She seemed ready to
listen without mental reservation, without suspicion, without a thought
for herself. I concluded I would go and give her back her portrait
and those letters myself. Curiosity? Yes; and also some other feeling
perhaps. All that had been Kurtz's had passed out of my hands: his soul,
his body, his station, his plans, his ivory, his career. There remained
only his memory and his Intended--and I wanted to give that up, too,
to the past, in a way--to surrender personally all that remained of him
with me to that oblivion which is the last word of our common fate. I
don't defend myself. I had no clear perception of what it was I really
wanted. Perhaps it was an impulse of unconscious loyalty, or the
fulfilment of one of those ironic necessities that lurk in the facts of
human existence. I don't know. I can't tell. But I went.
"I thought his memory was like the other memories of the dead that
accumulate in every man's life--a vague impress on the brain of shadows
that had fallen on it in their swift and final passage; but before the
high and ponderous door, between the tall houses of a street as still
and decorous as a well-kept alley in a cemetery, I had a vision of him
on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the
earth with all its mankind.
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