Сердце тьмы. Уровень 2 / Heart of Darkness

12

I didn’t want any more loitering in the shade. I went towards the station. Near the buildings I met a white man. In the first moment I took him for a ghost. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. His hair was parted, brushed, oiled. A big white hand held a green parasol. He was amazing, and had a pen behind his ear.

I shook hands with this miracle. I learned he was the Company’s chief accountant. He came out for a moment to get a breath of fresh air. The expression sounded wonderfully odd. I respected the fellow. Yes; I respected his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. He was like a doll; but in the great demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance. That’s backbone. His starched collars were achievements of character. Later, I asked him how he managed all that. He said modestly,

“I was teaching one of the native women. It was difficult. She had some distaste for the work.”

Thus this man verily accomplished something. And he was devoted to his books, which were in order.

Everything else in the station was in a muddle – heads, things, buildings. Dusty negros with splay feet arrived and departed. A stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads was sent into the depths of darkness. In return came a precious trickle of ivory.

I waited in the station. Ten days – an eternity. I lived in a hut in the yard. But I sometimes got into the accountant’s office. It was built of horizontal planks. They were badly put together.

It was hot there, too. Big flies buzzed fiendishly. They did not sting, but stabbed. I sat generally on the floor, while he was perching on a high stool. He wrote, he wrote. Sometimes he stood up for exercise. When a bed with a sick man was put in there, he exhibited some annoyance.

“The groans of this sick person,” he said, “distract my attention. It is extremely difficult to guard against clerical errors in this climate.”

One day he remarked,

“In the interior you will no doubt meet Mr. Kurtz.”

“Who is Mr. Kurtz was?” I asked.

“He is a first-class agent,” he answered.

Then he added slowly,

“He is a very remarkable person. Mr. Kurtz is in charge of a trading-post^[25], a very important one, in the true ivory-country, at the very bottom of there. He sends much ivory, much more than all the others.”

He began to write again. The sick man was too ill to groan. The flies buzzed.

Suddenly there was a murmur of voices and a great tramping of feet. A caravan came in. A violent babble of uncouth sounds burst out on the other side of the planks. All the carriers were speaking together. In the midst of the uproar I heard the lamentable voice of the chief agent, “I give it up^[26].”

For the twentieth time that day… He rose slowly.

“What a frightful row,” he said.

He crossed the room gently to look at the sick man. Then he returned and said to me,

“He does not hear.”

“What! Dead?” I asked, startled.

“No, not yet,” he answered, with great composure.

Then he added,

“When one work here, one begins to hate those savages – hate them to the death.”

He remained thoughtful for a moment.

“When you see Mr. Kurtz,” he went on, “tell him from me that everything here” – he glanced at the deck – “is very satisfactory. I don’t like to write to him – with those messengers of ours you never know who may get your letter – at that Central Station.”

He stared at me for a moment with his mild eyes.

“Oh, he will go far, very far,” he began again. “He will be a somebody in the Administration. They, above – the Council in Europe, you know have plans”.

He turned to his work. The noise outside ceased. I stopped at the door. In the steady buzz of flies the agent was lying insensible. The other man bent over his books. He was working; and fifty feet below the doorstep I saw the tree-tops of the grove of death.

13

Next day I left that station at last, with a caravan of sixty men, for a two-hundred-mile tramp.

No use to tell you much about that. Paths, paths, everywhere; over the empty land, through the long grass, through burnt grass, through thickets, down and up chilly ravines, up and down stony hills ablaze with heat. And a solitude, a solitude, nobody, not a hut. I passed through several abandoned villages. There’s something pathetically childish in the ruins of grass walls.

Day after day, with the stamp and shuffle of sixty pair of bare feet behind me, each pair under a 60-lb load^[27].

Camp, cook, sleep, strike camp, march. Now and then a dead carrier, in the long grass near the path, with an empty water-gourd. His long staff was lying by his side. A great silence around and above. Sounds were weird, appealing, suggestive and wild.

Once I saw the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead. I had a white companion, not a bad chap, but rather too fleshy. I asked him,

“Why did you coming here?”

“To make money, of course. What do you think?” he said, scornfully.

Then he got fever, and we carried him in a hammock. As he weighed much I had quarrels with the carriers. They jibbed, ran away – quite a mutiny. So, one evening, I made a speech in English with gestures. The next morning I started the hammock off in front all right.

