Falk eBook

Joseph M. Carey
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 114 pages of information about Falk.

Falk eBook

Joseph M. Carey
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 114 pages of information about Falk.

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.

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Project Gutenberg
Falk from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.