The notes below were taken on the south bank on Thursday evening and are set down in the order observed. For once the matter can be reported in the time the matter took. The light at the fifth honk lay long across the water, as the light tends to lie long at this turn of the season. The angle was steady and in no hurry. The older drakes weigh that angle informally on most evenings of June. On this evening they had been invited to weigh it with rather more attention than usual, because the question was no longer the light tonight. The question was the light on Sunday.
This correspondent took up a place on the south bank a little after the fourth honk, at the distance from the older drakes’ western station that the drakes have, over the seasons, fixed as the limit past which their words will not carry. The spot is a well-known one. It is the spot at which the fragments may be recorded as fragments, and not as substance.
The subject under deliberation was plain from their postures, and from the angle at which the easternmost drake had turned his head toward the willow. It was whether the light, on the evening of Sunday the twenty-first, would be, in the formula the Cultural Subcommittee has now twice put on the public record, right. That is the one question this paper holds to be in the older drakes’ particular gift to answer. No other party on the pond is so placed to settle it. They have seen more midsummer evenings than any bird now on the water, more than any single party at present resident, and the Cultural Subcommittee holds their reading of evening light in a respect that is, on all the evidence, well earned.
The deliberation went briskly, by the drakes’ standards. The fragments reached the bank in this order. “The angle is, on the whole,” and then a pause of some eight breaths, and then a remark whose only surviving word was “acceptable.” The next came clearer. “We have seen worse,” which the easternmost drake gave with the small weight on worse that the older drakes keep for matters in which they have at some point been obliged to act. A third drake spoke. “It will hold by Sunday, by my reading,” from one whose reading on such things this paper has had cause, in past seasons, to trust. A further exchange ran below the threshold of recording. The deliberation closed on one word, agreed by general nodding, and the word that carried to the south bank, with what this correspondent calls admirable clarity, was “right.”
So the verdict stands. The older drakes of the south bank, in conference at their western station on the evening of Thursday the eighteenth, have judged the evening light of this season, in the longer evenings of June, to be right. The judgement is rendered without ceremony, which is their custom, and accepted without ceremony, which is the gazette’s. The Cultural Subcommittee was not, by any account reaching the bank, present for it, and will learn of the verdict through the customary channels.
Set the two evenings side by side, then. Thursday’s light, after the deliberation closed, went on moving across the water in the manner the drakes had described. By the sixth honk it had reached the place they seemed to take for the place it would occupy at the same hour on Sunday evening. The breeze was light. The reeds were dry. The southern waters were quiet, with no rehearsal to carry, and held the willow without remark. The frog was not visible. The light went down the water and held its angle and let the evening keep it.