1In those days Holland had no king. It was ruled by its merchants, and chief among them was a man named Johan de Witt, with his brother Cornelis beside him. Johan was a reckoner. He had written a book on curves, and another that showed by numbers what a city should pay for a pension on a man's life. He governed as he reckoned: coolly, and with the books open.
2Under him the land had twenty years without a prince. The preachers did not love him, for he kept them out of the council room. The common people did not love him either, for he did not ride a horse or wear a plume, and their hearts were with the young Prince of Orange, who did both. But the ships went out and came home, and a man could print in Amsterdam what would have had him hanged in Paris.
3The grinder of glass lived in the top room of the painter's house on the back canal, and worked at his lenses and his great book, and thought the weather would hold.
4Then, in one spring, it broke. The king of France came over the border with the greatest army seen in that age, a hundred thousand men and more. The English fell on the Dutch ships in the same month. Town after town opened its gates without a shot. The Dutch cut their own dikes and let the sea in over their own fields to stop the French horse, and farmers stood on the roofs of their barns and watched their cattle drown.
5It is still called, in that country, the Year of Disaster.
6A frightened people looks for a man to blame. The preachers told them from every pulpit who it was. The De Witts had sold the land to France. The De Witts had left the forts empty. Give us the Prince, the people cried, and they got him, and still they were not eased. A man with a knife set upon Johan in the street at night and left him for dead. He lived, and laid down his office. Cornelis was seized on the word of a barber who swore he had plotted to kill the Prince. They put him to the torture, and he confessed nothing, for there was nothing. They banished him all the same.
7On a Saturday in August, Johan de Witt went on foot to the prison in the middle of The Hague to fetch his brother out and take him home. It was a ten-minute walk from the painter's house.
8A crowd had been gathering at the prison gate since morning. The city's own watch was among them, armed. Someone had seen to it that the horsemen who guarded the gate were ordered away.
9What was done to the two brothers in that street will be told here in few words, for the fire of this book is not fed with such things. They were dragged out of the gate. They were killed with gun-butts and blades, there on the stones, by neighbours. And when they were dead the crowd was not finished with them. It hung what was left of them by the feet from a gallows post, and men came with knives, and pieces were sold that evening in the taverns for a few pence.
10That is enough. Know only that it was not an army that did it, nor a tyrant. It was a town.
11Hendrik van der Spyck, the painter, came home at dusk with his face the colour of putty. He had been near enough to see. He told it in the kitchen in a low voice, so that the children would not hear, and his wife put her apron over her head.
12The lodger had come down for his supper. He stood on the bottom stair and heard it all. He did not say anything. He went back up, and they heard his door close.
13He was a man who had written that the passions should be studied like lines and planes, without scorn and without tears. He had made a rule of it: not to mock what men do, not to weep over it, but to understand it. He had kept that rule when his own people cursed him. He had kept it, nearly, when Adriaan died.
14That night he could not keep it. The painter's wife, passing on the landing, heard him weeping. She had lodged him for a year and had never heard him so much as raise his voice.
15Toward midnight he came down the stairs with his hat on. He had a sheet of paper in his hand, the large kind he used for drawing the paths of light through glass. On it he had lettered two words in Latin, big enough to read across a street: ULTIMI BARBARORUM. It means the lowest of barbarians.
16Hendrik was sitting up by the kitchen fire, for he could not sleep either. He saw the hat, and he saw the paper.
17"Where are you going, sir?"
18"To the place where they did it. I am going to fix this to the wall there, where they will all see it in the morning."
19"They are still there," said Hendrik. "They are drunk. They have fires lit. If you put that up in front of them they will hang you on the same post."
20"Very likely."
21"They cannot even read it. It is in Latin."
22"Some of them can. The ones who sent the horsemen away can read it."
23The painter looked at his lodger. He was a small, thin, dark man with a cough, who ate gruel and paid his rent to the day. He had never seen him like this. The man's hands were steady, and that frightened Hendrik more than if they had shaken.
24Hendrik van der Spyck was no philosopher. He did not argue. He got up, walked past his lodger to the street door, turned the key in the lock, drew it out, and put it in his breeches pocket. Then he sat down on the bench in front of the door, a broad man, with his arms folded.
25"You may have it in the morning," he said.
26They stayed so for some time, the one standing, the other sitting. The kitchen fire ticked.
27"You have a book up there that is not finished," Hendrik said at last. "I do not know what is in it, and I dare say I should not like it. But you have been at it since before you came to us, and I have seen your lamp burning at two in the morning. If you go out of this door, they will tear it up with you. Is that what it was for?"
28The grinder of glass stood a while longer. Then he took off his hat.
29He put the paper in the kitchen fire himself, and watched it curl. He sat down on the other end of the bench. Neither of them went to bed. They sat there until the windows turned grey, the Lutheran and the outcast Jew, with the locked door at their backs, and when the children came down, Hendrik's wife made everyone porridge.
