Part 4 (2/2)
I had cut hi hiht proportion It was by no h 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 ithin thirty yards fro black legs, waving long black arlow It had horns--antelope horns, I think--on its head Some sorcerer, soh 'Do you knohat you are doing?' I whispered 'Perfectly,' he answered, raising his voice for that single word: it sounded to -truht 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 tor 'You will be lost,' I said--'utterly lost' One gets sometiht thing, though indeed he could not have been more irretrievably lost than he was at this verylaid--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 s,' 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 affir 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 see of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the ratified and monstrous passions This alone, I was convinced, had driven hileam of fires, the throb of druuiled 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 whoh or low I had, even like the niggers, to invoke hiradation 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 hiround or floated in the air I've been telling you e said--repeating the phrases we pronounced,--but what's the good? They were coed on every waking day of life But what of that? They had behind theestiveness of words heard in dreahtled with a soul, I a with a lunatic either Believe ence was perfectly clear--concentrated, it is true, upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear; and therein washiood, on account of unavoidable noise But his soul wasalone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone h the ordeal of looking into itto one's belief in led 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 h 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 ti, covered the slope with a , bronze bodies I stea down-stream, and two thousand eyes followed the evolutions of the splashi+ng, thu the water with its terrible tail and breathing black s the river, three ht red earth from head to foot, strutted to and fro restlessly When we caain, they faced the river, stamped their feet, nodded their horned heads, swayed their scarlet bodies; they shook towards the fierce river-dey skin with a pendent tail--soourd; they shouted periodically together strings of ae; 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 h 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 strea, and all that wildchorus of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance
”'Do you understand this?' I asked
”He kept on looking out past led expression of wistfulness and hate He made no answer, but I saw a s, 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 hi of the whistle, and I did this because I saw the pilgri out their rifles with an air of anticipating a jolly lark At the sudden screech there was a ed hten them away,' cried so 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 woically her bare ar river
”And then that imbecile cron 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 doards 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 tier was very placid, he had no vital anxieties now, he took us both in with a colance: the 'affair' had come off as well as could be wished
I saw the ti when I would be left alone of the party of 'unsound rims looked upon me with disfavor I was, so to speak, nue how I accepted this unforeseen partnershi+p, this choice of nightmares forced upon reedy phanto deep to the very last It survived his strength to hide in the nificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy i 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 sentiinal 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 ht for the possession of that soul satiated with pri fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances of success and power
”Sos hastly Nowhere, where he intended to acco that is really profitable, and then there will be no linition of your ability,' he would say 'Of course you htreaches that were like one and the same reach, monotonous bends that were exactly alike, slipped past the stea patiently after this grie, of conquest, of trade, of'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 ring 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 raph,--the lot tied together with a shoe-string 'Keep this for er) 'is capable of prying into ' In the afternoon I saw hi on his back with closed eyes, and I withdrew quietly, but I heard hihtly, die, die ' I listened There was nothingsoment of a phrase fro for the papers andof my ideas It's a duty'
”His was an impenetrable darkness I looked at hi at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shi+nes But I had not ine-driver to take to pieces the leaky cylinders, to straighten a bent connecting-rod, and in other such s, nuts, bolts, spanners, haet on with thee we fortunately had aboard; I toiled wearily in a wretched scrap-heap--unless I had the shakes too bad to stand
”One evening co in with a candle I was startled to hear hi here in the dark waiting for death'
The light ithin a foot of his eyes I forced myself to murmur, 'Oh, nonsense!' and stood over hie 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, te that supree? He cried in a whisper at soe, 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 pilgri in the er, who lifted his eyes to give nored
He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar s 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 er's boy put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing conterims rushed out to see I remained, and went on with my dinner I believe I was considered brutally callous However, I did not eat ht, don't you know--and outside it was so beastly, beastly dark I went no ment upon the adventures of his soul on this earth The voice was gone What else had been there? But I a in a muddy hole
”And then they very nearly buried o to join Kurtz there and then I did not I rehtmare out to the end, and to show my loyalty to Kurtz oncelife is--that ic for a futile purpose
The e of yourself--that corets I have wrestled with death It is the ine It takes place in an i around, without spectators, without clareat desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticisht, and still less in that of your adversary If such is the forreater riddle than some of us think it to be I ithin a hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with hu to say This is the reason why I affir to say He said it Since I had peeped over the edgeof his stare, that could not see the flah to eh to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness He had sued '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 gli of desire and hate And it is not rayness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contes--even of this pain itself No! It is his extreh True, he had e, while I had been per 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 -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 nificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal