1The great book was finished in the grinder's forty-third year. He took it to Amsterdam himself to see it through the press. He was there two weeks, and he came home with the pages still under his arm.
2For a whisper had run ahead of him. It was said in the churches and on the Exchange that the Jew of The Hague had a book at the printer's which proved there was no God. Preachers had gone to the Prince and to the magistrates to lay complaint against it before a sheet was set. Certain men were waiting, he was told, to seize it on the day it appeared, and the printer with it.
3He remembered the saws. He would not send Rieuwertsz to that place. So he locked the book in his writing desk in the top room of the painter's house, and wrote to his friend in London that he had thought it best to wait.
4But he was not a man with much waiting left in him. Twenty years of glass had gone into his chest. He was thin as a rake now, and in the mornings there was blood on the cloth.
5In the autumn of the next year a visitor came to the back canal. He was a German of thirty, in a great dark wig, with ink on his cuffs and the manners of a court. His name was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
6There was no quicker mind then alive, unless it was Newton's. He had built a machine of brass wheels that could multiply. He had just found, in Paris, a new way of reckoning with things that change, the same that Newton had found in secret ten years before, though neither yet knew of the other's work. He was on his way to Hanover to keep a duke's library, and he had come out of his road to climb these stairs.
7They had exchanged a letter or two, years back, about lenses. The grinder had not quite trusted him then. He had asked a friend: what is this man doing in France, and whom does he serve? He was a careful judge of men, and he had seen something in Leibniz that was not false but was not all one piece either. Here was a man who wished to please.
8Still, he let him in. They talked on several days, and for many hours. Leibniz had with him a paper he had written, a proof that a most perfect being must exist, and he read it aloud, and the sick man heard it through and thought it sound. They spoke of the killing of the De Witts. It was then that he told the story of the paper and the locked door.
9And it is nearly certain that Leibniz was shown what lay in the desk, or some part of it. He wrote down afterward, for himself alone, what the Jew of The Hague held: that there is one substance only, and all things are ways of its being.
10He turned it over in his mind as he rode on to Hanover. For if it were so, then nothing stood outside the world to choose it, or to mend it, or to answer a prayer in it. And Leibniz was a man who served princes and hoped to join the broken churches together again. He needed a God who chose.
11So he spent the next forty years building a different house: a world of numberless small souls, each one a mirror of the whole, set in harmony by a maker who had picked the best world that could be. It was a great work, and there was true gold in it. He saw that force is not lost when bodies strike but is carried on, and you will hear of that again. He saw that a small thing may hold the pattern of the Whole.
12But in all those years he spoke of the grinder of glass in public only to blame him, and he let it be thought their meeting had been a matter of an hour and some talk of the news. Do not judge him hard. He had a place to keep. It is only that there were two men in that top room, both of them seeking, and one of them had nothing to lose and the other had a duke.
13Leibniz went down the stairs. The winter came in off the sea.
14Now hear what happened on a night in the hard part of that winter, when the canal was skinned with ice.
15The painter and his wife had gone with the older children to a kinsman's house, and the lodger sat alone in the kitchen, where the only good fire was. He had cooked his supper himself, as he often did: a gruel of oats with raisins in it and a lump of butter. All his life he had kept a liking for raisins.
16There was a knock at the street door, not loud. He opened it. A woman stood on the step with a pedlar's box on her back, the kind in which thread and needles and ribbon are carried from farm to farm. She was neither young nor old. Sleet was coming down slantwise behind her, and her shawl was white with it.
17She asked, in the Dutch of some other province, whether she might stand by a fire until the worst was past. He held the door wide.
18She set down her box and sat on the children's bench, and steam rose from her shoulders. He looked at the pot. There was enough for one man's supper. He took down a second bowl and divided it, and gave her the half with more raisins in it, and they ate without much talk, as people do who are cold.
19She looked about the kitchen while she ate. She looked at his hands, which were grey in the creases and would never be clean again.
20"You are a miller?" she said.
21"A grinder of glass. For spectacles, and for the tubes that look at stars."
22"So that folk can see further."
23"That is the hope."
24She nodded. She wiped her bowl with her finger, like a child. A fit of coughing took him then, and he turned away to the hearth until it passed, and put the cloth back in his sleeve. She had seen the cloth. She did not say anything foolish about it.
25Instead she asked him a question. She asked it lightly, as one might ask a traveller where he was bound.
26"What have you left open?"
27He did not take her meaning at first. He thought of the street door, and then of the shutters. Then he understood that she was not asking about the house.
28He was a man who had answers. He had answered rabbis and princes and the secretary of the learned society of England. He found he had none ready for a seller of thread. He thought of his brother's hand lifting a little way and falling. He thought of Adriaan. He thought of Simon's brother, going away shaking his head. And he thought of the top room, and the desk, and the lock on the desk.
29"I am not yet sure," he said. "I had believed it was a thing I had finished. I see that it is a thing I have only shut."
30She seemed to find that a fair answer. She asked nothing more. He banked the fire for her and brought down his own blanket, and she lay on the bench by the hearth.
