The Reed-Bed Subcommittee convened in good order on Wednesday afternoon, in the reeds above the south bank. The Clerk presided in his ordinary capacity. The Warden of the Sluice attended in his customary advisory one. And the Junior Member of the Subcommittee, who readers will by now have noticed is becoming a presence, attended both as a member and, for the purposes of this dispatch, as the mover of a motion. It was tabled at the appointed hour. As lodged with the Clerk, it ran like this. Two things had been recovered: the Halford filing of the fifteenth of April, and the pebble of the Coot of the Channel Sprint. In light of them, the Subcommittee was to recognise the records review presently in train at the sluice as a procedural development of merit, and to signal its appreciation thereof.
The motion was received in silence. The silence, as is customary in these matters, was constructive. The Clerk, who had conducted the review himself and so could not in propriety be drawn on a motion concerning his own labour, declined to vote. Two senior members consulted their notes for the length of the silence. A third was at the reeds with what looked like an interest in the weather. The Warden, who does not vote and did not, declined to indicate whether he was minded to indicate anything. The pebble, returned that morning to the Clerk’s keeping at the Subcommittee’s request, sat on the bench at his immediate left. It stayed there the whole session. In the closing minutes, an attentive observer reported it had been moved an estimated half an inch to the right by a draught off the reeds.
The Junior Member was undeterred. He has, by now, become rather practised at receiving the silence. He requested, as a procedural matter, that his motion be minuted. Minuting, he noted, would be no vote on the motion, no endorsement, no position of any kind. It would only record that the motion had been put. The Clerk said he had heard the request and would, at his next opportunity, take it under consideration. Pressed mildly on the timing, the Clerk replied that the request to minute was itself of sufficient gravity to warrant the consideration of whether to consider it, and that such consideration would follow in due course. The Junior Member nodded. This paper, which has begun to keep a small notebook on the matter, reads it as the patience of a member who has started to suspect that the manoeuvres he is watching may, in time, become a kind of record themselves.
The pebble, before the close, was referred again to the Clerk of the Race. The Clerk of the Race, again not present, was again so notified. The Halford filing went into next week’s agenda under “Items of Continuing Interest,” and Halford’s request for a brief comparison with his third filing was accepted, deferred, and minuted, the Clerk having no objection to the minuting in that case. After the session, two senior members gave the Junior Member private words at the edge of the reeds. Their content is not, at this writing, known here. The duration was about three minutes. The Junior Member’s face, on emerging, was thoughtful. The pebble stayed where the draught had left it, half an inch to the right, minding the bench.