Title: Falk: A Reminiscence
Author: Conrad, Joseph
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Falk: A Reminiscence" ***


FALK

A REMINISCENCE


By Joseph Conrad



Several of us, all more or less connected with the sea, were dining in
a small river-hostelry not more than thirty miles from London, and less
than twenty from that shallow and dangerous puddle to which our coasting
men give the grandiose name of “German Ocean.” And through the wide
windows we had a view of the Thames; an enfilading view down the Lower
Hope Reach. But the dinner was execrable, and all the feast was for the
eyes.

That flavour of salt-water which for so many of us had been the very
water of life permeated our talk. He who hath known the bitterness of
the Ocean shall have its taste forever in his mouth. But one or two
of us, pampered by the life of the land, complained of hunger. It was
impossible to swallow any of that stuff. And indeed there was a strange
mustiness in everything. The wooden dining-room stuck out over the mud
of the shore like a lacustrine dwelling; the planks of the floor seemed
rotten; a decrepit old waiter tottered pathetically to and fro before
an antediluvian and worm-eaten sideboard; the chipped plates might have
been disinterred from some kitchen midden near an inhabited lake; and
the chops recalled times more ancient still. They brought forcibly to
one’s mind the night of ages when the primeval man, evolving the first
rudiments of cookery from his dim consciousness, scorched lumps of flesh
at a fire of sticks in the company of other good fellows; then, gorged
and happy, sat him back among the gnawed bones to tell his artless tales
of experience--the tales of hunger and hunt--and of women, perhaps!

But luckily the wine happened to be as old as the waiter. So,
comparatively empty, but upon the whole fairly happy, we sat back and
told our artless tales. We talked of the sea and all its works. The
sea never changes, and its works for all the talk of men are wrapped in
mystery. But we agreed that the times were changed. And we talked of old
ships, of sea-accidents, of break-downs, dismastings; and of a man who
brought his ship safe to Liverpool all the way from the River Platte
under a jury rudder. We talked of wrecks, of short rations and of
heroism--or at least of what the newspapers would have called heroism
at sea--a manifestation of virtues quite different from the heroism of
primitive times. And now and then falling silent all together we gazed
at the sights of the river.

A P. & O. boat passed bound down. “One gets jolly good dinners on board
these ships,” remarked one of our band. A man with sharp eyes read
out the name on her bows: Arcadia. “What a beautiful model of a ship!”
 murmured some of us. She was followed by a small cargo steamer, and the
flag they hauled down aboard while we were looking showed her to be a
Norwegian. She made an awful lot of smoke; and before it had quite blown
away, a high-sided, short, wooden barque, in ballast and towed by a
paddle-tug, appeared in front of the windows. All her hands were forward
busy setting up the headgear; and aft a woman in a red hood, quite alone
with the man at the wheel, paced the length of the poop back and forth,
with the grey wool of some knitting work in her hands.

“German I should think,” muttered one. “The skipper has his wife on
board,” remarked another; and the light of the crimson sunset all
ablaze behind the London smoke, throwing a glow of Bengal light upon the
barque’s spars, faded away from the Hope Reach.

Then one of us, who had not spoken before, a man of over fifty, that had
commanded ships for a quarter of a century, looking after the barque now
gliding far away, all black on the lustre of the river, said:

This reminds me of an absurd episode in my life, now many years ago,
when I got first the command of an iron barque, loading then in a
certain Eastern seaport. It was also the capital of an Eastern kingdom,
lying up a river as might be London lies up this old Thames of ours.
No more need be said of the place; for this sort of thing might have
happened anywhere where there are ships, skippers, tugboats, and orphan
nieces of indescribable splendour. And the absurdity of the episode
concerns only me, my enemy Falk, and my friend Hermann.

There seemed to be something like peculiar emphasis on the words “My
friend Hermann,” which caused one of us (for we had just been speaking
of heroism at sea) to say idly and nonchalantly:

“And was this Hermann a hero?”

Not at all, said our grizzled friend. No hero at all. He was a
Schiff-fuhrer: Ship-conductor. That’s how they call a Master Mariner
in Germany. I prefer our way. The alliteration is good, and there is
something in the nomenclature that gives to us as a body the sense
of corporate existence: Apprentice, Mate, Master, in the ancient and
honourable craft of the sea. As to my friend Hermann, he might have
been a consummate master of the honourable craft, but he was called
officially Schiff-fuhrer, and had the simple, heavy appearance of a
well-to-do farmer, combined with the good-natured shrewdness of a small
shopkeeper. With his shaven chin, round limbs, and heavy eyelids he did
not look like a toiler, and even less like an adventurer of the sea.
Still, he toiled upon the seas, in his own way, much as a shopkeeper
works behind his counter. And his ship was the means by which he
maintained his growing family.

She was a heavy, strong, blunt-bowed affair, awakening the ideas of
primitive solidity, like the wooden plough of our forefathers. And there
were, about her, other suggestions of a rustic and homely nature. The
extraordinary timber projections which I have seen in no other vessel
made her square stern resemble the tail end of a miller’s waggon. But
the four stern ports of her cabin, glazed with six little greenish panes
each, and framed in wooden sashes painted brown, might have been the
windows of a cottage in the country. The tiny white curtains and the
greenery of flower pots behind the glass completed the resemblance. On
one or two occasions when passing under stern I had detected from my
boat a round arm in the act of tilting a watering pot, and the bowed
sleek head of a maiden whom I shall always call Hermann’s niece, because
as a matter of fact I’ve never heard her name, for all my intimacy with
the family.

This, however, sprang up later on. Meantime in common with the rest
of the shipping in that Eastern port, I was left in no doubt as to
Hermann’s notions of hygienic clothing. Evidently he believed in
wearing good stout flannel next his skin. On most days little frocks and
pinafores could be seen drying in the mizzen rigging of his ship, or
a tiny row of socks fluttering on the signal halyards; but once a
fortnight the family washing was exhibited in force. It covered the
poop entirely. The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby
activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions
of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity. Trunks without heads waved
at you arms without hands; legs without feet kicked fantastically with
collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments that, taking
the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for
a moment violently distended as by the passage of obese and invisible
bodies. On these days you could make out that ship at a great distance
by the multi-coloured grotesque riot going on abaft her mizzen mast.

She had her berth just ahead of me, and her name was Diana,--Diana not
of Ephesus but of Bremen. This was proclaimed in white letters a foot
long spaced widely across the stern (somewhat like the lettering of a
shop-sign) under the cottage windows. This ridiculously unsuitable name
struck one as an impertinence towards the memory of the most charming
of goddesses; for, apart from the fact that the old craft was physically
incapable of engaging in any sort of chase, there was a gang of four
children belonging to her. They peeped over the rail at passing boats
and occasionally dropped various objects into them. Thus, sometime
before I knew Hermann to speak to, I received on my hat a horrid
rag-doll belonging to Hermann’s eldest daughter. However, these
youngsters were upon the whole well behaved. They had fair heads, round
eyes, round little knobby noses, and they resembled their father a good
deal.

This Diana of Bremen was a most innocent old ship, and seemed to know
nothing of the wicked sea, as there are on shore households that know
nothing of the corrupt world. And the sentiments she suggested were
unexceptionable and mainly of a domestic order. She was a home. All
these dear children had learned to walk on her roomy quarter-deck. In
such thoughts there is something pretty, even touching. Their teeth, I
should judge, they had cut on the ends of her running gear. I have
many times observed the baby Hermann (Nicholas) engaged in gnawing the
whipping of the fore-royal brace. Nicholas’ favourite place of residence
was under the main fife-rail. Directly he was let loose he would
crawl off there, and the first seaman who came along would bring him,
carefully held aloft in tarry hands, back to the cabin door. I fancy
there must have been a standing order to that effect. In the course of
these transportations the baby, who was the only peppery person in the
ship, tried to smite these stalwart young German sailors on the face.

Mrs. Hermann, an engaging, stout housewife, wore on board baggy blue
dresses with white dots. When, as happened once or twice I caught her at
an elegant little wash-tub rubbing hard on white collars, baby’s socks,
and Hermann’s summer neckties, she would blush in girlish confusion, and
raising her wet hands greet me from afar with many friendly nods. Her
sleeves would be rolled up to the elbows, and the gold hoop of her
wedding ring glittered among the soapsuds. Her voice was pleasant, she
had a serene brow, smooth bands of very fair hair, and a good-humoured
expression of the eyes. She was motherly and moderately talkative. When
this simple matron smiled, youthful dimples broke out on her fresh broad
cheeks. Hermann’s niece on the other hand, an orphan and very silent, I
never saw attempt a smile. This, however, was not gloom on her part but
the restraint of youthful gravity.

They had carried her about with them for the last three years, to help
with the children and be company for Mrs. Hermann, as Hermann mentioned
once to me. It had been very necessary while they were all little, he
had added in a vexed manner. It was her arm and her sleek head that
I had glimpsed one morning, through the stern-windows of the cabin,
hovering over the pots of fuchsias and mignonette; but the first time I
beheld her full length I surrendered to her proportions. They fix her
in my mind, as great beauty, great intelligence, quickness of wit
or kindness of heart might have made some her other woman equally
memorable.

With her it was form and size. It was her physical personality that had
this imposing charm. She might have been witty, intelligent, and kind to
an exceptional degree. I don’t know, and this is not to the point. All
I know is that she was built on a magnificent scale. Built is the only
word. She was constructed, she was erected, as it were, with a regal
lavishness. It staggered you to see this reckless expenditure of
material upon a chit of a girl. She was youthful and also perfectly
mature, as though she had been some fortunate immortal. She was heavy
too, perhaps, but that’s nothing. It only added to that notion of
permanence. She was barely nineteen. But such shoulders! Such round
arms! Such a shadowing forth of mighty limbs when with three long
strides she pounced across the deck upon the overturned Nicholas--it’s
perfectly indescribable! She seemed a good, quiet girl, vigilant as
to Lena’s needs, Gustav’s tumbles, the state of Carl’s dear little
nose--conscientious, hardworking, and all that. But what magnificent
hair she had! Abundant, long, thick, of a tawny colour. It had the sheen
of precious metals. She wore it plaited tightly into one single tress
hanging girlishly down her back and its end reached down to her waist.
The massiveness of it surprised you. On my word it reminded one of a
club. Her face was big, comely, of an unruffled expression. She had a
good complexion, and her blue eyes were so pale that she appeared to
look at the world with the empty white candour of a statue. You could
not call her good-looking. It was something much more impressive.
The simplicity of her apparel, the opulence of her form, her imposing
stature, and the extraordinary sense of vigorous life that seemed to
emanate from her like a perfume exhaled by a flower, made her beautiful
with a beauty of a rustic and olympian order. To watch her reaching up
to the clothes-line with both arms raised high above her head, caused
you to fall a musing in a strain of pagan piety. Excellent Mrs.
Hermann’s baggy cotton gowns had some sort of rudimentary frills at neck
and bottom, but this girl’s print frocks hadn’t even a wrinkle; nothing
but a few straight folds in the skirt falling to her feet, and these,
when she stood still, had a severe and statuesque quality. She was
inclined naturally to be still whether sitting or standing. However, I
don’t mean to say she was statuesque. She was too generously alive; but
she could have stood for an allegoric statue of the Earth. I don’t mean
the worn-out earth of our possession, but a young Earth, a virginal
planet undisturbed by the vision of a future teeming with the monstrous
forms of life and death, clamorous with the cruel battles of hunger and
thought.

The worthy Hermann himself was not very entertaining, though his English
was fairly comprehensible. Mrs. Hermann, who always let off one speech
at least at me in an hospitable, cordial tone (and in Platt-Deutsch I
suppose) I could not understand. As to their niece, however satisfactory
to look upon (and she inspired you somehow with a hopeful view as to
the prospects of mankind) she was a modest and silent presence, mostly
engaged in sewing, only now and then, as I observed, falling over that
work into a state of maidenly meditation. Her aunt sat opposite her,
sewing also, with her feet propped on a wooden footstool. On the other
side of the deck Hermann and I would get a couple of chairs out of the
cabin and settle down to a smoking match, accompanied at long intervals
by the pacific exchange of a few words. I came nearly every evening.
Hermann I would find in his shirt sleeves. As soon as he returned from
the shore on board his ship he commenced operations by taking off his
coat; then he put on his head an embroidered round cap with a tassel,
and changed his boots for a pair of cloth slippers. Afterwards he smoked
at the cabin-door, looking at his children with an air of civic virtue,
till they got caught one after another and put to bed in various
staterooms. Lastly, we would drink some beer in the cabin, which
was furnished with a wooden table on cross legs, and with black
straight-backed chairs--more like a farm kitchen than a ship’s cuddy.
The sea and all nautical affairs seemed very far removed from the
hospitality of this exemplary family.

And I liked this because I had a rather worrying time on board my own
ship. I had been appointed ex-officio by the British Consul to take
charge of her after a man who had died suddenly, leaving for the
guidance of his successor some suspiciously unreceipted bills, a few
dry-dock estimates hinting at bribery, and a quantity of vouchers for
three years’ extravagant expenditure; all these mixed up together in a
dusty old violin-case lined with ruby velvet. I found besides a large
account-book, which, when opened, hopefully turned out to my infinite
consternation to be filled with verses--page after page of rhymed
doggerel of a jovial and improper character, written in the neatest
minute hand I ever did see. In the same fiddle-case a photograph of my
predecessor, taken lately in Saigon, represented in front of a garden
view, and in company of a female in strange draperies, an elderly,
squat, rugged man of stern aspect in a clumsy suit of black broadcloth,
and with the hair brushed forward above the temples in a manner
reminding one of a boar’s tusks. Of a fiddle, however, the only trace
on board was the case, its empty husk as it were; but of the two last
freights the ship had indubitably earned of late, there were not even
the husks left. It was impossible to say where all that money had gone
to. It wasn’t on board. It had not been remitted home; for a letter
from the owners, preserved in a desk evidently by the merest accident,
complained mildly enough that they had not been favoured by a scratch
of the pen for the last eighteen months. There were next to no stores on
board, not an inch of spare rope or a yard of canvas. The ship had been
run bare, and I foresaw no end of difficulties before I could get her
ready for sea.

As I was young then--not thirty yet--I took myself and my troubles very
seriously. The old mate, who had acted as chief mourner at the captain’s
funeral, was not particularly pleased at my coming. But the fact is the
fellow was not legally qualified for command, and the Consul was bound,
if at all possible, to put a properly certificated man on board. As to
the second mate, all I can say his name was Tottersen, or something like
that. His practice was to wear on his head, in that tropical climate, a
mangy fur cap. He was, without exception, the stupidest man I had ever
seen on board ship. And he looked it too. He looked so confoundedly
stupid that it was a matter of surprise for me when he answered to his
name.

I drew no great comfort from their company, to say the least of it;
while the prospect of making a long sea passage with those two fellows
was depressing. And my other thoughts in solitude could not be of a
gay complexion. The crew was sickly, the cargo was coming very slow; I
foresaw I would have lots of trouble with the charterers, and doubted
whether they would advance me enough money for the ship’s expenses.
Their attitude towards me was unfriendly. Altogether I was not getting
on. I would discover at odd times (generally about midnight) that I
was totally inexperienced, greatly ignorant of business, and hopelessly
unfit for any sort of command; and when the steward had to be taken to
the hospital ill with choleraic symptoms I felt bereaved of the only
decent person at the after end of the ship. He was fully expected to
recover, but in the meantime had to be replaced by some sort of servant.
And on the recommendation of a certain Schomberg, the proprietor of the
smaller of the two hotels in the place, I engaged a Chinaman. Schomberg,
a brawny, hairy Alsatian, and an awful gossip, assured me that it was
all right. “First-class boy that. Came in the suite of his Excellency
Tseng the Commissioner--you know. His Excellency Tseng lodged with me
here for three weeks.”

He mouthed the Chinese Excellency at me with great unction, though
the specimen of the “suite” did not seem very promising. At the time,
however, I did not know what an untrustworthy humbug Schomberg was. The
“boy” might have been forty or a hundred and forty for all you could
tell--one of those Chinamen of the death’s-head type of face and
completely inscrutable. Before the end of the third day he had revealed
himself as a confirmed opium-smoker, a gambler, a most audacious thief,
and a first-class sprinter. When he departed at the top of his speed
with thirty-two golden sovereigns of my own hard-earned savings it was
the last straw. I had reserved that money in case my difficulties came
to the worst. Now it was gone I felt as poor and naked as a fakir. I
clung to my ship, for all the bother she caused me, but what I could not
bear were the long lonely evenings in her cuddy, where the atmosphere,
made smelly by a leaky lamp, was agitated by the snoring of the mate.
That fellow shut himself up in his stuffy cabin punctually at eight, and
made gross and revolting noises like a water-logged trump. It was odious
not to be able to worry oneself in comfort on board one’s own ship.
Everything in this world, I reflected, even the command of a nice little
barque, may be made a delusion and a snare for the unwary spirit of
pride in man.

From such reflections I was glad to make any escape on board that Bremen
Diana. There apparently no whisper of the world’s iniquities had ever
penetrated. And yet she lived upon the wide sea: and the sea tragic
and comic, the sea with its horrors and its peculiar scandals, the sea
peopled by men and ruled by iron necessity is indubitably a part of the
world. But that patriarchal old tub, like some saintly retreat, echoed
nothing of it. She was world proof. Her venerable innocence apparently
had put a restraint on the roaring lusts of the sea. And yet I have
known the sea too long to believe in its respect for decency. An
elemental force is ruthlessly frank. It may, of course, have been
Hermann’s skilful seamanship, but to me it looked as if the allied
oceans had refrained from smashing these high bulwarks, unshipping
the lumpy rudder, frightening the children, and generally opening this
family’s eyes out of sheer reticence. It looked like reticence. The
ruthless disclosure was in the end left for a man to make; a man strong
and elemental enough and driven to unveil some secrets of the sea by the
power of a simple and elemental desire.

