Heart of Darkness (14 page)

"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 worshippers, 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 sombre 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 forever. 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 quickly 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 inextinguishable 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 any one 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 the 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
back 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 any one 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 murmured 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 insisted. '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 sombre under an overcast
sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.