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NOSTROMO
A TALE OF THE SEABOARD
BY
JOSEPH CONRAD
"So foul a sky clears without a storm."
- SHAKESPEARE
TO
JOHN GALSWORTHY
AUTHOR'S NOTE
"NOSTROMO" is the most anxiously meditated of the longer novels
which belong to the period following upon the publication of the
"Typhoon" volume of short stories.
I don't mean to say that I became then conscious of any impending
change in my mentality and in my attitude towards the tasks of my
writing life. And perhaps there was never any change, except in
that mysterious, extraneous thing which has nothing to do with
the theories of art; a subtle change in the nature of the
inspiration; a phenomenon for which I can not in any way be held
responsible. What, however, did cause me some concern was that
after finishing the last story of the "Typhoon" volume it seemed
somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about.
This so strangely negative but disturbing mood lasted some little
time; and then, as with many of my longer stories, the first hint
for "Nostromo" came to me in the shape of a vagrant anecdote
completely destitute of valuable details.
As a matter of fact in 1875 or '6, when very young, in the West
Indies or rather in the Gulf of Mexico, for my contacts with land
were short, few, and fleeting, I heard the story of some man who
was supposed to have stolen single-handed a whole lighter-full of
silver, somewhere on the Tierra Firme seaboard during the
troubles of a revolution.
On the face of it this was something of a feat. But I heard no
details, and having no particular interest in crime qua crime I
was not likely to keep that one in my mind. And I forgot it till
twenty-six or seven years afterwards I came upon the very thing
in a shabby volume picked up outside a second-hand book-shop. It
was the life story of an American seaman written by himself with
the assistance of a journalist. In the course of his wanderings
that American sailor worked for some months on board a schooner,
the master and owner of which was the thief of whom I had heard
in my very young days. I have no doubt of that because there
could hardly have been two exploits of that peculiar kind in the
same part of the world and both connected with a South American
revolution.
The fellow had actually managed to steal a lighter with silver,
and this, it seems, only because he was implicitly trusted by his
employers, who must have been singularly poor judges of
character. In the sailor's story he is represented as an
unmitigated rascal, a small cheat, stupidly ferocious, morose, of
mean appearance, and altogether unworthy of the greatness this
opportunity had thrust upon him. What was interesting was that he
would boast of it openly.
He used to say: "People think I make a lot of money in this
schooner of mine. But that is nothing. I don't care for that.
Now and then I go away quietly and lift a bar of silver. I must
get rich slowly--you understand."
There was also another curious point about the man. Once in the
course of some quarrel the sailor threatened him: "What's to
prevent me reporting ashore what you have told me about that
silver?"
The cynical ruffian was not alarmed in the least. He actually
laughed. "You fool, if you dare talk like that on shore about me
you will get a knife stuck in your back. Every man, woman, and
child in that port is my friend. And who's to prove the lighter
wasn't sunk? I didn't show you where the silver is hidden. Did
I? So you know nothing. And suppose I lied? Eh?"
Ultimately the sailor, disgusted with the sordid meanness of that
impenitent thief, deserted from the schooner. The whole episode
takes about three pages of his autobiography. Nothing to speak
of; but as I looked them over, the curious confirmation of the
few casual words heard in my early youth evoked the memories of
that distant time when everything was so fresh, so surprising, so
venturesome, so interesting; bits of strange coasts under the
stars, shadows of hills in the sunshine, men's passions in the
dusk, gossip half-forgotten, faces grown dim. . . . Perhaps,
perhaps, there still was in the world something to write about.
Yet I did not see anything at first in the mere story. A rascal
steals a large parcel of a valuable commodity--so people say.
It's either true or untrue; and in any case it has no value in
itself. To invent a circumstantial account of the robbery did not
appeal to me, because my talents not running that way I did not
think that the game was worth the candle. It was only when it
dawned upon me that the purloiner of the treasure need not
necessarily be a confirmed rogue, that he could be even a man of
character, an actor and possibly a victim in the changing scenes
of a revolution, it was only then that I had the first vision of
a twilight country which was to become the province of Sulaco,
with its high shadowy Sierra and its misty Campo for mute
witnesses of events flowing from the passions of men
short-sighted in good and evil.
Such are in very truth the obscure origins of "Nostromo"--the
book. From that moment, I suppose, it had to be. Yet even then I
hesitated, as if warned by the instinct of self-preservation from
venturing on a distant and toilsome journey into a land full of
intrigues and revolutions. But it had to be done.
It took the best part of the years 1903-4 to do; with many
intervals of renewed hesitation, lest I should lose myself in the
ever-enlarging vistas opening before me as I progressed deeper in
my knowledge of the country. Often, also, when I had thought
myself to a standstill over the tangled-up affairs of the
Republic, I would, figuratively speaking, pack my bag, rush away
from Sulaco for a change of air and write a few pages of the
"Mirror of the Sea." But generally, as I've said before, my
sojourn on the Continent of Latin America, famed for its
hospitality, lasted for about two years. On my return I found
(speaking somewhat in the style of Captain Gulliver) my family
all well, my wife heartily glad to learn that the fuss was all
over, and our small boy considerably grown during my absence.
My principal authority for the history of Costaguana is, of
course, my venerated friend, the late Don Jose Avellanos,
Minister to the Courts of England and Spain, etc., etc., in his
impartial and eloquent "History of Fifty Years of Misrule." That
work was never published--the reader will discover why--and I am
in fact the only person in the world possessed of its contents. I
have mastered them in not a few hours of earnest meditation, and
I hope that my accuracy will be trusted. In justice to myself,
and to allay the fears of prospective readers, I beg to point out
that the few historical allusions are never dragged in for the
sake of parading my unique erudition, but that each of them is
closely related to actuality; either throwing a light on the
nature of current events or affecting directly the fortunes of
the people of whom I speak.
As to their own histories I have tried to set them down,
Aristocracy and People, men and women, Latin and Anglo-Saxon,
bandit and politician, with as cool a hand as was possible in the
heat and clash of my own conflicting emotions. And after all this
is also the story of their conflicts. It is for the reader to say
how far they are deserving of interest in their actions and in
the secret purposes of their hearts revealed in the bitter
necessities of the time. I confess that, for me, that time is the
time of firm friendships and unforgotten hospitalities. And in my
gratitude I must mention here Mrs. Gould, "the first lady of
Sulaco," whom we may safely leave to the secret devotion of Dr.
Monygham, and Charles Gould, the Idealist-creator of Material
Interests whom we must leave to his Mine--from which there is no
escape in this world.
About Nostromo, the second of the two racially and socially
contrasted men, both captured by the silver of the San Tome Mine,
I feel bound to say something more.
I did not hesitate to make that central figure an Italian. First
of all the thing is perfectly credible: Italians were swarming
into the Occidental Province at the time, as anybody who will
read further can see; and secondly, there was no one who could
stand so well by the side of Giorgio Viola the Garibaldino, the
Idealist of the old, humanitarian revolutions. For myself I
needed there a Man of the People as free as possible from his
class-conventions and all settled modes of thinking. This is not
a side snarl at conventions. My reasons were not moral but
artistic. Had he been an Anglo-Saxon he would have tried to get
into local politics. But Nostromo does not aspire to be a leader
in a personal game. He does not want to raise himself above the
mass. He is content to feel himself a power--within the People.
But mainly Nostromo is what he is because I received the
inspiration for him in my early days from a Mediterranean sailor.
Those who have read certain pages of mine will see at once what I
mean when I say that Dominic, the padrone of the Tremolino, might
under given circumstances have been a Nostromo. At any rate
Dominic would have understood the younger man perfectly--if
scornfully. He and I were engaged together in a rather absurd
adventure, but the absurdity does not matter. It is a real
satisfaction to think that in my very young days there must,
after all, have been something in me worthy to command that man's
half-bitter fidelity, his half-ironic devotion. Many of
Nostromo's speeches I have heard first in Dominic's voice. His
hand on the tiller and his fearless eyes roaming the horizon from
within the monkish hood shadowing his face, he would utter the
usual exordium of his remorseless wisdom: "Vous autres
gentilhommes!" in a caustic tone that hangs on my ear yet. Like
Nostromo! "You hombres finos!" Very much like Nostromo. But
Dominic the Corsican nursed a certain pride of ancestry from
which my Nostromo is free; for Nostromo's lineage had to be more
ancient still. He is a man with the weight of countless
generations behind him and no parentage to boast of. . . . Like
the People.
In his firm grip on the earth he inherits, in his improvidence
and generosity, in his lavishness with his gifts, in his manly
vanity, in the obscure sense of his greatness and in his faithful
devotion with something despairing as well as desperate in its
impulses, he is a Man of the People, their very own unenvious
force, disdaining to lead but ruling from within. Years
afterwards, grown older as the famous Captain Fidanza, with a
stake in the country, going about his many affairs followed by
respectful glances in the modernized streets of Sulaco, calling
on the widow of the cargador, attending the Lodge, listening in
unmoved silence to anarchist speeches at the meeting, the
enigmatical patron of the new revolutionary agitation, the
trusted, the wealthy comrade Fidanza with the knowledge of his
moral ruin locked up in his breast, he remains essentially a Man
of the People. In his mingled love and scorn of life and in the
bewildered conviction of having been betrayed, of dying betrayed
he hardly knows by what or by whom, he is still of the People,
their undoubted Great Man--with a private history of his own.
One more figure of those stirring times I would like to mention:
and that is Antonia Avellanos--the "beautiful Antonia." Whether
she is a possible variation of Latin-American girlhood I wouldn't
dare to affirm. But, for me, she is. Always a little in the
background by the side of her father (my venerated friend) I hope
she has yet relief enough to make intelligible what I am going to
say. Of all the people who had seen with me the birth of the
Occidental Republic, she is the only one who has kept in my
memory the aspect of continued life. Antonia the Aristocrat and
Nostromo the Man of the People are the artisans of the New Era,
the true creators of the New State; he by his legendary and
daring feat, she, like a woman, simply by the force of what she
is: the only being capable of inspiring a sincere passion in the
heart of a trifler.
If anything could induce me to revisit Sulaco (I should hate to
see all these changes) it would be Antonia. And the true reason
for that--why not be frank about it?--the true reason is that I
have modelled her on my first love. How we, a band of tallish
schoolboys, the chums of her two brothers, how we used to look up
to that girl just out of the schoolroom herself, as the
standard-bearer of a faith to which we all were born but which
she alone knew how to hold aloft with an unflinching hope! She
had perhaps more glow and less serenity in her soul than Antonia,
but she was an uncompromising Puritan of patriotism with no taint
of the slightest worldliness in her thoughts. I was not the only
one in love with her; but it was I who had to hear oftenest her
scathing criticism of my levities--very much like poor Decoud--or
stand the brunt of her austere, unanswerable invective. She did
not quite understand--but never mind. That afternoon when I came
in, a shrinking yet defiant sinner, to say the final good-bye I
received a hand-squeeze that made my heart leap and saw a tear
that took my breath away. She was softened at the last as though
she had suddenly perceived (we were such children still!) that I
was really going away for good, going very far away--even as far
as Sulaco, lying unknown, hidden from our eyes in the darkness of
the Placid Gulf.
That's why I long sometimes for another glimpse of the "beautiful
Antonia" (or can it be the Other?) moving in the dimness of the
great cathedral, saying a short prayer at the tomb of the first
and last Cardinal-Archbishop of Sulaco, standing absorbed in
filial devotion before the monument of Don Jose Avellanos, and,
with a lingering, tender, faithful glance at the
medallion-memorial to Martin Decoud, going out serenely into the
sunshine of the Plaza with her upright carriage and her white
head; a relic of the past disregarded by men awaiting impatiently
the Dawns of other New Eras, the coming of more Revolutions.
But this is the idlest of dreams; for I did understand perfectly
well at the time that the moment the breath left the body of the
Magnificent Capataz, the Man of the People, freed at last from
the toils of love and wealth, there was nothing more for me to do
in Sulaco.
J. C.
October, 1917.
CONTENTS
PART FIRST
THE SILVER OF THE MINE
PART SECOND
THE ISABELS
PART THIRD
THE LIGHTHOUSE
NOSTROMO
CHAPTER ONE
IN THE time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the
town of Sulaco--the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears
witness to its antiquity--had never been commercially anything
more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local
trade in ox-hides and indigo. The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the
conquerors that, needing a brisk gale to move at all, would lie
becalmed, where your modern ship built on clipper lines forges
ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had been barred out of
Sulaco by the prevailing calms of its vast gulf. Some harbours of
the earth are made difficult of access by the treachery of sunken
rocks and the tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an
inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in
the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if within an
enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple open to the ocean,
with its walls of lofty mountains hung with the mourning
draperies of cloud.
On one side of this broad curve in the straight seaboard of the
Republic of Costaguana, the last spur of the coast range forms an
insignificant cape whose name is Punta Mala. From the middle of
the gulf the point of the land itself is not visible at all; but
the shoulder of a steep hill at the back can be made out faintly
like a shadow on the sky.
On the other side, what seems to be an isolated patch of blue
mist floats lightly on the glare of the horizon. This is the
peninsula of Azuera, a wild chaos of sharp rocks and stony levels
cut about by vertical ravines. It lies far out to sea like a
rough head of stone stretched from a green-clad coast at the end
of a slender neck of sand covered with thickets of thorny scrub.
Utterly waterless, for the rainfall runs off at once on all sides
into the sea, it has not soil enough--it is said--to grow a
single blade of grass, as if it were blighted by a curse. The
poor, associating by an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas
of evil and wealth, will tell you that it is deadly because of
its forbidden treasures. The common folk of the neighbourhood,
peons of the estancias, vaqueros of the seaboard plains, tame
Indians coming miles to market with a bundle of sugar-cane or a
basket of maize worth about threepence, are well aware that heaps
of shining gold lie in the gloom of the deep precipices cleaving
the stony levels of Azuera. Tradition has it that many
adventurers of olden time had perished in the search. The story
goes also that within men's memory two wandering sailors--
Americanos, perhaps, but gringos of some sort for certain--talked
over a gambling, good-for-nothing mozo, and the three stole a
donkey to carry for them a bundle of dry sticks, a water-skin,
and provisions enough to last a few days. Thus accompanied, and
with revolvers at their belts, they had started to chop their way
with machetes through the thorny scrub on the neck of the
peninsula.
On the second evening an upright spiral of smoke (it could only
have been from their camp-fire) was seen for the first time
within memory of man standing up faintly upon the sky above a
razor-backed ridge on the stony head. The crew of a coasting
schooner, lying becalmed three miles off the shore, stared at it
with amazement till dark. A negro fisherman, living in a lonely
hut in a little bay near by, had seen the start and was on the
lookout for some sign. He called to his wife just as the sun was
about to set. They had watched the strange portent with envy,
incredulity, and awe.
The impious adventurers gave no other sign. The sailors, the
Indian, and the stolen burro were never seen again. As to the
mozo, a Sulaco man--his wife paid for some masses, and the poor
four-footed beast, being without sin, had been probably permitted
to die; but the two gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to
be dwelling to this day amongst the rocks, under the fatal spell
of their success. Their souls cannot tear themselves away from
their bodies mounting guard over the discovered treasure. They
are now rich and hungry and thirsty--a strange theory of
tenacious gringo ghosts suffering in their starved and parched
flesh of defiant heretics, where a Christian would have renounced
and been released.
These, then, are the legendary inhabitants of Azuera guarding its
forbidden wealth; and the shadow on the sky on one side with the
round patch of blue haze blurring the bright skirt of the horizon
on the other, mark the two outermost points of the bend which
bears the name of Golfo Placido, because never a strong wind had
been known to blow upon its waters.
On crossing the imaginary line drawn from Punta Mala to Azuera
the ships from Europe bound to Sulaco lose at once the strong
breezes of the ocean. They become the prey of capricious airs
that play with them for thirty hours at a stretch sometimes.
Before them the head of the calm gulf is filled on most days of
the year by a great body of motionless and opaque clouds. On the
rare clear mornings another shadow is cast upon the sweep of the
gulf. The dawn breaks high behind the towering and serrated wall
of the Cordillera, a clear-cut vision of dark peaks rearing their
steep slopes on a lofty pedestal of forest rising from the very
edge of the shore. Amongst them the white head of Higuerota
rises majestically upon the blue. Bare clusters of enormous rocks
sprinkle with tiny black dots the smooth dome of snow.
Then, as the midday sun withdraws from the gulf the shadow of the
mountains, the clouds begin to roll out of the lower valleys.
They swathe in sombre tatters the naked crags of precipices above
the wooded slopes, hide the peaks, smoke in stormy trails across
the snows of Higuerota. The Cordillera is gone from you as if it
had dissolved itself into great piles of grey and black vapours
that travel out slowly to seaward and vanish into thin air all
along the front before the blazing heat of the day. The wasting
edge of the cloud-bank always strives for, but seldom wins, the
middle of the gulf. The sun--as the sailors say--is eating it up.
Unless perchance a sombre thunder-head breaks away from the main
body to career all over the gulf till it escapes into the offing
beyond Azuera, where it bursts suddenly into flame and crashes
like a sinster pirate-ship of the air, hove-to above the horizon,
engaging the sea.
At night the body of clouds advancing higher up the sky smothers
the whole quiet gulf below with an impenetrable darkness, in
which the sound of the falling showers can be heard beginning and
ceasing abruptly--now here, now there. Indeed, these cloudy
nights are proverbial with the seamen along the whole west coast
of a great continent. Sky, land, and sea disappear together out
of the world when the Placido--as the saying is--goes to sleep
under its black poncho. The few stars left below the seaward
frown of the vault shine feebly as into the mouth of a black
cavern. In its vastness your ship floats unseen under your feet,
her sails flutter invisible above your head. The eye of God
Himself--they add with grim profanity--could not find out what
work a man's hand is doing in there; and you would be free to
call the devil to your aid with impunity if even his malice were
not defeated by such a blind darkness.
The shores on the gulf are steep-to all round; three uninhabited
islets basking in the sunshine just outside the cloud veil, and
opposite the entrance to the harbour of Sulaco, bear the name of
"The Isabels."
There is the Great Isabel; the Little Isabel, which is round; and
Hermosa, which is the smallest.
That last is no more than a foot high, and about seven paces
across, a mere flat top of a grey rock which smokes like a hot
cinder after a shower, and where no man would care to venture a
naked sole before sunset. On the Little Isabel an old ragged
palm, with a thick bulging trunk rough with spines, a very witch
amongst palm trees, rustles a dismal bunch of dead leaves above
the coarse sand. The Great Isabel has a spring of fresh water
issuing from the overgrown side of a ravine. Resembling an
emerald green wedge of land a mile long, and laid flat upon the
sea, it bears two forest trees standing close together, with a
wide spread of shade at the foot of their smooth trunks. A ravine
extending the whole length of the island is full of bushes; and
presenting a deep tangled cleft on the high side spreads itself
out on the other into a shallow depression abutting on a small
strip of sandy shore.
From that low end of the Great Isabel the eye plunges through an
opening two miles away, as abrupt as if chopped with an axe out
of the regular sweep of the coast, right into the harbour of
Sulaco. It is an oblong, lake-like piece of water. On one side
the short wooded spurs and valleys of the Cordillera come down at
right angles to the very strand; on the other the open view of
the great Sulaco plain passes into the opal mystery of great
distances overhung by dry haze. The town of Sulaco itself--tops
of walls, a great cupola, gleams of white miradors in a vast
grove of orange trees--lies between the mountains and the plain,
at some little distance from its harbour and out of the direct
line of sight from the sea.
CHAPTER TWO
THE only sign of commercial activity within the harbour, visible
from the beach of the Great Isabel, is the square blunt end of
the wooden jetty which the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company (the
O.S.N. of familiar speech) had thrown over the shallow part of
the bay soon after they had resolved to make of Sulaco one of
their ports of call for the Republic of Costaguana. The State
possesses several harbours on its long seaboard, but except
Cayta, an important place, all are either small and inconvenient
inlets in an iron-bound coast--like Esmeralda, for instance,
sixty miles to the south--or else mere open roadsteads exposed to
the winds and fretted by the surf.
Perhaps the very atmospheric conditions which had kept away the
merchant fleets of bygone ages induced the O.S.N. Company to
violate the sanctuary of peace sheltering the calm existence of
Sulaco. The variable airs sporting lightly with the vast
semicircle of waters within the head of Azuera could not baffle
the steam power of their excellent fleet. Year after year the
black hulls of their ships had gone up and down the coast, in and
out, past Azuera, past the Isabels, past Punta Mala--disregarding
everything but the tyranny of time. Their names, the names of all
mythology, became the household words of a coast that had never
been ruled by the gods of Olympus. The Juno was known only for
her comfortable cabins amidships, the Saturn for the geniality of
her captain and the painted and gilt luxuriousness of her saloon,
whereas the Ganymede was fitted out mainly for cattle transport,
and to be avoided by coastwise passengers. The humblest Indian in
the obscurest village on the coast was familiar with the
Cerberus, a little black puffer without charm or living
accommodation to speak of, whose mission was to creep inshore
along the wooded beaches close to mighty ugly rocks, stopping
obligingly before every cluster of huts to collect produce, down
to three-pound parcels of indiarubber bound in a wrapper of dry
grass.
And as they seldom failed to account for the smallest package,
rarely lost a bullock, and had never drowned a single passenger,
the name of the O.S.N. stood very high for trustworthiness.
People declared that under the Company's care their lives and
property were safer on the water than in their own houses on
shore.
The O.S.N.'s superintendent in Sulaco for the whole Costaguana
section of the service was very proud of his Company's standing.
He resumed it in a saying which was very often on his lips, "We
never make mistakes." To the Company's officers it took the form
of a severe injunction, "We must make no mistakes. I'll have no
mistakes here, no matter what Smith may do at his end."
Smith, on whom he had never set eyes in his life, was the other
superintendent of the service, quartered some fifteen hundred
miles away from Sulaco. "Don't talk to me of your Smith."
Then, calming down suddenly, he would dismiss the subject with
studied negligence.
"Smith knows no more of this continent than a baby."
"Our excellent Senor Mitchell" for the business and official
world of Sulaco; "Fussy Joe" for the commanders of the Company's
ships, Captain Joseph Mitchell prided himself on his profound
knowledge of men and things in the country--cosas de Costaguana.
Amongst these last he accounted as most unfavourable to the
orderly working of his Company the frequent changes of government
brought about by revolutions of the military type.
The political atmosphere of the Republic was generally stormy in
these days. The fugitive patriots of the defeated party had the
knack of turning up again on the coast with half a steamer's load
of small arms and ammunition. Such resourcefulness Captain
Mitchell considered as perfectly wonderful in view of their utter
destitution at the time of flight. He had observed that "they
never seemed to have enough change about them to pay for their
passage ticket out of the country." And he could speak with
knowledge; for on a memorable occasion he had been called upon to
save the life of a dictator, together with the lives of a few
Sulaco officials--the political chief, the director of the
customs, and the head of police--belonging to an overturned
government. Poor Senor Ribiera (such was the dictator's name) had
come pelting eighty miles over mountain tracks after the lost
battle of Socorro, in the hope of out-distancing the fatal
news--which, of course, he could not manage to do on a lame mule.
The animal, moreover, expired under him at the end of the
Alameda, where the military band plays sometimes in the evenings
between the revolutions. "Sir," Captain Mitchell would pursue
with portentous gravity, "the ill-timed end of that mule
attracted attention to the unfortunate rider. His features were
recognized by several deserters from the Dictatorial army amongst
the rascally mob already engaged in smashing the windows of the
Intendencia."
Early on the morning of that day the local authorities of Sulaco
had fled for refuge to the O.S.N. Company's offices, a strong
building near the shore end of the jetty, leaving the town to the
mercies of a revolutionary rabble; and as the Dictator was
execrated by the populace on account of the severe recruitment
law his necessities had compelled him to enforce during the
struggle, he stood a good chance of being torn to pieces.
Providentially, Nostromo--invaluable fellow--with some Italian
workmen, imported to work upon the National Central Railway, was
at hand, and managed to snatch him away--for the time at least.
Ultimately, Captain Mitchell succeeded in taking everybody off in
his own gig to one of the Company's steamers--it was the
Minerva--just then, as luck would have it, entering the harbour.
He had to lower these gentlemen at the end of a rope out of a
hole in the wall at the back, while the mob which, pouring out of
the town, had spread itself all along the shore, howled and
foamed at the foot of the building in front. He had to hurry them
then the whole length of the jetty; it had been a desperate dash,
neck or nothing--and again it was Nostromo, a fellow in a
thousand, who, at the head, this time, of the Company's body of
lightermen, held the jetty against the rushes of the rabble, thus
giving the fugitives time to reach the gig lying ready for them
at the other end with the Company's flag at the stern. Sticks,
stones, shots flew; knives, too, were thrown. Captain Mitchell
exhibited willingly the long cicatrice of a cut over his left ear
and temple, made by a razor-blade fastened to a stick--a weapon,
he explained, very much in favour with the "worst kind of nigger
out here."
Captain Mitchell was a thick, elderly man, wearing high, pointed
collars and short side-whiskers, partial to white waistcoats, and
really very communicative under his air of pompous reserve.
"These gentlemen," he would say, staring with great solemnity,
"had to run like rabbits, sir. I ran like a rabbit myself.
Certain forms of death are--er--distasteful to
a--a--er--respectable man. They would have pounded me to death,
too. A crazy mob, sir, does not discriminate. Under providence we
owed our preservation to my Capataz de Cargadores, as they called
him in the town, a man who, when I discovered his value, sir, was
just the bos'n of an Italian ship, a big Genoese ship, one of the
few European ships that ever came to Sulaco with a general cargo
before the building of the National Central. He left her on
account of some very respectable friends he made here, his own
countrymen, but also, I suppose, to better himself. Sir, I am a
pretty good judge of character. I engaged him to be the foreman
of our lightermen, and caretaker of our jetty. That's all that he
was. But without him Senor Ribiera would have been a dead man.
This Nostromo, sir, a man absolutely above reproach, became the
terror of all the thieves in the town. We were infested,
infested, overrun, sir, here at that time by ladrones and
matreros, thieves and murderers from the whole province. On this
occasion they had been flocking into Sulaco for a week past.
They had scented the end, sir. Fifty per cent. of that murdering
mob were professional bandits from the Campo, sir, but there
wasn't one that hadn't heard of Nostromo. As to the town leperos,
sir, the sight of his black whiskers and white teeth was enough
for them. They quailed before him, sir. That's what the force of
character will do for you."
It could very well be said that it was Nostromo alone who saved
the lives of these gentlemen. Captain Mitchell, on his part,
never left them till he had seen them collapse, panting,
terrified, and exasperated, but safe, on the luxuriant velvet
sofas in the first-class saloon of the Minerva. To the very last
he had been careful to address the ex-Dictator as "Your
Excellency."
"Sir, I could do no other. The man was down--ghastly, livid, one
mass of scratches."
The Minerva never let go her anchor that call. The superintendent
ordered her out of the harbour at once. No cargo could be
landed, of course, and the passengers for Sulaco naturally
refused to go ashore. They could hear the firing and see plainly
the fight going on at the edge of the water. The repulsed mob
devoted its energies to an attack upon the Custom House, a
dreary, unfinished-looking structure with many windows two
hundred yards away from the O.S.N. Offices, and the only other
building near the harbour. Captain Mitchell, after directing the
commander of the Minerva to land "these gentlemen" in the first
port of call outside Costaguana, went back in his gig to see what
could be done for the protection of the Company's property. That
and the property of the railway were preserved by the European
residents; that is, by Captain Mitchell himself and the staff of
engineers building the road, aided by the Italian and Basque
workmen who rallied faithfully round their English chiefs. The
Company's lightermen, too, natives of the Republic, behaved very
well under their Capataz. An outcast lot of very mixed blood,
mainly negroes, everlastingly at feud with the other customers of
low grog shops in the town, they embraced with delight this
opportunity to settle their personal scores under such favourable
auspices. There was not one of them that had not, at some time or
other, looked with terror at Nostromo's revolver poked very close
at his face, or been otherwise daunted by Nostromo's resolution.
He was "much of a man," their Capataz was, they said, too
scornful in his temper ever to utter abuse, a tireless
taskmaster, and the more to be feared because of his aloofness.
And behold! there he was that day, at their head, condescending
to make jocular remarks to this man or the other.
Such leadership was inspiriting, and in truth all the harm the
mob managed to achieve was to set fire to one--only one--stack
of railway-sleepers, which, being creosoted, burned well. The
main attack on the railway yards, on the O.S.N. Offices, and
especially on the Custom House, whose strong room, it was well
known, contained a large treasure in silver ingots, failed
completely. Even the little hotel kept by old Giorgio, standing
alone halfway between the harbour and the town, escaped looting
and destruction, not by a miracle, but because with the safes in
view they had neglected it at first, and afterwards found no
leisure to stop. Nostromo, with his Cargadores, was pressing them
too hard then.
CHAPTER THREE
IT MIGHT have been said that there he was only protecting his
own. From the first he had been admitted to live in the intimacy
of the family of the hotel-keeper who was a countryman of his.
Old Giorgio Viola, a Genoese with a shaggy white leonine
head--often called simply "the Garibaldino" (as Mohammedans are
called after their prophet)--was, to use Captain Mitchell's own
words, the "respectable married friend" by whose advice Nostromo
had left his ship to try for a run of shore luck in Costaguana.
The old man, full of scorn for the populace, as your austere
republican so often is, had disregarded the preliminary sounds of
trouble. He went on that day as usual pottering about the "casa"
in his slippers, muttering angrily to himself his contempt of the
non-political nature of the riot, and shrugging his shoulders.
In the end he was taken unawares by the out-rush of the rabble.
It was too late then to remove his family, and, indeed, where
could he have run to with the portly Signora Teresa and two
little girls on that great plain? So, barricading every opening,
the old man sat down sternly in the middle of the darkened cafe
with an old shot-gun on his knees. His wife sat on another chair
by his side, muttering pious invocations to all the saints of the
calendar.
