Fortune's Numbers

There is a peculiar cruelty in the hour a great labour is done — not the weariness, which one looks for, but the silence that comes after; the way the mind, having been wound to its uttermost tension, finds the cord cut and yet goes on turning at nothing. I am thinking of the months that followed the printing of the Notes, in that autumn of 1843 — my initials standing modestly at the foot of seven Notes that ran to three times the length of the article they served — and I am thinking of it now, in a darkened room at the closing of the year, with my own pulse the one engine left me to attend. I had built a thing. And then there was nothing left me to build.

I had supposed — how was I not to suppose it? — that the work must beget more work; that a woman who had shown what the engine might do, who had set the operations marching down their columns to fetch the Bernoulli Numbers out of the dark of analysis, would be sent for. There would be a second labour, and a third — a whole life of them, each more ambitious than the last, until the great vaulted thing I carried only in my head should stand somewhere in iron and brass for eyes other than mine. I believed then — how was I not to believe it? — that my own mind was no common instrument, that it was fitted for some great and continuing labour; and I believe it now, lying here. But time, it transpired, was in no haste to show anything whatever. The engine itself was never built. It stood, as it had always stood, in drawings, and in argument, and in Mr. Babbage's unbreakable conviction — which the government would not finance and the age would not credit. And if the engine was not to be raised, what remained for its Interpreter to interpret?

So my powers, having found at last their proper channel, found it stopped — and a faculty that has been quickened and then denied its object does not lie quietly down. It goes seeking. It is as restless as a hound shut from the field. This is the truth I have most honestly to set down in this chapter, neither dressing it as wisdom nor disowning it as madness: that the very appetite which made the Notes — the hunger to find the hidden law beneath the visible show of things, to reduce the bewildering particular to the governing general — was the selfsame appetite that led me afterward into follies I can neither wholly excuse nor pretend I did not choose.

The first of them was of the nobler sort — or wore, at least, the nobler dress. I turned to the hidden laws of the nerves; to mesmerism, and to all that lies beyond the cold frontier where the philosophy of the schools throws up its hands and pronounces: here is matter, and there, somewhere, is spirit, and between the two no road. I could not believe there was no road. I had spent my best years insisting that imagination and analysis were not two countries but one — poetical science, I had named it — and it seemed to me a species of cowardice to suppose that the unseen workings of the living body, the currents that pass along the nerve, the strange traffic between the will and the flesh, should be the one province shut forever against calculation. If the loom could weave a flower it never saw, and the engine weave its algebraical patterns just as the loom weaves leaves, then surely the nervous frame — that subtlest of looms — obeyed an order one might, in the fulness of time, write down. I meant to be the one to write it. I conceived in those years of a calculus of the nervous system, a mathematics of the unseen; and I do not now think the dream contemptible. I think only that I had no instrument fit to attempt it, no patience to abide until one should be made, and a body too often laid low to be a fair laboratory for the study of its own animating fire.

That is the charitable account. The other waits at the turning of the lane, and I will not walk past it.

For there was a second hunger, and it learned to wear the dress of the first. The turf. I can hear how the word must sound, set down in the hand of a woman who once corrected the figures of the cleverest mechanician in England. Yet I beg you to mark how it came on — for it came not as a vice but as a problem; and there is no bait so exactly fitted to a mind such as mine as a problem in the dress of a vice. A field of horses is a system of chances. Chances are governed by law; the doctrine of probabilities is as honest a branch of analysis as any I studied with De Morgan by the morning post. It seemed to me — it seemed to me with the full, treacherous clarity of a true conviction — that a system might be found: a calculus of the racecourse, a method whereby the operations of pure reason, applied steadily and without the fever that undoes the lesser player, might master the very thing that undoes him. I would not gamble. I would compute. I drew the distinction so finely, and held to it so long, that I had pledged the second of my jewels before I understood there had never been any distinction at all.

I remember a morning — I will not say in which year, for the years ran together by then like ink in rain — when I sat with my papers spread, my columns of weights and distances and past performances ranged as neatly as ever I ranged an operation upon the cards; and I felt the old exaltation rise in me, the certainty that I stood at the lip of a thing no one before me had seen. It was the very feeling of 1843. The very same feeling. And that, I have come to think in this dim room, was the whole secret of my undoing — that folly and genius are lit by one lamp, and I had no sure means, in the moment itself, to tell by the light alone into which room I had walked. The Notes had been right. The system was wrong. And yet, from within, they felt identical — the same leap, the same architecture rising in the mind, the same insufferable confidence that I, Ada, had glimpsed the law where others saw only the dust of the running horses.

The losses I shall neither soften nor inflate. There were debts. There were sums I dared not name to William, and at the last sums I dared not keep from him; there were the family jewels, pledged and redeemed and pledged again, until the redeeming stopped. I had drawn into the affair, by then, certain confederates of the sporting world whom I shall not dignify by naming and should be ashamed to have named me — for a Countess does not consort with the touts and the legs of the betting-ring; and a Countess did. I held the secret as I had once held a hard passage of the calculus — privately, fiercely, in the conviction that I alone commanded the whole of it. And as with the calculus, I was for a long while the one person in the room who could not see how the demonstration must end.

What confounds me yet — and I have had idle, aching hours in which to turn it over — is that the will in me never once failed. It was as strong in the years of the turf as in the summer of Note G; stronger, it may be, for being thwarted. I have never been a languid woman. I do not know that species of indolence which lets a gift lie fallow from mere want of caring. No — my misfortune was the opposite, and the rarer one: a will of great force with no fit object on which to spend itself; a Mill turning at full speed with no cards fed to it, grinding and grinding upon the empty air, and at last, for sheer want of true work, manufacturing its own false work to grind. Give such a faculty a Bernoulli Number to fetch home, and it will labour like an angel. Give it nothing, and it will not rest — it will go down to the racecourse and find there a counterfeit of the thing it was made for, and call the counterfeit by the true thing's name.

I will not plead, as the penitents plead, that I was deceived by others. Deceived I was — but the deceiver wore my own countenance. I had told the world, in Note G, that the engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing; that it can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. I see now that I was describing myself, and did not know it. The engine of my own mind was a glorious instrument, and an obedient one; it would compute whatever it was set; and having finished its great commission and being set no other by the world, it took up the orders that I myself, in my restlessness, supplied. It performed them faultlessly. The fault was never in the operations. The fault lay in the woman who chose what to order — and chose, for a season, the horses.

There is a temptation, here at the close, to gather the whole into a moral and tie the ribbon upon it. I distrust the temptation. The truth is plainer, and bears no ribbon: I was a person of more power than my circumstances had any place to put, and the surplus, finding no honourable channel, cut a dishonourable one, as water will. Mr. Babbage's engine was never built, and so its Interpreter was, in the worldly sense, unemployed — which is a thing the world has never known how to use, a woman of analytical genius with no analysis required of her. I made my own employment. That it was the worst employment I ever undertook does not alter that it sprang from the best part of me, run wild. The lamp that lit the Notes lit the ruin also. I should be a liar to claim there were two.

The medicine is rising again; the ceiling has begun its slow breathing. I lay down the pen a little while, and think — not of the debts, which my mother's hand will settle when my own hands have stopped, but of that morning with the papers spread, and the exaltation, and how like it was. As time will show, I wrote once. I did not guess that what time would also show was this: that to see further than one's age is no protection whatever against walking, eyes open and certain, straight off the edge of one's own cleverness.