Living Silver 



The trap, too, was magnificently simple and, as Jan surveyed 

 the line of bufiFs, he thought it elegant: obviously an aristocrat 

 gear of good pedigree. And it was. With the possible exception 

 of the beach seine and the worm at the end of a hook, it was the 

 oldest of fishing methods. lan's schoolmaster was not a satisfac- 

 tory person for it. Twelve hundred years of unqualified superiority 

 give more than a schoolmaster's tone to anything, even a fishing 

 net : and, anyhow, drift nets were too lazy to make good school- 

 masters. They just sat about on the surface, as they had sat for 

 over a millennium, and waited for the living water to deposit its 

 riches in their suave cells. They were no more active than the 

 honeycomb of a bee's hive. And they were filled as easily, by an 

 Act of God, a process of nature too mysterious, in this case, for 

 men to be able to predict it, too secret, even, for them to be able 

 to explain it after it had happened. The drift net was really one 

 of those effete Italian noblemen who are always on the surface of 

 things, relaxed and polished, and to whom the depths come up 

 and make their offerings in inexplicable homage. 



The times, though, were against aristocrats. Jan, being a Pole, 

 was particularly well aware of the historical tendencies that were 

 destroying the privileges of lineage. And the Russian revolution 

 had had its contemporary parallels in the herring industry. About 

 191 3, it had been, that the first German trawler put down a her- 

 ring net ; and the numbers of herring trawlers had been increasing 

 alarmingly ever since, the quantity of their catches improving; 

 until, by the time the Stanislaw had taken to the herring hunt, it 

 seemed likely that the days of the drift net were almost over. 



To begin with the herring trawls had been similar to the ordi- 

 nary otter ones, but the revelation, in 1 9 1 9, of the potentialities of 

 the Fladen Ground began a much more intensive concentration 

 on the herring as a trawlable fish among continental skippers. On 

 Fladen, during the months of August and September the North 

 Sea herring congregated in immense numbers : and these shoals 

 were not vulnerable to the drifters since they spent their time on 

 the bottom. But, just because the surface gill nets could not get 



210 