The old republican did not believe in saints, or in prayers, or
in what he called "priest's religion." Liberty and Garibaldi were
his divinities; but he tolerated "superstition" in women,
preserving in these matters a lofty and silent attitude.
His two girls, the eldest fourteen, and the other two years
younger, crouched on the sanded floor, on each side of the
Signora Teresa, with their heads on their mother's lap, both
scared, but each in her own way, the dark-haired Linda indignant
and angry, the fair Giselle, the younger, bewildered and
resigned. The Patrona removed her arms, which embraced her
daughters, for a moment to cross herself and wring her hands
hurriedly. She moaned a little louder.
"Oh! Gian' Battista, why art thou not here? Oh! why art thou not
here?"
She was not then invoking the saint himself, but calling upon
Nostromo, whose patron he was. And Giorgio, motionless on the
chair by her side, would be provoked by these reproachful and
distracted appeals.
"Peace, woman! Where's the sense of it? There's his duty," he
murmured in the dark; and she would retort, panting--
"Eh! I have no patience. Duty! What of the woman who has been
like a mother to him? I bent my knee to him this morning; don't
you go out, Gian' Battista--stop in the house, Battistino--look
at those two little innocent children!"
Mrs. Viola was an Italian, too, a native of Spezzia, and though
considerably younger than her husband, already middle-aged. She
had a handsome face, whose complexion had turned yellow because
the climate of Sulaco did not suit her at all. Her voice was a
rich contralto. When, with her arms folded tight under her ample
bosom, she scolded the squat, thick-legged China girls handling
linen, plucking fowls, pounding corn in wooden mortars amongst
the mud outbuildings at the back of the house, she could bring
out such an impassioned, vibrating, sepulchral note that the
chained watch-dog bolted into his kennel with a great rattle.
Luis, a cinnamon-coloured mulatto with a sprouting moustache and
thick, dark lips, would stop sweeping the cafe with a broom of
palm-leaves to let a gentle shudder run down his spine. His
languishing almond eyes would remain closed for a long time.
This was the staff of the Casa Viola, but all these people had
fled early that morning at the first sounds of the riot,
preferring to hide on the plain rather than trust themselves in
the house; a preference for which they were in no way to blame,
since, whether true or not, it was generally believed in the town
that the Garibaldino had some money buried under the clay floor
of the kitchen. The dog, an irritable, shaggy brute, barked
violently and whined plaintively in turns at the back, running in
and out of his kennel as rage or fear prompted him.
Bursts of great shouting rose and died away, like wild gusts of
wind on the plain round the barricaded house; the fitful popping
of shots grew louder above the yelling. Sometimes there were
intervals of unaccountable stillness outside, and nothing could
have been more gaily peaceful than the narrow bright lines of
sunlight from the cracks in the shutters, ruled straight across
the cafe over the disarranged chairs and tables to the wall
opposite. Old Giorgio had chosen that bare, whitewashed room for
a retreat. It had only one window, and its only door swung out
upon the track of thick dust fenced by aloe hedges between the
harbour and the town, where clumsy carts used to creak along
behind slow yokes of oxen guided by boys on horseback.
In a pause of stillness Giorgio cocked his gun. The ominous sound
wrung a low moan from the rigid figure of the woman sitting by
his side. A sudden outbreak of defiant yelling quite near the
house sank all at once to a confused murmur of growls. Somebody
ran along; the loud catching of his breath was heard for an
instant passing the door; there were hoarse mutters and footsteps
near the wall; a shoulder rubbed against the shutter, effacing
the bright lines of sunshine pencilled across the whole breadth
of the room. Signora Teresa's arms thrown about the kneeling
forms of her daughters embraced them closer with a convulsive
pressure.
The mob, driven away from the Custom House, had broken up into
several bands, retreating across the plain in the direction of
the town. The subdued crash of irregular volleys fired in the
distance was answered by faint yells far away. In the intervals
the single shots rang feebly, and the low, long, white building
blinded in every window seemed to be the centre of a turmoil
widening in a great circle about its closed-up silence. But the
cautious movements and whispers of a routed party seeking a
momentary shelter behind the wall made the darkness of the room,
striped by threads of quiet sunlight, alight with evil, stealthy
sounds. The Violas had them in their ears as though invisible
ghosts hovering about their chairs had consulted in mutters as to
the advisability of setting fire to this foreigner's casa.
It was trying to the nerves. Old Viola had risen slowly, gun in
hand, irresolute, for he did not see how he could prevent them.
Already voices could be heard talking at the back. Signora Teresa
was beside herself with terror.
"Ah! the traitor! the traitor!" she mumbled, almost inaudibly.
"Now we are going to be burnt; and I bent my knee to him. No! he
must run at the heels of his English."
She seemed to think that Nostromo's mere presence in the house
would have made it perfectly safe. So far, she, too, was under
the spell of that reputation the Capataz de Cargadores had made
for himself by the waterside, along the railway line, with the
English and with the populace of Sulaco. To his face, and even
against her husband, she invariably affected to laugh it to
scorn, sometimes good-naturedly, more often with a curious
bitterness. But then women are unreasonable in their opinions, as
Giorgio used to remark calmly on fitting occasions. On this
occasion, with his gun held at ready before him, he stooped down
to his wife's head, and, keeping his eyes steadfastly on the
barricaded door, he breathed out into her ear that Nostromo would
have been powerless to help. What could two men shut up in a
house do against twenty or more bent upon setting fire to the
roof? Gian' Battista was thinking of the casa all the time, he
was sure.
"He think of the casa! He!" gasped Signora Viola, crazily. She
struck her breast with her open hands. "I know him. He thinks of
nobody but himself."
A discharge of firearms near by made her throw her head back and
close her eyes. Old Giorgio set his teeth hard under his white
moustache, and his eyes began to roll fiercely. Several bullets
struck the end of the wall together; pieces of plaster could be
heard falling outside; a voice screamed "Here they come!" and
after a moment of uneasy silence there was a rush of running feet
along the front.
Then the tension of old Giorgio's attitude relaxed, and a smile
of contemptuous relief came upon his lips of an old fighter with
a leonine face. These were not a people striving for justice, but
thieves. Even to defend his life against them was a sort of
degradation for a man who had been one of Garibaldi's immortal
thousand in the conquest of Sicily. He had an immense scorn for
this outbreak of scoundrels and leperos, who did not know the
meaning of the word "liberty."
He grounded his old gun, and, turning his head, glanced at the
coloured lithograph of Garibaldi in a black frame on the white
wall; a thread of strong sunshine cut it perpendicularly. His
eyes, accustomed to the luminous twilight, made out the high
colouring of the face, the red of the shirt, the outlines of the
square shoulders, the black patch of the Bersagliere hat with
cock's feathers curling over the crown. An immortal hero! This
was your liberty; it gave you not only life, but immortality as
well!
For that one man his fanaticism had suffered no diminution. In
the moment of relief from the apprehension of the greatest
danger, perhaps, his family had been exposed to in all their
wanderings, he had turned to the picture of his old chief, first
and only, then laid his hand on his wife's shoulder.
The children kneeling on the floor had not moved. Signora Teresa
opened her eyes a little, as though he had awakened her from a
very deep and dreamless slumber. Before he had time in his
deliberate way to say a reassuring word she jumped up, with the
children clinging to her, one on each side, gasped for breath,
and let out a hoarse shriek.
It was simultaneous with the bang of a violent blow struck on the
outside of the shutter. They could hear suddenly the snorting of
a horse, the restive tramping of hoofs on the narrow, hard path
in front of the house; the toe of a boot struck at the shutter
again; a spur jingled at every blow, and an excited voice
shouted, "Hola! hola, in there!"
CHAPTER FOUR
ALL the morning Nostromo had kept his eye from afar on the Casa
Viola, even in the thick of the hottest scrimmage near the Custom
House. "If I see smoke rising over there," he thought to himself,
"they are lost." Directly the mob had broken he pressed with a
small band of Italian workmen in that direction, which, indeed,
was the shortest line towards the town. That part of the rabble
he was pursuing seemed to think of making a stand under the
house; a volley fired by his followers from behind an aloe hedge
made the rascals fly. In a gap chopped out for the rails of the
harbour branch line Nostromo appeared, mounted on his silver-grey
mare. He shouted, sent after them one shot from his revolver, and
galloped up to the cafe window. He had an idea that old Giorgio
would choose that part of the house for a refuge.
His voice had penetrated to them, sounding breathlessly hurried:
"Hola! Vecchio! O, Vecchio! Is it all well with you in there?"
"You see--" murmured old Viola to his wife. Signora Teresa was
silent now. Outside Nostromo laughed.
"I can hear the padrona is not dead."
"You have done your best to kill me with fear," cried Signora
Teresa. She wanted to say something more, but her voice failed
her.
Linda raised her eyes to her face for a moment, but old Giorgio
shouted apologetically--
"She is a little upset."
Outside Nostromo shouted back with another laugh--
"She cannot upset me."
Signora Teresa found her voice.
"It is what I say. You have no heart--and you have no conscience,
Gian' Battista--"
They heard him wheel his horse away from the shutters. The party
he led were babbling excitedly in Italian and Spanish, inciting
each other to the pursuit. He put himself at their head, crying,
"Avanti!"
"He has not stopped very long with us. There is no praise from
strangers to be got here," Signora Teresa said tragically.
"Avanti! Yes! That is all he cares for. To be first
somewhere--somehow--to be first with these English. They will be
showing him to everybody. 'This is our Nostromo!'" She laughed
ominously. "What a name! What is that? Nostromo? He would take a
name that is properly no word from them."
Meantime Giorgio, with tranquil movements, had been unfastening
the door; the flood of light fell on Signora Teresa, with her two
girls gathered to her side, a picturesque woman in a pose of
maternal exaltation. Behind her the wall was dazzlingly white,
and the crude colours of the Garibaldi lithograph paled in the
sunshine.
Old Viola, at the door, moved his arm upwards as if referring all
his quick, fleeting thoughts to the picture of his old chief on
the wall. Even when he was cooking for the "Signori Inglesi"--the
engineers (he was a famous cook, though the kitchen was a dark
place)--he was, as it were, under the eye of the great man who
had led him in a glorious struggle where, under the walls of
Gaeta, tyranny would have expired for ever had it not been for
that accursed Piedmontese race of kings and ministers. When
sometimes a frying-pan caught fire during a delicate operation
with some shredded onions, and the old man was seen backing out
of the doorway, swearing and coughing violently in an acrid cloud
of smoke, the name of Cavour--the arch intriguer sold to kings
and tyrants--could be heard involved in imprecations against the
China girls, cooking in general, and the brute of a country where
he was reduced to live for the love of liberty that traitor had
strangled.
Then Signora Teresa, all in black, issuing from another door,
advanced, portly and anxious, inclining her fine, black-browed
head, opening her arms, and crying in a profound tone--
"Giorgio! thou passionate man! Misericordia Divina! In the sun
like this! He will make himself ill."
At her feet the hens made off in all directions, with immense
strides; if there were any engineers from up the line staying in
Sulaco, a young English face or two would appear at the
billiard-room occupying one end of the house; but at the other
end, in the cafe, Luis, the mulatto, took good care not to show
himself. The Indian girls, with hair like flowing black manes,
and dressed only in a shift and short petticoat, stared dully
from under the square-cut fringes on their foreheads; the noisy
frizzling of fat had stopped, the fumes floated upwards in
sunshine, a strong smell of burnt onions hung in the drowsy heat,
enveloping the house; and the eye lost itself in a vast flat
expanse of grass to the west, as if the plain between the Sierra
overtopping Sulaco and the coast range away there towards
Esmeralda had been as big as half the world.
Signora Teresa, after an impressive pause, remonstrated--
"Eh, Giorgio! Leave Cavour alone and take care of yourself now we
are lost in this country all alone with the two children, because
you cannot live under a king."
And while she looked at him she would sometimes put her hand
hastily to her side with a short twitch of her fine lips and a
knitting of her black, straight eyebrows like a flicker of angry
pain or an angry thought on her handsome, regular features.
It was pain; she suppressed the twinge. It had come to her first
a few years after they had left Italy to emigrate to America and
settle at last in Sulaco after wandering from town to town,
trying shopkeeping in a small way here and there; and once an
organized enterprise of fishing--in Maldonado--for Giorgio, like
the great Garibaldi, had been a sailor in his time.
Sometimes she had no patience with pain. For years its gnawing
had been part of the landscape embracing the glitter of the
harbour under the wooded spurs of the range; and the sunshine
itself was heavy and dull--heavy with pain--not like the
sunshine of her girlhood, in which middle-aged Giorgio had wooed
her gravely and passionately on the shores of the gulf of
Spezzia.
"You go in at once, Giorgio," she directed. "One would think you
do not wish to have any pity on me--with four Signori Inglesi
staying in the house." "Va bene, va bene," Giorgio would mutter.
He obeyed. The Signori Inglesi would require their midday meal
presently. He had been one of the immortal and invincible band
of liberators who had made the mercenaries of tyranny fly like
chaff before a hurricane, "un uragano terribile." But that was
before he was married and had children; and before tyranny had
reared its head again amongst the traitors who had imprisoned
Garibaldi, his hero.
There were three doors in the front of the house, and each
afternoon the Garibaldino could be seen at one or another of them
with his big bush of white hair, his arms folded, his legs
crossed, leaning back his leonine head against the side, and
looking up the wooded slopes of the foothills at the snowy dome
of Higuerota. The front of his house threw off a black long
rectangle of shade, broadening slowly over the soft ox-cart
track. Through the gaps, chopped out in the oleander hedges, the
harbour branch railway, laid out temporarily on the level of the
plain, curved away its shining parallel ribbons on a belt of
scorched and withered grass within sixty yards of the end of the
house. In the evening the empty material trains of flat cars
circled round the dark green grove of Sulaco, and ran, undulating
slightly with white jets of steam, over the plain towards the
Casa Viola, on their way to the railway yards by the harbour. The
Italian drivers saluted him from the foot-plate with raised hand,
while the negro brakesmen sat carelessly on the brakes, looking
straight forward, with the rims of their big hats flapping in the
wind. In return Giorgio would give a slight sideways jerk of the
head, without unfolding his arms.
On this memorable day of the riot his arms were not folded on his
chest. His hand grasped the barrel of the gun grounded on the
threshold; he did not look up once at the white dome of
Higuerota, whose cool purity seemed to hold itself aloof from a
hot earth. His eyes examined the plain curiously. Tall trails of
dust subsided here and there. In a speckless sky the sun hung
clear and blinding. Knots of men ran headlong; others made a
stand; and the irregular rattle of firearms came rippling to his
ears in the fiery, still air. Single figures on foot raced
desperately. Horsemen galloped towards each other, wheeled round
together, separated at speed. Giorgio saw one fall, rider and
horse disappearing as if they had galloped into a chasm, and the
movements of the animated scene were like the passages of a
violent game played upon the plain by dwarfs mounted and on foot,
yelling with tiny throats, under the mountain that seemed a
colossal embodiment of silence. Never before had Giorgio seen
this bit of plain so full of active life; his gaze could not take
in all its details at once; he shaded his eyes with his hand,
till suddenly the thundering of many hoofs near by startled him.
A troop of horses had broken out of the fenced paddock of the
Railway Company. They came on like a whirlwind, and dashed over
the line snorting, kicking, squealing in a compact, piebald,
tossing mob of bay, brown, grey backs, eyes staring, necks
extended, nostrils red, long tails streaming. As soon as they had
leaped upon the road the thick dust flew upwards from under their
hoofs, and within six yards of Giorgio only a brown cloud with
vague forms of necks and cruppers rolled by, making the soil
tremble on its passage.
Viola coughed, turning his face away from the dust, and shaking
his head slightly.
"There will be some horse-catching to be done before to-night,"
he muttered.
In the square of sunlight falling through the door Signora
Teresa, kneeling before the chair, had bowed her head, heavy with
a twisted mass of ebony hair streaked with silver, into the palm
of her hands. The black lace shawl she used to drape about her
face had dropped to the ground by her side. The two girls had got
up, hand-in-hand, in short skirts, their loose hair falling in
disorder. The younger had thrown her arm across her eyes, as if
afraid to face the light. Linda, with her hand on the other's
shoulder, stared fearlessly. Viola looked at his children. The
sun brought out the deep lines on his face, and, energetic in
expression, it had the immobility of a carving. It was impossible
to discover what he thought. Bushy grey eyebrows shaded his dark
glance.
"Well! And do you not pray like your mother?"
Linda pouted, advancing her red lips, which were almost too red;
but she had admirable eyes, brown, with a sparkle of gold in the
irises, full of intelligence and meaning, and so clear that they
seemed to throw a glow upon her thin, colourless face. There were
bronze glints in the sombre clusters of her hair, and the
eyelashes, long and coal black, made her complexion appear still
more pale.
"Mother is going to offer up a lot of candles in the church. She
always does when Nostromo has been away fighting. I shall have
some to carry up to the Chapel of the Madonna in the Cathedral."
She said all this quickly, with great assurance, in an animated,
penetrating voice. Then, giving her sister's shoulder a slight
shake, she added--
"And she will be made to carry one, too!"
"Why made?" inquired Giorgio, gravely. "Does she not want to?"
"She is timid," said Linda, with a little burst of laughter.
"People notice her fair hair as she goes along with us. They call
out after her, 'Look at the Rubia! Look at the Rubiacita!' They
call out in the streets. She is timid."
"And you? You are not timid--eh?" the father pronounced, slowly.
She tossed back all her dark hair.
"Nobody calls out after me."
Old Giorgio contemplated his children thoughtfully. There was
two years difference between them. They had been born to him
late, years after the boy had died. Had he lived he would have
been nearly as old as Gian' Battista--he whom the English called
Nostromo; but as to his daughters, the severity of his temper,
his advancing age, his absorption in his memories, had prevented
his taking much notice of them. He loved his children, but girls
belong more to the mother, and much of his affection had been
expended in the worship and service of liberty.
When quite a youth he had deserted from a ship trading to La
Plata, to enlist in the navy of Montevideo, then under the
command of Garibaldi. Afterwards, in the Italian legion of the
Republic struggling against the encroaching tyranny of Rosas, he
had taken part, on great plains, on the banks of immense rivers,
in the fiercest fighting perhaps the world had ever known. He
had lived amongst men who had declaimed about liberty, suffered
for liberty, died for liberty, with a desperate exaltation, and
with their eyes turned towards an oppressed Italy. His own
enthusiasm had been fed on scenes of carnage, on the examples of
lofty devotion, on the din of armed struggle, on the inflamed
language of proclamations. He had never parted from the chief of
his choice--the fiery apostle of independence--keeping by his
side in America and in Italy till after the fatal day of
Aspromonte, when the treachery of kings, emperors, and ministers
had been revealed to the world in the wounding and imprisonment
of his hero--a catastrophe that had instilled into him a gloomy
doubt of ever being able to understand the ways of Divine
justice.
He did not deny it, however. It required patience, he would say.
Though he disliked priests, and would not put his foot inside a
church for anything, he believed in God. Were not the
proclamations against tyrants addressed to the peoples in the
name of God and liberty? "God for men--religions for women," he
muttered sometimes. In Sicily, an Englishman who had turned up in
Palermo after its evacuation by the army of the king, had given
him a Bible in Italian--the publication of the British and
Foreign Bible Society, bound in a dark leather cover. In periods
of political adversity, in the pauses of silence when the
revolutionists issued no proclamations, Giorgio earned his living
with the first work that came to hand--as sailor, as dock
labourer on the quays of Genoa, once as a hand on a farm in the
hills above Spezzia--and in his spare time he studied the thick
volume. He carried it with him into battles. Now it was his only
reading, and in order not to be deprived of it (the print was
small) he had consented to accept the present of a pair of
silver-mounted spectacles from Senora Emilia Gould, the wife of
the Englishman who managed the silver mine in the mountains three
leagues from the town. She was the only Englishwoman in Sulaco.
Giorgio Viola had a great consideration for the English. This
feeling, born on the battlefields of Uruguay, was forty years old
at the very least. Several of them had poured their blood for the
cause of freedom in America, and the first he had ever known he
remembered by the name of Samuel; he commanded a negro company
under Garibaldi, during the famous siege of Montevideo, and died
heroically with his negroes at the fording of the Boyana. He,
Giorgio, had reached the rank of ensign-alferez-and cooked for
the general. Later, in Italy, he, with the rank of lieutenant,
rode with the staff and still cooked for the general. He had
cooked for him in Lombardy through the whole campaign; on the
march to Rome he had lassoed his beef in the Campagna after the
American manner; he had been wounded in the defence of the Roman
Republic; he was one of the four fugitives who, with the general,
carried out of the woods the inanimate body of the general's wife
into the farmhouse where she died, exhausted by the hardships of
that terrible retreat. He had survived that disastrous time to
attend his general in Palermo when the Neapolitan shells from the
castle crashed upon the town. He had cooked for him on the field
of Volturno after fighting all day. And everywhere he had seen
Englishmen in the front rank of the army of freedom. He respected
their nation because they loved Garibaldi. Their very countesses
and princesses had kissed the general's hands in London, it was
said. He could well believe it; for the nation was noble, and the
man was a saint. It was enough to look once at his face to see
the divine force of faith in him and his great pity for all that
was poor, suffering, and oppressed in this world.
The spirit of self-forgetfulness, the simple devotion to a vast
humanitarian idea which inspired the thought and stress of that
revolutionary time, had left its mark upon Giorgio in a sort of
austere contempt for all personal advantage. This man, whom the
lowest class in Sulaco suspected of having a buried hoard in his
kitchen, had all his life despised money. The leaders of his
youth had lived poor, had died poor. It had been a habit of his
mind to disregard to-morrow. It was engendered partly by an
existence of excitement, adventure, and wild warfare. But mostly
it was a matter of principle. It did not resemble the
carelessness of a condottiere, it was a puritanism of conduct,
born of stern enthusiasm like the puritanism of religion.
This stern devotion to a cause had cast a gloom upon Giorgio's
old age. It cast a gloom because the cause seemed lost. Too many
kings and emperors flourished yet in the world which God had
meant for the people. He was sad because of his simplicity.
Though always ready to help his countrymen, and greatly respected
by the Italian emigrants wherever he lived (in his exile he
called it), he could not conceal from himself that they cared
nothing for the wrongs of down-trodden nations. They listened to
his tales of war readily, but seemed to ask themselves what he
had got out of it after all. There was nothing that they could
see. "We wanted nothing, we suffered for the love of all
humanity!" he cried out furiously sometimes, and the powerful
voice, the blazing eyes, the shaking of the white mane, the
brown, sinewy hand pointing upwards as if to call heaven to
witness, impressed his hearers. After the old man hadbroken off
abruptly with a jerk of the head and a movement of the arm,
meaning clearly, "But what's the good of talking to you?" they
nudged each other. There was in old Giorgio an energy of
feeling, a personal quality of conviction, something they called
"terribilita"--"an old lion," they used to say of him. Some
slight incident, a chance word would set him off talking on the
beach to the Italian fishermen of Maldonado, in the little shop
he kept afterwards (in Valparaiso) to his countrymen customers;
of an evening, suddenly, in the cafe at one end of the Casa Viola
(the other was reserved for the English engineers) to the select
clientele of engine-drivers and foremen of the railway shops.
With their handsome, bronzed, lean faces, shiny black ringlets,
glistening eyes, broad-chested, bearded, sometimes a tiny gold
ring in the lobe of the ear, the aristocracy of the railway works
listened to him, turning away from their cards or dominoes. Here
and there a fair-haired Basque studied his hand meantime, waiting
without protest. No native of Costaguana intruded there. This was
the Italian stronghold. Even the Sulaco policemen on a night
patrol let their horses pace softly by, bending low in the saddle
to glance through the window at the heads in a fog of smoke; and
the drone of old Giorgio's declamatory narrative seemed to sink
behind them into the plain. Only now and then the assistant of
the chief of police, some broad-faced, brown little gentleman,
with a great deal of Indian in him, would put in an appearance.
Leaving his man outside with the horses he advanced with a
confident, sly smile, and without a word up to the long trestle
table. He pointed to one of the bottles on the shelf; Giorgio,
thrusting his pipe into his mouth abruptly, served him in person.
Nothing would be heard but the slight jingle of the spurs. His
glass emptied, he would take a leisurely, scrutinizing look all
round the room, go out, and ride away slowly, circling towards
the town.
CHAPTER FIVE
IN THIS way only was the power of the local authorities
vindicated amongst the great body of strong-limbed foreigners who
dug the earth, blasted the rocks, drove the engines for the
"progressive and patriotic undertaking." In these very words
eighteen months before the Excellentissimo Senor don Vincente
Ribiera, the Dictator of Costaguana, had described the National
Central Railway in his great speech at the turning of the first
sod.
He had come on purpose to Sulaco, and there was a one-o'clock
dinner-party, a convite offered by the O.S.N. Company on board
the Juno after the function on shore. Captain Mitchell had
himself steered the cargo lighter, all draped with flags, which,
in tow of the Juno's steam launch, took the Excellentissimo from
the jetty to the ship. Everybody of note in Sulaco had been
invited--the one or two foreign merchants, all the
representatives of the old Spanish families then in town, the
great owners of estates on the plain, grave, courteous, simple
men, caballeros of pure descent, with small hands and feet,
conservative, hospitable, and kind. The Occidental Province was
their stronghold; their Blanco party had triumphed now; it was
their President-Dictator, a Blanco of the Blancos, who sat
smiling urbanely between the representatives of two friendly
foreign powers. They had come with him from Sta. Marta to
countenance by their presence the enterprise in which the capital
of their countries was engaged. The only lady of that company
was Mrs. Gould, the wife of Don Carlos, the administrator of the
San Tome silver mine. The ladies of Sulaco were not advanced
enough to take part in the public life to that extent. They had
come out strongly at the great ball at the Intendencia the
evening before, but Mrs. Gould alone had appeared, a bright spot
in the group of black coats behind the President-Dictator, on the
crimson cloth-covered stage erected under a shady tree on the
shore of the harbour, where the ceremony of turning the first sod
had taken place. She had come off in the cargo lighter, full of
notabilities, sitting under the flutter of gay flags, in the
place of honour by the side of Captain Mitchell, who steered, and
her clear dress gave the only truly festive note to the sombre
gathering in the long, gorgeous saloon of the Juno.
The head of the chairman of the railway board (from London),
handsome and pale in a silvery mist of white hair and clipped
beard, hovered near her shoulder attentive, smiling, and
fatigued. The journey from London to Sta. Marta in mail boats and
the special carriages of the Sta. Marta coast-line (the only
railway so far) had been tolerable--even pleasant--quite
tolerable. But the trip over the mountains to Sulaco was another
sort of experience, in an old diligencia over impassable roads
skirting awful precipices.
"We have been upset twice in one day on the brink of very deep
ravines," he was telling Mrs. Gould in an undertone. "And when we
arrived here at last I don't know what we should have done
without your hospitality. What an out-of-the-way place Sulaco
is!--and for a harbour, too! Astonishing!"
"Ah, but we are very proud of it. It used to be historically
important. The highest ecclesiastical court for two
viceroyalties, sat here in the olden time," she instructed him
with animation.
"I am impressed. I didn't mean to be disparaging. You seem very
patriotic."
"The place is lovable, if only by its situation. Perhaps you
don't know what an old resident I am."
"How old, I wonder," he murmured, looking at her with a slight
smile. Mrs. Gould's appearance was made youthful by the mobile
intelligence of her face. "We can't give you your ecclesiastical
court back again; but you shall have more steamers, a railway, a
telegraph-cable--a future in the great world which is worth
infinitely more than any amount of ecclesiastical past. You
shall be brought in touch with something greater than two
viceroyalties. But I had no notion that a place on a sea-coast
could remain so isolated from the world. If it had been a
thousand miles inland now--most remarkable! Has anything ever
happened here for a hundred years before to-day?"
While he talked in a slow, humorous tone, she kept her little
smile. Agreeing ironically, she assured him that certainly
not--nothing ever happened in Sulaco. Even the revolutions, of
which there had been two in her time, had respected the repose of
the place. Their course ran in the more populous southern parts
of the Republic, and the great valley of Sta. Marta, which was
like one great battlefield of the parties, with the possession of
the capital for a prize and an outlet to another ocean. They were
more advanced over there. Here in Sulaco they heard only the
echoes of these great questions, and, of course, their official
world changed each time, coming to them over their rampart of
mountains which he himself had traversed in an old diligencia,
with such a risk to life and limb.
The chairman of the railway had been enjoying her hospitality for
several days, and he was really grateful for it. It was only
since he had left Sta. Marta that he had utterly lost touch with
the feeling of European life on the background of his exotic
surroundings. In the capital he had been the guest of the
Legation, and had been kept busy negotiating with the members of
Don Vincente's Government--cultured men, men to whom the
conditions of civilized business were not unknown.
What concerned him most at the time was the acquisition of land
for the railway. In the Sta. Marta Valley, where there was
already one line in existence, the people were tractable, and it
was only a matter of price. A commission had been nominated to
fix the values, and the difficulty resolved itself into the
judicious influencing of the Commissioners. But in Sulaco--the
Occidental Province for whose very development the railway was
intended--there had been trouble. It had been lying for ages
ensconced behind its natural barriers, repelling modern
enterprise by the precipices of its mountain range, by its
shallow harbour opening into the everlasting calms of a gulf full
of clouds, by the benighted state of mind of the owners of its
fertile territory--all these aristocratic old Spanish families,
all those Don Ambrosios this and Don Fernandos that, who seemed
actually to dislike and distrust the coming of the railway over
their lands. It had happened that some of the surveying parties
scattered all over the province had been warned off with threats
of violence. In other cases outrageous pretensions as to price
had been raised. But the man of railways prided himself on being
equal to every emergency. Since he was met by the inimical
sentiment of blind conservatism in Sulaco he would meet it by
sentiment, too, before taking his stand on his right alone. The
Government was bound to carry out its part of the contract with
the board of the new railway company, even if it had to use force
for the purpose. But he desired nothing less than an armed
disturbance in the smooth working of his plans. They were much
too vast and far-reaching, and too promising to leave a stone
unturned; and so he imagined to get the President-Dictator over
there on a tour of ceremonies and speeches, culminating in a
great function at the turning of the first sod by the harbour
shore. After all he was their own creature--that Don Vincente.
