The Chemistry of Tears

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.

“Make no fuss on my account,” I said.

Frau Helga, however, was stoking the firebox with crackling yellow wood. Her face was very red.

Herr Sumper’s countenance, in contrast, was cool. He nodded that I should be seated next to him.

“How long will it take?” I asked.

He placed his considerable hand upon my own as if that sign could be an answer.

I told him: “In England we would say, time is of the essence.”

“You are, as they also say in England, ‘in good hands.’ ”

“Indeed, but surely you have some idea how long those hands will take to do their job.”

“I have a very definite idea,” he said, accepting a dripping green wine bottle from the child. He boxed the boy gently across the head and the latter squeaked happily and ducked away. “I have a very definite idea that you will achieve your heart’s desire.”

“Vaucanson’s duck.”

“Your heart’s desire,” he said.

He was slippery, of course. I watched as he shared the wine, giving the boy a thimbleful before emptying a good half bottle into his stein.

“And what is my heart’s desire?”

“Why, the same as mine,” he said and poured for me.

“Spargelzeit,” said he.

“Spargelzeit,” I said, and raised my glass.

“In English,” said the precise little Arnaud, who had been left to fill his own glass, “you might translate Spargel as edible ivory.”

“Konigsgemuse,” said the musical boy, and happily suffered being squashed against the clockmaker’s massive chest.

“It is the King’s vegetable,” announced Frau Helga placing in front of me a plate of white asparagus and small unpeeled potatoes.

So Spargelzeit was not a toast. Far from it—a curse—I cannot swallow egg whites, liver, brains, cod, eel, anything soft and slimy. If they had given me a plate of maggots it would have been the same.

My companions at Furtwangen were hogging in, sighing and making very personal noises. Frau Helga, in particular, was so emotionally affected by this spectral Spargel that she made me quite embarrassed.

I selected a small unskinned potato and scraped the sauce away.

“Eat up,” instructed Herr Sumper, picking up the long white vegetable, the secret organ of a ghost which he sucked into the maw beneath the bush of upper lip. “We have yet to agree on what you will pay for board. But at this meal you are our honoured guest.”

The potato tasted of wet jute. The asparagus lay before me naked. I cut its tip off and washed it down with wine.

Sumper narrowed his eyes.

“You like it?”

“Immensely.”

He considered me closely.

“You don’t know how to taste it,” said Herr Sumper. “I can read your thoughts.”

I did not comment. He winked at the boy, who squealed with laughter. I was not sorry when Frau Helga slapped his leg. I thrust my plate away from me.

“The more for us,” he said, dividing my meal between the other diners. When the gluttons had eaten my meal, Sumper wiped his mouth and spoke to Carl behind the napkin.

Immediately the boy sprang from his chair and up the stairs. To work, I thought. I put aside my pride and followed him.

There is nothing better to soothe the stomach acids than the company of an artisan when he is at his careful labour. When my wife’s first “portrait” had commenced, I would often walk into the village to the workshop of my widowed friend George Binns, whose father had been the clockmaker to Her Majesty the Queen. There amidst all the quiet ticking I found some peace. So I expected it would be in Furtwangen. The child slipped through the workshop door but a large hand restrained my shoulder.

“You are the patron,” said Herr Sumper, dancing me around then blocking my path through his doorway. “I am the artist.”

Well, of course this was preposterous. He was not an artist, he was a clockmaker. I had already endured a