1In the summer that the plague came to London, a girl of fourteen named Bess walked out of the city by the north road with a bundle and a paper. The paper was signed by a churchwarden. It said that she was clean of the sickness. Her mother had paid for it with her wedding ring, the day before the red cross was painted on their door.
2After the cross, no one came out of that house. The law was that a house with plague in it was nailed shut for forty days, with all inside, sick and well together, and a watchman at the door. Bess stood in the street at night and called up to the window. On the fourth night her mother did not answer, nor her brothers. On the sixth she saw the cart stop there, and she turned and began to walk.
3She walked a hundred miles. She slept under hedges. At every town they met her at the bridge with pitchforks and would not look at her paper. Once a woman left bread for her on a milestone, and backed away from it before Bess could come near, and Bess thought that was the kindest thing she had ever seen.
4She had an uncle who was shepherd on a farm in Lincolnshire, at a place called Woolsthorpe. It was the only name she knew outside London. She came there in August, more dead than alive.
5The farm was a house of grey stone in a fold of green hills, with an orchard before it. The mistress was a widow, Mistress Hannah Smith, a firm woman who had buried two husbands and ran the land herself. She came out to the gate and looked at Bess from twenty paces.
6"From London?"
7"Yes, mistress. I have a paper."
8"Paper." The widow thought. Half her farm servants were standing behind her, and Bess could see in their faces what they wanted done. "Forty days in the far sheepcote. Your uncle will leave food at the stone. If you are living at the end of it, there is work in the kitchen. If you come near the house before then, I will set the dogs on you, and be sorry for it."
9It was hard, and it was just. Bess went to the sheepcote.
10She had forty days with nothing to do but grieve and watch. And the thing she watched, because it was the only thing that moved, was the mistress's eldest son.
11He was twenty-two, pale and thin, with a long face and a way of not seeing you. He had been at the university in Cambridge, and the plague had shut it and sent the scholars home. His name was Isaac. The farm people said the name the way you say the name of a horse that will not pull.
12Her uncle told her about him, across the field, in a shout. He had been born on a Christmas morning, so small and so early that the two women sent to fetch help for him sat down to rest on the way, sure he would be dead before they got back. His father was dead before he was born. When he was three his mother had married an old rich parson in the next parish, who would not have the child in his house. So she left him at the farm with his grandmother, in sight of the steeple of the church where his mother lived with another family. When the parson died she came back with three new children. He was ten.
13They had tried to make a farmer of him. He let the sheep stray into the neighbours' corn while he sat under a hedge with a book. In the end his mother gave up and let the schoolmaster send him to Cambridge. Now he was back, and as much use as before.
14"He's cracked," her uncle shouted. "Keep clear of him."
15Bess watched him from the sheepcote. He walked up and down the orchard for hours with his lips moving. He sat on the wall and blew bubbles of soap through a pipe, like a child, and stared at them until they burst.
16On the forty-first day she was alive, and went up to the kitchen.
17The other servants would not sleep in the same loft with her. It was said in the village that the plague had gone into that London house for a reason. Bess heard it, as she was meant to. She was fourteen, and her mother was in a pit with a hundred strangers, and she half believed it. Why else was she alive? She had been kept back for something worse.
18She was set to carry the young master's meals up to his room, because no one else would.
19The first time, she knocked and no one answered. She pushed the door with her hip and went in with the tray, and stopped.
20The room was black dark at noon. He had hung a blanket over the window. There was one small round hole in the shutter, and through it a beam of sunlight came in as thin and straight as a rod. He was standing in the dark with a three-cornered bar of glass in his hand.
21He put the glass into the beam.
22The white rod of light bent. And on the far wall, where there should have been a round white spot, there was a long band of colour: red at the foot, then orange, yellow, green, blue, and a deep violet at the top.
23Bess had stepped forward without knowing it, and the band fell across her apron. Her white apron was red, and gold, and blue.
24She should have run. In the village they would have called it conjuring. But she had walked a hundred miles through worse than this, and she found she was more curious than afraid.
25"Where do they come from?" she said. "The colours. Is it the glass makes them?"
26He turned his head. She thought it was the first time he had looked straight at anyone since she came. It was a real question, and it seems that real questions were the only speech he had any use for.
27"That is what the books say," he said. "That the glass stains the light, as dye stains wool. I thought so too. Watch."
28He took a board with a small hole in it, and held it so that only the green part of the band passed through. Behind the board he set a second bar of glass in the green beam. "If glass stains light, this will stain it again. What colour now?"
29She looked at the wall. "Green. The same green."
30"The same green. It bends, and it stays green. I cannot change it, whatever I do. So the glass did not make it." He took the board away, and the whole band came back. "They were in the white all along, all of them together. The glass only spreads them out, because each one bends a little more than the one beside it. White is not the pure light. White is the crowd."
31He seemed to remember then that he was talking to a kitchen girl, and stopped, and looked at the tray as if he did not know what it was for. She set it down and went out. Her apron was white again.