This, however, occurred much later, and meantime I took sanctuary in
that serene old ship early every evening. The only person on board that
seemed to be in trouble was little Lena, and in due course I perceived
that the health of the rag-doll was more than delicate. This object led
a sort of “in extremis” existence in a wooden box placed against the
starboard mooring-bitts, tended and nursed with the greatest sympathy
and care by all the children, who greatly enjoyed pulling long faces and
moving with hushed footsteps. Only the baby--Nicholas--looked on with a
cold, ruffianly leer, as if he had belonged to another tribe altogether.
Lena perpetually sorrowed over the box, and all of them were in deadly
earnest. It was wonderful the way these children would work up their
compassion for that bedraggled thing I wouldn’t have touched with a pair
of tongs. I suppose they were exercising and developing their racial
sentimentalism by the means of that dummy. I was only surprised that
Mrs. Hermann let Lena cherish and hug that bundle of rags to that
extent, it was so disreputably and completely unclean. But Mrs. Hermann
would raise her fine womanly eyes from her needlework to look on with
amused sympathy, and did not seen to see it, somehow, that this
object of affection was a disgrace to the ship’s purity. Purity, not
cleanliness, is the word. It was pushed so far that I seemed to detect
in this too a sentimental excess, as if dirt had been removed in
very love. It is impossible to give you an idea of such a meticulous
neatness. It was as if every morning that ship had been arduously
explored with--with toothbrushes. Her very bowsprit three times a week
had its toilette made with a cake of soap and a piece of soft flannel.
Arrayed--I _must_ say arrayed--arrayed artlessly in dazzling white paint
as to wood and dark green as to ironwork the simple-minded distribution
of these colours evoked the images of simple-minded peace, of arcadian
felicity; and the childish comedy of disease and sorrow struck me
sometimes as an abominably real blot upon that ideal state.

I enjoyed it greatly, and on my part I brought a little mild excitement
into it. Our intimacy arose from the pursuit of that thief. It was in
the evening, and Hermann, who, contrary to his habits, had stayed on
shore late that day, was extricating himself backwards out of a little
gharry on the river bank, opposite his ship, when the hunt passed.
Realising the situation as though he had eyes in his shoulder-blades, he
joined us with a leap and took the lead. The Chinaman fled silent like
a rapid shadow on the dust of an extremely oriental road. I followed. A
long way in the rear my mate whooped like a savage. A young moon threw
a bashful light on a plain like a monstrous waste ground: the
architectural mass of a Buddhist temple far away projected itself
in dead black on the sky. We lost the thief of course; but in my
disappointment I had to admire Hermann’s presence of mind. The velocity
that stodgy man developed in the interests of a complete stranger earned
my warm gratitude--there was something truly cordial in his exertions.

He seemed as vexed as myself at our failure, and would hardly listen to
my thanks. He said it was “nothings,” and invited me on the spot to
come on board his ship and drink a glass of beer with him. We poked
sceptically for a while amongst the bushes, peered without conviction
into a ditch or two. There was not a sound: patches of slime glimmered
feebly amongst the reeds. Slowly we trudged back, drooping under the
thin sickle of the moon, and I heard him mutter to himself, “Himmel!
Zwei und dreissig Pfund!” He was impressed by the figure of my loss. For
a long time we had ceased to hear the mate’s whoops and yells.

Then he said to me, “Everybody has his troubles,” and as we went on
remarked that he would never have known anything of mine hadn’t he by an
extraordinary chance been detained on shore by Captain Falk. He didn’t
like to stay late ashore--he added with a sigh. The something doleful in
his tone I put to his sympathy with my misfortune, of course.

On board the Diana Mrs. Hermann’s fine eyes expressed much interest and
commiseration. We had found the two women sewing face to face under the
open skylight in the strong glare of the lamp. Hermann walked in first,
starting in the very doorway to pull off his coat, and encouraging
me with loud, hospitable ejaculations: “Come in! This way! Come in,
captain!” At once, coat in hand, he began to tell his wife all about
it. Mrs. Hermann put the palms of her plump hands together; I smiled
and bowed with a heavy heart: the niece got up from her sewing to
bring Hermann’s slippers and his embroidered calotte, which he assumed
pontifically, talking (about me) all the time. Billows of white stuff
lay between the chairs on the cabin floor; I caught the words “Zwei und
dreissig Pfund” repeated several times, and presently came the beer,
which seemed delicious to my throat, parched with running and the
emotions of the chase.

I didn’t get away till well past midnight, long after the women had
retired. Hermann had been trading in the East for three years or more,
carrying freights of rice and timber mostly. His ship was well known in
all the ports from Vladivostok to Singapore. She was his own property.
The profits had been moderate, but the trade answered well enough while
the children were small yet. In another year or so he hoped he would
be able to sell the old Diana to a firm in Japan for a fair price. He
intended to return home, to Bremen, by mail boat, second class, with
Mrs. Hermann and the children. He told me all this stolidly, with slow
puffs at his pipe. I was sorry when knocking the ashes out he began
to rub his eyes. I would have sat with him till morning. What had I to
hurry on board my own ship for? To face the broken rifled drawer in my
state-room. Ugh! The very thought made me feel unwell.

I became their daily guest, as you know. I think that Mrs. Hermann from
the first looked upon me as a romantic person. I did not, of course,
tear my hair _coram populo_ over my loss, and she took it for lordly
indifference. Afterwards, I daresay, I did tell them some of my
adventures--such as they were--and they marvelled greatly at the extent
of my experience. Hermann would translate what he thought the most
striking passages. Getting up on his legs, and as if delivering a
lecture on a phenomenon, he addressed himself, with gestures, to the two
women, who would let their sewing sink slowly on their laps. Meantime
I sat before a glass of Hermann’s beer, trying to look modest. Mrs.
Hermann would glance at me quickly, emit slight “Ach’s!” The girl never
made a sound. Never. But she too would sometimes raise her pale eyes
to look at me in her unseeing gentle way. Her glance was by no means
stupid; it beamed out soft and diffuse as the moon beams upon a
landscape--quite differently from the scrutinising inspection of the
stars. You were drowned in it, and imagined yourself to appear blurred.
And yet this same glance when turned upon Christian Falk must have been
as efficient as the searchlight of a battle-ship.

Falk was the other assiduous visitor on board, but from his behaviour
he might have been coming to see the quarter-deck capstan. He certainly
used to stare at it a good deal when keeping us company outside the
cabin door, with one muscular arm thrown over the back of the chair, and
his big shapely legs, in very tight white trousers, extended far out and
ending in a pair of black shoes as roomy as punts. On arrival he would
shake Hermann’s hand with a mutter, bow to the women, and take up his
careless and misanthropic attitude by our side. He departed abruptly,
with a jump, going through the performance of grunts, handshakes, bow,
as if in a panic. Sometimes, with a sort of discreet and convulsive
effort, he approached the women and exchanged a few low words with them,
half a dozen at most. On these occasions Hermann’s usual stare became
positively glassy and Mrs. Hermann’s kind countenance would colour up.
The girl herself never turned a hair.

Falk was a Dane or perhaps a Norwegian, I can’t tell now. At all events
he was a Scandinavian of some sort, and a bloated monopolist to boot.
It is possible he was unacquainted with the word, but he had a clear
perception of the thing itself. His tariff of charges for towing ships
in and out was the most brutally inconsiderate document of the sort I
had ever seen. He was the commander and owner of the only tug-boat on
the river, a very trim white craft of 150 tons or more, as elegantly
neat as a yacht, with a round wheel-house rising like a glazed turret
high above her sharp bows, and with one slender varnished pole mast
forward. I daresay there are yet a few shipmasters afloat who remember
Falk and his tug very well. He extracted his pound and a half of
flesh from each of us merchant-skippers with an inflexible sort of
indifference which made him detested and even feared. Schomberg used to
remark: “I won’t talk about the fellow. I don’t think he has six drinks
from year’s end to year’s end in my place. But my advice is, gentlemen,
don’t you have anything to do with him, if you can help it.”

This advice, apart from unavoidable business relations, was easy to
follow because Falk intruded upon no one. It seems absurd to compare a
tugboat skipper to a centaur: but he reminded me somehow of an engraving
in a little book I had as a boy, which represented centaurs at a stream,
and there was one, especially in the foreground, prancing bow and arrows
in hand, with regular severe features and an immense curled wavy beard,
flowing down his breast. Falk’s face reminded me of that centaur.
Besides, he was a composite creature. Not a man-horse, it is true, but
a man-boat. He lived on board his tug, which was always dashing up and
down the river from early morn till dewy eve.

In the last rays of the setting sun, you could pick out far away down
the reach his beard borne high up on the white structure, foaming up
stream to anchor for the night. There was the white-clad man’s body, and
the rich brown patch of the hair, and nothing below the waist but the
‘thwart-ship white lines of the bridge-screens, that lead the eye to the
sharp white lines of the bows cleaving the muddy water of the river.

Separated from his boat to me at least he seemed incomplete. The tug
herself without his head and torso on the bridge looked mutilated as it
were. But he left her very seldom. All the time I remained in harbour
I saw him only twice on shore. On the first occasion it was at my
charterers, where he came in misanthropically to get paid for towing out
a French barque the day before. The second time I could hardly believe
my eyes, for I beheld him reclining under his beard in a cane-bottomed
chair in the billiard-room of Schomberg’s hotel.

It was very funny to see Schomberg ignoring him pointedly. The
artificiality of it contrasted strongly with Falk’s natural unconcern.
The big Alsatian talked loudly with his other customers, going from one
little table to the other, and passing Falk’s place of repose with his
eyes fixed straight ahead. Falk sat there with an untouched glass at his
elbow. He must have known by sight and name every white man in the room,
but he never addressed a word to anybody. He acknowledged my presence by
a drop of his eyelids, and that was all. Sprawling there in the chair,
he would, now and again, draw the palms of both his hands down his face,
giving at the same time a slight, almost imperceptible, shudder.

It was a habit he had, and of course I was perfectly familiar with it,
since you could not remain an hour in his company without being made to
wonder at such a movement breaking some long period of stillness. It was
a passionate and inexplicable gesture. He used to make it at all sorts
of times; as likely as not after he had been listening to little Lena’s
chatter about the suffering doll, for instance. The Hermann children
always besieged him about his legs closely, though, in a gentle way, he
shrank from them a little. He seemed, however, to feel a great affection
for the whole family. For Hermann himself especially. He sought his
company. In this case, for instance, he must have been waiting for him,
because as soon as he appeared Falk rose hastily, and they went out
together. Then Schomberg expounded in my hearing to three or four people
his theory that Falk was after Captain Hermann’s niece, and asserted
confidently that nothing would come of it. It was the same last year
when Captain Hermann was loading here, he said.

Naturally, I did not believe Schomberg, but I own that for a time I
observed closely what went on. All I discovered was some impatience on
Hermann’s part. At the sight of Falk, stepping over the gangway, the
excellent man would begin to mumble and chew between his teeth something
that sounded like German swear-words. However, as I’ve said, I’m not
familiar with the language, and Hermann’s soft, round-eyed countenance
remained unchanged. Staring stolidly ahead he greeted him with, “Wie
gehts,” or in English, “How are you?” with a throaty enunciation. The
girl would look up for an instant and move her lips slightly: Mrs.
Hermann let her hands rest on her lap to talk volubly to him for a
minute or so in her pleasant voice before she went on with her sewing
again. Falk would throw himself into a chair, stretch his big legs, as
like as not draw his hands down his face passionately. As to myself, he
was not pointedly impertinent: it was rather as though he could not be
bothered with such trifles as my existence; and the truth is that being
a monopolist he was under no necessity to be amiable. He was sure to get
his own extortionate terms out of me for towage whether he frowned
or smiled. As a matter of fact, he did neither: but before many days
elapsed he managed to astonish me not a little and to set Schomberg’s
tongue clacking more than ever.

It came about in this way. There was a shallow bar at the mouth of the
river which ought to have been kept down, but the authorities of the
State were piously busy gilding afresh the great Buddhist Pagoda just
then, and I suppose had no money to spare for dredging operations. I
don’t know how it may be now, but at the time I speak of that sandbank
was a great nuisance to the shipping. One of its consequences was that
vessels of a certain draught of water, like Hermann’s or mine, could not
complete their loading in the river. After taking in as much as possible
of their cargo, they had to go outside to fill up. The whole procedure
was an unmitigated bore. When you thought you had as much on board as
your ship could carry safely over the bar, you went and gave notice to
your agents. They, in their turn, notified Falk that so-and-so was ready
to go out. Then Falk (ostensibly when it fitted in with his other work,
but, if the truth were known, simply when his arbitrary spirit moved
him), after ascertaining carefully in the office that there was enough
money to meet his bill, would come along unsympathetically, glaring
at you with his yellow eyes from the bridge, and would drag you out
dishevelled as to rigging, lumbered as to the decks, with unfeeling
haste, as if to execution. And he would force you too to take the end of
his own wire hawser, for the use of which there was of course an extra
charge. To your shouted remonstrances against that extortion this
towering trunk with one hand on the engine-room telegraph only shook its
bearded head above the splash, the racket, and the clouds of smoke
in which the tug, backing and filling in the smother of churning
paddle-wheels behaved like a ferocious and impatient creature. He had
her manned by the cheekiest gang of lascars I ever did see, whom he
allowed to bawl at you insolently, and, once fast, he plucked you out
of your berth as if he did not care what he smashed. Eighteen miles down
the river you had to go behind him, and then three more along the
coast to where a group of uninhabited rocky islets enclosed a sheltered
anchorage. There you would have to lie at single anchor with your naked
spars showing to seaward over these barren fragments of land scattered
upon a very intensely blue sea. There was nothing to look at besides but
a bare coast, the muddy edge of the brown plain with the sinuosities
of the river you had left, traced in dull green, and the Great Pagoda
uprising lonely and massive with shining curves and pinnacles like the
gorgeous and stony efflorescence of tropical rocks. You had nothing to
do but to wait fretfully for the balance of your cargo, which was sent
out of the river with the greatest irregularity. And it was open to
you to console yourself with the thought that, after all, this stage
of bother meant that your departure from these shores was indeed
approaching at last.

We both had to go through that stage, Hermann and I, and there was a
sort of tacit emulation between the ships as to which should be ready
first. We kept on neck and neck almost to the finish, when I won
the race by going personally to give notice in the forenoon; whereas
Hermann, who was very slow in making up his mind to go ashore, did not
get to the agents’ office till late in the day. They told him there that
my ship was first on turn for next morning, and I believe he told them
he was in no hurry. It suited him better to go the day after.

That evening, on board the Diana, he sat with his plump knees well
apart, staring and puffing at the curved mouthpiece of his pipe.
Presently he spoke with some impatience to his niece about putting the
children to bed. Mrs. Hermann, who was talking to Falk, stopped short
and looked at her husband uneasily, but the girl got up at once and
drove the children before her into the cabin. In a little while Mrs.
Hermann had to leave us to quell what, from the sounds inside, must have
been a dangerous mutiny. At this Hermann grumbled to himself. For half
an hour longer Falk left alone with us fidgeted on his chair, sighed
lightly, then at last, after drawing his hands down his face, got up,
and as if renouncing the hope of making himself understood (he hadn’t
opened his mouth once) he said in English: “Well.... Good night,
Captain Hermann.” He stopped for a moment before my chair and looked
down fixedly; I may even say he glared: and he went so far as to make a
deep noise in his throat. There was in all this something so marked
that for the first time in our limited intercourse of nods and grunts he
excited in me something like interest. But next moment he disappointed
me--for he strode away hastily without a nod even.

His manner was usually odd it is true, and I certainly did not pay much
attention to it; but that sort of obscure intention, which seemed to
lurk in his nonchalance like a wary old carp in a pond, had never before
come so near the surface. He had distinctly aroused my expectations. I
would have been unable to say what it was I expected, but at all events
I did not expect the absurd developments he sprung upon me no later than
the break of the very next day.

I remember only that there was, on that evening, enough point in his
behaviour to make me, after he had fled, wonder audibly what he might
mean. To this Hermann, crossing his legs with a swing and settling
himself viciously away from me in his chair, said: “That fellow don’t
know himself what he means.”

There might have been some insight in such a remark. I said nothing,
and, still averted, he added: “When I was here last year he was just the
same.” An eruption of tobacco smoke enveloped his head as if his temper
had exploded like gunpowder.

I had half a mind to ask him point blank whether he, at least, didn’t
know why Falk, a notoriously unsociable man, had taken to visiting his
ship with such assiduity. After all, I reflected suddenly, it was a
most remarkable thing. I wonder now what Hermann would have said. As it
turned out he didn’t let me ask. Forgetting all about Falk apparently,
he started a monologue on his plans for the future: the selling of the
ship, the going home; and falling into a reflective and calculating
mood he mumbled between regular jets of smoke about the expense. The
necessity of disbursing passage money for all his tribe seemed to
disturb him in a manner that was the more striking because otherwise
he gave no signs of a miserly disposition. And yet he fussed over the
prospect of that voyage home in a mail boat like a sedentary grocer
who has made up his mind to see the world. He was racially thrifty I
suppose, and for him there must have been a great novelty in finding
himself obliged to pay for travelling--for sea travelling which was the
normal state of life for the family--from the very cradle for most of
them. I could see he grudged prospectively every single shilling which
must be spent so absurdly. It was rather funny. He would become doleful
over it, and then again, with a fretful sigh, he would suppose there
was nothing for it now but to take three second-class tickets--and there
were the four children to pay for besides. A lot of money that to spend
at once. A big lot of money.

