Cruickshank was a Genius, perhaps even a Superior Being with a completely different nature. Why not? We believe Jesus walked upon the water.

“We are arrogant in our ignorance,” said the arrogant clockmaker, with his alarming eyes glittering in the firelight in Furtwangen. “If animals possessed senses of a different nature from our own, how would we know? Those creatures, despised by us, might have sources of information we cannot dream exist. They might have a bodily and intellectual existence far higher than our own, why not, why not my Englishman? In London I was twenty-eight years old,” said Sumper, “and I was drunk with ideas like this, some of which I had carried in secret like pebbles in my pocket since my childhood. So when the Genius met my eye, he saw I wished to serve, and when the fuss was over in the works, he asked me to walk with him to the west side of Soho Square where he made his home.”

I WAS PERCY’S ENGINE, his pulse, his voltaic coil. With the ink of my pen I nourished him, describing the manufacture of an automaton I had never seen. Thus were my days spent. My nights, on the other hand, were quite impossible, for nothing would stop Sumper talking. Carl and his mother escaped to their bed. Then it was the worse for me. I was swallowed, buried. The drifts of snow built up to the deep sills.

Sumper claimed to have been “born” with the opening of Cruickshank’s front door. Here, in Soho Square, he would soon come to “completely understand” the Cruickshank Engine. He claimed this, glaring at me. He had proof. That is, he had been able to give a “very practical but not theoretical” report of the invention to Prince Albert.

His huge horse eyes demanded some response. What could one say? It was not only a lie, but completely beyond all possibility. Herr Saxe-Coburg, as the pater had had good reason to know, had a character remote and isolated in the extreme. He could not even see a man like Sumper.

Yes, it might seem unlikely, the clockmaker finally admitted, but it had “precisely the same degree of probability” as a foreign saw miller’s son walking in the company of the Honourable Albert Cruickshank. “Eh, Henry? Eh.”

There was a deep order in the world he entered at the top of Cruickshank’s stairs. The worshipper continued, speaking nonsense like a convert to a Baptist sect. Trapped in Germany, I watched him stride up to the tiled stove and around the table, and it soon became clear to me that what he so excitably described as “deep order” was a True Believer’s attempt to give meaning to a mess—children’s toys, oriental figurines, turned brass implements, fragments of marble and a huge library of books in front of almost every one of which was placed some curiosity or object, each one of which beckoned one’s attention.

In the centre of the old man’s solar system there was, allegedly, a large vitrine which housed silver automata, two ladies which Cruickshank frankly confessed he had loved since his childhood. They were both naked, alive and not alive, gleaming silver, thirteen inches high.

Cruickshank set the silver ladies going.

“Extraordinary,” I said.

“You do not understand.”

What I could not grasp, apparently, was that Albert Cruickshank was a Genius. And this Genius knew that Sumper understood him better than anyone ever born. This was all the more remarkable because he was a saw miller with no education.

The silver lady examined young Sumper with her eyeglasses—could she see the huge oafish body with its coarse and musty coverings, the enormous hands clasped across a secret pittering heart? When she had finished she returned to her companion. This second lady was a dancer. On her hand there sat a silver bird. While its mistress wiggled it wagged its tail and flapped its wings.

I told Sumper he was exceedingly fortunate. I said a man could live in London all his life and never see such things.

I don’t know why I said this. It was not true.

He became excited. He related how he had followed Cruickshank down a narrow staircase where there was a workshop growing “like a shelf fungus” against his house.

The sanctus sanctorum was cold, but filled with wonderful lathes and drills and presses and, to one side, a large drawing table where he produced the plans he brought to Bowling Green Lane.

Cruickshank tried to hire him there and then.

But Sumper was unworthy. He was not a vise and lathe man. He had no maths or calculus at all.

“But you laughed,” insisted Cruickshank. “QED. You are my man.”

“I gave only the impression I had understood. All I did was smile.”

“Indeed.”

But anyone could see, Sumper told me, that a clever man would not have added 2 + 2 without good reason. 2 + 2 was predictable. He had smiled, because he had been waiting to see what the surprise would be. Of course he knew 171 was “wrong” but also he assumed it must be right. All he knew was: he who makes the programme is the god.

