In HEART OF DARKNESS, there is the meeting between Marlow and
Kurtz's fiancee, when he hands her the letters and picture left by the dead Kurtz. "She came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk. . . .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 pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance was guileless, profound, confident, and (p. 126 in Bantam, and p. 153 in Signet Classics editions). It is literally a "twilight meeting." Dusk is falling. This symbolizes Marlow's moral twilight (see ). He had intended to tell her the bitter truth about Kurtz's life and death. But under the compulsion of her utter trust in Kurtz's goodness, he covers up, and falsifies the man's last words, reporting that he died with her name on his lips. This white lie is Marlow's own shameful submission to the "heart of darkness," a darkness, so Conrad's story declares, whose twilight shadow is cast across the world.
