Heart of Darkness
by
Joseph Conrad
Part 2 out of 2
belonging to some coast tribe, and educated by my poor predecessor,
was the helmsman. He sported a pair of brass earrings, wore a blue
cloth wrapper from the waist to the ankles, and thought all the world
of himself. He was the most unstable kind of fool I had ever seen.
He steered with no end of a swagger while you were by; but if he lost
sight of you, he became instantly the prey of an abject funk,
and would let that cripple of a steamboat get the upper hand of him
in a minute.
"I was looking down at the sounding-pole, and feeling much annoyed
to see at each try a little more of it stick out of that river,
when I saw my poleman give up the business suddenly, and stretch himself
flat on the deck, without even taking the trouble to haul his pole in.
He kept hold on it though, and it trailed in the water.
At the same time the fireman, whom I could also see below me,
sat down abruptly before his furnace and ducked his head.
I was amazed. Then I had to look at the river mighty quick,
because there was a snag in the fairway. Sticks, little sticks,
were flying about--thick: they were whizzing before my nose,
dropping below me, striking behind me against my pilot-house.
All this time the river, the shore, the woods, were very quiet--
perfectly quiet. I could only hear the heavy splashing thump
of the stern-wheel and the patter of these things. We cleared
the snag clumsily. Arrows, by Jove! We were being shot at!
I stepped in quickly to close the shutter on the land side.
That fool-helmsman, his hands on the spokes, was lifting his knees high,
stamping his feet, champing his mouth, like a reined-in horse.
Confound him! And we were staggering within ten feet of the bank.
I had to lean right out to swing the heavy shutter, and I saw
a face amongst the leaves on the level with my own, looking at me
very fierce and steady; and then suddenly, as though a veil had
been removed from my eyes, I made out, deep in the tangled gloom,
naked breasts, arms, legs, glaring eyes,--the bush was swarming
with human limbs in movement, glistening, of bronze color.
The twigs shook, swayed, and rustled, the arrows flew out
of them, and then the shutter came to. `Steer her straight,'
I said to the helmsman. He held his head rigid, face forward;
but his eyes rolled, he kept on lifting and setting down
his feet gently, his mouth foamed a little. `Keep quiet!'
I said in a fury. I might just as well have ordered a tree
not to sway in the wind. I darted out. Below me there was
a great scuffle of feet on the iron deck; confused exclamations;
a voice screamed, `Can you turn back?' I caught shape of a
V-shaped ripple on the water ahead. What? Another snag!
A fusillade burst out under my feet. The pilgrims had opened with
their Winchesters, and were simply squirting lead into that bush.
A deuce of a lot of smoke came up and drove slowly forward.
I swore at it. Now I couldn't see the ripple or the snag either.
I stood in the doorway, peering, and the arrows came in swarms.
They might have been poisoned, but they looked as though
they wouldn't kill a cat. The bush began to howl.
Our wood-cutters raised a warlike whoop; the report of a rifle
just at my back deafened me. I glanced over my shoulder,
and the pilot-house was yet full of noise and smoke when I made
a dash at the wheel. The fool-nigger had dropped everything,
to throw the shutter open and let off that Martini-Henry. He stood
before the wide opening, glaring, and I yelled at him to come back,
while I straightened the sudden twist out of that steamboat.
There was no room to turn even if I had wanted to, the snag
was somewhere very near ahead in that confounded smoke,
there was no time to lose, so I just crowded her into the bank--
right into the bank, where I knew the water was deep.
"We tore slowly along the overhanging bushes in a whirl of broken
twigs and flying leaves. The fusillade below stopped short,
as I had foreseen it would when the squirts got empty.
I threw my head back to a glinting whizz that traversed
the pilot-house, in at one shutter-hole and out at the other.
Looking past that mad helmsman, who was shaking the empty rifle
and yelling at the shore, I saw vague forms of men running
bent double, leaping, gliding, distinct, incomplete, evanescent.
Something big appeared in the air before the shutter, the rifle
went overboard, and the man stepped back swiftly, looked at me
over his shoulder in an extraordinary, profound, familiar manner,
and fell upon my feet. The side of his head hit the wheel twice,
and the end of what appeared a long cane clattered round and knocked
over a little camp-stool. It looked as though after wrenching that
thing from somebody ashore he had lost his balance in the effort.
The thin smoke had blown away, we were clear of the snag,
and looking ahead I could see that in another hundred yards
or so I would be free to sheer off, away from the bank;
but my feet felt so very warm and wet that I had to look down.
The man had rolled on his back and stared straight up at me;
both his hands clutched that cane. It was the shaft of a spear that,
either thrown or lunged through the opening, had caught him
in the side just below the ribs; the blade had gone in out
of sight, after making a frightful gash; my shoes were full;
a pool of blood lay very still, gleaming dark-red under the wheel;
his eyes shone with an amazing luster. The fusillade burst out again.
He looked at me anxiously, gripping the spear like something precious,
with an air of being afraid I would try to take it away from him.
I had to make an effort to free my eyes from his gaze and attend
to the steering. With one hand I felt above my head for the line
of the steam-whistle, and jerked out screech after screech hurriedly.
The tumult of angry and warlike yells was checked instantly,
and then from the depths of the woods went out such a tremulous
and prolonged wail of mournful fear and utter despair as may be
imagined to follow the flight of the last hope from the earth.
There was a great commotion in the bush; the shower of arrows stopped,
a few dropping shots rang out sharply--then silence, in which
the languid beat of the stern-wheel came plainly to my ears.
I put the helm hard a-starboard at the moment when the pilgrim
in pink pyjamas, very hot and agitated, appeared in the doorway.
`The manager sends me--' he began in an official tone,
and stopped short. `Good God!' he said, glaring at the wounded man.
"We two whites stood over him, and his lustrous and inquiring
glance enveloped us both. I declare it looked as though he would
presently put to us some question in an understandable language;
but he died without uttering a sound, without moving a limb,
without twitching a muscle. Only in the very last moment, as though
in response to some sign we could not see, to some whisper we could
not hear, he frowned heavily, and that frown gave to his black
death-mask an inconceivably somber, brooding, and menacing expression.
The luster of inquiring glance faded swiftly into vacant glassiness.
`Can you steer?' I asked the agent eagerly. He looked very dubious;
but I made a grab at his arm, and he understood at once I
meant him to steer whether or no. To tell you the truth,
I was morbidly anxious to change my shoes and socks. `He is dead,'
murmured the fellow, immensely impressed. `No doubt about it,'
said I, tugging like mad at the shoe-laces. `And, by the way,
I suppose Mr. Kurtz is dead as well by this time.'
"For the moment that was the dominant thought. There was a sense
of extreme disappointment, as though I had found out I had been
striving after something altogether without a substance.
I couldn't have been more disgusted if I had traveled all this way
for the sole purpose of talking with Mr. Kurtz. Talking with.
. . . I flung one shoe overboard, and became aware
that that was exactly what I had been looking forward to--
a talk with Kurtz. I made the strange discovery that I had
never imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing.
I didn't say to myself, `Now I will never see him,'
or `Now I will never shake him by the hand,' but, `Now I
will never hear him.' The man presented himself as a voice.
Not of course that I did not connect him with some sort of action.
Hadn't I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration
that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory
than all the other agents together? That was not the point.
The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his
gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it
a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words--
the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating,
the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating
stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of
an impenetrable darkness.
"The other shoe went flying unto the devil-god of that river.
I thought, `By Jove! it's all over. We are too late; he has vanished--
the gift has vanished, by means of some spear, arrow, or club.
I will never hear that chap speak after all,'--and my sorrow
had a startling extravagance of emotion, even such as I had
noticed in the howling sorrow of these savages in the bush.
I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been
robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life. . . . Why
do you sigh in this beastly way, somebody? Absurd? Well, absurd.
Good Lord! mustn't a man ever--Here, give me some tobacco."
. . .
