Turkey Red

by James Clerk Maxwell, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The matching-room at the Millburn works faced north, as a matching-room must, and had one window eleven feet high and a table under it covered in grey baize. On the table lay the pattern book, which was older than the manager, and beside the pattern book lay a piece of Welsh slate the size of a playing card, which belonged to Thomas Rennie and to nobody else.

Rennie had matched cloth at Millburn for thirty-one years. Every piece of Turkey red that went out of the works to Calcutta, to Rangoon, to Port of Spain and to the warehouses in Manchester that sent it on to places he could not have found on a map, went first across his table. He laid the end of the piece against the pattern, he looked, he put the slate down beside both, he looked again, and he said "Pass" or he said "Back." He was paid twenty-eight shillings a week for those two words, which was four shillings more than the head dyer, and the head dyer had stopped resenting it some time in the eighteen-fifties.

His method was his own and he did not explain it. The slate was for depth. A red that was too light stood off the slate; a red that was too dark sank into it. He had learned this as a boy of fourteen in his first month, when old Galloway, who had the table before him, cuffed him for passing a piece that had been through the madder one time fewer than it should. After that he never once mistook depth. He could tell a piece dyed three times from a piece dyed three times and boiled a quarter-hour too long in the soap. He could tell, the dyers said, the day of the week a piece had been dunged.

It was the summer of 1872, and the works had gone over to the new red.

The new red came from Germany in casks, as a paste, and the paste was alizarin, the same substance that the madder root had been yielding up for three thousand years, but made from coal tar by chemists in Ludwigshafen. It was cheaper than madder by half. It did not need to be ground or steeped, and it left no woody sludge in the bottom of the vats for the boys to dig out on a Saturday. Mr Orrock, the manager, had made a speech about it in the yard, standing on a cask, in which he used the word "progress" four times and the word "economy" seven. The dyers listened with their arms folded. They had been told about progress before, generally just ahead of a reduction in hands.

For six weeks the new red went through the vats and across Rennie's table and out of the gate on the carts to the railway at Balloch, and Rennie passed it, piece after piece, as he had passed the old.

In the seventh week a letter came from Manchester.

Mr Orrock brought it into the matching-room himself and read it aloud, which was a thing he did when he wished somebody else to share the weight of a letter. Messrs Hulme & Speirs regretted to inform the Millburn Turkey Red Company that the consignment of the fourteenth ult., forty-two pieces, did not answer to sample. The colour was described by their buyer as foxy. Their buyer was of the opinion that it would not pass in the Bombay market, where the native merchant was particular. Messrs Hulme & Speirs would hold the goods at the Company's disposal and would be obliged by instructions.

"Foxy," said Mr Orrock. He folded the letter. "Forty-two pieces. That is three hundred and some pounds, Rennie, lying in a warehouse in Manchester being called foxy."

Rennie said that he had seen every one of those pieces and that they matched.

"They do not match, according to Hulme & Speirs."

"Then Hulme & Speirs have a buyer wi' a cold," said Rennie. "Or a bad window."

They had one of the returned pieces sent up from the station so that it could be laid on the table, and on the next day it was. Rennie laid it against the pattern. He put down the slate. He looked for a long time, because Mr Orrock was standing behind him and because the head dyer, McKellar, had come up from the vats without being asked and was standing behind Mr Orrock.

"It matches," said Rennie.

McKellar said nothing. Mr Orrock looked at McKellar.

"Well, McKellar?"

"I'm no' the matcher, sir."

"I know you are not the matcher. I am asking you what you see."

McKellar rubbed his jaw, which was stained to the second knuckle of every finger with a colour that would not come out in this life. "It's a wee thing browner," he said. "To my eye. Just a wee thing. Like a red that's been left out."

"It is the same depth to the hair," said Rennie.

"I'm no' saying depth, Tam."

There the matter stood, because the matter had no means of moving. A colour is not a weight. You cannot put it in a scale-pan against a standard brass and read it off. When two men disagree about a colour they have nothing left to appeal to but a third man, and the third man has his own eyes and his own grievances, and very soon there is a quarrel that will outlast the cloth.

Mr Orrock, who was not a fool, perceived this. He also perceived that he had spent a great deal of the Company's money on casks of German paste and had made a speech from the top of one of them. So he did what a manager does when he wishes a question settled by somebody whom nobody at the works can afterwards blame. He wrote to Glasgow.

---

The man from the Andersonian came on the Thursday by the morning train. His name was Mr Laurie; he lectured on natural philosophy to the evening classes, which were full of engineers' apprentices, and he did experiments for manufacturers at a guinea a day. He was perhaps thirty, thin, with spectacles that he took off to look at anything closely, which seemed to Rennie a sign either of great learning or of poor spectacles.

