At its first appearance “Typhoon,” the story, was classed by some critics as a deliberately intended storm-piece.  Others picked out MacWhirr, in whom they perceived a definite symbolic intention.  Neither was exclusively my intention.  Both the typhoon and Captain MacWhirr presented themselves to me as the necessities of the deep conviction with which I approached the subject of the story.  It was their opportunity.  It was also my opportunity; and it would be vain to discourse about what I made of it in a handful of pages, since the pages themselves are here, between the covers of this volume, to speak for themselves.

This is a belated reflection.  If it had occurred to me before it would have perhaps done away with the existence of this Author’s Note; for, indeed, the same remark applies to every story in this volume.  None of them are stories of experience in the absolute sense of the word.  Experience in them is but the canvas of the attempted picture.  Each of them has its more than one intention.  With each the question is what the writer has done with his opportunity; and each answers the question for itself in words which, if I may say so without undue solemnity, were written with a conscientious regard for the truth of my own sensations.  And each of those stories, to mean something, must justify itself in its own way to the conscience of each successive reader.

“Falk”—­the second story in the volume—­offended the delicacy of one critic at least by certain peculiarities of its subject.  But what is the subject of “Falk”?  I personally do not feel so very certain about it.  He who reads must find out for himself.  My intention in writing “Falk” was not to shock anybody.  As in most of my writings I insist not on the events but on their effect upon the persons in the tale.  But in everything I have written there is always one invariable intention, and that is to capture the reader’s attention, by securing his interest and enlisting his sympathies for the matter in hand, whatever it may be, within the limits of the visible world and within the boundaries of human emotions.

I may safely say that Falk is absolutely true to my experience of certain straightforward characters combining a perfectly natural ruthlessness with a certain amount of moral delicacy.  Falk obeys the law of self-preservation without the slightest misgivings as to his right, but at a crucial turn of that ruthlessly preserved life he will not condescend to dodge the truth.  As he is presented as sensitive enough to be affected permanently by a certain unusual experience, that experience had to be set by me before the reader vividly; but it is not the subject of the tale.  If we go by mere facts then the subject is Falk’s attempt to get married; in which the narrator of the tale finds himself unexpectedly involved both on its ruthless and its delicate side.