第18章 The Twenty-Fifth Night

The gale came up on the twenty-fifth and it came up hard, and by six in the evening the sea was throwing water over the jetty at the height of a man's chest, which is a thing you can see from the kitchen window and a thing that has happened twice in eleven years. I want the state of the station on the twenty-fifth set down exactly, because everything after it depends on it and because it is the last of my entries made in the plain style I have kept all winter. The engine was dead. The boiler was on the last of the oil Sven had in the store, which was four days' worth and not five. The wire room was at eleven degrees by the thermometer on the wall, which is a thermometer that has never read anything else, and the dormitory was at nineteen. The case was on the bench with the five in it and the sixth on the shelf. The aerial was up and I could hear it in the wind, which is a thing I have never once been able to hear before and could hear on the twenty-fifth, and Torsten said he could hear it too and Halvard said he had heard it for a fortnight and had said nothing because he could not account for it. Barometer 979 at six, 974 at midnight. The six of us, the six cords, and the fourth night. I did not go out on the twenty-fifth. Neither did Karin. The two of us laid the second and the third on the two nights before, from the south end, the way Odd had it, and on the twenty-fifth it was a sea that no boat goes out in, and I wrote that in the log in the plainest words I could find and I underlined it twice, and underlining in a log book is a thing a station-master does perhaps twice in eleven years. So the fourth night was laid by one of the five of us, and I will not name him, and I will say only that he is a better man than the book has any right to record and that he was sick for two days afterwards and would not let anybody take the boat out to him. At three o'clock the note came and it was the lowest any of us had heard it. That is the phrase I have in the book and I mean it literally. It was lower in pitch than on any night in November, and it was longer, and six of them did not sound together that night. They sounded in sequence. The five in the case went, and then there was a gap of about a second, and then the one on the shelf went, and the whole thing was over in about nine seconds. Halvard had it written down before I was through the door. "Sequence," he said. "It has never done that. In nine ringings the six have been simultaneous to inside a tenth of a second, and tonight they were staggered, and the gap is between the five and the one." "Meaning." "Meaning the five in the case are closer to each other than the one on the shelf, and tonight it took the one on the shelf a second to catch up." He had his torch off, because we have not had a light in this room since the twenty-third and we do not use one. "Erik, in November I logged a carrier inside three of the notes. Tonight I had my hand on the aerial lead for the whole of it and I have never felt anything like it. There was a current in the line for the duration and it was not a carrier. It was the current going into something." "Into what." "That is the fifth explanation," he said, "and I am not saying it in this room." So I did not ask. There is a limit in me about the fifth explanation and I have had it since the twenty-second, and it is this: I am a man of fifty-three with a farm at Vossnes and eleven winters of a station that other men are sent to because it is quiet, and I have one skill, and the skill is that I do not write down a thing I have not seen with my own eyes. Everything else in this account I have written down because I saw it. There is one thing I have not seen, and Halvard has it in his notebook, and it is in a tin box on a coast four hundred miles from here in an office that has never once had to decide anything, and I would rather it stayed there until somebody with more than one eye on it looks at it. That is the whole of my cowardice and it is the last thing in this book I have any difficulty writing. The gale went round the building all night. At about two I went out to the north end of the jetty with a lamp because the door had begun to knock and I wanted to see whether the sea was over it, and it was not, and I stood in the wind for about four minutes and did the thing I have done every gale of my life on this rock, which is to stand at the edge of the water in the dark and let it come at me. And I heard it there. Not the note. The cord, on the rocks, a mile out, with a gale up the strait coming through it, and the gale going through the net in five places and through the gap in the sixth, and the sound coming through the gap being a thin high note that a man four hundred metres away could hear with his ear against the wall. I came in and wrote it. *25th. 03:00, note, six sources, sequenced, nine seconds, pitch lower than any previous. 04:10, gale audible in cord from the north jetty, and audible in the gap. Barometer 972. Six cords required on the nights of the 5th to the 10th. Four laid. Cause unknown.* And then I sat in the kitchen with Sven for about an hour, because he was up anyway, doing something to the stove, and neither of us said very much, and at about five he said the thing that I have carried out of this winter and put in no book. "You have written four hundred pages since November," he said. "It is eleven pages." "It is four hundred pages." He wiped his hands. "I have read it. I have read it four times, and I have never told you, and I would like to tell you now that I read it and I do not know what you think you are doing." "I am writing it down." "You are writing a case," he said. "You have been writing a case for four months against something you will not name, and you have been very careful, and I have read it, and I am the only man on this rock who would tell you that you have also been building a thing that will hold a case. And I would like to know which of the two it is, because if it is the second one then the sixth of January is the day the boat comes and you will have to hand it to a man in Trondheim, and he will not be a man who was ever on a coast." I did not answer him, because I did not know, and because the two of them are the same thing and have been since November, and because Sven is fifty-eight and has not been ashore since 1952 and has spent nine years in a room with a stove in it, and I am not going to sit here at five in the morning and explain a discipline to him. He did not press it. He put the cloth down and came and sat on the end of the bunk opposite and looked at the dark window for a while. "I was in a town," he said. "I never told any of you and I have thought about telling four of you and never the fifth, and it is not a town I could go back to, and that is not the point." He turned the cloth over in his hands. "The point is that when a thing goes on long enough, people begin to arrange their lives around it. They do not decide to. It happens the way snow happens. And then the thing stops, and they find out how much of themselves they built to stand up in it, and it does not come down. It stays standing. I have been standing in it since fifty-two." Then he got up and went back to his stove, and I sat there until the sky began to go at about ten, and on the wall in front of me the clock said four minutes slow, which is what it has said every month for eleven years, and which neither of us has ever corrected in daylight because there is no daylight to correct it in.