32After that she brought his meals every day, and mostly found the last one uneaten. Sometimes he let her stay.
33He never asked her about London. But once, in the dark of that room, she said it aloud. She did not know why. Perhaps because he was the one person on the farm who would not cross himself.
34"They say it came on us for our sins. My mother. The little ones."
35He was quiet a while. He was a believer, more than anyone knew; he read his Bible harder than the parson did.
36"How many died in your street?" he asked.
37"All the Dawsons. The baker and his wife. The old curate, that sat up with the sick."
38"And who lived?"
39She thought. "The man that kept the gin-shop. He beat his wife."
40"Then you have seen for yourself what it chose by," he said. "I do not know why the plague takes one house and leaves the next. No one knows. But a thing that is not yet known is not the same as a thing that has no cause." He turned the glass over in his fingers. "I should want to see it counted before I let any man tell me whose fault it was."
41It was not comfort. He had none to give; he was the least comforting person she ever met. But she carried it down the stairs with the tray, and that night she slept.
42Now hear about the apple.
43It was a warm still day near the end of the fruit. Bess was in the orchard filling a basket with windfalls for the pigs. He was sitting under a tree with his back against the trunk, not reading. The moon was up, as it sometimes is by day, pale as a thumbnail, above the barn.
44An apple came down from the branch and struck the grass between them.
45She reached for it. He said, "Wait," and she waited.
46He was looking at the apple, and then at the place on the branch it had come from, and then up beyond the branch.
47"Why down?" he said.
48She thought he had gone simple at last. "Because it is heavy."
49"That is a word. Why straight down? Not aside. Not up. Always toward the middle of the earth, as if the earth drew it." "And if the tree were twice as high, it would still fall. And from the church steeple. How high does it go, this drawing? Does it stop somewhere? Why should it stop?"
50He was looking at the moon.
51"The moon doesn't fall, though," said Bess.
52"No," he said slowly. "Does it not?"
53He got up and went down to the pond at the bottom of the orchard, and she followed with her basket, because she wanted to know. He picked up a stone and tossed it out flat over the water. It splashed a few yards off.
54"It goes forward, and it falls. Both at once. The Florentine showed that." He threw another, harder. It curved farther and splashed farther. "Harder, and it falls farther off. Now. The earth is a ball. Suppose I stood on the highest mountain and threw so hard that by the time the stone had fallen a yard, the ground had curved away from under it by a yard."
55Bess saw it. She saw it before he said it, and never afterward knew how. "It would not come down. It would go on falling all the way round."
56"All the way round," he said. "For ever. Falling, and never landing." And he looked up again at the pale thing over the barn.
57He did not come to supper that night, or to breakfast. When she took his tray up at noon he was at the table in his shirt, with sheets of paper all over the floor. He did not see her. She set the tray on the bed and stood by the door.
58She learned afterward, in pieces, what he was reckoning. A German called Kepler had found a rule that tied each planet's year to its distance from the sun. From that rule the young master had drawn out a second rule: the drawing of the sun must grow weaker with distance, by the distance multiplied by itself. Twice as far, a quarter of the pull.
59Now he was trying it on the apple. The moon stands sixty times farther from the middle of the earth than an apple tree does. If the pull that brought down the apple reaches as far as the moon, it must be weaker there by sixty times sixty. He knew how far an apple falls in the first second. So he could say how far the moon ought to fall toward the earth in a minute. And he knew from the astronomers how far it truly does.
60He wrote, many years after, what he found: that the two numbers answered "pretty nearly."
61Pretty nearly. Not exactly. They were out by about one part in seven. The fault was not his. He had no book in that farmhouse to give him the true size of the earth, and the seaman's rough figure he used was too small.
62Bess saw him put down the pen. She saw him look at the last number for a long time. Then he gathered the sheets off the floor, squared them, and laid them in a box, and shut the lid.
63He was twenty-three years old. He had, in that box, the colours of light, and a new way of reckoning, and the thing that holds the moon. A man who wanted to be known would have printed any one of them. He printed none. Pretty nearly was not enough for him. But another man in another country had once thrown away two years' work over a quarter of the moon's width, and this was the same refusal.
64In the spring the plague slackened and the university opened. He went back with his box, and Bess did not see him again except once, at his mother's burying, years after.
65The September after, word came up the road that London had burned. Her street was gone, and the pit, and the door with the cross. Bess stood in the yard when she heard it and found that she did not think it was a judgment. A baker had left his oven hot. The wind had been in the east. There would be reasons, if someone counted.
66She married a carter and lived to be old in that village. She told her children that she had once seen her apron turn into a rainbow, and they did not believe her. She told them an apple and the moon were one kind of thing, and that she knew the man who had found it out. They did not believe that either.
67But that was twenty years on. For nearly twenty years the box stayed shut, in a college room in Cambridge. It might have stayed shut for ever. Now hear how it was opened.