The Glassman

by Horatio Nelson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The fog came up out of the Weald a little after nine, the way it does in that country in the back end of the year. It did not come down from the sky. It rose from the low ground between the hills like milk coming up in a pan, first in the bottoms along the brooks, then over the hedges, then over the tops of the oaks, until the whole of the country to the south of Hascombe Hill was gone and there was nothing out there at all but a white floor with the sun on it.

Amos Puttock had his eye at the south glass when it happened, and he watched Blackdown go. The telegraph on Blackdown was nine miles off, a black frame on a black hill with six square holes in it and the sky showing through. Then the frame was grey, and then it was a smudge, and then the glass was full of white, and he took his eye away and wiped the eyepiece with his thumb out of habit and put his eye back. White.

"South's gone," he said.

"North's clear," said Joe Muggeridge from the other end of the hut, at the other glass. "Netley's working."

Puttock went down the length of the hut, which was six paces, and Muggeridge moved over for him. They had been shipmates in the Belliqueux in the last war and had shared a mess for four years, and since then a hut on a hill for five, and they moved round each other in it without needing to speak, as men do who have learned to live between guns.

Through the north glass Netley Heath stood up clear and small over the ridge, with the hills behind it blue in the sun. Its shutters were moving. They were moving fast.

"Call it," said Puttock, and went back to his own end, where there was nothing to see, and sat down on the bench with the journal on his knees and the pencil in his fingers.

---

The station on Hascombe Hill was a wooden house of two rooms set on the highest ground in the parish, with the frame on its roof, twenty feet of timber, holding six shutters in two columns. Each shutter was a board about a yard square, pivoted through its middle, so that it could be turned flat to the eye and close its hole, or edge-on and leave the hole open to the sky. Six shutters, each open or shut, gave sixty-three changes, if you did not count the one where they were all shut, which meant nothing, or meant that the station was at rest. Each change stood for a letter, or a number, or a word, or a whole sentence out of the book, and the book was in a locked box under the lieutenant's bed, and the lieutenant was in Godalming.

Lieutenant Garland went to Godalming on the first Monday of the month to draw his half-pay and the station's money from the agent, and to dine at the King's Arms, and generally to sleep there. He had been a lieutenant for twenty-two years. He was a decent man and a sober one, and the Admiralty had given him this hill because he had no interest to give him a ship. He kept the key of the book box on a string round his neck and it went to Godalming with him. That was correct. The book was secret, and the men were not to read the messages they passed, and they did not. They passed changes. A glassman read the change through the telescope from the next station, and called it, and the ropemen in the room below hauled on the lines and turned the shutters to make the same change on their own frame, and the glassman at the far glass watched the next station make it after them, and so it went on, from the roof of the Admiralty in Whitehall to the sea at Portsmouth, and nobody in between knew what had been said.

"One, four, five," said Muggeridge.

Puttock wrote it down, 1·4·5, and below him in the house Dick Stedman and the boy Will Ide hauled, and the frame groaned over their heads and the shutters clapped round. Then they stood. There was no one to the south to see them, and there was no use in making it. They made it anyway, because they had been told to make it, and the boy did not yet know that there was no one to see.

"Two, three," said Muggeridge. "Six. One, two, three, four. Five."

Puttock wrote.

He had been a glassman for five years, and he did not know what any of it meant. But he knew what it looked like. There was a shape to the work, the way there is a shape to the weather. Every morning at a fixed hour London sent down the time, and the time went down to Portsmouth and the answer came back, and the whole of it took a minute and a little more. That was nothing; that was like the watch-bell. There were the long ones on a Tuesday and a Friday, slow and regular, which Garland said were the victualling, and which went on so long that the boy fell asleep on the ropes. There were short ones in the afternoon, four or five changes and a stop, that came up from Portsmouth and seemed to want an answer from London, and got one. There was a kind that came perhaps once in a month, that began with a particular change and was repeated through twice, very carefully, every change held until the next station had made it; Garland, who was a talkative man after his dinner, had once said that those were about money.

This one was not like any of those.

"Netley's not waiting," said Muggeridge.

"I see it."

"I mean they're not waiting on us. They're not looking to see we've made it. They're making the next before we've got the last up."

"I know. Call it."

Netley Heath could not see the fog. Netley Heath could see Hascombe frame, nine miles to the south of it, standing up clear on its hill with the white below it, making every change it was given. Netley Heath had no notion that Hascombe was talking to a wall. And Netley Heath, which was only passing on what Cabbage Hill gave it, as Cabbage Hill passed on what Putney gave it, was hurrying. Somebody at the top of the line was standing over the men in the Admiralty and telling them to be quick, and the hurry had come down forty miles through four pairs of hands and arrived at Hascombe with the paint still wet on it.

It went on for twenty-two minutes by the clock on the shelf. Then the Netley frame shut every shutter and stood at rest, and that was the end of it.