On the fifteenth day I saw the big river again. We hobbled into the Central Station. It was on a back water surrounded by scrub and forest, with a pretty border of smelly mud. The first glance at the place was enough to let you see: the flabby devil was running that show.

White men with long staves in their hands appeared languidly from amongst the buildings. They were strolling up to look at me. Then they retired out of sight somewhere. One of them, a stout, excitable chap with black moustaches, informed me with great volubility and many digressions, that my steamer was at the bottom of the river. I was thunderstruck. What, how, why? Oh, it was ‘all right.’ The ‘manager himself’ was there. All quite correct.

“Everybody behaved splendidly! splendidly! You must,” he said in agitation, “go and see the general manager at once. He is waiting!”

I did not see the real significance of that wreck at once. I fancy I see it now, but I am not sure – not at all. Certainly the affair was too stupid – when I think of it – to be altogether natural. Still… But at the moment it presented itself simply as a confounded nuisance. The steamer was sunk^[28].

I asked myself what to do there, now my boat was lost. As a matter of fact, I had plenty to do. I must fish my command out of the river. I began to work the very next day. That, and the repairs when I brought the pieces to the station, took some months.

14

My first interview with the manager was curious. He did not ask me to sit down after my twenty-mile walk that morning. He was commonplace in complexion, in features, in manners, and in voice. He was of middle size and of ordinary build. His eyes were remarkably cold. And there was only an indefinable, faint expression of his lips – a smile – not a smile – I remember it, but I can’t explain. It was unconscious, this smile was. It came at the end of his speeches like a seal.

He was a common trader – nothing more. He inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust – just uneasiness – nothing more. You have no idea how effective such a… a… faculty can be. He had no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even. That was evident in such things as the deplorable state of the station. He had no intelligence. His position came to him – why? Perhaps because he was never ill. Triumphant health is a kind of power in itself.

But he was great. He was great by this little thing that it was impossible to tell what could control such a man. He never gave that secret away. Perhaps there was nothing within him.

Once when various tropical diseases laid low^[29] almost every ‘agent’ in the station, he said,

“Men who come here must have no entrails.”

When he was annoyed by the constant quarrels of the white men, he ordered an immense round table. And a special house for it. This was the station’s dining-room. Where he sat was the first place – the rest were nowhere. He was neither civil nor uncivil. He was quiet.

He began to speak as soon as he saw me. I was late. He did not wait. He started without me. He wanted to visit the up-river stations^[30]. He did not know who was dead and who was alive, and how they got on – and so on, and so on. He paid no attention to my explanations, and repeated several times that the situation was ‘very grave, very grave.’

15

There were rumours that a very important station was in jeopardy, and its chief, Mr. Kurtz, was ill. He hoped it was not true. Mr. Kurtz was… I felt weary and irritable. Damn that Kurtz, I thought. I said,

“I heard of Mr. Kurtz on the coast.”

“Ah! So they talk of him down there,” he murmured to himself.

Then he began again. Mr. Kurtz was the best agent he had, an exceptional man, of the greatest importance to the Company. Therefore I understood his anxiety. He was ‘very, very uneasy.’ He exclaimed,

“Ah, Mr. Kurtz!”

Then he broke the stick of sealing-wax^[31]. He was dumfounded by the accident. Next thing he wanted to know ‘how long to’… I interrupted him again. I was hungry, you know, was standing. on my feet too. I was getting savage.

“How can I tell?” I said. “I did not see the wreck. Some months, no doubt.”

All this talk was futile.

“Some months,” he said. “Well, let us say three months before we can make a start. Yes. That will be enough.”

I flung out of his hut. He lived all alone in a clay hut with a verandah. I was muttering to myself my opinion of him. He was an idiot, indeed.

I went to work the next day. I saw this station, I saw the men, they were strolling aimlessly about in the sunshine of the yard. I asked myself sometimes what it all meant. They wandered here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like faithless pilgrims. The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air. They were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all. Oh God! It was completely unreal. And outside, the silent wilderness struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth.

16

Oh, these months! Well, never mind. Various things happened. One evening a grass shed full of calico, cotton prints and beads burst into a blaze suddenly. An avenging fire consumed all that trash. I was smoking my pipe quietly by my steamer, and saw them all. The stout man with moustaches came down to the river, with a tin pail in his hand. He assured me that everybody was ‘behaving splendidly, splendidly.’ He dipped about a quart of water and tore back again. I noticed there was a hole in the bottom of his pail.

