No More Learning

Absurd! My dear boys, what can you expect from a man who out of sheer
nervousness had just flung overboard a pair of new shoes. Now I think of
it, it is amazing I did not shed tears. I am, upon the whole, proud
of my fortitude. I was cut to the quick at the idea of having lost the
inestimable privilege of listening to the gifted Kurtz. Of course I
was wrong. The privilege was waiting for me. Oh yes, I heard more than
enough. And I was right, too. A voice. He was very little more than a
voice. And I heard--him--it--this voice--other voices--all of them were
so little more than voices--and the memory of that time itself lingers
around me, impalpable, like a dying vibration of one immense jabber,
silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of
sense. Voices, voices--even the girl herself--now--"

He was silent for a long time.

"I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie," he began suddenly.
"Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it--completely.
They--the women, I mean--are out of it--should be out of it. We must
help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours
gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it. You should have heard the
disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying, 'My Intended. ' You would have
perceived directly then how completely she was out of it. And the lofty
frontal bone of Mr. Kurtz! They say the hair goes on growing sometimes,
but this--ah specimen, was impressively bald. The wilderness had patted
him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball--an ivory ball; it had
caressed him, and--lo! --he had withered; it had taken him, loved him,
embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed
his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish
initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favorite. Ivory? I should
think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting
with it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above
or below the ground in the whole country. 'Mostly fossil,' the manager
had remarked disparagingly. It was no more fossil than I am; but they
call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears these niggers do bury
the tusks sometimes--but evidently they couldn't bury this parcel
deep enough to save the gifted Mr. Kurtz from his fate. We filled the
steamboat with it, and had to pile a lot on the deck. Thus he could
see and enjoy as long as he could see, because the appreciation of this
favor had remained with him to the last. You should have heard him say,
'My ivory. ' Oh yes, I heard him. 'My Intended, my ivory, my station, my
river, my--' everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in
expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of
laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything
belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he
belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That
was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible--it
was not good for one either--trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat
amongst the devils of the land--I mean literally. You can't understand.
How could you? --with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind
neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately
between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and
gallows and lunatic asylums--how can you imagine what particular region
of the first ages a man's untrammeled feet may take him into by the way
of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--by the way of silence,
utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbor can be heard
whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great
difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate
strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course you may
be too much of a fool to go wrong--too dull even to know you are being
assaulted by the powers of darkness. I take it, no fool ever made a
bargain for his soul with the devil: the fool is too much of a fool, or
the devil too much of a devil--I don't know which. Or you may be such
a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to
anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only
a standing place--and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain
I won't pretend to say. But most of us are neither one nor the other.
The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with
sights, with sounds, with smells too, by Jove! --breathe dead hippo,
so to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don't you see?
Your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of
unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in--your power of devotion,
not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business. And that's
difficult enough. Mind, I am not trying to excuse or even explain--I am
trying to account to myself for--for--Mr. Kurtz--for the shade of Mr.
Kurtz. This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere honored me with
its amazing confidence before it vanished altogether. This was because
it could speak English to me. The original Kurtz had been educated
partly in England, and--as he was good enough to say himself--his
sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his
father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz;
and by-and-by I learned that, most appropriately, the International
Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the
making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it too.
I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence,
but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had
found time for! But this must have been before his--let us say--nerves,
went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending
with unspeakable rites, which--as far as I reluctantly gathered
from what I heard at various times--were offered up to him--do you
understand? --to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece
of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later
information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument
that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, 'must
necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural
beings--we approach them with the might as of a deity,' and so on, and
so on. 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good
practically unbounded,' &c. , &c. From that point he soared and took me
with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember,
you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an
august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the
unbounded power of eloquence--of words--of burning noble words. There
were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases,
unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently
much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of
a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to
every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying,
like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes! '
The curious part was that he had apparently forgotten all about that
valuable postscriptum, because, later on, when he in a sense came to
himself, he repeatedly entreated me to take good care of 'my pamphlet'
(he called it), as it was sure to have in the future a good influence
upon his career. I had full information about all these things, and,
besides, as it turned out, I was to have the care of his memory. I've
done enough for it to give me the indisputable right to lay it, if I
choose, for an everlasting rest in the dust-bin of progress, amongst
all the sweepings and, figuratively speaking, all the dead cats of
civilization. But then, you see, I can't choose. He won't be forgotten.
Whatever he was, he was not common. He had the power to charm or
frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance in his
honor; he could also fill the small souls of the pilgrims with bitter
misgivings: he had one devoted friend at least, and he had conquered
one soul in the world that was neither rudimentary nor tainted with
self-seeking. No; I can't forget him, though I am not prepared to affirm
the fellow was exactly worth the life we lost in getting to him. I
missed my late helmsman awfully,--I missed him even while his body
was still lying in the pilot-house. Perhaps you will think it passing
strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of
sand in a black Sahara. Well, don't you see, he had done something, he
had steered; for months I had him at my back--a help--an instrument. It
was a kind of partnership. He steered for me--I had to look after him, I
worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created,
of which I only became aware when it was suddenly broken. And the
intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt
remains to this day in my memory--like a claim of distant kinship
affirmed in a supreme moment.

