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his noble heart, nothing remains nothing but a memory.
You and I
We shall always remember him, I said hastily.
No! she cried. It is impossible that all this should be
lost that such a life should be sacrificed to leave
nothing but sorrow. You know what vast plans he had. I
knew of them, too I could not perhaps understand but
others knew of them. Something must remain. His words,
at least, have not died.
His words will remain, I said.
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And his example, she whispered to herself. Men
looked up to him his goodness shone in every act. His
example
True, I said; his example, too. Yes, his example. I
forgot that.
But I do not. I cannot I cannot believe not yet. I
cannot believe that I shall never see him again, that
nobody will see him again, never, never, never.
She put out her arms as if after a retreating figure,
stretching them back and with clasped pale hands across
the fading and narrow sheen of the window. Never see
him! I saw him clearly enough then. I shall see this
eloquent phantom as long as I live, and I shall see her, too,
a tragic and familiar Shade, resembling in this gesture
another one, tragic also, and bedecked with powerless
charms, stretching bare brown arms over the glitter of the
infernal stream, the stream of darkness. She said suddenly
very low, He died as he lived.
His end, said I, with dull anger stirring in me, was in
every way worthy of his life.
And I was not with him, she murmured. My anger
subsided before a feeling of infinite pity.
Everything that could be done I mumbled.
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Ah, but I believed in him more than any one on
earth more than his own mother, more than himself.
He needed me! Me! I would have treasured every sigh,
every word, every sign, every glance.
I felt like a chill grip on my chest. Don t, I said, in a
muffled voice.
Forgive me. I I have mourned so long in silence in
silence& . You were with him to the last? I think of his
loneliness. Nobody near to understand him as I would
have understood. Perhaps no one to hear. &
To the very end, I said, shakily. I heard his very last
words& . I stopped in a fright.
Repeat them, she murmured in a heart-broken tone.
I want I want something something to to live
with.
I was on the point of crying at her, Don t you hear
them? The dusk was repeating them in a persistent
whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell
menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. The
horror! The horror!
His last word to live with, she insisted. Don t you
understand I loved him I loved him I loved him!
I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.
The last word he pronounced was your name.
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I heard a light sigh and then my heart stood still,
stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the
cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. I
knew it I was sure! & She knew. She was sure. I heard
her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It
seemed to me that the house would collapse before I
could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head.
But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a
trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered
Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn t he said he
wanted only justice? But I couldn t. I could not tell her. It
would have been too dark too dark altogether& .
Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in
the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a
time. We have lost the first of the ebb, said the Director
suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a
black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to
the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an
overcast sky seemed to lead into the heart of an
immense darkness.
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