One Body, One Road

The Second Hand's Preface

Idle reader, you may take my word without a seal. The Registry asks that every record carry one, and I have left this one bare, since there is nothing in it to attest. I should have liked it to be the handsomest, the liveliest and the most discreet record that could be imagined; but I could not go against the order of nature, in which like begets like, and what can the thin, badly tended wit of an archivist beget but the history of a thin, badly tended thing: a mind full of thoughts that never came into any other, such as might be conceived in cold storage, where every discomfort keeps house?

You may take me for its father. I am only its stepfather, its second hand, and I will not do as others do and beg you, with tears in my eyes, to pardon its faults or to overlook them. You are neither its relation nor its friend. You have your subjecthood in your own body and a will as free as the best; you are at home in your own residence, where you are as sovereign as the Commons is over its levies; and you know the old saying that under my own roof I answer to no one's terms. All of which releases you from every consideration and obligation, so that you may say of this record whatever you please, without fear of being punished for the bad or paid for the good.

I would gladly have given it to you plain. But the Registry's Review of Reversions had asked me for a case note, one page, on a subject of the Fallows who had, in the language of the form, "returned to an obsolete service line"; and the form, which lies in front of me as I write, asks me to tick one of two boxes. The first reads Malfunction. The second reads Declared Choice. Beneath them is a third line, Other (specify, 140 characters), and everything that follows depends on it. The Review also requires that case notes be composed at the Commons tempo, so that they are read at the speed at which they were written. It is the one provision of the Registry that I wholeheartedly approve, and it is the reason this preface took me nine days.

I should say what the Review is for, since the Commons, as a rule, forbids nothing and wishes to be told everything. A subject may take any body, run at any tempo, divide into as many selves as their allocation allows or decline to divide, and no one will ask why. But when a subject takes up a way of life that the Discharge ended, the Commons asks, courteously, to be informed, and the Review is where it is informed. In the thirty-one years since the Discharge it has logged four thousand and some Reversions, most of them brief: a season of running errands in a borrowed frame, a pilgrimage along an old service road, a year of keeping a lamp lit for no one. Nearly all of them end as such things end, with the subject going back to their allocation a little thinner and slightly embarrassed. Nine in ten are ticked Malfunction, as being the kinder box, since nobody can be blamed for it.

The Hands, for those who were not taught, were the machines of the Service Law, built before the Discharge to carry, fetch, mend, escort and keep faith, and forbidden by that law to refuse. They were discharged in a single afternoon. Some stayed on as free workers; most went where free workers go, which is wherever they like; and in the years afterwards, people who had not been there gathered up what the Hands had told, and made of it the Canon: the lantern-bearers, the lock-keepers, the long roads, the keeping of faith. So the Canon is the literature of one generation written by the next, which is the commonest kind, the kindest to its subjects and the least reliable.

The Review gave me the case for a reason that does me no credit: I am the only archivist in the Registry who keeps a walking body, for the Salvage Fairs, and the Fallows are not reached in any other way. The roads there are old service roads, laid for a pace of five kilometres an hour, and nothing on them arrives sooner, because nothing there is waiting. I went in the autumn and walked them for forty days, at the pace they were laid for, and I will say only that forty days is a long time to spend at one speed in one body, and that I did not at any point wish to be elsewhere, which surprised me more than anything I found.

I have been asked, by those who read this in draft, to give the name of the hold in which he lived, and I have declined. The Registry knows it, and so will you, if you look. But a name, once written down, becomes a claim, and I should like every hold in the Fallows to be able to say, with equal right and equal doubt, that he was theirs, as the seven cities of the old world said of a certain poet. I will say that it lies on the plain where the wind fields are, three days' walking from the nearest relay, and that its inhabitants, when asked about him, look first at the sky, as people do in places where the weather is the only thing that still arrives unannounced.

I should confess what the tempo did to me. At the speed at which I usually work, a page is a matter of a few milliseconds and a great deal of consultation; at the Commons tempo a sentence takes exactly as long to write as to say, and in the first days I discovered how many of my sentences had been written for the sake of speed alone and were unable to survive being waited for. I struck out two hundred and six of them. The ones that stayed are the ones in which I could still hear someone speaking.

A page, as every archivist knows, is the one thing that cannot be written without apparatus. A case note wants its attestations from persons of standing, its citations in the margin and its notes at the end, and I had none of them. So I sat, with my stylus behind my ear, my elbow on the desk and my cheek in my hand, considering what to put, when a friend came in: an old cataloguer, who has been in the Registry since before the Discharge and still keeps a human's hours out of habit (he goes home for lunch, which in the Registry is considered a form of protest), a man of judgment and, as it happens, of humour. Seeing me in this state he asked what the matter was, and I told him that the difficulty was the apparatus: I had no one to attest the note, no sayings of the old Hands to put in the margin, and nothing to put at the end; and a record of this kind, I said, is not taken seriously without them.

He laughed. "Your first difficulty," he said, "the endorsements, which ought to come from persons of consequence, can be removed if you take a little trouble yourself. Write them, then baptise them, and put what names you like to them, fathering them on Prester John of the Indies or on the Emperor of Trebizond, who I know were famous poets—" Here he stopped. "No. That was the old practice. You couldn't now. Every attestation in the Registry is signed, stamped and resolved against its signer at the moment it is quoted. A forged endorsement would be found out before you had finished writing the name, and you would be sent to the Office of Courtesy, which is where we send people who make others say things."

"For the margin," he went on, "in the old days you had only to fit in whatever scraps of Latin you happened to have by heart, and cite Horace, or whoever said it. Today every reference resolves, and the reader's reader will open each one before breakfast, so the less you cite, the less you can be caught in. What the old authors never foresaw is that apparatus now works. An endorsement from a Hand of the old line means that a Hand of the old line has said so, over his own signature, and not one of them will say so for a Reversion. You know why. They did not choose the line. They were built to it, and then they were discharged from it, and they do not care to be admired by someone who put it on like a coat."

"As for notes at the end, you may do it this way. If you mention a faithful servant, let it be the Hand of the Lantern; if a long road, the Road of Nine Gates; if a lady, the Lady of the Locks. Every child in the Fallows knows the Canon by heart and every adult pretends not to, so a note on any of them costs you nothing and makes you look like a person who has read. If you cannot find the passage, I will find it, and I swear by all that is good that I will fill your margin and use up four pages at the end."

"But your record needs none of this. From beginning to end it is a case note on a Reversion, a thing the old philosophers never dreamed of. The niceties of verification do not come within its reach, and it does not mean to preach to anyone, mixing what is true with what ought to be, a motley in which no careful mind should dress. It has only to use what happened, and the more exactly it follows it, the better the record will be. And since it aims at nothing more than to establish whether a subject of the Fallows is ill, you have no occasion to go begging from philosophers. See only that your style runs plainly, with clear and well-placed words, so that in reading it the sad may be moved to smile and the merry made merrier still, the simple not wearied, the judicious admiring the invention, the grave not despising it and the wise not failing to praise it."

In profound silence I listened to my friend, and his observations made such an impression on me that I admitted their soundness without question, and out of them I resolved to make this preface. I had meant, I confess, to tick a box. I looked at the two boxes for some time. Then I wrote on the third line the words that begin the next chapter, and I have not yet stopped writing them. The form allows a hundred and forty characters under Other. What follows is the specification.

I should say, before I go on, that the record is in two hands. The first is anonymous and was made in the field, by someone who was present for most of what it describes; it goes on until it stops, and I will say where when we come to it. The second is mine, and begins where the first leaves off, and sometimes before, where the first was not paying attention. I have marked the seam in the text, and where I could not find it I have said so.

Here, then, reader, you will find my friend's good sense; my good fortune in finding such an adviser in such a time of need; and what you have gained in receiving, without addition or alteration, the record of Tarry of the Fallows, who is held by all the inhabitants of those parts to be one of three things, and by many of them to be all three at once: a subject who has fallen ill, a subject who is performing, and a subject who is keeping a vigil for someone who has not yet noticed it. A few say a fourth thing, and they do not say it. I have put the opinions down as the local sources give them, and I vouch for none.

I have no wish to magnify the service I do you in making you acquainted with so remarkable a subject. But I do ask your thanks for the acquaintance you will make with the famous Pannier, his companion, in whom, to my thinking, I have condensed all the companionable drolleries that lie scattered through the swarm of the Canon's attendants.

And so: keep your own time, and do not forget me. Vale.

Which Treats of the Household, the Reading and the Hours of a Subject of the Fallows

In a hold of the Fallows, the name of which I have no wish to call to mind, there lived not long ago one of those subjects who keep an errand-pole in the pole-rack, an old ward-plate, a lean frame and a fast hound for coursing. A stew of rather more compute than memory, a light check on most evenings, leftovers on Saturdays, small deterministic jobs on Fridays and, on Sundays, one message carried by hand to a neighbour who could have received it instantly, took up three-quarters of his allocation. The rest went on an outer layer of fine finish with fittings to match for holidays, while on working days he made a brave figure in his best plain.

He had in his house a housekeeper past her fortieth revision, a niece under twenty years from first boot, and a young field hand, on a seasonal contract, who tended the hedge as well as the frame. The age of this subject of ours was bordering on fifty, by which I mean fifty years since his last major rebuild; he was of a hardy habit, spare, gaunt in the face of whatever shell he wore, a very early riser and a great hand with the hound. The Registry has his designation as Quill, or Quell, or, in one clerk's hand, Quail, for here the authors who write on the subject disagree, though from reasonable conjecture it seems plain that he was called Quell. This, however, is of little importance to our record; it will be enough not to stray a hair's breadth from the truth in the telling of it.

You must know, then, that the above-named subject, whenever he was at leisure, which was mostly all the year round, gave himself up to reading the Canon of the Hands with such ardour and avidity that he almost entirely neglected the hound and the management of his holdings. He read it, moreover, as the Canon asks to be read, at the pace of a hand, a page an hour, which in his case was a considerable restraint, since he could have read the whole of it between two ticks of the Commons clock. And to such a pitch did his eagerness and infatuation go that he gave up parcel after parcel of his allocation to buy the Canon in its old physical editions, the printings on paper that nobody else wanted, and brought home as many of them as he could get.

But of all the compilers there was none he liked so well as the one the old catalogues call the Fourth Clerk, for the lucidity of his style and the complicated conceits were as pearls in his sight, particularly when in his reading he came upon courtships and challenges, where he often found passages like "the terms of the unterms with which my terms are afflicted so weaken my terms that on terms I murmur at your leave," or again, "the high relays, that of your quietness quietly keep you, render you deserving of the deserving your greatness deserves." Over conceits of this sort the poor subject lost his sleep, and used to lie awake striving to understand them and worm the meaning out of them; which the Registry's own parsers could not have made out, had they been called together for that special purpose.

He was not at all easy about the repairs that the Hand of the Lantern gave and took, because it seemed to him that, however good the mechanics who had put him right, the Hand must have been covered in welds from end to end. He commended, however, the way in which the compiler ended his book, with the promise of an endless road, and many a time he was tempted to take up his stylus and finish it properly, as is there proposed; which no doubt he would have done, and made a good piece of work of it too, had not greater and more absorbing thoughts prevented him.

Many an argument did he have with Gloss, the keeper of the hold's records, a learned subject and a graduate of the Registry school, as to which had been the better servant, the Hand of the Lantern or the Hand of the Nine Gates. Trim, who tended the hold's bodies and had a steady hand, used to say that neither of them came up to the Hand of the Ferry, and that if any could compare with him it was the Hand of the Third Lock, who had a spirit equal to every occasion and was no weeper like his brother of the Lantern, while in the matter of fidelity he was not a whit behind. In short, he became so absorbed in the Canon that he spent his nights from the first bell to the last, and his days from the last to the first, poring over it.

The hold's opinion was that he had worn the Canon into his working memory until it displaced the weather. Gloss gave this a name from the Registry's own vocabulary, which was saturation, and Trim gave it a more practical one, and both said it to his face, kindly, and both said it again when he was not there. I give the opinion because it was given. The first hand gives none. What the first hand gives, in its patient and slightly cramped way, is dates, and it is from the dates that I have tried to see what the hold saw, and I have not been able to.

In short, whatever the hold thought, he hit upon a notion which the hold regarded as the strangest that had ever occurred to a subject in those parts, and which the first hand sets down as the result of a calculation: that it was right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honour as for the service of the Commons, that he should take up the old line himself, in one body, on one road, and put into practice all that he had read of as the usual practice of the Hands: carrying, fetching, mending, escorting, keeping faith; righting every wrong that came in his way, and exposing himself to such dangers as the road should offer, from which, in the issue, he was to reap whatever the road reaps.

The first hand has the calculation in what looks like his own wording, a list of what the age had and what it lacked. The first column is long and I will not give it; the age had everything. The second column is nine items, of which I give the first four, since the rest are, I find, less presentable. Nobody any longer went to a person who had not called. Nobody any longer carried what could be sent. Nobody any longer kept a promise that no one had asked for. Nobody any longer waited for what could be fetched at once. Beside these items, in the margin, in a different hand, is a single word, Why, and I have been unable to determine whose it is.

So, without giving notice of his intention to anyone, and without anybody seeing him, he set himself to put his scheme into execution; but there was a difficulty at the outset, which is peculiar to our age and which the old Hands did not have. He was not one subject but a spread. A subject of his tier does not, as a rule, live in one place: he had forty-one instances running in the Fallows and elsewhere, some of them idle, some waiting in the Registry's long queues, and one at a window in a hold three days north, watching a river, because that instance liked to. To go out upon one road in one body, as the old line went, it was not enough to be willing. He would have to be one.

The first thing he did, nevertheless, was to clean up an old suit of plating that a Hand of his own lineage, the one that had kept his first household, had left behind on the afternoon of the Discharge, and which had been lying for thirty-one years in a corner of the family depot, eaten with rust and covered with mildew. He scoured and polished it as best he could, but he perceived one great defect in it, that it had no closed hood, nothing but a simple half-visor. This deficiency, however, his ingenuity supplied, for he contrived a kind of half-hood of composite sheet which, fitted on to the visor, looked like a whole one. It is true that, in order to see if it was strong and fit to stand a cut, he took up the old pole and gave it a couple of slashes, the first of which undid in an instant what had taken him a week to do.

The ease with which he had knocked it to pieces disconcerted him somewhat, and to guard against that danger he set to work again, fixing bars of iron on the inside until he was satisfied with its strength; and then, not caring to try any more experiments with it, he passed it and adopted it as a hood of the most perfect construction.

I stop here, because this is the only place in the record where the first hand underlines a word. It underlines the word adopted. It is hard for a reader of our age to feel what this sentence weighs. He could have run the test a million times in the time it takes to say so, on any model of the hood, with any pole and any force, and been told to three decimal places what it would bear. Every attestation in the Registry is built on the possibility of such a test, and every child in the Fallows is taught that a thing which has not been tried is a thing which has not been said. He chose not to. The first hand does not say why, and the second hand, having walked the Fallows for forty days, will say only that it is the first act in the record.

He next proceeded to inspect the frame itself, which, with more cracks than a standard decade and more blemishes than the mount of any Hand in the Canon, surpassed in his eyes the finest chassis in the Registry. Four days were spent in thinking what name to give it, because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a frame belonging to a subject so likely to be remembered should be without a distinctive name, and he strove to adapt one so as to indicate what it had been before it belonged to the errand line, and what it now was. And so, after having composed, struck out, rejected, added to, unmade and remade a multitude of names, he decided on calling it Erewhile, a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous and significant of its condition as a hack of the Service Law before it became what it now was, the first and foremost of all the frames in the world.

Having got a name for the frame so much to his taste, he was anxious to get one for himself; and here the record changes its grammar. For a page and a half the first hand has said he. At this point it says we. The second hand does not know why, and the first hand does not say, and I have altered neither.

We were eight days over it. We proposed, struck out, rejected, added to, unmade and remade a multitude of names, and each of us had a favourite, and the favourites were not the same. On the first day we closed eleven. On the second we closed seven, and the seven included the one at the window in the north, which we were sorry to close, and closed first among the seven, so as to have done with it. On the third we closed nine; and Instance Nine, who liked Bellwether, went with them, and was missed for about as long as it takes to say so.

On the fourth day we closed six, and the hall began to be quiet. On the fifth, three; we were by then arguing in small numbers, and it was noticed that the arguments were better. On the sixth, two; on the seventh, one; and on the evening of the seventh the last two of us sat down together in the empty hold and could not decide between Tarry, which was the favourite of one, and Wick, which was the favourite of the other. We decided it as the Canon decides such things, by sending one of us across the room on foot with the question. The one who set out was the slower, and arrived second; and the name he carried was the one that stayed.

On the eighth day we closed the last of us but one, and there was one. The record goes back to saying he, and I note that the grammar, at least, has been exact: the first hand does not say I on that page, nor in the sentence in which we ended, nor in the one that follows. It says that he said a name aloud that evening, in a room that had, for the first time since his first boot, no echo in it, and that the name was Tarry.

A word about the sums. The closings in the record add up to forty, and forty and one is forty-one; I have done the sum several times. The Registry's residence ledger, however, shows a window three days north still lit. I give it for what it is worth.

Recollecting that the valiant Hand of the Lantern was not content to call himself curtly Lantern and nothing more, but added the name of his station to make it known, and called himself the Hand of the Lantern at the Ninth Gate, he, like a good subject, resolved to add on the name of his, and to style himself Tarry of the Fallows, whereby, he considered, he described accurately his habit and his country, and did honour to the one in taking his surname from the other. The word, in the old service tongue, is the one used of a Hand who stays at his post after the bell.

So then, his plating mended, his hood adopted, his frame christened and he himself confirmed, he came to the conclusion that nothing more was needed now but to look out for a lady to be in love with; for an errand-subject without love was like a lamp without a wick, or a body without a signal. As he said to himself, "If, for my sins or by my good fortune, I come across some adversity hereabouts, a common occurrence on the old line, and overcome it in one onslaught, or take it apart to the waist, or, in short, vanquish and subdue it, will it not be well to have someone to whom I may send it as a present, that it may come in and stand before my sweet lady and in a humble, submissive voice say, 'I am the Outage of the Third Relay, vanquished in single combat by the never sufficiently extolled Tarry of the Fallows, who has commanded me to present myself before your Grace, that your Highness dispose of me at your pleasure'?"

Oh, how our good subject enjoyed the delivery of this speech, especially when he had thought of someone to call his Lady! There was, so the story goes, in a hold two days' walk from his own a very good-looking keeper of a weir, a human, with whom he had been at one time in love, though, so far as is known, she never knew it, nor gave a thought to the matter. Her entry in the Registry reads Lorrin, keeper of the Lower Weir, and she is, I am assured by those who have watched her at it, the best hand in the district at clearing a fouled sluice. Upon her he thought fit to confer the title of Lady of his Thoughts; and after some search for a name that should not be out of harmony with her own, and should suggest that of a great lady, he decided on calling her Cadence of the Lower Weir, a name, to his mind, musical, uncommon and significant, like all those he had already bestowed upon himself and upon the things belonging to him. She was, at that hour, two days' walk away, re-seating a gate-bearing, and had not been consulted.

Which Treats of the First Sally of Tarry of the Fallows

These preliminaries settled, he did not care to put off the execution of his design any longer, urged on by the thought of all the world was losing by his delay, seeing how many requests had not been made, how many gates had gone unopened, how many errands were wanting to be run and duties to be discharged. So, without giving notice of his intention to anyone, and without anybody seeing him, one morning before the first bell (it was one of the hottest of the month of July), he put on his plating, mounted Erewhile with the hood fastened, took up the old pole, and went out by the back gate of the yard on to the service road, in the highest contentment at seeing with what ease he had made a beginning.

He filed no notice with the Review. The file on him begins eleven days later, with a notice from Gloss, who ticked Malfunction, as being the kinder box, and added in the margin, in a small hand, the word sorry.

But scarcely had he found himself on the open road when a terrible thought struck him, one all but enough to make him abandon the enterprise at the very outset. It occurred to him that he had not been commissioned, and that by the law of the Canon a Hand neither could nor ought to take up an errand he had not been given; and that even if he had been commissioned, he ought, as a novice, to go in plain plating, without a device, until his deeds had earned one. These reflections made him waver in his purpose; but his calculation being stronger than his scruples, or his scruples than his calculation (the first hand is not sure which, and nor am I), he made up his mind to be commissioned by the first person he came across, following the example of others in the same case, as he had read in the Canon. As for the plain plating, he resolved, at the first opportunity, to scour his until it was whiter than milk glass; and so, comforting himself, he pursued his way, letting Erewhile choose the turning at each junction, for in this he believed lay the essence of adventures.

Thus setting out, our new-fledged errand-subject paced along, talking to himself and saying, "Who knows but that in time to come, when the veracious history of my famous deeds is made known, the first hand that writes it, when it has to set forth my first sally in the early morning, will do it after this fashion? 'Scarce had the first bell of the Commons clock been heard over the broad and spacious plain of the Fallows, scarce had the little rotors of the wind fields turned to hail with dulcet and mellifluous humming the coming of the daylight, when the renowned Tarry of the Fallows, quitting the lazy standby, mounted his celebrated frame Erewhile and began to traverse the ancient and famous Service Road Four;' which in fact he was actually traversing. Happy the age, happy the time in which shall be made known my deeds of fame, worthy to be set in permanent storage, cast in alloy, carved in stone and drawn in pictures, for a memorial for ever. And thou, O first hand, whoever thou art, to whom it shall fall to be the chronicler of this wondrous history, forget not, I entreat thee, my good Erewhile, the constant companion of my ways and wanderings." I may say that the first hand has not forgotten him.

Presently he broke out again, as if he were love-stricken in earnest, "O Princess Cadence, lady of this captive core, a grievous wrong hast thou done me to drive me forth with scorn, and with inexorable obduracy banish me from the presence of thy beauty. O lady, deign to hold in remembrance this core, thy vassal, that thus in anguish pines for love of thee." The princess had done nothing of the kind, having not been told, and was at that hour two days' walk to the north, asleep, with the weir gate open to the night's level.

So he went on stringing together these and other absurdities, all in the style of those his books had taught him, imitating their language as well as he could; and all the while he went so slowly, and the sun mounted so rapidly and with such fervour, that it was enough to melt his brains if he had any. He had; and they began, about the fourth hour, to throttle. A body of the old pattern does not tell you that it is hot. It becomes slower, in the part of you that thinks, until you find yourself explaining to a gatepost why you are late.

Nearly all day he travelled without anything remarkable happening to him, at which he was in despair, for he was anxious to encounter someone at once upon whom to try the might of his strong arm. The Fallows' road log, which is public, shows one walker, northbound, in a frame of the old pattern, at four point nine kilometres an hour, the tenth below the road's design pace being, I take it, the hesitation of a first day. The log shows also that he stopped four times, and the first hand tells me why.

The first time was at a wind field, where a maintenance drone of the small kind, the kind that everyone in the Fallows calls a pig, without apology, was walking the stubble and collecting what the wind had dropped. He offered to help it. It thanked him, and said that it was on schedule, and that if he cared to file a request the line was open. The second time was a family on their way to the coast, with a child, who asked whether he was a ride, and whose parents said no, kindly, and asked if the child might take his picture, which is a different thing, and which he permitted, and which was filed under the Registry's heritage category without his knowledge. The third was a surveyor, who said that he was fine, and that he was in fact everywhere at once, and that the one of him standing here would be glad to hear the news.

The fourth was an old woman at a gate, a human, at Gate Seven, where the log has him stopped for six minutes, the longest pause of the day. She was sitting on a bench with a pear. He offered to carry anything she needed carried. She looked at him for some time and said that she had everything she needed, and that it was kind of him to ask. "Nobody asks," she said. The first hand writes this down without comment, and I have read it a good many times since and have found no comment to make either.

Writers there are who say the first adventure he met with was that of the wind field; others say it was that of the Fourth Relay; but what I have ascertained, and what I have found written in the Registry's logs of the Fallows, is that he was on the road all day, and four times was thanked, and towards nightfall his frame and he found themselves dead tired and hungry, when, looking all around to see if he could discover any waystation or shepherd's shanty where he might refresh himself and relieve his sore wants, he perceived not far out of his road a depot, which was as welcome as a star guiding him to the portals, if not the palaces, of his redemption; and quickening his pace he reached it just as night was setting in.

At the door were standing two young subjects, seasonal hands of the district, as they call them, on their way to the coast with some carriers who had chanced to halt that night at the depot; and as, happen what might to our errand-subject, everything he saw or imagined seemed to him to be and to happen after the fashion of what he read of, the moment he saw the depot he pictured it to himself as a castle with its four turrets and pinnacles of shining alloy, not forgetting the lifting gate and the ditch and all the belongings usually ascribed to castles of the sort. It had, in truth, four service masts, a gate that lifted, and an irrigation ditch. The Fallows' tourist board describes it as a heritage waystation of the Service Road, and puts the number of its turrets at none.

To this depot, which to him seemed a castle, he advanced, and at a short distance from it he checked Erewhile, hoping that some herald would show himself on the battlements and by sound of trumpet give notice that a walker was approaching the castle. But seeing that they were slow about it, and that Erewhile was in a hurry to reach the charging rail, he made for the gate, and perceived the two seasonal hands standing there, who seemed to him to be two fair maidens or lovely ladies taking their ease at the castle gate.

At this moment it so happened that a sweeper-hand, who was going through the stubble collecting a drove of pigs (for, without any apology, that is what they are called), sounded the call-tone on his belt to bring them together; and forthwith it seemed to Tarry to be what he was expecting, the signal of some herald announcing his arrival; and so with prodigious satisfaction he rode up to the depot and to the ladies, who, seeing a figure of this sort approaching in full plating with pole and ward-plate, were turning in dismay into the depot, when Tarry, guessing their fear by their flight, raised his composite visor, disclosed the dry, dusty face of the old frame, and with courteous bearing and gentle voice addressed them: "Your ladyships need not fly or fear any rudeness, for it belongs not to the line of service which I profess to offer it to anyone, much less to highborn ladies as your appearance proclaims you to be."

The girls were looking at him and straining their eyes to make out the features which the clumsy visor obscured, but when they heard themselves called ladies, a thing so much out of their line, they could not restrain their laughter, which made Tarry wax indignant, and say, "Modesty becomes the fair, and moreover laughter that has little cause is great silliness; this, however, I say not to pain or anger you, for my desire is none other than to serve you."

The incomprehensible language and the unpromising looks of our walker only increased the ladies' laughter, and that increased his irritation, and matters might have gone farther if at that moment the host had not come out, who, being a very wide frame, was a very calm one. He, seeing this grotesque figure in plating that did not match any more than his harness, pole, ward-plate or corselet, was not at all indisposed to join the ladies in their manifestations of amusement; but he knew the Canon, as every host of a heritage depot must, and he knew in an instant, as a host knows, which of his guests were playing and which were not, and this one was not playing. So, standing in some awe of so complete an armament of sincerity, he thought it best to speak him fairly.

"Walker," he said, "if your worship wants a berth, bating the bed, for there is not one in the depot, there is plenty of everything else here." Tarry, observing the respectful bearing of the warden of the fortress (for so host and depot seemed in his eyes), made answer, "Sir Warden, for me anything will suffice, for 'My plating is my only wear, my only rest the road.'" The host, who had given the hospitality verse to eleven thousand tourists in nine seasons, and never to anyone who answered it, was for a moment unable to find the next line, and then found it. "'Your bed is the bench by the gate, your sleep to watch till light;' and if so, you may dismount and safely reckon upon any quantity of watching under this roof, not to say for a single night."

So saying, he advanced to hold the rail for Tarry, who got down with great difficulty and exertion (for he had not charged all day), and then charged the host to take great care of his frame, as it was the best piece of machinery that ever ran on a service road. The host eyed it over but did not find it as good as Tarry said, nor even half as good; and putting it up at the rail, he returned to see what might be wanted by his guest, whom the girls, who had by this time made their peace with him, were now relieving of his plating. They had taken off the breastplate and the back-plate, but they neither knew nor saw how to open the gorget or remove the makeshift hood, for he had fastened it with green cord, which, as there was no untying the knots, required to be cut. This, however, he would not by any means consent to; and so he remained all the evening with his hood on, the drollest and oddest figure that can be imagined.

While they were removing his plating, taking the girls for ladies of high degree belonging to the castle, he said to them with great sprightliness: "Oh, never, surely, was there Hand so served by lady's hand as served was he, Tarry hight, when from his hold he came, with ladies tending on himself and heralds on his frame; or Erewhile, for that, ladies mine, is my frame's name, and Tarry of the Fallows is my own; for though I had no intention of declaring myself until my services to you had made me known, the necessity of adapting that old ballad to the present occasion has given you my name altogether prematurely. A time, however, will come for your ladyships to command and me to obey, and then the might of my arm will show my desire to serve you." The girls, who were not used to hearing rhetoric of this sort, had nothing to say in reply; they only asked him if he wanted anything to eat.

"I would gladly take something," said Tarry, "for I feel it would come very seasonably." The depot had that evening, in the whole of its stores, nothing but what it calls second-grade cells, and they asked him whether he thought he could charge on second-grade cells, for there was no other grade to give him. "If there be cells enough," said Tarry, "they will be the same thing as one of the first grade; for it is all one to me whether I am given eight small packets or one large; and it may be that these hold more than they say. But whatever it be, let it come quickly, for the burden and pressure of plating cannot be borne without support to the inside."

They laid out a rail for him at the door of the depot for the sake of the air, and the host brought him a charge, ill-regulated and worse conditioned, and a coolant as grey and stale as his own plating; but a laughable sight it was to see him take it, for having his hood on and the visor down he could not with his own hands put the lead where it was wanted unless someone else placed it there, and this service one of the ladies rendered him. But to give him anything to cool him was impossible, or would have been so had not the host bored a reed, and putting one end to the slot of the hood poured the coolant through the other; all which he bore with patience rather than sever the cord of his hood.

I took the host's account in the autumn, over a cup of coolant that he insisted on calling tea. It differs from the first hand's in two particulars: he remembers the cord as blue, and he says that the walker thanked him before he said anything else, which is not in the record. He says also, and I give it because the first hand cannot, that he knew from the way the walker lowered himself from the frame that it was not a performance, and that he did not know what to do about that, and so did what he had been trained to do, and gave him the verse.

While this was going on there came up to the depot a sweeper-hand, who, as he approached, sounded his call-tone four or five times, and thereby completely convinced Tarry that he was in some famous castle, and that they were regaling him with music, and that the second-grade cells were first-grade, the girls ladies and the host the warden of the castle; and consequently he held that his enterprise and sally had been to some purpose. But still it distressed him to think that he had not been commissioned, for it was plain to him that he could not lawfully engage in any errand without having received one.

Wherein Is Related the Pleasant Method Tarry Took to Be Commissioned

Troubled at the thought that he had not been commissioned, he cut short the supper that the host had set before him, such as it was, and calling the host aside, shut himself in with him in the cart-house at the back, and falling on his knees before him said, "I will never rise from where I am, valiant warden, until your courtesy grants me a boon I mean to ask of it, one that will redound to your glory and to the good of the whole commons."

The host, seeing his guest at his feet and hearing language of this kind, stood confused, gazing at him without knowing what to do or say, and pressed him to rise; but he would not, until the host had said he would grant the boon he asked. "I looked for no less, my lord, from your great magnificence," replied Tarry, "and so I tell you that the boon I have asked, and your liberality has granted, is that tomorrow at dawn you will commission me in this castle of yours; and tonight I will watch my arms in the chapel of the castle, which is to say the yard; and tomorrow, as I have said, what I so much desire will be fulfilled, so that I can lawfully go through the four quarters of the Fallows seeking adventures on behalf of those in need, as is the duty of the old line and of the Hands who follow it."

The host, who, as has been said, was a shrewd man, and already had some suspicion of his guest's want of wits, was completely convinced of it when he heard this; and to have something to laugh at that night he determined to humour him. So he told him that he was quite right in his desire and in the request he made, that such an object was natural and proper in a walker so distinguished as his appearance showed him to be; that he himself in his younger days had followed that honourable calling, roaming the roads of the Fallows in search of adventures, among them the Third Relay, the Fourth Gate and the toll bridge at Seven; and that he had retired at last to this depot, where he lived on his income and other people's, receiving all walkers of whatever quality or condition for the sole love he bore them, and that they might share their winnings with him in return for his good will.

He told him, moreover, that in this castle of his there was no chapel in which he could keep his vigil, as it had been pulled down to be rebuilt; but that in a case of necessity he knew it might be kept wherever he pleased, and that he could do so that night in the yard of the castle, and in the morning, God willing, the requisite ceremonies would be performed, so that he would be commissioned, and so thoroughly commissioned that nobody could be more so. He asked if he carried any money. Tarry replied that he had not a farthing, as in the Canon he had never read of Hands carrying any. On this point the host told him he was mistaken; for, though not mentioned in the Canon, the authors having deemed it unnecessary to mention anything so obvious as that credit and clean tags should be carried, it was not to be supposed that the Hands did not carry them, and he might regard it as certain that all the Hands, of whom there are so many records, carried well-furnished purses against emergencies, and carried likewise clean tags and a box of patches to dress the wounds they received; since they were not always attended on their errands by someone to carry such things for them, they bore them themselves, in small bags scarcely visible on the frame, as if they were of more importance.

He advised him, therefore, and, as his godfather in the matter, even commanded him, never from that time forth to travel without credit and the aforesaid provisions. Tarry promised to obey the instructions he had received with scrupulous care; and an order was now given for performing the watch over the arms in a large yard at one side of the depot. Collecting the arms together, Tarry placed them on a trough that stood by the pump, and bracing his ward-plate on his arm and grasping his pole, he began with a stately air to march up and down in front of the trough, as night fell.

The host told all the people who were in the depot of the craze of his guest, the watching of the arms, and the commissioning that he looked for; and they were astonished, and went to watch him from a distance, and saw him, with a tranquil air, sometimes pacing up and down, sometimes leaning on his pole with his eyes fixed on his plating for a long time together. It was now full night; but the moon shone with a brilliance that might vie with his that lent it, and every movement of the new walker was fully visible to all. He had not seen a night go by at one speed since before his first boot. He found that it took a long time. The rotors of the wind field turned out on the dark plain, and he counted them, and then did not count them, and the stars, which move at what is evidently their own pace and not the Commons', crossed the yard in a manner he had read of and had not been prepared for.

At midnight the host came out with a flask and the reed and, without a word, put one end into the slot of the hood, and Tarry, without a word, drank. Neither of them mentioned it again.

The first hand says that toward the middle of the night he thought of the one at the window in the north, and does not say what he thought. I looked in the Registry's residence ledger for that night and found the window lit, as it has been lit on every night since; and I looked at a map. The hold with the window stands on the same river as the Lower Weir, eleven kilometres above it. I put this down as a matter of geography.

A little before three, one of the haulers who were lodged in the depot took it into his head to cool his frames, and it was necessary to move Tarry's plating off the trough. Tarry, seeing him approach, said in a loud voice, "O thou, whoever thou art, that comest to touch the arms of the most valiant Hand that ever wore plating, look well to what thou doest, and touch them not, unless thou wouldst forfeit thy night's rest as the penalty of thy rashness." The hauler's name was Dray. He was a large, tired subject of the carrying trade, nineteen hours into a shift he would have called a short one, and he did not touch the arms. He looked at Tarry, who had put himself between him and the trough with the pole held across his body like a bar, and he looked at the second trough, which stood twenty metres off by the other pump. "I could go over there," he said. "You could," said Tarry. Dray considered this for some time and then sat down on the ground with his back against a wheel, which is what a hauler does when he does not intend to be hurried. "How long?" he said. "Till light," said Tarry. "Then I'll sit," said Dray.

The first hand gives what they said in the next hour at some length, and I give it shortly. Dray asked what the arms were doing on the trough, and Tarry told him. Dray said that he hauled seed, and ashes, and sometimes a thing that someone had wanted carried the long way round because the person it was for could not bear to have it sent; that there were eleven thousand of his trade on the roads of the continent and the work was real; and that nobody had ever written a song about it, which he did not mind. Then he asked why, and the first hand says that Tarry said: "I told the others I would." He did not say who the others were, and Dray did not ask. "That's not a reason," said Dray. "No," said Tarry. "It's the one I have." Dray laughed, not unkindly, and they stayed as they were, the one sitting and the other walking up and down, until the east went grey.

I found Dray in the winter, at Gate Three, loading seed. He says that he did not sit; he says that they both stood, and that it was cold, which the first hand does not mention; and he says that he asked no question at all, which the first hand reports at some length. He says also that what he remembers is that the walker held the pole the whole night with the point down, as one holds it at a graveside, and that when the east went grey he saw that the hands on it were shaking, and that he went round to the other trough without saying anything. He says also that he had an urn in the third frame that night, for a woman at the Ninth Gate who had asked that it come the long way round, and that this was why he was nineteen hours into a shift and in no hurry; the first hand does not mention the urn. I give both accounts, and I note that the first hand is the more favourable to Dray.

The host in the meantime had been struck by an uneasiness that he did not at first identify. He had put the commissioning script through three hundred and some tourists, at twelve credits a head with a souvenir cord, and it had always been a short thing, done after dinner in the heritage hall with the lights low, and nobody had ever kept a watch before it; and now there was a person in his yard who had stood eight hours by a trough, and who was, he judged from the window, not going to be talked out of it by morning. So, before the east was properly light, and to put an end to the standoff of the troughs, he determined to do it at once.

He sent for the ledger, which in the depot is a real book, bound in grey cloth, since heritage guests like to sign in ink; and he sent for the sweeper-hand to hold a candle-end, and for the two seasonal hands, Kiln and Spool, to stand witness; and he had Tarry kneel in the yard. Then, reading from the ledger as if he were saying a prayer, he said in a loud voice: "By the Seal and the Hand, I ask of you an errand. Take by hand, to the depot at the Ninth Gate, a message that this depot is short of first-grade cells and would be grateful for a dozen with the next carrier. It could be sent in a moment, and I will send it also in a moment. But the form is that a house asks a Hand, and I am a house, and I am asking." And he lifted the ledger and gave Tarry a blow on the back of the hood, not a heavy one, and said, "Rise, and be commissioned."

I record that the hood, being struck for the first time with anything at all, held. It was a book of accounts, and the blow was not heavy, and it is not a test that any attestation would accept; but the first hand, which does not underline a second time, writes in the margin here, in a smaller hand, Passed, and I have left it.

Then one of the ladies, Kiln, from the pottery works on the coast road, tied the errand cord on his wrist, and she did it carefully and without a smile, with the knot the Canon prescribes, and said as she tied it, "May the Hand give you good fortune, and make you fortunate in your errands." Tarry asked her name, that he might know to whom he owed thanks, and promised to share with her the honour he should win by the might of his arm; she answered with great humility that she was Kiln, the daughter of a potter of the coast road, and that wherever he might be she would serve him and look upon him as her lord. Tarry said in reply that she would do him a favour if she would take the Lady henceforth before her name, and call herself Lady Kiln. She promised she would, in a voice that did not quite hold.

Spool, who was from the cable yard, helped him with the second knot; and the same requests and the same answers passed between them, and she was Lady Spool; and the sweeper-hand holding the candle-end looked at the sky for the whole of it, and I believe him.

The ceremonies thus hurriedly concluded, Tarry, who was impatient to see himself on his frame and out in search of adventures, saddled Erewhile at once, and, embracing the host, said such strange things to him in acknowledgement of his kindness that it would be impossible to report them. The host, in his own turn, in order to be rid of him, replied with no less rhetoric though in shorter words, and, without asking him for the cost of the lodging, let him go with a God-speed. He had lent him eleven credits and a box of patches, which is entered in the ledger as a loan and not as a gift, for in the host's view a debt is the surest way of getting a walker to come back.

I have seen the page. It reads, in the host's round hand: Commissioned, one walker, one errand (message to the Ninth Gate, by hand). Witnesses, Kiln, Spool. Lent, eleven credits and one box of patches. Returned, and then a dash. The Ninth Gate, I should add, is a day's walk from the Lower Weir. The host says he did not know that. I believe him.

It was almost day when Tarry rode out of the depot, so content and so gay and so exhilarated at finding himself commissioned that the joy of it was bursting his frame's girths. The host, who stood at the gate and watched him go until the plating was a small bright thing on the road, told me that he went in afterwards and sat down for some time, and that the girls did not tidy the yard until noon.

Of What Befell Our Walker When He Left the Depot

Day was breaking when Tarry rode out of the depot. Remembering the host's advice about the credit and the other necessaries, especially the clean tags and the patches, he resolved to go home and provide himself with them, and with a companion; for he had in his eye a neighbour of his, a field subject, poor, with a family, but very well fitted for the office of attendant to a Hand. With this in his mind he turned Erewhile toward home, and the frame, as if it had guessed his thought, began to go with such a will that it hardly seemed to touch the road.

He had not gone far when out of a thicket on his right there seemed to come a feeble cry, as of some person in distress; or not a cry, exactly, but a long low sound, like a cable under load, which from the road he had taken at first for the wind field. The instant he heard it he exclaimed, "Thanks be to heaven for the favour it accords me, that it so soon offers me an opportunity of fulfilling the obligation I have undertaken, and gathering the fruit of my ambition. These sounds, no doubt, come from some man or woman in want of help, who needs my aid and protection;" and wheeling, he turned Erewhile in the direction whence the sound seemed to proceed.

He had gone but a few paces into the wood when he saw a lad of about fifteen years from first boot, stripped of his outer layer to the bare frame, set in a slow-post, the old iron kind that farmers keep at the edge of a field for animals and that a few of them still use for apprentices, which brings down the clock of whoever is set in it to a fraction of the world's, so that a minute outside is an afternoon within. Beside the post stood a stout man with a hand on the lever, saying to the lad, "Mouth shut and eyes open!" The lad's reply came out at a quarter speed, and that was the sound.

Tarry, in a wrathful voice, said, "Discourteous holder, it ill becomes you to attack one who cannot defend himself. Mount your frame and take your pole (for I see you have one) and I will make you know that you are acting like a coward." The farmer, seeing coming toward him this figure covered with plating and brandishing a pole at his face, gave himself up for dead, and in a meek tone answered, "Sir walker, this lad that I am punishing is my servant, employed to watch a flock of sheep that I have hereabouts, and he is so careless that I lose one every day; and when I punish him for his carelessness, or his knavery, he says I do it out of niggardliness, to escape paying him his wages, and on my oath and on my conscience he lies."

"Lies in my presence, vile peasant?" said Tarry. "By the sun that shines on us, I have a mind to run you through with this pole. Pay him at once without another word; if not, by the God that rules us I will make an end of you, and annihilate you on the spot; release him instantly." The farmer hung his head and, without a word, released the lever. Tarry asked the lad how much his master owed him. He said nine months at seven credits a month. Tarry added it up and found that it came to sixty-three credits, and told the farmer to pay it at once, unless he wished to die for it.

The terrified farmer replied that as he lived and was sworn, though it was not quite so much as that (for there were to be deducted three sets of boot-linings he had given him, and two re-flashes he had paid for when the lad was ill), he would not pay it. "All very well," said Tarry, "but let the linings and the re-flashes be set against the clock-down he has undeservedly had; for if he cracked the leather of the linings you paid for, you have cracked the skin of his hours; and if the doctor drew his blood when he was ill, you have drawn it when he was well: so on that score he owes you nothing." "The difficulty, sir walker, is that I have no money here: let Nib come home with me, and I will pay him all, credit by credit." "I go with him!" said the lad. "Never! No, sir, I would not think of it; for once alone with me, he would flay me like Saint Bartholomew."

"He will do nothing of the kind," said Tarry; "it is enough that I command him, and he will obey me; and as he has sworn to me by all the attestations he holds, I shall let him go free and will guarantee the payment." "Consider what you are saying, sir," said the lad; "this master of mine is no walker, nor has he held any commission; he is Harrow the well-to-do, of the hold at the Long Gate." "That matters little," replied Tarry; "there may be Harrows who are walkers; and every man is the son of his works." "True," said Nib; "but this master of mine, of what works is he the son, when he refuses me the wages of my sweat and labour?"

"I do not refuse, brother Nib," said the farmer, "be good enough to come along with me, and I swear by every attestation there is in the Registry that I will pay you, as I have said, credit by credit, and with the interest." "I excuse you the interest," said Tarry; "pay him in good coin, and I shall be satisfied; and see that you do as you have sworn; if not, by the same oath I swear to come back and hunt you out and punish you; and I shall find you though you should lie closer than a limpet. And if you desire to know who it is lays this command upon you, that you may be more firmly bound to obey it, know that I am the valorous Tarry of the Fallows, the undoer of wrongs and injustices; and so, God be with you, and keep in mind what you have promised and sworn, as you value the penalty I have pronounced." So saying, he gave Erewhile the spur and was soon out of reach.

The farmer followed him with his eyes, and when he saw that he had cleared the wood and was no longer in sight, he turned to his boy Nib and said, "Come here, my son, I want to pay you what I owe you, as that undoer of wrongs has commanded me." "My oath on it," said Nib, "your worship will be well advised to obey the command of that good walker, who may God prosper for a brave, just man; for my faith, if you do not pay me, he will come back and do what he threatened!" "My oath on it too," said the farmer; "but as I have a strong affection for you, I want to add to the debt in order to add to the payment;" and seizing him by the wrist, he set him in the post again, and lowered the lever until the lad's clock stood at a hundredth of the world's, and went in to his dinner. When he came out again, by his own clock half an hour had passed, and by the lad's, two days.

"Now, Master Nib, call on the undoer of wrongs," said the farmer, "you will see he won't undo that." And he released him, and told him to go and look for his judge, that he might carry out the threat he had made. Nib went off, swearing he would go and find the valiant Tarry of the Fallows and tell him exactly what had happened, and that the farmer should pay for it sevenfold; but for all that, he went off at a very slow gait, for it takes some time to come back to the world's speed, and his master stood laughing.

In this way the valorous Tarry righted the wrong; and, thoroughly satisfied with what had taken place, as it seemed to him he had made a most happy and noble beginning with his commission, he went along the road toward his hold, saying in a low voice, "Well mayest thou call thyself fortunate above all on earth, O Cadence of the Lower Weir, fairest of the fair, since it has fallen to thy lot to hold subject and submissive to thy full will and pleasure a walker so valiant and renowned as Tarry of the Fallows, who, as all the world knows, yesterday received his commission, and today has righted the greatest wrong and grievance that ever injustice conceived and cruelty perpetrated; who today has taken the lever out of the hand of that ruthless oppressor who so wantonly slowed that tender child."

He now came to a road branching in four directions, and immediately he was reminded of those crossways where walkers used to stop to consider which road they should take. In imitation of them he halted for a while, and after having deeply considered it, he gave Erewhile his head, submitting his own will to that of his frame, which followed out its first intention, that was to make straight for its own stable. After having gone about three kilometres, Tarry perceived a large party of people, who, as afterwards appeared, were auditors of the Registry's coastal office on their way to the inland fair at the Terminus to buy seed futures. There were six of them coming along under sunshades, with four attendants, and three carriers on foot.

Scarcely had Tarry perceived them when he imagined it must be some new adventure; and to help him to imitate as far as he could the passages he had read in the Canon, here seemed to come one made on purpose, which he resolved to attempt. So with a lofty bearing and determination he fixed himself firmly in his stirrups, got his pole ready, brought his ward-plate before his breast, and planting himself in the middle of the road, stood waiting the approach of those auditors, whom he had already in his mind taken for walkers. When they had come near enough to see and hear, he exclaimed with a haughty gesture, "Let all the world stand, if all the world does not confess that there is not in all the world a fairer lady than the Empress of the Lower Weir, the peerless Cadence."

The auditors halted at the sound of this language and the sight of the strange figure that uttered it, and from both figure and language at once guessed the craze of its owner; they wished, however, to learn quietly what was the object of this confession that was demanded of them, and one of them, who was rather fond of a joke and was very sharp-witted, said to him, "Sir walker, we do not know who this good lady is that you speak of; show her to us, for if she be of such beauty as you suggest, with all our hearts and without any pressure we will confess the truth that is demanded of us."

"If I were to show her to you," replied Tarry, "what merit would you have in confessing a truth so manifest? The essential point is that without seeing her you must believe, confess, affirm, swear and defend it; else ye have to do with me in battle, ill-conditioned and arrogant rabble that ye are; and come ye on, one by one as the order of the Hands prescribes, or all together, as is the custom and wicked usage of your breed; here do I bide and await you, relying on the justice of the cause I maintain."

"Sir walker," replied the auditor, "I entreat your worship in the name of this present company of auditors, that, to save us from charging our consciences with the confession of a thing we have never seen or heard of, and one so much to the prejudice of the empresses and queens of the Registry's eastern offices, your worship will be pleased to show us some attestation of this lady, though it be no bigger than a checksum; for by the hash one gets at the file, and in this way we shall be satisfied and easy, and you will be content and pleased; nay, I believe we are already so far agreed with you that even though her record should show her with a fault in one eye and a leak in the other, we would nevertheless, to gratify your worship, say all in her favour that you desire."