He was the embodied triumph of the best elements in the State.
These were facts, and, unless facts meant nothing, Sir John
argued to himself, such a man's influence must be real, and his
personal action would produce the conciliatory effect he
required. He had succeeded in arranging the trip with the help of
a very clever advocate, who was known in Sta. Marta as the agent
of the Gould silver mine, the biggest thing in Sulaco, and even
in the whole Republic. It was indeed a fabulously rich mine. Its
so-called agent, evidently a man of culture and ability, seemed,
without official position, to possess an extraordinary influence
in the highest Government spheres. He was able to assure Sir John
that the President-Dictator would make the journey. He regretted,
however, in the course of the same conversation, that General
Montero insisted upon going, too.
General Montero, whom the beginning of the struggle had found an
obscure army captain employed on the wild eastern frontier of the
State, had thrown in his lot with the Ribiera party at a moment
when special circumstances had given that small adhesion a
fortuitous importance. The fortunes of war served him
marvellously, and the victory of Rio Seco (after a day of
desperate fighting) put a seal to his success. At the end he
emerged General, Minister of War, and the military head of the
Blanco party, although there was nothing aristocratic in his
descent. Indeed, it was said that he and his brother, orphans,
had been brought up by the munificence of a famous European
traveller, in whose service their father had lost his life.
Another story was that their father had been nothing but a
charcoal burner in the woods, and their mother a baptised Indian
woman from the far interior.
However that might be, the Costaguana Press was in the habit of
styling Montero's forest march from his commandancia to join the
Blanco forces at the beginning of the troubles, the "most heroic
military exploit of modern times." About the same time, too, his
brother had turned up from Europe, where he had gone apparently
as secretary to a consul. Having, however, collected a small band
of outlaws, he showed some talent as guerilla chief and had been
rewarded at the pacification by the post of Military Commandant
of the capital.
The Minister of War, then, accompanied the Dictator. The board
of the O.S.N. Company, working hand-in-hand with the railway
people for the good of the Republic, had on this important
occasion instructed Captain Mitchell to put the mail-boat Juno at
the disposal of the distinguished party. Don Vincente, journeying
south from Sta. Marta, had embarked at Cayta, the principal port
of Costaguana, and came to Sulaco by sea. But the chairman of the
railway company had courageously crossed the mountains in a
ramshackle diligencia, mainly for the purpose of meeting his
engineer-in-chief engaged in the final survey of the road.
For all the indifference of a man of affairs to nature, whose
hostility can always be overcome by the resources of finance, he
could not help being impressed by his surroundings during his
halt at the surveying camp established at the highest point his
railway was to reach. He spent the night there, arriving just too
late to see the last dying glow of sunlight upon the snowy flank
of Higuerota. Pillared masses of black basalt framed like an open
portal a portion of the white field lying aslant against the
west. In the transparent air of the high altitudes everything
seemed very near, steeped in a clear stillness as in an
imponderable liquid; and with his ear ready to catch the first
sound of the expected diligencia the engineer-in-chief, at the
door of a hut of rough stones, had contemplated the changing hues
on the enormous side of the mountain, thinking that in this
sight, as in a piece of inspired music, there could be found
together the utmost delicacy of shaded expression and a
stupendous magnificence of effect.
Sir John arrived too late to hear the magnificent and inaudible
strain sung by the sunset amongst the high peaks of the Sierra.
It had sung itself out into the breathless pause of deep dusk
before, climbing down the fore wheel of the diligencia with stiff
limbs, he shook hands with the engineer.
They gave him his dinner in a stone hut like a cubical boulder,
with no door or windows in its two openings; a bright fire of
sticks (brought on muleback from the first valley below) burning
outside, sent in a wavering glare; and two candles in tin
candlesticks--lighted, it was explained to him, in his
honour--stood on a sort of rough camp table, at which he sat on
the right hand of the chief. He knew how to be amiable; and the
young men of the engineering staff, for whom the surveying of the
railway track had the glamour of the first steps on the path of
life, sat there, too, listening modestly, with their smooth faces
tanned by the weather, and very pleased to witness so much
affability in so great a man.
Afterwards, late at night, pacing to and fro outside, he had a
long talk with his chief engineer. He knew him well of old. This
was not the first undertaking in which their gifts, as
elementally different as fire and water, had worked in
conjunction. From the contact of these two personalities, who had
not the same vision of the world, there was generated a power for
the world's service--a subtle force that could set in motion
mighty machines, men's muscles, and awaken also in human breasts
an unbounded devotion to the task. Of the young fellows at the
table, to whom the survey of the track was like the tracing of
the path of life, more than one would be called to meet death
before the work was done. But the work would be done: the force
would be almost as strong as a faith. Not quite, however. In the
silence of the sleeping camp upon the moonlit plateau forming the
top of the pass like the floor of a vast arena surrounded by the
basalt walls of precipices, two strolling figures in thick
ulsters stood still, and the voice of the engineer pronounced
distinctly the words--
"We can't move mountains!"
Sir John, raising his head to follow the pointing gesture, felt
the full force of the words. The white Higuerota soared out of
the shadows of rock and earth like a frozen bubble under the
moon. All was still, till near by, behind the wall of a corral
for the camp animals, built roughly of loose stones in the form
of a circle, a pack mule stamped his forefoot and blew heavily
twice.
The engineer-in-chief had used the phrase in answer to the
chairman's tentative suggestion that the tracing of the line
could, perhaps, be altered in deference to the prejudices of the
Sulaco landowners. The chief engineer believed that the obstinacy
of men was the lesser obstacle. Moreover, to combat that they had
the great influence of Charles Gould, whereas tunnelling under
Higuerota would have been a colossal undertaking.
"Ah, yes! Gould. What sort of a man is he?"
Sir John had heard much of Charles Gould in Sta. Marta, and
wanted to know more. The engineer-in-chief assured him that the
administrator of the San Tome silver mine had an immense
influence over all these Spanish Dons. He had also one of the
best houses in Sulaco, and the Gould hospitality was beyond all
praise.
"They received me as if they had known me for years," he said.
"The little lady is kindness personified. I stayed with them for
a month. He helped me to organize the surveying parties. His
practical ownership of the San Tome silver mine gives him a
special position. He seems to have the ear of every provincial
authority apparently, and, as I said, he can wind all the
hidalgos of the province round his little finger. If you follow
his advice the difficulties will fall away, because he wants the
railway. Of course, you must be careful in what you say. He's
English, and besides he must be immensely wealthy. The Holroyd
house is in with him in that mine, so you may imagine--"
He interrupted himself as, from before one of the little fires
burning outside the low wall of the corral, arose the figure of a
man wrapped in a poncho up to the neck. The saddle which he had
been using for a pillow made a dark patch on the ground against
the red glow of embers.
"I shall see Holroyd himself on my way back through the States,"
said Sir John. "I've ascertained that he, too, wants the
railway."
The man who, perhaps disturbed by the proximity of the voices,
had arisen from the ground, struck a match to light a cigarette.
The flame showed a bronzed, black-whiskered face, a pair of eyes
gazing straight; then, rearranging his wrappings, he sank full
length and laid his head again on the saddle.
"That's our camp-master, whom I must send back to Sulaco now we
are going to carry our survey into the Sta. Marta Valley," said
the engineer. "A most useful fellow, lent me by Captain Mitchell
of the O.S.N. Company. It was very good of Mitchell. Charles
Gould told me I couldn't do better than take advantage of the
offer. He seems to know how to rule all these muleteers and
peons. We had not the slightest trouble with our people. He shall
escort your diligencia right into Sulaco with some of our railway
peons. The road is bad. To have him at hand may save you an upset
or two. He promised me to take care of your person all the way
down as if you were his father."
This camp-master was the Italian sailor whom all the Europeans in
Sulaco, following Captain Mitchell's mispronunciation, were in
the habit of calling Nostromo. And indeed, taciturn and ready,
he did take excellent care of his charge at the bad parts of the
road, as Sir John himself acknowledged to Mrs. Gould afterwards.
CHAPTER SIX
AT THAT time Nostromo had been already long enough in the country
to raise to the highest pitch Captain Mitchell's opinion of the
extraordinary value of his discovery. Clearly he was one of those
invaluable subordinates whom to possess is a legitimate cause of
boasting. Captain Mitchell plumed himself upon his eye for
men--but he was not selfish--and in the innocence of his pride
was already developing that mania for "lending you my Capataz de
Cargadores" which was to bring Nostromo into personal contact,
sooner or later, with every European in Sulaco, as a sort of
universal factotum--a prodigy of efficiency in his own sphere of
life.
"The fellow is devoted to me, body and soul!" Captain Mitchell
was given to affirm; and though nobody, perhaps, could have
explained why it should be so, it was impossible on a survey of
their relation to throw doubt on that statement, unless, indeed,
one were a bitter, eccentric character like Dr. Monygham--for
instance--whose short, hopeless laugh expressed somehow an
immense mistrust of mankind. Not that Dr. Monygham was a prodigal
either of laughter or of words. He was bitterly taciturn when at
his best. At his worst people feared the open scornfulness of his
tongue. Only Mrs. Gould could keep his unbelief in men's motives
within due bounds; but even to her (on an occasion not connected
with Nostromo, and in a tone which for him was gentle), even to
her, he had said once, "Really, it is most unreasonable to demand
that a man should think of other people so much better than he is
able to think of himself."
And Mrs. Gould had hastened to drop the subject. There were
strange rumours of the English doctor. Years ago, in the time of
Guzman Bento, he had been mixed up, it was whispered, in a
conspiracy which was betrayed and, as people expressed it,
drowned in blood. His hair had turned grey, his hairless, seamed
face was of a brick-dust colour; the large check pattern of his
flannel shirt and his old stained Panama hat were an established
defiance to the conventionalities of Sulaco. Had it not been for
the immaculate cleanliness of his apparel he might have been
taken for one of those shiftless Europeans that are a moral
eyesore to the respectability of a foreign colony in almost every
exotic part of the world. The young ladies of Sulaco, adorning
with clusters of pretty faces the balconies along the Street of
the Constitution, when they saw him pass, with his limping gait
and bowed head, a short linen jacket drawn on carelessly over the
flannel check shirt, would remark to each other, "Here is the
Senor doctor going to call on Dona Emilia. He has got his little
coat on." The inference was true. Its deeper meaning was hidden
from their simple intelligence. Moreover, they expended no store
of thought on the doctor. He was old, ugly, learned--and a little
"loco"--mad, if not a bit of a sorcerer, as the common people
suspected him of being. The little white jacket was in reality a
concession to Mrs. Gould's humanizing influence. The doctor, with
his habit of sceptical, bitter speech, had no other means of
showing his profound respect for the character of the woman who
was known in the country as the English Senora. He presented this
tribute very seriously indeed; it was no trifle for a man of his
habits. Mrs. Gould felt that, too, perfectly. She would never
have thought of imposing upon him this marked show of deference.
She kept her old Spanish house (one of the finest specimens in
Sulaco) open for the dispensation of the small graces of
existence. She dispensed them with simplicity and charm because
she was guided by an alert perception of values. She was highly
gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate
shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal
comprehension. Charles Gould (the Gould family, established in
Costaguana for three generations, always went to England for
their education and for their wives) imagined that he had fallen
in love with a girl's sound common sense like any other man, but
these were not exactly the reasons why, for instance, the whole
surveying camp, from the youngest of the young men to their
mature chief, should have found occasion to allude to Mrs.
Gould's house so frequently amongst the high peaks of the Sierra.
She would have protested that she had done nothing for them, with
a low laugh and a surprised widening of her grey eyes, had
anybody told her how convincingly she was remembered on the edge
of the snow-line above Sulaco. But directly, with a little
capable air of setting her wits to work, she would have found an
explanation. "Of course, it was such a surprise for these boys to
find any sort of welcome here. And I suppose they are homesick.
I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick."
She was always sorry for homesick people.
Born in the country, as his father before him, spare and tall,
with a flaming moustache, a neat chin, clear blue eyes, auburn
hair, and a thin, fresh, red face, Charles Gould looked like a
new arrival from over the sea. His grandfather had fought in the
cause of independence under Bolivar, in that famous English
legion which on the battlefield of Carabobo had been saluted by
the great Liberator as Saviours of his country. One of Charles
Gould's uncles had been the elected President of that very
province of Sulaco (then called a State) in the days of
Federation, and afterwards had been put up against the wall of a
church and shot by the order of the barbarous Unionist general,
Guzman Bento. It was the same Guzman Bento who, becoming later
Perpetual President, famed for his ruthless and cruel tyranny,
readied his apotheosis in the popular legend of a sanguinary
land-haunting spectre whose body had been carried off by the
devil in person from the brick mausoleum in the nave of the
Church of Assumption in Sta. Marta. Thus, at least, the priests
explained its disappearance to the barefooted multitude that
streamed in, awestruck, to gaze at the hole in the side of the
ugly box of bricks before the great altar.
Guzman Bento of cruel memory had put to death great numbers of
people besides Charles Gould's uncle; but with a relative
martyred in the cause of aristocracy, the Sulaco Oligarchs (this
was the phraseology of Guzman Bento's time; now they were called
Blancos, and had given up the federal idea), which meant the
families of pure Spanish descent, considered Charles as one of
themselves. With such a family record, no one could be more of a
Costaguanero than Don Carlos Gould; but his aspect was so
characteristic that in the talk of common people he was just the
Inglez--the Englishman of Sulaco. He looked more English than a
casual tourist, a sort of heretic pilgrim, however, quite unknown
in Sulaco. He looked more English than the last arrived batch of
young railway engineers, than anybody out of the hunting-field
pictures in the numbers of Punch reaching his wife's drawing-room
two months or so after date. It astonished you to hear him talk
Spanish (Castillan, as the natives say) or the Indian dialect of
the country-people so naturally. His accent had never been
English; but there was something so indelible in all these
ancestral Goulds--liberators, explorers, coffee planters,
merchants, revolutionists--of Costaguana, that he, the only
representative of the third generation in a continent possessing
its own style of horsemanship, went on looking thoroughly English
even on horseback. This is not said of him in the mocking spirit
of the Llaneros--men of the great plains--who think that no one
in the world knows how to sit a horse but themselves. Charles
Gould, to use the suitably lofty phrase, rode like a centaur.
Riding for him was not a special form of exercise; it was a
natural faculty, as walking straight is to all men sound of mind
and limb; but, all the same, when cantering beside the rutty
ox-cart track to the mine he looked in his English clothes and
with his imported saddlery as though he had come this moment to
Costaguana at his easy swift pasotrote, straight out of some
green meadow at the other side of the world.
His way would lie along the old Spanish road--the Camino Real of
popular speech--the only remaining vestige of a fact and name
left by that royalty old Giorgio Viola hated, and whose very
shadow had departed from the land; for the big equestrian statue
of Charles IV at the entrance of the Alameda, towering white
against the trees, was only known to the folk from the country
and to the beggars of the town that slept on the steps around the
pedestal, as the Horse of Stone. The other Carlos, turning off to
the left with a rapid clatter of hoofs on the disjointed pavement
--Don Carlos Gould, in his English clothes, looked as
incongruous, but much more at home than the kingly cavalier
reining in his steed on the pedestal above the sleeping leperos,
with his marble arm raised towards the marble rim of a plumed
hat.
The weather-stained effigy of the mounted king, with its vague
suggestion of a saluting gesture, seemed to present an
inscrutable breast to the political changes which had robbed it
of its very name; but neither did the other horseman, well known
to the people, keen and alive on his well-shaped, slate-coloured
beast with a white eye, wear his heart on the sleeve of his
English coat. His mind preserved its steady poise as if sheltered
in the passionless stability of private and public decencies at
home in Europe. He accepted with a like calm the shocking manner
in which the Sulaco ladies smothered their faces with pearl
powder till they looked like white plaster casts with beautiful
living eyes, the peculiar gossip of the town, and the continuous
political changes, the constant "saving of the country," which to
his wife seemed a puerile and bloodthirsty game of murder and
rapine played with terrible earnestness by depraved children. In
the early days of her Costaguana life, the little lady used to
clench her hands with exasperation at not being able to take the
public affairs of the country as seriously as the incidental
atrocity of methods deserved. She saw in them a comedy of naive
pretences, but hardly anything genuine except her own appalled
indignation. Charles, very quiet and twisting his long
moustaches, would decline to discuss them at all. Once, however,
he observed to her gently--
"My dear, you seem to forget that I was born here." These few
words made her pause as if they had been a sudden revelation.
Perhaps the mere fact of being born in the country did make a
difference. She had a great confidence in her husband; it had
always been very great. He had struck her imagination from the
first by his unsentimentalism, by that very quietude of mind
which she had erected in her thought for a sign of perfect
competency in the business of living. Don Jose Avellanos, their
neighbour across the street, a statesman, a poet, a man of
culture, who had represented his country at several European
Courts (and had suffered untold indignities as a state prisoner
in the time of the tyrant Guzman Bento), used to declare in Dona
Emilia's drawing-room that Carlos had all the English qualities
of character with a truly patriotic heart.
Mrs. Gould, raising her eyes to her husband's thin, red and tan
face, could not detect the slightest quiver of a feature at what
he must have heard said of his patriotism. Perhaps he had just
dismounted on his return from the mine; he was English enough to
disregard the hottest hours of the day. Basilio, in a livery of
white linen and a red sash, had squatted for a moment behind his
heels to unstrap the heavy, blunt spurs in the patio; and then
the Senor Administrator would go up the staircase into the
gallery. Rows of plants in pots, ranged on the balustrade between
the pilasters of the arches, screened the corredor with their
leaves and flowers from the quadrangle below, whose paved space
is the true hearthstone of a South American house, where the
quiet hours of domestic life are marked by the shifting of light
and shadow on the flagstones.
Senor Avellanos was in the habit of crossing the patio at five
o'clock almost every day. Don Jose chose to come over at tea-time
because the English rite at Dona Emilia's house reminded him of
the time he lived in London as Minister Plenipotentiary to the
Court of St. James. He did not like tea; and, usually, rocking
his American chair, his neat little shiny boots crossed on the
foot-rest, he would talk on and on with a sort of complacent
virtuosity wonderful in a man of his age, while he held the cup
in his hands for a long time. His close-cropped head was
perfectly white; his eyes coalblack.
On seeing Charles Gould step into the sala he would nod
provisionally and go on to the end of the oratorial period. Only
then he would say--
"Carlos, my friend, you have ridden from San Tome in the heat of
the day. Always the true English activity. No? What?"
He drank up all the tea at once in one draught. This performance
was invariably followed by a slight shudder and a low,
involuntary "br-r-r-r," which was not covered by the hasty
exclamation, "Excellent!"
Then giving up the empty cup into his young friend's hand,
extended with a smile, he continued to expatiate upon the
patriotic nature of the San Tome mine for the simple pleasure of
talking fluently, it seemed, while his reclining body jerked
backwards and forwards in a rocking-chair of the sort exported
from the United States. The ceiling of the largest drawing-room
of the Casa Gould extended its white level far above his head.
The loftiness dwarfed the mixture of heavy, straight-backed
Spanish chairs of brown wood with leathern seats, and European
furniture, low, and cushioned all over, like squat little
monsters gorged to bursting with steel springs and horsehair.
There were knick-knacks on little tables, mirrors let into the
wall above marble consoles, square spaces of carpet under the two
groups of armchairs, each presided over by a deep sofa; smaller
rugs scattered all over the floor of red tiles; three windows
from the ceiling down to the ground, opening on a balcony, and
flanked by the perpendicular folds of the dark hangings. The
stateliness of ancient days lingered between the four high,
smooth walls, tinted a delicate primrose-colour; and Mrs. Gould,
with her little head and shining coils of hair, sitting in a
cloud of muslin and lace before a slender mahogany table,
resembled a fairy posed lightly before dainty philtres dispensed
out of vessels of silver and porcelain.
Mrs. Gould knew the history of the San Tome mine. Worked in the
early days mostly by means of lashes on the backs of slaves, its
yield had been paid for in its own weight of human bones. Whole
tribes of Indians had perished in the exploitation; and then the
mine was abandoned, since with this primitive method it had
ceased to make a profitable return, no matter how many corpses
were thrown into its maw. Then it became forgotten. It was
rediscovered after the War of Independence. An English company
obtained the right to work it, and found so rich a vein that
neither the exactions of successive governments, nor the
periodical raids of recruiting officers upon the population of
paid miners they had created, could discourage their
perseverance. But in the end, during the long turmoil of
pronunciamentos that followed the death of the famous Guzman
Bento, the native miners, incited to revolt by the emissaries
sent out from the capital, had risen upon their English chiefs
and murdered them to a man. The decree of confiscation which
appeared immediately afterwards in the Diario Official, published
in Sta. Marta, began with the words: "Justly incensed at the
grinding oppression of foreigners, actuated by sordid motives of
gain rather than by love for a country where they come
impoverished to seek their fortunes, the mining population of San
Tome, etc. . . ." and ended with the declaration: "The chief of
the State has resolved to exercise to the full his power of
clemency. The mine, which by every law, international, human,
and divine, reverts now to the Government as national property,
shall remain closed till the sword drawn for the sacred defence
of liberal principles has accomplished its mission of securing
the happiness of our beloved country."
And for many years this was the last of the San Tome mine. What
advantage that Government had expected from the spoliation, it is
impossible to tell now. Costaguana was made with difficulty to
pay a beggarly money compensation to the families of the victims,
and then the matter dropped out of diplomatic despatches. But
afterwards another Government bethought itself of that valuable
asset. It was an ordinary Costaguana Government--the fourth in
six years--but it judged of its opportunities sanely. It
remembered the San Tome mine with a secret conviction of its
worthlessness in their own hands, but with an ingenious insight
into the various uses a silver mine can be put to, apart from the
sordid process of extracting the metal from under the ground. The
father of Charles Gould, for a long time one of the most wealthy
merchants of Costaguana, had already lost a considerable part of
his fortune in forced loans to the successive Governments. He was
a man of calm judgment, who never dreamed of pressing his claims;
and when, suddenly, the perpetual concession of the San Tome mine
was offered to him in full settlement, his alarm became extreme.
He was versed in the ways of Governments. Indeed, the intention
of this affair, though no doubt deeply meditated in the closet,
lay open on the surface of the document presented urgently for
his signature. The third and most important clause stipulated
that the concession-holder should pay at once to the Government
five years' royalties on the estimated output of the mine.
Mr. Gould, senior, defended himself from this fatal favour with
many arguments and entreaties, but without success. He knew
nothing of mining; he had no means to put his concession on the
European market; the mine as a working concern did not exist. The
buildings had been burnt down, the mining plant had been
destroyed, the mining population had disappeared from the
neighbourhood years and years ago; the very road had vanished
under a flood of tropical vegetation as effectually as if
swallowed by the sea; and the main gallery had fallen in within a
hundred yards from the entrance. It was no longer an abandoned
mine; it was a wild, inaccessible, and rocky gorge of the Sierra,
where vestiges of charred timber, some heaps of smashed bricks,
and a few shapeless pieces of rusty iron could have been found
under the matted mass of thorny creepers covering the ground. Mr.
Gould, senior, did not desire the perpetual possession of that
desolate locality; in fact, the mere vision of it arising before
his mind in the still watches of the night had the power to
exasperate him into hours of hot and agitated insomnia.
It so happened, however, that the Finance Minister of the time
was a man to whom, in years gone by, Mr. Gould had,
unfortunately, declined to grant some small pecuniary assistance,
basing his refusal on the ground that the applicant was a
notorious gambler and cheat, besides being more than half
suspected of a robbery with violence on a wealthy ranchero in a
remote country district, where he was actually exercising the
function of a judge. Now, after reaching his exalted position,
that politician had proclaimed his intention to repay evil with
good to Senor Gould--the poor man. He affirmed and reaffirmed
this resolution in the drawing-rooms of Sta. Marta, in a soft and
implacable voice, and with such malicious glances that Mr.
Gould's best friends advised him earnestly to attempt no bribery
to get the matter dropped. It would have been useless. Indeed,
it would not have been a very safe proceeding. Such was also the
opinion of a stout, loud-voiced lady of French extraction, the
daughter, she said, of an officer of high rank (officier
superieur de l'armee), who was accommodated with lodgings within
the walls of a secularized convent next door to the Ministry of
Finance. That florid person, when approached on behalf of Mr.
Gould in a proper manner, and with a suitable present, shook her
head despondently. She was good-natured, and her despondency was
genuine. She imagined she could not take money in consideration
of something she could not accomplish. The friend of Mr. Gould,
charged with the delicate mission, used to say afterwards that
she was the only honest person closely or remotely connected with
the Government he had ever met. "No go," she had said with a
cavalier, husky intonation which was natural to her, and using
turns of expression more suitable to a child of parents unknown
than to the orphaned daughter of a general officer. "No; it's no
go. Pas moyen, mon garcon. C'est dommage, tout de meme. Ah! zut!
Je ne vole pas mon monde. Je ne suis pas ministre--moi! Vous
pouvez emporter votre petit sac."
For a moment, biting her carmine lip, she deplored inwardly the
tyranny of the rigid principles governing the sale of her
influence in high places. Then, significantly, and with a touch
of impatience, "Allez," she added, "et dites bien a votre
bonhomme--entendez-vous?--qu'il faut avaler la pilule."
After such a warning there was nothing for it but to sign and
pay. Mr. Gould had swallowed the pill, and it was as though it
had been compounded of some subtle poison that acted directly on
his brain. He became at once mine-ridden, and as he was well read
in light literature it took to his mind the form of the Old Man
of the Sea fastened upon his shoulders. He also began to dream of
vampires. Mr. Gould exaggerated to himself the disadvantages of
his new position, because he viewed it emotionally. His position
in Costaguana was no worse than before. But man is a desperately
conservative creature, and the extravagant novelty of this
outrage upon his purse distressed his sensibilities. Everybody
around him was being robbed by the grotesque and murderous bands
that played their game of governments and revolutions after the
death of Guzman Bento. His experience had taught him that,
however short the plunder might fall of their legitimate
expectations, no gang in possession of the Presidential Palace
would be so incompetent as to suffer itself to be baffled by the
want of a pretext. The first casual colonel of the barefooted
army of scarecrows that came along was able to expose with force
and precision to any mere civilian his titles to a sum of 10,000
dollars; the while his hope would be immutably fixed upon a
gratuity, at any rate, of no less than a thousand. Mr. Gould
knew that very well, and, armed with resignation, had waited for
better times. But to be robbed under the forms of legality and
business was intolerable to his imagination. Mr. Gould, the
father, had one fault in his sagacious and honourable character:
he attached too much importance to form. It is a failing common
to mankind, whose views are tinged by prejudices. There was for
him in that affair a malignancy of perverted justice which, by
means of a moral shock, attacked his vigorous physique. "It will
end by killing me," he used to affirm many times a day. And, in
fact, since that time he began to suffer from fever, from liver
pains, and mostly from a worrying inability to think of anything
else. The Finance Minister could have formed no conception of the
profound subtlety of his revenge. Even Mr. Gould's letters to his
fourteen-year-old boy Charles, then away in England for his
education, came at last to talk of practically nothing but the
mine. He groaned over the injustice, the persecution, the outrage
of that mine; he occupied whole pages in the exposition of the
fatal consequences attaching to the possession of that mine from
every point of view, with every dismal inference, with words of
horror at the apparently eternal character of that curse. For the
Concession had been granted to him and his descendants for ever.
He implored his son never to return to Costaguana, never to claim
any part of his inheritance there, because it was tainted by the
infamous Concession; never to touch it, never to approach it, to
forget that America existed, and pursue a mercantile career in
Europe. And each letter ended with bitter self-reproaches for
having stayed too long in that cavern of thieves, intriguers, and
brigands.
To be told repeatedly that one's future is blighted because of
the possession of a silver mine is not, at the age of fourteen, a
matter of prime importance as to its main statement; but in its
form it is calculated to excite a certain amount of wonder and
attention. In course of time the boy, at first only puzzled by
the angry jeremiads, but rather sorry for his dad, began to turn
the matter over in his mind in such moments as he could spare
from play and study. In about a year he had evolved from the
lecture of the letters a definite conviction that there was a
silver mine in the Sulaco province of the Republic of Costaguana,
where poor Uncle Harry had been shot by soldiers a great many
years before. There was also connected closely with that mine a
thing called the "iniquitous Gould Concession," apparently
written on a paper which his father desired ardently to "tear and
fling into the faces" of presidents, members of judicature, and
ministers of State. And this desire persisted, though the names
of these people, he noticed, seldom remained the same for a whole
year together. This desire (since the thing was iniquitous)
seemed quite natural to the boy, though why the affair was
iniquitous he did not know. Afterwards, with advancing wisdom, he
managed to clear the plain truth of the business from the
fantastic intrusions of the Old Man of the Sea, vampires, and
ghouls, which had lent to his father's correspondence the flavour
of a gruesome Arabian Nights tale. In the end, the growing youth
attained to as close an intimacy with the San Tome mine as the
old man who wrote these plaintive and enraged letters on the
other side of the sea. He had been made several times already to
pay heavy fines for neglecting to work the mine, he reported,
besides other sums extracted from him on account of future
royalties, on the ground that a man with such a valuable
concession in his pocket could not refuse his financial
assistance to the Government of the Republic. The last of his
fortune was passing away from him against worthless receipts, he
wrote, in a rage, whilst he was being pointed out as an
individual who had known how to secure enormous advantages from
the necessities of his country. And the young man in Europe grew
more and more interested in that thing which could provoke such a
tumult of words and passion.
