Читать книгу Newton’s Niece - Derek Beaven - Страница 12

‘I’m ready to attempt Projection,’ said my uncle quietly, as if it were an everyday sort of thing.

‘But, Maître,’ said Nick, ‘I had no idea you would embark on such a thing. If I had known I would never have left you. I would have been here, with you, by your side at such a time.’ And then he continued in a Swiss Latin which lost me. But I knew the falseness and flattery of it from its tone.

It was a grey, squally day. The air was full of droplets; they blew finely against the casement windows, then dried again – a faint cold precipitation of Winter in our jar. He had just arrived. My Uncle Isaac and I had spent all the previous afternoon preparing the furnaces – all five, in both rooms – which he had constructed himself; I’d never felt so involved – in anything. My uncle was keyed up, and kept moving from one place to another, checking the colour of this one’s glow, supervising the firing of that, or the rich boiling of another, giving me instructions and then taking the tongs or the bellows out of my hands. ‘No, no, no, not like that; like this. See? Stronger. Not that strongly. Let me. Here.’ And mere was the occasional ‘Good’, and just the occasional ‘That’s right.’ So despite my discovery of the lens we still had a good time together, sweating and chuckling, both so excited about I didn’t know what that we neither of us touched the food sent up. The cat bloated.

Some of the pictures in the books had shown a man and a woman standing on either side of a brick oven, she wearing a moon and he a sun. I fancied myself absorbed into the magic of the curious process, as playing a part in a masque. My mother had once allowed me to stay to see a masque in Cambridge. In the figure of the magical heroine I’d allowed myself to suspect that there was a condition of life unlike my own imprisonment – my imprisonment in the male body of a wolf creature. Now I allowed myself in thought to escape into this masque of earth and fire, full of roar and hiss, strenuous lift, and dip to your partner. I tasted salt sweat whenever I licked my lips. Then, when it was late, and we’d banked up the fires because we were exhausted, and the amalgam in the larger crucible was skimming with a faint crinkly green, like the burnish on a housefly, while the last concoction in its glass needed to cool down for some hours, I slipped out of my clothes and into bed too quickly for the lens; to fall nearly asleep, nearly elated.

But Nicholas showing up next morning changed the whole atmosphere.

‘It is not a position I would naturally have occupied;’ said Isaac.

‘Pardon me? Position?’

‘The position of Projector. It smacks of sorcery. Quackery, charlatanism,’ said my uncle. ‘I told you we do God’s work here. We proceed along rational paths. The grand drama is not my way, Monsieur Fario. What I’ve been seeking to do, as you, Sir, must know … For it’s I who’ve brought you to this converse with matter, and opened your eyes a little – though you imagine yourself already an adept, and once sought to betray me in London with the …friend … you wrote of, claiming to have made a production of the medicinal Stone to sell! Yes indeed, Sir, I know you what you are, since I went there to London to find out all and expose the traducement.’ Fatio’s face turned white. ‘But we shall say no more of these thing;’ went on my uncle, his voice trembling. ‘What I’ve been seeking to do is to bring logic and order to my subject. Mine, Sir. I have made it mine enough.’ He looked up at the shelved volumes, and at the open ones, and a sudden rage lit up his face. He brought his fist down on the desk quite unexpectedly and a whole case of stoppered bottles threatened to smash themselves against each other. ‘It is an art hopelessly … forgive me … Papist! Cartesian! Hookish! And Athanasian!’

These thundering epithets were my uncle’s oaths. They were the areas in which he saw the greatest evidence of the underlying whoredom that clogged up the works of things; and showed moreover that Descartes had become for him almost the Antichrist, together with his other bêtes noires; which was surprising in the light of what I said before, and had occurred because he’d realised that in the wake of I think therefore I am his necessary God was rapidly disappearing down a Cartesian vortex. You should imagine that in these Words lay twenty years of utter frustration at the labyrinth the whole subject of chemistry represented to him.

‘Of course, of course,’ said Nick, soft and startled, unwrapping from its basketwork protection a large glass object – not the homunculus – which he had brought.

‘However, things have come to a pass,’ said Isaac, taking the object without comment as if somehow its production were pre-arranged and the conversation merely for the benefit of some audience beyond the immediate action, ‘which seems to demand that the arcanum of the Mysterium is attempted. Under properly controlled conditions,’ rolling these phrases grandly off his tongue to intimidate the other man with his intellectual authority even as he took the key ingredient. ‘For I don’t see how else we might know the complete ins and outs of the curiosity referred to so often, and so grossly, in the tomes.’ He jerked his head again towards his shelves.