I sat with him listening (not for the first time) to these
heart-searchings till I grew thoroughly sleepy, and then I left him and
turned in on board my ship. At daylight I was awakened by a yelping of
shrill voices, accompanied by a great commotion in the water, and the
short, bullying blasts of a steam-whistle. Falk with his tug had come
for me.

I began to dress. It was remarkable that the answering noise on board my
ship together with the patter of feet above my head ceased suddenly. But
I heard more remote guttural cries which seemed to express surprise and
annoyance. Then the voice of my mate reached me howling expostulations
to somebody at a distance. Other voices joined, apparently indignant;
a chorus of something that sounded like abuse replied. Now and then the
steam-whistle screeched.

Altogether that unnecessary uproar was distracting, but down there in my
cabin I took it calmly. In another moment, I thought, I should be going
down that wretched river, and in another week at the most I should be
totally quit of the odious place and all the odious people in it.

Greatly cheered by the idea, I seized the hair-brushes and looking at
myself in the glass began to use them. Suddenly a hush fell upon the
noise outside, and I heard (the ports of my cabin were thrown open)--I
heard a deep calm voice, not on board my ship, however, hailing
resolutely in English, but with a strong foreign twang, “Go ahead!”

There may be tides in the affairs of men which taken at the flood...
and so on. Personally I am still on the look out for that important
turn. I am, however, afraid that most of us are fated to flounder for
ever in the dead water of a pool whose shores are arid indeed. But
I know that there are often in men’s affairs unexpectedly--even
irrationally--illuminating moments when an otherwise insignificant
sound, perhaps only some perfectly commonplace gesture, suffices
to reveal to us all the unreason, all the fatuous unreason, of our
complacency. “Go ahead” are not particularly striking words even when
pronounced with a foreign accent; yet they petrified me in the very
act of smiling at myself in the glass. And then, refusing to believe my
ears, but already boiling with indignation, I ran out of the cabin and
up on deck.

It was incredibly true. It was perfectly true. I had no eyes for
anything but the Diana. It was she, then, was being taken away. She was
already out of her berth and shooting athwart the river. “The way this
loonatic plucked that ship out is a caution,” said the awed voice of my
mate close to my ear. “Hey! Hallo! Falk! Hermann! What’s this infernal
trick?” I yelled in a fury.

Nobody heard me. Falk certainly could not hear me. His tug was turning
at full speed away under the other bank. The wire hawser between her and
the Diana, stretched as taut as a harp-string, vibrated alarmingly.

The high black craft careened over to the awful strain. A loud crack
came out of her, followed by the tearing and splintering of wood.
“There!” said the awed voice in my ear. “He’s carried away their towing
chock.” And then, with enthusiasm, “Oh! Look! Look! sir, Look! at them
Dutchmen skipping out of the way on the forecastle. I hope to goodness
he’ll break a few of their shins before he’s done with ‘em.”

I yelled my vain protests. The rays of the rising sun coursing level
along the plain warmed my back, but I was hot enough with rage. I
could not have believed that a simple towing operation could suggest so
plainly the idea of abduction, of rape. Falk was simply running off with
the Diana.

The white tug careered out into the middle of the river. The red floats
of her paddle-wheels revolving with mad rapidity tore up the whole reach
into foam. The Diana in mid-stream waltzed round with as much grace
as an old barn, and flew after her ravisher. Through the ragged fog of
smoke driving headlong upon the water I had a glimpse of Falk’s square
motionless shoulders under a white hat as big as a cart-wheel, of his
red face, his yellow staring eyes, his great beard. Instead of keeping
a lookout ahead, he was deliberately turning his back on the river to
glare at his tow. The tall heavy craft, never so used before in her
life, seemed to have lost her senses; she took a wild sheer against her
helm, and for a moment came straight at us, menacing and clumsy, like
a runaway mountain. She piled up a streaming, hissing, boiling wave
half-way up her blunt stem, my crew let out one great howl,--and then we
held our breaths. It was a near thing. But Falk had her! He had her in
his clutch. I fancied I could hear the steel hawser ping as it surged
across the Diana’s forecastle, with the hands on board of her bolting
away from it in all directions. It was a near thing. Hermann, with his
hair rumpled, in a snuffy flannel shirt and a pair of mustard-coloured
trousers, had rushed to help with the wheel. I saw his terrified round
face; I saw his very teeth uncovered by a sort of ghastly fixed grin;
and in a great leaping tumult of water between the two ships the Diana
whisked past so close that I could have flung a hair-brush at his head,
for, it seems, I had kept them in my hands all the time. Meanwhile
Mrs. Hermann sat placidly on the skylight, with a woollen shawl on
her shoulders. The excellent woman in response to my indignant
gesticulations fluttered a handkerchief, nodding and smiling in the
kindest way imaginable. The boys, only half-dressed, were jumping about
the poop in great glee, displaying their gaudy braces; and Lena in a
short scarlet petticoat, with peaked elbows and thin bare arms, nursed
the rag-doll with devotion. The whole family passed before my sight as
if dragged across a scene of unparalleled violence. The last I saw was
Hermann’s niece with the baby Hermann in her arms standing apart from
the others. Magnificent in her close-fitting print frock she displayed
something so commanding in the manifest perfection of her figure that
the sun seemed to be rising for her alone. The flood of light brought
out the opulence of her form and the vigour of her youth in a glorifying
way. She went by perfectly motionless and as if lost in meditation; only
the hem of her skirt stirred in the draught; the sun rays broke on her
sleek tawny hair; that bald-headed ruffian, Nicholas, was whacking her
on the shoulder. I saw his tiny fat arm rise and fall in a workmanlike
manner. And then the four cottage windows of the Diana came into view
retreating swiftly down the river. The sashes were up, and one of the
white calico curtains was fluttered straight out like a streamer above
the agitated water of the wake.

To be thus tricked out of one’s turn was an unheard of occurrence. In
my agent’s office, where I went to complain at once, they protested with
apologies they couldn’t understand how the mistake arose: but Schomberg
when I dropped in later to get some tiffin, though surprised to see me,
was perfectly ready with an explanation. I found him seated at the end
of a long narrow table, facing his wife--a scraggy little woman, with
long ringlets and a blue tooth, who smiled abroad stupidly and looked
frightened when you spoke to her. Between them a waggling punkah fanned
twenty cane-bottomed chairs and two rows of shiny plates. Three
Chinamen in white jackets loafed with napkins in their hands around that
desolation. Schomberg’s pet table d’hote was not much of a success that
day. He was feeding himself ferociously and seemed to overflow with
bitterness.

He began by ordering in a brutal voice the chops to be brought back for
me, and turning in his chair: “Mistake they told you? Not a bit of it!
Don’t you believe it for a moment, captain! Falk isn’t a man to make
mistakes unless on purpose.” His firm conviction was that Falk had been
trying all along to curry favour on the cheap with Hermann. “On the
cheap--mind you! It doesn’t cost him a cent to put that insult upon you,
and Captain Hermann gets in a day ahead of your ship. Time’s money! Eh?
You are very friendly with Captain Hermann I believe, but a man is bound
to be pleased at any little advantage he may get. Captain Hermann is a
good business man, and there’s no such thing as a friend in business. Is
there?” He leaned forward and began to cast stealthy glances as usual.
“But Falk is, and always was, a miserable fellow. I would despise him.”

I muttered, grumpily, that I had no particular respect for Falk.

“I would despise him,” he insisted, with an appearance of anxiety which
would have amused me if I had not been fathoms deep in discontent. To a
young man fairly conscientious and as well-meaning as only the young
man can be, the current ill-usage of life comes with a peculiar cruelty.
Youth that is fresh enough to believe in guilt, in innocence, and in
itself, will always doubt whether it have not perchance deserved its
fate. Sombre of mind and without appetite, I struggled with the
chop while Mrs. Schomberg sat with her everlasting stupid grin and
Schomberg’s talk gathered way like a slide of rubbish.

“Let me tell you. It’s all about that girl. I don’t know what Captain
Hermann expects, but if he asked me I could tell him something about
Falk. He’s a miserable fellow. That man is a perfect slave. That’s what
I call him. A slave. Last year I started this table d’hote, and sent
cards out--you know. You think he had one meal in the house? Give the
thing a trial? Not once. He has got hold now of a Madras cook--a blamed
fraud that I hunted out of my cookhouse with a rattan. He was not fit to
cook for white men. No, not for the white men’s dogs either; but, see,
any damned native that can boil a pot of rice is good enough for Mr.
Falk. Rice and a little fish he buys for a few cents from the fishing
boats outside is what he lives on. You would hardly credit it--eh? A
white man, too....”

He wiped his lips, using the napkin with indignation, and looking at me.
It flashed through my mind in the midst of my depression that if all the
meat in the town was like these table d’hote chops, Falk wasn’t so far
wrong. I was on the point of saying this, but Schomberg’s stare was
intimidating. “He’s a vegetarian, perhaps,” I murmured instead.

“He’s a miser. A miserable miser,” affirmed the hotel-keeper with great
force. “The meat here is not so good as at home--of course. And dear
too. But look at me. I only charge a dollar for the tiffin, and one
dollar and fifty cents for the dinner. Show me anything cheaper. Why am
I doing it? There’s little profit in this game. Falk wouldn’t look
at it. I do it for the sake of a lot of young white fellows here that
hadn’t a place where they could get a decent meal and eat it decently in
good company. There’s first-rate company always at my table.”

The convinced way he surveyed the empty chairs made me feel as if I had
intruded upon a tiffin of ghostly Presences.

“A white man should eat like a white man, dash it all,” he burst out
impetuously. “Ought to eat meat, must eat meat. I manage to get meat for
my patrons all the year round. Don’t I? I am not catering for a dam’ lot
of coolies: Have another chop captain.... No? You, boy--take away!”

He threw himself back and waited grimly for the curry. The half-closed
jalousies darkened the room pervaded by the smell of fresh whitewash:
a swarm of flies buzzed and settled in turns, and poor Mrs. Schomberg’s
smile seemed to express the quintessence of all the imbecility that had
ever spoken, had ever breathed, had ever been fed on infamous buffalo
meat within these bare walls. Schomberg did not open his lips till he
was ready to thrust therein a spoonful of greasy rice. He rolled his
eyes ridiculously before he swallowed the hot stuff, and only then broke
out afresh.

“It is the most degrading thing. They take the dish up to the wheelhouse
for him with a cover on it, and he shuts both the doors before he begins
to eat. Fact! Must be ashamed of himself. Ask the engineer. He can’t
do without an engineer--don’t you see--and as no respectable man can be
expected to put up with such a table, he allows them fifteen dollars
a month extra mess money. I assure you it is so! You just ask Mr.
Ferdinand da Costa. That’s the engineer he has now. You may have seen
him about my place, a delicate dark young man, with very fine eyes and a
little moustache. He arrived here a year ago from Calcutta. Between you
and me, I guess the money-lenders there must have been after him. He
rushes here for a meal every chance he can get, for just please tell me
what satisfaction is that for a well-educated young fellow to feed all
alone in his cabin--like a wild beast? That’s what Falk expects his
engineers to put up with for fifteen dollars extra. And the rows on
board every time a little smell of cooking gets about the deck! You
wouldn’t believe! The other day da Costa got the cook to fry a steak for
him--a turtle steak it was too, not beef at all--and the fat caught
or something. Young da Costa himself was telling me of it here in this
room. ‘Mr. Schomberg’--says he-’if I had let a cylinder cover blow off
through the skylight by my negligence Captain Falk couldn’t have been
more savage. He frightened the cook so that he won’t put anything on the
fire for me now.’ Poor da Costa had tears in his eyes. Only try to put
yourself in his place, captain: a sensitive, gentlemanly young fellow.
Is he expected to eat his food raw? But that’s your Falk all over. Ask
any one you like. I suppose the fifteen dollars extra he has to give
keep on rankling--in there.”

And Schomberg tapped his manly breast. I sat half stunned by his
irrelevant babble. Suddenly he gripped my forearm in an impressive and
cautious manner, as if to lead me into a very cavern of confidence.

“It’s nothing but enviousness,” he said in a lowered tone, which had a
stimulating effect upon my wearied hearing. “I don’t suppose there
is one person in this town that he isn’t envious of. I tell you he’s
dangerous. Even I myself am not safe from him. I know for certain he
tried to poison....”

“Oh, come now,” I cried, revolted.

“But I know for certain. The people themselves came and told me of it.
He went about saying everywhere I was a worse pest to this town than the
cholera. He had been talking against me ever since I opened this hotel.
And he poisoned Captain Hermann’s mind too. Last time the Diana was
loading here Captain Hermann used to come in every day for a drink or a
cigar. This time he hasn’t been here twice in a week. How do you account
for that?”

He squeezed my arm till he extorted from me some sort of mumble.

“He makes ten times the money I do. I’ve another hotel to fight against,
and there is no other tug on the river. I am not in his way, am I? He
wouldn’t be fit to run an hotel if he tried. But that’s just his nature.
He can’t bear to think I am making a living. I only hope it makes him
properly wretched. He’s like that in everything. He would like to keep a
decent table well enough. But no--for the sake of a few cents. Can’t do
it. It’s too much for him. That’s what I call being a slave to it. But
he’s mean enough to kick up a row when his nose gets tickled a bit. See
that? That just paints him. Miserly and envious. You can’t account for
it any other way. Can you? I have been studying him these three years.”

He was anxious I should assent to his theory. And indeed on thinking it
over it would have been plausible enough if there hadn’t been always the
essential falseness of irresponsibility in Schomberg’s chatter. However,
I was not disposed to investigate the psychology of Falk. I was engaged
just then in eating despondently a piece of stale Dutch cheese, being
too much crushed to care what I swallowed myself, let along bothering my
head about Falk’s ideas of gastronomy. I could expect from their study
no clue to his conduct in matters of business, which seemed to me
totally unrestrained by morality or even by the commonest sort of
decency. How insignificant and contemptible I must appear, for the
fellow to dare treat me like this--I reflected suddenly, writhing in
silent agony. And I consigned Falk and all his peculiarities to the
devil with so much mental fervour as to forget Schomberg’s existence,
till he grabbed my arm urgently. “Well, you may think and think till
every hair of your head falls off, captain; but you can’t explain it in
any other way.”

For the sake of peace and quietness I admitted hurriedly that I
couldn’t: persuaded that now he would leave off. But the only result was
to make his moist face shine with the pride of cunning. He removed his
hand for a moment to scare a black mass of flies off the sugar-basin and
caught hold of my arm again.

“To be sure. And in the same way everybody is aware he would like to get
married. Only he can’t. Let me quote you an instance. Well, two years
ago a Miss Vanlo, a very ladylike girl, came from home to keep house for
her brother, Fred, who had an engineering shop for small repairs by
the water side. Suddenly Falk takes to going up to their bungalow after
dinner, and sitting for hours in the verandah saying nothing. The poor
girl couldn’t tell for the life of her what to do with such a man, so
she would keep on playing the piano and singing to him evening after
evening till she was ready to drop. And it wasn’t as if she had been
a strong young woman either. She was thirty, and the climate had been
playing the deuce with her. Then--don’t you know--Fred had to sit up with
them for propriety, and during whole weeks on end never got a single
chance to get to bed before midnight. That was not pleasant for a tired
man--was it? And besides Fred had worries then because his shop didn’t
pay and he was dropping money fast. He just longed to get away from here
and try his luck somewhere else, but for the sake of his sister he hung
on and on till he ran himself into debt over his ears--I can tell you.
I, myself, could show a handful of his chits for meals and drinks in
my drawer. I could never find out tho’ where he found all the money at
last. Can’t be but he must have got something out of that brother of
his, a coal merchant in Port Said. Anyhow he paid everybody before he
left, but the girl nearly broke her heart. Disappointment, of course,
and at her age, don’t you know.... Mrs. Schomberg here was very
friendly with her, and she could tell you. Awful despair. Fainting
fits. It was a scandal. A notorious scandal. To that extent that old Mr.
Siegers--not your present charterer, but Mr. Siegers the father, the old
gentleman who retired from business on a fortune and got buried at sea
going home, _he_ had to interview Falk in his private office. He was a man
who could speak like a Dutch Uncle, and, besides, Messrs. Siegers had
been helping Falk with a good bit of money from the start. In fact you
may say they made him as far as that goes. It so happened that just at
the time he turned up here, their firm was chartering a lot of sailing
ships every year, and it suited their business that there should be good
towing facilities on the river. See?... Well--there’s always an
ear at the keyhole--isn’t there? In fact,” he lowered his tone
confidentially, “in this case a good friend of mine; a man you can see
here any evening; only they conversed rather low. Anyhow my friend’s
certain that Falk was trying to make all sorts of excuses, and old
Mr. Siegers was coughing a lot. And yet Falk wanted all the time to be
married too. Why! It’s notorious the man has been longing for years to
make a home for himself. Only he can’t face the expense. When it comes
to putting his hand in his pocket--it chokes him off. That’s the truth
and no other. I’ve always said so, and everybody agrees with me by this
time. What do you think of that--eh?”

He appealed confidently to my indignation, but having a mind to annoy
him I remarked, “that it seemed to me very pitiful--if true.”

He bounced in his chair as if I had run a pin into him. I don’t know
what he might have said, only at that moment we heard through the half
open door of the billiard-room the footsteps of two men entering from
the verandah, a murmur of two voices; at the sharp tapping of a coin on
a table Mrs. Schomberg half rose irresolutely. “Sit still,” he hissed at
her, and then, in an hospitable, jovial tone, contrasting amazingly with
the angry glance that had made his wife sink in her chair, he cried very
loud: “Tiffin still going on in here, gentlemen.”

