Feint Ruled

by Alfred Milner, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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I. Bloemfontein, June 1899

The conference sat in the railway station. Walter Pengelly, second clerk in the Imperial Secretary's office, heard three explanations for this on the first day: that a station was neutral ground, that it had the only room in Bloemfontein long enough for the table, and that President Steyn wished both his guests to understand they might leave whenever they pleased. He wrote none of them down. He had not been brought up from Cape Town to explain things. He had been brought to copy them.

They gave him a table in the parcels office, behind a partition of varnished boards through which came the noise of the shunting yard and, at intervals, coal smoke and the smell of hot oil. On the table were two inkstands, a blotter, a box of J nibs, a ream of Waterlow's foolscap, feint ruled, with a margin he ruled himself in red, and the cipher book in its tin case, which was to stay under his hand and was never to be left in the room alone. When he went out to the lavatory he took the tin case with him. By the second morning the Free State policeman at the door had stopped looking at it.

It was the last day of May, and cold in the way the high veld is cold, a dry clean cold that split the skin across the knuckles. By eleven it was warm. By four it was cold again. Pengelly kept his overcoat on at the table until ten and put it back on at half past three, and he noticed that the copies he made in the afternoons were a shade more cramped than those of the mornings, as if the hand had drawn in its shoulders.

He had been in the office four years. In that time he had learned that a despatch has a body and a skeleton, and that the clerk is responsible for the skeleton: the date, the number, the enclosures, the reference to the previous despatch, the reference in the previous despatch to the one before that. A despatch without its skeleton could be read but could not be found. H.E. — nobody in the office said the High Commissioner, and nobody at all said Sir Alfred — was particular about skeletons. Pengelly had seen a draft come back from Government House with nothing altered in the prose and a single pencilled ring round a reference number that was wrong by one.

Three weeks earlier, on the fourth of May, Pengelly had put into cipher the longest telegram he had ever handled. It ran through two evenings and the greater part of a night. He had been chosen for it because he was quick and did not talk, and he did not talk, though he remembered one phrase from it because of the trouble it gave him in the groups: thousands of British subjects kept permanently in the position of helots. There was no group in the book for helots. He had spelled it out letter by letter, and checked it twice, and the next morning the senior clerk had initialled it without a word.

His brother Jory was an assayer at the Robinson Deep and earned four hundred and twenty pounds a year, which was a little under three times what Pengelly earned. Jory had a house in Doornfontein with a wire-netted stoep and a Zulu cook and a piano on the instalment plan, and wrote to Cape Town about the piano and the price of eggs and once, at length, about a dog. He had not written about the franchise. Pengelly had thought about this while he spelled out helots, and then he had stopped thinking about it and finished the group.

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On the Friday, the second of June, the President of the South African Republic produced a Bill.

It came through the partition at a quarter past four, carried by Mr Fane, the private secretary, who was twenty-nine and had a First in Greats and held papers away from his body as if they might be warm.

"Dutch," Fane said. "Clauses and subclauses. Somebody in Pretoria has worked very hard. Can you read it?"

"Slowly, sir."

"There's a translator coming over from the town. In the meantime H.E. wants a figure."

"What figure, sir?"

Fane looked at the paper, and then at Pengelly, a look that admitted that they were both, in the end, clerks.

"How many men get the vote under this, and when. And how many under ours. Five years, retrospective, against — this. Seven years, not retrospective, with conditions. On one sheet. By the morning."

He went out. The shunting engine reversed along the siding and the partition shook.

Pengelly had three sources and no illusions about any of them. He had the abstract of the Johannesburg sanitary census of 1896, which counted heads and did not ask how long they had been there. He had a return from the Uitlander Council, giving residents by year of arrival, which had been compiled by men who wanted the number to be large. And he had the President's Bill, which the translator, a thin Hollander with a cold, began reading aloud to him at six o'clock, clause by clause, while Pengelly wrote the English in pencil on the left of each sheet and his own questions on the right.

The conditions were where the arithmetic lived. A man must have registered his arrival within so many days of arriving; most had not. A man must have been naturalised for so many years before he could vote for the First Volksraad; the naturalisation itself required residence; the residence, under the Bill, would be counted from a date. Pengelly turned each condition into an assumption and wrote the assumption in the red margin, in small capitals, so that whoever read the figure would know exactly how much of it was guessing. ASSUMED: ONE IN THREE REGISTERED ON ARRIVAL. ASSUMED: COUNCIL RETURN OVERSTATES BY ONE FIFTH. It was not a thing anyone had asked him to do. It was the skeleton.

By two in the morning he had ruled six columns. Year of arrival. Adult males, estimated. Qualified at once under H.E.'s terms. Qualified under the President's terms, by year: 1899, 1900, 1901, and so on to 1906. The translator had gone to bed. The lamp smoked if he turned it higher, so he left it low and leaned closer.

