Heart of Darkness
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