Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
Contents
I
The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the
sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being
bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the
turn of the tide.
The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an
interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together
without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges
drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas
sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low
shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above
Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom,
brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.
The Director of Companies was our captain and our host. We four affectionately
watched his back as he stood in the bows looking to seaward. On the whole river
there was nothing that looked half so nautical. He resembled a pilot, which to
a seaman is trustworthiness personified. It was difficult to realize his work
was not out there in the luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding
gloom.
Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea.
Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of separation, it had
the effect of making us tolerant of each other’s yarns—and even
convictions. The Lawyer—the best of old fellows—had, because of his
many years and many virtues, the only cushion on deck, and was lying on the
only rug. The Accountant had brought out already a box of dominoes, and was
toying architecturally with the bones. Marlow sat cross-legged right aft,
leaning against the mizzen-mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a
straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of
hands outwards, resembled an idol. The director, satisfied the anchor had good
hold, made his way aft and sat down amongst us. We exchanged a few words
lazily. Afterwards there was silence on board the yacht. For some reason or
other we did not begin that game of dominoes. We felt meditative, and fit for
nothing but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and
exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck,
was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marsh was
like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping
the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over
the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the
approach of the sun.
And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from
glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about
to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over
a crowd of men.
Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the serenity became less brilliant
but more profound. The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the
decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its
banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the
uttermost ends of the earth. We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid
flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the august light
of abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the
phrase goes, “followed the sea” with reverence and affection, than
to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The
tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories
of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea.
It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir
Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled—the
great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are
like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind
returning with her rotund flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the
Queen’s Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the
Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests—and that never
returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford,
from Greenwich, from Erith—the adventurers and the settlers; kings’
ships and the ships of men on ’Change; captains, admirals, the dark
“interlopers” of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned
“generals” of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of
fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the
torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the
sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the
mystery of an unknown earth!... The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths,
the germs of empires.
The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the
shore. The Chapman light-house, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone
strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway—a great stir of lights
going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the
monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in
sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.
“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the
dark places of the earth.”
He was the only man of us who still “followed the sea.” The worst
that could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a
seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so
express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and
their home is always with them—the ship; and so is their
country—the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is
always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores,
the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a
sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing
mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of
his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. For the rest, after his hours of
work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the
secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth
knowing. The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of
which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if
his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode
was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it
out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty
halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of
moonshine.
His remark did not seem at all surprising. It was just like Marlow. It was
accepted in silence. No one took the trouble to grunt even; and presently he
said, very slow—“I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans
first came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day .... Light came
out of this river since—you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running
blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the
flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness
was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine—what
d’ye call ’em?—trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly
to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of
these craft the legionaries—a wonderful lot of handy men they must have
been, too—used to build, apparently by the hundred, in a month or two, if
we may believe what we read. Imagine him here—the very end of the world,
a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as
rigid as a concertina—and going up this river with stores, or orders, or
what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages,—precious little to
eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian
wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a
wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay—cold, fog, tempests,
disease, exile, and death—death skulking in the air, in the water, in the
bush. They must have been dying like flies here. Oh, yes—he did it. Did
it very well, too, no doubt, and without thinking much about it either, except
afterwards to brag of what he had gone through in his time, perhaps. They were
men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he was cheered by keeping his eye
on a chance of promotion to the fleet at Ravenna by and by, if he had good
friends in Rome and survived the awful climate. Or think of a decent young
citizen in a toga—perhaps too much dice, you know—coming out here
in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his
fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post
feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him—all that
mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in
the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries.
He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable.
And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of
the abomination—you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to
escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”
He paused.
“Mind,” he began again, lifting one arm from the elbow, the palm of
the hand outwards, so that, with his legs folded before him, he had the pose of
a Buddha preaching in European clothes and without a
lotus-flower—“Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this. What
saves us is efficiency—the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were
not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was
merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for
that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it,
since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.
They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was
just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going
at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The
conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who
have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a
pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only.
An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an
unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down
before, and offer a sacrifice to....”
He broke off. Flames glided in the river, small green flames, red flames, white
flames, pursuing, overtaking, joining, crossing each other—then
separating slowly or hastily. The traffic of the great city went on in the
deepening night upon the sleepless river. We looked on, waiting
patiently—there was nothing else to do till the end of the flood; but it
was only after a long silence, when he said, in a hesitating voice, “I
suppose you fellows remember I did once turn fresh-water sailor for a
bit,” that we knew we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear
about one of Marlow’s inconclusive experiences.
“I don’t want to bother you much with what happened to me
personally,” he began, showing in this remark the weakness of many
tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their audience would like
best to hear; “yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know
how I got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to the place where I
first met the poor chap. It was the farthest point of navigation and the
culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light
on everything about me—and into my thoughts. It was sombre enough,
too—and pitiful—not extraordinary in any way—not very clear
either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light.
“I had then, as you remember, just returned to London after a lot of
Indian Ocean, Pacific, China Seas—a regular dose of the East—six
years or so, and I was loafing about, hindering you fellows in your work and
invading your homes, just as though I had got a heavenly mission to civilize
you. It was very fine for a time, but after a bit I did get tired of resting.
Then I began to look for a ship—I should think the hardest work on earth.
But the ships wouldn’t even look at me. And I got tired of that game,
too.
“Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for
hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the
glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth,
and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all
look that) I would put my finger on it and say, ’When I grow up I will go
there.’ The North Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, I
haven’t been there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour’s off.
Other places were scattered about the hemispheres. I have been in some of them,
and... well, we won’t talk about that. But there was one yet—the
biggest, the most blank, so to speak—that I had a hankering after.
“True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled
since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank
space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously
over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river
especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an
immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar
over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I
looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a
bird—a silly little bird. Then I remembered there was a big concern, a
Company for trade on that river. Dash it all! I thought to myself, they
can’t trade without using some kind of craft on that lot of fresh
water—steamboats! Why shouldn’t I try to get charge of one? I went
on along Fleet Street, but could not shake off the idea. The snake had charmed
me.
“You understand it was a Continental concern, that Trading society; but I
have a lot of relations living on the Continent, because it’s cheap and
not so nasty as it looks, they say.
“I am sorry to own I began to worry them. This was already a fresh
departure for me. I was not used to get things that way, you know. I always
went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go. I wouldn’t
have believed it of myself; but, then—you see—I felt somehow I must
get there by hook or by crook. So I worried them. The men said ‘My dear
fellow,’ and did nothing. Then—would you believe it?—I tried
the women. I, Charlie Marlow, set the women to work—to get a job.
Heavens! Well, you see, the notion drove me. I had an aunt, a dear enthusiastic
soul. She wrote: ‘It will be delightful. I am ready to do anything,
anything for you. It is a glorious idea. I know the wife of a very high
personage in the Administration, and also a man who has lots of influence
with,’ etc. She was determined to make no end of fuss to get me appointed
skipper of a river steamboat, if such was my fancy.
“I got my appointment—of course; and I got it very quick. It
appears the Company had received news that one of their captains had been
killed in a scuffle with the natives. This was my chance, and it made me the
more anxious to go. It was only months and months afterwards, when I made the
attempt to recover what was left of the body, that I heard the original quarrel
arose from a misunderstanding about some hens. Yes, two black hens.
Fresleven—that was the fellow’s name, a Dane—thought himself
wronged somehow in the bargain, so he went ashore and started to hammer the
chief of the village with a stick. Oh, it didn’t surprise me in the least
to hear this, and at the same time to be told that Fresleven was the gentlest,
quietest creature that ever walked on two legs. No doubt he was; but he had
been a couple of years already out there engaged in the noble cause, you know,
and he probably felt the need at last of asserting his self-respect in some
way. Therefore he whacked the old nigger mercilessly, while a big crowd of his
people watched him, thunderstruck, till some man—I was told the
chief’s son—in desperation at hearing the old chap yell, made a
tentative jab with a spear at the white man—and of course it went quite
easy between the shoulder-blades. Then the whole population cleared into the
forest, expecting all kinds of calamities to happen, while, on the other hand,
the steamer Fresleven commanded left also in a bad panic, in charge of the
engineer, I believe. Afterwards nobody seemed to trouble much about
Fresleven’s remains, till I got out and stepped into his shoes. I
couldn’t let it rest, though; but when an opportunity offered at last to
meet my predecessor, the grass growing through his ribs was tall enough to hide
his bones. They were all there. The supernatural being had not been touched
after he fell. And the village was deserted, the huts gaped black, rotting, all
askew within the fallen enclosures. A calamity had come to it, sure enough. The
people had vanished. Mad terror had scattered them, men, women, and children,
through the bush, and they had never returned. What became of the hens I
don’t know either. I should think the cause of progress got them, anyhow.
However, through this glorious affair I got my appointment, before I had fairly
begun to hope for it.
“I flew around like mad to get ready, and before forty-eight hours I was
crossing the Channel to show myself to my employers, and sign the contract. In
a very few hours I arrived in a city that always makes me think of a whited
sepulchre. Prejudice no doubt. I had no difficulty in finding the
Company’s offices. It was the biggest thing in the town, and everybody I
met was full of it. They were going to run an over-sea empire, and make no end
of coin by trade.
“A narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, high houses, innumerable
windows with venetian blinds, a dead silence, grass sprouting between the
stones, imposing carriage archways right and left, immense double doors
standing ponderously ajar. I slipped through one of these cracks, went up a
swept and ungarnished staircase, as arid as a desert, and opened the first door
I came to. Two women, one fat and the other slim, sat on straw-bottomed chairs,
knitting black wool. The slim one got up and walked straight at me—still
knitting with downcast eyes—and only just as I began to think of getting
out of her way, as you would for a somnambulist, stood still, and looked up.
Her dress was as plain as an umbrella-cover, and she turned round without a
word and preceded me into a waiting-room. I gave my name, and looked about.
Deal table in the middle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one end a large
shining map, marked with all the colours of a rainbow. There was a vast amount
of red—good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is
done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and,
on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress
drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn’t going into any of these. I
was going into the yellow. Dead in the centre. And the river was
there—fascinating—deadly—like a snake. Ough! A door opened, a
white-haired secretarial head, but wearing a compassionate expression,
appeared, and a skinny forefinger beckoned me into the sanctuary. Its light was
dim, and a heavy writing-desk squatted in the middle. From behind that
structure came out an impression of pale plumpness in a frock-coat. The great
man himself. He was five feet six, I should judge, and had his grip on the
handle-end of ever so many millions. He shook hands, I fancy, murmured vaguely,
was satisfied with my French. Bon Voyage.
