The Home Run 



as he stood taut in the wheelhouse ; the bag curdled clear of the 

 surface ; and, interwoven with these sounds he heard again the cry 

 of many gulls. Jan marked out the sea by the birds he saw there, 

 another thing that Conrad seemed to miss, their omnipresent im- 

 portance as sea-indicators. The different species of them studded 

 the horizon like mile-posts. First came the squawking teams of 

 marauding herring gulls, inshore gluttons that were all voice and 

 greedy little eyes, stumbling multitudinously in the wake of the 

 ship, almost incapable of the lovely clean silent flight of the true 

 oceanic birds. It was queer to Jan, the way the Scots, who were 

 supposed to be a nation of seamen, talked of seagulls as though 

 they only were found over the marine waters. For seagulls always 

 hugged the coast, dinning about over the markets, whitening the 

 decks of an incoming vessel with their liquid blobs of excrement, 

 careering in disordered herds over stretches of sand and marram 

 grass. They were never to be seen over the sea itself. They did 

 not dive out of the morning sky with the sun, rising again from the 

 same anonymous curve of cold water as they would sink into in 

 the evening. They never lost sight of land. Jan disliked them. 

 They were poseurs, he thought, with fame as sea-birds but only 

 the clumsiest of wings and most enormous of appetites to support 

 their claims. And the noise, the noise. They shrieked above the 

 concrete of the market like a slaughterhouse on wings. 



Out at sea, though, only the tiny kittiwakes, squatting unper- 

 turbed on a plunging mast-top, represented the true gulls. The 

 shite-hawks, as fishermen called the herring gull, were absent and 

 their place taken by brown skuas and dead- white gannets. Never 

 before had Jan seen such an intense opaque whiteness as he saw 

 in the feathers of a full-grown gannet. The young were often 

 freckled with black but the older birds were white, a deep tranquil 

 white that almost disguised the energy of their movements. It all 

 looked too easy. At sea they had the same casual air as can be 

 admired on the cricket field when a great batsman is dallying at 

 the wicket, watching a ball come towards him: the gannet, too, 

 was capable of the same sudden gust of power in a single move- 



149 



