Heart of Darkness - Chapter 3 Part 2

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Chapter three, Part two.
When I woke up shortly after midnight, his warning came
to my mind, with its hint of danger that seemed
in the starred darkness, real enough to make me get
up for the purpose of having a look around on
the hill. A big fire burned, illuminating fitfully a crooked

(00:24):
corner of the station house. One of the agents, with
a picket of a few of our blacks armed for
the purpose, was keeping guard over the ivory. But deep
within the forest, red gleams that wavered that seemed to
sink and rise from the ground. Amongst confused columnar's shapes
of intense blackness showed the exact position of the camp
where mister Kurtz's adorers were keeping their uneasy vigil. The

(00:49):
monotonous beating of a big drum filled the air with
muffled shocks and a lingering vibration, a steady droning sound
of many men chanting each to himself. Some weird incantation
came out from a hive and had a strange narcotic
effect upon my half awake senses. I believe I dozed
off leaning over the rail till an abrupt burst of yells,

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an overwhelming outbreak of a pent up and mysterious frenzy,
woke me up in a bewildered wonder. It was cut
short all at once, and the low droning went on
with an effect of audible and soothing silence. I glanced
casually into the little cabin. A light was burning within,
but mister Kurtz was not there. I think I would

(01:36):
have raised an outcry if I had believed my eyes,
but I didn't believe them at first. The thing seemed
so impossible. The fact is I was completely unerved by
a sheer, blank fright, pure abstract terror, unconnected with any
distinct shape of physical danger. What made this emotion so
overpowering was, how shall I define it? The moral shock

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I received, as if something altogether monstrous, intolerable to thought,
and odious to the soul had been thrust upon me unexpectedly.
This lasted, of course, the merest fraction of a second,
and then the usual sense of commonplace, deadly danger. The
possibility of a sudden onslaught and massacre, or something of
the kind which I saw impending, was positively welcome and composing.

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It pacified me, in fact, so much that I did
not raise an alarm. There was an agent buttoned up
inside an ulster and sleeping on a chair on deck,
within three feet of me. The yells had not awakened him.
He snored very slightly. I left him to his slumbers
and leapt ashore. I did not betray mister Kurtz. It
was ordered. I should never betray him. It was written,

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I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.
I was anxious to deal with the shadow by myself alone,
and to this day I don't know why I was
so jealous of sharing with any one the peculiar blackness
of that experience. As soon as I got on the bank,
I saw trail, a broad trail through the grass. I
remembered the exultation with which I said to myself, he

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can't walk, he is crawling on all fours. I've got him.
The grass was wet with dew. I strode rapidly with
clenched fists. I fancy I had some vague notion of
falling upon him and giving him a drubbing. I don't know.
I had some imbecile thoughts. The knitting old woman with
the cat obtruded herself upon my memory as a most

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improper person to be sitting at the other end of
such an affair. I saw a row of pilgrims squirting
lead in the air out of Winchester's held to the hip.
I thought I would never get back to the steamer,
and imagined myself living alone and unarmed in the woods
to an advanced age. Such silly things, you know, And
I remember. I confounded the beat of the drum with

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the beating of my heart, and was pleased at its
calm regularity. I kept to the track, though then stopped
to listen. The night was very clear, a dark blue space,
sparkling with dew and starlight, in which black things stood
very still. I thought I could see a kind of

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motion ahead of me. I was strangely cock sure of
everything that night. I actually left the track and ran
in a wide semicircle, I verily believe, chuckling to myself,
so as to get in front of that stir of
that motion I had seen, If indeed I had seen anything,
I was circumventing curts as though it had been a

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boyish game. I came upon him, and if he had
not heard me coming I would have fallen over him too,
but he got up in time. He rose unsteady, long, pale, indistinct,
like a vapor exhaled by the earth, and swayed slightly,
misty and silent before me, while at my back the

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fires loomed between the trees, and the murmur of many
voices issued from the forest. I had cut him off cleverly,
but when actually confronting him, I seemed to come to
my senses. I saw the danger in its right proportion.
It was by no means over yet Suppose he began
to shout. Though he could hardly stand, there was still

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plenty of vigor in his voice. Go away, hide yourself,
he said, in that profound tone. It was very awful.
I glanced back. We were within thirty yards from the
nearest fire. A black figure stood up, strode on long
black legs, waving long black arms across the glow. It

