On the Supposed Estrangement of the Elves

The proposition that an Elf who enters a counting-house thereby severs himself from his tribe enjoys considerable favour among persons who have never visited either establishment. Its companion error holds that the breach, once made, must deepen with every succeeding generation. I have examined the correspondence of families divided between tribal territory and the manufacturing towns, and found ample estrangement, together with remittances, botanical enquiries, invitations declined for six successive decades, and requests that somebody come home to settle a boundary dispute. Such evidence supports several conclusions about particular families and will scarcely bear the weight of a general theory of Elven society, however urgently Professor Harlowe requires one for the opening chapter of his book.

“Second-generation integrated” is especially liable to mislead the Human reader. The expression identifies an Elf born to parents already established outside traditional life; it tells us little about the duration or intimacy of that person’s acquaintance with tribal relatives. A grandmother may visit, disapprove of the curtains, remain for eleven years, and impart a considerable education without altering anybody’s address. Conversely, I have met a first-generation emigrant who had avoided his birthplace for three centuries and could recall its ceremonial observances only by consulting a book written by a Dwarf. He pronounced the book inaccurate. When I asked where, he admitted that he had forgotten. I liked him considerably better after this admission, though I declined to cite his judgement.

There are substantial disagreements, and affection does not render them harmless. An integrated Elf may regard the clearing of a building site as an ordinary expense while his traditional cousin considers each felled tree to require justification. Yet even here the convenient division fails upon examination. A tribal forester may approve a clearance which an Elven municipal clerk opposes, because the forester has inspected the drainage and the clerk has inspected the contractor’s accounts. One must ascertain what each believes the proposed work will accomplish, what injury each acknowledges, and whose authority each accepts. I have repeatedly found a quarrel described as religious to contain an excellent objection to fraudulent surveying; calling the disputants irreconcilable saved their employer the trouble of answering it.

At the North Fenwold pumping station I was obliged to pursue this distinction with rather more haste than is customary in scholarship. The station supplied a predominantly Human settlement within the jurisdiction of the Fenwold tribe. Its engineer, Miss Ilyra Aubrin, was an Elf born in the city to integrated parents; the tribal examiner, Orvel, had known her mother before that lady entered the railway service. Aubrin proposed cutting through a stand of white alder to lay a replacement intake; Orvel refused his seal. I arrived while he was explaining that her mother would once have understood his objection, and Aubrin was reaching for a long iron spanner. I initially told Orvel that a public water supply could hardly be held hostage to family reproaches. This was an intervention of great confidence and defective information. He answered that the settlement possessed a reserve cistern, and asked whether I had measured it. I had walked past it twice.

Aubrin then told him that his tribe preferred fever among children to scratches upon bark. Orvel caught her wrist as she lifted the spanner from the bench; she struck his hand away, and he took hold of the knife at his belt. I put the survey roll between them and told Aubrin to give me the spanner, since she had just made it impossible for anyone to distinguish a working gesture from a threat. I told Orvel to release the knife and his claim upon her mother’s conscience. He informed me that I understood nothing of their relationship. “You have supplied sufficient evidence that its discussion is obstructing the waterworks,” I replied. “The remainder can wait.” Aubrin surrendered the tool with an observation upon my qualifications which I allowed to pass. Orvel removed his hand from the knife. I then apologised for my accusation concerning the water supply, explicitly and in their hearing; an apology delivered later to one’s notebook has remarkably little influence upon a quarrel.

We inspected the cistern together. Its stated capacity was correct, but nearly a quarter of its depth was occupied by sediment, a circumstance omitted from the report supplied to Orvel. Aubrin had known the effective capacity and assumed that he knew it also; Orvel, meanwhile, had marked an alternative route on a plan which had never reached her office. That route followed an old gravel cutting and spared most of the alder roots, although it required additional pipe. I required them to calculate the remaining supply before resuming their accusations, and undertook to put my name beside the estimate when the settlement’s trustees objected to the expense. The examiner authorised a narrow temporary intake under the law’s provision for urgent necessity; Aubrin revised the permanent line. Neither acquired the other’s convictions during the afternoon, though both acquired enough common information to finish the work, which was the result the inhabitants required.

I cannot say whether either would actually have used a weapon. I saw gestures sufficient to warrant interruption, and have no wish to improve the anecdote by promoting apprehension into fact. Nor does the eventual agreement prove that traditional and integrated Elves would invariably agree if their paperwork were better. Orvel believed that Aubrin owed obligations which she had never accepted; Aubrin believed his office entitled him to examine engineering consequences and gave him no standing whatever in her family history. That dispute survived. Their immediate danger arose when each treated the other’s position as evidence of a defective allegiance, and recruited an absent mother to make the charge hurt. Accounts of Elven relations ought to preserve such particulars: once “the traditional mind” or “the urban Elf” stands in for the people concerned, an observer can explain their conduct without examining it. I have caught myself doing it, even with a cistern in plain view.