“One hundred per cent correct,” said Cruickshank. “Here is what I want from you: just shape the wood patterns from which the engine’s bronze cams will then be cast.”

“But you don’t need me for such a thing. It is a skill possessed by every common cuckoo clockmaker.”

“Then have a drink because I have my man.”

Sumper smiled. The Genius offered him a penny for his thoughts.

“I will tell you, Herr Brandling,” said Sumper. “I will tell you what I could never say to him. I was thinking I had arrived at my soul’s true home.”

Who would not envy him?

ALL MY LIFE, it has been assumed I was a dunderhead who would not understand, for instance, why his wife had moved her room.

Hence Sumper: Henry, you could not understand.

At the same time he was determined to test me out.

“The thing is, Herr Brandling, I had been peacefully asleep in bed.”

Not a squeak from me.

“I’ll wager you will not conceive what happened next?”

“Rather not, old chap.”

“I was being murdered.”

Clearly this was not true.

“No, no. A weeping man had fallen on me,” he declared, “like a monkey from the rafter. He bawled and struck me.”

It had been the middle of the night when the Superior Being, now in his nightgown, had thrown himself at Sumper, howling and striking at the sleeping man’s big face. Sumper’s first response had been characteristically violent, but his second thought was less expected—he took the old man in his arms and held him until he went to sleep.

Dear Pater, I thought. The horrors of old men in the night.

When dawn came, the employer had departed. Sumper dressed and descended to the breakfast table. And there was Cruickshank, reading from The Times, undamaged except for a scratch on his high and hawkish nose.

“I was no doctor,” Sumper said. This did not prevent him diagnosing palsy.

In the months ahead, apparently, he decided that Cruickshank’s condition was not attached to Cruickshank but was, in a sense, Cruickshank himself. Cruickshank was the terror. He had moulded his body around the terror’s shape, deepened his own eyes, straightened his own mouth, set his jaw like steel.

Further, Sumper concluded, showing an unattractive astonishment at his own intelligence, the very trauma that brought Cruickshank each night flailing and wailing to the room upstairs, this same pain had also formed the Cruickshank Engine. The Engine and the Madness were the same, he said.

“Cruickshank’s family—his wife, two girls and a baby boy—had been lost at sea. You see that don’t you?”

I’m afraid I yawned. I did not mean to. Against my will I learned that the shipwreck had been solely the result of poor Admiralty charts. The Captain would have sworn on those tables as on a Bible but they led him to the rocks.

Mr. Cruickshank was a Genius, he shouted. He sought RATIONAL EXPLANATION for the cause of tragedy and he, Cruickshank himself, had personally examined the Admiralty tables and he had found them RIDDLED WITH HUMAN ERROR. It was unbearable that his family had been dashed and drowned not by fate or God or nature, but BY MISTAKE. Was I listening? These numeric errors haunted poor Cruickshank’s mind like angry bees, and for many months, while still in mourning, he had sat at his desk with his pencil in his hand and, slowly, carefully, corrected the errors in all their sickening multitudes. Perhaps he imagined that, as a result of these tedious labours, the dead would soon walk, the fire in the stove would light and the kitchen fill with the smell of Yorkshire pudding.

He notified “the ministry” of the miscalculations and the ministry printed errata sheets and these were sent out to the navy and the merchant fleet. But then, to Cruickshank’s horror, he found human error re-enter the charts as relentlessly as water through a leaking roof—many of the errata slips had been copied incorrectly. In 140 volumes of tables he found around 3,700 errata sheets that were as wrong as the errors they supposedly corrected. These astronomical tables were calculated by men with celluloid eyeshades who gloried in such titles as Computer or Chief Computer or Computer’s Boy. Their penmanship was such a wonder you might imagine it produced by lathe. Alas, they were simple clerks, with holes in their socks and onion on their breath, being so thoroughly human that they were unsuited to reliably repeating a simple action like addition.

As a result there were noxious errors in transcription, which spread without relent in the ground between the calculation and the printer, and then there were slip-ups in the typesetting, a cloud of them like locusts, and blunders of proofreading as numerous as grains of sand, each microscopic inaccuracy an Isle of Scylla, sufficient to cleave an oaken hull, and no matter how many nights the bereaved man occupied himself with the most menial arithmetic, the mistakes continued.

