Heart of Darkness
by
Joseph Conrad
Part 3 out of 3
--I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.
But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of
awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she
was one of those creatures that are not the playthings
of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And,
by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me too
he seemed to have died only yesterday--nay, this very
minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time
--his death and her sorrow--I saw her sorrow in the
very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw
them together--I heard them together. She had said,
with a deep catch of the breath, 'I have survived;' while
my strained ears seemed to hear distinctly, mingled with
her tone of despairing regret, the summing-up whisper
of his eternal condemnation. I asked myself what I
was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart
as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and
absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold.
She motioned me to a chair. We sat down. I laid the
packet gently on the little table, and she put her hand
over it. . . . 'You knew him well,' she murmured,
after a moment of mourning silence.
"'Intimacy grows quick out there,' I said. 'I knew
him as well as it is possible for one man to know another.'
"'And you admired him,' she said. 'It was impossible
to know him and not to admire him. Was it?'
"'He was a remarkable man,' I said, unsteadily. Then
before the appealing fixity of her gaze, that seemed to
watch for more words on my lips, I went on, 'It was
impossible not to--'
"'Love him,' she finished eagerly, silencing me into
an appalled dumbness. 'How true! how true! But
when you think that no one knew him so well as I! I
had all his noble confidence. I knew him best.'
"'You knew him best,' I repeated. And perhaps she
did. But with every word spoken the room was growing
darker, and only her forehead, smooth and white, re-
mained illumined by the unextinguishable light of belief
and love.
"'You were his friend,' she went on. 'His friend,'
she repeated, a little louder. 'You must have been, if
he had given you this, and sent you to me. I feel I
can speak to you--and oh! I must speak. I want you
--you who have heard his last words--to know I have
been worthy of him. . . . It is not pride. . . . Yes!
I am proud to know I understood him better than any-
one on earth--he told me so himself. And since his
mother died I have had no one--no one--to--to--'
"I listened. The darkness deepened. I was not even
sure whether he had given me the right bundle. I rather
suspect he wanted me to take care of another batch of
his papers which, after his death, I saw the manager
examining under the lamp. And the girl talked, easing
her pain in the certitude of my sympathy; she talked as
thirsty men drink. I had heard that her engagement
with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He
wasn't rich enough or something. And indeed I don't
know whether he had not been a pauper all his life. He
had given me some reason to infer that it was his im-
patience of comparative poverty that drove him out
there.
"'. . . Who was not his friend who had heard him
speak once?' she was saying. 'He drew men towards
him by what was best in them.' She looked at me with
intensity. 'It is the gift of the great,' she went on,
and the sound of her low voice seemed to have the ac-
companiment of all the other sounds, full of mystery,
desolation, and sorrow, I had ever heard--the ripple of
the river, the soughing of the trees swayed by the wind,
the murmurs of wild crowds, the faint ring of incom-
prehensible words cried from afar, the whisper of a
voice speaking from beyond the threshold of an eternal
darkness. 'But you have heard him! You know!' she
cried.
"'Yes, I know,' I said with something like despair
in my heart, but bowing my head before the faith that
was in her, before that great and saving illusion that
shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in the
triumphant darkness from which I could not have de-
fended her--from which I could not even defend
myself.
"'What a loss to me--to us!'--she corrected herself
with beautiful generosity; then added in a murmur, 'To
the world.' By the last gleams of twilight I could see
the glitter of her eyes, full of tears--of tears that would
not fall.
"'I have been very happy--very fortunate--very
proud,' she went on. 'Too fortunate. Too happy for
a little while. And now I am unhappy for--for
life.'
"She stood up; her fair hair seemed to catch all the
remaining light in a glimmer of gold. I rose too.
"'And of all this,' she went on, mournfully, 'of all his
promise, and of all his greatness, of his generous mind,
of his noble heart, nothing remains--nothing but a
memory. You and I--'
"'We shall always remember him,' I said, hastily.
"'No!' she cried. 'It is impossible that all this should
be lost--that such a life should be sacrificed to leave
nothing--but sorrow. You know what vast plans he
had. I knew of them too--I could not perhaps under-
stand,--but others knew of them. Something must re-
main. His words, at least, have not died.'
"'His words will remain,' I said.
"'And his example,' she whispered to herself. 'Men
looked up to him,--his goodness shone in every act. His
example--'
"'True,' I said; 'his example too. Yes, his example.
I forgot that.'
"'But I do not. I cannot--I cannot believe--not yet.
I cannot believe that I shall never see him again, that
nobody will see him again, never, never, never.'
"She put out her arms as if after a retreating figure,
stretching them black and with clasped pale hands across
the fading and narrow sheen of the window. Never see
him! I saw him clearly enough then. I shall see this
eloquent phantom as long as I live, and I shall see her
too, a tragic and familiar Shade, resembling in this ges-
ture another one, tragic also, and bedecked with power-
less charms, stretching bare brown arms over the glitter
of the infernal stream, the stream of darkness. She said
suddenly very low, 'He died as he lived.'
"'His end,' said I, with dull anger stirring in me,
'was in every way worthy of his life.'
"'And I was not with him,' she murmured. My anger
subsided before a feeling of infinite pity.
"'Everything that could be done--' I mumbled.
"'Ah, but I believed in him more than anyone on
earth--more than his own mother, more than--himself.
He needed me! Me! I would have treasured every sigh,
every word, every sign, every glance.'
"I felt like a chill grip on my chest. 'Don't,' I said,
in a muffled voice.
"'Forgive me. I--I--have mourned so long in silence
--in silence. . . . You were with him--to the last?
I think of his loneliness. Nobody near to understand
him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to
hear. . . .'
"'To the very end,' I said, shakily. 'I heard his very
last words. . . .' I stopped in a fright.
"'Repeat them,' she said in a heart-broken tone. 'I
want--I want--something--something--to--to live
with.'
"I was on the point of crying at her, 'Don't you hear
them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent
whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell
menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. 'The
horror! the horror!'
"'His last word--to live with,' she murmured. 'Don't
you understand I loved him--I loved him--I loved him!'
"I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.
"'The last word he pronounced was--your name.'
"I heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still,
stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by
the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable
pain. 'I knew it--I was sure!' . . . She knew. She
was sure. I heard her weeping; she had hidden her
face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would
collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would
fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The
heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have
fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice
which was his due? Hadn't he said he wanted only jus-
tice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would
have been too dark--too dark altogether. . . ."
Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in
the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a
time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Di-
rector, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was
barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-
way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed
somber under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the
heart of an immense darkness.
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