he remarked. 'Expect nothing else,' I said. 'There are only private letters.' He withdrew upon some threat of legal proceedings, and I saw him no more; but an-other 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 a great musician. 'There was the ****** of an im-mense success,' said the man, who was an organist, Ibelieve, 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 pro-fession, whether he ever had any--which was the greatest of 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 inter-view) 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 into a large cotton handkerchief and withdrew in senile agita-tion, 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 Kurtz's proper sphere ought to have been politics 'on the popular side.'
He had furry straight eyebrows, bristly hair cropped short, an eye-glass on a broad ribbon, and, becoming expansive, confessed his opinion that Kurtz 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 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, '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. 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, with-out suspicion, without a thought for herself. I con-cluded 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 Kurtz's had passed out of my hands: his soul, his body, his station, his plans, his ivory, his career. There remained only his memory and 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 Ireally wanted. Perhaps it was an impulse of uncon-scious loyalty, or the fulfillment of one of these ironic 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 ponderous door, between the tall houses of a street as still and decorous as a well-kept alley in a cemetery, Ihad a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind. He lived then before me; he 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, the wild crowd of obedient worshipers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beat-ing of a heart--the heart of a conquering darkness. It was a moment of triumph for the wilderness, an invad-ing 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, his abject threats, the colossal scale of his vile desires, the meanness, the torment, the tem-pestuous 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. I collected it myself at a very great personal risk. I am afraid they will try to claim it as theirs though. H'm. 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. 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!'
"The dusk was falling. I had to wait in a lofty draw-ing-room with three long windows from floor to ceiling that were like three luminous and bed****d columns.
