The Clockmender* - Patrick O'Brian (The Rendezvous and other stories - 1994)

W.W.Norton & Company - New York London (*from The Chian Wine - 1974)

SUDDENLY he was awake. His waking had the abrupt complete-

ness of an electric light, entirely off one second and entirely on

the next. This was no warm transition from a confused doze to

a partial consciousness of the world, an awareness that would

begin with the pillow, the position of his relaxed body under the

bedclothes, and that would work slowly outwards to a confort-

able realization of the world, with himself in it, each piece falling

naturally into its accustomed place. No. This was an abrupt

and full awakening from a profound sleep; and the world that

presented itself was naked, instantly concrete, sharply defined

and entire.

   He knew at once that there was no hope whatever of drifting

off again, and he realized with horror that the grey light in the

room could not have been there much above an hour. He looked

over the edge of his bed at the pair of chronometers on the low

table: on each severe dial the steel hands showed five twenty-five.

Some disturbance, some chance noise had cheated him of three

hours of sleep.

   It was a tragedy. He would have to get up very soon, for in a

short time the insistent restlessness of his body would make be

intolerable and he would be forced into waste of another day,

another cruelly lengthened day.

   Three hours more to serve. It was a tragedy: and it was so

unfair. He had spun out the evening until well past ten o'clock,

and he had won the right to sleep until eight or even nine. He

had gone on polishing the new-cut pallets of the Knibb clock

until they were almost beyond perfection, burnishing the faces

with a slip of agate - four thousand lengthways strokes to each

of the four angles. Two hours and thirteen minutes, timing each

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stroke by the beat of a half-seconds pendulum. That had earned

him his rest, surely.

   But no. Here he was at half-past five, irrevocably awake and

committed to the day. Something tapped on the window and

scraped across the glass: that must have been it, he thought,

looking round; the long thin branch from the wistaria: it should

have been pruned years ago, when it was a stray twig; but now

it had grown long enough to reach the windowpane as the cold

wind of the dawn dragged it against the side of the house.

   He had planted that wistaria himself when first he had the

place. In those days he had been up with the first light - he had

been up before the first light - for he had often switched on the

lamp as he dressed. He had dressed in his gardening clothes at

once, to lose no time.

   He had dressed then: he had willingly gone through the process

of putting on all those garments, selecting, buttoning, tying, turn-

ing right-side out, doing-up; every day he had accepted the series

of motions that would have to be reserved at night. At that time

he had been able to accept the drill of left arm - right arm, left

leg - right leg, left foot - right foot, and its perpetual repetition.

And the prospect of it had never kept him daunted in his bed:

he remembered his eager getting up - springing up - in spite of

his warn sleepiness, from a bed where he had gone to sleep still

working out the details of the garden. Of the kitchen garden,

mostly, for although he had a brave show of flowers it was the

parallelograms of the kitchen garden that fascinated him - the

drilled rows of the potatoes and the cabbages - and he would lie

fighting against sleep while he carried out the mental arithmetic

designed to show the total yield of his thirty-five rows of main-

crop potatoes, if each plant yielded an average of three and a

quarter pounds.

   He remembered that now, as a fact: but he could no longer

comprehend the once-vital urgency that had made it a fact; he

could not feel that there was anything at all in common between

the young man who had so enthusiastically worked out the

cropping-plan for a seven-year rotation; who had, as the winter

days grew short, dug the last double trenches by the light of a

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hurricane lamp to be doubly ready for the longed-for spring.

Nothing in common between the man who had dug and cherished

the garden and the one who now had not even visited the lower

plot, the head-high jungle of nettles and fool's parsley, for months

and months. Yet there was a physical continuity: the body was

the same. And it was the same bed in which he lay. The wistaria,

too, was a speaking witness. He had planted it, a straggling

whipple, over the buried carcass of an ass, and now its trunk

was like a grey python on the wall and its untended branches

rapped against his bedroom windowpane.

   One day, perhaps, he would go down through the tangle of

roses to the kitchen garden and see whether among the rank

growth below the apple-trees he could find the remains of his

hives. Once, nearly three years ago it must be now, he had

survived. Once, nearly three years ago it must be now, he had

seen a swarm clustered like an uncoloured shining bunch of

grapes on the handle of a forgotten spade. They might have been

from his own bees.

   He would go down. But at the thought of actually doing it, of

fixing a time for doing it, of dressing in order to do it, so great

a physical repulsion seized him that to escape he turned his head

further down into his pillow and fixed his eyes on the glass

window in the side of the chronometer case.

   The cylindrical hairspring contracted, swelled, contracted, the

pulsation of a metal heart: he could not see the slow, even swing

of the balance-wheel pinion: the soft gleam of brass in the grey

light was like the ever-returning wink of a lighthouse, impersonal,

utterly reliable, continuing an indefinite series that drew out

towards infinity; and in time the beautiful monotony steadied

his mind. Now he could think more evenly of the prospects of

the lengthened day.

   They were horrible. But they were not so horrible as thinking

of the garden and of all those other things that had once filled

his life. Some of them he had cut out deliberately: he had ampu-

tated them when each in turn had threatened to grow into an

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exclusive obsession. Seeing his friends, for example; and his exact

system of economy - that had been one of the hardest, but he

had succeeded in the end, and now his rows of account books,

with every item of expenditure balanced against each incoming

penny, had remained unopened these many years. It had been

so delightful to calculate the market cost of the garden produce:

the bees had had their ledger too: and it had been such a keen

triumph to deny himself for the reward of carrying over a surplus

from one month to the next. But now he spent as he chose, not

even taking a note of it; and in the second drawer of his desk the

dividend vouchers piled up, still uncounted; and somewhere

there was a clip of uncashed cheques.

   This amputation had been successful, but it had required a

dreadful effort: other things had fallen away of themselves. He

had deliberately shut his door to callers, but he had never of set

purpose opposed himself to books or music. Yet the one was as

successful as the other, and it would now mean as much for-

bidden and indeed impossible effort to open the piano and play

as to open the door and engage in conversation with a casual

visitor.

   They had shredded away, all these things - all positive action,

all doing, had retreated obediently, to the other side of what was

tolerable. When he got up now, he would slip on his dressing-

gown. More than that would be - he wrenched away from the

thought.

   What do fleas do when they are not biting? he wondered. Or

dogs, when they are not fighting, eating or being taken for a walk

- house dogs? They must fall back into the stagnant pool of

time. What a universal cruelty, repeated throughout an infinity

of members, to be suspended in the fantastically deliberate flow

of time, with no possible escape but the even greater horror of

the farther limit, where there was no time at all. For very small

creatures perhaps it would be worse: a day might be a year for

them, by reason of their size.

   On the days and the unending hours, he thought, turning his

head from side to side. Yet all the time one's body lived eagerly

in the flow: hair and nails - every night his unwanted beard

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thrust up another hundredth of an inch; and continuously, with-

out a second's pause, his skin renewed itself, thrust on by in-

numerable subtle needless combinations of blind vitality.

   Why should the clocks alone have stayed? There seemed to be

no reason for their permanence, but in the next room, among

the desert of unopened books, there was his workbench, clean,

sharp-angled and precise with its rows of tools, broaches, dies

and taps, throws, pliers of different shapes and sizes, all ranged

so exactly that by now he could pick up each separate tool with-

out taking his eyes from his work. This perfect arrangement

called for years and years of use, but then of course he had begun

years and years ago. To begin with the old grandfather in the

hall could not be made to go: the watchmaker in the village was

ill, so he had tinkered with it himself. A common thirty-hour

movement, no more, but the simple mechanism, the wonderfully

clear train of cause and effect, fascinated him and when he

eventually mastered it, when the clock was ticking comfortably,

he felt the strangest triumph. He bought books on clocks and

even began to collect them in a small way: with the pleasure

they brought him came the reproaches of his conscience - it was

excessive and disproportionate to spend twelve hours a day for

a week in wrestling inexpertly (he was inexpert then) with the

escapement, of a repeating verge - but in this case, and in this

case alone, the reproach died of itself. The proposition that clocks

should go was unanswerable. It was of absolute importance that

they should go, should measure time exactly, and he concen-

trated all his powers to the task. He also bought more clocks.

   'Well,' Dr Provis said, almost the last time he ever came to

the house, 'I suppose it is a harmless way of killing time.' The

remark was approving in substance but it was delivered with a

kind of sneer: resenting this, he countered with a shrug of his

shoulders and a half turn of his body. 'Ha, ha,' he replied. 'I think

there is a difference, Provis, between killing time and measuring it.'

   And then again, the full significance apart, this was an activity

in which he could control all the factors; for clocks, rightly

adjusted, would go; they had none of the intolerably frustrating

imponderables of living things, yet for him they were alive

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enough. They exactly suited him; and his somewhat inhuman

persistence suited them.

   But in the last eighteen months the area of his pleasure had

contracted. By now he had a very high degree of skill; he could

cut a pair of pallets for any escapement the old clockmakers had

ever made, and in case of need he could even produce a new

scape wheel. But a new scape wheel was now a few hours' work:

once it had been the toil of weeks, and once he had felt a tingling

elation as the new wheel first revolved, ticked, and swung the

doubtful pendulum. And by now he had an example of every

variant; there was no new principle to be explored, and by the

rules of his conscience he could not clutter up his house with

clocks that would essentially be no more than duplicates of those

manual ability, could he interfere with a clock that was going

perfectly. Once, with no more than a half-imagined hint of irregu-

larity, he had felt justified in stripping a clock and searching over

every part of it, perfecting as he went; but he could not do so

now. It must not be blind activity, doing for the sake of doing:

it had to have the dignity of an end in view. That was a discipline

which he must never, never break, or the whole thing would fall

into an incoherent mockery.

   He could do it all now, verge pallets, deadbeat pallets, ordinary

anchor pallets... abruptly he remembered his evening's work.

To make a long night's sleep more sure he had stayed up to

finish the pallets of the small Knibb clock. He had finished the

work entirely: he should have kept it for today. Without it the

grey hours stretched away in an endless plain without anything

at all to break the horrifying blank.

   He lay there with the utter vacancy before him, and if no relief

had come he might have screamed at last. But a few minutes

to six the arm lifted from the locking plate of the Graham bracket

clock; the detent wheel spun three-quarters of a turn; the hoop

wheel moved the distance of two pinion leaves; the clock was

ready to strike six. It was immediately followed by the others.

His practised ear heard the cocking of the clocks, and a springing

hope made his thin heart beat.

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   There was no hope from the Knibb clock: that would be going

accurately, with no shadow of a doubt. It was perfectly in beat

and he had regulated its pendulum to the last hairs-breadth: he

knew that clock. But it seemed to him that in his sleep he had

heard the Tompion drop a stroke, as if the locking plate were

worn: it had given trouble seven years before. Unless it were a

dream it would be the Tompion, and it would probably have

happened at three - he heard them through his sleep, he knew.

And if that were so it would now strike five, not six. Five strokes

instead of six: it would be an escape, a reprieve for one more day

at least.

   He listened intently, breathing shallow not to make a noise.

The hands of the two chronometers crept in perfect unison

towards the point of six. In the next room an assembly of long-

case clocks, bracket clocks, wall clocks and table clocks stood

poised to bell out the time. On the equation clocks and the big

regulator would not say anything: they had no bells. The others,

the converted Cromwellian lantern clock, the early Fromanteel,

the Tompion, the Graham deadbeat, the Mudge, the Quare, the

Harrison, had all raised their striking trains. They stood there

in no order, here and there about the book-lined room: he cared

nothing for the beauty of their cases and some rested on rough

trial benches, stripped of their hoods and covered from the dust

with glass bell jars. Their ticking filled the room with a strange,

depressingly urgent confusion of sound as they flicked the present

by. Brass and iron insects, horrifying in their nakedness and

numbers, perpetually eating time.

   He waited, and as the moment drew nearer and nearer he

clenched his fists under the bedclothes.

   The first clock dropped and whirred; the pin gathered the tail

of the hammer and bore down upon it. The first stroke rang out

pure, but the second was lost in the clangour of the other clocks,

whirring, striking faster or slower, all bawling out that it was

six, pinning the moment down.

   Straining his head up from his pillow he followed the deep,

smooth tone of the Tompion through the competing din. At the

fourth stroke his expression changed, and at the fifth face lost

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its humanity. Now there was the racing pause between the fifth

stroke of that one bell and the sound of the sixth, if it should

ever come. The pause lengthened at last beyond the possibility

of another stroke - it had missed for sure; but until the last of

the clocks had finished, the Graham with its melancholy toll, his

face did not change. Only then, when the last sound had died

to a humming in the bell, did he allow his strained-up head to

move. It sank down, and his eyelids fluttered over his eyes; but

in another minute he was up, his fingers twitching with activity.

He threw the dressing-gown over his shoulders and shuffled

quickly to the door: and as he opened it he lowered his head to

conceal the pale smile on his face.

                              

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I myself typed this text, and I'd like

to have it used for education purposes.

I copied this one from a book 

in my personal library.

Calvin