Living Silver 



things except the mate in the hold, the skipper perched in his glass 

 oilskin and the owners still safer and more dry in Aberdeen. It 

 was supposed to be bad luck for the men to learn how many fish 

 they had caught, just as practically everything else was supposed 

 to be bad luck. Those who sailed on a Friday were sure to drown. 

 To sail on a Sunday was to provoke the wrath of God. To speak of 

 a minister was sacrilegious . To mention a rabbit was to ensure an 

 accident. To talk of salmon was to sink the ship. There was a 

 forbidden vocabulary, large enough to fill a pocket dictionary, 

 each word banned by the superstitions of the sea. Among so much 

 licence it was strange to observe so many taboos. He wondered 

 vaguely if the unmentionable terms were particularly common 

 among women. Let women try to stop us swearing. We'll show 

 them. We'll ban their favourite words. There'll be no talk of 

 corpses and no mention of chickens aboard. 



And he found himself going back over the queer men of the sea 

 until, in the end, he arrived back at himself, reading Conrad in a 

 Polish translation when he was a child : and he found himself the 

 queerest of the whole herd. And Conrad, Conrad. He had been 

 so pitiful in Polish, where there were hardly any words to describe 

 the seas and most of the terms for the rigging of ships were bor- 

 rowed from other languages. But in English, yes, Conrad in 

 English was a very different matter. He had the vocabulary then, 

 and he knew how to use it. You could get something of the feel 

 of the sea from Conrad in English. But even then. . . . Oh, it 

 was very difficult ! Perhaps to an Englishman it would have been 

 all right. But Jan was a Pole and he noticed the difference. It was 

 not the sea that Conrad was describing but a series of soul-shaking 

 commotions interfretted with the peace that passeth all under- 

 standing, the peace that is more sinister than any commotion. The 

 English certainly never forgot that Conrad was Jozef Naiecz 

 Korzeniowski - they even listed his books under that name in their 

 public libraries - but they had no idea what it meant to be Josef 

 Naiecz Korzeniowski rather than Joseph Conrad. All they knew 

 was that, when he got drunk, he would talk to his English servants 



144 



