Heart of Darkness
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