There was no answer, but the voices dropped suddenly. The head Chinaman
went out. We heard the clink of ice in the glasses, pouring sounds, the
shuffling of feet, the scraping of chairs. Schomberg, after wondering in
a low mutter who the devil could be there at this time of the day, got
up napkin in hand to peep through the doorway cautiously. He retreated
rapidly on tip-toe, and whispering behind his hand informed me that
it was Falk, Falk himself who was in there, and, what’s more, he had
Captain Hermann with him.

The return of the tug from the outer Roads was unexpected but possible,
for Falk had taken away the Diana at half-past five, and it was now two
o’clock. Schomberg wished me to observe that neither of these men would
spend a dollar on a tiffin, which they must have wanted. But by the time
I was ready to leave the dining-room Falk had gone. I heard the last of
his big boots on the planks of the verandah. Hermann was sitting quite
alone in the large, wooden room with the two lifeless billiard tables
shrouded in striped covers, mopping his face diligently. He wore
his best go-ashore clothes, a stiff collar, black coat, large white
waistcoat, grey trousers. A white cotton sunshade with a cane handle
reposed between his legs, his side whiskers were neatly brushed, his
chin had been freshly shaved; and he only distantly resembled the
dishevelled and terrified man in a snuffy night shirt and ignoble old
trousers I had seen in the morning hanging on to the wheel of the Diana.

He gave a start at my entrance, and addressed me at once in some
confusion, but with genuine eagerness. He was anxious to make it clear
he had nothing to do with what he called the “tam pizness” of the
morning. It was most inconvenient. He had reckoned upon another day up
in town to settle his bills and sign certain papers. There were also
some few stores to come, and sundry pieces of “my ironwork,” as he
called it quaintly, landed for repairs, had been left behind. Now he
would have to hire a native boat to take all this out to the ship. It
would cost five or six dollars perhaps. He had had no warning from
Falk. Nothing.... He hit the table with his dumpy fist.... Der
verfluchte Kerl came in the morning like a “tam’ ropper,” making a great
noise, and took him away. His mate was not prepared, his ship was moored
fast--he protested it was shameful to come upon a man in that way.
Shameful! Yet such was the power Falk had on the river that when I
suggested in a chilling tone that he might have simply refused to have
his ship moved, Hermann was quite startled at the idea. I never realised
so well before that this is an age of steam. The exclusive possession
of a marine boiler had given Falk the whip-hand of us all. Hermann,
recovering, put it to me appealingly that I knew very well how unsafe it
was to contradict that fellow. At this I only smiled distantly.

“Der Kerl!” he cried. He was sorry he had not refused. He was indeed.
The damage! The damage! What for all that damage! There was no occasion
for damage. Did I know how much damage he had done? It gave me a certain
satisfaction to tell him that I had heard his old waggon of a ship crack
fore and aft as she went by. “You passed close enough to me,” I added
significantly.

He threw both his hands up to heaven at the recollection. One of them
grasped by the middle the white parasol, and he resembled curiously
a caricature of a shop-keeping citizen in one of his own German comic
papers. “Ach! That was dangerous,” he cried. I was amused. But directly
he added with an appearance of simplicity, “The side of your iron ship
would have been crushed in like--like this matchbox.”

“Would it?” I growled, much less amused now; but by the time I had
decided that this remark was not meant for a dig at me he had
worked himself into a high state of resentfulness against Falk. The
inconvenience, the damage, the expense! Gottferdam! Devil take the
fellow. Behind the bar Schomberg with a cigar in his teeth, pretended
to be writing with a pencil on a large sheet of paper; and as Hermann’s
excitement increased it made me comfortingly aware of my own calmness
and superiority. But it occurred to me while I listened to his
revilings, that after all the good man had come up in the tug. There
perhaps--since he must come to town--he had no option. But evidently he
had had a drink with Falk, either accepted or offered. How was that? So
I checked him by saying loftily that I hoped he would make Falk pay for
every penny of the damage.

“That’s it! That’s it! Go for him,” called out Schomberg from the bar,
flinging his pencil down and rubbing his hands.

We ignored his noise. But Hermann’s excitement suddenly went off
the boil as when you remove a saucepan from the fire. I urged on his
consideration that he had done now with Falk and Falk’s confounded tug.
He, Hermann, would not, perhaps, turn up again in this part of the world
for years to come, since he was going to sell the Diana at the end
of this very trip (“Go home passenger in a mail boat,” he murmured
mechanically). He was therefore safe from Falk’s malice. All he had to
do was to race off to his consignees and stop payment of the towage bill
before Falk had the time to get in and lift the money.

Nothing could have been less in the spirit of my advice than the
thoughtful way in which he set about to make his parasol stay propped
against the edge of the table.

While I watched his concentrated efforts with astonishment he threw at
me one or two perplexed, half-shy glances. Then he sat down. “That’s all
very well,” he said reflectively.

It cannot be doubted that the man had been thrown off his balance by
being hauled out of the harbour against his wish. His stolidity had been
profoundly stirred, else he would never have made up his mind to ask me
unexpectedly whether I had not remarked that Falk had been casting eyes
upon his niece. “No more than myself,” I answered with literal truth.
The girl was of the sort one necessarily casts eyes at in a sense. She
made no noise, but she filled most satisfactorily a good bit of space.

“But you, captain, are not the same kind of man,” observed Hermann.

I was not, I am happy to say, in a position to deny this. “What about
the lady?” I could not help asking. At this he gazed for a time into
my face, earnestly, and made as if to change the subject. I heard him
beginning to mutter something unexpected, about his children growing
old enough to require schooling. He would have to leave them ashore with
their grandmother when he took up that new command he expected to get in
Germany.

This constant harping on his domestic arrangements was funny. I suppose
it must have been like the prospect of a complete alteration in his
life. An epoch. He was going, too, to part with the Diana! He had served
in her for years. He had inherited her. From an uncle, if I remember
rightly. And the future loomed big before him, occupying his thought
exclusively with all its aspects as on the eve of a venturesome
enterprise. He sat there frowning and biting his lip, and suddenly he
began to fume and fret.

I discovered to my momentary amusement that he seemed to imagine I
could, should or ought, have caused Falk in some way to pronounce
himself. Such a hope was incomprehensible, but funny. Then the contact
with all this foolishness irritated me. I said crossly that I had seen
no symptoms, but if there were any--since he, Hermann, was so sure--then
it was still worse. What pleasure Falk found in humbugging people in
just that way I couldn’t say. It was, however, my solemn duty to warn
him. It had lately, I said, come to my knowledge that there was a man
(not a very long time ago either) who had been taken in just like this.

All this passed in undertones, and at this point Schomberg, exasperated
at our secrecy, went out of the room slamming the door with a crash
that positively lifted us in our chairs. This, or else what I had said,
huffed my Hermann, He supposed, with a contemptuous toss of his head
towards the door which trembled yet, that I had got hold of some of
that man’s silly tales. It looked, indeed, as though his mind had been
thoroughly poisoned against Schomberg. “His tales were--they were,” he
repeated, seeking for the word--“trash.” They were trash, he reiterated,
and moreover I was young yet...

This horrid aspersion (I regret I am no longer exposed to that sort of
insult) made me huffy too. I felt ready in my own mind to back up every
assertion of Schomberg’s and on any subject. In a moment, devil only
knows why, Hermann and I were looking at each other most inimically.
He caught up his hat without more ado and I gave myself the pleasure of
calling after him:

“Take my advice and make Falk pay for breaking up your ship. You aren’t
likely to get anything else out of him.”

When I got on board my ship later on, the old mate, who was very full of
the events of the morning, remarked:

“I saw the tug coming back from the outer Roads just before two P.M.”
 (He never by any chance used the words morning or afternoon. Always P.M.
or A.M., log-book style.) “Smart work that. Man’s always in a state of
hurry. He’s a regular chucker-out, ain’t he, sir? There’s a few pubs I
know of in the East-end of London that would be all the better for
one of his sort around the bar.” He chuckled at his joke. “A regular
chucker-out. Now he has fired out that Dutchman head over heels, I
suppose our turn’s coming to-morrow morning.”

We were all on deck at break of day (even the sick--poor devils--had
crawled out) ready to cast off in the twinkling of an eye. Nothing
came. Falk did not come. At last, when I began to think that probably
something had gone wrong in his engine-room, we perceived the tug going
by, full pelt, down the river, as if we hadn’t existed. For a moment I
entertained the wild notion that he was going to turn round in the next
reach. Afterwards I watched his smoke appear above the plain, now here,
now there, according to the windings of the river. It disappeared. Then
without a word I went down to breakfast. I just simply went down to
breakfast.

Not one of us uttered a sound till the mate, after imbibing--by means
of suction out of a saucer--his second cup of tea, exclaimed: “Where the
devil is the man gone to?”

“Courting!” I shouted, with such a fiendish laugh that the old chap
didn’t venture to open his lips any more.

I started to the office perfectly calm. Calm with excessive rage.
Evidently they knew all about it already, and they treated me to a
show of consternation. The manager, a soft-footed, immensely obese man,
breathing short, got up to meet me, while all round the room the young
clerks, bending over the papers on their desks, cast upward glances in
my direction. The fat man, without waiting for my complaint, wheezing
heavily and in a tone as if he himself were incredulous, conveyed to
me the news that Falk--Captain Falk--had declined--had absolutely
declined--to tow my ship--to have anything to do with my ship--this day
or any other day. Never!

I did my best to preserve a cool appearance, but, all the same, I must
have shown how much taken aback I was. We were talking in the middle
of the room. Suddenly behind my back some ass blew his nose with great
force, and at the same time another quill-driver jumped up and went out
on the landing hastily. It occurred to me I was cutting a foolish figure
there. I demanded angrily to see the principal in his private room.

The skin of Mr. Siegers’ head showed dead white between the iron grey
streaks of hair lying plastered cross-wise from ear to ear over the top
of his skull in the manner of a bandage. His narrow sunken face was of
an uniform and permanent terra-cotta colour, like a piece of pottery.
He was sickly, thin, and short, with wrists like a boy of ten. But from
that debile body there issued a bullying voice, tremendously loud, harsh
and resonant, as if produced by some powerful mechanical contrivance
in the nature of a fog-horn. I do not know what he did with it in
the private life of his home, but in the larger sphere of business it
presented the advantage of overcoming arguments without the slightest
mental effort, by the mere volume of sound. We had had several
passages of arms. It took me all I knew to guard the interests of my
owners--whom, nota bene, I had never seen--while Siegers (who had
made their acquaintance some years before, during a business tour in
Australia) pretended to the knowledge of their innermost minds, and, in
the character of “our very good friends,” threw them perpetually at my
head.

He looked at me with a jaundiced eye (there was no love lost between
us), and declared at once that it was strange, very strange. His
pronunciation of English was so extravagant that I can’t even attempt to
reproduce it. For instance, he said “Fferie strantch.” Combined with
the bellowing intonation it made the language of one’s childhood sound
weirdly startling, and even if considered purely as a kind of unmeaning
noise it filled you with astonishment at first. “They had,” he
continued, “been acquainted with Captain Falk for very many years, and
never had any reason....”

“That’s why I come to you, of course,” I interrupted. “I’ve the right
to know the meaning of this infernal nonsense.” In the half light of the
room, which was greenish, because of the tree-tops screening the
window, I saw him writhe his meagre shoulders. It came into my head, as
disconnected ideas will come at all sorts of times into one’s head, that
this, most likely, was the very room where, if the tale were true, Falk
had been lectured by Mr. Siegers, the father. Mr. Siegers’ (the son’s)
overwhelming voice, in brassy blasts, as though he had been trying to
articulate his words through a trombone, was expressing his great regret
at a conduct characterised by a very marked want of discretion... As I
lived I was being lectured too! His deafening gibberish was difficult to
follow, but it was _my_ conduct--mine!--that... Damn! I wasn’t going to
stand this.

“What on earth are you driving at?” I asked in a passion. I put my hat
on my head (he never offered a seat to anybody), and as he seemed for
the moment struck dumb by my irreverence, I turned my back on him and
marched out. His vocal arrangements blared after me a few threats of
coming down on the ship for the demurrage of the lighters, and all the
other expenses consequent upon the delays arising from my frivolity.

Once outside in the sunshine my head swam. It was no longer a question
of mere delay. I perceived myself involved in hopeless and humiliating
absurdities that were leading me to something very like a disaster. “Let
us be calm,” I muttered to myself, and ran into the shade of a
leprous wall. From that short side-street I could see the broad main
thoroughfare ruinous and gay, running away, away between stretches of
decaying masonry, bamboo fences, ranges of arcades of brick and plaster,
hovels of lath and mud, lofty temple gates of carved timber, huts of
rotten mats--an immensely wide thoroughfare, loosely packed as far as
the eye could reach with a barefooted and brown multitude paddling ankle
deep in the dust. For a moment I felt myself about to go out of my mind
with worry and desperation.

Some allowance must be made for the feelings of a young man new to
responsibility. I thought of my crew. Half of them were ill, and I
really began to think that some of them would end by dying on board if
I couldn’t get them out to sea soon. Obviously I should have to take my
ship down the river, either working under canvas or dredging with the
anchor down; operations which, in common with many modern sailors,
I only knew theoretically. And I almost shrank from undertaking them
shorthanded and without local knowledge of the river bed, which is so
necessary for the confident handling of the ship. There were no pilots,
no beacons, no buoys of any sort; but there was a very devil of a
current for anybody to see, no end of shoal places, and at least two
obviously awkward turns of the channel between me and the sea. But how
dangerous these turns were I would not tell. I didn’t even know what
my ship was capable of! I had never handled her in my life. A
misunderstanding between a man and his ship in a difficult river with no
room to make it up, is bound to end in trouble for the man. On the other
hand, it must be owned I had not much reason to count upon a general run
of good luck. And suppose I had the misfortune to pile her up high and
dry on some beastly shoal? That would have been the final undoing of
that voyage. It was plain that if Falk refused to tow me out he would
also refuse to pull me off. This meant--what? A day lost at the
very best; but more likely a whole fortnight of frizzling on some
pestilential mud-flat, of desperate work, of discharging cargo; more than
likely it meant borrowing money at an exorbitant rate of interest--from
the Siegers’ gang too at that. They were a power in the port. And that
elderly seaman of mine, Gambril, had looked pretty ghastly when I
went forward to dose him with quinine that morning. _He_ would certainly
die--not to speak of two or three others that seemed nearly as bad,
and of the rest of them just ready to catch any tropical disease going.
Horror, ruin and everlasting remorse. And no help. None. I had fallen
amongst a lot of unfriendly lunatics!

At any rate, if I must take my ship down myself it was my duty to
procure if possible some local knowledge. But that was not easy. The
only person I could think of for that service was a certain Johnson,
formerly captain of a country ship, but now spliced to a country wife
and gone utterly to the bad. I had only heard of him in the vaguest way,
as living concealed in the thick of two hundred thousand natives, and
only emerging into the light of day for the purpose of hunting up some
brandy. I had a notion that if I could lay my hands on him I would sober
him on board my ship and use him for a pilot. Better than nothing. Once
a sailor always a sailor--and he had known the river for years. But in
our Consulate (where I arrived dripping after a sharp walk) they could
tell me nothing. The excellent young men on the staff, though willing to
help me, belonged to a sphere of the white colony for which that sort of
Johnson does not exist. Their suggestion was that I should hunt the
man up myself with the help of the Consulate’s constable--an
ex-sergeant-major of a regiment of Hussars.

This man, whose usual duty apparently consisted in sitting behind a
little table in an outer room of Consular offices, when ordered to
assist me in my search for Johnson displayed lots of energy and a
marvellous amount of local knowledge of a sort. But he did not conceal
an immense and sceptical contempt for the whole business. We explored
together on that afternoon an infinity of infamous grog shops, gambling
dens, opium dens. We walked up narrow lanes where our gharry--a tiny
box of a thing on wheels, attached to a jibbing Burmah pony--could by
no means have passed. The constable seemed to be on terms of scornful
intimacy with Maltese, with Eurasians, with Chinamen, with Klings, and
with the sweepers attached to a temple, with whom he talked at the gate.
We interviewed also through a grating in a mud wall closing a blind
alley an immensely corpulent Italian, who, the ex-sergeant-major
remarked to me perfunctorily, had “killed another man last year.”
 Thereupon he addressed him as “Antonio” and “Old Buck,” though that
bloated carcase, apparently more than half filling the sort of cell
wherein it sat, recalled rather a fat pig in a stye. Familiar and never
unbending, the sergeant chucked--absolutely chucked--under the chin
a horribly wrinkled and shrivelled old hag propped on a stick, who had
volunteered some sort of information: and with the same stolid face he
kept up an animated conversation with the groups of swathed brown women,
who sat smoking cheroots on the door-steps of a long range of clay
hovels. We got out of the gharry and clambered into dwellings airy like
packing crates, or descended into places sinister like cellars. We got
in, we drove on, we got out again for the sole purpose, as it seemed, of
looking behind a heap of rubble. The sun declined; my companion was curt
and sardonic in his answers, but it appears we were just missing Johnson
all along. At last our conveyance stopped once more with a jerk, and the
driver jumping down opened the door.

A black mudhole blocked the lane. A mound of garbage crowned with the
dead body of a dog arrested us not. An empty Australian beef tin bounded
cheerily before the toe of my boot. Suddenly we clambered through a gap
in a prickly fence....

It was a very clean native compound: and the big native woman, with bare
brown legs as thick as bedposts, pursuing on all fours a silver dollar
that came rolling out from somewhere, was Mrs. Johnson herself. “Your
man’s at home,” said the ex-sergeant, and stepped aside in complete
and marked indifference to anything that might follow. Johnson--at
home--stood with his back to a native house built on posts and with its
walls made of mats. In his left hand he held a banana. Out of the right
he dealt another dollar into space. The woman captured this one on the
wing, and there and then plumped down on the ground to look at us with
greater comfort.

