A Way in the World Read Online Free Page B

been told that everything printed in the island was lodged in the vault. All the records of the colony were there, all the births, deaths, deeds, transfers of property and slaves, all the life of the island for the century and a half of the colonial time. I would have liked to look at old things, old newspapers, old books. But the smell offish glue was very strong in the vault. That, together with the smell of old dust and old paper, the airlessness, which became worse the deeper you went in, the dim light, and the sheer quantity of old paper, was too much for me.
    Morning and afternoon the copies I had written out were checked and initialled by a senior clerk, who came and sat at my table, like a teacher in the kindergarten. Then they were taken for signature to the desk of the big man of our office: the deputy registrar-general or sometimes the acting deputy registrar-general, in whose full name I had had to write out the copies. Then stamps were stuck on, cancelled with the raised letters of the iron seal of the department; and the copies were at last ready to be handed out.
    All of this searching, writing, checking, signing, the attentions of so many people—for a job that might nowadays be done by one person and a computer. All of that fetching and carrying by the messengers: they were on their feet for much of the day, tramping between the vault and the outer office, cradling those bulky, awkwardly shaped volumes in their arms. Theirs was technically an office job, but it required strength and stamina, and they were powerfully built men.
    I would try sometimes to imagine myself spending all my life in that department. A working life of checking and being checked, of writing out certificates in the names of one’s seniors: I thought I could see how, after longing for the security of the civil service job, the job could get at you and you would become full of hate, and not only for the people whose full name you wrote out, as though your own didn’t matter.
    There were two people in the office, a brown man and a Chinese woman, who had served many years and whose thoughts were now of retirement. They had probably entered the government service during the First World War. It was hard for me to think back so far, to imagine that stacking up of the weeks and months and years; it was hard enough for me to go back just ten years, to my discovery of the city, and the first time I had walked down St. Vincent Street with my father. But now for these two people the years had passed. They had seen the job through, and the job had seen them through. Age and endurance were now like a kind of luck that lifted them above other people, above office strife and ambition. They made small, unhurried movements, as though the job and the years had taught them patience.
    The woman—her desk was directly below the front counter: she gave out the completed certificates—was motherly, tender with everyone, as though the job had brought out all her feminine instincts. But the gentleness of the man had been given him by drinking. He was known for it; hewould come in on a Monday like a man both revivified and rested, worn a little finer by the drinking of the weekend.
    Sometimes, near pay-day, there was drinking in the office after office hours. It seemed to be a recognized office facility. The drinkers—some with a towel over their shoulders: that towel an emblem of the end of the working day—the drinkers would sit on desks or with their legs over the arms of chairs, and drink seriously for half an hour or so. I was not a drinker; it was the seriousness of these occasions that I remember. There was no humour, no friendship. It was as though the rum went straight to the soul and privacy of every man.
    In the department there was a black boy from St. James. We had been street acquaintances, no more, for some years. I knew he lived near me, but I didn’t know exactly where, and I felt he wanted to keep it like that. He talked sometimes about