Puttock looked at what he had. Three pages of the journal, close-written. He counted the changes and did not like the number, and counted them again and got the same.

"Well," said Muggeridge.

Below them the boy called up, through the hatch, "Shall we stand at rest, Mr Puttock?"

"Stand at rest," said Puttock.

The shutters went round with a clap, all six together, and then there was no sound in the hut but the clock and the drip of the fog on the eaves, which had come up as high as the house now and was moving past the south window in slow wreaths, so that the near furze bushes came and went.

---

There was an order for this, and both of them knew it, because Garland had read it to them when they came, and had read it to them again every quarter since, out of a sense of duty, in a flat voice, as a chaplain reads the Articles of War. When the station could not see, it was to note the hour in the journal, and the state of the weather, and to keep its glass on the next station until it could. If the lieutenant judged the message to be urgent, he might send it forward by hand, on a horse, to the next station that could see, and the cost of the horse would be allowed.

"If the lieutenant judges," said Muggeridge.

"I know what it says."

"Well, he ain't here to judge. And he can't judge till he's read it, and he can't read it without the book, and the book's here and the key ain't." Muggeridge sat down on the other end of the bench. He was a heavy, slow, careful man from Cranleigh, and he was not saying anything that was not so. "We write fog, half past nine, south station not visible, and we keep a glass on Blackdown. It'll burn off by noon. It always does, this time of year."

"It didn't on Lady Day."

"That was March."

Puttock got up and went to the south window and looked at nothing. Then he came back and stood over the journal on the bench and looked at the three pages.

He did not know what it said. He could not know. He had sat at that glass and called changes through the end of the last war, and the peace, and the beginning of this one, a hundred thousand of them perhaps, and he had never once been told what a single one of them meant, and he had not wanted to be. It was not his trade. In the Belliqueux he had been a quartermaster's mate, and he had stood his trick at the wheel and steered the course he was given, and he had not been told why the ship was going where she was going, either, and it had never troubled him. A man at the wheel does not need to know where the ship is going. He needs to know the course.

"It'll burn off by noon," said Muggeridge again.

"And then what? Then we make it to Blackdown, and they make it to Beacon Hill, and so on down, and it's in Portsmouth by half after twelve."

"Well, then."

"And it was in Netley at half past nine," said Puttock. "That's three hours. They didn't send it at that pace to have it lie three hours on a hill in Surrey."

"You don't know what pace they sent it at. You don't know they ain't always that quick at the Admiralty of a Monday, with nobody to cut the clerks short. You don't know nothing about it, Amos, no more nor I do."

"I know Netley wasn't waiting on us."

Muggeridge opened his mouth and shut it again. He had seen that too.

---

The horse was at Burgate Farm, at the foot of the hill, a big grey mare called Sukey that the farmer let to the station by the month, at so much a month whether she was used or not, and she had been used twice in the year that Puttock knew of, both times by Garland, both times to Godalming. The farmer's name was Tidy. He was in his yard in his shirt-sleeves when Puttock came down out of the fog with the paper buttoned inside his coat, and he listened to what Puttock wanted, and looked at him.

"Mr Garland's chit?"

"Mr Garland's in Godalming."

"Then I'll want Mr Garland's chit, Mr Puttock. She's let to the King on Mr Garland's say-so. You know that."

Puttock had five shillings and some copper in his breeches, which was what he had until quarter day. He put the five shillings on the top of the gate, in a row.

"That's against the chit," he said. "If he won't sign it, you keep them."

Tidy looked at the shillings, and at Puttock, and then he called the boy to saddle the mare. He did not pick the shillings up. He left them on the gate, where they lay, and Puttock did not take them back either, and they were still there when he rode out of the yard.

He was no horseman. He had been on a horse perhaps a dozen times in his life, and most of those were at a walk behind a hay-cart when he was a boy. But a man who has been aloft in a gale off Ushant does not much mind a horse, and Sukey was an old, sensible mare who had carried a farmer to market for fifteen years and did not mind what was on her back, so long as it did not pull her mouth about. He gave her her head and she took him down the lane at a jog that loosened every tooth he had.

The fog was very thick in the bottoms. He could see the hedge on his right hand and the ditch on his left and twenty yards of lane before him, and nothing else. He went through Hascombe village without seeing it, only the smell of woodsmoke and a dog barking and the shape of the church tower, there and gone. He knew the road as far as Dunsfold, because he walked there on a Sunday sometimes to his sister's, and after Dunsfold he knew it by asking, and after Chiddingfold he did not know it at all.

He asked at the forge at Chiddingfold. The smith came out wiping his hands on his apron and stood in the fog and said, Blackdown, that was over Fernhurst way, that was a long step, five mile, six, and the road was bad, and why would anyone go to Blackdown on such a day as this, there was nothing up there but the King's telegraph and the heather.

