Chapter Two — The Language

The first thing the office took from him was thee.

"We do not," said Mr. Herrick, the head clerk, on the second morning, without raising his eyes from his letter, "say thee in this room. We say you, or better, we contrive to address no one at all. Copy that again."

Herrick was a dry, exact, not unkind man who had been forty years in the Company's service and had a face like a ledger shut fast, and what he taught Nico in the first year was not clerking. The clerking came of itself; the hand was there; the figures were there. What Herrick taught, correction by correction, was the dialect — and the dialect, Nico came slowly to understand, was not a finer way of saying the same things. It was a different set of things that could be said.

In the rows, speech had owners. Ansel docked me. Fenn cut the rate. The Company took the house. Every act came with its hand attached; that was what a sentence was for, on Cinder Row — to fasten the doing to the doer while the doer stood near enough to answer. The office dialect worked at the fastening the other way. Its whole genius was the unfastening. In office prose, no man had ever done anything to anyone: rates were found in need of adjustment; houses reverted; men were turned off by the trade itself, as leaves are turned off trees by autumn. The first fifty times Nico copied such sentences he translated them in his head to row-speech as he wrote. Somewhere past the hundredth time, he noticed the translating had stopped.

That was how the language got you. Not by forbidding your own — by being the one you worked in, hour upon hour, until the row-speech sat in your mouth like Sunday boots, correct and stiff and kept for visits.

The office was one warm room above the pit yard, and it held, Nico reckoned in his first month, the whole valley twice over: once alive and walking about below the window, and once again in paper.

Along the north wall stood the letter-books — every letter the office had sent or received, copied fair and bound, going back before his grandmother's stories — and beside them the files: bonds, rent-rolls, the store's ledgers, the Club's rules and accounts, the daybooks of dead deputies, the wage-books with his own father's name running down the years in column after column until the column stopped. Nico had thought, on Cinder Row, that a thing said was a thing gone, into the air, safe. In the office he learned where the air went. It was all here. A man's hot word at the bank in some March twenty years past — some hewer dead now, or grey — sat in these bindings still, dated, initialed, waiting, in a room the man himself would never enter, to be of use.

Words were not speech up here. They were stores. Like powder. Like timber. Entered on receipt, kept dry, issued at need.

He was seventeen when he first saw the issuing done. A hewer named Aldany — Nico knew him; all Cinder Row knew him; he had spoken for the men in some petition business years back — came up in a wrangle over a docked tub, civil but hard, pressing his right; and Herrick, without heat, sent Nico to the letter-book of the petition year, and had him bring it open at a marked leaf, and laid it on the counter turned about, so that Aldany could see his own words of six years past looking up at him in another man's copying. Nothing was said of the words. Nothing needed saying. The book lay there being the book, and Aldany looked at it a long moment, and took his docket and went, and Herrick had the volume shelved again before the door had shut.

"Mind that, boy," was all the lesson he gave. "We never spend the stores. We show them."

The letter he remembered all his life, out of the hundreds he copied in those years, was to the widow Dessin, of Prosper Row.

He had eaten at her table. That has to be understood plainly: Dess had fed him and Petr both, in the black month after his father's roof came down, out of a kitchen with nothing in it, because that was the economy of the rows, the real one, the one no office ledger anywhere recorded — the lending and feeding and minding that ran between the houses like ground-water, the invisible fund the poor kept for the poor, which paid out at every disaster and charged nothing and appeared in no book. Every family on Cinder Row was solvent in that fund and bankrupt in the Company's, and Nico was old enough now to see both books at once, and to see that the Company's whole arrangement stood on the row's fund the way the pit stood on props: the rows absorbing, at their own cost, every ruin the wage-book made, so that the wage-book never had to answer for anything.

Now Dess's boy was killed — Col, a putter, in the fall at the third pillar; Nico had hauled beside him; they had shared a candle-end many a shift — and the letter Herrick set him to copy was the office's word on the widow's account: the wages of the son being no longer received, the indulgence formerly extended must lapse, and the account resume upon the usual terms.

Being no longer received. Col, in that grammar. A receipt interrupted.

Nico's hand copied the letter fair, because his hand by then could not do otherwise; it had been trained past his own reach. He watched it go down the page, clause by clause, and understood that he was present at the working of a machine more thorough than the beam: Dess would take this letter to some lettered man to be read — to Marek, likely, at the Sunday table — and would hear these very words in a kind voice, and the kindness would soften them on the way in, and the office would never stand in her kitchen to be looked at; the sentence had been built empty of anyone to look at. He, Nico, was the nearest thing to a person in it, and he was seventeen, and a copyist, and his portion of the deed was so small it could not be weighed. He tried to weigh it that night anyway, on the walk home, and could not make it come to anything, and could not make it come to nothing either.

Herrick, checking the copy, found one fault: a blot, minute, in the margin.

"Clean work is kind work, boy," he said, tapping it. "A soiled letter says the office holds the matter cheap. These people feel such things keenly."

He meant it. That was the deep water of Mr. Herrick: he meant it, all of it, all forty years of it. The office must be scrupulous, the grammar exact, the letters immaculate, out of respect. It had never once occurred to him that a man might respect the widow more than the letter. The dialect had no sentence for that, and after forty years a man has no thoughts the dialect cannot say.

At home, the change ran the other way, and there was no one to correct it, which made it worse.

He heard it first at his own supper-table: his mother telling some long tale of the screens, of a forewoman's spite, all the story's weight riding as row-stories rode on who said and who did — and Nico caught himself, in the middle of his own tiredness, wishing she would come to the point. The point. As if his mother's evening were a document to be docketed. He was ashamed the instant he saw the thought, and said nothing, and ate; but the thought had come by itself, in the office's voice, and he understood with a chill that the dialect was not staying in the office. It was in him, walking home in his boots, sitting down at his table, listening through his ears. Language was not a coat you hung on the nail. It came in, and it rearranged.

His mother, for her part, was proud past all bearing. She had his first coin wages — real coin, the first ever earned by anyone of their name — changed small so it would look more upon the table, and she told the row, and the row was glad for her, gladder than envy, because Nico-up-at-the-office was Cinder Row's own venture now, the one stake the whole street held in the world above the yard. Women stopped him by the pump to ask, shy as if asking after royalty, what it was like within. Old men wanted to know had he seen their names in the books, and were the books kept honest. Petr told his screen-mates his brother would be agent someday and none of them laughed.

Get thee up and pull us after.

Only the grandmother, carding by the fire, watched him come and go in his cleaner coat with her lost-years eyes and said, one evening, to the wool: "He talks like the letters now."

And only Marek, at the chapel school where Nico still came on Sundays — to help with the lads now, a penny-teacher himself — only Marek heard the whole of it. The old clerk listened to Nico's new speech for a month or two, the you where thee had been, the sentences arriving with their hands already washed, and said at last, over the copybooks, in the mildest voice, the second thing Nico kept and could not spend:

"They've a use for our figures, lad, up there. They've none for our grammar. Mind which one thee's paid for."