He thought of it every day; but he thought of it without
bitterness. It might have been an unfortunate affair for his poor
dad, and the whole story threw a queer light upon the social and
political life of Costaguana. The view he took of it was
sympathetic to his father, yet calm and reflective. His personal
feelings had not been outraged, and it is difficult to resent
with proper and durable indignation the physical or mental
anguish of another organism, even if that other organism is one's
own father. By the time he was twenty Charles Gould had, in his
turn, fallen under the spell of the San Tome mine. But it was
another form of enchantment, more suitable to his youth, into
whose magic formula there entered hope, vigour, and
self-confidence, instead of weary indignation and despair. Left
after he was twenty to his own guidance (except for the severe
injunction not to return to Costaguana), he had pursued his
studies in Belgium and France with the idea of qualifying for a
mining engineer. But this scientific aspect of his labours
remained vague and imperfect in his mind. Mines had acquired for
him a dramatic interest. He studied their peculiarities from a
personal point of view, too, as one would study the varied
characters of men. He visited them as one goes with curiosity
to call upon remarkable persons. He visited mines in Germany, in
Spain, in Cornwall. Abandoned workings had for him strong
fascination. Their desolation appealed to him like the sight of
human misery, whose causes are varied and profound. They might
have been worthless, but also they might have been misunderstood.
His future wife was the first, and perhaps the only person to
detect this secret mood which governed the profoundly sensible,
almost voiceless attitude of this man towards the world of
material things. And at once her delight in him, lingering with
half-open wings like those birds that cannot rise easily from a
flat level, found a pinnacle from which to soar up into the
skies.
They had become acquainted in Italy, where the future Mrs. Gould
was staying with an old and pale aunt who, years before, had
married a middle-aged, impoverished Italian marquis. She now
mourned that man, who had known how to give up his life to the
independence and unity of his country, who had known how to be as
enthusiastic in his generosity as the youngest of those who fell
for that very cause of which old Giorgio Viola was a drifting
relic, as a broken spar is suffered to float away disregarded
after a naval victory. The Marchesa led a still, whispering
existence, nun-like in her black robes and a white band over the
forehead, in a corner of the first floor of an ancient and
ruinous palace, whose big, empty halls downstairs sheltered under
their painted ceilings the harvests, the fowls, and even the
cattle, together with the whole family of the tenant farmer.
The two young people had met in Lucca. After that meeting Charles
Gould visited no mines, though they went together in a carriage,
once, to see some marble quarries, where the work resembled
mining in so far that it also was the tearing of the raw material
of treasure from the earth. Charles Gould did not open his heart
to her in any set speeches. He simply went on acting and thinking
in her sight. This is the true method of sincerity. One of his
frequent remarks was, "I think sometimes that poor father takes a
wrong view of that San Tome business." And they discussed that
opinion long and earnestly, as if they could influence a mind
across half the globe; but in reality they discussed it because
the sentiment of love can enter into any subject and live
ardently in remote phrases. For this natural reason these
discussions were precious to Mrs. Gould in her engaged state.
Charles feared that Mr. Gould, senior, was wasting his strength
and making himself ill by his efforts to get rid of the
Concession. "I fancy that this is not the kind of handling it
requires," he mused aloud, as if to himself. And when she
wondered frankly that a man of character should devote his
energies to plotting and intrigues, Charles would remark, with a
gentle concern that understood her wonder, "You must not forget
that he was born there."
She would set her quick mind to work upon that, and then make the
inconsequent retort, which he accepted as perfectly sagacious,
because, in fact, it was so--
"Well, and you? You were born there, too."
He knew his answer.
"That's different. I've been away ten years. Dad never had such a
long spell; and it was more than thirty years ago."
She was the first person to whom he opened his lips after
receiving the news of his father's death.
"It has killed him!" he said.
He had walked straight out of town with the news, straight out
before him in the noonday sun on the white road, and his feet had
brought him face to face with her in the hall of the ruined
palazzo, a room magnificent and naked, with here and there a long
strip of damask, black with damp and age, hanging down on a bare
panel of the wall. It was furnished with exactly one gilt
armchair, with a broken back, and an octagon columnar stand
bearing a heavy marble vase ornamented with sculptured masks and
garlands of flowers, and cracked from top to bottom. Charles
Gould was dusty with the white dust of the road lying on his
boots, on his shoulders, on his cap with two peaks. Water dripped
from under it all over his face, and he grasped a thick oaken
cudgel in his bare right hand.
She went very pale under the roses of her big straw hat, gloved,
swinging a clear sunshade, caught just as she was going out to
meet him at the bottom of the hill, where three poplars stand
near the wall of a vineyard.
"It has killed him!" he repeated. "He ought to have had many
years yet. We are a long-lived family."
She was too startled to say anything; he was contemplating with a
penetrating and motionless stare the cracked marble urn as though
he had resolved to fix its shape for ever in his memory. It was
only when, turning suddenly to her, he blurted out twice, "I've
come to you--I've come straight to you--," without being able to
finish his phrase, that the great pitifulness of that lonely and
tormented death in Costaguana came to her with the full force of
its misery. He caught hold of her hand, raised it to his lips,
and at that she dropped her parasol to pat him on the cheek,
murmured "Poor boy," and began to dry her eyes under the downward
curve of her hat-brim, very small in her simple, white frock,
almost like a lost child crying in the degraded grandeur of the
noble hall, while he stood by her, again perfectly motionless in
the contemplation of the marble urn.
Afterwards they went out for a long walk, which was silent till
he exclaimed suddenly--
"Yes. But if he had only grappled with it in a proper way!"
And then they stopped. Everywhere there were long shadows lying
on the hills, on the roads, on the enclosed fields of olive
trees; the shadows of poplars, of wide chestnuts, of farm
buildings, of stone walls; and in mid-air the sound of a bell,
thin and alert, was like the throbbing pulse of the sunset glow.
Her lips were slightly parted as though in surprise that he
should not be looking at her with his usual expression. His usual
expression was unconditionally approving and attentive. He was
in his talks with her the most anxious and deferential of
dictators, an attitude that pleased her immensely. It affirmed
her power without detracting from his dignity. That slight girl,
with her little feet, little hands, little face attractively
overweighted by great coils of hair; with a rather large mouth,
whose mere parting seemed to breathe upon you the fragrance of
frankness and generosity, had the fastidious soul of an
experienced woman. She was, before all things and all flatteries,
careful of her pride in the object of her choice. But now he was
actually not looking at her at all; and his expression was tense
and irrational, as is natural in a man who elects to stare at
nothing past a young girl's head.
"Well, yes. It was iniquitous. They corrupted him thoroughly, the
poor old boy. Oh! why wouldn't he let me go back to him? But now
I shall know how to grapple with this."
After pronouncing these words with immense assurance, he glanced
down at her, and at once fell a prey to distress, incertitude,
and fear.
The only thing he wanted to know now, he said, was whether she
did love him enough--whether she would have the courage to go
with him so far away? He put these questions to her in a voice
that trembled with anxiety--for he was a determined man.
She did. She would. And immediately the future hostess of all the
Europeans in Sulaco had the physical experience of the earth
falling away from under her. It vanished completely, even to the
very sound of the bell. When her feet touched the ground again,
the bell was still ringing in the valley; she put her hands up to
her hair, breathing quickly, and glanced up and down the stony
lane. It was reassuringly empty. Meantime, Charles, stepping with
one foot into a dry and dusty ditch, picked up the open parasol,
which had bounded away from them with a martial sound of drum
taps. He handed it to her soberly, a little crestfallen.
They turned back, and after she had slipped her hand on his arm,
the first words he pronounced were--
"It's lucky that we shall be able to settle in a coast town.
You've heard its name. It is Sulaco. I am so glad poor father did
get that house. He bought a big house there years ago, in order
that there should always be a Casa Gould in the principal town of
what used to be called the Occidental Province. I lived there
once, as a small boy, with my dear mother, for a whole year,
while poor father was away in the United States on business. You
shall be the new mistress of the Casa Gould."
And later, in the inhabited corner of the Palazzo above the
vineyards, the marble hills, the pines and olives of Lucca, he
also said--
"The name of Gould has been always highly respected in Sulaco. My
uncle Harry was chief of the State for some time, and has left a
great name amongst the first families. By this I mean the pure
Creole families, who take no part in the miserable farce of
governments. Uncle Harry was no adventurer. In Costaguana we
Goulds are no adventurers. He was of the country, and he loved
it, but he remained essentially an Englishman in his ideas. He
made use of the political cry of his time. It was Federation. But
he was no politician. He simply stood up for social order out of
pure love for rational liberty and from his hate of oppression.
There was no nonsense about him. He went to work in his own way
because it seemed right, just as I feel I must lay hold of that
mine."
In such words he talked to her because his memory was very full
of the country of his childhood, his heart of his life with that
girl, and his mind of the San Tome Concession. He added that he
would have to leave her for a few days to find an American, a man
from San Francisco, who was still somewhere in Europe. A few
months before he had made his acquaintance in an old historic
German town, situated in a mining district. The American had his
womankind with him, but seemed lonely while they were sketching
all day long the old doorways and the turreted corners of the
mediaeval houses. Charles Gould had with him the inseparable
companionship of the mine. The other man was interested in mining
enterprises, knew something of Costaguana, and was no stranger to
the name of Gould. They had talked together with some intimacy
which was made possible by the difference of their ages. Charles
wanted now to find that capitalist of shrewd mind and accessible
character. His father's fortune in Costaguana, which he had
supposed to be still considerable, seemed to have melted in the
rascally crucible of revolutions. Apart from some ten thousand
pounds deposited in England, there appeared to be nothing left
except the house in Sulaco, a vague right of forest exploitation
in a remote and savage district, and the San Tome Concession,
which had attended his poor father to the very brink of the
grave.
He explained those things. It was late when they parted. She had
never before given him such a fascinating vision of herself. All
the eagerness of youth for a strange life, for great distances,
for a future in which there was an air of adventure, of combat--a
subtle thought of redress and conquest, had filled her with an
intense excitement, which she returned to the giver with a more
open and exquisite display of tenderness.
He left her to walk down the hill, and directly he found himself
alone he became sober. That irreparable change a death makes in
the course of our daily thoughts can be felt in a vague and
poignant discomfort of mind. It hurt Charles Gould to feel that
never more, by no effort of will, would he be able to think of
his father in the same way he used to think of him when the poor
man was alive. His breathing image was no longer in his power.
This consideration, closely affecting his own identity, filled
his breast with a mournful and angry desire for action. In this
his instinct was unerring. Action is consolatory. It is the
enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Only in
the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over
the Fates. For his action, the mine was obviously the only field.
It was imperative sometimes to know how to disobey the solemn
wishes of the dead. He resolved firmly to make his disobedience
as thorough (by way of atonement) as it well could be. The mine
had been the cause of an absurd moral disaster; its working must
be made a serious and moral success. He owed it to the dead man's
memory. Such were the--properly speaking--emotions of Charles
Gould. His thoughts ran upon the means of raising a large amount
of capital in San Francisco or elsewhere; and incidentally there
occurred to him also the general reflection that the counsel of
the departed must be an unsound guide. Not one of them could be
aware beforehand what enormous changes the death of any given
individual may produce in the very aspect of the world.
The latest phase in the history of the mine Mrs. Gould knew from
personal experience. It was in essence the history of her married
life. The mantle of the Goulds' hereditary position in Sulaco had
descended amply upon her little person; but she would not allow
the peculiarities of the strange garment to weigh down the
vivacity of her character, which was the sign of no mere
mechanical sprightliness, but of an eager intelligence. It must
not be supposed that Mrs. Gould's mind was masculine. A woman
with a masculine mind is not a being of superior efficiency; she
is simply a phenomenon of imperfect
differentiation--interestingly barren and without importance.
Dona Emilia's intelligence being feminine led her to achieve the
conquest of Sulaco, simply by lighting the way for her
unselfishness and sympathy. She could converse charmingly, but
she was not talkative. The wisdom of the heart having no concern
with the erection or demolition of theories any more than with
the defence of prejudices, has no random words at its command.
The words it pronounces have the value of acts of integrity,
tolerance, and compassion. A woman's true tenderness, like the
true virility of man, is expressed in action of a conquering
kind. The ladies of Sulaco adored Mrs. Gould. "They still look
upon me as something of a monster," Mrs. Gould had said
pleasantly to one of the three gentlemen from San Francisco she
had to entertain in her new Sulaco house just about a year after
her marriage.
They were her first visitors from abroad, and they had come to
look at the San Tome mine. She jested most agreeably, they
thought; and Charles Gould, besides knowing thoroughly what he
was about, had shown himself a real hustler. These facts caused
them to be well disposed towards his wife. An unmistakable
enthusiasm, pointed by a slight flavour of irony, made her talk
of the mine absolutely fascinating to her visitors, and provoked
them to grave and indulgent smiles in which there was a good deal
of deference. Perhaps had they known how much she was inspired
by an idealistic view of success they would have been amazed at
the state of her mind as the Spanish-American ladies had been
amazed at the tireless activity of her body. She would--in her
own words--have been for them "something of a monster." However,
the Goulds were in essentials a reticent couple, and their guests
departed without the suspicion of any other purpose but simple
profit in the working of a silver mine. Mrs. Gould had out her
own carriage, with two white mules, to drive them down to the
harbour, whence the Ceres was to carry them off into the Olympus
of plutocrats. Captain Mitchell had snatched at the occasion of
leave-taking to remark to Mrs. Gould, in a low, confidential
mutter, "This marks an epoch."
Mrs. Gould loved the patio of her Spanish house. A broad flight
of stone steps was overlooked silently from a niche in the wall
by a Madonna in blue robes with the crowned child sitting on her
arm. Subdued voices ascended in the early mornings from the paved
well of the quadrangle, with the stamping of horses and mules led
out in pairs to drink at the cistern. A tangle of slender bamboo
stems drooped its narrow, blade-like leaves over the square pool
of water, and the fat coachman sat muffled up on the edge,
holding lazily the ends of halters in his hand. Barefooted
servants passed to and fro, issuing from dark, low doorways
below; two laundry girls with baskets of washed linen; the baker
with the tray of bread made for the day; Leonarda--her own
camerista--bearing high up, swung from her hand raised above her
raven black head, a bunch of starched under-skirts dazzlingly
white in the slant of sunshine. Then the old porter would hobble
in, sweeping the flagstones, and the house was ready for the day.
All the lofty rooms on three sides of the quadrangle opened into
each other and into the corredor, with its wrought-iron railings
and a border of flowers, whence, like the lady of the mediaeval
castle, she could witness from above all the departures and
arrivals of the Casa, to which the sonorous arched gateway lent
an air of stately importance.
She had watched her carriage roll away with the three guests from
the north. She smiled. Their three arms went up simultaneously to
their three hats. Captain Mitchell, the fourth, in attendance,
had already begun a pompous discourse. Then she lingered. She
lingered, approaching her face to the clusters of flowers here
and there as if to give time to her thoughts to catch up with her
slow footsteps along the straight vista of the corredor.
A fringed Indian hammock from Aroa, gay with coloured
featherwork, had been swung judiciously in a corner that caught
the early sun; for the mornings are cool in Sulaco. The cluster
of flor de noche buena blazed in great masses before the open
glass doors of the reception rooms. A big green parrot, brilliant
like an emerald in a cage that flashed like gold, screamed out
ferociously, "Viva Costaguana!" then called twice mellifluously,
"Leonarda! Leonarda!" in imitation of Mrs. Gould's voice, and
suddenly took refuge in immobility and silence. Mrs. Gould
reached the end of the gallery and put her head through the door
of her husband's room.
Charles Gould, with one foot on a low wooden stool, was already
strapping his spurs. He wanted to hurry back to the mine. Mrs.
Gould, without coming in, glanced about the room. One tall, broad
bookcase, with glass doors, was full of books; but in the other,
without shelves, and lined with red baize, were arranged
firearms: Winchester carbines, revolvers, a couple of shot-guns,
and even two pairs of double-barrelled holster pistols. Between
them, by itself, upon a strip of scarlet velvet, hung an old
cavalry sabre, once the property of Don Enrique Gould, the hero
of the Occidental Province, presented by Don Jose Avellanos, the
hereditary friend of the family.
Otherwise, the plastered white walls were completely bare, except
for a water-colour sketch of the San Tome mountain--the work of
Dona Emilia herself. In the middle of the red-tiled floor stood
two long tables littered with plans and papers, a few chairs, and
a glass show-case containing specimens of ore from the mine.
Mrs. Gould, looking at all these things in turn, wondered aloud
why the talk of these wealthy and enterprising men discussing the
prospects, the working, and the safety of the mine rendered her
so impatient and uneasy, whereas she could talk of the mine by
the hour with her husband with unwearied interest and
satisfaction. And dropping her eyelids expressively, she added--
"What do you feel about it, Charley?"
Then, surprised at her husband's silence, she raised her eyes,
opened wide, as pretty as pale flowers. He had done with the
spurs, and, twisting his moustache with both hands, horizontally,
he contemplated her from the height of his long legs with a
visible appreciation of her appearance. The consciousness of
being thus contemplated pleased Mrs. Gould.
"They are considerable men," he said.
"I know. But have you listened to their conversation? They don't
seem to have understood anything they have seen here."
"They have seen the mine. They have understood that to some
purpose," Charles Gould interjected, in defence of the visitors;
and then his wife mentioned the name of the most considerable of
the three. He was considerable in finance and in industry. His
name was familiar to many millions of people. He was so
considerable that he would never have travelled so far away from
the centre of his activity if the doctors had not insisted, with
veiled menaces, on his taking a long holiday.
"Mr. Holroyd's sense of religion," Mrs. Gould pursued, "was
shocked and disgusted at the tawdriness of the dressed-up saints
in the cathedral--the worship, he called it, of wood and tinsel.
But it seemed to me that he looked upon his own God as a sort of
influential partner, who gets his share of profits in the
endowment of churches. That's a sort of idolatry. He told me he
endowed churches every year, Charley."
"No end of them," said Mr. Gould, marvelling inwardly at the
mobility of her physiognomy. "All over the country. He's famous
for that sort of munificence." "Oh, he didn't boast," Mrs. Gould
declared, scrupulously. "I believe he's really a good man, but
so stupid! A poor Chulo who offers a little silver arm or leg to
thank his god for a cure is as rational and more touching."
"He's at the head of immense silver and iron interests," Charles
Gould observed.
"Ah, yes! The religion of silver and iron. He's a very civil man,
though he looked awfully solemn when he first saw the Madonna on
the staircase, who's only wood and paint; but he said nothing to
me. My dear Charley, I heard those men talk among themselves.
Can it be that they really wish to become, for an immense
consideration, drawers of water and hewers of wood to all the
countries and nations of the earth?"
"A man must work to some end," Charles Gould said, vaguely.
Mrs. Gould, frowning, surveyed him from head to foot. With his
riding breeches, leather leggings (an article of apparel never
before seen in Costaguana), a Norfolk coat of grey flannel, and
those great flaming moustaches, he suggested an officer of
cavalry turned gentleman farmer. This combination was gratifying
to Mrs. Gould's tastes. "How thin the poor boy is!" she thought.
"He overworks himself." But there was no denying that his
fine-drawn, keen red face, and his whole, long-limbed, lank
person had an air of breeding and distinction. And Mrs. Gould
relented.
"I only wondered what you felt," she murmured, gently.
During the last few days, as it happened, Charles Gould had been
kept too busy thinking twice before he spoke to have paid much
attention to the state of his feelings. But theirs was a
successful match, and he had no difficulty in finding his answer.
"The best of my feelings are in your keeping, my dear," he said,
lightly; and there was so much truth in that obscure phrase that
he experienced towards her at the moment a great increase of
gratitude and tenderness.
Mrs. Gould, however, did not seem to find this answer in the
least obscure. She brightened up delicately; already he had
changed his tone.
"But there are facts. The worth of the mine--as a mine--is beyond
doubt. It shall make us very wealthy. The mere working of it is
a matter of technical knowledge, which I have--which ten thousand
other men in the world have. But its safety, its continued
existence as an enterprise, giving a return to men--to strangers,
comparative strangers--who invest money in it, is left altogether
in my hands. I have inspired confidence in a man of wealth and
position. You seem to think this perfectly natural--do you? Well,
I don't know. I don't know why I have; but it is a fact. This
fact makes everything possible, because without it I would never
have thought of disregarding my father's wishes. I would never
have disposed of the Concession as a speculator disposes of a
valuable right to a company--for cash and shares, to grow rich
eventually if possible, but at any rate to put some money at once
in his pocket. No. Even if it had been feasible--which I
doubt--I would not have done so. Poor father did not understand.
He was afraid I would hang on to the ruinous thing, waiting for
just some such chance, and waste my life miserably. That was the
true sense of his prohibition, which we have deliberately set
aside."
They were walking up and down the corredor. Her head just reached
to his shoulder. His arm, extended downwards, was about her
waist. His spurs jingled slightly.
"He had not seen me for ten years. He did not know me. He parted
from me for my sake, and he would never let me come back. He was
always talking in his letters of leaving Costaguana, of
abandoning everything and making his escape. But he was too
valuable a prey. They would have thrown him into one of their
prisons at the first suspicion."
His spurred feet clinked slowly. He was bending over his wife as
they walked. The big parrot, turning its head askew, followed
their pacing figures with a round, unblinking eye.
"He was a lonely man. Ever since I was ten years old he used to
talk to me as if I had been grown up. When I was in Europe he
wrote to me every month. Ten, twelve pages every month of my
life for ten years. And, after all, he did not know me! Just
think of it--ten whole years away; the years I was growing up
into a man. He could not know me. Do you think he could?"
Mrs. Gould shook her head negatively; which was just what her
husband had expected from the strength of the argument. But she
shook her head negatively only because she thought that no one
could know her Charles--really know him for what he was but
herself. The thing was obvious. It could be felt. It required no
argument. And poor Mr. Gould, senior, who had died too soon to
ever hear of their engagement, remained too shadowy a figure for
her to be credited with knowledge of any sort whatever.
"No, he did not understand. In my view this mine could never have
been a thing to sell. Never! After all his misery I simply could
not have touched it for money alone," Charles Gould pursued: and
she pressed her head to his shoulder approvingly.
These two young people remembered the life which had ended
wretchedly just when their own lives had come together in that
splendour of hopeful love, which to the most sensible minds
appears like a triumph of good over all the evils of the earth. A
vague idea of rehabilitation had entered the plan of their life.
That it was so vague as to elude the support of argument made it
only the stronger. It had presented itself to them at the instant
when the woman's instinct of devotion and the man's instinct of
activity receive from the strongest of illusions their most
powerful impulse. The very prohibition imposed the necessity of
success. It was as if they had been morally bound to make good
their vigorous view of life against the unnatural error of
weariness and despair. If the idea of wealth was present to them
it was only in so far as it was bound with that other success.
Mrs. Gould, an orphan from early childhood and without fortune,
brought up in an atmosphere of intellectual interests, had never
considered the aspects of great wealth. They were too remote, and
she had not learned that they were desirable. On the other hand,
she had not known anything of absolute want. Even the very
poverty of her aunt, the Marchesa, had nothing intolerable to a
refined mind; it seemed in accord with a great grief: it had the
austerity of a sacrifice offered to a noble ideal. Thus even the
most legitimate touch of materialism was wanting in Mrs. Gould's
character. The dead man of whom she thought with tenderness
(because he was Charley's father) and with some impatience
(because he had been weak), must be put completely in the wrong.
Nothing else would do to keep their prosperity without a stain on
its only real, on its immaterial side!
Charles Gould, on his part, had been obliged to keep the idea of
wealth well to the fore; but he brought it forward as a means,
not as an end. Unless the mine was good business it could not be
touched. He had to insist on that aspect of the enterprise. It
was his lever to move men who had capital. And Charles Gould
believed in the mine. He knew everything that could be known of
it. His faith in the mine was contagious, though it was not
served by a great eloquence; but business men are frequently as
sanguine and imaginative as lovers. They are affected by a
personality much oftener than people would suppose; and Charles
Gould, in his unshaken assurance, was absolutely convincing.
Besides, it was a matter of common knowledge to the men to whom
he addressed himself that mining in Costaguana was a game that
could be made considably more than worth the candle. The men of
affairs knew that very well. The real difficulty in touching it
was elsewhere. Against that there was an implication of calm and
implacable resolution in Charles Gould's very voice. Men of
affairs venture sometimes on acts that the common judgment of the
world would pronounce absurd; they make their decisions on
apparently impulsive and human grounds. "Very well," had said the
considerable personage to whom Charles Gould on his way out
through San Francisco had lucidly exposed his point of view. "Let
us suppose that the mining affairs of Sulaco are taken in hand.
There would then be in it: first, the house of Holroyd, which is
all right; then, Mr. Charles Gould, a citizen of Costaguana, who
is also all right; and, lastly, the Government of the Republic.
So far this resembles the first start of the Atacama nitrate
fields, where there was a financing house, a gentleman of the
name of Edwards, and--a Government; or, rather, two
Governments--two South American Governments. And you know what
came of it. War came of it; devastating and prolonged war came of
it, Mr. Gould. However, here we possess the advantage of having
only one South American Government hanging around for plunder out
of the deal. It is an advantage; but then there are degrees of
badness, and that Government is the Costaguana Government."
Thus spoke the considerable personage, the millionaire endower of
churches on a scale befitting the greatness of his native
land--the same to whom the doctors used the language of horrid
and veiled menaces. He was a big-limbed, deliberate man, whose
quiet burliness lent to an ample silk-faced frock-coat a
superfine dignity. His hair was iron grey, his eyebrows were
still black, and his massive profile was the profile of a
Caesar's head on an old Roman coin. But his parentage was German
and Scotch and English, with remote strains of Danish and French
blood, giving him the temperament of a Puritan and an insatiable
imagination of conquest. He was completely unbending to his
visitor, because of the warm introduction the visitor had brought
from Europe, and because of an irrational liking for earnestness
and determination wherever met, to whatever end directed.
"The Costaguana Government shall play its hand for all it's
worth--and don't you forget it, Mr. Gould. Now, what is
Costaguana? It is the bottomless pit of 10 per cent. loans and
other fool investments. European capital has been flung into it
with both hands for years. Not ours, though. We in this country
know just about enough to keep indoors when it rains. We can sit
and watch. Of course, some day we shall step in. We are bound to.
But there's no hurry. Time itself has got to wait on the greatest
country in the whole of God's Universe. We shall be giving the
word for everything: industry, trade, law, journalism, art,
politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith's
Sound, and beyond, too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up
at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in
hand the outlying islands and continents of the earth. We shall
run the world's business whether the world likes it or not. The
world can't help it--and neither can we, I guess."
By this he meant to express his faith in destiny in words
suitable to his intelligence, which was unskilled in the
presentation of general ideas. His intelligence was nourished on
facts; and Charles Gould, whose imagination had been permanently
affected by the one great fact of a silver mine, had no objection
to this theory of the world's future. If it had seemed
distasteful for a moment it was because the sudden statement of
such vast eventualities dwarfed almost to nothingness the actual
matter in hand. He and his plans and all the mineral wealth of
the Occidental Province appeared suddenly robbed of every vestige
of magnitude. The sensation was disagreeable; but Charles Gould
was not dull. Already he felt that he was producing a favourable
impression; the consciousness of that flattering fact helped him
to a vague smile, which his big interlocutor took for a smile of
discreet and admiring assent. He smiled quietly, too; and
immediately Charles Gould, with that mental agility mankind will
display in defence of a cherished hope, reflected that the very
apparent insignificance of his aim would help him to success. His
personality and his mine would be taken up because it was a
matter of no great consequence, one way or another, to a man who
referred his action to such a prodigious destiny. And Charles
Gould was not humiliated by this consideration, because the thing
remained as big as ever for him. Nobody else's vast conceptions
of destiny could diminish the aspect of his desire for the
redemption of the San Tome mine. In comparison to the correctness
of his aim, definite in space and absolutely attainable within a
limited time, the other man appeared for an instant as a dreamy
idealist of no importance.
The great man, massive and benignant, had been looking at him
thoughtfully; when he broke the short silence it was to remark
that concessions flew about thick in the air of Costaguana. Any
simple soul that just yearned to be taken in could bring down a
concession at the first shot.
"Our consuls get their mouths stopped with them," he continued,
with a twinkle of genial scorn in his eyes. But in a moment he
became grave. "A conscientious, upright man, that cares nothing
for boodle, and keeps clear of their intrigues, conspiracies, and
factions, soon gets his passports. See that, Mr. Gould? Persona
non grata. That's the reason our Government is never properly
informed. On the other hand, Europe must be kept out of this
continent, and for proper interference on our part the time is
not yet ripe, I dare say. But we here--we are not this country's
Government, neither are we simple souls. Your affair is all
right. The main question for us is whether the second partner,
and that's you, is the right sort to hold his own against the
third and unwelcome partner, which is one or another of the high
and mighty robber gangs that run the Costaguana Government. What
do you think, Mr. Gould, eh?"
He bent forward to look steadily into the unflinching eyes of
Charles Gould, who, remembering the large box full of his
father's letters, put the accumulated scorn and bitterness of
many years into the tone of his answer--
"As far as the knowledge of these men and their methods and their
politics is concerned, I can answer for myself. I have been fed
on that sort of knowledge since I was a boy. I am not likely to
fall into mistakes from excess of optimism."
"Not likely, eh? That's all right. Tact and a stiff upper lip is
what you'll want; and you could bluff a little on the strength of
your backing. Not too much, though. We will go with you as long
as the thing runs straight. But we won't be drawn into any large
trouble. This is the experiment which I am willing to make. There
is some risk, and we will take it; but if you can't keep up your
end, we will stand our loss, of course, and then--we'll let the
thing go. This mine can wait; it has been shut up before, as you
know. You must understand that under no circumstances will we
consent to throw good money after bad."
