The End of the Loaf
On Sunmorn the Workshop had its big bang at nine, as it always did, and then its lie-in, and the whole of Low Road took the rest of the morning off.
It was the rest day. The women sat on their steps in the sun with their mending; the men stood in knots at the corner of the road, discussing the price of mutton; and in the orphanage kitchen Lili, who allowed herself one hour a week, sat at the table with her feet up on a chair and a mug of tea in her lap and a look of sombre satisfaction, like a ship's captain whose vessel has come into harbour. Ione had a free morning, and nothing to do in it, and for the first time in a week no notion of how to spend it; and so she took her satchel and went out for a walk.
She walked as far as the Workshop gate.
She was not sure why. It was a large, grim, interesting gate, of black iron with a brass plate, hung with notices; and on the right-hand post the board stood, with its careful DAYS SINCE LAST ACCIDENT, and a fresh 0, chalked in that morning with undiminished optimism. Beside the board, on the stone, someone had pinned a card. It was a handsome card, in a square clear gnomish hand, with a border of tiny cogs, and Ione stopped in front of it with her head on one side, as she stopped before anything printed.
THE GNOME WORKSHOP OF FLINTLOCK (LOW ROAD BRANCH)
TAKES APPRENTICES, AGED FOURTEEN TO SIXTEEN, ON WATERTIDE OF THE SIXTEENTH OF SUNPEAK.
Candidates must be sound in wind and limb and must read aloud, without error, PAGE 14 of the Manual of Safe Practice, in the presence of a Proctor.
Meals are provided. We are very sorry about the noise.
And in front of the card, with his big raw hand flat against the stone and his head bent, so close that his nose almost touched the paper, stood Hob.
He was reading it. She saw that at once. His lips moved; his finger went under each word, slowly, with a kind of fierce laborious care, like a man crossing a stream on stones; and at the third line he stopped, and his finger shook, and he started again from the beginning. He did not see her. He was altogether alone, with his shoulders hunched and the sunlight on the back of his neck; and what was in his face, as she came up softly across the cobbles, she knew perfectly well, because she had worn it herself, a long time ago, in a hall of green fire.
It was the face of a person who is trying not to be found out.
"Hob," said Ione.
He went rigid. Then he turned round, and for a half second his eyes were blank and wild as a trapped colt's; and then he was gone. He went down Low Road at a run, with his elbows going, and his scorched cuffs flapping, and turned the corner by the Pantry and was lost.
She did not follow him. She stood on the pavement, beside the card, reading it again. After a time she took out her pencil and copied the date into the margin of her satchel-book. Then she went home, and did a thing that Lili would have called wise: she did nothing at all.
He came to her at dusk.
She was in the schoolroom, in the cool, with the window open and the frog on the sill. She had been looking at the board, with its brace and its notice. She heard the door; she did not turn round at once; and when she did he was standing in the middle of the floor, a great raw dark boy with his arms stiff at his sides, and looking at his boots.
"It's the sixteenth," said Hob. "Watertide. That's six days."
"I know," said Ione.
"You saw."
"I did."
"You'll tell Mistress."
"I shall not," said Ione. "It isn't my business. It's yours." She went on, in the quietest voice that she had, and without looking at him, "Hob, in this house a person's business is his own. I have never heard it said more plainly than in the first hour I came. I should like to say it back."
He did not answer. He stood there breathing through his nose. And then, in a rush, with his eyes on the floor and his hands knotted together, he said, "I can read. I can. I can read my letters. I know all of 'em. It's the words, when they come together. They go all over the place. Some of 'em lie down, and some of 'em stand on their heads, and I can read stove, and damper, and coal, and I can read my name, but I look at a long one and it's like looking at a field in the dark, and I can feel the people watching. I've been here since I was six, Miss. Nobody ever noticed. I just, I just went and did the stove."
"Nobody noticed," said Ione, "because you were so very good at the stove."
"The Workshop wants me. Mr. Tinkwick said. He's seen me, over the wall, with the pipes. They'd have me for the steam. I know the steam." His voice cracked. "But you've to read page fourteen. And I'll be fifteen at Fruitfall, and Mistress can't keep us after, she's not got the room, and every year one goes, and if I don't go to the Workshop I'll go to the docks, and I don't, I'd, I'd sooner be—" He stopped. "I'd sooner be useful."
"You are the most useful person I have met this week," said Ione. "And you have six days."
He looked up.
"Can you do it in six days?" said Hob.