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had horns, antelope horns. I think on its head, some sorcerer,
some witch man, No doubt, it looked fiendlike enough. Do
you know what you are doing? I whispered perfectly, he answered,
raising his voice, for that single word sounded to me

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far off and yet loud, like a hail through a
speaking trumpet. If he makes a row, we are lost.
I thought 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 tormented thing.
You will be lost, I said, utterly. Lost. One gets

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sometimes such a flash of inspiration. You know, I did
say the right thing, though indeed he could not have
been more irretrievably lost than he was at this very moment,
when the foundations of our intimacy were being laid. To endure,
to endure even to the end, even beyond. I had

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immense plans, he muttered, irresolutely, Yes, said I. But if
you try to shut I'll smash your head with There
was not a stick or a stone near. I will
throttle you for good, I corrected myself. I was on
the threshold of great things, he pleaded, in a voice

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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 affirmed steadily.
I did not want to have the throttling of him.
You understand, and indeed, it would have been very little
use for any practical purpose. I tried to break the spell,

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the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness, that seemed to
draw him to its pitiless breast, by the awakening of
forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and
monstrous passions. This alone, I was convinced, had driven him
out to the edge of the forest, to the bush
towards the gleam of fires, the throb of drums, the

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drone of weird incantations. This alone had beguiled his unlawful
soul beyond the back of permitted aspirations. And don't you
see the terror of the position was not in being
knocked on the head, although I had a very lively
sense of that danger too, But in this that I

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had to deal with a being to whom I could
not appeal in the name of anything high or low.
I had, even, like the niggers, to invoke him himself,
his own exalted and incredible degradation. There was nothing either
above or below him, And I knew it. He had
kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man, He

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had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was alone,
and I before him, did not know whether I stood
on the ground or floated in the air. I've been
telling you what we said, repeating the phrases we pronounced.
But what's the good? They were common every day words,
the familiar, vague sounds, exchanged on every waking day of life.

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But what of that they had behind them? To my mind?
The terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases
spoken in nightmares. Soul. If anybody ever struggled with a soul,
I am the man, and I wasn't arguing with a lunatic,
either believe me or not. His intelligence was perfectly clear, concentrated,

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it is true, upon himself, with horrible intensity, yet clear,
And therein was my only chance, barring, of course, the
killing him there and then, which wasn't so good on
account of unavoidable noise. But his soul was mad, being
alone in the wilderness. It had looked within itself, and

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by heavens, I tell you it had gone mad. I
had for my sins, I suppose to go through the
ordeal of looking into it myself. No eloquence could have
been so withering to one's belief in mankind as his
final burst of sinceri. He struggled within himself too. I

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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 my forehead while my
legs shook under me, as though I had carried half

(10:26):
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 of all the time, flowed out of the
woods again, filling the clearing, covered the slope with a

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mass of naked, breathing, quivering, bronzed bodies. I steamed up
a bit, then swung down stream, and two thousand eyes
followed the evolutions of the splashing, thumping, fierce river demon,
beating the water with its terrible tail and breathing black
smoke into the air. In front of the first rank

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along the river, three men plastered with bright red earth
from head to foot, strutted to and fro restlessly. When
we came abreast again, they faced the river, stamped their feet,
nodded their horned heads, swayed their scarlet bodies. They shook
towards the fierce river demon, a bunch of black feathers,

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a mangy skin with a pendant tail, something that looked
like a dried gourd. They shouted periodically to gather strings
of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language,
and the deep murmurs of the crowd interrupted suddenly, were
like the responses of some satanic litany. We had carried
Kurts into the pilot house. There was more air there.

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Lying on the couch, he stared through the open shutter.
There was an eddy on the mass of human bodies,
and the woman with helmeted head and tawny cheeks rushed
out to the very brink of the stream. She put
out her hands, shouting something, and all that wild mob
took up the shout in a roaring chorus of articulated, rapid,
breathless utterance. Do you understand this? I asked? He kept

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on looking out past me with fiery longing eyes with
a mingled expression of wistfulness and hate. He made no answer,
but I saw a smile, a smile of indefinable meaning,
appear on his colorless lips that a moment after twitched convulsively.
Do I not, he said, slowly, gasping as if the

