Heart of Darkness
came in with trade goods—ghastly glazed calico that made you shudder
only to look at it, glass beads value about a penny a quart, confounded
spotted cotton handkerchiefs. And no rivets. Three carriers could have
brought all that was wanted to set that steamboat afloat.
“He was becoming confidential now, but I fancy my unresponsive attitude
must have exasperated him at last, for he judged it necessary to inform
me he feared neither God nor devil, let alone any mere man. I said I
could see that very well, but what I wanted was a certain quantity of
rivets—and rivets were what really Mr. Kurtz wanted, if he had only
known it. Now letters went to the coast every week.... ‘My dear sir,’
he cried, ‘I write from dictation.’ I demanded rivets. There was a
way—for an intelligent man. He changed his manner; became very cold,
and suddenly began to talk about a hippopotamus; wondered whether
sleeping on board the steamer (I stuck to my salvage night and day) I
wasn’t disturbed. There was an old hippo that had the bad habit of
getting out on the bank and roaming at night over the station grounds.
The pilgrims used to turn out in a body and empty every rifle they
could lay hands on at him. Some even had sat up o’ nights for him. All
this energy was wasted, though. ‘That animal has a charmed life,’ he
said; ‘but you can say this only of brutes in this country. No man—you
apprehend me?—no man here bears a charmed life.’ He stood there for a
moment in the moonlight with his delicate hooked nose set a little
askew, and his mica eyes glittering without a wink, then, with a curt
Good-night, he strode off. I could see he was disturbed and
considerably puzzled, which made me feel more hopeful than I had been
for days. It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to my
influential friend, the battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. I
clambered on board. She rang under my feet like an empty Huntley &
Palmer biscuit-tin kicked along a gutter; she was nothing so solid in
make, and rather less pretty in shape, but I had expended enough hard
work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have
served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit—to find
out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and
think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man
does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your
own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever
know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it
really means.
“I was not surprised to see somebody sitting aft, on the deck, with his
legs dangling over the mud. You see I rather chummed with the few
mechanics there were in that station, whom the other pilgrims naturally
despised—on account of their imperfect manners, I suppose. This was the
foreman—a boiler-maker by trade—a good worker. He was a lank, bony,
yellow-faced man, with big intense eyes. His aspect was worried, and
his head was as bald as the palm of my hand; but his hair in falling
seemed to have stuck to his chin, and had prospered in the new
locality, for his beard hung down to his waist. He was a widower with
six young children (he had left them in charge of a sister of his to
come out there), and the passion of his life was pigeon-flying. He was
an enthusiast and a connoisseur. He would rave about pigeons. After
work hours he used sometimes to come over from his hut for a talk about
his children and his pigeons; at work, when he had to crawl in the mud
under the bottom of the steamboat, he would tie up that beard of his in
a kind of white serviette he brought for the purpose. It had loops to
go over his ears. In the evening he could be seen squatted on the bank
rinsing that wrapper in the creek with great care, then spreading it
solemnly on a bush to dry.
“I slapped him on the back and shouted, ‘We shall have rivets!’ He
scrambled to his feet exclaiming, ‘No! Rivets!’ as though he couldn’t
believe his ears. Then in a low voice, ‘You... eh?’ I don’t know why we
behaved like lunatics. I put my finger to the side of my nose and
nodded mysteriously. ‘Good for you!’ he cried, snapped his fingers
above his head, lifting one foot. I tried a jig. We capered on the iron
deck. A frightful clatter came out of that hulk, and the virgin forest
on the other bank of the creek sent it back in a thundering roll upon
the sleeping station. It must have made some of the pilgrims sit up in
their hovels. A dark figure obscured the lighted doorway of the
manager’s hut, vanished, then, a second or so after, the doorway itself
vanished, too. We stopped, and the silence driven away by the stamping
of our feet flowed back again from the recesses of the land. The great
wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks,
branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was
like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants,
piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every
little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved not. A
deadened burst of mighty splashes and snorts reached us from afar, as
though an icthyosaurus had been taking a bath of glitter in the great
river. ‘After all,’ said the boiler-maker in a reasonable tone, ‘why
shouldn’t we get the rivets?’ Why not, indeed! I did not know of any
reason why we shouldn’t. ‘They’ll come in three weeks,’ I said
confidently.
“But they didn’t. Instead of rivets there came an invasion, an
infliction, a visitation. It came in sections during the next three
weeks, each section headed by a donkey carrying a white man in new
clothes and tan shoes, bowing from that elevation right and left to the
impressed pilgrims. A quarrelsome band of footsore sulky niggers trod
on the heels of the donkey; a lot of tents, camp-stools, tin boxes,
white cases, brown bales would be shot down in the courtyard, and the
air of mystery would deepen a little over the muddle of the station.
