Heart of Darkness
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!...
“When I woke up shortly after midnight his warning came to my mind with
its hint of danger that seemed, in the starred darkness, real enough to
make me get up for the purpose of having a look round. On the hill a
big fire burned, illuminating fitfully a crooked corner of the
station-house. One of the agents with a picket of a few of our blacks,
armed for the purpose, was keeping guard over the ivory; but deep
within the forest, red gleams that wavered, that seemed to sink and
rise from the ground amongst confused columnar shapes of intense
blackness, showed the exact position of the camp where Mr. Kurtz’s
adorers were keeping their uneasy vigil. The monotonous beating of a
big drum filled the air with muffled shocks and a lingering vibration.
A steady droning sound of many men chanting each to himself some weird
incantation came out from the black, flat wall of the woods as the
humming of bees comes out of a hive, and had a strange narcotic effect
upon my half-awake senses. I believe I dozed off leaning over the rail,
till an abrupt burst of yells, an overwhelming outbreak of a pent-up
and mysterious frenzy, woke me up in a bewildered wonder. It was cut
short all at once, and the low droning went on with an effect of
audible and soothing silence. I glanced casually into the little cabin.
A light was burning within, but Mr. Kurtz was not there.
“I think I would have raised an outcry if I had believed my eyes. But I
didn’t believe them at first—the thing seemed so impossible. The fact
is I was completely unnerved by a sheer blank fright, pure abstract
terror, unconnected with any distinct shape of physical danger. What
made this emotion so overpowering was—how shall I define it?—the moral
shock I received, as if something altogether monstrous, intolerable to
thought and odious to the soul, had been thrust upon me unexpectedly.
This lasted of course the merest fraction of a second, and then the
usual sense of commonplace, deadly danger, the possibility of a sudden
onslaught and massacre, or something of the kind, which I saw
impending, was positively welcome and composing. It pacified me, in
fact, so much that I did not raise an alarm.
“There was an agent buttoned up inside an ulster and sleeping on a
chair on deck within three feet of me. The yells had not awakened him;
he snored very slightly; I left him to his slumbers and leaped ashore.
I did not betray Mr. Kurtz—it was ordered I should never betray him—it
was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice. I was
anxious to deal with this shadow by myself alone—and to this day I
don’t know why I was so jealous of sharing with any one the peculiar
blackness of that experience.
“As soon as I got on the bank I saw a trail—a broad trail through the
grass. I remember the exultation with which I said to myself, ‘He can’t
walk—he is crawling on all-fours—I’ve got him.’ The grass was wet with
dew. I strode rapidly with clenched fists. I fancy I had some vague
notion of falling upon him and giving him a drubbing. I don’t know. I
had some imbecile thoughts. The knitting old woman with the cat
obtruded herself upon my memory as a most improper person to be sitting
at the other end of such an affair. I saw a row of pilgrims squirting
lead in the air out of Winchesters held to the hip. I thought I would
never get back to the steamer, and imagined myself living alone and
unarmed in the woods to an advanced age. Such silly things—you know.
And I remember I confounded the beat of the drum with the beating of my
heart, and was pleased at its calm regularity.
“I kept to the track though—then stopped to listen. The night was very
clear; a dark blue space, sparkling with dew and starlight, in which
black things stood very still. I thought I could see a kind of motion
ahead of me. I was strangely cocksure of everything that night. I
actually left the track and ran in a wide semicircle (I verily believe
chuckling to myself) so as to get in front of that stir, of that motion
I had seen—if indeed I had seen anything. I was circumventing Kurtz as
though it had been a boyish game.
“I came upon him, and, if he had not heard me coming, I would have
fallen over him, too, but he got up in time. He rose, unsteady, long,
pale, indistinct, like a vapour exhaled by the earth, and swayed
slightly, misty and silent before me; while at my back the fires loomed
between the trees, and the murmur of many voices issued from the
forest. I had cut him off cleverly; but when actually confronting him I
seemed to come to my senses, I saw the danger in its right proportion.
It was by no means over yet. Suppose he began to shout? Though he could
hardly stand, there was still plenty of vigour in his voice. ‘Go
away—hide yourself,’ he said, in that profound tone. It was very awful.
I glanced back. We were within thirty yards from the nearest fire. A
black figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black
arms, across the glow. It had horns—antelope horns, I think—on its
head. Some sorcerer, some witch-man, no doubt: it looked fiendlike
enough. ‘Do you know what you are doing?’ I whispered. ‘Perfectly,’ he
answered, raising his voice for that single word: it sounded to me far
off and yet loud, like a hail through a speaking-trumpet. ‘If he makes