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 t