Falk | Page 3

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FALK
BY JOSEPH CONRAD

FALK
A REMINISCENCE
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-