1Five years after the curse, the grinder of glass left Amsterdam and went to live in a village called Rijnsburg, among the bulb fields near Leiden. He took a room at the back of a surgeon's house. It had one window, a bed, a table, and space for the lathe.
2The village was a quiet place. A plain sort of Christians met there who kept no priests and let any man stand up and speak. They did not ask a stranger what he believed. That was why he chose it.
3The surgeon had a daughter named Grietje, ten years old, who was not allowed in the lodger's room and was therefore in it whenever she could be.
4She would stand in the door and watch him work. He sat at the lathe with his foot on the treadle and a lump of glass fixed to a wooden handle with black pitch. He pressed the glass into an iron dish that turned, and fed it wet sand, and the room filled with a sound like rain on a far roof. Every little while he lifted the glass to the window and looked through it, and frowned, and set it down again.
5"Why do you look so cross at it?" she asked.
6"Because it is nearly right," he said.
7"Nearly right is good."
8"In bread, yes. Not in glass. Come and see."
9He held up two lenses that looked the same to her, and he let her look at the church tower through each. Through the first, the weathercock had a ghost beside it. Through the second, it stood alone and sharp, and she could count the feathers of its tail.
10"The first one tells a small lie," he said. "You would not notice, looking at a tower. But a man will point it at a star, and write down what he sees, and other men will build on what he writes. So it must not lie at all."
11A fine grey powder lay on everything in that room: on the sill, on the books, on his sleeves and in his black hair. It was the glass itself, ground to dust. Grietje wrote her name in it on the table. He breathed it all day. In those years he had begun to cough in the mornings, a dry small cough, and he paid it no mind.
12One evening he fixed two lenses in a brass tube no longer than her hand, and put a dead flea under it on a slip of glass, and told her to look.
13She looked, and she cried out and jumped back, and then she looked again for a long time. The flea was as big as a crab. It wore armour. It had hairs on its legs, set in rows, as neat as stitching.
14"Who made it so careful?" she said. "A flea!"
15He did not answer her at once. He took her out behind the house when the dark came, and he set a longer tube on the fence post and turned it to the moon. And she saw that the moon was not a lamp. It was a country. It had mountains, and the mountains had shadows, and the shadows all fell one way.
16She was quiet, walking back. At the door she said, "The dominie says heaven is up there, above the moon. Is that where God lives? Past the mountains?"
17"What did you see, when you looked?" he asked.
18"Rock. And the sun shining on it sideways. The same as here."
19"And in the flea?"
20"Legs and joints. The same as a crab, only small."
21"Then you have looked as far up as glass can reach, and as far down," he said, "and you found no wall in either place. Only more of the same house. Think about where you would put a wall, Grietje. I have thought about it for ten years, and I cannot find the place."
22She did not understand him. But she remembered it when she was old, and told her grandchildren that a Jew who made spectacles had once shown her the moon, and had asked her a riddle about a wall.
23He was not altogether alone in those years. In Amsterdam there were a few men who had known him before the curse and would not give him up. They were merchants and doctors, plain Christians of the sort who kept no priests. One sold spices. One was a physician named Meyer. One was a bookseller named Rieuwertsz, whose shop had a bad name with the preachers and a good name with everyone who liked to think.
24These friends could not have him among them, so they had his pages. He sent them what he wrote, a few sheets at a time, and they met in the evenings behind a closed shutter and read the sheets aloud, and argued over them line by line. When they could not agree what he meant, one of them wrote to Rijnsburg to ask. And he wrote back, patiently, as a man answers children he respects.
25The youngest of that circle was a merchant's son named Simon de Vries. He was rich, and sickly, and he loved the grinder of glass as a younger brother loves an elder.
26One day in spring Simon came out to Rijnsburg by the canal boat and walked up through the tulip fields with a heavy purse under his coat. He set it on the table, in the dust. There were two thousand florins in it.
27"So that you may stop grinding and only write," Simon said. "It is nothing to me. I have more than I can use, and you cough."
28The grinder looked at the purse for some time. It was more than he would earn at the lathe in ten years.
29"If I take it," he said, "I will begin to think about it. I will think how to keep it, and what I owe you for it, and whether a line I am writing would please you. I have just enough now. A man who has just enough has nothing in the house to be afraid for. Take it home, Simon. Come back with a question instead. You are better at those than you know."
30Simon took it home. He was hurt, and then he was not, for he came back within the month with three questions written out, and they sat up half the night over them.
31In the summer of that same year a stranger knocked at the surgeon's door. He was a German who lived in London, a quick, kind, talkative man named Oldenburg. He was a gatherer of learned men. He knew the ones in England who were weighing the air and pumping it out of glass jars, and soon he would be the secretary of their new society, the same that a young man named Newton would one day lead.