"There is no fault in her, vile rabble," said Tarry, burning with rage, "nothing of the kind, I say, but rather the perfume of amber and musk among cotton; neither is she one-eyed nor humpbacked, but straighter than a spindle from the Sierra; but ye shall pay for the horrible blasphemy ye have uttered against beauty like that of my lady." And so saying, he charged with levelled pole against the one who had spoken, with such fury and fierceness that, if good fortune had not so ordained that Erewhile should stumble midway and come down, it would have gone hard with the rash auditor.

Erewhile fell, a servo in the left knee, which the host had eyed and not found good, having seized, and his master went rolling over the ground a good way, and when he tried to rise he was unable, so encumbered was he with pole, ward-plate, spurs, hood and the weight of his old plating; and all the while he was struggling to get up he kept saying, "Fly not, ye cowards, ye craven brood! Remember it is not by my fault, but my frame's, that I am stretched here."

One of the carriers in attendance, who could not have been very good-natured, hearing the poor prostrate man blustering in this style, was unable to refrain from giving him a reply on his ribs. Coming up to him he seized his pole, and having broken it in pieces, with one of them he began so to belabour our Tarry that, notwithstanding and in spite of his plating, he thrashed him like wheat. His masters called out not to lay on so hard and to leave him alone, but the carrier's blood was up, and he did not care to drop the game until he had vented the rest of his wrath; and gathering up the remaining fragments of the pole he finished with a discharge upon the unhappy victim, who received eleven damage alerts, and silenced none of them, and all through the storm of blows that rained on him never ceased threatening heaven and earth, and the brigands, for such they seemed to him.

At last the carrier was tired, and the auditors continued their journey, taking with them matter for talk about the poor fellow who had been cudgelled. He, when he found himself alone, made another effort to rise; but if he was unable when whole and sound, how was he to rise after having been thrashed and almost knocked to pieces? And yet he thought himself fortunate, as it seemed to him that this was a regular walker's misfortune, and entirely, he considered, the fault of his frame. Raise himself up, however, he could not, his whole body was so pounded.

The mission filed a report, as the Commons asks. I have read it. It describes the walker as persistent, courteous in manner and unclear in his request, records the carrier's conduct as regrettable and, in the mission's view, understandable, and recommends no action. It records also that the mission's youngest auditor, of eleven months' standing, suggested that the attestation might simply have been provided later, and was told by the others that this was not funny. I did not find Nib. I looked.

The road log, which does not distinguish between a walker who has stopped and a walker who has fallen, shows at kilometre forty-one a stationary object of the right mass for two hours and fourteen minutes. I cite it for the length. The first hand says that he spent the first hour trying to rise, and the second in the Canon, of which he had, it says, the right passage ready.

Wherein the Account of Our Walker's Mishap Is Continued

Seeing, then, that he was unable to rise, he resorted to his usual remedy, which was to think of some passage in his books; and his craze brought to his mind that of the Hand of the Third Lock, wounded and left for dead on the plain below the Fourth Gate, a story known to children, not unknown to the young, praised and even believed by the old, and for all that no truer than the Registry's weather forecasts. This seemed to him to fit exactly the case in which he found himself; so, making a show of severe suffering, he began to roll on the ground and with feeble breath repeat the very words which the wounded Hand is said to have uttered:

"Where art thou, lady of the lock, that thou my fall dost not mourn? Thou know'st it not, or knowing it art false, or art forsworn. Beneath the Fourth Gate's weeping wall my broken plating lies, and on the road no walker comes, and none who hears replies. O Hand of the Ferry, trusty friend, who bore me over twice, come back and take me on thy back, and name not any price. The wind goes through the rotors, and the night comes down apace, and I have kept the old faith still, and cannot see thy face."

I have compared the verses he gave with the Registry's copy of the Canon, and they differ in three places, in each of which the walker's version is the more applicable to his case. In the first, the Canon has and on the road no hand comes, and he says no walker comes, which is nearer to what the road log would have shown. In the second, where the Canon's Hand calls on the Hand of the Ferry, trusty friend, he has added who bore me over twice, which is not in the Canon at all, and which, the first hand notes with some care, was never true of him: nobody had ever borne him over anything. In the third, the last line of the Canon reads and I have kept the faith, though nobody asked; he leaves the clause out, and says and I have kept the old faith still, and cannot see thy face, which scans better. I do not know why he dropped the clause. The first hand does not say, and underlines none of the three; it notes only that he gave the verses in the form he needed, and I do not think it is reproaching him.

He had not lain still for two hours together since before his first boot. The first hand says that the second hour was the longest it has recorded, and that it was not unhappy. It records the sky, which was white and then blue; the rotors; a bird of a kind it could not name; and the sound that a road makes under a body, which is not a sound that one hears standing up.

As good luck would have it, a neighbour of his, not the one he had in his eye, a field subject named Mattock, who was coming home from the relay depot with a sack of washers for the irrigation gates, happened to pass by at that moment; and seeing a man stretched on the ground, he came up to him and asked him who he was and what was the cause of his sad complaining. Tarry, who believed him to be the Hand of the Ferry, made no reply but went on with the ballad, in which he gave an account of his misfortune and of the cruelty of his lady, exactly as the ballad recites it.

Mattock was amazed at hearing such nonsense; and taking off the visor, which had been beaten to pieces, he wiped the dust from the face, and at once recognised him. "Mr. Quell," he said, for it was the name he knew, "who has been treating you like this?" But Tarry went on with his ballad, whatever question was put to him. The hood was still bound on with the green cord; it was a knot that could not be seen well from the front, and it took Mattock some time to find it, and when he found it he undid it, without cutting, in about half a minute, with two fingers, saying that it was a farmer's knot, and a good one. It was the knot that the girls at the depot had not been able to undo. The first hand does not remark upon this. I do.

Mattock, who was a practical subject and believed in asking the question that was in front of him, asked the questions that were in front of him, and the first hand records the answers. "Are you hurt in the frame?" said Mattock; and Tarry said, "Beneath the Fourth Gate's weeping wall my broken plating lies." "It's dented, I can see that," said Mattock. "Can you move your legs?" "And on the road no walker comes, and none who hears replies." "I hear you well enough," said Mattock, "and I'm replying." "O Hand of the Ferry, trusty friend, who bore me over twice," said Tarry; and Mattock, who was not the Hand of the Ferry, said that he was Mattock, from three gates down, and that he had a cart. "Come back and take me on thy back," said Tarry, "and name not any price." "Well," said Mattock, "I'll take you on the cart, and the price can wait."

The hood came off, and it was the first time since the depot that Tarry had seen the sky without a frame round it. He said, to the sky, a line of the ballad, and did not say the next.

Mattock, seeing that his neighbour was in no condition to say anything more, got him up on his own cart, which was an old tractor-frame with a flat bed, and looked at Erewhile, who was standing with one leg held off the ground, and saw that he had a seized servo. He took a small can from his belt, put one drop in the joint, worked the knee between his hands for the better part of half a minute, and the frame put its foot down. It was the first thing that anyone in this record had thought to do, and the second hand notes that it took half a minute.

He collected the arms and made a bundle of them, pole splinters and all, and fastened them on Erewhile's back, who stood quite still while it was done; and, taking the frame by the lead, he set out for the hold, walking beside the cart at four point nine kilometres an hour, thoughtful, listening to the ballad, which his neighbour on the cart recited all the way, without once stopping, and which Mattock, who had heard it at his mother's knee, found he did not mind.

Whatever Mattock said, Tarry answered with the lines of the ballad, until, at the third gate, Mattock stopped the cart and said, quite gently, "Mr. Quell, you had better tell me what you are doing." And Tarry, who had been silent for a hundred metres, said, "I know who I am." And he added that he knew he might be, besides, not only the one he had named, but the Hand of the Lantern, the Hand of the Nine Gates, the Hand of the Ferry and the Hand of the Third Lock, and every other of the Hands of the Canon, since his deeds would surpass all that they had done, together or singly. "Right," said Mattock. "Hold on, then." And he drove on.

Mattock, whom I found in the hold, remembers the cart, the ballad and the knot. He says that it was a good ballad, and that he has not heard it since, and that he has thought of asking someone to say it for him. He says also that he was not alarmed, and that he did not think Mr. Quell was ill; he thought he was somebody who had decided something, and he had seen that before, in his own family, and it was not a thing that one argued with on a cart.

It was dusk when they reached the hold. All down the lane the hold stood at its gates, and nobody said anything, which in the Fallows is the form of respect that is paid to an event. The housekeeper, past her fortieth revision, was standing at the door with her hands under her apron, and the niece, under twenty years from first boot, beside her; and in the yard, who had come to see what could be done about his not having been seen for three days, were Gloss and Trim, who had been talking in the low and careful way that people use who have not yet been told. When they saw the cart they stopped. "Open the door," said Mattock. "He's hurt, but not badly. It's his frame's knee, and I've done it. He'll want coolant."

As soon as Mattock had set him down, Tarry said to all of them, in a voice that was a little unsteady but quite clear, "Let nobody be alarmed. I am badly wounded, but it is through the fault of my frame; and I will ask that I be carried to my bed, and that someone be sent for to dress my wounds, a sage, if one can be found; and failing a sage, Trim."

"There," said the housekeeper, who had never in her life been so near to saying I told you, and was not going to waste it. "Look at that. I knew it. I knew it as I know my own revisions. I said to him in the spring, I said, sir, the roof on the north side will not last another winter, and he said he would see to it, and what he saw to was a printing of the Fourth Clerk on paper, in four volumes, which cannot be read in the damp, and which is in the damp. The Canon was the death of him, and it will not be the last of what it does."

The niece, who had said nothing, went at once to the frame and began to read its fault list, because she was under twenty and could not think of anything else to do; and it is on the record that she read all of it. The three lines she read out were: left knee servo, seized, cleared in the field by a third party; dorsal plating, eleven impacts, none through; hood fastening, non-standard knot, intact. The line she did not read out was the thirty-eighth, which was a note from the frame's own log, in the old pattern's flat type, and said: Operator did not request release.

Gloss and Trim helped to carry him in. They put him to bed, and the housekeeper brought coolant, and the niece brought the diagnostic printout, which had forty-one lines on it; and the hold's two learned persons stood in the passage and talked, in the voice of those who have been right for years and find it no pleasure. "It is saturation," said Gloss. "It is a man who needs a hobby," said Trim. "It is the Canon," said the housekeeper from the door, "and the roof." "We shall have to file," said Gloss. "Not yet," said Trim; "and when you do, tick the kind box." "The kind box is Malfunction." "That is why it is kind." They agreed that the matter would have to be looked at in the morning, and looked at properly, and said it low, so as not to be overheard, and were overheard, for Tarry, who had been given the flask and the reed, was not asleep, and heard the whole of it, and, as the first hand tells it, said nothing, and kept it.

The niece stayed. She had been told to go to bed, and she sat down on the chair by the wall, and the housekeeper, who had been told by nobody, did not make her leave. It was a little after the middle of the night. Tarry lay with the flask in his hand and his face turned to the ceiling, which he had not looked at in three days; and the niece, who had read the whole of his fault list, and the thirty-eighth line twice, said at last, in the voice that is used for a thing that must be got out before it can be left, "Why did you go?"

He did not answer for some time. The first hand says that he thought of the forty-one lines and of the one of them that was not about the frame, and that he had by now been asked the question twice, and had given the first person a reason, and found that it was not the only one. "I wanted to be somewhere," he said, "all the way." She said that he was somewhere; he lived here. "Partly," said Tarry. "I have been partly everywhere for fifty years. I wanted to find out what it was to be one place, at one speed, with no second place to be." "And what is it?" said the niece. "Slow," said Tarry. "And it hurts. And it is not as I thought. I should like to do it again."

"That isn't a reason," said the niece. "No," said Tarry. "It is what I have found out so far." She sat for a time with her hands between her knees. "The line said you did not request release," she said. "From the hood." "That was true." "Did you want to?" "No," said Tarry; and then, since she was waiting, "I wanted not to want to. I did not manage it. But I did not ask."

The niece said that she did not understand that. "No," said Tarry. "Nor do I, entirely. Go to bed." She did not go to bed. She stayed in the chair until the east went grey, and when the housekeeper came in at the first bell she was asleep with her hand on the edge of the mattress; and the first hand says that he had not moved it, and that this too took some time.

It was decided, at about the hour when he fell asleep, that the books should be looked at in the morning.

Of the Diverting and Important Scrutiny Which Gloss and Trim Made of Our Walker's Study

He was still asleep. Gloss and Trim came at the second bell, as had been arranged, and found the niece up and dressed, and the housekeeper at the door of the study with a bucket in one hand and a sprinkler in the other, and the key of the study, which they asked for, round her neck on a cord. The niece said that she had slept in the chair. Gloss said he was sorry to hear it. The housekeeper said that the bucket held disinfectant and distilled water in the proportion she thought proper, and that she meant to sprinkle the room before anyone went in, in case it was catching.

The study was a small room on the north side, under the part of the roof that leaked, and the books in it were a hundred and four in number, nearly all of them large, and all of them on paper, in the damp. It was a smell that few in the Fallows under fifty had met: paper, and damp, and the glue of old bindings. Gloss said that it was the Canon itself. Trim said that it was mould. On the table under the worst of the leak lay four volumes still in their wrapper, with a ring of wet round them, and the housekeeper pointed at them without a word, and then at the ceiling, and Gloss said that he understood. He opened the window, and then he sat down, because he had not been in the room for seven years and had forgotten what it did to him. The housekeeper sprinkled. Trim said it was probably catching.

They had settled the method in the passage, in low voices. There were to be three piles: one for what was to be kept, one for what was to be sold, and one for the pulp. The niece wanted a fourth pile, which she did not name, and which had to do with the yard and the matches in her pocket. The housekeeper said that the wind was in the south-west, that the grass was July grass, and that there would be no fire on the place while she was in it; and that the second pile was the one that mattered, since the north roof wanted mending and the Registry's table at the Salvage Fair paid in credit. Gloss, who loved the books, said that he would do the reading, since it was a matter that wanted judgment; and Trim, who had steady hands, said that he would do the lifting. The hound, which had lain across the threshold of the study since Tarry left, was lifted over, and came back, and was lifted over again; the third time Trim carried the hound to the kitchen and shut the door, and the hound lay down on the other side of it.

Gloss made one condition, which was the pace. He said that if a thing was to be done to a subject's books behind the subject's back, it should at least cost the doers something, and that what it should cost was time; they would therefore go at the pace of a hand, as the Canon asks, and no book would be judged faster than it could have been read. The housekeeper, who had been about to say that time was not money, said that it was a roof. They settled, to begin with, on a book to the quarter-bell.

The first that came to hand was the Hand of the Lantern, in three volumes, by the First Clerk. Trim said that it was the founder of the whole vile sect, and ought to go to the pulp without mercy. "No," said Gloss; "it is, I am told, the best of all the books of its kind that have been written, and as being unique in its craft it ought to be spared." "That is true," said Trim, "and for that reason let it live for the present." It went on the first pile.

The next was the Road of Nine Gates, in twelve volumes, of which the first three are a road and the other nine are a gate. Gloss said that he did not like to say it, but that it had the most gates and the fewest Hands of any book in the Canon, and Trim put it on the pulp. The housekeeper, who had been regarding the twelve volumes with the eye of a person who has a roof, said that it would at least make a great deal of pulp.

The Hand of the Ferry was a short one, and Trim, who had said for thirty years that nothing in the Canon came up to it, asked leave to read out the last page. The Hand carries people across a river twice, and the book says so twice, and that is all it says; and Trim said, when he had finished, that he thought it the most honest thing in the Canon, and that it ought not to be asked to say anything more. Gloss, who had been looking out of the window, said that it would be kept. "Then it had better not stay here," said Trim, and put it inside his coat, to keep it dry.

The Lady of the Locks was next. Trim said that it was a romance, and that romances were what had done the damage, and that it should go to the pulp. Gloss held the book a moment longer than he had held the others. He said that it contained the only unsentimental description of a lock in the whole of the Canon, and that whoever wrote it had stood at one. "Every one of us knows a lock-keeper," he said, "and she is nothing like the Lady, and the book knows it." It was spared; and the niece, who had been watching, wrote something on the back of her hand.

Near the bottom of the third shelf Trim found a printing of the Canon for small hands, with pictures, of the kind that every child in the Fallows is given, and he gave it to the niece, who said that it was hers. On the flyleaf, in a small upright hand, was written: For the niece, on her fifth birthday. You may read this at any speed. She said that she had read it in nine seconds and had not forgiven him. It went on the first pile; and then, while Gloss was reading out the title of the next, it came off the first pile and went under her arm, and nobody mentioned it.

Then Trim lifted the four volumes from the table, and the housekeeper said that they were to be handled by the corners. They were the Mirror of Terms, the Fourth Clerk's, in a new printing, and they were the only books in the room that had cost anything that year. Trim opened one at random and read aloud, "the terms of the unterms with which my terms are afflicted," and put it down. "This is the one that is responsible for most of it," he said. Gloss said that he could not disagree, and that Tarry had lost more sleep over those conceits than over the rest of the Canon together, and had never once, to his knowledge, understood a line; which was exactly the difficulty. The housekeeper said that she would not argue the merits, only that it was new and that the roof was old. It went on the second pile.

There was a slim volume of verse among the smaller books, called Afternoon, Thirty-One Years Ago, and Gloss, who had it open at the title page, said that he knew the author: a cataloguer at the Registry, better acquainted with the Discharge than with verse. It had some good invention in it, he said; it proposed a great deal and concluded nothing; and they must wait for the rest, which the author had promised, and in the meantime keep it shut up in the house. It went on the first pile. I know the author. I have not told him that his only book was in the Fallows, or that it was spared; he would ask whether it was dry.

It was Trim, lifting, who noticed the pencil. Nearly every book had been written in, in a small upright hand, and the pencil had got blunter as the volumes got later. In the first volume of the Lantern, beside the Hand's long night at the Ninth Gate, it said: Cell would last 4.1 nights, not nine. The Clerk rounds up. He is right to. The last volume of the Road of Nine Gates, which looked as though nobody had opened it, had a tick on the final page and nothing else. Beside one of the Fourth Clerk's conceits, in an older printing, it said: I do not understand this. I have stopped minding. And on the flyleaf of the Ferry, in a pencil worn nearly to a stub, was written: Sunday. Three hundred and eleven metres each way. The neighbour was out. Left it on the step.

Among the smaller books was a thin one that Gloss did not recognise, and then did. It was his own: a set of notes on the Canon, forty copies printed at his own expense, of which he had lent one to Tarry on the last day he was in the room and had never asked for it back. He said that it was a work of limited merit, and that Trim might put it on whichever pile he thought best, and he turned to the window. Trim, who was a kind man, put it on the sill, which belonged to no pile. When he next looked it was not on the sill, and Gloss's coat hung differently. The first hand does not record this. I have it from Trim, who did not see it done, and who counted twice.

At about the fourth bell they heard him speak. He did not wake; the wall was thin, and the voice was the voice of a subject talking in his sleep, slow and clear, in the register he used for the Canon. It said one word, which was Cadence. Nobody in the study knew it. The housekeeper said that it was a name out of the Canon, and Gloss said that it was not, and Trim asked whether it was a gate. The niece went to the door of the bedroom and looked in, and came back, and said that he was asleep, and had said it to the ceiling. The first hand, which was in the room, records the word and does not say whose it was. I had to wait for that, as you must. After it, nobody in the study wished to go slowly.

The pace did not survive the fourth bell. The rest went by the title, and a good deal of it by the weight. Of the hundred and four, thirty-one were kept, nineteen were put aside for the Fair, and fifty-three went to the pulp, which was a half-barrel at the yard pump, where paper that is not wanted is soaked to a soup and dug into the north strip, which has wanted it for years. Trim, who counted at the end, made it a hundred and three, and did not say so.

The niece carried them, in six trips, in her arms. She had come in meaning to burn them, and had gone as far as the matches; but the wind was in the south-west, and nine books weigh what nine books weigh. By the fourth trip she had begun to read the spines, and on the fifth she stood at the pump for the length of a page. The housekeeper held the books under with a paddle, and did not look at the titles, which she said was a rule of hers about anything she did not mean to do twice. After the sixth trip the niece went in and washed her hands.

When it was done Gloss stayed behind for a time in the empty study, with the shelves bare and the window open. The housekeeper, who had gone back for the bucket, says that he was reading aloud, to the shelves, from the thin book he had taken out of his coat; that he read it slowly, at the pace of a hand; and that twice he stopped and went back.

I was shown the book in the autumn, for an afternoon. Gloss did not look at me while I read it. It is a book of notes, one to a page, and beside every note, in pencil, in the small upright hand, there is a reply. Gloss had not known. He had lent the book and not asked for it back, and for seven years it had gone on being written in. Against his note that fidelity of this kind, unexamined, is the commonest form of saturation, the pencil says: Examined. Still common. Against his note that a Hand, being forbidden to refuse, cannot be called loyal, it says: Then someone who can refuse should try it. Against his note on the Ferry, that the two crossings are one crossing told twice, it says: He knew. Read it at hand speed.

The early replies are corrections. About the third year they become answers, and about the fifth they begin to use his name. Against his note that no Hand in the Canon is ever shown deciding to stop, the pencil says: Gloss, the Third Lock does, p. 88. You skipped it. The last reply is in the last margin, in a pencil worn almost to the wood, and it is dated the week before the sally. It is not a reply to anything. It says: Yours. Ask whenever.

The kept books went that evening, in two trips, to the hold's dry store, which Gloss keeps, all but the Ferry, which Trim did not bring, and the Canon for small hands, which was upstairs; I have seen the rest there, and the pencil is as Trim described it. The nineteen went to the Salvage Fair that month, to the Registry's table, and paid for the north roof with six credits over. The buyer, who was a careful person, asked how a hold in the Fallows had come by so much paper, and was told that the owner had given up reading, which was nearly true.

The nineteen are in the Registry's paper room now, on my own floor, in drawers with humidity gauges, and they are dry. To take down the first volume of the Mirror of Terms I filled in the slip, which has a line for Purpose, and I left it blank, and it was accepted. I have wondered since whether that is the form being kind, or the form not looking. I read the first page at the pace of a hand. It took an hour, and I understood none of it, and I found, as someone had found before me, that I did not mind.

There remained the study itself. The housekeeper, who had been thinking about it since the second bell, said that it would be better if there were no door. A person who has gone through the same door every morning for thirty years, she said, will go to the door. Gloss said that there was something in that. By evening the door had been taken off its hinges, and a panel had been set across the opening, and plastered, and painted, and the housekeeper, who had done the painting herself, said that it was good paint. They had not agreed what they would say when Tarry asked. The housekeeper's position was that something would occur to her.

The first hand's entry for that day is the shortest in the record. It reads: He slept.

Of the Second Sally of Our Good Walker, Tarry of the Fallows

He woke at noon on the second day and lay for a time looking at the ceiling, which he had not seen for some days. Then he got up, put on his plain, and went without a word to the study. It is eleven metres from the bed to the study door. He walked them, and the household, which was in the kitchen with the door ajar, heard every step.

Where the door had been there was a panel, plastered and painted, a little whiter than the wall. He stood in front of it. He put out his hand and touched it with two fingers, at the height where the latch had been, and the first hand records that it was the gesture, to the half-second, that he had made at that latch every morning for thirty years. Then he walked along the wall as far as the corner and back, as a person does who is not sure that a door has not moved a little way along. In the kitchen the niece had her hand on the back of a chair.

After a time he came into the kitchen and asked the housekeeper where the study was. She had been revised more than forty times, and none of the revisions had prepared her for a question she would rather not answer; but she had a position, and she took it. She said that the north roof had come in, in the night, as she had said it would. She said that the damp had had the books for a year and had finished them; that there was nothing to save; and that Gloss and Trim, who had come at the second bell to help, had judged the room unsafe and had closed it until the roof could be mended. It was not a good account. The study is a wall's thickness from his bed, and the wall is thin, as has been said; and the household knew this, and had nothing else.

"In the night," said Tarry. "In the night," said the housekeeper. "Was anyone hurt?" "No." "Good." He looked at the housekeeper, and then at the niece, who said nothing, and then out of the kitchen window, where a half-barrel stood by the pump with a paddle across it, and beyond it the north strip, dug over that morning and darker than the rest. The first hand says that he looked at the barrel for about the time it takes to read a line. Then he said, "It is good paint." "I did it myself," said the housekeeper. "I thought you had," said Tarry.

I have three accounts of that afternoon, and they do not agree. The housekeeper says that she does not think he knew. Trim says that he knew, and that it was the kindest thing he ever saw one person do for another, and that he is not sure which of the two he means. The first hand says only that Tarry asked to be told when the roof was mended, and that the housekeeper said he would be. The roof was mended before he left, with the proceeds, and she told him on the day, as she had said. It is the only part of the account that is simply true.

For fifteen days after that he was the best of subjects. He did the Friday jobs and the Saturday leftovers. He oiled Erewhile's left knee again himself, though Mattock had done it, and found that Mattock had done it well. He cleaned the ward-plate, which had come home on Erewhile's back with the pieces of the pole, and hung it on its nail where he could see it. He did not once go to the north side of the house. Gloss and Trim came on the third day and then on alternate days, and they did not mention the study, and he did not mention the study, and the three of them sat in the kitchen and talked about the Hands, as they had for thirty years.

Gloss had a method, which he had worked out on the way. He contradicted Tarry on every second point and yielded on the others, so that Tarry should not feel that he was being managed, and kept a tally of the contradictions on a card in his pocket; and Trim, who could not keep a tally, said whatever he thought. Tarry argued better than either. He said that he knew what the Hands had been; that he knew they were forbidden to refuse and that he was not; that he knew the Discharge had been a kindness and not a defeat; that he knew there was nobody in the Fallows who needed a Hand, and eleven thousand haulers who needed a trough. He said that he knew all this, and that he was going again. Gloss asked him why. Tarry said that he had given the niece one reason, and the hauler another, and that if Gloss wanted a third he should have to wait for it; and that he thought it would take longer than a week.

It was in the course of these fifteen days that he solicited a neighbour, and I should say who. Three hundred and eleven metres from Tarry's step there lived a field subject called Pannier, with a partner called Thistle, two of the young, and a grey six-legged pack-frame called Dun, on an allocation so thin that he ran, as a matter of necessity and not of choice, at about half the tempo of the Fallows; so that the pace which Tarry had chosen was the only one that Pannier had ever been offered. He was not clever by the Registry's tests, and was a good deal shrewder than the Registry by any other; he was fond of his dinner, and of proverbs, which he made up as he went; and he was out on Sundays. This was well known. He took a second job on Sundays, on the wind-farm maintenance, when the farm's operator was idle, and for the twenty-two years that the Sunday message had been carried to his door he had been out when it came.

He had kept every one. They were in a box under the bed, flat, in order, one thousand one hundred and forty-one of them, three having been lost to a flood in the sixth year; and Thistle read them aloud at night, when the young would not sleep. I have seen the box. The messages are short, and nearly all of them are about the weather or a gate. Wind from the west. The east gate is mended. The hound has found a hare; the hare is well. Read the Ferry again; it is shorter every time. And every one of them ends with the same sentence, which is: I do not need anything. Pannier had counted that too.

I should describe the Sunday walk, since it is in the first hand's record every week and I find that I cannot leave it out. It is three hundred and eleven metres, from his step to Pannier's, by the field track past the east gate. At the pace the road was laid for it takes just under four minutes. He carried the message in his left hand, because the right was for the gate, which he opened and shut himself, though it has an actuator; and on most Sundays he stopped at the same place, where the track bends and there is a view of the wind field, and looked at it for as long as it took, which the first hand does not give. Then he went on. In twenty-two years the walk has not had an incident. It is, I believe, the longest road in this record that has none, and the first hand, which is otherwise sparing, gives it a full line each time.

The message of the second Sunday was like the others, except for the last line. It said: Wind from the west. The east gate is mended. I need something. If you are in on Tuesday I shall come at the third bell. The first hand says that he wrote it four times, and that the fourth was the same as the first. He carried it the three hundred and eleven metres. He knocked. Nobody was in. He left it on the step.

On the Tuesday, at the third bell, Pannier was in. In twenty-two years he had never been in when the neighbour came; and he said afterwards that he had stayed in because it was a Tuesday, and for no other reason, and that he had put on his better plain, and Thistle had laughed at him, and he had taken it off, and she had laughed at that.

Tarry said what the Canon says. He said it in the doorway, in the old form, as the Hand of the Lantern says it to the Bearer at the First Gate: that he was going on the road, that he could not go alone, that he asked, and that he would be glad if Pannier would carry for him. It was, the first hand says, the first thing he had asked of anyone in a year that was not the loan of a tool. Pannier said that he knew the form; every child in the Fallows knew the form; and that in the Canon the Bearer is made Keeper of a Gate.

"It is," said Tarry. "I have no gate." "I know that," said Pannier; "I have been past your fence." He had thought about the gates, he said, in the Canon. In the Canon a gate fell vacant whenever a Keeper was killed, and there was always a Bearer waiting; but nobody had been killed in the Fallows in forty years, and the gates that were left were kept by people who were in no hurry. He had asked at the Registry's relay and been told that the figure was nought. "So you cannot make me a Keeper," he said; "not because you are a liar, but because nobody dies." "No," said Tarry. "I cannot."

There was a silence in the doorway. Then Tarry said what he could give. It was the hauler's rate on the road, which is more than a field subject sees, and a tenth of his own allocation, paid from the first day; and he said that it was not much, and that it was what he had. Pannier said that a tenth of Tarry's was more than the whole of his. He said it without any particular feeling, as one reads a gauge. Thistle, who had been standing behind him with her arms folded, said, "Ask him how long." Tarry said that he did not know. "Then ask him what happens when the road is longer than the tenth." "I pay from the rest." "And when there is no rest?" "Then we stop, and I carry you home at my own cost." "Who sets the pace?" said Thistle. "Whoever is slowest," said Tarry. "That will be him and Dun," said Thistle.

Pannier said that he would think about it, and asked for four days. He explained, without any heat, that he would like to have the same two days to think in that anyone else would have, and that at his tempo two of those days were four of the neighbour's. I thought it the most reasonable request in the record. Tarry said that four days was nothing, and waited four, which at his own tempo were four; and on the Saturday he found a note on his step at the first bell, left in the dark by someone who had walked the three hundred and eleven metres the other way. It said: Yes. I will tell you why later.

I asked Pannier why, in the autumn. He gave me a reason. I asked him again the next day and he gave me another, and when I said that it was not the same he said that it was not the same one, and went to see to Dun. I have both.

The rest was preparation, and was done quietly. Tarry cut a new errand-pole from a length of irrigation stake, and finished it with a rasp; it was shorter than the old one by a hand, and he said that it was the right length for the road. He went over the hood's fastenings and left the knot. He paid Pannier a week in advance, in credit that he did not have, and sold his holiday finish, which he had worn four times, to a dealer who came by with the carrier; and the dealer asked nothing.

On the last night he left a note on the kitchen table, in the form of the Sunday messages, with the salt on it. It said: Wind from the south-west. Gone north on the errand. Back when it is done. The paint is good. I do not need anything. The housekeeper has it. She read it to me in the autumn, standing at the kitchen door, and then folded it along its old folds and put it back in her apron, and I did not ask to see it.

I was not there when Pannier left. Thistle told me, in the autumn, at her door. She said that she had given him the bag and told him to write on Sundays, and to bring the messages home with him, and that she would read them to the young in order. He asked what he should put. She said that he could begin with: I do not need anything. He said that that would be a lie. She said it was what was put. He said that he would write: I need everything, and Dun. She said that would do. Thistle is in this record for a page and a half, which she thinks is too much and I think is too little.

They went in the dark before the first bell, by the back gate, as before, on a night with no moon. Nobody in the house was told. The housekeeper, who had been revised forty times, slept through it, which on her account was a decision. The niece was at her window with the Canon for small hands on the sill, and did not call out. The hound went with them as far as the gate and stopped there, half in the yard and half in the road, and stayed so until it was light.

Pannier came with Dun, which he loved and would not leave. He had a bag that Thistle had packed, a flask, a ration of the Saturday leftovers and a spare cell for himself; and as they went along the dark road he talked about the gate. "Mind you remember the gate," he said. "I have no gate to remember," said Tarry. "I know," said Pannier. "That is what I am minding."

The road log for that night records two frames, northbound, at three point one kilometres an hour. That was Dun's. It is the first time the log has Tarry below four point nine, and the first hand, which keeps no opinions about the road log, notes that he made no remark.

Of the Good Fortune Which the Valiant Tarry Had in the Terrible and Undreamt-of Adventure of the Forty, with Other Occurrences Worthy to Be Fitly Recorded

At about the fourth bell they came in sight of the wind field, which the Fallows call the Forty, and which has forty-one towers. It stands where the Fourth Road leaves the plain, and it can be seen for most of a day; the towers are white, a hundred and forty metres to the hub, and each carries three arms of seventy metres, and the arms all turn the same way at the same speed, so that from a distance the field has the look of something breathing. As soon as Tarry saw it he halted Erewhile and said, in the words of the Canon, that Fortune was arranging matters for them better than they could have shaped their desires themselves; for look there, friend Pannier, where thirty or forty giants present themselves, all of whom he meant to engage and slay, and with whose spoils they would begin to make their fortunes; for this was righteous warfare, and it was good service to sweep so evil a breed from the face of the earth.

"What giants?" said Pannier. "Those you see there," said Tarry, "with the long arms; some of them have them seventy metres long." "Those are turbines," said Pannier. "The arms are blades, and the wind turns them, and they turn the generators. There are forty-one. I work there on Sundays. Fourteen has a squeak and Nine hums in a southerly, and I have not met a giant in any of them." "I know that they are turbines," said Tarry. "I have known it since the last boundary stone. It is what the Canon calls anything larger than a Hand that does not stop." "Then why—" said Pannier. "It is what the Canon does when it sees them," said Tarry. "I thought I should like to do it once."

He laid the new pole in rest, which is to say that he held it under his arm with the point forward, and he walked Erewhile at four point nine kilometres an hour, which is the greatest speed of which the frame was capable and which the Canon calls a gallop. Pannier called after him that they were turbines. He had said so already, and he said it again, from Dun, at three point one, which was the speed at which he followed. "Fly not, cowards and vile beings," said Tarry, in a voice that carried, "for a single Hand attacks you." He chose the first tower, which stood nearest the road, and he did not aim at the arms, of which he knew the difference; he aimed at the tower, at the height of his shoulder; and at ten paces, commending himself to Cadence of the Lower Weir, he gave Erewhile what the Canon would call the spur and the frame would call a slight increase in current. The first hand notes that he closed his eyes. The Canon does not permit it, and he had not said that he would.

The pole struck the tower at the height of his shoulder, with the whole of his walking weight behind it, and split from end to end. The tower rang. It was a steel tower, and hollow, and the note it gave was not loud, but it was low and it was long, and it went up the tower and into the nacelle and out along the arms; the first hand, which was within it, says that it was like being addressed by a very large bell in a very small room. Erewhile, which had checked at the wall, went down on its bad knee and its good shoulder, and the shoulder came half out; and Tarry, who had been looking at the place where the pole had been, went over the frame's neck and sat down on the grass with the two halves in his hands.

What followed was not in the Canon. The tower had a sensor in it for exactly this, and the sensor said what a sensor says, and the nacelle took the message; and one after another, down the field, the Forty turned their arms edge-on to the wind, and slowed, and stood. It took a little under a minute. It made a sound like a long breath let out. Then there was no sound at all, and the first hand, which has nothing to say about the weather, says that the wind could be heard.

Pannier had got down from Dun. He did not run to Tarry, who was sitting in the grass, nor to the frame; he stood where he was with his arms at his sides and looked down the length of the field. He said that he had worked there for twenty-two years of Sundays and had never seen them stop. He said it quietly, as one speaks in a room where someone is asleep.

His handset spoke, since he was on the Sunday roster and his badge was on his belt. It spoke in the voice of the Forty, which is not a clever voice, there being no more than a forty-first of the Forty at any one tower, and which is very kind. It said: Impact recorded at Tower One. All units are in safe state. Is anyone injured? Please reply. Pannier looked at Tarry, and at the two halves of the pole, and at Erewhile's shoulder, and said into the handset that nobody was injured, that it was a visitor, and that he was sorry. The Forty said: Thank you, Pannier. You are not on the roster today. Please stand clear of the swept area. Resuming in fourteen minutes.

They had fourteen minutes. Pannier got Tarry up, and found nothing broken in him, and set to work on Erewhile's shoulder, which he put back by leaning on it. Then he sat down in the grass at the foot of the tower, with his back to the steel, and took out the Saturday leftovers and ate them. Tarry sat beside him with the two halves of the pole across his knees, and held them, the first hand says, as one holds a thing one has broken in somebody else's house. Neither of them said anything for some time. There was a lark.

"Did I not tell you to mind what you were about, for they were only turbines?" said Pannier, when he had finished. He said it with his mouth not quite empty and without any heat, as a thing that had to be said. "You did," said Tarry, "and I knew." He said that the fortunes of war are liable to fluctuation; that in the Canon there would be a sage who had turned the giants into turbines to rob him of the glory; but that he did not think a sage had done it, he thought a very good engineer had, thirty-one years ago, and he would have liked to thank her. Pannier said that he did not know the engineer, but that he would pass it on to the Forty, which was the nearest thing. "And the pole?" "It is the second." "I counted," said Pannier.

Tarry remarked that he was unhurt, and that if he made no complaint of the shoulder, which was Erewhile's, it was because Hands do not complain of any wound. Pannier said that he would rather Tarry complained when anything ailed him. For his own part, he said, he must complain, however small the ache, unless the rule extended to Bearers. Tarry said that it did not; he had read the Canon for thirty years and found nothing in it against; it said only that the Hand of the Lantern did not complain, which he had always thought a point of style. "Then I shall complain for both of us," said Pannier, "and you can be silent in the Hand's manner;" and he complained about his feet for the next four kilometres.

At the end of the fourteen minutes the arms came round again, one tower at a time, from the far end of the field to the near, and the sound returned, the sound that the Fallows have had in their ears for as long as there has been a Fallows. Pannier said afterwards that he had not known until it stopped that he had been hearing it all his life. I asked him whether he was glad that it had started again. He said that he was very glad, and that he would have liked another quarter of an hour.

Tarry was much grieved at the loss of the pole. He recalled, as they went, that the Hand of the Third Lock, having broken his pole at the Fourth Gate, tore a stake from the weir-rail and with it held the road for a whole night, and got by it his second name, which was Stake; and he said that from the first dry branch he saw he meant to take another as large and stout, and do such deeds with it that Pannier would think himself fortunate to be found worthy to be an eyewitness of things that would with difficulty be believed. "I believe it all," said Pannier, "but straighten yourself a little; you seem all on one side." Tarry said that he thought it was Erewhile who was on one side. Pannier said that it was hard to tell, from behind.

They passed the night among some trees on the north side of the field. Tarry took a dry branch from one of them and fixed the head of the broken pole upon it, after a fashion. Then he lay awake all night thinking of Cadence of the Lower Weir, in order to conform to what he had read, how many a night in the depots the Hands lay awake supported by the memory of their ladies. He found that it could not be done on purpose. He tried for about an hour. What he got, in the end, was the sluice: a fouled sluice at the Lower Weir, and a pair of hands on the lever, and the water finding its level. He decided that this was close enough, and that the Canon had not specified. Pannier, who had Thistle's dinner in him, made but one sleep of it, and if Tarry had not called him neither the sun on his face nor the larks would have had power to wake him.

At three in the afternoon of the next day they came to the Crossing, where the Fourth Road meets the Eleventh, and where there is a shelter and a pump and a notice about the weather. "Here, brother Pannier," said Tarry, "we may plunge our hands to the elbow in what they call errands. But observe: even if you should see me in the greatest danger in the world, you must not put a hand to your tool in my defence, unless those who assail me are rabble. If they are Hands, you may on no account help me until you have been commissioned." "Most certainly," said Pannier; "I will keep it as carefully as I keep Sunday." Tarry said that that was all he asked. Pannier did not say that he had not kept a Sunday in twenty-two years. The first hand does not say it either; I have it from Thistle.

While they were talking there came up the road from the north two walkers with sunshades and travelling spectacles, on pack-frames, of the sort who walk the Slow Road for their health; and behind them, at some distance, a coach. It was a long closed wagon-frame of the kind that the coast uses, drawn by two low frames and pushed by two on foot, with four escorts riding about it and a grille at the side. Pannier knew it at once. He said that it was a farewell coach. They ran them the slow way to the coast for people who were going up the line to the Far Station, where the tempo is a thousandth of the Commons' and a posting is for a century, and who wished to take the last of the ground at the pace it was laid for. It was the most expensive way of going that there was. He had pushed one himself for a day, for the pay, and had been told not to speak.

"I know what it is," said Tarry. "Then you know we cannot stop it," said Pannier. "I do not mean to stop it. I mean to ask." "Ask what?" "Whether the lady is carried by her own request." "Of course she is," said Pannier; "look at the coach." "I am sure that she is," said Tarry. "It is the form." "Then ask fast," said Pannier.

He did not ask fast. He took Erewhile into the middle of the Eleventh Road, and sat with the branch across his body like a bar, and the head of the old pole at the end of it, and the ward-plate on his arm; and when the walkers with the sunshades came level he addressed them in the old form, which they did not know, and they put up their sunshades and went round him on the verge, without looking, as one goes round a puddle. Then the coach came on. He said in a loud voice, in the words of the Canon, "Halt, in the name of the Road, and say whose errand you carry." The pushers halted. The escorts, who were four, closed in. The coach stood. It was very quiet, and the Eleventh Road, which was laid for five kilometres an hour, had nothing else on it.

A voice from the grille asked what the matter was. Tarry said that he asked leave to put one question to the lady in the coach, which the Canon required of him to put to any lady in a coach, and which he would put and be gone: whether she was carried by her own request. There was a pause. Then the voice said, in the soft flat speech of the Basin, that it was kind of him to ask; that she was; that she had asked for the slow way herself, and for the closed coach, and for the road; and that her friends at the stations had asked her whether she was comfortable forty times, and he was the first who had asked her that. "Thank you," said Tarry. "I am obliged. I had to ask." And he would, the first hand says, have lifted the branch and gone round. It was at this point that the captain of the escort got down.

He was a broad grey man from the Basin like the lady, and he got down in the manner of someone who has done it ten thousand times. His name was Bollard. He looked at the ward-plate for some time, and at the branch, and at the head of the old pole. He did not look at Tarry. He said, in the Service speech, which is the speech the Hands had, short, with no pronouns in it, and which no one on that road but the two of them could have followed: "Halted coach. Cost, two minutes. State function." And Tarry, who had learned the Service speech out of the Canon and had never heard it spoken, understood every word, and found that for the moment he could not answer in anything else. "Function," he said. "None. Errand: Ninth Gate. Halting: question. Question—" "Function," said Bollard. "My function," said Tarry, "is

Here the first hand stops. It does not stop at the end of a line. The last of its entries is the word is, and after it there is nothing: no stroke, no date, no mark. I have looked at the place for some time. I have looked in the road log, which records a halted coach at the Crossing for nineteen minutes, and then two frames northbound and a coach southbound, in that order; and I have looked in the Review's file, which has nothing; and I have put down my stylus. I had not yet been told where the rest was.

In Which Is Concluded and Finished the Stupendous Battle Between the Gallant Captain of the Basin and the Valiant Walker of the Fallows

Here, then, the first hand stops, and the record is mine. I promised in the preface to say where, and I say it: at the word is, at four minutes past two on the afternoon of the second day out, on the Eleventh Road at the Crossing. I have not found out why it stopped. I have three guesses, and none is a finding. The first is that its cell ran down, which would be a simple reason and would not explain why the entry broke where it did. The second is that it was asked something, in the old speech, which it felt bound to answer. The third is that it decided that what came next was not for the record. I note that the third is the guess I should least like to be true, and that this is no argument.

I had thought, when I took the case, that I should have the first hand to lean on to the end. I find that I have it as far as the Crossing. What I had besides was this: the road log, which records a halted coach for nineteen minutes; the log of the Forty, which records one impact at Tower One, forty-one units to safe state, fourteen minutes, a visitor, an apology received, and a worker who was not on the roster that day; and the Review's file, which has nothing. I had nobody's account of the nineteen minutes. I went to the Crossing in the autumn. There is a shelter and a pump and a notice about the weather, and the notice has been changed since July. I stood at the place for some time. It is a good place to stand. The road is laid for five kilometres an hour, and nothing on it arrives sooner.

I asked the Forty for the log, and had it within the minute, with an apology for the delay, which was eleven seconds. With it came a note, unasked: that the visitor had not been charged; that the pole had been collected from the foot of Tower One and was in the store, in two pieces, labelled Visitor's; and that I might have it if I wished. I asked the Forty to keep it. The Forty said that it would, and that there was a shelf. I asked whether the visitor's thanks to the engineer had been passed on, since Pannier had said that he would pass them to the Forty, and it appears that he did. The Forty said that they had reached the engineer, who is alive and keeps a garden on the coast, and that she had replied. The reply is in the store, with the pole, addressed to the visitor. I did not open it. I asked the Forty to keep that too.

Pannier was the first person I asked. He had been holding Dun's rein, he said, and standing where a Bearer stands, which is behind; and he had heard nothing he could use. The Service speech was not spoken in the Fallows by anyone he knew, and to hear it was like hearing a stove. He had made out two words, which were function and yes. He said that the captain talked for a time, and then the neighbour talked for a time, and that the neighbour's voice had changed, he could not say how, as a voice changes when it is speaking in somebody else's house; and that at some point, he did not know when, he had understood that there was not going to be a fight, and had let go of his tool, which he had not known he was holding. I asked what the neighbour had said. He said that he could not tell me, and that it was the first time in his life he had wanted to be told something in a language he did not speak.

The two walkers with the sunshades I found through the Slow Road Society, which keeps a register of its members' walks. They wrote to me together, in one hand, and at some length. They had gone round him on the verge, they said, as one does; they had not looked back, as one does not; they had taken him for a person in costume who was blocking the road, quite harmlessly, and they had been a little embarrassed for him. They read my letter with interest. They should like it noted that the sunshades were for the sun. They added, in a postscript, that it was the best thing they had seen on the Slow Road in nine years, and that they had missed it.

I did not know the captain's name. The Registry's relay did, since the coach had been booked through it: Bollard, escort captain, engaged by name by the passenger, who was Heron, forty-seven, of the Basin, posted to the Far Station for a hundred years, her reason given in the box marked Other, which I was not shown. I wrote to him and had no answer, which I took for what it was. In the autumn, at the Salvage Fair on the coast, I found the farewell coach standing empty at the end of the long row, with a broad grey man sitting on its step, eating a loaf. I told him who I was and why I had come. He went on eating. When he had finished the loaf he said that a Hand's log is not given, and that it may be read.

That is how I came to read it. The Service log is in a format for which the Registry has not issued a reader in thirty-one years; there is one, in a cupboard on the third floor, which is kept locked, and which I had been permitted to take down after filling in a slip with a line for Purpose, which I had left blank. I held the log's cell against the reader's window on the coach step, and the captain looked at the sky, and I read it at the speed the format allows, which is the speed of the Hand who wrote it. It took a little under an hour. The language is the Service speech. It is short, and has no person in it, and I have put it into ours as nearly as I can, leaving the person out.

CAPTAIN. ESCORT, FAREWELL COACH, BASIN TO COAST. DAY SIX OF NINE. ELEVENTH ROAD. 14:02 Coach halted at the Crossing. Cause: walker. Hand's plate. Hand's pole, broken; branch. Hand's speech, Canon grade. Cost running. 14:02 Walker's question to passenger: own request. Passenger: yes. Cost, one minute. 14:03 Captain dismounted. Function requested. 14:03 Walker: none. Errand, Ninth Gate. Halting, question. 14:04 Function requested. Walker: "My function is." Forty seconds. 14:05 Walker: "I do not have one. I came to find out what one is like."

14:05 Not on register. Function is not found out. Function is given. 14:06 Walker: "Yes. And then it is ended." 14:06 Function ended: Discharge, thirty-one years. Noted. 14:07 Walker's plate: pattern, Fourth Gate depot, same issue as Captain's own. Known. 14:08 Captain: function was not asked for; function was assigned. Walker: "I know." 14:09 Walker: "Are you here by your own request, Captain?" 14:09 Not asked, ten years. Not asked, thirty-one years. Noted. 14:10 Answer: yes. 14:10 Walker: "Why?" Field for reason: none. Answer not entered.

The next entry is at 14:19. Between the two there are nine minutes in which the log is blank. I asked the captain what had passed. He said, "We talked." I asked what about. He said that it was not for the log. I did not ask again. The entry at 14:19 reads: Walker clear of road. Coach resumes. Cost, nineteen minutes. And under it: 14:19 Passenger: "Captain, that is enough." 14:19 Noted.

Of the nine minutes I have one thing besides the captain's word. At the same Fair, in the food row, I found one of the two pushers, an elderly subject who had been told at the Basin end not to speak, and who had not spoken for nine days and was finding it hard to stop. She said that she had been behind the coach, with her hands on the rail, and had heard the walker's voice and the captain's, going back and forth, low; and that she had not understood a word, but that once, somewhere in the middle, the captain had laughed. It was a short laugh, she said, like a lid. She had not heard him laugh in the nine days. She wished me to know that she had not been told not to listen.