"Poor fool! If he had only left that shutter alone. He had no restraint,
no restraint--just like Kurtz--a tree swayed by the wind. As soon as
I had put on a dry pair of slippers, I dragged him out, after first
jerking the spear out of his side, which operation I confess I performed
with my eyes shut tight. His heels leaped together over the little
door-step; his shoulders were pressed to my breast; I hugged him from
behind desperately. Oh! he was heavy, heavy; heavier than any man on
earth, I should imagine. Then without more ado I tipped him overboard.
The current snatched him as though he had been a wisp of grass, and I
saw the body roll over twice before I lost sight of it for ever. All the
pilgrims and the manager were then congregated on the awning-deck
about the pilot-house, chattering at each other like a flock of excited
magpies, and there was a scandalized murmur at my heartless promptitude.
What they wanted to keep that body hanging about for I can't guess.
Embalm it, maybe. But I had also heard another, and a very ominous,
murmur on the deck below. My friends the wood-cutters were likewise
scandalized, and with a better show of reason--though I admit that the
reason itself was quite inadmissible. Oh, quite! I had made up my mind
that if my late helmsman was to be eaten, the fishes alone should have
him. He had been a very second-rate helmsman while alive, but now he was
dead he might have become a first-class temptation, and possibly cause
some startling trouble. Besides, I was anxious to take the wheel, the
man in pink pyjamas showing himself a hopeless duffer at the business.

"This I did directly the simple funeral was over. We were going
half-speed, keeping right in the middle of the stream, and I listened
to the talk about me. They had given up Kurtz, they had given up the
station; Kurtz was dead, and the station had been burnt--and so on--and
so on. The red-haired pilgrim was beside himself with the thought that
at least this poor Kurtz had been properly revenged. 'Say! We must have
made a glorious slaughter of them in the bush. Eh? What do you think?
Say? ' He positively danced, the bloodthirsty little gingery beggar.
And he had nearly fainted when he saw the wounded man! I could not help
saying, 'You made a glorious lot of smoke, anyhow. ' I had seen, from the
way the tops of the bushes rustled and flew, that almost all the shots
had gone too high. You can't hit anything unless you take aim and fire
from the shoulder; but these chaps fired from the hip with their eyes
shut. The retreat, I maintained--and I was right--was caused by the
screeching of the steam-whistle. Upon this they forgot Kurtz, and began
to howl at me with indignant protests.

"The manager stood by the wheel murmuring confidentially about the
necessity of getting well away down the river before dark at all events,
when I saw in the distance a clearing on the river-side and the outlines
of some sort of building. 'What's this? ' I asked. He clapped his hands
in wonder. 'The station! ' he cried. I edged in at once, still going
half-speed.

