The lower sluice gate, in the warm and lengthening hour the older drakes have lately taken to calling the evening proper, was on Tuesday about what I have come to expect of it. The water stood at the level the Deputy of the Warden of the Sluice has been entering, these last several conditions reports, as within seasonal range. The sediment at the east channel junction looked no different than it had when the previous fortnight closed. The principal humidity gauge, in its spot beside the gate where the Deputy has kept it since the cooler weeks of spring, read ten drakes. That is half a drake under the morning figure, which is how the gauge behaves as evening comes on.
The Deputy was at the gate when I arrived, in the place that has, over recent weeks and without anyone announcing it, become her place. She was writing in her notebook. The notebook is bound the way she has preferred for some time and runs to a length I have, before now, called more than the season seems to ask for. It lay open at a page that looked, by the little I could make out from a respectful distance, to have been lately begun. She kept her eyes on it. She gave no sign, while I watched, of wanting to be approached. I paid the usual courtesy and stood off at the distance her habits allow.
The marking on the sluice wall was just behind where she worked. Three short parallel lines, scratched or cut by some unknown hand, with a fourth fainter than the rest. A photographic record of it has been asked for more than once and has not, by what I could get from the Clerk, been produced. The late light came at the wall on the angle that lights it for a short while in the evenings now. The Deputy did not turn to look at the marking. I will not read her not turning as her not minding it. By the way she had set herself, she was minding the gate and the gate’s small business, and the wall was where the wall has always been.
A scrap of pondweed had gathered at the lower lip of the gate over the afternoon and lay on the water there. After a stretch I put at a quarter hour, the Deputy lifted it clear with a small movement of her wing. She looked it over. I will say only that she looked it over carefully, and leave it there. She turned it once. She let it go on the slow side of the gate, in a way that would carry it off into the channel with nothing further done to it, which is how she has handled such things all season. She went back to her notebook. The pondweed, on its own time, moved.
The Warden of the Sluice was not there. I will put it the way this paper has settled on for these evenings: he was not observed, and there was no reliable way to observe him. My inquiries earlier in the afternoon, made at the usual points and made with the usual discretion, turned up nothing to say the Warden had been at the sluice on any day this week. The Clerk, asked, said the office’s correspondence had for some time now been arriving at the gate; that the gate’s officer had been taking it in; that whatever came up had been settled in the customary way. Asked whether the Subcommittee had formed any view on the present arrangement, the Clerk said it had not, the last time it sat, been moved to form one, and that the customary practice was, on present showing, holding.
The Deputy kept writing. By the time I made to leave, the light had crossed the wall far enough to leave only the top of the three lines clear. She was still at the page. The wall held its one line in the last of it, and she did not look up from the gate she was keeping.