第 七 章 · 第3章（2）

"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. 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.