"Through my glasses I saw the slope of a hill interspersed with rare
trees and perfectly free from undergrowth. A long decaying building on
the summit was half buried in the high grass; the large holes in the
peaked roof gaped black from afar; the jungle and the woods made a
background. There was no inclosure or fence of any kind; but there had
been one apparently, for near the house half-a-dozen slim posts remained
in a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamented with
round carved balls. The rails, or whatever there had been between, had
disappeared. Of course the forest surrounded all that. The river-bank
was clear, and on the water-side I saw a white man under a hat like a
cart-wheel beckoning persistently with his whole arm. Examining the
edge of the forest above and below, I was almost certain I could see
movements--human forms gliding here and there. I steamed past prudently,
then stopped the engines and let her drift down. The man on the shore
began to shout, urging us to land. 'We have been attacked,' screamed
the manager. 'I know--I know. It's all right,' yelled back the other, as
cheerful as you please. 'Come along. It's all right. I am glad. '

"His aspect reminded me of something I had seen--something funny I had
seen somewhere. As I maneuvered to get alongside, I was asking myself,
'What does this fellow look like? ' Suddenly I got it. He looked like
a harlequin. His clothes had been made of some stuff that was brown
holland probably, but it was covered with patches all over, with bright
patches, blue, red, and yellow,--patches on the back, patches on front,
patches on elbows, on knees; colored binding round his jacket, scarlet
edging at the bottom of his trousers; and the sunshine made him look
extremely gay and wonderfully neat withal, because you could see how
beautifully all this patching had been done. A beardless, boyish face,
very fair, no features to speak of, nose peeling, little blue eyes,
smiles and frowns chasing each other over that open countenance like
sunshine and shadow on a windswept plain. 'Look out, captain! ' he
cried; 'there's a snag lodged in here last night. ' What! Another snag? I
confess I swore shamefully. I had nearly holed my cripple, to finish off
that charming trip. The harlequin on the bank turned his little pug nose
up to me. 'You English? ' he asked, all smiles. 'Are you? ' I shouted from
the wheel. The smiles vanished, and he shook his head as if sorry for
my disappointment. Then he brightened up. 'Never mind! ' he cried
encouragingly. 'Are we in time? ' I asked. 'He is up there,' he replied,
with a toss of the head up the hill, and becoming gloomy all of a
sudden. His face was like the autumn sky, overcast one moment and bright
the next.

"When the manager, escorted by the pilgrims, all of them armed to the
teeth, had gone to the house, this chap came on board. 'I say, I
don't like this. These natives are in the bush,' I said. He assured me
earnestly it was all right. 'They are simple people,' he added; 'well,
I am glad you came. It took me all my time to keep them off. ' 'But you
said it was all right,' I cried. 'Oh, they meant no harm,' he said; and
as I stared he corrected himself, 'Not exactly. ' Then vivaciously, 'My
faith, your pilot-house wants a clean up! ' In the next breath he advised
me to keep enough steam on the boiler to blow the whistle in case of any
trouble. 'One good screech will do more for you than all your rifles.
They are simple people,' he repeated.
He rattled away at such a rate
he quite overwhelmed me. He seemed to be trying to make up for lots of
silence, and actually hinted, laughing, that such was the case. 'Don't
you talk with Mr. Kurtz? ' I said. 'You don't talk with that man--you
listen to him,' he exclaimed with severe exaltation. 'But now--' He
waved his arm, and in the twinkling of an eye was in the uttermost
depths of despondency. In a moment he came up again with a jump,
possessed himself of both my hands, shook them continuously, while he
gabbled: 'Brother sailor . . . honor . . . pleasure . . . delight . . .
introduce myself . . . Russian . . . son of an arch-priest . . .
Government of Tambov . . . What? Tobacco! English tobacco; the excellent
English tobacco! Now, that's brotherly. Smoke? Where's a sailor that
does not smoke? '