“In about forty-five seconds I found myself again in the waiting-room
with the compassionate secretary, who, full of desolation and sympathy, made me
sign some document. I believe I undertook amongst other things not to disclose
any trade secrets. Well, I am not going to.
“I began to feel slightly uneasy. You know I am not used to such
ceremonies, and there was something ominous in the atmosphere. It was just as
though I had been let into some conspiracy—I don’t
know—something not quite right; and I was glad to get out. In the outer
room the two women knitted black wool feverishly. People were arriving, and the
younger one was walking back and forth introducing them. The old one sat on her
chair. Her flat cloth slippers were propped up on a foot-warmer, and a cat
reposed on her lap. She wore a starched white affair on her head, had a wart on
one cheek, and silver-rimmed spectacles hung on the tip of her nose. She
glanced at me above the glasses. The swift and indifferent placidity of that
look troubled me. Two youths with foolish and cheery countenances were being
piloted over, and she threw at them the same quick glance of unconcerned
wisdom. She seemed to know all about them and about me, too. An eerie feeling
came over me. She seemed uncanny and fateful. Often far away there I thought of
these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm
pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other
scrutinizing the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes.
Ave! Old knitter of black wool. Morituri te salutant. Not many of
those she looked at ever saw her again—not half, by a long way.
“There was yet a visit to the doctor. ‘A simple formality,’
assured me the secretary, with an air of taking an immense part in all my
sorrows. Accordingly a young chap wearing his hat over the left eyebrow, some
clerk I suppose—there must have been clerks in the business, though the
house was as still as a house in a city of the dead—came from somewhere
up-stairs, and led me forth. He was shabby and careless, with inkstains on the
sleeves of his jacket, and his cravat was large and billowy, under a chin
shaped like the toe of an old boot. It was a little too early for the doctor,
so I proposed a drink, and thereupon he developed a vein of joviality. As we
sat over our vermouths he glorified the Company’s business, and by and by
I expressed casually my surprise at him not going out there. He became very
cool and collected all at once. ‘I am not such a fool as I look, quoth
Plato to his disciples,’ he said sententiously, emptied his glass with
great resolution, and we rose.
“The old doctor felt my pulse, evidently thinking of something else the
while. ‘Good, good for there,’ he mumbled, and then with a certain
eagerness asked me whether I would let him measure my head. Rather surprised, I
said Yes, when he produced a thing like calipers and got the dimensions back
and front and every way, taking notes carefully. He was an unshaven little man
in a threadbare coat like a gaberdine, with his feet in slippers, and I thought
him a harmless fool. ‘I always ask leave, in the interests of science, to
measure the crania of those going out there,’ he said. ‘And when
they come back, too?’ I asked. ‘Oh, I never see them,’ he
remarked; ‘and, moreover, the changes take place inside, you know.’
He smiled, as if at some quiet joke. ‘So you are going out there. Famous.
Interesting, too.’ He gave me a searching glance, and made another note.
‘Ever any madness in your family?’ he asked, in a matter-of-fact
tone. I felt very annoyed. ‘Is that question in the interests of science,
too?’ ‘It would be,’ he said, without taking notice of my
irritation, ‘interesting for science to watch the mental changes of
individuals, on the spot, but...’ ‘Are you an alienist?’ I
interrupted. ‘Every doctor should be—a little,’ answered that
original, imperturbably. ‘I have a little theory which you messieurs who
go out there must help me to prove. This is my share in the advantages my
country shall reap from the possession of such a magnificent dependency. The
mere wealth I leave to others. Pardon my questions, but you are the first
Englishman coming under my observation...’ I hastened to assure him I was
not in the least typical. ‘If I were,’ said I, ‘I
wouldn’t be talking like this with you.’ ‘What you say is
rather profound, and probably erroneous,’ he said, with a laugh.
‘Avoid irritation more than exposure to the sun. Adieu. How do you
English say, eh? Good-bye. Ah! Good-bye. Adieu. In the tropics one must
before everything keep calm.’... He lifted a warning forefinger....
‘Du calme, du calme.’
“One thing more remained to do—say good-bye to my excellent aunt. I
found her triumphant. I had a cup of tea—the last decent cup of tea for
many days—and in a room that most soothingly looked just as you would
expect a lady’s drawing-room to look, we had a long quiet chat by the
fireside. In the course of these confidences it became quite plain to me I had
been represented to the wife of the high dignitary, and goodness knows to how
many more people besides, as an exceptional and gifted creature—a piece
of good fortune for the Company—a man you don’t get hold of every
day. Good heavens! and I was going to take charge of a two-penny-half-penny
river-steamboat with a penny whistle attached! It appeared, however, I was also
one of the Workers, with a capital—you know. Something like an emissary
of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such
rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman,
living right in the rush of all that humbug, got carried off her feet. She
talked about ‘weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid
ways,’ till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to
hint that the Company was run for profit.
“‘You forget, dear Charlie, that the labourer is worthy of his
hire,’ she said, brightly. It’s queer how out of touch with truth
women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything
like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to
set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact
we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would
start up and knock the whole thing over.
“After this I got embraced, told to wear flannel, be sure to write often,
and so on—and I left. In the street—I don’t know why—a
queer feeling came to me that I was an imposter. Odd thing that I, who used to
clear out for any part of the world at twenty-four hours’ notice, with
less thought than most men give to the crossing of a street, had a
moment—I won’t say of hesitation, but of startled pause, before
this commonplace affair. The best way I can explain it to you is by saying
that, for a second or two, I felt as though, instead of going to the centre of
a continent, I were about to set off for the centre of the earth.
“I left in a French steamer, and she called in every blamed port they
have out there, for, as far as I could see, the sole purpose of landing
soldiers and custom-house officers. I watched the coast. Watching a coast as it
slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before
you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and
always mute with an air of whispering, ‘Come and find out.’ This
one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of
monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be
almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far,
far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. The sun
was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam. Here and there
greyish-whitish specks showed up clustered inside the white surf, with a flag
flying above them perhaps. Settlements some centuries old, and still no bigger
than pinheads on the untouched expanse of their background. We pounded along,
stopped, landed soldiers; went on, landed custom-house clerks to levy toll in
what looked like a God-forsaken wilderness, with a tin shed and a flag-pole
lost in it; landed more soldiers—to take care of the custom-house clerks,
presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf; but whether they did or
not, nobody seemed particularly to care. They were just flung out there, and on
we went. Every day the coast looked the same, as though we had not moved; but
we passed various places—trading places—with names like Gran’
Bassam, Little Popo; names that seemed to belong to some sordid farce acted in
front of a sinister back-cloth. The idleness of a passenger, my isolation
amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid
sea, the uniform sombreness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth
of things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. The voice of
the surf heard now and then was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a
brother. It was something natural, that had its reason, that had a meaning. Now
and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality. It
was paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the white of their
eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with
perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks—these chaps; but they
had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement, that was as
natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being
there. They were a great comfort to look at. For a time I would feel I belonged
still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long.
Something would turn up to scare it away. Once, I remember, we came upon a
man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and
she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on
thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long
six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung
her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity
of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a
continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and
vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a
feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a
touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the
sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly
there was a camp of natives—he called them enemies!—hidden out of
sight somewhere.
“We gave her her letters (I heard the men in that lonely ship were dying
of fever at the rate of three a day) and went on. We called at some more places
with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a
still and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb; all along the
formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to
ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks
were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the
contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an
impotent despair. Nowhere did we stop long enough to get a particularized
impression, but the general sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me.
It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares.
“It was upward of thirty days before I saw the mouth of the big river. We
anchored off the seat of the government. But my work would not begin till some
two hundred miles farther on. So as soon as I could I made a start for a place
thirty miles higher up.
“I had my passage on a little sea-going steamer. Her captain was a Swede,
and knowing me for a seaman, invited me on the bridge. He was a young man,
lean, fair, and morose, with lanky hair and a shuffling gait. As we left the
miserable little wharf, he tossed his head contemptuously at the shore.
‘Been living there?’ he asked. I said, ‘Yes.’
‘Fine lot these government chaps—are they not?’ he went on,
speaking English with great precision and considerable bitterness. ‘It is
funny what some people will do for a few francs a month. I wonder what becomes
of that kind when it goes upcountry?’ I said to him I expected to see
that soon. ‘So-o-o!’ he exclaimed. He shuffled athwart, keeping one
eye ahead vigilantly. ‘Don’t be too sure,’ he continued.
‘The other day I took up a man who hanged himself on the road. He was a
Swede, too.’ ‘Hanged himself! Why, in God’s name?’ I
cried. He kept on looking out watchfully. ‘Who knows? The sun too much
for him, or the country perhaps.’
“At last we opened a reach. A rocky cliff appeared, mounds of turned-up
earth by the shore, houses on a hill, others with iron roofs, amongst a waste
of excavations, or hanging to the declivity. A continuous noise of the rapids
above hovered over this scene of inhabited devastation. A lot of people, mostly
black and naked, moved about like ants. A jetty projected into the river. A
blinding sunlight drowned all this at times in a sudden recrudescence of glare.
‘There’s your Company’s station,’ said the Swede,
pointing to three wooden barrack-like structures on the rocky slope. ‘I
will send your things up. Four boxes did you say? So. Farewell.’
“I came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass, then found a path leading
up the hill. It turned aside for the boulders, and also for an undersized
railway-truck lying there on its back with its wheels in the air. One was off.
The thing looked as dead as the carcass of some animal. I came upon more pieces
of decaying machinery, a stack of rusty rails. To the left a clump of trees
made a shady spot, where dark things seemed to stir feebly. I blinked, the path
was steep. A horn tooted to the right, and I saw the black people run. A heavy
and dull detonation shook the ground, a puff of smoke came out of the cliff,
and that was all. No change appeared on the face of the rock. They were
building a railway. The cliff was not in the way or anything; but this
objectless blasting was all the work going on.
