Heart of Darkness | Page 9

more people besides, as an exceptional
and gifted creature-- a piece of good fortune for the Company--a man
you don't get hold of every day. Good heavens! and I was going to take
charge of a two-penny-halfpenny river-steamboat with a penny whistle
attached! It appeared, however, I was also one of the Workers, with a
capital-- you know. Something like an emissary of light, something like
a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose in
print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman, living right
in the rush of all that humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked about
`weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,' till, upon my
word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the
Company was run for profit.
"`You forget, dear Charlie, that the laborer is worthy of his hire,' she
said, brightly. It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They
live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it,
and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it
up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact
we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of
creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.
"After this I got embraced, told to wear flannel, be sure to write often,
and so on--and I left. In the street--I don't know why--a queer feeling
came to me that I was an impostor. Odd thing that I, who used to clear
out for any part of the world at twenty-four hours' notice, with less
thought than most men give to the crossing of a street, had a moment--I
won't say of hesitation, but of startled pause, before this commonplace
affair. The best way I can explain it to you is by saying that, for a
second or two, I felt as though, instead of going to the center of a
continent, I were about to set off for the center of the earth.
"I left in a French steamer, and she called in every blamed port they
have out there, for, as far as I could see, the sole purpose of landing
soldiers and custom-house officers. I watched the coast. Watching a
coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is
before you-- smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or
savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, `Come and find

out.' This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an
aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so
dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight,
like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was
blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to
glisten and drip with steam. Here and there grayish-whitish specks
showed up, clustered inside the white surf, with a flag flying above
them perhaps. Settlements some centuries old, and still no bigger than
pin-heads on the untouched expanse of their background. We pounded
along, stopped, landed soldiers; went on, landed custom-house clerks to
levy toll in what looked like a God-forsaken wilderness, with a tin shed
and a flag-pole lost in it; landed more soldiers--to take care of the
custom-house clerks, presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the
surf; but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care.
They were just flung out there, and on we went. Every day the coast
looked the same, as though we had not moved; but we passed various
places--trading places--with names like Gran' Bassam Little Popo,
names that seemed to belong to some sordid farce acted in front of a
sinister backcloth. The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst
all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid
sea, the uniform somberness of the coast, seemed to keep me away
from the truth of things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless
delusion. The voice of the surf heard now and then was a positive
pleasure, like the speech of a brother. It was something natural, that had
its reason, that had a meaning. Now and then a boat from the shore
gave one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black
fellows. You could see from afar the white of their eyeballs glistening.
They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had
faces like grotesque masks--these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a
wild vitality, an intense energy of movement, that was as natural and
true as the surf along their coast. They wanted