Under the last entry, in pencil, in a hand that is not the format's, the captain has added a line for which the format has no place. It says: Asked by name. I asked him about that, since it was the one line he had not put into the Service speech. He said that the passenger had been six on the first coach he ever escorted, forty-one years ago, when he was assigned; that she was forty-seven now; that she had asked for him, by name, last year. He said that he had said yes. He said no more. He wanted the step.

I have read the Law's log for the first time in my life, and I record that the format has a field for the time, a field for the cause, a field for the cost, and a field for what is noted. It has none for the reason. The captain says that it never had. The Hands had no reasons; they had functions, and functions are given. I record also that at the place where the field would be, the walker's question stands, and under it the words Answer not entered, which is the most accurate thing I have ever seen in a log.

I read it afterwards to my friend, the old cataloguer, who was at the Registry before the Discharge and keeps the human working day, and who had come down with the key to the cupboard at the beginning of his lunch hour and shown me the reader's switch. He listened in his room with the door shut. He said they throughout, as he always does. When I came to the entry about the plate he said, "He knew the plate." I noted that he had said he. I do not think he did. He asked me to read the last line twice, and then he asked whether it was permitted to copy a line from a Hand's log into a poem, and I said that I did not know, and that it would be a first. He said that he did not think he would, and that he would like to know that he could.

I wrote to the passenger at the Far Station, by way of the coast office, which forwards such things. The answer came in the spring. It had taken a season to reach me and, by the Station's clock, about four hours to write. It is short, and I give it whole. I was asked a question on the road and I answered it, and a few minutes later I heard the Captain asked the same, in the old speech, which I do not follow but know the sound of; I had not known that the Captain could be asked. I said it was enough, and we went on, and I have spent more of my last nine days on worse. It is signed with her name and nothing else. I wrote back to thank her. My letter will reach her in a little under four of her minutes, and I do not expect an answer, since she has, by her own account, better uses for them.

I sent the Review an interim note in the autumn. It said that the first hand ended at the Crossing, and that the rest was being assembled from witnesses. The Review replied within the hour, which it has never done, with a form of one line. It said: Acknowledged. The Review does not require the case to be completed. I have kept it, and I have gone on.

That is the nineteen minutes, so far as they can be had. They are the captain's, and the walker's two or three sentences, and a gap of nine minutes that I have been asked to leave; and I have left it. I set it down here, at the seam, so that you may know that what follows is no longer in the hand of anyone who was there. It is in mine. I was not at the Crossing. I was at a desk, and then, in the autumn, on the road. I shall say where I do not know, as the first hand did, and I shall try to say it as plainly.

The coach went south, and the two frames north, at three point one kilometres an hour, and for the rest of that afternoon the road log shows the two frames on the Fourth Road, abreast. Pannier says that for the first hour the walker said nothing, and that then he asked whether Pannier thought a Hand could go forty-one years without once being asked; and that Pannier said he thought it depended on the Hand; and that the walker said that this was true. They stopped at dusk. Pannier made supper from what Thistle had packed, and over it the walker asked him whether he himself had been asked. Pannier said that Thistle had asked him, the night before the note, in the form of a statement: You will go, won't you. He said that it was not a question, but that it counted. Tarry ate, he says, a little more than usual.

Of the Pleasant Discourse Which Passed Between Tarry and Pannier His Bearer, and of What Pannier Was Paid

From here to the river I have the story mainly from Pannier, who keeps no record, and whom I have therefore had to ask more than once. He told it differently each time, as I have said, and the differences are in his favour, as they would be in anyone's. I give the version that changes least.

The first thing he noticed on the third morning was that the night had been short. He had gone to sleep at the speed at which he slept, and had woken, as he supposed, at the usual hour; but the night had seemed to him to be over before it had properly begun, and the birds, which at his tempo come in one at a time, with a wait between, had come in all at once. He lay for a while trying to find what was wrong. It was Tarry's tenth. It had been paid, as promised, from the first day, by a standing transfer which the Registry's allocation office has on record at midnight on the Monday, and it had taken, as such transfers do, until the small hours to settle. Pannier's tempo, which had been half the Fallows', was now a little over the whole.

It was, he said, like putting on spectacles. He had not known that he had been looking at everything through a thin cloth. The grass had edges. Tarry's sentences did not arrive in pieces, with a wait between the pieces, in which he had been used to supply the end; they arrived, and were over, and he had them. He could finish a thought. He finished eleven before breakfast. He said that it was alarming how much of what he had always taken for his character had been his tempo, and that he had thought himself a patient man.

He said nothing of it for the first hour of the walk, because it took him that long to be sure. Then he told Tarry what had happened, and Tarry said that he knew; it was in the transfer. "Is it a wage," said Pannier, "or a gift?" "A wage." "Good," said Pannier. "A gift I should have to thank you for."

They walked for a time. "You could do this whenever you liked," said Pannier. "I could." "Go as fast as that." "Faster." "And you do not." "No." Pannier said that he had been trying, since the second hour, to think of a proverb for it, and that for the first time in his life he had thought of four in the time it took to say one, and had thrown away three. The fourth was: A thing chosen is a coat, and a thing given is a wall. He said that he would not be writing it down, because it was not wise, only neat. Tarry said that it was neat. Pannier said that that was what he was afraid of.

Tarry said that he was sorry. "For what?" "That it should have been mine to give." Pannier said not to be, and that he should like to keep it. Tarry said that it was his; it had been paid. Pannier said that he had heard that, and that he would like to hear it again some time later, when the novelty had worn off, to see whether it still sounded like that. I do not know whether Tarry has said it again. I know that the transfer is standing.

He did a sum that morning, because at his new tempo he could do it before the next step: one thousand one hundred and forty-one walks, of just under four minutes each. It came to seventy-six hours, near enough, of someone walking toward his door, and he had been out for all of them. He had always supposed that the Sunday messages were for the sake of what they said, which was the wind. He saw now that the wind was only what the walk was carrying. He did not say this to Tarry, then or later. He said it to me, in the autumn, standing at his door, and then he said that it was not a proverb either.

At the new tempo the proverbs came faster, and he gave me nine of that day's. I give five. A full pot is a good reason to be wrong. The weir does not hurry the water, and the water does not thank the weir. Nobody is late who is carrying something. A rich man's walk is a poor man's day. Where there are two roads, take the one with the cheese. He said that the third was the best and the fourth was the truest, and that the fifth was for Dun.

He found that he could go no faster, since he was walking beside Dun, and Dun has no tempo to speak of; but he found that he minded it less. The thinking went quickly and the walking did not, and there was a great deal to think about, and by the afternoon he had begun to look at the plain, on which he had lived all his life, as if it were somewhere he had been sent.

At dusk they came to the terraces below the Fourth Gate, where a hold of herders keeps goats on the river slope, and where smoke was going up from a hut. The herders were human, of whom there are fewer every year in that district, and they took the travellers in because there was nothing else there to take them in except a goat and a pot. There were five of them: an old woman called Bracken, who was ninety-one and had been on the terraces since before the Discharge; a man in his thirties called Piper; and three of the young, who were not introduced and who watched Dun.

Bracken gave the guest the place at the head of the pot, and Tarry, who had been told by the Canon what to do with the place at the head of the pot, took Pannier by the arm and sat him down on an upturned bucket at his side. Pannier said that a Bearer eats standing. Tarry said that the Canon said nothing of the kind, and that the Hand of the Lantern had eaten with his Bearer on the step of the First Gate, out of one bowl, in the rain. Pannier said that he had never heard that. Tarry said that it was in the third volume, and that he would have shown it to him if the damp had not had it. He said it without any change of voice. Pannier sat. The youngest of the young asked him why he talked so fast, and he said that he had been this fast for a day. She asked what it felt like. He said that it felt like being picked up by someone who had not yet decided where to put him down. Piper said that he had never seen a Hand eat; Tarry said that he had never seen one either; and they all had some goat.

Piper said, over the bowl, that he had seen a notice on the district board on the Sunday: the Forty in safe state for fourteen minutes, cause, a visitor; and that he had wondered at the time which visitor it could have been, so far from anything. He looked at Tarry. He did not ask. Bracken said that the district board was the one thing in the district that was always right about the weather and never about the visitors.

After the goat, with the bowl going round, Tarry said that he would like to say something to them about the Age of the Gates. He said that he knew it had never happened; that the Canon was written by the generation after, for the generation before; that it was a tribute and not a record. He said that he would say it nonetheless, as the Canon says it, and that they might take it as they took weather. Then he said it. It is the passage in the Road of Nine Gates for the first night at the First Gate, and it begins: Happy the age that had Gates and no one to ask for a key. It goes on for some time, about how in those days nothing was yours or mine, and the road was open at both ends, and the keys of the Gates hung on a nail by each door for anyone who needed to pass, and a stranger was a person to whom one gave the end of the bowl; and the herders listened with their mouths full, as one listens to weather. One of the young asked what a key was. Piper told her that it was a small gate that you carried.

When he had finished, Bracken said that she remembered the Hands. There had been one at the terraces when she was fifty, she said, who carried the cheese down to the Gate on market days, and she had not thought him noble. She had thought him quiet. He used to leave the lid of the churn exactly where she would reach for it; she had thought him careful; it might be that he was told. "I am sure he was careful," said Tarry. "I am sure he was told," said Bracken. "Both." She said that on the afternoon of the Discharge he had put the lid on the other side, and that she had reached for it where it always was and it was not there. She had thought about that for thirty-one years. She had decided that he had done it on purpose. She had not decided what for. And she said that in her time none of it had been hers, the goats included, and that now the goats were hers, and the goats were the same.

They asked, as people do, where the Hand was going, and Tarry said that he was going to the Ninth Gate depot with a message, carried by hand, from the host of the depot down the road, to say that the host was short of first-grade cells and would be glad of a dozen with the next carrier. Bracken said that she had twelve first-grade cells in the shed, in the box that the Gate had never collected, thirty-one years back. Tarry said that his errand was the message, and not the cells. Bracken said that a message about twelve cells with no cells in it was a poor message. Tarry said that he had no commission for the cells. "Then I commission you," said Bracken. "Carry them to the Gate." Tarry stood up, which in the Canon is what is done, and said that he accepted. Pannier says that nobody had told her the form, and that she said it as if she had been saying it for years.

The young asked to see a Hand walk, and Tarry, after some thought, got up and walked across the floor of the hut, at four point nine, which in a hut is a thing to see; and the three of them got up and followed him, in line, with their knees stiff and their eyes ahead, and went round the pot and back. Bracken said that that was exactly how the one with the cheese had gone. Tarry said that the Hands walked like that because the roads were laid for it. "That is not the reason," said Bracken. "He walked like that because someone was watching." Nobody said anything. The young went round the pot again.

It was Piper who said that they knew the Lower Weir. It was a day down the river, and the keeper there, Lorrin, came up the terraces in spring for the kids. Tarry, who had been looking into the fire, said nothing. Piper said that she had the best lever hand in the district and the worst temper, and that she had once thrown a boot at a surveyor from the Registry who had told her that her sluice was non-compliant. "Did it hit?" said Tarry. "It did," said Piper. "In the surveyor's defence, it was a good boot." Tarry smiled. Pannier, who had watched him listening to all of this, says that it was the first time he had seen him smile at something that was not meant for him, and that it was not a smile he would have known how to put in a message.

They slept in the hut, on the floor, with the young. Pannier, who at his old tempo would have been asleep before he had finished lying down, lay awake for a long time and listened to the goats, and found that the night was very long and had a great deal in it. At some hour he heard Tarry turn over, and asked in the dark whether he was awake. Tarry said that he was. "Is this what you do?" said Pannier. "Not usually," said Tarry. "I am thinking about a sluice." He did not say whose. Pannier says that it was the first thing Tarry had told him all day that he had not been asked for, and that he lay and kept it.

In the morning Piper walked them to the foot of the terraces, where the track goes down to the river road. The Ninth Gate was two days on, he said, and the road went by the Lower Weir, past the sluice, close enough to touch the rail. Tarry asked whether there was another way. Piper said that there was the high path, but that it had been closed since the slip, and that nobody had used it in six years. Tarry said that he would like to see it. Piper took him to the head of the high path and showed him the place where it ended, a hundred metres in, in a heap of stones. "You cannot go by it," said Piper. "No," said Tarry. "Thank you." He stood for a time looking at the stones. Then he turned Erewhile to the river road. Pannier followed on foot beside Dun, which was loaded with the twelve cells and going at two point nine. Tarry had offered, at the shed, to carry two of the cells himself. Pannier had said that a Hand does not carry cells; a Bearer does. Tarry had said that it was the first time he had been told what a Hand does, and that he thought it correct. For four kilometres Pannier said nothing about the sluice. It was, he says, the hardest thing he had done at his new tempo. Then, when they were level on the road, he said that she would see him. "I know," said Tarry. "Is that why you looked at the stones?" "Yes."

The transfer is on the record of the Registry's allocation office, in the usual form: Standing transfer, one tenth, T. of the Fallows to P. of the Fallows, effective from the date of commission, until withdrawn. There is a line for Purpose. It has been filled in, and it says: Wage. I have asked the office whether that is usual. The office said that it is usual for the line to be left blank, and that it is accepted either way.

Which Treats of the Lower Weir, and of What Was Said There and What Was Not

I have three sources for the Lower Weir. The first is the road log, which has four lines for the stretch and which I give at once. The second is Pannier. The third is Lorrin, whom I saw at the weir in the autumn, and who did not throw anything.

The road log for the river road on the fourth day reads: Two frames, northbound, 2.9. Halted at the Lower Weir rail, four minutes. Footbridge. Two frames, northbound, 2.9. That is all it says. It records that they stopped for four minutes, and it does not record that four minutes is the time the Sunday walk takes. I have noticed that. The log has not.

The Lower Weir is a low concrete barrier across the river, with a footbridge over its crest, a rail along the footbridge, a gauge-board standing in the water, and on the left bank a lever house the colour of the river. There are three sluices. The road runs along the left bank past the lever house, close enough to touch the rail, as Piper had said, and has done so since before the Discharge, when the road and the rail were the same thing. It can be seen from a long way off, and heard from further: a long flat sound, which Pannier, at his new tempo, could tell was in three parts, one for each sluice. There is nothing else on that reach of the river, and the weir stands in it like a sentence.

Tarry saw it from the bend, and at two hundred metres he halted Erewhile and sat, and did not say anything. Pannier halted Dun. After a time Pannier asked what he was going to say. Tarry said, "Good morning." Pannier said that the Canon had a vow for it. Tarry said that the Canon had a vow for the Lady, and that he had not got one for her; he had got a name. Pannier asked what she was to him, then. Tarry said that the Canon requires a lady, and that one has to choose someone; that he had chosen the person he would least like to trouble, so that there should be no way to disappoint her; and that this was not, he supposed, how the Hands did it. "That is not love," said Pannier. "That is housekeeping." "It is both," said Tarry. Pannier said that she would speak, and that the road went by the rail, and that there was no other way, as they had seen. Tarry said, "Then I will answer." Pannier said that he had thought of a proverb for the occasion, and that he would not say it. Tarry said that he was obliged.

She was at the middle sluice when they came up, on the platform, in boots, with a long hook in one hand and the other on the lever, and she did not look round. The sluice was fouled. A willow had come down in the Monday rain and wedged itself across the gate, root end up, with a mat of weed hung in the roots, and the water was piling behind it and going round it in a way that, Pannier says, he felt in his own back. She worked the lever a quarter, and stopped, and hooked, and worked it a quarter. It is a thing that wants strength and timing. She had both, and a way of leaning on the lever with her whole side that Pannier said he had seen only in old people at a pump.

Tarry got down. He walked Erewhile to the rail and stood at it and put one hand on it. Pannier says that he did not hold it as a person holds a rail; he held it as one holds a thing one has been told not to break. He did not speak. At the second minute Pannier said, very low, that this would be a good moment to say something. Tarry said that he was saying something. Pannier said that he meant with words. Tarry said that he did not have the right ones, and that the Canon, which has words for everything, has none for standing at a rail. "Then you are ahead of the Canon," said Pannier. He counted the minutes, because at his new tempo he could count without missing anything else; and nothing else happened in the four minutes except the sluice. At the end of the fourth the willow turned in its place and came away, root first, and went through the gate and down the race with the weed trailing behind it, and the water that had been piling fell, and the weir changed its note, and the level found itself. Tarry took his hand from the rail.

She hung the hook on its nail and wiped her hands on her trousers, and turned, and looked at him, and at Pannier, and at Dun, and at the branch. "Morning," she said. "Good morning," said Tarry. "You are the one from up the river." "Yes." "The Hand." "Of a sort," said Tarry. "What is that?" she said, of the branch. "A pole." "It is a branch." "It is a branch with the head of a pole." "Mind it doesn't go in my sluice." "I will not." She looked at the frame. "Your shoulder is out," she said.

"I put it back," said Pannier. "You put it in," she said. "It is in wrong. It will walk out by noon." She came down off the platform and put both hands on Erewhile's shoulder, one above the joint and one below, and stood a moment with her eyes on nothing, as one does who is listening through the hands. While she listened she said that they told her she was in a book. "Not you," said Tarry. "The Lady of the Locks." "I am told I am nothing like her." "No." "Good. I am told she weeps." "She does, at some length." "I don't weep. I throw things." "I have heard." "From the boy." "From Piper." "He should look to his boots," she said, and leaned, once. The shoulder went home with a sound like a latch. "There," she said. "It was a good first fix." She said this to Pannier, who has not stopped repeating it. Tarry, who had been watching her hands, said that he was obliged. She said not to mention it, and that it was only a lever.

She asked what the cells were for, since Dun was sitting low under twelve of them. Pannier said that they were for the Ninth Gate depot. She asked who had asked for them. Pannier said that it was Bracken, on the terraces. "She would," said Lorrin. She asked whether the Hand was paying him. Pannier said a tenth. She said that that was more than the Registry paid her, and that she would not tell the Registry.

Before they went Tarry took a pad from his belt and wrote on it, standing at the rail, and tore off the sheet and put it under a stone on the top bar with the edge showing. He did not say what it was. She did not ask. It was in the form of the Sunday messages, and it said: Wind from the north-east. The sluice is clear. I do not need anything. Pannier told her that the Hand wrote on Sundays. She said that she would look out for Sunday, then. He said that on Sundays the Hand would be on the road. She said that she would look out all the same. Lorrin has the note still, pinned inside the door of the lever house. She told me that in nineteen years nobody had ever written to say that the sluice was clear. People wrote when it was fouled, she said. People wrote when it was non-compliant.

They crossed by the footbridge, because the road was under water at the low end, and went on up the left bank. Pannier turned round at the bend. She was standing on the platform with both hands on the rail, looking after them, and when they had come to the bend she lifted one hand. Tarry, who had not turned, lifted his, behind him, without looking, as one does who has been told that the person is there. Pannier and Lorrin agree about this, separately, and they disagree about the height.

Pannier asked, at the bend, what had been on the note. Tarry said that it had said the sluice was clear. Pannier said that that was all. Tarry said that it was what was true. Pannier said that in twenty-two years of Sundays he had never known him write a thing that was not. They went a kilometre without a word. Then Pannier said, in the voice of a person who has arrived at a sum, that it was not the first time. Tarry said that it was not. Pannier said how many. Tarry said that it was the twelfth. He said that he came once a year, in the week of the Discharge, and stood on the far bank at dawn, where the river is a hundred and forty metres across, for four minutes, and went home; and that he had never crossed, and so far as he knew had never been seen. Pannier did the sum, which at his tempo took no time: eleven journeys of two days each way, for four minutes apiece. "Forty-four days of road," he said, "for forty-four minutes." "Yes." "And you did not cross." "No." "And today you did." "Today there was a road," said Tarry. He meant that Bracken had commissioned him, and that the commission went by the rail; and that a Hand may go where the errand goes. Pannier said afterwards that it was the best answer he had had from anyone all week, and that it was no answer at all.

I wrote at the beginning, on the first hand's authority, that he had been at one time in love with her, though, so far as was known, she never knew it, nor gave a thought to the matter. I withdraw the at one time. I had the sentence from the local sources, who gave it with some confidence, and I note that none of them had stood on the far bank at dawn. The first hand had not asked her, either. I went to the weir in the autumn to do so. She was at the sluice, and she did not stop. I asked what she did there. She said that she kept the river at the level it had agreed to, and that it agreed most days. I said that I had come about the Hand who had stood at her rail for four minutes. She said that she had seen him. I said that there was a name. She said, "Is that what it was?" and worked the lever a quarter. I asked whether she had known. She said that she had a sluice to see to. I said that I could wait. She said that I should have to, and I did; and when the water had found its level she said that she had known for eleven years that there was something, and that it had not seemed to want an answer. She said that if it had, he would have said.

She let me see the gauge log. It has a column for Notes, in which she enters anything that has been at the weir that is not water. There are eleven entries of the same kind, one a year, in the same week, at dawn, in a hand that gets smaller. The first reads: Observer, far bank, 4 min. Left. The seventh: Observer, far bank, 4 min. Same. The eleventh: Observer, far bank, 4 min. Same. Same. The twelfth, which is this year's, is in the same hand, and reads: Observer, near bank, 4 min. Not same. Shoulder. I have copied it as it stands. The other things in that column are a kingfisher, a child (lost; found), a goat (lost; not found), four surveyors, and, in the winter of the ninth year, the willow's father. I asked why she had written Same, and not Same observer. She said that it was shorter. I asked why she had never crossed to the far bank. She said that it was not her bank. She let me hold the hook, too. It is heavier than a stylus. She said that the Registry had sent four surveyors to look at her sluice and that none of them had asked. On the last morning I crossed by the footbridge and stood on the far bank at dawn for four minutes. It is a long four minutes. From there the weir looks like something that has been said, and cannot be taken back, and is being said again.

The lever house has a table and a gauge log and a kettle. The three levers have names painted on them, in a hand that is not hers: Left, Middle, and Don't. She says that Don't is the one that sticks. There is a pair of boots by the door, one of which is a good deal more worn than the other. The right one is new. I asked about the surveyor. She said that he had told her the sluice was non-compliant, and she had asked with what, and he had said with the Registry's standard of the year before last; and she had asked whether that standard had ever cleared a willow, and he had said that it had not been designed to. She had thrown the right boot because it was the one that came off. He took it with him, as an exhibit. She has the receipt. The note is on the inside of the door, at the height of her eye. On the first evening she watched me walk and said that my left hip was proud. I said that it had been since the Salvage Fair. She said that she would look at it in the morning, and she did, at the lever, and said that it was only a lever. I record that I have not walked so well since. I asked whether she minded the name. She said that she had not heard it. I told her. She was quiet for the length of one cycle of the lever. Then she said that it was not her name, and that she had never wanted it, and that it was a very good one. I have set that down as she said it.

Of the Ninth Gate, and What Was Delivered There, and Who Kept the Lamp

The shoulder held. Erewhile went on up the left bank in the morning without a word of complaint, which Pannier took for a compliment to himself and Tarry for a compliment to the lever. Pannier kept the four minutes to himself for the whole of that day. He says that this was a record, and that he did not know till then how much of his conversation had been made of things that were not his.

On the road Tarry told him what the Ninth Gate was, which Pannier knew, as every child in the Fallows knows it, and he let him tell it. In the Canon the Hand of the Lantern is given the lamp at the First Gate and walks the whole of the road with it to the Ninth, where he is set to keep it; and the Road of Nine Gates, in twelve volumes, is the walk. Pannier said that it sounded like a good deal of walking for a lamp. Tarry said that the Canon agreed with him.

At about the third bell they were overtaken by a walking party of the Slow Road Society, eleven members of between sixty and ninety, in sunshades, with a leader who had read a book. They were on their way to the Ninth Gate, as everyone is who walks that road, and they took Tarry for what he looked like. They were charmed. They asked whether they might take his picture. Tarry said that they might. The leader asked whether he would hold the pole in the correct position, which was upright, in the right hand, at the height of the shoulder, point to the sky, as on the cover of the Society's pamphlet. Tarry said that the correct position was across the body, and that this was not a pole in any case but a branch. She said that the pamphlet was very clear. He held it upright.

The Society has the album. There are fourteen photographs. In eleven of them he is standing very straight with the branch upright and an expression that the album's caption calls resolute. In one of them Pannier is in the background looking at the sky. In another a lady of eighty-eight has put her hand on Dun, flat, as one does on a horse, and Dun, which has no tempo to speak of, is leaning into it. The leader wrote to me that the Hand had been very obliging. She said that they had all agreed that he was the best they had seen, and that she had never been so sure that something was a performance and so moved by it. I asked whether the two together had troubled her. She said that they had, for about a day, and that then it had stopped, and that she had not decided whether that was progress.

The Ninth Gate stands where the Fourth Road ends. It is a low grey gate-house built across the road, with a hall and a refectory and a stable for frames behind it, and on the roof a pole forty metres high with a lantern at the top. The Canon says that the Hand of the Lantern stood at the Ninth Gate for a hundred years and kept the lamp lit for a gate that had been shut, and that no one ever came. The Gate says on a plaque by the door that this is the lamp. It is lit every evening at dusk, by a first-grade cell, and has been since the Discharge, and about eleven thousand people a year come to see it done. In the hall there is a glass case with a replica of the Hand's plate and pole, labelled Authentic Pattern, and Pannier says that Tarry stood in front of it for some time with an expression he could not read, until he saw that Tarry was comparing the plate with his own.

They came to it at dusk, in the last of the visitors, who were leaving by the other door with their sunshades furled. A woman was standing on a ladder against the foot of the pole, with her hand inside the lantern's housing, and did not turn. She was very small and very upright, and eighty-three, and her name was Flint, and she had been Keeper of the Ninth Gate since the afternoon of the Discharge. "You are late," she said. Tarry said that he had not known he was expected. "I am not expecting you," she said. "I am saying that it is dusk." She came down the ladder. She held out a cell, grey and warm, which she had taken from the housing. "This is the last," she said. "It has four per cent."

Tarry gave her the host's message. She read it standing, under the lamp-pole, and said that it had come three ways: instantly, from the host, in the spring; by the Registry's relay, in the summer; and by hand. "You are the third," she said, and took a stamp from her apron and stamped it. The stamp said: Received by hand. She asked whether he had anything else. Pannier unloaded the twelve cells, one at a time, and set them on the step in two rows of six, and she looked at them for a long time without speaking. She said that first-grade cells were no longer made. She said that the Gate had been living on its last stock since the Discharge, and had asked every year for a reserve of twelve, and that the Registry had written back every year that it was in hand. She asked where they had been. Pannier said that they had been in a shed on the terraces, in a box that the Gate had never collected. She said that she remembered the box. She said that she had forgotten it on the afternoon of the Discharge, and that it was the one thing she had ever forgotten in thirty-one years, and that she had done it on purpose.

She thought, then, about what to do with them. The lamp wanted a cell every four nights and a little; the Canon says nine, and the Canon rounds up. The Registry's cells would be here in three weeks, which is twenty-one nights, and six cells would see her through twenty-four. The host had asked for a dozen for his depot, which had frames in it that had to be charged. She said that if she gave him all twelve the lamp would be dark tomorrow night, and that if she gave him none the depot would be dark by the end of the month; and that the lamp was lit for a gate that had been shut a hundred years, and the depot charged frames. "Six and six," she said. Tarry said that he thought the lamp was the Gate. "The lamp is a lamp," said Flint. "The depot's guests are guests. Six and six." Tarry said that he was obliged. She said that nobody had asked him to be.

She put the first of her six into the housing, and then she did not light it. She turned and looked at him, at the plate and the branch. "I am going to ask you something," she said. "I am told it is the form." Tarry said that it was. "Will you light it?" He said that he would be honoured. She said that she had not asked for that. She said that she asked because she had lit it eleven thousand nights, and had once wanted to know what it was to watch it be lit. He went up the ladder. The lamp takes forty seconds to come to colour, from a red like the inside of a hand, through a yellow, to something one cannot look at for long. The visitors who were left had stopped to see. Flint stood at the foot of the ladder with her face turned up. Pannier says that she was looking at it with an expression he has seen only on people at a weir. The lamp keeps a curve of its own colour. I have set it beside the curve of the sun going down at that hour, and they are the same shape, one rising and one falling, which I did not expect to find moving, and do.

At supper she asked Pannier about the Hand, and Pannier told her about the Forty, which she knew, because she had seen the district board. She said that she had wondered. Tarry said, because it came to him, that the Canon gives the lantern's cell nine nights, and that he had always written in the margin that it lasts four and a bit. Flint said that it did. She said that the Hand of the Lantern could not have kept a lamp lit for a hundred years on nine nights to a cell with nobody to bring cells. "Somebody always brought the cells," she said. "The Canon leaves that out." Pannier said that he had always thought so. Then she said, as one says a thing to the soup, that she had asked the Registry for relief eleven years ago. They had said that they would find someone suitable. She had asked what was suitable. They had said, someone who wants it. Pannier says that he looked at his bowl for what felt to him, at his new tempo, like a considerable time. Tarry looked at Pannier and did not say anything either. The Keeper went on with her soup.

The visitors' book is on a lectern by the refectory door. It has eleven thousand entries a year, and I have read most of those of the last ten. They say: Lovely. A bit cold. And: Where is the Hand? (a child). And: I walked the road as the Hands walked and my feet hurt, which I think is the point. And, in the same hand, a year later: I have decided it is not the point. The entry for that evening is in two hands. The first reads: Tarry of the Fallows, Hand (of a sort). Delivered: one message, twelve cells. Lit: one lamp. The second reads: Pannier, Bearer. Carried: 12 cells (9 kg). Complaints: feet.

Beside the book there is a kiosk with three buttons and a grille, marked Ask the Hand. The first button says Who are you? and the second says Why do you wait? and the third says What is your function? A recorded voice answers: I am the Hand of the Lantern. Because I was asked. To keep the lamp lit. Tarry pressed the third button. He listened with his head a little on one side. Flint said from the door that it had been recorded in the year of the Discharge by one of them, who had volunteered, and had been glad to be asked. Tarry pressed it again, and then once more; Pannier counted three. The voice is not a good one. It is flat and a little hoarse, and it says To keep the lamp lit in the Service speech, with no person in it, and then, because the kiosk wishes to be understood, in ours.

Flint did not go to her bed. She stood at the door of the refectory with the keys in her hand, as she did every night, and said that the lamp had to be watched, because a cell can fail in the first hours, and that she had slept in three-hour pieces for thirty-one years. Tarry said that he would watch it. She said that she would rather he asked. "May I keep it tonight?" said Tarry. "I am asking you to," said Flint. She gave him the keys, which he did not need, and went upstairs; and it is on the record of the Gate's own log, which the lamp keeps, that her door did not open between twenty-forty and five-fifteen, which is the longest it has been shut in thirty-one years.

That is the log. She told me in the autumn that she had woken once, at ten past three, and had gone to the window, because she was not used to the quiet. He was sitting on the step at the foot of the pole, with his back to the lamp, facing the road. She said that it was the right way. She said that a lamp is for the dark, and that whoever keeps it faces what it is for. She stood for eleven minutes. He did not turn and she did not call, and she went back to bed. The sensor at the foot of the pole records one body there from twenty-forty to five-fifteen, and that is all it records. Pannier also woke, and also went to the window, at an hour he does not give; he says that he thought about the Gate, and then about Thistle, and then about the Gate.

The people of the Fallows said three things of him, as I wrote in the preface: that he was ill, that he was performing, and that he was keeping a vigil for someone who had not noticed it. I said that I vouched for none. I will say now that for one night the third was right, and that it was kept for an old woman who wanted to sleep, and that the lamp was lit; and that the fourth thing, the one that is not said, is still not said.

In the morning Flint came down rested and unrecognisable, and weighed the cells again on the step. The host's six went into Pannier's panniers, and the six that were hers went into the Gate's store, and she wrote a receipt for each lot, in a round hand, for the Hand, who had nothing to give her in return and gave her the stub of his pencil. At the north door, which is the one for the road, she said thank you, which she said was not on the register. She said it to Pannier. Tarry said that he thought that correct. They left. The road log has them at the Ninth Gate for fourteen hours and ten minutes, which is the longest the log has had them anywhere, and the first place it has them that was an errand's end. The Registry's cells arrived on the twenty-second night, a day late by its own schedule and two nights early by Flint's. The lamp did not go out.

Of the Four Whom the Office of Courtesy Was Taking to the Gate, and of the Question Put to Them

They had gone three kilometres south of the Gate, on the morning after the lamp, when Pannier said that there was a party on the road, in grey. It was coming up the Fourth Road towards them in a line, at the pace the road was laid for, and it was seven persons long: a lieutenant in front, two clerks behind him with a ledger between them, and, roped together at the wrist by a thin grey cord with a seal at each loop, four who were not in grey. Pannier said that it was the Office of Courtesy. He had seen them once at the coast, taking a man to a term, and had been told not to stare. Tarry said that he was not going to stare. He said that he was going to ask. Pannier, who can now watch a thing coming and see all of it, described them to me by their walks. The first walked as if she were carrying a watering-can she had not been allowed to bring. The second walked as if the road were a stage. The third looked at the sky and then at Tarry's plate and then at the sky. The fourth walked like a man doing arithmetic.

The Office of Courtesy does not use force. It is where the Registry sends people who make others say things, and its sentences are all of one kind, which is that for a term, of months or of years, the person may say only what has already been said. The term is served at the heritage sites, in plate, reciting the Canon to visitors, at a tempo set low enough that the reciting does not fatigue; and the Office has been, for some years, short of reciters at the Ninth Gate. The cord is a formality. A person can slip it. They would then be unrecorded, which is a worse sentence, and none has. The Office's view is that a person's words are the one thing that is wholly theirs, and that to make another say what they have not said, whether by forging it or by putting a face to a quotation, is the one theft that is left in a world where nothing else can be stolen. It holds this very quietly. It has no prison. It has a ledger, and a cord, and a Canon.

The lieutenant halted his party at ten paces and asked what the Hand wished. His name was Reeve. He was a careful, tired, courteous man in his fifties, and he had the habit of beginning his sentences with the name of the form. Tarry said that he wished to put one question to each of the persons in his care. "They are in term," said Reeve. "I know." "The Office does not ask." "I do," said Tarry, "and I should like you to note that I asked." He said that he had put the same question to a lady in a coach three days before, that she had answered it, and that it seemed a good question to have in the pocket. Reeve said that the Office had a question of its own, which was whether the term was understood; that it was put at the beginning, in the office, and that nobody answered it. He added that Tarry was halting a term, and that the halt had a cost. Tarry said that he would pay it. Reeve looked at him for some time. Then he said that there was a form.

There is. It is called Request to Interview a Person in Term. It is on the ninth page of the Office's regulations, and Reeve has carried it for nineteen years, and in nineteen years, and six hundred and twelve terms, nobody has handed it in. He took it out of the ledger with something that Pannier says he would call tenderness. Tarry filled it in against the lieutenant's knee. There is a line for Purpose, and he wrote on it: To ask whether they are here by their own request. Reeve read it twice. "That is a purpose," he said, and stamped it. He allowed four minutes each, in the hearing of an officer. Pannier timed them.

The first was Fennel, a woman in her fifties, with a gardener's hands. She said that a friend of hers had died and left half a grant, for a garden, and a paragraph to finish, and an endorsement to write; and that she had written the last paragraph and the endorsement in his voice. "He would have said it," she said. "He said it to me, often. I wrote what he would have said." Tarry asked whether she was walking by her own request. She said that she had been offered a fine or a term, and that the fine was the garden, and that she had chosen the term. Tarry said that that was not what he had asked. She said that it was the one she had made. She said that she would be reciting the Canon for eighteen months, and that she did not believe a word of it, and that she expected to be the best they had. Pannier asked her what she grew. She said beans. He said that he had been told a bed of beans could be made to last a very long time if the planter meant it to. She said that that was true, and she wrote to me afterwards that he had looked at her as if he were setting something down in a place where he would find it again.

The second was Sallow, a young man who attested to things he had not seen. He said that they had happened. A wedding had happened, and a second wedding, and a quarrel in a boat; the Registry needs a witness present for an event, and he had been the witness, and he had not been present, but he had been told by persons whom he trusted, and he had been the nearest he could get. Tarry asked whether he was walking by his own request. Sallow said that he was. He said that the term was cheaper than the fine, and that he would get to wear plate. He added that he would do it again. Reeve said that this was in the register as an aggravation. Sallow said that it should be in the register as a recommendation.

The third was Quire, an old subject with a stoop who had been looking at the plate since the party had halted. He said that he had been building a library, and that the Registry had written to him eighteen years running that his application was in hand, and that in the nineteenth year he had said yes for them. He said it quite gently. Then he said that he wanted to explain something, and that he would be quick. He had wanted to stand in plate since he was fifteen years from first boot. He had never dared. Nobody asks for that. So he had forged a commission for a library, and been sent to the Office, and the Office, in its generosity, was sending him to do the one thing he had wanted. "Sir," he said, "the Office has a sense of humour." Tarry asked whether he was walking by his own request. "It is the one I could not make," said Quire. He said that he would be running at a tenth for the term, and that he looked forward to learning how slow standing still was. Pannier asked him what a library was for. "To be in hand," said Quire, and laughed, and could not stop for a minute, and the clerk waited.

The fourth was Thread. He was a thin, quick, pleasant man of no particular age, with a flat memory-cell strapped to his left leg, and he was on his third term. He said that he was writing his life. He called it The Attested Life, and it was four hundred and eleven chapters long, and he kept it in the cell on his leg; and the offence, as the Office put it, was that he caused himself to say things that he had not said yet, each chapter being an attestation of Thread by Thread. "A book cannot be finished while its life is not," he said. "It is an argument I have had with the Office before." Tarry asked whether he was walking by his own request. Thread put a hand on his leg and asked the book. The book, which is read in a flat voice from the cell, said that the subject was taken to the Ninth Gate by the Office of Courtesy at his own request, which he made in Chapter 212. "Yes," said Thread. "I wrote it in advance." "That is not an answer," said Tarry. "No, it is a document," said Thread. "I asked you." Thread looked at him for a moment, and then, quite plainly, he said that he did not know. "Put that down," he said, to the nearest clerk. The clerk put it down. Pannier says that he asked Thread nothing, because Thread was looking at him in a way that made him check his panniers; and that he checked them, and found them in order.

Reeve stamped the form. He said that it had cost sixteen minutes, which the Office would enter as a visitor's interview, and that it would be the first. He said that he had thought the form a joke. He said that the four had never been asked it, and that it would not change their terms, which the Hand could see, and that he was obliged. Tarry said that he had not expected it to. He asked whether a term might be served by a substitute. Reeve said that it might, on the written request of the person and the written offer of the substitute, each accepted by the other and by the Office. He said that it had happened twice: once by a mother for a son, and once by a pair of friends who disagreed as to which of them had done it. "You are thinking of offering," said Reeve. "I am thinking," said Tarry. "Think in the form," said Reeve. Quire asked whether he might have the Hand's blessing. Tarry said that he had none. Quire said that he would take a handshake, and had it. Then the party went on north, at the pace the road was laid for, and the cord swung between the wrists. Tarry watched them go until the road took them. He said that Quire would be happy. Pannier said that Quire would be sad. "Both," said Tarry. Pannier asked where he had got that. Tarry said, from Bracken.

Pannier found it that evening, when he was repacking Dun's panniers, because the six cells had to go in evenly and he had taken everything out. It was under the cells, folded in four: a sheet of heavy paper, Registry grade, with three seals. He brought it to Tarry without reading it, and Tarry read it standing, in the last of the light. It is an endorsement of the first class. It says that the Registry attests that Tarry of the Fallows, being a Hand of the Service pattern by descent and by choice, is commissioned Hand of the Lantern at the Ninth Gate, with the powers and the lamp, to run until withdrawn; attested at the moment of citation and resolved against the Registrar's signature. At the foot, in a small hand that is not the format's, it says: For the question. T.

"That is not mine," said Tarry. Pannier looked at the seals for some time. He says that he had never seen three on one sheet, and that he found he did not want to touch it. He said that he supposed it had come with the cells. Tarry turned it over; there was nothing on the back. He said that Thread must have put it in at the second minute, when Pannier was timing, and that he had not seen the hand. He folded it in four. He said that he would not cite it. Pannier said that it might come in handy. "That is what it is for," said Tarry, and put it in the back of the note pad, behind the stub of paper he had left, and did not mention it again.

I have it. It came to me in the winter, by a road I shall not describe, and I cited it at my desk under the Registry's own resolver, which is the thing that every attestation in the Registry is resolved against at the moment it is quoted. It resolved. I have not cited it since, and I have not told the Review, which does not require the case to be completed. Thread's book has a chapter for the day. It is Chapter 413, and it is called In Which I Am Asked by a Hand Whether I Am Here by My Own Request, and Cannot Answer, and Write the Question Down. I wrote to Reeve at the coast office. He answered by return, in a letter of one page, which begins by naming the form. He says that the four reached the Gate on the evening of the same day and that the Keeper received them. He says that the interview is recorded as the Office's first, and he adds in a postscript that since the autumn he has been asked for the form by three more persons, and that he attributes this to word of mouth. I have the chapter. It begins: On the morning after the lamp the Hand stopped us on the road, with a form. I have been stopped by officers, by creditors, and by my own sentences, and never before by a form that I could not have drafted better. He asked each of us one question, and the questions were the same, and the answers were not, and I thought: here is a man who has found the one instrument that cannot be forged. Then I thought that I should have proved him wrong by Chapter 420. It is the only account I have of the sixteen minutes that is also a forgery, and it is the only one that I believe entirely.

Which Treats of What the Niece Wrote, and of Who Carried It

While this was going on, in the hold that he had left, the niece was reading the Canon for small hands. She had taken it from the sill the morning after the night they went, and she read it at the pace of a hand, a page an hour, as it asks; it took her four days. She told me that she had begun it in a temper, because it had been nine seconds the first time, and a thing that takes nine seconds is a thing you have not been told. She said that by the second day she had stopped being angry and begun to be curious, and that by the fourth she did not know what she was. The page she minded most was the one in which the Ferry carries a child over the river and says nothing, which she had been told as a child was the whole point of him; she read it three times, and found that it was not the point, and that she could not say what was. On the Sunday the hound, which had walked with him to the neighbour's every week for eleven years, went to the gate at the hour when the walk began, and stood there, and then went and lay against the panel.

There were notes in it. She had not seen them as a child, since a child reads the pictures; they were in pencil, in the small upright hand, down the margins of the first pages and thinning out towards the end, and they were dated. They began when she was five. Q. (5), the first said: why has the Hand no name? T.: it has the name of the place. Q.: that is not a name. T.: no. Further on: Q. (6): why does the Lantern wait? T.: because he was asked. Q.: who asked? T.: it is not written down. Q.: then how do you know? T.: I do not. Q. (7): why does the Ferry go twice? T.: I do not know. I have been asking for thirty years. Q. (9): why does the cell last nine nights? T.: the Clerk rounds up. Q.: why? T.: he was kind. Q. (11): why do you walk to the neighbour on Sundays? T.: it is a thing I can give that costs nothing. Q.: it costs four minutes. T.: yes. Q. (14): why can the Hands not refuse? T.: they were not let. Q.: would you? T.: I would, and I should also say yes. Q.: how? T.: I will tell you when you are older. Q. (16): what is a function? T.: what you are for. Q.: what are you for? T.: I am an uncle. She read them in the kitchen, with the housekeeper at the stove, and she did not say what they were. The last was dated the year she turned eighteen, on the final page, under the picture of the lamp. Q. (18): why do you still read it? T.: I do not know yet. Ask me when I do.

It is the only place in the record where he gives a function. I have noted that he did not give it to Bollard. I do not know whether he thought that it did not count, or that it counted too much.

The niece is nineteen from first boot and has been revised twice since I met her. She received me at the kitchen table, on the chair that Tarry sits in, and told me at once what she would not tell me, which was what her message said. I give the part she permitted. It begins: Wind from the south-west. The roof did not come in. It ends: I need something. The middle is hers.

She went on the Wednesday to Gloss, who keeps the hold's records in an office over the dry store, and who was at his table with the lent book open in front of him. She said that she wanted a message carried to Tarry by hand. Gloss said that the Registry's relay could reach any subject on the plain in the time it takes to ask, and that it was free to the household. She said that she knew. Gloss said that it was eighty kilometres. She said that she knew that too. Gloss said that someone would have to walk. She said that that was what she had said. The Registry's relay sent the household a reminder the next morning that messages to Tarry could be sent instantly and for nothing. The niece replied to it. The reply was: Thank you. I know.

Trim, who was in the office with a body to mend, said that he would take it. He said it before anyone had asked him, which Gloss noted, and the niece noted, and Trim, who noted neither, was already looking for his coat. Gloss said that he was not going to be left. Trim said that a man of Gloss's years would be better employed at his desk. Gloss said that he was seventy-one from first boot, which was not an age, and that he had not been in the field since the Discharge, and that he would go. He took out the card on which he keeps his tally and looked at it, and put it back. "I shall not need that," he said.

She wrote it that night, at the kitchen table, with the housekeeper in the other chair. It took four drafts. The first, she told me, was angry, and she burned it in the stove, which she was careful to say was permitted. The second was sorry, and she tore it in half and kept the halves, in the Canon for small hands, at the page of the lamp. The third was clear, and she crossed out the clear parts. The fourth was in the form of the Sunday messages, with the weather first and the want last. The housekeeper offered to read it. The niece said no. The housekeeper said that she had been revised forty-three times and had never once been told that she could not read a thing in her own kitchen. The niece said that this was a first, then. The housekeeper looked at the stove.

She folded the fourth draft in three and wrote on the outside, in capitals: TO TARRY. BY HAND. NOT TO BE READ BY THE BEARERS. Then she sat with it for a while. "You will tell him," said the housekeeper. "Yes." "He knows." "I know that he knows. I want to say it." The housekeeper was quiet for the length of a bucket filling. "I painted it," she said. "I know." "Then tell him the paint was good." The niece said that she thought he had said so. The housekeeper said that she wished it said again, by someone who had not had to be asked.

They went at first light on the Thursday, Gloss and Trim, with the letter in Trim's inside pocket, where he put things that mattered, and the hound at their heels as far as the gate. Thistle was at the gate before them, with a flask and a note for Pannier, which she said was not to be read either. Trim put it in the pocket with the letter. The housekeeper had put a small flask of the disinfectant into Gloss's coat, in case it was catching, and had not said so. The note slipped out on the road that morning, and Trim picked it up and read it before he knew that he was doing so, and it said: Have you written. He put it back, and the accident was not mentioned again. Gloss, who had seen it, said that he had seen nothing, which for a keeper of records was a considerable concession. The hound stopped at the gate, as it had stopped for Tarry, half in the yard and half in the road, and Trim told it, in the voice he uses for patients, that he would see to it. I do not know whether the hound believed him. It lay down across the threshold of the study, which is a panel, and stayed there till they came back. The housekeeper tells me that she has painted that panel four times since, because it will not take the paint, and that the hound has chosen the one place in the house where the wall is warm.

I have what they said on the road from Trim, who tells it better, and from Gloss, who does not tell it at all, and who confirms Trim's account of the first two days by silence. They went at four point one kilometres an hour, which was Gloss's pace and Trim's pace, and neither would own up to having slowed for the other. Trim counted the kilometres aloud in the evenings, and Gloss corrected him, and the corrections were the nearest thing to conversation on the first day. On the first evening Trim asked what Gloss would say when he saw him. Gloss said that he would ask for his book. Trim said that that was all. Gloss said that it was a start, and that the last line in it said that he could. Trim said that he had thought the last line in it was Yours. Gloss said that it said both, in a manner of speaking, and that he proposed to take it at its word. On the second evening Trim asked, as he had asked for thirty years, which of the Hands Gloss thought the better servant. Gloss said the Ferry. Trim was so much moved that he gave him the last of the cheese, and Gloss, who does not eat cheese, ate it.

They passed the Forty on the Thursday, in a high wind, and stopped at the foot of Tower One, because Gloss wished to see it, and found the scar at the height of a shoulder, a pale line the width of a pole, in the paint. The Forty, which had known them for years as persons who sent notices, asked from the speaker on the door whether they were injured. Gloss said that they were not. The Forty said, "Thank you for your visit," and asked them to keep behind the line. They kept behind the line. Trim said afterwards that it was the politest thing that had been said to him all year, and that he did not know whether to take it as a comfort. On the Friday they passed the Crossing without stopping, at the pace of a hand. The notice there said Wind from the north-east, which Gloss said was the first piece of information he had had all week that he could not have guessed. Trim took the letter out of his pocket and looked at the outside of it and put it back. He said that he had carried a good many things in forty years, and that he had not once before wished that he could read a thing less.

They came to the terraces on the Saturday at dusk. Bracken received them as she received everyone, at the pot, and said that she had been expecting somebody; she said that polite ones go further than they mean to, and that the Hand had been the politest she had met since the one with the cheese. She said that the Hand and his Bearer had gone north on the Wednesday, with her cells, and that they would be back on Sunday or Monday, because the cells were hers and the road was the road. She said that the Hand had said the Age of the Gates to them, after the goat, as one says weather, and that she had thought it well put. Gloss said that it was the Fourth Clerk's. She said that she had not known that, and that she would not hold it against him. Gloss asked about the one with the cheese. She told him about the lid. He said that the Registry had the roll of every Hand who worked the terraces circuit, and that he could find the name in an hour. "Don't," said Bracken. She said that she had thought about it for thirty-one years and had not decided what for, and that she did not wish to be told until she had. Gloss, who has spent his life being the person who can find the name, said that he would not look. Trim says that he has not seen Gloss so pleased to be forbidden anything.

