Short story · 3 min read · Set in Veyne ·
A Rope Longer Each Buying
The quay at Veyne renews its mooring rope once a season, and every rope the invoice brings measures longer than the last, at a cheaper rate the foot.
The quay at Veyne buys one rope a season. It has bought one rope a season for as long as the store ledger has run, and the store ledger runs back past anyone still drawing pay on the cut. The rope is a mooring rope for the bollard line at the quay's face, renewed when the season turns, and it is entered in the ledger under rigging, one line to a year.
The rope is bought by the foot. The chandler at the head of the cut tenders for it each season, and the invoice states the length and the rate of the foot, and the ledger keeps the two figures straight down the years. Read down, the lengths grow. Never much: a yard this year over last, a yard and a half the next, the growth steady and unhurried and never once called for by any requisition, minute, or spoken order the store can show. The length simply comes, and comes longer.
The rate of the foot falls. That is the half of the ledger the treasury reads, and the treasury is satisfied: the per-foot price has gone down at every buying since the rate was first noted, and the total tendered sits every season inside the same allowance, which has not moved in the whole of the record. A longer rope at a lower foot for the same money was annotated, one season, on the margin of the tender, as the ordinary course of trade. The annotation is signed, and the accounts have gone through unqueried every year on the strength of it.
The bollard line has not moved. The bollards were cast when the quay was cast, the distance they stand off the wall is the distance in the survey, and the survey is the survey of record. A mooring is made fast at both ends or it is not a mooring. The year's rope therefore has no farther to reach than the first year's rope had, and it nevertheless comes each season able to reach farther, and the surplus it arrives with is dealt with in the ordinary way: when the new rope is bent on, the length gone spare is cut off and kept.
The cut-downs are racked along the south wall, as rigging is kept. The rack has filled past the seasons it was built for. One winter an assistant with a slow tide to wait out laid the cut-downs along the wall to measure them, office tape in hand, and gave it up partway, not for time but for wall: the wall ended while the rope did not. His figure for what he did measure went into his pocket and not into the ledger, and the ledger, sounded in mild conversation by the quaymaster, says what it has always said, which is one rope a season.
The chandler was asked about the rate once, being owed that much candour. He said the foot comes cheaper on long orders, as trade goes, and he was asked who had ordered long, and he turned up his season book and put his finger on the standing order line, which reads the quay, and dates from before his time and before his father's. He was not asked anything further, and he has sent his tender round each season as before.
The tender, it should be said, asks the quay one question in print, the only question the form holds: how many feet will be wanted this season. Each season the tender comes back to the store with the answer line already filled, the length standing on it in the clerk's own ink and the clerk's own hand, and the length is always longer than the year before. The clerk is asked, some years, how he comes to know the length before the chandler's hemp is out of the bale. He says the allowance is the same, the rate is lower, and the answer is division. Nobody on the cut has been able to make that division come out to those feet without knowing first how long the rope means to be, and the rope has not said, and October comes the way it comes.