My man was sallow of face, grizzled, unshaven, muddy on elbows and
back; where the seams of his serge coat yawned you could see his white
nakedness. The vestiges of a paper collar encircled his neck. He looked
at us with a grave, swaying surprise. “Where do you come from?” he
asked. My heart sank. How could I have been stupid enough to waste
energy and time for this?

But having already gone so far I approached a little nearer and declared
the purpose of my visit. He would have to come at once with me, sleep on
board my ship, and to-morrow, with the first of the ebb, he would give
me his assistance in getting my ship down to the sea, without steam. A
six-hundred-ton barque, drawing nine feet aft. I proposed to give
him eighteen dollars for his local knowledge; and all the time I was
speaking he kept on considering attentively the various aspects of the
banana, holding first one side up to his eye, then the other.

“You’ve forgotten to apologise,” he said at last with extreme precision.
“Not being a gentleman yourself, you don’t know apparently when you
intrude upon a gentleman. I am one. I wish you to understand that when I
am in funds I don’t work, and now...”

I would have pronounced him perfectly sober hadn’t he paused in great
concern to try and brush a hole off the knee of his trousers.

“I have money--and friends. Every gentleman has. Perhaps you would like
to know my friend? His name is Falk. You could borrow some money. Try to
remember. F-A-L-K, Falk.” Abruptly his tone changed. “A noble heart,” he
said muzzily.

“Has Falk been giving you some money?” I asked, appalled by the detailed
finish of the dark plot.

“Lent me, my good man, not given me. Lent,” he corrected suavely.
“Met me taking the air last evening, and being as usual anxious to
oblige--Hadn’t you better go to the devil out of my compound?”

And upon this, without other warning, he let fly with the banana which
missed my head, and took the constable just under the left eye. He
rushed at the miserable Johnson, stammering with fury. They fell....
But why dwell on the wretchedness, the breathlessness, the degradation,
the senselessness, the weariness, the ridicule and humiliation
and--and--the perspiration, of these moments? I dragged the ex-hussar
off. He was like a wild beast. It seems he had been greatly annoyed
at losing his free afternoon on my account. The garden of his bungalow
required his personal attention, and at the slight blow of the banana
the brute in him had broken loose. We left Johnson on his back, still
black in the face, but beginning to kick feebly. Meantime, the big woman
had remained sitting on the ground, apparently paralysed with extreme
terror.

For half an hour we jolted inside our rolling box, side by side, in
profound silence. The ex-sergeant was busy staunching the blood of a
long scratch on his cheek. “I hope you’re satisfied,” he said suddenly.
“That’s what comes of all that tomfool business. If you hadn’t
quarrelled with that tugboat skipper over some girl or other, all this
wouldn’t have happened.”

“You heard _that_ story?” I said.

“Of course I heard. And I shouldn’t wonder if the Consul-General himself
doesn’t come to hear of it. How am I to go before him to-morrow with
that thing on my cheek--I want to know. Its _you_ who ought to have got
this!”

After that, till the gharry stopped and he jumped out without
leave-taking, he swore to himself steadily, horribly; muttering great,
purposeful, trooper oaths, to which the worst a sailor can do is like
the prattle of a child. For my part I had just the strength to crawl
into Schomberg’s coffee-room, where I wrote at a little table a note to
the mate instructing him to get everything ready for dropping down the
river next day. I couldn’t face my ship. Well! she had a clever sort of
skipper and no mistake--poor thing! What a horrid mess! I took my head
between my hands. At times the obviousness of my innocence would reduce
me to despair. What had I done? If I had done something to bring about
the situation I should at least have learned not to do it again. But I
felt guiltless to the point of imbecility. The room was empty yet;
only Schomberg prowled round me goggle-eyed and with a sort of awed
respectful curiosity. No doubt he had set the story going himself; but
he was a good-hearted chap, and I am really persuaded he participated in
all my troubles. He did what he could for me. He ranged aside the heavy
match-stand, set a chair straight, pushed a spittoon slightly with
his foot--as you show small attentions to a friend under a great
sorrow--sighed, and at last, unable to hold his tongue:

“Well! I warned you, captain. That’s what comes of running your head
against Mr. Falk. Man’ll stick at nothing.”

I sat without stirring, and after surveying me with a sort of
commiseration in his eyes he burst out in a hoarse whisper: “But for
a fine lump of a girl, she’s a fine lump of a girl.” He made a loud
smacking noise with his thick lips. “The finest lump of a girl that I
ever...” he was going on with great unction, but for some reason or
other broke off. I fancied myself throwing something at his head. “I
don’t blame you, captain. Hang me if I do,” he said with a patronising
air.

“Thank you,” I said resignedly. It was no use fighting against this
false fate. I don’t know even if I was sure myself where the truth of
the matter began. The conviction that it would end disastrously had been
driven into me by all the successive shocks my sense of security had
received. I began to ascribe an extraordinary potency to agents in
themselves powerless. It was as if Schomberg’s baseless gossip had the
power to bring about the thing itself or the abstract enmity of Falk
could put my ship ashore.

I have already explained how fatal this last would have been. For my
further action, my youth, my inexperience, my very real concern for the
health of my crew must be my excuse. The action itself, when it came,
was purely impulsive. It was set in movement quite undiplomatically and
simply by Falk’s appearance in the doorway.

The room was full by then and buzzing with voices. I had been looked
at with curiosity by every one, but how am I to describe the sensation
produced by the appearance of Falk himself blocking the doorway? The
tension of expectation could be measured by the profundity of the
silence that fell upon the very click of the billiard balls. As to
Schomberg, he looked extremely frightened; he hated mortally any sort
of row (fracas he called it) in his establishment. Fracas was bad
for business, he affirmed; but, in truth, this specimen of portly,
middle-aged manhood was of a timid disposition. I don’t know what,
considering my presence in the place, they all hoped would come of it. A
sort of stag fight, perhaps. Or they may have supposed Falk had come in
only to annihilate me completely. As a matter of fact, Falk had come in
because Hermann had asked him to inquire after the precious white cotton
parasol which, in the worry and excitement of the previous day, he had
forgotten at the table where we had held our little discussion.

It was this that gave me my opportunity. I don’t think I would have gone
to seek Falk out. No. I don’t think so. There are limits. But there was
an opportunity and I seized it--I have already tried to explain why. Now
I will merely state that, in my opinion, to get his sickly crew into
the sea air and secure a quick despatch for his ship a skipper would be
justified in going to any length, short of absolute crime. He should
put his pride in his pocket; he may accept confidences; explain his
innocence as if it were a sin; he may take advantage of misconceptions,
of desires and of weaknesses; he ought to conceal his horror and other
emotions, and, if the fate of a human being, and that human being
a magnificent young girl, is strangely involved--why, he should
contemplate that fate (whatever it might seem to be) without turning a
hair. And all these things I have done; the explaining, the listening,
the pretending--even to the discretion--and nobody, not even Hermann’s
niece, I believe, need throw stones at me now. Schomberg at all events
needn’t, since from first to last, I am happy to say, there was not the
slightest “fracas.”

Overcoming a nervous contraction of the windpipe, I had managed to
exclaim “Captain Falk!” His start of surprise was perfectly genuine, but
afterwards he neither smiled nor scowled. He simply waited. Then, when
I had said, “I must have a talk with you,” and had pointed to a chair
at my table, he moved up to me, though he didn’t sit down. Schomberg,
however, with a long tumbler in his hand, was making towards us
prudently, and I discovered then the only sign of weakness in Falk. He
had for Schomberg a repulsion resembling that sort of physical fear
some people experience at the sight of a toad. Perhaps to a man so
essentially and silently concentrated upon himself (though he could talk
well enough, as I was to find out presently) the other’s irrepressible
loquacity, embracing every human being within range of the tongue, might
have appeared unnatural, disgusting, and monstrous. He suddenly gave
signs of restiveness--positively like a horse about to rear, and,
muttering hurriedly as if in great pain, “No. I can’t stand that
fellow,” seemed ready to bolt. This weakness of his gave me the
advantage at the very start. “Verandah,” I suggested, as if rendering
him a service, and walked him out by the arm. We stumbled over a few
chairs; we had the feeling of open space before us, and felt the fresh
breath of the river--fresh, but tainted. The Chinese theatres across the
water made, in the sparsely twinkling masses of gloom an Eastern town
presents at night, blazing centres of light, and of a distant and
howling uproar. I felt him become suddenly tractable again like an
animal, like a good-tempered horse when the object that scares him is
removed. Yes. I felt in the darkness there how tractable he was, without
my conviction of his inflexibility--tenacity, rather, perhaps--being in
the least weakened. His very arm abandoning itself to my grasp was as
hard as marble--like a limb of iron. But I heard a tumultuous scuffling
of boot-soles within. The unspeakable idiots inside were crowding to the
windows, climbing over each other’s backs behind the blinds, billiard
cues and all. Somebody broke a window pane, and with the sound of
falling glass, so suggestive of riot and devastation, Schomberg reeled
out after us in a state of funk which had prevented his parting with his
brandy and soda. He must have trembled like an aspen leaf. The piece of
ice in the long tumbler he held in his hand tinkled with an effect
of chattering teeth. “I beg you, gentlemen,” he expostulated thickly.
“Come! Really, now, I must insist...”

How proud I am of my presence of mind! “Hallo,” I said instantly in a
loud and naive tone, “somebody’s breaking your windows, Schomberg. Would
you please tell one of your boys to bring out here a pack of cards and a
couple of lights? And two long drinks. Will you?”

To receive an order soothed him at once. It was business. “Certainly,”
 he said in an immensely relieved tone. The night was rainy, with
wandering gusts of wind, and while we waited for the candles Falk said,
as if to justify his panic, “I don’t interfere in anybody’s business.
I don’t give any occasion for talk. I am a respectable man. But this
fellow is always making out something wrong, and can never rest till he
gets somebody to believe him.”

This was the first of my knowledge of Falk. This desire of
respectability, of being like everybody else, was the only recognition
he vouchsafed to the organisation of mankind. For the rest he might have
been the member of a herd, not of a society. Self-preservation was his
only concern. Not selfishness, but mere self-preservation. Selfishness
presupposes consciousness, choice, the presence of other men; but his
instinct acted as though he were the last of mankind nursing that law
like the only spark of a sacred fire. I don’t mean to say that living
naked in a cavern would have satisfied him. Obviously he was
the creature of the conditions to which he was born. No doubt
self-preservation meant also the preservation of these conditions. But
essentially it meant something much more simple, natural, and powerful.
How shall I express it? It meant the preservation of the five senses
of his body--let us say--taking it in its narrowest as well as in its
widest meaning. I think you will admit before long the justice of this
judgment. However, as we stood there together in the dark verandah I had
judged nothing as yet--and I had no desire to judge--which is an idle
practice anyhow. The light was long in coming.

“Of course,” I said in a tone of mutual understanding, “it isn’t exactly
a game of cards I want with you.”

I saw him draw his hands down his face--the vague stir of the passionate
and meaningless gesture; but he waited in silent patience. It was
only when the lights had been brought out that he opened his lips. I
understood his mumble to mean that “he didn’t know any game.”

“Like this Schomberg and all the other fools will have to keep off,”
 I said tearing open the pack. “Have you heard that we are universally
supposed to be quarrelling about a girl? You know who--of course. I am
really ashamed to ask, but is it possible that you do me the honour to
think me dangerous?”

As I said these words I felt how absurd it was and also I felt
flattered--for, really, what else could it be? His answer, spoken in
his usual dispassionate undertone, made it clear that it was so, but
not precisely as flattering as I supposed. He thought me dangerous with
Hermann, more than with the girl herself; but, as to quarrelling, I
saw at once how inappropriate the word was. We had no quarrel. Natural
forces are not quarrelsome. You can’t quarrel with the wind that
inconveniences and humiliates you by blowing off your hat in a street
full of people. He had no quarrel with me. Neither would a boulder,
falling on my head, have had. He fell upon me in accordance with the law
by which he was moved--not of gravitation, like a detached stone, but
of self-preservation. Of course this is giving it a rather wide
interpretation. Strictly speaking, he had existed and could have existed
without being married. Yet he told me that he had found it more and
more difficult to live alone. Yes. He told me this in his low, careless
voice, to such a pitch of confidence had we arrived at the end of half
an hour.

It took me just about that time to convince him that I had never
dreamed of marrying Hermann’s niece. Could any necessity have been more
extravagant? And the difficulty was the greater because he was so hard
hit that he couldn’t imagine anybody being able to remain in a state of
indifference. Any man with eyes in his head, he seemed to think, could
not help coveting so much bodily magnificence. This profound belief was
conveyed by the manner he listened sitting sideways to the table and
playing absently with a few cards I had dealt to him at random. And the
more I saw into him the more I saw of him. The wind swayed the lights
so that his sunburnt face, whiskered to the eyes, seemed to successively
flicker crimson at me and to go out. I saw the extraordinary breadth
of the high cheek-bones, the perpendicular style of the features,
the massive forehead, steep like a cliff, denuded at the top, largely
uncovered at the temples. The fact is I had never before seen him
without his hat; but now, as if my fervour had made him hot, he had
taken it off and laid it gently on the floor. Something peculiar in
the shape and setting of his yellow eyes gave them the provoking
silent intensity which characterised his glance. But the face was thin,
furrowed, worn; I discovered that through the bush of his hair, as
you may detect the gnarled shape of a tree trunk lost in a dense
undergrowth. These overgrown cheeks were sunken. It was an anchorite’s
bony head fitted with a Capuchin’s beard and adjusted to a herculean
body. I don’t mean athletic. Hercules, I take it, was not an athlete. He
was a strong man, susceptible to female charms, and not afraid of dirt.
And thus with Falk, who was a strong man. He was extremely strong, just
as the girl (since I must think of them together) was magnificently
attractive by the masterful power of flesh and blood, expressed in
shape, in size, in attitude--that is by a straight appeal to the senses.
His mind meantime, preoccupied with respectability, quailed before
Schomberg’s tongue and seemed absolutely impervious to my protestations;
and I went so far as to protest that I would just as soon think of
marrying my mother’s (dear old lady!) faithful female cook as Hermann’s
niece. Sooner, I protested, in my desperation, much sooner; but it did
not appear that he saw anything outrageous in the proposition, and in
his sceptical immobility he seemed to nurse the argument that at all
events the cook was very, very far away. It must be said that, just
before, I had gone wrong by appealing to the evidence of my manner
whenever I called on board the Diana. I had never attempted to approach
the girl, or to speak to her, or even to look at her in any marked way.
Nothing could be clearer. But, as his own idea of--let us say--courting,
seemed to consist precisely in sitting silently for hours in the
vicinity of the beloved object, that line of argument inspired him with
distrust. Staring down his extended legs he let out a grunt--as much as
to say, “That’s all very fine, but you can’t throw dust in _my_ eyes.”

At last I was exasperated into saying, “Why don’t you put the matter at
rest by talking to Hermann?” and I added sneeringly: “You don’t expect
me perhaps to speak for you?”

To this he said, very loud for him, “Would you?”

And for the first time he lifted his head to look at me with wonder
and incredulity. He lifted his head so sharply that there could be
no mistake. I had touched a spring. I saw the whole extent of my
opportunity, and could hardly believe in it.

“Why. Speak to... Well, of course,” I proceeded very slowly, watching
him with great attention, for, on my word, I feared a joke. “Not,
perhaps, to the young lady herself. I can’t speak German, you know.
But...”

He interrupted me with the earnest assurance that Hermann had the
highest opinion of me; and at once I felt the need for the greatest
possible diplomacy at this juncture. So I demurred just enough to draw
him on. Falk sat up, but except for a very noticeable enlargement of the
pupils, till the irises of his eyes were reduced to two narrow yellow
rings, his face, I should judge, was incapable of expressing excitement.
“Oh, yes! Hermann did have the greatest...”

“Take up your cards. Here’s Schomberg peeping at us through the blind!”
 I said.

We went through the motions of what might have been a game of e’carte’.
Presently the intolerable scandalmonger withdrew, probably to inform the
people in the billiard-room that we two were gambling on the verandah
like mad.

We were not gambling, but it was a game; a game in which I felt I held
the winning cards. The stake, roughly speaking, was the success of the
voyage--for me; and he, I apprehended, had nothing to lose. Our intimacy
matured rapidly, and before many words had been exchanged I perceived
that the excellent Hermann had been making use of me. That simple and
astute Teuton had been, it seems, holding me up to Falk in the light of
a rival. I was young enough to be shocked at so much duplicity. “Did he
tell you that in so many words?” I asked with indignation.

Hermann had not. He had given hints only; and of course it had not taken
very much to alarm Falk; but, instead of declaring himself, he had taken
steps to remove the family from under my influence. He was perfectly
straightforward about it--as straightforward as a tile falling on your
head. There was no duplicity in that man; and when I congratulated
him on the perfection of his arrangements--even to the bribing of the
wretched Johnson against me--he had a genuine movement of protest. Never
bribed. He knew the man wouldn’t work as long as he had a few cents in
his pocket to get drunk on, and, naturally (he said-”_naturally_”) he
let him have a dollar or two. He was himself a sailor, he said, and
anticipated the view another sailor, like myself, was bound to take.
On the other hand, he was sure that I should have to come to grief. He
hadn’t been knocking about for the last seven years up and down that
river for nothing. It would have been no disgrace to me--but he asserted
confidently I would have had my ship very awkwardly ashore at a spot two
miles below the Great Pagoda....

And with all that he had no ill-will. That was evident. This was a
crisis in which his only object had been to gain time--I fancy. And
presently he mentioned that he had written for some jewellery, real good
jewellery--had written to Hong-Kong for it. It would arrive in a day or
two.

