Chapter 17 The Six Secrets

We told each other on the twenty-fourth, in the wire room, with the case open on the bench and the lamp on the table and the engine still dead, and it was not a thing anybody had planned. Halvard said it. He had been sitting with it since the twenty-second and on the twenty-fourth he put the notebook down and said, "We are all carrying something, and there is a thing at three o'clock in the morning, and if any one of us is carrying something that has to do with it then it is going to come out tonight whether we like it or not. So let us get it out now while we are all in a room." Nobody argued. That is the thing I have thought about most since. Six people on an island four hundred metres off a coast, four days into a dark with no light in it, and not one of us argued, and I do not think we argued because we trusted each other. I think we argued because we were all carrying one and we were all tired. "Radio first," said Halvard. "Because I have said part of mine and it is the smallest part." "Go on." "Three ringings in November had a carrier inside them. Eleven ringings had nothing on any band, and I have the figures, and I wrote them down. A carrier is a transmitter. A transmitter is a man. So on the third, the fourth and the sixth of December, somebody on this rock transmitted inside that note, and it was not me, and it was not any of you, and I have not slept a whole night since the sixth." He put his hand flat on the notebook. "And it is the smallest part because the larger part is the fifth explanation and I am not going to say it in this room either. I am going to say one thing about it and it is this: I have been the only man on this island with a receiver for thirty years, and the thing on that shelf has been pointing at my aerial for four months, and I have not once been able to get a reading on it, and I want somebody else to be holding that before I say anything more." Karin went next, and she did it standing, which I have never seen her do. "My sister is in Trondheim and she is ill and I have written nothing for two years." She said it in about four seconds and then she stood there and let the room have it. "That is all of it. I did not tell Sven for eight months and I did not tell any of you because a woman on a station with six men in a thirty-one-metre building is not a woman who is owed an explanation. So I did the thing I have apparently decided to do, which is to keep it, and I have been worse at it than I have been at the readings." Torsten did not have to do anything. "I have known about the head since the September," he said. "It is in the log at ten past two this morning with my name on it, and I have been waiting since the September for a night when saying it would not sound like an excuse, and this is the night, and it has taken me two months and a dead generator to say it, and that is what I am." "Odd," said Sven. Odd did not go at once. He had the hank in his lap and he was working it the whole time, three strands over the thumb, the way he does. "Two things," he said. "And I have never said the first one and I am not going to be asked." "Two." "Ingrid was my wife and she died in the February of fifty-eight, in the room I am sleeping in now, and I have laid cord on the rocks every ebb since and I have never once been asked by anybody on this station why, and you all know why, and not one of you has ever said it out loud, and I have been grateful for that for three years." The cord stopped. "And the second thing is that I have been braiding it wrong. I have been laying it from the north end and I have been taking it off on the seventh night, and both are wrong, and I found that out on the twenty-first and I have not been able to put it in the log because it is not a thing you put in a log. It goes in at the bottom of this table with the rest of it." Then they all looked at me. "I was on the rocks," I said, "on the night she died. At about two, on the ebb, with a lamp, laying about four fathoms on the north end. And I did not know he was out there because I did not look for anybody, and we were about eleven fathoms apart in the same gale and neither of us knew, and he came in at about four and I was in my bunk and I heard the north door." I have never written that sentence anywhere except in this account and I am not going to in the log, and that is the entire difference between the log and this. "One cord a night," Odd said. "Seven nights, and you were the first." "Six nights. I have had it wrong twice since the fourteenth of November and I have got it right now because Karin has written the dates on that board behind you and I can read them from here." He was not looking at me. "The fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, and the tenth. And on the tenth it comes off. And I have laid one and the gale has not come yet." "Then we have five nights," said Karin. "Four, after tonight. And each of us can lay one." "Can any of us lay one," said Torsten. "That is the question I would ask. I have watched him work it. I do not believe a man in an office could do it and I do not believe a man off a boat could do it." "I can," said Karin. Sven put down the cloth he had been holding for a quarter of an hour. "I am not going to lay a cord," he said. "I am the cook and I am fifty-eight years old and my hands are gone in a way I have not mentioned to anybody in this room. I can do everything in this building except that, and I have been quietly proud of that for nine years, and I have just watched a woman of twenty-nine say she can and put a man of fifty in his place, and I would like it written down that I said no first and was not asked twice." Nobody asked him twice. That is the whole of the twenty-fourth. Six of us, and the lamp, and the case on the bench, and the five of us who had a cord to lay by the tenth, and one man who had a stove to keep going. I will not pretend it was a warm scene. It was the coldest I have ever been in a heated building. I did the thing I do at eight and read the barometer and wrote it, and the barometer was 986 and falling for the fourth day, which is the lowest reading in the book, and I wrote it, and then I wrote the day. *24th. 16:00, barometer 986, falling. Wind west six, rising. 20:30, six cords for the nights of the 5th to the 10th inclusive; three laid, on the nights of the 5th, 6th and 7th, by O., K.V. and myself. 03:00, note, six sources, six seconds. Cause unknown.* And I put the lamp out at eight and went to the bed by the door and lay in my clothes in the dark and listened to the wind come round the corner of the building and find the same seam it has found every night since the fourteenth of November, and I listened for a long time past the point where a man of fifty-three has any business staying awake, and what I listened for was the sound of somebody out on the rocks, laying a cord, in the dark, eleven fathoms from where I had been.