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 these 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 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 sepulcher, I had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind. He lived then before me; he lived as much as he had ever liveda shadow insatiable, of splendid appearances, of frightful realities; a shadow darker than the shadow of night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence. The vision seemed to enter the house with me, the stretcher, the phantom bearers; the wild crowd of obedient worshippers; the gloom of the forests; the glitter of the reach between the murky bends; the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beating of a heart-the heart of a conquering darkness. It was a moment of triumph for the wilderness, an invading and vengeful rush which, it seemed to me, I would have to keep back alone for the salvation of another soul. And the memory of what I had heard him say afar there, with the horned shapes stirring at my back, in the glow of the fires, within the patient woods, those broken phrases came back to me, were heard again in their ominous and terrifying simplicity: 'I have lived-supremely!' 'What do you want here? J have been dead and damned.' 'Let me go-I want more of it.' More of what? More blood, more heads on stakes, more adoration, rapine and murder. I remembered his abject pleading, his

abject threats, the colossal scale of his vile desires, the meanness, the torment, the tempestuous anguish of his soul. And later on his collected languid manner, when he said one day, "This lot of ivory now is really mine. The company did not pay for it. I collected it myself at my personal risk. I am afraid they will claim it as theirs. It is a difficult case. What do you think I ought to do-resist? Eh! I want no more than justice.' He wanted no more than justice. No more than justice. I rang the bell before a mahogany door on the first floor, and while I waited he seemed to stare at me out of the polished panel-stare with that wide and immense stare embracing, condemning, loathing all the universe; I seemed to hear the whispered cry, 'O, the horror!'

"The dusk was falling. I had to wait in a lofty drawing room with three long windows from floor to ceiling that were like three luminous and bedraped columns. The bent gilt legs and backs of the furniture shone in indistinct curves. The tall white marble fireplace had a cold and heavy whiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a sombre and polished sarcophagus. A high door openedclosed. I rose.

"She came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating toward me in the dusk. She was in mourning. It was more than a year since his death, more than a year since the news came; she seemed as though she could remember and mourn forever. She took both my hands in hers and murmured, 'I heard you were coming.' I noticed she was not very young-I mean not girlish. She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering. The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead. This fair hair, this fair visage, this candid brow

seemed surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance was guileless, profound, confident and trustful. She carried her sorrowful head as though she were proud of that sorrow, as though she would say, I-I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves. But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And by jove! the impression was so powerful that for me too he seemed to have died only yesterdaynay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time-his death and her sorrow. I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. It was too terrible. Do you understand? I saw them together-I heard them together. She had said with a deep catch of the breath, 'I have survived,' while my strained ears seemed to hear distinctly, mingled with her tone of despairing regret, the summing-up whisper of his eternal condemnation. I tell you it was terrible. I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold. I wanted to get out. She motioned me to a chair. We sat down. I laid the packet gently on the little table, and she put her hand over it. 'You knew him well,' she murmured, after a moment of mourning silence.

"'You knew him best,' I repeated. And perhaps she did. But I fancied that with every word spoken the room was growing darker, and only her forehead smooth and white, remained illumined by the unextinguishable light of belief and love.

"You were his friend, she went on. 'His friend,' she repeated, a little louder. 'You must have been, if he had given this to you, and sent you to me. I feel I can speak to you-O, I must speak. I want you-you who have heard his last words-to know I have been worthy of him. It is not pride. . . . Yes! I am proud to know I understood him better than anyone on earth-he said it himself. And since his mother died I have had no one-no cne-to-to-'

...

"I listened. The darkness deepened. I was not even sure whether he had given me the right bundle. I rather suspect he wanted me to take care of another batch of his papers which, after his death, I saw the manager examining under the lamp. But in the box I had brought to his bedside there were several packages pretty well alike, all tied with shoestrings, and probably he had made a mistake. And the girl talked, easing her pain in the certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved generally. He wasn't rich enough or something. And, indeed, I don't know whether he had not been & pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to infer that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there.

Who was not his friend who

Lad heard him speak once?' she was saying. He drew the men toward him by what was best in them.' She looked at me with intensity. It is the gift of the great,' she went on, and the sound of her low voice seemed to have the accompaniment of all the other sounds, full of mystery, desolation, and sorrow I had ever heard-the ripple of the river, the soughing of the trees swayed by the wind, the murmurs of wild crowds, the faint ring of incomprehensible words cried from afar, the whisper of a voice speaking from beyond the threshold of an eternal darkness. 'But you have heard him! You know!' she cried.

