Watch and Watch

by Isaac Newton, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The paper was nailed to the post by the furnace door, at the height of a man's eyes, so that it could not be lost and could not be pretended not to have been read. Humphrey had read it the first night by the light of the fire and every night since, and could have said it with his eyes shut, but he read it again now, because it was midnight and his watch was beginning and reading it was part of the watch.

The vent at the second notch. The door shut. Two handfuls of charcoal at every half hour by the clock in the court, laid on the back of the fire, not the front. Mark each half hour in the book with the time and the word fed. Do not open the door to look. Do not touch the glass.

There was no name at the bottom. There did not need to be.

The book lay on the bench under the window, a few quires of paper sewn into a limp cover, ruled down the left side in a column for the hour. The last entry was in the other hand, small and upright and very even: 11½. fed. Below it Humphrey wrote 12. fed., in his own hand, which was larger and leaned forward, and went to the scuttle.

The elaboratory stood at the end of the garden, by the east end of the chapel, a low brick shed with a chimney that had been built higher the year before. Inside it smelled of soot and old vinegar and something underneath those that Humphrey had never been able to name and had stopped trying to. Along the back wall ran the shelves: crucibles stacked mouth into mouth, glasses with long necks laid in straw, stone jars with paper over their tops and nothing written on the paper. The book his master sometimes read lay on the end of the shelf, swollen, its boards spotted white with mould. Humphrey had once lifted the cover far enough to read Agricola and then put it down again.

The furnace was brick, as high as his waist, and Mr Newton had made it himself, and altered it twice since Lady Day, cutting a new vent with a cold chisel and filling an old one with clay. On top of it sat an iron pan of sand, and in the sand, buried to its shoulders, a round glass the size of two fists, with its neck drawn out long and narrow and the end of the neck melted shut. Humphrey had watched him shut it, in the first week of the fire: the neck held in the flame of a lamp blown by a little pipe, turning and turning until the glass went soft and ran together and closed like a mouth.

What was in the glass he did not know. A matter, dark grey, heavy, that sat in the bottom of the round like a little heap of wet ash. He knew there was quicksilver in it because he had seen the quicksilver poured, and he had once found a scrap of gold leaf on the floor by the bench, folded and creased, and put it on the bench and said nothing about it. Beyond that he did not know and had not asked. In all the time since he had come from Grantham to be his namesake's clerk he had asked perhaps four questions about what was done in this room, and had had four answers that told him nothing at all.

The charcoal hissed when it went on and settled. He shut the door, and sat down on the stool, and took out his copying.

---

He was not supposed to have it there. Nobody had told him so, but he knew it as he knew not to whistle in the chapel. The sheets were foul papers, Mr Newton's own drafts, written fast and scored through and written again between the lines, and Humphrey's work was to make a fair copy of them in a hand a printer could read. He had been at it since the winter. The first part was gone already, bound in its cover and taken to London by the carrier to go before the Royal Society. This was the next part. He had brought it out with him because at two in the morning there was nothing to do between half hours but sit, and a man who sits will sleep.

He set the candle on the bench and the inkhorn by it and began where he had left off. De motu corporum quibus resistitur in ratione velocitatis... He did not understand much of it. He understood more than he had in the winter. He knew when a proposition ended and the demonstration began, and he knew that a figure drawn in the margin went in the same place in the copy, and that the letters at its corners went in exactly where they stood and not a hair's breadth anywhere else, because he had once put a D on the wrong side of a line and had had the sheet handed back to him without a word, the D ringed.

The clock in the court struck the half hour. He fed the fire and wrote 12½. fed. and sat down again.

He thought about Grantham. He did not mean to. It came into his head the way the sound of the wind did, under the door. His mother's kitchen, and the smell of it, and his sister who had written at Easter to say she was to be married to a maltster at Spittlegate and would he come. He had not gone. Mr Newton had not refused him leave; he had not been asked. The fire had been lit on Lady Day and would not go out until May was well in, and the fair copy was wanted, and there had seemed no way to say I am going to Grantham for a week in that room, any more than there was a way to say it to the furnace.

1. fed.

He had found the mess untouched again at supper. The bread and the mutton and the small beer, laid on the end of the table in the chamber at noon by the bedmaker, all of it there at six with the fat gone white on the plate. He had taken it away and said nothing, as he always did, and Mr Newton, standing at the desk by the window in his gown, writing, had not looked up, as he always did not. Humphrey sometimes thought that if he took the plate away full and brought it back full, day after day for a month, his master would not know, and would die thin and astonished at the end of it.

1½. fed.

He copied a figure. It was a curve, and a line touching it, and other lines falling from the line to the curve at equal distances, like the teeth of a comb. He drew it slowly with the rule and the compasses. At the end of each of the falling lines was a little letter, and he set them in one by one.