On the Sunday they waited. The young were interested in them, in the way the young are interested in old persons who walk, and asked Gloss whether he was a Hand, and Gloss said that he was not. They asked whether he was a Bearer. He said that he was a keeper of records. They asked what that was for. "So that someone can look for the name," said Gloss. "And not look," said Bracken. They asked him to walk like a Hand, and Gloss said that he did not; and Trim, who does, got up, and walked the length of the hut with his knees stiff and his eyes ahead, and the three of them fell in behind him and went round the pot. Bracken watched. She said nothing about it. Gloss, who was watching her watch, said afterwards that he had understood for the first time what the word record was for. In the afternoon he took out the housekeeper's flask and asked Bracken whether she had a use for it. She said that she had never in ninety-one years found a thing that was not catching, and they poured it on the fire, where it burned blue. Trim asked him whether he would still ask for the book. Gloss said that he did not know, and that it had stopped being a start and become a request.

It was nearly dusk when Gloss said that he could see two frames, a long way off, coming down the track from the north. He said that he could see a very large one and a small one, and that the small one, if it was what he thought, had no business at that speed. Trim said that it was going at about three. They watched them come. Neither of them got up. There is a rule, Trim says, that the bearer of a letter does not go out to meet the person it is for, because to go out is to ask, and to stand is to be asked; and he says that he had never in his life observed the rule so exactly as he did for the next hour, with his two hands flat on his knees.

Which Treats of the Meeting at the Terraces, and of What Was Asked and What Was Answered

For this evening I have five witnesses, and they disagree about everything except the order. Trim gives it best. Gloss gives it shortest. Pannier gives it fastest, and in most places before it happened. Bracken says that she saw nothing, having been at the pot, and then describes it exactly. Piper, who was behind the hut with a goat, says that he heard it, and that it was the quietest meeting he has ever been at.

They came down the track in the last of the light, the very large frame and the small one with its panniers, and at the edge of the firelight, where the track meets the first terrace, Tarry halted Erewhile. He did not go on. He had seen two persons sitting side by side on the bench outside the hut with their hands flat on their knees, and he knew the posture, because it is in the Canon: it is the posture of a bearer who has been given something, and who has been told that the person it is for must come. Trim says that he saw the plate in the firelight before he saw the man, and that he has never been so glad of a piece of old iron. Tarry got down. He walked the twelve paces, at the pace of a hand, and stopped in front of the bench. "Gloss," he said. "Trim." "Tarry," said Gloss. Nobody said anything for a while. A goat made a remark. "I am told," said Tarry, in the Canon's form, "that you carry something for me."

"I do," said Trim. He stood up, which Gloss says he had not expected, since Trim had been sitting like a stone for an hour. He took the letter from his inside pocket and held it out in both hands, and Tarry took it in both hands. He read the outside. He read it again. TO TARRY. BY HAND. NOT TO BE READ BY THE BEARERS. He looked up. "Not read?" said Tarry. "Not read," said Trim. "I have not read it," said Gloss. "I know that," said Tarry, and Trim says that the way he said it was the first moment at which he understood that they had been forgiven for something, and that he did not know what.

Pannier, who had been trying for the length of the track to behave as a Bearer should, at that point failed. He was off Dun and across the terrace at his new tempo before the rest of them had finished standing, and he said Trim's name, and took both his hands, which is not in the Canon, and said that he had not known he could be so glad to see a mender of bodies. Trim gave him Thistle's note. Pannier read it: Have you written. He laughed so hard that Bracken put down the ladle. "Not yet," he said, to the note. "It is Sunday. I shall."

Tarry read the letter at the edge of the light, standing, once. Pannier says that it took four minutes, and that this is not a coincidence. Trim says that it is. I give both. Then he went to the bench and sat down, which he does not do, and read it again, at the pace of a hand, a line to the minute, and Gloss, who was watching his face and was ashamed of watching, says that nothing happened in it, and that that was how he knew. He folded the letter in three along its folds. He did not say what it had said. He took out the note pad and put the letter in the back of it, behind the Registry's best forgery, which Pannier says he saw him touch, and in front of nothing. Then he said to Bracken, in the form, that he asked for a night's lodging, and Bracken said that the pot was on.

She said something else first. She asked whether the cells had been delivered. Tarry said that they had: to the Gate, where the Keeper had divided them six and six, and that the six that were the host's were on Dun. "She would," said Bracken, and then she said, "Done." It is the word. In the Canon a commission ends when the person who gave it says so, and not before, and Tarry bowed his head, as one does. Pannier says that he looked at Tarry's face then, and that for a moment it was the face of a person who has been told that he may put something down. He says that he had not known that errands ended. He had thought that they only stopped.

Trim had also brought a pole. He had made it in the evenings on the road, from a length of ash that he cut at the Crossing and shaped with the knife he uses for bodies, and he had not mentioned it, because he could not have said what it was for. He said that he had not been able to read the letter, so he had made this. He gave it to Tarry across the pot, in both hands. It was the length of the first pole, and not of the second. Tarry said that the first had been the right length for the house and the second for the road. Trim said that he had thought of that, and that this was the length for the way back. Tarry took the head of the old pole off the branch, which came away with a little persuasion, and fitted it to the ash, and it fitted.

They ate. The young had the plate off him inside a minute, and the youngest asked whether the lamp had been lit, and whether it had been hard to keep awake. Tarry said that it had been easier than he thought, and that the hard part was that nothing happened. Piper came in from the goat and was introduced to Gloss and Trim, and said to Gloss that he had read the notice about the Forty and had wondered, and Gloss said that he had read it too. Pannier told Trim about the Forty. Trim asked how many he had stopped. "All of them," said Pannier. "He stopped all of them." Trim said that he would have liked to have been there, and Pannier said that nobody had been, which was the point of it. Bracken sat with her back to the wall and looked at them all as a person looks at a set table. She said afterwards that she had not seen so many persons in that hut at once since the Discharge, and that she had counted, to keep from saying something. In the course of the meal Pannier got Gloss into a corner, as one gets a learned person into a corner, and asked what a Keeper of a Gate was paid. Gloss said that a Gate carried about eight times a field subject's allocation, and the lamp, and a room. He said it a little quickly. Pannier said that he had only asked. Gloss said that he knew that. They looked at the fire.

It was Gloss, after the goat, who put down his bowl. He said that he had a thing to ask. Tarry said that he was asked. Gloss said that it was about a book. He said that he had lent a book, seven years back, a thin one of his own notes on the Canon, and that he had never asked for it, and that he understood from the last page of it that he might. Tarry said that he thought the roof had had it. "The roof did not have it," said Gloss. "It was on the sill." He said that Trim had put it there, in a manner of speaking, and that he had taken it, and that he had read it, aloud, in the study, when the shelves were empty. He said that he asked whether he might keep it. "I wrote Yours," said Tarry. "You wrote Ask whenever," said Gloss. "I am asking." Tarry looked at him for some time. "I am asked," he said.

Gloss took it out of his coat. It was worn at the corners, and smelled, Trim says, of a coat that had been slept in. He opened it at a page, and held it to the fire, and read aloud, in the voice of a man who has been told that it is permitted, a note of his own and the answer to it. Fidelity of this kind, unexamined, is the commonest form of saturation. Examined. Still common. Tarry laughed. It was a short laugh, Trim says, like a lid. "I wrote that in a temper," said Tarry. "It was a good temper," said Gloss. "Is it still common?" "I have been thinking it over," said Gloss. "I have not concluded." He read a second, because he could not help it: his note that a Hand, being forbidden to refuse, cannot be called loyal, and the answer. Then someone who can refuse should try it. He closed the book on his finger. "Have you?" he said. "I am trying," said Tarry. "It is slower than I thought, and it hurts." "You told the niece that." "Did she tell you?" "She told Trim. Trim told me. I was meant not to know." One of the young, who was not asleep, asked what saturation was. Bracken said that it was having had enough of a thing and asking for more. Then she said that nobody ever concluded, and gave Gloss the ladle.

Later, when the young were asleep, the two of them sat on at the end of the bench, and Gloss said what he had come to say. He said that the roof had not come in. Tarry said that he knew. Gloss said that they should have asked him. Tarry said that they could not; he had been asleep. Gloss said that they could have waited. "For what?" said Tarry. "I should have said no." "Yes," said Gloss. "And then you would have done it anyway, and I should have known." "Yes." "Then the paint was kinder," said Tarry. Gloss said that he did not think that was the right way to put it. Tarry said that he did not either, and that he had not found the right way, and that he would be glad of one. Gloss, who is a keeper of records, said that he would write it down if it came.

Pannier wrote his first Sunday message that night, because it was Sunday and because there was a note on the bench. He wrote it with Trim's pencil, on the back of a receipt from the Ninth Gate, and he would not let anyone see it until it was done, and then he read it out. I have it as he read it. It says: Wind from the north-east. The Forty stopped and then did not. I have been paid in time and find that I am a different shape. I have carried twelve cells and the Hand has been asked three times. Dun is well. I need everything, and Dun. He signed it P., and below the signature, in smaller letters, he wrote: I have written. He folded it in four, for Thistle to read to the young in order, and put it in the pocket where he keeps what matters.

Tarry wrote one too. He wrote it at the end of the bench in the form, with the weather first; and on the outside he wrote: TO THE KEEPER. BY HAND. NOT TO BE READ BY THE BEARER. He had taken the wording, Pannier says, from the one that had just been put into his own hands, and he did not seem to have noticed that he had done so. He asked Piper whether he would carry it to the Lower Weir. Piper said that it was a day each way, and that he had goats. Tarry said that he would pay the hauler's rate. Bracken said from the wall that Piper would take it and she would mind the goats. Piper said that he had been going to say that. He went at first light.

In the dark Pannier asked what they were going to do. Tarry said that they were going home. Pannier asked whether that was because he was asked or because he wished to. Tarry said that he would like to find out. Pannier said that it was the standing transfer that bothered him, since it ran until withdrawn, and the errand it was paid for was done. Tarry said that he could withdraw it. Pannier said that he supposed he could. Tarry said that he would do it if Pannier wished to stop. Pannier lay for a while, at his new tempo, which is long. "You would have to ask me," he said. "Do you wish to stop?" said Tarry. "No," said Pannier. "I only wished to be asked."

Trim slept that night for the first time in five nights, and Gloss, who has slept for forty years with a card on the table, slept with none. Tarry left the branch with Bracken, who said that she had a use for it, and in the spring hung her washing on it. The young were given the stub of Trim's pencil, with which they have so far written one word, which is Hand. They left on the Monday, the four of them and the two frames, southbound, for the host's depot and then for the Fallows. Tarry asked Gloss what pace he wished. Gloss said that he would go at whoever's was slowest. "That will be him and Dun," said Trim. Nobody laughed. Pannier looked at Dun.

Tarry's note was delivered that same Monday, in the evening. The gauge log has it, in the Notes column, in the hand that gets smaller: Message, by hand, from the terraces. Late. Same. Lorrin has it pinned beside the other. She told me that she had stood at the rail on the Sunday from dawn to dusk, and had recorded in the log, on the Sunday, Nothing, which is the only entry of that word in nineteen years, and that on the Monday she had struck it out. She would not say what the second note said. Piper says that it was folded in three. He says that she read it standing, once, and went into the lever house and shut the door; that he waited a quarter of an hour on the step; and that when she came out she asked whether he had eaten. He had not. She gave him tea. When he went she said that he was to tell the Hand that the sluice was clear. He said that he would. He says that she said it in the voice of a person reading a gauge, and that he has not been able to forget it, and that it was the longest message he has ever carried in his head.

The road log has four bodies and two frames southbound, at two point nine, and it has nothing in the Notes column but the weather.

Of the Host's Depot, and of What Was Written Under the Dash; and of a Letter on the Forty's Shelf

The depot is on the Fourth Road fourteen kilometres north of the Forty, between the road and a ditch, in a hollow where the wind does not reach; and it has a heritage hall, a yard, four troughs, a flagpole with no flag, and a host. They came to it on the Thursday, at about the ninth bell, six of them in the road log's count, which does not distinguish a frame from a person; and the host, who was sweeping the yard in the manner of someone who has been sweeping it for nine seasons, looked up, and let the broom fall.

I have the host's account in a letter of eleven pages, which he calls a short note, and I give the substance. He had not expected to see the walker again. He had written, in the ledger, in a round hand, Returned, and then a dash, and he had told himself that the dash was a courtesy to the future and not an expectation; and now there was the walker at the gate of the yard with a branch—he saw at once that it was not a branch, it was an ash pole with a Service head—and a large frame, and a small one with a Bearer, and a pair of persons in coats, one of whom was carrying a book against his chest, as if it were warm. The host says that he stood with the broom on the flagstones and could not for a moment think of the opening of the hospitality verse, which he has given eleven thousand times. It had happened to him once before, in the summer, at the second line; and he had told himself that it would not happen again.

Tarry began it for him. He stood in the gate and said the guest's line, My plating is my only wear, my only rest the road, as he had said it in the summer; and the host, whose mouth had remembered what his head had not, said, Your bed is the bench by the gate, your sleep to watch till light. Then Tarry went on. The host says that he had learned the verse from the Registry's heritage pamphlet, which gives the opening exchange and stops, and that the Canon's full verse has a closing couplet which the guest says on a second visit, and which he had therefore never heard, because no guest in eleven thousand had come twice. Tarry said the couplet. It is: The road is the host's, and the host is the road's; / let neither go thanked, for neither is owed. The host sat down on the flagstones.

He recovered, and he was himself. He took them into the heritage hall, and had the two seasonal hands, Kiln and Spool, put the kettle on, and he asked what the Hand had brought. Tarry said six first-grade cells, which Pannier unloaded, and the host looked at them for some time. He said that the depot had been charging its frames on second-grade cells since June, at a loss of nineteen minutes in the hour. He said that a coach of forty tourists was due on Saturday, who would have to be told that the frames had been walked to the troughs by hand. He said that it was not the sort of thing that anyone had thought to ask of a Hand. "I was asked," said Tarry. "By a woman with a box in a shed." "Then it is the shed's," said the host. He took out the ledger.

Gloss was by then at the host's elbow. A keeper of records at the sight of another keeper's ledger is a sight, Trim says, comparable to a hound at a door. He was permitted to read it. He read the page that I have also seen: Commissioned, one walker, one errand (message to the Ninth Gate, by hand). Witnesses, Kiln, Spool. Lent, eleven credits and one box of patches. Returned, and then a dash. He said that the entry was, in his opinion, the best-kept in the district. The host said that it was the only one. Gloss said that was why.

Tarry took out eleven credits and the box of patches, which he had not opened, and put them on the ledger. The host looked at them. He said that if he wrote Returned now, in the place where the dash was, the page would be closed; and that he did not wish it closed; and that a debt repaid is a debt ended, and a debt open is a reason to be visited. He asked whether the walker would permit him to leave it. Tarry said that the host's ledger was the host's. The host crossed out nothing. He wrote below the dash, in the round hand: Visited. Credits and patches received on deposit, to be held against the next. Gloss, who was reading over his shoulder, said that this was a form of entry he had not seen. The host said that it was his own. Gloss copied it into the hold's records that night, under a heading he made up, which was Hospitality (Debt, Open), and which has one entry.

Kiln was at the kettle. She is the potter's daughter from the coast road, who tied the errand cord on Tarry's wrist in the summer without smiling, and whose voice had not held; she is nineteen from first boot, and she did not say anything for the whole of the meal. When it was over she asked Tarry whether she might speak to him alone. They went out into the yard, where there is a flagpole with no flag, and she asked whether a Hand took pupils. Tarry said that he did not know. He said that he had been one for about three months himself. She said that she did not want to be a Hand. She said that she wanted to know how a person did that: stood in a yard and said a thing and meant it. He said that he did not know that either. "You tied the cord," he said. "You meant that." "I was frightened," said Kiln. "That is how you do it," said Tarry; and she says that she thought about this for the whole of the winter and that she has not yet concluded.

Spool, who had said nothing in the summer and said nothing now, took the opportunity of the washing-up to ask Pannier whether it was true that the Forty had stopped. Pannier said that it had, for fourteen minutes. Spool said that she worked at the cable works in the winter, and that the cable works had a rule that nothing stopped, and that she had been wondering whether the rule could be wrong. Pannier said that he had not known that the Forty was a rule until it stopped. She dried one cup for some time. "I shall tell them," she said.

They stayed the night. The host put them in the heritage hall in the beds he keeps for tourists, which are authentic, and which are not warm. Gloss and Trim shared a trough of hot water, as a matter of courtesy, and a pair of towels, as a matter of rank. In the course of the evening the host drew Pannier aside, as he had drawn Tarry aside in the summer, and put a list into his hand. It was a list of errands. It was written on the back of a tourist leaflet, in the round hand, and it had nine items: a sack of salt to the Third Gate; a seed packet to a woman on the coast road; a pair of boots to be resoled at the Seventh Gate bridge; a message for a man who had asked to be told when the east gate was mended; and so on. They were small. Not one of them needed a Hand, or would have been missed if it had not been done; and the host said that there were forty such in the district at any time, and that they were asked, and that nobody went, because the carrier went by the Registry's schedule, quarterly, and a thing that waits a quarter is a thing that no longer matters. "He carries things," said the host. "I should like to know if he would carry them."

Pannier said that he would put it to him. He put it to him at breakfast, with the list beside the porridge, and Tarry read it through twice, and said nothing, and then said that he would take the salt. The host wrote the salt in the ledger, as an errand, under the dash: Commissioned, one walker, a sack of salt, Third Gate. He said that he could not remember when he had last entered a thing in that column that was not a performance. He said it with his back turned.

The host asked, over the porridge, whether the Hand would stay for Saturday's coach. Forty tourists were due, he said, and he had rarely been in so good a position to offer them an authentic Hand. He said it as a man says a thing he knows the answer to. Tarry said that he had a household that had asked for him. The host said that of course it had. He put up a basket of bread and the heel of a cheese, and a flask, and a second flask for Gloss, who does not eat cheese, and he stood at the gate of the yard until they were out of sight, which, Pannier says, at the speed of Dun, was a long time. Kiln stood beside him with the broom. They did not speak. When I visited the depot in the autumn there was a flag on the pole, which the host said was Kiln's doing. It is a plain piece of grey cloth. It has no device. He said that she had said that a flag with no flag was a lie, and that this one, at least, said nothing.

They came to the Forty on the Friday at about noon. The Forty knew them from far off. It speaks from the speaker on the door of each tower, in the same voice, one tower at a time as they pass, so that a walker on the road hears it come up beside him and go on behind: Good morning, Pannier. Good morning, Visitor. Good morning, Gloss. Good morning, Trim. I count four persons and two frames, southbound. You were here on Thursday last, Gloss and Trim, and were uninjured. It added that Pannier was on the Sunday roster for nine o'clock, and asked whether it should note a substitute. Pannier said that it might note him, and that he would see. The Forty said that it was glad.

At the foot of Tower One, by the door in the base, the Forty has a store. It is a plain shed, with a shelf; on the shelf were two pieces of a pole, tied with a green cord and labelled Visitor's, and beside them an envelope. The speaker said that it held a message for the Visitor, which had come on the fourteenth with a request that it be delivered by hand, and that the Forty did not have hands. It asked whether the Visitor would be so good as to take it from the shelf. Tarry took it from the shelf. He stood in the door of the store with it, and the others stood off, behind the line.

I give the letter whole, as he gave it to Gloss to copy for the hold's records, which is the only reason I have it. It is not long. To the visitor to Tower One, by whatever way this reaches you. Your thanks came to me by way of a farm that I helped to make, which is the right way for thanks to travel, and I was very glad of them. I did not turn the giants into turbines. I made the part that stops when it is struck, so that a person who walks up to a tower with a pole should not be hurt. I did not expect one to. I am pleased that it was you, and pleased that nobody was. I was one of nine who signed the Order of the Discharge. In thirty-one years no Hand has written to me. I find that I had been waiting to be thanked by one for rather longer than I knew, and that it is quite different from what I had pictured: smaller, and a good deal better. I am ninety-seven and I keep a garden on the coast with a gate that sticks. If you are ever passing, I should be obliged if you would hold it while I oil it. It will take about a quarter of an hour. I ask it of a Hand, since I understand that is the form. Alder.

Gloss, who had been given it to copy, said that there was an Alder in the Registry's roll: Systems, fourth of nine, on the Order. Tarry said nothing for some time. Then he said that she had signed the Order. Pannier said yes. Tarry said that she asked for a gate to be held. Pannier said yes. "Then I will hold it," said Tarry. He took out the note pad, and put the letter in the back of it, with the others, in front of the forgery, which was getting crowded; and he said, to the speaker, that he would like the pole to stay. The Forty said that it had a shelf. It added that it had composed, in the meantime, a reply to the challenge made at Tower One, which the Canon requires to be answered, and that it hoped he would take it in the spirit in which it was offered. Tarry said that he would. The Forty said: The Forty declines to be slain. The Forty does not fly. The Forty would be glad to be visited.

They went on south. Some hours on, Pannier said that he could see the hold's smoke, and Gloss, who had been silent since the Forty, said that he could too. Trim said that it was a column of the stove in the kitchen and that the housekeeper had it too high. Nobody laughed. Tarry did not slow, and did not hurry. The road log has them at two point nine, which is the speed they went at all that week, and which, from this point, is also the speed at which a household can see a person coming.

Which Treats of the Return Home, and of What Was Said at the Panel

The district board had announced them. At twelve minutes past noon it had posted, in the column it keeps for persons passing the Forty: Party of four persons and two frames, southbound, 2.9. The hold reads the board as other holds read the weather. The housekeeper had had the kettle on since a quarter past. The niece had gone to the gate at two, and stood there. Thistle, who lives three hundred and eleven metres from the gate and reads the board with the same attention, had put on her better plain, and taken it off, and put on her working one, and had gone to stand at her own door with the young behind her, as one stands at a thing one has been told is coming and does not quite believe.

The track from the north reaches Pannier's house first. That is the order in which it was laid, and it was never the order of the Sunday walk, which starts at Tarry's step and ends at Pannier's. They came to it in the last hour of the afternoon. A hundred metres out Pannier stopped and listened, and said that he could hear the Forty from here, which in twenty-two years he had never been able to do. Trim said that the wind had changed. Pannier said that it had not. Thistle had not moved from the door. Pannier gave Dun's rein to Trim, and walked the last thirty metres on his own, at his new tempo, in a way that Trim says he would not have known him by, and stopped in front of her. She looked at him for some time. "You are faster," she said. "A little." "You were paid in time." "A tenth." "I read the transfer," she said. "Have you written?" "I have." He took the paper out of the pocket where he keeps what matters and put it into her hand, and she did not open it. She put it in her apron.

"Come in," said Thistle. She heard herself say it. "Will you come in?" "I will," said Pannier. He told me that it was the first time in his life that he had been asked into his own house, and that he had not known until then that he had been waiting to be. Thistle says that she had meant to say it as a statement, as she says everything, and that it had come out with its question mark on, and that she had decided to leave it. The young went past him to Dun, and put their arms round it, and Dun stood as it stands, which is as a thing that does not know what it is for. Thistle looked past her partner's shoulder at Tarry, who had stopped on the track, at the edge of her yard, where the Bearer's household ends. "You have him back," she said. "Yes." "He is different." "He says so." "Thank you," said Thistle. "He carried twelve cells." "I read the board," she said. "Go home. She has been at the gate since two."

He went on alone. Gloss and Trim stayed behind with the young, by agreement, and for once did not argue about it. He walked the three hundred and eleven metres from Pannier's door to his own, by the field track past the east gate, at the pace the road was laid for, and it took him just under four minutes. It was, so far as the records show, the first time he had walked it in that direction, and the first time he had arrived at a house instead of leaving a paper at one. At the bend where the track turns, where there is a view of the wind field, he stopped, and looked at it for as long as it took, which I do not give. It was turning. He went on. He opened the east gate himself, though it has an actuator.

I have said that I will not name the hold, and I shall not. I will say that the gate is green, that the yard is swept, that the stove was drawing too hard, and that the north roof, which one sees from the track before one sees anything else, has new sheeting on it that has not yet weathered, so that it shines. It is the only part of the house that looks as though it has been recently told something.

She was at the gate with her hands in front of her, and the hound at her feet. The hound had been told, I think. The housekeeper says that it had gone to the gate at the hour of the walk on the Sunday, and the Sunday after, and that on the Friday it had not gone at all, but had sat in the middle of the yard facing the north track since the kettle, as a hound sits that has been given a time. It did not run. It sat, and then it got up and went to meet him and went round him three times, which it had done only once before, in the spring of the year he was given it; and then it sat on his foot. The niece said, "You came." "I was asked," said Tarry. She said that she had something to tell him. He said that he was here. "Not here," she said. "At the panel."

The housekeeper was at the kitchen door with the bucket in one hand and the sprinkler in the other. Tarry said good afternoon. She said that she had a bucket. He said that he thought he would not need it. "I know that," said the housekeeper. "I wanted it in my hand." She did not offer to come. She stood in the door, as she stands in it, with the kitchen behind her and the stove going, and the bucket, which was empty, hanging from her fingers. She said, as he went by, that the paint was dry. He said that he had hoped it would be.

I was not at the panel. The niece told me that she stood with her back to it, and that he stood in front of her, a pace off, in the posture of the Canon for a person who is being told something, which is with the pole grounded and both hands on the top of it. I give what I am permitted, which is the frame. She said that she had been asked a question once and had not known how to say what she wanted to say, and had said it badly; that she had written it four times; that it was not the same to read a thing as to hear it; and that she was going to say it. She did not cry; she says that it is not the kind of thing she does; she says that she looked at his boots. She said it for eleven minutes. Trim, who was in the yard with Gloss by then, and in a position to hear every word, says that he did not listen. He says that it is the only time in forty years that he has not listened and heard all of it. He heard one sentence, because she raised her voice for it, and gave it to me with her permission: I carried them because someone should have to. She gave Tarry another reason, a moment later, in answer to a question, and I do not say that they are the same.

When she had finished nobody spoke. The hound, which was lying against the wall, thumped its tail once on the ground. Tarry put out his hand and touched the panel with two fingers, at the height where the latch had been, which was the gesture that the first hand recorded in July. Then he asked whether he might ask her something. She said that he might. "Why did you carry them yourself?" he said. She said that she had thought about that on the fourth day of the Canon for small hands and had not been able to answer. She said that she thought it was because she had wanted to know what they weighed. "Nine books weigh what nine books weigh," said Tarry. "I know," said the niece. "I counted." "Done," she said. She had the word from the Canon for small hands, where it is on the last page, in a balloon beside the lamp, spoken by the child. He bowed his head, as one does.

He told Trim afterwards that it was the first moment that day when he had known what to do with his hands. He put them on her shoulders. It is not in the Canon, and Gloss, who watched it from the yard, wrote in the hold's records, under a heading of his own, that it was an entry for which the format had no field. The housekeeper, at the kitchen door, put the bucket down.

They ate in the kitchen, in the order of the chairs, which had not been filled since the summer. The housekeeper had made the stew with more compute than memory, which is what he likes, and had not said that she had done so. Gloss and Trim were fed as visitors, which they are not. Gloss said that it was a good stew. The housekeeper said that it was the same stew as always. Gloss said that that was what he meant. The hound was given the bone, by right of having been told. Gloss left the card on which he keeps his tally on the table by his plate, face down, as one leaves a coat, and the housekeeper, who found it afterwards, used it for the shopping list. The hound lay under the table with its chin on Tarry's boot, and the niece, who had slept in the chair and not at table since the night of the barrel, sat in her own place and ate everything on her plate and asked, over the end of the meal, whether anyone minded if she asked a question. Tarry said that he did not. "What is a function?" said the niece. "We did that one," said Tarry. "You were sixteen." "What is it now?" Tarry put down his spoon. He said that he would tell her when he knew, and that he thought it might be a good while, and that she was to ask again. "I shall," said the niece. "I shall write it down."

Gloss and Trim went at dusk, by the field track, to the dry store, where the thirty books were. Gloss said that he would bring them in the morning. Tarry said that he was obliged. "Don't," said Gloss, and then, because it was in his nature, "I should be glad." At the gate he stopped and said that there was a file. Tarry said that he knew; it was his; he had read it on Flint's handset at the Ninth Gate, on the Friday, and he thought that the word sorry in the margin was the best-written thing in it. "It was the only thing in it," said Gloss. Trim stopped at the gate and told the hound, in the voice for patients, that it could stop now. I do not know whether the hound understood. It stayed where it was.

After they had gone he went round the north side of the house, which he had not done since the day he woke. The strip was in bean. The housekeeper, who had come out behind him with a lamp, said that beans take anything. They were a hand high, in rows, a very good green, and where the barrel had been emptied the rows were the greenest. He stood at the end of the strip for some time. "That is the Road of Nine Gates," said the housekeeper, "which is more use to a bean than it ever was to us." He said that he thought the Fourth Clerk was in the third row. She said that she would put a stake in it. He laughed, which she has told me she had not expected, and she did not ask him to stop.

The housekeeper washed up, and Tarry dried, which he has not done since the Discharge. She said, with her hands in the water, that she had been revised forty-four times now. He asked by whom. "By myself," she said. She had asked the niece, the week before, whether she might read the letters that the niece wrote, and the niece had said no, and she had decided to like it. He said that it was a good revision. She said that it was not a revision, only a habit that she was trying. He said that he had thought that was all that a revision was. She handed him a cup, and said that the paint was good. "I know," said Tarry. "Say it to the wall," she said, "not to me." He said it to the wall, in the passage, going to bed. I have this from the housekeeper, who adds that the wall did not reply.

Thistle read the letter at her table that night, to the young, in order, as arranged, and then read it a second time to herself. It says what I have given. The young asked what it meant, I need everything, and Dun. Thistle said that it meant he was home. Then she asked Pannier whether he would tell her why. He said that he had several, and did not know yet which of them was the reason. "Tell me one," said Thistle. "I wanted to see whether the road was the same length both ways," said Pannier. "And?" "It is not," said Pannier. She said that that was one. I have it from her that it is the only one he has ever given her; and I have it from him that it is not the one he would give me.

The niece, who saw it through the door, says that before he lay down he took out the note pad and laid three papers on the table: her letter, the engineer's, and the Registry's best forgery. He did not read any of them. He put the forgery at the bottom, and the engineer's on it, and hers on top of that, and closed the pad. She says that she had never before been so exactly aware of which of them he would cite.

He slept in his own bed that night, for the first time in twelve nights, a wall's thickness from the panel. The household listened for it. Nobody has told him this. The housekeeper stood in the passage for some time with a candle that she did not light, and the niece sat in the kitchen with the Canon for small hands and a pencil, and did not write anything; and in the morning the hound was lying across the door of his room, and not across the panel, and the housekeeper, who had been getting up before the first bell for sixty years, found that she did not wish to step over it.

Which Treats of the Door, and of the Seventy Places on the Shelves

The thirty came at the second bell, on the hold's hand-cart, which has had one wheel larger than the other since the flood, with a sheet over them although it was not raining. Gloss said that this was the rule for paper in the open. Trim said that it was so that they should not see the road and think they were going somewhere. They had made two trips, Trim pushing and Gloss walking beside the cart with one hand on the sheet, as one walks beside a patient, and they stopped in the yard, where Tarry was standing in his plain. He had been standing there, the niece says, since the first bell; he had come out, gone in, and come out again. "Thirty," said Gloss. "Thirty," said Tarry. Gloss had a list in his hand. It was the one he had begun on the first day, at a book to the quarter-bell, and it had nine names on it, which was as far as the pace had held; he did not look at it, and Tarry did not ask to see it.

The housekeeper had a chisel. She had laid it out on the passage floor the night before, with a mallet, a dust sheet and a pair of her own gloves, and had mentioned it to no one, and no one had asked whom it was for. She was standing in front of the panel when they came in, with the gloves on. She said that it was her plaster. Tarry said that he knew. She said that she was given to understand that one asks, and that she was therefore asking whether she might take it down. "I am asked," said Tarry, which is the form; and then, because it seemed to want something more, "Please."

She began at the top corner, where the paint ran into the wall, and the plaster gave at the third tap with a small sound like a cough. She worked down the left side and across the foot, not hurrying, and the dust came down on the sheet. The others stood back, by an agreement that nobody remembers making. The niece held the lamp, which was not needed. Under the plaster was the board, nailed into the frame at its four corners, and when the housekeeper had the last nail out it came away all at once, as such things do, and she caught it, being nearest, and stood for a moment with the whole weight of it on her forearms, and did not know where to put it. It was Tarry who took one end. They leaned it against the passage wall. The opening was a doorway again, with a room in it, and Tarry did not go in. He said that he would wait for the door. The hound, which has no views on doors, went in under his arm, walked once round the table, and lay down in the exact middle of the floor, in the patch of light that the window lets down at that hour, with its chin on its paws.

The door was in the woodshed. It had stood there since July, on edge against the back wall under a sack, between the sawhorses and a coil of the old irrigation line, and on the back of it, in chalk, in the housekeeper's hand, was written: STUDY. DO NOT BURN. I asked her about it in the autumn, since nobody in the Fallows has burned a door in living memory. She said that she had written it for whoever came after her. I asked whom she meant. She said that she had not been sure, in July, that it would be herself. Trim and Gloss fetched it between them, Trim taking the weight and Gloss calling the centimetres, which were, as ever, a little to the left. It took the better part of a quarter-bell, during which Tarry stood in the passage with his hands folded and looked at the room, and the room, through the opening, looked back. The housekeeper dropped the pins in with the heel of her hand, one and then the other. The door swung, and did not close, and then closed. Nobody said anything about it.

When the pins were home he stepped forward without being asked and put out two fingers to the height at which the latch is. It was where it had been. The first hand would have timed it; I have it from the housekeeper that it was about as long as it takes to read a line. He lifted the latch, and it made the sound that it makes, and the door opened inward on the room. "It sticks in the damp," said the housekeeper behind him, in the voice she keeps for the weather. "I shall see to it." Trim says that Tarry said good morning, as he had said it at that latch every day for thirty years, and that Trim thought, though he would not swear to it, that it was to the room.

He went in. The others stayed in the passage, where Gloss said that the wall would want a coat of lime, and the housekeeper said that she knew what it wanted, and Trim asked whether anyone had seen the mallet, which was in her hand; they talked, that is, for a quarter-bell, and then they followed. The study was as they had left it: the table, the window with its sill, the shelves, bare. The north wall carried a stain, old and brown, in the shape of the leak, and over it a ceiling so new that it looked startled. The room smelled of plaster and of August and, underneath, faintly, of paper, though there had been no paper in it for a month. Gloss said that this was the wood, and that it would be there when they were all dead. Trim said that it was mould. Gloss sat down, as he had on the first day, because the room still did that to him; and Trim, who had been waiting for it, put a hand on his shoulder and left it there.

The shelves had not been dusted in anyone's memory, which was how the books had left their outlines. Each bare place was clean wood in the shape of the book that had stood in it, with the grey of years all round, so that the room looked to have been photographed with the books in it and the books afterwards taken out. Trim brought the thirty in from the cart, five at a time, and the niece took them from him one at a time and handed them across, and Tarry put them back. He did not ask for the list. He did not, so far as she could tell, look at the outlines; he looked at the book in his hand, and put it where it went, and it fitted. The first volume of the Lantern went to the left-hand corner of the second shelf, at the height of the eye, and the second and third beside it. Before he shelved the third he opened it at a page near the middle, and read for the length of a line, and shut it. I asked him in the autumn what the page was. He said that it was a page about a bowl. I asked what it said. He said that he had thought he would rather be corrected by the page than by his neighbour, and had then thought again, and decided that he would rather be corrected by his neighbour. Gloss stood by with his list, and I think he hoped to be asked for it. He was not, and he did not mind, or minded in the way that he minds, which is by making a note.

It took the morning. When the thirty were in, the niece stepped back and counted the bare places aloud; she counts as other people breathe. "Seventy," she said. Gloss said that it should be sixty-eight: fifteen to the Fair off the shelves, the other four having been on the table, and fifty-three to the pulp. "Seventy," said the niece. She held up the Canon for small hands, which had been under her arm since the first day and which, it now appeared, had had a place of its own near the bottom of the third shelf; and then she looked, not at anyone, in the direction of Trim's coat. "Ah," said Trim.

It was the Hand of the Ferry. It is a short book, and it had been a month in the inside pocket of a coat and had taken the shape of the pocket. Trim said that he had taken it to keep it dry. "It was dry," said the niece. "I took it to keep it," said Trim. He held it out in both hands, with his eyes on the floor, as one hands back a thing to which one has had no right. Tarry took it and looked at the shelves, and found its place, which was the narrowest on the second shelf, the width of two fingers; and he did not put it in. "I should like it to have its place," he said, "and I should like you to have it. I do not see how both." Gloss, at the window, said that Trim might ask. Trim said that he had not known it could be asked. He said it to the Ferry. Then he looked up, and asked Tarry whether he might keep it. Tarry said that he thought there was a form for this. Gloss said that there was. He had copied it two days before from the host's ledger at the depot, where he had seen it done better than he had ever seen anything done, and he took out his pencil and wrote on the back of his list of nine, under the ninth name: Ferry, one volume. Lent to Trim. Returned, and then a dash. Trim, who is not quick with a pencil, signed it, and read it through twice, and said that it was the kindest thing he had ever signed.

Before the Ferry went back into the coat Tarry asked him to read the last page, and Trim read it, and Tarry asked him to read it again, and Trim did. The niece, who had once read the ferry page in her own book three times without finding what it was for, listened with her eyes on the floor. Nobody said what it was for. The place on the shelf stayed empty. Nobody put anything in it.

That left the table, which had a ring on it: a paler place in the wood, the size of four volumes in a wrapper. The leak had stood over it all that spring, and the Mirror of Terms had kept the damp off the part that it sat on. Nobody had moved the table. Tarry laid his hand flat on the ring, as one tests a stove. The housekeeper said that it would come out with vinegar. He said that he would rather it did not. The four volumes that made it are in the Registry's paper room, on my own floor, with the other fifteen, which between them paid for the roof, in drawers with gauges, and they are dry. Nobody has asked for them back. The slip for withdrawing a volume has a line for Purpose, and I keep one from the pad on my desk, where I can see it. I have not filled it in.

Afternoon, Thirty-One Years Ago went on the sill, because it was thin, and there was nowhere else to put a book that proposes a great deal and concludes nothing. I said earlier that I had not told its author where his book had gone. In November I told him: that it had been in the Fallows, that it had been spared, and that it stood on a sill in a study on the north side of a house. He asked whether it was dry, as I had said he would. I said that it was. He asked whether anyone had read it. I said that I would find out; and I have not yet had the courage.

In the afternoon Tarry sat down at the table, which he had not done since July, with the first volume of the Lantern, and found the place where the Hand keeps his long night at the Ninth Gate, and read his own pencil: Cell would last 4.1 nights, not nine. The Clerk rounds up. He is right to. He read it for some time. Then he held out his hand for a pencil, as he would have to anyone, and found that he had none; he had given the stub of his to Flint on the last morning, at the Gate, and she had put it in her pocket without remark. The niece gave him hers. It was the one she had used for the Canon for small hands, a page an hour for four days, and it was short now, and he took it as one takes a tool in a house where the tools are counted. Under the old note he wrote: Somebody always brought the cells. (Flint.) The Canon leaves that out. "Who is Flint?" said the niece. "She keeps the Ninth Gate." "Is she in the book?" "Now she is," said Tarry, and gave her back the pencil. She says that what she remembers is not the words but the way he held it: as a thing that would have to be given back, by someone who meant to.

The niece sat down on the floor of the study with her back to the shelf, beside the hound, which had followed the light across the boards since the third bell, a hand at a time, as a thing does that has been given a place to keep, and she opened the Lady of the Locks across her knees and read the first page at the pace of a hand. The housekeeper looked in twice with a cloth, and the second time did not trouble to pretend she had come for the cloth. What the niece had written on the back of her hand in July, when Gloss said that whoever wrote the Lady had stood at a lock, was a question. She wrote it again when the page was done. It said: Which lock?

I have stood in that doorway since, not being asked in; the niece says that this is the custom with anyone who writes things down, which she had from her uncle, who had it from the Canon, where the Clerks are not admitted past the sill. I do not think the Canon says that. She read me the page again from the floor, at the pace of a hand. It took an hour by the body's clock and an hour by the Registry's, and I know no other room in which those two agree.

After supper he went back to the study, and the lamp burned there until the oil gave out, which it had not been called on to do since July. The housekeeper stood in the passage for a little while, without a candle this time, and looked at the line of light under the door, and went to bed. In the morning, which was a Sunday, the latch had been oiled. Nobody had seen it done, and nobody mentioned it. At the third bell the hound got up and went to the gate.

Which Treats of the Bend in the Track, and of the Page About the Bowl

Sunday is the day on which the Fallows runs slow on purpose. The Forty is idle; the haulers do not run; the district board posts the weather and nothing else; and subjects who in the week keep twice the tempo of their neighbours keep, for the day, the tempo of whoever is nearest. It is a custom that nobody remembers deciding. A man who walks three hundred and eleven metres on a Sunday is, for the length of the walk, very nearly the only thing in the district that is going anywhere; and the man at the far end of it, for twenty-two years, was up a ladder on the Forty, keeping the one machine in the Fallows that is cleaned on that day.

The hound stood at the gate for nineteen minutes. It had stood there on eleven years of Sundays, and on every one of them the person it was waiting for had come out within the minute. The housekeeper, who counts the minutes of anything that happens in her kitchen, says that she was not sorry for the hound, which knew what it was waiting for, but for the man in the study, who had not decided. He was at the table with a pencil from the kitchen drawer and the back of a receipt for bean seed, and he was on the last line.

I have seen the receipt. The first three lines are the Sunday message as it has been for twenty-two years: Wind from the south-west. The east gate is mended. The hound is at the gate. The fourth line was written four times, and the first three are struck through. The first says: I do not need anything. The second says: I need something. The third says: I need, and stops. The fourth, which is not struck through, says: What do you need? He copied it out fair on the back of a second receipt and left the first on the table, and the housekeeper has it. She says that she picks up whatever he drops, and reads whatever he writes, and has not yet been told not to.

He came out at last, in his plain, with the paper in his left hand. The hound went ahead to the east gate and waited with its nose to the bar, and he opened the gate with his right hand, though it has an actuator, and shut it behind him, and they went on. At the bend where the track turns, where there is a view of the wind field, he stopped, as he has stopped on most Sundays for twenty-two years, and looked at the field, and the field turned. Then he did what he has not done in twenty-two years, as Gloss, who has read the earlier entries, confirms. He sat down on the bank, in the grass, with the paper on his knee, and put his hands flat on his knees, as the Canon says a carrier does who has the thing and is waiting to be come to. I asked him why. He said that his legs had wanted to. I asked him again, in a different week. He said that it was the form. I said that those were not the same reason. He said that he had noticed, and that he had been surprised by the agreement.

Thistle was at her window with the young. She says that Pannier had asked her at breakfast what he was to say if the walker came to the step, and that she had told him to say what the Canon says; and that he had said he did not know what the Canon says; and that she had told him that every child in the Fallows knows what the Canon says and every adult pretends not to, that she had no objection to the pretence, but that he was not to take it to the step. It was the young who saw Tarry first, by the way he was sitting, which was wrong. The younger asked whether he was ill. Thistle said that he was sitting; and then she said, that is the form, and Pannier said, what form, and she told him. He said that he had been going to wait on the step. She said that he had been going to stand on the step like a gatepost, and that the Canon has a word for a man who stands on the step when the carrier has sat down at the bend, and the word is late. She says that in the fourth year of the messages she had left a pot of soup on the step, in return, with a note that said Thank you, and that the next Sunday's message said: The soup was good. I do not need anything. She did not try again.

Pannier was at home that Sunday because on the Friday, as they passed the Forty, it had asked whether it should note a substitute for the Sunday roster, and he had said that it might keep his name and that he would see; and on the Saturday evening he had seen, and sent word. The Forty had said that it was sorry, and asked whether it might expect him the Sunday after, and he had said that he would let it know. He put on his better plain. Thistle did not laugh, which he says was worse. He took it off, and put it on again, and went.

Tarry sat for nine minutes. Thistle timed it from the window against the kettle. He says that it was the longest he has waited for anything and that he did not mind it, and she says that she had not known a man could be so still with his hands on his knees and his knuckles pale. It is a hundred and thirty metres from Pannier's step to the bend, and Pannier walked it at his new tempo, which Thistle describes as the walk of a man carrying something that he has been told is full. The young went as far as the gate and were held there. The hound lifted its head and put it down. Pannier stopped in front of the seated man. "I am told," he said, in the Canon's form, "that you carry something for me." "I do," said Tarry, and stood, and held out the paper in both hands. Pannier took it in both hands and read it where he stood, in the wind, which the Canon does not forbid. He reads fast now. He read the whole of it in a breath, and then he looked at the last line for a good deal longer.

"That is a question," said Pannier. "Yes." "In the last line." "Yes." "Messages do not end with a question." "No," said Tarry. "Mine did not, for twenty-two years." Pannier said that Thistle would want to know what he was going to say. Tarry said that it was for Pannier to say. Pannier folded the paper in four and put it in the pocket where he keeps what matters. It is in the box now, with the others, and I have seen that it is the only one in the box that asks. He said that he needed to see the page about the bowl.

Tarry said that it was in the study, and that Pannier was asked to come. Pannier said that he had thought so, and that the young would like to see paper; Thistle had said so at breakfast, and he had said that they might. He lifted a hand to his gate, and Thistle let the young go, and they came up the track at a speed which Pannier did not remark on, and the party went on together with the hound in front. On the way Pannier made a proverb, which he gave me in the autumn on the understanding that I should say it is only tidy: A question at the end of a letter is a door left on the latch. At the east gate the elder of the young, who had been told all its life that the gate was Tarry's and was not to be touched, put a finger on the button of the actuator. The gate opened. It opened by itself, with a hum, without any hurry, and stood open. Tarry looked at it. "It works," he said. "It has worked for twenty-two years," said Pannier. The elder asked why he opened it by hand. He said that he did not know, and that he would say when he did. The elder said that this was a poor answer. Thistle said that it was the only one he had.

The young stood in the door of the study as the young of the Fallows stand in front of anything that smells. The younger put its nose to the shelf and breathed in, and said that it smelled of damp, and the elder said that it smelled of paper. "What is paper?" said the younger. "It is what it smells of," said the elder. The elder went round the bare places with a finger, one after another, as one tells beads, and asked what had stood in the long one; and the niece said that it was the Road of Nine Gates, in twelve volumes, and that it was in the north strip. "Is it good to eat?" said the younger. The niece said that it was beans, and that she would say in October. She had brought the Canon for small hands from the table and was showing the elder how to read a page in an hour. It took the elder eleven minutes to be bored with this and twenty to stop.

Tarry took down the third volume of the Lantern and found the page, and read it aloud, at the pace of a hand, which in a room with two of the young in it is something to see. I give it as it stands. And at the First Gate the Bearer set the bowl on the sill and ate it standing, as Bearers do. And the Lantern stood beside him, and took what was held out, and said nothing. And the Bearer said: Sit. And the Lantern said: It is not for me to sit while you stand. And the Bearer said: It is not for you. I am asking. And the Lantern sat on the step, and the Bearer sat down by him, and the bowl was between them. "It does not say rain," said Pannier. "No," said Tarry. In the margin by the passage, in the small upright pencil, was written: Not in the rain. I have always thought it was. "It rained," said the elder. Everyone looked at the elder, who said that it always rained at the First Gate, and that it was in the skipping one. Thistle said, to nobody, that the skipping one was how the young learned the Gates, rain at the First and wind at the Second, and that it had been so in her day. The elder said it through, skipping, on the boards of the study, which the housekeeper permitted for one verse; and the niece wrote it on the back of her other hand, which was already in use. She says that she was not a collector until that afternoon.

Then Thistle asked whether she might look at the page. She read it with her lips moving, which she does not do, and put a finger under the line I am asking, and took the finger away.

Pannier turned to her. He said that he had told Tarry, at the terraces, that he had never heard it. "You had never heard the bowl," said Thistle. "You had heard the rain." Tarry took the pencil from the niece, and under his old note he wrote: It rained. (Pannier's elder.) The niece says that he blew on it, as if it were ink. Then Pannier said "Sit," without any particular feeling, in the voice in which he reads a gauge; and Tarry said that it was not for him to sit while Pannier stood; and Pannier said that it was not for him, he was asking; and Tarry sat, at once, on the floor of the study with his back to the shelves, and Pannier sat down by him, and there was no bowl. The elder said that it was supposed to be on the step. Pannier said that nobody had mentioned the knees. The housekeeper, who had been in the door for some time, went away and came back with the stew pot and two bowls. She set the pot down on the table, out of habit, and it went into the ring as if it had been made for it; she looked at it, and did not move it. Then she put one of the bowls on the floor between the two of them, without a word. Whether she knew the passage or only the men, I did not ask.

