第18章 The Warden's Disbursement

Halberd Jessop's room on the Coalstairs was not a room you could sit in and feel safe in, and that was the first thing Ryam thought at seven in the morning when he got in. The press was not a machine. It was a set of balances standing on a stone block with the frame of them cut out of brass and the beams of iron, and they were the size of two men with their arms out, and they weighed a hundredweight apiece, and there was no mechanism at all in them. He had worked two months on them as a prentice and he knew all four of them by the sound. The style of the account was wrong. That was what was wrong with it, and it took him nine weeks and a room full of mistakes in other people's books to be able to say so, and what it was was this. Every account in Halbeck was kept in the form of the Hourhouse, which is to say that it begins with the thing itself and then goes to the weighing of the thing. You begin with the stone, and then you weigh the stone, and the stone is the reason for the weighing and the weighing does not pretend to be older than the stone. This account began with the weighing. It began with a column of weights in the weights column, and the thing itself came afterwards, in a third column, in the writing of it, and the third column was headed with the date. The whole book was upside down. The book had been begun with the result and the reason had been put in afterwards. "There," he said. "Two hundred and forty." "Two hundred and forty what?" "There are two hundred and forty prentices cut in the south ward in a year. Four in a quarter." He put his finger on the number and then moved it away. "I have been counting them for eleven weeks off the back of my own chits and I have got to two hundred and forty twice, from two different directions, and it is not in any book you are allowed to read." Halberd Jessop put both hands flat on the table. "That is the whole of it," she said. "That is the arithmetic of the whole thing. Nine years of paying nothing into a fund to keep four hundred names out of the street, and then deciding to pay it out of the band, and then paying it out of the band of the children instead of the bands of the ones who owe it." He felt the room go cold. "Say that again," he said. "I did not say it just now." She did not raise her voice. "I have said it nineteen years, one Saturday at a time, to a woman who has a slate. I said it the week the office opened. I said it the year they cut the well. I said it the year they took the third one off the water. You are not the first man to bring me a number, and you will be the last, and I am telling you now that I have never once in nineteen years been able to find the band it came out of." "The bands of the children." "That is what the book says. Two hundred and forty of them a year, a hundred and twenty hours each, and every one of them cut in a year when the ward has nothing coming in to give, and the book calls it a renewal and puts it under an account with four digits and a letter." "You have had this for nineteen years." "I have had the noise of it for nineteen years." She was not being dramatic and she was not being cold either. "I have had a cloth business and a laundry and four hundred names, and every winter for nineteen years I have had more south-ward names in this building and less coming in, and the coal has got dearer, and the water has gone to the roof, and I have never been able to say why, and I have asked every man I have ever met including two wardens and a Reckoner and a man who keeps the fair copy, and they all look at me exactly the way you looked at me on Friday." She put her hands in her lap. "And I am the woman in the Grey Stile who is on the list of the ward and is thirty-first on it and was carried off on Tuesday with a basket and a shawl," she said. "There. That is also what I am. You have been telling people you would not use anybody, and you have not told anybody anything, and I have had nine days to sit in a room with no window thinking about the arithmetic of my own life, and here is the arithmetic of my own life." The wind came down off the weir and went round the shutters. "What is thirty-first," said Ryam. "On the list of the ward, thirtieth is March the eleventh." She said it the way she said numbers. "The eleventh. And before March the eleventh there are thirty names on the list, and every one of them is a south-ward family, and every one of them has been paying a hundred and twenty a quarter for nineteen years out of the band of whatever child in the ward was nearest the stairs." "And after March the eleventh?" "After March the eleventh the list is closed for the quarter," she said, "and then the list is made up again, and it will be a different list, and it will be made up in the counting floor by people who will not be looking at this room." Ryam stood in the middle of the floor and looked at the fireback by the hearth with his own name and his mother's name and thirty-fifth on it on the face of it, and he thought about how he had come into this room eleven weeks ago wanting a woman to hold a slate, and how she had taken the stone out of his hand and pointed at a line, and how he had said *is that a name*, and how he had been right about the name and wrong about nearly everything else, and how the only thing he had actually done in eleven weeks was to carry somebody else's bag from the south desk to the counting floor and back. "None of it is any use on its own," he said. "The four digits, the arrears, the number two hundred and forty. I have had the memorandum column since the fourteenth of the month and I have had nothing to put it against. You can say I made the number up. Halberd said I could have made it up. Coll said I made it up on a yard at eight in the morning with a lamp in his hand and no one to say it to. There is no man in this city who can say any of this who is not already standing in a room where he can be shut." "No," said Halberd Jessop. "I am not asking you to say it." "I know what you are asking me to ask." "Then ask it," Ryam said, and took the fireback off the hearth and put it on the table between them, and turned it over. ---