He set the compasses down to trim the candle. He put his elbows on the bench and his chin on his hands to look at the figure, and see if it was right.

---

The clock woke him. He did not know what hour it was striking; he had come in on the end of it. He knew only that the candle had burnt down nearly to the stick and gone crooked, and that his neck hurt, and that the room was cold.

The room was cold.

He was at the furnace before he was properly awake. He did not open the door. He put his eye to the vent instead, and saw what he knew he would see, a few coals the colour of a dying sunset at the very back, grey everywhere else, grey ash lying over the front of the fire like a fall of snow.

He looked at the glass. It sat in its sand as it always sat, the grey matter in the bottom. It looked no different. He did not know if that meant anything.

The clock in the court began again, and this time he counted. It struck three.

The last mark in the book was 1½. fed. Two, two and a half, three. Three feedings missed, and the fire half gone.

He did then what he afterward could not account for, except that he was young and frightened and his hands knew how to make a fire burn better than they knew how to wait. He opened the vent from the second notch to the fourth. He took charcoal from the scuttle, not two handfuls but four, five, and laid it on, and the paper on the post said the back, not the front, and he laid it on the back and then on the front as well. He took the small bellows from its nail and knelt and worked them at the vent, steady, the way he had seen his mother bring up the bread oven on a cold morning, until the red came back into the coals and then the yellow, and the furnace began to tick as it does when it is warming, and the sand in the pan sent up a faint dry smell of hot stone.

Then he shut the vent to the second notch, and got up, and was ashamed of the bellows in his hand, and put it back on its nail.

He did not know how long he stood looking at the furnace before he looked at the glass again.

There were stars in it.

That was the only word that came to him, then or after. The round of the glass above the matter, which had been clear as water every night for six weeks, had a light on it. Points, very small, very bright, scattered over the inside of the dome. As he looked there were more of them. They came out the way stars come out on a winter evening, not where you are looking but just beside it, so that you turn your eye and there is one, and you turn it again and there is another, and the first has a companion you are sure was not there a moment before. They were silver. They held the candle in each of them, tiny and exact. Some were the size of a pin's head, and some were smaller than he could properly see, so that he saw them only as a brightness, like breath on a glass.

He stood with his hands at his sides and did not breathe.

The stars grew. Two near the top touched, and became one, and it was larger and brighter than either. Another joined it. Then it was too heavy for its place, and it began to move down the curve of the glass, slowly, then quickly, a bright thread running down the inside of the dome and gathering others as it went, and it fell back into the grey matter at the bottom and was gone into it. Another thread followed it. Another. The dome was a field of points, and the points were running together and falling, and fresh points coming out where the old had been.

It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He was afraid of it. There was nothing on the paper on the post about it at all.

---

He sat down at the bench and took the pen.

The column waited. 1½. fed, and below it the blank, and the clock had struck three some minutes since. He could write 2. fed, and 2½. fed, and 3. fed, in a steady hand, three lines, it would take him no time. Nobody had seen. The fire was burning now, burning well, better than well. And then underneath he could write what he had seen, and take the book across the garden, and the stars would be the thing, and nobody would ask what the fire had been before them.

He wrote, in his own forward-leaning hand, larger than he meant:

2. not fed. H.N. asleep. 2½. not fed. 3. fire very low. Fed four handfuls and more, front and back. Vent opened to the fourth notch. Bellows. After 3. stars on the inside of the glass above the matter. Silver. They run down.

He sanded it, and put the pen in the horn, and went to wake his master.

---

Mr Newton was not asleep. Humphrey had known he would not be. There was a light at the window of the chamber by the gate, and when he went up the stairs the door was ajar, and his master was standing at the desk in his gown with his back to the room, his shoes trodden down at the heels and his stockings fallen round his ankles, writing. The candles had been lit from one another all night and stood in their own grease. He did not turn round.

"Sir."

"Is it three?"

"Past, sir. There's something in the glass."

Mr Newton turned. He looked at Humphrey's face for a moment and then past him at the door, and then he put the pen down, not in the standish but on the open page, where it rolled and left a line of ink across the writing, and went out and down the stairs without his hat.

In the elaboratory he stopped inside the door. He did not go to the glass. He went to the paper on the post first, and read it, though he had written it, and then he looked at the vent, and at the scuttle, and at the bellows on its nail, which was still swinging very slightly. Then he went to the bench and picked up the book and read the last five lines in it, holding it up close to the candle. Humphrey stood by the door with his hands behind him and waited to be told to go back to Grantham.

His master put the book down and bent to the glass.

