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.