Falk, a Reminiscence

FALK, A REMINISCENCE BY JOSEPH CONRAD

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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 Ger- man 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 exe- crable, 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 swal- low any of that stuff.  And indeed there was a strange mustiness in everything.  The wooden din- ing-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 dis- interred from some kitchen midden near an inhab- ited 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 conscious- ness, 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 hun- ger 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, dismast- ings; 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 ra- tions and of heroism--or at least of what the news- papers would have called heroism at sea--a mani- festation 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 beauti- ful 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 king- dom, 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 hap- pened anywhere where there are ships, skippers, tugboats, and orphan nieces of indescribable splen- dour.  And the absurdity of the episode concerns only me, my enemy Falk, and my friend Hermann.

There seemed to be something like peculiar em- phasis 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 hon- ourable 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 cur- tains and the greenery of flower pots behind the glass completed the resemblance.  On one or two occasions when passing under stern I had de- tected from my boat a round arm in the act of tilt- ing 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 East- ern port, I was left in no doubt as to Hermann's no- tions 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 after- noon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activ- ity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened hu- manity.  Trunks without heads waved at you arms without hands; legs without feet kicked fantasti- cally with collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments that, taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, be- came 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