She did not know. She said so, because it was the truth, and because of what she had learned in a week in a wash-house. "I do not know. But I think that I know what the trouble is. I think that you have been taught to read as a lock is taught to a key, by a great many people shouting. And I think that you do not read the way you bank a stove."
"How do I bank a stove?"
"Slowly. With all the ash round the coals. A little at a time. Until you can't tell where one part ends and the next begins." She set down the chalk. "Come back tonight, after the others are in bed. And bring page fourteen."
Mr. Tinkwick lent the Manual.
He brought it himself, on Moonglow, in the sack on his back, as a man brings something very precious and a little embarrassing, and laid it on the kitchen table beside the teapot. It was a thin grey book, a good deal thumbed and with a scorched corner; and it had on its cover, in neat black capitals, MANUAL OF SAFE PRACTICE (WORKSHOP EDITION, 41ST REVISION). "It's a bit," said Tinkwick, "it's got, um. It's been added to. Over the years. By people who were, in the event, wrong." He blew his nose on a spotted handkerchief. "I'm so sorry. I am told that page fourteen is the best of it."
It was.
Ione read it through that evening, in the kitchen, by the lamp, with her chin in her hands; and by the time she reached the foot of the page she had had to put her face down on her arms. It was a page of numbered paragraphs in a firm square print, and it was headed IN CASE OF DIFFICULTY.
1. If it is on fire, do not look surprised. Look for the bucket.
2. If it is making a noise that it did not make yesterday, leave the room quietly and tell someone who is not in it.
3. If it explodes, please remain calm and in one piece.
4. If you are not in one piece, apologise to the person nearest you. Then see the Foreman, who will also be sorry.
5. Nothing on this page is a joke.
"It is a very serious book," said Ione, when she could speak.
She taught him in the kitchen, at night, by the light of a candle in a jam jar.
She did it as she had never been taught to do anything. She did not begin at the top. She began with the paragraph that said bucket; because Hob knew about buckets; and she wrote the word on a slate and said, "What does this say?" and he said slowly, "Bucket," and she wrote it again with the first letters rubbed out, and again; and when he was sure of that she gave him fire. She did not shout. She did not say that he was almost right. She sat on the bench beside him in the lamplight with her pencil, and when he stuck, she sat still, and breathed, and waited, as Lili had waited for the bread to rise; and he found his way across the word by himself, one stone at a time, and looked up with the whole of his face lit like a window.
"It's dam-per," said Ione, on the second night.
"Dam. Per."
"You see? You banked it. You know it. It is only a stove made out of letters." She wrote it on the slate in a long low line, damp-er, and then, underneath, sur-prised. "A word is just a fire to be banked. You do the ash first, and then the coals, and then it all holds together. Try that."
"Sur. Prised."
"Again, together."
"Surprised," said Hob, and put down the slate, and stared at it, and said, in a thick odd voice, "Oh."
By the third night she had found the way he went wrong: he started at the end of the word and read backward in his head, so that bucket came out tekcub, and he had to turn it round, which took time; and she taught him to put a finger under the first letter and stay there. By the fourth he could read the whole of the first paragraph. By the fifth, which was Earthstrong, he read it without his finger.
There were others there, in the end.
Tobbin came first, on the second night, in a nightshirt and the satchel, which he had decided was his, and which he dragged after him by the strap; he climbed onto the bench by the stove and went to sleep in it, with his head on the bag, and was never moved. Wick came down on the third night with his jar, and sat on the bottom stair in his own small circle of gold and listened, and said nothing, and went away again. Nan hummed to the fire. And once, quite late, Ione looked up from the slate and saw Lili in the passage door, with her sleeves down and her hair loosened for the night, watching, with her large scrubbed hands folded in her apron. She said nothing. She went in silence to the dresser, and took down a ladle bun, and put it in the drawer where Hob would find it; and then she went out as quietly as she had come, and the stair creaked under her one tread at a time, a long way up.
The Tally was growing.
It had begun, on Spiriteve, with DAY 3. On the next day it said DAY 4, and after that someone put DAY 5 in a smaller, pleased hand; and by Starsight the thing had acquired a life of its own. Dunny had drawn a small gnome at the end of it, running. Nan had added a bar of music. The twins, who disagreed about which of them was the chalker, had written DAY 6 twice, one above the other, and nobody had had the heart to wipe either out. On Windwhisper, Sunpeak 13, which was Day 7, Mrs. Hale's six days fell. On Earthstrong the children looked at one another across the porridge, and did not mention the thing at all.
On Firespark they were level.