Thus the great personage had spoken then, in his own private
office, in a great city where other men (very considerable in the
eyes of a vain populace) waited with alacrity upon a wave of his
hand. And rather more than a year later, during his unexpected
appearance in Sulaco, he had emphasized his uncompromising
attitude with a freedom of sincerity permitted to his wealth and
influence. He did this with the less reserve, perhaps, because
the inspection of what had been done, and more still the way in
which successive steps had been taken, had impressed him with the
conviction that Charles Gould was perfectly capable of keeping up
his end.
"This young fellow," he thought to himself, "may yet become a
power in the land."
This thought flattered him, for hitherto the only account of this
young man he could give to his intimates was--
"My brother-in-law met him in one of these one-horse old German
towns, near some mines, and sent him on to me with a letter. He's
one of the Costaguana Goulds, pure-bred Englishmen, but all born
in the country. His uncle went into politics, was the last
Provincial President of Sulaco, and got shot after a battle. His
father was a prominent business man in Sta. Marta, tried to keep
clear of their politics, and died ruined after a lot of
revolutions. And that's your Costaguana in a nutshell."
Of course, he was too great a man to be questioned as to his
motives, even by his intimates. The outside world was at liberty
to wonder respectfully at the hidden meaning of his actions. He
was so great a man that his lavish patronage of the "purer forms
of Christianity" (which in its naive form of church-building
amused Mrs. Gould) was looked upon by his fellow-citizens as the
manifestation of a pious and humble spirit. But in his own
circles of the financial world the taking up of such a thing as
the San Tome mine was regarded with respect, indeed, but rather
as a subject for discreet jocularity. It was a great man's
caprice. In the great Holroyd building (an enormous pile of
iron, glass, and blocks of stone at the corner of two streets,
cobwebbed aloft by the radiation of telegraph wires) the heads of
principal departments exchanged humorous glances, which meant
that they were not let into the secrets of the San Tome business.
The Costaguana mail (it was never large--one fairly heavy
envelope) was taken unopened straight into the great man's room,
and no instructions dealing with it had ever been issued thence.
The office whispered that he answered personally--and not by
dictation either, but actually writing in his own hand, with pen
and ink, and, it was to be supposed, taking a copy in his own
private press copy-book, inaccessible to profane eyes. Some
scornful young men, insignificant pieces of minor machinery in
that eleven-storey-high workshop of great affairs, expressed
frankly their private opinion that the great chief had done at
last something silly, and was ashamed of his folly; others,
elderly and insignificant, but full of romantic reverence for the
business that had devoured their best years, used to mutter
darkly and knowingly that this was a portentous sign; that the
Holroyd connection meant by-and-by to get hold of the whole
Republic of Costaguana, lock, stock, and barrel. But, in fact,
the hobby theory was the right one. It interested the great man
to attend personally to the San Tome mine; it interested him so
much that he allowed this hobby to give a direction to the first
complete holiday he had taken for quite a startling number of
years. He was not running a great enterprise there; no mere
railway board or industrial corporation. He was running a man! A
success would have pleased him very much on refreshingly novel
grounds; but, on the other side of the same feeling, it was
incumbent upon him to cast it off utterly at the first sign of
failure. A man may be thrown off. The papers had unfortunately
trumpeted all over the land his journey to Costaguana. If he was
pleased at the way Charles Gould was going on, he infused an
added grimness into his assurances of support. Even at the very
last interview, half an hour or so before he rolled out of the
patio, hat in hand, behind Mrs. Gould's white mules, he had said
in Charles's room--
"You go ahead in your own way, and I shall know how to help you
as long as you hold your own. But you may rest assured that in a
given case we shall know how to drop you in time."
To this Charles Gould's only answer had been: "You may begin
sending out the machinery as soon as you like."
And the great man had liked this imperturbable assurance. The
secret of it was that to Charles Gould's mind these
uncompromising terms were agreeable. Like this the mine
preserved its identity, with which he had endowed it as a boy;
and it remained dependent on himself alone. It was a serious
affair, and he, too, took it grimly.
"Of course," he said to his wife, alluding to this last
conversation with the departed guest, while they walked slowly up
and down the corredor, followed by the irritated eye of the
parrot--"of course, a man of that sort can take up a thing or
drop it when he likes. He will suffer from no sense of defeat.
He may have to give in, or he may have to die to-morrow, but the
great silver and iron interests will survive, and some day will
get hold of Costaguana along with the rest of the world."
They had stopped near the cage. The parrot, catching the sound of
a word belonging to his vocabulary, was moved to interfere.
Parrots are very human.
"Viva Costaguana!" he shrieked, with intense self-assertion, and,
instantly ruffling up his feathers, assumed an air of puffed-up
somnolence behind the glittering wires.
"And do you believe that, Charley?" Mrs. Gould asked. "This seems
to me most awful materialism, and--"
"My dear, it's nothing to me," interrupted her husband, in a
reasonable tone. "I make use of what I see. What's it to me
whether his talk is the voice of destiny or simply a bit of
clap-trap eloquence? There's a good deal of eloquence of one sort
or another produced in both Americas. The air of the New World
seems favourable to the art of declamation. Have you forgotten
how dear Avellanos can hold forth for hours here--?"
"Oh, but that's different," protested Mrs. Gould, almost shocked.
The allusion was not to the point. Don Jose was a dear good man,
who talked very well, and was enthusiastic about the greatness of
the San Tome mine. "How can you compare them, Charles?" she
exclaimed, reproachfully. "He has suffered--and yet he hopes."
The working competence of men--which she never questioned--was
very surprising to Mrs. Gould, because upon so many obvious
issues they showed themselves strangely muddle-headed.
Charles Gould, with a careworn calmness which secured for him at
once his wife's anxious sympathy, assured her that he was not
comparing. He was an American himself, after all, and perhaps he
could understand both kinds of eloquence--"if it were worth while
to try," he added, grimly. But he had breathed the air of England
longer than any of his people had done for three generations, and
really he begged to be excused. His poor father could be
eloquent, too. And he asked his wife whether she remembered a
passage in one of his father's last letters where Mr. Gould had
expressed the conviction that "God looked wrathfully at these
countries, or else He would let some ray of hope fall through a
rift in the appalling darkness of intrigue, bloodshed, and crime
that hung over the Queen of Continents."
Mrs. Gould had not forgotten. "You read it to me, Charley," she
murmured. "It was a striking pronouncement. How deeply your
father must have felt its terrible sadness!"
"He did not like to be robbed. It exasperated him," said Charles
Gould. "But the image will serve well enough. What is wanted here
is law, good faith, order, security. Any one can declaim about
these things, but I pin my faith to material interests. Only let
the material interests once get a firm footing, and they are
bound to impose the conditions on which alone they can continue
to exist. That's how your money-making is justified here in the
face of lawlessness and disorder. It is justified because the
security which it demands must be shared with an oppressed
people. A better justice will come afterwards. That's your ray of
hope." His arm pressed her slight form closer to his side for a
moment. "And who knows whether in that sense even the San Tome
mine may not become that little rift in the darkness which poor
father despaired of ever seeing?"
She glanced up at him with admiration. He was competent; he had
given a vast shape to the vagueness of her unselfish ambitions.
"Charley," she said, "you are splendidly disobedient."
He left her suddenly in the corredor to go and get his hat, a
soft, grey sombrero, an article of national costume which
combined unexpectedly well with his English get-up. He came back,
a riding-whip under his arm, buttoning up a dogskin glove; his
face reflected the resolute nature of his thoughts. His wife had
waited for him at the head of the stairs, and before he gave her
the parting kiss he finished the conversation--
"What should be perfectly clear to us," he said, "is the fact
that there is no going back. Where could we begin life afresh? We
are in now for all that there is in us."
He bent over her upturned face very tenderly and a little
remorsefully. Charles Gould was competent because he had no
illusions. The Gould Concession had to fight for life with such
weapons as could be found at once in the mire of a corruption
that was so universal as almost to lose its significance. He was
prepared to stoop for his weapons. For a moment he felt as if the
silver mine, which had killed his father, had decoyed him further
than he meant to go; and with the roundabout logic of emotions,
he felt that the worthiness of his life was bound up with
success. There was no going back.
CHAPTER SEVEN
"MRS. GOULD was too intelligently sympathetic not to share that
feeling. It made life exciting, and she was too much of a woman
not to like excitement. But it frightened her, too, a little; and
when Don Jose Avellanos, rocking in the American chair, would go
so far as to say, "Even, my dear Carlos, if you had failed; even
if some untoward event were yet to destroy your work--which God
forbid!--you would have deserved well of your country," Mrs.
Gould would look up from the tea-table profoundly at her unmoved
husband stirring the spoon in the cup as though he had not heard
a word.
Not that Don Jose anticipated anything of the sort. He could not
praise enough dear Carlos's tact and courage. His English,
rock-like quality of character was his best safeguard, Don Jose
affirmed; and, turning to Mrs. Gould, "As to you, Emilia, my
soul"--he would address her with the familiarity of his age and
old friendship--"you are as true a patriot as though you had been
born in our midst."
This might have been less or more than the truth. Mrs. Gould,
accompanying her husband all over the province in the search for
labour, had seen the land with a deeper glance than a trueborn
Costaguanera could have done. In her travel-worn riding habit,
her face powdered white like a plaster cast, with a further
protection of a small silk mask during the heat of the day, she
rode on a well-shaped, light-footed pony in the centre of a
little cavalcade. Two mozos de campo, picturesque in great hats,
with spurred bare heels, in white embroidered calzoneras, leather
jackets and striped ponchos, rode ahead with carbines across
their shoulders, swaying in unison to the pace of the horses. A
tropilla of pack mules brought up the rear in charge of a thin
brown muleteer, sitting his long-eared beast very near the tail,
legs thrust far forward, the wide brim of his hat set far back,
making a sort of halo for his head. An old Costaguana officer, a
retired senior major of humble origin, but patronized by the
first families on account of his Blanco opinions, had been
recommended by Don Jose for commissary and organizer of that
expedition. The points of his grey moustache hung far below his
chin, and, riding on Mrs. Gould's left hand, he looked about with
kindly eyes, pointing out the features of the country, telling
the names of the little pueblos and of the estates, of the
smooth-walled haciendas like long fortresses crowning the knolls
above the level of the Sulaco Valley. It unrolled itself, with
green young crops, plains, woodland, and gleams of water,
park-like, from the blue vapour of the distant sierra to an
immense quivering horizon of grass and sky, where big white
clouds seemed to fall slowly into the darkness of their own
shadows.
Men ploughed with wooden ploughs and yoked oxen, small on a
boundless expanse, as if attacking immensity itself. The mounted
figures of vaqueros galloped in the distance, and the great herds
fed with all their horned heads one way, in one single wavering
line as far as eye could reach across the broad potreros. A
spreading cotton-wool tree shaded a thatched ranche by the road;
the trudging files of burdened Indians taking off their hats,
would lift sad, mute eyes to the cavalcade raising the dust of
the crumbling camino real made by the hands of their enslaved
forefathers. And Mrs. Gould, with each day's journey, seemed to
come nearer to the soul of the land in the tremendous disclosure
of this interior unaffected by the slight European veneer of the
coast towns, a great land of plain and mountain and people,
suffering and mute, waiting for the future in a pathetic
immobility of patience.
She knew its sights and its hospitality, dispensed with a sort of
slumbrous dignity in those great houses presenting long, blind
walls and heavy portals to the wind-swept pastures. She was given
the head of the tables, where masters and dependants sat in a
simple and patriarchal state. The ladies of the house would talk
softly in the moonlight under the orange trees of the courtyards,
impressing upon her the sweetness of their voices and the
something mysterious in the quietude of their lives. In the
morning the gentlemen, well mounted in braided sombreros and
embroidered riding suits, with much silver on the trappings of
their horses, would ride forth to escort the departing guests
before committing them, with grave good-byes, to the care of God
at the boundary pillars of their estates. In all these households
she could hear stories of political outrage; friends, relatives,
ruined, imprisoned, killed in the battles of senseless civil
wars, barbarously executed in ferocious proscriptions, as though
the government of the country had been a struggle of lust between
bands of absurd devils let loose upon the land with sabres and
uniforms and grandiloquent phrases. And on all the lips she found
a weary desire for peace, the dread of officialdom with its
nightmarish parody of administration without law, without
security, and without justice.
She bore a whole two months of wandering very well; she had that
power of resistance to fatigue which one discovers here and there
in some quite frail-looking women with surprise--like a state of
possession by a remarkably stubborn spirit. Don Pepe--the old
Costaguana major--after much display of solicitude for the
delicate lady, had ended by conferring upon her the name of the
"Never-tired Senora." Mrs. Gould was indeed becoming a
Costaguanera. Having acquired in Southern Europe a knowledge of
true peasantry, she was able to appreciate the great worth of the
people. She saw the man under the silent, sad-eyed beast of
burden. She saw them on the road carrying loads, lonely figures
upon the plain, toiling under great straw hats, with their white
clothing flapping about their limbs in the wind; she remembered
the villages by some group of Indian women at the fountain
impressed upon her memory, by the face of some young Indian girl
with a melancholy and sensual profile, raising an earthenware
vessel of cool water at the door of a dark hut with a wooden
porch cumbered with great brown jars. The solid wooden wheels of
an ox-cart, halted with its shafts in the dust, showed the
strokes of the axe; and a party of charcoal carriers, with each
man's load resting above his head on the top of the low mud wall,
slept stretched in a row within the strip of shade.
The heavy stonework of bridges and churches left by the
conquerors proclaimed the disregard of human labour, the
tribute-labour of vanished nations. The power of king and church
was gone, but at the sight of some heavy ruinous pile overtopping
from a knoll the low mud walls of a village, Don Pepe would
interrupt the tale of his campaigns to exclaim--
"Poor Costaguana! Before, it was everything for the Padres,
nothing for the people; and now it is everything for those great
politicos in Sta. Marta, for negroes and thieves."
Charles talked with the alcaldes, with the fiscales, with the
principal people in towns, and with the caballeros on the
estates. The commandantes of the districts offered him
escorts--for he could show an authorization from the Sulaco
political chief of the day. How much the document had cost him
in gold twenty-dollar pieces was a secret between himself, a
great man in the United States (who condescended to answer the
Sulaco mail with his own hand), and a great man of another sort,
with a dark olive complexion and shifty eyes, inhabiting then the
Palace of the Intendencia in Sulaco, and who piqued himself on
his culture and Europeanism generally in a rather French style
because he had lived in Europe for some years--in exile, he said.
However, it was pretty well known that just before this exile he
had incautiously gambled away all the cash in the Custom House of
a small port where a friend in power had procured for him the
post of subcollector. That youthful indiscretion had, amongst
other inconveniences, obliged him to earn his living for a time
as a cafe waiter in Madrid; but his talents must have been great,
after all, since they had enabled him to retrieve his political
fortunes so splendidly. Charles Gould, exposing his business
with an imperturbable steadiness, called him Excellency.
The provincial Excellency assumed a weary superiority, tilting
his chair far back near an open window in the true Costaguana
manner. The military band happened to be braying operatic
selections on the plaza just then, and twice he raised his hand
imperatively for silence in order to listen to a favourite
passage.
"Exquisite, delicious!" he murmured; while Charles Gould waited,
standing by with inscrutable patience. "Lucia, Lucia di
Lammermoor! I am passionate for music. It transports me. Ha! the
divine--ha!--Mozart. Si! divine . . . What is it you were
saying?"
Of course, rumours had reached him already of the newcomer's
intentions. Besides, he had received an official warning from
Sta. Marta. His manner was intended simply to conceal his
curiosity and impress his visitor. But after he had locked up
something valuable in the drawer of a large writing-desk in a
distant part of the room, he became very affable, and walked back
to his chair smartly.
"If you intend to build villages and assemble a population near
the mine, you shall require a decree of the Minister of the
Interior for that," he suggested in a business-like manner.
"I have already sent a memorial," said Charles Gould, steadily,
"and I reckon now confidently upon your Excellency's favourable
conclusions."
The Excellency was a man of many moods. With the receipt of the
money a great mellowness had descended upon his simple soul.
Unexpectedly he fetched a deep sigh.
"Ah, Don Carlos! What we want is advanced men like you in the
province. The lethargy--the lethargy of these aristocrats! The
want of public spirit! The absence of all enterprise! I, with my
profound studies in Europe, you understand--"
With one hand thrust into his swelling bosom, he rose and fell on
his toes, and for ten minutes, almost without drawing breath,
went on hurling himself intellectually to the assault of Charles
Gould's polite silence; and when, stopping abruptly, he fell back
into his chair, it was as though he had been beaten off from a
fortress. To save his dignity he hastened to dismiss this silent
man with a solemn inclination of the head and the words,
pronounced with moody, fatigued condescension--
"You may depend upon my enlightened goodwill as long as your
conduct as a good citizen deserves it."
He took up a paper fan and began to cool himself with a
consequential air, while Charles Gould bowed and withdrew. Then
he dropped the fan at once, and stared with an appearance of
wonder and perplexity at the closed door for quite a long time.
At last he shrugged his shoulders as if to assure himself of his
disdain. Cold, dull. No intellectuality. Red hair. A true
Englishman. He despised him.
His face darkened. What meant this unimpressed and frigid
behaviour? He was the first of the successive politicians sent
out from the capital to rule the Occidental Province whom the
manner of Charles Gould in official intercourse was to strike as
offensively independent.
Charles Gould assumed that if the appearance of listening to
deplorable balderdash must form part of the price he had to pay
for being left unmolested, the obligation of uttering balderdash
personally was by no means included in the bargain. He drew the
line there. To these provincial autocrats, before whom the
peaceable population of all classes had been accustomed to
tremble, the reserve of that English-looking engineer caused an
uneasiness which swung to and fro between cringing and
truculence. Gradually all of them discovered that, no matter what
party was in power, that man remained in most effective touch
with the higher authorities in Sta. Marta.
This was a fact, and it accounted perfectly for the Goulds being
by no means so wealthy as the engineer-in-chief on the new
railway could legitimately suppose. Following the advice of Don
Jose Avellanos, who was a man of good counsel (though rendered
timid by his horrible experiences of Guzman Bento's time),
Charles Gould had kept clear of the capital; but in the current
gossip of the foreign residents there he was known (with a good
deal of seriousness underlying the irony) by the nickname of
"King of Sulaco." An advocate of the Costaguana Bar, a man of
reputed ability and good character, member of the distinguished
Moraga family possessing extensive estates in the Sulaco Valley,
was pointed out to strangers, with a shade of mystery and
respect, as the agent of the San Tome mine--"political, you
know." He was tall, black-whiskered, and discreet. It was known
that he had easy access to ministers, and that the numerous
Costaguana generals were always anxious to dine at his house.
Presidents granted him audience with facility. He corresponded
actively with his maternal uncle, Don Jose Avellanos; but his
letters--unless those expressing formally his dutiful
affection--were seldom entrusted to the Costaguana Post Office.
There the envelopes are opened, indiscriminately, with the
frankness of a brazen and childish impudence characteristic of
some Spanish-American Governments. But it must be noted that at
about the time of the re-opening of the San Tome mine the
muleteer who had been employed by Charles Gould in his
preliminary travels on the Campo added his small train of animals
to the thin stream of traffic carried over the mountain passes
between the Sta. Marta upland and the Valley of Sulaco. There are
no travellers by that arduous and unsafe route unless under very
exceptional circumstances, and the state of inland trade did not
visibly require additional transport facilities; but the man
seemed to find his account in it. A few packages were always
found for him whenever he took the road. Very brown and wooden,
in goatskin breeches with the hair outside, he sat near the tail
of his own smart mule, his great hat turned against the sun, an
expression of blissful vacancy on his long face, humming day
after day a love-song in a plaintive key, or, without a change of
expression, letting out a yell at his small tropilla in front. A
round little guitar hung high up on his back; and there was a
place scooped out artistically in the wood of one of his
pack-saddles where a tightly rolled piece of paper could be
slipped in, the wooden plug replaced, and the coarse canvas
nailed on again. When in Sulaco it was his practice to smoke and
doze all day long (as though he had no care in the world) on a
stone bench outside the doorway of the Casa Gould and facing the
windows of the Avellanos house. Years and years ago his mother
had been chief laundry-woman in that family--very accomplished in
the matter of clear-starching. He himself had been born on one of
their haciendas. His name was Bonifacio, and Don Jose, crossing
the street about five o'clock to call on Dona Emilia, always
acknowledged his humble salute by some movement of hand or head.
The porters of both houses conversed lazily with him in tones of
grave intimacy. His evenings he devoted to gambling and to calls
in a spirit of generous festivity upon the peyne d'oro girls in
the more remote side-streets of the town. But he, too, was a
discreet man.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THOSE of us whom business or curiosity took to Sulaco in these
years before the first advent of the railway can remember the
steadying effect of the San Tome mine upon the life of that
remote province. The outward appearances had not changed then as
they have changed since, as I am told, with cable cars running
along the streets of the Constitution, and carriage roads far
into the country, to Rincon and other villages, where the foreign
merchants and the Ricos generally have their modern villas, and a
vast railway goods yard by the harbour, which has a quay-side, a
long range of warehouses, and quite serious, organized labour
troubles of its own.
Nobody had ever heard of labour troubles then. The Cargadores of
the port formed, indeed, an unruly brotherhood of all sorts of
scum, with a patron saint of their own. They went on strike
regularly (every bull-fight day), a form of trouble that even
Nostromo at the height of his prestige could never cope with
efficiently; but the morning after each fiesta, before the Indian
market-women had opened their mat parasols on the plaza, when the
snows of Higuerota gleamed pale over the town on a yet black sky,
the appearance of a phantom-like horseman mounted on a
silver-grey mare solved the problem of labour without fail. His
steed paced the lanes of the slums and the weed-grown enclosures
within the old ramparts, between the black, lightless cluster of
huts, like cow-byres, like dog-kennels. The horseman hammered
with the butt of a heavy revolver at the doors of low pulperias,
of obscene lean-to sheds sloping against the tumble-down piece of
a noble wall, at the wooden sides of dwellings so flimsy that the
sound of snores and sleepy mutters within could be heard in the
pauses of the thundering clatter of his blows. He called out
men's names menacingly from the saddle, once, twice. The drowsy
answers--grumpy, conciliating, savage, jocular, or
deprecating--came out into the silent darkness in which the
horseman sat still, and presently a dark figure would flit out
coughing in the still air. Sometimes a low-toned woman cried
through the window-hole softly, "He's coming directly, senor,"
and the horseman waited silent on a motionless horse. But if
perchance he had to dismount, then, after a while, from the door
of that hovel or of that pulperia, with a ferocious scuffle and
stifled imprecations, a cargador would fly out head first and
hands abroad, to sprawl under the forelegs of the silver-grey
mare, who only pricked forward her sharp little ears. She was
used to that work; and the man, picking himself up, would walk
away hastily from Nostromo's revolver, reeling a little along the
street and snarling low curses. At sunrise Captain Mitchell,
coming out anxiously in his night attire on to the wooden balcony
running the whole length of the O.S.N. Company's lonely building
by the shore, would see the lighters already under way, figures
moving busily about the cargo cranes, perhaps hear the invaluable
Nostromo, now dismounted and in the checked shirt and red sash of
a Mediterranean sailor, bawling orders from the end of the jetty
in a stentorian voice. A fellow in a thousand!
The material apparatus of perfected civilization which
obliterates the individuality of old towns under the stereotyped
conveniences of modern life had not intruded as yet; but over the
worn-out antiquity of Sulaco, so characteristic with its stuccoed
houses and barred windows, with the great yellowy-white walls of
abandoned convents behind the rows of sombre green cypresses,
that fact--very modern in its spirit--the San Tome mine had
already thrown its subtle influence. It had altered, too, the
outward character of the crowds on feast days on the plaza before
the open portal of the cathedral, by the number of white ponchos
with a green stripe affected as holiday wear by the San Tome
miners. They had also adopted white hats with green cord and
braid--articles of good quality, which could be obtained in the
storehouse of the administration for very little money. A
peaceable Cholo wearing these colours (unusual in Costaguana) was
somehow very seldom beaten to within an inch of his life on a
charge of disrespect to the town police; neither ran he much risk
of being suddenly lassoed on the road by a recruiting party of
lanceros--a method of voluntary enlistment looked upon as almost
legal in the Republic. Whole villages were known to have
volunteered for the army in that way; but, as Don Pepe would say
with a hopeless shrug to Mrs. Gould, "What would you! Poor
people! Pobrecitos! Pobrecitos! But the State must have its
soldiers."
Thus professionally spoke Don Pepe, the fighter, with pendent
moustaches, a nut-brown, lean face, and a clean run of a
cast-iron jaw, suggesting the type of a cattle-herd horseman from
the great Llanos of the South. "If you will listen to an old
officer of Paez, senores," was the exordium of all his speeches
in the Aristocratic Club of Sulaco, where he was admitted on
account of his past services to the extinct cause of Federation.
The club, dating from the days of the proclamation of
Costaguana's independence, boasted many names of liberators
amongst its first founders. Suppressed arbitrarily innumerable
times by various Governments, with memories of proscriptions and
of at least one wholesale massacre of its members, sadly
assembled for a banquet by the order of a zealous military
commandante (their bodies were afterwards stripped naked and
flung into the plaza out of the windows by the lowest scum of the
populace), it was again flourishing, at that period, peacefully.
It extended to strangers the large hospitality of the cool, big
rooms of its historic quarters in the front part of a house, once
the residence of a high official of the Holy Office. The two
wings, shut up, crumbled behind the nailed doors, and what may be
described as a grove of young orange trees grown in the unpaved
patio concealed the utter ruin of the back part facing the gate.
You turned in from the street, as if entering a secluded orchard,
where you came upon the foot of a disjointed staircase, guarded
by a moss-stained effigy of some saintly bishop, mitred and
staffed, and bearing the indignity of a broken nose meekly, with
his fine stone hands crossed on his breast. The
chocolate-coloured faces of servants with mops of black hair
peeped at you from above; the click of billiard balls came to
your ears, and ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the
first sala, very stiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good
light, Don Pepe moving his long moustaches as he spelt his way,
at arm's length, through an old Sta. Marta newspaper. His
horse--a stony-hearted but persevering black brute with a hammer
head--you would have seen in the street dozing motionless under
an immense saddle, with its nose almost touching the curbstone of
the sidewalk.
Don Pepe, when "down from the mountain," as the phrase, often
heard in Sulaco, went, could also be seen in the drawing-room of
the Casa Gould. He sat with modest assurance at some distance
from the tea-table. With his knees close together, and a kindly
twinkle of drollery in his deep-set eyes, he would throw his
small and ironic pleasantries into the current of conversation.
There was in that man a sort of sane, humorous shrewdness, and a
vein of genuine humanity so often found in simple old soldiers of
proved courage who have seen much desperate service. Of course he
knew nothing whatever of mining, but his employment was of a
special kind. He was in charge of the whole population in the
territory of the mine, which extended from the head of the gorge
to where the cart track from the foot of the mountain enters the
plain, crossing a stream over a little wooden bridge painted
green--green, the colour of hope, being also the colour of the
mine.
It was reported in Sulaco that up there "at the mountain" Don
Pepe walked about precipitous paths, girt with a great sword and
in a shabby uniform with tarnished bullion epaulettes of a senior
major. Most miners being Indians, with big wild eyes, addressed
him as Taita (father), as these barefooted people of Costaguana
will address anybody who wears shoes; but it was Basilio, Mr.
Gould's own mozo and the head servant of the Casa, who, in all
good faith and from a sense of propriety, announced him once in
the solemn words, "El Senor Gobernador has arrived."
Don Jose Avellanos, then in the drawing-room, was delighted
beyond measure at the aptness of the title, with which he greeted
the old major banteringly as soon as the latter's soldierly
figure appeared in the doorway. Don Pepe only smiled in his long
moustaches, as much as to say, "You might have found a worse name
for an old soldier."
And El Senor Gobernador he had remained, with his small jokes
upon his function and upon his domain, where he affirmed with
humorous exaggeration to Mrs. Gould--
"No two stones could come together anywhere without the
Gobernador hearing the click, senora."
And he would tap his ear with the tip of his forefinger
knowingly. Even when the number of the miners alone rose to over
six hundred he seemed to know each of them individually, all the
innumerable Joses, Manuels, Ignacios, from the villages
primero--segundo--or tercero (there were three mining villages)
under his government. He could distinguish them not only by their
flat, joyless faces, which to Mrs. Gould looked all alike, as if
run into the same ancestral mould of suffering and patience, but
apparently also by the infinitely graduated shades of
reddish-brown, of blackish-brown, of coppery-brown backs, as the
two shifts, stripped to linen drawers and leather skull-caps,
mingled together with a confusion of naked limbs, of shouldered
picks, swinging lamps, in a great shuffle of sandalled feet on
the open plateau before the entrance of the main tunnel. It was a
time of pause. The Indian boys leaned idly against the long line
of little cradle wagons standing empty; the screeners and
ore-breakers squatted on their heels smoking long cigars; the
great wooden shoots slanting over the edge of the tunnel plateau
were silent; and only the ceaseless, violent rush of water in the
open flumes could be heard, murmuring fiercely, with the splash
and rumble of revolving turbine-wheels, and the thudding march of
the stamps pounding to powder the treasure rock on the plateau
below. The heads of gangs, distinguished by brass medals hanging
on their bare breasts, marshalled their squads; and at last the
mountain would swallow one-half of the silent crowd, while the
other half would move off in long files down the zigzag paths
leading to the bottom of the gorge. It was deep; and, far below,
a thread of vegetation winding between the blazing rock faces
resembled a slender green cord, in which three lumpy knots of
banana patches, palm-leaf roots, and shady trees marked the
Village One, Village Two, Village Three, housing the miners of
the Gould Concession.
