Chapter Five — The Effort

The board's offices stood in the city, in a street of stone fronts, and the Company's front had its name cut over the door in letters a hand deep, gilded; and it was under that gilding, at six-and-twenty, in a good coat, that Nico came at last to the top of things — and found the top was a reading-room.

He had imagined — the rows imagine it still; it is their one comfort — that somewhere above there must be a black chamber, a hard-faced few who knew, who did the thing knowingly and hid it. There was no chamber. There was a long quiet floor of desks, and on the desks, in the most beautiful order he had ever seen, lay the whole coalfield rendered into paper: four pits, nine thousand souls, thirty years — wages, yields, rents, funds, and the returns the districts sent up each quarter, digested into tables a man could hold in one hand. As junior secretary to the board he kept those tables. It was the highest work of his life and the lightest: no docket, no widow at the counter, no face. Figures came up to him washed clean of everyone they had happened to.

It took him half a year of that floor to find what he had climbed ten years to find, because it was nowhere hidden. That was the last lesson of the ascent, and he set it down late in life in the flyleaf of an almanac, under older sentences in another man's fading hand: at the bottom the truth is buried. At the top it is bound.

He found it first in the timber question, because he went looking there — a man whose father lay under sixty yards of unpropped roof does not forget to look.

It was all in the bindings, minuted, decorous, complete. The engineers' report of years back: the deep-seam roofs being what they were, timbering to the close standard would cost, per annum, per pit, a figure. Against it, the actuary's paper — the Company retained an actuary, as it retained a physician and a law-agent and a chaplain — computing the expected charge of the alternative: so many falls per annum upon the wider spacing, so many deaths per thousand tons raised (the phrase was exactly that, ruled into a column-head, per thousand tons, as if the tons were the ones dying); the funeral moneys, the smart-moneys, the widows' allowances from funds the men's own sixpences fed; and at the foot, the two figures set side by side, and the lesser underscored, and the minute adopting it: the existing scale of allowances being found adequate, no alteration of the timber standard is recommended at this time.

Nowhere the sentence the rows would have written: it is cheaper to bury us than to prop us. The office had no such sentence; the dialect could not form it; Nico, who had mastered the dialect, understood at last that this was the dialect's whole and only purpose — to be a language in which the true sentence could be enacted annually and never once said.

He sat with the binding open a long evening, and did what his nature must: he carried the column-head out to its edges. Deaths per thousand tons. His father, then, had not been killed by a roof. His father had been expended — drawn down from a budgeted allowance, within the recommended scale, in a good year for the fund. Col likewise. The five of the third pillar likewise, and the nine of the grandmother's Delling story, and backward so through every black date the rows kept; none of it accident, none of it wickedness; all of it purchase. The pits ate men at a rate, the rate was known, the rate was chosen — chosen again calmly at every renewal of every such minute — because the cost of feeding fewer to the seams was set against the dividend, and the dividend had never once lost the comparison.

And the dividend — he kept those tables too — the dividend went up out of the valley twice a year, clean as winding, to the stone streets and the railed squares and the houses with trees; to the heirs, the funds, the cathedral trust; to the good floor he sat on and the good coat he sat in. He had eaten off it ten years. High living was not adorned by the arrangement, was not incidental to it: it was the sum of it. Somebody's warmth had to cost something; the whole art of the books above was that the cost and the warmth should never appear on one page; and here, at the top, on his own desk, was the one place in the kingdom where both columns met — and they met in his hands, and his hands kept the tables fair, and were praised.

The minute concerning himself he came upon by accident, in the winter, verifying a pension question in an old signature-book of the board.

It was thirty years old, four lines, adopted without discussion, in the standing orders touching the districts: that the practice be continued of selecting from the workmen's families, at intervals, a youth of parts for advancement through the offices; the cost being trifling and the effect conducing greatly to contentment in the districts, the visible prospect of rising being found the cheapest of the instruments of order.

