Page 144 - HEART OF DARKNESS

Heart of Darkness

‘Sometimes he was contemptibly childish. He desired
to have kings meet him at railway-stations on his return
from some ghastly Nowhere, where he intended to
accomplish great things. ‘You show them you have in you

something that is really profitable, and then there will be
no limits to the recognition of your ability,’ he would say.
‘Of course you must take care of the motives— right
motives—always.’ The long reaches that were like one and
the same reach, monotonous bends that were exactly alike,
slipped past the steamer with their multitude of secular
trees looking patiently after this grimy fragment of another
world, the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of
massacres, of blessings. I looked ahead—piloting. ‘Close
the shutter,’ said Kurtz suddenly one day; ‘I can’t bear to
look at this.’ I did so. There was a silence. ‘Oh, but I will
wring your heart yet!’ he cried at the invisible wilderness.
‘We broke down—as I had expected—and had to lie
up for repairs at the head of an island. This delay was the
first thing that shook Kurtz’s confidence. One morning he
gave me a packet of papers and a photograph— the lot
tied together with a shoe-string. ‘Keep this for me,’ he
said. ‘This noxious fool’ (meaning the manager) ‘is capable
of prying into my boxes when I am not looking.’ In the
afternoon I saw him. He was lying on his back with closed

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