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And bethiles I had to look after the savage as fireman He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler He was there belowas seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind legs A fewhad done for that really fine chap He squinted at the steae with an evident effort of intrepidity—and he had filed his teeth, too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornaht to have been clapping his hands and sta his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of ie5

As everybody knows, Conrad is a roes clapping their hands and sta in their place, unlike this dog in a parody of breeches For Conrad, things being in their place is of the utmost importance

“Fine fellows—cannibals—in their place,” he tells us pointedly Tragedy begins when things leave their accustohold between the policeman and the baker to take a peep into the heart of darkness

Before the story takes us into the Congo basin proper we are given this nice little vignette as an exas in their place:

Now and then a boat froave one a momentary contact with reality It was paddled by black fellows You could see fro They shouted, sang; their bodies strearotesque masks—these chaps; but they had bone, y oftheir coast They wanted no excuse for being there They were a great comfort to look at6

Towards the end of the story Conrad lavishes a whole page quite unexpectedly on an African woman who has obviously been some kind of mistress to Mr Kurtz and now presides (if I may be permitted a little liberty) like a formidable mystery over the inexorable imminence of his departure:

She was savage and superb, wild-eyed andat us without a stir and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose

This Amazon is drawn in considerable detail, albeit of a predictable nature, for two reasons First, she is in her place and so can win Conrad’s special brand of approval; and second, she fulfils a structural requiree counterpart to the refined, European woman ill step forth to end the story:

She ca toward… She took both ” … She had a 7

The difference in the attitude of the novelist to these tomen is conveyed in too many direct and subtle ways to need elaboration But perhaps the nificant difference is the one implied in the author’s bestowal of hu of it from the other It is clearly not part of Conrad’s purpose to confer language on the “rudimentary souls” of Africa In place of speech they ed short grunting phrases” even a themselves But most of the time they were too busy with their frenzy There are two occasions in the book, however, when Conrad departs solish speech, on the savages The first occurs when cannibalisets the better of them:

“Catch ’i of his eyes and a flash of sharp white teeth—“catch ’im Give ’im to us” “To you, eh?” I asked; “ould you do with them?” “Eat ’im!” he said curtly8

The other occasion was the famous announcement: “Mistah Kurtz—he dead”9

At first sight these instances enerosity from Conrad In reality they constitute some of his best assaults In the case of the cannibals the incorunts that had thus far served them for speech suddenly proved inadequate for Conrad’s purpose of letting the European gli the necessity for consistency in the portrayal of the du their conviction by clear, una out of their own mouths, Conrad chose the latter As for the announcement of Mr Kurtz’s death by the “insolent black head in the doorway,” what better or more appropriate finis could be written to the horror story of that ard child of civilization ilfully had given his soul to the powers of darkness and “taken a high seat ast the devils of the land” than the proclamation of his physical death by the forces he had joined?

It ht be contended, of course, that the attitude to the African in Heart of Darkness is not Conrad’s but that of his fictional narrator, Marlow, and that far fro it up to irony and criticiso to considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and the moral universe of his story He has, for example, a narrator behind a narrator The prih the filter of a second, shadowy person But if Conrad’s intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire between hiical malaise of his narrator, his care seelects to hint, clearly and adequately, at an alternative frae the actions and opinions of his characters It would not have been beyond Conrad’s power to ht it necessary Conrad seems to me to approve of Marloith only minor reservations—a fact reinforced by the similarities between their two careers

Marlow coh to us not only as a witness of truth, but one holding those advanced and hulish liberal tradition which required all Englisharia or the Congo of King Leopold of the Belgians or wherever

Thus, Marlow is able to toss out such bleeding-heart sentiments as these:

They were all dying slowly—it was very clear They were not ene earthly now—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish glooality of tis, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to craay and rest10

The kind of liberalism espoused here by Marlow/Conrad touched all the best land, Europe and America It took different fored to sidestep the ultimate question of equality bethite people and black people That extraordinary missionary Albert Schweitzer, who sacrificed brilliant careers in y in Europe for a life of service to Africans in much the same area as Conrad writes about, epitomizes the ambivalence In a comment which has often been quoted Schweitzer says: “The African is indeed my brother but my junior brother” And so he proceeded to build a hospital appropriate to the needs of junior brothers with standards of hygiene reer Naturally he becarims flocked, and I believe still flock even after he has passed on, to witness the prodigious e of the primeval forest

Conrad’s liberalish He would not use the word “brother” however qualified; the farthest he would go was “kinship” When Marlow’s African helives his whitelook: