The Enchanted Evening

There are evenings that do not consent to end when the candles are snuffed — they go on burning somewhere behind the eyes for the remainder of a life, and one warms one's hands at them long after the house and the company have gone to dust. I have such an evening still in my keeping. It is the fifth of June, in the year 1833; I am seventeen; and I am standing in a fine London drawing-room, learning — for the first time, and once for all — what I was for. The medicine cannot reach that room. I have laboured, these dim months, to let it dull every other thing; but that one set of candles it will not put out, and I am glad of it — I would keep that light though I had to surrender all the rest.

I had been presented at court not long before, in the spring of that year, in the proper feathers and the proper terror — made over into an object to be looked at and approved. I do not despise the ceremony now as I despised it then; my mother had her reasons, and rank is a species of armour, and I have since had cause to be grateful for armour. But a girl who is shown to a room of strangers as a thing of value learns very quickly to ask herself what, precisely, she is valued for — and the answer the season returned to me was not one I could consent to live inside. I was a daughter to be matched. I wished to be a mind to be reckoned with. I did not yet know that within a few weeks the distinction would be made flesh — or rather made brass — upon a small table, in a house off Portland Place.

It was Mrs Somerville who took me — Mary Somerville, who had already begun to be to me what no governess, and no Fury my mother ever set to watch me, could be: a woman who knew things, and who did not account the knowing of them unwomanly. She had the gift, rare in the learned, of making her knowledge a door and not a wall; one came away from her not crushed but enlarged. She told me, with that quiet certainty of hers, that there was a gentleman I ought to meet, and a machine I ought to see, and that I need be frightened of neither. I was not frightened. I was — I recall the exact temperature of the feeling — impatient; impatient in the way one is impatient at the foot of a stair one somehow already knows leads somewhere.

The soirées of Mr Babbage were famous, and I had heard them described before ever I climbed those steps: the cleverest people in London packed wall to wall, and somewhere amid the talk a contrivance of his that did sums. Did sums. That was how it was put to me, and that — I am sorry to say — was how the greater part of that brilliant room understood it on the evening I am describing. There it stood: only a portion of his Difference Engine, a fragment, a mere fraction of the whole he meant to raise — and yet a thing of real beauty. Columns of geared wheels; figured brass and polished steel; the numbers cut upon the discs catching the light as they turned. He set it in motion. The wheels took up their labour, one tier driving the next, and the figures climbed and changed and rendered up their answers in orderly succession — without a hand to guide them, without a slip, without fatigue.

And the room admired. That is the word, and it is a small word, and I have never forgot how small it sounded. They admired as one admires a conjuror, or an automaton that writes a verse, or a singing bird wound up with a key — a clever toy, a marvel of the season, a thing to be exclaimed over and then abandoned for the supper-table. The ladies pronounced it ingenious; the gentlemen pronounced it ingenious and expensive; and everyone was perfectly polite. They saw a machine that performed arithmetic with no error and great elegance — and they were right, and they saw nothing.

I tell it now as a fault in them; and it was not a fault. It was only that I had been made to see the other thing, and they had not. I have wondered, in the long reckonings of this last year, whether what visited me at that table was a faculty or an affliction — whether to be unable to watch a brass wheel turn without seeing through it, into the country that lies behind it, is a blessing or a particular kind of solitude. For what I saw, standing a little apart with my heart going like the engine itself, was not a machine that did sums. A loom does not weave; it is the means whereby figured silk is brought into being out of a governing design. So here. The numbers were not the thing. The numbers were the flowers and the leaves; behind them, holding them, was a pattern — a method made obedient; a procedure of thought lifted clean out of the frail human head, where it forgets and tires and falters, and laid down instead in metal that would not forget and could not tire. I was looking at reasoning, divorced from the reasoner. I was looking at the steps of an analysis performed by a thing that did not comprehend them — and would never have need to.

I could not have spoken it then in the words I command now; I had not yet the mathematics, nor the years. But I knew it as one knows the floor is there before one's foot has finished its fall. A machine might be made to follow the path of thought, wherever a path could be exactly laid down for it — and if a path of figures, then why not a path of any quantities whatever that obeyed laws we could set down? The arithmetic before me was a single closed door in a wall that ran, I felt assured, out of sight in both directions — and beyond it lay a whole country that ran on behind the wheels, into which no one in that admiring, courteous, blind room had so much as glanced.

And then there was the man. Mr Babbage was past forty — there are near four-and-twenty years between us, and I have always reckoned it one of Providence's wittier arrangements that two such minds should be set down a generation apart and then introduced over a machine. He was brilliant, and he was aggrieved — both at once; and the grievance did not diminish the brilliance but seemed rather to feed it, as a banked fire throws more heat than an open one. The world had not given him what his engine deserved; he knew it; he could not let it alone. A lesser vanity would have wearied me. His did not — because beneath it the thing itself was true, and he knew that too, and the knowledge made him magnetic. He spoke of the work as a man speaks of the one matter upon which he cannot be made ironical. I put him questions — I do not now recall which, only that they were not the questions the room had been asking — and I saw him look at me a second time, the way one looks up when an instrument one had thought silent gives back a true note. That second look was the beginning of everything. We were, from that evening, two persons who had seen the same invisible thing; and there is no friendship deeper nor more durable than that — it outlasts agreement, it outlasts even affection; it is a kind of shared citizenship.

I went home in the carriage through the June dark with my whole interior furniture rearranged. I have used the word enchanted of that evening, and I mean it precisely and not prettily: I had been laid under an obligation by something larger than myself, as the bewitched in the old tales are bound — unable thereafter to want what they had wanted before. My studies, which until that night had been a discipline merely — my mother's discipline, the rational cure prescribed against my father's fire, Numbers set as a sentry over a temperament thought dangerous — my studies acquired, within the space of an hour, a destination. The calculus, the operations, the patient drill that had been a fence drawn round me became, all at once, a road. I would not study mathematics to be made safe. I would study it to be made fit — fit to follow that man down into that hidden country; and, more than follow: to be the one who could come back and tell the rest what was there. Even then, untaught as I was, I felt the particular shape of my own future use. He would build it; I would interpret it. Imagination and analysis — which I had been taught to hold apart as the poet's vice and the geometer's virtue — I understood that night to be neither vice nor virtue, but the single sight by which I had seen through the brass; and I had, by some accounting I did not order, been given both.

I lie here now in a darkened room in my thirty-seventh year — having reached at last the six-and-thirty at which my father stopped — and I take that evening out and turn it in the light, as one turns a polished disc. The engine he showed me was never finished; the greater engine we afterward dreamed and laboured over was never built at all, and may not be in any year I could be living to see. There are hours, when the pain is bad and the medicine bad in its own fashion, when I am tempted to count it all a girl's enchantment merely — a clever toy after all, and I the only creature in the room foolish enough to fall in love with it. But the temptation will not hold. I saw what I saw. The brass was turning; the figures were climbing in their faultless order; and behind them stood the pattern, waiting — and I knew, with a certainty I have never since been able to unknow, that a machine had been made to walk a little way along the road of thought, and that the road ran on past where the wheels could yet carry it: on and on into the dark, toward a morning I shall not live to see, but do not, even now, doubt.