‘You mean that never before have you …? You haven’t …? You’ve never tried …? Never done …? In all these years?’ said Nick, allowing the sexual innuendo to build up in all these silences while maintaining a look of wide-eyed scientific innocence on his foxy little face.

‘No, Sir. I have not,’ replied my uncle firmly. ‘I’ve been seeking the Net, the Atomic Theory, a matter of weights, truth and values, not questing vainly after fools’ promises.’

‘Ah. Bien sûr. Bien sûr,’ the Swiss nodded.

‘But today Philosophy demands this ultimate. I tell you, Sir, something I would not confess to any other. To none other.’

‘Monsieur Isaac, what is it you have to confess to me alone? It is a boundless honour you do me with this intimacy. What is it, Maître? What?’

‘It is … I have of late, Sir, entertained more than ever my … my dark suspicion.’

‘Suspicion, Isaac?’

‘A terrible suspicion. A suspicion that … that I am mocked.’

‘Mocked? By whom? Ah, Monsieur …!’

‘Do not interrupt me, Sir, I beg you. Mocked by … by all this. By my own Art. By these metals. By … but it’s of no account. I’ve been under such strain these months. It is nothing. Of no account. Take no thought for a moment’s lapse. Come along, boy, we must take the vessels down to the greater Athanor.’

And he led us down the stairs in a curious parade of three, bearing strange gifts out to the micro-temple where we should generate the divine child. But Nick wouldn’t give up.

‘Mocked, my dear Monsieur Newton? How is this? My feelings for you, Maître. Maître, my love … and respect for you.’

‘Sir! The Athanor.’ We entered the laboratory.

‘Isaac!’

‘Don’t tempt me, Nicholas. I’ve had such sorrow at your hands. Four years I have known … Don’t mock me now, Sir. I’m about to do a terrible thing because of you; and this … creature,’ indicating me.

I felt my eyes widening and my lips peeling back from my teeth.

‘You! Yes, you … !’ suddenly turning on me, his demeanour madly changed, and then breaking away with his head in his hands. ‘The satyrs mock the lame smith even as he attends to his fire. But you two shall be initiates and I shall burn the corruption out of you as I’ve burnt it out of myself and these metals.’ He flicked at his mercury-white, disordered hair. ‘No. Forgive me. That’s unjust. For my hard heart reaches out to you both in … it is such a knocking in my breast …’ tears sprang to his eyes and he could hardly breathe to say the phrase,’… in love. There. It is a word I have given to no one else before this moment. You are the chosen ones.’

I think we were both aghast.

‘But my mission!’ he went on, turning away as if to cover the lapse. ‘Don’t you understand how important it is that I should be utterly … But of course you couldn’t. Although I thought perhaps, Nicholas, my dear … my dearest … friend, that you might have … Never mind. Listen, both of you.’ He took from his bench a great leather book and exposed the pages to us. ‘The work of Alchemy is said to be a Christian work, a Platonic fulfilment of … of love. What we do in the fire, according to these writers from the past, from the dead, is to purify the flesh of the world. And I? I’ve sought only to understand. I’ve sought to understand what it was that lay behind the trumpery and lewd filth it was all dressed up in. What was the star regulus, the dove, the eagle, the Babylonian dragon, the Green Lion, the menstruations and ferments of the actions of the Sal Ammoniac, the royal or uncommon sperm? What were they? Find them, said my soul. Uncover their truth. These I would, by my pure … my nearly pure life lay at His feet, saying Father, so hath your servant performed.’ The book fell open at its title page: its Tableau de Riches Inventions. I saw the representation of an eagle flying. Far up in the sky, it was attached by a string from its beak to a sealed vessel below. My uncle went on: ‘And yet He kept all from me in this matter. For years. For years! But what does He ask of me now? To be drawn into the very flesh of these emblems even as the old writers describe? To find my passions, even my very flesh, set … set alight so that I may not separate myself from the business I … we … do. God mocks or instructs … Or the Devil does!’ and he heaved a great sigh, ‘and this grotesquerie that we embark on now is what I must do to put Him to the test as He puts me; saying, very well, let us try whether we can all burn away the faeces of carnality, for this glass may be the vessel, but so is this body and this room and this unusually quadratic College in which we find ourselves locked up together. In our own torment. Oh I am all broken in pieces.’ He paused and stared from the brick of the small furnace, to Nick, to me. Then he picked up his thread again, ‘Could it be that even as I attempted with cool head to construct the sense of the wretched books, they have with their cold pages constructed me?’