30We know of that night because he told it himself, years after, to a visitor from Germany. He did not tell it as a brave thing he had meant to do. He told it as a thing he had been stopped from doing by a man with more sense.
31For he had seen, by morning, what the paper had been. It was true, each word of it. But it would have opened no door for anyone. It was his rage that wished to walk out into that street, and rage has the shortest horizon of all: it sees as far as the next minute and calls that the world. The town was the Far Hand that night. The unfinished book was the Near Hand. A door key in a painter's pocket had shown him the difference.
32Now hear how he was tried a second time, with honey and not with blood.
33In the winter after the killing, a letter came to the house on the back canal with a prince's seal on it. It was from a professor at Heidelberg, writing for his master, the Elector of the Palatinate. The Elector offered Benedictus de Spinoza the chair of philosophy in his university.
34Turn that over. He was a man cursed by his own people and called a devil by everyone else's. He lived on three hundred florins and the sale of lenses. Here were a salary, a title, a hall full of students, the company of the learned, and a prince's hand over his head. The letter said he should have the fullest freedom to philosophise. And it added, pleasantly, that the prince trusted he would not misuse that freedom to disturb the established religion.
35He kept the letter six weeks. Hendrik's wife saw it lying on his table, with the seal, and thought, he will leave us.
36Then he wrote his answer, and it was as courteous as the offer. He said he had never wished to teach in public. He said the teaching of the young would take him from his own work. And he said, as to that last pleasant line, that he did not know how wide or how narrow the freedom would be found, once someone was offended, and someone would be. He thanked the prince. He stayed in the top room.
37It was the thousand florins of the elders over again, in a finer purse. A fence had been drawn round the gift, and he could not see where it ran, and he knew that a man who does not know where the fence runs will soon be walking carefully everywhere. He had just enough. He kept it.
38The third trial came in summer, and it came because of a kindness.
39The French army still lay at Utrecht, and its general was the Prince of Condé, a man who liked to have thinkers at his table. One of his officers wrote to the grinder of glass, asking him to come and be presented. Passes were sent, signed by both sides. Great men of The Hague knew of it and said he should go: any word between the camps might help toward peace. So he went, across the flooded country, to the enemy's camp.
40The Prince had been called away, and they did not meet. The grinder waited some weeks, was treated well, was told that the King of France himself might give a pension to a philosopher who would put the King's name at the front of a book. He said he had no book to give to that purpose, and he went home.
41He came back to a city that had heard where he had been.
42It was the same city, one year on, and it had learned how easy the thing was. By evening there was a knot of men on the bridge of the back canal. The Jew has been to the French. The atheist is a spy. The knot grew. Someone threw a stone, and a pane broke in the room where the children slept.
43Hendrik van der Spyck came up the stairs two at a time. This time it was his own face that was wild. He had a houseful of children. He had seen what that street could do. He did not ask his lodger to go, for he was not that kind of man, but he could not keep his fear from showing.
44The grinder of glass was sitting at his bench. He put down what he was holding and stood up.
45"Do not be afraid on my account," he said. "I can clear myself easily. There are men enough among the first in this country who know why I went to Utrecht. But hear me, Hendrik. If those people make the least move toward your door, I will go down to them. I will go out by myself, even if they should do to me what they did to the good De Witts. I am an honest citizen. And no one in this house shall be touched for my sake."
46The painter stared at him. A year before, this man had stood in the kitchen with his hat on, and Hendrik had needed a lock to hold him. He was offering now to walk out of the same door. And yet it was not the same thing at all, and even Hendrik, who was no philosopher, could see how it differed.
47The first time he had wished to go out because he was angry. Now he was not angry. He was as quiet as when he held a lens to the light. He had counted who was in the house, and what could be saved, and what it would cost, and he had found the sum simple.
48Hendrik did not lock the door that night. He sat by it, with a cudgel, and his lodger sat on the stair above him. They listened to the voices on the bridge. Twice someone beat on the shutters. Near midnight it began to rain, hard, off the sea, and the men on the bridge thought of their beds. By one o'clock the canal was empty.
49In the morning Hendrik's wife swept up the glass from the children's floor. The lodger came down and paid for the pane out of his lens money, though they told him not to.
50Some time after, when the house was quiet again, she asked him a thing that had been on her heart. She was a simple, devout woman. She asked whether he thought she could be saved in the faith she had been raised in.
51He did not give her a page from his locked desk. He told her that her faith was a good one, and that she had no need to look for another, so long as she lived in it peaceably and was kind. She was content with that. He meant it. He never in his life tried to take from any plain person the lamp they walked by.
52So he had been offered death in a street, and honour in a hall, and a king's gold, all inside two years. He had refused each one, and he was back at his bench with dust on his sleeves. The cough was deeper now. He had perhaps guessed what it meant.
53There was the book to finish. And there was one question that no one had yet put to him, which was waiting on the road. Now hear who came to ask it.