“A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced
in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small
baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their
footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind
waggled to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs
were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were
connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically
clinking. Another report from the cliff made me think suddenly of that ship of
war I had seen firing into a continent. It was the same kind of ominous voice;
but these men could by no stretch of imagination be called enemies. They were
called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells, had come to
them, an insoluble mystery from the sea. All their meagre breasts panted
together, the violently dilated nostrils quivered, the eyes stared stonily
uphill. They passed me within six inches, without a glance, with that complete,
deathlike indifference of unhappy savages. Behind this raw matter one of the
reclaimed, the product of the new forces at work, strolled despondently,
carrying a rifle by its middle. He had a uniform jacket with one button off,
and seeing a white man on the path, hoisted his weapon to his shoulder with
alacrity. This was simple prudence, white men being so much alike at a distance
that he could not tell who I might be. He was speedily reassured, and with a
large, white, rascally grin, and a glance at his charge, seemed to take me into
partnership in his exalted trust. After all, I also was a part of the great
cause of these high and just proceedings.
“Instead of going up, I turned and descended to the left. My idea was to
let that chain-gang get out of sight before I climbed the hill. You know I am
not particularly tender; I’ve had to strike and to fend off. I’ve
had to resist and to attack sometimes—that’s only one way of
resisting—without counting the exact cost, according to the demands of
such sort of life as I had blundered into. I’ve seen the devil of
violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the
stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove
men—men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in
the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby,
pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he
could be, too, I was only to find out several months later and a thousand miles
farther. For a moment I stood appalled, as though by a warning. Finally I
descended the hill, obliquely, towards the trees I had seen.
“I avoided a vast artificial hole somebody had been digging on the slope,
the purpose of which I found it impossible to divine. It wasn’t a quarry
or a sandpit, anyhow. It was just a hole. It might have been connected with the
philanthropic desire of giving the criminals something to do. I don’t
know. Then I nearly fell into a very narrow ravine, almost no more than a scar
in the hillside. I discovered that a lot of imported drainage-pipes for the
settlement had been tumbled in there. There wasn’t one that was not
broken. It was a wanton smash-up. At last I got under the trees. My purpose was
to stroll into the shade for a moment; but no sooner within than it seemed to
me I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno. The rapids were near,
and an uninterrupted, uniform, headlong, rushing noise filled the mournful
stillness of the grove, where not a breath stirred, not a leaf moved, with a
mysterious sound—as though the tearing pace of the launched earth had
suddenly become audible.
“Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the
trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim
light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on
the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The
work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers
had withdrawn to die.
“They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies,
they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now—nothing but black
shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.
Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time
contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they
sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest.
These moribund shapes were free as air—and nearly as thin. I began to
distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees. Then, glancing down, I saw a
face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder
against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at
me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the
orbs, which died out slowly. The man seemed young—almost a boy—but
you know with them it’s hard to tell. I found nothing else to do but to
offer him one of my good Swede’s ship’s biscuits I had in my
pocket. The fingers closed slowly on it and held—there was no other
movement and no other glance. He had tied a bit of white worsted round his
neck—Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge—an ornament—a
charm—a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it? It
looked startling round his black neck, this bit of white thread from beyond the
seas.
“Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs
drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing, in an
intolerable and appalling manner: his brother phantom rested its forehead, as
if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others were scattered in
every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a
pestilence. While I stood horror-struck, one of these creatures rose to his
hands and knees, and went off on all-fours towards the river to drink. He
lapped out of his hand, then sat up in the sunlight, crossing his shins in
front of him, and after a time let his woolly head fall on his breastbone.
“I didn’t want any more loitering in the shade, and I made haste
towards the station. When near the buildings I met a white man, in such an
unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort of
vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy
trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed,
oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing,
and had a penholder behind his ear.
“I shook hands with this miracle, and I learned he was the
Company’s chief accountant, and that all the book-keeping was done at
this station. He had come out for a moment, he said, ‘to get a breath of
fresh air. The expression sounded wonderfully odd, with its suggestion of
sedentary desk-life. I wouldn’t have mentioned the fellow to you at all,
only it was from his lips that I first heard the name of the man who is so
indissolubly connected with the memories of that time. Moreover, I respected
the fellow. Yes; I respected his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His
appearance was certainly that of a hairdresser’s dummy; but in the great
demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance. That’s backbone.
His starched collars and got-up shirt-fronts were achievements of character. He
had been out nearly three years; and, later, I could not help asking him how he
managed to sport such linen. He had just the faintest blush, and said modestly,
‘I’ve been teaching one of the native women about the station. It
was difficult. She had a distaste for the work.’ Thus this man had verily
accomplished something. And he was devoted to his books, which were in
apple-pie order.
“Everything else in the station was in a muddle—heads, things,
buildings. Strings of dusty niggers with splay feet arrived and departed; a
stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire sent into
the depths of darkness, and in return came a precious trickle of ivory.
“I had to wait in the station for ten days—an eternity. I lived in
a hut in the yard, but to be out of the chaos I would sometimes get into the
accountant’s office. It was built of horizontal planks, and so badly put
together that, as he bent over his high desk, he was barred from neck to heels
with narrow strips of sunlight. There was no need to open the big shutter to
see. It was hot there, too; big flies buzzed fiendishly, and did not sting, but
stabbed. I sat generally on the floor, while, of faultless appearance (and even
slightly scented), perching on a high stool, he wrote, he wrote. Sometimes he
stood up for exercise. When a truckle-bed with a sick man (some invalid agent
from upcountry) was put in there, he exhibited a gentle annoyance. ‘The
groans of this sick person,’ he said, ‘distract my attention. And
without that it is extremely difficult to guard against clerical errors in this
climate.’
“One day he remarked, without lifting his head, ‘In the interior
you will no doubt meet Mr. Kurtz.’ On my asking who Mr. Kurtz was, he
said he was a first-class agent; and seeing my disappointment at this
information, he added slowly, laying down his pen, ‘He is a very
remarkable person.’ Further questions elicited from him that Mr. Kurtz
was at present in charge of a trading-post, a very important one, in the true
ivory-country, at ‘the very bottom of there. Sends in as much ivory as
all the others put together...’ He began to write again. The sick man was
too ill to groan. The flies buzzed in a great peace.
“Suddenly there was a growing murmur of voices and a great tramping of
feet. A caravan had come in. A violent babble of uncouth sounds burst out on
the other side of the planks. All the carriers were speaking together, and in
the midst of the uproar the lamentable voice of the chief agent was heard
‘giving it up’ tearfully for the twentieth time that day.... He
rose slowly. ‘What a frightful row,’ he said. He crossed the room
gently to look at the sick man, and returning, said to me, ‘He does not
hear.’ ‘What! Dead?’ I asked, startled. ‘No, not
yet,’ he answered, with great composure. Then, alluding with a toss of
the head to the tumult in the station-yard, ‘When one has got to make
correct entries, one comes to hate those savages—hate them to the
death.’ He remained thoughtful for a moment. ‘When you see Mr.
Kurtz’ he went on, ‘tell him from me that everything
here’—he glanced at the deck—’ is very satisfactory. I
don’t like to write to him—with those messengers of ours you never
know who may get hold of your letter—at that Central Station.’ He
stared at me for a moment with his mild, bulging eyes. ‘Oh, he will go
far, very far,’ he began again. ‘He will be a somebody in the
Administration before long. They, above—the Council in Europe, you
know—mean him to be.’
“He turned to his work. The noise outside had ceased, and presently in
going out I stopped at the door. In the steady buzz of flies the homeward-bound
agent was lying finished and insensible; the other, bent over his books, was
making correct entries of perfectly correct transactions; and fifty feet below
the doorstep I could see the still tree-tops of the grove of death.
“Next day I left that station at last, with a caravan of sixty men, for a
two-hundred-mile tramp.
“No use telling you much about that. Paths, paths, everywhere; a
stamped-in network of paths spreading over the empty land, through the long
grass, through burnt grass, through thickets, down and up chilly ravines, up
and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a solitude, a solitude, nobody, not
a hut. The population had cleared out a long time ago. Well, if a lot of
mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to
travelling on the road between Deal and Gravesend, catching the yokels right
and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage
thereabouts would get empty very soon. Only here the dwellings were gone, too.
Still I passed through several abandoned villages. There’s something
pathetically childish in the ruins of grass walls. Day after day, with the
stamp and shuffle of sixty pair of bare feet behind me, each pair under a
60-lb. load. Camp, cook, sleep, strike camp, march. Now and then a carrier dead
in harness, at rest in the long grass near the path, with an empty water-gourd
and his long staff lying by his side. A great silence around and above. Perhaps
on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor
vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild—and perhaps
with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country. Once a
white man in an unbuttoned uniform, camping on the path with an armed escort of
lank Zanzibaris, very hospitable and festive—not to say drunk. Was
looking after the upkeep of the road, he declared. Can’t say I saw any
road or any upkeep, unless the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole
in the forehead, upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles farther on, may
be considered as a permanent improvement. I had a white companion, too, not a
bad chap, but rather too fleshy and with the exasperating habit of fainting on
the hot hillsides, miles away from the least bit of shade and water. Annoying,
you know, to hold your own coat like a parasol over a man’s head while he
is coming to. I couldn’t help asking him once what he meant by coming
there at all. ‘To make money, of course. What do you think?’ he
said, scornfully. Then he got fever, and had to be carried in a hammock slung
under a pole. As he weighed sixteen stone I had no end of rows with the
carriers. They jibbed, ran away, sneaked off with their loads in the
night—quite a mutiny. So, one evening, I made a speech in English with
gestures, not one of which was lost to the sixty pairs of eyes before me, and
the next morning I started the hammock off in front all right. An hour
afterwards I came upon the whole concern wrecked in a bush—man, hammock,
groans, blankets, horrors. The heavy pole had skinned his poor nose. He was
very anxious for me to kill somebody, but there wasn’t the shadow of a
carrier near. I remembered the old doctor—‘It would be interesting
for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot.’ I
felt I was becoming scientifically interesting. However, all that is to no
purpose. On the fifteenth day I came in sight of the big river again, and
hobbled into the Central Station. It was on a back water surrounded by scrub
and forest, with a pretty border of smelly mud on one side, and on the three
others enclosed by a crazy fence of rushes. A neglected gap was all the gate it
had, and the first glance at the place was enough to let you see the flabby
devil was running that show. White men with long staves in their hands appeared
languidly from amongst the buildings, strolling up to take a look at me, and
then retired out of sight somewhere. One of them, a stout, excitable chap with
black moustaches, informed me with great volubility and many digressions, as
soon as I told him who I was, that my steamer was at the bottom of the river. I
was thunderstruck. What, how, why? Oh, it was ‘all right.’ The
‘manager himself’ was there. All quite correct. ‘Everybody
had behaved splendidly! splendidly!’—‘you must,’ he
said in agitation, ‘go and see the general manager at once. He is
waiting!’