"That's where I'm going," said Puttock.

"You won't see the telegraph in this, master. Nobody won't."

"Which road?"

The smith told him, and Puttock got it wrong twice before Fernhurst, once at a crossways in a wood where all three roads looked the same and all three went down into white, and once at a farm where a woman came out with a bucket and sent him back the way he had come. Sukey did not care. She jogged when he let her and walked when he did not, and she stopped twice to drink at a ford without consulting him, and he let her, because it was her water and his hurry, and he had been long enough at sea to know which of those mattered more to a horse. He kept his hand on the paper inside his coat. It was the only thing he had. It was three pages of numbers in his own pencil, copied out of the journal fair, so that the journal could stay at the station, as it must, and he had checked it against the journal twice before he left, standing at the bench with Muggeridge reading the changes off and Puttock pointing to each one, the way they did the time, and they had found one wrong and mended it.

The clock in a church tower somewhere off in the fog struck eleven. He did not know what church. He did not know where he was. The lane went up, and kept going up, and became a track, and the oaks became birches, and the birches became heather and pine, and Sukey began to blow.

Then the fog thinned. He looked up and there was blue in it, very pale, and then a great deal of blue, and then he came up out of the top of the fog as a man comes up out of water, and the sun was on him.

He stopped the mare, because he could not help himself.

It was the whole of the Weald, lying under him, white from end to end, smooth as a sheet, and the sun shining on it so bright he had to put his hand up. Out of it, here and there, stood the tops of the hills like islands, the North Downs a long blue line to the north, and Hindhead standing up to the north-west, and far off, very small, a dark knob that he knew was Hascombe Hill, with something on it like a gallows that he knew was his own frame, at rest, all its shutters shut. And to the south, past the edge of Blackdown, the land fell away clear towards the sea, green and brown in the sun, with no fog on it at all.

On the very top of the hill, a hundred yards off, among the heather, stood the Blackdown telegraph, and its shutters were at rest too, and a man in a blue jacket was sitting on the step of the house with his elbows on his knees, eating bread and cheese.

---

The lieutenant at Blackdown was a young man named Haynes, who had been at Blackdown three months and had come to it from a frigate, and who had a frigate officer's way of standing up very quickly. He stood up very quickly now, as Puttock came up through the heather leading the mare. He knew Puttock's face, as it happened, though they had never spoken; he had seen it at the end of his glass every day for three months.

"Hascombe," he said. "Good God. We've been looking for you since half past nine. We thought you'd burned down."

Puttock took the paper out of his coat and gave it him, and said what it was. Haynes looked at the numbers, and then at the top of the first page, and his face changed. He did not say anything about it. He turned round and shouted into the house, "Glass! Glass, and the ropes, quick as you like!" and then, to Puttock, "Is Beacon Hill showing?"

"I don't know, sir. You'd know that better nor me."

"It's showing. It's been showing all morning, damn it, and nothing to give it." He went into the house with the paper, and Puttock heard him calling the first change in a voice that would have carried to the foretop. "One, four, five!"

Over Puttock's head the frame groaned and the shutters went round with a clap.

He stood in the heather and held the mare and listened. He could hear them working inside, Haynes calling and a glassman answering him, and the ropes running through their sheaves, and the clap of the shutters over his head, and after a while a pause, and then the shutters again, and he knew the glassman was watching Beacon Hill make it, ten miles to the south, in the sun. He did not need to look. He knew the rhythm of it as well as he knew his own pulse. Haynes was not waiting either; he was giving the next change before Beacon Hill had shown the last. Puttock found that he was counting with them under his breath, and that he could have called the next change before Haynes did, and that he did not want to. It was Haynes's now. It was going away from him down the hill towards the sea.

Sukey put her head down and began to crop the short grass between the heather. The sun was warm on the back of Puttock's neck. Below him, nine miles off, the white lay over the Weald as flat and still as it had at nine o'clock, and Hascombe frame stood up out of it with all its shutters shut, and nothing moving there, and somewhere under it Joe Muggeridge was sitting with his eye at the south glass, looking at the fog.

Haynes came out once, while the second page was going, and stood beside him a moment in the sun.

"You'll want a chit for that horse," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"I'll write you one." He looked at Puttock sideways, as though he wanted to ask a question, and then thought better of it, or thought there was no need. "Who told you to bring it?"

Puttock thought about it.

"Netley did, sir," he said.

Haynes looked at him a moment longer, and then went back in, and Puttock heard him take up the calling again, quick and clear, from where he had left it. The shutters clapped over their heads. Puttock stood in the heather with the reins in his hand, and did not ask what it said, and listened to it go.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem octāvum Kalendās Novembrēs (25 October 2026), ab Horātiō Nelsōne per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Horatio Nelson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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