Living Silver 



that was altogether lacking in the trials of the sea, one terrifying 

 quality that cancelled out all its advantages: it never stopped. It 

 was ordinary, yes, and it was fairly comfortable, and a lot of sea- 

 men genuinely loved their homes; but that home life, it was too 

 awful, it never stopped, it went on and on, not only every day but 

 every other day as well. And that was enough to make it insup- 

 portable. 



Home was wonderful as an occasional haven. Therefore the sea 

 must be made uncomfortable in contrast. But home was terrible 

 as a continuous way of life . A man needed the freedom of an hori- 

 zon in which he could stretch his eyes. He needed the movement 

 of a ship under him so that he would be able to know where he 

 stood. Above all, he needed a release from the finnicky tidiness 

 of feminine fingers. Jan had seen the same thing during the war, 

 men grumbling about the hell they were living through yet obvi- 

 ously preferring lice in their hair to a continual reprimand for not 

 being properly groomed. 



Then, too, when they came ashore, they could always celebrate. 

 If the trip had been a good one, they caroused on their good 

 fortune, on the size of the take and the price it had fetched. If, on 

 the other hand, the trip had been nothing but a series of gales and 

 torn nets, ending with a breakdown in the engine-room that had 

 forced them to put back to port, why then they could celebrate 

 the fact that they were alive at all, that they had come through it. 

 Whatever happened there was some event to make merry about. 

 Three weeks gives twelve men a good chance of scraping up a 

 birthday or an anniversary between them. Or somebody could be 

 lucky on the horses. It was all the same. The whole ship had to 

 celebrate. The result was that even the one tiny stretch of time 

 their work left free for their families was frittered away in mascu- 

 line conviviality. They had no real home life whatever. They 

 escaped it. And Jan became increasingly certain that they wanted 

 just such an escape, though why he could not imagine. He came 

 of a stolid peasant stock. But he did begin to understand the lure 

 of the sea and how it lay in the absence of womankind. Not one 



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