“I did not see the real significance of that wreck at once. I fancy I see
it now, but I am not sure—not at all. Certainly the affair was too
stupid—when I think of it—to be altogether natural. Still... But at
the moment it presented itself simply as a confounded nuisance. The steamer was
sunk. They had started two days before in a sudden hurry up the river with the
manager on board, in charge of some volunteer skipper, and before they had been
out three hours they tore the bottom out of her on stones, and she sank near
the south bank. I asked myself what I was to do there, now my boat was lost. As
a matter of fact, I had plenty to do in fishing my command out of the river. I
had to set about it the very next day. That, and the repairs when I brought the
pieces to the station, took some months.
“My first interview with the manager was curious. He did not ask me to
sit down after my twenty-mile walk that morning. He was commonplace in
complexion, in features, in manners, and in voice. He was of middle size and of
ordinary build. His eyes, of the usual blue, were perhaps remarkably cold, and
he certainly could make his glance fall on one as trenchant and heavy as an
axe. But even at these times the rest of his person seemed to disclaim the
intention. Otherwise there was only an indefinable, faint expression of his
lips, something stealthy—a smile—not a smile—I remember it,
but I can’t explain. It was unconscious, this smile was, though just
after he had said something it got intensified for an instant. It came at the
end of his speeches like a seal applied on the words to make the meaning of the
commonest phrase appear absolutely inscrutable. He was a common trader, from
his youth up employed in these parts—nothing more. He was obeyed, yet he
inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That
was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust—just uneasiness—nothing
more. You have no idea how effective such a... a... faculty can be. He had no
genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even. That was evident in
such things as the deplorable state of the station. He had no learning, and no
intelligence. His position had come to him—why? Perhaps because he was
never ill... He had served three terms of three years out there... Because
triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in
itself. When he went home on leave he rioted on a large scale—pompously.
Jack ashore—with a difference—in externals only. This one could
gather from his casual talk. He originated nothing, he could keep the routine
going—that’s all. But he was great. He was great by this little
thing that it was impossible to tell what could control such a man. He never
gave that secret away. Perhaps there was nothing within him. Such a suspicion
made one pause—for out there there were no external checks. Once when
various tropical diseases had laid low almost every ‘agent’ in the
station, he was heard to say, ‘Men who come out here should have no
entrails.’ He sealed the utterance with that smile of his, as though it
had been a door opening into a darkness he had in his keeping. You fancied you
had seen things—but the seal was on. When annoyed at meal-times by the
constant quarrels of the white men about precedence, he ordered an immense
round table to be made, for which a special house had to be built. This was the
station’s mess-room. Where he sat was the first place—the rest were
nowhere. One felt this to be his unalterable conviction. He was neither civil
nor uncivil. He was quiet. He allowed his ‘boy’—an overfed
young negro from the coast—to treat the white men, under his very eyes,
with provoking insolence.
“He began to speak as soon as he saw me. I had been very long on the
road. He could not wait. Had to start without me. The up-river stations had to
be relieved. There had been so many delays already that he did not know who was
dead and who was alive, and how they got on—and so on, and so on. He paid
no attention to my explanations, and, playing with a stick of sealing-wax,
repeated several times that the situation was ‘very grave, very
grave.’ There were rumours that a very important station was in jeopardy,
and its chief, Mr. Kurtz, was ill. Hoped it was not true. Mr. Kurtz was... I
felt weary and irritable. Hang Kurtz, I thought. I interrupted him by saying I
had heard of Mr. Kurtz on the coast. ‘Ah! So they talk of him down
there,’ he murmured to himself. Then he began again, assuring me Mr.
Kurtz was the best agent he had, an exceptional man, of the greatest importance
to the Company; therefore I could understand his anxiety. He was, he said,
‘very, very uneasy.’ Certainly he fidgeted on his chair a good
deal, exclaimed, ‘Ah, Mr. Kurtz!’ broke the stick of sealing-wax
and seemed dumfounded by the accident. Next thing he wanted to know ‘how
long it would take to’... I interrupted him again. Being hungry, you
know, and kept on my feet too. I was getting savage. ‘How can I
tell?’ I said. ‘I haven’t even seen the wreck yet—some
months, no doubt.’ All this talk seemed to me so futile. ‘Some
months,’ he said. ‘Well, let us say three months before we can make
a start. Yes. That ought to do the affair.’ I flung out of his hut (he
lived all alone in a clay hut with a sort of verandah) muttering to myself my
opinion of him. He was a chattering idiot. Afterwards I took it back when it
was borne in upon me startlingly with what extreme nicety he had estimated the
time requisite for the ‘affair.’
“I went to work the next day, turning, so to speak, my back on that
station. In that way only it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the redeeming
facts of life. Still, one must look about sometimes; and then I saw this
station, these men strolling aimlessly about in the sunshine of the yard. I
asked myself sometimes what it all meant. They wandered here and there with
their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims
bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air,
was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of
imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove!
I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent
wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something
great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing
away of this fantastic invasion.
“Oh, these months! Well, never mind. Various things happened. One evening
a grass shed full of calico, cotton prints, beads, and I don’t know what
else, burst into a blaze so suddenly that you would have thought the earth had
opened to let an avenging fire consume all that trash. I was smoking my pipe
quietly by my dismantled steamer, and saw them all cutting capers in the light,
with their arms lifted high, when the stout man with moustaches came tearing
down to the river, a tin pail in his hand, assured me that everybody was
‘behaving splendidly, splendidly,’ dipped about a quart of water
and tore back again. I noticed there was a hole in the bottom of his pail.
“I strolled up. There was no hurry. You see the thing had gone off like a
box of matches. It had been hopeless from the very first. The flame had leaped
high, driven everybody back, lighted up everything—and collapsed. The
shed was already a heap of embers glowing fiercely. A nigger was being beaten
near by. They said he had caused the fire in some way; be that as it may, he
was screeching most horribly. I saw him, later, for several days, sitting in a
bit of shade looking very sick and trying to recover himself; afterwards he
arose and went out—and the wilderness without a sound took him into its
bosom again. As I approached the glow from the dark I found myself at the back
of two men, talking. I heard the name of Kurtz pronounced, then the words,
‘take advantage of this unfortunate accident.’ One of the men was
the manager. I wished him a good evening. ‘Did you ever see anything like
it—eh? it is incredible,’ he said, and walked off. The other man
remained. He was a first-class agent, young, gentlemanly, a bit reserved, with
a forked little beard and a hooked nose. He was stand-offish with the other
agents, and they on their side said he was the manager’s spy upon them.
As to me, I had hardly ever spoken to him before. We got into talk, and by and
by we strolled away from the hissing ruins. Then he asked me to his room, which
was in the main building of the station. He struck a match, and I perceived
that this young aristocrat had not only a silver-mounted dressing-case but also
a whole candle all to himself. Just at that time the manager was the only man
supposed to have any right to candles. Native mats covered the clay walls; a
collection of spears, assegais, shields, knives was hung up in trophies. The
business intrusted to this fellow was the making of bricks—so I had been
informed; but there wasn’t a fragment of a brick anywhere in the station,
and he had been there more than a year—waiting. It seems he could not
make bricks without something, I don’t know what—straw maybe.
Anyway, it could not be found there and as it was not likely to be sent from
Europe, it did not appear clear to me what he was waiting for. An act of
special creation perhaps. However, they were all waiting—all the sixteen
or twenty pilgrims of them—for something; and upon my word it did not
seem an uncongenial occupation, from the way they took it, though the only
thing that ever came to them was disease—as far as I could see. They
beguiled the time by back-biting and intriguing against each other in a foolish
kind of way. There was an air of plotting about that station, but nothing came
of it, of course. It was as unreal as everything else—as the
philanthropic pretence of the whole concern, as their talk, as their
government, as their show of work. The only real feeling was a desire to get
appointed to a trading-post where ivory was to be had, so that they could earn
percentages. They intrigued and slandered and hated each other only on that
account—but as to effectually lifting a little finger—oh, no. By
heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a
horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very
well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a
halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick.
“I had no idea why he wanted to be sociable, but as we chatted in there
it suddenly occurred to me the fellow was trying to get at something—in
fact, pumping me. He alluded constantly to Europe, to the people I was supposed
to know there—putting leading questions as to my acquaintances in the
sepulchral city, and so on. His little eyes glittered like mica
discs—with curiosity—though he tried to keep up a bit of
superciliousness. At first I was astonished, but very soon I became awfully
curious to see what he would find out from me. I couldn’t possibly
imagine what I had in me to make it worth his while. It was very pretty to see
how he baffled himself, for in truth my body was full only of chills, and my
head had nothing in it but that wretched steamboat business. It was evident he
took me for a perfectly shameless prevaricator. At last he got angry, and, to
conceal a movement of furious annoyance, he yawned. I rose. Then I noticed a
small sketch in oils, on a panel, representing a woman, draped and blindfolded,
carrying a lighted torch. The background was sombre—almost black. The
movement of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight on the face
was sinister.
“It arrested me, and he stood by civilly, holding an empty half-pint
champagne bottle (medical comforts) with the candle stuck in it. To my question
he said Mr. Kurtz had painted this—in this very station more than a year
ago—while waiting for means to go to his trading post. ‘Tell me,
pray,’ said I, ‘who is this Mr. Kurtz?’
“‘The chief of the Inner Station,’ he answered in a short
tone, looking away. ‘Much obliged,’ I said, laughing. ‘And
you are the brickmaker of the Central Station. Every one knows that.’ He
was silent for a while. ‘He is a prodigy,’ he said at last.
‘He is an emissary of pity and science and progress, and devil knows what
else. We want,’ he began to declaim suddenly, ‘for the guidance of
the cause intrusted to us by Europe, so to speak, higher intelligence, wide
sympathies, a singleness of purpose.’ ‘Who says that?’ I
asked. ‘Lots of them,’ he replied. ‘Some even write that; and
so he comes here, a special being, as you ought to know.’
