The squeak of soles on parquetry met Winceworth and cat as they reached the corridor adjacent to the Scrivenery. Decorum, in architecture, is the suitability of a building, and the several parts and ornaments thereof, to its station and occasion. Swansby House’s central, circular, shelf-lined Scrivenery was a bright, vast room with high windows and whitewashed stuccoed dome. A bookish bullring with the acoustics of a basilica. Even on a dull January day, sunshine lanced down upon the Swansby workers below, light curdling the dust in the air whenever it rose from disturbed old papers. There must have been at least fifty desks in the room, all regularly spaced and facing the entrance. Light glinted from the flat blades of paper knives in flashed blurs.
The majority of the sounds of the Scrivenery were dedicated to paper—the sibilance of documents slid across desktop, the slightly more stuttered shuffling of leaves arranged into order or the khuhhkunk-ffppp of a book removed from its purchase on the shelves lining the large, airy room. It is a lexicographer’s impulse to categorise these things. All this was a welcome, cathedral-like calm compared to the orange oriole nightmare of Dr. Rochfort-Smith’s office, let alone the braying scheme and flux of Birdcage Walk and London’s many other streets. The general noise was low; the peeling back of pages, the plopping of cats from desk to floor and the occasional sniff or sneeze were the highlights as lexicographers moved quietly from their desks to the ranked pigeonholes of index cards set into the walls of the domed Scrivenery hall. These pigeonholes were arranged alphabetically in huge towering labelled wooden shelves all around the perimeter of the room.
Pigeonholes—depending on whether it was a good or bad day at Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary, informally this manner of shelving was referred to by the lexicographers as either the dovecote or the cloacae. Winceworth’s desk was amongst the S-words.
He slunk into his seat with his head still a-clanging. Notions of slinking seemed to characterise even his most fluid gestures. Just as the lisp descended over his tongue as he entered the building, so too his shoulders shot unnaturally high once sat at his desk. Winceworth intuitively moved to pick up his Swansby standard-issue pen. It was not in its usual place. He looked at his hands as though trying to remember what possible use they could be.
* * *
—
Conversation in the Scrivenery took place in muttered tones. All was conducted at the level of murmur, grumble or croon apart from rare moments of particular inspiration or when grievous error and frustration were realised. Generally this was frowned upon but, after all, even the most slapdash of lexicographers is only human and Winceworth was certainly guilty of such eruptions. Misspellings and grammatical up-slips snagged his eyeline and produced a physical reaction. A sprightly tsk usually released some of the tension. Perhaps all readers experience this feeling—a well-crafted sentence runs through the reading mind as a rope runs through hands but when that sentence contains errors or distracting ambiguities, eccentric syntax or bleurghs of vocabulary or grammar, its progress is stalled or coarsened. Compare the textured skeins of these two examples:
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The jumx quickfoot browned oevr the, dogly laze.
Surely a tsk might be excused in the latter case.
The colleague occupying the desk next to Winceworth was not a tsker. Whenever Bielefeld encountered an error or disruption on a page, a kind of whinnying, sniffing gag tore from his throat. It was quite distressing and often made Winceworth start. Bielefeld’s eyes would widen, his hands would draw up on either side of his neatly whiskered cheeks and a small, high, vocalised peal would ring through the air. The noise was animal in nature but also not unlike the sound of a finger being pulled across a wineglass. It made cats and lexicographers turn their heads. The moment would then pass and calm returned to his face as Bielefeld scored a line through the error or retraced his steps on the page, carrying on as if nothing had happened.
The peace in Swansby’s Press was rent by these squawks quite regularly and nobody other than Winceworth seemed to mind.
Shoutsnorting colleague Bielefeld was already scribbling away at the desk on Winceworth’s left. Bielefeld was shaped like a carafe. On Winceworth’s right sat Appleton, shaped like a cafetière. All three exchanged the normal noises of pleasantry.
Winceworth’s desk was littered with yesterday’s blue index cards and scrunched pieces of paper, ready for work even if he was not. He wished he had thought to clear his desk. Clear desk, clear mind. There must be a word for that, too—when your environment is arranged so as to inspire calm and rational industry. It would be indulgent to come up with such a word. But—if he did—perhaps a sprinkling of classical Latin, the cool of its marble statuary in its vowels and cadences. Yes, maybe bring in something of quiescent, quiescens, present participle of quiescere, “to come to rest, to be quiet.” As he ordered his space, he considered the composition of a new word as if he was concocting a recipe. Could borrow from quiescens-stock, then, but add to it the steadying influence of “elbow room” or “ease” implied by something like Old French eise, aise cognate with Provençal ais, Italian agio, “relieve from burdened or laborious duties,” then stir in, what?—something foraged from an Alpine stroll along to the cooling tributaries of fresh through fersh, “unsalted; pure; sweet; eager” via Old English fersc, “of water,” itself transposed from Proto-Germanic friskaz. A neat enlivening spritz of etymology to this new word. So: his desk might be freasquiscent and ready for work?
A hand patted Winceworth’s shoulder and he fully jumped in his chair.
“Quite the party last night, hah!”
Winceworth looked from the hand to the face peering at him. While working at Swansby’s, he had made a conscious effort not to make a taxonomy of his fellow workers. Even a private cataloguing (Bielefeld: carafe; Appleton: cafetière) seemed unfair, dehumanising even, but so many figures just slipped into set types. Without wanting to stereotype or acknowledge cliché, therefore, Winceworth knew that the person blinking breezily down at him was an Anglo-Saxon scholar. This specific species within Swansby’s stable of lexicographers all seemed to be half-composed of clouds. White clouds on top of their heads and white clouds on their chins—their eyes were cloudy and their breath was somehow warmer and heavier than anyone else’s when they leaned in too close to speak. They always did lean in too close as if nudged forward by an unseen crosswind, and seemed to take up a lot of room whenever they moved, always choosing to walk in the centre of a corridor or channel between desks rather than stepping to one side. It was a gentle filling of space, not an aggressive one. The Anglo-Saxon scholars wafted rather than surged or marched.
They spoke softly with lumpy, lilting vowels. This one was no exception.
“The party,” Winceworth repeated. “Last night? Yes, quite a party, that party.”