There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match flared,
and Marlow's lean face appeared, worn, hollow, with downward folds
and dropped eyelids, with an aspect of concentrated attention;
and as he took vigorous draws at his pipe, it seemed to retreat and
advance out of the night in the regular flicker of the tiny flame.
The match went out.
"Absurd!" he cried. "This is the worst of trying to tell. . . . Here you
all are, each moored with two good addresses, like a hulk with two anchors,
a butcher round one corner, a policeman round another, excellent appetites,
and temperature normal--you hear--normal from year's end to year's end.
And you say, Absurd! Absurd be--exploded! Absurd! My dear boys, what can
you expect from a man who out of sheer nervousness had just flung overboard
a pair of new shoes. Now I think of it, it is amazing I did not shed tears.
I am, upon the whole, proud of my fortitude. I was cut to the quick
at the idea of having lost the inestimable privilege of listening to the
gifted Kurtz. Of course I was wrong. The privilege was waiting for me.
Oh yes, I heard more than enough. And I was right, too. A voice.
He was very little more than a voice. And I heard--him--it--this voice--
other voices--all of them were so little more than voices--and the memory
of that time itself lingers around me, impalpable, like a dying vibration
of one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean,
without any kind of sense. Voices, voices--even the girl herself--now--"
He was silent for a long time.
"I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie,"
he began suddenly. "Girl! What? Did I mention a girl?
Oh, she is out of it--completely. They--the women, I mean--
are out of it--should be out of it. We must help them to stay
in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse.
Oh, she had to be out of it. You should have heard the disinterred
body of Mr. Kurtz saying, `My Intended.' You would have
perceived directly then how completely she was out of it.
And the lofty frontal bone of Mr. Kurtz! They say the hair goes
on growing sometimes, but this--ah specimen, was impressively bald.
The wilderness had patted him on the head, and, behold, it was
like a ball--an ivory ball; it had caressed him, and--lo!--
he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him,
got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its
own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation.
He was its spoiled and pampered favorite. Ivory? I should think so.
Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting with it.
You would think there was not a single tusk left either above
or below the ground in the whole country. `Mostly fossil,'
the manager had remarked disparagingly. It was no more fossil than I am;
but they call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears these niggers
do bury the tusks sometimes--but evidently they couldn't bury this
parcel deep enough to save the gifted Mr. Kurtz from his fate.
We filled the steamboat with it, and had to pile a lot on the deck.
Thus he could see and enjoy as long as he could see, because the
appreciation of this favor had remained with him to the last.
You should have heard him say, `My ivory.' Oh yes, I heard him.
`My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my--' everything belonged
to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing
the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would
shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him--
but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to,
how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.
That was the reflection that made you creepy all over.
It was impossible--it was not good for one either--trying to imagine.
He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land--
I mean literally. You can't understand. How could you?--
with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors
ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between
the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and
gallows and lunatic asylums--how can you imagine what particular
region of the first ages a man's untrammeled feet may take him
into by the way of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--
by the way of silence, utter silence, where no warning voice
of a kind neighbor can be heard whispering of public opinion?
These little things make all the great difference.
When they are gone you must fall back upon your own
innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness.
Of course you may be too much of a fool to go wrong--too dull
even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness.
I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil:
the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil--
I don't know which. Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted
creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly
sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing place--
and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won't
pretend to say. But most of us are neither one nor the other.
The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights,
with sounds, with smells too, by Jove!--breathe dead hippo,
so to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don't you see?
Your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging
of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in--your power of devotion,
not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business.
And that's difficult enough. Mind, I am not trying to excuse or
even explain--I am trying to account to myself for--for--Mr. Kurtz--
for the shade of Mr. Kurtz. This initiated wraith from the back
of Nowhere honored me with its amazing confidence before it
vanished altogether. This was because it could speak English to me.
The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and--as he was
good enough to say himself--his sympathies were in the right place.
His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe
contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by-and-by I learned that,
most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression
of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report,
for its future guidance. And he had written it too. I've seen it.
I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence,
but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing
he had found time for! But this must have been before his--
let us say--nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain
midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which--as far
as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times--
were offered up to him--do you understand?--to Mr. Kurtz himself.
But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph,
however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous.
He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development
we had arrived at, `must necessarily appear to them [savages] in
the nature of supernatural beings--we approach them with the might
as of a deity,' and so on, and so on. `By the simple exercise
of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,'
&c., &c. From that point he soared and took me with him.
The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember,
you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled
by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm.
This was the unbounded power of eloquence--of words--
of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to
interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note
at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later,
in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method.
It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every
altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying,
like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: `Exterminate all
the brutes!' The curious part was that he had apparently
forgotten all about that valuable postscriptum, because, later on,
when he in a sense came to himself, he repeatedly entreated me
to take good care of `my pamphlet' (he called it), as it was
sure to have in the future a good influence upon his career.
I had full information about all these things, and, besides,
as it turned out, I was to have the care of his memory.
I've done enough for it to give me the indisputable right to lay it,
if I choose, for an everlasting rest in the dust-bin of progress,
amongst all the sweepings and, figuratively speaking, all the dead
cats of civilization. But then, you see, I can't choose.
He won't be forgotten. Whatever he was, he was not common.
He had the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into
an aggravated witch-dance in his honor; he could also fill
the small souls of the pilgrims with bitter misgivings:
he had one devoted friend at least, and he had conquered one
soul in the world that was neither rudimentary nor tainted with
self-seeking. No; I can't forget him, though I am not prepared to affirm
the fellow was exactly worth the life we lost in getting to him.
I missed my late helmsman awfully,--I missed him even while his
body was still lying in the pilot-house. Perhaps you will think it
passing strange this regret for a savage who was no more account
than a grain of sand in a black Sahara. Well, don't you see,
he had done something, he had steered; for months I had him at
my back--a help--an instrument. It was a kind of partnership.
He steered for me--I had to look after him, I worried about
his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created,
of which I only became aware when it was suddenly broken.
And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received
his hurt remains to this day in my memory--like a claim of distant
kinship affirmed in a supreme moment.
"Poor fool! If he had only left that shutter alone.
He had no restraint, no restraint--just like Kurtz--a tree swayed
by the wind. As soon as I had put on a dry pair of slippers,
I dragged him out, after first jerking the spear out of his side,
which operation I confess I performed with my eyes shut tight.
His heels leaped together over the little door-step; his shoulders
were pressed to my breast; I hugged him from behind desperately.
Oh! he was heavy, heavy; heavier than any man on earth,
I should imagine. Then without more ado I tipped him overboard.
The current snatched him as though he had been a wisp of grass,
and I saw the body roll over twice before I lost sight
of it for ever. All the pilgrims and the manager were then
congregated on the awning-deck about the pilot-house,
chattering at each other like a flock of excited magpies,
and there was a scandalized murmur at my heartless promptitude.
What they wanted to keep that body hanging about for I can't guess.
Embalm it, maybe. But I had also heard another, and a very ominous,
murmur on the deck below. My friends the wood-cutters
were likewise scandalized, and with a better show of reason--
though I admit that the reason itself was quite inadmissible.
Oh, quite! I had made up my mind that if my late helmsman
was to be eaten, the fishes alone should have him.
He had been a very second-rate helmsman while alive, but now
he was dead he might have become a first-class temptation,
and possibly cause some startling trouble. Besides, I was
anxious to take the wheel, the man in pink pyjamas showing
himself a hopeless duffer at the business.
"This I did directly the simple funeral was over. We were going half-speed,
keeping right in the middle of the stream, and I listened to the talk
about me. They had given up Kurtz, they had given up the station;
Kurtz was dead, and the station had been burnt--and so on--and so on.
The red-haired pilgrim was beside himself with the thought that at
least this poor Kurtz had been properly revenged. `Say! We must
have made a glorious slaughter of them in the bush. Eh? What do
you think? Say?' He positively danced, the bloodthirsty little
gingery beggar. And he had nearly fainted when he saw the wounded man!
I could not help saying, `You made a glorious lot of smoke, anyhow.'