31When the painter's wife came into the kitchen before dawn to light the stove, the bench was empty and the blanket folded. The bolt of the street door had been drawn back from inside. On the table was a paper of needles, the good kind, that no one had paid for.
32The lodger came down later than usual that day. He asked Hendrik to come up to his room. He showed him the writing desk, and the key.
33"When I am dead," he said, in the voice he used for the rent, "do nothing else first. Before you send for anyone, before the magistrate's man comes to make his list, put this desk on the Amsterdam barge. Send it to Jan Rieuwertsz the bookseller, in Amsterdam. Do not open it. Will you do that?"
34Hendrik looked at the desk. He was a man who had once put a key in his pocket for this lodger's sake. He put this one in the same pocket.
35"I will," he said.
36It was some weeks later, on a Saturday in February, that the lodger came down in the afternoon and sat with the family. He smoked a pipe of tobacco. He asked what the sermon had been that week, and listened while Hendrik told it. He went up early.
37On the Sunday morning a doctor came from Amsterdam, a friend, sent for by letter. The doctor had the people of the house boil an old cock, and at noon the sick man drank the broth and ate some of the meat with good appetite. The family went to the afternoon service, as they did every Sunday of their lives.
38When they came back along the canal, the doctor met them at the door. It had been about three o'clock, and quiet. The man upstairs had been forty-four years old.
39He had written once, in the book that was in the desk, a line about dying: "A free man thinks of death least of all things." He had lived by it. He had not spent his last strength on fear of the Last Door. He had spent it on what would stand open after.
40The children were crying in the kitchen. Hendrik van der Spyck did not sit down with them yet. He went up the stairs. He did not stop at the bed. He lifted the writing desk in his arms, for it was not large, and carried it down, and wrapped it in a piece of sailcloth from his painting room, and tied it with cord. He wrote on a label the name of a bookseller and a street in Amsterdam, and nothing more.
41The night barge for Amsterdam left from the town quay. It was a long, low boat drawn by a horse on the bank, and it carried cheeses, letters, and sleeping passengers. Hendrik gave the desk to the bargeman with a coin and watched him stow it under the tilt, between a crate of hens and a cask of herring. The horse leaned into the rope. The boat slid away into the dark with a lantern at its bow.
42Consider that boat. Under the cloth, among the hens, lay the whole work of a life: every line he had written, under one small lock. If the bargeman had been curious, if a sheriff's man had been on the quay, if the lantern had been knocked into the straw, there would be no more to tell. The painter stood on the stones until he could not see the light. Then he went home and sat with his children.
43The magistrate's clerk came on the Monday to list the dead man's goods, as the law required. He found a bed with its hangings, some shirts, a few chairs, a hundred and sixty books, and the tools and glasses of the grinder's trade. He found no writings, and no desk to hold them.
44Six coaches followed the coffin, which was many for a lodger. A sister came from Amsterdam to claim what her brother had left. When she learned that the sale of it would hardly pay for the burial and the apothecary, she signed it away again and went home. The lenses were sold at auction and fetched a good price. They were very true.
45And in Amsterdam, in the back room of a bookshop, five or six men stood round a table by candlelight while Rieuwertsz cut the cord. One of them had the key. They opened the desk.
46They had read pieces of the great book for fifteen years, a few sheets at a time, behind a shutter. Not one of them had seen it whole. Now it lay before them in his small clear hand, five parts, built like geometry: first the things laid down, then each thing shown from the ones before, so that a reader who granted the first page could not get off the road until the last.
47Meyer the physician read from it aloud. There was a place where the dead man wrote of "the eternal and infinite Being, which we call God or Nature." Or. The whole of what he had seen when he looked for the outside was in that small word. He had not said there was no God. He had said there was nothing else.
48And from that word he had drawn out, link by link, how a man should live: that hatred is never good; that the one who understands his own passions is less their slave; that a free person's wisdom is a thinking upon life; that the mind's best joy is to know itself a part of the Whole, and that this joy asks no payment afterward, for it is the payment. The book ended with a plain sentence. They read it standing: "But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."
49Then they went to work, and it was dangerous work. Men from more than one church were hunting for those papers, and a word had gone as far as Rome. The friends copied by night. They made the Latin clean. And one of them, an old translator, put the whole of it into Dutch, so that at the last it went out in the common tongue after all, as Adriaan had wanted.
50It came from the press before the year was out. There was no printer's name on it, and no city. Of the author it gave three letters only: B. d. S. He had asked for that. He had said a teaching should not be called by any man's name.
51Within six months it was forbidden through all Holland, as profane and godless, on pain of heavy fines and prison. It was too late. A book is like the coal in Asha's horn: once another fire has been lit from it, there is no putting it out by stamping on the first.
52One went to Hanover, to a duke's librarian in a great wig, who kept it close and argued with it for the rest of his days. And what that librarian wrote in answer, about the force that lives in moving things, went on in its turn to Paris. There, some thirty years after the desk went down the canal, a girl was born in a great house who would be told that numbers were not for her.
53The ember passed. Hear now what she did with it.