‘Why ought I to know?’ I interrupted, really surprised. He paid no
attention. ‘Yes. Today he is chief of the best station, next year he will
be assistant-manager, two years more and... but I dare-say you know what he
will be in two years’ time. You are of the new gang—the gang of
virtue. The same people who sent him specially also recommended you. Oh,
don’t say no. I’ve my own eyes to trust.’ Light dawned upon
me. My dear aunt’s influential acquaintances were producing an unexpected
effect upon that young man. I nearly burst into a laugh. ‘Do you read the
Company’s confidential correspondence?’ I asked. He hadn’t a
word to say. It was great fun. ‘When Mr. Kurtz,’ I continued,
severely, ‘is General Manager, you won’t have the
opportunity.’
“He blew the candle out suddenly, and we went outside. The moon had
risen. Black figures strolled about listlessly, pouring water on the glow,
whence proceeded a sound of hissing; steam ascended in the moonlight, the
beaten nigger groaned somewhere. ‘What a row the brute makes!’ said
the indefatigable man with the moustaches, appearing near us. ‘Serve him
right. Transgression—punishment—bang! Pitiless, pitiless.
That’s the only way. This will prevent all conflagrations for the future.
I was just telling the manager...’ He noticed my companion, and became
crestfallen all at once. ‘Not in bed yet,’ he said, with a kind of
servile heartiness; ‘it’s so natural. Ha!
Danger—agitation.’ He vanished. I went on to the riverside, and the
other followed me. I heard a scathing murmur at my ear, ‘Heap of
muffs—go to.’ The pilgrims could be seen in knots gesticulating,
discussing. Several had still their staves in their hands. I verily believe
they took these sticks to bed with them. Beyond the fence the forest stood up
spectrally in the moonlight, and through that dim stir, through the faint
sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to
one’s very heart—its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of
its concealed life. The hurt nigger moaned feebly somewhere near by, and then
fetched a deep sigh that made me mend my pace away from there. I felt a hand
introducing itself under my arm. ‘My dear sir,’ said the fellow,
‘I don’t want to be misunderstood, and especially by you, who will
see Mr. Kurtz long before I can have that pleasure. I wouldn’t like him
to get a false idea of my disposition....’
“I let him run on, this papier-mache Mephistopheles, and it seemed
to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find
nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe. He, don’t you see, had
been planning to be assistant-manager by and by under the present man, and I
could see that the coming of that Kurtz had upset them both not a little. He
talked precipitately, and I did not try to stop him. I had my shoulders against
the wreck of my steamer, hauled up on the slope like a carcass of some big
river animal. The smell of mud, of primeval mud, by Jove! was in my nostrils,
the high stillness of primeval forest was before my eyes; there were shiny
patches on the black creek. The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of
silver—over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted
vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I
could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by
without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered
about himself. I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity
looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace. What were we who had
strayed in here? Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt
how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing that couldn’t talk, and
perhaps was deaf as well. What was in there? I could see a little ivory coming
out from there, and I had heard Mr. Kurtz was in there. I had heard enough
about it, too—God knows! Yet somehow it didn’t bring any image with
it—no more than if I had been told an angel or a fiend was in there. I
believed it in the same way one of you might believe there are inhabitants in
the planet Mars. I knew once a Scotch sailmaker who was certain, dead sure,
there were people in Mars. If you asked him for some idea how they looked and
behaved, he would get shy and mutter something about ‘walking on
all-fours.’ If you as much as smiled, he would—though a man of
sixty—offer to fight you. I would not have gone so far as to fight for
Kurtz, but I went for him near enough to a lie. You know I hate, detest, and
can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but
simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality
in lies—which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world—what I
want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten
would do. Temperament, I suppose. Well, I went near enough to it by letting the
young fool there believe anything he liked to imagine as to my influence in
Europe. I became in an instant as much of a pretence as the rest of the
bewitched pilgrims. This simply because I had a notion it somehow would be of
help to that Kurtz whom at the time I did not see—you understand. He was
just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do
you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am
trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of
a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity,
surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of
being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of
dreams....”
He was silent for a while.
“... No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation
of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth,
its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We
live, as we dream—alone....”
He paused again as if reflecting, then added:
“Of course in this you fellows see more than I could then. You see me,
whom you know....”
It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another. For
a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice.
There was not a word from anybody. The others might have been asleep, but I was
awake. I listened, I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the word, that
would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that
seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river.
“... Yes—I let him run on,” Marlow began again, “and
think what he pleased about the powers that were behind me. I did! And there
was nothing behind me! There was nothing but that wretched, old, mangled
steamboat I was leaning against, while he talked fluently about ‘the
necessity for every man to get on.’ ‘And when one comes out here,
you conceive, it is not to gaze at the moon.’ Mr. Kurtz was a
‘universal genius,’ but even a genius would find it easier to work
with ‘adequate tools—intelligent men.’ He did not make
bricks—why, there was a physical impossibility in the way—as I was
well aware; and if he did secretarial work for the manager, it was because
‘no sensible man rejects wantonly the confidence of his superiors.’
Did I see it? I saw it. What more did I want? What I really wanted was rivets,
by heaven! Rivets. To get on with the work—to stop the hole. Rivets I
wanted. There were cases of them down at the coast—cases—piled
up—burst—split! You kicked a loose rivet at every second step in
that station-yard on the hillside. Rivets had rolled into the grove of death.
You could fill your pockets with rivets for the trouble of stooping
down—and there wasn’t one rivet to be found where it was wanted. We
had plates that would do, but nothing to fasten them with. And every week the
messenger, a long negro, letter-bag on shoulder and staff in hand, left our
station for the coast. And several times a week a coast caravan came in with
trade goods—ghastly glazed calico that made you shudder only to look at
it, glass beads value about a penny a quart, confounded spotted cotton
handkerchiefs. And no rivets. Three carriers could have brought all that was
wanted to set that steamboat afloat.
“He was becoming confidential now, but I fancy my unresponsive attitude
must have exasperated him at last, for he judged it necessary to inform me he
feared neither God nor devil, let alone any mere man. I said I could see that
very well, but what I wanted was a certain quantity of rivets—and rivets
were what really Mr. Kurtz wanted, if he had only known it. Now letters went to
the coast every week.... ‘My dear sir,’ he cried, ‘I write
from dictation.’ I demanded rivets. There was a way—for an
intelligent man. He changed his manner; became very cold, and suddenly began to
talk about a hippopotamus; wondered whether sleeping on board the steamer (I
stuck to my salvage night and day) I wasn’t disturbed. There was an old
hippo that had the bad habit of getting out on the bank and roaming at night
over the station grounds. The pilgrims used to turn out in a body and empty
every rifle they could lay hands on at him. Some even had sat up o’
nights for him. All this energy was wasted, though. ‘That animal has a
charmed life,’ he said; ‘but you can say this only of brutes in
this country. No man—you apprehend me?—no man here bears a charmed
life.’ He stood there for a moment in the moonlight with his delicate
hooked nose set a little askew, and his mica eyes glittering without a wink,
then, with a curt Good-night, he strode off. I could see he was disturbed and
considerably puzzled, which made me feel more hopeful than I had been for days.
It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to my influential friend, the
battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. I clambered on board. She rang
under my feet like an empty Huntley & Palmer biscuit-tin kicked along a
gutter; she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape, but
I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential
friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a
bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had
rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I
don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the
work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself,
not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the
mere show, and never can tell what it really means.
“I was not surprised to see somebody sitting aft, on the deck, with his
legs dangling over the mud. You see I rather chummed with the few mechanics
there were in that station, whom the other pilgrims naturally despised—on
account of their imperfect manners, I suppose. This was the foreman—a
boiler-maker by trade—a good worker. He was a lank, bony, yellow-faced
man, with big intense eyes. His aspect was worried, and his head was as bald as
the palm of my hand; but his hair in falling seemed to have stuck to his chin,
and had prospered in the new locality, for his beard hung down to his waist. He
was a widower with six young children (he had left them in charge of a sister
of his to come out there), and the passion of his life was pigeon-flying. He
was an enthusiast and a connoisseur. He would rave about pigeons. After work
hours he used sometimes to come over from his hut for a talk about his children
and his pigeons; at work, when he had to crawl in the mud under the bottom of
the steamboat, he would tie up that beard of his in a kind of white serviette
he brought for the purpose. It had loops to go over his ears. In the evening he
could be seen squatted on the bank rinsing that wrapper in the creek with great
care, then spreading it solemnly on a bush to dry.
“I slapped him on the back and shouted, ‘We shall have
rivets!’ He scrambled to his feet exclaiming, ‘No! Rivets!’
as though he couldn’t believe his ears. Then in a low voice,
‘You... eh?’ I don’t know why we behaved like lunatics. I put
my finger to the side of my nose and nodded mysteriously. ‘Good for
you!’ he cried, snapped his fingers above his head, lifting one foot. I
tried a jig. We capered on the iron deck. A frightful clatter came out of that
hulk, and the virgin forest on the other bank of the creek sent it back in a
thundering roll upon the sleeping station. It must have made some of the
pilgrims sit up in their hovels. A dark figure obscured the lighted doorway of
the manager’s hut, vanished, then, a second or so after, the doorway
itself vanished, too. We stopped, and the silence driven away by the stamping
of our feet flowed back again from the recesses of the land. The great wall of
vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves,
boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of
soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple
over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence.
And it moved not. A deadened burst of mighty splashes and snorts reached us
from afar, as though an icthyosaurus had been taking a bath of glitter in the
great river. ‘After all,’ said the boiler-maker in a reasonable
tone, ‘why shouldn’t we get the rivets?’ Why not, indeed! I
did not know of any reason why we shouldn’t. ‘They’ll come in
three weeks,’ I said confidently.
“But they didn’t. Instead of rivets there came an invasion, an
infliction, a visitation. It came in sections during the next three weeks, each
section headed by a donkey carrying a white man in new clothes and tan shoes,
bowing from that elevation right and left to the impressed pilgrims. A
quarrelsome band of footsore sulky niggers trod on the heels of the donkey; a
lot of tents, camp-stools, tin boxes, white cases, brown bales would be shot
down in the courtyard, and the air of mystery would deepen a little over the
muddle of the station. Five such instalments came, with their absurd air of
disorderly flight with the loot of innumerable outfit shops and provision
stores, that, one would think, they were lugging, after a raid, into the
wilderness for equitable division. It was an inextricable mess of things decent
in themselves but that human folly made look like the spoils of thieving.