"The pipe soothed him, and gradually I made out he had run away from
school, had gone to sea in a Russian ship; ran away again; served some
time in English ships; was now reconciled with the arch-priest. He made
a point of that. 'But when one is young one must see things, gather
experience, ideas; enlarge the mind. ' 'Here! ' I interrupted. 'You can
never tell! Here I have met Mr. Kurtz,' he said, youthfully solemn and
reproachful. I held my tongue after that. It appears he had persuaded a
Dutch trading-house on the coast to fit him out with stores and goods,
and had started for the interior with a light heart, and no more idea of
what would happen to him than a baby. He had been wandering about that
river for nearly two years alone, cut off from everybody and everything.
'I am not so young as I look. I am twenty-five,' he said. 'At first old
Van Shuyten would tell me to go to the devil,' he narrated with keen
enjoyment; 'but I stuck to him, and talked and talked, till at last he
got afraid I would talk the hind-leg off his favorite dog, so he gave
me some cheap things and a few guns, and told me he hoped he would never
see my face again. Good old Dutchman, Van Shuyten. I've sent him one
small lot of ivory a year ago, so that he can't call me a little thief
when I get back. I hope he got it. And for the rest I don't care. I had
some wood stacked for you. That was my old house. Did you see? '

"I gave him Towson's book. He made as though he would kiss me, but
restrained himself. 'The only book I had left, and I thought I had lost
it,' he said, looking at it ecstatically. 'So many accidents happen to
a man going about alone, you know. Canoes get upset sometimes--and
sometimes you've got to clear out so quick when the people get angry. '
He thumbed the pages. 'You made notes in Russian? ' I asked. He nodded.
'I thought they were written in cipher,' I said. He laughed, then became
serious. 'I had lots of trouble to keep these people off,' he said. 'Did
they want to kill you? ' I asked. 'Oh no! ' he cried, and checked
himself. 'Why did they attack us? ' I pursued. He hesitated, then
said shamefacedly, 'They don't want him to go. ' 'Don't they? ' I said,
curiously. He nodded a nod full of mystery and wisdom. 'I tell you,' he
cried, 'this man has enlarged my mind. ' He opened his arms wide, staring
at me with his little blue eyes that were perfectly round. "




III


"I looked at him, lost in astonishment. There he was before me, in
motley, as though he had absconded from a troupe of mimes, enthusiastic,
fabulous. His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and
altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was
inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so
far, how he had managed to remain--why he did not instantly disappear.
'I went a little farther,' he said, 'then still a little farther--till
I had gone so far that I don't know how I'll ever get back. Never mind.
Plenty time. I can manage. You take Kurtz away quick--quick--I tell
you. ' The glamour of youth enveloped his particolored rags, his
destitution, his loneliness, the essential desolation of his futile
wanderings. For months--for years--his life hadn't been worth a day's
purchase; and there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all
appearance indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and
of his unreflecting audacity. I was seduced into something like
admiration--like envy. Glamour urged him on, glamour kept him unscathed.
He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe in and
to push on through. His need was to exist, and to move onwards at
the greatest possible risk, and with a maximum of privation. If the
absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever
ruled a human being, it ruled this be-patched youth. I almost envied
him the possession of this modest and clear flame. It seemed to have
consumed all thought of self so completely, that, even while he was
talking to you, you forgot that it was he--the man before your eyes--who
had gone through these things. I did not envy him his devotion to Kurtz,
though. He had not meditated over it. It came to him, and he accepted it
with a sort of eager fatalism. I must say that to me it appeared about
the most dangerous thing in every way he had come upon so far.

"They had come together unavoidably, like two ships becalmed near
each other, and lay rubbing sides at last. I suppose Kurtz wanted an
audience, because on a certain occasion, when encamped in the forest,
they had talked all night, or more probably Kurtz had talked. 'We talked
of everything,' he said, quite transported at the recollection. 'I
forgot there was such a thing as sleep. The night did not seem to last
an hour. Everything! Everything! . . . Of love too. ' 'Ah, he talked to
you of love! ' I said, much amused. 'It isn't what you think,' he cried,
almost passionately. 'It was in general. He made me see things--things. '

"He threw his arms up. We were on deck at the time, and the headman
of my wood-cutters, lounging near by, turned upon him his heavy and
glittering eyes. I looked around, and I don't know why, but I assure you
that never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle, the
very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so
impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness. 'And, ever
since, you have been with him, of course? ' I said.