Outside the laboratory the wicked East Anglian wind was getting up. Sure enough, a storm rumbled in the distance. We raked out, woke and refuelled the main furnace, and then bellowsed it until it was roaring, with a terrible white incandescence inside its walls. Into this heat we lowered, Fatio and I, according to my uncle’s instructions, the conical crucible that contained part of the work from yesterday. Within a short while I saw the clay grow a kind of transparent orange. My uncle set on top of this an alembic, which I gathered was to collect a distillate as it ran down a long tube, which he wound round so that the nozzle entered the orifice of another furnace. This we also renewed, and installed in it a bath of iron which was spiked by its feet into the clay of the floor. To my amazement, he poured into it the contents of my great fermenting bowl – the one I’d filled with bits at random. He muttered to find so much trash at the bottom of it, but seemed to believe the decanted soup was satisfactory for his purpose. Then, he took Fatio’s sealed glass which I’d brought down from his chambers. I had a chance to inspect it closely. It was egg-shaped. Coming from each end of the egg were metallic projections fused through the shell, which was intricately silvered and obscure. It seemed designed to stand by itself in a fitting in the base of the iron bath, so that the thick wire coming out of its top stuck up towards the chimney.

Over this Newton and Fatio together lifted a ceramic cover to marry up with the iron rim, but not before they’d threaded a fine chain through the top. For the first time I noticed that this chain hung down from the interior of the chimney. Its dangling end was so designed that a little biting clip could fasten on to the wire from the glass egg. The whole apparatus now seemed complete, with the egg nested in its cover and seated in its ironware, but it remained to them to feed in the downpipe from the alembic and make all the seals up with fireputty.

‘So,’ said my uncle, ‘the hermaphroditus must be roasted over the coals until he’s ready to give up his star semen. This essence rises up with desire and we draw the spirit down this long condensing tube so that it fertilises the Queen here.’ Then he went over to his workbench and took one of his notebooks. He motioned us to sit down.

‘Twelve years ago I felt I was on the verge of solving the riddle of the metals, but it merely drew me on to torment me and left me weeping and bereft – as indeed I find myself now. Had it not been that I wrestled with Heavenly Nature and overcame

‘You speak of your Principia, Sir?’

‘I do, Nick. But this earthy trade came near to wrecking me. I felt as though I should die with grief. Listen.’ And he began to read from his notes:

‘May 10 1681’ I understood that the morning star is Venus and that she is the daughter of Saturn and one of the doves. May 14 I understood the trident. May 15 I understood “there are indeed certain sublimations of mercury” &c as also another dove: that is a sublimate which is wholly feculent rises from its body’s white, leaves a black faeces in the bottom which is washed by solution, and mercury is sublimed again from the cleansed bodies until no more faeces remains in the bottom. Is not this very pure sublimate sophic sal ammoniac? May 18 I perfected the ideal solution. That is two equal salts carry up Saturn. Then he carries up the Stone and joined with malleable Jove also makes sophic sal ammoniac, and that in such proportion that Jove grasps the sceptre. Then the eagle carries Jupiter up. Hence Saturn can be combined without salts in the desired proportions so that the fire does not predominate. At last mercury sublimate and sophic sal ammoniac shatter the helmet and the menstruum carries everything up.

‘Two years later I made Jupiter fly on his eagle.’

‘Sir, I had no idea you had achieved these things,’ said Fatio. ‘You told me nothing of it.’

‘Yesterday I completed the retracing of those steps, ready to put everything to trial today as I told you, in the light of what I now suspect.’

‘That you are mocked? I still do not know what you mean, Maître.’

‘That it is not possible to separate off the Me from the It. The Us from the That.’ And he pointed to the fire. ‘It is my worst fear – that what goes on in there depends on us, and on what goes on out here. It is that which I put to the test today.’

I looked out of one of the windows. It had started to rain heavily on to his Biblical garden. A man stood outside. Great drops bounced on and battered at the opium poppies, and at the stranger’s wide, black hat. We, inside, were both awestruck by the solemnity of my Uncle Isaac’s tones.