"'Yes, I know,' I said, with something like despair in my heart, but bowing my head before the faith that was in her, before that great and saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in the triumphant darkness from which I could not have defended her-from which I could not even defend myself.

66 'What a loss to me-to us!' She corrected herself with beautiful generosity, then added in a murmur. "To the world.' By the last gleams of twilight I could see the glitter of her eyes, full of tears-of tears that would not fall. "I have been very happy-very fortunate very proud,' she went on. "Too fortunate. Too happy for a little while. And now I am unhappy for-for life.' "She stood up; her fair hair seemed to catch all the remaining light in a glimmer of gold. I rose, too.

"And of all this,' she went on, mournfully, of all his promise, and of all his greatness, of his generous mind, of his noble heart, nothing remainsnothing but a memory. You and I-' "I will 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 noth

ing-but sorrow. You know he had vast plans. I knew 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. "And his example,' she whispered to herself. 'Wherever he went men looked up to him-his goodness shone in every act. His example-'

66

"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 will 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 doneI mumbled.

"Ah, but I believe 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 murmur, every word, every sign, every glance.'

"I felt 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. Ferhaps no one to hear. . . .'

I

""To the very end,' I said shakily. 'I heard his very last words. stopped in a fright.

"'Repeat them,' she said in a heartbroken 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 murmured. '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 wasyour name.'

"I heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry Blackwood's Magazine.

of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. 'I knew it-I was sure!" She knew. She was sure. I heard her weeping, her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would collapse directly, 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 looked around. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds and the tranquil waterway that leads to the uttermost ends of the earth, flowing sombre under an overcast sky, seemed to lead also into the heart of an immense darkress.

The Argosy.

[We are authorized to publish in anticipation-as especially interesting during the present year-a letter which will appear in the forthcoming volumes of "The Story of My Life."]

To Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford. Ober-Ammergau, June 2.-We have seen the Passion-Play. It is a day to have lived for; nothing can be more sublimely devotional, more indescribably pathetic.

"On Friday night we slept at Oberau, and drove here early on Saturday morning, finding the Lowthers at once in the village street, and spending most of that day in drawing with them. We went at once to the house of the Burgomaster to inquire where we were billeted. All the material part of life is most comfortably and economically arranged for visitors. I am quartered with St. Thomas, and all through the day one meets peasants with long hair, recalling Biblical figures. The Burgomaster's beautiful daughter is the Virgin Mary. In a gracious and touching spirit of unselfish love all these villagers live together for mutual help and comfort. They have been trained under their late pastor, Aloys Daisemberger, to regard the Passions-Spiel, which is the great event of their quiet lives, not only as a religious service of thanksgiving to which every talent and energy must be contributed for the glory of God, and a manifestation of gratitude for His preservation of them, but they are also taught to look upon it as an instrument which God's grace has placed in their hands for the calling back of Europe to Christianity, through the dark mists of infidelity which have been creeping over it in the nineteenth century. And truly in this the actual visit to Ober-Ammergau may be as full 1 Joseph Maier, the eminent wood-sculptor.

of teaching as the great representation itself-the simple contact with such men as 'Christus Maier," as he is called, whose life's work is "to endeavor to do God's will auf's innersten, and to be helpful to those around him.' Here, in Ober-Ammergau-perhaps here alone-religion takes no heed of Roman Catholic or Protestant vagaries; the will of God, the example of Christ, those are the only guidance of life. In the five sermons of Daisemberger preparatory to the Passion-Play of 1871, there is not a single word which indicates Romanism. 'Look, O disciples of Christ,' says Daisemberger to his people; 'see your Master, how gentle, how kind He is, how mild in His intercourse with those around Him, how full of heartiest sympathy for their joys and sorrows. Then can you, in your intercourse with those around you, be grumbling, rough, discourteous, selfasserting, repellant and wanting in sympathy? Oh no! you could never endure to be so unlike your Master.'

A

"It is a beautiful place, a high upland mountain valley, covered with rich pastures and enamelled with flowers. long street, or rather road, lined by comfortable detached timber houses, leads to the handsome church, around which the older part of the village groups itself above the clear, rushing Ammer, and is highly picturesque. Beyond the village, in the meadows overlooked by the peak of the Kofel, is the theatre where the great drama of the Passion is enacted, which, ever since 1634, has commemorated every tenth year the then deliverance of Ammergau from the plague which was devastating the neighboring villages.

"All through Friday it was curious to meet a succession of London ac

2 "Die Fruchte der Passionbetrachtung."