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eyes to trust.’ Light dawned upon me. My dear aunt’s
influential acquaintances were producing an unexpected
effect upon that young man. I nearly burst into a laugh.
‘Do you read the Company’s confidential
correspondence?’ I asked. He hadn’t a word to say. It was
great fun. ‘When Mr. Kurtz,’ I continued, severely, ‘is
General Manager, you won’t have the opportunity.’
‘He blew the candle out suddenly, and we went
outside. The moon had risen. Black figures strolled about
listlessly, pouring water on the glow, whence proceeded a
sound of hissing; steam ascended in the moonlight, the
beaten nigger groaned somewhere. ‘What a row the brute
makes!’ said the indefatigable man with the moustaches,
appearing near us. ‘Serve him right. Transgression—
punishment—bang! Pitiless, pitiless. That’s the only way.
This will prevent all conflagrations for the future. I was
just telling the manager …’ He noticed my companion,
and became crestfallen all at once. ‘Not in bed yet,’ he
said, with a kind of servile heartiness; ‘it’s so natural. Ha!
Danger—agitation.’ He vanished. I went on to the
riverside, and the other followed me. I heard a scathing
murmur at my ear, ‘Heap of muffs—go to.’ The pilgrims
could be seen in knots gesticulating, discussing. Several
had still their staves in their hands. I verily believe they
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took these sticks to bed with them. Beyond the fence the
forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through
that dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable
courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one’s very
heart—its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its
concealed life. The hurt nigger moaned feebly somewhere
near by, and then fetched a deep sigh that made me mend
my pace away from there. I felt a hand introducing itself
under my arm. ‘My dear sir,’ said the fellow, ‘I don’t want
to be misunderstood, and especially by you, who will see
Mr. Kurtz long before I can have that pleasure. I wouldn’t
like him to get a false idea of my disposition….’
‘I let him run on, this papier-mache Mephistopheles,
and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my
forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but
a little loose dirt, maybe. He, don’t you see, had been
planning to be assistant-manager by and by under the
present man, and I could see that the coming of that Kurtz
had upset them both not a little. He talked precipitately,
and I did not try to stop him. I had my shoulders against
the wreck of my steamer, hauled up on the slope like a
carcass of some big river animal. The smell of mud, of
primeval mud, by Jove! was in my nostrils, the high
stillness of primeval forest was before my eyes; there were
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shiny patches on the black creek. The moon had spread
over everything a thin layer of silver— over the rank grass,
over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing
higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I
could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it
flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great,
expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself. I
wondered whether the stillness on the face of the
immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as
a menace. What were we who had strayed in here? Could
we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt
how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing that
couldn’t talk, and perhaps was deaf as well. What was in
there? I could see a little ivory coming out from there, and
I had heard Mr. Kurtz was in there. I had heard enough
about it, too— God knows! Yet somehow it didn’t bring
any image with it— no more than if I had been told an
angel or a fiend was in there. I believed it in the same way
one of you might believe there are inhabitants in the
planet Mars. I knew once a Scotch sailmaker who was
certain, dead sure, there were people in Mars. If you asked
him for some idea how they looked and behaved, he
would get shy and mutter something about ‘walking on
all-fours.’ If you as much as smiled, he would—though a
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man of sixty— offer to fight you. I would not have gone
so far as to fight for Kurtz, but I went for him near
enough to a lie. You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a
lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but
simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a
flavour of mortality in lies— which is exactly what I hate
and detest in the world— what I want to forget. It makes
me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would
do. Temperament, I suppose. Well, I went near enough to
it by letting the young fool there believe anything he liked
to imagine as to my influence in Europe. I became in an
instant as much of a pretence as the rest of the bewitched
pilgrims. This simply because I had a notion it somehow
would be of help to that Kurtz whom at the time I did not
see—you understand. He was just a word for me. I did not
see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you
see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It
seems to me I am trying to tell you ya dream—making a
vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey
the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity,
surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling
revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible
which is of the very essence of dreams….’
He was silent for a while.