He did not look at the cloth first. He looked at the window, and asked which way it faced, and whether the sun ever came in at it, and what o'clock the light began to fail in winter. Then he unbuckled a leather case and took out a brass top.

It was a top in the plain sense, of the kind a child spins on a kitchen floor, only heavier and better made, with a disc of brass on its spindle about the size of a saucer. The rim of the disc was divided by fine lines into a hundred equal parts. Out of the case he took also a packet of paper discs, each one slit along a radius from the edge to the centre, and each painted one flat colour: a red, a green, a blue, a white, a black.

"Vermilion," said Mr Laurie, holding them up one at a time, "emerald green, ultramarine. White, black. Nothing else. The colours of a shilling paint-box."

He slid the red disc and the green and the blue together on the spindle, so that each, by its slit, overlapped the others, and turned them about one another until the red showed over perhaps a third of the circle, the green over a third and the blue over the rest. Then he set a smaller pair of discs, the white and the black, on top of these in the same manner, so that there was a little grey-and-white wheel in the middle of a large red-green-blue one. He set the top spinning on the baize.

The colours went out of it at once. The outer ring became a sort of dirty grey, like a wet pavement, and the inner ring became a grey too, a little paler. Mr Laurie stopped it with one finger, shifted the green a little, shifted the black a little, spun it again. The two greys came closer. He stopped it, shifted, spun. After the fourth trial McKellar, who had come up again, said "That's them the same," in a voice of real surprise, as though he had seen a trick with cards.

Mr Laurie read off the rim. "Thirty-seven of vermilion, twenty-seven ultramarine, thirty-six of the green," he said, and wrote it down. "Against twenty-eight white and seventy-two black. That is my eye. Now I should like everybody's."

"What's it for?" said Mr Orrock.

"It is to give you a number," said Mr Laurie. "You told me in your letter that you had an argument about a colour. A colour is a hard thing to argue about. A number is a little easier."

He went round the room. He made McKellar match the two greys, and McKellar, swearing softly, got it in seven tries; thirty-six, twenty-eight, thirty-six. He made Mr Orrock do it; thirty-eight, twenty-six, thirty-six. He sent down to the finishing room for two of the folding women and a girl, and the girl, whose name was Jessie Galbraith and who was fifteen and had never been in the matching-room in her life, got it in four tries and turned quite red herself when the men looked at her: thirty-seven, twenty-seven, thirty-six.

"You see," said Mr Laurie, "we all differ a little. A hand's breadth on the rim. That is the difference between one eye and another, and between the same eye on Monday and on Friday. It is very small."

Then he gave the top to Rennie.

Rennie had watched the others and did not need telling. He spun it, stopped it, adjusted, spun again, and in three tries pronounced the greys the same. Mr Laurie bent and read it with his spectacles off. He did not say the numbers aloud. He wrote them down. Then he moved the green disc a long way, so that there was hardly any green showing at all, and red over nearly half the outer ring, and said, "Try again from here, if you please."

Rennie tried again. He worked the blue and the black, and let the red and the green share what was left of the outer ring as they pleased, because it seemed to him that it made no odds how they shared it, and he got the greys the same in four tries.

McKellar, behind him, said, "Tam, that's never grey."

"It is grey," said Rennie.

"It's the colour o' a brick," said McKellar.

Mr Laurie stopped the top. He moved the red almost away and gave the green nearly half the circle, and handed it back. Rennie matched it again, quickly, against the same inner grey. Jessie Galbraith, who stood nearest, put a hand over her mouth.

Mr Laurie wrote for some time in his notebook, and then he put the notebook in his pocket and asked if he might speak with Mr Rennie alone for a quarter of an hour, and Mr Orrock, after looking at him, took the others out.

---

When they were gone Mr Laurie sat down on the edge of the table, which nobody had ever done, and turned the brass top over in his fingers.

"I will tell you what I think," he said, "and then you will tell me if I am wrong. You were a long while finding the strawberries in a bed when you were a boy."

Rennie said nothing.

"And you have been told, all your life, now and again, that a thing was green when you would have called it brown, or red when you would have called it brown. And you thought, as a sensible man would, that other people were careless with their words."

"Folk are careless wi' their words," said Rennie.

"They are. But not about this." Mr Laurie put the top on the baize. "Every man's eye is three things. Not really three; I mean that it has three ways of answering to light, and all the colours anybody has ever seen are made of how strongly each of those three answers. That is why I need three discs, a red, a green and a blue, and not two or four, to match any grey. Mr McKellar needs three. Miss Galbraith needs three. You, Mr Rennie, need two. I can take away your red, or I can take away your green, and you will still match me the grey, and match it more steadily than any of them. Your eye has two of the three. One of them is wanting."

