[A draft letter, two pages of unlined writing paper, folded once and kept inside the cover of folder F-03 in the fireproof cabinet at 42 Laurel Street, Brayton Hill, the flat of Mrs. Helen Calder. Ink black, hand careful. Marked at the upper right, in a different ink: "not sent — H.C., 4 Jan 1924." Below that, in pencil: "consider again at the equinox."]
42 Laurel Street, Port Hume, the Eighteenth of December, 1923.
My dear Miss Pellman,
You will forgive, I hope, the impertinence of a letter from a woman with whom you have spoken only at the Ladies' Musical Society and once, briefly, at the desk of the Hume Polytechnic library — both occasions on which I behaved, in candour, as if I were not the person I am about to tell you I am.
I am the stenographer who has typed, for Mr. Charles Reddick, every legal document of consequence drawn for the Hume Shipping Company since the autumn of 1898. The carbons of that work are not, properly, mine; nor are they properly Mr. Reddick's, who declined them on the afternoon of the 16th of December, 1912, with the words Mrs. Calder, it is no longer anyone's property. They are kept in a four-drawer cabinet behind the door of my second bedroom. The key hangs in a hatbox on the top shelf of my closet — which I mention because, in the event of my death, you should not have to ask my nephew Walter for it.
I would like to write to you about Folder F-03.
F-03 contains a single carbon, of a Company schedule executed on the 12th of June, 1908. It establishes, in plain figures, the Company's standing obligation to the family of any man killed in the course of its service. A first mate, on the 1908 figures, was owed two thousand two hundred dollars, with a further four hundred for each dependent — and, in the particular case of a captain's widow, an additional thousand in recognition of particular sacrifice borne. The figures were the floor and not the ceiling. They were not, by their own terms, to be adjusted downward except by formal action of the President.
The figure paid, in November of 1912, to the widow of the Iphigenia's first mate — with a boy of sixteen in the house — was two hundred and forty dollars. The figure paid to the widow of a deckhand who had crossed himself on his ladder every morning of his service was ninety. I had, in 1908, sat at the typewriter and put those higher figures onto the page in good faith. I had assumed, as one assumes, that a figure once approved by a President of a Company was a figure that would be paid by that Company. I cannot say now what use my faith was put to.
The arithmetic is not the point of the letter, Miss Pellman; the arithmetic is, plainly, the letter. I have not the courage of arithmetic, however. I have the carbon, which is a different thing.
I am told by Mrs. Harriss, in whom I have not confided but who has, in her way, indicated a great many things over tea, that you keep a cabinet of your own; and that what is in it is, in a manner of speaking, the same kind of document as what is in mine. I had thought, when I began this letter, that perhaps two such cabinets ought one day to be in the same room. I have not, as you see by the date below, posted it.
I shall consider further. I am fifty-one this year. Mr. Reddick is sixty-one, and his health, by what I observe across a desk, is not what it was. There is a season for these things; I have not, in candour, identified the season.
If you should ever find yourself at the Society on a Tuesday evening, I am usually at the piano before the lecture begins. I do not lecture. I accompany.
Yours, with such regard as the circumstances afford,
Helen Calder.
[at the foot, in pencil, undated:]
I have read this through again. I have not sent it. I am told by a girl at the Beacon — not Miss Pellman; the other one — that Mr. Vantine has begun, this winter, to make routine inquiries among the older members of the Society concerning the inventories of their household effects, and to suggest that the Ladies' Auxiliary might benefit from bequests of papers of historic interest. He has not yet inquired of me. He will. — H.C., 4 March 1924.