The Chemistry of Tears

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.