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.
“Come, Cuckoo,” said Thigpen, “follow me.”
He led the way through bench-loads of clockmakers, at their prayers like seminarians, and then down beside the outhouse and into another factory which ran all the way to Northampton Road and here, in a long cold workshop with a ceiling made of glass, loomed some immense scientific instrument, like a giant’s abacus, like a locomotive engine, as astonishing as an elephant of brass and steel. Sumper claimed that this strange machine would completely change his life, but at the time he could not afford to see it. He was occupied with being a vise and lathe man.
“Herr Brandling, you cannot imagine the hatred toward a stranger.” The English lathe men drew their hands across their throats, meaning either that they would kill Sumper or the machine would do it for them.
Yet when Sumper was introduced to the bench lathe it did not seem so terrifying at first. Thigpen explained that the other tools in his workshop were of great delicacy, requiring accurate adjustment every occasion they were used. In many cases the time employed in adjusting the calibration was longer than the time of production.
I told Sumper I was not a mechanic. I could not understand him.
“The same for me, exactly, Herr Brandling. There was no time to even memorize the names of things.”
Broadly speaking, Thigpen explained to Sumper, it was good economy to keep one machine constantly employed in one kind of work. No fiddle-farting, he said. One lathe, for example, should be kept constantly making cylinders. His men were proud to spend their hours in fiddle-fart, but those days would soon be over on Bowling Green Lane.
“One lathe, one job,” he said.
Sumper was a foreigner and he was doing what the English would not do. He was not scared of them. He said this many times.
If he was to be killed it would be by tedium. Work at that pre-set lathe required the murder of all intelligence and skill.
Yet even if he was of the lower orders, he soon noticed that there was a higher game being played. As he became more skilled he had time to look around, and then he understood that there were gentlemen, lords and dukes coming and going all day long, members of the Royal Society.
“The Royal Society,” I said. “I suppose they came to give you Instruction.”
The joke was not well taken and I leapt to make things right. “And what did you learn in Bowling Green Lane, Herr Sumper?”
“What did I learn, my little one? Only that there were worlds beyond my knowledge and your imagination.”