He added the columns and added them again from the bottom up, as he had been taught, and the totals agreed. Then he sat for some minutes looking at the sheet without writing on it.

Under H.E.'s terms a great many men would have the vote at once. Under the President's, a good many fewer at once, and then, year by year, more; and the two columns, which began far apart, came towards each other like the rails of a line seen down its length. By the end of 1903, on his assumptions, they differed by fewer men than worked underground on a single shift at the Robinson Deep. By 1905 he could not honestly distinguish them from the error in his own guessing. The difference between the two offers, as near as Pengelly could make it, was a matter of four or five years, and a matter of whether a man was trusted to wait.

He wrote at the foot, in ink, The divergence is principally one of time, and then, because that was an opinion and opinions were not his to give, he ruled through it once, neatly, so that it could still be read, and initialled the deletion. He blotted the sheet and put it in a jacket and slept for three hours in a chair in the stationmaster's office with the tin case on his knees.

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Fane took it at eight. At half past nine the partition door stood open for a minute while a porter brought coal, and through two further doors Pengelly could see a section of the conference room: the end of the long table, a green baize cloth, a carafe, and H.E. sitting alone at the near corner with a sheet of foolscap in his hand.

It was his sheet. He knew it by the red margin.

H.E. read with a pencil held lightly above the page, not touching it, moving down the columns as a man reads a timetable for a train he has already decided to take. He was a slight man, and in the cold of the morning he looked older than forty-five. He came to the foot of the sheet and stopped, and Pengelly saw him read the line that had been ruled through. The pencil came down once, very lightly, and made a small tick in the margin, beside the assumptions.

"It's admirably clear," H.E. said to Fane, who was standing at his shoulder. His voice was quiet and level and carried perfectly. "Thank the man. It is not, of course, a question of arithmetic."

He laid the sheet face down on the pile to his left. Pengelly had worked under him long enough to know the piles. The right was for what was to be answered. The left was for what had been read.

The porter came out with the empty scuttle and the door closed.

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On Monday the fifth of June, a little after noon, Fane brought him a half-sheet in H.E.'s small sloping hand and stood over him while he ciphered it for the Secretary of State. It contained, in the middle of other matter, one sentence that Pengelly had heard H.E. speak through the open doors an hour earlier and that he now set out in groups of five figures, counting each group against his finger: The Conference is absolutely at an end, and there is no obligation on either side arising out of it.

There was a group for absolutely. There was a group for obligation. He did not have to spell anything.

The Free State policeman at the door, who had heard the English through two walls and Dutch from the corridor, said to nobody in particular, as Pengelly came out with the tin case, that the old man had said it was not the vote they wanted, it was his country. The policeman said this in a perfectly ordinary voice, as he might have said that the train from Kimberley was late, and then he went back to looking at the yard.

H.E.'s carriage was coupled to the evening train south. Pengelly travelled in the second van with the despatch boxes. At Springfontein, while the engine took water, he got down and walked along the platform in the dark to stretch his legs, and found that the cold had come back exactly as it had been on the first morning, as if nothing whatever had been agreed or not agreed in between.

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II. Cape Town, October 1899

The registry occupied the basement of the office in Adderley Street and smelled of glue and the sea. In the second week of October Pengelly was sent down to it to docket the Bloemfontein papers for the archive.

He worked through them in order, as they had been minuted: the President's Bill in Dutch, the translator's English in Pengelly's own pencil, the shorthand notes of each sitting, fair-copied; the telegrams in and out, each with its cipher sheet pinned behind it. The ultimatum had come from Pretoria on the ninth. It had expired at five o'clock in the afternoon on the eleventh, while Pengelly was eating a mutton pie at his desk, and nothing had happened in the office at five o'clock, nobody had looked up or put down a pen. The Cape Times the next morning had been full of it.

His sheet was in a jacket of its own near the back. On the outside, in Fane's hand: Franchise — estimate of effect of rival proposals. Seen by H.E. Put by. Inside, the six columns, the red margin, the small capitals, the line ruled through at the foot with his initials beside it, and the faint pencil tick by the assumptions, which he would not have known to look for if he had not seen it made.

Nobody had written on the sheet anything to say that the figures were wrong. Nobody had written anything to say that they were right. It had been read, and it had been put by, and the jacket was in proper order, with a number that agreed with the number in the register and a reference to the despatch it would have been enclosed in, had it been enclosed.

He tied the bundle with the pink tape, made the knot the way the senior clerk liked it, and wrote the docket on the outside. Then he went upstairs, because there was a great deal of work. In the following four months the office tripled. Men arrived from London with letters of introduction and were given desks in the corridor.

In November Jory came to the counter downstairs in a borrowed coat, one of the many thousands down from the Rand that spring, to say that the house in Doornfontein had been shut up, that the piano was in the care of a man he did not trust, and that he did not know when he would see either again.

