Heart of Darkness
around and above. Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off
drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird,
appealing, suggestive, and wild—and perhaps with as profound a meaning
as the sound of bells in a Christian country. Once a white man in an
unbuttoned uniform, camping on the path with an armed escort of lank
Zanzibaris, very hospitable and festive—not to say drunk. Was looking
after the upkeep of the road, he declared. Can’t say I saw any road or
any upkeep, unless the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole
in the forehead, upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles farther
on, may be considered as a permanent improvement. I had a white
companion, too, not a bad chap, but rather too fleshy and with the
exasperating habit of fainting on the hot hillsides, miles away from
the least bit of shade and water. Annoying, you know, to hold your own
coat like a parasol over a man’s head while he is coming to. I couldn’t
help asking him once what he meant by coming there at all. ‘To make
money, of course. What do you think?’ he said, scornfully. Then he got
fever, and had to be carried in a hammock slung under a pole. As he
weighed sixteen stone I had no end of rows with the carriers. They
jibbed, ran away, sneaked off with their loads in the night—quite a
mutiny. So, one evening, I made a speech in English with gestures, not
one of which was lost to the sixty pairs of eyes before me, and the
next morning I started the hammock off in front all right. An hour
afterwards I came upon the whole concern wrecked in a bush—man,
hammock, groans, blankets, horrors. The heavy pole had skinned his poor
nose. He was very anxious for me to kill somebody, but there wasn’t the
shadow of a carrier near. I remembered the old doctor—‘It would be
interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on
the spot.’ I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting. However,
all that is to no purpose. On the fifteenth day I came in sight of the
big river again, and hobbled into the Central Station. It was on a back
water surrounded by scrub and forest, with a pretty border of smelly
mud on one side, and on the three others enclosed by a crazy fence of
rushes. A neglected gap was all the gate it had, and the first glance
at the place was enough to let you see the flabby devil was running
that show. White men with long staves in their hands appeared languidly
from amongst the buildings, strolling up to take a look at me, and then
retired out of sight somewhere. One of them, a stout, excitable chap
with black moustaches, informed me with great volubility and many
digressions, as soon as I told him who I was, that my steamer was at
the bottom of the river. I was thunderstruck. What, how, why? Oh, it
was ‘all right.’ The ‘manager himself’ was there. All quite correct.
‘Everybody had behaved splendidly! splendidly!’—‘you must,’ he said in
agitation, ‘go and see the general manager at once. He is waiting!’
“I did not see the real significance of that wreck at once. I fancy I
see it now, but I am not sure—not at all. Certainly the affair was too
stupid—when I think of it—to be altogether natural. Still... But at the
moment it presented itself simply as a confounded nuisance. The steamer
was sunk. They had started two days before in a sudden hurry up the
river with the manager on board, in charge of some volunteer skipper,
and before they had been out three hours they tore the bottom out of
her on stones, and she sank near the south bank. I asked myself what I
was to do there, now my boat was lost. As a matter of fact, I had
plenty to do in fishing my command out of the river. I had to set about
it the very next day. That, and the repairs when I brought the pieces
to the station, took some months.
“My first interview with the manager was curious. He did not ask me to
sit down after my twenty-mile walk that morning. He was commonplace in
complexion, in features, in manners, and in voice. He was of middle
size and of ordinary build. His eyes, of the usual blue, were perhaps
remarkably cold, and he certainly could make his glance fall on one as
trenchant and heavy as an axe. But even at these times the rest of his
person seemed to disclaim the intention. Otherwise there was only an
indefinable, faint expression of his lips, something stealthy—a
smile—not a smile—I remember it, but I can’t explain. It was
unconscious, this smile was, though just after he had said something it
got intensified for an instant. It came at the end of his speeches like
a seal applied on the words to make the meaning of the commonest phrase
appear absolutely inscrutable. He was a common trader, from his youth
up employed in these parts—nothing more. He was obeyed, yet he inspired
neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That
was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust—just uneasiness—nothing
more. You have no idea how effective such a... a... faculty can be. He
had no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even. That
was evident in such things as the deplorable state of the station. He
had no learning, and no intelligence. His position had come to him—why?
Perhaps because he was never ill... He had served three terms of three
years out there... Because triumphant health in the general rout of
constitutions is a kind of power in itself. When he went home on leave
he rioted on a large scale—pompously. Jack ashore—with a difference—in
externals only. This one could gather from his casual talk. He
originated nothing, he could keep the routine going—that’s all. But he
was great. He was great by this little thing that it was impossible to
tell what could control such a man. He never gave that secret away.