“This devoted band called itself the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, and I
believe they were sworn to secrecy. Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid
buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and
cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious
intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things
are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the
land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there
is in burglars breaking into a safe. Who paid the expenses of the noble
enterprise I don’t know; but the uncle of our manager was leader of that
lot.
“In exterior he resembled a butcher in a poor neighbourhood, and his eyes
had a look of sleepy cunning. He carried his fat paunch with ostentation on his
short legs, and during the time his gang infested the station spoke to no one
but his nephew. You could see these two roaming about all day long with their
heads close together in an everlasting confab.
“I had given up worrying myself about the rivets. One’s capacity
for that kind of folly is more limited than you would suppose. I said
Hang!—and let things slide. I had plenty of time for meditation, and now
and then I would give some thought to Kurtz. I wasn’t very interested in
him. No. Still, I was curious to see whether this man, who had come out
equipped with moral ideas of some sort, would climb to the top after all and
how he would set about his work when there.”
II
“One evening as I was lying flat on the deck of my steamboat, I heard
voices approaching—and there were the nephew and the uncle strolling
along the bank. I laid my head on my arm again, and had nearly lost myself in a
doze, when somebody said in my ear, as it were: ‘I am as harmless as a
little child, but I don’t like to be dictated to. Am I the
manager—or am I not? I was ordered to send him there. It’s
incredible.’ ... I became aware that the two were standing on the shore
alongside the forepart of the steamboat, just below my head. I did not move; it
did not occur to me to move: I was sleepy. ‘It is
unpleasant,’ grunted the uncle. ‘He has asked the Administration to
be sent there,’ said the other, ‘with the idea of showing what he
could do; and I was instructed accordingly. Look at the influence that man must
have. Is it not frightful?’ They both agreed it was frightful, then made
several bizarre remarks: ‘Make rain and fine weather—one
man—the Council—by the nose’—bits of absurd sentences
that got the better of my drowsiness, so that I had pretty near the whole of my
wits about me when the uncle said, ‘The climate may do away with this
difficulty for you. Is he alone there?’ ‘Yes,’ answered the
manager; ‘he sent his assistant down the river with a note to me in these
terms: “Clear this poor devil out of the country, and don’t bother
sending more of that sort. I had rather be alone than have the kind of men you
can dispose of with me.” It was more than a year ago. Can you imagine
such impudence!’ ‘Anything since then?’ asked the other
hoarsely. ‘Ivory,’ jerked the nephew; ‘lots of it—prime
sort—lots—most annoying, from him.’ ‘And with
that?’ questioned the heavy rumble. ‘Invoice,’ was the reply
fired out, so to speak. Then silence. They had been talking about Kurtz.
“I was broad awake by this time, but, lying perfectly at ease, remained
still, having no inducement to change my position. ‘How did that ivory
come all this way?’ growled the elder man, who seemed very vexed. The
other explained that it had come with a fleet of canoes in charge of an English
half-caste clerk Kurtz had with him; that Kurtz had apparently intended to
return himself, the station being by that time bare of goods and stores, but
after coming three hundred miles, had suddenly decided to go back, which he
started to do alone in a small dugout with four paddlers, leaving the
half-caste to continue down the river with the ivory. The two fellows there
seemed astounded at anybody attempting such a thing. They were at a loss for an
adequate motive. As to me, I seemed to see Kurtz for the first time. It was a
distinct glimpse: the dugout, four paddling savages, and the lone white man
turning his back suddenly on the headquarters, on relief, on thoughts of
home—perhaps; setting his face towards the depths of the wilderness,
towards his empty and desolate station. I did not know the motive. Perhaps he
was just simply a fine fellow who stuck to his work for its own sake. His name,
you understand, had not been pronounced once. He was ‘that man.’
The half-caste, who, as far as I could see, had conducted a difficult trip with
great prudence and pluck, was invariably alluded to as ‘that
scoundrel.’ The ‘scoundrel’ had reported that the
‘man’ had been very ill—had recovered imperfectly.... The two
below me moved away then a few paces, and strolled back and forth at some
little distance. I heard: ‘Military post—doctor—two hundred
miles—quite alone now—unavoidable delays—nine months—no
news—strange rumours.’ They approached again, just as the manager
was saying, ‘No one, as far as I know, unless a species of wandering
trader—a pestilential fellow, snapping ivory from the natives.’ Who
was it they were talking about now? I gathered in snatches that this was some
man supposed to be in Kurtz’s district, and of whom the manager did not
approve. ‘We will not be free from unfair competition till one of these
fellows is hanged for an example,’ he said. ‘Certainly,’
grunted the other; ‘get him hanged! Why not? Anything—anything can
be done in this country. That’s what I say; nobody here, you understand,
here, can endanger your position. And why? You stand the
climate—you outlast them all. The danger is in Europe; but there before I
left I took care to—’ They moved off and whispered, then their
voices rose again. ‘The extraordinary series of delays is not my fault. I
did my best.’ The fat man sighed. ‘Very sad.’ ‘And the
pestiferous absurdity of his talk,’ continued the other; ‘he
bothered me enough when he was here. “Each station should be like a
beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for trade of course, but
also for humanizing, improving, instructing.” Conceive you—that
ass! And he wants to be manager! No, it’s—’ Here he got
choked by excessive indignation, and I lifted my head the least bit. I was
surprised to see how near they were—right under me. I could have spat
upon their hats. They were looking on the ground, absorbed in thought. The
manager was switching his leg with a slender twig: his sagacious relative
lifted his head. ‘You have been well since you came out this time?’
he asked. The other gave a start. ‘Who? I? Oh! Like a charm—like a
charm. But the rest—oh, my goodness! All sick. They die so quick, too,
that I haven’t the time to send them out of the country—it’s
incredible!’ ‘Hm’m. Just so,’ grunted the uncle.
‘Ah! my boy, trust to this—I say, trust to this.’ I saw him
extend his short flipper of an arm for a gesture that took in the forest, the
creek, the mud, the river—seemed to beckon with a dishonouring flourish
before the sunlit face of the land a treacherous appeal to the lurking death,
to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart. It was so startling
that I leaped to my feet and looked back at the edge of the forest, as though I
had expected an answer of some sort to that black display of confidence. You
know the foolish notions that come to one sometimes. The high stillness
confronted these two figures with its ominous patience, waiting for the passing
away of a fantastic invasion.
“They swore aloud together—out of sheer fright, I
believe—then pretending not to know anything of my existence, turned back
to the station. The sun was low; and leaning forward side by side, they seemed
to be tugging painfully uphill their two ridiculous shadows of unequal length,
that trailed behind them slowly over the tall grass without bending a single
blade.
“In a few days the Eldorado Expedition went into the patient wilderness,
that closed upon it as the sea closes over a diver. Long afterwards the news
came that all the donkeys were dead. I know nothing as to the fate of the less
valuable animals. They, no doubt, like the rest of us, found what they
deserved. I did not inquire. I was then rather excited at the prospect of
meeting Kurtz very soon. When I say very soon I mean it comparatively. It was
just two months from the day we left the creek when we came to the bank below
Kurtz’s station.
“Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings
of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.
An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm,
thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The
long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed
distances. On silvery sand-banks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side
by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost
your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long
against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched
and cut off for ever from everything you had known
once—somewhere—far away—in another existence perhaps. There
were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when
you have not a moment to spare for yourself; but it came in the shape of an
unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming
realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this
stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness
of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you
with a vengeful aspect. I got used to it afterwards; I did not see it any more;
I had no time. I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly
by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I was
learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I shaved by a
fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the life out of the
tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to keep a lookout for the
signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for next day’s steaming.
When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the
surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth
is hidden—luckily, luckily. But I felt it all the same; I felt often its
mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks, just as it watches you
fellows performing on your respective tight-ropes for—what is it?
half-a-crown a tumble—”
“Try to be civil, Marlow,” growled a voice, and I knew there was at
least one listener awake besides myself.
“I beg your pardon. I forgot the heartache which makes up the rest of the
price. And indeed what does the price matter, if the trick be well done? You do
your tricks very well. And I didn’t do badly either, since I managed not
to sink that steamboat on my first trip. It’s a wonder to me yet. Imagine
a blindfolded man set to drive a van over a bad road. I sweated and shivered
over that business considerably, I can tell you. After all, for a seaman, to
scrape the bottom of the thing that’s supposed to float all the time
under his care is the unpardonable sin. No one may know of it, but you never
forget the thump—eh? A blow on the very heart. You remember it, you dream
of it, you wake up at night and think of it—years after—and go hot
and cold all over. I don’t pretend to say that steamboat floated all the
time. More than once she had to wade for a bit, with twenty cannibals splashing
around and pushing. We had enlisted some of these chaps on the way for a crew.
Fine fellows—cannibals—in their place. They were men one could work
with, and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other
before my face: they had brought along a provision of hippo-meat which went
rotten, and made the mystery of the wilderness stink in my nostrils. Phoo! I
can sniff it now. I had the manager on board and three or four pilgrims with
their staves—all complete. Sometimes we came upon a station close by the
bank, clinging to the skirts of the unknown, and the white men rushing out of a
tumble-down hovel, with great gestures of joy and surprise and welcome, seemed
very strange—had the appearance of being held there captive by a spell.
The word ivory would ring in the air for a while—and on we went again
into the silence, along empty reaches, round the still bends, between the high
walls of our winding way, reverberating in hollow claps the ponderous beat of
the stern-wheel. Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running up
high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept the little
begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty
portico. It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether
depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle
crawled on—which was just what you wanted it to do. Where the pilgrims
imagined it crawled to I don’t know. To some place where they expected to
get something. I bet! For me it crawled towards Kurtz—exclusively; but
when the steam-pipes started leaking we crawled very slow. The reaches opened
before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the
water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the
heart of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of
drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained
faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of
day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell. The dawns were
heralded by the descent of a chill stillness; the wood-cutters slept, their
fires burned low; the snapping of a twig would make you start. We were
wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an
unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking
possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound
anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend,
there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of
yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping of feet stamping, of
bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless
foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and
incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us,
welcoming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of
our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly
appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse.
We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because
we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone,
leaving hardly a sign—and no memories.
“The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled
form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing
monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not
inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their
not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and
spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of
their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with
this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were
man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest
trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of
there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of
first ages—could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of
anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the
future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour,
rage—who can tell?—but truth—truth stripped of its cloak of
time. Let the fool gape and shudder—the man knows, and can look on
without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore.
