Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Page B

some
time in English ships; was now reconciled with the arch-priest. He made
a point of that. 'But when one is young one must see things, gather
experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.' 'Here!' I interrupted. 'You
can never tell! Here I met Mr. Kurtz,' he said, youthfully solemn and
reproachful. I held my tongue after that. It appears he had persuaded a
Dutch trading-house on the coast to fit him out with stores and goods,
and had started for the interior with a light heart and no more idea of
what would happen to him than a baby. He had been wandering about that
river for nearly two years alone, cut off from everybody and everything.
'I am not so young as I look. I am twenty-five,' he said. 'At first old
Van Shuyten would tell me to go to the devil,' he narrated with keen
enjoyment; 'but I stuck to him, and talked and talked, till at last he
got afraid I would talk the hind-leg off his favourite dog, so he gave
me some cheap things and a few guns, and told me he hoped he would never
see my face again. Good old Dutchman, Van Shuyten. I've sent him one
small lot of ivory a year ago, so that he can't call me a little thief
when I get back. I hope he got it. And for the rest I don't care. I had
some wood stacked for you. That was my old house. Did you see?'
    "I gave him Towson's book. He made as though he would kiss me, but
restrained himself. 'The only book I had left, and I thought I had lost
it,' he said, looking at it ecstatically. 'So many accidents happen to
a man going about alone, you know. Canoes get upset sometimes—and
sometimes you've got to clear out so quick when the people get angry.'
He thumbed the pages. 'You made notes in Russian?' I asked. He nodded.
'I thought they were written in cipher,' I said. He laughed, then became
serious. 'I had lots of trouble to keep these people off,' he said.
'Did they want to kill you?' I asked. 'Oh, no!' he cried, and checked
himself. 'Why did they attack us?' I pursued. He hesitated, then
said shamefacedly, 'They don't want him to go.' 'Don't they?' I said
curiously. He nodded a nod full of mystery and wisdom. 'I tell you,' he
cried, 'this man has enlarged my mind.' He opened his arms wide, staring
at me with his little blue eyes that were perfectly round."

III
*
    "I looked at him, lost in astonishment. There he was before me, in
motley, as though he had absconded from a troupe of mimes, enthusiastic,
fabulous. His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and
altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was
inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so
far, how he had managed to remain—why he did not instantly disappear.
'I went a little farther,' he said, 'then still a little farther—till
I had gone so far that I don't know how I'll ever get back. Never mind.
Plenty time. I can manage. You take Kurtz away quick—quick—I tell
you.' The glamour of youth enveloped his parti-coloured rags, his
destitution, his loneliness, the essential desolation of his futile
wanderings. For months—for years—his life hadn't been worth a day's
purchase; and there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all
appearances indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and
of his unreflecting audacity. I was seduced into something like
admiration—like envy. Glamour urged him on, glamour kept him
unscathed. He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to
breathe in and to push on through. His need was to exist, and to move
onwards at the greatest possible risk, and with a maximum of privation.
If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure
had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this bepatched youth. I almost
envied him the possession of this modest and clear flame. It seemed to
have consumed all thought of self so completely, that even while he
was talking to you, you forgot that it was he—the man before your
eyes—who had gone through these things. I did not envy him his devotion
to Kurtz, though. He had not