Living Silver 



This concentration was agile, as though the centre of gravity was 

 shifting disorderly from one extremity to the other, a regimen of 

 odd particulars feeding it weight, now here, now there, never 

 static, never equal to its opposite, never open to systematic ex- 

 amination. For, when it came to seining, Jan was never sure what 

 he should concentrate on. Anything might give at any moment, 

 and his job was to detect the signs before anything snapped ; and 

 Jerzy's job was the same; and Adam's; and Tadeusz's. Always 

 there was the unhesitant expectancy (it was fatal to hesitate) that 

 something would go wrong; something always meant everything. 

 Something would go wrong. Yet nothing must stop. The ropes 

 must be shot even though something was going to go wrong, un- 

 less, of course, Jan could see what was going to go wrong. Then 

 everything could be stopped, the danger averted. But, even after 

 that particular flaw had been corrected, he must not lose his 

 unhesitant expectancy that something was going to go wrong, 

 something that would cost him a couple of hundred pounds. 



Concentration, then, but anxiety too ; and concentration upon 

 the anxiety without ever allowing it to disturb the strenuous phy- 

 sical processes that contradicted it with the energy of hope ; con- 

 scientious anxiety and conscientious insensitivity to the effects of 

 anxiety. Seining, that is, created a moral weariness where trawl- 

 ing had been limited to the physical. It was the sense of responsi- 

 bility, every one of them being responsible to the others yet none 

 of them able to feel that the others were responsible for them, a 

 three-rayed responsibility that each of them sustained in his single 

 person. That was what did it, and Jan often found himself longing 

 for the authoritative physical ill-being of the trawler. Here it was 

 impossible to fall into an uncomfortable stupor. Here he had to 

 discover a continual alertness, as sharp as that of a man who is 

 carrying on three telephone conversations at the one time; and 

 this very alertness, this increase in consciousness made him more 

 aware of whatever physical pain or peril came his way. There was 

 no snoozing off into a dull agony of freezing fingers and sleepy skin. 

 His mind was full of pins and needles so that not one of his senses 



172 



