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.