As a result of this obsession, according to Sumper, Cruickshank became ill. During his illness, or after his illness, certainly as a result of his illness, he began to consider how he would replace the pulp and fibre of the human brain with brass and steel, not some “gilded folly like Vaucanson’s which served only to amuse the rich and mindless.” Cruickshank removed all “lethal sloppiness” from his machine. Those were his exact words, said Sumper.

Cruickshank had previously kept sketchbooks of birds, and nature scenes, no beetle was too lowly for his interest. That is, his eyes had keenly sought to know and understand the natural world. But now all that bright curiosity turned inwards and his eyes, as often as not, rested on his shoes as he sought to invent a steam-driven automaton which would provide navigation charts without a single error. The engine would accept the numbers that were entered and then it would repeat additions to ten places. The machine would add and add and add, like the most dogged human, but without our species’ relentless tendency to error. And the results of these calculations would be kept from the murderous hands of human beings. The machine would produce the correct number and from these numbers it would set the type WITHOUT HUMAN INTERFERENCE and from the type it would make a mould and from the mould it would pour a printing plate which would WITHOUT HUMAN INTERFERENCE print the tables. He planned all this inside the grieving cavern of his mind, with equations going that way, and axles turning, cams moving in and out, levers interrupting and releasing, and calculating to seven orders of difference and thirty decimal places so every number was thirty to thirty-one digits long.

The Grieving Genius, said Sumper, walked the streets of London, all the while devising—completely in his head—a series of shapes that never existed on the earth before, and he saw how this three-dimensional cam would drive against that three-dimensional cam and how they would align on an axle. In comparison to this endeavour Vaucanson’s duck should be seen as exactly what it is—a machine to produce fake shit, excuse me.

These shapes CAME TO MY MASTER, Sumper said. He received every part COMPLETELY IN HIS HEAD. He drew the part with astonishing precision. He then taught Thigpen how to see the plan, and how to make the wood pattern and how to cast it in bronze, or turn it on a lathe so that all these elements would finally give the illusion, as they turned, that they were like a molten cord, sinuously rotating on columns like the vertebrae of some creature from a distant star. These parts were made to tolerances of one half-thousandth of an inch and were designed so that it was impossible to make an error. When instructed to make an error the machine would jam.

To do this Cruickshank required twenty-five thousand parts in an assemblage twelve foot high and eight foot deep and weighing many tons. With ten thousand parts he was almost half way there. Who could possibly conceive what order of being this was?

HRH the Queen never once said that she found the notion hard to grasp. But as in knighthoods, battles, invasions, the gold standard and the transportation of assassins, there must be, not only the monarch, but thousands of sucking ignoramuses, said Sumper, men who have rights and territories and opinions, and these astronomers, for instance, astronomers in particular, could not imagine, because no human mind could possibly calculate how much a machine like this might cost. By the time Thigpen had spent thousands of pounds the bureaucrats had decided that they had a white elephant on their hands. No one, certainly not Cruickshank, could tell them when it would be complete.

So, said Sumper, no sooner had I been transported to the REALMS OF GOLD, to that elevated position where I might help change the history of mankind, no sooner had I arrived in Soho Square, but the idiots at the palace declared they would no longer foot the bill.

Germans, cried Sumper. Germans. That’s what I could not tolerate. Idiots, cretins, stuck up, stitched up, basically stupid people who could have paid for the Engine by melting down a crown or two.

“You see, Henry? In this case you are exactly equal to Queen Victoria. You worry you are being cheated, no? She was just the same.”

He laughed at me and put his hand upon my shoulder, and in what followed assumed a greater degree of intimacy than was his place to assume.

“I was a young man,” he said, “but once I had been employed it was clear that I had become, in my happiness, the most unhealthy creature on this earth, a monk. In your own situation you will easily imagine the mad bordello of my dreams, which reflected everything but my actual situation, nightly holding a Genius to my chest. How I wished to still his raging soul, if you will forgive the expression.”

With this gamey brothel talk, Henry Brandling, Christian gentleman, was provided all the reason needed to retire.