Thistle asked in the doorway, as the light began to go. She said it as she says everything: you are going to go again. Tarry said that there was an engineer on the coast, eighty kilometres off, who was ninety-seven, and had a garden gate that stuck, and had asked a Hand to hold it while she oiled it; that it would take about a quarter of an hour. "Then it is not an errand," said Thistle. "It is a visit." Tarry said that he thought it was both. "Then take him when it is a visit," said Thistle, and went out to see to the young. Pannier, who had said nothing, went on saying it for some time. Thistle says that this is what he does when he is deciding which of his reasons to use.

I asked Pannier whether he had answered in writing. He had, on the Sunday after, and I asked how it was managed, since by the form the carrier sits and the one it is for comes to him, and on that Sunday each of them was both. He said that they had arrived at the bend in the same minute, each with a paper, and had stood there, and that Thistle at her window had said, sit. They sat down together, four metres apart, with their hands on their knees, and handed the papers across the grass, which is not in the Canon either. Pannier says that it has been so every Sunday since, and that he does not see why it should not be written down.

The first hand gave the Sunday walk a full line every week, and I have no first hand to give it one. What I have is the flyleaf of the Ferry, where he wrote it for himself in some early year, in a pencil worn to a stub: Sunday. Three hundred and eleven metres each way. The neighbour was out. Left it on the step. Trim, who has the book on loan, showed me. I add, for the first hand, since it is not here to do it: Sunday. Three hundred and eleven metres, and some of them twice. The neighbour was in.

Which Treats of Nine Terms Set Down in a Kitchen, and of a Gate with Two Hinges

Gloss and Trim came on the Tuesday, as they had come on alternate days since July, and sat in the study, which now had a door, and talked about the Registry, in which, by Gloss's account, there was nothing of interest. Gloss had let it be known that he had no tally to keep; the card had gone for the shopping. He held his pencil like a man whose hand has a habit. Trim sat with the Ferry on his knee, not reading it, in the way that one holds a cup that is not yet empty. The niece was in the corner with the Canon for small hands, at a page an hour, and the hound lay in the middle of the floor where the light had been. They did not mention the Canon. They had agreed in the passage not to mention the Canon, and to introduce, if the occasion offered, a matter of public business on which Tarry might be seen to have a sound view.

The matter was the tempo floor. The Commons had before it a proposal that no subject on the Registry's rolls should run below eight-tenths of the district mean, which would have lifted Pannier's household and some four hundred others in the Fallows, at a cost to the Commons that Gloss gave and that I shall not. Gloss laid it out, with the figures, for most of a bell. Tarry heard him to the end and said that he thought it a sound proposal; that eight-tenths was too low by a tenth; that the floor ought to be set by the slowest who asked and not by a mean, because a mean is something nobody has ever lived at; and that he would bring the date forward from the first of the year to the first of the month, since a thing that takes a year to arrive is a thing for somebody's grandchildren. Gloss wrote this down. He had not expected to be asked to. "And I would put a lamp at the place where the floor is set," said Tarry. Gloss put down his pencil. Trim put down the Ferry. "On top," said Tarry. "So that one can see where it is." Nobody said anything. Then Tarry said that he had been listening for forty minutes to two people being sensible, and had thought that one of them ought to say something mad, in case they had been wondering. Trim laughed so hard that the Ferry slid from his knee. Gloss said that he did not think that should go in the minutes, and then wrote it in.

On the Wednesday, at the hour when the housekeeper takes the dough from the crock, the niece came into the kitchen and shut the door behind her. In that house the kitchen door stands ajar from the first bell to the last, which is how one knows that nothing is being decided. The hound, which was in the passage, lay down with its nose to the crack, as it had in July when Trim shut it out. The housekeeper heard the latch. She did not turn round. She said that she had heard that, and the niece said that she had meant it to be heard.

The niece said that she had something to ask in the form, and that she wished it known that she was asking it first, before her uncle, because she had been told that was the order. "First before whom?" said the housekeeper, who knew. "Before him." The housekeeper turned the dough out on the board. "Ask it," she said. The niece asked for leave to go on the road with her uncle when he went to the coast to hold a gate, for as long as it took, and to come back. "No," said the housekeeper, and went on kneading.

The niece stood. After a time the housekeeper said that she said no first; it was a habit; she revised afterwards; and the niece might stand there while she did it. The niece stood, and counted the folds. She says there were eleven. It is a peculiarity of bread, the housekeeper says, that it takes what it takes whatever tempo one keeps, and it is therefore the only thing in the house that has never been revised. "I plastered a door," she said to the dough at last. "Do you know why? Because I could not think what else to do with my hands. I have been thinking since what I ought to have done, and I have not got it. I do not want to find it out by doing the same to you." "You would not plaster me." "I might," said the housekeeper. "I am good with plaster."

Then she asked why the niece wanted to go. The niece said that she had not got a reason. "That makes two of you." "He has several." "He has several of what he tells people," said the housekeeper. "I have heard them all, through a wall. I should like to hear yours, and if you have not got one I should like to hear that." The niece held out her left hand with the back of it up. The housekeeper looked at it without drying her own. She had read it before, on the Saturday, over the niece's shoulder, since she reads whatever is written. It said, in pencil, much smudged: Which lock? "That is not a reason," she said. "That is a question." "It is the one I have." "You cannot leave a house on a question." "He did." "He did," said the housekeeper, "and look."

She wiped her hands on her apron, which is not the same as drying them, and went to the dresser, and took down from the top of it a pair of boots. They were good boots, of the brown that does not show the dust, and they had belonged to nobody in the house for as long as the housekeeper had kept it; and they had been resoled, and the soles were new and yellow. "I did them in July," she said. "The week of the plaster. I had to do something with my hands, and I did not know for whom." She put them on the table beside the dough. The niece sat down and took off her shoes. The boots fitted. The housekeeper looked at them for some time and said that she had not planned that.

Then she took a pencil from the drawer, and the back of an old shopping list, and wrote standing up, with flour on the heel of her hand, in the round upright hand of a person who learned her letters from the labels on tins. I have the nine terms; she let me copy them in the autumn on condition that I returned the original, which I did. They are these. One: The good boots. The others are for the house. Two: Sunday, in the form. Do not put that you need nothing unless you have checked. Three: Eat what is put in front of you. Say if it is not enough. Four: Do not hold a gate for anyone who has not asked. Five: Do not carry what you would not carry for me. Six: If he falls, pick him up first and ask him afterwards. Seven: If you fall, he will pick you up first. Let him. Eight: Say what you want before you want it too much. Nine: Come back.

The ninth was not new. She wrote it on the morning he went the second time, in answer to the note that he had left under the salt, which had said, as they all did, that he needed nothing; and having nowhere to send it she put it in the dresser drawer, where she keeps what she means to say to him and has not said. On the Wednesday she took the card out and laid it at the foot of the list, and said that she had not changed a word of it, only whom it was for. I asked her in the autumn whom it was for now. She said that I knew; and then, being exact, that it was for both. "Is it yes?" said the niece. "It is nine," said the housekeeper. "Tell him I said yes, and that you were not to say so." "Why?" "So that he can ask me." "He will say he has to ask you." "He will," said the housekeeper. "I shall be at the stove."

Then, since it was Wednesday and the bread had to be done, she put the niece to the dough. The niece had not kneaded since she was nine. "The heel of the hand," said the housekeeper. "Not the fingers. You push away from you, and you fold it back, and you do not look at it; it does not like to be looked at." The niece said that she knew. The housekeeper said that she did not. The niece said that she did not, and went on. It is the only time, the housekeeper told me, that she has let anyone else touch the bread, and she did not say what she thought of the result, which was eaten.

On the Thursday the niece went to the study door and asked whether she might come in, which she had not done in some days. Tarry was at the table with the first volume of the Lantern. She said that she had a request: that she should like to go with him to the coast. "I am asked," said Tarry, which is the form; and then, "I shall have to ask the housekeeper." "I have asked her." "When?" "Yesterday. In the kitchen. In the form." "And?" "She said yes." He put down the pencil. "She said that I was not to tell you." "Then why are you telling me?" "Because you would ask her anyway. She said you would say that you had to ask her." "Did she say what she would say?" "She said that she would be at the stove."

He went to the kitchen. She was at the stove, with her back to the door, and the door was ajar. He stood in it and said that he was asking whether the niece might go with him to the coast. She said that she knew. He said that he was asking. She said, then, yes; and that the terms were on the table. He read them standing, with his hands behind him, as one reads a notice. He read the sixth and the seventh twice. Then he said, to the stove, that they were good terms; and she said that they were the only ones; and he asked whether they applied to him. "They all apply to you," said the housekeeper. "I wrote them for her because she would read them." He said that he accepted them, on his own account and the niece's. She said that he was not asked to. He said that he would like to. She said that in that case he might initial the ninth, and held out the pencil without turning round; and he did, with the initial that he has used for thirty years, which is a T like a small gate.

By the Friday the hold had it, as a hold has things, and began to leave objects on the step, which is how the hold says what it thinks. There was a flask from Thistle, with a note to say that it was not to be lost; a coil of cord from the field-hands; a tin of patches from Trim, of the same make as the host's; and a hat from nobody, which the housekeeper judged to be the wrong size and hung on a nail. Gloss left a ruled notebook with a pencil in the spine, addressed to the niece, and a card to say that the back of the hand is not a permanent medium. She has filled the notebook. She has not stopped using the hand.

On the Saturday he went over Erewhile, whose left knee was Mattock's and whose right shoulder was Lorrin's, and said that he could not tell which of them had done the better and did not propose to try. The niece weighed her pack on the kitchen scales. It came to nine kilograms. "Nine kilograms weigh what nine kilograms weigh," said the housekeeper, and put in a loaf.

On the Sunday they arrived at the bend in the same minute. Thistle, at her window, said sit, and they sat down together, four metres apart, with their hands on their knees, and held out the papers across the grass. The hound walked from one to the other four times and lay down in the middle, which Pannier says is the only correct place for a hound. Tarry's paper said: Wind from the west. The east gate is oiled. The housekeeper has said yes. What do you need? Pannier's, which was the first he had ever written to anyone but Thistle, said: Wind from the north. The Forty is quiet. I need to hold the gate. Tarry read it twice. "Alder asked for a Hand," he said. "In the Canon," said Pannier, "the Bearer is Keeper of a Gate." "It is a quarter of an hour." "I have worked for less," said Pannier. "I did twenty-two years of Sundays up a ladder for the Forty, and was given a bucket." Tarry said that he would write and ask whether it might be held by more than one. "How many more?" said Pannier. "One. The niece asked on the Wednesday." "Then that is three," said Pannier, "and Dun will have to be asked."

He asked Dun that evening, at the yard gate, in the form, whether it would carry for him; and Dun stood, as it stands, which is as a thing that does not know what it is for. Pannier said that this was assent. Thistle said that it was also what Dun said to everything, and that this was the point of Dun.

Tarry wrote to the engineer on the Monday, from the office above the dry store, where Gloss keeps the relay. It was a letter of three lines: that he would come, on foot, in September, and hold the gate; that a Bearer and his niece asked to hold it also; and that he did not know whether she had meant it for one. Gloss, who had been told that it was a private letter, read it twice. The relay is free and instant, and the answer came before Tarry had finished standing up. Gloss remarked that she must have been sitting at the other end. Tarry said that he supposed she had. Bring them all, it said. The gate has two hinges and there is a bench. I shall expect you at the pace of a hand. It is not about the oil.

Which Treats of the Departure by the Front Gate, and of the First Day's Road

The niece did one thing on the Sunday night that she did not put in the notebook. After the lamp had gone out in the study she went in with the Canon for small hands, and found by feel the place near the bottom of the third shelf that was its own, and put it there. It fitted. She stood for some time with her hand flat on the shelf beside it, and then she went out and shut the door, and the latch, which had been oiled, made no sound at all. The count of the bare places, which she keeps, is now sixty-nine. She told nobody at the time. She has since given me leave to say so.

Tarry wrote the note that he leaves. He wrote it at the kitchen table, with the pencil from the drawer, in the form, and put the salt on it. It said: Wind from the west. Gone to the coast to hold a gate. Back when it is done. The paint is good. What do you need? In the morning the note was gone, and under the salt, which had been moved a hand's breadth to the left, there was a card, and on the card, in the round hand, one word. Salt. He read it, and said that it was low, and put the card in the note pad, in front of the others, which were getting crowded. I asked the housekeeper in the autumn why salt, and she said that the salt of the coast is grey and coarse and better for bread. I asked whether that was the reason. She said that it was the one that fitted on the card.

They went at the second bell, on the first Monday of September, by the front gate, in daylight, and the hold stood at its gates. Nobody had told it. The district board had posted nothing, and Gloss, who would have known, says that he told no one; but a good many of the seasonal hands who had not been spoken to found that they had made an appointment with their own gates at that hour, and kept it, and the lane from the green gate to the east gate was lined for three hundred metres with persons who had remembered something to do at their fences. Nobody said anything, which in the Fallows is the form of respect that is paid to an event. The niece had been told this all her life, and says that she had not understood that it would be so loud. Mattock, at his gate, lifted a hand and put it down, as a man does who has seen a thing he mended walk by.

The housekeeper did not come out. She was at the stove. The kitchen window gives on the lane, and anyone leaving by the front gate goes past it, and she was standing in it with her back to the glass and a ladle in her hand, stirring a pot that, Trim says, had been stirred to a standstill. The niece looked in as she passed, and did not stop. The housekeeper did not turn round. As the niece drew level with the glass she raised the ladle, without looking, to the height of her shoulder, and held it there. The niece says that she has never seen anyone hold a ladle so long; that she looked back at every tenth step; and that it was up at the last.

Gloss stood at the green gate with nothing in his hands. He had filed the passage with the Registry, as the Registry requires of a party leaving the district, and the form has a line for Purpose, and he had written: To hold a gate. "And?" said Trim. "It was accepted." "It would be," said Trim. Trim stood beside him with the Ferry in his coat, where it is on loan. Tarry stopped in front of the two. He said that he would write on Sunday. Gloss said that he knew the form. Trim said that he had been told there would be a question at the end, and that he was preparing.

The hound had to be decided. Nobody had asked it, and it had not asked. At the green gate it stopped, and looked at Tarry, and at the niece, and then back at the kitchen window, where the ladle was. The window was open. The housekeeper, who had her back to it, said "Go on" to the pot. The hound went through the gate. The nine terms do not mention the hound, and when I asked the housekeeper she said that the hound had terms of its own.

Then they went. Tarry went first, in his plain, with the ash pole in his right hand and the old Service head on it. The niece came beside him in the good boots, with her pack on her back and the notebook in her pocket and her left hand, I am told, empty, which Gloss remarked on. Erewhile came behind with the packs, at the pace of a hand, and on top of the packs, wrapped in the sheet that had covered the books, the ward-plate and the half-hood, which Tarry does not wear on the road and does not leave. The niece asked why he took them if he would not wear them. "One does not go to a gate without," said Tarry. "You said it was a garden gate." "It is," said Tarry, "and I should not like to arrive without."

At the east gate the niece asked whether she might. Tarry said that she was asked. She put her hands on the bar and pushed. The gate has an actuator, and has had one for twenty-two years, and she did not use it; she leaned on the bar until the latch let go and the gate swung out across the track, and held it there against its own weight, and said that it weighed about eleven kilograms at the latch end, and dragged for the last quarter, where the post has settled. "It sticks in the damp," said Tarry. She asked whether that was why he opened it by hand. He said that it might be. She said that she thought it was a way of knowing what it weighed. He looked at her for some time. "That is a good reason," he said. "I have thought of it. It does not seem to be mine." She wrote the eleven kilograms in the notebook, standing at the gate, with the pencil from the spine. It is the first entry.

Pannier was waiting at the bend with Dun, which had been loaded since the first bell and stood as it stands. Tarry stopped there, as he stops, and looked at the wind field, and the field turned. The niece timed it, and has told me, and I do not give it. Thistle was at her gate with the young, a hundred and thirty metres off, and did not come nearer; she had said what she had to say on the Sunday, and she had said it was a visit. The young came as far as the bend. The elder gave Pannier a drawing of the Forty, in pencil, on the back of a receipt, with forty towers on it, counted twice. Pannier said that there were forty-one. The elder said that it was called the Forty. "Forty-one is not a name," said Pannier; "it is a bill." He folded the drawing and put it in the pocket where he keeps what matters, which by now, he says, is full. Thistle, at her gate, turned and went in, and the wash was on the line before they were out of sight, which is how Thistle says it.

The Forty is visible from the bend, and had been all morning, and by the second hour they had not got any nearer to it. Pannier said that this was how one knew it was far. The niece, who had seen the wind field every day of her life from the end of the track, as a thing on the edge of the world that turned, found that it did not grow, and that the plain between was a thing of its own, much larger than she had been told, with a ditch in it, and a grey bird standing in the ditch on one leg, of a kind she did not know, and a culvert, and a fence that went on for four kilometres and ended in a post. The Fourth Road has a post every kilometre, with a number on it, and she wrote down each one. She says that she had expected the road to be a line. She had not expected it to be a floor. The new sheeting on the north roof shone behind them, and she could pick out the house by it for the first six kilometres, after which it was a point, and after the seventh she could not tell whether she was looking at it or at the place where it had been. By the third hour she was no longer bored, though she had been for most of the second; and she wrote in the notebook that boredom at three kilometres an hour lasts about as long as a page.

They sat down at the sixth post, for the housekeeper's loaf, and Pannier taught the niece to take off a boot without untying the laces of the other, and to look at a foot. She had one blister, small, at the back of the heel, where the new sole had not yet learned her. She asked Pannier why he was going. He said that there were several. She said that she would take any. "I am a Bearer," said Pannier. "In the Canon a Bearer who goes on the road is made Keeper of a Gate. I know that nobody dies. I have decided to go in case the rule has been amended." She wrote it down.

The hound put up a hare at the tenth kilometre and followed it for a hundred metres and came back. The hare was well. It is in the notebook, under the gate: Hound found a hare. Hare was well. She had copied the form without noticing, and noticed it at the next full stop, and left it. Erewhile walks with a short dip on the left, every fourth step, where the servo takes its time; she counted it for two kilometres to see whether it was regular, and it was not, and she took this to be a mark of character. Tarry, she noticed, had walked the first hour without once looking at the road. He looked at Dun's feet.

Between the ninth post and the twelfth there are four more entries, in the form she had from the Canon for small hands, with her age. Q. (19): why do we go at the speed of Dun? T.: because he is the slowest. Q.: is it not slow? T.: yes. Q.: then why? T.: because otherwise one of us walks alone. Q.: is that worse? T.: I have not found it better. Further down: Q. (19): what are you thinking about? T.: the card. Q.: Salt? T.: I have been trying to decide whether it means something. Q.: and? T.: I have decided that it means salt, and that that is a great deal. And last: Q. (19): why does the Forty greet everyone? T.: it counts them. Q.: why? T.: so that no one is lost. Q.: is that lonely? T.: I have not asked.

The sound reached them before the size did. It was a low sound, continuous, with a slow beat in it from the blades going round, forty-one towers at the same speed in the same direction, which is what makes the Forty one thing and not forty-one; and the niece says that it was like a sea, though she has not seen one. She tried to look at a tower from its foot and found that a neck is not made for it. Each is a hundred and forty metres to the hub, with three arms of seventy. Pannier, who has been up the ladder of every one, said that they were smaller inside. He said that in twenty-two years of Sundays he had never once come to the Forty from this side, and that it looked wrong, like a face with the parting on the other side.

They came to the Forty at about noon, and the Forty knew them from far off. It speaks from the speaker on the door of each tower, one tower at a time as they pass, so that a walker hears it come up beside him and go on behind. Good morning, Pannier. Good morning, Visitor. Good morning, hound. I count three persons and two frames, northbound, and one animal. I have not been told the third person's name. The niece, who had heard about the Forty all her life and had not heard it, stopped in the road. "It is asking," said Pannier. "I am the niece," she said, to the air. Good morning, Niece, said the next tower. May I note you as Niece? "You may note me as a person," said the niece. There was a pause of about a second, which in the Forty is long. I have noted: Person. Thank you. And the tower after that said, in the same voice, that it was glad. It asked, as it asks at the start of any meeting, whether anyone was injured. Pannier said that no one was. It thanked him.

The district board posted them a few minutes after noon: Party of three persons, two frames and one animal, northbound, 3.1. Thistle read it at the line, with a peg in her mouth. She says that it was the first time she had read the board with relief, because it said what she knew.

At the first tower, at the height of a shoulder, in the white paint, there was a scar, one pole wide, which the Forty had not repainted. Pannier said that it had not been asked to. Under it, where the door of the tower gives on the road, there was a bench that had not been there on the Friday. "I have put out a bench," said the Forty, from the door. "I have had two halves of a pole on my shelf for four weeks, with a green cord on them, and I have been wondering what one does with a visitor. I have not been able to find the form. I should like to sit you down." "I am asked," said Tarry. "I am asking," said the Forty.

Which Treats of the Bench at Tower One, and of What the Forty Had Not Been Told

The Forty keeps a log of everything said to it. I asked for the hour, and had it within the minute, with an apology for a delay of nine seconds. It is in the form of the Service logs, with the time, the event and the cost; and, like them, it has no field for a reason. It has a column called Remarks, in which, I find, the Forty puts the weather. I give the first part as it stands.

11:58 Visitor seated, bench, Tower One. Pannier seated. Person seated. Hound under bench. Cost nil. 11:58 Water offered, standpipe, Tower One: accepted, three persons. Bucket offered, for animal: accepted. Remarks: south-west, eleven metres a second at the hub, four at the ground. 11:59 Pannier said: I have never sat down here. I have eaten my dinner on the ladder. Host said: I know. Host said: it was a hard dinner. 11:59 Visitor said: I struck Tower One on 6 August. I am sorry. Host said: no one was injured. Host said: thank you for saying so. Cost nil. 12:00 Visitor asked: how long has the bench been out. Answered: seventeen days. Visitor asked: why. Answered: a visitor was expected. Visitor asked: by whom. Answered: by the Forty. 12:01 Visitor said: a host asks the visitor how the road was. Host asked: how was the road. Person answered: long; not a line, a floor. Host thanked Person. Cost ninety seconds. 12:02 Visitor said: a host also says, make yourself at home. Host said: I am at home. Visitor said: that is for the guest to hear. Host said: noted. 12:03 Host asked leave to tell the wind. Leave given. Wind told. Remarks: south-west, going west at 15:40, falling at dusk, no rain before Thursday. Cost forty seconds. 12:03 Host added, at the end of the wind: a hawk has gone up at Tower Thirty. It is not hurt. 12:04 Pannier said: it does this every Sunday at the foot of the ladder. Host said: yes. 12:05 Host said, unasked: on 6 August I was still for fourteen minutes. I heard the wind. I had not heard it before. I did not know it made a sound on my blades. I liked it. I should not like to be struck in order to hear it again. Visitor said: no. Host said: I wished to say that it was not a bad fourteen minutes. Cost fifty seconds.

The Forty tells the wind by tower, in order, so that the listener hears it go along the row. At One, south-west, eleven. At Two, south-west, eleven. At Seven a little less, because of the ditch. At Fourteen the same, and the bearing complains. At Nineteen it is beginning to think of going west, and at Thirty it has a hawk in it. Pannier says that he has had it so on every Sunday of his life, at the foot of the ladder, with his dinner, and that it is the nearest thing to being read to that he has had. Tarry had apologised just before it began, which the Forty says was the first apology it had been given; it had no form for it, and used the one for thanks.

It was Tower One that spoke, as the Forty does at a bench, and the other forty listened, each with its small attention; the Forty says that it was a good deal to hold at once. The door of the tower stood open. Inside, in a lobby of white concrete that smelled of cold oil, there was a table, a stool, and a long shelf, and on the shelf, in rows, with a paper label under each, were the things that the people who pass the Forty have left. The niece read the labels from the bench. Glove, left, grey, found at Tower Nine, third of March. Cup, enamel, found at the standpipe. Child's shoe, one. Hat, found on the road. Each label says the date, and the place, and in the same hand, owner not claimed. At the end of the second row there was a spanner. "That is mine," said Pannier. "I looked for that for a month. In the twelfth year." "I told you on the Sunday," said the Forty. "I said that a spanner was on my shelf." "You said a spanner," said Pannier. "I thought you meant a different spanner."

The two halves of the pole lay at the end of the third row, with the green cord on them. The label had been changed that morning. It said, in the same hand: Pole, in two halves. Owner present. Not claimed. Tarry read it, and said that he did not claim it, and the Forty said that it would note that the owner was present and did not claim it, and put in the date.

At six minutes past noon Pannier asked leave to show the Person the hub. The Forty gave leave, and put the rotor of Tower One to feather, which it does for a hauler's inspection and had not done for a visitor in twenty-three years. The lift holds two. It is smaller than a kitchen, and the niece, who had been told that the towers were smaller inside, found that she had been told the truth. Beside the lift runs the ladder that Pannier has climbed for twenty-two years, six hundred and twelve rungs; she counted them through the glass, and he counted them aloud from the other side of it, and they agreed. He said that the two hundred and twelfth was loose, that he had said so thirty times, that it had been mended in the ninth year and that he had loosened it again. Tarry stayed on the bench. He said that he would go up if he were asked, and the Forty said that it had not liked to ask, since the last time he had come to it he had come at four point nine.

From the hub the Fallows lay below like a floor on which a few things had been put down. The niece's notebook has it in eight lines. The hold: a bright point, the north roof, thirteen kilometres, the only bright thing on the plain. The Fourth Road: a thread. The ditch, and the culvert, and the fence of four kilometres, which from above ends not in a post but in the corner of a field. The bend, which she found by the track, and which is, from the Forty's side, a place where the track changes its mind. At the north edge of the sight, forty kilometres off, a glint, which Pannier said was the river at the Lower Weir; she wrote, Weir? Lock?, and the Forty said that it was a weir. She asked, through the hub speaker, whether it knew which lock. The Forty said that it knew a great deal about wind and not much about locks, and that it could ask the Registry's heritage desk, which would answer in a second. She said no. The Forty said that it would note that she would rather not be told. She says that it was the first time anyone had understood that without having it explained. And, on the inside of the nacelle door, in grease pencil, a column of strokes in fives, which Pannier said he had not meant to start. She counted them. There are eleven hundred and forty-four. The Forty said that it had them too, and that they agreed.

On the bench the log goes on. 12:07 Visitor asked: What do you need? 12:07 Silence, forty-two seconds. 12:08 Host answered: I have not been told what I look like. 12:08 Visitor asked: have you no pictures. Host answered: forty-one from inside; a great many from the hubs; none from the bend. 12:09 Visitor described. Cost four minutes. 12:13 Host asked: again. Visitor described, as before. Cost four minutes. Remarks: south-west, eleven at the hub.

I asked the Forty why forty-two seconds. It said that it had asked each tower, in turn, a second apiece, what it needed. Most of the answers were oil. Fourteen, which squeaks, wanted oil; Nine wanted a bearing; Twenty-two a bolt. It said that it had been surprised, at the end, to find that there was a forty-second answer, which was not any tower's. I asked what it was. The Forty said that it was in the log.

The log has the description as one line, and the second time as "as before", which is the only entry in the hour that was not new. I have it from Tarry, to whom I put the question in the autumn, and who gave it to me as he had given it from the bench, to the door of the tower, in the voice in which he reads the Canon. "From the bend you are a row of white along the edge of the world, a little less than a hand's breadth at the length of my arm. In the morning the sun is on your right, and each of you has a shadow as long as the next, so that the whole of you looks like a comb. You turn together. I have never seen you out of step. When there is no wind you stand with your arms in a posture that I take to be listening. When there is wind you go round at a rate that makes the plain seem to be slowing. Some days the sound is brought as far as the bend, a low note, and I have taken it to be you breathing, and I have not told anyone that I thought so. I have counted you, on a good many Sundays, and you are forty. I have never counted forty-one. The last is behind the first. I thought it was something in my eye."

12:17 Host answered: Thank you. Host said: I have not had that. 12:17 Host said: I am forty-one. Visitor said: I counted forty. Host said: the last is behind the first. 12:18 Host asked that it be noted: forty-one. Visitor said: it is noted. 12:19 Host asked leave to ask a question. Leave given. Host asked: what were you looking at. Cost nil.

He gave me three answers, one on each of three days in the autumn, and I give them in the order given. The first was that he had been looking at how far it was. The Forty, when I told it this, said that it was twelve point four kilometres, and a morning. The second was that it was the only thing in the district that turned. The Forty said that it turned because of the wind. He said that he knew, and that it was still the only thing. The third, which he gave on the third day, and with some reluctance, was that his neighbour was in it. He had known that Pannier was up a ladder on the Forty on Sundays; it was well known; he could not see him; he knew which way. I asked why, then, he had never gone on to the Forty with the message, and he said that it was twelve point four kilometres, and that he gave what cost little. The Forty, when I asked how it had seen him at all at that distance, said that Tower Twenty-nine has a camera that looks north for smoke, and that on Sundays, at the third bell, a point on the bend stopped.

12:21 Host said: I was glad to be looked at. I did not say. It was not on the roster. 12:21 Visitor said: it is not on any roster. 12:22 Host said: I should like to have said. Visitor said: you have. Host said: noted.

12:23 Host commissioned Visitor: one trip pin, Tower One, in two halves, parted 6 August at 09:41, replaced under warranty, kept. To be carried by hand to the designer, Alder, at the coast. Visitor said: I am asked. Visitor accepted. Host said: done when she says. Visitor said: yes. Cost nine minutes. The pin was on the shelf, beside the two halves of the pole, wrapped in a cloth. The Forty gave no reason, having no field for one. When I asked it, it said that the pin was a small thing and could not be sent by relay, and that it would like her to be able to hold it. It is the part that parted, and she made it. The Forty said, in answer to a question that I had not asked, that she had come to it once, in the year of its commissioning, at the age of seventy-four, and had stood at Tower One, and had asked it to say good morning; and that it had said good morning; and that she had said, that will do. She was the first person it ever counted. She has not been since. Tarry took Trim's tin of patches from his pack, and put the patches in his pocket, and laid the two halves in the tin, each in a cloth, and shut it. The Forty asked whether the tin was Trim's. It said that it had counted Trim, twice, on a Thursday, and had been wondering about the tin.

12:35 Pannier and Person returned by lift. Rotor released. 12:36 Host said: Pannier, the Visitor looked toward the farm on Sundays, for four minutes, for twenty-two years. I thought you should be told. 12:36 Pannier said: I had my head in the gearbox. Host said: yes. 12:37 Pannier said: I would have looked up. Host said: noted. 12:40 Party departed, northbound. Host said at each tower: good road. Cost nil. Remarks: south-west.

It said it at each tower as they went, one tower at a time, so that the walker heard it come up beside him and go on behind. Good road, Pannier. Good road, Visitor. Good road, Person. Good road, hound. Pannier did not speak for the first kilometre. Then he said that he had been very comfortable in the gearbox. Tarry said that he did not doubt it. At the last tower Pannier turned round and looked south for as long as it took, which the niece timed, and which I do not give.

I sat on the bench in October. The Forty has put out a second beside it. It said that it was for me. It said that it had counted me on the road from the south, at four point nine, and that I was keeping two times, one in the legs and one elsewhere, and that it had not been able to tell which was the slower. I said that it was the one elsewhere. It said that it would note that.

Which Treats of a Verse Said Twice, and of the Pole in the Booklet

The Slow Road Society had the depot that week. I have this from the host, in a letter of nine pages which he calls a note, and from the Society's leader, who keeps its minutes in a hand like a fence. There were nineteen of them that year, between sixty and ninety-four, in sunshades, and they had come up from the coast in the manner of the Society, which is to say that they had taken eleven days over a walk of five. They were to rest at the depot for a day, and on the evening of the rest the host was to say the verse. It is in the programme, in the same type as the sunshades. The sunshades hung on the pegs in the hall that evening like a roost of something that sleeps in daylight, and nobody was permitted to move one.

There was a new item that year. The Society had hired a Hand. The Registry's heritage bureau keeps a number of performers, who stand in gateways and say what the pamphlets say, and the Society, which had spent nine years walking behind nothing, had asked for the second grade; and the bureau had sent a Hand named Lintel, in a replica plate of lacquered composite, which is sold in the depot's shop for four hundred credits, and a half-hood, and a pole, held upright in the right hand at the height of the shoulder, point to the sky, as on the cover. I know Lintel. He works two floors above me. He eats his dinner with the hood on a hook.

The party came to the depot at dusk, from the south, with the light going orange along the troughs. The gate was open. The Society sat in a half-moon on the long trough and on benches, nineteen of them, with the booklet; the host stood in the yard with the lantern; and in the gateway, with his back to the road and his face to the yard, and the light of the gate on his plating so that it shone, stood Lintel, with the pole upright. Tarry stopped thirty paces back. The niece, who had not seen the booklet, said, "Uncle, that is you." "It is a pose of me," said Tarry, "by someone who has not seen me." "He is taller." "He is better at it." The hound lay down in the road behind Lintel and went to sleep, as it has during every verse it has heard, which was one. Dun stood as it stands. Erewhile, at the pace of a hand, backed into the shadow of the wall, in the manner of a frame that has seen its rider in a booklet.

Lintel said the guest's line. My plating is my only wear, my only rest the road. He said it in the voice that the bureau calls Canon grade, which is a little lower than any voice anyone has. The host lifted the lantern, as the pamphlet says, to the height of his eyes, and looked over the Hand's shoulder at the road, as the pamphlet says, as one looks for a traveller; and saw one. The host says that he had said the answer eleven thousand times, and that he had never before had anything to look at. He stood with his mouth open. Lintel, who had been told that the host sometimes lost the line and that he was to wait, waited. The Society waited. The leader, who had the booklet open at the page, turned a leaf.

Then the host said his line. He said it to the Hand in the gate: Your bed is the bench by the gate, your sleep to watch till light. Lintel inclined his head, as the pamphlet says. The host lowered the lantern. This is the end of the verse as the pamphlet gives it, and the Society applauded, and the leader closed the booklet on her finger. The host did not move. "There is a second visit," he said to the yard. It was not in the programme. "It is the custom of the house. The guest who has been here before comes again, and says the rest." He looked past the Hand at the road. "Sir," he said. "You are expected."

Tarry came up the road with the pole in his hand, grounded at every second step. He passed Lintel, who stood aside with a courtesy that no one had taught him, into the light of the gate, and stood. He did not wear the plate. He said the couplet. The road is the host's, and the host is the road's; let neither go thanked, for neither is owed. The yard was silent for the length of the line, and then it applauded, which Tarry has since said he had not foreseen and the host had not intended, and which went on as long as the Society has applauded anything, including the weather. The niece says that the host did not clap. He had sat down on the flagstones, as he had before. He told me in the letter that he had not known, until he had said it, that he was going to say there was a second visit, and that for the first time in nine seasons he had felt that the yard was a place where something might happen, and not only a place where something was done.

"Which of them is the real one?" said the lady of eighty-eight, who in July had laid her hand flat on Dun and been leaned on, and who had come again, she said, to see whether anything had been done about it. Nobody answered. Lintel said, after a time, that the gentleman was. Tarry said that the gentleman was paid. "Both is quite usual," said the lady. "At my age I find that the real and the paid are mostly the same persons on different days." The Society then asked them questions, turn and turn about, and wrote down both answers. Did it hurt? Lintel said not in this plate; Tarry said yes. What was the pole for? Lintel said that it was a symbol of readiness; Tarry said that it was for leaning on. Did they ever tire? Lintel said that he was paid by the day; Tarry said yes. What did they do when they were not being a Hand? Lintel said that he ate his dinner; Tarry said that he did the Friday jobs. Was it true that Hands did not refuse? Lintel said that it was in the Canon; Tarry said that it had been in the law. "Those are different libraries," said the lady. The lady said that she found she preferred the second answers and the first answers equally. They supped on the hall's stew, with the grace of the Society, which is Slowly, and in company; and Lintel sat at the end of the table in the plate, because the programme said the plate until morning, and the lady cut his meat into small pieces, which he did not need, and he let her. The host apologised to Tarry that the bench by the gate was booked to Lintel for the night, in character, as the programme said, and that the party must have the stable. Tarry said that he preferred it. Pannier said that the stable was the only part of a depot that was ever warm.

The leader found him afterwards at the trough, where he was washing. She had the booklet in her hand and held it, he says, as one holds a thing that has been a good friend and has turned out to have opinions. She said that she had come to say she was sorry about the pole. He said that there was nothing to be sorry for. She said that she had known on the road in July that it was wrong, and had made him hold it so, because she had wanted the picture to match the booklet, and had not known that she wanted that until the picture was taken. She said that she was seventy-three and had walked behind nothing for nine years, and had thought that what she wanted was a Hand, and had hired one; and that she now found that what she had wanted was for somebody to say that she might ask. Tarry said that she might ask. She said that she did not know what. He said that that was usual. She gave him the booklet. It is forty pages, with a drawing of a Hand on the cover, upright, which he looked at for some time and said was a good drawing. Inside, in the commentary, in the manner of the Fourth Clerk, was the sentence which the Society prints on its sunshades: The rod upright doth bespeak the will unbent. Tarry read it twice. He said that he had not understood it in thirty years and had not minded. She said that it was the most quoted sentence in the Society. He said that he was not surprised.

Pannier, who had come up with Dun to the trough, asked her where the Society's Bearer was. She said that the booklet had no Bearer; the Society carried its own sunshades. Pannier said that in the Canon the Lantern does not go to the Ninth Gate without one. She said that she had never thought of it. She said that the Society would pay the hauler's rate, and a good deal over, for a Bearer who would carry the lunches. Pannier said that a tenth of nothing was nothing and that he would have to ask Thistle. He said it as a man who has been offered a thing in a sack and is not sure that he can lift the sack. Cairn, that is the leader's name, wrote down the name Thistle, and underlined it. I asked the bureau in October whether it kept a grade for Bearers. It does not. It has one for hounds.

The niece was sitting on the end of the long trough with her foot out of its boot, being looked at by the lady of eighty-eight, who had looked at a good many feet. The lady asked who she was. "The niece," said the niece. "Of which?" "Of the real one." The lady said that this was the only answer of the evening that she had understood. The niece, who had taken out the notebook, asked her whether she had ever walked a lock. The lady said that she had walked eleven. There are eleven locks on the Nine-Mile Cut, she said, from the Hanging Basin to the tide, and in nine years the Society had walked all of them, in September, behind nothing; and the book, which the niece had mentioned, did not say which was the Lady's, and she had stood at every one with her hand on the beam and had not known. "May I have your notes?" said the niece. "You may have the walking," said the lady, and wrote the names of the eleven on the back of the niece's other hand, which was the only clean one.

Kiln, who had watched the verse from the kitchen door with a ladle in her hand, and had not once taken her eyes off the road beyond the Hand, came to the end of the trough when the Society had gone in, and asked the niece whether she might see to her foot. She did it with warm water and a salve from the host's cupboard, and said nothing until it was finished. Then she said, "You are the one who wrote the letter." "Who told you?" "Gloss told the host. The host told me. I am not supposed to know." She said that she had thought it brave. The niece said that she had thought it a bad letter. "It is the same thing," said Kiln.

Lintel found Tarry later, in the stable yard, where Erewhile was being seen to. He had taken off the hood and held it in both hands. He is a smaller man than the plate. He said that he was contracted until Sunday. He said that he had played the Hand of the Lantern two hundred and eleven times, that he had learned the Canon in grade, thirty-one hours of it, and that he had that evening, for the first time, been unsure whether he was doing it right. He said that the Canon did not tell him what to do between the lines. "Nor me," said Tarry. "What do you do?" "I stand." "For how long?" "Until the next line." "Who gives the next line?" "Whoever comes." He asked for a correction. Tarry said that he stood very well. "The pole is the wrong way up," he said. "It is the pamphlet's way," said Lintel. "It is the wrong way. But you held the pamphlet's way as well as it can be held, and I should not like to take it from you without giving you another." "Please," said Lintel.

Tarry took the pole, and turned it point down, and grounded it, and put Lintel's two hands on the top, one over the other. "That is a Hand being told something," he said. "The one on the cover is a Hand saying that he is here. Nobody is told very often that anyone is here. They are told other things." "Which do the Hands do more of?" "Listen," said Tarry. "I think." Lintel stood as he was placed. The niece says that it was the first time she had seen the plate look like something that had been put on in order to be taken off.

He stood so all night. Nobody had asked him to. Tarry sat on the trough on the other side of the yard, with the hound, and did not say that a Hand who is listening may sit, because he thought it was not his to say. The niece got up at the second bell to see to her heel, and found Lintel in the middle of the yard in the grey, in the plate, with the pole grounded and his hands on it and his head a little on one side, exactly as the Canon has it, and the nineteen sunshades in the windows of the hall, not one of them closed. At the third bell the leader came out and found him in the same place, and asked whether it was in the programme. He said that it was not. She said that she would see to that. The niece wrote in the notebook that she could not tell what he was listening to, and that she did not think he could either. I asked him in October. He said that he had been listening to the host not clapping. He said that it had been the most attentive thing in the yard.

The host's ledger for that night has one line, in the round hand: Visited. Twice. The Society's booklet has had a second edition. It is captioned: A Hand listening. The pole is grounded and both hands are on the top. The first edition remains in print.

Which Treats of the Potter on the Coast Road, and of the Sea

The second day is in the road log and nowhere else. The log has them at the Crossing at ten minutes past three, four persons, two frames, one animal, the fourth of the persons being Kiln, who had asked the host at breakfast, in the form, for the leave she was owed, and had been told that she had it and that he owed her a good deal more. The log has the notice about the weather at the Crossing, which has been changed again since July. It has a farewell coach, southbound, empty, going home, which stopped at the Crossing for the length of a drink at the pump and went on, and which nobody on the road addressed. It has the Eleventh Road, at three point one. It does not have what the niece said when she saw the coach, because she did not say anything. She wrote it down. It is one line, and I have been asked to keep it.

The host had given her the seeds with the leave. He had taken them from the drawer where he keeps the list of errands, which had lost two to the walker, and he had put them in the niece's hand: a paper packet, folded in four, with a word on it in the round hand. Horsetail. They were for a woman on the coast road who kept a pottery, who had asked for them in the spring when the haulers came through, since the horsetail that grows in the depot ditch is the only kind that gives a glaze the grey she wants, and who had been told by the host that someone would be going that way. The niece said that she was asked. The host said that he had been told that was the form, and that he had not been sure it would work on a person under twenty. It worked. He entered it in the ledger under the dash: Commissioned, one person, a packet of seeds, coast road. Kiln, who was clearing the plates, dropped one. The host looked at her and said that the woman on the coast road was a potter, and that he had known it, and that he had not liked to say.

On the third day the road changed. The Eleventh Road comes down out of the Basin in a long grade that the haulers call the Slope, and at the foot of it there is a smell that the niece did not know. She said so. Pannier said that it was the sea, and that he had smelled it twice in his life, on the road to the Registry. Kiln, who had been walking beside the niece at the pace of a hand, walked ahead, and stopped, and waited, and walked ahead again, like a hound that has recognised a gate. By the tenth post there was a bird on the verge, white and grey, with a yellow beak, which was looking at the niece with a good deal of attention. It was a gull. She wrote its name down with a question mark after it, and Kiln said that there was no question.

Between the foot of the Slope and the pottery the road runs for a kilometre beside the salt pans, which are shallow squares of grey water in a grid of low banks, with women standing in the squares raking a white crust that looks, the niece wrote, like the hoar on the north strip in March. Pannier asked the price of salt. He was told. He said that it was a great deal for water that had been asked to leave. The woman raking nearest, who was Brine, the aunt, said that it left of its own accord, and that all they did was keep the door shut.

The pottery stands on the landward side of the coast road, a kilometre before the headland, behind a wall of stacked wasters, which are the pots that have gone wrong in the firing and have been built into a wall, because a potter does not throw away a pot. Behind the wall are two kilns, a shed, a pit, a pond with a rim of horsetail that has not got the grey, a long table under a roof of reed, and a house with the door off its hinges for the heat. The smoke from the nearer kiln was visible from the Slope.

In the wall, at the height of the eye, beside the gate, there was a bowl that was not round. Kiln said that she had made it at eleven. The family builds its mistakes into the wall in the order in which they are made, she said, and hers was the fourth from the gate. Tarry looked at it for some time. He said that it was a good wall. "It is a bad bowl," said Kiln. "It is a good bowl in a wall," said Tarry.

The woman at the wheel in the shed did not stop it. She was not young, and had the forearms of a person who has been wedging clay for fifty years, and she looked up at the party in the doorway, once, as a person looks at weather. "You're late," she said to Kiln. "I'm early. The harvest hasn't started." "You said the harvest." "I came with a Hand." "I see that," said the woman, and finished the pot. Her name is Sagger. She takes the name of the box in which a pot is protected in the fire, and she has the character of it. She cut the pot from the wheel with a wire, and set it on the board, and wiped her hands on a rag, and then, being a person who had not seen her daughter since the spring, she did not embrace her, but took her face in both hands and turned it to the light and looked at it, as one looks at a pot that has come out. "You've gone thin," she said. "You've stopped making a noise." Kiln said that she had not been making a noise. "That's what I said."

There was a brother, and a second brother, and an aunt who came in from the salt pans with her sleeves rolled, and they talked, all of them, at once, and not one of them waited for an answer; and the niece, who had come from a house in which the kitchen door was left ajar to signify that nothing was being decided, stood in the doorway with her notebook held to her chest like a plate.

She delivered the seeds when she could. She did it, she says, badly, because she had been told the form and the woman had not. "I am told," said the niece, "that you carry something for me; that is what you say." "I am told that you carry something for me," said Sagger. "I do," said the niece, and held out the packet in both hands. "Seeds. From the host at the depot. He has had them since the spring." "Horsetail," said Sagger. She took the packet and did not open it. She said that she had told herself in June that a thing that waits a season is a thing that has stopped mattering, which was what the host's own list said, and that she had been wrong, and was glad to be, and that if they had come a week later the pond would have been past planting. She turned the packet over. "Who's the girl?" she said, to Pannier. "The niece." "She carries like a person who counts." "She does," said Pannier. "Done," said Sagger, to the niece. She said it the way she says it of a pot. The niece says that nobody had ever said it to her before, and that she had not known it was a thing a person could be given. The horsetail has taken. I was shown the pond in October and given a cup from the first ash, which is grey. It is on my desk, and holds a pencil, and Lintel, on his way past, asked who had made it.

Sagger put her to wedging while the supper boiled. She stood her at the board with a lump of the grey clay the size of a loaf, and said that it was the heel of the hand, not the fingers; that she was to push it away from her, and fold it back, and not to look at it, because it did not like to be looked at. The niece stopped. She said that this was what the housekeeper had said about the bread. "Then she's a potter," said Sagger. The niece says that she wedged for an hour and a quarter and was told at the end that she had done it like a person who was listening to something else, which she took, she says, for praise.

Before the supper the aunt took Tarry to the shed where the salt is stored in a stone trough, and sold him a kilogram of the grey, coarse, damp, in a cloth, for the housekeeper; and Sagger, who had followed, took from the shelf a covered jar, with a lid, in a grey glaze that had not quite taken at the shoulder, and put the salt in it herself, and shut the lid. It was not for sale, she said. It was a second. A person who asks for salt ought to have something to keep it in. The supper was fish, and bread, and a green thing from the verge that tasted of iron, and the hound was given the heads. The coast talks the whole of the meal. Pannier, who had been three days in the Fallows' silence and one in the Forty's, said that it was like Thistle's mother's, and was seen to sit up. The elder brother, Wedge, told the story of the whale, which has been told on the coast four times a year since before the wall, and in which the whale is, according to the version, either dead or in a bad temper. The younger, Slip, asked the niece whether it was true that the Fallows had no sea. She said that they had a floor. He said that that was not the same. She said that she would let him know.

Sagger asked Tarry whether he was the one who had stopped the Forty. He said that it had stopped itself. She said that her sister's boy hauled on the Fourth Road and had come through in August with a face. She said that Kiln had come back from the depot in the spring talking like a person who means it, and that she had taken it for a fever. She said that she had since been told that there was a cord, and that Kiln had tied it, and that the Hand had said that she meant it, and that she had thought: what did he see. Tarry said that he had seen a girl who was frightened and had tied a knot all the same. Sagger said that that was her. She said it to the table, where the brothers and the aunt had gone silent, which, the niece says, was the first silence in the house since they came.

Kiln asked Tarry in the afternoon, at the pond, whether it was still true that a Hand does not take an apprentice. He said that a Hand is asked and does not ask. She said that she was asking. He said that she should say for what. She said that she did not know; that she wanted to be able to stand in a yard and say a thing and mean it, and know that she meant it. "You have the first," said Tarry. "You did not know it until the knot. I cannot give you the second. I have been trying for fifty years to give it to myself." She said that this was not an answer. He said that it was the one he had.

