No More Learning

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 cold heavy glance, said very
quietly, 'He _was_,' and turned his back on me. My hour of favor 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 lips, 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
sandal-wise 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,' &c. , &c. 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! ' 'Goodby,' 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 anyone 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 vapor 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 vigor 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 fiend-like 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 a row we are lost,' I thought
to myself. This clearly was not a case for fisticuffs, even apart from
the very natural aversion I had to beat that Shadow--this wandering and
tormented thing. 'You will be lost,' I said--'utterly lost. ' One gets
sometimes such a flash of inspiration, you know. I did say the right
thing, though indeed he could not have been more irretrievably lost than
he was at this very moment, when the foundations of our intimacy were
being laid--to endure--to endure--even to the end--even beyond.

"'I had immense plans,' he muttered irresolutely. 'Yes,' said I; 'but if
you try to shout I'll smash your head with--' There was not a stick or
a stone near. 'I will throttle you for good,' I corrected myself. 'I was
on the threshold of great things,' he pleaded, in a voice of longing,
with a wistfulness of tone that made my blood run cold. 'And now for
this stupid scoundrel--' 'Your success in Europe is assured in any
case,' I affirmed, steadily. I did not want to have the throttling of
him, you understand--and indeed it would have been very little use for
any practical purpose. I tried to break the spell--the heavy, mute spell
of the wilderness--that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the
awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified
and monstrous passions. This alone, I was convinced, had driven him out
to the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of fires, the
throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations; this alone had beguiled
his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations. And, don't
you see, the terror of the position was not in being knocked on the
head--though I had a very lively sense of that danger too--but in this,
that I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the
name of anything high or low. I had, even like the niggers, to invoke
him--himself his own exalted and incredible degradation. There was
nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself
loose of the earth. Confound the man! he had kicked the very earth to
pieces. He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood
on the ground or floated in the air. I've been telling you what we
said--repeating the phrases we pronounced,--but what's the good? They
were common everyday words,--the familiar, vague sounds exchanged on
every waking day of life. But what of that? They had behind them, to my
mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases
spoken in nightmares. Soul! If anybody had ever struggled with a soul,
I am the man. And I wasn't arguing with a lunatic either. Believe me
or not, his intelligence was perfectly clear--concentrated, it is true,
upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear; and therein was my only
chance--barring, of course, the killing him there and then, which wasn't
so good, on account of unavoidable noise. But his soul was mad. Being
alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I
tell you, it had gone mad. I had--for my sins, I suppose--to go through
the ordeal of looking into it myself. No eloquence could have been so
withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity.
He struggled with himself, too. I saw it,--I heard it. I saw the
inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and
no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.
I kept my head pretty well;
but when I had him at last stretched on the couch, I wiped my forehead,
while my legs shook under me as though I had carried half a ton on my
back down that hill. And yet I had only supported him, his bony arm
clasped round my neck--and he was not much heavier than a child.

"When next day we left at noon, the crowd, of whose presence behind the
curtain of trees I had been acutely conscious all the time, flowed out
of the woods again, filled the clearing, covered the slope with a mass
of naked, breathing, quivering, bronze bodies. I steamed up a bit, then
swung down-stream, and two thousand eyes followed the evolutions of
the splashing, thumping, fierce river-demon beating the water with its
terrible tail and breathing black smoke into the air. In front of the
first rank, along the river, three men, plastered with bright red earth
from head to foot, strutted to and fro restlessly. When we came abreast
again, they faced the river, stamped their feet, nodded their horned
heads, swayed their scarlet bodies; they shook towards the fierce
river-demon a bunch of black feathers, a mangy skin with a pendent
tail--something that looked like a dried gourd; they shouted
periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds
of human language; and the deep murmurs of the crowd, interrupted
suddenly, were like the response of some satanic litany.

"We had carried Kurtz into the pilot-house: there was more air there.
Lying on the couch, he stared through the open shutter. There was an
eddy in the mass of human bodies, and the woman with helmeted head and
tawny cheeks rushed out to the very brink of the stream. She put out her
hands, shouted something, and all that wild mob took up the shout in a
roaring chorus of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance.

"'Do you understand this? ' I asked.

"He kept on looking out past me with fiery, longing eyes, with a mingled
expression of wistfulness and hate. He made no answer, but I saw a
smile, a smile of indefinable meaning, appear on his colorless lips
that a moment after twitched convulsively. 'Do I not? ' he said slowly,
gasping, as if the words had been torn out of him by a supernatural
power.