He must meet that truth with his own true stuff—with his own inborn
strength. Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty
rags—rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a
deliberate belief. An appeal to me in this fiendish row—is there? Very
well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is
the speech that cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright
and fine sentiments, is always safe. Who’s that grunting? You wonder I
didn’t go ashore for a howl and a dance? Well, no—I didn’t.
Fine sentiments, you say? Fine sentiments, be hanged! I had no time. I had to
mess about with white-lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages
on those leaky steam-pipes—I tell you. I had to watch the steering, and
circumvent those snags, and get the tin-pot along by hook or by crook. There
was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man. And between
whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved
specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me, and, upon
my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches
and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs. A few months of training had done
for that really fine chap. He squinted at the steam-gauge and at the
water-gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity—and he had filed teeth,
too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and
three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping
his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at
work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. He was
useful because he had been instructed; and what he knew was this—that
should the water in that transparent thing disappear, the evil spirit inside
the boiler would get angry through the greatness of his thirst, and take a
terrible vengeance. So he sweated and fired up and watched the glass fearfully
(with an impromptu charm, made of rags, tied to his arm, and a piece of
polished bone, as big as a watch, stuck flatways through his lower lip), while
the wooded banks slipped past us slowly, the short noise was left behind, the
interminable miles of silence—and we crept on, towards Kurtz. But the
snags were thick, the water was treacherous and shallow, the boiler seemed
indeed to have a sulky devil in it, and thus neither that fireman nor I had any
time to peer into our creepy thoughts.
“Some fifty miles below the Inner Station we came upon a hut of reeds, an
inclined and melancholy pole, with the unrecognizable tatters of what had been
a flag of some sort flying from it, and a neatly stacked wood-pile. This was
unexpected. We came to the bank, and on the stack of firewood found a flat
piece of board with some faded pencil-writing on it. When deciphered it said:
‘Wood for you. Hurry up. Approach cautiously.’ There was a
signature, but it was illegible—not Kurtz—a much longer word.
‘Hurry up.’ Where? Up the river? ‘Approach cautiously.’
We had not done so. But the warning could not have been meant for the place
where it could be only found after approach. Something was wrong above. But
what—and how much? That was the question. We commented adversely upon the
imbecility of that telegraphic style. The bush around said nothing, and would
not let us look very far, either. A torn curtain of red twill hung in the
doorway of the hut, and flapped sadly in our faces. The dwelling was
dismantled; but we could see a white man had lived there not very long ago.
There remained a rude table—a plank on two posts; a heap of rubbish
reposed in a dark corner, and by the door I picked up a book. It had lost its
covers, and the pages had been thumbed into a state of extremely dirty
softness; but the back had been lovingly stitched afresh with white cotton
thread, which looked clean yet. It was an extraordinary find. Its title was,
An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship, by a man Towser,
Towson—some such name—Master in his Majesty’s Navy. The
matter looked dreary reading enough, with illustrative diagrams and repulsive
tables of figures, and the copy was sixty years old. I handled this amazing
antiquity with the greatest possible tenderness, lest it should dissolve in my
hands. Within, Towson or Towser was inquiring earnestly into the breaking
strain of ships’ chains and tackle, and other such matters. Not a very
enthralling book; but at the first glance you could see there a singleness of
intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work, which made
these humble pages, thought out so many years ago, luminous with another than a
professional light. The simple old sailor, with his talk of chains and
purchases, made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious sensation
of having come upon something unmistakably real. Such a book being there was
wonderful enough; but still more astounding were the notes pencilled in the
margin, and plainly referring to the text. I couldn’t believe my eyes!
They were in cipher! Yes, it looked like cipher. Fancy a man lugging with him a
book of that description into this nowhere and studying it—and making
notes—in cipher at that! It was an extravagant mystery.
“I had been dimly aware for some time of a worrying noise, and when I
lifted my eyes I saw the wood-pile was gone, and the manager, aided by all the
pilgrims, was shouting at me from the riverside. I slipped the book into my
pocket. I assure you to leave off reading was like tearing myself away from the
shelter of an old and solid friendship.
“I started the lame engine ahead. ‘It must be this miserable
trader—this intruder,’ exclaimed the manager, looking back
malevolently at the place we had left. ‘He must be English,’ I
said. ‘It will not save him from getting into trouble if he is not
careful,’ muttered the manager darkly. I observed with assumed innocence
that no man was safe from trouble in this world.
“The current was more rapid now, the steamer seemed at her last gasp, the
stern-wheel flopped languidly, and I caught myself listening on tiptoe for the
next beat of the boat, for in sober truth I expected the wretched thing to give
up every moment. It was like watching the last flickers of a life. But still we
crawled. Sometimes I would pick out a tree a little way ahead to measure our
progress towards Kurtz by, but I lost it invariably before we got abreast. To
keep the eyes so long on one thing was too much for human patience. The manager
displayed a beautiful resignation. I fretted and fumed and took to arguing with
myself whether or no I would talk openly with Kurtz; but before I could come to
any conclusion it occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any
action of mine, would be a mere futility. What did it matter what any one knew
or ignored? What did it matter who was manager? One gets sometimes such a flash
of insight. The essentials of this affair lay deep under the surface, beyond my
reach, and beyond my power of meddling.
“Towards the evening of the second day we judged ourselves about eight
miles from Kurtz’s station. I wanted to push on; but the manager looked
grave, and told me the navigation up there was so dangerous that it would be
advisable, the sun being very low already, to wait where we were till next
morning. Moreover, he pointed out that if the warning to approach cautiously
were to be followed, we must approach in daylight—not at dusk or in the
dark. This was sensible enough. Eight miles meant nearly three hours’
steaming for us, and I could also see suspicious ripples at the upper end of
the reach. Nevertheless, I was annoyed beyond expression at the delay, and most
unreasonably, too, since one night more could not matter much after so many
months. As we had plenty of wood, and caution was the word, I brought up in the
middle of the stream. The reach was narrow, straight, with high sides like a
railway cutting. The dusk came gliding into it long before the sun had set. The
current ran smooth and swift, but a dumb immobility sat on the banks. The
living trees, lashed together by the creepers and every living bush of the
undergrowth, might have been changed into stone, even to the slenderest twig,
to the lightest leaf. It was not sleep—it seemed unnatural, like a state
of trance. Not the faintest sound of any kind could be heard. You looked on
amazed, and began to suspect yourself of being deaf—then the night came
suddenly, and struck you blind as well. About three in the morning some large
fish leaped, and the loud splash made me jump as though a gun had been fired.
When the sun rose there was a white fog, very warm and clammy, and more
blinding than the night. It did not shift or drive; it was just there, standing
all round you like something solid. At eight or nine, perhaps, it lifted as a
shutter lifts. We had a glimpse of the towering multitude of trees, of the
immense matted jungle, with the blazing little ball of the sun hanging over
it—all perfectly still—and then the white shutter came down again,
smoothly, as if sliding in greased grooves. I ordered the chain, which we had
begun to heave in, to be paid out again. Before it stopped running with a
muffled rattle, a cry, a very loud cry, as of infinite desolation, soared
slowly in the opaque air. It ceased. A complaining clamour, modulated in savage
discords, filled our ears. The sheer unexpectedness of it made my hair stir
under my cap. I don’t know how it struck the others: to me it seemed as
though the mist itself had screamed, so suddenly, and apparently from all sides
at once, did this tumultuous and mournful uproar arise. It culminated in a
hurried outbreak of almost intolerably excessive shrieking, which stopped
short, leaving us stiffened in a variety of silly attitudes, and obstinately
listening to the nearly as appalling and excessive silence. ‘Good God!
What is the meaning—’ stammered at my elbow one of the
pilgrims—a little fat man, with sandy hair and red whiskers, who wore
sidespring boots, and pink pyjamas tucked into his socks. Two others remained
open-mouthed a while minute, then dashed into the little cabin, to rush out
incontinently and stand darting scared glances, with Winchesters at
‘ready’ in their hands. What we could see was just the steamer we
were on, her outlines blurred as though she had been on the point of
dissolving, and a misty strip of water, perhaps two feet broad, around
her—and that was all. The rest of the world was nowhere, as far as our
eyes and ears were concerned. Just nowhere. Gone, disappeared; swept off
without leaving a whisper or a shadow behind.
“I went forward, and ordered the chain to be hauled in short, so as to be
ready to trip the anchor and move the steamboat at once if necessary.
‘Will they attack?’ whispered an awed voice. ‘We will be all
butchered in this fog,’ murmured another. The faces twitched with the
strain, the hands trembled slightly, the eyes forgot to wink. It was very
curious to see the contrast of expressions of the white men and of the black
fellows of our crew, who were as much strangers to that part of the river as
we, though their homes were only eight hundred miles away. The whites, of
course greatly discomposed, had besides a curious look of being painfully
shocked by such an outrageous row. The others had an alert, naturally
interested expression; but their faces were essentially quiet, even those of
the one or two who grinned as they hauled at the chain. Several exchanged
short, grunting phrases, which seemed to settle the matter to their
satisfaction. Their headman, a young, broad-chested black, severely draped in
dark-blue fringed cloths, with fierce nostrils and his hair all done up
artfully in oily ringlets, stood near me. ‘Aha!’ I said, just for
good fellowship’s sake. ‘Catch ’im,’ he snapped, with a
bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp teeth—‘catch
’im. Give ’im to us.’ ‘To you, eh?’ I asked;
‘what would you do with them?’ ‘Eat ’im!’ he said
curtly, and, leaning his elbow on the rail, looked out into the fog in a
dignified and profoundly pensive attitude. I would no doubt have been properly
horrified, had it not occurred to me that he and his chaps must be very hungry:
that they must have been growing increasingly hungry for at least this month
past. They had been engaged for six months (I don’t think a single one of
them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They
still belonged to the beginnings of time—had no inherited experience to
teach them as it were), and of course, as long as there was a piece of paper
written over in accordance with some farcical law or other made down the river,
it didn’t enter anybody’s head to trouble how they would live.