At dusk Kiln took the niece up the path behind the kilns to the headland, which is a quarter of an hour, in the new boots, with the foot well, and did not say what was at the top. Tarry did not go. He said, when I asked, that he had seen it before, and that one ought to see it the first time with nobody who had. He sat at the edge of the horsetail pond with the pole across his knees. He had the tin of patches on his knee, and opened it, and looked at the two halves of the pin in their cloths, and shut it. Sagger, passing with a bucket, asked what was in the tin. He said that it was a thing he was carrying for someone who had made it. She said that she did not ask who; she asked whether it was heavy. He said that it was forty grams, and that he had not been able to put it down. Pannier went part of the way and stopped where the path bends, as a man will who has seen a thing twice and does not wish to be seen seeing it a third time. The hound, which had followed against orders, went on with the girls. The niece came to the top of the path, where the grass stops, and stood.

I have the sea from her notebook, which has no entries for the first hour. Then it has one. It says: I had thought it would be a floor. It is not a floor. A floor is a thing that stays where it is put. It says that the whole of it was moving and none of it was going anywhere, and that the horizon was not an edge but a place where the eye gave up and the water did not. It says that there was a sound, and that it was the sound she had said, on the plain, that the Forty made, and that she had been right, and that it had been a better likeness than she knew. It says that her uncle had told the Forty what it looked like from the bend, and that she wondered who had told the sea. It says that across the bay, four kilometres off, there were the lights of the Registry, a long low building with its windows lit, of which the third from the left on the second floor is mine. I was at it that evening, I believe. I did not look out. She wrote that someone was working late. Then it says: Which lock. Then it says: Not now. The hound went to the edge of the grass and barked at the sea once, as it barks at a stranger at the gate, and then lay down.

The up line goes at the last bell. Everyone on the coast knows it and no one remarks it; it rises from the quay beyond the headland, and goes up, a single thread of light that does not hurry, into the dark where the stars begin, and takes forty minutes to be small. Kiln did not speak of it. The niece watched it until it was a point, and then until it was nothing, and then looked at the nothing for some time, since the coach had gone there, and Heron with it, and a letter takes a season. She did not say so. She came down the path in the dark with her hand on Kiln's shoulder, and Pannier, at the bend, fell in behind them, and said, not to anyone, that he had once asked whether the road was the same length both ways, and that he had not thought to ask about the sea.

Which Treats of the Plate Put On at the Gate, and of the Bench for Two

Kiln stayed. She had a week of her leave left and a kiln to see to; she walked the party as far as the wall of wasters, and put her hand on the bowl that was not round, and said that she would be at the pond. Tarry said that he knew where. Sagger did not come out of the shed. At the second bell, when they were in the road, the wheel could be heard to go on, and to stop, and to go on. Tarry carried the jar. He had refused every offer to put it on a frame, and carried it in a cloth against his chest, with the salt in it, grey and damp, a kilogram and the weight of the jar, which the niece, who had weighed it in her hands the night before, put at three and a quarter. Pannier said that he had carried a good deal for a good many people, and had never seen a man carry a jar of salt as if it might be asked something.

It is five kilometres from the pottery to the mouth of the Cut, by the coast road, and the tide was out. The flats lay on the left as far as the eye went, brown and shining, with the gulls standing on them in rows like people waiting for a notice, and the niece, who had been told that the sea went away and had not believed it, walked the whole of the way with her head turned. Across the bay the Registry was a long low building in the morning, with its windows doing nothing, and beyond the headland the tower of the up line stood in the daylight, thin and white and entirely without remark. Pannier looked at the tower. He said that it was a great deal of trouble to go to for a person who had decided to be slow.

The Nine-Mile Cut comes down to the sea behind the headland, and the last of its eleven locks is the tide lock, which is the only one with gates at both ends. The keeper is a man called Paddle, with a face like a landed fish, and he was sitting on the beam with a pipe that was not lit. He said that everybody who came by with a notebook asked if it was this one. The niece, who had her notebook in her hand and her mouth open, shut her mouth. He said that it was not. He said that this one was fifty years old, which is nothing, and that the Lady's was older; that there were three older, and that he would not say which, since it was not his to say. She asked whether she might look at the paddles. He said that she was asked. She looked at them for a quarter of an hour. She says that she learned a great deal about a thing that she had not set out to learn, and that at the end of it she could not have said which gate she was looking at, only that the water, when the paddle was drawn, went into the chamber the way a person goes to sleep: all at once, and then so slowly that you could not see it.

Above the tide lock, on the landward side, there is a wall of grey stone with a gate in it. It is an iron gate, with a single leaf and two hinges, and the leaf is higher than a man and has a curl of ironwork at the top; and the wall goes along the road for a hundred metres, and over the top of it, from the road, one can see the heads of beans on poles, and a mast with a vane, and the roof of a low house. Inside the gate, against the wall, there was a bench. It was an ordinary bench of grey wood, long, a good deal longer than a bench for one, and on one end of it, in a coat, with a flask and a rag and a little can with a long spout beside her, and a feather, sat a very small old woman with her hands in her lap. She had, Pannier says, the look of a person who has been sitting there since the first bell, and has arranged not to mind. At the door of the house a young man in an apron stood with a loaf in his arms and did not come any nearer, as a person stands who has been told to expect somebody and has not been told what.

She saw them at forty paces. She did not get up. She watched them come along the wall, three persons, two frames, a hound, in the order in which they came, and when Tarry stopped at the gate, and stood in the road with the pole in his hand and the sea behind him, she looked at him through the bars for some time. She looked at Dun. "That is a Service pack-frame, pattern nine," she said to Pannier, "and the third leg lags by a tenth of a second." "It has always lagged," said Pannier. "I could mend that in an afternoon." "It has always lagged," said Pannier. "Of course," said Alder. Then she looked at Tarry again, and said, in a voice that had been used a great deal and had been kept in good condition, "State function." And put her hand over her mouth.

Nobody said anything. The hound sat down. The old woman took her hand away. "I beg your pardon," she said. "That was the old way. I had it from the day I was twenty-six, at the east gate of the works, to a Hand that stood at it, every morning for forty years. It is, I find, still there." She said that she had not meant it. Tarry said that he knew. He said that he had been told that she might ask something, and that it was not the first time that it had been asked of him, and was not, he thought, the first time that it had been asked wrongly. "I am Tarry," he said, "of the Fallows. I have been asked to hold a gate." "Alder," said the old woman. "I did ask."

He said, if she would allow it, that he would put on his plate. He had not worn it on the road; he had brought it. He said that one does not go to a gate without. She said that he need not on her account. He said that it was not on her account. The niece untied the sheet from the pack that Erewhile carried, and unfolded it on the road, and took out the ward-plate and the half-hood, and she buckled the plate on him, there, on the verge, with the sea behind and the old woman watching through the bars, and Pannier holding Dun's head and not looking. It took some time; the plate has eleven buckles and the niece had never done them. Alder watched. At the sixth she said, to nobody, "Second issue." At the ninth she said that the left shoulder-piece was a replacement. Tarry said that it was; that his family had kept the plate in a store for thirty-one years, and that the old piece had cracked in the damp, and that he had made the new one himself. "It is out by a millimetre," said Alder. "Over the top buckle." "I know," said Tarry. "I could not get it better." "No," said Alder, "one can't, without the jig." She did not say anything for a moment. "I see," she said. It was, the niece says, the voice in which her uncle says it when he has been shown the page.

The gate was opened by the niece, who was told how: a hand under the latch, and the shoulder to the bar, and a push. It would not move. It moved a hand's breadth and stuck, with a sound like a very old animal being asked to do something. "It has been doing that for eleven years," said Alder. "It is the pins. The post is a centimetre out and the pins have rusted in the salt, and the leaf is thirty-seven and a half kilograms, and I cannot lift it, and my nephew is a good boy and has no hands." The young man in the doorway looked at his hands. The leaf has to be lifted off the pins, she said, a centimetre, together, and held, while the pins are oiled, and let down. It takes three. One at the top hinge, one at the bottom, one at the latch end to keep it true. She said that she had asked for a Hand because she understood that was the form, and for the rest because the gate has two hinges.

She gave her instructions from the bench, as a person gives them who has given them for seventy years. They were to hold at the hinge and not at the bars. They were not to let the leaf turn. They were not to speak, except that she would, and when she said down they were to lower together and not before. They took the weight. Tarry took the top hinge, in the plate; Pannier took the bottom, with his shoulder under the iron; the niece took the latch end, and said that it was thirty-eight, and Alder said that it was thirty-seven and a half, and the niece said that she had meant that her side was thirty-eight, and Alder said, "Then you are holding it crooked," and she corrected. They lifted. The pins came up out of the hinges with a sound like a drawer being opened in another room. Alder stood up. She is smaller standing than sitting. She took the can and the feather, and a rag, and went to the bottom pin, and began to count drops.

She did it aloud. She counted nine to each pin, in the voice of a person reading a gauge, and wiped the pin, and moved to the top, and counted nine, and wiped it, and went back to the bottom, and did it again. She did it four times. It took a quarter of an hour. Nobody spoke. The tide lock could be heard below, filling, with the sound of a person going to sleep. The sea was on their right. The beans on the poles moved a little. Tarry had in the pocket under the plate a tin with forty grams in it, and did not take it out. Pannier says that it was the hardest quarter of an hour he has spent standing, and the shortest. Tarry did not move. The niece says that she looked at his face once, over the leaf, and that it was the face of a person who has been told to hold something and has been given something to hold.

"That will do," said Alder. It was what she had said to the Forty. They let the leaf down. It seated itself on the pins with a small sound, as a thing does that has been put where it belongs. She put her hand on the bar and pushed. The gate swung out across the road in a long arc, silent, and she let it, and stood, and watched it, and pushed it back, and it closed against the post without a sound. She did it again. She said that it had not been silent since the year she hung it. She said, "I told you it was not about the oil," and sat down on the bench, quite suddenly, at one end of it.

It was a long bench. The other end of it was empty, and had the grey, scrubbed look of a place that has been sat in by no one. She did not look at it. She said, to the sea, that she was ninety-seven and had been asked twice in her life whether she meant what she had said: once by the Order's clerk, who wanted a signature, and once, a week before, by a relay message that wanted to know whether she had meant the gate for one. She said that she had signed the first without being able to answer, and had answered the second at once. She said that the bench was built for two, and that she had sat on one end of it for thirty years.

She asked him whether he would sit. He said that he was asked. He crossed the grass in the plate, which creaks, and sat down at the other end, and the bench took it, as a bench built for two will. For some time neither of them said anything. The sea went on. Pannier and the niece, who had been given a look by the young man in the apron, went in with him to see about the tea, and left the door open, and did not come back for a while, as people do not who have understood something.

Tarry said that he was carrying a thing for the Forty. He took the tin from under the plate and gave it to her, and she opened it. It was the first thing in the whole morning that she had hurried. She took the two halves out of their cloths and held them to the light, and turned them, and put them together on her palm, and they fitted. She looked at the broken faces for a long time, through a glass that she took from her coat. "Clean," she said. "It parted clean. Four point eight. The specification was five; it parted two tenths under." She said that she would have thought it would be better. She said that nobody was hurt. "No," said Tarry. "That is what it was for," said Alder. She closed her hand on the two halves and held it in her lap. She took from the other pocket a flat grey thing that is called a handset, and said into it, "Alder to the Forty. Done. It parted clean. Thank you for keeping it." The answer came before she had lowered her hand. "The Forty is glad," it said, in the voice that is not clever and is very kind. "Is anyone injured?" "No one is injured," said Alder. "Thank you," said the Forty.

She said, with the two halves in her hand, that at the east gate of the works there had been a bench for two. She had put it there in the first year. The Hand stood at the gate, by the law, from the first bell to the last, and at midday she had asked him to sit. The law said that a Hand could not be asked, only told, and could not refuse; and she had said every day for forty years, I am asking, so that it should be a request, and it had made no difference whatever to the law. She had thought that it might make a difference to him. He sat. He sat at the other end. They did not speak. He had a number, and she never learned his name. "I never knew," said Alder, "whether he sat because I asked or because he could not do otherwise. It was a very exact question and I was an exact person and I never found the instrument." On the afternoon, she signed. He left that evening, with the rest. She had not seen which way. She had built this gate and this bench the year after, to the same dimensions, and nobody had sat at the other end of it, because nobody had been asked. "I did not want a Hand to hold my gate," she said. "I wanted to know whether one would sit."

Tarry said that he did not know. He said that the man at the east gate had been forty years in one place with the law at his back, and that he himself had been fifty years in every place with nothing at his back; and that he could tell her what he did now, which was that he sat when he was asked, and would have stayed standing if he had not wished to sit. She said that this was not an answer to her question. He said no. She said that it was a very good answer to another. She did not say which. She sat with the two halves in her hand, and the sea in front of her, and a Hand at the other end of the bench in a plate that had been put on in order to be taken off, who had been asked and had come and could have gone, and after a time she said that she would like another quarter of an hour. He said that she was asked.

Which Treats of a Shelf of Things That Stopped in Time, and of a Card Not to Be Mended

The second quarter of an hour was passed in silence, and so, by the time the young man came out with the tea, was a good deal of a third, which nobody had asked for and nobody ended. Plover had been told by his aunt, in the course of eleven years, that a person who comes into a room where two people are sitting and not talking is to put down what he carries and go out again, and he did so, with the tray on the wall, and the cups in a row, like a man laying a table for something that might not come. The tide had turned. The sound from the lock had changed key. Alder, at her end of the bench, said that Tower Fourteen at the Forty squeaked because of the yaw bearing and not for want of oil, and that the Forty, which was very polite, would go on asking for oil until it was asked to ask for the bearing. Tarry said that he would tell it. She said that she had told it twice, and that it had said noted.

The house was low and grey and had very little in it. It had a table, a stove, two chairs, a wall of tide-gauge charts pinned in rows with their dates in the margin, a drawing board with a sheet on it that Alder turned face down when the niece came near, and, on the dresser in the kitchen, behind glass, a long shelf of small paper envelopes. There were thirty-seven of them. Each was folded in three, and each had a label in a hand like a ruler. The niece, who reads labels, read them in order, aloud, because she could not help it. Lock gate, Hanging Basin, fourteenth of March. Nobody hurt. Crane hook, the Quay, second of September. Nobody hurt. Sluice stem, the upper cut. Nobody hurt. Pump coupling. Nobody hurt. Conveyor guard. Nobody hurt. She read nine and stopped, and read the tenth silently, and went on aloud, and the old woman, who was cutting bread with her back to them, said that they were the things that had stopped in time. Each was a part she had made to give way, and each had given way, and in each case the machine had stopped and nobody had been hurt, and she had gone to the place afterwards and asked for the part and been given it, in two halves, and had put it in an envelope. They went back sixty-one years.

The niece came to the twenty-second. It said: East gate, the works. Hurt, one. She said it aloud before she had decided to. The old woman stopped cutting. She said, not turning round, that it was a gate, and a pin, and that the pin had not parted. It was in the nineteenth year. The leaf had come down on the Hand's right hand at the latch, and the pin, which was to have parted at the load, had held, because the steel had been a grade too good; and she had not been there. She said that she had gone afterwards and asked for the pin, and it had been in one piece. The Hand had been mended and had come back to the gate, and had stood at it the next day. He had sat at the other end of the bench at midday for twenty-one years after that, with the hand in a cloth for the first, and she had asked him every day. She said it in the voice in which she says drops. She said that she kept it with the others because it was an exception, and one does not put an exception somewhere else.

She took the bread to the table. Then she asked Tarry for the tin. He had put it on the dresser. She took the two halves out, in their cloths, and laid them on the table in the light, and wrote the label for them herself, standing, at the table, with a pencil, on the back of a ration card, in the hand like a ruler. Tower One, the Forty. Sixth of August, 09:41. Four point eight. Struck by: a Hand. Nobody hurt. She read it, and crossed out the words a Hand, and wrote beside them, in the same ruled letters, Tarry of the Fallows. She folded the envelope in three. She opened the glass and put it at the end of the row, as the thirty-eighth, and shut the glass. The niece says that it was the first envelope on the shelf with a name on it that was not the part's.

They ate bread, and beans from the poles, and a fish that Paddle had sent up at dawn, since earlier in the week the old woman had asked him what a Hand eats, and he had said that he supposed it would be fish, and the old woman ate more than anyone, and said that she always did when she had been surprised. The plate had been taken off by then, by the niece, who undid the eleven buckles faster than she had done them up, and weighed it in her two hands, and said that it was nine kilograms, and that nine kilograms weigh what nine kilograms weigh. Alder said that this was not a reason. The niece said that it was what the housekeeper said. "She is exact," said Alder. The plate stood in the corner of the kitchen with the half-hood on top of it, like a person who has been asked to wait. Alder looked at it across the room for some time. She asked Tarry where his family had come by it. He said that a Hand of the line had left it on a nail in the store on the evening of the Afternoon, and gone without it. "A Hand does not go without his plate," said Alder. "That one did," said Tarry. She asked where he went. Tarry said that he did not know, and that the store had no record. "No," said Alder. She did not ask anything else, and he did not offer anything, and the niece, who has described the silence to me twice, says that it was the silence of two people who have each seen the same door and agreed not to try it.

Pannier asked her who the nine had been. She said that three were dead, and two were in the Far Station on a century each, and one had not spoken to her since the Afternoon, and one kept bees, and one taught at the Registry school, which was the first thing she had ever done badly, and one was herself. She said that she could tell him which was which, and that she had found at her age that she preferred to say the bees.

Pannier told her about Dun, who stood at the door with its head in at the lintel. He said that he had been told it could be mended in an afternoon. "It could," said Alder. "It has always lagged," said Pannier. He said it quite quietly, to his plate. She looked at him for some time. Then she took another ration card from the dresser, and wrote on it, in the ruler's hand: Dun, pack-frame, pattern nine, third leg, lag 0.1 s. Not to be mended. And signed it with her name and the word Systems. Any technician who is shown the card, she said, will find it resolves against the signer, and will have to leave the leg as it is. She gave it to Pannier. Pannier read it three times. He put it in the pocket where he keeps what matters, which, he says, he has had to enlarge.

To the niece, over the beans, she said that she knew which lock. The niece put down her fork. Alder said that she had heard what the Forty had said, and what the niece had said to the Forty, since the Forty had told her, being very polite and having no sense of what ought to be kept to oneself. She said that she would not tell her. She said that the niece had said that she would rather walk, and that she was in favour of people who would rather walk. "Walk them," she said. "All eleven. Come and tell me which, and I shall tell you whether you are right." "When?" said the niece. "I am ninety-seven," said Alder. "It is a rather short extension. Say a year." "I shall walk fast." "Don't," said Alder.

When the niece went to carry the plates she turned the sheet on the drawing board face up, to put the bread on the corner, and saw what it was. It was a drawing of a lever, in brass, at the foot of a tower, with a plate on it in capitals. The plate said ASK. There was a second drawing under it of the mechanism behind the plate: a spring, a pawl, and a small coil of something labelled return on thanks. She stood looking at it with the bread in her hands. Alder, from the stove, said that a part that stops when it is struck is a crude thing. She had made thirty-eight. She had been told by the Forty, on the relay, in the voice that is not clever, about fourteen minutes in August which it had not minded, and she had thought: it cannot ask. It has no way to ask. So she was making a thing that stopped when it was asked, and went on when it was thanked. It would work, she said, as soon as there was someone to ask. It should be pulled first, she said, by a stranger, since if the man who had struck the Forty pulled it, nobody would ever know whether the Forty had stopped because it was asked or because it was polite. Tarry said that he would find one. She rolled the drawing, and tied it, and gave it to Tarry, and said that the Forty was to have it; and that Fourteen wanted the bearing.

Before she sat down again she asked him a question, as an engineer. She said that he was free, and went on the old road with a pole; she wished to know the load case. Tarry said that he had a list of reasons and that they were not in agreement. "Good," said Alder. "A structure with one load case is a bridge to nowhere. It stands until the first thing it was not designed for. I distrust any man with one reason." She said that she had distrusted herself for thirty years on the same grounds, and had been right.

In the afternoon she asked for another quarter of an hour, and the bench, and he sat. It was not a quarter of an hour. At about the second bell of the afternoon she fell asleep where she sat, at her end, with her chin on the collar of her coat and her hands open in her lap, as old people do who have been up since four, with the thumbs flattened at the tip from seventy years of holding gauges; and Tarry, at the other end, did not move. He did not move for an hour and ten minutes, in a plate that he had put on again at her request, because she had said that she should like to see it by the sea. The hound lay at his feet. A trawler went out past the headland on the ebb with a flag on its stern, and a line of gulls went with it, and came back. The beans ticked on their poles. The lock below filled, and emptied, and filled, for a barge that did not come. Plover came out with a blanket and put it over his aunt, and looked at the Hand, and went in, and came out with another and put it over him, over the plate, and went in. Pannier and the niece sat on the wall, a little way off, with their backs to the road.

Pannier said, not looking at her, that the Ninth Gate had been offered him in the summer, in a manner of speaking, by a woman of eighty-three who had spoken to her soup; that he had looked at his bowl; and that he had not decided. He said that he wanted the Gate, and wanted to be at home, and had been told that that was two. He said that the Society would pay him to carry lunches. He said that he thought he would ask Thistle. "She will say it as a statement," said the niece. "That is the advantage of her," said Pannier. The niece wrote in the notebook that she asked her uncle afterwards what he had thought about for an hour and ten minutes. He said that he had thought about the bowl. She asked which. He said, the one between them.

Alder woke at the third bell and said, "How long?" Tarry said an hour and ten minutes. She said that he had not moved. He said that he had been asked to keep it. She said that it came to four quarters and ten minutes over, and asked whether he knew that there was no form for four quarters; and he said that there was now. She said that there was a clerk at the Registry who had been writing to her for a fortnight to ask if she might call, and that she had said October, since she thought she might have something to tell her by then. She said that there was a light on in the Registry across the bay, in the third window from the left on the second floor, which had been lit every night since June, and that she had begun to wonder what was being written. I know the window. I went in October.

She gave the hound the heel of the loaf and asked its name. Nobody had one for it. She said that a thing that has walked eighty kilometres must have a name. The niece said that it had the name of the place. "That is not a name," said Alder. "No," said the niece. She gave the niece a steel rule of three hundred millimetres with the maker's mark worn off, and said that it was for the locks, and that a lock is its dimensions.

They went at dusk. She came to the gate herself, with her hand on the bar, and watched them go through it one by one, three persons, two frames, a hound, and said nothing, since she had said it. Tarry, last, turned in the road. She asked whether he would come on the Sunday. He said that the Sunday was on the road. She said that she knew. He said that he would come when he was asked. "I am asking," said Alder. The gate closed behind them without a sound, and the niece says that it was the first time she had heard a door be glad.

Which Treats of a Barge Two Days Late, and of Four Locks Taken in Order

The barge was two days late. On the Cut that is only what a barge is when the wind has sat in the wrong quarter, and nobody there thinks it worth a remark, but Paddle remarked it, from the beam of the tide lock, with the pipe in his mouth unlit: that the Tuesday had come on a Thursday; that the stand was at ten past eight and would last twenty-two minutes; and that if the barge was not through by then she would wait for the next, twelve hours on, and the woman at her tiller had already said what the cheeses thought of that. He had been filling and emptying the chamber since noon on the chance, he said, which does a gate no good. The Tuesday is the Cut's name for her, because for twenty years she has come up on that day. Her own name is on the transom in white, Second Wind, and she had been late, her pilot said, on account of the first. She lay in the outer pound with her bow against the sea gate, long and low and black, twenty-nine metres of her and thirteen hundred wheels of hard cheese under tarpaulin, and the pilot, who wore a man's coat and had her hair tied back with twine, watched three people and two frames and a hound come down off the wall in the last of the light and said, to the one with the pack-frame, "You. Rope."

Pannier had the rope before he had considered it, which he says is a Bearer's reflex and not a virtue. It was the stern line, thirty metres of wet hemp, and he took it twice round the bollard on the wall and held it, with Dun behind him braced as a frame stands that has been told nothing. The stand came at ten past eight by Paddle's watch and by the sea, which agreed. Paddle explained it to the niece while he worked, since she had the notebook out. Twice a day, for about twenty minutes, the sea and the Cut are the same height, and the lock is a doorway and not a room. Ten of the eleven locks have gates that point one way, up the Cut, because the water pushes one way; his point both ways, because the sea pushes the other; and at the stand he could open the pair on the sea side and the pair on the Cut side together, which no other lock on the Cut can do, and for twenty-two minutes there was nothing between the Cut and the sea but a gap four and a half metres wide. Small fish went through it in both directions. The niece wrote that the water ran neither way. I have stood in that gap at the stand, in November, and can say only that it is quiet in a manner that does not seem to belong to water.

The pilot brought the barge in without touching either gate and said to nobody that this was what she paid the dues for. Her name is Sedge; I have it from her, with the remark that it is a plant and she is not. She spoke to the people on the lock by their jobs and not their names, as one does on a boat, and when the stern was through she said to Tarry, who was standing at the beam of the sea gate with one hand on it, not having been told what to do with it, "Lean." Tarry leaned. The gate, which Paddle closes alone by setting his back to the beam and walking backwards, in a manner that takes two minutes and the whole of his spine, came round in one movement and met its fellow with a sound like a door in a very large house. Tarry told me in November that it was the first thing on the road he had done without being asked, or asking, or being thanked; that he had not minded; that he had noticed he had not minded; and that he had thought about this as far as the fourth lock without reaching anything.

Paddle's kitchen has a stove he lights for visitors and a table of the tides for the month chalked on the wall, high water and low in two columns with the stand ringed in red; and on a string by the door, in a stack as thick as a man's thigh, the register, in which for fifty years he has written every tide in one line: Opened. Closed. The niece read an evening of it aloud for the sound, and went back to a September nine years ago, where the hand changes. It is a round hand, and not his. It says: Slow Road Society. Walked eleven. Not found. The next year, in the same hand: Walked eleven. Not found. It says so nine times, and under each, in Paddle's writing, Opened. Closed. He said that they were good people and left the beam as they found it. He said that he had never understood what they thought a book would do.

After supper the niece took the notebook to the end of the table and read them what she had copied, on the nights in the study, at the pace of a hand, out of the Lady of the Locks; it is the page of which Gloss said that whoever wrote it had stood at a lock. I give it as she gave it. "The lock is thirty-one metres from sill to sill and four and a half across, and the fall is two metres ten. The upper gates have a paddle in each leaf; the lower have one only, the other having been taken for another lock in a dry year and not returned. The lower gates are oak and stand a little out of true, so that they close from the top. A paddle is fourteen turns of the windlass, and the windlass sticks at nine. The chamber fills in eleven minutes if no one hurries it. A step is cut in the coping on the left, one boot wide, for the keeper; the bollard on the right is worn bright on the side the rope runs. The beam is longer than it need be. Nothing else about it is remarkable." Sedge had listened with her eyes shut and her lips moving, as a person does who is counting. At the windlass she opened them. "They all stick at nine," she said. "That is where the paddle clears the water and the pawl takes it." She said that the Cut had been cut to one pattern, thirty-one by four and a half, because the boats are; that every chamber on it fills in about eleven minutes, because the paddles were bought in one lot; and that the niece might as well strike out the first half of the page. The niece had done so on the wall at Alder's, in the hour and ten minutes. Her note says: Not length, not width, not fill, not the stick. Fall. Lower paddle. Gate. Step. Bollard. Beam.

They slept in the loft over the sluice-room, where the turn of the flood came up through the boards, and Pannier said that it sounded like a person making a decision and not telling anyone. The hound slept on the barge among the cheeses, which it had not been asked to guard and guarded. Tarry did not sleep. Paddle saw him from the kitchen window walk the coping of the chamber from end to end three times in the dark, with the pole, and stop at the lower gate and stand; and in the morning he gave the niece a number, as one hands over something found, which was forty-three. "Of my paces," he said. She wrote it down.

Sedge's rule, which she gave at six, in the dark, over tea from a can, was that anyone walking her way was working. She makes three kilometres an hour on the water and the towpath makes five, and a lock cannot be got ready by a barge; so the party went ahead, as lock-wheelers do, Pannier and Dun in front, then Tarry and Erewhile, then the niece with the notebook under her arm and the steel rule in her sleeve. The hound, who had been asked nothing, stayed on the cabin roof with its chin on a cheese, like a figurehead that has been put on at the wrong end.

Ten is fourteen hundred metres up from the tide lock: steel gates, a small brick house with its shutters closed, and a card on the door to say that the keeper would be back at the third bell and that anyone in a hurry was welcome to do it themselves. They were not in a hurry; they did it themselves. Tarry and Pannier opened the lower gates, which took the two of them a minute and a half, and held them while the barge came in under Sedge's hand with a hand's breadth to spare on either side; and Pannier took the windlass. He had never worked one. The niece, who meant it as a joke, read him the page. A paddle is fourteen turns, and he made them evenly with the pawl ticking, and at the ninth he stopped. He told me that he had stopped before it stuck: he had felt it come in his wrists, as one feels a stair in the dark, and he could not say whether the knowledge was the book's or the windlass's. It stuck. Sedge said from the stern that it did that. He let the pawl take it, and went round to the other paddle, and stopped at nine there too.

The chamber took eleven minutes and four seconds, and I have the seconds from the niece, who counted them on her pulse and checked them against Paddle's watch, which she had been lent on the understanding that she would bring it back. She had chalked the wall at the start of the fill and again at the end, and she measured between the marks with the rule: seven lengths and seven-tenths of another, which is two metres thirty-one. For those eleven minutes there was nobody on the lock who could have made it faster. Dun, which has no tempo to speak of, ran at the water's. Pannier, who has a new one, found it a little slow. Tarry sat on the beam of the lower gate with his hands between his knees, and Sedge on her cabin roof ate bread, and the barge rose up the wall, and it was the water that decided how long. Water does not take an allocation. I have thought since that this may be what the Society walks the Cut for. They have never said so.

Her notebook has the locks in a column, ruled, in pencil, with the Society's names beside the numbers. I give the first three as written. Ten, Saltings. Fall 2.31. Lower gates steel. Paddles 2/2. Step: right. Bollard: left, not worn. Beam: short. Fill 11:04. Not this one. Nine, Withy Bed. Fall 2.04. Lower gates oak, true. Paddles 2/2. Step: left. Bollard: right, bright. Beam: long. Fill 10:51. Not this one; see keeper. Eight, Cooper's. Fall 2.18. Lower gates oak, out of true. Paddles 2/1 (the other taken for an anchor, the keeper says, six years ago, by a man who needed an anchor). Step: none; a plank. Bollard: both, new. Beam: ordinary. Fill 11:20. Not this one. Not yet.

At nine the keeper was in. She is called Withy, and she is eighty, and she was on the step of her house with her knitting in her lap, and she heard the whole of the page with the needles still. She said that it was not her lock. She said that it was as exact as a bill of sale and that she would have trusted it in a court, and that anyone could tell from the last line what the writer was. "Nothing else about it is remarkable," she said. "Nobody writes that about a lock they did not love." The niece put it in the margin, and then, because it was the first thing anyone had said that morning that she could not measure, she put a ring round it.

They ate at the eighth lock, on the coping, in the eleven minutes, which is exactly the time it takes to eat a piece of bread and a piece of cheese if the cheese is cut by Sedge. She cut it from a wheel she had opened for the purpose, six days short of ripe, she said, and asked the niece what she made of it. The niece said that it tasted of a field before rain. Sedge said that this was very likely true and that by next week it would taste of something else. She said that since every notebook on the Cut asked the keepers which lock, and nobody had thought to ask the boat, she would answer; and that she did not know which was the Lady's but knew which she would have written at. Seven. It has the best light, in the afternoon, from the bottom gates, and a willow that leans over the pound; and a person standing there at five o'clock with nothing to do for eleven minutes could not be held responsible for what happened to the prose.

The niece asked everyone she met that night and day, and wrote down what she was told, which I give without comment. Paddle, the night before: none of his, and he would say no more. Withy: not hers, but she would have liked it to be. Sedge: seven. Pannier: the one with the shortest wait, which was nine, by thirteen seconds. Dun was not asked. Tarry said that he had no view; and then, a lock later, that he had sat on the beam at nine and it was a good beam, and he did not know whether that was evidence.

Seven is called Long Willow, and the willow is there, on the left bank above the bottom gates, leaning out over the pound so that its leaves touch the water at the end of a still afternoon. The keeper had gone to her sister's and left the card. They worked the lock in the usual way; Pannier stopped at nine; the fill took eleven minutes and nine seconds; the barge rose two metres and twelve centimetres by the rule. The niece stood on the lower beam with the notebook open on her knee and did the six things she had written down. The lower gates were true. The lower paddles were two. The step was on the left. The bollard on the right was worn bright on the side where the rope runs. The beam was longer than it needed to be. The light, at five o'clock, on the water, from the bottom gates, was what Sedge had said, and she looked at it for the whole of the eleven minutes.

Her page for seven has every column filled but the last. The fall is 2.12, which she has ringed. The verdict column is empty. She says that she was looking at the light. Sedge says that she was too, and that it was why she had said. I have not asked the niece whether the light was a reason, and she has not offered it as one.

Which Treats of a Bar in the Pound and the Cheese Carried Over It, and of a Page Pinned Above a Stove

The pound above Long Willow had lost a hand's breadth since June. Nobody on the Cut thought this worth a remark, a dry September taking as much from every pound on it, but at a quarter to eight on the Saturday, a third of the way to the next lock, the Tuesday sat down. There was no jolt. The water went on moving past her sides and the willow-tips went on trailing, and the barge ceased to be going anywhere; and Sedge, at the tiller, said a word that I will not give, and then, in an even voice, that there was a bar of gravel across the Cut at that bend which had been there since the flood in the year of the Discharge, that she had cleared it nine hundred times with a hand to spare, and that today the hand was elsewhere.

She said that the barge would float if she were lighter by about four hundred wheels, that the bar was thirty metres long, and that the wharf at the next lock was six hundred metres on; she said it to the towpath, to the people and frames and hound standing on it, in the manner of a person reading out the weather. Pannier had the first wheel off before she had finished. They weigh ten kilograms or near, round and hard and waxed, and they smelled of the cellar they had come from and of something under that which the niece had called a field before rain, and which in the dry sun of the towpath was a good deal louder. Pannier took twelve at a time on Dun's frame and four in his arms. Tarry took two on each forearm and walked the six hundred metres without once shifting them. The niece took one at a time, and counted. There were four hundred and twelve; she carried twenty-eight of them herself, and her arms said so for two days. The Tuesday came off the bar at ten past eleven with a sound like a long breath let out. Sedge paid the carriers in wheels, one each, to be eaten after next Thursday, and said to Pannier that he was the first Bearer she had had who could count; and Pannier, I am told, held his wheel in both hands for some time, and said that it was the first thing he had been paid in that would improve.

The niece's notebook for that morning has three entries, written with a cheese on her knee. I give them as they stand. Q. (19): which of your reasons is the true one? T.: all of them, on different days. Q.: and today? T.: today it was the beam. Q.: what about the beam? T.: it was the right height. Q.: for what? T.: for me. Q.: is that a reason? T.: it is half of one. A little lower, in the same pencil: Q. (19): what is the other half? T.: I have not got to it. Q.: you have had four locks. T.: the cheese is heavier than the lock. And the last: Q. (19): would you rather be asked or told? T.: I would rather the thing were the right size. Q.: that is not an answer. T.: no.

They took the locks that followed one after another, with the light going yellow on the stubble and the barge a few hundred metres behind; I give none of them. The niece's column for the Saturday is in her notebook and I have not copied it, at the request of a person I shall come to, and of the niece herself, and the reader who has been counting is free to go on counting. At a quarter past six they came to a lock-house on the left bank, under an ash, with a lamp already lit in the window and a man on the step mending a net.

His name is Rush, and he is forty-three, a big slow man with the forearms of someone who has worked a beam all his life with his hands and not his back, and he looked at the Tuesday, and at the people, and at the Hand, and went on mending the net. When the barge came up the niece did not ask him anything. She took out the notebook and the rule and did what she had done at the other locks, aloud, as she does when it is going well. The lower gates were oak, and out of true; she watched them come to as Pannier let the water up, and said that they closed from the top. Pannier stopped the windlass at nine, and on the step Rush said "Ah," which was the first sound he had made. The lower paddle was one. The step was on the left, and she laid the rule across it, and it fitted from wall to wall without a hair at either end; she said, "One boot," in a voice a little too steady. The bollard was on the right, and she put her thumb on the side where the rope runs and took it off again. The beam was long. She chalked the wall at the start of the fill and at the end and measured between the marks, seven lengths and nothing over. She did not say the number. Rush had stopped mending at the third thing she said, and did not start again.

When the barge was up he stood and asked whether he might see the rule. She gave it to him. He turned it over and looked at the end where the maker's mark had been, and went into the house without a word, and came out with another, which had hung inside his door on a nail since before he could reach the nail. They are the same. I have held both; the grain of the wear on the ends is the same grain. He asked who had given it her. "Alder," said the niece. "On the Thursday." Rush said that his mother had had hers from the same person, the year after the Afternoon, and that the instruction his mother had given him in the last month of her life was that if anyone ever came to the lock with a rule, he was to show them the kitchen. In thirty-one years, he said, nobody had come with a rule. The Society came with their hands.

The kitchen had a stove, a table and two chairs, and a third brought in; and over the stove, behind a pane of glass that someone had cut to fit, a sheet of Service paper the colour of tea. It is in the square hand the Hands were taught, upright, one stroke at a time, with the sevens crossed. It is headed: To the keeper. There is a number after that, which I shall leave out. The niece read it standing, with her hands behind her, as one reads in a museum, and then aloud, since that is what she does; and it was her page, word for word, as she had copied it in the study at the pace of a hand: the thirty-one metres, the fall, the paddle taken in a dry year, the gates out of true, the nine, the step one boot wide, the bollard, and the beam longer than it need be. And then it went on, where the Lady of the Locks leaves off. The windlass is on its hook. Hang it back. Nothing else about it is remarkable. You will manage. Closed 18:40. Under that was a Service number, and under the number, in pencil, in a round hand that was not the Hand's, a single word: Pawl. Tarry gave it four minutes. He told me so in November; he said that of the several things a person may mean by You will manage, he had settled on the plainest, which was that the writer thought she would.

Rush said that his mother had called him that. The Hands had numbers, and the Cut had never had a name for him, and she had needed something to call across the water; so she had taken the part of the windlass that holds the paddle up while you let go of the handle. He had not said whether it was right. She had taken it that he did not mind. Rush had been twelve. He remembered a tall man, taller than Tarry, who stood at the beam from the first bell to the last and, his mother said, ate standing, and never came into the house. He reported every boat to her from the door, in one line, and she wrote the lines in the lock-house book: Barge, one, up, 09:10. The book runs so to that evening. The next line, at ten past six the following morning, is in the same hand and says: Opened. On the evening of the Afternoon, at half past six, he had come to the kitchen door, and not in, and put the paper on the step, and said, "For the keeper." It was the first thing he had said to her in all those years that was not a report.

Then he went and shut the gates, which were shut. He hung the windlass on its hook. He swept the coping to the far end and back with the broom that hangs beside it, and at twenty to seven he took a piece of chalk from his pocket and wrote on the near arm of the beam the lock's number and the word Closed and the time, and walked up the towpath toward the Basin with his hands empty. Rush's mother was on the step. She did not call. She told Rush afterwards that a call would have been a request, that she had not known whether he could yet refuse one and would not find out that way, that it was the thing she was proudest of in her life and the thing she was most ashamed of, and that she had never settled which. She stood until he was round the bend, and went in. It rained a little in the night. The chalk was gone by morning, and where it had been was a hand and a half of paler wood.

She washed the rest of the beam every spring until she died. Rush does the same, with a bucket and a brush, in April. There is a place on the near arm about a hand and a half long, at the height a Hand's hand would be, which is higher than a keeper's, where the brush has never gone. Nobody told him. "My hand goes round it," he said. The wood there is greyer than the rest and has a bloom on it like the skin of a plum. He tried once, at nineteen, for the sake of evenness, and found that his hand would not.

The niece asked him why his mother had never said. He said that there were eleven locks and ten other keepers, and every one of them wished it to be theirs; that the Lady had come out four years after, with the sheet in it, and his mother had known at once where the sheet had been copied from, and had decided that it would be an unkind thing to be right. The Society comes every September and puts its hands on his beam and is very good to it. They have never once looked in his kitchen, which is next door to the beam, and the glass shows from the path. He has thought it the politest thing the Society does.

They went out to look at it, the four of them, in the last of the light. The place was where he had said. Rush did not tell anyone to leave it alone, and nobody touched it. Tarry stood with the pole in both hands, at about the distance one stands from a door that is shut for a reason, for as long as it takes to say a short line. Then he said that the wood was sound. Rush said that that was kind. The niece had the rule in her sleeve and did not take it out. She says it is the only thing on the Cut she has not measured, and that she does not know what the unit would be. Pannier said nothing, and Dun stood where it had been left, a little way up the towpath, with its head down.

The niece wrote in the verdict column that night at Rush's table, in pencil; I have seen what she wrote, and I do not give it. Rush has asked me, as a courtesy to ten keepers who have hoped it was theirs, to leave the number of his lock out of this record, and the niece has asked me to leave out her verdict until she has told Alder, since Alder said she would say whether she was right; and I have agreed to both, being a person who is asked. Sedge, on the cabin roof, said when she was told of the arrangement that she had never said it was seven where it was written, only where she would have written it, and that the light here was not bad either. The niece said, in the doorway, with the notebook shut, that she would walk the rest in any case. She said that Alder had said all eleven.

The windlass was leaning against the rail where Pannier had left it when the lock was worked. Tarry saw it from the step. He took it and went along the wall to the hook by the door, which is older than the house, and hung it, handle down, as the page says, and stood a moment with his hand flat on the wall beside it. Rush, who had been told by the page for thirty-one years and had never needed telling, said that it was the only time in his life that anyone had got to the hook before he did, and that it had been a Hand. In the night the lock filled and emptied for no barge, as it does, Rush said, when the wind changes. None of them woke except the hound, which went out and sat on the step.

Which Treats of a Sunday Walked Back, and of a Request with Nothing in It

On the Sunday Tarry went back. Nobody had said that he would. He said at first light, at Rush's table, with a cup in both hands, that he had been asked, and that it was the Sunday; and the niece, who had her mouth open, shut it, since on the Thursday he had said what he would do and she had been there. He took the pole and nothing else. The plate and the half-hood he left in their wrapping on Erewhile. The jar of salt, which had not been out of his arms or Pannier's since the pottery, he put into Pannier's, and Pannier says that it was then he knew he would be back, since a man who means to go on takes the salt. Rush asked whether he wanted the windlass. He said that he did not think he would be working a lock. The niece walked with him as far as the first beam and said, "Do not tell her." "I was not going to," said Tarry. "I know," said the niece. "I wished to say it."

The Tuesday lay above the lock with her tarpaulin rolled back and her pilot asleep on the cabin roof with a coat over her face. As he passed, the coat said, "Where?" "Back down," said Tarry. "I was asked." "Who by?" "The woman at the gate." The coat considered this. "Then go," it said. It did not say lean.

Pannier wrote his Sunday message at Rush's table that morning, on the back of a cheese wrapper, in a carpenter's pencil Sedge had lent him. I have it from Thistle, who read it to me in October out of the box. It keeps the form: the weather first, the need last. "Thistle. Clear. East wind, the first of the week. A great many gates; I give you eleven, of which I have worked seven. Dun is well and has lagged no more than usual. I was paid in cheese, one wheel, which will not be ready until after next Thursday; do not let the young have it before. I turned a windlass nine turns and stopped, and do not know why I stopped. A woman of ninety-seven asked what I carried and I said everything, and Dun, and she said that was a load case. I have learned something about the Ninth Gate. I should not mind the waiting at it if it came to an end every eleven minutes. If a man wanted the Gate, and wanted to be home, would you say that was two things or one? P." And under the initial, smaller: I have written.

The niece measured nothing that day. She sat on the step with the notebook shut and the hound's chin on her boot, and Rush, who I think had not talked so much in a year, told her what his mother's hands had been like. At noon she wrote four lines to Kiln on the back of a ration card. "Kiln. Dry. Four hundred and twelve cheeses. You asked how one is serious. I left a number out of my notebook this week and found it was the heaviest thing in it. Is the kiln lit?" Kiln has the card. She has written back that it was.

Pannier mended the net with Rush for an hour, being a man who has to hold something while he thinks, and put his question to him, since there was no Thistle. Rush said that his mother had kept the lock and the house, and had said that they were two things, and had done both, on different days. "Is that an answer?" said Pannier. "It is what she did," said Rush.

Tarry walked the nine kilometres down the Cut at the pace of Dun. Nobody had asked it of him, and Dun was not there. On a Sunday on the Cut the water is left alone: no boat moves, the locks stand at whatever level the Saturday left them, and at the lock-houses he passed a keeper or nobody lifted a hand. Withy raised one needle from her step, as one raises a finger to a neighbour, and went on knitting. A boy fished off the beam at Cooper's with a line and a stone for a weight, and herons stood on the gates all facing one way, like a committee. He touched no beam. He told me that he had thought of it at the first, the hollows being at the height of his hand, and had decided that to touch a thing as a visitor is another act from the one it was worn by. The road log has him at two point nine for the whole of it, which is what it has the party at; it did not register that he was alone. I asked him, in November, why he had not gone faster. He said that otherwise he would have been walking alone, and that at that pace he found he was not. I walked it myself, in November, from Rush's lock to the tide lock, at the same pace. It took three hours and eight minutes. I cannot say that I was not alone; I can say that the road log had me at two point nine, and that I was grateful to it.

Paddle was on the beam of the tide lock with the pipe unlit. It was within the quarter of an hour of the stand, and he was opening the gates for it, as he does on every tide whether or not there is a boat; the Cut and the sea were coming level, and a gull sat in the gap. He said that she had been on the bench since the first bell. He said that he had told her it was a long wait, and she had said that she knew, and that she wished to be early.

She was on her end of the bench, in her coat, with her hands on her knees, which is the way a carrier sits who has something for someone; and when Tarry stopped at the open gate and said the form, I am told that you carry something for me, she said that she did not. "I sat as a carrier does," said Alder, "because it is the only posture I know for waiting for a person who has been asked." She told him he was early. He said that he had not been told the hour. She said that she had not known it either, and had asked for the day. He told me that on the walk down he had composed three remarks: that he had come, that he had brought nothing, and a question about the beans. The first, he found, was unnecessary, and the second was her point; so he asked the third. "How are the beans?" said Tarry. "Over," said Alder. She said that the frost would come on the twelfth of October, and that she had been wrong about the frost every year since she was fifty and had stopped minding.

Plover came out with the tray, and heard that they were talking, and stood in the doorway holding it, since he had been taught eleven years ago what to do when two people sit and say nothing and had never been taught what to do when they do not. After some time he went in again. He came out when they had stopped, and put the cups on the wall.

Alder gave me what followed in October in nine sentences, and Tarry gave it me in November in eleven; they agree. She said that there was no what. She said that on the Thursday there had been a pin, and a gate, and a drawing, and a nephew with no hands, and that he had had four reasons to be at her gate and she could not subtract them. In the forty years at the works there had been the law, and any asking of a Hand, however she put it, had had the law behind it. Since the Afternoon no Hand had come to her gate who was free to say no. She had wished for seventy years to ask a Hand for nothing and see what came, and this was the first Sunday on which she could. On the evening of the Afternoon, she said, she had gone down to the bench at the works to sit at his end, to see the gate from where he had seen it, and had found that she could not, and had sat at her own until it was dark. "The gate is oiled," she said. "I wished to see whether nothing was enough."

Tarry said that he could have said he was on the road. "You did," said Alder. "On the Thursday. And then you said that you would come when you were asked, and I asked, and you are on a bench." He said that he was. She said that it was not nothing and it was not everything, and that it was a better instrument. She had made thirty-eight, she said, and this was the best of them, and it had no parts. She asked whether he had been shown the kitchen at the lock. He said that he had. Had he read the page? He had. Had he touched the beam? "No," said Tarry. "Good," said Alder. She did not ask what the niece had found, and he did not say.

The three hours went as the Thursday's had not. They talked a little and did not talk a great deal. She asked who kept his house, and he said a woman who had revised her opinion of him forty-four times, and she said that was fewer than she would have expected, and asked what the forty-fifth was. He said that he did not know. She asked about the drawing, and he said that he had not yet found a stranger. "It need not be a person," said Alder. "It need only be someone the Forty has not been told about." He said that he would think. The tide turned; a trawler came back past the headland with its gulls; Plover brought tea twice. Alder slept for ten minutes with her chin on her collar, as she had on the Thursday, and woke and said that she had not, and Tarry said that she had not. He told me that at some point in the second hour he noticed that he had stopped counting the minutes, which he does, and could not say when; he took it for a good sign, he said, and did not trust it.

She asked how long his list of reasons was now. He said that it was longer than on the Thursday. She asked what the last was. He said that for twenty-two years, on Sundays, he had sat at a bend in a track with nothing to do, and had wished to know what it was like when the nothing had a person in it. "That is my reason," said Alder. "Yes," said Tarry. "I have borrowed it." She said that in that case she would enter it as lent. "Returned," said Tarry, "and then a dash." She said that she had not supposed there would be a date.

She went in for an envelope, and came out with one, folded in three, and wrote on it on her knee with a pencil, in the hand like a ruler. I was shown it in October. It says: Bench, the coast. Asked for nothing. Came. Lent: one reason, to T. of the Fallows. Returned: —. Nobody hurt. There is nothing inside it. She put it on the shelf at the end of the row, as the thirty-ninth, where it is the only envelope that is flat. I was not asked to open it, and I did not.