I had seen, from the way the tops of the bushes rustled and flew,
that almost all the shots had gone too high. You can't hit anything
unless you take aim and fire from the shoulder; but these chaps
fired from the hip with their eyes shut. The retreat, I maintained--
and I was right--was caused by the screeching of the steam-whistle. Upon
this they forgot Kurtz, and began to howl at me with indignant protests.
"The manager stood by the wheel murmuring confidentially about
the necessity of getting well away down the river before dark at
all events, when I saw in the distance a clearing on the river-side
and the outlines of some sort of building. `What's this?'
I asked. He clapped his hands in wonder. `The station!' he cried.
I edged in at once, still going half-speed.
"Through my glasses I saw the slope of a hill interspersed
with rare trees and perfectly free from undergrowth. A long
decaying building on the summit was half buried in the high grass;
the large holes in the peaked roof gaped black from afar;
the jungle and the woods made a background. There was no inclosure
or fence of any kind; but there had been one apparently, for near
the house half-a-dozen slim posts remained in a row, roughly trimmed,
and with their upper ends ornamented with round carved balls.
The rails, or whatever there had been between, had disappeared.
Of course the forest surrounded all that. The river-bank
was clear, and on the water-side I saw a white man under a hat
like a cart-wheel beckoning persistently with his whole arm.
Examining the edge of the forest above and below, I was almost
certain I could see movements--human forms gliding here and there.
I steamed past prudently, then stopped the engines and let her
drift down. The man on the shore began to shout, urging us to land.
`We have been attacked,' screamed the manager. `I know--I know.
It's all right,' yelled back the other, as cheerful as you please.
`Come along. It's all right. I am glad.'
"His aspect reminded me of something I had seen--something funny
I had seen somewhere. As I maneuvered to get alongside, I was
asking myself, `What does this fellow look like?' Suddenly I got it.
He looked like a harlequin. His clothes had been made of some stuff
that was brown holland probably, but it was covered with patches all over,
with bright patches, blue, red, and yellow,--patches on the back,
patches on front, patches on elbows, on knees; colored binding
round his jacket, scarlet edging at the bottom of his trousers;
and the sunshine made him look extremely gay and wonderfully neat withal,
because you could see how beautifully all this patching had been done.
A beardless, boyish face, very fair, no features to speak of,
nose peeling, little blue eyes, smiles and frowns chasing each other over
that open countenance like sunshine and shadow on a windswept plain.
`Look out, captain!' he cried; `there's a snag lodged in here
last night.' What! Another snag? I confess I swore shamefully.
I had nearly holed my cripple, to finish off that charming trip.
The harlequin on the bank turned his little pug nose up to me.
`You English?' he asked, all smiles. `Are you?' I shouted from the wheel.
The smiles vanished, and he shook his head as if sorry for my disappointment.
Then he brightened up. `Never mind!' he cried encouragingly.
`Are we in time?' I asked. `He is up there,' he replied, with a toss
of the head up the hill, and becoming gloomy all of a sudden.
His face was like the autumn sky, overcast one moment and bright the next.
"When the manager, escorted by the pilgrims, all of them armed
to the teeth, had gone to the house, this chap came on board.
`I say, I don't like this. These natives are in the bush,'
I said. He assured me earnestly it was all right.
`They are simple people,' he added; `well, I am glad you came.
It took me all my time to keep them off.' `But you said it
was all right,' I cried. `Oh, they meant no harm,' he said;
and as I stared he corrected himself, `Not exactly.'
Then vivaciously, `My faith, your pilot-house wants a clean up!'
In the next breath he advised me to keep enough steam
on the boiler to blow the whistle in case of any trouble.
`One good screech will do more for you than all your rifles.
They are simple people,' he repeated. He rattled away at such
a rate he quite overwhelmed me. He seemed to be trying to make
up for lots of silence, and actually hinted, laughing, that such
was the case. `Don't you talk with Mr. Kurtz?' I said.
`You don't talk with that man--you listen to him,' he exclaimed
with severe exaltation. `But now--' He waved his arm, and in
the twinkling of an eye was in the uttermost depths of despondency.
In a moment he came up again with a jump, possessed himself
of both my hands, shook them continuously, while he gabbled:
`Brother sailor . . . honor . . . pleasure . . . delight . . .
introduce myself . . . Russian . . . son of an arch-priest . .
. Government of Tambov . . . What? Tobacco! English tobacco;
the excellent English tobacco! Now, that's brotherly.
Smoke? Where's a sailor that does not smoke?'
"The pipe soothed him, and gradually I made out he had
run away from school, had gone to sea in a Russian ship;
ran away again; served some time in English ships; was now
reconciled with the arch-priest. He made a point of that.
`But when one is young one must see things, gather experience,
ideas; enlarge the mind.' `Here!' I interrupted.
`You can never tell! Here I have met Mr. Kurtz,' he said,
youthfully solemn and reproachful. I held my tongue after that.
It appears he had persuaded a Dutch trading-house on the coast to fit
him out with stores and goods, and had started for the interior
with a light heart, and no more idea of what would happen to him
than a baby. He had been wandering about that river for nearly
two years alone, cut off from everybody and everything.
`I am not so young as I look. I am twenty-five,' he said.
`At first old Van Shuyten would tell me to go to the devil,'
he narrated with keen enjoyment; `but I stuck to him, and talked
and talked, till at last he got afraid I would talk the hind-leg off
his favorite dog, so he gave me some cheap things and a few guns,
and told me he hoped he would never see my face again.
Good old Dutchman, Van Shuyten. I've sent him one small lot
of ivory a year ago, so that he can't call me a little thief when I
get back. I hope he got it. And for the rest I don't care.
I had some wood stacked for you. That was my old house.
Did you see?'
"I gave him Towson's book. He made as though he would kiss me,
but restrained himself. `The only book I had left, and I
thought I had lost it,' he said, looking at it ecstatically.
`So many accidents happen to a man going about alone, you know.
Canoes get upset sometimes--and sometimes you've got to clear
out so quick when the people get angry.' He thumbed the pages.
`You made notes in Russian?' I asked. He nodded. `I thought they
were written in cipher,' I said. He laughed, then became serious.
`I had lots of trouble to keep these people off,' he said.
`Did they want to kill you?' I asked. `Oh no!' he cried,
and checked himself. `Why did they attack us?' I pursued.
He hesitated, then said shamefacedly, `They don't want him to go.'
`Don't they?' I said, curiously. He nodded a nod full of mystery
and wisdom. `I tell you,' he cried, `this man has enlarged my mind.'
He opened his arms wide, staring at me with his little blue eyes
that were perfectly round."
III
"I looked at him, lost in astonishment. There he was before me, in motley,
as though he had absconded from a troupe of mimes, enthusiastic, fabulous.
His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering.
He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed,
how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain--
why he did not instantly disappear. `I went a little farther,'
he said, `then still a little farther--till I had gone so far that I
don't know how I'll ever get back. Never mind. Plenty time.
I can manage. You take Kurtz away quick--quick--I tell you.'
The glamour of youth enveloped his particolored rags, his destitution,
his loneliness, the essential desolation of his futile wanderings.
For months--for years--his life hadn't been worth a day's purchase;
and there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all appearance
indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and of his
unreflecting audacity. I was seduced into something like admiration--
like envy. Glamour urged him on, glamour kept him unscathed.
He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe
in and to push on through. His need was to exist, and to move onwards
at the greatest possible risk, and with a maximum of privation.
If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure
had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this be-patched youth.
I almost envied him the possession of this modest and clear flame.
It seemed to have consumed all thought of self so completely, that,
even while he was talking to you, you forgot that it was he--the man
before your eyes--who had gone through these things. I did not envy
him his devotion to Kurtz, though. He had not meditated over it.
It came to him, and he accepted it with a sort of eager fatalism.
I must say that to me it appeared about the most dangerous thing
in every way he had come upon so far.
"They had come together unavoidably, like two ships becalmed near
each other, and lay rubbing sides at last. I suppose Kurtz wanted
an audience, because on a certain occasion, when encamped in the forest,
they had talked all night, or more probably Kurtz had talked.