“Well, then,” I said cheerily, “everything is all right. All you’ve got
to do is to present it to the lady together with your heart, and live
happy ever after.”

Upon the whole he seemed to accept that view as far as the girl was
concerned, but his eyelids drooped. There was still something in the
way. For one thing Hermann disliked him so much. As to me, on the
contrary, it seemed as though he could not praise me enough. Mrs.
Hermann too. He didn’t know why they disliked him so. It made everything
most difficult.

I listened impassive, feeling more and more diplomatic. His speech was
not transparently clear. He was one of those men who seem to live, feel,
suffer in a sort of mental twilight. But as to being fascinated by the
girl and possessed by the desire of home life with her--it was as clear
as daylight. So much being at stake, he was afraid of putting it to
the hazard of declaration. Besides, there was something else. And with
Hermann being so set against him...

“I see,” I said thoughtfully, while my heart beat fast with the
excitement of my diplomacy. “I don’t mind sounding Hermann. In fact, to
show you how mistaken you were, I am ready to do all I can for you in
that way.”

A light sigh escaped him. He drew his hands down his face, and it
emerged, bony, unchanged of expression, as if all the tissues had
been ossified. All the passion was in those big brown hands. He was
satisfied. Then there was that other matter. If there were anybody on
earth it was I who could persuade Hermann to take a reasonable view! I
had a knowledge of the world and lots of experience. Hermann admitted
this himself. And then I was a sailor too. Falk thought that a sailor
would be able to understand certain things best....

He talked as if the Hermanns had been living all their life in a rural
hamlet, and I alone had been capable, with my practice in life, of
a large and indulgent view of certain occurrences. That was what my
diplomacy was leading me to. I began suddenly to dislike it.

“I say, Falk,” I asked quite brusquely, “you haven’t already a wife put
away somewhere?”

The pain and disgust of his denial were very striking. Couldn’t I
understand that he was as respectable as any white man hereabouts;
earning his living honestly. He was suffering from my suspicion, and the
low undertone of his voice made his protestations sound very pathetic.
For a moment he shamed me, but, my diplomacy notwithstanding, I seemed
to develop a conscience, as if in very truth it were in my power to
decide the success of this matrimonial enterprise. By pretending hard
enough we come to believe anything--anything to our advantage. And I had
been pretending very hard, because I meant yet to be towed safely down
the river. But through conscience or stupidity, I couldn’t help alluding
to the Vanlo affair. “You acted rather badly there. Didn’t you?” was
what I ventured actually to say--for the logic of our conduct is always
at the mercy of obscure and unforeseen impulses.

His dilated pupils swerved from my face, glancing at the window with
a sort of scared fury. We heard behind the blinds the continuous
and sudden clicking of ivory, a jovial murmur of many voices, and
Schomberg’s deep manly laugh.

“That confounded old woman of a hotel-keeper then would never, never let
it rest!” Falk exclaimed. “Well, yes! It had happened two years ago.”
 When it came to the point he owned he couldn’t make up his mind to trust
Fred Vanlo--no sailor, a bit of a fool too. He could not trust him,
but, to stop his row, he had lent him enough money to pay all his debts
before he left. I was greatly surprised to hear this. Then Falk could
not be such a miser after all. So much the better for the girl. For a
time he sat silent; then he picked up a card, and while looking at it he
said:

“You need not think of anything bad. It was an accident. I’ve been
unfortunate once.”

“Then in heaven’s name say nothing about it.”

As soon as these words were out of my mouth I fancied I had said
something immoral. He shook his head negatively. It had to be told.
He considered it proper that the relations of the lady should know. No
doubt--I thought to myself--had Miss Vanlo not been thirty and damaged by
the climate he would have found it possible to entrust Fred Vanlo with
this confidence. And then the figure of Hermann’s niece appeared before
my mind’s eye, with the wealth of her opulent form, her rich youth, her
lavish strength. With that powerful and immaculate vitality, her girlish
form must have shouted aloud of life to that man, whereas poor Miss
Vanlo could only sing sentimental songs to the strumming of a piano.

“And that Hermann hates me, I know it!” he cried in his undertone, with
a sudden recrudescence of anxiety. “I must tell them. It is proper that
they should know. You would say so yourself.”

He then murmured an utterly mysterious allusion to the necessity for
peculiar domestic arrangements. Though my curiosity was excited I did
not want to hear any of his confidences. I feared he might give me a
piece of information that would make my assumed role of match-maker
odious--however unreal it was. I was aware that he could have the girl
for the asking; and keeping down a desire to laugh in his face, I
expressed a confident belief in my ability to argue away Hermann’s
dislike for him. “I am sure I can make it all right,” I said. He looked
very pleased.

And when we rose not a word had been said about towage! Not a word! The
game was won and the honour was safe. Oh! blessed white cotton umbrella!
We shook hands, and I was holding myself with difficulty from breaking
into a step dance of joy when he came back, striding all the length of
the verandah, and said doubtfully:

“I say, captain, I have your word? You--you--won’t turn round?”

Heavens! The fright he gave me. Behind his tone of doubt there was
something desperate and menacing. The infatuated ass. But I was equal to
the situation.

“My dear Falk,” I said, beginning to lie with a glibness and effrontery
that amazed me even at the time--“confidence for confidence.” (He had
made no confidences.) “I will tell you that I am already engaged to an
extremely charming girl at home, and so you understand....”

He caught my hand and wrung it in a crushing grip.

“Pardon me. I feel it every day more difficult to live alone...”

“On rice and fish,” I interrupted smartly, giggling with the sheer
nervousness of a danger escaped.

He dropped my hand as if it had become suddenly red hot. A moment of
profound silence ensued, as though something extraordinary had happened.

“I promise you to obtain Hermann’s consent,” I faltered out at last, and
it seemed to me that he could not help seeing through that humbugging
promise. “If there’s anything else to get over I shall endeavour
to stand by you,” I conceded further, feeling somehow defeated and
over-borne; “but you must do your best yourself.”

“I have been unfortunate once,” he muttered unemotionally, and turning
his back on me he went away, thumping slowly the plank floor as if his
feet had been shod with iron.

Next morning, however, he was lively enough as man-boat, a combination
of splashing and shouting; of the insolent commotion below with the
steady overbearing glare of the silent head-piece above. He turned us
out most unnecessarily at an ungodly hour, but it was nearly eleven
in the morning before he brought me up a cable’s length from Hermann’s
ship. And he did it very badly too, in a hurry, and nearly contriving to
miss altogether the patch of good holding ground, because, forsooth,
he had caught sight of Hermann’s niece on the poop. And so did I; and
probably as soon as he had seen her himself. I saw the modest, sleek
glory of the tawny head, and the full, grey shape of the girlish print
frock she filled so perfectly, so satisfactorily, with the seduction of
unfaltering curves--a very nymph of Diana the Huntress. And Diana the
ship sat, high-walled and as solid as an institution, on the smooth
level of the water, the most uninspiring and respectable craft upon the
seas, useful and ugly, devoted to the support of domestic virtues like
any grocer’s shop on shore. At once Falk steamed away; for there was
some work for him to do. He would return in the evening.

He ranged close by us, passing out dead slow, without a hail. The beat
of the paddle-wheels reverberating amongst the stony islets, as if from
the ruined walls of a vast arena, filled the anchorage confusedly with
the clapping sounds of a mighty and leisurely applause. Abreast of
Hermann’s ship he stopped the engines; and a profound silence reigned
over the rocks, the shore and the sea, for the time it took him to raise
his hat aloft before the nymph of the grey print frock. I had snatched
up my binoculars, and I can answer for it she didn’t stir a limb,
standing by the rail shapely and erect, with one of her hands grasping a
rope at the height of her head, while the way of the tug carried slowly
past her the lingering and profound homage of the man. There was for me
an enormous significance in the scene, the sense of having witnessed
a solemn declaration. The die was cast. After such a manifestation he
couldn’t back out. And I reflected that it was nothing whatever to me
now. With a rush of black smoke belching suddenly out of the funnel, and
a mad swirl of paddle-wheels provoking a burst of weird and precipitated
clapping, the tug shot out of the desolate arena. The rocky islets lay
on the sea like the heaps of a cyclopean ruin on a plain; the centipedes
and scorpions lurked under the stones; there was not a single blade
of grass in sight anywhere, not a single lizard sunning himself on a
boulder by the shore. When I looked again at Hermann’s ship the girl
had disappeared. I could not detect the smallest dot of a bird on the
immense sky, and the flatness of the land continued the flatness of the
sea to the naked line of the horizon.

This is the setting now inseparably connected with my knowledge of
Falk’s misfortune. My diplomacy had brought me there, and now I had only
to wait the time for taking up the role of an ambassador. My diplomacy
was a success; my ship was safe; old Gambril would probably live; a
feeble sound of a tapping hammer came intermittently from the Diana.
During the afternoon I looked at times at the old homely ship, the
faithful nurse of Hermann’s progeny, or yawned towards the distant
temple of Buddha, like a lonely hillock on the plain, where shaven
priests cherish the thoughts of that Annihilation which is the worthy
reward of us all. Unfortunate! He had been unfortunate once. Well, that
was not so bad as life goes. And what the devil could be the nature
of that misfortune? I remembered that I had known a man before who had
declared himself to have fallen, years ago, a victim to misfortune; but
this misfortune, whose effects appeared permanent (he looked desperately
hard up) when considered dispassionately, seemed indistinguishable from
a breach of trust. Could it be something of that nature? Apart, however,
from the utter improbability that he would offer to talk of it even to
his future uncle-in-law, I had a strange feeling that Falk’s physique
unfitted him for that sort of delinquency. As the person of Hermann’s
niece exhaled the profound physical charm of feminine form, so her
adorer’s big frame embodied to my senses the hard, straight masculinity
that would conceivably kill but would not condescend to cheat. The thing
was obvious. I might just as well have suspected the girl of a curvature
of the spine. And I perceived that the sun was about to set.

The smoke of Falk’s tug hove in sight, far away at the mouth of the
river. It was time for me to assume the character of an ambassador, and
the negotiation would not be difficult except in the matter of keeping
my countenance. It was all too extravagantly nonsensical, and I
conceived that it would be best to compose for myself a grave demeanour.
I practised this in my boat as I went along, but the bashfulness that
came secretly upon me the moment I stepped on the deck of the Diana is
inexplicable. As soon as we had exchanged greetings Hermann asked me
eagerly if I knew whether Falk had found his white parasol.

“He’s going to bring it to you himself directly,” I said with great
solemnity. “Meantime I am charged with an important message for which he
begs your favourable consideration. He is in love with your niece....”

“Ach So!” he hissed with an animosity that made my assumed gravity
change into the most genuine concern. What meant this tone? And I
hurried on.

“He wishes, with your consent of course, to ask her to marry him at
once--before you leave here, that is. He would speak to the Consul.”

Hermann sat down and smoked violently. Five minutes passed in that
furious meditation, and then, taking the long pipe out of his mouth,
he burst into a hot diatribe against Falk--against his cupidity, his
stupidity (a fellow that can hardly be got to say “yes” or “no” to the
simplest question)--against his outrageous treatment of the shipping in
port (because he saw they were at his mercy)--and against his manner
of walking, which to his (Hermann’s) mind showed a conceit positively
unbearable. The damage to the old Diana was not forgotten, of course,
and there was nothing of any nature said or done by Falk (even to the
last offer of refreshment in the hotel) that did not seem to have been
a cause of offence. “Had the cheek” to drag him (Hermann) into that
coffee-room; as though a drink from him could make up for forty-seven
dollars and fifty cents of damage in the cost of wood alone--not
counting two days’ work for the carpenter. Of course he would not stand
in the girl’s way. He was going home to Germany. There were plenty of
poor girls walking about in Germany.

“He’s very much in love,” was all I found to say.

“Yes,” he cried. “And it is time too after making himself and me talked
about ashore the last voyage I was here, and then now again; coming on
board every evening unsettling the girl’s mind, and saying nothing. What
sort of conduct is that?”

The seven thousand dollars the fellow was always talking about did not,
in his opinion, justify such behaviour. Moreover, nobody had seen them.
He (Hermann) seriously doubted if there were seven thousand cents, and
the tug, no doubt, was mortgaged up to the top of the funnel to the firm
of Siegers. But let that pass. He wouldn’t stand in the girl’s way. Her
head was so turned that she had become no good to them of late. Quite
unable even to put the children to bed without her aunt. It was bad for
the children; they got unruly; and yesterday he actually had to give
Gustav a thrashing.

For that, too, Falk was made responsible apparently. And looking at my
Hermann’s heavy, puffy, good-natured face, I knew he would not exert
himself till greatly exasperated, and, therefore, would thrash very
hard, and being fat would resent the necessity. How Falk had managed
to turn the girl’s head was more difficult to understand. I supposed
Hermann would know. And then hadn’t there been Miss Vanlo? It could not
be his silvery tongue, or the subtle seduction of his manner; he had no
more of what is called “manner” than an animal--which, however, on the
other hand, is never, and can never be called vulgar. Therefore it must
have been his bodily appearance, exhibiting a virility of nature
as exaggerated as his beard, and resembling a sort of constant
ruthlessness. It was seen in the very manner he lolled in the chair. He
meant no offence, but his intercourse was characterised by that sort of
frank disregard of susceptibilities a man of seven foot six, living in a
world of dwarfs, would naturally assume, without in the least wishing to
be unkind. But amongst men of his own stature, or nearly, this frank
use of his advantages, in such matters as the awful towage bills for
instance, caused much impotent gnashing of teeth. When attentively
considered it seemed appalling at times. He was a strange beast. But
maybe women liked it. Seen in that light he was well worth taming, and
I suppose every woman at the bottom of her heart considers herself as a
tamer of strange beasts. But Hermann arose with precipitation to carry
the news to his wife. I had barely the time, as he made for the cabin
door, to grab him by the seat of his inexpressibles. I begged him to
wait till Falk in person had spoken with him. There remained some small
matter to talk over, as I understood.

He sat down again at once, full of suspicion.

“What matter?” he said surlily. “I have had enough of his nonsense.
There’s no matter at all, as he knows very well; the girl has nothing in
the world. She came to us in one thin dress when my brother died, and I
have a growing family.”

“It can’t be anything of that kind,” I opined. “He’s desperately
enamoured of your niece. I don’t know why he did not say so before. Upon
my word, I believe it is because he was afraid to lose, perhaps, the
felicity of sitting near her on your quarter deck.”

I intimated my conviction that his love was so great as to be in a sense
cowardly. The effects of a great passion are unaccountable. It has
been known to make a man timid. But Hermann looked at me as if I had
foolishly raved; and the twilight was dying out rapidly.

“You don’t believe in passion, do you, Hermann?” I said cheerily. “The
passion of fear will make a cornered rat courageous. Falk’s in a corner.
He will take her off your hands in one thin frock just as she came to
you. And after ten years’ service it isn’t a bad bargain,” I added.

Far from taking offence, he resumed his air of civic virtue. The sudden
night came upon him while he stared placidly along the deck, bringing in
contact with his thick lips, and taking away again after a jet of smoke,
the curved mouthpiece fitted to the stem of his pipe. The night came
upon him and buried in haste his whiskers, his globular eyes, his puffy
pale face, his fat knees and the vast flat slippers on his fatherly
feet. Only his short arms in respectable white shirt-sleeves remained
very visible, propped up like the flippers of a seal reposing on the
strand.

“Falk wouldn’t settle anything about repairs. Told me to find out first
how much wood I should require and he would see,” he remarked; and after
he had spat peacefully in the dusk we heard over the water the beat of
the tug’s floats. There is, on a calm night, nothing more suggestive of
fierce and headlong haste than the rapid sound made by the paddle-wheels
of a boat threshing her way through a quiet sea; and the approach of
Falk towards his fate seemed to be urged by an impatient and passionate
desire. The engines must have been driven to the very utmost of their
revolutions. We heard them slow down at last, and, vaguely, the white
hull of the tug appeared moving against the black islets, whilst a slow
and rhythmical clapping as of thousands of hands rose on all sides. It
ceased all at once, just before Falk brought her up. A single brusque
splash was followed by the long drawn rumbling of iron links running
through the hawse pipe. Then a solemn silence fell upon the Roadstead.

“He will soon be here,” I murmured, and after that we waited for him
without a word. Meantime, raising my eyes, I beheld the glitter of a
lofty sky above the Diana’s mastheads. The multitude of stars gathered
into clusters, in rows, in lines, in masses, in groups, shone all
together, unanimously--and the few isolated ones, blazing by themselves
in the midst of dark patches, seemed to be of a superior kind and of
an inextinguishable nature. But long striding footsteps were heard
hastening along the deck; the high bulwarks of the Diana made a deeper
darkness. We rose from our chairs quickly, and Falk, appearing before
us, all in white, stood still.

Nobody spoke at first, as though we had been covered with confusion. His
arrival was fiery, but his white bulk, of indefinite shape and without
features, made him loom up like a man of snow.

“The captain here has been telling me...” Hermann began in a homely
and amicable voice; and Falk had a low, nervous laugh. His cool,
negligent undertone had no inflexions, but the strength of a powerful
emotion made him ramble in his speech. He had always desired a home.
It was difficult to live alone, though he was not answerable. He was
domestic; there had been difficulties; but since he had seen Hermann’s
niece he found that it had become at last impossible to live by himself.
“I mean--impossible,” he repeated with no sort of emphasis and only with
the slightest of pauses, but the word fell into my mind with the force
of a new idea.

“I have not said anything to her yet,” Hermann observed quietly. And
Falk dismissed this by a “That’s all right. Certainly. Very proper.”
 There was a necessity for perfect frankness--in marrying, especially.
Hermann seemed attentive, but he seized the first opportunity to ask us
into the cabin. “And by-the-by, Falk,” he said innocently, as we passed
in, “the timber came to no less than forty-seven dollars and fifty
cents.”

