Dark Matter

The next morning, I took a wherry boat from London Bridge to York Building stairs. Upon alighting, I and others found the mud on the jetty quite frozen over, which was so hazardous to our company that I thought fit to complain to the watermen that the steps should have been salted and kept free of ice so that passengers might step off a boat without threat to life or limb. At this the watermen, who were weatherbeaten, strong-looking men, merely laughed, and, sore from the previous evening—for I still had the apprehension that I had been the butt of the Ordnance’s joke—I started to draw my sword; but then I saw my master standing by the water tower and thought better of pricking their arses.

“You were right to contain your anger,” he said, when at last I was safely on the embankment beside him, “for there’s not a more independent lot of men in London. They are generally temperate, for a drunken waterman would hardly be trusted, and yet they can be most violent. If you had drawn your sword you would very likely have found yourself in the river. A seven-year apprenticeship makes a poor man most obdurate in defence of his rights and knowledgeable of his proper duties, which, alas, do not include the cleaning of the jetties. For the Thames, being a tidal river, would make a mockery of anyone that swept these walkways free of mud. High tide was but one hour before you landed.”

Bridling under my master’s lecture, I said that I had no idea he knew so much about London watermen and the tides that affected their trade.

At this he smiled thinly. “About watermen I know only what most people know about all London workmen: that they are a blight. But about tides I know a great deal,” he said. “You see, it was I who first explained them.”

And as we took a short coach ride up to the Maypole in the Strand, Newton proceeded to tell me how by propositions mathematically demonstrated he had deduced the motions of planets, the comets, the Moon, and the sea.

“So it is the gravitational effect of the Moon that makes the tides?” I said, summing up his own much longer account of this celestial phenomenon. Newton nodded. “And you received all this from the fall of an apple?”

“In truth, it was a fig,” he said. “But I cannot abide the taste of figs, whereas I am most fond of apples. I have never been able to tolerate the idea that it was the fruit I despise most in the world that gave me my idea of how the world moves. And it was only the germ of my idea. I remember thinking that if the power of gravity could extend to the top of a tree, how much farther might it extend? And indeed, I perceived that the only limit to its power was the size of the bodies themselves.”

It was clear that Newton saw the world in a different way from everyone else; which made me feel mightily privileged that I enjoyed such a great man’s confidence. Perhaps I was beginning to understand a little of the excellence of his mind; but this was enough to appreciate that it was only my failure to grasp a little more of the actual theories themselves that stopped him and me from becoming friends. In truth, we were always separated by such a wide river of knowledge and ability that he was to me like a man must seem to an ape. In all respects he was a paragon, a human touchstone that might try gold, or good from bad.

The question of why the name of St. Leger Scroope had seemed familiar to my master was answered almost as soon as we arrived at his place of business, in a house at The Bell, near the Maypole. A servant answered the door to us by whose manner of dress—for he wore a small cap upon his head—I took to be a Jew; and having enquired our business, he nodded gravely, and then went to fetch his master.

Scroope himself was a tall man, at least six fingers higher than me, with a black periwig, a beard turned up in the Spanish manner, and fine clothes which were as rich as gold and silver could make them. I thought Scroope recognised my master immediately, although he waited until the Doctor had explained the purpose of his visit before giving expression to this knowledge.

“But do you not know me, Doctor Newton?” he asked, smiling strangely; and seeing Newton’s eyes narrow as he struggled to find Scroope in his remembrances, the goldsmith’s face took on a disappointed aspect.

“I confess, Mister Scroope, that you have the advantage of me, sir,” stammered Newton.

“Why then, that it is a first for me, sir, for I never yet knew any man who could best you.” Scroope bowed handsomely. “Pray, let me remind you, sir. I was your fellow commoner at Trinity College, Doctor Newton, assigned to your tuition, although I neither matriculated in the university, nor graduated from it.”

“Yes,” agreed Newton, smiling uncertainly. “I remember you now. But then you had not the beard, nor the wealth, I’ll hazard.”

“A man alters much in twenty-five years.”

“Twenty-six, as I recall,” said Newton. “Also that you were much neglected by me, although you were not unusual in that respect.”