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words had been torn out of him by a supernatural power.
I pulled the string of the whistle, And I did
this because I saw the pilgrims on deck getting out
their rifles with an air of anticipating a jolly lark.
At the sudden screech, there was a movement of abject
terror through that wedge mass of bodies. Don't don't you
frighten them away? Cried some one on deck, disconsolately. I

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pulled the string 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 woman did not
so much as flinch, and stretched tragically her bare arms

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after us over the somber and glittering river. And then
that imbecile crowd down 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 down towards the sea with twice the speed of
our upward progress. And Kurtz's life was running swiftly too, ebbing, ebbing,

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out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time.
The manager was very placid, He had no vital anxieties.
Now he took us both in with a comprehensive and
satisfied glance. The affair had come off as well as
could be wished. I saw the time approaching when I
would be left alone of the party of unsound method.

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The pilgrims looked upon me with disfavor. I was, so
to speak, numbered with the dead. It is strange how
I accepted this unforeseen partnership, this choice of nightmares, forced
upon me in the tenebrous land invaded by these mean
and greedy phantoms. Curt's discoursed a voice, a voice it

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rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength
to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence, the barren
darkness of his heart. Oh he struggled. He struggled. The
wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images,
now images of wealth and fame, revolving obsequiously around his

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inextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression. My intended, my station,
my career, my ideas. These were the subjects for the
occasional utterances of elevated sentiments. The shade of the original
curts frequented the bedside of the hollow sham, whose fate
it was to be buried presently in the mold of

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primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly
hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the
possession of that soul, satiated with primitive emotions, avid of
lying fame of sham, distinction of all the appearances of
success and power. Sometimes he was contemptibly childish. He desired

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to have kings meet him at railway stations on his
return from some ghastly nowhere where he intended to accomplish
great things. You show them you have in you something
that is really profitable, and then there will be no
limits to the recognition of your ability. He would say.
Of course, you must take care of the motives, right
motives always the long reaches that were like one and

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the same reach, monotonous bends that were exactly alike, slipped
past the steamer with their multitude of secular trees, looking
patiently after this grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner
of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres of blessings.

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I looked ahead, piloting close the shutter, said Kurt Suddenly,
one day I can't beare to look at this. I
did so. There was a silence. Oh but I will
wring your heart, yet, he cried at the invisible wilderness.

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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 morning, he gave me a packet of papers and
a photograph the lot, tied together with a shoe string.
Keep this for me, he said, this noxious fool, meaning

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the manager is capable of prying into my boxes when
I am not looking. In the afternoon, I saw him.
He was lying on his back with closed eyes, and
I withdrew quickly, but I heard him mutter, live rightly,
Die die, I listened, there was nothing more. Was he

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rehearsing some speech in his sleep, or was it a
fragment of a phrase from some newspaper article. He had
been writing for the papers, and meant to do so
again for the furthering of my ideas. It's a duty.
His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as
you peer down a man who is lying at the
bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines. But

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I had not much time to him, because I was
helping the engine driver to take to pieces the leaky cylinders,
to straighten a bent connecting rod, and in other such matters.
I lived an infernal mess of rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners, hammers,
ratchet drills, things I abominate because I don't get on

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with them. I tended the little forge we fortunately had
a board. I toiled wearily in a wretched scrap heap
unless I had the shakes too bad to stand. One evening,
coming in with a candle, I was startled to hear
him say, a little tremulously, I am lying here in
the dark, waiting for death. The light was within a

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foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, oh, nonsense,
and stood over him, as if transfixed anything approaching. The
change that came over his features I have never seen
before and hoped never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched.
I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had

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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, temptation, and surrender. During
that supreme moment of complete knowledge, he cried in a

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whisper at some image, 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 pilgrims were dining in the mess room, and I
took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes
to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored.

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He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar smile of his,
sealing the unexpressed depths of his meanness. A continuous shower
of small flies streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth,
upon her hands, and faces. Suddenly, the manager's boy put
his insolent black head in the doorway and said, in

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a tone of scathing contempt, Mista Kurtz. He dead. All
the pilgrims rushed out to see. I remained and went
on with my dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous.
However I did not eat much. There was a lamp

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in there, light you don't know, and outside it was
so beastly, beastly dark. I went no more near the
remarkable man who had pronounced a judgment upon the adventures
of his soul on this earth. The voice was gone.
What else had been there? But I am of course

