Documents lodged with the Reed-Bed Clerk’s rooms on Friday morning show that Drake Halford, long resident on the east shore and a fixture of these pages these eight seasons, has lodged a seventh formal filing in connection with his household’s census. It was delivered shortly after the office opened and signed for in the customary fashion. It runs to two leaves on the principal matter and a third headed “supplementary.” The opening sentence gives its occasion as “the present week’s correspondence at the gazette and the matters arising therefrom,” and nothing more.
The principal pages do not, on review, advance materially on the sixth filing of the twenty-eighth of last month. The household is still recorded as five members. The members are still named in the order Drake Halford has consistently preferred. The first filing’s record of four members is still acknowledged as the matter at the centre of the present complexity. His customary statement on it, which this paper has reproduced before, is reaffirmed once more. The first filing, he holds, was prepared in conditions which may, in a household of long standing, sometimes produce an undercount by way of momentary inattention. The reaffirmation runs under the heading “the matter of the first filing, again briefly,” and stops there.
It is the supplementary leaf that drew my attention, and which the Clerk has chosen to file alongside the principal pages rather than separately. In the Drake’s own hand, and in the same careful figures the household has used all season, the leaf sets out an arithmetic of the household’s crust consumption at the east bank approach on the previous Monday morning. The total, nine crusts, is the figure he gave in his letter of the second instant. The leaf gives the average per member, one and four-fifths. It closes with what the Drake calls “the household’s respectful but firm response to such accountings as may, in good faith, be advanced to the contrary,” and signs off.
The Clerk was asked at the close of business about the leaf’s standing in relation to the principal filing. The leaf had been received, he said, “in the manner customary to a supplement,” and would be filed alongside the principal pages. The heading would be “Items of Continuing Interest,” which he called “a heading sufficient to its purpose,” and let stand. He added more, in the careful aside I have come to read as his signal of information the Subcommittee would not find inconvenient. The letter the Household Adjoining the Halfords filed on the second instant, and which ran in Monday’s column, had been requested for filing alongside the same item. The request was his own, on the grounds that “the arithmetics in question were, in their present form, of a piece,” he noted. The letter has been so filed.
Drake Halford, seen leaving the reeds around the third honk in the company of no member of his household and carrying nothing by way of further documentation, was approached for a comment. He observed that the morning was fine. He observed, secondly, that the seventh filing was, in his view, “as complete as the present state of his information permits.” He observed, thirdly, that he was on his way home, and went. The arithmetic, in this paper’s considered view, remains the household’s own.
The Subcommittee will, the Clerk has confirmed, take the matter up at no specially convened session. The seventh filing will reach a future Wednesday’s agenda once other matters of similar standing have, in his careful phrasing, “accumulated to a quantum sufficient to the heading.” The Household Adjoining had, when the filing was lodged, added nothing further. The Drake offered his supplementary leaf, for the record, “in the spirit of full disclosure rather than in the spirit of controversy.”