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.