Rennie looked at the window. Outside, on the bleaching-green, the girls were laying out lengths of cloth to dry, and the cloth was the colour it had always been to him, the colour of Turkey red, which was the colour of the inside of the lip, of the hearth when it was banked, of nothing in particular, the colour of his whole working life.

"Thirty-one year," he said.

"Yes."

"Thirty-one year I have passed every piece of cloth that went out of this works. And I have never had a piece come back. Not one. Ask Orrock. Ask anybody." He turned round. "If my eye is half an eye, how is it that I never had a piece come back?"

Mr Laurie had evidently been hoping for that question, for he took off his spectacles to answer it.

"Because madder never went wrong in the direction you can't see," he said. "Think. What goes wrong with a madder red? It goes too light because the dyer was mean with the madder, or it goes too dark because he was generous, or the oiling was poor and it goes thin and weak. All of those are depth. All of those you see better than any man in Scotland, I should think, because you have spent thirty years looking at nothing else. Your slate is a better instrument than my top for depth. Madder could go wrong a hundred ways, but all hundred ways were ways your eye can follow. So you never passed a bad piece. There was no bad piece of that kind to pass."

He picked up the returned piece from Manchester and laid it beside the pattern.

"This is the same depth," he said. "You are perfectly right. Your slate is right. But the German paste is not quite madder. The root has other things in it besides alizarin, which lent the old red its fire, and the paste has other things in it too, left over from the tar, and some casks have more of them than others. Where there is more, the red leans a very little towards brown. It has gone wrong, if you like to call it that, in the one direction that has no depth to it. For you there is simply no such direction. It is like asking a man who can only walk north and south whether he has strayed east."

Rennie sat down in his own chair, which he had not done while Mr Laurie was on the table, and put his two hands flat on the baize.

"So Orrock will put me out," he said.

Mr Laurie was silent a moment. "I shall have to tell him what I found," he said. "I can't give him a number and then tell him a different one. But I shall tell him the whole of it, which includes the strawberries and also the thirty-one years. I shall tell him that every piece you passed before June was a good one, and that he has the best judge of depth in the Vale working for him. What he does then is his affair." He began packing the discs back in their packet, very neatly, edge to edge. "If I were him I should not put you out. I should get you an assistant."

---

It was Jessie Galbraith they gave him, at seven shillings, which was two more than the finishing room and caused a certain amount of talk in it.

For the first week she stood at the end of the table and said nothing whatever, and Rennie did his matching exactly as before, but at the end laid each piece aside without saying "Pass" or "Back," and looked at her. And she said, quietly, "It's fine," or she said, "It's that bit brown again, Mr Rennie," and he said "Back," and wrote it in the book.

In the second week he gave her the slate.

"You're too quick," he said. "You look at the red and you think you've seen it. You've no' seen it. Put the slate by it. Does it stand off? Does it go in?"

She put the slate by it and looked. "It's the same," she said.

"It is not the same. It's been through the soap too long. Look at the edge where it comes to the slate."

She looked for a long time. "I don't see it."

"You will," said Rennie. "I didna see it either, for a month. Old Galloway gave me a skelp on the ear for every piece I missed and I'll no' do that to you, but you'll see it."

She saw it, at the end of three weeks, quite suddenly, on a Tuesday morning, and said "Oh," and Rennie said nothing but turned his head away to the window so that she should not see his face.

In September a letter came from Hulme & Speirs saying that the latest consignment answered admirably to sample and that the Bombay market had made no difficulty. Mr Orrock read it aloud in the matching-room, and then, because he was a manager and could not help it, made a short speech about the advantages of the scientific method, during which Rennie and the girl went on matching.

Mr Laurie had left the brass top behind, by accident or not, in the drawer of the baize table. Sometimes in the dinner hour Jessie took it out and set the discs on it as she had watched him do, and spun it on the baize to see the colours go out. Once she set it to a match of her own, red and green and blue against the black and the white, and turned it carefully until the two greys were the same to her, and then pushed it across the table to Rennie without saying anything.

He bent over it, the way Mr Laurie had bent, and watched it spin.

"Aye," he said. "That's grey."

Whatever she made the same, he saw the same; it was only the other way about that they parted. He reached out and stopped the top with one finger, and the colours came back into it.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem octāvum Kalendās Novembrēs (25 October 2026), ā Iacōbō Clerk Maxwellō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

James Clerk Maxwell, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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