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!...