Drifting 



Tadeusz about it. George helped him by mentioning that if they 

 didn't get to hell out of it the nets over the starboard would bear 

 straight down into them. Tadeusz naturally wanted to wait for 

 slack water. That was when the big swim would come, if it was 

 going to come at all. But the wheelhouse bucked. It was as though 

 the sea had hiccupped. The impoliteness of it outraged Tad 's sense 

 of the proprieties. He couldn't trust anything that acted so un- 

 ceremoniously. It might do anything next. They began to haul. 



At the best, in the calmest of water, the hauling of drift nets 

 was a wearisome business. Now, as the sea grew frantic and the 

 boat went mad under their feet, it was hell. No trawler ever 

 moved in such a splendid series of semi-somersaults as the Stanislaw 

 performed on that night. Jan was almost praying that they would 

 catch no herring for he didn't know how they were going to stow 

 them among the clatter of colliding waterfalls. To open the fish 

 hatch would have been like inviting the sea to come aboard and 

 smother them. Net after net was hauled in. Jan, again near the 

 stem but on the port side now, could just make out the clatter of 

 the capstan as it hauled in the back rope. He unbent its seizings 

 and arranged them in order on an iron bar. But it had become one 

 of those entirely ridiculous things, like offering a nice juicy bone 

 to a rabid dog or saying 'I'm very pleased to meet you' to a hang- 

 man who has just been introduced for the first and last time. One 

 of the students was downstairs vomiting blood and the other was 

 slithering on drunken sea-boots dangerously near to the starboard 

 rail. 



They reached the ridge, though, and, as the weather broke 

 about them in a white pediment flying with gargoyles and black 

 green buttresses, Tadeusz himself knelt with his neck in the water 

 to lift up the first of the four buoys they had expected to lose. The 

 rest of the net was shredded as fine as new-picked cotton. It had 

 been torn lose and ground into the sand and shale of the bottom. 

 Then the real heave began. 



The first three nets, the nets on the ridge, were the worst. 

 After that, with the sharp increase in depth, the sea had more 



217 



