Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 165.djvu/650

644 went on with an effect of audible and soothing silence. I glanced casually into the little cabin. A light was burning. Kurtz was not there.

“I think I would have raised an outcry if I had believed my eyes. But I didn’t believe them at first, the thing seemed so impossible. The fact is I was completely unnerved. Sheer blank fright, pure abstract terror, unconnected with any distinct shape of physical danger. What made this emotion so overpowering was—how shall I define it?—the moral shock I received, as if something altogether monstrous, intolerable to thought, odious to the soul, had been thrust upon me unexpectedly. This lasted of course the merest fraction of a second, and then the usual sense of commonplace, deadly danger, the possibility of a sudden onslaught and massacre, or something of the kind, which I saw impending, was positively welcome and composing. It pacified me, in fact, and I did not raise an alarm.

“There was an agent buttoned up inside an ulster sleeping on a chair on deck within three feet of me. The yells had not awakened him, and he snored very slightly. I left him to his slumbers and leaped ashore. I did not betray Mr Kurtz—it was ordered I should never betray him—it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice. I was anxious to deal with this shadow by myself alone,—and to this day I don’t know why I was so jealous of sharing with any one the dismal blackness of this experience.

“As soon as I got on the bank I saw a trail—a broad trail through the grass. I remember the exultation with which I said to myself, ‘He can’t walk—he is crawling—I've got him.’ The grass was wet with dew. I strode rapidly with clenched fists. I fancy I had some vague notion of falling upon him and giving him a drubbing. I don’t know. I had some imbecile thoughts. The knitting old woman with the cat obtruded herself upon me as a most improper person to be sitting at the other end of such an affair. I saw a row of pilgrims squirting lead in the air out of Winchesters held to the hip. I thought I would never get back to the steamer, and saw myself living alone and unarmed in the woods to an advanced age. Such silly things—you know. And I remember I confounded the beat of the drum with the beating of my heart, and was pleased at its calm regularity.

“I kept to the track though—then stopped to listen. The night was very clear: a dark blue space, sparkling with dew and starlight, where black things stood very still. I thought I saw a kind of motion ahead of me. I was strangely cocksure of everything that night. I actually left the track and ran in a wide semicircle, I verily believe chuckling to myself, so as to get in front of that stir, of that motion I had seen—if indeed I had seen anything. I was circumventing Kurtz as if it had been a boyish game for fun.

“I came upon him, and, if he