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III. Pretoria, February 1902

The returns came in on the first of every month, by rail where the line was open and by armoured train where it was not, and they came on a printed form that Pengelly had helped to design.

He had been in Pretoria since the previous August. The office occupied the upper floor of a building on Church Square that had belonged to a firm of Hollander attorneys whose brass plate was still on the door because nobody had been told to take it down. In November the camps had passed from the military to the civil administration. H.E. had wanted them, and had got them, and from that week the returns were his; and since the returns were his, they were, at one remove, Pengelly's.

The form had eleven columns. Camp. Population at the beginning of the month. Admissions. Discharges. Deaths, under sixteen. Deaths, over sixteen. Deaths, total. Population at the end of the month. Medical officers. Nurses. Rate per thousand per annum. The last column was the one that was read. A month's deaths, multiplied by twelve, multiplied by a thousand, divided by the mean of the population at the beginning and the end: Pengelly could do it in his head for the small camps and on paper for the large ones, and he did all of them on paper, twice, because it was the column that was read.

In October, before the transfer, the rate across the camps had stood at three hundred and forty-four. The figure had gone to London and been printed, and questions had been asked about it in the House, and a lady had written to The Times. In January it had been one hundred and sixty. The new medical officers had come out, and the nurses, and the inspectors, and a great quantity of condensed milk, and boilers for the water, and a printed instruction on the placing of latrines that Pengelly had copied forty-one times in a single week. He had ruled the January sheet on the last day of January and sent it in on the first of February with a quiet feeling in his chest that he did not look at closely.

Now it was the first week of March and he was working on February, and the figure, as near as he could make it with three camps still to come in, was going to be below seventy.

"Seventy," said Ormerod, reading over his shoulder.

Ormerod was one of the young men H.E. had brought out from Oxford the year before — New College, a rowing blue, a habit of standing too close. He was writing a paper on the reconstruction of the Transvaal for the Secretary of State and needed Pengelly's figures for it, and he needed them, he said, in a form that could be read by a man in a hurry. There were several of these young men now, in and around the Square, and the clerks called them the nursery among themselves and were careful not to call them that in front of anyone.

"Below seventy, sir. If Irene and Klerksdorp come in as I expect."

"Below seventy. Do you know what that is, Pengelly? That's the system. That's what happens when you put it in the hands of people who count." He said it with real feeling. He was not a cold young man; he had gone out to Irene himself in December and come back and not spoken at dinner. "It's the best thing we've done out here. It is quite simply the best thing."

Pengelly looked at the column. It was true. It was the best thing he had done. He had not known, in the parcels office at Bloemfontein, that a column could save anybody.

"There's this as well, sir," he said, and passed over the other return.

It had come up from the Native Refugee Department, which had its own office on the other side of the Square and its own form, which Pengelly had not designed. It had seven columns, not eleven. There was no column for medical officers, because there were none to enter. The deaths column was filled in for some camps and blank for others, and against the blanks someone had written not recorded or registration incomplete or nothing at all. A note at the foot said that systematic returns had been commenced only in the middle of the previous year. The people in these camps had come off the same farms, cleared by the same mounted columns; they were also, Pengelly knew from the copy he had made of a minute in January, cutting wood and digging for the army for a wage, and there was a separate return for that, in a third office.

Ormerod held the sheet at arm's length and frowned at it, not unkindly, the way he might have frowned at a badly kept scorebook.

"That's not ours," he said.

"It came to us, sir."

"It came to us by mistake. It's a separate department. It's a separate question." He laid the sheet on the corner of the desk. "Put it in with the other and you'll spoil the curve, and the curve is the point. H.E. wants a sheet that a man can read. Keep them separate. Different heads, different columns. If anyone wants the native figures they're on file."

He went to the window and stood looking down at the Square, where a team of sixteen oxen was hauling a wagon of railway sleepers past the statue plinth that had been put up for the old President and had never been given its statue, because the bronze had reached Lourenço Marques from Rome just as the war began and had got no further.

"It's going to be a fine country," Ormerod said, to the window. "In ten years. You'll see. All of this." He moved his hand to include the Square and the oxen and the wagon and the brass plate on the door downstairs. "One country. Properly administered. One set of forms."

Pengelly took a fresh quire of foolscap from the cupboard. It was Waterlow's, feint ruled, from the same stationer's batch, for all he could tell, as the ream in the parcels office: the same pale blue lines, the same watermark when he held a sheet to the window. He laid it square to the edge of the desk. He filled his pen, and took the red ink and the ruler, and drew the margin down the left-hand side in one stroke without lifting the nib.

Then he ruled the sheet across, and down, and wrote the heading of the first column in small capitals, as the form required, EUROPEAN; and moved the ruler two inches to the right, and drew the second line, and stopped with the pen above the paper, and wrote the second heading, NATIVE.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ab Alfredō Milnerō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Alfred Milner, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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