It was Day 9, Miss Pomfret's day, the record. Nobody said anything about it. The children went about their work in a profound and brittle silence, like people carrying a bowl brimful of water; and Ione, who had a headache and a ladle of grammar in her head, went through her lesson in a dream, and came out afterward into the yard to find the entire class waiting by the pump with their gears round their necks and their hands behind them.
"Miss," said Marit.
"Yes?"
"We aren't going to say anything. We just wanted you to know," said Marit, severely, "that we haven't told anyone. Not Mrs. Dunnock. Not Mr. Tinkwick. It's only us."
"Thank you," said Ione.
"And we aren't counting," said Dunny.
"No," said Ione. "Of course not."
"It's tomorrow," said Tobbin, from the satchel.
On the morning of Watertide, the sixteenth, the whole of the orphanage went to the Workshop gate.
Nobody had arranged it. At a quarter to ten, when Hob came down the stair in a clean shirt that had been Mr. Pike's, with his big hands washed pink and his hair slicked flat with water, the kitchen was empty; and when he came out through the door into the street he found that they were all standing across the road on the orphanage step in a row, from the biggest to the smallest, with their brass gears on bootlaces round their necks, looking at him and not at him, in the grave good-mannered way of the house. Lili stood at the end with her spoon. She had flour to the elbow. She said nothing at all, but when he came by she put out one hard brown hand and gripped him, once, by the shoulder.
He crossed the road alone. Ione went with him as far as the gate.
There was a table inside, on the cobbles of the yard, in the shade of the great grey wall: a trestle with a green cloth, and behind it, in a high-backed chair that put his boots on a stool, sat Mr. Tinkwick, with his ledger open and his goggles pushed up. There were three other boys in the yard, with their mothers. One was Lorrin from the Docks. Two were gnome-lads, and they were reading their page in a rapid high clatter, one after the other, like a pair of clockwork birds, and being marked.
"Next," said Tinkwick, in a thin official voice that broke upon the word. "Next candidate, please, to the Proctor. Er. That's me. I'm so sorry."
Hob went up to the table. He stood with his arms at his sides. He looked, for a moment, a very long way from home; then he looked over his shoulder, at the gate, and he found Ione standing in it, with her satchel in both her hands, and she did not smile or nod. She only looked at him. It was a plain steady look. It said, you have banked it. It will be there in the morning.
He turned back.
"Page fourteen," said Tinkwick, and pushed the Manual across. "Aloud, please. Without error. Take your time."
Hob put his finger on the first letter.
"Page," he read, in a low flat voice, "fourteen. In. Case. Of. Dif-fi-cul-ty."
"Very good," said Tinkwick faintly.
"One," said Hob. "If it is on fire, do not look sur-prised. Look for the bucket."
It was steady. It was slow. It was a voice like a man carrying a lamp across a dark floor, with all of the light in it; and the gnome-lads stopped to listen; the mothers went still; across the road the row of children on the step had stopped breathing. He read the second, and the third, and he came, at the fourth, to the long word, and stopped, and Ione, in the gate, gripped the post.
Ap-ol-o-gise.
"A-pol-o-gise," said Hob. He drew a breath. "Apologise to the person nearest you. Then see the Foreman, who will also be sorry."
There was a very small sound, from the gate. It was Ione, giving a hiccup.
"Five," read Hob. "Nothing on this page is a joke."
And then, from the far side of the Workshop wall, with a long low rising groan that shook the cobbles under their feet, there came a sound like a gigantic animal clearing its throat.
"That's the Watertide one," said Dunny's voice, very faintly, from across the road. "It's a wet slap."
The wall bulged. A cloud of steam went up from the yard, in a boiling white fountain, with a hiss and a smell of hot kettles, and a handful of tiles slid off the roof and shattered; and the two gnome-lads dropped under the table with their arms over their heads. Tinkwick had flung up his ledger as a shield. The mothers screamed. And Hob, in the middle of the yard, in the white blowing steam, with his clean borrowed shirt wet to the skin, looked down at the page and went on.
"Six," read Hob, quite clearly, over the hissing, with his finger under the line. "In case of an emergency, remain calm, and in one piece."
"There isn't a six," whispered Tinkwick, from under the table.
"There is now," said Hob.
The steam thinned. It went up and away over the roofs in a long slow bright curl, and under it the yard was very quiet; and from the end of Low Road, across the cobbles, a small cracked chorus rose up of nineteen children cheering. Tinkwick came out from under the table. His goggles were fogged, and there was a tile in his hair. He looked at Hob, who stood with the Manual in both hands, soaked and trembling and entirely upright; and in the grey, singed, entirely unmilitary face there appeared a smile of such sweetness that Ione had to look away.
