第10章 The Man on the Second Landing

Merek Coldspur was waiting in Ryam's kitchen when Ryam got back from the wash house, and there was a sack of coal by the door, and the lamp was turned down to a quarter, which was the hour for a man who wanted to be told something without saying it. "Your mother is asleep," Coldspur said. "I waited an hour and she is asleep." "How long are you here?" "Long enough." He looked at the fire. "Ryam. I am going to ask you a question and I would prefer that you answered it as a man and not as a clerk. Are you carrying a slate?" The room went very quiet. Ryam put the bucket down. "Who told you?" "Eleven people have asked me in nine days how much a standing fee is. That number is not fourteen, so it is a strange thing for eleven of them to ask at once." He turned the lamp down another notch with his thumb. "There is a clerk on the south desk who has been paid for two hundred years' worth of a fee that nobody has ever seen, and there are ten of you who have come back in asking for it, and the difference between those two facts is a woman of forty-six on the Coalstairs with a slate and a milk jug." "She said a name." "She said a name that is a good clerk, and the man who wrote the words under it is a better clerk than she knows." Coldspur leaned forward. "I am going to tell you four things and I am going to tell you them once. Are you listening as a man?" "Yes." "One. There is no standing fee. There has never been a standing fee. I have been on the south desk for nineteen years and there has never been a standing fee and there is not one on the day we are speaking. "Two. The hundred and twenty hours on your chit is real. It was taken off your band at the cut and you paid it, and you are not owed it, and I will not be able to give it back to you because it went into the ward fund and the ward fund is spent and the hour is in the bottom of the ledger and it cannot be climbed out of. "Three. That one hundred and twenty is on every south-ward prentice's chit, and it is on yours because the tariff for the south ward is set in the standing book and the standing book was set by people who had a great deal of reason, and every advance on it has been poured into the ward fund for nineteen years, and the ward fund is what pays the physicians and the coal and the water and the four men in the Grey Stile who have nowhere else. "Four. And I am telling you that because I read the same standing book when I came onto the desk, and I did not ask, because I was twenty-six and I did not think to ask, and because they had put a fire in my mother's kitchen and my mother's kitchen had a hole in the roof." Ryam had not moved. "You knew," he said. "I read the book." "You read the book." "For nineteen years." Coldspur put his hand flat on the table. "And I have never once been able to find a single line in the Rolls that puts my name against any of it, and I have looked, and looking is not a thing you can do with a question. You have to do it with a pencil, at night, in a room you should not be in, for four years." "Then you are the standing fee." "I am a man in a corridor." "You are a man in a corridor who is going to tell a nineteen-year-old that he should stop asking." "I am a man in a corridor who has watched two of them stop asking," Coldspur said, "and one of them stop asking by way of the warden's office and the warden's stipend, and he reads the fair copy in the third gallery now, and he is happy, and I would not go back to him for anything. And the other one did not stop asking. He asked in the gallery in front of eleven people in the wrong tone of voice, and he did not pay a single hour more for the rest of his life, and he was found at Newyear in the Weir with his coat on the step." He stood up and pushed his chair back. "You have a fair copy in your hand. Read it. Then decide what you are, and after you have decided, do not come and tell me about it. Come and tell me when you have decided whether you are going to be the kind of man who brings it to a desk." He picked up his hat. "Keep the coal," he said at the door. "And keep your hands off the Grey Stile. You will not know why I said that until somebody tells you what is in it, and I would rather you found that out in daylight." The lamp went out behind him when he shut the door, and the coal sack stood against the wall by the door like a guest who had decided to stay. Ryam sat on the floor beside it for a while without lighting it again. Then he got the slate out from under his coat and read the three lines in the dark, by touch, with his thumb, the way he had learned to read a band in the dark when he was small and the lamp had cost him an hour to leave burning. One hundred and twenty. Nine days. Merek Coldspur. And then, because a number sitting on a slate does not become an argument, he got the chalk-stub out of his pocket and made a fourth line, which was the only one that had ever frightened him, and it went in very small and very straight. NINE. Not the hundred and twenty. The nine. Coldspur had said the fund pays the physicians, the coal, the water and the four men in the Grey Stile, and his mother took nine a week from the ward physician, and there had been eleven prentices on that stair this morning each putting a hundred and twenty into the account that paid for her, and the arithmetic of that was so large and so obvious that it had taken him twenty minutes to see it, because there is no protection in this world against an arithmetic that you are willing to sit down with. One hundred and twenty times eleven men a quarter, and his mother got nine of it a week, and the rest of it went where the rest of it went, and the ward had told the ward kitchens and the ward physicians and the Grey Stile that they were full up, and everybody who was owed had asked, and everybody who asked had been told the same two words. He sat with the chalk in his hand for a long time. Then he rubbed the fourth line out with his thumb until the slate was blank in that place, and he did not rub out the first three, because the first three were not an argument. They were a receipt. He slept that night in the front room with the slate under his head, and his mother turned over four times in the small hours, and he lay there doing the only arithmetic he had left, which was the oldest one in Halbeck and the only one nobody could charge him for. *What will it cost me to be the man who asks?* ---