Page 136 - HEART OF DARKNESS

Heart of Darkness

said to myself, ‘He can’t walk—he is crawling on all-
fours—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 my
memory 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
imagined 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, in which black things stood very still. I
thought I could see 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 though it had been a boyish
game.

135 of 162