`We talked of everything,' he said, quite transported at the recollection.
`I forgot there was such a thing as sleep. The night did not seem
to last an hour. Everything! Everything! . . . Of love too.'
`Ah, he talked to you of love!' I said, much amused. `It isn't
what you think,' he cried, almost passionately. `It was in general.
He made me see things--things.'
"He threw his arms up. We were on deck at the time, and the headman
of my wood-cutters, lounging near by, turned upon him his heavy and
glittering eyes. I looked around, and I don't know why, but I assure
you that never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle,
the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark,
so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness.
`And, ever since, you have been with him, of course?' I said.
"On the contrary. It appears their intercourse had been very much
broken by various causes. He had, as he informed me proudly,
managed to nurse Kurtz through two illnesses (he alluded to it as you
would to some risky feat), but as a rule Kurtz wandered alone,
far in the depths of the forest. `Very often coming to this station,
I had to wait days and days before he would turn up,' he said.
`Ah, it was worth waiting for!--sometimes.' `What was
he doing? exploring or what?' I asked. `Oh yes, of course;'
he had discovered lots of villages, a lake too--he did not know
exactly in what direction; it was dangerous to inquire too much--
but mostly his expeditions had been for ivory. `But he had no
goods to trade with by that time,' I objected. `There's a good
lot of cartridges left even yet,' he answered, looking away.
`To speak plainly, he raided the country,' I said. He nodded.
`Not alone, surely!' He muttered something about the villages
round that lake. `Kurtz got the tribe to follow him, did he?'
I suggested. He fidgeted a little. `They adored him,' he said.
The tone of these words was so extraordinary that I looked at
him searchingly. It was curious to see his mingled eagerness
and reluctance to speak of Kurtz. The man filled his life,
occupied his thoughts, swayed his emotions. `What can you expect?'
he burst out; `he came to them with thunder and lightning, you know--
and they had never seen anything like it--and very terrible.
He could be very terrible. You can't judge Mr. Kurtz as you would
an ordinary man. No, no, no! Now--just to give you an idea--
I don't mind telling you, he wanted to shoot me too one day--
but I don't judge him.' `Shoot you!' I cried. `What for?'
`Well, I had a small lot of ivory the chief of that village
near my house gave me. You see I used to shoot game
for them. Well, he wanted it, and wouldn't hear reason.
He declared he would shoot me unless I gave him the ivory
and then cleared out of the country, because he could do so,
and had a fancy for it, and there was nothing on earth
to prevent him killing whom he jolly well pleased.
And it was true too. I gave him the ivory. What did I care!
But I didn't clear out. No, no. I couldn't leave him.
I had to be careful, of course, till we got friendly
again for a time. He had his second illness then.
Afterwards I had to keep out of the way; but I didn't mind.
He was living for the most part in those villages on the lake.
When he came down to the river, sometimes he would take to me,
and sometimes it was better for me to be careful. This man suffered
too much. He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away.
When I had a chance I begged him to try and leave while there
was time; I offered to go back with him. And he would say yes,
and then he would remain; go off on another ivory hunt;
disappear for weeks; forget himself amongst these people--
forget himself--you know.' `Why! he's mad,' I said.
He protested indignantly. Mr. Kurtz couldn't be mad.
If I had heard him talk, only two days ago, I wouldn't dare
hint at such a thing. . . . I had taken up my binoculars
while we talked and was looking at the shore, sweeping the limit
of the forest at each side and at the back of the house.
The consciousness of there being people in that bush, so silent,
so quiet--as silent and quiet as the ruined house on the hill--
made me uneasy. There was no sign on the face of nature
of this amazing tale that was not so much told as suggested
to me in desolate exclamations, completed by shrugs,
in interrupted phrases, in hints ending in deep sighs.
The woods were unmoved, like a mask--heavy, like the closed door
of a prison--they looked with their air of hidden knowledge,
of patient expectation, of unapproachable silence.
The Russian was explaining to me that it was only lately
that Mr. Kurtz had come down to the river, bringing along
with him all the fighting men of that lake tribe. He had been
absent for several months--getting himself adored, I suppose--
and had come down unexpectedly, with the intention to all appearance
of making a raid either across the river or down stream.
Evidently the appetite for more ivory had got the better of the--
what shall I say?--less material aspirations. However he had got much
worse suddenly. `I heard he was lying helpless, and so I came up--
took my chance,' said the Russian. `Oh, he is bad, very bad.'
I directed my glass to the house. There were no signs of life,
but there was the ruined roof, the long mud wall peeping above
the grass, with three little square window-holes, no two of the
same size; all this brought within reach of my hand, as it were.
And then I made a brusque movement, and one of the remaining
posts of that vanished fence leaped up in the field of my glass.
You remember I told you I had been struck at the distance by certain
attempts at ornamentation, rather remarkable in the ruinous aspect
of the place. Now I had suddenly a nearer view, and its first
result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow.
Then I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I saw
my mistake. These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic;
they were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing--
food for thought and also for the vultures if there had been
any looking down from the sky; but at all events for such
ants as were industrious enough to ascend the pole.
They would have been even more impressive, those heads on
the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house.
Only one, the first I had made out, was facing my way.
I was not so shocked as you may think. The start back I
had given was really nothing but a movement of surprise.
I had expected to see a knob of wood there, you know.
I returned deliberately to the first I had seen--and there
it was, black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids,--a head
that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the
shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth,
was smiling too, smiling continuously at some endless and jocose
dream of that eternal slumber.
"I am not disclosing any trade secrets. In fact the manager said
afterwards that Mr. Kurtz's methods had ruined the district.
I have no opinion on that point, but I want you clearly to understand
that there was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there.
They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification
of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him--
some small matter which, when the pressing need arose,
could not be found under his magnificent eloquence.
Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say.
I think the knowledge came to him at last--only at the very last.
But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him
a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it
had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know,
things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this
great solitude--and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating.
It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.
. . . I put down the glass, and the head that had appeared near
enough to be spoken to seemed at once to have leaped away from me
into inaccessible distance.
"The admirer of Mr. Kurtz was a bit crestfallen. In a hurried,
indistinct voice he began to assure me he had not dared to
take these--say, symbols--down. He was not afraid of the natives;
they would not stir till Mr. Kurtz gave the word. His ascendency
was extraordinary. The camps of these people surrounded the place,
and the chiefs came every day to see him. They would crawl.
. . . `I don't want to know anything of the ceremonies used
when approaching Mr. Kurtz,' I shouted. Curious, this feeling
that came over me that such details would be more intolerable
than those heads drying on the stakes under Mr. Kurtz's windows.
After all, that was only a savage sight, while I seemed at one bound
to have been transported into some lightless region of subtle horrors,
where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief,
being something that had a right to exist--obviously--
in the sunshine. The young man looked at me with surprise.
I suppose it did not occur to him Mr. Kurtz was no idol of mine.
He forgot I hadn't heard any of these splendid monologues on,
what was it? on love, justice, conduct of life--or what not.
If it had come to crawling before Mr. Kurtz, he crawled as much as the
veriest savage of them all. I had no idea of the conditions, he said:
these heads were the heads of rebels. I shocked him excessively
by laughing. Rebels! What would be the next definition I was to hear?
There had been enemies, criminals, workers--and these were rebels.
Those rebellious heads looked very subdued to me on their sticks.
`You don't know how such a life tries a man like Kurtz,' cried Kurtz's
last disciple. `Well, and you?' I said. `I! I! I am a simple man.
I have no great thoughts. I want nothing from anybody.
How can you compare me to . . .?' His feelings were too much for speech,
and suddenly he broke down. `I don't understand,' he groaned.
`I've been doing my best to keep him alive, and that's enough.
I had no hand in all this. I have no abilities. There hasn't been
a drop of medicine or a mouthful of invalid food for months here.
He was shamefully abandoned. A man like this, with such ideas.
Shamefully! Shamefully! I--I-- haven't slept for the last ten nights.
. . .'
"His voice lost itself in the calm of the evening. The long shadows
of the forest had slipped down hill while we talked, had gone
far beyond the ruined hovel, beyond the symbolic row of stakes.
All this was in the gloom, while we down there were yet in the sunshine,
and the stretch of the river abreast of the clearing glittered
in a still and dazzling splendor, with a murky and over-shadowed
bend above and below. Not a living soul was seen on the shore.
The bushes did not rustle.
"Suddenly round the corner of the house a group of men appeared,
as though they had come up from the ground. They waded waist-deep
in the grass, in a compact body, bearing an improvised stretcher
in their midst. Instantly, in the emptiness of the landscape, a cry
arose whose shrillness pierced the still air like a sharp arrow flying
straight to the very heart of the land; and, as if by enchantment,
streams of human beings--of naked human beings--with spears in their hands,
with bows, with shields, with wild glances and savage movements,
were poured into the clearing by the dark-faced and pensive forest.
The bushes shook, the grass swayed for a time, and then everything
stood still in attentive immobility.
"`Now, if he does not say the right thing to them we are all
done for,' said the Russian at my elbow. The knot of men
with the stretcher had stopped too, half-way to the steamer,
as if petrified. I saw the man on the stretcher sit up,
lank and with an uplifted arm, above the shoulders of the bearers.
`Let us hope that the man who can talk so well of love in general
will find some particular reason to spare us this time,' I said.
I resented bitterly the absurd danger of our situation, as if to be at
the mercy of that atrocious phantom had been a dishonoring necessity.
I could not hear a sound, but through my glasses I saw the thin
arm extended commandingly, the lower jaw moving, the eyes of
that apparition shining darkly far in its bony head that nodded
with grotesque jerks. Kurtz--Kurtz--that means short in German--
don't it? Well, the name was as true as everything else
in his life--and death. He looked at least seven feet long.
His covering had fallen off, and his body emerged from it
pitiful and appalling as from a winding-sheet. I could see
the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving.
It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old
ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless
crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze. I saw him
open his mouth wide--it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect,
as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth,
all the men before him. A deep voice reached me faintly.
He must have been shouting. He fell back suddenly.
The stretcher shook as the bearers staggered forward again,
and almost at the same time I noticed that the crowd of savages
was vanishing without any perceptible movement of retreat,
as if the forest that had ejected these beings so suddenly had
drawn them in again as the breath is drawn in a long aspiration.
"Some of the pilgrims behind the stretcher carried his arms--
two shot-guns, a heavy rifle, and a light revolver-carbine--
the thunderbolts of that pitiful Jupiter. The manager bent over him
murmuring as he walked beside his head. They laid him down in one
of the little cabins--just a room for a bed-place and a camp-stool
or two, you know. We had brought his belated correspondence,
and a lot of torn envelopes and open letters littered his bed.
His hand roamed feebly amongst these papers. I was struck by
the fire of his eyes and the composed languor of his expression.
It was not so much the exhaustion of disease. He did not seem in pain.
This shadow looked satiated and calm, as though for the moment it
had had its fill of all the emotions.
"He rustled one of the letters, and looking straight in my face said,
`I am glad.' Somebody had been writing to him about me.
These special recommendations were turning up again.
The volume of tone he emitted without effort, almost without
the trouble of moving his lips, amazed me. A voice! a voice!
It was grave, profound, vibrating, while the man did not seem
capable of a whisper. However, he had enough strength in him--
factitious no doubt--to very nearly make an end of us, as you
shall hear directly.
"The manager appeared silently in the doorway; I stepped
out at once and he drew the curtain after me. The Russian,
eyed curiously by the pilgrims, was staring at the shore.
I followed the direction of his glance.
"Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance,
flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest,
and near the river two bronze figures, leaning on tall spears,
stood in the sunlight under fantastic headdresses of spotted skins,
warlike and still in statuesque repose. And from right to left
along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition
of a woman.
"She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and
fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle
and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high;
her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass
leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow,
a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass
beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men,
that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step.
She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her.
She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was
something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress.
And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole
sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of
the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive,
as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous
and passionate soul.
"She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us.
Her long shadow fell to the water's edge. Her face had a tragic
and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled
with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve.
She stood looking at us without a stir and like the wilderness
itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose.
A whole minute passed, and then she made a step forward.
There was a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of
fringed draperies, and she stopped as if her heart had failed her.
The young fellow by my side growled. The pilgrims murmured
at my back. She looked at us all as if her life had depended
upon the unswerving steadiness of her glance. Suddenly she
opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head,
as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, and at
the same time the swift shadows darted out on the earth, swept around
on the river, gathering the steamer into a shadowy embrace.
A formidable silence hung over the scene.
"She turned away slowly, walked on, following the bank, and passed
into the bushes to the left. Once only her eyes gleamed back at us
in the dusk of the thickets before she disappeared.
"`If she had offered to come aboard I really think I would have tried
to shoot her,' said the man of patches, nervously. `I had been risking
my life every day for the last fortnight to keep her out of the house.
She got in one day and kicked up a row about those miserable rags I
picked up in the storeroom to mend my clothes with. I wasn't decent.
At least it must have been that, for she talked like a fury to Kurtz
for an hour, pointing at me now and then. I don't understand the dialect
of this tribe. Luckily for me, I fancy Kurtz felt too ill that day
to care, or there would have been mischief. I don't understand.
. . . No--it's too much for me. Ah, well, it's all over now.'
"At this moment I heard Kurtz's deep voice behind the curtain,
`Save me!--save the ivory, you mean. Don't tell me.
Save ME! Why, I've had to save you. You are interrupting my
plans now. Sick! Sick! Not so sick as you would like to believe.
Never mind. I'll carry my ideas out yet--I will return.
I'll show you what can be done. You with your little
peddling notions--you are interfering with me. I will return.
I . . .'
"The manager came out. He did me the honor to take me under
the arm and lead me aside. `He is very low, very low,' he said.
He considered it necessary to sigh, but neglected to be
consistently sorrowful. `We have done all we could for him--haven't we?
But there is no disguising the fact, Mr. Kurtz has done more harm
than good to the Company. He did not see the time was not ripe
for vigorous action. Cautiously, cautiously--that's my principle.
We must be cautious yet. The district is closed to us for
a time. Deplorable! Upon the whole, the trade will suffer.
I don't deny there is a remarkable quantity of ivory--mostly fossil.
We must save it, at all events--but look how precarious
the position is--and why? Because the method is unsound.'
`Do you,' said I, looking at the shore, `call it "unsound method"?'
`Without doubt,' he exclaimed, hotly. `Don't you?' . . . `No
method at all,' I murmured after a while. `Exactly,' he exulted.
`I anticipated this. Shows a complete want of judgment.
It is my duty to point it out in the proper quarter.'
`Oh,' said I, `that fellow--what's his name?--the brickmaker, will make
a readable report for you.' He appeared confounded for a moment.
It seemed to me I had never breathed an atmosphere so vile,
and I turned mentally to Kurtz for relief--positively for relief.
`Nevertheless I think Mr. Kurtz is a remarkable man,' I said
with emphasis. He started, dropped on me a cold heavy glance,
said very quietly, `He WAS,' and turned his back on me.
My hour of favor was over; I found myself lumped along with Kurtz
as a partisan of methods for which the time was not ripe:
I was unsound! Ah! but it was something to have at least
a choice of nightmares.
"I had turned to the wilderness really, not to Mr. Kurtz, who,
I was ready to admit, was as good as buried. And for a moment
it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full
of unspeakable secrets. I felt an intolerable weight oppressing
my breast, the smell of the damp earth, the unseen presence
of victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night.
. . . The Russian tapped me on the shoulder. I heard him mumbling
and stammering something about `brother seaman--couldn't conceal--
knowledge of matters that would affect Mr. Kurtz's reputation.'
I waited. For him evidently Mr. Kurtz was not in his grave;
I suspect that for him Mr. Kurtz was one of the immortals.
`Well!' said I at last, `speak out. As it happens, I am
Mr. Kurtz's friend--in a way.'
"He stated with a good deal of formality that had we not been `of
the same profession,' he would have kept the matter to himself
without regard to consequences. `He suspected there was an active
ill-will towards him on the part of these white men that--'
`You are right,' I said, remembering a certain conversation I
had overheard. `The manager thinks you ought to be hanged.'
He showed a concern at this intelligence which amused me at first.
`I had better get out of the way quietly,' he said, earnestly.
`I can do no more for Kurtz now, and they would soon find some excuse.
What's to stop them? There's a military post three hundred miles
from here.' `Well, upon my word,' said I, `perhaps you had
better go if you have any friends amongst the savages near by.'
`Plenty,' he said. `They are simple people--and I want nothing,
you know.' He stood biting his lips, then: `I don't want any harm
to happen to these whites here, but of course I was thinking of
Mr. Kurtz's reputation--but you are a brother seaman and--' `All right,'
said I, after a time. `Mr. Kurtz's reputation is safe with me.'
I did not know how truly I spoke.
"He informed me, lowering his voice, that it was Kurtz
who had ordered the attack to be made on the steamer.
`He hated sometimes the idea of being taken away--and then again.
. . . But I don't understand these matters. I am a simple man.
He thought it would scare you away--that you would give it up,
thinking him dead. I could not stop him. Oh, I had an awful time
of it this last month.' `Very well,' I said. `He is all right now.'
`Ye-e-es,' he muttered, not very convinced apparently.
`Thanks,' said I; `I shall keep my eyes open.' `But quiet--eh?'
he urged, anxiously. `It would be awful for his reputation if
anybody here--' I promised a complete discretion with great gravity.
`I have a canoe and three black fellows waiting not very far.
I am off. Could you give me a few Martini-Henry cartridges?'
I could, and did, with proper secrecy. He helped himself,
with a wink at me, to a handful of my tobacco. `Between sailors--
you know--good English tobacco.' At the door of the pilot-house
he turned round--' I say, haven't you a pair of shoes you could spare?'
He raised one leg. `Look.' The soles were tied with knotted
strings sandal-wise under his bare feet. I rooted out an old pair,
at which he looked with admiration before tucking it under his left arm.
One of his pockets (bright red) was bulging with cartridges,
from the other (dark blue) peeped `Towson's Inquiry,' &c., &c. He
seemed to think himself excellently well equipped for a renewed
encounter with the wilderness. `Ah! I'll never, never meet
such a man again. You ought to have heard him recite poetry--
his own too it was, he told me. Poetry!' He rolled his eyes at
the recollection of these delights. `Oh, he enlarged my mind!'
`Goodby,' said I. He shook hands and vanished in the night.
Sometimes I ask myself whether I had ever really seen him--
whether it was possible to meet such a phenomenon! . . .
"When I woke up shortly after midnight his warning came to my mind
with its hint of danger that seemed, in the starred darkness,
real enough to make me get up for the purpose of having a look round.
On the hill a big fire burned, illuminating fitfully a crooked corner
of the station-house. One of the agents with a picket of a few of
our blacks, armed for the purpose, was keeping guard over the ivory;
but deep within the forest, red gleams that wavered, that seemed
to sink and rise from the ground amongst confused columnar shapes
of intense blackness, showed the exact position of the camp
where Mr. Kurtz's adorers were keeping their uneasy vigil.
The monotonous beating of a big drum filled the air with muffled
shocks and a lingering vibration. A steady droning sound of many men
chanting each to himself some weird incantation came out from the black,
flat wall of the woods as the humming of bees comes out of a hive,
and had a strange narcotic effect upon my half-awake senses.
I believe I dozed off leaning over the rail, till an abrupt burst
of yells, an overwhelming outbreak of a pent-up and mysterious frenzy,
woke me up in a bewildered wonder. It was cut short all at once,
and the low droning went on with an effect of audible and soothing silence.
I glanced casually into the little cabin. A light was burning within,
but Mr. Kurtz was not there.
"I think I would have raised an outcry if I had believed my eyes.
But I didn't believe them at first--the thing seemed so impossible.
The fact is I was completely unnerved by a sheer blank fright,
pure abstract terror, unconnected with any distinct shape
of physical danger. What made this emotion so overpowering was--
how shall I define it?--the moral shock I received,
as if something altogether monstrous, intolerable to thought
and odious to the soul, had been thrust upon me unexpectedly.
This lasted of course the merest fraction of a second, and then
the usual sense of commonplace, deadly danger, the possibility
of a sudden onslaught and massacre, or something of the kind,
which I saw impending, was positively welcome and composing.
It pacified me, in fact, so much, that I did not raise an alarm.
"There was an agent buttoned up inside an ulster and sleeping on a chair
on deck within three feet of me. The yells had not awakened him;
he snored very slightly; I left him to his slumbers and leaped ashore.
I did not betray Mr. Kurtz--it was ordered I should never betray him--
it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.
I was anxious to deal with this shadow by myself alone,--and to this day
I don't know why I was so jealous of sharing with anyone the peculiar
blackness of that experience.
"As soon as I got on the bank I saw a trail--a broad trail through
the grass. I remember the exultation with which I said to myself,
`He can't walk--he is crawling on all-fours--I've got him.'
The grass was wet with dew. I strode rapidly with clenched fists.
I fancy I had some vague notion of falling upon him and giving
him a drubbing. I don't know. I had some imbecile thoughts.
The knitting old woman with the cat obtruded herself upon my memory
as a most improper person to be sitting at the other end of such
an affair. I saw a row of pilgrims squirting lead in the air
out of Winchesters held to the hip. I thought I would never get
back to the steamer, and imagined myself living alone and unarmed
in the woods to an advanced age. Such silly things--you know.
And I remember I confounded the beat of the drum with the beating
of my heart, and was pleased at its calm regularity.
"I kept to the track though--then stopped to listen.
The night was very clear: a dark blue space, sparkling with
dew and starlight, in which black things stood very still.
I thought I could see a kind of motion ahead of me.
I was strangely cocksure of everything that night.
I actually left the track and ran in a wide semicircle (I verily
believe chuckling to myself) so as to get in front of that stir,
of that motion I had seen--if indeed I had seen anything.
I was circumventing Kurtz as though it had been a boyish game.
"I came upon him, and, if he had not heard me coming,
I would have fallen over him too, but he got up in time.
He rose, unsteady, long, pale, indistinct, like a vapor exhaled
by the earth, and swayed slightly, misty and silent before me;
while at my back the fires loomed between the trees, and the murmur
of many voices issued from the forest. I had cut him off cleverly;
but when actually confronting him I seemed to come to my senses,
I saw the danger in its right proportion. It was by no means over yet.
Suppose he began to shout? Though he could hardly stand,
there was still plenty of vigor in his voice. `Go away--
hide yourself,' he said, in that profound tone. It was very awful.
I glanced back. We were within thirty yards from the nearest fire.
A black figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long
black arms, across the glow. It had horns--antelope horns, I think--
on its head. Some sorcerer, some witch-man, no doubt: it looked
fiend-like enough. `Do you know what you are doing?' I whispered.
`Perfectly,' he answered, raising his voice for that single word:
it sounded to me far off and yet loud, like a hail through a
speaking-trumpet. `If he makes a row we are lost,' I thought to myself.
This clearly was not a case for fisticuffs, even apart from
the very natural aversion I had to beat that Shadow--this wandering
and tormented thing. `You will be lost,' I said--'utterly lost.'
One gets sometimes such a flash of inspiration, you know.
I did say the right thing, though indeed he could not have
been more irretrievably lost than he was at this very moment,
when the foundations of our intimacy were being laid--to endure--
to endure--even to the end--even beyond.
"`I had immense plans,' he muttered irresolutely.
`Yes,' said I; `but if you try to shout I'll smash your
head with--' There was not a stick or a stone near.
`I will throttle you for good,' I corrected myself.
`I was on the threshold of great things,' he pleaded, in a voice
of longing, with a wistfulness of tone that made my blood run cold.
`And now for this stupid scoundrel--' `Your success in Europe
is assured in any case,' I affirmed, steadily. I did not want
to have the throttling of him, you understand--and indeed it
would have been very little use for any practical purpose.
I tried to break the spell--the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness--
that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening
of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified
and monstrous passions. This alone, I was convinced,
had driven him out to the edge of the forest, to the bush,
towards the gleam of fires, the throb of drums, the drone
of weird incantations; this alone had beguiled his unlawful soul
beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations. And, don't you see,
the terror of the position was not in being knocked on the head--
though I had a very lively sense of that danger too--but in this,
that I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in
the name of anything high or low. I had, even like the niggers,
to invoke him--himself his own exalted and incredible degradation.
There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it.
He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man!
he had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was alone,
and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground
or floated in the air. I've been telling you what we said--
repeating the phrases we pronounced,--but what's the good?
They were common everyday words,--the familiar, vague sounds
exchanged on every waking day of life. But what of that?
They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness
of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.
Soul! If anybody had ever struggled with a soul, I am the man.
And I wasn't arguing with a lunatic either. Believe me or not,
his intelligence was perfectly clear--concentrated, it is true,
upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear; and therein
was my only chance--barring, of course, the killing him there
and then, which wasn't so good, on account of unavoidable noise.
But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked
within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad.
I had--for my sins, I suppose--to go through the ordeal of looking
into it myself. No eloquence could have been so withering
to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity.
He struggled with himself, too. I saw it,--I heard it.
I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint,
no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.
I kept my head pretty well; but when I had him at last stretched
on the couch, I wiped my forehead, while my legs shook under me
as though I had carried half a ton on my back down that hill.
And yet I had only supported him, his bony arm clasped round my neck--
and he was not much heavier than a child.
"When next day we left at noon, the crowd, of whose presence behind
the curtain of trees I had been acutely conscious all the time,
flowed out of the woods again, filled the clearing, covered the slope
with a mass of naked, breathing, quivering, bronze bodies.
I steamed up a bit, then swung down-stream, and two thousand eyes followed
the evolutions of the splashing, thumping, fierce river-demon beating
the water with its terrible tail and breathing black smoke into the air.
In front of the first rank, along the river, three men, plastered with
bright red earth from head to foot, strutted to and fro restlessly.
When we came abreast again, they faced the river, stamped their feet,
nodded their horned heads, swayed their scarlet bodies; they shook
towards the fierce river-demon a bunch of black feathers, a mangy
skin with a pendent tail--something that looked like a dried gourd;
they shouted periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled
no sounds of human language; and the deep murmurs of the crowd,
interrupted suddenly, were like the response of some satanic litany.
"We had carried Kurtz into the pilot-house: there was more air there.
Lying on the couch, he stared through the open shutter.
There was an eddy in the mass of human bodies, and the woman
with helmeted head and tawny cheeks rushed out to the very brink
of the stream. She put out her hands, shouted something,
and all that wild mob took up the shout in a roaring chorus
of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance.
"`Do you understand this?' I asked.
"He kept on looking out past me with fiery, longing eyes, with a
mingled expression of wistfulness and hate. He made no answer,
but I saw a smile, a smile of indefinable meaning, appear on
his colorless lips that a moment after twitched convulsively.
`Do I not?' he said slowly, gasping, as if the words had been
torn out of him by a supernatural power.
"I pulled the string of the whistle, and I did this because I
saw the pilgrims on deck getting out their rifles with an air
of anticipating a jolly lark. At the sudden screech there was
a movement of abject terror through that wedged mass of bodies.
`Don't! Don't you frighten them away,' cried someone on
deck disconsolately. I pulled the string time after time.
They broke and ran, they leaped, they crouched, they swerved,
they dodged the flying terror of the sound. The three red chaps had
fallen flat, face down on the shore, as though they had been shot dead.
Only the barbarous and superb woman did not so much as flinch,
and stretched tragically her bare arms after us over the somber
and glittering river.
"And then that imbecile crowd down on the deck started their little fun,
and I could see nothing more for smoke.
"The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness,
bearing us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our
upward progress; and Kurtz's life was running swiftly too,
ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time.
The manager was very placid, he had no vital anxieties now,
he took us both in with a comprehensive and satisfied glance:
the `affair' had come off as well as could be wished.
I saw the time approaching when I would be left alone of
the party of `unsound method.' The pilgrims looked upon me
with disfavor. I was, so to speak, numbered with the dead.
It is strange how I accepted this unforeseen partnership,
this choice of nightmares forced upon me in the tenebrous land
invaded by these mean and greedy phantoms.
"Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last.
It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence
the barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled!
The wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now--images of
wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift
of noble and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas--
these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments.
The shade of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow sham,
whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mold of primeval earth.
But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries
it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated
with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction,
of all the appearances of success and power.
"Sometimes he was contemptibly childish. He desired to have
kings meet him at railway-stations on his return from some
ghastly Nowhere, where he intended to accomplish great things.
`You show them you have in you something that is really profitable,
and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability,'
he would say. `Of course you must take care of the motives--
right motives--always.' The long reaches that were like one
and the same reach, monotonous bends that were exactly alike,
slipped past the steamer with their multitude of secular trees
looking patiently after this grimy fragment of another world,
the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres,
of blessings. I looked ahead--piloting. `Close the shutter,'
said Kurtz suddenly one day; `I can't bear to look at this.'
I did so. There was a silence. `Oh, but I will wring your heart yet!'
he cried at the invisible wilderness.
"We broke down--as I had expected--and had to lie up for repairs at the head
of an island. This delay was the first thing that shook Kurtz's confidence.
One morning he gave me a packet of papers and a photograph,--
the lot tied together with a shoe-string. `Keep this for me,' he said.
`This noxious fool' (meaning the manager) `is capable of prying
into my boxes when I am not looking.' In the afternoon I saw him.
He was lying on his back with closed eyes, and I withdrew quietly,
but I heard him mutter, `Live rightly, die, die . . .' I listened.
There was nothing more. Was he rehearsing some speech in his sleep,
or was it a fragment of a phrase from some newspaper article?
He had been writing for the papers and meant to do so again,
`for the furthering of my ideas. It's a duty.'
"His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer
down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun
never shines. But I had not much time to give him, because I was
helping the engine-driver to take to pieces the leaky cylinders,
to straighten a bent connecting-rod, and in other such matters.
I lived in an infernal mess of rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners,
hammers, ratchet-drills--things I abominate, because I don't get
on with them. I tended the little forge we fortunately had aboard;
I toiled wearily in a wretched scrap-heap--unless I had the shakes
too bad to stand.
"One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say
a little tremulously, `I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.'
The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur,
`Oh, nonsense!' and stood over him as if transfixed.
"Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have
never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched.
I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent.
I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride,
of ruthless power, of craven terror--of an intense and hopeless despair.
Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation,
and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge?
He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,--he cried
out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath--
"`The horror! The horror!'
"I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining
in the mess-room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted
his eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored.
He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar smile of his sealing
the unexpressed depths of his meanness. A continuous shower of small
flies streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces.
Suddenly the manager's boy put his insolent black head in the doorway,
and said in a tone of scathing contempt--
"`Mistah Kurtz--he dead.'
"All the pilgrims rushed out to see. I remained, and went on with my dinner.
I believe I was considered brutally callous. However, I did not eat much.
There was a lamp in there--light, don't you know--and outside it was
so beastly, beastly dark. I went no more near the remarkable man who had
pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on this earth.
The voice was gone. What else had been there? But I am of course aware
that next day the pilgrims buried something in a muddy hole.
"And then they very nearly buried me.
"However, as you see, I did not go to join Kurtz there and then.
I did not. I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end, and to show
my loyalty to Kurtz once more. Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is--
that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.
The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself--that comes
too late--a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death.
It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place
in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around,
without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire
of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere
of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still
less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom,
then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.
I was within a hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement,
and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.
This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a remarkable man.
