Chapter Four — The Legitimacy

The agent's office stood in the market town, in a square with trees in it, and the trees were the first thing Nico could not get past.

Trees, in his understanding, grew where the Company had no present use for the ground. These had been planted — set out in rows more regular than Cinder Row, watered, railed, kept — ground spent on greenness the way the office spent ink, for the look of the thing. He lodged in a Company room whose window gave onto them, with coals found, and a woman who did the grate, and in the mornings there was no bell, no cage, no dark: he rose when the light told him, like gentry, like the trees.

He was two years in that office under Mr. Sorrel, the district agent, and if the pit office had taught him the dialect, the agent's office taught him what the dialect was for.

The pit made coal. The agent's office made something else, which Nico watched being made day upon day until he could name it: it made rightfulness. Every hard thing the Company's arrangement did below — the dockings, the distraints, the lapsed indulgences, the turnings-off — came up to this office raw, as anger, as a widow's asking, as a memorial with forty signatures and a curate's covering letter; and the office received each one with perfect courtesy, and passed it into the process, and the process turned it over at its own pace, in its own grammar, and what came out the far end was not the hard thing undone. It was the hard thing ratified — considered, reviewed, regretted, and found in order — the same iron, now wearing the paper of its own acquittal.

And the paper was in Nico's hand. That was his work now: he drafted the answers. Sorrel had seen inside a fortnight what Herrick's reports had promised, that the boy's prose was the best instrument the district office had ever held — and Nico, who at the beam had docked his neighbors by the hundredweight, learned what it was to dock them by the sentence.

He was good at it. Let the record keep that plain. He was better than good; he was the best in the district, and being best took the shape it always takes: the work came to him.

In his first autumn a memorial came up from the Delling pit — the men asking, by farthing subscription, to appoint a checkweighman of their own to stand at the Delling beam.

Nico read it twice. The hand was some chapel teacher's; the asking was the old asking; it might have been the Vesta's, a generation back, with Brant's fate still unspent. And upon Sorrel's minute — decline, warmly — Nico drafted the answer, and the drafting took him one evening, because he knew this ground the way Petr knew the low seam: he had stood on both sides of it. The board's fullest consideration. The men's creditable concern for fair dealing, noted with satisfaction. The beam at Delling standing certified by the proper officer, and provision now directed — directed, as a grant, as a fruit of the men's own petition — for its inspection twice yearly hereafter, as heretofore. In view of which the appointment proposed was found unnecessary.

He read it over fair, and knew it for what it was: the finest lock ever fitted to a door, cut by the man who had himself stood knocking. The Delling men would take that answer as the Vesta's men had taken its grandfather — as a hearing, as half a victory — and their memorial would go into the north-wall bindings of some office, stored, dry; and the Delling beam would read what it read.

He posted it with the evening bag. Then he sat by his railed trees in the dusk with a bought supper going cold, and made, in the manner of clerks, an entry in the books no office keeps:

that the machine's parts were men; that he was become a part; that the part which drafts the acquittal is nearer the iron than the part that swings it; and that all his reasons stood — see more, rise higher, do good someday, pull them after — stood exactly as sound as ever, and had that season begun, very quietly, to smell.

The rules came to him next, because rules were prose, and prose in that district meant Nico.

The Field Clubs of the four pits were to have their rules revised and made uniform — a housekeeping matter, Sorrel called it — and a committee sat upon it one week in the winter: Sorrel, the Company's law-agent out from the city, a physician retained for the occasion, and Nico to hold the pen. Four days of that small warm room taught him more of the world's true government than all his years at the beam.

They came, on the second day, to rule the seventh: relief payable to a member disabled by accident occurring underground. The law-agent read it and tapped it and asked, mild as arithmetic, whether the wording did not leave a flank open — whether the dust, the black spit, the hewers' slow drowning that the district's own physician here could describe for the committee, might not someday be argued an injury of the employment; and had the committee considered the exposure?

