The Discovery Of Slowness. Sten Nadolny
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worthwhile. By contrast, Dr Orme thinks you’re someone who learns things by rote, who is done no favour with ancient languages. He wants to speak to your father to see about an apprenticeship for you.’
Tom had eavesdropped in the evenings at the open window of the Wheatsheaf Inn. ‘I didn’t hear everything. They didn’t say a word about me. Burnaby said––I thought this would interest you.’
‘Yes, very much,’ John said. ‘Many thanks for trying.’
‘Burnaby talked about your fine memory. Later he remarked that freedom was only an interim stage. I don’t know if that was about you. He shouted in rage, “The pupils love me.” I believe Dr Orme was furious, too, but quieter. He said something about “being God-like” and “equality” and that Burnaby wasn’t mature enough yet. Or that the time wasn’t. His voice was rather low.’
A coach drove over the bridge out of town. Now John managed to bring out his question. ‘Have you read my book?’
‘What book? Your notes? What should I want with them?’
Then John began to speak about Matthew and how he was determined to become a sailor. ‘Matthew is in love with my aunt. He’ll take me along, and you, too.’
‘What for? I’m going to be a doctor or an apothecary. If you want to drown, do it by yourself.’ And as though to confirm this Tomtook his beautiful foot out of the Lud’s water, in which surely no human being could drown, and put his stocking back on.
Burnaby actually taught mathematics of late, always on Saturdays. It didn’t seem to give him any real pleasure that John already knew a lot about it, but his smile remained. When John discovered an error in Burnaby’s explanations, the teacher started to talk about education – beseeching, fiery, or a little woebegone, but always smiling. John wanted to try to understand education, for he wanted to make Burnaby very happy.
Dr Orme sat in on Saturdays and listened. Perhaps he knew mathematics better than Burnaby, but a clause in the school’s constitution prohibited his teaching anything but religion, history and languages.
Now and then he smiled.
John Franklin sat in detention. When somebody had turned away impatiently and had not waited for his answer he had simply grabbed him and held him tight, without considering sufficiently that the person was Burnaby. I can’t let go, John concluded from this, not of any image, any person or any teacher. Burnaby, however, had concluded from this that John must be severely punished.
Detention was the harshest punishment. Not for John Franklin, who could wait like a spider. If only he could have had something to read! For he had come to love books of all kinds. Paper could wait: that wasn’t pressing. He knew Gulliver, Robinson, and Spavens’s biography; recently also Roderick Random. Just now poor Jack Rattlin would have almost had his leg sawed off. The incompetent ship’s doctor, Mackshane, probably a secret Catholic, had already put the tourniquet on him when Roderick Random stopped him. With a venomous glance, the quack fled; six weeks later Jack Rattlin reported back for service on two healthy legs. A good argument against all hasty decisions. ‘There are three points in time: a correct time, a missed time and a premature time.’ John wanted to write that in his copybook when he got out.
It wasn’t very comfortable in detention. The stones in the cellar were still wintry. Lying on his back, John spoke to Sagals through the vaulted ceiling – to the spirit who had written all the books in the world, to the creator of all libraries.
Burnaby had shouted: ‘That’s how you all reward me!’ Why ‘you all’? It was only John in whose grip he had wriggled. And Hopkinson murmuring, full of admiration, ‘Man alive, are you strong!’
He wouldn’t be able to stay at school. Where could he wait for Matthew? He should have shown up long ago. Better get out as soon as he could. Hide on a barge under a load of grain. Let them think he had drowned in the Lud.
In the port of Hull he could start on a coal-carrying ship, like the great James Cook.
There was nothing doing with Tom. Sherard Lound would have gone along. But he was now hoeing beets in the field.
While John was taking counsel with Sagals, the cellar door opened and Dr Orme entered, his head way down between his shoulders as though he wanted to show that a school cellar wasn’t really designed for teachers.
‘I’ve come to pray with you,’ said Dr Orme. He looked at John very carefully, but not in an unfriendly way. His eyelids clapped open and shut as though, under great strain, they were trying to fan air into his brain. ‘Your books and your notebook were delivered to me,’ he said. ‘Tell me, who is Sagals?’
Now he was on a ship in the middle of the ocean! ‘And I’m not too late for this!’ he whispered, and he smiled at the horizon. He joyfully hit the rail with his fist, again and again, as though he wanted to prescribe a rhythm for the ship in which to pitch her way to Lisbon.
The Channel coast was out of sight; the fog was only a thin strip of mist. The rigging stood up straight or ran crosswise from side to side. At some point it always led to the top, making the viewer bend his head and neck back to follow it. It wasn’t the ship that bore the masts but the sails that pulled and lifted the ship, which seemed to hold on only with a thousand lines. What ships he had seen in the Channel, elaborately rigged ships with names like Leviathan and Agamemnon. Since the gravestones of St James’s, he had not found so worthy a place for letters as the bow or stern of a ship. In the end, a gigantic ship of the line had emerged from the fog; they had almost been rammed in spite of bells and foghorns.
Before him lay the sea, the good skin, the true surface of the entire planet. John had seen a globe in the library at Louth: the continents were furry and jagged; they locked into each other and spread out to try to cover as much of the globe as they could. In the harbour at Hull he had observed that pyramids of wooden planks were built in the water to prove the land’s dominance over the sea. ‘Dolphins,’ they called them, to cause even more confusion. The Dutch sailor said: ‘That’s no dolphin, that’s a Duckdalbe – a breakwater.’ And since he didn’t grin or wink but only spat as usual, it had to be right. John asked him to repeat it and learned the word. He also discovered that the French enjoyed having a long reach and that since the Revolution the concave mirrors of their lighthouses had been made of pure silver. John felt fine. Perhaps all this was already the longed-for freedom.
In Hull, over a dish of jellied meat, he had mused about freedom. One had it if one didn’t have to tell others in advance what one planned to do. Or if one kept quiet about it.
Half a freedom: if one had to announce one’s plans in advance. Slavery: if others could foretell what one would do.
All reflections led back to the conclusion that it would be better to come to some understanding with Father than simply to stay away. One could become a midshipman only through connections. Since Matthew had not returned, only Father remained.
Soon they crossed longitude 3 degrees west. The town of Louth was situated at zero; the meridian ran straight through the middle of the market square. Without Dr Orme – John knew that – he’d still sit there and look not upon the sea but into the defensively poised curves of the ear of Hopkinson, who had just been thinking about flannel.
Dr Orme had changed things at school. They now had a piece of meat twice a week and a new assistant master who kept the moderators in line.
Dr Orme! John was grateful to him and knew he always would be. Dr Orme had not maintained that he lived only for him, nor had he talked of love or education, but he had been interested in John’s special case, out of curiosity and without a trace of pity. He had tested John’s eyes and ears, his comprehension and memory. With