Certainly they had brought with them some rotten hippo-meat, which
couldn’t have lasted very long, anyway, even if the pilgrims
hadn’t, in the midst of a shocking hullabaloo, thrown a considerable
quantity of it overboard. It looked like a high-handed proceeding; but it was
really a case of legitimate self-defence. You can’t breathe dead hippo
waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on
existence. Besides that, they had given them every week three pieces of brass
wire, each about nine inches long; and the theory was they were to buy their
provisions with that currency in riverside villages. You can see how
that worked. There were either no villages, or the people were hostile,
or the director, who like the rest of us fed out of tins, with an occasional
old he-goat thrown in, didn’t want to stop the steamer for some more or
less recondite reason. So, unless they swallowed the wire itself, or made loops
of it to snare the fishes with, I don’t see what good their extravagant
salary could be to them. I must say it was paid with a regularity worthy of a
large and honourable trading company. For the rest, the only thing to
eat—though it didn’t look eatable in the least—I saw in their
possession was a few lumps of some stuff like half-cooked dough, of a dirty
lavender colour, they kept wrapped in leaves, and now and then swallowed a
piece of, but so small that it seemed done more for the looks of the thing than
for any serious purpose of sustenance. Why in the name of all the gnawing
devils of hunger they didn’t go for us—they were thirty to
five—and have a good tuck-in for once, amazes me now when I think of it.
They were big powerful men, with not much capacity to weigh the consequences,
with courage, with strength, even yet, though their skins were no longer glossy
and their muscles no longer hard. And I saw that something restraining, one of
those human secrets that baffle probability, had come into play there. I looked
at them with a swift quickening of interest—not because it occurred to me
I might be eaten by them before very long, though I own to you that just then I
perceived—in a new light, as it were—how unwholesome the pilgrims
looked, and I hoped, yes, I positively hoped, that my aspect was not
so—what shall I say?—so—unappetizing: a touch of fantastic
vanity which fitted well with the dream-sensation that pervaded all my days at
that time. Perhaps I had a little fever, too. One can’t live with
one’s finger everlastingly on one’s pulse. I had often ‘a
little fever,’ or a little touch of other things—the playful
paw-strokes of the wilderness, the preliminary trifling before the more serious
onslaught which came in due course. Yes; I looked at them as you would on any
human being, with a curiosity of their impulses, motives, capacities,
weaknesses, when brought to the test of an inexorable physical necessity.
Restraint! What possible restraint? Was it superstition, disgust, patience,
fear—or some kind of primitive honour? No fear can stand up to hunger, no
patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as
to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than
chaff in a breeze. Don’t you know the devilry of lingering starvation,
its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its sombre and brooding ferocity?
Well, I do. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly.
It’s really easier to face bereavement, dishonour, and the perdition of
one’s soul—than this kind of prolonged hunger. Sad, but true. And
these chaps, too, had no earthly reason for any kind of scruple. Restraint! I
would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the
corpses of a battlefield. But there was the fact facing me—the fact
dazzling, to be seen, like the foam on the depths of the sea, like a ripple on
an unfathomable enigma, a mystery greater—when I thought of it—than
the curious, inexplicable note of desperate grief in this savage clamour that
had swept by us on the river-bank, behind the blind whiteness of the fog.
“Two pilgrims were quarrelling in hurried whispers as to which bank.
‘Left.’ ‘no, no; how can you? Right, right, of course.’
‘It is very serious,’ said the manager’s voice behind me;
‘I would be desolated if anything should happen to Mr. Kurtz before we
came up.’ I looked at him, and had not the slightest doubt he was
sincere. He was just the kind of man who would wish to preserve appearances.
That was his restraint. But when he muttered something about going on at once,
I did not even take the trouble to answer him. I knew, and he knew, that it was
impossible. Were we to let go our hold of the bottom, we would be absolutely in
the air—in space. We wouldn’t be able to tell where we were going
to—whether up or down stream, or across—till we fetched against one
bank or the other—and then we wouldn’t know at first which it was.
Of course I made no move. I had no mind for a smash-up. You couldn’t
imagine a more deadly place for a shipwreck. Whether we drowned at once or not,
we were sure to perish speedily in one way or another. ‘I authorize you
to take all the risks,’ he said, after a short silence. ‘I refuse
to take any,’ I said shortly; which was just the answer he expected,
though its tone might have surprised him. ‘Well, I must defer to your
judgment. You are captain,’ he said with marked civility. I turned my
shoulder to him in sign of my appreciation, and looked into the fog. How long
would it last? It was the most hopeless lookout. The approach to this Kurtz
grubbing for ivory in the wretched bush was beset by as many dangers as though
he had been an enchanted princess sleeping in a fabulous castle. ‘Will
they attack, do you think?’ asked the manager, in a confidential tone.
“I did not think they would attack, for several obvious reasons. The
thick fog was one. If they left the bank in their canoes they would get lost in
it, as we would be if we attempted to move. Still, I had also judged the jungle
of both banks quite impenetrable—and yet eyes were in it, eyes that had
seen us. The riverside bushes were certainly very thick; but the undergrowth
behind was evidently penetrable. However, during the short lift I had seen no
canoes anywhere in the reach—certainly not abreast of the steamer. But
what made the idea of attack inconceivable to me was the nature of the
noise—of the cries we had heard. They had not the fierce character boding
immediate hostile intention. Unexpected, wild, and violent as they had been,
they had given me an irresistible impression of sorrow. The glimpse of the
steamboat had for some reason filled those savages with unrestrained grief. The
danger, if any, I expounded, was from our proximity to a great human passion
let loose. Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence—but
more generally takes the form of apathy....
“You should have seen the pilgrims stare! They had no heart to grin, or
even to revile me: but I believe they thought me gone mad—with fright,
maybe. I delivered a regular lecture. My dear boys, it was no good bothering.
Keep a lookout? Well, you may guess I watched the fog for the signs of lifting
as a cat watches a mouse; but for anything else our eyes were of no more use to
us than if we had been buried miles deep in a heap of cotton-wool. It felt like
it, too—choking, warm, stifling. Besides, all I said, though it sounded
extravagant, was absolutely true to fact. What we afterwards alluded to as an
attack was really an attempt at repulse. The action was very far from being
aggressive—it was not even defensive, in the usual sense: it was
undertaken under the stress of desperation, and in its essence was purely
protective.
“It developed itself, I should say, two hours after the fog lifted, and
its commencement was at a spot, roughly speaking, about a mile and a half below
Kurtz’s station. We had just floundered and flopped round a bend, when I
saw an islet, a mere grassy hummock of bright green, in the middle of the
stream. It was the only thing of the kind; but as we opened the reach more, I
perceived it was the head of a long sand-bank, or rather of a chain of shallow
patches stretching down the middle of the river. They were discoloured, just
awash, and the whole lot was seen just under the water, exactly as a
man’s backbone is seen running down the middle of his back under the
skin. Now, as far as I did see, I could go to the right or to the left of this.
I didn’t know either channel, of course. The banks looked pretty well
alike, the depth appeared the same; but as I had been informed the station was
on the west side, I naturally headed for the western passage.
“No sooner had we fairly entered it than I became aware it was much
narrower than I had supposed. To the left of us there was the long
uninterrupted shoal, and to the right a high, steep bank heavily overgrown with
bushes. Above the bush the trees stood in serried ranks. The twigs overhung the
current thickly, and from distance to distance a large limb of some tree
projected rigidly over the stream. It was then well on in the afternoon, the
face of the forest was gloomy, and a broad strip of shadow had already fallen
on the water. In this shadow we steamed up—very slowly, as you may
imagine. I sheered her well inshore—the water being deepest near the
bank, as the sounding-pole informed me.
“One of my hungry and forbearing friends was sounding in the bows just
below me. This steamboat was exactly like a decked scow. On the deck, there
were two little teakwood houses, with doors and windows. The boiler was in the
fore-end, and the machinery right astern. Over the whole there was a light
roof, supported on stanchions. The funnel projected through that roof, and in
front of the funnel a small cabin built of light planks served for a
pilot-house. It contained a couch, two camp-stools, a loaded Martini-Henry
leaning in one corner, a tiny table, and the steering-wheel. It had a wide door
in front and a broad shutter at each side. All these were always thrown open,
of course. I spent my days perched up there on the extreme fore-end of that
roof, before the door. At night I slept, or tried to, on the couch. An athletic
black 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 on 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 landside. 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 colour. 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 sight 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 lustre. 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 questions 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 sombre, brooding, and menacing expression. The lustre 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 travelled 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 preeminently, 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 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 favourite. 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 favour 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 neighbours 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 untrammelled 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 neighbour 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 honoured 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 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,’ etc., etc. 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 honour; 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 doorstep; 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 avenged. ‘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 riverside 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
enclosure 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 waterside 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 manoeuvred 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 the front,
patches on elbows, on knees; coloured binding around 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 wind-swept 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... honour... 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 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 favourite 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 parti-coloured 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 appearances
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 bepatched 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 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 ascendancy 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 that 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 downhill 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 splendour, with a murky and
overshadowed 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, halfway 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 dishonouring 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
head-dresses 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 have
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 honour 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 heavy glance, said very
quietly, ‘he was,’ and turned his back on me. My hour of
favour 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 lip, 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 sandalwise 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,’ etc., etc. 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!’ ‘Good-bye,’ 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 any one 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 vapour 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 vigour 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
fiendlike 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 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 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 responses 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 colourless 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 some one 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 sombre 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 disfavour. 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 mould 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 sombre 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
greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators,
without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without
the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, 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 candour,
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 greyness
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 pretence, 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 daresay 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
behaviour was inexcusable, but then my temperature was seldom normal in these
days. My dear aunt’s endeavours 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,’ etc., etc. 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
grey 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 eyeglass 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 fulfilment of one of those 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
worshippers, 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
sombre 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 forever. 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 quickly 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 inextinguishable light of belief
and love.
“‘You were his friend,’ she went on. ‘His
friend,’ she repeated, a little louder. ‘You must have been, if he
had given you this, and sent you to me. I feel I can speak to you—and oh!
I must speak. I want you—you who have heard his last words—to know
I have been worthy of him.... It is not pride.... Yes! I am proud to know I
understood him better than any one on earth—he told me so himself. And
since his mother died I have had no one—no
one—to—to—’
“I listened. The darkness deepened. I was not even sure whether he had
given me the right bundle. I rather suspect he wanted me to take care of
another batch of his papers which, after his death, I saw the manager examining
under the lamp. And the girl talked, easing her pain in the certitude of my
sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard that her engagement with
Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He wasn’t rich enough or
something. And indeed I don’t know whether he had not been a pauper all
his life. He had given me some reason to infer that it was his 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 the 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
back 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 any one 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 murmured 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 insisted.
‘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 sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to
lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad | Librivox Audio Recording
