The Clerk of the Race is back. He returned on Wednesday morning and filed at the Reed-Bed Clerk’s office before the pigeonholes were even open. The season has run very nearly its whole length without him. The Subcommittee has declined more than once to say where he went, and this paper has declined to guess. He is back, and that is the news. The Reed-Bed Clerk, who is not easily surprised, took the filing with an attentiveness this reporter has not seen from him before.
The filing was one leaf, both sides, three items. First, he recorded his return, with the date. He expected, he wrote, to be available for adjudication “during the period customary to the present season’s matters,” which is the Clerk’s way of saying a while. Second, he decreed the rematch Channel Sprint. It had been deferred twice in his absence, as readers of the twenty-seventh of May and the fourteenth of last month will recall. It will now run on Wednesday the eighth instant, Old Willow to Sluice, the usual way, conditions allowing. Third, the coot’s classification, outstanding since the spring sprint of the sixteenth of April, will be settled at the rematch itself and not before. His reasoning: “the matter is more properly considered in the immediate aftermath of the contest to which it relates,” which it will be.
Then the pebble. It has sat in the Reed-Bed Clerk’s keeping for the fourth time this season, waiting for exactly this. The two Clerks conducted a brief exchange over it, with all the formality the pebble has earned. The Reed-Bed Clerk presented it. The Clerk of the Race looked at the pebble and confirmed that the pebble was the pebble he understood it to be. He ruled that it stay in the Reed-Bed Clerk’s keeping until race morning. It is to be returned to its owner at the finish line, on the owner presenting himself at the start. The arrangement was accepted. The pebble went back to its usual spot, which it holds now by long tenancy.
The coot was not at the reeds on Wednesday. This reporter went to his station on the bank at the second honk and found him gone, then went back at the fourth and found him present and not inclined to be interviewed. He made one short remark, not worth reproducing. The gist: he would be at the start on the eighth, he would finish third as he has said all season he would finish third, and he had nothing more to add until the eighth arrived. That was that.
In other business: the Rising Young Goose of the north bank, who won the spring sprint at seven splashes and a bit, and the Veteran Mallard formerly of the south shore, who finished a close second, are both said to be weighing whether to enter. Drake Halford’s fifth filing is still under review. The wall marking sits where it always sits, under miscellaneous observations. The Junior Member came in good time and tabled no motion.
So the question is finally inside a season that can answer it. Whether it gets answered is the business of the eighth. Until then the pebble is with the Clerk, where it has been since the twenty-first of May.
More to follow, presumably.