Whole families had been moving from the first towards the spot in
the Higuerota range, whence the rumour of work and safety had
spread over the pastoral Campo, forcing its way also, even as the
waters of a high flood, into the nooks and crannies of the
distant blue walls of the Sierras. Father first, in a pointed
straw hat, then the mother with the bigger children, generally
also a diminutive donkey, all under burdens, except the leader
himself, or perhaps some grown girl, the pride of the family,
stepping barefooted and straight as an arrow, with braids of
raven hair, a thick, haughty profile, and no load to carry but
the small guitar of the country and a pair of soft leather
sandals tied together on her back. At the sight of such parties
strung out on the cross trails between the pastures, or camped by
the side of the royal road, travellers on horseback would remark
to each other--
"More people going to the San Tome mine. We shall see others
to-morrow."
And spurring on in the dusk they would discuss the great news of
the province, the news of the San Tome mine. A rich Englishman
was going to work it--and perhaps not an Englishman, Quien sabe!
A foreigner with much money. Oh, yes, it had begun. A party of
men who had been to Sulaco with a herd of black bulls for the
next corrida had reported that from the porch of the posada in
Rincon, only a short league from the town, the lights on the
mountain were visible, twinkling above the trees. And there was a
woman seen riding a horse sideways, not in the chair seat, but
upon a sort of saddle, and a man's hat on her head. She walked
about, too, on foot up the mountain paths. A woman engineer, it
seemed she was.
"What an absurdity! Impossible, senor!"
"Si! Si! Una Americana del Norte."
"Ah, well! if your worship is informed. Una Americana; it need be
something of that sort."
And they would laugh a little with astonishment and scorn,
keeping a wary eye on the shadows of the road, for one is liable
to meet bad men when travelling late on the Campo.
And it was not only the men that Don Pepe knew so well, but he
seemed able, with one attentive, thoughtful glance, to classify
each woman, girl, or growing youth of his domain. It was only the
small fry that puzzled him sometimes. He and the padre could be
seen frequently side by side, meditative and gazing across the
street of a village at a lot of sedate brown children, trying to
sort them out, as it were, in low, consulting tones, or else they
would together put searching questions as to the parentage of
some small, staid urchin met wandering, naked and grave, along
the road with a cigar in his baby mouth, and perhaps his mother's
rosary, purloined for purposes of ornamentation, hanging in a
loop of beads low down on his rotund little stomach. The
spiritual and temporal pastors of the mine flock were very good
friends. With Dr. Monygham, the medical pastor, who had accepted
the charge from Mrs. Gould, and lived in the hospital building,
they were on not so intimate terms. But no one could be on
intimate terms with El Senor Doctor, who, with his twisted
shoulders, drooping head, sardonic mouth, and side-long bitter
glance, was mysterious and uncanny. The other two authorities
worked in harmony. Father Roman, dried-up, small, alert,
wrinkled, with big round eyes, a sharp chin, and a great
snuff-taker, was an old campaigner, too; he had shriven many
simple souls on the battlefields of the Republic, kneeling by the
dying on hillsides, in the long grass, in the gloom of the
forests, to hear the last confession with the smell of gunpowder
smoke in his nostrils, the rattle of muskets, the hum and spatter
of bullets in his ears. And where was the harm if, at the
presbytery, they had a game with a pack of greasy cards in the
early evening, before Don Pepe went his last rounds to see that
all the watchmen of the mine--a body organized by himself--were
at their posts? For that last duty before he slept Don Pepe did
actually gird his old sword on the verandah of an unmistakable
American white frame house, which Father Roman called the
presbytery. Near by, a long, low, dark building, steeple-roofed,
like a vast barn with a wooden cross over the gable, was the
miners' chapel. There Father Roman said Mass every day before a
sombre altar-piece representing the Resurrection, the grey slab
of the tombstone balanced on one corner, a figure soaring
upwards, long-limbed and livid, in an oval of pallid light, and a
helmeted brown legionary smitten down, right across the
bituminous foreground. "This picture, my children, muy linda e
maravillosa," Father Roman would say to some of his flock, "which
you behold here through the munificence of the wife of our Senor
Administrador, has been painted in Europe, a country of saints
and miracles, and much greater than our Costaguana." And he would
take a pinch of snuff with unction. But when once an inquisitive
spirit desired to know in what direction this Europe was
situated, whether up or down the coast, Father Roman, to conceal
his perplexity, became very reserved and severe. "No doubt it is
extremely far away. But ignorant sinners like you of the San Tome
mine should think earnestly of everlasting punishment instead of
inquiring into the magnitude of the earth, with its countries and
populations altogether beyond your understanding."
With a "Good-night, Padre," "Good-night, Don Pepe," the
Gobernador would go off, holding up his sabre against his side,
his body bent forward, with a long, plodding stride in the dark.
The jocularity proper to an innocent card game for a few cigars
or a bundle of yerba was replaced at once by the stern duty mood
of an officer setting out to visit the outposts of an encamped
army. One loud blast of the whistle that hung from his neck
provoked instantly a great shrilling of responding whistles,
mingled with the barking of dogs, that would calm down slowly at
last, away up at the head of the gorge; and in the stillness two
serenos, on guard by the bridge, would appear walking noiselessly
towards him. On one side of the road a long frame building--the
store--would be closed and barricaded from end to end; facing it
another white frame house, still longer, and with a verandah--the
hospital--would have lights in the two windows of Dr. Monygham's
quarters. Even the delicate foliage of a clump of pepper trees
did not stir, so breathless would be the darkness warmed by the
radiation of the over-heated rocks. Don Pepe would stand still
for a moment with the two motionless serenos before him, and,
abruptly, high up on the sheer face of the mountain, dotted with
single torches, like drops of fire fallen from the two great
blazing clusters of lights above, the ore shoots would begin to
rattle. The great clattering, shuffling noise, gathering speed
and weight, would be caught up by the walls of the gorge, and
sent upon the plain in a growl of thunder. The pasadero in Rincon
swore that on calm nights, by listening intently, he could catch
the sound in his doorway as of a storm in the mountains.
To Charles Gould's fancy it seemed that the sound must reach the
uttermost limits of the province. Riding at night towards the
mine, it would meet him at the edge of a little wood just beyond
Rincon. There was no mistaking the growling mutter of the
mountain pouring its stream of treasure under the stamps; and it
came to his heart with the peculiar force of a proclamation
thundered forth over the land and the marvellousness of an
accomplished fact fulfilling an audacious desire. He had heard
this very sound in his imagination on that far-off evening when
his wife and himself, after a tortuous ride through a strip of
forest, had reined in their horses near the stream, and had gazed
for the first time upon the jungle-grown solitude of the gorge.
The head of a palm rose here and there. In a high ravine round
the corner of the San Tome mountain (which is square like a
blockhouse) the thread of a slender waterfall flashed bright and
glassy through the dark green of the heavy fronds of tree-ferns.
Don Pepe, in attendance, rode up, and, stretching his arm up the
gorge, had declared with mock solemnity, "Behold the very
paradise of snakes, senora."
And then they had wheeled their horses and ridden back to sleep
that night at Rincon. The alcalde--an old, skinny Moreno, a
sergeant of Guzman Bento's time--had cleared respectfully out of
his house with his three pretty daughters, to make room for the
foreign senora and their worships the Caballeros. All he asked
Charles Gould (whom he took for a mysterious and official person)
to do for him was to remind the supreme Government--El Gobierno
supreme--of a pension (amounting to about a dollar a month) to
which he believed himself entitled. It had been promised to him,
he affirmed, straightening his bent back martially, "many years
ago, for my valour in the wars with the wild Indios when a young
man, senor."
The waterfall existed no longer. The tree-ferns that had
luxuriated in its spray had died around the dried-up pool, and
the high ravine was only a big trench half filled up with the
refuse of excavations and tailings. The torrent, dammed up
above, sent its water rushing along the open flumes of scooped
tree trunks striding on trestle-legs to the turbines working the
stamps on the lower plateau--the mesa grande of the San Tome
mountain. Only the memory of the waterfall, with its amazing
fernery, like a hanging garden above the rocks of the gorge, was
preserved in Mrs. Gould's water-colour sketch; she had made it
hastily one day from a cleared patch in the bushes, sitting in
the shade of a roof of straw erected for her on three rough poles
under Don Pepe's direction.
Mrs. Gould had seen it all from the beginning: the clearing of
the wilderness, the making of the road, the cutting of new paths
up the cliff face of San Tome. For weeks together she had lived
on the spot with her husband; and she was so little in Sulaco
during that year that the appearance of the Gould carriage on the
Alameda would cause a social excitement. From the heavy family
coaches full of stately senoras and black-eyed senoritas rolling
solemnly in the shaded alley white hands were waved towards her
with animation in a flutter of greetings. Dona Emilia was "down
from the mountain."
But not for long. Dona Emilia would be gone "up to the mountain"
in a day or two, and her sleek carriage mules would have an easy
time of it for another long spell. She had watched the erection
of the first frame-house put up on the lower mesa for an office
and Don Pepe's quarters; she heard with a thrill of thankful
emotion the first wagon load of ore rattle down the then only
shoot; she had stood by her husband's side perfectly silent, and
gone cold all over with excitement at the instant when the first
battery of only fifteen stamps was put in motion for the first
time. On the occasion when the fires under the first set of
retorts in their shed had glowed far into the night she did not
retire to rest on the rough cadre set up for her in the as yet
bare frame-house till she had seen the first spongy lump of
silver yielded to the hazards of the world by the dark depths of
the Gould Concession; she had laid her unmercenary hands, with an
eagerness that made them tremble, upon the first silver ingot
turned out still warm from the mould; and by her imaginative
estimate of its power she endowed that lump of metal with a
justificative conception, as though it were not a mere fact, but
something far-reaching and impalpable, like the true expression
of an emotion or the emergence of a principle.
Don Pepe, extremely interested, too, looked over her shoulder
with a smile that, making longitudinal folds on his face, caused
it to resemble a leathern mask with a benignantly diabolic
expression.
"Would not the muchachos of Hernandez like to get hold of this
insignificant object, that looks, por Dios, very much like a
piece of tin?" he remarked, jocularly.
Hernandez, the robber, had been an inoffensive, small ranchero,
kidnapped with circumstances of peculiar atrocity from his home
during one of the civil wars, and forced to serve in the army.
There his conduct as soldier was exemplary, till, watching his
chance, he killed his colonel, and managed to get clear away.
With a band of deserters, who chose him for their chief, he had
taken refuge beyond the wild and waterless Bolson de Tonoro. The
haciendas paid him blackmail in cattle and horses; extraordinary
stories were told of his powers and of his wonderful escapes from
capture. He used to ride, single-handed, into the villages and
the little towns on the Campo, driving a pack mule before him,
with two revolvers in his belt, go straight to the shop or store,
select what he wanted, and ride away unopposed because of the
terror his exploits and his audacity inspired. Poor country
people he usually left alone; the upper class were often stopped
on the roads and robbed; but any unlucky official that fell into
his hands was sure to get a severe flogging. The army officers
did not like his name to be mentioned in their presence. His
followers, mounted on stolen horses, laughed at the pursuit of
the regular cavalry sent to hunt them down, and whom they took
pleasure to ambush most scientifically in the broken ground of
their own fastness. Expeditions had been fitted out; a price had
been put upon his head; even attempts had been made,
treacherously of course, to open negotiations with him, without
in the slightest way affecting the even tenor of his career. At
last, in true Costaguana fashion, the Fiscal of Tonoro, who was
ambitious of the glory of having reduced the famous Hernandez,
offered him a sum of money and a safe conduct out of the country
for the betrayal of his band. But Hernandez evidently was not of
the stuff of which the distinguished military politicians and
conspirators of Costaguana are made. This clever but common
device (which frequently works like a charm in putting down
revolutions) failed with the chief of vulgar Salteadores. It
promised well for the Fiscal at first, but ended very badly for
the squadron of lanceros posted (by the Fiscal's directions) in a
fold of the ground into which Hernandez had promised to lead his
unsuspecting followers They came, indeed, at the appointed time,
but creeping on their hands and knees through the bush, and only
let their presence be known by a general discharge of firearms,
which emptied many saddles. The troopers who escaped came riding
very hard into Tonoro. It is said that their commanding officer
(who, being better mounted, rode far ahead of the rest)
afterwards got into a state of despairing intoxication and beat
the ambitious Fiscal severely with the flat of his sabre in the
presence of his wife and daughters, for bringing this disgrace
upon the National Army. The highest civil official of Tonoro,
falling to the ground in a swoon, was further kicked all over the
body and rowelled with sharp spurs about the neck and face
because of the great sensitiveness of his military colleague.
This gossip of the inland Campo, so characteristic of the rulers
of the country with its story of oppression, inefficiency,
fatuous methods, treachery, and savage brutality, was perfectly
known to Mrs. Gould. That it should be accepted with no indignant
comment by people of intelligence, refinement, and character as
something inherent in the nature of things was one of the
symptoms of degradation that had the power to exasperate her
almost to the verge of despair. Still looking at the ingot of
silver, she shook her head at Don Pepe's remark--
"If it had not been for the lawless tyranny of your Government,
Don Pepe, many an outlaw now with Hernandez would be living
peaceably and happy by the honest work of his hands."
"Senora," cried Don Pepe, with enthusiasm, "it is true! It is as
if God had given you the power to look into the very breasts of
people. You have seen them working round you, Dona Emilia--meek
as lambs, patient like their own burros, brave like lions. I have
led them to the very muzzles of guns--I, who stand here before
you, senora--in the time of Paez, who was full of generosity, and
in courage only approached by the uncle of Don Carlos here, as
far as I know. No wonder there are bandits in the Campo when
there are none but thieves, swindlers, and sanguinary macaques to
rule us in Sta. Marta. However, all the same, a bandit is a
bandit, and we shall have a dozen good straight Winchesters to
ride with the silver down to Sulaco."
Mrs. Gould's ride with the first silver escort to Sulaco was the
closing episode of what she called "my camp life" before she had
settled in her town-house permanently, as was proper and even
necessary for the wife of the administrator of such an important
institution as the San Tome mine. For the San Tome mine was to
become an institution, a rallying point for everything in the
province that needed order and stability to live. Security
seemed to flow upon this land from the mountain-gorge. The
authorities of Sulaco had learned that the San Tome mine could
make it worth their while to leave things and people alone. This
was the nearest approach to the rule of common-sense and justice
Charles Gould felt it possible to secure at first. In fact, the
mine, with its organization, its population growing fiercely
attached to their position of privileged safety, with its
armoury, with its Don Pepe, with its armed body of serenos
(where, it was said, many an outlaw and deserter--and even some
members of Hernandez's band--had found a place), the mine was a
power in the land. As a certain prominent man in Sta. Marta had
exclaimed with a hollow laugh, once, when discussing the line of
action taken by the Sulaco authorities at a time of political
crisis--
"You call these men Government officials? They? Never! They are
officials of the mine--officials of the Concession--I tell you."
The prominent man (who was then a person in power, with a
lemon-coloured face and a very short and curly, not to say
woolly, head of hair) went so far in his temporary discontent as
to shake his yellow fist under the nose of his interlocutor, and
shriek--
"Yes! All! Silence! All! I tell you! The political Gefe, the
chief of the police, the chief of the customs, the general, all,
all, are the officials of that Gould."
Thereupon an intrepid but low and argumentative murmur would flow
on for a space in the ministerial cabinet, and the prominent
man's passion would end in a cynical shrug of the shoulders.
After all, he seemed to say, what did it matter as long as the
minister himself was not forgotten during his brief day of
authority? But all the same, the unofficial agent of the San
Tome mine, working for a good cause, had his moments of anxiety,
which were reflected in his letters to Don Jose Avellanos, his
maternal uncle.
"No sanguinary macaque from Sta. Marta shall set foot on that
part of Costaguana which lies beyond the San Tome bridge," Don
Pepe used to assure Mrs. Gould. "Except, of course, as an
honoured guest--for our Senor Administrador is a deep politico."
But to Charles Gould, in his own room, the old Major would remark
with a grim and soldierly cheeriness, "We are all playing our
heads at this game."
Don Jose Avellanos would mutter "Imperium in imperio, Emilia, my
soul," with an air of profound self-satisfaction which, somehow,
in a curious way, seemed to contain a queer admixture of bodily
discomfort. But that, perhaps, could only be visible to the
initiated. And for the initiated it was a wonderful place, this
drawing-room of the Casa Gould, with its momentary glimpses of
the master--El Senor Administrador--older, harder, mysteriously
silent, with the lines deepened on his English, ruddy,
out-of-doors complexion; flitting on his thin cavalryman's legs
across the doorways, either just "back from the mountain" or with
jingling spurs and riding-whip under his arm, on the point of
starting "for the mountain." Then Don Pepe, modestly martial in
his chair, the llanero who seemed somehow to have found his
martial jocularity, his knowledge of the world, and his manner
perfect for his station, in the midst of savage armed contests
with his kind; Avellanos, polished and familiar, the diplomatist
with his loquacity covering much caution and wisdom in delicate
advice, with his manuscript of a historical work on Costaguana,
entitled "Fifty Years of Misrule," which, at present, he thought
it was not prudent (even if it were possible) "to give to the
world"; these three, and also Dona Emilia amongst them, gracious,
small, and fairy-like, before the glittering tea-set, with one
common master-thought in their heads, with one common feeling of
a tense situation, with one ever-present aim to preserve the
inviolable character of the mine at every cost. And there was
also to be seen Captain Mitchell, a little apart, near one of the
long windows, with an air of old-fashioned neat old bachelorhood
about him, slightly pompous, in a white waistcoat, a little
disregarded and unconscious of it; utterly in the dark, and
imagining himself to be in the thick of things. The good man,
having spent a clear thirty years of his life on the high seas
before getting what he called a "shore billet," was astonished at
the importance of transactions (other than relating to shipping)
which take place on dry land. Almost every event out of the usual
daily course "marked an epoch" for him or else was "history";
unless with his pomposity struggling with a discomfited droop of
his rubicund, rather handsome face, set off by snow-white close
hair and short whiskers, he would mutter--
"Ah, that! That, sir, was a mistake."
The reception of the first consignment of San Tome silver for
shipment to San Francisco in one of the O.S.N. Co.'s mail-boats
had, of course, "marked an epoch" for Captain Mitchell. The
ingots packed in boxes of stiff ox-hide with plaited handles,
small enough to be carried easily by two men, were brought down
by the serenos of the mine walking in careful couples along the
half-mile or so of steep, zigzag paths to the foot of the
mountain. There they would be loaded into a string of two-wheeled
carts, resembling roomy coffers with a door at the back, and
harnessed tandem with two mules each, waiting under the guard of
armed and mounted serenos. Don Pepe padlocked each door in
succession, and at the signal of his whistle the string of carts
would move off, closely surrounded by the clank of spur and
carbine, with jolts and cracking of whips, with a sudden deep
rumble over the boundary bridge ("into the land of thieves and
sanguinary macaques," Don Pepe defined that crossing); hats
bobbing in the first light of the dawn, on the heads of cloaked
figures; Winchesters on hip; bridle hands protruding lean and
brown from under the falling folds of the ponchos. The convoy
skirting a little wood, along the mine trail, between the mud
huts and low walls of Rincon, increased its pace on the camino
real, mules urged to speed, escort galloping, Don Carlos riding
alone ahead of a dust storm affording a vague vision of long ears
of mules, of fluttering little green and white flags stuck upon
each cart; of raised arms in a mob of sombreros with the white
gleam of ranging eyes; and Don Pepe, hardly visible in the rear
of that rattling dust trail, with a stiff seat and impassive
face, rising and falling rhythmically on an ewe-necked
silver-bitted black brute with a hammer head.
The sleepy people in the little clusters of huts, in the small
ranches near the road, recognized by the headlong sound the
charge of the San Tome silver escort towards the crumbling wall
of the city on the Campo side. They came to the doors to see it
dash by over ruts and stones, with a clatter and clank and
cracking of whips, with the reckless rush and precise driving of
a field battery hurrying into action, and the solitary English
figure of the Senor Administrador riding far ahead in the lead.
In the fenced roadside paddocks loose horses galloped wildly for
a while; the heavy cattle stood up breast deep in the grass,
lowing mutteringly at the flying noise; a meek Indian villager
would glance back once and hasten to shove his loaded little
donkey bodily against a wall, out of the way of the San Tome
silver escort going to the sea; a small knot of chilly leperos
under the Stone Horse of the Alameda would mutter: "Caramba!" on
seeing it take a wide curve at a gallop and dart into the empty
Street of the Constitution; for it was considered the correct
thing, the only proper style by the mule-drivers of the San Tome
mine to go through the waking town from end to end without a
check in the speed as if chased by a devil.
The early sunshine glowed on the delicate primrose, pale pink,
pale blue fronts of the big houses with all their gates shut yet,
and no face behind the iron bars of the windows. In the whole
sunlit range of empty balconies along the street only one white
figure would be visible high up above the clear pavement--the
wife of the Senor Administrador--leaning over to see the escort
go by to the harbour, a mass of heavy, fair hair twisted up
negligently on her little head, and a lot of lace about the neck
of her muslin wrapper. With a smile to her husband's single,
quick, upward glance, she would watch the whole thing stream past
below her feet with an orderly uproar, till she answered by a
friendly sign the salute of the galloping Don Pepe, the stiff,
deferential inclination with a sweep of the hat below the knee.
The string of padlocked carts lengthened, the size of the escort
grew bigger as the years went on. Every three months an
increasing stream of treasure swept through the streets of Sulaco
on its way to the strong room in the O.S.N. Co.'s building by the
harbour, there to await shipment for the North. Increasing in
volume, and of immense value also; for, as Charles Gould told his
wife once with some exultation, there had never been seen
anything in the world to approach the vein of the Gould
Concession. For them both, each passing of the escort under the
balconies of the Casa Gould was like another victory gained in
the conquest of peace for Sulaco.
No doubt the initial action of Charles Gould had been helped at
the beginning by a period of comparative peace which occurred
just about that time; and also by the general softening of
manners as compared with the epoch of civil wars whence had
emerged the iron tyranny of Guzman Bento of fearful memory. In
the contests that broke out at the end of his rule (which had
kept peace in the country for a whole fifteen years) there was
more fatuous imbecility, plenty of cruelty and suffering still,
but much less of the old-time fierce and blindly ferocious
political fanaticism. It was all more vile, more base, more
contemptible, and infinitely more manageable in the very
outspoken cynicism of motives. It was more clearly a
brazen-faced scramble for a constantly diminishing quantity of
booty; since all enterprise had been stupidly killed in the land.
Thus it came to pass that the province of Sulaco, once the field
of cruel party vengeances, had become in a way one of the
considerable prizes of political career. The great of the earth
(in Sta. Marta) reserved the posts in the old Occidental State to
those nearest and dearest to them: nephews, brothers, husbands
of favourite sisters, bosom friends, trusty supporters--or
prominent supporters of whom perhaps they were afraid. It was the
blessed province of great opportunities and of largest salaries;
for the San Tome mine had its own unofficial pay list, whose
items and amounts, fixed in consultation by Charles Gould and
Senor Avellanos, were known to a prominent business man in the
United States, who for twenty minutes or so in every month gave
his undivided attention to Sulaco affairs. At the same time the
material interests of all sorts, backed up by the influence of
the San Tome mine, were quietly gathering substance in that part
of the Republic. If, for instance, the Sulaco Collectorship was
generally understood, in the political world of the capital, to
open the way to the Ministry of Finance, and so on for every
official post, then, on the other hand, the despondent business
circles of the Republic had come to consider the Occidental
Province as the promised land of safety, especially if a man
managed to get on good terms with the administration of the mine.
"Charles Gould; excellent fellow! Absolutely necessary to make
sure of him before taking a single step. Get an introduction to
him from Moraga if you can--the agent of the King of Sulaco,
don't you know."
No wonder, then, that Sir John, coming from Europe to smooth the
path for his railway, had been meeting the name (and even the
nickname) of Charles Gould at every turn in Costaguana. The agent
of the San Tome Administration in Sta. Marta (a polished,
well-informed gentleman, Sir John thought him) had certainly
helped so greatly in bringing about the presidential tour that he
began to think that there was something in the faint whispers
hinting at the immense occult influence of the Gould Concession.
What was currently whispered was this--that the San Tome
Administration had, in part, at least, financed the last
revolution, which had brought into a five-year dictatorship Don
Vincente Ribiera, a man of culture and of unblemished character,
invested with a mandate of reform by the best elements of the
State. Serious, well-informed men seemed to believe the fact, to
hope for better things, for the establishment of legality, of
good faith and order in public life. So much the better, then,
thought Sir John. He worked always on a great scale; there was a
loan to the State, and a project for systematic colonization of
the Occidental Province, involved in one vast scheme with the
construction of the National Central Railway. Good faith, order,
honesty, peace, were badly wanted for this great development of
material interests. Anybody on the side of these things, and
especially if able to help, had an importance in Sir John's eyes.
He had not been disappointed in the "King of Sulaco." The local
difficulties had fallen away, as the engineer-in-chief had
foretold they would, before Charles Gould's mediation. Sir John
had been extremely feted in Sulaco, next to the
President-Dictator, a fact which might have accounted for the
evident ill-humour General Montero displayed at lunch given on
board the Juno just before she was to sail, taking away from
Sulaco the President-Dictator and the distinguished foreign guests
in his train.
The Excellentissimo ("the hope of honest men," as Don Jose had
addressed him in a public speech delivered in the name of the
Provincial Assembly of Sulaco) sat at the head of the long table;
Captain Mitchell, positively stony-eyed and purple in the face
with the solemnity of this "historical event," occupied the foot
as the representative of the O.S.N. Company in Sulaco, the hosts
of that informal function, with the captain of the ship and some
minor officials from the shore around him. Those cheery, swarthy
little gentlemen cast jovial side-glances at the bottles of
champagne beginning to pop behind the guests' backs in the hands
of the ship's stewards. The amber wine creamed up to the rims of
the glasses.
Charles Gould had his place next to a foreign envoy, who, in a
listless undertone, had been talking to him fitfully of hunting
and shooting. The well-nourished, pale face, with an eyeglass and
drooping yellow moustache, made the Senor Administrador appear by
contrast twice as sunbaked, more flaming red, a hundred times
more intensely and silently alive. Don Jose Avellanos touched
elbows with the other foreign diplomat, a dark man with a quiet,
watchful, self-confident demeanour, and a touch of reserve. All
etiquette being laid aside on the occasion, General Montero was
the only one there in full uniform, so stiff with embroideries in
front that his broad chest seemed protected by a cuirass of gold.
Sir John at the beginning had got away from high places for the
sake of sitting near Mrs. Gould.
The great financier was trying to express to her his grateful
sense of her hospitality and of his obligation to her husband's
"enormous influence in this part of the country," when she
interrupted him by a low "Hush!" The President was going to make
an informal pronouncement.
The Excellentissimo was on his legs. He said only a few words,
evidently deeply felt, and meant perhaps mostly for
Avellanos--his old friend--as to the necessity of unremitting
effort to secure the lasting welfare of the country emerging
after this last struggle, he hoped, into a period of peace and
material prosperity.
Mrs. Gould, listening to the mellow, slightly mournful voice,
looking at this rotund, dark, spectacled face, at the short body,
obese to the point of infirmity, thought that this man of
delicate and melancholy mind, physically almost a cripple, coming
out of his retirement into a dangerous strife at the call of his
fellows, had the right to speak with the authority of his
self-sacrifice. And yet she was made uneasy. He was more pathetic
than promising, this first civilian Chief of the State Costaguana
had ever known, pronouncing, glass in hand, his simple watchwords
of honesty, peace, respect for law, political good faith abroad
and at home--the safeguards of national honour.
He sat down. During the respectful, appreciative buzz of voices
that followed the speech, General Montero raised a pair of heavy,
drooping eyelids and rolled his eyes with a sort of uneasy
dullness from face to face. The military backwoods hero of the
party, though secretly impressed by the sudden novelties and
splendours of his position (he had never been on board a ship
before, and had hardly ever seen the sea except from a distance),
understood by a sort of instinct the advantage his surly,
unpolished attitude of a savage fighter gave him amongst all
these refined Blanco aristocrats. But why was it that nobody was
looking at him? he wondered to himself angrily. He was able to
spell out the print of newspapers, and knew that he had performed
the "greatest military exploit of modern times."
"My husband wanted the railway," Mrs. Gould said to Sir John in
the general murmur of resumed conversations. "All this brings
nearer the sort of future we desire for the country, which has
waited for it in sorrow long enough, God knows. But I will
confess that the other day, during my afternoon drive when I
suddenly saw an Indian boy ride out of a wood with the red flag
of a surveying party in his hand, I felt something of a shock.
The future means change--an utter change. And yet even here
there are simple and picturesque things that one would like to
preserve."
Sir John listened, smiling. But it was his turn now to hush Mrs.
Gould.
"General Montero is going to speak," he whispered, and almost
immediately added, in comic alarm, "Heavens! he's going to
propose my own health, I believe."
General Montero had risen with a jingle of steel scabbard and a
ripple of glitter on his gold-embroidered breast; a heavy
sword-hilt appeared at his side above the edge of the table. In
this gorgeous uniform, with his bull neck, his hooked nose
flattened on the tip upon a blue-black, dyed moustache, he looked
like a disguised and sinister vaquero. The drone of his voice had
a strangely rasping, soulless ring. He floundered, lowering,
through a few vague sentences; then suddenly raising his big head
and his voice together, burst out harshly--
"The honour of the country is in the hands of the army. I assure
you I shall be faithful to it." He hesitated till his roaming
eyes met Sir John's face upon which he fixed a lurid, sleepy
glance; and the figure of the lately negotiated loan came into
his mind. He lifted his glass. "I drink to the health of the man
who brings us a million and a half of pounds."
