Vale rode up to the quarry on the forty-sixth morning to see his mason at work, and he counted the labour gang aloud from his saddle as he came. He could not help it. The quarry lay in a long bowl of grey rock at the head of the Thornwick road, with the cutting running down its north face in terraces, and every terrace held a line of haulers with their ropes and their barrows and their hammers, and every hauler had a figure. He counted them as he passed. Sixty-one. Sixty-two. The clerk at the cutting’s head, with his book. The child with the water-jar. The masons’ Form, standing at the foot of the first wall with its hands at its sides. Sixty-three.
He reached the Form and counted it as a subject.
Then he stopped, with his horse’s head held high and his count on his lips, and he uncounted it.
It was a small thing to do, and it came to him all at once, as a figure sometimes does when you have been adding a column for too long. A Form was not a subject. It was a tool. His census had never counted tools in its life. It counted the people who had come to the parlour and the people who had stayed away, and it kept the names of the dead in a separate book, and it had never once been asked to put a mason’s copy in a column beside a labourer’s child…
