The Chemistry of Tears Read Online Free PDF Page A

no English. It was my intention that I should make an “adventure” of my sad situation and that Percy should feel himself a constant partner. I would keep a day journal to serve as rawmaterial for a continual stream of letters that would place me always by his side.
    ONE CANNOT CLAIM THAT sanity has been, so to speak, one’s
birthright
. There were several aunts who proved a little wobbly and my uncle Edward, an exceptional athlete, returned to his bed for thirty years after rescuing a young boy from the German Sea at Aldeburgh. If we Brandlings have sometimes lost our wits or our fortunes on the horses we have also—this is the other side of the coin—known that the impossible was possible nine times out of ten. That was the basis of our fortune. If the pater had not believed that the steam engine was possible he would not have plunged so much on Stephenson. He therefore ruined himself, or so it was said for a number of years. But of course the impossible was possible and because of that there was now a Brandling Railway and a Brandling Junction, and as a result of that triumph he could order the draughtsman to conjure up that extraordinary spectacle, of the swift trains rolling sweetly through the glass tunnels in the middle of Fortnum & Mason’s.
    In this sense I was, if only in a modest sense, a Brandling.
    Of course no one in Karlsruhe knew what a Brandling was or how he should be treated. Certainly no English soldier would dream of ordering me to vacate a park bench so he might occupy it, and when a German did so, my dictionary was no use at all. Likewise the town’s clockmakers did not seem to know how they should treat me. After some four or five unsatisfactory encounters I was cheered enormously to spy, through green panes of ancient glass, a very clever music box made in the form of a merry-go-round. The horses were moving up and down and the riders themselves responding in the most original and lifelike manner, raising an arm high, or slipping sideways in a saddle. Entering a door so low I had to stoop, I beheld the watchmaker himself scuttling out of the shadows of his workroom still buttoning his frock coat. In the light he revealed himself to be slightand very fair, with those pale watery eyes so common in those who spend their days peering into complex engines. He was not a young man and suggested, by his general manner, someone who had found the life of solitude he sought.
    At first everything seemed very promising, and he examined my plans with interest. Would he accept them? His feelings were not clear. Yet he was a watchmaker with an ingenious automaton in his window. I had brought him a project worthy of his peculiar intelligence.
    “You wait,” he said in English. I thought, thank God, but he spoke no more, using mime to indicate that he would leave the shop, but not for long. Far from being offended when he locked the door behind him, I was encouraged.
    While I waited I contented myself with the queer facsimile of life, so dead and not dead it would give a man goose-bumps. All its details I would remember for my son. There were perhaps twenty riders and each one must have, at the heart of its magic, a series of brass cams of the most ingenious construction. It is no small thing to be able to turn these curiously shaped parts, but that is not the half of it for the watchmaker must be an artist who can observe the natural movement of the human figure, and then know what cams he must cut to achieve his counterfeit.
    So there I was, the Second Friend—all knees and moustache, happily crouched beside the door, observing the wonderful machine like a tail-flicking cat—when my man returned. Behind him was a very homely-looking fellow, a policeman in fact.
    He had been conscripted to translate, and began his service by telling me I was a Respected Sir, and as Karlsruhe seemed to be a place where one must be a Respected Sir, I was very pleased to hear him say so.
    I told the policeman that M.