Falk, uncovering his head, lingered in the passage. “Some other time,”
 he said; and Hermann nudged me angrily--I don’t know why. The girl alone
in the cabin sat sewing at some distance from the table. Falk stopped
short in the doorway. Without a word, without a sign, without the
slightest inclination of his bony head, by the silent intensity of his
look alone, he seemed to lay his herculean frame at her feet. Her hands
sank slowly on her lap, and raising her clear eyes, she let her soft,
beaming glance enfold him from head to foot like a slow and pale caress.
He was very hot when he sat down; she, with bowed head, went on with her
sewing; her neck was very white under the light of the lamp; but Falk,
hiding his face in the palms of his hands, shuddered faintly. He drew
them down, even to his beard, and his uncovered eyes astonished me by
their tense and irrational expression--as though he had just swallowed
a heavy gulp of alcohol. It passed away while he was binding us to
secrecy. Not that he cared, but he did not like to be spoken about; and
I looked at the girl’s marvellous, at her wonderful, at her regal hair,
plaited tight into that one astonishing and maidenly tress. Whenever she
moved her well-shaped head it would stir stiffly to and fro on her back.
The thin cotton sleeve fitted the irreproachable roundness of her
arm like a skin; and her very dress, stretched on her bust, seemed to
palpitate like a living tissue with the strength of vitality animating
her body. How good her complexion was, the outline of her soft cheek and
the small convoluted conch of her rosy ear! To pull her needle she kept
the little finger apart from the others; it seemed a waste of power
to see her sewing--eternally sewing--with that industrious and precise
movement of her arm, going on eternally upon all the oceans, under all
the skies, in innumerable harbours. And suddenly I heard Falk’s voice
declare that he could not marry a woman unless she knew of something
in his life that had happened ten years ago. It was an accident. An
unfortunate accident. It would affect the domestic arrangements of their
home, but, once told, it need not be alluded to again for the rest of
their lives. “I should want my wife to feel for me,” he said. “It
has made me unhappy.” And how could he keep the knowledge of it to
himself--he asked us--perhaps through years and years of companionship?
What sort of companionship would that be? He had thought it over. A wife
must know. Then why not at once? He counted on Hermann’s kindness
for presenting the affair in the best possible light. And Hermann’s
countenance, mystified before, became very sour. He stole an inquisitive
glance at me. I shook my head blankly. Some people thought, Falk went
on, that such an experience changed a man for the rest of his life. He
couldn’t say. It was hard, awful, and not to be forgotten, but he did
not think himself a worse man than before. Only he talked in his sleep
now, he believed.... At last I began to think he had accidentally
killed some one; perhaps a friend--his own father maybe; when he went on
to say that probably we were aware he never touched meat. Throughout he
spoke English, of course of my account.

He swayed forward heavily.

The girl, with her hands raised before her pale eyes, was threading her
needle. He glanced at her, and his mighty trunk overshadowed the table,
bringing nearer to us the breadth of his shoulders, the thickness of
his neck, and that incongruous, anchorite head, burnt in the desert,
hollowed and lean as if by excesses of vigils and fasting. His beard
flowed imposingly downwards, out of sight, between the two brown hands
gripping the edge of the table, and his persistent glance made sombre by
the wide dilations of the pupils, fascinated.

“Imagine to yourselves,” he said in his ordinary voice, “that I have
eaten man.”

I could only ejaculate a faint “Ah!” of complete enlightenment. But
Hermann, dazed by the excessive shock, actually murmured, “Himmel! What
for?”

“It was my terrible misfortune to do so,” said Falk in a measured
undertone. The girl, unconscious, sewed on. Mrs. Hermann was absent
in one of the state-rooms, sitting up with Lena, who was feverish; but
Hermann suddenly put both his hands up with a jerk. The embroidered
calotte fell, and, in the twinkling of an eye, he had rumpled his hair
all ends up in a most extravagant manner. In this state he strove to
speak; with every effort his eyes seemed to start further out of their
sockets; his head looked like a mop. He choked, gasped, swallowed, and
managed to shriek out the one word, “Beast!”

From that moment till Falk went out of the cabin the girl, with her
hands folded on the work lying in her lap, never took her eyes off him.
His own, in the blindness of his heart, darted all over the cabin, only
seeking to avoid the sight of Hermann’s raving. It was ridiculous, and
was made almost terrible by the stillness of every other person present.
It was contemptible, and was made appalling by the man’s over-mastering
horror of this awful sincerity, coming to him suddenly, with the
confession of such a fact. He walked with great strides; he gasped. He
wanted to know from Falk how dared he to come and tell him this? Did he
think himself a proper person to be sitting in this cabin where his wife
and children lived? Tell his niece! Expected him to tell his niece!
His own brother’s daughter! Shameless! Did I ever hear tell of such
impudence?--he appealed to me. “This man here ought to have gone and
hidden himself out of sight instead of...”

“But it’s a great misfortune for me. But it’s a great misfortune for
me,” Falk would ejaculate from time to time.

However, Hermann kept on running frequently against the corners of the
table. At last he lost a slipper, and crossing his arms on his breast,
walked up with one stocking foot very close to Falk, in order to ask
him whether he did think there was anywhere on earth a woman abandoned
enough to mate with such a monster. “Did he? Did he? Did he?” I tried
to restrain him. He tore himself out of my hands; he found his slipper,
and, endeavouring to put it on, stormed standing on one leg--and Falk,
with a face unmoved and averted eyes, grasped all his mighty beard in
one vast palm.

“Was it right then for me to die myself?” he asked thoughtfully. I laid
my hand on his shoulder.

“Go away,” I whispered imperiously, without any clear reason for this
advice, except that I wished to put an end to Hermann’s odious noise.
“Go away.”

He looked searchingly for a moment at Hermann before he made a move.
I left the cabin too to see him out of the ship. But he hung about the
quarter-deck.

“It is my misfortune,” he said in a steady voice.

“You were stupid to blurt it out in such a manner. After all, we don’t
hear such confidences every day.”

“What does the man mean?” he mused in deep undertones. “Somebody had to
die--but why me?”

He remained still for a time in the dark--silent; almost invisible. All
at once he pinned my elbows to my sides. I felt utterly powerless in his
grip, and his voice, whispering in my ear, vibrated.

“It’s worse than hunger. Captain, do you know what that means? And I
could kill then--or be killed. I wish the crowbar had smashed my skull
ten years ago. And I’ve got to live now. Without her. Do you understand?
Perhaps many years. But how? What can be done? If I had allowed myself
to look at her once I would have carried her off before that man in my
hands--like this.”

I felt myself snatched off the deck, then suddenly dropped--and I
staggered backwards, feeling bewildered and bruised. What a man! All was
still; he was gone. I heard Hermann’s voice declaiming in the cabin, and
I went in.

I could not at first make out a single word, but Mrs. Hermann, who,
attracted by the noise, had come in some time before, with an expression
of surprise and mild disapproval, depicted broadly on her face, was
giving now all the signs of profound, helpless agitation. Her husband
shot a string of guttural words at her, and instantly putting out one
hand to the bulkhead as if to save herself from falling, she clutched
the loose bosom of her dress with the other. He harangued the two women
extraordinarily, with much of his shirt hanging out of his waist-belt,
stamping his foot, turning from one to the other, sometimes throwing
both his arms together, straight up above his rumpled hair, and keeping
them in that position while he uttered a passage of loud denunciation;
at others folding them tight across his breast--and then he hissed with
indignation, elevating his shoulders and protruding his head. The girl
was crying.

She had not changed her attitude. From her steady eyes that, following
Falk in his retreat, had remained fixed wistfully on the cabin door, the
tears fell rapid, thick, on her hands, on the work in her lap, warm
and gentle like a shower in spring. She wept without grimacing, without
noise--very touching, very quiet, with something more of pity than of
pain in her face, as one weeps in compassion rather than in grief--and
Hermann, before her, declaimed. I caught several times the word
“Mensch,” man; and also “Fressen,” which last I looked up afterwards
in my dictionary. It means “Devour.” Hermann seemed to be requesting an
answer of some sort from her; his whole body swayed. She remained mute
and perfectly still; at last his agitation gained her; she put the palms
of her hands together, her full lips parted, no sound came. His voice
scolded shrilly, his arms went like a windmill--suddenly he shook a
thick fist at her. She burst out into loud sobs. He seemed stupefied.

Mrs. Hermann rushed forward babbling rapidly. The two women fell on each
other’s necks, and, with an arm round her niece’s waist, she led her
away. Her own eyes were simply streaming, her face was flooded. She
shook her head back at me negatively, I wonder why to this day. The
girl’s head dropped heavily on her shoulder. They disappeared.

Then Hermann sat down and stared at the cabin floor.

“We don’t know all the circumstances,” I ventured to break the silence.
He retorted tartly that he didn’t want to know of any. According to his
ideas no circumstances could excuse a crime--and certainly not such
a crime. This was the opinion generally received. The duty of a human
being was to starve. Falk therefore was a beast, an animal; base, low,
vile, despicable, shameless, and deceitful. He had been deceiving him
since last year. He was, however, inclined to think that Falk must
have gone mad quite recently; for no sane person, without necessity,
uselessly, for no earthly reason, and regardless of another’s
self-respect and peace of mind, would own to having devoured human
flesh. “Why tell?” he cried. “Who was asking him?” It showed Falk’s
brutality because after all he had selfishly caused him (Hermann) much
pain. He would have preferred not to know that such an unclean creature
had been in the habit of caressing his children. He hoped I would say
nothing of all this ashore, though. He wouldn’t like it to get about
that he had been intimate with an eater of men--a common cannibal. As
to the scene he had made (which I judged quite unnecessary) he was not
going to inconvenience and restrain himself for a fellow that went about
courting and upsetting girls’ heads, while he knew all the time that
no decent housewifely girl could think of marrying him. At least he
(Hermann) could not conceive how any girl could. Fancy Lena!... No,
it was impossible. The thoughts that would come into their heads every
time they sat down to a meal. Horrible! Horrible!

“You are too squeamish, Hermann,” I said.

He seemed to think it was eminently proper to be squeamish if the word
meant disgust at Falk’s conduct; and turning up his eyes sentimentally
he drew my attention to the horrible fate of the victims--the
victims of that Falk. I said that I knew nothing about them. He
seemed surprised. Could not anybody imagine without knowing? He--for
instance--felt he would like to avenge them. But what if--said I--there
had not been any? They might have died as it were, naturally--of
starvation. He shuddered. But to be eaten--after death! To be devoured!
He gave another deep shudder, and asked suddenly, “Do you think it is
true?”

His indignation and his personality together would have been enough to
spoil the reality of the most authentic thing. When I looked at him I
doubted the story--but the remembrance of Falk’s words, looks, gestures,
invested it not only with an air of reality but with the absolute truth
of primitive passion.

“It is true just as much as you are able to make it; and exactly in the
way you like to make it. For my part, when I hear you clamouring about
it, I don’t believe it is true at all.”

And I left him pondering. The men in my boat lying at the foot of
Diana’s side ladder told me that the captain of the tug had gone away in
his gig some time ago.

I let my fellows pull an easy stroke; because of the heavy dew the clear
sparkle of the stars seemed to fall on me cold and wetting. There was
a sense of lurking gruesome horror somewhere in my mind, and it was
mingled with clear and grotesque images. Schomberg’s gastronomic
tittle-tattle was responsible for these; and I half hoped I should never
see Falk again. But the first thing my anchor-watchman told me was that
the captain of the tug was on board. He had sent his boat away and was
now waiting for me in the cuddy.

He was lying full length on the stern settee, his face buried in the
cushions. I had expected to see it discomposed, contorted, despairing.
It was nothing of the kind; it was just as I had seen it twenty times,
steady and glaring from the bridge of the tug. It was immovably set and
hungry, dominated like the whole man by the singleness of one instinct.

He wanted to live. He had always wanted to live. So we all do--but in
us the instinct serves a complex conception, and in him this instinct
existed alone. There is in such simple development a gigantic force,
and like the pathos of a child’s naive and uncontrolled desire. He wanted
that girl, and the utmost that can be said for him was that he wanted
that particular girl alone. I think I saw then the obscure beginning,
the seed germinating in the soil of an unconscious need, the first shoot
of that tree bearing now for a mature mankind the flower and the fruit,
the infinite gradation in shades and in flavour of our discriminating
love. He was a child. He was as frank as a child too. He was hungry for
the girl, terribly hungry, as he had been terribly hungry for food.

Don’t be shocked if I declare that in my belief it was the same
need, the same pain, the same torture. We are in his case allowed to
contemplate the foundation of all the emotions--that one joy which is
to live, and the one sadness at the root of the innumerable torments.
It was made plain by the way he talked. He had never suffered so. It was
gnawing, it was fire; it was there, like this! And after pointing below
his breastbone, he made a hard wringing motion with his hands. And I
assure you that, seen as I saw it with my bodily eyes, it was anything
but laughable. And again, as he was presently to tell me (alluding to an
early incident of the disastrous voyage when some damaged meat had been
flung overboard), he said that a time soon came when his heart ached
(that was the expression he used), and he was ready to tear his hair out
at the thought of all that rotten beef thrown away.

I had heard all this; I witnessed his physical struggles, seeing the
working of the rack and hearing the true voice of pain. I witnessed it
all patiently, because the moment I came into the cuddy he had called
upon me to stand by him--and this, it seems, I had diplomatically
promised.

His agitation was impressive and alarming in the little cabin, like the
floundering of a great whale driven into a shallow cove in a coast. He
stood up; he flung himself down headlong; he tried to tear the cushion
with his teeth; and again hugging it fiercely to his face he let himself
fall on the couch. The whole ship seemed to feel the shock of his
despair; and I contemplated with wonder the lofty forehead, the noble
touch of time on the uncovered temples, the unchanged hungry character
of the face--so strangely ascetic and so incapable of portraying
emotion.

What should he do? He had lived by being near her. He had sat--in the
evening--I knew?-all his life! She sewed. Her head was bent--so. Her
head--like this--and her arms. Ah! Had I seen? Like this.

He dropped on a stool, bowed his powerful neck whose nape was red,
and with his hands stitched the air, ludicrous, sublimely imbecile and
comprehensible.

And now he couldn’t have her? No! That was too much. After thinking too
that... What had he done? What was my advice? Take her by force? No?
Mustn’t he? Who was there then to kill him? For the first time I saw
one of his features move; a fighting teeth-baring curl of the lip....
“Not Hermann, perhaps.” He lost himself in thought as though he had
fallen out of the world.

I may note that the idea of suicide apparently did not enter his head
for a single moment. It occurred to me to ask:

“Where was it that this shipwreck of yours took place?”

“Down south,” he said vaguely with a start.

“You are not down south now,” I said. “Violence won’t do. They would
take her away from you in no time. And what was the name of the ship?”

“Borgmester Dahl,” he said. “It was no shipwreck.”

He seemed to be waking up by degrees from that trance, and waking up
calmed.

“Not a shipwreck? What was it?”

“Break down,” he answered, looking more like himself every moment. By
this only I learned that it was a steamer. I had till then supposed they
had been starving in boats or on a raft--or perhaps on a barren rock.

“She did not sink then?” I asked in surprise. He nodded. “We sighted the
southern ice,” he pronounced dreamily.

“And you alone survived?”

He sat down. “Yes. It was a terrible misfortune for me. Everything went
wrong. All the men went wrong. I survived.”

Remembering the things one reads of it was difficult to realise the true
meaning of his answers. I ought to have seen at once--but I did not; so
difficult is it for our minds, remembering so much, instructed so much,
informed of so much, to get in touch with the real actuality at our
elbow. And with my head full of preconceived notions as to how a case of
“cannibalism and suffering at sea” should be managed I said--“You were
then so lucky in the drawing of lots?”

“Drawing of lots?” he said. “What lots? Do you think I would have
allowed my life to go for the drawing of lots?”

Not if he could help if, I perceived, no matter what other life went.

“It was a great misfortune. Terrible. Awful,” he said. “Many heads went
wrong, but the best men would live.”

“The toughest, you mean,” I said. He considered the word. Perhaps it was
strange to him, though his English was so good.

“Yes,” he asserted at last. “The best. It was everybody for himself at
last and the ship open to all.”

Thus from question to question I got the whole story. I fancy it was the
only way I could that night have stood by him. Outwardly at least he was
himself again; the first sign of it was the return of that incongruous
trick he had of drawing both his hands down his face--and it had its
meaning now, with that slight shudder of the frame and the passionate
anguish of these hands uncovering a hungry immovable face, the wide
pupils of the intent, silent, fascinating eyes.

It was an iron steamer of a most respectable origin. The burgomaster
of Falk’s native town had built her. She was the first steamer ever
launched there. The burgomaster’s daughter had christened her. Country
people drove in carts from miles around to see her. He told me all this.
He got the berth as what we should call a chief mate. He seemed to think
it had been a feather in his cap; and, in his own corner of the world,
this lover of life was of good parentage.

The burgomaster had advanced ideas in the ship-owning line. At that time
not every one would have known enough to think of despatching a cargo
steamer to the Pacific. But he loaded her with pitch-pine deals and sent
her off to hunt for her luck. Wellington was to be the first port, I
fancy. It doesn’t matter, because in latitude 44 d south and somewhere
halfway between Good Hope and New Zealand the tail shaft broke and the
propeller dropped off.

They were steaming then with a fresh gale on the quarter and all their
canvas set, to help the engines. But by itself the sail power was not
enough to keep way on her. When the propeller went the ship broached-to
at once, and the masts got whipped overboard.