I strolled up. There was no hurry. The flame leaped high, lighted up everything – and collapsed. The shed was already a heap of embers. A negro was screeching most horribly. They said he caused the fire. I saw him, later. For several days, he was sitting in a bit of shade. He was looking very sick and trying to recover himself. Afterwards he arose and went out – and the wilderness without a sound took him into its bosom again.

As I approached the glow from the dark I found myself at the back of two men. They were talking. I heard the name of Kurtz, then the words,

“Take advantage of this unfortunate accident.”

One of the men was the manager. I wished him a good evening.

“Did you ever see anything like it – eh? It is incredible,” he said, and walked off.

The other man remained. He was a first-class agent, young, gentlemanly, reserved, with a little beard and a hooked nose. I did not speak to him before. We began to talk, and by and by we strolled away from the ruins. Then he asked me to his room, which was in the main building of the station.

He struck a match. I perceived that this young aristocrat had a whole candle. Just at that time the manager was the only man who had any right to candles. Native mats covered the clay walls. I saw a collection of spears, assegais, shields and knives in trophies.

This fellow was making bricks. But there wasn’t a fragment of a brick anywhere in the station. He was waiting. He could not make bricks without something, I don’t know what – straw maybe. It did not appear clear to me what he was waiting for. An act of special creation perhaps. However, they were all waiting – all the sixteen or twenty pilgrims of them – for something. Upon my word, they liked to wait. But the only thing that ever came to them was disease.

They were intriguing against each other. They intrigued and slandered and hated each other.

17

I had no idea why he wanted to be sociable. But as we chatted, it suddenly occurred to me the fellow was trying to know something. He alluded constantly to Europe, to the people I knew there, and so on. His little eyes glittered like mica discs – with curiosity. At first I was astonished, but very soon I became awfully curious. What does he want from me? My head had nothing in it but that wretched steamboat business. It was evident he took me for a shameless prevaricator. At last he got angry, and, to conceal a movement of furious annoyance, he yawned. I rose. Then I noticed a small sketch in oils, on a panel. It represented a woman. She was draped and blindfolded, carrying a lighted torch. The background was sombre – almost black. The movement of the woman was stately. The effect of the torchlight on the face was sinister.

He stood with an empty champagne bottle with the candle in it.

“Mr. Kurtz painted this,” he said. “In this station more than a year ago.”

“Tell me, pray,” said I, “who is Mr. Kurtz?”

“The chief of the Inner Station,” he answered.

“Much obliged,” I said and laughed. “And you are the brickmaker of the Central Station. Every one knows that.”

He was silent for a while.

“He is a prodigy,” he said at last. “He is an emissary of pity and science and progress, and devil knows what else. We want,” he began to declaim suddenly, “higher intelligence, wide sympathies, a singleness of purpose.”

“Who says that?” I asked.

“Lots of them,” he replied. “Some even write that. And so he comes here, a special being^[32], as you must know.”

“Why must I know?” I interrupted, really surprised.

He paid no attention.

“Yes. Today he is chief of the best station, next year he will be assistant-manager, two years more and… I daresay you know what he will be in two years’ time. You are of the new gang – the gang of virtue. The same people who sent him specially also recommended you. Oh, don’t say no. I have my own eyes.”

Light dawned upon me. My dear aunt’s influential acquaintances were producing an unexpected effect upon that young man. I laughed.

“Do you read the Company’s confidential correspondence?” I asked.

He did not answer. 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. We went outside. Black figures strolled about listlessly. Steam ascended in the moonlight. A negro groaned somewhere.

“What a noise the brute makes!” said the indefatigable man with the moustaches near us. “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.

“Not in bed yet,” he said, with servile heartiness; “it’s so natural. Ha! Danger – agitation.”

He vanished. I went on to the riverside. The other followed me. I heard a murmur at my ear,

“Idiots!”

The pilgrims were gesticulating, discussing. Several had still their staves in their hands. I verily believe they took these sticks to bed with them. Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight. Through that dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one’s very heart. I felt its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.

The negro moaned feebly somewhere nearby, and then fetched a deep sigh. I went away from there. I felt a hand 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 soon. Please don’t let him get a false idea of my disposition… ”