Jo.
Go on, now, tell us the rest.
Cob.
What I want to say is, that it’s a blessing for Daantje he’s out of his head, ’fraid as he’s always been of death. Afraid!
Jo.
So is everyone else, Cobus.
Cob.
Every one? That’s all in the way you look at it. If my time should come tomorrow, then, I think, we must all! The waters of the sea will not wash away that fact. God has given, God has taken away. Now, don’t laugh, think! God takes us and we take the fish. On the fifth day He created the Sea, great whales and the moving creatures that abound therein, and said: “Be fruitful,” and He blessed them. That was evening and that was morning, that was the fifth day. And on the sixth day He created man and said also: “Be fruitful,” and blessed them. That was again evening and again morning, that was the sixth day. No, now, don’t laugh. You must think. When I was on the herring catch, or on the salting voyage, there were times when I didn’t dare use the cleaning knife. Because when you shove a herring’s head to the left with your thumb, and you lift out the gullet with the blade, the creature looks at you with such knowing eyes, and yet you clean two hundred in an hour. And when you cut throats out of fourteen hundred cod, that makes twenty-eight hundred eyes that look at you! Look! Just look. Ask me how many fish have I killed? I had few equals in boning and cutting livers. Tja, tja, and how afraid they all were! Afraid! They looked up at the clouds as if they were saying: “How about this now. He blessed us same as He blessed you?” I say: we take the fish and God takes us. We must all, the beasts must, and the men must, and because we all must, none of us should—now, that’s just as if you’d pour a full barrel into an empty one. I’d be afraid to be left alone in the empty barrel, with every one else in the other barrel. No, being afraid is no good; being afraid is standing on your toes and looking over the edge.
Kneirtje.
Is that a way to talk at night? You act as if you’d had a dram.