Living Silver 



Cowie just stepped aboard her. One of his crew would pick him 

 up and plaster him into a bunk. Yet, in the morning, he sailed. 

 He always sailed. And he always brought his boat back, usually 

 with as fair a catch as could be seen in a week's quay watching. It 

 was impossible. But so was the other. The man couldn't have 

 this sense of responsibility and yet act as he did. Equally, he 

 couldn't carry a ship through all kinds of seasons, all economic 

 fluctuations, without the same alert concentration as Jan found so 

 difficult to sustain. And the concentration would have been im- 

 possible without the anxiety; and the anxiety was caused by the 

 sense of responsibility. It was all impossible. Everything seemed 

 to be wrong simultaneously. Perhaps it was that these born sea- 

 men knew their ships so well that they registered weak points al- 

 most without knowing what they were doing. Perhaps they said 

 things like : ' Check the first ten fathoms of that third coil before 

 you shoot her again', without themselves realising that they had 

 glimpsed a frayed patch on the last ten fathoms as the wet ropes 

 scurried through the pulleys. Nobody could have consciously 

 registered such a glimmer of danger through the bottle-green 

 miasma of a hangover. Yet Cowie always knew. He was notor- 

 iously thrifty of gear - afraid that the loss of a rope would cheat 

 him out of an extra few haufs of Glen Grant. 



And it was not only the debauchees of Buchan who amazed Jan 

 by their sense of responsibility. The church folk did it as well. 

 He could understand their competence within the family circle 

 of their own craft but repeatedly he was brought up with a start 

 by their audacious generosity when it came to lifeboats or to the 

 rescuing of any complete stranger the sea might throw at them. 

 Men who would not have given the shell of an egg to an Indian 

 pauper were willing, at any moment, to risk their lives, and often 

 to lose them, for irresponsible youngsters who had put out in a 

 rowing boat in spite of an imminent blizzard. And the northern 

 puritans were mean, not just proverbially but in all the circum- 

 stantial detail of fact. They contrasted pointedly with their less 

 religious neighbours. 



174 