Five such instalments came, with their absurd air of disorderly flight
with the loot of innumerable outfit shops and provision stores, that,
one would think, they were lugging, after a raid, into the wilderness
for equitable division. It was an inextricable mess of things decent in
themselves but that human folly made look like the spoils of thieving.
“This devoted band called itself the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, and
I believe they were sworn to secrecy. Their talk, however, was the talk
of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without
audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight
or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not
seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear
treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more
moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into
a safe. Who paid the expenses of the noble enterprise I don’t know; but
the uncle of our manager was leader of that lot.
“In exterior he resembled a butcher in a poor neighbourhood, and his
eyes had a look of sleepy cunning. He carried his fat paunch with
ostentation on his short legs, and during the time his gang infested
the station spoke to no one but his nephew. You could see these two
roaming about all day long with their heads close together in an
everlasting confab.
“I had given up worrying myself about the rivets. One’s capacity for
that kind of folly is more limited than you would suppose. I said
Hang!—and let things slide. I had plenty of time for meditation, and
now and then I would give some thought to Kurtz. I wasn’t very
interested in him. No. Still, I was curious to see whether this man,
who had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort, would climb to
the top after all and how he would set about his work when there.”
II
“One evening as I was lying flat on the deck of my steamboat, I heard
voices approaching—and there were the nephew and the uncle strolling
along the bank. I laid my head on my arm again, and had nearly lost
myself in a doze, when somebody said in my ear, as it were: ‘I am as
harmless as a little child, but I don’t like to be dictated to. Am I
the manager—or am I not? I was ordered to send him there. It’s
incredible.’ ... I became aware that the two were standing on the shore
alongside the forepart of the steamboat, just below my head. I did not
move; it did not occur to me to move: I was sleepy. ‘It _is_
unpleasant,’ grunted the uncle. ‘He has asked the Administration to be
sent there,’ said the other, ‘with the idea of showing what he could
do; and I was instructed accordingly. Look at the influence that man
must have. Is it not frightful?’ They both agreed it was frightful,
then made several bizarre remarks: ‘Make rain and fine weather—one
man—the Council—by the nose’—bits of absurd sentences that got the
better of my drowsiness, so that I had pretty near the whole of my wits
about me when the uncle said, ‘The climate may do away with this
difficulty for you. Is he alone there?’ ‘Yes,’ answered the manager;
‘he sent his assistant down the river with a note to me in these terms:
“Clear this poor devil out of the country, and don’t bother sending
more of that sort. I had rather be alone than have the kind of men you
can dispose of with me.” It was more than a year ago. Can you imagine
such impudence!’ ‘Anything since then?’ asked the other hoarsely.
‘Ivory,’ jerked the nephew; ‘lots of it—prime sort—lots—most annoying,
from him.’ ‘And with that?’ questioned the heavy rumble. ‘Invoice,’ was
the reply fired out, so to speak. Then silence. They had been talking
about Kurtz.
“I was broad awake by this time, but, lying perfectly at ease, remained
still, having no inducement to change my position. ‘How did that ivory
come all this way?’ growled the elder man, who seemed very vexed. The
other explained that it had come with a fleet of canoes in charge of an
English half-caste clerk Kurtz had with him; that Kurtz had apparently
intended to return himself, the station being by that time bare of
goods and stores, but after coming three hundred miles, had suddenly
decided to go back, which he started to do alone in a small dugout with
four paddlers, leaving the half-caste to continue down the river with
the ivory. The two fellows there seemed astounded at anybody attempting
such a thing. They were at a loss for an adequate motive. As to me, I
seemed to see Kurtz for the first time. It was a distinct glimpse: the
dugout, four paddling savages, and the lone white man turning his back
suddenly on the headquarters, on relief, on thoughts of home—perhaps;
setting his face towards the depths of the wilderness, towards his
empty and desolate station. I did not know the motive. Perhaps he was
just simply a fine fellow who stuck to his work for its own sake. His
name, you understand, had not been pronounced once. He was ‘that man.’
The half-caste, who, as far as I could see, had conducted a difficult
trip with great prudence and pluck, was invariably alluded to as ‘that
scoundrel.’ The ‘scoundrel’ had reported that the ‘man’ had been very
ill—had recovered imperfectly.... The two below me moved away then a
few paces, and strolled back and forth at some little distance. I
heard: ‘Military post—doctor—two hundred miles—quite alone
now—unavoidable delays—nine months—no news—strange rumours.’ They
approached again, just as the manager was saying, ‘No one, as far as I
know, unless a species of wandering trader—a pestilential fellow,
snapping ivory from the natives.’ Who was it they were talking about
now? I gathered in snatches that this was some man supposed to be in
Kurtz’s district, and of whom the manager did not approve. ‘We will not