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‘… No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the
life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that
which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and
penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we
dream—alone. …’
He paused again as if reflecting, then added:
‘Of course in this you fellows see more than I could
then. You see me, whom you know. …’
It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could
hardly see one another. For a long time already he, sitting
apart, had been no more to us than a voice. There was not
a word from anybody. The others might have been asleep,
but I was awake. I listened, I listened on the watch for the
sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to the
faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to
shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of
the river.
‘… Yes—I let him run on,’ Marlow began again, ‘and
think what he pleased about the powers that were behind
me. I did! And there was nothing behind me! There was
nothing but that wretched, old, mangled steamboat I was
leaning against, while he talked fluently about ‘the
necessity for every man to get on.’ ‘And when one comes
out here, you conceive, it is not to gaze at the moon.’ Mr.
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Kurtz was a ‘universal genius,’ but even a genius would
find it easier to work with ‘adequate tools—intelligent
men.’ He did not make bricks—why, there was a physical
impossibility in the way—as I was well aware; and if he
did secretarial work for the manager, it was because ‘no
sensible man rejects wantonly the confidence of his
superiors.’ Did I see it? I saw it. What more did I want?
What I really wanted was rivets, by heaven! Rivets. To get
on with the work—to stop the hole. Rivets I wanted.
There were cases of them down at the coast— cases—
piled up—burst—split! You kicked a loose rivet at every
second step in that station-yard on the hillside. Rivets had
rolled into the grove of death. You could fill your pockets
with rivets for the trouble of stooping down— and there
wasn’t one rivet to be found where it was wanted. We had
plates that would do, but nothing to fasten them with.
And every week the messenger, a long negro, letter-bag
on shoulder and staff in hand, left our station for the coast.
And several times a week a coast caravan came in with
trade goods—ghastly glazed calico that made you shudder
only to look at it, glass beads value about a penny a quart,
confounded spotted cotton handkerchiefs. And no rivets.
Three carriers could have brought all that was wanted to
set that steamboat afloat.
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‘He was becoming confidential now, but I fancy my
unresponsive attitude must have exasperated him at last,
for he judged it necessary to inform me he feared neither
God nor devil, let alone any mere man. I said I could see
that very well, but what I wanted was a certain quantity of
rivets—and rivets were what really Mr. Kurtz wanted, if
he had only known it. Now letters went to the coast every
week. … ‘My dear sir,’ he cried, ‘I write from dictation.’ I
demanded rivets. There was a way—for an intelligent
man. He changed his manner; became very cold, and
suddenly began to talk about a hippopotamus; wondered
whether sleeping on board the steamer (I stuck to my
salvage night and day) I wasn’t disturbed. There was an
old hippo that had the bad habit of getting out on the
bank and roaming at night over the station grounds. The
pilgrims used to turn out in a body and empty every rifle
they could lay hands on at him. Some even had sat up o’
nights for him. All this energy was wasted, though. ‘That
animal has a charmed life,’ he said; ‘but you can say this
only of brutes in this country. No man—you apprehend
me?—no man here bears a charmed life.’ He stood there
for a moment in the moonlight with his delicate hooked
nose set a little askew, and his mica eyes glittering without
a wink, then, with a curt Good-night, he strode off. I
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could see he was disturbed and considerably puzzled,
which made me feel more hopeful than I had been for
days. It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to my
influential friend, the battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot
steamboat. I clambered on board. She rang under my feet
like an empty Huntley & Palmer biscuit-tin kicked along a
gutter; she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less
pretty in shape, but I had expended enough hard work on
her to make me love her. No influential friend would
have served me better. She had given me a chance to
come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t
like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine
things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man
does—but I like what is in the work— the chance to find
yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—
what no other man can ever know. They can only see the
mere show, and never can tell what it really means.
‘I was not surprised to see somebody sitting aft, on the
deck, with his legs dangling over the mud. You see I
rather chummed with the few mechanics there were in
that station, whom the other pilgrims naturally despised—
on account of their imperfect manners, I suppose. This
was the foreman—a boiler-maker by trade—a good
worker. He was a lank, bony, yellow-faced man, with big
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