Authors: Joseph Conrad
"It developed itself, I should say, two hours after the fog lifted, and
its commencement was at a spot, roughly speaking, about a mile and a
half below Kurtz's station. We had just floundered and flopped round a
bend, when I saw an islet, a mere grassy hummock of bright green, in the
middle of the stream. It was the only thing of the kind; but as we opened
the reach more, I perceived it was the head of a long sand-bank, or
rather of a chain of shallow patches stretching down the middle of the
river. They were discoloured, just awash, and the whole lot was seen
just under the water, exactly as a man's backbone is seen running down
the middle of his back under the skin. Now, as far as I did see, I could
go to the right or to the left of this. I didn't know either channel, of
course. The banks looked pretty well alike, the depth appeared the same;
but as I had been informed the station was on the west side, I naturally
headed for the western passage.
"No sooner had we fairly entered it than I became aware it was much
narrower than I had supposed. To the left of us there was the long
uninterrupted shoal, and to the right a high, steep bank heavily
overgrown with bushes. Above the bush the trees stood in serried ranks.
The twigs overhung the current thickly, and from distance to distance a
large limb of some tree projected rigidly over the stream. It was then
well on in the afternoon, the face of the forest was gloomy, and a
broad strip of shadow had already fallen on the water. In this shadow
we steamed up—very slowly, as you may imagine. I sheered her well
inshore—the water being deepest near the bank, as the sounding-pole
informed me.
"One of my hungry and forbearing friends was sounding in the bows just
below me. This steamboat was exactly like a decked scow. On the deck,
there were two little teakwood houses, with doors and windows. The
boiler was in the fore-end, and the machinery right astern. Over
the whole there was a light roof, supported on stanchions. The funnel
projected through that roof, and in front of the funnel a small cabin
built of light planks served for a pilot-house. It contained a couch,
two camp-stools, a loaded Martini-Henry leaning in one corner, a tiny
table, and the steering-wheel. It had a wide door in front and a broad
shutter at each side. All these were always thrown open, of course. I
spent my days perched up there on the extreme fore-end of that roof,
before the door. At night I slept, or tried to, on the couch. An
athletic black belonging to some coast tribe and educated by my poor
predecessor, was the helmsman. He sported a pair of brass earrings, wore
a blue cloth wrapper from the waist to the ankles, and thought all the
world of himself. He was the most unstable kind of fool I had ever seen.
He steered with no end of a swagger while you were by; but if he lost
sight of you, he became instantly the prey of an abject funk, and would
let that cripple of a steamboat get the upper hand of him in a minute.
"I was looking down at the sounding-pole, and feeling much annoyed to
see at each try a little more of it stick out of that river, when I saw
my poleman give up on the business suddenly, and stretch himself flat on
the deck, without even taking the trouble to haul his pole in. He kept
hold on it though, and it trailed in the water. At the same time the
fireman, whom I could also see below me, sat down abruptly before his
furnace and ducked his head. I was amazed. Then I had to look at the
river mighty quick, because there was a snag in the fairway. Sticks,
little sticks, were flying about—thick: they were whizzing before my
nose, dropping below me, striking behind me against my pilot-house. All
this time the river, the shore, the woods, were very quiet—perfectly
quiet. I could only hear the heavy splashing thump of the stern-wheel
and the patter of these things. We cleared the snag clumsily. Arrows, by
Jove! We were being shot at! I stepped in quickly to close the shutter
on the landside. That fool-helmsman, his hands on the spokes, was
lifting his knees high, stamping his feet, champing his mouth, like a
reined-in horse. Confound him! And we were staggering within ten feet of
the bank. I had to lean right out to swing the heavy shutter, and I saw
a face amongst the leaves on the level with my own, looking at me very
fierce and steady; and then suddenly, as though a veil had been removed
from my eyes, I made out, deep in the tangled gloom, naked breasts,
arms, legs, glaring eyes—the bush was swarming with human limbs in
movement, glistening of bronze colour. The twigs shook, swayed, and
rustled, the arrows flew out of them, and then the shutter came to.
'Steer her straight,' I said to the helmsman. He held his head rigid,
face forward; but his eyes rolled, he kept on lifting and setting down
his feet gently, his mouth foamed a little. 'Keep quiet!' I said in a
fury. I might just as well have ordered a tree not to sway in the wind.
I darted out. Below me there was a great scuffle of feet on the iron
deck; confused exclamations; a voice screamed, 'Can you turn back?'
I caught sight of a V-shaped ripple on the water ahead. What? Another
snag! A fusillade burst out under my feet. The pilgrims had opened with
their Winchesters, and were simply squirting lead into that bush. A
deuce of a lot of smoke came up and drove slowly forward. I swore at
it. Now I couldn't see the ripple or the snag either. I stood in the
doorway, peering, and the arrows came in swarms. They might have been
poisoned, but they looked as though they wouldn't kill a cat. The bush
began to howl. Our wood-cutters raised a warlike whoop; the report of a
rifle just at my back deafened me. I glanced over my shoulder, and the
pilot-house was yet full of noise and smoke when I made a dash at the
wheel. The fool-nigger had dropped everything, to throw the shutter
open and let off that Martini-Henry. He stood before the wide opening,
glaring, and I yelled at him to come back, while I straightened the
sudden twist out of that steamboat. There was no room to turn even if I
had wanted to, the snag was somewhere very near ahead in that confounded
smoke, there was no time to lose, so I just crowded her into the
bank—right into the bank, where I knew the water was deep.