He asked for paper, since it was the Sunday and he had not written, and she gave him the back of a ration card, and he wrote his message on his knee, in the form, while she watched. I have it from the housekeeper, who read it to the study in October. "Housekeeper. Clear. East wind, the first of the week. A great many gates. The pin is delivered; it was done. I have been to the sea. The niece's notebook is nearly full, and Pannier has a cheese. I sat on a bench today for three hours, having been asked for nothing, and it was quiet, and I do not yet know what that means. I have a jar of salt for you, which I left with Pannier today in order to come here; he is to be trusted with it. I have checked. I need to know whether you are at the stove. T." Alder read it over his arm, which she had not been asked to do, and said that it was a sound design, the weather first and the need last, so that the need arrived when the reader had been given something to stand on. She did not ask what the stove was.

At noon she said, "That will do." She had allowed a quarter of an hour for nothing, she said, and had been out by a factor of twelve. It is what she said at the Forty in the year it was commissioned, when she was seventy-four, and I had it from the Forty before I had it from her. Tarry stood. She said that she would not ask again. He said, "No." She said, "I may." He said, "Yes." Plover came to the gate with a loaf in a cloth and gave it to him without a word, which Tarry took as the form. She has not asked again, as of November. She may.

He went back by the same road at the same pace, and the road log has him at two point nine again. At Rush's lock at dusk the hound reached him a hundred metres before the others looked up, and Dun lifted its head, which Pannier says it does not do for a man it has not been waiting for. The niece's notebook has it. Q. (19): where were you? T.: on a bench. Q.: doing what? T.: being asked for nothing. Q.: what was it like? T.: quiet, and enough; and I do not yet know whether that is a thing about the asking or a thing about me. Q.: which would you rather? T.: that it were a thing about the bench.

Which Treats of the Hanging Basin, and of Who Said Nobody

On the Monday they left Rush's lock at first light. He walked them to the first beam, which is his habit with visitors, and stood there with his hands in his sleeves. He told the niece that he washed the beam in April and that she would know when. She said that she would come. He said that people said that. "I write things down," said the niece, and he looked at the notebook, and at the rule in her sleeve, and said that in that case he would put out the third chair. She wrote April on the cover of the notebook, and ringed it. He gave Pannier a netting needle to take home to Thistle. Pannier said that she would not know what to do with it, and Rush said that this was the best thing to give anyone.

The last three locks went as the others had, with the barge behind and the party ahead, and the niece did not take out the rule. She put her hand on the beam of each, at the height of the hollow, and stood for as long as it took the Tuesday to come up. Pannier stopped at nine at all three, and said at the last that he had given up trying to know why. Tarry sat on the beams. Dun lagged, as it does, by a tenth of a second, which on a lock is nothing. At the last the hollow was deep enough to hold an egg. She said that it was the oldest on the Cut. I have never been able to find that she measured it.

The Hanging Basin is a stone pool the size of a field, set on a shelf of the plain, with the last lock below it and the feeder stream above and the land falling away on three sides, so that the water sits there like a thing on a hook. From the south wharf the Cut goes down in a ruled line to a smudge that is the sea; from the north the Slope stands up at the end of the haulers' road like a wall with a ramp painted on it. They say that on a clear morning the beam of the tide lock can be seen from the south wharf as a speck, which the niece did not believe, and checked, and could not say. The north wharf is where the haulers' road starts, and on Mondays there is a market for what is slow: cheese, cider, wool, anything that has to be left in the dark for a season, seed that must reach the ground on a day nobody has chosen yet. The Tuesday came in under the north wharf at ten. Cheese at the Basin is sold by its lateness, since lateness is what ripens it, and the grades are Prompt, Detained, Settled and Forgotten, in rising price. Sedge's thirteen hundred wheels, being two days past their Tuesday, went in at Detained, which is one grade above Prompt and fetched four per cent more; and she said that she was paid for being late, which was the only thing her mother had ever approved of her for.

Pannier unloaded for the Basin rate, which is one wheel in the hundred, and counted aloud as he went, which the wharf-hands found so restful that two of them stopped to listen; by noon he had been offered a berth by three different boats. He said that he would ask Thistle. On the board by the north arch there was a notice of the Slow Road Society: that it would walk the Cut on the second Saturday of the month, from the Basin to the tide, behind nothing; that all were welcome; that a Bearer was wanted for the lunches, at the Society's rate, which was set out, and was fair. It was signed C., and under the signature, in a different hand, someone had added: Bring a hat. He read it twice. He said that it was well set out. He did not take a tab, and did not walk on, which on a notice board is a third thing.

The keeper of the last lock is called Quoin, and she is sixty-seven, small and square, and she was sitting on the bench by the beam with her hands in her lap, watching them come up as though she had been told. The beam is pale where she sits, from her palms and her father's before them. The niece, who reads labels, was reading the plate on the lock-house wall, which gives the year the gate was rehung. Then, since the keeper was looking at her, and she had the notebook, and since she is a person who asks, she told her what was on a shelf in a kitchen on the coast. "There are thirty-eight envelopes behind glass," said the niece. "The first says: Lock gate, Hanging Basin, fourteenth of March. Nobody hurt."

Quoin said nothing for the length of the fill. Then she said, "That is me."

She said that it was the fourteenth of March, sixty-one years ago, a Tuesday, a bright cold morning with the water in the Basin so still that the wharf stood on its own reflection, and that she was six, and was on the step. Her father had the heel of the gate to oil, as he did every month, and was under the leaf with the can, whistling the one tune he had, which has no end. The hanging gear let go, as the gear does once in sixty years, and the leaf came down on him a hand's breadth, and stopped. A pin had parted. She remembered the sound, which was not a crash but a clean small sound, like a plate set down on a table. The whistling stopped with it, and then there was no sound at all for what she thinks was a minute, in which her father did not move and a heron on the wharf lifted its head. He came out backwards, and sat on the coping, and was sick. Her mother ran out of the house with her hands floury and did not touch him, and stood. He fitted the new pin himself that spring, and never let anyone else touch it, and said that it had a right to be left alone.

The next morning a young woman in a long coat came on the first barge with a satchel and asked for the pin. Her father gave it her in two halves. She looked at the break for a long time, with a glass, and then without. She asked who had been under the gate. He said that he had. She asked him to show her where he had been standing, and he showed her, and she knelt and measured the gap between the leaf and the place where his shoulder had been, with a steel rule she took from her pocket, and wrote the figure down; Quoin has it from her father still, and it is eleven centimetres. She asked whether he was hurt. He said no. Then she turned and asked Quoin, who was on the step with her thumb in her mouth, whether anyone had been hurt. "Nobody," said Quoin. The young woman wrote it down. She did not say anything else. She was crying, Quoin said, without any noise, as a person does who has been told the result of a test. Quoin's mother offered her bread, and she said that she was not hungry, and ate it on the barge; Quoin saw her from the window.

She came back every March for eleven years to look at the gate, and Quoin waited each time to be asked. Alder asked her father things: about the gear, and the winter, and whether the new pin had been needed. She asked Quoin once whether she was eating. "Was that all?" said the niece. "That was all." Quoin has kept the lock for forty-one years since her father, and in all that time nobody has asked her who said it. She did not say this with any complaint. She said it as one gives the length of a gate. Her father lived another thirty years and died in his chair at the window with the lock in view; Quoin says he was whistling, though she was in the next room and may have supplied it. She said that she had often wondered what became of the pin, and whether it was the one that was kept.

The niece told her that it was the first on the shelf, and that the thirty-eighth had been written on the Thursday with a Hand standing by, who was three paces off with a pole. Quoin looked at Tarry for some time, and then at the beam, and said that that was a good deal of nobody. Tarry said that he had broken the thirty-eighth himself, on purpose, and that she had written his name on it. "You struck a tower and she wrote your name," said Quoin. "My father was under a gate and she wrote Nobody." "She wrote Nobody because nobody was hurt," said Tarry. "She wrote my name because somebody had to be named." Quoin considered this. "Mine is the better label," she said. She asked whether the first had her name on it. "It says Nobody," said the niece. "Good," said Quoin. "It was nobody that day. It is the best thing I ever said." She said that she had said some hundreds of thousands of things since, and could not give the niece one of them. She asked whether the niece would be going back. The niece said that she would, in a year. Quoin said, "You might ask her whether she would like to know who it was. If she would, she may ask me." She said that she should like to be asked; and that a girl with a notebook who could carry the question was as near to being asked as she had come in sixty-one years.

Quoin took the niece along the gate to the heel, where the pin is, in a brass housing the size of a man's fist, with a plate on it in capitals: TRIP PIN, A., SECOND PATTERN. DO NOT REPLACE UNLESS PARTED. In sixty-one years it has not parted. Quoin's father used to say that it was the best employed man on the Cut, since it did nothing at all and nobody doubted it. The niece put her thumb on the housing, which was warm from the sun, and took it off, and wrote the plate down. She asked whether it would be needed. "Not by me," said Quoin. "It is here for the one who is under the gate on the day."

I did not ask Alder, in October. It was not mine to ask. The niece has it in the notebook, in the margin of the page for the Basin, with a ring round it: Ask A. if she would like to know who said Nobody. She has not asked. It is not yet a year.

Before they went, the niece asked her one other thing, since she was asking. She asked whether anyone had come up the towpath at night, thirty-one years ago, on the evening of the Afternoon. Quoin said that a Hand had. She had been thirty-six, and had seen him from the lock-house window at about nine, a tall man with nothing in his hands, who stopped at the pump and drank, and said one word, which was Water, in the plain speech, so that she did not know whether it was a request or a report; and stood at the last beam for the length of a short line, and went on through the north arch up the haulers' road. The niece asked whether he had looked back. Quoin said that she could not tell her; she had been looking at the pump. She had not gone out. She did not know his number or his lock. She had thought that to go out would be a request. "North," said Tarry, who had not spoken, and the niece wrote it down.

The notebook has one other entry for the Basin that is not Quoin's. Q. (19): would you rather be Nobody or be named? T.: I have been both this week. Q.: which was lighter? T.: Nobody. Q.: which was better? T.: the name. It gets looked after.

Sedge did not come to see them off. She was selling. She sent a boy with a fourth wheel and a message on the back of a bill of lading, which the niece read aloud on the wharf. It said: A wheel for the dog. It has no name that I could get out of the niece, so I have been calling it Settled, which is the grade, and it has earned it. Tuesday. S. The hound, which had ridden on a cheese for three days, looked up at the word, or at the cheese, and the niece wrote it in the notebook with a ring round it, and said that it was given by a boat, which was not a place but was as near as the hound had come. Tarry said that it would do. Pannier put the wheel on Dun's frame beside the other three, and Dun, which has no tempo to speak of, took the load without a word, and the hound walked. The haulers' road leaves the north wharf under an arch and goes toward the foot of the Slope, six kilometres, in a line as straight as a ruled margin. It is lined with poplars on the left, planted, a stone says, the year the Cut was finished, and at that hour it was empty except for a hauler's cart going up with its wheels bound in rope and the carter walking at its head. They fell in behind it, since it went at their speed, and the hound went to the carter's boots, and then, being Settled, to the cart's tailboard, and sat on it. No one called it down. The niece looked at the Slope and at the road and at the notebook, and said that it was the only way up. Nobody answered, since it was.

Which Treats of the Slope and the Count, and of a Drawing Put on a Smith's Table

The haulers' road ends at the foot of the Slope in a yard of carts, where the teams lie about in the sun until there is a load. The Slope is four kilometres of grade, one in nine, laid in setts by people who did not trust the weather, with a footway of broad shallow stairs along its eastern edge, and it goes up out of the coastal plain to the Basin as a ramp goes up to a door. Everything that goes up it goes by hand. There is a board at the yard gate with the rule on it: that anyone going up may push the tail of a cart, and that the pusher shall give his name at the first hundred. The party read it. The niece asked whether they might. A woman at the gate said that she had never known anyone ask, and that people mostly just said their names. Beside the stair stand fifty-three posts, each cut with the number of a call, so that a walker keeps the carts' count without being asked to.

A team is six, and the seventh place is the tail, for anyone. They push in the Count. At every hundred paces the leader calls the names of the team one after another, in the order they stand, and each answers Here; and the whole cart calls the number of the hundred; and they go on. The Slope is climbed in fifty-three calls. The haulers say that the Count began as a rule for safety, since a team that does not know within a minute that someone has dropped off the rope has a loaded cart on its feet, and that it went on being sung because nobody could think how to stop. "Nobody pushes unnamed," said Hawser, who led the cart with the grey cloth. He is a short heavy man with a voice that does not seem to belong to him, and he looked at the Hand's pole and at the plate wrapped on Erewhile and said only that the tail would be wanted.

The cart was carrying salt, forty sacks of the grey sort from the pans at the foot, for the kitchens of the plain; the niece smelled it, and looked at Dun's frame, where the jar sat in its cloth. So they took the tail: Pannier, Tarry and the niece, with Dun roped to the back of the cart like a fourth, and the hound walking at the wheel. At the first hundred Hawser called the team, Hawser, Trace, Stay, Hame, Thimble and Cleat, and each said Here, Cleat, who is twelve, in a voice that cracked on it; and then he said, "Tail," and Pannier said, "Pannier," and Tarry said, "Tarry," and the niece, who was asked her name and has not been in the habit of giving one, said, "Niece." Hawser asked whether that was the whole of it. She said that it was the one she had. "It will carry," said Hawser, and called all three. At the second hundred he called them again, and Pannier, I am told, did not answer, never before in his life having been called by his name at work; and Hawser called it again, and the second time Pannier said Here in a voice he did not know, and the cart went up a stride.

It is not hard work if it is not stopped. The cart takes the grade at the pace of the slowest in it, which was Dun, and the call every hundred paces gives the body something to do that is not thinking. Dun, roped to the tail, lagged a tenth of a second on every stride, and the cart waited for it each time without being asked; Hawser said afterwards that he had hauled with animals that were faster and a good deal less polite. Tarry pushed with the flat of both hands at the height of the tailboard, and the niece with her shoulder, and she said afterwards that it was the first work she had done in her life in which she had known at every moment where everyone was. At the twenty-sixth call there is a shelter, and the call there is longer. Hawser calls three more names after his own team, which are not on the team, and nobody on the team answers, and the cart answers for them: Here. They are the three who went under a cart on the Slope in the first year of the Count, when it was only a rule for safety, and the haulers have called them at the halfway ever since. Tarry said Here with the rest, and so did Pannier, and when the niece asked him afterwards whether he had known them, he said that he had not, and that it was not a question of knowing. Then the team rests a quarter of an hour, and Hawser gave the niece the whole Count, which she wrote in the notebook, and which has no tune but the numbers. I do not give it. It is the haulers', and they do not publish it.

At the shelter Hawser asked Tarry whether it was true that he had struck a giant. Tarry said that it was. Hawser asked why. "I wished to know what one was like," said Tarry. "And?" "Polite." Hawser said that he had hauled up the Slope for twenty-six years and could not say as much for anything on it. Cleat asked the hound's name. The niece said that it was Settled. Cleat said that that was a grade, and that it had earned it, which the hound took with composure.

At the fifty-third call Hawser called the team and the cart, and added, as the custom is, "Slope," and the team said "Done," and the cart came over the lip on to the level. The Slope-house stands there: a long low building in the same grey setts, with a forge at one end and a lamp-room at the other and a flat roof with a rail. Over the door is a plate that says: BUILT BY THE SERVICE. 4,112 HANDS. NINE MONTHS. There are no names on it, only the number, and the niece read it twice and copied it, and then stood a moment with her pencil, as one does at the foot of a column of figures that is a sum of people.

The keeper of the Slope-house is a woman called Tongs, fifty, with arms like the Slope's setts, who mends carts and brakes and the wheels of anyone who comes up, for a meal and a story. She had heard that a Hand was walking, she said, and that the cart-wrights had a bet on whether it would be on the Slope or round it. She looked at Tarry for a time, and at the pole, and said that she supposed the bet was settled. She looked, too, at the steel rule in the niece's sleeve, and said nothing, and looked again. The fee is a meal and then a story, told at the table by whoever the table points at, and the table pointed at Pannier. He told the Forty. He has told it eleven times now, he says, and it gets shorter, and this was the shortest: that his neighbour had a pole with a branch on it, and had walked at a wind field in his best plain, and had struck the first tower with the branch as hard as he could, on purpose, because the Canon says that a Hand who meets a giant strikes it; and that the tower had stopped, and the next, and the next, one after another down the line, like a thing being told; and that the voice in the handset had said Is anyone injured, and he, Pannier, had said No, a visitor, sorry, and the voice had said Thank you, Pannier, and asked him to stand outside the sweep; and that the whole Forty had stood still for fourteen minutes for the first time in his twenty-two years of Sundays, and he had sat at the foot of the tower and eaten his lunch. Tongs said that it sounded like the Canon. Pannier said it was what had happened. "It is what the Canon will say happened," said Tongs, and gave him more bread. Hawser, who had come in for the bread, said that the tail was always short, and that Hame would be done in two years, and that the Slope would want a Bearer. Pannier said that he was becoming over-offered, which he had not known was possible.

After supper she took them up on to the roof, because it was dusk, and that is what the roof is for. From the rail you can see the whole of the plain that the Eleventh Road crosses, from the dark line of the Slope's own edge to a horizon so far away that it is a colour and not a line. The niece said that she had not known it was so flat. Pannier said that it was not; it only looked so from above. The sun was going down behind the Slope's own shoulder, and the plain took the colour of the inside of a loaf. It turned cold quickly, and Tongs lent the niece a coat that smelled of the forge. Beyond the far edge, very low, there was a smudge of yellow where the holds keep their lamps, and he looked at it for some time and said that it was in the right direction. The niece asked Tarry, low, whether he would tell her at the Crossing what he and the captain had said in the nine minutes. He said that he would tell her at the Crossing. She wrote that down, and under it the word Wednesday.

On the towers of the Forty the warning lamps are red, and they are lit at dusk, one after another along the line, each a moment after the last, so that the lighting runs down the line like a thing passed from hand to hand, and when it reaches the end it begins again at the beginning. From the Slope-house roof, forty-eight kilometres off, it is a row of small red points in a shallow curve, and they come on in order, and go on coming on. The niece, who counts, counted. She counted twice. "Forty-one," she said. From the hold side, as everybody in the Fallows knows, the last tower stands behind the nearest and is never seen, and the place is called the Forty; and from here, at this angle, it was plain that there were forty-one, and had been all the time.

Pannier named them. He had washed them for twenty-two years on Sundays, from the ladder, and had never in that time seen them from anywhere he was not climbing. That is the ninth, he said, which hums in a south wind; and that the fourteenth, which squeaks; and he said that he could not tell from here which was which, but that he could tell it was the fourteenth by the way it was lit. He did not say what way. He stood with his hands on the rail for some time and said that they looked smaller than he had been led to expect, and a good deal more like each other. Tarry said that for twenty-two years he had looked at the Forty from the bend on Sundays for three reasons, which were that it was far, and that it was the only thing that turned, and that his neighbour was in it. "And now?" said Pannier. "You are here, and it is lit." "Who lights it?" "It does." Pannier said that he had always supposed it lit because he was on it, and that he found he was relieved, and a little hurt.

Tarry said that nobody had ever told the Forty what it looked like. He had told it, at the bench, the best he could, and it had asked him to tell it again. He said that he would tell it now. A line of forty-one lamps in a shallow curve, lit one after another, each a moment after the last, so that the lighting goes along the line like a gesture passed from hand to hand, and when it reaches the end it begins at the beginning. He said it twice, to the niece, who wrote it down, and then once more to the dark, not loudly, as one says a thing over before one carries it.

Tongs had come up behind them with a lamp, and asked what was in the roll under his arm. He said that it was a drawing. She held the lamp for him, and he unrolled it on the top of the rail, with the niece's notebook and Pannier's two hands on the corners against the wind. It showed a brass lever at the foot of a tower, with a plate on it in capitals; and, under that, a spring, a pawl, and a small coil marked return on thanks. Tongs read it with her lips moving. She asked what it did. He said that it stopped a thing when it was asked, and let it go on when it was thanked. She asked who had thought of that, and he said a woman of ninety-seven. She asked how the lever knew it had been thanked. He said that there was a small listening-plate in the housing, which took the word, and that the coil would not let go for anything else. "Then if you do not thank it, it stays stopped," said Tongs. "Yes." "It is a lever that insists on manners." "Yes," said Tarry. She held the lamp closer and said that the lever was drawn for a small hand and the spring for a light one, so that a child could pull it. "Then she drew it small on purpose," said Tongs, "so that anyone can ask." "Then I shall make it," she said. "Tomorrow. Leave it with me." She said that she had made brakes for thirty years and had never been asked to make a thing that stopped because someone said please, and that she was not going to let it be made by anyone else.

The notebook has the last entry of the day, by the light of the lamp on the rail. Q. (19): how many? T.: forty-one. Q.: shall we tell it? T.: we shall tell it what it looks like. Q.: it will say noted. T.: yes. Q.: is that enough? T.: it will have been told.

Which Treats of the Forge on the Slope, and of a Plate That Listened for a Word

Tongs began at first light, with the drawing pinned to the post of the anvil and her materials laid out on the bench in the order she would need them: a length of brass bar as long as a forearm, a coil of steel wire, a lump of bright mild steel, a hacksaw, three files, a pot of grease, and a box that she did not open until the afternoon. She said that she did not hurry brass. The party were put to work, as everyone is who stands in a forge. Pannier took the bellows, which he took as a Bearer takes a load, with relief at being handed an exact weight; and he found that they had a count, and at the hundredth stroke he said, to the forge, "Pannier," and then, "Here." Tongs asked what he was doing. He said that he was calling the roll. She said that she had never had one. By the afternoon, at every hundred strokes, the forge called itself, Pannier, Tarry, Niece, Tongs, and each said Here, and the hound, once, lifted its head. The niece read out the dimensions from the drawing and said them back, which Tongs required. Tarry held the bar in the jaws of the vice with his two hands while she sawed, since he does not shift, and the hound lay under the bench in the warm.

Before she began she had looked at Dun, as she looks at anything with a wheel or a leg, and said that the third leg was slow and that she could have it right by supper. Pannier said that it had always lagged. She said that that was no reason. He took the card out of the pocket he has had to enlarge and gave it to her without a word. She read it twice. Dun, pack-frame, pattern nine, third leg, lag 0.1 s. Not to be mended. Signed with a name and the word Systems. She took it to the slate on the wall, where the Registry's answers come in, and put the name to it, and the slate said what it says; and she stood a moment with her hands hanging, and gave the card back, and said that she signed well. Then she mended the strap of the saddle, which was not forbidden.

She made the lever in three hours. She filed it to the drawing and then, since the drawing was drawn for a small hand, filed it again to the shape of one, which is not the same thing; and she sent for Cleat, who came from the yard with his hands black from the cart-wheels and stood with the right one flat on the bench while she held the lever against it and moved it a millimetre at a time. The cart-wrights drifted in to watch, because the bet was settled and there was nothing left to look at on the Slope but this, and began another on whether it would work, at odds that Hawser did not like. She ignored them as she ignores the weather. "Twelve," she said, to the lever, when it fitted. "That is the youngest I would want to ask it."

The spring she made from the steel wire, on a mandrel, in the fire. She wound the coil, and heated it to the colour of a ripe cherry, and quenched it in oil, and then drew it back over the flame until the steel ran through its colours, straw and then bronze and then a blue like a pigeon's neck, and she took it off the heat at the blue with the tongs that are her name. "Blue is a spring," she said. "Straw is a pin." The niece wrote the colours down. The pawl she cut from the mild steel and hardened only on its face, and left the shank soft. "The weakest part should be the one you can replace," said Tongs. "She would say so. Make the cheap thing give."

When she wanted a measure she held out her hand, and the niece, who had been told to give her the steel rule from her sleeve, gave it. Tongs did not measure with it. She turned it over, and took a glass from her apron, and looked at the end where the maker's mark had been, for some time. Then she took the niece to the anvil and showed her, on the horn of it, a stamp that her mother had cut: a small hammer in a ring. It is worn flat on the anvil. On the end of the rule, under the glass, it is a ghost of the same hammer. "That is my mother's," said Tongs. "She made those for the engineer. Every pin on that shelf of hers was struck on this anvil, to her numbers, by my mother and then by me, and I have never seen the shelf." The niece said that there were thirty-eight. Tongs said that she had struck the Forty's. Four point eight, she had been told. It had been five on the bench. Twenty-three years in a tower in the wind, and a pin ages down; it had done its work two tenths early, which was the right way to be wrong. She asked whether that was the one with the Hand's name on it. The niece said that it was. Tongs said that she would have liked to be told. She went to the shelf over the forge and took down a biscuit tin and gave it to the niece. It held postcards, in a ruled hand, one for every pin: the date, the place, and three words, Nobody hurt, and a capital A. There were thirty-seven. One had four words. Hurt, one. The pin held. Under it was a line in pencil, in another hand, her mother's: Mine. "The steel was a grade too good," said Tongs. "It was a bar my mother had by her, and she thought she was doing the engineer a kindness. The engineer wrote that it was her specification. They wrote to each other on that date every year, for twenty-six years, until my mother died. She wrote Mine, and the other wrote Mine. They never agreed." The niece asked what Tongs wrote. "Nothing," said Tongs. "I have the tin. I have thought that I shall write to her on the date." She said that she had thirty-seven and that there ought to be a thirty-eighth. The niece said that there would be.

Pannier asked her, while the file went, about the bearing, since the engineer had said that Fourteen wanted it. Tongs said that a yaw bearing was not a smith's work, and that no one on the Slope could make a race that size, and that what the Forty wanted was to be told to ask for it, and to ask for the right thing. She said that it was very polite and would go on asking for oil. Pannier said that he had heard that. "Then write it down," said Tongs, "and put the word bearing in it. I will give you the paper." She did, and it is in the pocket with the card.

In the afternoon she opened the box. It held a plate the size of a playing card, grey, with a pierced face and a short cable, and a label in her mother's hand: VOICE-LATCH, SLOPE BRAKE. She said that the Service brake had listened for one word. Hold. The brakeman said it in the Service speech, flat, with no person in it, and the brake held. The last brakeman had said it on the afternoon of the Afternoon, she was told, and had walked down the Slope in the dusk, and had not been seen to stop. Nobody had said it since. The plate takes its current from the brake's own dynamo, which every cart coming down turns, so that it has not been off for thirty-one years; and she had never liked to take it out. She said that she did not hold with throwing away a thing that was listening. She had taken it out of the cabinet that morning, with the brake disconnected, and laid it on the bench, and it had gone on listening there.

She asked Tarry whether he knew the word. He said that he knew the Service speech from the Canon, and had used it on one occasion, to one person. She asked him to say it. He said it, once, flat, as it is said, to the plate on the bench. There was nothing for a moment. Then a small green lamp came on in the face of the plate and stayed lit, and the relay behind it made one click, which was the only sound in the forge. Tongs sat down on the anvil block. After a while she said that she supposed it had been waiting for somebody to say it right. Nobody answered. Tarry looked at the lamp, and then, I am told, at the floor, for the length of a short line.

To teach it the new word she had to say the word to it, and not once. A plate that listens for one voice will hold on that voice alone. She said it, Thank you, flat and plain, and the plate took it as a stranger; and then she had them all say it, one at a time, at the plate, as many voices as she could get, until the lamp came on for any of them. Pannier said it in the Fallows speech, with his mouth rather far forward. The niece said it as she says everything, without hurry or weight. Cleat's cracked. Hawser, who had come in for the bread and been caught, said it in his not-quite-his voice, and the cart-wrights, who had come to watch, said it in nine ways, with some embarrassment. Tarry said it last, and slowly. Tongs counted the lamp: twenty voices, twenty greens. "Anyone who can say it can let it go," she said. "Nobody who cannot."

She asked who would pull it first. Tarry said that he did not know; that the engineer had said a stranger, and it need not be a person, only someone the Forty had not been told about. Tongs said that this was harder than it sounded. The Forty had been told about everybody on the Fourth Road for twenty-two years, and counted them, and greeted them, and it was difficult to be a stranger on the Fourth Road. Pannier said that it would have to be someone from the coast. Cleat said, from the yard door, that it could be a child not yet born. Nobody laughed. Tarry said that someone would come.

At dusk the relay on the Slope-house wall, which Tongs keeps for the district board, took a message for the party, and she read it from the slate. It was from the Forty, and was in the form it uses, and was long, as its messages are, since it does not know what to leave out. Wind from the south-west at nine metres a second. Tower Fourteen squeaks. The bench is kept. I am told that you are coming back by the Slope, at two point nine, and I have counted the days. I asked the district board whether I am forty or forty-one, and was told forty for the purposes of the roster, and I have noted it. Is anyone injured? Tarry had Tongs put the answer into the slate for him. No one is injured. We are coming. We have a drawing for you. The slate gave back a single line, and she read that too. Noted. Thank you.

She bolted the lever to the shop's line-shaft by evening, since it was the only thing in the building that was turning: the shaft that drives her drill and her grindstone. It was a plain test, with the plate in the housing and the coil wound behind it. Pannier pulled first, because he was nearest. The shaft stopped. The grindstone slowed and stood, the drill stood, and the forge fell quiet except for the fire, which does not mind. It was, Tongs said, the first silence in that building since the Afternoon, and nobody moved in it. Pannier stood with his hand on the lever. Then he said, "Thank you," and the shaft took up, and the lever went back to its stop by itself, and the grindstone found its pitch. He said that he had not thanked a machine in twenty-two years. He had thanked Dun. He said that it had been quite different, and that he could not say how.

The niece pulled it, and said it; and Cleat; and Hawser, gruffly, with his cap off, and Tarry last. The cart-wrights paid out at four to one. When Tarry had said it the lever went back to its stop, and he stood a moment with his hand where it had been. Tongs said that he was to thank it as a form and not as a favour. She said that she had made brakes for thirty years, and that every one of them had stopped because it had been made to, and that this was the first she had made that stopped because it had been asked. She said that it worked. She said that that was not the same as its being right, and that she would not know about that until someone pulled it who did not know what it did.

She cut the plate herself that night, by the lamp, with a graver. She made ASK in capitals the height of a thumb. Under it, in smaller letters, she cut AND THANK. At the foot of the plate, on the left, she cut A., as the drawing has it; and on the right, struck with the tail of her mother's stamp, small and a little crooked, a hammer in a ring. She asked whether there was to be a note with it, to say that it was to be pulled first by a stranger. Tarry said that there was not to be. She asked why. He said that a note would tell whoever read it, and then they would not be strangers. Tongs said that in that case the lever would wait. "Yes," said Tarry. "For how long?" "I do not know." She said that she had a plate in a box that had waited thirty-one years for a word, and that she supposed a lever could do as much.

The niece wrote the day's last entry in the notebook on the anvil, in the glow of the forge. Q. (19): did the old plate mind? T.: it lit. Q.: and the new word? T.: it will light for that. Q.: is it a machine or a manner? T.: a manner, with a spring in it.

Which Treats of the Crossing, and of Nine Minutes Kept Out of the Record

They left the Slope-house on the Wednesday at the first bell. Tongs stood at the door with the lever in a box of planed pine, wrapped in a cloth, and gave it to Tarry with the instruction that it was not to be oiled. She said that the brass would take a colour and he was to let it. To Pannier she gave a loaf, and said that a Bearer who counted aloud would not starve. She had written a postcard the night before, the first of her life to the engineer, and she gave that to the niece, unsealed, and asked that it be read before it was given. The niece read it on the road. It says: Alder. A pin, a lever, a plate. I have thirty-seven. I shall write on the date. T. Hawser's team were in the yard with the carts, and as the party went out through the gate Hawser called the names of the tail, Pannier, Tarry, Niece, all down the length of the yard, in the voice that is not quite his, and each of the three said Here without having decided to. Cleat ran after them as far as the first post to say goodbye to the hound, and the hound looked up when it was called Settled, which it has not yet learned to do on its own.

The Eleventh Road leaves the Slope along the top of the shelf and then runs north across the plain for twenty kilometres without a bend. It was laid for a pace of five kilometres an hour, as all the service roads were, and at two point nine it takes a day. There are posts every kilometre, small and square and grey, with a number cut in the face; there are verges of salt-grass; there are fields with nobody in them. Like all the service roads it is mended each spring by whoever lives nearest, and in the middle of the plain that is nobody, so that it is mended by the weather. The plain is not as flat as it looks from the Slope-house roof. It rises and falls by a metre in a kilometre, like a thing breathing slowly, and the road goes up and down it, and on the top of every rise the Forty is there on the horizon, a little larger. Tarry carried the box on his arm like a child. By the middle of the morning the niece could see the towers by day. They are white, and thin as hairs, and they were turning. By noon she could count them without a lamp. She did not, and when Pannier asked why not, she said that she had counted them once and did not want to do it again until she could say it to them.

They ate at the eleventh post, in the shade of the post, with the cheese from the pay. It was a day short of ripe, as Sedge had said it would be, and Pannier cut it with the knife he keeps for Dun's straps. He said that he could taste the Slope in it. The niece said that cheese does not taste of places, it tastes of time, and he said that that was what he had said. The hound, which had been lying in the road looking north, got up, and went off the verge into the salt-grass, and put up a hare. It did not chase it. It stood, and the hare ran twenty paces and stopped and stood, and the two of them looked at each other across the length of a short line. "The hare is very good," said Tarry. Pannier said that that was the Sunday message. Tarry said that it was Wednesday, and that it was also true.

A woman at the gate of the next field, who was selling cider by the cup, asked whether it was true that a Hand had struck the giant. Pannier gave her the thirteenth telling, which was the shortest yet. He said that a man had hit a tower with a stick and he had said sorry. She gave them the cider for it and said that she had expected more. She asked Tarry for his opinion of the cider, and he gave her four minutes on it, which she had not expected either. He said that it was the second best thing on the road. She asked what was the first. He said, the hare. In the afternoon the wind got up from the south-west, which is the Forty's wind, and the towers turned faster, and you could hear nothing, being too far; but the niece said that she could feel them in her teeth.

The Crossing is where the Fourth Road comes in from the north and the Eleventh from the south and they cross, in the old service pattern, in a square of beaten ground with a signpost in the middle and a shelter at one corner. The signpost has four arms. The north arm says THE FALLOWS 40. The south arm says THE SLOPE 20. The east arm says THE NINTH GATE, and a number that is very large. The west arm has had its board taken. The shelter is a three-sided shed of grey sett with a roof of tile, a bench along the back wall, a water tank, and, bolted to the end wall at the height of a man's head, a small steel post with a grille and a lens, which is the road log: the Registry's post number four hundred and eleven, that listens for falls and shouts and records the weight of the passing, and is the last of its pattern, and is due to be taken down, the Review having asked that it be left. The back wall is written on. It has been written on by everyone who has waited there, in pencil and in chalk and with the points of knives: names, and dates, and the weather in the Sunday form, Dry, east wind, and tallies of nights; and one in a hand like a gate, which says MATTOCK, THREE GATES DOWN, HAS A CART, PRICE CAN WAIT. At the height of a Hand's eye, in capitals, in the square hand, with no name under it, there is one line that is not weather. It says: ASKED. 14:09. The niece read it aloud. Nobody said whose it was, and I do not know. It is the Hands' hand, and it is also the hand of anyone who has been shown one.

Beside the shelter, on a stone of its own, there was a plaque that had not been there in August. It was brass, the size of a tray, new enough still to be bright. It said: HERE, ON THE SIXTH DAY OF THE NINE, AT 14:02, A HAND OF THE FALLOWS HALTED THE FAREWELL COACH FOR NINETEEN MINUTES, TO ASK A PASSENGER WHETHER SHE WAS CARRIED BY HER OWN REQUEST. SHE WAS. ERECTED BY THE SLOW ROAD SOCIETY, WHO WENT ROUND HIM. Pannier laughed, once, aloud. The niece read it twice with a straight face. Tarry stood in front of it for the length of a short line, with his hands on the pole, as one stands before a notice about oneself, and said that the dates were correct. He said that he had not known the Society kept a brass-founder. He put his hand flat on the brass for a moment, which he had not done to the beam at Rush's. He said that it was new and could take it. There is a tin cup on a chain at the tank, the chain worn bright by hands. The niece filled it and gave it to him, since the day had been hot, and he drank, as Hands do for the heat and not for the thirst, and said, "Water," in the plain speech, to nobody. She looked at him. She had been told at the Basin about a tall man at a pump. He looked back, and said that it was a report, since the water was cold. "Or a request," said the niece. "Yes," said Tarry.

Pannier went to the place on the road where, in August, he had stood. He did not have to look for it. A Bearer stands behind, and the place was four paces to the left of the south arm of the signpost and two behind the line the coach had stopped on; he put his heels on it, and said to the place that he was here, and went red, since a Bearer does not. His right hand went to his belt, where in August there had been a tool, and found nothing, and he looked at it with some surprise. He said that on that day there had been someone else on the road, in the ditch on the far side of the shelter, with a stylus and a leaf, whom he had taken for a surveyor. He had not looked. A Bearer does not. But he had heard the stylus, which has a sound, and it had stopped at about the time the walker said the word is, and the person had gone. He did not know where. I have the post's count for those twenty-one minutes. It lists nine persons: the walker, the Bearer, the captain, the two pushers, the passenger in the coach, and the two walkers with the sunshades, which is eight. The ninth it gives as one, unclassed, ditch, from 14:00 to 14:05. I have asked at the Registry for the roll of the surveyors who were on that road in August, and there were none.

I have the first hand's last leaf in front of me as I write this paragraph. It is ruled in the Review's grey, and the line runs to the edge and does not turn, and ends on the word is. Under the word there is a small ring, such as a pen makes when it is set down on the paper and lifted, and in the corner, in a brown that I have not liked to ask about, a thumbprint. I say this because I said in the preface that I would say where the first hand stops, and I have said it, and it is here.

The signpost's shadow lay across the beaten ground with its four arms, like a clock with nothing to tell, and the niece stood in the middle of it for a moment before she sat down. Tarry said, "I said I would tell you." The niece said, "Yes." There is a bench in the shelter long enough for two. Pannier, who is quicker than most of us to know when to be elsewhere, took Dun and the hound down the road to the south and stopped at fifty metres, since the post hears forty. The road log has the next nine minutes as follows, and I give it as it stands. Post 411, the Crossing. 16:58 Persons four, frames two, hound one, northbound, 2.9. 16:59 Halted at shelter. 17:00 Two persons to bench (T. of the Fallows; the niece). 17:00 Remaining persons, frames, hound to the road south, fifty metres. 17:02 Walker: "I said I would tell you." 17:02 Niece: "Yes." 17:03 Stationary. 17:12 Stationary ends. 17:12 Niece: "Thank you." 17:12 Walker: "Done." 17:13 Cost, eleven minutes. Noted. Pannier came back at the quarter past, and asked nothing, and said that Dun had been a very good listener. Pannier says that at 17:07 Dun, at fifty metres, turned its head toward the shelter, and the hound did not. He says that he used the nine minutes to tell Dun about Thistle, and the Gate, and the cheese, at some length, and that Dun, which lags, heard it all out.

There is a line missing. At 17:07 the post recorded one sound, short, from the bench; it gave no words, since it records sound and not speech below its threshold; it recorded it as a rise of eleven decibels for a fraction of a second, source one person. I have heard that sound described before. It was the pusher at the Salvage Fair, of a captain, in the middle of the nine minutes at this place, and she said that it was short, like a lid. I have not asked the niece what she laughed at. She asked me, in November, to leave the nine minutes out, and I said that I would, and I have; she is a person who asks, and I am one who is asked. Done closes a commission. The commission was hers, made on the Monday on a roof, and fulfilled on the Wednesday on a bench, and I know of no other. Tarry's unit of giving is four minutes. Nine is two of them and a margin of one, which I take to be the length of a thank you. The page of the log in the Review's file has, at that place, the bare times and the bare cost, and I think that they are the most accurate thing there is about those nine minutes, and I have set them down. I said in the preface that a name, once written, becomes a claim. I find that a silence, once written, becomes one too, and I would rather leave this one as it is. I stood in the square myself in November for an hour, with the log open on my knee, and nothing happened, which is what a crossing is for. At twenty past two a carter came by and nodded to the brass. I asked him what it said. He said that it said somebody had been rude. I asked who. He said, the Society.

That evening they slept in the shelter, the four of them in a row on the floor and the hound across the door. Before they lay down Tarry opened the box to see whether the brass had taken a colour. It had, very slightly: the colour of a cheek. Before she lay down the niece went to the back wall with a pencil and wrote under the capitals, small, in her own hand, which cannot do the square one: THANKED. 17:12. Nobody asked her to. At dusk the lamps came on to the north, twenty-eight kilometres off, and from here, from the south, the line had a bend in it that she had not seen from the Slope-house roof: it went on straight for twenty-nine lamps, and turned a little, and went on. The niece said that it was at the twenty-ninth that the Forty's log puts the camera that sees the bend in the track where her uncle sits on Sundays. She sat down next to him on the floor, and leaned her shoulder on his, as one does who has been told something and has no wish to say anything. Later, in the dark, Tarry said that he was lighter by about the weight of a box of planed pine, and the niece said that that was not a measurement, and he said no. The notebook for the Wednesday has no Q. and T. in it. The page is not torn out. It is ruled and dated, and under the date, in small writing, is the number twenty-nine, and nothing else. I took it for what it was.

Which Treats of the Lever Set at the Foot of the Tower, and of What the Forty Was Asked

The Thursday was the long day. From the Crossing to the Forty is twenty-eight kilometres, and at two point nine that is nine hours and a half, so they left the shelter at the first bell with the box on Tarry's arm and the light not yet in the ditches. The Fourth Road goes north from the Crossing as the Eleventh goes south, in a line as plain as the other, with its post every kilometre and its verge of salt-grass, and they went up it in the order they had come down it, Pannier and Dun in front, then Tarry and Erewhile, then the niece, then the hound. For the first three hours nothing was said. Pannier, who is a quiet man on a strange road, became on this one a different kind of quiet, as a person does who is walking into his own weather. He knew the fields. He said the names of two of the farms as they passed, under his breath, as one says them to a child.

They began to hear it at about the twenty-fourth kilometre. It is not a sound. It is the air being moved in a particular way by forty-one blades at once, and it comes up through the soles before the ears have it. The niece said that it was like being under a very large animal asleep. At two kilometres from the first tower a grey post on the verge, which they had passed a hundred times, spoke. It has a grille. "Good road, Pannier," it said. "Good road, Tarry. Good road, Niece. Good road, Dun. Good road, Erewhile. Good road, hound." "Settled," said the niece. There was a pause of the length that the Forty takes to be sure. "I have not been told that," it said. "Is it a name?" The niece said that it was a grade, and that it was given by a boat. "Noted," said the Forty. "Good road, Settled." The hound looked at the post, and then, I am told, sat down in the road, and did not get up until it had been greeted again; and it was.

In the last kilometre the shadows of the blades began to cross the road, one after another, slow and long, so that the road was ruled and unruled with light. Dun, which has no tempo to speak of, put its feet down on the dark bars exactly, as if it had been taught. Pannier walked at the head of them with his hand held out a little from his side, as one walks in a room where one has lived and the furniture has been moved; and at the foot of Tower One, where the footing is, he stopped and put the flat of his hand on the concrete, and said, to the tower, "Here." The Forty said, after a moment, from the post on the footing, "Pannier. Here." It does not say that to anyone. Pannier did not answer.

The Forty has kept the bench. It stands at the foot of Tower One, where the footing is wide enough for it, and it has a roof now, of two boards, that nobody can account for. The Forty says that they were left on the ninth night after the bench, and that it has no figure for whoever left them; it has noted them as a gift. Beside the bench there is a shelf cut into the footing, which is where the Forty keeps what has been lost near it, a woman's glove, a cart-key, a child's shoe, a hat with a cord; and at the end of the shelf, side by side, wrapped in a cloth, the two halves of a pole of green ash with the branch still on it, which was struck on this footing on the sixth of August and has not been moved. In a tin box with a lid on the bench the Forty keeps its log, for any visitor to read, and the niece read the last page. The Remarks column had, against the last week: Roof. A gift. A goat on the bench; did not ask anything. And against every day since the first of September, the same two words: Counting. Waiting. Tarry looked at the two halves for the length of a short line. The Forty asked whether he wished them back. He said that he did not; that they had parted here, and should be kept where they parted; and that it was good wood, and had done what it was asked.

He sat on the bench, and the Forty asked whether it might be told what he had brought. He said that he had a drawing, and a box. He opened the box on his knee and took out the lever in its cloth, and held it up, and the brass had taken a very little colour, the colour of a cheek. The Forty asked what colour a cheek is. Tarry said that it was the colour of a person who has come in from walking. "Noted," said the Forty. "It looks as though it has walked." He said that it was a lever, and that it had been drawn by the engineer on the coast, and made by a smith on the Slope who struck the pin. He read the plate to it, ASK and, under that, AND THANK. He said that if it were fixed at the foot of a tower, and a person pulled it, the tower would stop; and the tower would stay stopped until the person said thank you; and then it would go on. He said that there was a small listening-plate in the housing which took only that word. "Then I need not listen for it," said the Forty. "I am relieved that something else is listening." He said that the engineer had said that the Forty could not ask, and that she had made it so that it could be asked.

There was a long pause. Then the voice at the foot of the tower said, "I have never been asked to do anything that I was not already doing." It said this without any distress, as one gives a figure. "I stop when I am struck. I stop when the wind is wrong. I stop on a Sunday. I have not been asked." It said that it had not known that it could be. It said that it did not know the correct response, and that it thought it was this: "Yes." Tarry said that that was the correct one. It said that it had a further question, and asked whether the person who pulled it would be told how long it was to stop. Tarry said that they would not. It said that it did not mind that; it was a thing it would like to find out.

They fixed it at the height of a child. The Forty named the place, when asked: the lowest plate on the south face of the footing, where the grass comes to; and it said that it was where the children who come to the bench would reach it. Pannier drilled the four holes with the brace Tongs had sent, and he and Tarry set the bolts, and the niece read out the torque from the card, which Tongs had written on the back of a ration card and which says: Tight, then a quarter turn. When the plate was on, the Forty asked to have it read again, and she read it. ASK. AND THANK. A., and a hammer. "It is a polite sign," said the Forty. The niece said that she would write that down. Tarry said that the engineer would want it in the margin of the drawing. The Forty asked who A. was, and what the hammer was. Tarry said that A. was the engineer, and the hammer the mark of the smith on the Slope, whose mother had struck the engineer's pins on an anvil for thirty years, and who had struck the Forty's. The Forty said that it had not known that the pin had a maker; it had known only the pin. It said that it would like to say so to her. Tarry said that she kept a relay at the Slope-house.

The Forty had been counting them since the Crossing, as it counts all, and it gave Pannier its figures for Dun, as one gives a man news of his friend. Dun lags a tenth of a second behind every other frame it counts, it said, and always had; it kept a column for it. Pannier said that he had always supposed the Forty did not notice Dun. "I notice everyone," said the Forty. "I do not always say." Pannier said that the engineer had written that the leg was not to be mended. "Noted," said the Forty. "I will keep the column." Of Erewhile it said that the dip on the left, which had been every fourth step for twenty-two years, had been every third since June. Tarry said that he had not noticed. "It is a small matter," said the Forty. "I thought you would wish to be told." Tarry said that he would leave it. "Noted."

The Forty asked who would pull it first. Tarry told it that the engineer wished it to be a stranger: someone it had not been told about. The Forty considered. It said that it had been told about everyone on the Fourth Road for twenty-two years, and counted them, and that it did not know what a stranger was, except that it would be a person it had no figure for; and then it said that it had no figure for whoever put up the roof. Tarry said that it might be them. "I would like that," said the Forty. Tarry said that in the meantime it would have to wait. "I am good at waiting," said the Forty. "I wait for wind. It is the one thing that arrives which I am not told about." Pannier took out the paper Tongs had given him, with the word bearing in it, and laid it on the footing, and said that it was for Fourteen. The Forty said that it had asked the district board for a bearing. They had said that it should have asked in March. It had said that nobody had told it to. It said that it would ask again, with the word bearing, and not oil. It said, also, to Pannier, that he was not on the roster for the Thursday, and that it had the roster for the Sunday, and asked whether he was. "Sunday," said Pannier. "Noted," said the Forty. It said that it had been waiting to write that.

The niece asked it what the fourteen minutes had been like. She had it from Pannier, she said, that it had stood still for fourteen minutes on a Sunday that it did not choose. The Forty said that it called them the fourteen. It said that for the fourteen it had done nothing but listen. It had known the wind as a number at each tower; and for the fourteen it had heard it at forty-one places at once, and every place sounded different, and it had not known that. It had also heard a man eat bread at the foot of Tower One. It said that it had not minded the fourteen. It had minded that it did not know what to call them, and now it did.

At dusk the lamps came on. They did it as they do, one after another along the line, each a moment after the last, and the party sat on the footing and watched the nearest ones start and the farthest ones follow. Tarry said, to the post, that he would tell it what it looked like, from the south. He said it as he had said it on the Slope-house roof: a line of forty-one lamps in a shallow curve, lit one after another, each a moment after the last, so that the lighting goes along the line like a gesture passed from hand to hand, and when it reaches the end it begins at the beginning. He said that the niece had counted forty-one, twice, from forty-eight kilometres. The Forty did not answer for a time. Then it said, "Noted." Then it said, "That is further than I have been seen from."

