Heart of Darkness
“All the pilgrims rushed out to see. I remained, and went on with my
dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous. However, I did not
eat much. There was a lamp in there—light, don’t you know—and outside
it was so beastly, beastly dark. I went no more near the remarkable man
who had pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on this
earth. The voice was gone. What else had been there? But I am of course
aware that next day the pilgrims buried something in a muddy hole.
“And then they very nearly buried me.
“However, as you see, I did not go to join Kurtz there and then. I did
not. I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end, and to show my
loyalty to Kurtz once more. Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life
is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.
The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes
too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with
death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes
place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing
around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the
great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly
atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right,
and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of
ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it
to be. I was within a hair’s breadth of the last opportunity for
pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have
nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a
remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped
over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare,
that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to
embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts
that beat in the darkness. He had summed up—he had judged. ‘The
horror!’ He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of
some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a
vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a
glimpsed truth—the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is
not my own extremity I remember best—a vision of greyness without form
filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence
of all things—even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I
seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had
stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my
hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps
all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed
into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the
threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up
would not have been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry—much
better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable
defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was
a victory! That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and
even beyond, when a long time after I heard once more, not his own
voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a
soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal.
“No, they did not bury me, though there is a period of time which I
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!”