(20:58):
aware that next day the pill buried something in a
muddy hole, and then they very nearly buried me. However,
as you see, I did not go to join Kurtz there,
and then I did not. I remained to dream the
nightmare out to the end, and to show my loyalty
to Curts once more. Destiny, my destiny, droll thing. Life

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is that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a feudal purpose.
The most you can hope from it is some knowledge
of yourself that comes too late a crop of unextinguishable regrets.
I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting
contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable grayness,

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with nothing under foot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor,
without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the
great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism,
without much belief in your own rights, and still less
in that of your adversary. If such is the form

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of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than
some of us think it to be. I was within
a hair's breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and
I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing
to say. This is the reason why I affirm that
Kurtz was a remarkable man. He had something to say.

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He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself,
I understood better the meaning of his stare that could
not see the flame of the candle, but was wide
enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate
all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had
summed up. He had judged the horror. He was a

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remarkable man. After all. This was the expression of some
sort of belief. It had candor, It had viction, It
had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper. It
had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth, the strange
commingling of desire and hate. And it is not my
own extremity I remember best, a vision of grayness without form,

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filled with physical pain and a careless contempt for the
evanescence of all things, even of this pain itself. No,
it is his extremity that I seem to have lived through. True,
he had made that last stride, he had stepped over
the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back
my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference.

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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 my summing up would not have
been a word of careless contempt. Better his c much better.

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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 Curts to the last and even beyond. When a
long time after I heard once more, not his own voice,

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but the echo of his magnificent eloquence, thrown to me
from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal. No,
they did not bury me, though there is a period
of time which I remember mistily with a shuddering wonder,
like a passage through some inconceivable world that had no
hope in it and no desire. I found myself back

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in the sepulchral city, resenting the sight of people hurrying
through the streets to filter a little money from each other,
to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer,
to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon
my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was
to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure

(25:09):
they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing,
which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about
their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive
to me. Like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the
face of a danger, it is unable to comprehend. I
had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had

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some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces.
So full of stupid importance, I dare say I was
not very well at that time. I tottered about the
streets there were various affairs to settle, grinning bitterly at
perfectly respectable persons. I admit my behavior was inexcusable, but

(25:52):
then my temperature was seldom normal in these days. My
dear aunt's endeavors to nurse up my strength seemed altogether
side the mark. It was not my strength that wanted nursing.
It was my imagination that wanted soothing. I kept the
bundle of papers given me by Kurts, not knowing exactly

(26:13):
what to do with it. His mother had died lately,
watched over as I was told by his intended. A
clean shaved man with an official manner and wearing gold
rimmed spectacles called on me one day and made inquiries,
at first circuitous and afterwards suavely pressing about what he
was pleased to denominate certain documents. I was not surprised,

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because I had had two rows with the manager on
the subject out there. I had refused to give up
the smallest scrap out of that package, and I took
the same attitude with the spectacled man. He became darkly
menacing at last, and with much heat, argued that the
company had the right to every bit of information about
its territories, and said he mister Kurtz's knowledge of unexplored

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regions must have been necessarily extensive and peculiar, owing to
his great abilities and to the deplorable circumstances in which
he had been placed. Therefore, I assured him, mister Kurtz's knowledge, however, extensive,
did not bear upon the problems of commerce or administration.
He invoked, then the name of science. It would be

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an incalculable loss if et cetera, et cetera. I offered
him the report on the Suppression of Savage Customs, with
the postscriptum torn off. He took it up eagerly, but
ended up by sniffing at it with an air of contempt.
This is not what we had a right to expect,
he remarked. Expect nothing else. I said, there are only

(27:48):
private letters. He withdrew upon some threat of legal proceedings,
and I saw him no more. But another fellow calling
himself Kurtz's cousin, appeared two days later and was anxious
to hear all the details about his dear relative's last moments. Incidentally,
he gave me to understand that Kurtz had been essentially

(28:08):
a great musician. There was the making of an immense success,
said the man who was an organist, I believe, with
lank gray hair flowing over a greasy coat collar. I
had no reason to doubt his statement, And to this
day I am unable to say what was Kurtz's profession,
whether he ever had any, which was the greatest of

(28:29):
his talents. I had taken him for a painter who
wrote for the papers, or else for a journalist who
could paint. But even the cousin, who took snuff during
the interview, could not tell me what he had been exactly.
He was a universal genius. On that point, I agreed
with the old chap who thereupon blew his nose noisily

(28:50):
into a large cotton handkerchief and withdrew in senile agitation,
bearing off some family letters and memoranda without importance. Ultimately,
a journalist, anxious to know something of the fate of
his dear colleague, turned up. This visitor informed me Curtis's
proper sphere ought to have been politics. On the popular side.

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He had furry, straight eyebrows, bristly hair cropped short, an
eye glass on a broad ribbon, and, becoming expansive, confessed
his opinion that curt really couldn't write a bit, But
heavens how that man could talk. He electrified large meetings.
He had faith, don't you see? He had the faith.
He could get himself to believe anything anything. He would

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have been a splendid leader of an extreme party. What party,
I asked? Any party, answered the other. He was an
an extremist. Did I not think so? I assented, Did
I know? He asked, with a sudden flash of curiosity,

(30:00):
what it was that had induced him to go out there? Yes,
said I, and forthwith handed him the famous report for
publication if he thought fit. He glanced through it hurriedly,
mumbling all the time, judged it would do, and took
himself off with this plunder. Thus I was left at
last with a slim packet of letters and the girl's portrait.

(30:24):
She struck me as beautiful. I mean, she had a
beautiful expression. I know that the sunlight can be made
to lie too. Yet one felt that no manipulation of
light and pose could have conveyed the delicate shade of
truthfulness upon those features. She seemed ready to listen, without
mental reservation, without suspicion, without a thought for herself. I

(30:46):
concluded I would go and give her back her portrait
and those letters myself. Curiosity, yes, and also some other feeling.
Perhaps all that had been courtgees had passed out of
my hands, his soul, his body, his station, his plans,
his ivory, his career. There remained only his memory and

(31:09):
his intended And I wanted to give that up too,
to the past, in a way, to surrender personally all
that remained of him with me, to that oblivion which
is the last word of our common fate. I don't
defend myself. I had no clear perception of what it
was I really wanted. Perhaps it was an impulse of
unconscious loyalty, or the fulfillment of one of those ironic

(31:32):
necessities that lurk in the facts of human existence. I
don't know. I can't tell, but I went. 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

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ponderous door between the tall houses of a street, as
still and accord as a well kept alley in a cemetery,
I had a vision of him on a stretcher, opening
his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth
with all its mankind. He lived then before me, he

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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,

(32:37):
the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forest,
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 and invading

(33:00):
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,

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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.

(33:48):
I collected it myself at a very great personal risk.
I am afraid they will try to claim it as theirs. Though, Hm,
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.

(34:14):
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.

(34:38):
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 mass in a corner,

(35:01):
with dark gleams on the flat surfaces, like a somber
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

(35:23):
than a year since the news came. She seemed as
though she would remember and mourned 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,

(35:49):
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

(36:13):
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.

(36:36):
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

(36:57):
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

(37:18):
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 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

(37:40):
hand over it. You knew him well, she murmured, after
a moment of morning silence into missy 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

(38:01):
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.

(38:25):
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,

(38:48):
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.

(39:08):
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 two. I listened, the darkness deepened.

(39:36):
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 Curts had been disapproved

(39:58):
by her people. He wasn't rich enough for 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

(40:19):
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 sowing of

(40:42):
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

(41:07):
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

(41:27):
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

(41:53):
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 all

(42:15):
of this she went on mournfully, all of his promise,
and all of 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,

(42:38):
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

(43:04):
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,

(43:28):
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 with clasped, pale hands across the fading
and narrow sheen of the window. Never see him. I

(43:48):
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
just another one, tragic also, and bedecked with powerless charms,
stretching bare brown arms over the glitter of the infernal stream,

(44:10):
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.

(44:32):
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,

(44:54):
every glance. I felt like a chill grip on my chest.
Don't I said, in a muffled voice, forgive me. I
have mourned so long in silence, In silence. You were
with him to the last. I think of his loneliness.

(45:15):
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 affright repeat them, she murmured, in a heart broken tone.

(45:35):
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,

(45:57):
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.

(46:18):
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.

(46:42):
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 did not fall for such

(47:04):
a trifle. Would they have fallen? I wonder if I
had rendered curts 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,

(47:33):
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 somber under an overcast sky. Seemed to lead into

(47:57):
the heart of an immense darkness. End of Heart of
Darkness by Joseph Conrad