The Home Run 



in Polish. They didn't even have any ideas about w^hether he was 

 cursing them or w^hether he had gone shabby and sentimental. 

 And Korzeniow^ski w^as largely responsible for Conrad's w^orks. 



Or maybe that w^as wrong. Maybe the seas that Conrad des- 

 cribed w^ere just as he said they w^ere. Maybe they lay in that infi- 

 nite warm calm so deceptive to sailors : then suddenly tore their 

 bellies open and poured out their white blood beneath the knife 

 of a typhoon. Maybe it was like that. Jan would never know. But 

 he did know that Conrad's oceans were emblems for the mystery 

 that obfuscated so much of Polish literature and illuminated the 

 rest of it as though by lightning. And he did know that there was 

 little resemblance between the seas that Conrad described and 

 those that he, Jan, sailed. 



Here it was not a matter of storms and calms , though Jan had seen 

 storms often and calms occasionally. These northern seas had a 

 resonant leisurely rhythm and gave fair warning of their fits of 

 ferocity. They were not sudden and impulsive like the wrath of 

 God. They were patient, somewhat clumsy in all their motions, 

 rather like the proceedings in a human court of justice. Several 

 days sometimes elapsed before the first thickening of the grey in 

 the sky and the ultimate breakdown when sky and sea and air all 

 lost their identity and mixed into one furious element that threat- 

 ened to dissolve a ship as an acid would dissolve it. 



It was not that the Northern Atlantic could never be surprising 

 in its behaviour. It often was, in the same way as a human jury 

 often gives an odd verdict ; but the old land-lubber's saw that there 

 is usually some sort of weather at this time of the year was parti- 

 cularly relevant. Every trip was marked by promises of good 

 weather, threats of bad, and hopes that cut across both promises 

 and threats. There was always, that is, a measured amount of un- 

 certainty and that was what a sailor meant by 'weather' unless he 

 was talking of a storm about which there was no uncertainty what- 

 soever. Conrad's seas, on the other hand, seemed to be continu- 

 ally under the influence of breaks in the weather, completely un- 

 predictable flukes that fell from blue or leaden skies with no more 



14^ 



