grave.’ Then the mother surrendered her grief to God and bore it with patience and peace, and the child did not come again, but slept in his little bed beneath the earth.”
He was cruel and vile. I struck him on his big stone forehead, just beside the eye. He staggered. I kicked him in the groin. He doubled, letting out a girly shriek. Then I am afraid I became careless of my life for I knocked him and kicked his great meat carcass until he made no noise. What a lot of him there was, curled up amongst the mat of fir needles like a broken deer.
I was a fool. He had been my only hope. I returned to the inn and went to sleep.
MY TEMPER WAS RARE and awful, as frightening as a plunging horse that is better shot than fed. It had never helped me, never once. In this case, I was very lucky I had not murdered Sumper.
Next morning I dressed, doing up my buttons with swollen hands, already anticipating the nasty consequence of victory.
The girl brought my breakfast, but I could not eat, knowing only that I had made a mess of everything.
Then Sumper arrived and I was ashamed to see the raw colours of his cheeks, the almost naked bone, the damage I had caused the only person who could save my son.
When I left the inn he followed me wordlessly into the dark fir forest where I smelt my death. I anticipated the type of clearing where such matters are always settled. Low Hall, Furtwangen, it is all the same. Percy, I forsook thee.
We came to open farmland. The sun was reappearing in the western sky. The white charlock, which was obviously as much of a pest in Furtwangen as is its yellow brother in Low Hall, touched the morbid scene with falsely cheerful light.
“Where do we go?” I asked. “Let us get the business done.”
I had cut his lip and caused his moustache to rise crookedly upon his face. When he rested his hand upon my upper arm, he seemed to leer, but I detected in this single act of gentleness his regret for what he was now required to do.
“Look,” said he, pointing to a man and two women emerging from a small church. He went to speak to them and I noted well the broad shoulders and terrifying neck. I had no rage, and therefore not the least will to attack him from behind. I thought, I must run away, no matter what a coward I seem. But then the young man kissed both women and all the poor creatures began to weep. Really, their pain was almost unbearable. The women were hardly able to hold themselves upright. They made their way into the forest, staggering and howling in the most awful way.
The man turned his eyes upon me and all I saw was dark and dry. Then, with a lingering look of hatred, he raised his bundle to his shoulder and walked down the hill.
“A clockmaker,” Herr Sumper announced as he returned. The young man swung his bundle from his back and slammed it angrily against a tree. “Poor chap,” he said and his injured face looked particularly ugly in its sentimentality. “But he fell into the hands of a packer.”
Enough. I had always known that the world was filled with millions and millions of hearts, like gnats and flies, each with its own private grief like this one. But where was my punishment to take place?
I asked, “What is a packer?” but I was more concerned with sizing up his mighty arms.
“It is the packers,” he said, “who buy up clocks from the poor families who make them. The makers must accept whatever mean price they are offered.”
I stopped and put my fists up. “Where are we going, damn you?”
“Damn me?” He grinned at me and slapped my hands aside.
All around me were the signs of good sane Germans who cared for their little plots, carried manure, mould, whatever disgusting thing that was needed. They were industrious. They were humble. They were wilful. They tilled the subsoil, hoed and weeded until they compelled fertility. Why did I have to deal with a maniac? I knew the answer. I was a fool to have forgotten it.
“When I was young,” he said, placing his hand on my shoulder and thereby, while affecting to be companionable, forcing me to walk beside him, “the packers used to make the round of the cottages and collect the clocks themselves. But now the vermin have grown fat. They compel the clockmakers to come calling on them. They keep them waiting. Of course they are mostly inn-keepers,” he added. “The longer they are kept waiting, the more beer they drink and that is all subtracted from the price.
“So the young men are forced to go to England. They leave their mother and their wife behind.”
There, at the bottom of the hill, beside a narrow little stream, I was truly sorry for the swollen brute. “Just like yourself,” I said.
He considered me a moment, as if amused, then turned his attention to the view. “Here is my wife,” he said.
Amongst the many, many fanciful and quite insane things Herr Sumper would later insist on—his ability to cause lightning storms for instance—this small comment has its own peculiar place, for his “wife” appeared to be nothing less than the so-called “dung heap”: Furtwangen, with its lanes exceeding narrow and irregular, with its winding streets, its curious old buildings, its wood-carvings, and its profusion of old-fashioned metal-work. The only flaw in the picture was the obtrusively ugly modern structure, rising high and level, and looking gravelly and prosaic.
“What is that building?” I asked him.
At which point, while I was off my guard, he lurched at me.
I struck his throat.
His eyes bugged.
I spat at him.
He took me in a bear hug so tight he crushed my lungs and forced from me a most unmanly squeak, lifting me up high, turning me clockwise, anticlockwise, then upside down, and back again upon the earth.
“Why,” cried he, as he kissed me on both cheeks, “it is where they make your springs.”
Thus I understood this madman intended—after all that I had said and done—to make the automaton. Then, out of sheer relief, that my sick child would truly live, I slapped his face.
Procedures Meeting
Room 404 Annexe
3 May 2010
Present: E. Croft (Curator Horology), C. Gehrig (Conservator Horology), H. Williamson (Conservator Ceramics), S. Hall (Line Manager)
The purpose of the meeting was to decide a schedule for identifying, restoring, and reconstructing the automaton presently identified as H234.
It was decided that C. Gehrig would make an inventory of the automaton and present the findings to the Curator and the Ceramics Conservator in the last week of June. As the physical condition of this bequest is rather “pig in a poke” it was agreed that C. Gehrig and E. Croft (together, perhaps, with Development and Publicity) would meet before the August holidays to see where things stood. C. Gehrig asked if this object was primarily a “crowd- pleaser.” E. Croft said that “crowd-pleasers” had never been part of the museum’s mission. He added that although the budget for this restoration would be initially limited, he was not pessimistic about the future.
E. Croft then provided for the committee a receipt for weighed silver made out to a “Monsieur Sumper.”
The presence of glass rods and small silver fish gives some indication of the action. However it will require a full assessment to know the value (if any) of the swan both in an historical sense (c. 1854) and in terms of whatever use it may be to the Exhibitions Committee. It was clearly “early days.”
It was the Curator’s strong recommendation that the Conservators undertake this work in three stages.