"We tore slowly along the overhanging bushes in a whirl of broken twigs
and flying leaves. The fusillade below stopped short, as I had foreseen
it would when the squirts got empty. I threw my head back to a glinting
whizz that traversed the pilot-house, in at one shutter-hole and out
at the other. Looking past that mad helmsman, who was shaking the empty
rifle and yelling at the shore, I saw vague forms of men running bent
double, leaping, gliding, distinct, incomplete, evanescent. Something
big appeared in the air before the shutter, the rifle went overboard,
and the man stepped back swiftly, looked at me over his shoulder in an
extraordinary, profound, familiar manner, and fell upon my feet. The
side of his head hit the wheel twice, and the end of what appeared
a long cane clattered round and knocked over a little camp-stool. It
looked as though after wrenching that thing from somebody ashore he had
lost his balance in the effort. The thin smoke had blown away, we were
clear of the snag, and looking ahead I could see that in another hundred
yards or so I would be free to sheer off, away from the bank; but my
feet felt so very warm and wet that I had to look down. The man had
rolled on his back and stared straight up at me; both his hands clutched
that cane. It was the shaft of a spear that, either thrown or lunged
through the opening, had caught him in the side, just below the ribs;
the blade had gone in out of sight, after making a frightful gash; my
shoes were full; a pool of blood lay very still, gleaming dark-red under
the wheel; his eyes shone with an amazing lustre. The fusillade burst
out again. He looked at me anxiously, gripping the spear like something
precious, with an air of being afraid I would try to take it away from
him. I had to make an effort to free my eyes from his gaze and attend
to the steering. With one hand I felt above my head for the line of
the steam whistle, and jerked out screech after screech hurriedly. The
tumult of angry and warlike yells was checked instantly, and then from
the depths of the woods went out such a tremulous and prolonged wail of
mournful fear and utter despair as may be imagined to follow the flight
of the last hope from the earth. There was a great commotion in the
bush; the shower of arrows stopped, a few dropping shots rang out
sharply—then silence, in which the languid beat of the stern-wheel came
plainly to my ears. I put the helm hard a-starboard at the moment when
the pilgrim in pink pyjamas, very hot and agitated, appeared in the
doorway. 'The manager sends me—' he began in an official tone, and
stopped short. 'Good God!' he said, glaring at the wounded man.
"We two whites stood over him, and his lustrous and inquiring glance
enveloped us both. I declare it looked as though he would presently put
to us some questions in an understandable language; but he died without
uttering a sound, without moving a limb, without twitching a muscle.
Only in the very last moment, as though in response to some sign we
could not see, to some whisper we could not hear, he frowned heavily,
and that frown gave to his black death-mask an inconceivably sombre,
brooding, and menacing expression. The lustre of inquiring glance faded
swiftly into vacant glassiness. 'Can you steer?' I asked the agent
eagerly. He looked very dubious; but I made a grab at his arm, and he
understood at once I meant him to steer whether or no. To tell you
the truth, I was morbidly anxious to change my shoes and socks. 'He is
dead,' murmured the fellow, immensely impressed. 'No doubt about it,'
said I, tugging like mad at the shoe-laces. 'And by the way, I suppose
Mr. Kurtz is dead as well by this time.'
"For the moment that was the dominant thought. There was a sense of
extreme disappointment, as though I had found out I had been striving
after something altogether without a substance. I couldn't have been
more disgusted if I had travelled all this way for the sole purpose of
talking with Mr. Kurtz. Talking with . . . I flung one shoe overboard,
and became aware that that was exactly what I had been looking forward
to—a talk with Kurtz. I made the strange discovery that I had never
imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing. I didn't say to
myself, 'Now I will never see him,' or 'Now I will never shake him by
the hand,' but, 'Now I will never hear him.' The man presented himself
as a voice. Not of course that I did not connect him with some sort of
action. Hadn't I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration
that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all
the other agents together? That was not the point. The point was in his
being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood
out preeminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his
ability to talk, his words—the gift of expression, the bewildering,
the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the
pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an
impenetrable darkness.
"The other shoe went flying unto the devil-god of that river. I thought,
'By Jove! it's all over. We are too late; he has vanished—the gift has
vanished, by means of some spear, arrow, or club. I will never hear that
chap speak after all'—and my sorrow had a startling extravagance of
emotion, even such as I had noticed in the howling sorrow of these
savages in the bush. I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation
somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in
life. . . . Why do you sigh in this beastly way, somebody? Absurd? Well,
absurd. Good Lord! mustn't a man ever—Here, give me some tobacco." . . .
There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match flared, and
Marlow's lean face appeared, worn, hollow, with downward folds and
dropped eyelids, with an aspect of concentrated attention; and as he
took vigorous draws at his pipe, it seemed to retreat and advance out of
the night in the regular flicker of tiny flame. The match went out.
"Absurd!" he cried. "This is the worst of trying to tell. . . . Here
you all are, each moored with two good addresses, like a hulk with
two anchors, a butcher round one corner, a policeman round another,
excellent appetites, and temperature normal—you hear—normal from
year's end to year's end. And you say, Absurd! Absurd be—exploded!
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 favourite. 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
favour 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
neighbours 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 untrammelled 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 neighbour 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 honoured 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 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,' etc., etc. 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
honour; 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.