The Balance of Trade

Sogmarsh Wireless Presents — being thirty minutes of elevated commerce, less interruptions.

The Independent Literary Republic of Dudgeon had a flag, a national anthem of two lines (both disputed), and a Minister for Trade; and it was the Minister for Trade who observed, over the Thursday accounts, that a nation is not properly a nation until it exports.

Horace P. Dudgeon, President for Life of No. 4½ Sump Lane, agreed at once and grandly, as he agreed to all things that sounded like importance, and instructed his Minister to arrange a favourable balance of trade by Bog Night, international recognition to follow.

Sol Nipper, Minister for Trade, had a Department. It met in the back room of the Boot and Barrel, and it had never in its history exported anything — for the very good reason that everything it dealt in had come in: up the coast in Loomis Skerry's officially empty boat, down from the Fat Mile under the Griddler's convenient scales, or simply off the back of a passing cart into the keeping of Ma Tacket, who was far too well-mannered to ask where from. Nothing the Department owned had ever been made, and nothing had ever left.

"We've nothing to sell abroad," said Ma Tacket, "that we didn't nick from abroad to begin with."

"Then we sell it back to them," said Sol, "at a profit, and call it trade."

For Aubrey Vane was coming — Aubrey Vane of the Murkminster office that decides whether a thing legally exists — and if Vane certified a commerce, the Republic had a commerce; and if it had a commerce, it existed; and if it existed, Horace mattered internationally; and if Horace mattered, the rent on Sump Lane might at last become somebody else's difficulty. Vane must see, in one afternoon, a nation trading.

So the Department loaded a cart. Reed-Bed Fred's finest went on first — a bog-oak stool of great antiquity, dug that very morning out of the reed bed he had buried it in the week before. Pig-Farmer Louis added a side of bacon off a pig that no living soul had met. The Griddler crowned it with a crate of the Fat Mile's real fruit, worth a small fortune to a realm that had never tasted a plum. The whole cart was a lie, and a magnificent one, and Sol Nipper regarded it the way a father regards a promising child.

Loomis Skerry drove the cart to the quay, rowed it out past the harbour mouth into the fog — and, after a decent interval and a pipe, rowed it straight back. It came ashore as IMPORTS, paid for and stamped; was loaded again as EXPORTS, sold and stamped; rowed out; and back. By the third lap the Republic of Dudgeon had, on paper, the busiest port on the coast, and the same bog-oak stool had crossed the water six times and grown, under the Griddler's scales, appreciably heavier at every crossing.

Aubrey Vane stood on the quay with his certificate and his pencil and watched the cart come and go, and come and go, and could not for the life of him find the error — because there was none. The goods were real. The stamps were real. The money (a single float, going round with the cart) was real. Only the trade was imaginary, and that is not a thing a pencil can catch. He was on the very point of certifying the lot —

— when the stool fell off.

It fell off on the seventh lap, directly in front of Vane, and split; and out of it rolled last week's reed-bed mud and a label in Reed-Bed Fred's own careful hand, reading: GENUINE ANTIQUE — DO NOT SELL BEFORE THURSDAY. And there fell upon the quay a silence of the particular kind that ends republics.

Into that silence stepped Squidge.

Squidge, the Department's enforcer, stood six foot ten and was built like the west wall of the parish church, and he had been standing behind Aubrey Vane the whole afternoon for exactly this moment. He did not say anything; he never said anything. He simply gathered up the broken stool, and the label, with enormous care — the way a man lifts a hurt bird — and he looked at Aubrey Vane. And Vane, who had audited hard men in worse rooms than this, discovered in himself a sudden, total and unaccountable wish that everyone present should be happy, that the afternoon should end well, and that he personally should not be the cause of its not doing so.

He certified the trade. He recorded the port as thriving. He accepted, for the road, a plum.

So the Republic of Dudgeon was, for one Bog Night, an exporting nation of international standing, and Horace wept at the anthem, both disputed lines. The cart went back to being a cart. The stool went back to the reed bed to age another week. And the only thing that truly left Sogmarsh that day was the story of it, which walked to Murkminster on its own two legs and is walking yet — for a lie that good is never punished here, only enjoyed, and the valley has always been glad to trade an afternoon's truth for a better afternoon's telling.

The plum, Vane said afterwards, was the finest thing he had ever eaten. That part was not a lie. Nothing off the Fat Mile ever is — it is only smuggled, and weighed wrong, and worth every penny it never cost.