Perhaps there was nothing within him. Such a suspicion made one
pause—for out there there were no external checks. Once when various
tropical diseases had laid low almost every ‘agent’ in the station, he
was heard to say, ‘Men who come out here should have no entrails.’ He
sealed the utterance with that smile of his, as though it had been a
door opening into a darkness he had in his keeping. You fancied you had
seen things—but the seal was on. When annoyed at meal-times by the
constant quarrels of the white men about precedence, he ordered an
immense round table to be made, for which a special house had to be
built. This was the station’s mess-room. Where he sat was the first
place—the rest were nowhere. One felt this to be his unalterable
conviction. He was neither civil nor uncivil. He was quiet. He allowed
his ‘boy’—an overfed young negro from the coast—to treat the white men,
under his very eyes, with provoking insolence.
“He began to speak as soon as he saw me. I had been very long on the
road. He could not wait. Had to start without me. The up-river stations
had to be relieved. There had been so many delays already that he did
not know who was dead and who was alive, and how they got on—and so on,
and so on. He paid no attention to my explanations, and, playing with a
stick of sealing-wax, repeated several times that the situation was
‘very grave, very grave.’ There were rumours that a very important
station was in jeopardy, and its chief, Mr. Kurtz, was ill. Hoped it
was not true. Mr. Kurtz was... I felt weary and irritable. Hang Kurtz,
I thought. I interrupted him by saying I had heard of Mr. Kurtz on the
coast. ‘Ah! So they talk of him down there,’ he murmured to himself.
Then he began again, assuring me Mr. Kurtz was the best agent he had,
an exceptional man, of the greatest importance to the Company;
therefore I could understand his anxiety. He was, he said, ‘very, very
uneasy.’ Certainly he fidgeted on his chair a good deal, exclaimed,
‘Ah, Mr. Kurtz!’ broke the stick of sealing-wax and seemed dumfounded
by the accident. Next thing he wanted to know ‘how long it would take
to’... I interrupted him again. Being hungry, you know, and kept on my
feet too. I was getting savage. ‘How can I tell?’ I said. ‘I haven’t
even seen the wreck yet—some months, no doubt.’ All this talk seemed to
me so futile. ‘Some months,’ he said. ‘Well, let us say three months
before we can make a start. Yes. That ought to do the affair.’ I flung
out of his hut (he lived all alone in a clay hut with a sort of
verandah) muttering to myself my opinion of him. He was a chattering
idiot. Afterwards I took it back when it was borne in upon me
startlingly with what extreme nicety he had estimated the time
requisite for the ‘affair.’
“I went to work the next day, turning, so to speak, my back on that
station. In that way only it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the
redeeming facts of life. Still, one must look about sometimes; and then
I saw this station, these men strolling aimlessly about in the sunshine
of the yard. I asked myself sometimes what it all meant. They wandered
here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot
of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word ‘ivory’
rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were
praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a
whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I’ve never seen anything so unreal in
my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared
speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like
evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic
invasion.
“Oh, these months! Well, never mind. Various things happened. One
evening a grass shed full of calico, cotton prints, beads, and I don’t
know what else, burst into a blaze so suddenly that you would have
thought the earth had opened to let an avenging fire consume all that
trash. I was smoking my pipe quietly by my dismantled steamer, and saw
them all cutting capers in the light, with their arms lifted high, when
the stout man with moustaches came tearing down to the river, a tin
pail in his hand, assured me that everybody was ‘behaving splendidly,
splendidly,’ dipped about a quart of water and tore back again. I
noticed there was a hole in the bottom of his pail.
“I strolled up. There was no hurry. You see the thing had gone off like
a box of matches. It had been hopeless from the very first. The flame
had leaped high, driven everybody back, lighted up everything—and
collapsed. The shed was already a heap of embers glowing fiercely. A
nigger was being beaten near by. They said he had caused the fire in
some way; be that as it may, he was screeching most horribly. I saw
him, later, for several days, sitting in a bit of shade looking very
sick and trying to recover himself; afterwards he arose and went
out—and the wilderness without a sound took him into its bosom again.
As I approached the glow from the dark I found myself at the back of
two men, talking. I heard the name of Kurtz pronounced, then the words,
‘take advantage of this unfortunate accident.’ One of the men was the
manager. I wished him a good evening. ‘Did you ever see anything like
it—eh? it is incredible,’ he said, and walked off. The other man
remained. He was a first-class agent, young, gentlemanly, a bit
reserved, with a forked little beard and a hooked nose. He was
stand-offish with the other agents, and they on their side said he was
the manager’s spy upon them. As to me, I had hardly ever spoken to him
before. We got into talk, and by and by we strolled away from the
hissing ruins. Then he asked me to his room, which was in the main
building of the station. He struck a match, and I perceived that this
young aristocrat had not only a silver-mounted dressing-case but also a
whole candle all to himself. Just at that time the manager was the only
man supposed to have any right to candles. Native mats covered the clay
walls; a collection of spears, assegais, shields, knives was hung up in