Seining 



of it touching the single rope. One swift starboard turn and the 

 gear would be entangled. And there was no telling what would 

 happen with waves like these frittering over the bulwarks. They 

 were not the drowning kind. There was no danger to the ship. 

 If they had been that dangerous then Jerzy would have hacked the 

 rope through with a hatchet. But they weren't. They were just 

 nasty enough to make it slow and dangerous work. And Jan knew 

 what that meant. He knew that it meant something different to 

 every skipper. He knew that men had different instruments for 

 judging danger. He knew that somebody's idea of safety was usu- 

 ally the thing that drowned a man. It was not the sea. It was never 

 the sea. It w^as always the risk that somebody dared to take against 

 the challenge of the sea. And the men w^ho took up these chal- 

 lenges were sensible men. They thought they knew the risks. 

 They were like him. He, too, he especially, would have gone on 

 trying to rescue this gear since it was he who had endangered it. 

 But the choice was not his. It was Jerzy 's. Jerzy was taking his 

 place. And the risk came off. How often it didn't come off, that 

 was a secret between the sea and its drowned. What really wor- 

 ried Jan was that he had dealt the hand that Jerzy had been forced 

 to play. And his own life had, in the end, depended upon how 

 Jerzy had played it rather than upon how he himself had dealt it. 

 None of these subtleties mattered. There was, indeed, the bare 

 fact of the mistake, the barer fact that he was alive. That the gear 

 too was fished out safely and the second coil of the first side re- 

 spliced; all that was irrelevant. The undertone of risk was what 

 burdened him. His act was like the negative of a film and his sense 

 of guilt the enlarger. But no, it was wrong to call it guilt. It was 

 only the anxiety that breeds responsibility. 



But it w^as this responsibility, too, that revitalised Jan after the 

 monotony of trawling. Increasingly he understood the difference 

 between these independent fishermen of the Buchan coast and the 

 trade union standards of the rest of the fishing industry. Almost 

 tenderly they cared for their gaily-painted boats, almost reverently 

 they mended their nets and coated them with preservatives like 



177 