The disadvantage of being dismasted consisted in this, that they had
nothing to hoist flags on to make themselves visible at a distance. In
the course of the first few days several ships failed to sight them; and
the gale was drifting them out of the usual track. The voyage had been,
from the first, neither very successful nor very harmonious. There had
been quarrels on board. The captain was a clever, melancholic man, who
had no unusual grip on his crew. The ship had been amply provisioned for
the passage, but, somehow or other, several barrels of meat were found
spoiled on opening, and had been thrown overboard soon after leaving
home, as a sanitary measure. Afterwards the crew of the Borgmester Dahl
thought of that rotten carrion with tears of regret, covetousness and
despair.

She drove south. To begin with, there had been an appearance of
organisation, but soon the bonds of discipline became relaxed. A sombre
idleness succeeded. They looked with sullen eyes at the horizon. The
gales increased: she lay in the trough, the seas made a clean breach
over her. On one frightful night, when they expected their hulk to turn
over with them every moment, a heavy sea broke on board, deluged the
store-rooms and spoiled the best part of the remaining provisions. It
seems the hatch had not been properly secured. This instance of neglect
is characteristic of utter discouragement. Falk tried to inspire some
energy into his captain, but failed. From that time he retired more into
himself, always trying to do his utmost in the situation. It grew worse.
Gale succeeded gale, with black mountains of water hurling themselves on
the Borgmester Dahl. Some of the men never left their bunks; many became
quarrelsome. The chief engineer, an old man, refused to speak at all to
anybody. Others shut themselves up in their berths to cry. On calm days
the inert steamer rolled on a leaden sea under a murky sky, or showed,
in sunshine, the squalor of sea waifs, the dried white salt, the rust,
the jagged broken places. Then the gales came again. They kept body and
soul together on short rations. Once, an English ship, scudding in a
storm, tried to stand by them, heaving-to pluckily under their lee. The
seas swept her decks; the men in oilskins clinging to her rigging looked
at them, and they made desperate signs over their shattered bulwarks.
Suddenly her main-topsail went, yard and all, in a terrific squall; she
had to bear up under bare poles, and disappeared.

Other ships had spoken them before, but at first they had refused to be
taken off, expecting the assistance of some steamer. There were very few
steamers in those latitudes then; and when they desired to leave this
dead and drifting carcase, no ship came in sight. They had drifted south
out of men’s knowledge. They failed to attract the attention of a lonely
whaler, and very soon the edge of the polar ice-cap rose from the sea
and closed the southern horizon like a wall. One morning they were
alarmed by finding themselves floating amongst detached pieces of ice.
But the fear of sinking passed away like their vigour, like their hopes;
the shocks of the floes knocking against the ship’s side could not
rouse them from their apathy: and the Borgmester Dahl drifted out again
unharmed into open water. They hardly noticed the change.

The funnel had gone overboard in one of the heavy rolls; two of their
three boats had disappeared, washed away in bad weather, and the davits
swung to and fro, unsecured, with chafed rope’s ends waggling to the
roll. Nothing was done on board, and Falk told me how he had often
listened to the water washing about the dark engine-room where the
engines, stilled for ever, were decaying slowly into a mass of rust, as
the stilled heart decays within the lifeless body. At first, after the
loss of the motive power, the tiller had been thoroughly secured by
lashings. But in course of time these had rotted, chafed, rusted,
parting one by one: and the rudder, freed, banged heavily to and fro
night and day, sending dull shocks through the whole frame of the
vessel. This was dangerous. Nobody cared enough to lift a little finger.
He told me that even now sometimes waking up at night, he fancied he
could hear the dull vibrating thuds. The pintles carried away, and it
dropped off at last.

The final catastrophe came with the sending off of their one remaining
boat. It was Falk who had managed to preserve her intact, and now it
was agreed that some of the hands should sail away into the track of the
shipping to procure assistance. She was provisioned with all the food
they could spare for the six who were to go. They waited for a fine day.
It was long in coming. At last one morning they lowered her into the
water.

Directly, in that demoralised crowd, trouble broke out. Two men who
had no business there had jumped into the boat under the pretence of
unhooking the tackles, while some sort of squabble arose on the deck
amongst these weak, tottering spectres of a ship’s company. The
captain, who had been for days living secluded and unapproachable in the
chart-room, came to the rail. He ordered the two men to come up on board
and menaced them with his revolver. They pretended to obey, but suddenly
cutting the boat’s painter, gave a shove against the ship’s side and
made ready to hoist the sail.

“Shoot, sir! Shoot them down!” cried Falk-“and I will jump overboard to
regain the boat.” But the captain, after taking aim with an irresolute
arm, turned suddenly away.

A howl of rage arose. Falk dashed into his cabin for his own pistol.
When he returned it was too late. Two more men had leaped into the
water, but the fellows in the boat beat them off with the oars, hoisted
the boat’s lug and sailed away. They were never heard of again.

Consternation and despair possessed the remaining ship’s company,
till the apathy of utter hopelessness re-asserted its sway. That day a
fireman committed suicide, running up on deck with his throat cut from
ear to ear, to the horror of all hands. He was thrown overboard. The
captain had locked himself in the chart-room, and Falk, knocking vainly
for admittance, heard him reciting over and over again the names of his
wife and children, not as if calling upon them or commending them to
God, but in a mechanical voice like an exercise of memory. Next day the
doors of the chart-room were swinging open to the roll of the ship, and
the captain had disappeared. He must during the night have jumped into
the sea. Falk locked both the doors and kept the keys.

The organised life of the ship had come to an end. The solidarity of
the men had gone. They became indifferent to each other. It was Falk
who took in hand the distribution of such food as remained. They boiled
their boots for soup to eke out the rations, which only made their
hunger more intolerable. Sometimes whispers of hate were heard passing
between the languid skeletons that drifted endlessly to and fro, north
and south, east and west, upon that carcase of a ship.

And in this lies the grotesque horror of this sombre story. The last
extremity of sailors, overtaking a small boat or a frail craft, seems
easier to bear, because of the direct danger of the seas. The confined
space, the close contact, the imminent menace of the waves, seem to draw
men together, in spite of madness, suffering and despair. But there
was a ship--safe, convenient, roomy: a ship with beds, bedding, knives,
forks, comfortable cabins, glass and china, and a complete cook’s
galley, pervaded, ruled and possessed by the pitiless spectre of
starvation. The lamp oil had been drunk, the wicks cut up for food, the
candles eaten. At night she floated dark in all her recesses, and full
of fears. One day Falk came upon a man gnawing a splinter of pine wood.
Suddenly he threw the piece of wood away, tottered to the rail, and fell
over. Falk, too late to prevent the act, saw him claw the ship’s side
desperately before he went down. Next day another man did the same
thing, after uttering horrible imprecations. But this one somehow
managed to get hold of the broken rudder chains and hung on there,
silently. Falk set about trying to save him, and all the time the man,
holding with both hands, looked at him anxiously with his sunken eyes.
Then, just as Falk was ready to put his hand on him, the man let go his
hold and sank like a stone. Falk reflected on these sights. His heart
revolted against the horror of death, and he said to himself that he
would struggle for every precious minute of his life.

One afternoon--as the survivors lay about on the after deck--the
carpenter, a tall man with a black beard, spoke of the last sacrifice.
There was nothing eatable left on board. Nobody said a word to this; but
that company separated quickly, these listless feeble spectres slunk
off one by one to hide in fear of each other. Falk and the carpenter
remained on deck together. Falk liked the big carpenter. He had been the
best man of the lot, helpful and ready as long as there was anything to
do, the longest hopeful, and had preserved to the last some vigour and
decision of mind.

They did not speak to each other. Henceforth no voices were to be heard
conversing sadly on board that ship. After a time the carpenter tottered
away forward; but later on, Falk going to drink at the fresh-water pump,
had the inspiration to turn his head. The carpenter had stolen upon him
from behind, and, summoning all his strength, was aiming with a crowbar
a blow at the back of his skull.

Dodging just in time, Falk made his escape and ran into his cabin. While
he was loading his revolver there, he heard the sound of heavy blows
struck upon the bridge. The locks of the chartroom doors were slight,
they flew open, and the carpenter, possessing himself of the captain’s
revolver, fired a shot of defiance.

Falk was about to go on deck and have it out at once, when he remarked
that one of the ports of his cabin commanded the approaches to the
freshwater pump. Instead of going out he remained in and secured the
door. “The best man shall survive,” he said to himself--and the other,
he reasoned, must at some time or other come there to drink. These
starving men would drink often to cheat the pangs of their hunger. But
the carpenter too must have noticed the position of the port. They were
the two best men in the ship, and the game was with them. All the rest
of the day Falk saw no one and heard no sound. At night he strained his
eyes. It was dark--he heard a rustling noise once, but he was certain
that no one could have come near the pump. It was to the left of his
deck port, and he could not have failed to see a man, for the night was
clear and starry. He saw nothing; towards morning another faint noise
made him suspicious. Deliberately and quietly he unlocked his door. He
had not slept, and had not given way to the horror of the situation. He
wanted to live.

But during the night the carpenter, without at all trying to approach
the pump, had managed to creep quietly along the starboard bulwark, and,
unseen, had crouched down right under Falk’s deck port. When daylight
came he rose up suddenly, looked in, and putting his arm through the
round brass framed opening, fired at Falk within a foot. He missed--and
Falk, instead of attempting to seize the arm holding the weapon, opened
his door unexpectedly, and with the muzzle of his long revolver nearly
touching the other’s side, shot him dead.

The best man had survived. Both of them had at the beginning just
strength enough to stand on their feet, and both had displayed pitiless
resolution, endurance, cunning and courage--all the qualities of classic
heroism. At once Falk threw overboard the captain’s revolver. He was a
born monopolist. Then after the report of the two shots, followed by a
profound silence, there crept out into the cold, cruel dawn of Antarctic
regions, from various hiding-places, over the deck of that dismantled
corpse of a ship floating on a grey sea ruled by iron necessity and with
a heart of ice--there crept into view one by one, cautious, slow, eager,
glaring, and unclean, a band of hungry and livid skeletons. Falk faced
them, the possessor of the only fire-arm on board, and the second best
man--the carpenter--was lying dead between him and them.

“He was eaten, of course,” I said.

He bent his head slowly, shuddered a little, drawing his hands over his
face, and said, “I had never any quarrel with that man. But there were
our lives between him and me.”

Why continue the story of that ship, that story before which, with its
fresh-water pump like a spring of death, its man with the weapon, the
sea ruled by iron necessity, its spectral band swayed by terror and
hope, its mute and unhearing heaven?-the fable of the Flying Dutchman
with its convention of crime and its sentimental retribution fades like
a graceful wreath, like a wisp of white mist. What is there to say that
every one of us cannot guess for himself? I believe Falk began by going
through the ship, revolver in hand, to annex all the matches. Those
starving wretches had plenty of matches! He had no mind to have the ship
set on fire under his feet, either from hate or from despair. He lived
in the open, camping on the bridge, commanding all the after deck
and the only approach to the pump. He lived! Some of the others lived
too--concealed, anxious, coming out one by one from their hiding-places
at the seductive sound of a shot. And he was not selfish. They shared,
but only three of them all were alive when a whaler, returning from her
cruising ground, nearly ran over the water-logged hull of the Borgmester
Dahl, which, it seems, in the end had in some way sprung a leak in both
her holds, but being loaded with deals could not sink.

“They all died,” Falk said. “These three too, afterwards. But I would
not die. All died, all! under this terrible misfortune. But was I too to
throw away my life? Could I? Tell me, captain? I was alone there, quite
alone, just like the others. Each man was alone. Was I to give up my
revolver? Who to? Or was I to throw it into the sea? What would
have been the good? Only the best man would survive. It was a great,
terrible, and cruel misfortune.”

He had survived! I saw him before me as though preserved for a witness
to the mighty truth of an unerring and eternal principle. Great beads
of perspiration stood on his forehead. And suddenly it struck the table
with a heavy blow, as he fell forward throwing his hands out.

“And this is worse,” he cried. “This is a worse pain! This is more
terrible.”

He made my heart thump with the profound conviction of his cries. And
after he had left me alone I called up before my mental eye the image
of the girl weeping silently, abundantly, patiently, and as if
irresistibly. I thought of her tawny hair. I thought how, if unplaited,
it would have covered her all round as low as the hips, like the hair of
a siren. And she had bewitched him. Fancy a man who would guard his
own life with the inflexibility of a pitiless and immovable fate, being
brought to lament that once a crowbar had missed his skull! The sirens
sing and lure to death, but this one had been weeping silently as if
for the pity of his life. She was the tender and voiceless siren of this
appalling navigator. He evidently wanted to live his whole conception
of life. Nothing else would do. And she too was a servant of that
life that, in the midst of death, cries aloud to our senses. She was
eminently fitted to interpret for him its feminine side. And in her own
way, and with her own profusion of sensuous charms, she also seemed
to illustrate the eternal truth of an unerring principle. I don’t know
though what sort of principle Hermann illustrated when he turned up
early on board my ship with a most perplexed air. It struck me, however,
that he too would do his best to survive. He seemed greatly calmed on
the subject of Falk, but still very full of it.

“What is it you said I was last night? You know,” he asked after some
preliminary talk. “Too--too--I don’t know. A very funny word.”

“Squeamish?” I suggested.

“Yes. What does it mean?”

“That you exaggerate things--to yourself. Without inquiry, and so on.”

He seemed to turn it over in his mind. We went on talking. This Falk was
the plague of his life. Upsetting everybody like this! Mrs. Hermann was
unwell rather this morning. His niece was crying still. There was nobody
to look after the children. He struck his umbrella on the deck. She
would be like that for months. Fancy carrying all the way home, second
class, a perfectly useless girl who is crying all the time. It was
bad for Lena too, he observed; but on what grounds I could not guess.
Perhaps of the bad example. That child was already sorrowing and crying
enough over the rag doll. Nicholas was really the least sentimental
person of the family.

“Why does she weep?” I asked.

“From pity,” cried Hermann.

It was impossible to make out women. Mrs. Hermann was the only one he
pretended to understand. She was very, very upset and doubtful.

“Doubtful about what?” I asked.

He averted his eyes and did not answer this. It was impossible to make
them out. For instance, his niece was weeping for Falk. Now he (Hermann)
would like to wring his neck--but then... He supposed he had too
tender a heart. “Frankly,” he asked at last, “what do you think of what
we heard last night, captain?”

“In all these tales,” I observed, “there is always a good deal of
exaggeration.”

And not letting him recover from his surprise I assured him that I knew
all the details. He begged me not to repeat them. His heart was too
tender. They made him feel unwell. Then, looking at his feet and
speaking very slowly, he supposed that he need not see much of them
after they were married. For, indeed, he could not bear the sight of
Falk. On the other hand it was ridiculous to take home a girl with her
head turned. A girl that weeps all the time and is of no help to her
aunt.

“Now you will be able to do with one cabin only on your passage home,” I
said.

“Yes, I had thought of that,” he said brightly, almost. “Yes! Himself,
his wife, four children--one cabin might do. Whereas if his niece
went...”

“And what does Mrs. Hermann say to it?” I inquired.

Mrs. Hermann did not know whether a man of that sort could make a girl
happy--she had been greatly deceived in Captain Falk. She had been very
upset last night.

Those good people did not seem to be able to retain an impression for a
whole twelve hours. I assured him on my own personal knowledge that
Falk possessed in himself all the qualities to make his niece’s future
prosperous. He said he was glad to hear this, and that he would tell his
wife. Then the object of the visit came out. He wished me to help him to
resume relations with Falk. His niece, he said, had expressed the hope I
would do so in my kindness. He was evidently anxious that I should,
for though he seemed to have forgotten nine-tenths of his last night’s
opinions and the whole of his indignation, yet he evidently feared to
be sent to the right-about. “You told me he was very much in love,” he
concluded slyly, and leered in a sort of bucolic way.

As soon as he had left my ship I called Falk on board by signal--the
tug still lying at the anchorage. He took the news with calm gravity,
as though he had all along expected the stars to fight for him in their
courses.

I saw them once more together, and only once--on the quarter-deck of the
Diana. Hermann sat smoking with a shirt-sleeved elbow hooked over the
back of his chair. Mrs. Hermann was sewing alone. As Falk stepped over
the gangway, Hermann’s niece, with a slight swish of the skirt and a
swift friendly nod to me, glided past my chair.

They met in sunshine abreast of the mainmast. He held her hands and
looked down at them, and she looked up at him with her candid and
unseeing glance. It seemed to me they had come together as if attracted,
drawn and guided to each other by a mysterious influence. They were a
complete couple. In her grey frock, palpitating with life, generous of
form, olympian and simple, she was indeed the siren to fascinate that
dark navigator, this ruthless lover of the five senses. From afar I
seemed to feel the masculine strength with which he grasped those hands
she had extended to him with a womanly swiftness. Lena, a little pale,
nursing her beloved lump of dirty rags, ran towards her big friend; and
then in the drowsy silence of the good old ship Mrs. Hermann’s voice
rang out so changed that it made me spin round in my chair to see what
was the matter.

“Lena, come here!” she screamed. And this good-natured matron gave me a
wavering glance, dark and full of fearsome distrust. The child ran
back, surprised to her knee. But the two, standing before each other in
sunlight with clasped hands, had heard nothing, had seen nothing and no
one. Three feet away from them in the shade a seaman sat on a spar, very
busy splicing a strop, and dipping his fingers into a tar-pot, as if
utterly unaware of their existence.

When I returned in command of another ship, some five years afterwards,
Mr. and Mrs. Falk had left the place. I should not wonder if Schomberg’s
tongue had succeeded at last in scaring Falk away for good; and,
indubitably, there was a tale still going about the town of a certain
Falk, owner of a tug, who had won his wife at cards from the captain of
an English ship.


THE END





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Falk: A Reminiscence" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.