Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 165.djvu/647

1899.] low by my side growled. The pilgrims murmured at my back. She looked at us all as if her life depended upon the unswerving steadiness of her glance. Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, and at the same time the shadows of her arms darted out on the earth, swept around on the river, gathering the steamer into a shadowy embrace. Her sudden gesture seemed to demand a cry, but the unbroken silence that hung over the scene was more formidable than any sound could be.

“She turned, walked on, following the bank, and passed into the bushes to the left. Once only her eyes gleamed back at us in the dusk of the thickets and she disappeared.

“‘If she had offered to come aboard I think I would have tried to shoot her,’ said the man of patches, nervously. ‘I had been risking my life every day for the last fortnight to keep her out of the house. She got in once and kicked up a row about those miserable rags I picked up in the storeroom to mend my clothes with. I was not decent. At least it must have been that, for she talked to Kurtz for an hour, pointing at me now and then. I don’t understand the dialect of this tribe. Luckily for me, Kurtz felt too ill that day to care, or there would have been mischief. I don’t understand… No—it’s too much for me. Ah, well, it’s all over now.’

“At this moment I heard Kurtz’s deep voice behind the curtain, ‘Save me!—save the ivory, you mean. Don’t tell me. Save me! Why, I've had to save you. You are interrupting my plans now. Sick! Sick! Not so sick as you would like to believe. Never mind. I’ll carry my ideas out yet—I will return. I’ll show you what can be done. You with your little peddling notions—you are interfering me. I will return. I…’

“The manager came out. He did me the honour to take me under the arm and lead me aside. ‘He is very low, very low,’ he said. He considered it necessary to sigh, but forgot to be consistently sorrowful. ‘We have done all we could for him—haven’t we? But there is no disguising the fact, Mr Kurtz has done more harm than good to the Company. He did not see the time was not ripe for vigorous action. Cautiously, cautiously, that’s my principle. We must be cautious yet. The district is closed to us for a time. Deplorable! Upon the whole, the trade will suffer. I don’t deny there is a remarkable quantity of ivory—mostly fossil. We must save it, at all events—but look how precarious the position is—and why? Because the method is unsound.’ ‘Do you,’ said I, looking at the shore, ‘call it “unsound method”?’ ‘Without doubt,’ he exclaimed, hotly. ‘Don’t you?’ ‘No method at all,’ I murmured. ‘Exactly,’ he exulted. ‘I anticipated this. A complete want of judgment. It is my