An Elegant Solution(32)

For the greatest difference was that Strasbourg had no Rhine bridge.



I was still thinking of pendulums as I came to Mistress Dorothea’s kitchen. I watched her broom swing, and a hanging pot sway, and a clock hand swirl, and a ripple in the washbowl swim, and the sunlight through the window walk; all of them in motion repeating. I thought about how words went out and echoes came back, how word went out and consequence came back. How ideas went out and change came back, how something unknown could go out, and a death come back.

Wondering how anyone could stay unmoving in that storm, I came to the front sitting room to take wood to its fireplace. I found Daniel there musing; and his reverie was also oscillatory. He was standing and in his hands was a small table. He gripped it firmly, and the table flew up, and around, and down, like a bird wheeling and circling. Some odd mechanism was on the table but not falling off as the table flew. He saw me and cried, “Leonhard! You’ll drown!”

“In what?” I said and dropped my wood on the hearth.

“In the waves and wind!” He leaned to one side and to the other and his table rode high and low, a ship in a storm. “It’s a rare tempest about you here and you’re walking on water.”

“Peace, then, Daniel,” I said, “and be still. What sea are you in?”

“A sea of deception. Look what I have.” He set the table to safe harbor on the calm floor. It was an hourglass tied to it, with twine from the table legs knotted to the glass’s odd base. “See the sand? It’s about to run out. Now look.” From another, un-wavetossed table, he held another hourglass. “Identical. They both have kept the same time, one through the storm and one landlocked.” The last grains of sand did run through each at the same moment. I looked at the intricate base twined to the table. It was gimbaled and pivoted, and as I watched he tilted the table one way and another; the glass stayed upright. “See it? An hourglass that measures time evenly, even as a ship pitches. I had a blower in Padua make the glass for me, and a tinker make the frame to my design.”

It was an anti-pendulum, still while all else was moving. “Why did you make it?”

He was very intent on it. “For the Paris Competition.” He made an effort, for a moment, to seem as if it was trivial. But then he saw my grin, and no veil could have covered the bright light in his eyes and his own broad smile. “The problem this year,” he said, with passion, “is to tell how fast a ship moves against the water.” I knew this fervor in him. The only time that he was completely sincere and truthful was when he was in its grip, and it only sprung from his fascination with machines and their Mathematics: Daniel rendered childlike! “The captain throws out a log on a rope and measures how many knots on the rope the ship passes in a minute. But how can they measure the time? A time glass only keeps steady time if the ship is steady.”

“Until now,” I said.

“Yes, until now! Now a captain can have a glass that keeps steady in an unsteady world. Last winter I sent the plans to the Paris Academy. And a working model!”

“What was their response?”

He collapsed. Childish joy was brittle. “No response. I haven’t heard from them. The judging is complete, though. I’ll hear one way or another, and I know which way it will be.”

“Where would they have sent their letter?”

“Here.”

“Have you received any mail here?”

“Not a scrap.”

“None was waiting, either?”

“Not any.” Then the old Daniel returned, bright, shrewd, confiding. “And he wouldn’t, I know it. Not even him.”

“Your father, you mean?”

“Even he wouldn’t hold mail from me. It would come out soon enough, then he’d be in a real scandal.”

“Could there be any reason he would?” I asked.

“His strongest reasons are jealousy and spite. He couldn’t stand that I’ve won! He’d be in delirium.”

“But you say he’d never hold mail from you. And the winner of the Paris Competition is no secret. How will you hear who won? It would be in newspapers. There’d be more letters, too, from Societies.”

“I know it’ll come,” he said. “I want to hold that letter in my hand!”

“What will you do with it?”

He went cold, as cold as ice. “I’ll wave it under his nose, till he faints from the smell of it.”



An hour later, back at home and done with all the morning, I pictured the hourglass. To a man on the deck of a ship, it would seem it was the glass that was whirling and twisting; and to the glass, the man would be. And which would be right? Was there any true level to measure against? Or was every man the only measure of his own life? Everything would be shaken, and then maybe it would be plain what was fast and what was loose. I could hear a storm about me, with wind and rain, and saw its clouds and felt its cold and penetrating wet, even if the streets of Basel were sun-filled and pleasant. I wasn’t sure what was an anchor.