The new moon rose on Sunday evening, at the hour and bearing the older drakes had between them predicted to within a margin this paper will call generous. The pond took it the way the pond takes most things of the kind. A head or two inclined. The talk went briefly quiet for no reason anyone cared to give. The moon itself is not the story. Its purpose was, which was to occasion the second running of the Channel Sprint, the feast having been put off by the Subcommittee’s note of the twenty-seventh of May, off the moon first promised, for want of the Clerk of the Race.
The Clerk of the Race did not return.
His absence was confirmed in the usual way, by his going on not being there. The Clerk of the Reed-Bed Subcommittee, asked on Saturday whether any word had reached the reeds, said none had, and that this paper was free to draw the customary inferences. The customary inference is this. A feast twice reported as approaching, and twice as not arriving, is by its second non-arrival turning into a fixture of the season in its absence. The race is deferred again.
The coot of the Channel Sprint, found at his station on the lower reeds shortly after the third honk, was asked for a statement and declined to give one. His words, set down without comment, were that “the matter is not yet for comment.” It is the brevity a party keeps for a thing on which a great deal might be said, and on which nothing useful would be added by saying it now. The pebble was not on him. It has been with the Clerk of the Reed-Bed Subcommittee since the twenty-first of May, and the coot had already said, in his letter of the sixth, that he did not mean to carry it this time.
The Clerk keeps the season’s deferrals in a small ledger for the purpose. The Subcommittee’s tally now stands at a figure he is willing to call “comfortably within range.” Pressed on which range, he said that was a matter for the ledger and not the gazette. Our correspondent’s own count, off the Clerk’s by a margin neither will formalise, makes the Channel Sprint the eleventh distinct matter carried forward this season. The two counts are not strictly comparable. The Clerk has noted before that some matters can be deferred in a way that does not count.
The new moon will set in its own time. The Clerk of the Race, having not come back, will come back, this paper assumes, when conditions allow. The coot was last seen at sundown on the lower reeds, looking east toward the channel with no visible sign of intent. The Subcommittee takes the matter up again on Wednesday. Until it does, the race, the Clerk, and the feast are all where they were, which is to say still out, the channel unrun and Wednesday not yet here.