The Chemistry of Tears (22 page)

“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.”