He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge
myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see
the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe,
piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness.
He had summed up--he had judged. `The horror!' He was a remarkable man.
After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candor,
it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper,
it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth--the strange commingling
of desire and hate. And it is not my own extremity I remember best--
a vision of grayness without form filled with physical pain,
and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things--even of this
pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through.
True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge,
while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot.
And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom,
and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that
inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold
of the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not
have been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry--much better.
It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats,
by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory!
That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond,
when a long time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo
of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as translucently
pure as a cliff of crystal.
"No, they did not bury me, though there is a period of time which I
remember mistily, with a shuddering wonder, like a passage through
some inconceivable world that had no hope in it and no desire.
I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight
of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money
from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their
unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams.
They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose
knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I
felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.
Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace
individuals going about their business in the assurance of
perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings
of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend.
I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some
difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full
of stupid importance. I dare say I was not very well at that time.
I tottered about the streets--there were various affairs
to settle--grinning bitterly at perfectly respectable persons.
I admit my behavior was inexcusable, but then my temperature
was seldom normal in these days. My dear aunt's endeavors
to `nurse up my strength' seemed altogether beside the mark.
It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my
imagination that wanted soothing. I kept the bundle of papers
given me by Kurtz, not knowing exactly what to do with it.
His mother had died lately, watched over, as I was told,
by his Intended. A clean-shaved man, with an official manner
and wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, called on me one day and
made inquiries, at first circuitous, afterwards suavely pressing,
about what he was pleased to denominate certain `documents.'
I was not surprised, because I had had two rows with the manager
on the subject out there. I had refused to give up the smallest
scrap out of that package, and I took the same attitude
with the spectacled man. He became darkly menacing at last,
and with much heat argued that the Company had the right to every
bit of information about its `territories.' And, said he,
`Mr. Kurtz's knowledge of unexplored regions must have been
necessarily extensive and peculiar--owing to his great abilities
and to the deplorable circumstances in which he had been placed:
therefore'--I assured him Mr. Kurtz's knowledge, however extensive,
did not bear upon the problems of commerce or administration.
He invoked then the name of science. `It would be an incalculable
loss if,' &c., &c. I offered him the report on the `Suppression
of Savage Customs,' with the postscriptum torn off. He took it
up eagerly, but ended by sniffing at it with an air of contempt.
`This is not what we had a right to expect,' he remarked.
`Expect nothing else,' I said. `There are only private letters.'
He withdrew upon some threat of legal proceedings, and I saw him
no more; but another fellow, calling himself Kurtz's cousin,
appeared two days later, and was anxious to hear all the details
about his dear relative's last moments. Incidentally he gave me
to understand that Kurtz had been essentially a great musician.
`There was the making of an immense success,' said the man,
who was an organist, I believe, with lank gray hair flowing over
a greasy coat-collar. I had no reason to doubt his statement;
and to this day I am unable to say what was Kurtz's profession,
whether he ever had any--which was the greatest of his talents.
I had taken him for a painter who wrote for the papers,
or else for a journalist who could paint--but even the cousin
(who took snuff during the interview) could not tell me what
he had been--exactly. He was a universal genius--on that point
I agreed with the old chap, who thereupon blew his nose noisily
into a large cotton handkerchief and withdrew in senile agitation,
bearing off some family letters and memoranda without importance.
Ultimately a journalist anxious to know something of the fate
of his `dear colleague' turned up. This visitor informed me Kurtz's
proper sphere ought to have been politics `on the popular side.'
He had furry straight eyebrows, bristly hair cropped short,
an eye-glass on a broad ribbon, and, becoming expansive,
confessed his opinion that Kurtz really couldn't write
a bit--'but heavens! how that man could talk! He electrified
large meetings. He had faith--don't you see?--he had the faith.
He could get himself to believe anything--anything.
He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party.'
`What party?' I asked. `Any party,' answered the other.
`He was an--an--extremist.' Did I not think so? I assented.
Did I know, he asked, with a sudden flash of curiosity,
`what it was that had induced him to go out there?'
`Yes,' said I, and forthwith handed him the famous Report
for publication, if he thought fit. He glanced through
it hurriedly, mumbling all the time, judged `it would do,'
and took himself off with this plunder.
"Thus I was left at last with a slim packet of letters
and the girl's portrait. She struck me as beautiful--I mean
she had a beautiful expression. I know that the sunlight can
be made to lie too, yet one felt that no manipulation of light
and pose could have conveyed the delicate shade of truthfulness
upon those features. She seemed ready to listen without mental
reservation, without suspicion, without a thought for herself.
I concluded I would go and give her back her portrait and those
letters myself. Curiosity? Yes; and also some other feeling perhaps.
All that had been Kurtz's had passed out of my hands:
his soul, his body, his station, his plans, his ivory,
his career. There remained only his memory and his Intended--
and I wanted to give that up too to the past, in a way,--
to surrender personally all that remained of him with me
to that oblivion which is the last word of our common fate.
I don't defend myself. I had no clear perception of what it was I
really wanted. Perhaps it was an impulse of unconscious loyalty,
or the fulfillment of one of these ironic necessities that lurk
in the facts of human existence. I don't know. I can't tell.
But I went.
"I thought his memory was like the other memories of the dead
that accumulate in every man's life,--a vague impress on the brain
of shadows that had fallen on it in their swift and final passage;
but before the high and ponderous door, between the tall
houses of a street as still and decorous as a well-kept
alley in a cemetery, I had a vision of him on the stretcher,
opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth
with all its mankind. He lived then before me; he lived as much
as he had ever lived--a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances,
of frightful realities; a shadow darker than the shadow of the night,
and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence.
The vision seemed to enter the house with me--the stretcher,
the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshipers,
the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between
the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and muffled
like the beating of a heart--the heart of a conquering darkness.
It was a moment of triumph for the wilderness, an invading
and vengeful rush which, it seemed to me, I would have
to keep back alone for the salvation of another soul.
And the memory of what I had heard him say afar there,
with the horned shapes stirring at my back, in the glow of fires,
within the patient woods, those broken phrases came back to me,
were heard again in their ominous and terrifying simplicity.
I remembered his abject pleading, his abject threats,
the colossal scale of his vile desires, the meanness, the torment,
the tempestuous anguish of his soul. And later on I seemed to see
his collected languid manner, when he said one day, `This lot
of ivory now is really mine. The Company did not pay for it.
I collected it myself at a very great personal risk.
I am afraid they will try to claim it as theirs though.
H'm. It is a difficult case. What do you think I ought
to do--resist? Eh? I want no more than justice.'
. . . He wanted no more than justice--no more than justice.
I rang the bell before a mahogany door on the first floor,
and while I waited he seemed to stare at me out of the glassy panel--
stare with that wide and immense stare embracing, condemning,
loathing all the universe. I seemed to hear the whispered cry,
`The horror! The horror!'
"The dusk was falling. I had to wait in a lofty drawing-room
with three long windows from floor to ceiling that were
like three luminous and bedraped columns. The bent gilt
legs and backs of the furniture shone in indistinct curves.
The tall marble fireplace had a cold and monumental whiteness.
A grand piano stood massively in a corner, with dark gleams
on the flat surfaces like a somber and polished sarcophagus.
A high door opened--closed. I rose.
"She came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards
me in the dusk. She was in mourning. It was more than a year
since his death, more than a year since the news came;
she seemed as though she would remember and mourn for ever.
She took both my hands in hers and murmured, `I had heard you
were coming.' I noticed she was not very young--I mean not girlish.
She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering.
The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light
of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead.
This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded
by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me.
Their glance was guileless, profound, confident, and trustful.
She carried her sorrowful head as though she were proud
of that sorrow, as though she would say, `I--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, remained 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
anyone 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 impatience
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
accompaniment 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 incomprehensible 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 defended 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 understand,--but others knew of them. Something must remain.
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 gesture another one,
tragic also, and bedecked with powerless 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 justice? 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 Director, suddenly.
I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank
of clouds, and the tranquil waterway 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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