Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (top 10 books to read TXT) 📕

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 question 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 somber, brooding, and menacing expression.

The luster 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 traveled 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 pre-eminently, 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 the 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 favorite. 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 favor 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 neighbors 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 untrammeled 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 neighbor 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 honored 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