Chapter 19 The Twenty-Sixth Night

The barometer fell to 968 on the twenty-sixth and stopped, which is the thing a barometer does when the weather has decided and is no longer interested in arguing. It was the quietest day of the winter. I want that in the account because nobody believes it afterwards. The gale went round the corner of the building at a steady five and the sea came up the strait as a long grey swell that did not break once in four hours, and the wind did not rise and did not drop. The whole island went into a sort of patience. The stove ticked. The ice on the bucket had to be broken before anybody drank. That is the sort of thing a man writes in a book when there is nothing else, and I have put it in because the quietness is the last of the facts and I want the record complete before the last night. The four of us went out on the twenty-sixth: Odd, Karin, and the two of us who had not been named, and we were back at ten minutes to midnight with the boat full to the gunwales, and the fifth cord was on the rocks. That left one. I did not say so at the table afterward and I did not have to. Six of us had said on the seventh of December that there were six cords and six nights and the tenth was the seventh night, and on the evening of the twenty-sixth there was one cord left and one night left, and there were six of us, and every one of us knew the arithmetic without anybody doing it out loud. Sven knew it too. He was the one who said it, because he is the only man on this rock who will walk into a thing that all the rest of us are sitting on. "Five of you can lay," he said. "I cannot, and I have said so, and you have not asked me twice, and I would thank you to go on not asking me twice." He was doing something to the stove with a cloth and he did not turn round. "So five, and one, and the sixth is the sixth." "Or," said Torsten, "the sixth is one of the five, and the man who lays it does not come off the rocks." Nobody said anything for about a minute. The wire room was at eleven degrees and the dormitory was at nineteen and the difference between those two numbers had been the whole argument of my career for a fortnight. "Explain that," said Karin. "The net is six cords for six of us," Torsten said. "That is not a rule we made, that is what the shape on the rock is, and Odd's hands know it and mine do not. And on the seventh night the whole of it comes off. So on the seventh night the six of us are still six of us, and the net is still a net, and somebody is on the rocks when the last of it comes off." He took his spectacles off. "And it is not a question of a man being brave. It is a question of a count. Six men, six cords, and the net comes off the rock on a gale night with a man on it. Somebody is on the rocks at three o'clock in the morning, and the boat is not going back for him until the tide, and the tide is at six." "That is me," said Odd. "That is you if you say so." "That is me," Odd said, "and I have been going out on that shelf in the dark for nine years, and I know what it does to a man's hands, and I know what it did to my hands the winter after." "Then it is you," I said, "and you will go out at eleven and you will lay the last of it and you will sit on the north end with your back to the lamp and you will not move until I come out for you at six, and I will come out for you whatever the tide is doing, and if the boat cannot launch we will wade, and if we cannot wade then you will be the seventh cord and we will write that in the log." He looked at me for a while. "You have not said that to her," he said. "I know I have not." He was not talking about Karin Voss. He was talking about the log book in my hand and about the sentence I have not written in it, and about the fact that a station-master is a man who writes things down, and that I had just told him what I was going to write, and that in three years he had never once seen me write anything down that I had not seen with my own eyes, and that this was the first time. "Then I will be on the rocks at eleven," he said. At three o'clock the note came and it was the loudest it had ever been, and it was not one sound. I was in the dormitory doorway with the book under my arm. It came through the wall and it filled the corridor and it went on for a count of eleven and then it stopped, and I stood in the dark and listened to the silence it left. Then I went down to the wire room, and the five in the case had gone over, the way the stove goes over, and the sixth on the shelf was still going, and Halvard had his hand on the aerial strap and he said, in a voice I had never heard him use: "It is not a note. Erik, it is not a note. There is a modulation on it. There has been a modulation on all of them since November and I have had my hand on that strap for four weeks and it is a *signal*, it is going into the line, it is going somewhere, and I have been sitting in this chair refusing to write the word for a month." "Then write the word," I said. "I do not have a word." He let go of the strap and put both hands on the table. "I have a needle on a dial that points at eleven o'clock in a room with a wire over its roof, and there is a current in that wire for the duration of the note, and there is no power in the instrument on the shelf, and the power is coming from *this line*, and I have been the only man on this rock with a receiver for thirty years and there is a transmitter in this room that is not one of the six of us." I put the log book on the table. I have thought about that night a great deal and the thing I remember is not the sound. It is that there were four of us in a cold room, and every one of us knew exactly what the other three were thinking, and not one of us said it, and there is a thing in a man's face when he is not going to say it. Karin said it. "It is a station-master's problem," she said. "It is a log. It is a decision. And you are going to have to write a thing down tonight that you have not seen, and you have told us for eleven years that you do not do that." "Yes," I said. "Then do it," she said, "and do not ask any of us to help you, and I am going to bed, and I am not going to sleep, and I will be in the dormitory door and I will be there all night." She went. Torsten went. Sven went at some point without either of us noticing, which is a thing Sven does. That left me and Halvard in a room at eleven degrees with a case open on a bench and a wire coming through the wall. "Write what you saw," Halvard said. "On the third. On the twenty-third. Write what a man of fifty-three with a farm at Vossnes can be made to see, and write it as a man in a polar night, and write cause unknown at the bottom of it, and then get the boat." "Halvard—" "Get the boat," he said. "I have been at eight o'clock every night for a month telling you what the instrument points at, and you have let me, because you wanted somebody else to be holding it. So hold it. Write it. And in the morning we will take the case to the boat and put it in the boat and take it to Trondheim and put it in front of four men who have never seen this winter, and one of us will be a man who has seen it and four of them will not, and that is the only way any of it ever leaves this island." That is the last conversation I had with a man on this station for nine weeks and I have gone over it a great many times and there is not one word of it I would change, and there is not one word of it that I have forgiven him for. I wrote in the log by the light of a hurricane lamp with the tide in the corner of my eye, and I wrote it in the plain hand, and I wrote what I saw and not what Halvard asked me to write, because that is the whole of what I have. *26th. 03:00, note, six sources, loudest of the series, eleven seconds. 04:40, H.K. states the note carries a modulation and that the aerial lead carries current during it. Five cords laid. Sixth cord to be laid on the 27th, the seventh night, and the net to be taken off the rocks after. Cause unknown.* And underneath, and underlined, which I have done twice in eleven years, and here is the second of the two. *The note is not coming from outside. It is coming from the rocks. The gap in the net is the place it comes through and the instrument on the shelf points at the gap the way a needle points, and I have known that since the twenty-second and I have let a man in Bergen keep saying the words in his own order because I did not have the order.* I shut the book and the clock on the mantel struck six, hesitating as it always hesitated, and outside, four hundred metres off, out on a shelf of rock in the dark, a man of forty-nine sat with his back against a lamp and a length of cord in his hands and the sixth and last of the six under his knees.