The physician described it. He was thorough; he had numbers; so many of the district's hewers dead or done at fifty-five and under, the proportion rising with the deep seams. And the law-agent heard him fully out — this also Nico set down in the unkept books, that no one hurried, that the fact was given its whole dignity — and then said: at the Club's present rates, admission of the dust as an accident must cost the funds, per annum, a sum he named to the shilling; which sum must be found either by raising the men's sixpences — hardship, and ill-feeling — or by the Company's subvention; and the committee would recall that the funds' present sufficiency was itself an element of the Company's credit with its insurers and its board.

There was no wickedness in the room. Nico looked for it — some flicker, some Herrick-dryness a man could hate — and there was none. There was a physician who had told the truth, a lawyer minding his client's flank as lawyers are articled to do, an agent keeping his district's books sound as agents are paid to do; there was sherry at four o'clock; and there was the sentence they settled, which Nico's own pen made fair, the pen being his office: disabled by accident, that is to say by some violent and external event occurring underground at an ascertainable time and place.

At an ascertainable time and place. Fifteen years of dust has neither. The words cost nothing, changed nothing that any man could point to, forbade nothing, punished no one. They merely closed, forever and in advance, with the courtesy of a latch and not the clash of a bolt, the one door through which the largest single dying in the district might have come in and asked for money. The men would ratify the revised rules at the pit-head meetings — their own Clubs, their own vote, the office warmly recommending — and would not, in the reading-out, hear anything move; Nico knew to a certainty no man at any pit-head would hear it, because he himself would not have heard it, at the beam, three years gone. You needed this room to hear it. That was what the room was for.

So the committee rose, and shook hands, and the physician went back to the city; and thus was Nico present, pen in hand, at the exact place where it is done — where the cost of the bottom is weighed in the same scale as the comfort of the top, gram against gram, by decent men in a warm room, and the bottom found, upon computation, the cheaper; and the finding filed; and the file called prudence.

People were expendable. He had known it all his life the way the rows know it — in the bone, as grief. What the room taught him was the form in which the top knows it: as a rate. Deaths per thousand tons. Relief per annum, against subvention per annum. The rows buried men; the office amortized them. And of the two knowledges it was the office's that governed, because the office's could be carried into any room in the kingdom and remain composed, and grief cannot.

He went home for the grandmother's funeral that spring — she went easy, by the fire, the carding-comb in her lap — and found that home had learned to receive him as a visitor.

Not coldly. Worse: carefully. His mother put out the good cup. Neighbors at the door had their asking ready folded, as for the office, and thanked him twice for things he had not yet done. Only Petr — nineteen now, a hewer already, deep-voiced, coal in the creases of his knuckles that no Sunday scrubbing would lift again — only Petr still handled him like a brother, walked him up the moor road on the Sunday, and, at the top, where the wind was, asked him plainly how it was, up there, among them.

And Nico, who drafted the district's truth six days a week, found he could not draft one for his brother, and gave him instead, unfair copy, the thing itself:

"It's warm. The work's clean. Nobody's wicked." He looked down the valley, at the headgears standing black over the rows, all four pits' smoke leaning one way in the wind. "And the whole of it together does what a wicked man couldn't manage in a hundred years. I keep looking for the place where it's decided, Petr. I thought it was the beam. Then I thought it was Fenn. Now I've been in the rooms — I've held the pen in the rooms — and it's not in the rooms either. It's in the way the sums are set, before anybody sits down. The cruelty's in the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is nobody, and thee can't hang arithmetic."

Petr took his time, in their father's way. Then: "Sums get set by somebody, our Nico. Thee always told me — a figure stands on summat. Find what it stands on." He grinned, briefly, the boy showing through the coal-grime and the new size of him. "Thee's the one they let up the ladder. Climb, then. And mind" — the grin going; their father's face entire now — "get thee up. And pull."

The letter from the city came in the autumn: the board's offices, a junior secretaryship, Mr. Sorrel's warmest recommendation retained in the file.

He climbed.