32He had heard in Leiden that an outcast Jew in a village was thinking thoughts worth a day's walk. He came for an afternoon and stayed until the light failed. They sat in the garden behind the house and spoke of God and of matter and of how a mind may mend its own errors. When Oldenburg rose to go, he held the grinder's hand a long time, and made him promise to write.
33So a road was opened that ran from the back room in Rijnsburg across the sea to London. Letters went over it for fifteen years. Books came back: the Englishmen's trials with saltpetre and with air. The grinder read them and wrote long answers, courteous and stubborn. The ember that had come out of England was going home again, a little brighter, in a merchant's mailbag.
34He sealed those letters with a ring. Cut into it was a rose with its thorns, and under the rose one Latin word: CAUTE. It means Take care.
35It was his whole advice to himself. He was no coward. You have seen that. But he had weighed what he knew against what the age could bear, and he judged that a truth shouted too early is only a fire set in wet straw: much smoke, and men choking, and nothing warmed. So he told his friends to copy his pages by hand and to show them to no one they had not tried. He would wait. A lens is not ground in a day.
36He moved after two years to another village, Voorburg, nearer The Hague, and lodged with a painter. A great man lived a short walk from there, Christiaan Huygens, who had found the ring around Saturn and built the first clock that kept true time by a swinging weight. Huygens ground lenses too. He had no love for the Jew's philosophy, but he wrote to his brother that the little lenses the Jew of Voorburg made for his microscopes had a polish he could not match. That was praise from the best eye in Europe, and it was given grudgingly, which is the surest kind.
37Then the plague came to Holland.
38It came up the rivers in a wet summer. In Amsterdam the carts went through the streets before dawn, and the bells stopped tolling because there were too many to toll for. One in ten died in that city in a single year. The friends who met behind the shutter met no more for a season. Each stayed in his own house and counted his own.
39One of them, Pieter, had a little son. The child sickened and was dead in three days. Pieter wrote to Voorburg afterward, a broken letter. He said that weeks before, when the boy was still well, he had woken in the night and thought he heard the child groaning, just as the child groaned at the end. Was it a sign? Had he been warned, and failed to heed it?
40The grinder read this letter standing at his window. He had buried a mother, a brother, a sister, a father. He knew what the question under the question was. It was: could I have held the door?
41He wrote back gently. He did not tell the father that the groans were a message from beyond the world, for he did not believe it, and he would not buy his friend an hour's comfort with a false coin. But he did not scold him for a fool either. He wrote of how a father's love joins him to his child so nearly that the father's mind runs ahead along the child's road, and fears what may come there, and hears it in the dark. He wrote that this was love, and not a failing. It was all the comfort he had that was true. He sent it, and hoped it was enough, and knew it might not be.
42Pieter himself was dead before the next winter.
43And then it was Simon's turn. He had never been strong, and when the grinder next saw him he lay propped on pillows in his brother's house, with his wrists gone thin as a girl's.
44"I have no wife and no child," Simon said. "I am going to leave it all to you. Do not argue. I have had it written."
45"Then have it written again," said the grinder. "You have a brother. It is his by every right, and he will think of you kindly all his life, and not of some stranger who came between. Leave it to him."
46They disputed it for an hour, the dying man and the coughing one, each trying to give the other more. In the end Simon yielded, as he always had. But he was a merchant's son and he knew how to make a bargain bite. He bound his brother, in the will, to pay the grinder five hundred florins every year for as long as he lived.
47When Simon was buried and the brother came to Voorburg with the first year's payment, the grinder counted it and pushed two hundred back across the table.
48"Three hundred is enough," he said. "I have reckoned it. More than that and I shall have to think about it."
49The brother went away shaking his head. He told the story in Amsterdam, and men laughed, and then some of them stopped laughing.
50For consider what he had now, the man they had cursed in his lying down and his rising up. He had a room, a lathe, a ring with a rose on it, and three hundred florins a year from a dead friend. He had a cough that came now at night as well as in the morning. He owed nothing to any council, church or prince. And he had a stack of pages, written line under line, that grew by a sheet or two each week and that no one outside a closed shutter had seen.
51In those pages he was building, as carefully as he ground a lens, a thing that must not lie at all. For he knew that others would look through it one day, and write down what they saw, and build on that.
52The lamp burned at the end of the bench. The dust settled on the sill. And in Amsterdam a friend of his, who was braver than he was and less careful, had begun to say aloud in the street what the pages said in whispers. Now hear what was done to that friend.