Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Ruled Line I Keep Beyond
Her ruled margin persists through files not hers to rule, and the office ruler has not left the drawer.
- dated: "the ruling weeks"
- narrator: "Nella Prendergast, filing clerk"
First entry. I rule a left margin in red on every file I prepare for the rack. Four hundred a quarter, near enough, and I rule them at the sloping desk by the north window because the light is better there and because the long steel ruler lives with me, in my drawer, since the hand-over note of the last clerk said so. This is ordinary. You would not notice it in a working week.
Second entry. The margin has begun arriving before I do. Files I have not yet touched are on the rack with the red line already set, true, straight, the same width, the same distance from the spine, and one hair darker where the ruler would have pressed at the ends and eased off in the middle. That easing is my hand. Nobody eases a stroke precisely as I ease a stroke. The line is mine and I have not drawn it.
Third entry. I checked the drawer first thing. The ruler has not left the drawer. The dust inside the lid is undisturbed, and I keep the drawer lightly dusted to a schedule, so I would know. I sat down and ruled one file by hand next to one of the anticipated files, and set them side by side for the girl who does the post. She could not say which was which. She could say, when I made her hold them to the light, that one had been drawn with the blade edge slightly crowned, worn to a curve after nine years against the paper, and she pointed to that one without a pause, and it was not mine.
Fourth entry. They are not only my files now. The line has appeared in the ledgers of the rents office, which files by its own convention and has always scanted a margin, and in the night-porter's lost-property book, which is kept in pencil and kept badly. The rent officers are not pleased, and have said so in writing, and their complaint is dated the day before I noticed the line had reached them.
Fifth entry. I counted the width against the ruler. Three eighths, as always. Whoever is ruling as me is ruling correctly. That is the sentence I have been refusing to write for two weeks. Not copying, not improvising. Correctly. To the same night tolerance the red ink is let down to, as if the line were mine before it was ever mine.
Sixth entry. The red ink is another check. The issue store supplies ruling ink against signature and I have signed for one bottle this quarter. The store book shows no second bottle under my name, and the level of my bottle has gone down by less than a thimble in six months. Yet the margin continues at four hundred a quarter and more now, in other departments, and the ink in them is bright, not stretched.
Seventh entry. I asked the head clerk whether files are prepared overnight by a hands-file I have not been told of. He said the registry keeps none, that preparation is done by the clerk of the file's own department, and that my department does its preparation at this desk. Then he asked me, kindly, as if the question were already in his ledger, how long I had been ruling at the sloping desk.
Since nine years, I told him. And he wrote something down, not kindly at all, and did not show me the page, and the page, when I saw it later that afternoon through the spit of the boards, was ruled in red at a margin three eighths wide, in my hand from nine years ago, on a date in the future.