The stars were fewer now. The fire had settled under the shut vent, and the dome had cleared at its top, and what was left was a ring of fine bright points low on the curve, near the shoulder where the sand began, and a few threads still sliding. Mr Newton put his face so close to the glass that Humphrey thought the heat must hurt him. He did not move for a long time. Once his lips moved, as though he were counting.

"When did they come?"

"After I'd fed it, sir. After the bellows. A few minutes. I don't know how many."

"Where first?"

Humphrey thought. "At the top. In the middle of the top. Then all over."

"Did any come on the neck?"

He had not looked at the neck. He said so.

"How large, the first?"

"Very small, sir. Smaller than a pin's head."

"And the colour of the matter beneath, while they came. Did it change?"

"I didn't look at the matter, sir. I'm sorry. I looked at the stars."

His master straightened. He did not look angry. Humphrey had seen him angry, once, with a fellow of the college who had borrowed a book and returned it with a leaf turned down, and it had been a white, quiet, terrible thing, worse than shouting. This was not that. This was the look he had at the desk, when the writing would not come and he stood with the pen held up off the paper and his eyes fixed on nothing.

"They are quicksilver," he said. "The fire rose too fast and drove some of it up out of the matter. The top of the glass is cooler than the bottom. It gathers there, and then it falls back." He said this flatly, as a man reads a reckoning. "It is nothing new. Any apothecary's boy has seen quicksilver go up and come down."

"Yes, sir."

"It did not do it at the steady heat. Not in six weeks." He took the pen from the inkhorn. "That is the new thing. Not the stars. That it did not do it before."

He wrote under Humphrey's lines, standing, in his small even hand. Humphrey could not read it upside down and did not try. When he had done, his master turned and saw the papers on the end of the bench, the foul sheets and the fair copy, the curve and its comb of falling lines with the little letters at their ends, a fleck of soot already on the margin.

He picked them up. He looked at the copy for a moment, the figure, and Humphrey could not tell whether he was looking to see if it was right. Then he squared the sheets together, the foul and the fair, and carried them out of the door into the garden, and Humphrey heard him set them down on the bench outside under the window, where the dew would not reach them till morning.

"They do not come in here," Mr Newton said, when he came back.

"No, sir."

"Next time you find you are falling asleep, you will come across and wake me. Before. Not after."

"Yes, sir."

"Go to bed."

Humphrey went to the door. At the door he turned, because he had been going to ask it for six weeks and would never in his life be nearer to having the right. "Sir. What is it for?"

His master had sat down on the stool by the furnace, where Humphrey had sat, with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the glass. He did not answer. Humphrey did not think he had heard.

---

He slept until the bedmaker came at seven, and lay for a moment not knowing where he was, and then knowing, and then went down to the buttery for the morning mess because it was his business to, and carried it across the court on its board with a cloth over it: bread, a piece of cheese, small beer in a jug. The chamber was empty. The candles had burned out on the desk and the pen still lay across the page where it had rolled. He set the board down and stood looking at it, and then took it up again and carried it out through the garden.

The sheets were on the bench by the elaboratory window, wet at the edges, the top one curling. He took them up and held them against his chest under his arm, and went in.

The fire was low. Not out; low. The vent was at the second notch and the door shut, and the glass sat in its sand, clear at the dome, the grey matter in the bottom as it had always been, dull, keeping its counsel. On the stool beside it, with his back against the bricks of the furnace wall and his head fallen sideways on his shoulder, Mr Newton was asleep. His mouth was a little open. His hands lay in his lap, palm up, the fingers of the right black with ink and the fingers of the left grey with ash. Humphrey had lived all this while in the same rooms with him and had never seen him asleep.

He put the board down on the bench quietly. He put the sheets beside it, then thought better of it, and took them back outside and laid them on the bench under the window, and came in again.

The book lay open. Under his own lines of the night, under the few lines in the small even hand that he could now read the right way up, which were figures and the word stellae and the hour, the column went on:

3½. fed. 4. fed. 4½. fed. 5. fed. 5½. fed.

And under that, in the same hand, smaller, as if written slowly:

6. dormito. I.N.

Humphrey had Latin enough for that. It was a quarter past seven by the clock in the court. Humphrey took the tongs from the hook. He opened the door of the furnace the width of his hand, quietly, and laid two handfuls on the back of the fire, not the front, and shut it again, and looked at the glass, and there were no stars. He sat down at the bench. He took the pen out of the horn and wiped it and wrote, in the column, under his master's line:

6½. not fed. 7. not fed. 7¼. fed. H.N.

Then he sanded it and sat with his hands round the jug of small beer, not drinking it, and watched the glass, and let the man by the furnace sleep.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Isaacō Newtōnō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Isaac Newton, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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