The Culvert at Merewick

I had gone to Merewick to investigate a reported discrimination of musical intervals, and was detained for an afternoon by a culvert. Ash-of-the-Weir had objected to its proposed alteration. The town clerk mentioned this while finding me a chair, with the mild displeasure of a man whose agenda has acquired another enclosure. We were assembled outside the tithe barn, where Ash could attend without requiring any architectural concession beyond the removal of a rainwater butt. She lay with her forefeet beneath her breast and her head above the table. When the surveyor unfolded his drawing, she closed her eyes. I supposed that she intended to sleep through the technical explanation, a temptation with which I sympathised until I discovered that she had already heard it six times.

The proposal was to replace a cracked stone culvert beneath the mill road with a wider iron pipe. Floodwater would pass more freely; the road would cease subsiding; the carrier could abandon his present practice of approaching the depression at speed and trusting the suspension to complete the journey. Ash opposed the pipe. Asked whether she objected to iron, she said, ‘You may put iron … wherever you have AGREED to put it the water comes here.’ The capitals imperfectly represent an emphasis which caused the surveyor to retrieve a rolling pencil before it reached the edge. Nobody appeared discouraged. Senn asked whether the inlet might remain where it stood. Ash opened one eye and said that Senn had asked this already. The clerk consulted his minutes and confirmed that he had.

For forty minutes the meeting pursued distinctions which seemed to me increasingly remote from any reasonable objection. Ash permitted the replacement of a broken coping stone, provided it was broken. Excavation uphill she would tolerate, subject to seeing it. She refused a temporary diversion even when assured that the original channel would be restored within a week. Throughout these negotiations she watched a distant slope with the air of having granted Merewick a small and revocable portion of her attention. I eventually observed that a structure scarcely wider than my shoulders was receiving consideration sufficient for a railway viaduct. The miller asked whether I would prefer them to vote before they understood the objection. I replied that I would prefer an objection capable of being understood. Ash lowered her head sufficiently to examine me with both eyes. ‘Then you must … improve at it,’ she said, and resumed watching the slope.

This was a discourteous instruction, though within my professional competence. I asked the surveyor to show me precisely what the enlargement would change. He explained its capacity, its gradient and the superiority of the proposed joints. I interrupted him at the joints. Ash had accepted none of these as the subject under discussion, and repeating them more loudly would chiefly establish the carrying power of his voice. We carried the drawing to the culvert, the meeting following with its chairs. This migration occasioned no remark beyond the clerk’s request that somebody take the ink. At the roadside I found that the existing outlet discharged across a shallow shelf of stone before entering the stream. The drawing replaced this irregular apron with a neat chute. Ash placed one claw beside the shelf. ‘This,’ she said, ‘has been left out.’ The surveyor protested that it was outside the works. I told him that his drawing had nevertheless contrived to abolish it.

The shelf was warm. Water spread thinly over its upper surface, while a dry recess beneath retained heat from an exposed bank. Ash rested her lower jaw there on certain evenings. This information initially restored my original estimate of the grievance: we had spent most of an afternoon upon the drainage arrangements of a chin-rest. I said as much, in terms sufficiently courteous to be regrettable. Ash allowed me to finish. She then asked whether I recognised my rooms at the Collegium solely by the chair. I answered that I could recognise them without it. ‘Yes,’ she said, after a considerable pause. ‘You are very … easily satisfied with what remains.’ Senn, who had been crouching beside the outlet, asked her whether the evening water would still belong there if it arrived down the chute. Ash said that it would arrive elsewhere. The proposed displacement was eleven inches.

I could measure the displacement; I could not measure what it displaced for her. Further questions elicited that the warmth beneath the jaw, the movement of water past the left eye and the view upstream entered together into her recognition of this place. She could discuss each when I supplied the distinction. Asked which must be preserved, she became silent, then repeated that the water came here. I infer that our separation of a useful shelf from its accompanying circumstances was itself part of the difficulty. Her account supports that inference; it does not establish the constitution of a Draconic mind. Nor does it exclude ordinary obstinacy. Ash understood perfectly well that the road required repair, and showed considerable ingenuity in assigning every inconvenience of preserving her arrangement to somebody else.

I proposed retaining the shelf and carrying the enlarged flow beneath it, with a small opening to maintain the shallow run across its surface. The surveyor objected to the expense. I asked him to compare it with the cost of another six meetings, including his own attendance, and he became constructively interested. Ash required a demonstration with boards and buckets before agreeing that the proposal deserved excavation. She declined to promise approval of the finished work. The clerk entered this as progress, which by local standards it evidently was.

I remain of the opinion that Ash demanded an excessive quantity of municipal labour for eleven inches of water; I have withdrawn my opinion that eleven inches adequately described the matter. The repair subsequently succeeded, though the surveyor had to adjust the little opening twice under her supervision. She now rests beside it without acknowledging his contribution. He finds this trying; the miller tells me he has begun bringing visiting engineers to admire the workmanship. Merewick appears well supplied with inhabitants who consider their own exacting standards a public benefit, and I found much there to engage my sympathies.