No More Learning

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. 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! '

"The dusk was falling. I had to wait in a lofty drawing-room with three
long windows from floor to ceiling that were like three luminous and
bedraped columns. The bent gilt legs and backs of the furniture shone in
indistinct curves. The tall marble fireplace had a cold and monumental
whiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner, with dark gleams
on the flat surfaces like a somber and polished sarcophagus. A high door
opened--closed. I rose.

"She came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards
me in the dusk. She was in mourning. It was more than a year since his
death, more than a year since the news came; she seemed as though she
would remember and mourn for ever. She took both my hands in hers and
murmured, 'I had heard you were coming. ' I noticed she was not very
young--I mean not girlish. She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for
belief, for suffering. The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all
the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead.
This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by
an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance was
guileless, profound, confident, and trustful. She carried her sorrowful
head as though she were proud of that sorrow, as though she would say,
'I--I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves. ' But while we were
still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her
face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the
playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove!
the impression was so powerful that for me too he seemed to have died
only yesterday--nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same
instant of time--his death and her sorrow--I saw her sorrow in the very
moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together--I heard
them together. She had said, with a deep catch of the breath, 'I have
survived;' while my strained ears seemed to hear distinctly, mingled
with her tone of despairing regret, the summing-up whisper of his
eternal condemnation. I asked myself what I was doing there, with a
sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place
of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold. She
motioned me to a chair. We sat down. I laid the packet gently on the
little table, and she put her hand over it. . . . 'You knew him well,'
she murmured, after a moment of mourning silence.

"'Intimacy grows quick out there,' I said. 'I knew him as well as it is
possible for one man to know another. '

"'And you admired him,' she said. 'It was impossible to know him and not
to admire him. Was it? '

"'He was a remarkable man,' I said, unsteadily. Then before the
appealing fixity of her gaze, that seemed to watch for more words on my
lips, I went on, 'It was impossible not to--'

"'Love him,' she finished eagerly, silencing me into an appalled
dumbness. 'How true! how true! But when you think that no one knew him
so well as I! I had all his noble confidence. I knew him best. '

"'You knew him best,' I repeated. And perhaps she did. But with every
word spoken the room was growing darker, and only her forehead, smooth
and white, remained illumined by the unextinguishable light of belief
and love.

"'You were his friend,' she went on. 'His friend,' she repeated, a
little louder. 'You must have been, if he had given you this, and sent
you to me. I feel I can speak to you--and oh! I must speak. I want
you--you who have heard his last words--to know I have been worthy of
him. . . . It is not pride. . . . Yes! I am proud to know I understood
him better than anyone on earth--he told me so himself. And since his
mother died I have had no one--no one--to--to--'

"I listened. The darkness deepened. I was not even sure whether he had
given me the right bundle. I rather suspect he wanted me to take care
of another batch of his papers which, after his death, I saw the manager
examining under the lamp. And the girl talked, easing her pain in the
certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard
that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He
wasn't rich enough or something. And indeed I don't know whether he had
not been a pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to infer
that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out
there.

"'. . . Who was not his friend who had heard him speak once? ' she was
saying. 'He drew men towards him by what was best in them. ' She looked
at me with intensity. 'It is the gift of the great,' she went on, and
the sound of her low voice seemed to have the accompaniment of all
the other sounds, full of mystery, desolation, and sorrow, I had ever
heard--the ripple of the river, the soughing of the trees swayed by the
wind, the murmurs of wild crowds, the faint ring of incomprehensible
words cried from afar, the whisper of a voice speaking from beyond the
threshold of an eternal darkness. 'But you have heard him! You know! '
she cried.
"'Yes, I know,' I said with something like despair in my heart, but
bowing my head before the faith that was in her, before that great and
saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in
the triumphant darkness from which I could not have defended her--from
which I could not even defend myself.

"'What a loss to me--to us! '--she corrected herself with beautiful
generosity; then added in a murmur, 'To the world. ' By the last gleams
of twilight I could see the glitter of her eyes, full of tears--of tears
that would not fall.

"'I have been very happy--very fortunate--very proud,' she went on. 'Too
fortunate. Too happy for a little while. And now I am unhappy for--for
life. '

"She stood up; her fair hair seemed to catch all the remaining light in
a glimmer of gold. I rose too.

"'And of all this,' she went on, mournfully, 'of all his promise, and
of all his greatness, of his generous mind, of his noble heart, nothing
remains--nothing but a memory. You and I--'

"'We shall always remember him,' I said, hastily.

"'No! ' she cried. 'It is impossible that all this should be lost--that
such a life should be sacrificed to leave nothing--but sorrow. You
know what vast plans he had. I knew of them too--I could not perhaps
understand,--but others knew of them. Something must remain. His words,
at least, have not died. '

"'His words will remain,' I said.

"'And his example,' she whispered to herself. 'Men looked up to
him,--his goodness shone in every act. His example--'

"'True,' I said; 'his example too. Yes, his example. I forgot that. '

"'But I do not. I cannot--I cannot believe--not yet. I cannot believe
that I shall never see him again, that nobody will see him again, never,
never, never. '

"She put out her arms as if after a retreating figure, stretching them
black and with clasped pale hands across the fading and narrow sheen of
the window. Never see him! I saw him clearly enough then. I shall see
this eloquent phantom as long as I live, and I shall see her too, a
tragic and familiar Shade, resembling in this gesture another one,
tragic also, and bedecked with powerless charms, stretching bare brown
arms over the glitter of the infernal stream, the stream of darkness.
She said suddenly very low, 'He died as he lived. '

"'His end,' said I, with dull anger stirring in me, 'was in every way
worthy of his life. '

"'And I was not with him,' she murmured. My anger subsided before a
feeling of infinite pity.

"'Everything that could be done--' I mumbled.

"'Ah, but I believed in him more than anyone on earth--more than his
own mother, more than--himself. He needed me! Me! I would have treasured
every sigh, every word, every sign, every glance. '

"I felt like a chill grip on my chest. 'Don't,' I said, in a muffled
voice.

"'Forgive me. I--I--have mourned so long in silence--in silence. . . .
You were with him--to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody near
to understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to
hear. . . . '

"'To the very end,' I said, shakily. 'I heard his very last words. . . . '
I stopped in a fright.

"'Repeat them,' she said in a heart-broken tone. 'I want--I
want--something--something--to--to live with. '

"I was on the point of crying at her, 'Don't you hear them? ' The dusk
was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper
that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind.
'The horror! The horror! '

"'His last word--to live with,' she murmured. 'Don't you understand I
loved him--I loved him--I loved him! '

"I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.

"'The last word he pronounced was--your name. '

"I heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short
by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and
of unspeakable pain. 'I knew it--I was sure! ' . . . She knew. She was
sure. I heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It
seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that
the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens
do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I
had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he
wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have
been too dark--too dark altogether. . . . "

Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a
meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of
the ebb," said the Director, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was
barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading
to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast
sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.





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