Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer (22 page)

‘‘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 massively in a corner; with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a sombre 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 than a year since the news came; she seemed as though she would remember and mourn 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, 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 her sorrowful head as though she were proud of that sorrow, as though she would say, ‘I—I alone knew 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. 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 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 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 a 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 hand over it. . . . ‘You knew him well,' she murmured, after a moment of mourning silence.

‘‘ ‘Intimacy 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 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! 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, remained illumined by the unextinguishable 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. 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—to—'

‘‘I listened. The darkness deepened. 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 Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He wasn't rich enough or 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 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 soughing of 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 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 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 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 of all this,' she went on mournfully, ‘of all his promise, and of all 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!' 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 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. 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 and with clasped pale hands across the fading and narrow sheen of the window. Never see him! I 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 gesture another one, tragic also, and bedecked with powerless charms, stretching bare brown arms over the glitter of the infernal stream, 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. 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, every glance.'

‘‘I felt like a chill grip on my chest. ‘Don't,' I said, in a muffled voice.

‘‘ ‘Forgive me. I—I have mourned so long in silence—in silence. . . . You were with him—to the last? I think of his loneliness. 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 a fright.

‘‘ ‘Repeat them,' she murmured in a heart-broken tone. ‘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. ‘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.

‘‘ ‘The last words 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—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 do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz 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, 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 sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

Afterword

In the summer of 1978 I came into possession of the Signet edition of
Heart of Darkness
and
The Secret Sharer
, an earlier version of the one I presume the reader has just finished. It was green and battered and had someone else's annoying writing in the margins. The introduction to that edition was written in 1950, by Albert Guerard, who, along with his colleague at Stanford, Ian Watt, was one of the great early Conrad scholars and who did much to revive Conrad's popularity and reputation after it had fallen into a certain degree of obscurity in the middle of the century.

At the time, I was twenty years old, a sophomore at Columbia University, and I had set out specifically to read
Heart of Darkness
because when I'd read it as an assignment in high school, I'd had some difficulty understanding it. Although it is short, only a hundred pages or so in this and most other editions,
Heart of Darkness
is one of Conrad's most dense narratives. The structure of the book is complex, Conrad's irony is thick and relentless, and his language is difficult as well: he had learned English while living in France and his version of it would always be heavy with Latinates. As is often the case with Conrad, his point— his meaning or his multiple meanings—is a little hard to pick out from amid the somber moods and romantic outpourings of his narrative voice.

Yet I knew something important was there. So I was rereading it, sitting in the lobby of a building on Morningside Drive in New York City. Columbia owned the building and it housed many of the university's most distinguished faculty members—I'd been handed a job that summer as a replacement for the union doormen of that building, taking their shifts when they went on holiday. On this particular occasion, it was midafternoon on a mild day in July. The wide lobby doors were swung open to let in the air, and the bright summer light was cheerfully lacking the mean white glare so common during New York's overbearing summers. In strolled a handsome, well-built man I recognized as Professor Edward Said, of Columbia's English department. The foregoing sentence, and that he lived on the fourth floor of this building, constituted everything I then knew about him. The book that would make him truly famous,
Orientalism
, would not come out until later that year.

He walked toward me across the long lobby and I got up, put down my book, and started over to where the elevator was located, on the north side of the building, as it was also my job to run the manual elevator. Said had a sometimes gruff and always, in those days, physically confident air with strangers; he had barely spoken to me in the past. But suddenly he was interested. ‘‘What are you reading?'' he practically shouted and strode over to the table where I'd laid my book.
‘‘Heart of Darkness!'
' he said. ‘‘Great book, great book.'' Little did I know, from this relatively generic reaction, that Said was a respected Conrad scholar himself, that he'd done his doctoral dissertation on Conrad, that Conrad's exile and the effect it had on his personality and his work would be a source of continuing fascination for Said, nor, finally, that Conrad would be an author, and
Heart of Darkness
a text, that Said would return to over and over as he explored the fine mechanisms connecting the most transcendent art with specific cultures in specific historical situations.

We rode up to his floor and he quizzed me about what I'd studied and read, and he urged me to take his course that fall called ‘‘Modern British Literature,'' where we'd read
Heart of Darkness
, among many other major late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century British texts. I can say now with clarity that this limited exchange in that creaking and clanging old elevator, the four subsequent courses I took with Said, and his friendship in later years, were the most important professional influences of my life. Said was the greatest literary mind I have ever been in the presence of, by several orders of magnitude, and I would not be the critic and the writer I am without having known him and studied with him—all because of a little green book from Signet.