The cheapest of the instruments of order. There were older minutes beneath it, renewing older practice; the door was older than the Company; the door, he understood, holding the book steady on the desk with both hands, was as old as arrangements themselves. One lad a generation, up through the offices, visible the whole way — visible on purpose, the rows must see him rise, that was the mechanism entire: not what the chosen boy did up above, which was trifling, but what his rising did below. Every mother on every Cinder Row pointing her sons at the ladder. Every man of parts spending his parts on the climb and not on the — the minute did not say not on the rest; thirty years of board had never needed it said.

He had been priced. Before his birth he had been priced, column against column like the timber: so much for a copying boy's wage and a clerk's articles, against so much contentment in the districts; and the lesser figure underscored, and the practice continued; and Marek's question of the schoolroom dusk — why does the Company keep a door? — stood answered at last in the Company's own fair round hand, retained, docketed, dry.

He was not the door's exception. He was its product. His whole ascent, the shirt twice washed, the winks at the cage-side, his mother's coin changed small upon the table, Petr in the Monday dark — get thee up and pull us after — all of it had been, in the only books that governed, an instrument of order, performing within expectation, cheap at the price.

The Chairman dined his secretaries twice a year, and that spring Nico sat far down the long table of a house with three floors of warmth, under portraits of the dead men whose arrangements these still were, and heard the top of the world talk with its coat off.

They were not monsters. He confirmed it there finally and put the hope of it away: monsters could have been fought. They were reasonable men at wine, and they spoke of the pits as men speak of weather on land they are draining — frankly, without cruelty, without shame. The pits were heavy trades; heavy trades used men hard; it was in the nature of coal, of the age, of the world; the question — the Chairman said it across the cloth to a neighbor, urbane, unanswered because unremarkable — the question was never whether the trade should use men, but only that it use them in order: the rates certain, the funds sound, the districts content, no waste and no disturbance. A well-run coalfield, he said, turning his glass, was known by its quiet.

And Nico, far down the cloth in his good coat, silent among the silver, heard the whole of his life restated as a housekeeping virtue, and understood the last thing, the thing the rows could never believe of the top because the rows judged all men by the heart:

that the top was not hiding the arrangement, not from him, not from itself; that at this height there was nothing left to hide it from; that shame is a debt owed to the faces one must meet, and the top had arranged, at whatever cost in gilding and railed trees, to meet no faces; and that these men would sacrifice the bottom to keep this table — had sacrificed it, would sacrifice it again at every renewal of every minute, his father, Col, the five, the next five — not in rage, not even in greed exactly, but in maintenance, the way a man keeps a roof staunch over his own children, the rain being nobody, the rain being only what falls.

He walked back to his rooms through the stone streets in the dark, past the gilded name a hand deep, and that night he did not write to his mother, and did not sleep, and made the only entry that mattered in the unkept books:

He had gone looking, all these years, for the place where it was decided, and he was standing in it, and it was a dinner-table; and the men at the table could not be shamed and could not be petitioned and could not be surprised, because every channel a petition might travel was of their own building — he had drafted the answers himself, he was the channel's best mason — and nothing that entered by those channels would ever come out but ratified iron;

and therefore whatever he did now must go by no channel; and must be figures, not words, Marek was right, figures in their own fair hand, minutes, schedules, the column ruled per thousand tons, the four lines on the instruments of order — the top's own books, which the top could neither refute nor survive, laid open where the faces are;

and that he was the one man of the nine thousand ever placed to carry them out; placed there — this was the joke he did not laugh at, alone by his cold grate at the top of the world — placed there by the arrangement itself, which had raised him as an instrument of order, and had reckoned everything about him to the farthing except the one thing the books had no column for.

From that week he stayed late on the quiet floor, and his pen moved in the bindings, and what it copied went home under his shirt, a page a night, patient as dust.

The effort of his life had begun at last. It looked like nothing at all.

All the best effort in that valley always had.