Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Almeida Terrace ·
The Register of Other People's Umbrellas
The hall porter of Almeida Terrace counts the winter umbrella stand once in every hour of the season and each count comes out one over a register that has never been shown to be wrong.
- filed: "at the autumn stock"
- reference: "AT/UM/09"
1. Almeida Terrace is a terrace of professional rooms above a common hall. The umbrella stand stands to the left of the inner door, on a brass rack of thirty numbered hooks, and is kept by the hall porter, Mr S Larke, under a winter register he holds for the terrace committee.
2. The register is opened once a year, at the autumn stock, in the first week of October. Any resident or principal visitor wishing to leave an umbrella out the winter signs a line in his own hand, describing the umbrella and claiming its hook by number. This season's register was opened on the 3rd of October in the presence of the secretary, Miss N Blyth. Twenty-nine lines were signed. The thirtieth hook is kept vacant by long custom, the reason given in the terrace rules being "for whoever comes in wet", and the custom was examined this season and allowed to stand.
3. The porter counts the stand once in every hour, from half past five in the evening, when the last surgery has emptied, until the close of the count that falls inside the Thin Hour. Rule 9 requires the count to equal the register. On every card filed this season the count has exceeded the register by one. The difference has stood at one since the register was opened and has not fallen below one for any hour of any day.
4. None of the umbrellas in the stand is wet. The porter's cards carry the weather, and there has been heavy rain in three weeks of the season. It is his habit, at each count, to pass the back of his hand over the ferrules, and his cards record the habit observed. Not one umbrella, registered or otherwise, has given him wet to record.
5. The porter knows every registered umbrella by its owner's initials, ruled small on the label of the handle. The umbrella that makes the difference is never twice the same. At six one evening the count's overage was a black umbrella with a cracked ferrule nobody claimed; at seven a brown one, balloon-bellied; at eight, after the dispensary closed, a plain poplin number of the sort chambers keep for clients. At the Thin Hour the card reads, over and over, "the brown one with the brass tip", and the porter's note adds that he has not seen it that evening or any evening, and could not say where it went when the count was done.
6. The committee has tried to regularise the matter. The chairman directed that the extra umbrella be wintered out of the stand, in the passage by the stairs. The count followed it. Thereafter the stand came out level, the passage came out one over its own nothing, and the terrace held two counts instead of one, both wrong by the same amount. The direction was withdrawn at the November meeting.
7. The secretary next entered the extra umbrella in the register as line 30, owner unspecified. At the next hour the count read thirty-one. The line was struck through at the following hour and the count read thirty again. The arithmetic has never once been found to mistake: the stand is one over the register as the register stands, and the register will not stand anywhere else.
8. A claims book was opened. In a season and a half no claim has been entered, the printed slips remaining in the drawer with their stubs unwritten. Notices in the hall asking any gentleman with an umbrella out of place to make himself known to the porter drew two answers only, both from registered owners confirming that their own umbrellas were theirs and had not left their keeping.
9. The register has reverted to its twenty-nine signed lines and stands as first drawn. The porter's cards are the only record kept at the stand, and they have never once come out level.
10. Whether the stand runs one ahead of the register because the register is short of an owner, or because the terrace keeps one more umbrella than it keeps people, is not a question the autumn stock settles, and it is not, on the cards as filed, a question the winter means to answer either.