Kepler Read Free

Frau Barbara was waiting for him in their rooms. She had an air always of seeming cruelly neglected, by his presence no less than by his absence. Sorrowing and expectant, she asked: "Well?"
    Kepler selected a look of smiling abstraction and tested it gingerly. "Hmm?"
    "Well," his wife insisted, "what happened?"
    "O, we had breakfast. See, I brought you something," and produced from its hiding place in the crown of his hat, with a conjuror's flourish, an orange. "And I had coffee!"
    Regina, who had been leaning out at the open window, turned now and advanced upon her stepfather with a faint smile. Under her candid gaze he felt always a little shy.
    "There is a dead deer in the courtyard, " she said. "If you lean out far you can see it, on a cart. It's very big. "
    "That is an elk, " said Kepler gently. "It's called an elk. It got drunk, you know, and fell downstairs when…"
    Their baggage had come up, and Barbara had been unpacking, and now with the glowing fruit cupped in her hands she sat down suddenly amidst the strewn wreckage of their belongings and began to weep. Kepler and the child stared at her.
    "You settled nothing!" she wailed. "You didn't even
try."
     
    * * *
     
    Familiar indeed: disorder had been the condition of his life from the beginning. If he managed, briefly, a little inward calm, then the world without was sure to turn on him. That was how it had been in Graz, at the end. And yet that final year, before he was forced to flee to Tycho Brahe in Bohemia, had begun so well. The Archduke had tired for the moment of hounding the Lutherans, Barbara was pregnant again, and, with the Stiftsschule closed, there was ample time for his private studies. He had even softened toward the house on Stempfergasse, which at first had filled him with a deep dislike the origins of which he did not care to investigate. It was the last year of the century, and there was the relieved sense that some old foul thing was finally, having wrought much mischief, dying.
    In the spring, his heart full of hope, he had set himself again to the great task of formulating the laws of world harmony. His workroom was at the back of the house, a cubbyhole off the dank flagged passage leading to the kitchen. It had been a lumber room in Barbara's late husband's time. Kepler had spent a day clearing out the junk, papers and old boxes and broken furniture, which he had dumped unceremoniously through the window into the overgrown flowerbed outside. There it still lay, a mouldering heap of compost which put forth every spring clusters of wild gentian, in memory perhaps of the former master of the house, poor Marx Müller the pilfering paymaster, whose lugubrious ghost still loitered in his lost domain.
    There were other, grander rooms he might have chosen, for it was a large house, but Kepler preferred this one. It was out of the way. Barbara still had social pretensions then, and most afternoons the place was loud with the horse-faced wives of councillors and burghers, but the only sounds that disturbed the silence of his bolted lair were the querulous clucking of hens outside and the maidservant's song in the kitchen. The calm greenish light from the garden soothed his ailing eyes. Sometimes Regina came and sat with him. His work went well.
    He was at last attracting some attention. Galileus the Italian had acknowledged his gift of a copy of the
Mysterium cosmographicum.
True, his letter had been disappointingly brief, and no more than civil. Tycho Brahe, however, had written to him warmly and at length about the book. Also, his correspondence with the Bavarian Chancellor Herwart von Hohenburg continued, despite the religious turmoil. All this allowed him to believe that he was becoming a person of consequence, for how many men of twenty-eight could claim such luminaries among their colleagues (he thought that not too strong a word)?
    These crumbs might impress him, but others were harder to convince. He remembered the quarrel with his