"I pulled the string of the whistle, and I did this because I saw the
pilgrims on deck getting out their rifles with an air of anticipating a
jolly lark. At the sudden screech there was a movement of abject terror
through that wedged mass of bodies. 'Don't! Don't you frighten them
away,' cried someone on deck disconsolately. I pulled the string
time after time. They broke and ran, they leaped, they crouched, they
swerved, they dodged the flying terror of the sound. The three red chaps
had fallen flat, face down on the shore, as though they had been shot
dead. Only the barbarous and superb woman did not so much as flinch,
and stretched tragically her bare arms after us over the somber and
glittering river.

"And then that imbecile crowd down on the deck started their little fun,
and I could see nothing more for smoke.

"The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us
down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress; and
Kurtz's life was running swiftly too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart
into the sea of inexorable time. The manager was very placid, he had
no vital anxieties now, he took us both in with a comprehensive and
satisfied glance: the 'affair' had come off as well as could be wished.
I saw the time approaching when I would be left alone of the party of
'unsound method. ' The pilgrims looked upon me with disfavor. I was,
so to speak, numbered with the dead. It is strange how I accepted this
unforeseen partnership, this choice of nightmares forced upon me in the
tenebrous land invaded by these mean and greedy phantoms.

"Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It
survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the
barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The wastes
of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now--images of wealth
and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of
noble and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my
ideas--these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated
sentiments. The shade of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of
the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mold of
primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of
the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that
soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham
distinction, of all the appearances of success and power.

"Sometimes he was contemptibly childish. He desired to have kings meet
him at railway-stations on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where
he intended to accomplish great things. 'You show them you have in you
something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to
the recognition of your ability,' he would say. 'Of course you must take
care of the motives--right motives--always. ' The long reaches that were
like one and the same reach, monotonous bends that were exactly alike,
slipped past the steamer with their multitude of secular trees looking
patiently after this grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner
of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings. I looked
ahead--piloting. 'Close the shutter,' said Kurtz suddenly one day; 'I
can't bear to look at this. ' I did so. There was a silence. 'Oh, but I
will wring your heart yet! ' he cried at the invisible wilderness.

"We broke down--as I had expected--and had to lie up for repairs at the
head of an island. This delay was the first thing that shook
Kurtz's confidence. One morning he gave me a packet of papers and a
photograph,--the lot tied together with a shoe-string. 'Keep this for
me,' he said. 'This noxious fool' (meaning the manager) 'is capable of
prying into my boxes when I am not looking. ' In the afternoon I saw him.
He was lying on his back with closed eyes, and I withdrew quietly, but
I heard him mutter, 'Live rightly, die, die . . . ' I listened. There was
nothing more. Was he rehearsing some speech in his sleep, or was it a
fragment of a phrase from some newspaper article? He had been writing
for the papers and meant to do so again, 'for the furthering of my
ideas. It's a duty. '

"His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at
a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never
shines. But I had not much time to give him, because I was helping the
engine-driver to take to pieces the leaky cylinders, to straighten a
bent connecting-rod, and in other such matters. I lived in an
infernal mess of rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners, hammers,
ratchet-drills--things I abominate, because I don't get on with them. I
tended the little forge we fortunately had aboard; I toiled wearily in a
wretched scrap-heap--unless I had the shakes too bad to stand.

"One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a
little tremulously, 'I am lying here in the dark waiting for death. '
The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, 'Oh,
nonsense! ' and stood over him as if transfixed.

"Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have
never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched.
I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that
ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven
terror--of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again
in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme
moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at
some vision,--he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath--

"'The horror! The horror! '

"I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in
the mess-room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his
eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored.
He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar smile of his sealing the
unexpressed depths of his meanness. A continuous shower of small flies
streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces.
Suddenly the manager's boy put his insolent black head in the doorway,
and said in a tone of scathing contempt--

"'Mistah Kurtz--he dead. '

"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 grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around,
without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great
desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly
atmosphere of tepid skepticism, 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 candor, 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 grayness 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 pretense,
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 dare say 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 behavior was inexcusable, but then my temperature
was seldom normal in these days. My dear aunt's endeavors 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,' &c. , &c. 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 gray
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 eye-glass 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
fulfillment of one of these 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 worshipers, 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.