"On the contrary. It appears their intercourse had been very much broken
by various causes. He had, as he informed me proudly, managed to nurse
Kurtz through two illnesses (he alluded to it as you would to some risky
feat), but as a rule Kurtz wandered alone, far in the depths of the
forest. 'Very often coming to this station, I had to wait days and
days before he would turn up,' he said. 'Ah, it was worth waiting
for! --sometimes. ' 'What was he doing? exploring or what? ' I asked. 'Oh
yes, of course;' he had discovered lots of villages, a lake too--he
did not know exactly in what direction; it was dangerous to inquire
too much--but mostly his expeditions had been for ivory. 'But he had no
goods to trade with by that time,' I objected. 'There's a good lot of
cartridges left even yet,' he answered, looking away. 'To speak plainly,
he raided the country,' I said. He nodded. 'Not alone, surely! ' He
muttered something about the villages round that lake. 'Kurtz got the
tribe to follow him, did he? ' I suggested. He fidgeted a little. 'They
adored him,' he said. The tone of these words was so extraordinary that
I looked at him searchingly. It was curious to see his mingled eagerness
and reluctance to speak of Kurtz. The man filled his life, occupied his
thoughts, swayed his emotions. 'What can you expect? ' he burst out; 'he
came to them with thunder and lightning, you know--and they had never
seen anything like it--and very terrible. He could be very terrible.
You can't judge Mr. Kurtz as you would an ordinary man. No, no, no!
Now--just to give you an idea--I don't mind telling you, he wanted to
shoot me too one day--but I don't judge him. ' 'Shoot you! ' I cried.
'What for? ' 'Well, I had a small lot of ivory the chief of that village
near my house gave me. You see I used to shoot game for them. Well,
he wanted it, and wouldn't hear reason. He declared he would shoot me
unless I gave him the ivory and then cleared out of the country, because
he could do so, and had a fancy for it, and there was nothing on earth
to prevent him killing whom he jolly well pleased. And it was true too.
I gave him the ivory. What did I care! But I didn't clear out. No, no. I
couldn't leave him. I had to be careful, of course, till we got friendly
again for a time. He had his second illness then. Afterwards I had to
keep out of the way; but I didn't mind. He was living for the most part
in those villages on the lake. When he came down to the river, sometimes
he would take to me, and sometimes it was better for me to be careful.
This man suffered too much. He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't
get away. When I had a chance I begged him to try and leave while there
was time; I offered to go back with him. And he would say yes, and then
he would remain; go off on another ivory hunt; disappear for weeks;
forget himself amongst these people--forget himself--you know. ' 'Why!
he's mad,' I said. He protested indignantly. Mr. Kurtz couldn't be mad.
If I had heard him talk, only two days ago, I wouldn't dare hint at
such a thing. . . . I had taken up my binoculars while we talked and was
looking at the shore, sweeping the limit of the forest at each side and
at the back of the house. The consciousness of there being people in
that bush, so silent, so quiet--as silent and quiet as the ruined house
on the hill--made me uneasy. There was no sign on the face of nature
of this amazing tale that was not so much told as suggested to me in
desolate exclamations, completed by shrugs, in interrupted phrases, in
hints ending in deep sighs. The woods were unmoved, like a mask--heavy,
like the closed door of a prison--they looked with their air of hidden
knowledge, of patient expectation, of unapproachable silence. The
Russian was explaining to me that it was only lately that Mr. Kurtz had
come down to the river, bringing along with him all the fighting men of
that lake tribe. He had been absent for several months--getting himself
adored, I suppose--and had come down unexpectedly, with the intention to
all appearance of making a raid either across the river or down stream.
Evidently the appetite for more ivory had got the better of the--what
shall I say? --less material aspirations. However he had got much worse
suddenly. 'I heard he was lying helpless, and so I came up--took my
chance,' said the Russian. 'Oh, he is bad, very bad. ' I directed my
glass to the house. There were no signs of life, but there was the
ruined roof, the long mud wall peeping above the grass, with three
little square window-holes, no two of the same size; all this brought
within reach of my hand, as it were.