"That," said Mr. Tinkwick, "is a pass. That is the first clean page of the quarter. I'm so sorry about the noise." He wrote in the ledger, with a stub of pencil, and underlined it twice. "You'll start on Moonglow. The steam. I shall want you at six. Meals are provided."
The Tally had a new line before the sun was down.
They stood in a half circle round the larder door in the lamplight: Lili with her spoon, Hob in his dry shirt with a ladle bun in each hand and a look on his face that nobody dared to remark on, Elise with her basket, Tobbin on the satchel, the twins, Dunny, Nan, Wick with his unlit jar; and Marit stood in front of them with a piece of chalk, on a stool. She did not hurry. She looked at the list from top to bottom, Corbet, Anselm, Pike, Hale, Pomfret. She looked at the yard of blank green door under it. Then she reached up, on her toes, and wrote, in thick careful capitals that took her a long time:
MISS FAIRLIE. 10 DAYS. STILL HERE.
She stood back. She put the chalk down on the shelf, with the air of a person who has done a thing correctly. She said, in her severe small voice, without turning, "It's more than Miss Pomfret."
"It is," said Ione.
"I knew it would be."
"Did you?"
"I didn't," said Marit, and burst into tears, and Ione had her round the middle before she knew she had moved; and over her head, across the kitchen, she saw Lili turn quite suddenly to the stove and begin to stir something that did not need stirring, with her broad back to the room, and her shoulders trembling, and the long wooden spoon going round and round.
At five, a small stern figure in a white cap came up Low Road with a cloth-wrapped parcel in both hands.
She did not knock. She came into the kitchen through the open door, as one comes into a church, and stood on the flags in the lamplight with her floury forearms clasped round the bundle and her closed face turned up to Ione, who was sitting at the table with a mug and an immense weariness and a child on each knee. The kitchen went silent.
"Miss Fairlie," said Mrs. Dunnock.
"Mrs. Dunnock."
"I said I should tell you." She unwrapped the cloth. In it, on a clean white napkin, lay the end of a loaf: the dark crusty heel of an Earthstrong rye, with its black curl and its heavy crumb, still warm. "I have been baking for forty-one years. I have given the end to four people, and none of them were teachers." She put the loaf in front of Ione. "None of the teachers earned it. They were good. They did not stay." She drew herself up very small and straight. "I heard it from the Pantry. I heard about the frog. I heard about the stove. A woman who gives a frog a window is a woman that I should like to feed."
"I," said Ione. She found that she could not say anything else.
"The end is for those who've earned it," said Mrs. Dunnock. "Eat it before it gets cold."
She turned and went out. The door closed. For a moment nobody in the kitchen moved; and then Tobbin, from her left knee, reached out one round finger and broke off a corner of the crust, and ate it, and said, with deep content, "It's very good."
It was extraordinary bread. It was dense, and sour, and sweet, and a little burnt. She ate it with the whole class round her, in the warm lamplight, in pieces that were passed from hand to hand, and she thought it was the best thing that she had ever tasted.
Late that night she sat at the desk in the loft with the window open, and the lamp turned low, and the last crumbs of the heel in a saucer by her hand.
There was paper in front of her. It was a clean sheet, of good cream laid paper, which she had bought in Honeywell on the day before she came; and across the head of it, in her small neat hand, she had written the beginning of a letter. To the Wardens of the Written Word, in Convocation. The Petition of Entry of Ione Fairlie. She had been going to write it for a year. It would take a hundred years, they said, to be heard.
She looked at it for a while. Out in the dark the Workshop's chimney stood against the stars with a single small red glow at the top. From somewhere below came the faint creak of a stair, and the snap of a latch, and Lili's low voice saying bed; and from the next room, through the wall, a thin, tuneless, steady humming, which was Nan, counting.
She dipped her pen.
Dear Sirs, she wrote.
Then she put the pen down, and sat with her hands in her lap in the lamplight, thinking of a stove banked low and slow, and a frog on a sill, and a row of children on a step in the sun with bright gears on bootlaces round their necks. A hundred years was a very long time. It was a good deal longer than she had. She thought: I have twenty petitions already.
She blew out the lamp. And in the dark, at the foot of the stair, she heard a very small sound, a scrape and a hush, as of a jam jar set down on a tread; and she smiled; and she thought, quite clearly, in the plain bare voice of a person reading aloud, that a gerund is a verb that acts like a noun, and that there are some things which it is very good to be doing, and that staying is one of them.