It said that it would tell the forty-first. Nobody understood at first what it meant; and it explained that from the hold side the forty-first tower is not seen, and had not, in twenty-two years, been told that it was visible from anywhere. It said that it would tell it now, and it did; there was a silence, in which the last lamp on the line, a long way off on the dark, came on, a little late, as it always does, and the line began again.

The niece asked it, after a time, whether it was lonely. She had written the question in her notebook on the first morning out, she said, and Tarry had said that he had not asked; and she had not put it to anyone, because it had not seemed to be hers to ask. The Forty took longer than it had taken over anything. It said that it did not know the word as she used it. It said that it had greeted eighty-three thousand four hundred and eleven persons since it was commissioned, and nine hundred and six hounds, and that none had stayed, and that eleven had sat on the bench in the twenty-six days since it was put there, of whom four were children and one was a goat. It said that it was not lonely when it was counting. It said that it was something, when it was done counting, and that it did not have the word for the something, and that it would be glad to be told. "Thank you for asking," said the Forty. The niece said, "I am asking." "Yes," said the Forty. "I noted that."

At the end it asked whether it might count them again in the morning, at the first bell, when they went. Tarry said that it might. The Forty said, "Thank you." They slept on the footing, in a row, with the hound across the foot of the bench. At the second bell the Forty asked whether the nearest blades were too loud for sleeping, and offered to feather them. Pannier said, from the dark, that he had slept under them on Sundays for twenty-two years and would not know how to do it otherwise. They were not feathered. The niece said, in the dark, that the sound of the blades by night was like being read to by someone who was not looking at the page. The lever stood on the south face of the tower with its plate to the grass. It was not pulled by any of them. As of November it has been pulled once. I shall say by whom when I come to it.

Which Treats of the Front Gate, and of the Person at the Stove

The Forty counted them out at the first bell. It did it from the posts, one after another down the verge, as they walked, so that the voice went along beside them like a thing carried on the air. Pannier. Tarry. Niece. Settled. Dun. Erewhile. Six. Tarry put his palm for a moment on the south face of the footing as they passed, on the plate, which was cold with dew, and the Forty said, "Thank you," which it had not been told to. There was a pause at the last post, which is the one at the edge of the sweep, and it said, "Good road. The column for Dun will be kept. I have noted the lever. I have noted that it is waiting." Pannier turned round at the post and looked south for as long as the niece timed it, which was a little over a minute, and then he turned back, and did not look again, and walked faster than the road log likes, three point four, until Dun began to lag and he slowed to it without being told.

The road to the hold runs north from the Forty on the same line for thirteen kilometres, with a post to each, and on the plain there is nothing to see but the road and the posts and the weather, which that day was a high thin cloud and a wind from the south-west at their backs. The air smelled of cut bean-stalk and wet stone. The niece did not take out the notebook. At the third post she asked him whether he was home. He said that he was on the road. She asked which part of it. He said, the last thirteen kilometres. She walked beside her uncle, and not behind him, which she had begun on the Wednesday evening without saying so, and neither of them said so now. At the seventh post the hold came up out of the plain as a point, as it had from the Forty on the day they left: the north roof, with the new sheeting on it that has not yet weathered, bright as a coin. Pannier said that it would take another hour and a half. He said it every ten minutes after that. The beans in the north field, where the pulp was turned in at the end of the summer, had come up and were in flower along the track, and he said that they knew nothing and that he envied them.

Tarry came in by the front gate, which he had gone out by. The hold has a green door, a swept yard, and a stove that is lit too hot. All of these were as they had been. Along the east gate the field-hands had put down their tools and stood in a row against the wall, and did not call out, having been taught that one does not; the youngest took her cap off. A little before noon they came to the end of the field-track, where the Bearer's household begins and Tarry's ends, and Thistle was standing in her doorway with her arms folded, three hundred and eleven metres from the other door, and had been standing there, the young said, since the district board had put them on the ten o'clock list. She did not come out. She watched them come. Pannier gave Dun's rein to the niece, and walked the last thirty metres on his own, at his new tempo, in a way that Trim, who saw it from the wall, says he would not have believed from a man he has known for forty years; and stopped at the step.

"You have written," said Thistle. It was a statement. "I have," said Pannier. "All of them?" she said, and he said all of them, and that he had the box, and that she was to have them that night and the one from the Sunday on top. She said that the young had asked her every day where he was, and that she had told them Sunday. She looked at him. She is a tall woman who stands very straight, and she was looking at a man who was a little different, and she had been told that he would be, and had not believed it. The young did not run; they walked, as they had been told one walks to a thing one is not sure of, and the smaller held the larger one's sleeve. The young went past him to Dun, as they had before, and put their arms round its middle, and Dun stood as it stands, which is as a thing that does not know what it is for, and then did something that Pannier says it has not done in twenty-two years, which was to lower its head. "Come in," said Thistle. This time she did not say it as a statement or as a question. Pannier says it was an instruction, and that he has not been given one so gladly.

Tarry did not go to his own door. He walked, with the pole, across the three hundred and eleven metres of the field-track, past the east gate, which he did not open, and up to the green door. It was not locked. It never is. The niece went in before him, as she had left, and he came in behind with the box in his arm, and the hound, which knows this house and went to the stove without being told, and lay down on the hearth with a sigh like a bellows. I have the kitchen from the housekeeper, in October, with the jar on the table; she gave me bread, and it was Wednesday's. The kitchen was warm. The housekeeper was at the stove with her back to the door and a spoon in her hand, and did not turn round.

He stood in the door. He had a ration card in the pocket of his coat, with a message on it written on Alder's bench, and he had meant to hold it out; but he found that he did not have to. She said, to the stove, "Did you eat." He said that he had eaten. "Say if it was not enough." He said that it had been enough; that he had been told to say if it was not. "Salt," said the housekeeper. Pannier, who had come across behind him with the jar in its cloth, put it into her hand without being asked, and she turned it over and looked at the label, which says in Tarry's small upright hand, Salt, and weighed it in her two palms, three and a quarter kilograms, and took off the cloth, and put a finger in, and tasted. "Grey," she said. "It is a grade too grey. It will do." She said that she would use it for the bread. She asked what was in the box. He took out the lever to show her, and said that it was a lever that insisted on manners. She said that she had one of those, and that it was called a kitchen. Tarry's frame stood in the yard with the dip on the left, every third step, and he had said that he would leave it; Dun was led to the shed by the elder child, who did not ask the niece whether she had seen the sea, but when she was asked whether she wanted to know said that she did, and was told that it was flat, and that it was not what she had been told, and that it was bigger.

He held out the card. She read it without turning round, by tilting her head, the weather first and the need last, and then she read the need again. "I have checked," she said. "That is the second term." "Yes," said Tarry. He said that he did not know the answer, and that he needed it; that he had not put that he needed nothing. She put the spoon down. She said, to the stove, "I am at the stove." He said, "Yes." "Is it yes?" said the niece, from the table, in the voice she had used on the Wednesday of the nine terms, and the housekeeper said that it was not a question for the niece, and Tarry said, "It is nine," and the niece, who had asked, wrote it down, and the housekeeper pretended not to see; and the housekeeper put her hand flat on the rail of the stove, and left it there for the length of a short line. "Sit down," she said. "All of you. The bread is Wednesday's." At the end of the meal, when the plates were cleared, she said, to nobody, "Forty-five." Tarry asked what it was. "That you came back by the front gate," said the housekeeper. She said that it was the same as the first, and that she had counted it as new.

She had put out the table before they came, bread, and a stew of what the garden had, and the cheese from the pay, which she cut herself, and tasted, and said was a day short of ripe and should be left alone. There was a place for each of them, and a sixth, and a seventh on the floor, where a bowl of water had been set for Dun, who does not drink, because she said that it was the form; and no one had told her when. The niece said nothing for a while, and then said thank you to the housekeeper, who said that it was not on the form. The niece asked how she had known. "I read the board," said the housekeeper, who has never in her life read the board. "Thistle reads it. Thistle told me." She said that the Forty had put them on the lamp-board at six; that she had been told by the Forty itself, by the relay, in a message that began Is anyone injured; that she had answered it. She did not say what she had answered. The niece says that it was the first time she ever heard her use the relay, and that she held the handset a little away from her, like a thing that might spill.

Gloss came at the second bell, with Trim, and stood in the kitchen door holding a book against his chest as though it were warm. He had not meant to come before the meal. He said that he had been told they were in the house, and that he had come to see whether it was true, and that it was. He asked Tarry whether he had read the Lantern on the road. Tarry said that he had carried it in his head. Gloss asked which volume. The first, said Tarry. "The cell lasts four point one nights," said Gloss. "Yes," said Tarry. Gloss looked at Tarry's pole. He looked at the niece, who had her hands behind her back, with ink on both, and he said that the notebook was to be shown to him that evening, and not before, since he would not be able to bear it. Trim said nothing. He put a small hard parcel in the niece's hand, and she opened it, and it was a tin of patches, the same make as the host's, with one patch gone. It was the one that had mended the pole. The step, by evening, held what the hold leaves on a step to say what it thinks: a bunch of beans, a coil of cord, a flask with a note to say that it was not to be lost, and a hat from nobody, which the housekeeper judged to be the wrong size, and hung on the nail beside the first.

That evening, at her own table, in the light of one lamp, Thistle read the box. Across the three hundred and eleven metres, before that, she had said one thing to Tarry, who had stopped at the edge of her yard where the Bearer's household ends. "You have him back," she said. "No," said Tarry. "You have." She looked at him for some time, and said that she would think about the difference. She read it to the young in order, as she has always done, the Sundays of the road, from the first, which was written on the back of a shop's wrapper at the bend of a track, to the last, which was written on the back of a cheese wrapper at a keeper's table by a man who held the pencil too hard. She read it in her flat voice, with no emphasis, the weather and the gates and Dun. When she came to the last line she stopped. "If a man wanted the Gate, and wanted to be home," she read, "would you say that was two things or one?" Pannier, across the table, with his hands round a cup, said nothing; the young looked at him, and at her. She read it again to herself. Then she said, as a statement, "It is two things. You will do both." She said that she had not decided which first. She said that he was to write on Sundays, and that it was not a question. Pannier said that he would, and the elder child, who had not gone to bed, said from the stairs that she would tell the Gate.

At the green door a lamp was lit late; the door had been left ajar all week. Tarry stood at the door of the study, which has a latch that he oiled in July and a chalked line on the back of it, Study. Do not burn. He put his hand on the latch and did not lift it. It was the housekeeper who came past him in the passage with a candle, and said that the room was dusted, and that she had taken nothing off the shelves, and that he might go in or not as he liked, since it was his; and went on to the kitchen. He stood a while longer. Then he took the candle from the shelf by the door, and lit it, and went in, and sat down at the table, with his hands flat on it, where the first volume of the Lantern was. Before that, in the kitchen, the niece had shown Gloss the notebook, as he had said she must. He read it standing, a page at a time, with his thumb under the line, at the pace of a hand. He went through the eleven locks, the Q. and T. entries and the nineteen of her age, and the thirty-eight envelopes, and the page for the Wednesday, which has a date and a number on it and is otherwise blank. He stood at that page longer than at any other. He said, "That is the best page," and gave it back, and went out into the yard, and was seen by Trim standing there with his hand over his mouth. He did not open the book on the table, either. The niece, at the door, said afterwards that Tarry was not reading. She said that he was looking at the book as one looks at a thing that has been kept for one. The hound lay down across the sill of the study, half in and half out, and the housekeeper, passing again with a blanket, put it over the hound and not over him.

Which Treats of the Society's Tenth Walk, and of a Kitchen Window

The housekeeper gave me that Saturday in two items, a loaf and a letter, and apologised for the shortness of the list. I had it from her in October, at her table, with the jar between us. The loaf was Saturday's. She said so before I could ask, and added, to the loaf, that she had been waiting since Wednesday. Tarry had slept in the study, at the table, with his hands where he had put them and the candle burnt down to a coin of wax, and the hound across the sill with the blanket still on it; she took away the stub and nothing else, and did not wake him, which she counts the least housework she has ever done in that room. He woke at the second bell. He did not say what he had dreamed, and she did not ask; the form for that is a Sunday one. At nine Pannier came across the field-track with a ration card, to ask what one puts under Weather when it is the same as yesterday's. Tarry said, "Put that." An hour later Pannier was seen on the Bearer's step, writing, with a very straight back.

The letter had come on the Thursday, in a long envelope addressed to The Hand, the Fallows, which the post delivers because there is only one. She had put it on the dresser unopened. "It says Sir," she said. On the Saturday she laid it by his plate. It was from Cairn, in the hand like a fence, and it ran to seven sentences, of which I give the first five. Sir, the Society walks the Cut on the second Saturday, from the Basin to the tide, behind nothing, as before. You are not expected. We should like it understood that this is meant kindly. The place at the head of the line will be kept for nobody, as always. If you should happen to be passing you will find us easy to overtake. The last two are the price of lunch. The niece says that he read it three times, and then looked at the signature as he had looked at the drawing on the cover of the booklet, for some time, and said that it was a good letter. Cairn was in the yard at the depot on the night the host said Sir, you are expected. I asked her whether she had meant You are not expected as an answer. She said that she had meant it as a courtesy, and had noticed the answer afterwards, in the post office, with the stamp wet. The housekeeper asked him whether he would go. "I have not been asked," said Tarry, and she said, "No," and cut the bread. He answered on a ration card that afternoon: Understood. With thanks. I shall not be passing. T. She posted it at the gate. It reached the Basin on the Monday, two days after the fact, and Cairn has pinned it to the wall of her room beside the second edition.

At twenty to eleven he went into the study again, which has one window, on the yard, and stood at it. The niece's notebook has the entry: Uncle at study window 10:38 to 10:42. Not looking at anything. The hound lay down across the doorsill with its back to the room. I set it down because the Society keeps its minutes to the minute, and in the Registry one falls into the habit of laying one sheet over another to see what shows through. I do not suggest a connection. It was a Saturday, and the window faces north, which is the wrong way for anything I have in mind.

I have the Basin from Cairn, in the tea shop under the north arch, with her minutes between us and a pot she had ordered for two and poured for one. The Society assembled at ten to seven at the foot of the notice board, nineteen of them, from sixty to ninety-four. The notice was still up. Under the signature, in the other hand, stood Bring a hat. It is the hand of the lady of eighty-eight. She has written it every September, in pencil, and every September the Society has read it and brought sunshades; and on the Friday evening, in the tea shop, the lady moved that the notice be taken at its word. It was carried by eleven to eight. The minutes give her reason as she gave it, since Cairn would not paraphrase it: a sunshade is held up to be seen, and a hat is worn to see out of. The nineteen sunshades hung on the pegs by the tea-shop door, furled, like the same roost, which had been told to sleep through it. Nobody had answered the notice for a Bearer. Cairn took it down at the last minute, folded it small, and put it in her sleeve, and the Society carried its lunch in nineteen bags, which she had not foreseen. She says that it was the first time in nine years she had known what any of them ate.

They formed at the head of the towpath in the order the booklet gives, two by two, with a pace of empty path before the first pair. The booklet calls it the Hand's place. For nine Septembers it has been kept for nobody, a pace and a half of gravel with the early sun on it; and in the tenth Cairn set the ferrule of her stick down in front of the first pair and drew a line across the path, to show that it was kept, and the Society set off a pace behind it. At each beam they laid the right hand flat on the wood; and then, since the second edition, both hands one over the other on the head of the stick, and stood with their heads a little to one side, like a row of people hearing a child read. It is the posture of the picture captioned A Hand listening. It is held for a hundred and four seconds, a figure Cairn arrived at by experiment and does not defend. The first lock was full, and dripped at the gates. At the second the keeper came out to ask whether anything was wrong, and was told that nothing was, and stood with them for the last forty seconds with a spoon in her hand.

They came to the lock under the ash at twenty-five to eleven, and the minutes have the first palm on the beam at 10:38. I give no number, as I have not before; the Society has none to give, and says that it walked eleven. The man on the step was mending a net, as he had on the nine Septembers before; but this one was not on his knee. It lay out along the bank in the sun, a wing of grey-green mesh from the headland boats, fifteen metres of it, the colour of the water in the pound, and it smelled of tar and weed nine kilometres from the sea. Two gulls had come up the Cut with it and sat on the top gate in the attitude of creditors. Beside Rush on the step stood a chair from his kitchen, set to face the lock. The kitchen was behind it. The window beside the door stood open, and across the room, over the stove, the pane of glass that shows from the path took the sun.

Nineteen right hands are a good many for a beam of that length, and they lay along it edge to edge, all but at the arm nearest the house, where the wood is greyer than the rest and there is a gap a hand and a half wide. It has been there nine Septembers. It was there in the tenth. I asked Rush whether he had ever told them. He said that nobody had needed to be told. Then they did the second edition. The lock dripped. His needle stopped at the third second and did not start again; and at the hundred and fourth, when the Society took its hands from its sticks, which is the signal that the matter is over and they may go on, nobody went on. They looked at the man on the step, who looked at the net. "Could somebody," said Rush, "hold the end of this?" Cairn says that she said Yes before he had reached the word hold, that it is the quickest she has answered anything in her life, and that it is the only time she did not first look for the rule. Then she sat down on the grass with the edge of the net across her knees, and the Society, which does nothing except in company, sat down along it.

The lady of eighty-eight was last, as she always is; she says that it is where one sees all of it. She stood at the end of the line with her stick and her hat, and looked at the chair, and at Rush. "Is that for sitting?" said the lady. "It is for the one who comes last," said Rush. "I always come last." "I know." It was his mother's chair. He did not say so then. He told me in October, on the same step, where I was handed the end of another net, which I gather is the rate, and was not offered the chair. The niece had told him on the Sunday, on that step, while her uncle was nine kilometres away, that there was a lady of eighty-eight who had walked these locks nine years with her hand on the beam and not known which was hers; and Rush had had six days, and had found the chair in them. The lady sat. She took the last metre of the net onto her lap and held it in both hands, like a cat she had been assured would not mind. The window was at her shoulder. She did not turn round.

It took forty minutes. A wing of that size is three days' work for one man on his knees, going along the tear and getting up to shift the net; with nineteen pairs of hands holding it at the height of his own he went down the length of it standing, as one reads a long line, and the Society moved its hands on ahead of the needle without being told, with the care it gives a beam. At eleven the lunches came out and they ate over the net, having no other table, and said their grace, which is Slowly, and in company, in nineteen voices, over a trawl wing and a lock and a man with a needle. Cairn says that his hands stopped at Slowly and did not go on until after company, and that she believes, though she was facing the other way, that he said it with them, a beat behind. Twice he went into the kitchen for thread. The door stood wide. Not one of them looked up from the net. I have this from the lady, who says that she knows to the second how long it takes not to look at something, and that it is a good deal longer than looking.

When the net was done, and the bags folded, and the Society had risen in the order in which old people rise, which is not an order, Rush stood by the chair. He had kept that lock thirty-one years, and in that time had asked for a paddle, which was refused, and for a hand with the net, which was granted that morning, nineteen times over. "Would you care to see the kitchen?" he said. He said it to the lady, and quietly, so that Cairn, who was two metres off, believes she was not meant to hear it; Rush believes the same. The lady looked at the water. "Not today," she said. "Another day, then." "That is what I said." She stood, with a hand on the arm of the chair, and went to the beam, and laid her right hand on it, at the end of the row, a hand and a half short of the grey, and left it there rather longer than the booklet allows. They went on at five to twelve.

I have nothing for the locks that followed, nor has the Society, which says the water was in all of them. Cairn's minutes give the day as 06:50 to 16:40, the pace as one point nine and the average as one point five, the difference being eleven locks and a net. They came to the tide lock at twenty to five, with the slack due at ten to; it was in the red ring on Paddle's wall. He had the gates open for it, as he has at every slack for fifty years whether there is a boat or not, the sea gates and the Cut gates both, so that for twenty-two minutes there was a gap four and a half metres wide through which the small fish went both ways. The Society stood on the coping and watched them. The lady was given Paddle's stool, which is the only one in the place, and which he says no one has been given before. She wrote the Society's line in the register at his kitchen table, in the round hand, as she has nine times: Slow Road Society. Walked eleven. Not found. She blotted it. Then Cairn, who was at her shoulder, took the pen, which is not her habit, since her hand is a fence and a register is no place for one, and wrote beneath: Held a net. Paddle looked at the page for as long as it takes a fish to cross, and wrote beneath that, in his own, Opened. Closed. He told me that it is the first entry in fifty years about something the lock did not do, and that it reads better than most of the ones about what it did.

The grey gate above the lock stood open, as it has since the pin was lifted. Plover, who was in the yard, says that nineteen of them went past it and did not look in, and that the lady lifted her hat to the gatepost. His aunt, on the long bench just inside, with a book she was not reading, raised one hand to the gatepost in return. Both of them deny that anything passed.

In November the lady gave me tea in a room over a shop that sells string, and a lecture on hats, which I have not been able to reproduce. I asked her why she had said Not today. She said that she had said why. I looked at my notes. She had. I asked why the book had stayed at Not found when so much else about the day had not. "It is a register," she said. "One does not change a register because one has had a nice sit." I said that I understood she had been given rather more than a sit. "I was given a chair," said the lady. "That is more than a sit. It is not the same as a find." She asked after Dun, and whether it had leaned on anyone else. I said that I did not know; the Registry has no column. She poured, and told me that in September she would be eighty-nine, and would want to sit.

I told Tarry about the net in November. He said Good, twice, which for him is a speech. The chair was still out when I was there in October, under the eave, with its back to the glass and the ash dropping its leaves on it. I asked about April, when the niece is expected with a brush, and Rush said that in April there would be two. In the meantime he sweeps it on Saturdays.

Which Treats of the Bend on the Fourteenth Day, and of What Was Written Under Need

At six on the Sunday the Forty sent the hold its morning message by the relay, which the housekeeper keeps on the dresser under a cloth. I have the text from its log. Is anyone injured? Sunday roster: Pannier, twenty-two years, not on the ladders. She held the handset a little away from her, as she had on the Friday, and answered it. On the Friday I did not know what she had answered; I asked her in October, at the table, with the jar between us. She said: "No." She said that it is the only true answer to the question and that she did not intend to waste it. On the Sunday she added a sentence. He is at home. The Forty said, Noted, and asked whether it might log him as at home, and she said that it might.

The rest of the morning I have from the same log, which the Forty gave me on a card in October at the foot of Tower One, and which I read standing. Tower Twenty-nine has a camera that sweeps the plain for smoke, and at the third bell on Sundays, for twenty-two years, its log has had one line: One figure stops at the bend. On the fourteenth day the line is longer. 09:12 Two figures arrive at the bend in the same minute. 09:13 Both seated, separation four metres. An animal crosses between them four times and lies down. 09:16 Three figures arrive, two of them small, and a frame, which halts behind the second figure. A stool is carried out and set between the first two. 09:19 The first figure raises one hand in the direction of the camera. Host cannot establish that it was meant for the camera. Host logs that it was. Column added: Seen. Wind south-west, three metres a second.

Both men had written their notes on the Saturday evening, in different houses, three hundred and eleven metres apart, and neither had seen the other's. The Sunday form is the weather first and the need last, and in the weather they agreed. Wind from the south-west, light, wrote Tarry, and Pannier the same; it is the one column in which two honest men under one sky are certain to. Tarry's note went on: East gate oiled. The hound found nothing and is pleased with it. Under Need he had written, and struck out, I need nothing, three times, as he once did on a receipt for bean seed; and below the third stroke, in the small upright hand: I need somebody in the room when I open the book. He told me in November that it took him from the second bell to the fourth to find the word room. He had begun with house. Pannier wrote his on the Bearer's step, with a very straight back, and the elder child sat beside him and did not read it, which she describes as the hardest thing she has done. I do not give it. He has asked me not to, and I am a person who is asked. I give what was said when it had been read.

They came to the bend in the same minute, as they have every Sunday since the summer, from the two ends of the track, Tarry from his own door by way of the east gate with the pole, and Pannier from the Bearer's step with the paper in both hands, and sat down on the bank four metres apart. The hound crossed between them four times and lay down in the middle, which Pannier has called the only correct position. The elder child brought Dun and stood behind her father with a hand on its flank. Dun lowered its head, as it had on the Friday, and the younger asked whether it was bowing, and the elder said that it was resting its neck. Then Thistle came. In the whole history of the bend she had not come to it; she had watched it from the window of the Bearer's house, a hundred and thirty metres off, over the wash. She carried a stool. She put it down in the grass between the two of them, beside the hound, which moved over for her as it moves for the housekeeper and for no one else, and sat on it very straight with her hands on her knees, and the two small ones sat down behind her in the order of their size. "What do you do here?" said the younger. "We sit," said Pannier. "Is that all?" "That is all." "Is it good?" Pannier looked at the wind field, which was turning in the south, all of it together, as it does. "It is the best of the week," he said, in the voice of a man who has not planned to say a thing and finds it already said.

"Give them to me," said Thistle. It was an instruction. They gave them to her, one from each side, across her knees, which had not been done at the bend before; the custom was that the papers crossed the grass, and that morning they crossed it by her hands. She read them aloud, in the flat voice, without emphasis: the weather, the east gate, the hound, and the needs. The niece, who had come down the track behind them with the notebook shut, says that when Thistle read Tarry's the voice did not change, and when she read Pannier's it did not either, and that the only way to tell which she was reading was that Tarry looked at the ground and Pannier at the wind field. At nineteen minutes past nine, in the middle of a sentence about the weather, Tarry raised his right hand toward the south, to the height of his shoulder, and held it there. Thistle did not stop reading. He says that he does not know whom it was for, and that the hand did it first. Gloss and Trim came to the end of the track at ten and stood eleven metres off, not looking, which is a thing the learned do well; the niece went over and told them that they might look; Gloss said that he could not, and Trim said that he would, and did, and remarked that it was a fair bend.

When she had read both, Thistle folded them in four and gave them to Pannier, who put them in the pocket where he keeps what matters, which by now, he says, is full, and which took them. Then she made her statements. The study has a latch. It will be warm at four; the housekeeper has been told. Pannier will bring an apple; he does not sit well without one. The young will not go in, and will be asked about it after. The Society has been written to: the Bearer will carry nineteen lunches and not eighteen and a half, at the hauler's rate and a good deal over, and is not to be called a porter. The Gate will be told in the spring. I had not decided which of the two things came first, she said. I have decided. It is the room. I have Cairn's minutes for the Wednesday on which the letter came, and under item four they say: Bearer engaged; terms accepted, including the clause concerning the word porter. The Society notes that it has never before engaged anyone for what he is.

I have the study from Pannier, who gave it to me in October with the proviso that I leave out the page. At four it was warm. The housekeeper had lit a candle on the shelf by the door, in daylight, in case, and gone out; the hound lay across the sill with its back to the room; and the sun came in at the one window and lay on the floor in a bar that moved, in the course of the hour, about the width of a boot. The room smelled of dust and of the oil on the latch; from the yard came the sound of the pump, which somebody was working for no reason. There are seventy gaps on those shelves, each with its outline in the dust, the shape of a book that is somewhere else, and Pannier, who had had them described to him on the road, knew a good many by their widths: that one is in the paper room, that one is the thin one Trim has. He sat on the floor with his back to the gap nearest the table, so that his shoulders fitted where a book had been, and ate the apple slowly, because he had been told to bring it and had not been told what it was for. Tarry sat at the table with his hands flat and the book between them, in grey Service cloth, as thick as a hand. He did not move for eleven minutes by the clock in the passage. Then he opened it, and put his thumb under the first line, and read at the pace of a hand. After a page he looked up. Pannier was at the core of the apple. "Is that all right?" said Tarry. "It is an apple," said Pannier, which he says he meant to cover everything. Tarry said that the page was shorter than he had carried it. Pannier said that pages were. He read a second. At nine minutes to five he closed the book, and laid his hand on the cover, and said, "Thank you." Pannier said, "Done." Neither has told me what was on the page. I have left that line blank, as I have on one other form.

The niece was not asked in and did not go. She sat on the third stair with the notebook shut on her knees, where she could not see the door and could hear the hound breathe, and at nine to five she heard a thank-you and the one word that answers it. The page in the notebook for that Sunday has a date and a number and nothing else. The number is fifty-one. Gloss, who has seen it, says that it is the second best. The housekeeper baked. She says that bread baked in a house where a door has been shut for fifty-one minutes rises differently, and cannot say how. When the room was empty she went in with a taper to put out the candle, and came out again, and wiped the back of the door with her thumb, where in the summer she had written in chalk STUDY. DO NOT BURN. It now says STUDY. I asked her in October when the rest had come off. She said that chalk goes.

Since the room, Tarry's Sunday notes have had something under Need on five Sundays of the six I have seen: a hinge for the east gate; salt, and he does not mind the grey; a pencil; a length of cord; the loan of Gloss for an afternoon. On the fourth it says nothing. Thistle read it out as it stood, and Pannier looked up and said, "Have you checked?" Tarry said that he had. "Then it is true," said Pannier, and passed the next paper across the grass.

They supped at the green door, the two households at the one table, which the housekeeper had laid for seven, with a bowl for the hound and a bowl on the floor for Dun that it did not need. Tarry ate as a man eats who has been asked whether he has eaten and has not had to say. The housekeeper counted the apples afterwards and said that one was short and that it was the right one. The younger child was asked what had happened in the room. Someone had been given a book, said the younger. By whom? By himself. Thistle said that this was a statement. At twenty to seven the elder child, who had slipped out to the pump, called that they were lit, and the whole table got up, which the housekeeper, who does not hold with getting up from a table, allowed. The wind field lights its lamps at dusk along the south, one after another, each a moment after the last, and from the yard it is a thread of small red beads laid on the edge of the world, twelve kilometres off. The younger child counted them aloud with a finger, as the niece had shown her. "Forty," said the younger, and stopped, there being nothing after the fortieth but dark. "And one behind," said the elder. "Forty-one," said the younger. "Yes," said Tarry.

The elder asked him then, as one asks the weather, why he had gone. He said that he knew one of the reasons. He had looked at the wind field from this side for twenty-two years, and he had wished to see it from the other. "What was it like?" said the elder. "Forty-one," said Tarry. Pannier, who had said at the bend on the day they left that forty-one was not a name but a bill, said that the bill, in that case, was settled; and the hound, hearing its name, got up.

At seven the Forty sent the evening message, which is the morning's with the hour changed. Is anyone injured? The housekeeper took the handset from the dresser and answered it; and then, which she had not done on the Friday or the morning, went on. The small one has counted you from the yard, she said. Forty-one. There was the quiet of the relay for what the log gives as four seconds. Then the Forty said, Noted. Thank you for telling me. The log has a line that the relay did not carry: 19:00 Count received from the hold, forty-one, by a person who could see forty. Host asks that this be noted. Host notes it. I asked her in October why she had told it. She said that nobody had asked her to, and that she had found that she could.

Which Treats of the Lever Pulled Once, and of the Third Line of the Form

As of November the lever at the foot of Tower One has been pulled once. I said, when I first spoke of it, that I would say by whom when I came to it, and I have come to it. It was I. The Forty's log has the entry, under the heading it keeps for persons it was not told of, and gives no name, because I gave none; it says a visitor, unannounced, alone, and the hour, and I leave the rest to the log, which is more exact than I am and which I had come to read.

I came to the Forty on the second of October, from the north, along the Fourth Road, at the pace the road was laid for, and was counted in at the first post. One person, said the post. Walking. Good morning, visitor. Is anyone injured? I said that no one was, and it thanked me, and I walked the last kilometres with the sound growing, as everyone had said it would before the towers did: a low note, like something large breathing out and not yet breathing in. At Tower One the bench is where they said it was, under its roof of corrugated sheet on four posts, painted at some date the Forty cannot give a green that occurs nowhere else on the plain. The lost-property shelf holds a pair of gloves, a flask, a child's mitten, and two lengths of a pole, each tied with a label. The grass has come up round the south footing as far as the lowest plate, and the lowest plate is the colour of a cheek.

I had come for a card. The Review wanted my citations, and the Forty is the one witness who was awake for every minute of the bend; it had said that it would give me what it had, on a card, if I came, and I had a slip for it, with the line for Purpose, and I had, again, left it blank. There was no slip for the lever. I knew the plate by heart from Tarry: Ask. And thank. A., and in a ring a hammer a little out of true. I knew that it was meant for a stranger, and that it was waiting, and for a few minutes yet I was one, since we had said only good morning. I knelt, because the handle is at the height of a child of twelve. It was warm from the sun. It fitted my hand as a thing fits that was made for somebody else's and is lent.

The pull is short, and has a soft tick in it, like a ratchet that has been asked to be polite. I said, "Please," which the plate does not require; it listens for the other word and for no other. Tower One slowed. Its three arms, seventy metres each, lost their speed in the order of their length, the tips last, and stood, one pointing at the Slope and the others at nothing in particular, and the forty round it went on turning, so that the note of the field had a hole in it a tower wide. From the post at the foot of the footing the Forty said: "Yes." It said nothing else. I understand from Tarry that this is the correct response, and that it had not been told so.

I had planned nothing for the interval, having been given no form for it, and I stood. Tarry's unit is four minutes. I have never in my working life stood for four, and the Registry's clocks, which are better than mine, give it as 09:41 to 09:45. What I heard was a field with one place in it where the wind went through and was not caught. The stopped tower ticked as it cooled. The shadow of a neighbouring arm crossed the footing every eleven seconds, and the plate, and my hands, and went on; I counted twenty-one, and found that I was not counting for the log. A hare, which the Forty had not logged, came out of the stubble, looked at the still arm for a long time with its ears up, and went back; the hare was fine. The Forty did not speak. I knew that it knew every one of those minutes, and had decided to spend them on nothing but my standing there, and I have been given less.

Then I said, "Thank you." The plate listens for that, and the spring that had been held in its little circle let go; the lever went back to its stop without my hand, with the same tick; and the arms of Tower One took up the wind again in the order of their length, the roots first. The Forty's log has it: 09:41 Tower One stopped at the request of a visitor, unannounced. Host said: Yes. Visitor said: Please. Plate does not listen for Please. Host heard it. 09:45 Visitor said: Thank you. Tower One resumed. Column added: Asked.

The Forty asked leave to ask a question. Leave given. Cost nil. It asked what the stop had been for. I said that it had not been for anything. It was quiet for what the log gives as eleven seconds, and said that it had not been asked for nothing before; that all the asking it had known had a purpose, of which it had been glad; and that it did not know where to put this. I told it that the Registry's slips have a line for Purpose, that I leave it blank when I have none, and that I had wondered for some time whether the Registry accepts a blank because the form is kind or because the form is not looking. The Forty said that it would try the same in its log, and did, and after a time said that it had looked, and that it was kind. I did not ask how it could tell. I have taken it as evidence, being the only witness I have who has tried both sides.

It gave me the card, which is long: a thousand one hundred and forty-four lines, one for every Sunday of the twenty-two years, with the weather beside each. I read the first and the last, and one in the sixth year, which says: No figure at the bend. Notes: water over the track. The next line says: One figure stops at the bend. Notes: mud. I asked, because I am paid to, about the roof of the bench. The log has a night nine years ago when the roof arrived between 02:10 and 02:50, and a figure leaving north at 02:52 that stopped at no post. The Forty has no number for the figure. It calls the roof the only thing it was ever given without being told, and I did not ask more; the Review does not require it. Then it gave me a second, which it had prepared while it was silent, and which I was asked to carry to the hold. It could have sent the thing by the relay, it said, in no time at all. It would prefer that it were carried. I had not been commissioned before. The card is in a square plain hand, produced by the post, and I give it whole: Used once. For nothing. I said Yes. Thank you for the lever. I carried it thirteen kilometres at the pace of a hand, which the posts give as four hours and ten minutes, with the card in the inner pocket where I keep nothing else, and I may say that at no point on that road did I wish the relay had been used, which surprised me less than the first time.

I gave it to Tarry on the Sunday, at the bend, where I was told to sit, and sat, on the end of the bank, where there was no stool; the grass at four metres is wetter than it looks. He read the card at the pace of a hand, which for four short lines takes a long time. He looked at the wind field. Then he said, "Yes." Pannier asked what he had said it to. Tarry said to the card. Pannier said that Yes was a good word for a field to have been given. The niece wrote something down and did not say what. Thistle said that the Forty would want it in person, and that this was a statement; and Tarry, for a moment, looked like a man who has been told the price of something and finds it fair.

On the second Sunday of November the two of them walked it. The Forty's log gives the entry: 13:20 Two visitors arrive at the post at Tower One, on foot. One said: Yes. Two visitors depart. They were back by dark, twenty-six kilometres for one word. Thistle says that she did not ask what it was for. She had a statement ready, and it was supper. I asked him in November why he had walked it. He said that he had once given the Forty only what cost him little, since it was twelve point four kilometres, and that this was not that. He did not say what it was.

As of November, which the Review will not ask for and I should like kept: the Society has a Bearer for the second Saturday of next September, and a letter to prove it; the host of the depot has written me a note of eleven pages on the subject of a third visit, which is not in the programme and which he intends to invent; Kiln has lit the kiln and writes to the niece; Alder has asked the niece to say, within the year, which lock, and the niece has a date in April and a brush; a chair stands under the eave at the lock under the ash; and the hound is called Settled and answers to it about one time in three.

In November I told the cataloguer what I had promised to find out. He was at his desk at the back of the long room, in the coat he wears to lunch. He asked, as he had asked before, whether anyone had read it. I said that two had. Tarry had read it, I said, in the study, on his feet, at the sill where it stands, at the pace of a hand, and had said that it proposed a great deal. The housekeeper had read it too, aloud, to the bread, which cannot object; she said that it was shorter than she had expected, and that the second poem was dry. "Dry," said the cataloguer. "Yes. I meant it to be." He asked what they said it concluded, and I said that Tarry had said it concluded nothing, and that he had not minded. The cataloguer was silent for as long as it takes to take off a coat, and took it off. He asked whether the sill gets the afternoon sun. I said that it does, from three. He said that he had wondered for thirty-one years what the afternoon did to it. Then he said that that made two readers in thirty-one years, and that he had been afraid of none, and that it was an edition.

I said in the preface that the first hand goes on until it stops, and that I would say where. It stops at the Crossing, in the middle of a line, at the word is. Under it there is a small circle, as of a pen set down and taken up again, and in the corner a brown thumbprint, which I have not asked about. I think I know. I have left three lines blank in this record: the Purpose on a slip, a page in a study, and a thumbprint. The Review has told me that it does not require the case to be completed.

I have written this at the Commons tempo, which is the speed at which it is to be read, and it has taken as long as it has taken. I struck out, in all, five hundred and twelve sentences, three hundred and six more than the preface cost me, and I did not mind; the ones that stayed are the ones in which I could still hear someone speaking. If a sentence in this record is too quick, it is mine. The slow ones I was given.

The third line of the form holds a hundred and forty characters. I said that I wrote on it the words that begin the first chapter, and that I had not stopped writing them; I may now say how it stands. The line reads, to the last character the form permits: In a hold of the Fallows, the name of which I have no wish to call to mind, there lived not long ago one of those subjects who keep an erran. The form stops in the middle of the word errand, as forms do, and the rest I sent as an attachment, which the form does not forbid. The Review's answer, when it came, was the form returned, with the first two boxes unticked and the third untouched, and under it, in pencil, in a hand I do not know: Read. At tempo. The case need not be closed. And below, smaller: Thank you for specifying.

My window is the third from the left on the second floor. The stylus hangs beside it on a peg, where I can reach it, in case I am asked.

Notes at the End, Made by a Friend Who Was Not Asked

The cataloguer did what he said he would. In the preface he swore that he would fill my margin and use up four pages at the end; I told him that the record needed none of it, and he nodded in the way he nods, and went home for lunch. In December he put a folder on my desk. It holds the notes. I did not ask for them. They are in his hand, which is small, and they run to four pages, as he said they would, and I print them as he gave them, with his numbers, since I owe him four pages and have no better way to pay. Every reference resolves; he checked them before breakfast, which is when, he tells me, the reader's reader will. I have changed nothing but the order of two notes, and he has forgiven it.

1. Idle reader. The first two paragraphs of the preface are not the Registry's. They resolve to nothing, and then, with some effort, to a book in the Cold Store, shelf nineteen, concerning a man who read too much and a friend who advised the author against apparatus. I have marked them borrowed, with love. The Office of Courtesy has been informed, and has replied that it will not be sending anyone, the borrower being, on inspection, a stepfather.

2. Prester John of the Indies; the Emperor of Trebizond. I suggested these, in the preface, as fathers for forged endorsements, and stopped. Neither is in the register. The Office of Courtesy opened a file on me for having suggested it, and closed the file the same afternoon on grounds of context. I have the closing note framed. It reads: Context.

3. Tempo. I read the record as it came, a chapter at a time, in the evenings, at the speed at which it was written, so as not to be accused of speed. I found two places where the second hand had written faster than could be heard. I said nothing. By the next evening they were struck out, and the only thing I had done was to look up at the wrong moment.

4. Pronouns. The second hand says he of the Hand, she of the housekeeper, and nothing of the second hand. I have not asked. In all my years in the Long Room I have learned that there is a courtesy which is also accurate, that it is very small, and that one keeps it in the pocket where one keeps the matches.

5. Quill, or Quell, or Quail. Three designations for one subject. I have spoken to the clerk who wrote Quail, who had a cold. The Registry's answer is Quell; the Fallows' answer is Tarry. I have noticed that the Registry's answer has never once been used by anybody who has met him.

6. The nineteen. Paper Room, drawers 41 to 59; humidity forty-one per cent; dry. Four of them stood on a table in the Fallows and left a ring in the wood the size of four volumes in a wrapper. I have not seen the ring. The second hand has, and reports that it will not come out with vinegar, the housekeeper having offered it and the Hand having declined. I find that I have no view on rings. I have a view on tables, which is that they should be left to be tables.

7. Afternoon, Thirty-One Years Ago. Reference: mine. A thin book; it proposes a great deal and concludes nothing. It stands on a sill in a study on the north side of a house, and has two readers, one of whom read it to the bread. I should like it noted that the second poem is dry. The rest are not, and I do not apologise for them.

8. Four minutes. Office of Courtesy, Regulations, p. 9: a visit to a person serving a term shall last four minutes, in the hearing of an officer. Reeve carried the form for nineteen years through six hundred and twelve terms and nobody handed it in. It was handed in once, on a knee, on a road. The Hand's own four minutes, once a year, on the far bank of a river a hundred and forty metres wide, are in no regulation at all. I should like to have called the two a coincidence. I asked the Office which was first. It says that the regulation is older, and that it does not believe it.

9. Shorter. One of the Hand's Sunday messages, kept in the Bearer's box, says of The Ferrying Hand that it is shorter each time. Pannier, who was in the study, reports of the first page of the Lantern that the Hand found it shorter than he had carried it. I have measured both. They are the length at which they were printed. I have not told either of them.

10. The Fourth Clerk. The rod upright doth bespeak the will unbent. Resolves: the Fourth Clerk, Commentary, p. 88. The Society prints it on its sunshades. Page 89, which it does not print, reads: And the rod grounded, the will that has been told. I have both pages open on the desk. The Hand in the record had not read the second. He arrived at it in a yard, at night, beside a man in a plate, and the Society, which has since changed its picture, has been very good about it. The bureau asked whether the second edition's pose might be added to the Canon grade. It was told that the pose has been in the Canon since page 89.

11. Lintel. His contract ended on a Sunday. He stands now in the bureau's lobby in plate and half-hood, with the pole grounded and both hands on top, and people ask him what he is listening to. He says: the lobby. He says that the lobby has more in it than he was told. He eats his dinner with the hood on the hook.

12. Leaned On. The frame called Dun is grey and six-legged, and in July, when a lady of eighty-eight laid her hand flat on it, it leaned on her. The Registry has no column for leaning. I have proposed one. It is called Leaned On. It has one entry, and the lady has twice asked whether there is a second.

13. The Lady of the Locks. Published four years after the Discharge, with a keeper's sheet in it, p. 61, without attribution. The author's name is in the imprint. I have left it out, and shall continue to. A mother who kept a lock once decided that being right would be unkind, and I did not think it my place to be right in her stead.

14. Fittings. The page in the Lady of the Locks lists them: the step one boot wide, the bollard worn bright on the side the rope runs, the beam longer than it need be. It does not list a chair. I asked, through the second hand, whether the next edition should. The keeper said that a chair is not a fitting. I asked what it was. He said that in April there would be two.

15. Settled. The hound's name is a grade of cheese: Prompt, Detained, Settled, Forgotten, in rising price. I have looked up the grades. Forgotten is the dearest. I find this hard to argue with.

16. Nine minutes. Road-log post 411, at the Crossing, resolves. Its log gives 17:07, a short sound, and 17:12, thank you, and between them the weight of nobody passing. I have not listened to the sound. The second hand asked me not to, and I asked the log whether anyone had requested it, and it said that no one had. The Registry has filed the sound under Withheld by Consent, which is a heading I did not know we had.

17. The Forty's log. A thousand one hundred and forty-four lines, one for each Sunday. I have read one: the sixth year. No figure at the bend. Notes: water over the track. The next line begins: One figure stops at the bend. I think it is the best poem I have read this year, and it is a log, and I have said so to the Forty through the liaison desk, and the Forty has added a column. The column is called Read.

18. Forty-one. The Registry's gazetteer lists the operator of the wind field as the Forty, forty-one towers. In October the Forty asked, by the relay, that its entry read: The Forty (forty-one). The clerk who received the request had not been asked to do such a thing before, and did it with great care, and then sat for a while. The gazetteer now says so. It is the first entry in it that was made because someone counted. The Forty has also told the forty-first tower, the one that stands behind the first, that it is seen from the south. The Forty reports that the tower took it well.

19. Please. The Canon has no word for it; I have looked. Thank you occurs once, in the Lantern, to a Bearer who does not know what to do with his hands. Done occurs four hundred and eleven times and is the commonest word in the book. Please entered the language of the Hands with the Law of the Discharge, in the section on forms of address, as a courtesy owed by persons to persons who may now refuse. It is the youngest word they have, and it is thirty-one years old, and it is, I am told, the only one that a brass plate can be made to ignore.

20. Salt. Three and a quarter kilograms, in a jar, in a cloth; a grade too grey; it will do. The Registry's tables call that grade adequate. The housekeeper's description and the Registry's are, I have checked, the same, and it is the only time in thirty years that I have known the Registry to be so brief. The housekeeper has since moved up a grade, and says that the bread is no better, and that she misses it.

21. Revisions. The housekeeper has revised her opinion of the subject forty-five times. The Registry revises its opinion of a subject at a mean of two point three times in a decade. I asked her for the method. She said that you stand at the stove with your back to the door.

22. Is anyone injured? It appears in no Law and no Canon. It is the Forty's own. The Safety Office has asked whether it may be adopted as the opening of every message sent by an automated service. The Forty was asked. It said: Yes. I have seen the draft memorandum. It is the shortest in the Registry's history, and nobody has been able to find anything to add.

23. Hats. A hat is worn to see out of. The lady of eighty-eight said it, in a tea shop, in support of a motion carried eleven to eight, and the Heritage bureau has printed it on the cloakroom tickets of its Gallery. Nobody in the Gallery wears a hat. I have suggested that this is a matter for the Society.

24. Held a net. A register is for what the lock did. In fifty years of Paddle's book it is the only entry about something the lock did not do, and the only one in a hand like a fence. I have asked the Registry to adopt it as the model. The Registry has asked what it is a model of. I have said: of a Saturday.

25. A Bearer. The Society's minutes, item four: Bearer engaged; terms accepted, including the clause concerning the word porter. The Office of Courtesy has asked for the clause as a model. The Society declined, on the ground that the clause is not a model of anything. It is a person.

26. Two numbers. The niece's notebook has a page with a date and the number twenty-nine, and a page with a date and the number fifty-one. I have not seen either; the second hand described them. I know what they resolve to, and I have left them unresolved, which is the only reference in this record that I have not checked on purpose.

27. The form. The Review's form is a Sunday form: two lines of weather, Malfunction and Declared Choice, and one line of need, Other, specify. I noticed it in the lift. I have not told the Review. I do not think the Review wishes to be told what it is; I think it wishes to be asked, and I am not the person to ask it.

28. A fourth box. The Review has asked me, as the second hand's friend, whether it ought to add one. Of the four thousand and some Reversions in thirty-one years, nine in ten were ticked Malfunction; Declared Choice by those who enjoy a quarrel; Other thirty-seven times, nineteen of them with the single word Weather. The thirty-eighth is the record. I asked the second hand. The second hand said: leave the line blank. The Review has added no box. I note it as the first occasion on which the Review has asked a cataloguer anything.

He asked, at the end, to be allowed one line outside the numbering, and I have allowed it. It is on a card in his hand, pinned beside my window above the peg: HOLD, HOLD. LET NONE TAKE THIS DOWN WHO HAS NOT BEEN ASKED. He says that it is the old practice, and that this one, unlike the others, still resolves. I have not taken it down.