There had been a ten minutes' rain at dawn. The smell of the tropics moved over the sterile sand. It was cool, but there was no wind. The day promised heat. We had been up in Canada for the winter, and it was hard to believe that hot sunlight was free. A broad quilt of gulls and plover sat together on the shore waiting for the drying light or for the mist to rise, or the tide to ebb....
Steve resumed:
"He tells about a boy who loved maps—who used to look for hours at the continents—thrillingly attracted to the darkest places, the patches still unprotected. There was one heart of darkness with a river winding through. He doesn't tell you the continent or the river, but there were elephants there. He should have called the story Ivory.... Years afterward, the man, worn to the bone from the world's lies, sets out to penetrate this deepest black of the planet. He reaches the river and follows it for endless days, but the world has arrived. Some nation is there colonising for Ivory—you don't know which. The story is told like that—unplaced in time and space. Really it doesn't matter what particular imperialistic tendency is at work. The fact is, he climbed the river into the ghastliest chaos....
"You get the deep green of the heart of the continent, the mournful brooding leafiness—the natives herded and distracted, more afraid of the blast of a river-steamer's whistle than of any kind of violent death. Death was familiar to them. They were chained to labour, cast loose to die. Vultures swept the sky waiting for their limbs to fall still. There was the salty pester of fever in the air—men foolish with fever and heat—a haze of flies—white men burning out inside—oxidisation of human souls—a steady and hideous beat of death—devils of hate and violence and acquisitiveness—clerks making entries of Ivory—a nation's young men running through the jungles for Ivory—carloads of bright glass beads and painted calico for Ivory—all standards of life and career-building set upon Ivory—murder for that—lives lost, tribes shattered—the leafy heart of a fresh continent seared with the civil flame of greed—commodities dumped in river beds—mails that men would die for torn open by vandal hands—waste, perversity, nothing clean-cut even of crime, the horrible non-initiative of the middlemen.... All this told with patient exactitude, but with indescribable intensity; told by a master-hand that trembles; with the control that one can only know who is sensitive enough to tremble. You feel a big man bending forward to make you see something that all but killed him to find out. You feel him scarred and sick, his heart leaking, because he found it all so hideously and stupidly rotten. It's a little picture of a trade war—that's the point—the war of middlemen—middlemen turning to rend each other.... Heart of darkness—after that the light comes."
Steve opened and shut his fingers in the sunlight. The warmth was sweeter every minute.
"This fellow sees it all," he went on. "He's done a big job for me—for anybody who gives himself to the book. There's something immortal about being a workman like that—about any workman. That's why one wants to cast a weep after the passing hordes of middlemen. They can't do work. They don't even see the fog of human agony they've painted the world with. They are it. It is the old against the old. It's all about Ivory. They crucify for fossil."
Steve was lighting up.
"This Conrad brought back to me to-day a bigger love for the workman. The starved and scorned inventor gets the best of it, after all—not in Ivory—but he builds something in himself. He quickens something in himself that goes on in freed consciousness when the body falls. No, I don't insist that anything goes on in any particular way, but the deep moments of work somehow show a man that the best of him here is but a nexus between a savage past and a splendid future.... It's wonderful to be alive to-day. I believe there are secret agencies at work behind all the governments—that they are one at the top. I don't mean detectives, not intelligence or espionage bureaus. Potent, mystic, infallible forces. It doesn't matter. Some person or some group is holding the plan of the New Age.