He tossed off his champagne, and sat down heavily with a
half-surprised, half-bullying look all round the faces in the
profound, as if appalled, silence which succeeded the felicitous
toast. Sir John did not move.
"I don't think I am called upon to rise," he murmured to Mrs.
Gould. "That sort of thing speaks for itself." But Don Jose
Avellanos came to the rescue with a short oration, in which he
alluded pointedly to England's goodwill towards Costaguana--"a
goodwill," he continued, significantly, "of which I, having been
in my time accredited to the Court of St. James, am able to speak
with some knowledge."
Only then Sir John thought fit to respond, which he did
gracefully in bad French, punctuated by bursts of applause and
the "Hear! Hears!" of Captain Mitchell, who was able to
understand a word now and then. Directly he had done, the
financier of railways turned to Mrs. Gould--
"You were good enough to say that you intended to ask me for
something," he reminded her, gallantly. "What is it? Be assured
that any request from you would be considered in the light of a
favour to myself."
She thanked him by a gracious smile. Everybody was rising from
the table.
"Let us go on deck," she proposed, "where I'll be able to point
out to you the very object of my request."
An enormous national flag of Costaguana, diagonal red and yellow,
with two green palm trees in the middle, floated lazily at the
mainmast head of the Juno. A multitude of fireworks being let off
in their thousands at the water's edge in honour of the President
kept up a mysterious crepitating noise half round the harbour.
Now and then a lot of rockets, swishing upwards invisibly,
detonated overhead with only a puff of smoke in the bright sky.
Crowds of people could be seen between the town gate and the
harbour, under the bunches of multicoloured flags fluttering on
tall poles. Faint bursts of military music would be heard
suddenly, and the remote sound of shouting. A knot of ragged
negroes at the end of the wharf kept on loading and firing a
small iron cannon time after time. A greyish haze of dust hung
thin and motionless against the sun.
Don Vincente Ribiera made a few steps under the deck-awning,
leaning on the arm of Senor Avellanos; a wide circle was formed
round him, where the mirthless smile of his dark lips and the
sightless glitter of his spectacles could be seen turning amiably
from side to side. The informal function arranged on purpose on
board the Juno to give the President-Dictator an opportunity to
meet intimately some of his most notable adherents in Sulaco was
drawing to an end. On one side, General Montero, his bald head
covered now by a plumed cocked hat, remained motionless on a
skylight seat, a pair of big gauntleted hands folded on the hilt
of the sabre standing upright between his legs. The white plume,
the coppery tint of his broad face, the blue-black of the
moustaches under the curved beak, the mass of gold on sleeves and
breast, the high shining boots with enormous spurs, the working
nostrils, the imbecile and domineering stare of the glorious
victor of Rio Seco had in them something ominous and incredible;
the exaggeration of a cruel caricature, the fatuity of solemn
masquerading, the atrocious grotesqueness of some military idol
of Aztec conception and European bedecking, awaiting the homage
of worshippers. Don Jose approached diplomatically this weird
and inscrutable portent, and Mrs. Gould turned her fascinated
eyes away at last.
Charles, coming up to take leave of Sir John, heard him say, as
he bent over his wife's hand, "Certainly. Of course, my dear
Mrs. Gould, for a protege of yours! Not the slightest
difficulty. Consider it done."
Going ashore in the same boat with the Goulds, Don Jose Avellanos
was very silent. Even in the Gould carriage he did not open his
lips for a long time. The mules trotted slowly away from the
wharf between the extended hands of the beggars, who for that day
seemed to have abandoned in a body the portals of churches.
Charles Gould sat on the back seat and looked away upon the
plain. A multitude of booths made of green boughs, of rushes, of
odd pieces of plank eked out with bits of canvas had been erected
all over it for the sale of cana, of dulces, of fruit, of cigars.
Over little heaps of glowing charcoal Indian women, squatting on
mats, cooked food in black earthen pots, and boiled the water for
the mate gourds, which they offered in soft, caressing voices to
the country people. A racecourse had been staked out for the
vaqueros; and away to the left, from where the crowd was massed
thickly about a huge temporary erection, like a circus tent of
wood with a conical grass roof, came the resonant twanging of
harp strings, the sharp ping of guitars, with the grave drumming
throb of an Indian gombo pulsating steadily through the shrill
choruses of the dancers.
Charles Gould said presently--
"All this piece of land belongs now to the Railway Company. There
will be no more popular feasts held here."
Mrs. Gould was rather sorry to think so. She took this
opportunity to mention how she had just obtained from Sir John
the promise that the house occupied by Giorgio Viola should not
be interfered with. She declared she could never understand why
the survey engineers ever talked of demolishing that old
building. It was not in the way of the projected harbour branch
of the line in the least.
She stopped the carriage before the door to reassure at once the
old Genoese, who came out bare-headed and stood by the carriage
step. She talked to him in Italian, of course, and he thanked her
with calm dignity. An old Garibaldino was grateful to her from
the bottom of his heart for keeping the roof over the heads of
his wife and children. He was too old to wander any more.
"And is it for ever, signora?" he asked.
"For as long as you like."
"Bene. Then the place must be named, It was not worth while
before."
He smiled ruggedly, with a running together of wrinkles at the
corners of his eyes. "I shall set about the painting of the name
to-morrow."
"And what is it going to be, Giorgio?"
"Albergo d'Italia Una," said the old Garibaldino, looking away
for a moment. "More in memory of those who have died," he added,
"than for the country stolen from us soldiers of liberty by the
craft of that accursed Piedmontese race of kings and ministers."
Mrs. Gould smiled slightly, and, bending over a little, began to
inquire about his wife and children. He had sent them into town
on that day. The padrona was better in health; many thanks to the
signora for inquiring.
People were passing in twos and threes, in whole parties of men
and women attended by trotting children. A horseman mounted on a
silver-grey mare drew rein quietly in the shade of the house
after taking off his hat to the party in the carriage, who
returned smiles and familiar nods. Old Viola, evidently very
pleased with the news he had just heard, interrupted himself for
a moment to tell him rapidly that the house was secured, by the
kindness of the English signora, for as long as he liked to keep
it. The other listened attentively, but made no response.
When the carriage moved on he took off his hat again, a grey
sombrero with a silver cord and tassels. The bright colours of a
Mexican serape twisted on the cantle, the enormous silver buttons
on the embroidered leather jacket, the row of tiny silver buttons
down the seam of the trousers, the snowy linen, a silk sash with
embroidered ends, the silver plates on headstall and saddle,
proclaimed the unapproachable style of the famous Capataz de
Cargadores--a Mediterranean sailor--got up with more finished
splendour than any well-to-do young ranchero of the Campo had
ever displayed on a high holiday.
"It is a great thing for me," murmured old Giorgio, still
thinking of the house, for now he had grown weary of change. "The
signora just said a word to the Englishman."
"The old Englishman who has enough money to pay for a railway? He
is going off in an hour," remarked Nostromo, carelessly. "Buon
viaggio, then. I've guarded his bones all the way from the
Entrada pass down to the plain and into Sulaco, as though he had
been my own father."
Old Giorgio only moved his head sideways absently. Nostromo
pointed after the Goulds' carriage, nearing the grass-grown gate
in the old town wall that was like a wall of matted jungle.
"And I have sat alone at night with my revolver in the Company's
warehouse time and again by the side of that other Englishman's
heap of silver, guarding it as though it had been my own."
Viola seemed lost in thought. "It is a great thing for me," he
repeated again, as if to himself.
"It is," agreed the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores, calmly.
"Listen, Vecchio--go in and bring me, out a cigar, but don't look
for it in my room. There's nothing there."
Viola stepped into the cafe and came out directly, still absorbed
in his idea, and tendered him a cigar, mumbling thoughtfully in
his moustache, "Children growing up--and girls, too! Girls!" He
sighed and fell silent.
"What, only one?" remarked Nostromo, looking down with a sort of
comic inquisitiveness at the unconscious old man. "No matter," he
added, with lofty negligence; "one is enough till another is
wanted."
He lit it and let the match drop from his passive fingers.
Giorgio Viola looked up, and said abruptly--
"My son would have been just such a fine young man as you, Gian'
Battista, if he had lived."
"What? Your son? But you are right, padrone. If he had been like
me he would have been a man."
He turned his horse slowly, and paced on between the booths,
checking the mare almost to a standstill now and then for
children, for the groups of people from the distant Campo, who
stared after him with admiration. The Company's lightermen
saluted him from afar; and the greatly envied Capataz de
Cargadores advanced, amongst murmurs of recognition and
obsequious greetings, towards the huge circus-like erection. The
throng thickened; the guitars tinkled louder; other horsemen sat
motionless, smoking calmly above the heads of the crowd; it
eddied and pushed before the doors of the high-roofed building,
whence issued a shuffle and thumping of feet in time to the dance
music vibrating and shrieking with a racking rhythm, overhung by
the tremendous, sustained, hollow roar of the gombo. The
barbarous and imposing noise of the big drum, that can madden a
crowd, and that even Europeans cannot hear without a strange
emotion, seemed to draw Nostromo on to its source, while a man,
wrapped up in a faded, torn poncho, walked by his stirrup, and,
buffeted right and left, begged "his worship" insistently for
employment on the wharf. He whined, offering the Senor Capataz
half his daily pay for the privilege of being admitted to the
swaggering fraternity of Cargadores; the other half would be
enough for him, he protested. But Captain Mitchell's right-hand
man--"invaluable for our work--a perfectly incorruptible
fellow"--after looking down critically at the ragged mozo, shook
his head without a word in the uproar going on around.
The man fell back; and a little further on Nostromo had to pull
up. From the doors of the dance hall men and women emerged
tottering, streaming with sweat, trembling in every limb, to
lean, panting, with staring eyes and parted lips, against the
wall of the structure, where the harps and guitars played on with
mad speed in an incessant roll of thunder. Hundreds of hands
clapped in there; voices shrieked, and then all at once would
sink low, chanting in unison the refrain of a love song, with a
dying fall. A red flower, flung with a good aim from somewhere in
the crowd, struck the resplendent Capataz on the cheek.
He caught it as it fell, neatly, but for some time did not turn
his head. When at last he condescended to look round, the throng
near him had parted to make way for a pretty Morenita, her hair
held up by a small golden comb, who was walking towards him in
the open space.
Her arms and neck emerged plump and bare from a snowy chemisette;
the blue woollen skirt, with all the fullness gathered in front,
scanty on the hips and tight across the back, disclosed the
provoking action of her walk. She came straight on and laid her
hand on the mare's neck with a timid, coquettish look upwards out
of the corner of her eyes.
"Querido," she murmured, caressingly, "why do you pretend not to
see me when I pass?"
"Because I don't love thee any more," said Nostromo,
deliberately, after a moment of reflective silence.
The hand on the mare's neck trembled suddenly. She dropped her
head before all the eyes in the wide circle formed round the
generous, the terrible, the inconstant Capataz de Cargadores, and
his Morenita.
Nostromo, looking down, saw tears beginning to fall down her
face.
"Has it come, then, ever beloved of my heart?" she whispered. "Is
it true?"
"No," said Nostromo, looking away carelessly. "It was a lie. I
love thee as much as ever."
"Is that true?" she cooed, joyously, her cheeks still wet with
tears.
"It is true."
"True on the life?"
"As true as that; but thou must not ask me to swear it on the
Madonna that stands in thy room." And the Capataz laughed a
little in response to the grins of the crowd.
She pouted--very pretty--a little uneasy.
"No, I will not ask for that. I can see love in your eyes." She
laid her hand on his knee. "Why are you trembling like this? From
love?" she continued, while the cavernous thundering of the gombo
went on without a pause. "But if you love her as much as that,
you must give your Paquita a gold-mounted rosary of beads for the
neck of her Madonna."
"No," said Nostromo, looking into her uplifted, begging eyes,
which suddenly turned stony with surprise.
"No? Then what else will your worship give me on the day of the
fiesta?" she asked, angrily; "so as not to shame me before all
these people."
"There is no shame for thee in getting nothing from thy lover for
once."
"True! The shame is your worship's--my poor lover's," she flared
up, sarcastically.
Laughs were heard at her anger, at her retort. What an audacious
spitfire she was! The people aware of this scene were calling out
urgently to others in the crowd. The circle round the silver-grey
mare narrowed slowly.
The girl went off a pace or two, confronting the mocking
curiosity of the eyes, then flung back to the stirrup, tiptoeing,
her enraged face turned up to Nostromo with a pair of blazing
eyes. He bent low to her in the saddle.
"Juan," she hissed, "I could stab thee to the heart!"
The dreaded Capataz de Cargadores, magnificent and carelessly
public in his amours, flung his arm round her neck and kissed her
spluttering lips. A murmur went round.
"A knife!" he demanded at large, holding her firmly by the
shoulder.
Twenty blades flashed out together in the circle. A young man in
holiday attire, bounding in, thrust one in Nostromo's hand and
bounded back into the ranks, very proud of himself. Nostromo had
not even looked at him.
"Stand on my foot," he commanded the girl, who, suddenly subdued,
rose lightly, and when he had her up, encircling her waist, her
face near to his, he pressed the knife into her little hand.
"No, Morenita! You shall not put me to shame," he said. "You
shall have your present; and so that everyone should know who is
your lover to-day, you may cut all the silver buttons off my
coat."
There were shouts of laughter and applause at this witty freak,
while the girl passed the keen blade, and the impassive rider
jingled in his palm the increasing hoard of silver buttons. He
eased her to the ground with both her hands full. After
whispering for a while with a very strenuous face, she walked
away, staring haughtily, and vanished into the crowd.
The circle had broken up, and the lordly Capataz de Cargadores,
the indispensable man, the tried and trusty Nostromo, the
Mediterranean sailor come ashore casually to try his luck in
Costaguana, rode slowly towards the harbour. The Juno was just
then swinging round; and even as Nostromo reined up again to look
on, a flag ran up on the improvised flagstaff erected in an
ancient and dismantled little fort at the harbour entrance. Half
a battery of field guns had been hurried over there from the
Sulaco barracks for the purpose of firing the regulation salutes
for the President-Dictator and the War Minister. As the mail-boat
headed through the pass, the badly timed reports announced the
end of Don Vincente Ribiera's first official visit to Sulaco, and
for Captain Mitchell the end of another "historic occasion." Next
time when the "Hope of honest men" was to come that way, a year
and a half later, it was unofficially, over the mountain tracks,
fleeing after a defeat on a lame mule, to be only just saved by
Nostromo from an ignominious death at the hands of a mob. It was
a very different event, of which Captain Mitchell used to say--
"It was history--history, sir! And that fellow of mine, Nostromo,
you know, was right in it. Absolutely making history, sir."
But this event, creditable to Nostromo, was to lead immediately
to another, which could not be classed either as "history" or as
"a mistake" in Captain Mitchell's phraseology. He had another
word for it.
"Sir" he used to say afterwards, "that was no mistake. It was a
fatality. A misfortune, pure and simple, sir. And that poor
fellow of mine was right in it--right in the middle of it! A
fatality, if ever there was one--and to my mind he has never been
the same man since."
PART SECOND
THE ISABELS
CHAPTER ONE
THROUGH good and evil report in the varying fortune of that
struggle which Don Jose had characterized in the phrase, "the
fate of national honesty trembles in the balance," the Gould
Concession, "Imperium in Imperio," had gone on working; the
square mountain had gone on pouring its treasure down the wooden
shoots to the unresting batteries of stamps; the lights of San
Tome had twinkled night after night upon the great, limitless
shadow of the Campo; every three months the silver escort had
gone down to the sea as if neither the war nor its consequences
could ever affect the ancient Occidental State secluded beyond
its high barrier of the Cordillera. All the fighting took place
on the other side of that mighty wall of serrated peaks lorded
over by the white dome of Higuerota and as yet unbreached by the
railway, of which only the first part, the easy Campo part from
Sulaco to the Ivie Valley at the foot of the pass, had been laid.
Neither did the telegraph line cross the mountains yet; its
poles, like slender beacons on the plain, penetrated into the
forest fringe of the foot-hills cut by the deep avenue of the
track; and its wire ended abruptly in the construction camp at a
white deal table supporting a Morse apparatus, in a long hut of
planks with a corrugated iron roof overshadowed by gigantic cedar
trees--the quarters of the engineer in charge of the advance
section.
The harbour was busy, too, with the traffic in railway material,
and with the movements of troops along the coast. The O.S.N.
Company found much occupation for its fleet. Costaguana had no
navy, and, apart from a few coastguard cutters, there were no
national ships except a couple of old merchant steamers used as
transports.
Captain Mitchell, feeling more and more in the thick of history,
found time for an hour or so during an afternoon in the
drawing-room of the Casa Gould, where, with a strange ignorance
of the real forces at work around him, he professed himself
delighted to get away from the strain of affairs. He did not know
what he would have done without his invaluable Nostromo, he
declared. Those confounded Costaguana politics gave him more
work--he confided to Mrs. Gould--than he had bargained for.
Don Jose Avellanos had displayed in the service of the endangered
Ribiera Government an organizing activity and an eloquence of
which the echoes reached even Europe. For, after the new loan to
the Ribiera Government, Europe had become interested in
Costaguana. The Sala of the Provincial Assembly (in the
Municipal Buildings of Sulaco), with its portraits of the
Liberators on the walls and an old flag of Cortez preserved in a
glass case above the President's chair, had heard all these
speeches--the early one containing the impassioned declaration
"Militarism is the enemy," the famous one of the "trembling
balance" delivered on the occasion of the vote for the raising of
a second Sulaco regiment in the defence of the reforming
Government; and when the provinces again displayed their old
flags (proscribed in Guzman Bento's time) there was another of
those great orations, when Don Jose greeted these old emblems of
the war of Independence, brought out again in the name of new
Ideals. The old idea of Federalism had disappeared. For his part
he did not wish to revive old political doctrines. They were
perishable. They died. But the doctrine of political rectitude
was immortal. The second Sulaco regiment, to whom he was
presenting this flag, was going to show its valour in a contest
for order, peace, progress; for the establishment of national
self-respect without which--he declared with energy--"we are a
reproach and a byword amongst the powers of the world."
Don Jose Avellanos loved his country. He had served it lavishly
with his fortune during his diplomatic career, and the later
story of his captivity and barbarous ill-usage under Guzman Bento
was well known to his listeners. It was a wonder that he had not
been a victim of the ferocious and summary executions which
marked the course of that tyranny; for Guzman had ruled the
country with the sombre imbecility of political fanaticism. The
power of Supreme Government had become in his dull mind an object
of strange worship, as if it were some sort of cruel deity. It
was incarnated in himself, and his adversaries, the Federalists,
were the supreme sinners, objects of hate, abhorrence, and fear,
as heretics would be to a convinced Inquisitor. For years he had
carried about at the tail of the Army of Pacification, all over
the country, a captive band of such atrocious criminals, who
considered themselves most unfortunate at not having been
summarily executed. It was a diminishing company of nearly naked
skeletons, loaded with irons, covered with dirt, with vermin,
with raw wounds, all men of position, of education, of wealth,
who had learned to fight amongst themselves for scraps of rotten
beef thrown to them by soldiers, or to beg a negro cook for a
drink of muddy water in pitiful accents. Don Jose Avellanos,
clanking his chains amongst the others, seemed only to exist in
order to prove how much hunger, pain, degradation, and cruel
torture a human body can stand without parting with the last
spark of life. Sometimes interrogatories, backed by some
primitive method of torture, were administered to them by a
commission of officers hastily assembled in a hut of sticks and
branches, and made pitiless by the fear for their own lives. A
lucky one or two of that spectral company of prisoners would
perhaps be led tottering behind a bush to be shot by a file of
soldiers. Always an army chaplain--some unshaven, dirty man, girt
with a sword and with a tiny cross embroidered in white cotton on
the left breast of a lieutenant's uniform--would follow,
cigarette in the corner of the mouth, wooden stool in hand, to
hear the confession and give absolution; for the Citizen Saviour
of the Country (Guzman Bento was called thus officially in
petitions) was not averse from the exercise of rational clemency.
The irregular report of the firing squad would be heard, followed
sometimes by a single finishing shot; a little bluish cloud of
smoke would float up above the green bushes, and the Army of
Pacification would move on over the savannas, through the
forests, crossing rivers, invading rural pueblos, devastating the
haciendas of the horrid aristocrats, occupying the inland towns
in the fulfilment of its patriotic mission, and leaving behind a
united land wherein the evil taint of Federalism could no longer
be detected in the smoke of burning houses and the smell of spilt
blood. Don Jose Avellanos had survived that time. Perhaps, when
contemptuously signifying to him his release, the Citizen Saviour
of the Country might have thought this benighted aristocrat too
broken in health and spirit and fortune to be any longer
dangerous. Or, perhaps, it may have been a simple caprice. Guzman
Bento, usually full of fanciful fears and brooding suspicions,
had sudden accesses of unreasonable self-confidence when he
perceived himself elevated on a pinnacle of power and safety
beyond the reach of mere mortal plotters. At such times he would
impulsively command the celebration of a solemn Mass of
thanksgiving, which would be sung in great pomp in the cathedral
of Sta. Marta by the trembling, subservient Archbishop of his
creation. He heard it sitting in a gilt armchair placed before
the high altar, surrounded by the civil and military heads of his
Government. The unofficial world of Sta. Marta would crowd into
the cathedral, for it was not quite safe for anybody of mark to
stay away from these manifestations of presidential piety. Having
thus acknowledged the only power he was at all disposed to
recognize as above himself, he would scatter acts of political
grace in a sardonic wantonness of clemency. There was no other
way left now to enjoy his power but by seeing his crushed
adversaries crawl impotently into the light of day out of the
dark, noisome cells of the Collegio. Their harmlessness fed his
insatiable vanity, and they could always be got hold of again. It
was the rule for all the women of their families to present
thanks afterwards in a special audience. The incarnation of that
strange god, El Gobierno Supremo, received them standing, cocked
hat on head, and exhorted them in a menacing mutter to show their
gratitude by bringing up their children in fidelity to the
democratic form of government, "which I have established for the
happiness of our country." His front teeth having been knocked
out in some accident of his former herdsman's life, his utterance
was spluttering and indistinct. He had been working for
Costaguana alone in the midst of treachery and opposition. Let
it cease now lest he should become weary of forgiving!
Don Jose Avellanos had known this forgiveness.
He was broken in health and fortune deplorably enough to present
a truly gratifying spectacle to the supreme chief of democratic
institutions. He retired to Sulaco. His wife had an estate in
that province, and she nursed him back to life out of the house
of death and captivity. When she died, their daughter, an only
child, was old enough to devote herself to "poor papa."
Miss Avellanos, born in Europe and educated partly in England,
was a tall, grave girl, with a self-possessed manner, a wide,
white forehead, a wealth of rich brown hair, and blue eyes.
The other young ladies of Sulaco stood in awe of her character
and accomplishments. She was reputed to be terribly learned and
serious. As to pride, it was well known that all the Corbelans
were proud, and her mother was a Corbelan. Don Jose Avellanos
depended very much upon the devotion of his beloved Antonia. He
accepted it in the benighted way of men, who, though made in
God's image, are like stone idols without sense before the smoke
of certain burnt offerings. He was ruined in every way, but a man
possessed of passion is not a bankrupt in life. Don Jose
Avellanos desired passionately for his country: peace,
prosperity, and (as the end of the preface to "Fifty Years of
Misrule" has it) "an honourable place in the comity of civilized
nations." In this last phrase the Minister Plenipotentiary,
cruelly humiliated by the bad faith of his Government towards the
foreign bondholders, stands disclosed in the patriot.
The fatuous turmoil of greedy factions succeeding the tyranny of
Guzman Bento seemed to bring his desire to the very door of
opportunity. He was too old to descend personally into the centre
of the arena at Sta. Marta. But the men who acted there sought
his advice at every step. He himself thought that he could be
most useful at a distance, in Sulaco. His name, his connections,
his former position, his experience commanded the respect of his
class. The discovery that this man, living in dignified poverty
in the Corbelan town residence (opposite the Casa Gould), could
dispose of material means towards the support of the cause
increased his influence. It was his open letter of appeal that
decided the candidature of Don Vincente Ribiera for the
Presidency. Another of these informal State papers drawn up by
Don Jose (this time in the shape of an address from the Province)
induced that scrupulous constitutionalist to accept the
extraordinary powers conferred upon him for five years by an
overwhelming vote of congress in Sta. Marta. It was a specific
mandate to establish the prosperity of the people on the basis of
firm peace at home, and to redeem the national credit by the
satisfaction of all just claims abroad.
On the afternoon the news of that vote had reached Sulaco by the
usual roundabout postal way through Cayta, and up the coast by
steamer. Don Jose, who had been waiting for the mail in the
Goulds' drawing-room, got out of the rocking-chair, letting his
hat fall off his knees. He rubbed his silvery, short hair with
both hands, speechless with the excess of joy.
"Emilia, my soul," he had burst out, "let me embrace you! Let
me--"
Captain Mitchell, had he been there, would no doubt have made an
apt remark about the dawn of a new era; but if Don Jose thought
something of the kind, his eloquence failed him on this occasion.
The inspirer of that revival of the Blanco party tottered where
he stood. Mrs. Gould moved forward quickly and, as she offered
her cheek with a smile to her old friend, managed very cleverly
to give him the support of her arm he really needed.
Don Jose had recovered himself at once, but for a time he could
do no more than murmur, "Oh, you two patriots! Oh, you two
patriots!"--looking from one to the other. Vague plans of another
historical work, wherein all the devotions to the regeneration of
the country he loved would be enshrined for the reverent worship
of posterity, flitted through his mind. The historian who had
enough elevation of soul to write of Guzman Bento: "Yet this
monster, imbrued in the blood of his countrymen, must not be held
unreservedly to the execration of future years. It appears to be
true that he, too, loved his country. He had given it twelve
years of peace; and, absolute master of lives and fortunes as he
was, he died poor. His worst fault, perhaps, was not his
ferocity, but his ignorance;" the man who could write thus of a
cruel persecutor (the passage occurs in his "History of Misrule")
felt at the foreshadowing of success an almost boundless
affection for his two helpers, for these two young people from
over the sea.
Just as years ago, calmly, from the conviction of practical
necessity, stronger than any abstract political doctrine, Henry
Gould had drawn the sword, so now, the times being changed,
Charles Gould had flung the silver of the San Tome into the fray.
The Inglez of Sulaco, the "Costaguana Englishman" of the third
generation, was as far from being a political intriguer as his
uncle from a revolutionary swashbuckler. Springing from the
instinctive uprightness of their natures their action was
reasoned. They saw an opportunity and used the weapon to hand.
Charles Gould's position--a commanding position in the background
of that attempt to retrieve the peace and the credit of the
Republic--was very clear. At the beginning he had had to
accommodate himself to existing circumstances of corruption so
naively brazen as to disarm the hate of a man courageous enough
not to be afraid of its irresponsible potency to ruin everything
it touched. It seemed to him too contemptible for hot anger even.
He made use of it with a cold, fearless scorn, manifested rather
than concealed by the forms of stony courtesy which did away with
much of the ignominy of the situation. At bottom, perhaps, he
suffered from it, for he was not a man of cowardly illusions, but
he refused to discuss the ethical view with his wife. He trusted
that, though a little disenchanted, she would be intelligent
enough to understand that his character safeguarded the
enterprise of their lives as much or more than his policy. The
extraordinary development of the mine had put a great power into
his hands. To feel that prosperity always at the mercy of
unintelligent greed had grown irksome to him. To Mrs. Gould it
was humiliating. At any rate, it was dangerous. In the
confidential communications passing between Charles Gould, the
King of Sulaco, and the head of the silver and steel interests
far away in California, the conviction was growing that any
attempt made by men of education and integrity ought to be
discreetly supported. "You may tell your friend Avellanos that I
think so," Mr. Holroyd had written at the proper moment from his
inviolable sanctuary within the eleven-storey high factory of
great affairs. And shortly afterwards, with a credit opened by
the Third Southern Bank (located next door but one to the Holroyd
Building), the Ribierist party in Costaguana took a practical
shape under the eye of the administrator of the San Tome mine.
And Don Jose, the hereditary friend of the Gould family, could
say: "Perhaps, my dear Carlos, I shall not have believed in
vain."
CHAPTER TWO
AFTER another armed struggle, decided by Montero's victory of Rio
Seco, had been added to the tale of civil wars, the "honest men,"
as Don Jose called them, could breathe freely for the first time
in half a century. The Five-Year-Mandate law became the basis of
that regeneration, the passionate desire and hope for which had
been like the elixir of everlasting youth for Don Jose Avellanos.
And when it was suddenly--and not quite unexpectedly--endangered
by that "brute Montero," it was a passionate indignation that
gave him a new lease of life, as it were. Already, at the time of
the President-Dictator's visit to Sulaco, Moraga had sounded a
note of warning from Sta. Marta about the War Minister. Montero
and his brother made the subject of an earnest talk between the
Dictator-President and the Nestor-inspirer of the party. But Don
Vincente, a doctor of philosophy from the Cordova University,
seemed to have an exaggerated respect for military ability, whose
mysteriousness--since it appeared to be altogether independent of
intellect--imposed upon his imagination. The victor of Rio Seco
was a popular hero. His services were so recent that the
President-Dictator quailed before the obvious charge of political
ingratitude. Great regenerating transactions were being
initiated--the fresh loan, a new railway line, a vast
colonization scheme. Anything that could unsettle the public
opinion in the capital was to be avoided. Don Jose bowed to
these arguments and tried to dismiss from his mind the gold-laced
portent in boots, and with a sabre, made meaningless now at last,
he hoped, in the new order of things.
Less than six months after the President-Dictator's visit, Sulaco
learned with stupefaction of the military revolt in the name of
national honour. The Minister of War, in a barrack-square
allocution to the officers of the artillery regiment he had been
inspecting, had declared the national honour sold to foreigners.
The Dictator, by his weak compliance with the demands of the
European powers--for the settlement of long outstanding money
claims--had showed himself unfit to rule. A letter from Moraga
explained afterwards that the initiative, and even the very text,
of the incendiary allocution came, in reality, from the other
Montero, the ex-guerillero, the Commandante de Plaza. The
energetic treatment of Dr. Monygham, sent for in haste "to the
mountain," who came galloping three leagues in the dark, saved
Don Jose from a dangerous attack of jaundice.
After getting over the shock, Don Jose refused to let himself be
prostrated. Indeed, better news succeeded at first. The revolt in
the capital had been suppressed after a night of fighting in the
streets. Unfortunately, both the Monteros had been able to make
their escape south, to their native province of Entre-Montes. The
hero of the forest march, the victor of Rio Seco, had been
received with frenzied acclamations in Nicoya, the provincial
capital. The troops in garrison there had gone to him in a body.
The brothers were organizing an army, gathering malcontents,
sending emissaries primed with patriotic lies to the people, and
with promises of plunder to the wild llaneros. Even a Monterist
press had come into existence, speaking oracularly of the secret
promises of support given by "our great sister Republic of the
North" against the sinister land-grabbing designs of European
powers, cursing in every issue the "miserable Ribiera," who had
plotted to deliver his country, bound hand and foot, for a prey
to foreign speculators.
Sulaco, pastoral and sleepy, with its opulent Campo and the rich
silver mine, heard the din of arms fitfully in its fortunate
isolation. It was nevertheless in the very forefront of the
defence with men and money; but the very rumours reached it
circuitously--from abroad even, so much was it cut off from the
rest of the Republic, not only by natural obstacles, but also by
the vicissitudes of the war. The Monteristos were besieging
Cayta, an important postal link. The overland couriers ceased to
come across the mountains, and no muleteer would consent to risk
the journey at last; even Bonifacio on one occasion failed to
return from Sta. Marta, either not daring to start, or perhaps
captured by the parties of the enemy raiding the country between
the Cordillera and the capital. Monterist publications, however,
found their way into the province, mysteriously enough; and also
Monterist emissaries preaching death to aristocrats in the
villages and towns of the Campo. Very early, at the beginning of
the trouble, Hernandez, the bandit, had proposed (through the
agency of an old priest of a village in the wilds) to deliver two
of them to the Ribierist authorities in Tonoro. They had come to
offer him a free pardon and the rank of colonel from General
Montero in consideration of joining the rebel army with his
mounted band. No notice was taken at the time of the proposal. It
was joined, as an evidence of good faith, to a petition praying
the Sulaco Assembly for permission to enlist, with all his
followers, in the forces being then raised in Sulaco for the
defence of the Five-Year Mandate of regeneration. The petition,
like everything else, had found its way into Don Jose's hands. He
had showed to Mrs. Gould these pages of dirty-greyish rough paper
(perhaps looted in some village store), covered with the crabbed,
illiterate handwriting of the old padre, carried off from his hut
by the side of a mud-walled church to be the secretary of the
dreaded Salteador. They had both bent in the lamplight of the
Gould drawing-room over the document containing the fierce and
yet humble appeal of the man against the blind and stupid
barbarity turning an honest ranchero into a bandit. A postscript
of the priest stated that, but for being deprived of his liberty
for ten days, he had been treated with humanity and the respect
due to his sacred calling. He had been, it appears, confessing
and absolving the chief and most of the band, and he guaranteed
the sincerity of their good disposition. He had distributed heavy
penances, no doubt in the way of litanies and fasts; but he
argued shrewdly that it would be difficult for them to make their
peace with God durably till they had made peace with men.
Never before, perhaps, had Hernandez's head been in less jeopardy
than when he petitioned humbly for permission to buy a pardon for
himself and his gang of deserters by armed service. He could
range afar from the waste lands protecting his fastness,
unchecked, because there were no troops left in the whole
province. The usual garrison of Sulaco had gone south to the
war, with its brass band playing the Bolivar march on the bridge
of one of the O.S.N. Company's steamers. The great family
coaches drawn up along the shore of the harbour were made to rock
on the high leathern springs by the enthusiasm of the senoras and
the senoritas standing up to wave their lace handkerchiefs, as
lighter after lighter packed full of troops left the end of the
jetty.
Nostromo directed the embarkation, under the superintendendence
of Captain Mitchell, red-faced in the sun, conspicuous in a white
waistcoat, representing the allied and anxious goodwill of all
the material interests of civilization. General Barrios, who
commanded the troops, assured Don Jose on parting that in three
weeks he would have Montero in a wooden cage drawn by three pair
of oxen ready for a tour through all the towns of the Republic.
"And then, senora," he continued, baring his curly iron-grey head
to Mrs. Gould in her landau--"and then, senora, we shall convert
our swords into plough-shares and grow rich. Even I, myself, as
soon as this little business is settled, shall open a fundacion
on some land I have on the llanos and try to make a little money
in peace and quietness. Senora, you know, all Costaguana
knows--what do I say?--this whole South American continent knows,
that Pablo Barrios has had his fill of military glory."
Charles Gould was not present at the anxious and patriotic
send-off. It was not his part to see the soldiers embark. It was
neither his part, nor his inclination, nor his policy. His part,
his inclination, and his policy were united in one endeavour to
keep unchecked the flow of treasure he had started single-handed
from the re-opened scar in the flank of the mountain. As the mine
developed he had trained for himself some native help. There were
foremen, artificers and clerks, with Don Pepe for the gobernador
of the mining population. For the rest his shoulders alone
sustained the whole weight of the "Imperium in Imperio," the
great Gould Concession whose mere shadow had been enough to crush
the life out of his father.
Mrs. Gould had no silver mine to look after. In the general life
of the Gould Concession she was represented by her two
lieutenants, the doctor and the priest, but she fed her woman's
love of excitement on events whose significance was purified to
her by the fire of her imaginative purpose. On that day she had
brought the Avellanos, father and daughter, down to the harbour
with her.
Amongst his other activities of that stirring time, Don Jose had
become the chairman of a Patriotic Committee which had armed a
great proportion of troops in the Sulaco command with an improved
model of a military rifle. It had been just discarded for
something still more deadly by one of the great European powers.
How much of the market-price for second-hand weapons was covered
by the voluntary contributions of the principal families, and how
much came from those funds Don Jose was understood to command
abroad, remained a secret which he alone could have disclosed;
but the Ricos, as the populace called them, had contributed under
the pressure of their Nestor's eloquence. Some of the more
enthusiastic ladies had been moved to bring offerings of jewels
into the hands of the man who was the life and soul of the party.
There were moments when both his life and his soul seemed
overtaxed by so many years of undiscouraged belief in
regeneration. He appeared almost inanimate, sitting rigidly by
the side of Mrs. Gould in the landau, with his fine, old,
clean-shaven face of a uniform tint as if modelled in yellow wax,
shaded by a soft felt hat, the dark eyes looking out fixedly.
Antonia, the beautiful Antonia, as Miss Avellanos was called in
Sulaco, leaned back, facing them; and her full figure, the grave
oval of her face with full red lips, made her look more mature
than Mrs. Gould, with her mobile expression and small, erect
person under a slightly swaying sunshade.
Whenever possible Antonia attended her father; her recognized
devotion weakened the shocking effect of her scorn for the rigid
conventions regulating the life of Spanish-American girlhood.
And, in truth, she was no longer girlish. It was said that she
often wrote State papers from her father's dictation, and was
allowed to read all the books in his library. At the receptions--
where the situation was saved by the presence of a very decrepit
old lady (a relation of the Corbelans), quite deaf and motionless
in an armchair--Antonia could hold her own in a discussion with
two or three men at a time. Obviously she was not the girl to be
content with peeping through a barred window at a cloaked figure
of a lover ensconced in a doorway opposite--which is the correct
form of Costaguana courtship. It was generally believed that with
her foreign upbringing and foreign ideas the learned and proud
Antonia would never marry--unless, indeed, she married a
foreigner from Europe or North America, now that Sulaco seemed on
the point of being invaded by all the world.
CHAPTER THREE
WHEN General Barrios stopped to address Mrs. Gould, Antonia
raised negligently her hand holding an open fan, as if to shade
from the sun her head, wrapped in a light lace shawl. The clear
gleam of her blue eyes gliding behind the black fringe of
eyelashes paused for a moment upon her father, then travelled
further to the figure of a young man of thirty at most, of medium
height, rather thick-set, wearing a light overcoat. Bearing down
with the open palm of his hand upon the knob of a flexible cane,
he had been looking on from a distance; but directly he saw
himself noticed, he approached quietly and put his elbow over the
door of the landau.
The shirt collar, cut low in the neck, the big bow of his cravat,
the style of his clothing, from the round hat to the varnished
shoes, suggested an idea of French elegance; but otherwise he was
the very type of a fair Spanish creole. The fluffy moustache and
the short, curly, golden beard did not conceal his lips, rosy,
fresh, almost pouting in expression. His full, round face was of
that warm, healthy creole white which is never tanned by its
native sunshine. Martin Decoud was seldom exposed to the
Costaguana sun under which he was born. His people had been long
settled in Paris, where he had studied law, had dabbled in
literature, had hoped now and then in moments of exaltation to
become a poet like that other foreigner of Spanish blood, Jose
Maria Heredia. In other moments he had, to pass the time,
condescended to write articles on European affairs for the
Semenario, the principal newspaper in Sta. Marta, which printed
them under the heading "From our special correspondent," though
the authorship was an open secret. Everybody in Costaguana, where
the tale of compatriots in Europe is jealously kept, knew that it
was "the son Decoud," a talented young man, supposed to be moving
in the higher spheres of Society. As a matter of fact, he was an
idle boulevardier, in touch with some smart journalists, made
free of a few newspaper offices, and welcomed in the pleasure
haunts of pressmen. This life, whose dreary superficiality is
covered by the glitter of universal blague, like the stupid
clowning of a harlequin by the spangles of a motley costume,
induced in him a Frenchified--but most
un-French--cosmopolitanism, in reality a mere barren
indifferentism posing as intellectual superiority. Of his own
country he used to say to his French associates: "Imagine an
atmosphere of opera-bouffe in which all the comic business of
stage statesmen, brigands, etc., etc., all their farcical
stealing, intriguing, and stabbing is done in dead earnest. It is
screamingly funny, the blood flows all the time, and the actors
believe themselves to be influencing the fate of the universe. Of
course, government in general, any government anywhere, is a
thing of exquisite comicality to a discerning mind; but really we
Spanish-Americans do overstep the bounds. No man of ordinary
intelligence can take part in the intrigues of une farce macabre.
However, these Ribierists, of whom we hear so much just now, are
really trying in their own comical way to make the country
habitable, and even to pay some of its debts. My friends, you had
better write up Senor Ribiera all you can in kindness to your own
bondholders. Really, if what I am told in my letters is true,
there is some chance for them at last."
And he would explain with railing verve what Don Vincente Ribiera
stood for--a mournful little man oppressed by his own good
intentions, the significance of battles won, who Montero was (un
grotesque vaniteux et feroce), and the manner of the new loan
connected with railway development, and the colonization of vast
tracts of land in one great financial scheme.
And his French friends would remark that evidently this little
fellow Decoud connaissait la question a fond. An important
Parisian review asked him for an article on the situation. It was
composed in a serious tone and in a spirit of levity. Afterwards
he asked one of his intimates--
"Have you read my thing about the regeneration of Costaguana--une
bonne blague, hein?"
He imagined himself Parisian to the tips of his fingers. But far
from being that he was in danger of remaining a sort of
nondescript dilettante all his life. He had pushed the habit of
universal raillery to a point where it blinded him to the genuine
impulses of his own nature. To be suddenly selected for the
executive member of the patriotic small-arms committee of Sulaco
seemed to him the height of the unexpected, one of those
fantastic moves of which only his "dear countrymen" were capable.
"It's like a tile falling on my head. I--I--executive member!
It's the first I hear of it! What do I know of military rifles?
C'est funambulesque!" he had exclaimed to his favourite sister;
for the Decoud family--except the old father and mother--used
the French language amongst themselves. "And you should see the
explanatory and confidential letter! Eight pages of it--no less!"
This letter, in Antonia's handwriting, was signed by Don Jose,
who appealed to the "young and gifted Costaguanero" on public
grounds, and privately opened his heart to his talented god-son,
a man of wealth and leisure, with wide relations, and by his
parentage and bringing-up worthy of all confidence.
"Which means," Martin commented, cynically, to his sister, "that
I am not likely to misappropriate the funds, or go blabbing to
our Charge d'Affaires here."
The whole thing was being carried out behind the back of the War
Minister, Montero, a mistrusted member of the Ribiera Government,
but difficult to get rid of at once. He was not to know anything
of it till the troops under Barrios's command had the new rifle
in their hands. The President-Dictator, whose position was very
difficult, was alone in the secret.
"How funny!" commented Martin's sister and confidante; to which
the brother, with an air of best Parisian blague, had retorted:
"It's immense! The idea of that Chief of the State engaged, with
the help of private citizens, in digging a mine under his own
indispensable War Minister. No! We are unapproachable!" And he
laughed immoderately.
Afterwards his sister was surprised at the earnestness and
ability he displayed in carrying out his mission, which
circumstances made delicate, and his want of special knowledge
rendered difficult. She had never seen Martin take so much
trouble about anything in his whole life.
"It amuses me," he had explained, briefly. "I am beset by a lot
of swindlers trying to sell all sorts of gaspipe weapons. They
are charming; they invite me to expensive luncheons; I keep up
their hopes; it's extremely entertaining. Meanwhile, the real
affair is being carried through in quite another quarter."
When the business was concluded he declared suddenly his
intention of seeing the precious consignment delivered safely in
Sulaco. The whole burlesque business, he thought, was worth
following up to the end. He mumbled his excuses, tugging at his
golden beard, before the acute young lady who (after the first
wide stare of astonishment) looked at him with narrowed eyes, and
pronounced slowly--
"I believe you want to see Antonia."
"What Antonia?" asked the Costaguana boulevardier, in a vexed and
disdainful tone. He shrugged his shoulders, and spun round on his
heel. His sister called out after him joyously--
"The Antonia you used to know when she wore her hair in two
plaits down her back."
He had known her some eight years since, shortly before the
Avellanos had left Europe for good, as a tall girl of sixteen,
youthfully austere, and of a character already so formed that she
ventured to treat slightingly his pose of disabused wisdom. On
one occasion, as though she had lost all patience, she flew out
at him about the aimlessness of his life and the levity of his
opinions. He was twenty then, an only son, spoiled by his adoring
family. This attack disconcerted him so greatly that he had
faltered in his affectation of amused superiority before that
insignificant chit of a school-girl. But the impression left was
so strong that ever since all the girl friends of his sisters
recalled to him Antonia Avellanos by some faint resemblance, or
by the great force of contrast. It was, he told himself, like a
ridiculous fatality. And, of course, in the news the Decouds
received regularly from Costaguana, the name of their friends,
the Avellanos, cropped up frequently--the arrest and the
abominable treatment of the ex-Minister, the dangers and
hardships endured by the family, its withdrawal in poverty to
Sulaco, the death of the mother.
The Monterist pronunciamento had taken place before Martin Decoud
reached Costaguana. He came out in a roundabout way, through
Magellan's Straits by the main line and the West Coast Service of
the O.S.N. Company. His precious consignment arrived just in
time to convert the first feelings of consternation into a mood
of hope and resolution. Publicly he was made much of by the
familias principales. Privately Don Jose, still shaken and weak,
embraced him with tears in his eyes.
"You have come out yourself! No less could be expected from a
Decoud. Alas! our worst fears have been realized," he moaned,
affectionately. And again he hugged his god-son. This was indeed
the time for men of intellect and conscience to rally round the
endangered cause.
It was then that Martin Decoud, the adopted child of Western
Europe, felt the absolute change of atmosphere. He submitted to
being embraced and talked to without a word. He was moved in
spite of himself by that note of passion and sorrow unknown on
the more refined stage of European politics. But when the tall
Antonia, advancing with her light step in the dimness of the big
bare Sala of the Avellanos house, offered him her hand (in her
emancipated way), and murmured, "I am glad to see you here, Don
Martin," he felt how impossible it would be to tell these two
people that he had intended to go away by the next month's
packet. Don Jose, meantime, continued his praises. Every
accession added to public confidence, and, besides, what an
example to the young men at home from the brilliant defender of
the country's regeneration, the worthy expounder of the party's
political faith before the world! Everybody had read the
magnificent article in the famous Parisian Review. The world was
now informed: and the author's appearance at this moment was
like a public act of faith. Young Decoud felt overcome by a
feeling of impatient confusion. His plan had been to return by
way of the United States through California, visit Yellowstone
Park, see Chicago, Niagara, have a look at Canada, perhaps make a
short stay in New York, a longer one in Newport, use his letters
of introduction. The pressure of Antonia's hand was so frank, the
tone of her voice was so unexpectedly unchanged in its approving
warmth, that all he found to say after his low bow was--
"I am inexpressibly grateful for your welcome; but why need a man
be thanked for returning to his native country? I am sure Dona
Antonia does not think so."
"Certainly not, senor," she said, with that perfectly calm
openness of manner which characterized all her utterances. "But
when he returns, as you return, one may be glad--for the sake of
both."
Martin Decoud said nothing of his plans. He not only never
breathed a word of them to any one, but only a fortnight later
asked the mistress of the Casa Gould (where he had of course
obtained admission at once), leaning forward in his chair with an
air of well-bred familiarity, whether she could not detect in him
that day a marked change--an air, he explained, of more excellent
gravity. At this Mrs. Gould turned her face full towards him with
the silent inquiry of slightly widened eyes and the merest ghost
of a smile, an habitual movement with her, which was very
fascinating to men by something subtly devoted, finely
self-forgetful in its lively readiness of attention. Because,
Decoud continued imperturbably, he felt no longer an idle
cumberer of the earth. She was, he assured her, actually
beholding at that moment the Journalist of Sulaco. At once Mrs.
Gould glanced towards Antonia, posed upright in the corner of a
high, straight-backed Spanish sofa, a large black fan waving
slowly against the curves of her fine figure, the tips of crossed
feet peeping from under the hem of the black skirt. Decoud's
eyes also remained fixed there, while in an undertone he added
that Miss Avellanos was quite aware of his new and unexpected
vocation, which in Costaguana was generally the speciality of
half-educated negroes and wholly penniless lawyers. Then,
confronting with a sort of urbane effrontery Mrs. Gould's gaze,
now turned sympathetically upon himself, he breathed out the
words, "Pro Patria!"
What had happened was that he had all at once yielded to Don
Jose's pressing entreaties to take the direction of a newspaper
that would "voice the aspirations of the province." It had been
Don Jose's old and cherished idea. The necessary plant (on a
modest scale) and a large consignment of paper had been received
from America some time before; the right man alone was wanted.
Even Senor Moraga in Sta. Marta had not been able to find one,
and the matter was now becoming pressing; some organ was
absolutely needed to counteract the effect of the lies
disseminated by the Monterist press: the atrocious calumnies, the
appeals to the people calling upon them to rise with their knives
in their hands and put an end once for all to the Blancos, to
these Gothic remnants, to these sinister mummies, these impotent
paraliticos, who plotted with foreigners for the surrender of the
lands and the slavery of the people.
The clamour of this Negro Liberalism frightened Senor Avellanos.
A newspaper was the only remedy. And now that the right man had
been found in Decoud, great black letters appeared painted
between the windows above the arcaded ground floor of a house on
the Plaza. It was next to Anzani's great emporium of boots,
silks, ironware, muslins, wooden toys, tiny silver arms, legs,
heads, hearts (for ex-voto offerings), rosaries, champagne,
women's hats, patent medicines, even a few dusty books in paper
covers and mostly in the French language. The big black letters
formed the words, "Offices of the Porvenir." From these offices a
single folded sheet of Martin's journalism issued three times a
week; and the sleek yellow Anzani prowling in a suit of ample
black and carpet slippers, before the many doors of his
establishment, greeted by a deep, side-long inclination of his
body the Journalist of Sulaco going to and fro on the business of
his august calling.
CHAPTER FOUR
PERHAPS it was in the exercise of his calling that he had come to
see the troops depart. The Porvenir of the day after next would
no doubt relate the event, but its editor, leaning his side
against the landau, seemed to look at nothing. The front rank of
the company of infantry drawn up three deep across the shore end
of the jetty when pressed too close would bring their bayonets to
the charge ferociously, with an awful rattle; and then the crowd
of spectators swayed back bodily, even under the noses of the big
white mules. Notwithstanding the great multitude there was only a
low, muttering noise; the dust hung in a brown haze, in which the
horsemen, wedged in the throng here and there, towered from the
hips upwards, gazing all one way over the heads. Almost every one
of them had mounted a friend, who steadied himself with both
hands grasping his shoulders from behind; and the rims of their
hats touching, made like one disc sustaining the cones of two
pointed crowns with a double face underneath. A hoarse mozo would
bawl out something to an acquaintance in the ranks, or a woman
would shriek suddenly the word Adios! followed by the Christian
name of a man.
General Barrios, in a shabby blue tunic and white peg-top
trousers falling upon strange red boots, kept his head uncovered
and stooped slightly, propping himself up with a thick stick. No!
He had earned enough military glory to satiate any man, he
insisted to Mrs. Gould, trying at the same time to put an air of
gallantry into his attitude. A few jetty hairs hung sparsely from
his upper lip, he had a salient nose, a thin, long jaw, and a
black silk patch over one eye. His other eye, small and deep-set,
twinkled erratically in all directions, aimlessly affable. The
few European spectators, all men, who had naturally drifted into
the neighbourhood of the Gould carriage, betrayed by the
solemnity of their faces their impression that the general must
have had too much punch (Swedish punch, imported in bottles by
Anzani) at the Amarilla Club before he had started with his Staff
on a furious ride to the harbour. But Mrs. Gould bent forward,
self-possessed, and declared her conviction that still more glory
awaited the general in the near future.
"Senora!" he remonstrated, with great feeling, "in the name of
God, reflect! How can there be any glory for a man like me in
overcoming that bald-headed embustero with the dyed moustaches?"
Pablo Ignacio Barrios, son of a village alcalde, general of
division, commanding in chief the Occidental Military district,
did not frequent the higher society of the town. He preferred the
unceremonious gatherings of men where he could tell jaguar-hunt
stories, boast of his powers with the lasso, with which he could
perform extremely difficult feats of the sort "no married man
should attempt," as the saying goes amongst the llaneros; relate
tales of extraordinary night rides, encounters with wild bulls,
struggles with crocodiles, adventures in the great forests,
crossings of swollen rivers. And it was not mere boastfulness
that prompted the general's reminiscences, but a genuine love of
that wild life which he had led in his young days before he
turned his back for ever on the thatched roof of the parental
tolderia in the woods. Wandering away as far as Mexico he had
fought against the French by the side (as he said) of Juarez, and
was the only military man of Costaguana who had ever encountered
European troops in the field. That fact shed a great lustre upon
his name till it became eclipsed by the rising star of Montero.
All his life he had been an inveterate gambler. He alluded
himself quite openly to the current story how once, during some
campaign (when in command of a brigade), he had gambled away his
horses, pistols, and accoutrements, to the very epaulettes,
playing monte with his colonels the night before the battle.
Finally, he had sent under escort his sword (a presentation
sword, with a gold hilt) to the town in the rear of his position
to be immediately pledged for five hundred pesetas with a sleepy
and frightened shop-keeper. By daybreak he had lost the last of
that money, too, when his only remark, as he rose calmly, was,
"Now let us go and fight to the death." From that time he had
become aware that a general could lead his troops into battle
very well with a simple stick in his hand. "It has been my custom
ever since," he would say.
He was always overwhelmed with debts; even during the periods of
splendour in his varied fortunes of a Costaguana general, when he
held high military commands, his gold-laced uniforms were almost
always in pawn with some tradesman. And at last, to avoid the
incessant difficulties of costume caused by the anxious lenders,
he had assumed a disdain of military trappings, an eccentric
fashion of shabby old tunics, which had become like a second
nature. But the faction Barrios joined needed to fear no
political betrayal. He was too much of a real soldier for the
ignoble traffic of buying and selling victories. A member of the
foreign diplomatic body in Sta. Marta had once passed a judgment
upon him: "Barrios is a man of perfect honesty and even of some
talent for war, mais il manque de tenue." After the triumph of
the Ribierists he had obtained the reputedly lucrative Occidental
command, mainly through the exertions of his creditors (the Sta.
Marta shopkeepers, all great politicians), who moved heaven and
earth in his interest publicly, and privately besieged Senor
Moraga, the influential agent of the San Tome mine, with the
exaggerated lamentations that if the general were passed over,
"We shall all be ruined." An incidental but favourable mention of
his name in Mr. Gould senior's long correspondence with his son
had something to do with his appointment, too; but most of all
undoubtedly his established political honesty. No one questioned
the personal bravery of the Tiger-killer, as the populace called
him. He was, however, said to be unlucky in the field--but this
was to be the beginning of an era of peace. The soldiers liked
him for his humane temper, which was like a strange and precious
flower unexpectedly blooming on the hotbed of corrupt
revolutions; and when he rode slowly through the streets during
some military display, the contemptuous good humour of his
solitary eye roaming over the crowds extorted the acclamations of
the populace. The women of that class especially seemed
positively fascinated by the long drooping nose, the peaked chin,
the heavy lower lip, the black silk eyepatch and band slanting
rakishly over the forehead. His high rank always procured an
audience of Caballeros for his sporting stories, which he
detailed very well with a simple, grave enjoyment. As to the
society of ladies, it was irksome by the restraints it imposed
without any equivalent, as far as he could see. He had not,
perhaps, spoken three times on the whole to Mrs. Gould since he
had taken up his high command; but he had observed her frequently
riding with the Senor Administrador, and had pronounced that
there was more sense in her little bridle-hand than in all the
female heads in Sulaco. His impulse had been to be very civil on
parting to a woman who did not wobble in the saddle, and happened
to be the wife of a personality very important to a man always
short of money. He even pushed his attentions so far as to desire
the aide-de-camp at his side (a thick-set, short captain with a
Tartar physiognomy) to bring along a corporal with a file of men
in front of the carriage, lest the crowd in its backward surges
should "incommode the mules of the senora." Then, turning to the
small knot of silent Europeans looking on within earshot, he
raised his voice protectingly--
"Senores, have no apprehension. Go on quietly making your Ferro
Carril--your railways, your telegraphs. Your--There's enough
wealth in Costaguana to pay for everything--or else you would not
be here. Ha! ha! Don't mind this little picardia of my friend
Montero. In a little while you shall behold his dyed moustaches
through the bars of a strong wooden cage. Si, senores! Fear
nothing, develop the country, work, work!"
The little group of engineers received this exhortation without a
word, and after waving his hand at them loftily, he addressed
himself again to Mrs. Gould--
"That is what Don Jose says we must do. Be enterprising! Work!
Grow rich! To put Montero in a cage is my work; and when that
insignificant piece of business is done, then, as Don Jose wishes
us, we shall grow rich, one and all, like so many Englishmen,
because it is money that saves a country, and--"
But a young officer in a very new uniform, hurrying up from the
direction of the jetty, interrupted his interpretation of Senor
Avellanos's ideals. The general made a movement of impatience;
the other went on talking to him insistently, with an air of
respect. The horses of the Staff had been embarked, the steamer's
gig was awaiting the general at the boat steps; and Barrios,
after a fierce stare of his one eye, began to take leave. Don
Jose roused himself for an appropriate phrase pronounced
mechanically. The terrible strain of hope and fear was telling on
him, and he seemed to husband the last sparks of his fire for
those oratorical efforts of which even the distant Europe was to
hear. Antonia, her red lips firmly closed, averted her head
behind the raised fan; and young Decoud, though he felt the
girl's eyes upon him, gazed away persistently, hooked on his
elbow, with a scornful and complete detachment. Mrs. Gould
heroically concealed her dismay at the appearance of men and
events so remote from her racial conventions, dismay too deep to
be uttered in words even to her husband. She understood his
voiceless reserve better now. Their confidential intercourse
fell, not in moments of privacy, but precisely in public, when
the quick meeting of their glances would comment upon some fresh
turn of events. She had gone to his school of uncompromising
silence, the only one possible, since so much that seemed
shocking, weird, and grotesque in the working out of their
purposes had to be accepted as normal in this country.
Decidedly, the stately Antonia looked more mature and infinitely
calm; but she would never have known how to reconcile the sudden
sinkings of her heart with an amiable mobility of expression.
Mrs. Gould smiled a good-bye at Barrios, nodded round to the
Europeans (who raised their hats simultaneously) with an engaging
invitation, "I hope to see you all presently, at home"; then said
nervously to Decoud, "Get in, Don Martin," and heard him mutter
to himself in French, as he opened the carriage door, "Le sort en
est jete." She heard him with a sort of exasperation. Nobody
ought to have known better than himself that the first cast of
dice had been already thrown long ago in a most desperate game.
Distant acclamations, words of command yelled out, and a roll of
drums on the jetty greeted the departing general. Something like
a slight faintness came over her, and she looked blankly at
Antonia's still face, wondering what would happen to Charley if
that absurd man failed. "A la casa, Ignacio," she cried at the
motionless broad back of the coachman, who gathered the reins
without haste, mumbling to himself under his breath, "Si, la
casa. Si, si nina."
The carriage rolled noiselessly on the soft track, the shadows
fell long on the dusty little plain interspersed with dark
bushes, mounds of turned-up earth, low wooden buildings with iron
roofs of the Railway Company; the sparse row of telegraph poles
strode obliquely clear of the town, bearing a single, almost
invisible wire far into the great campo--like a slender,
vibrating feeler of that progress waiting outside for a moment of
peace to enter and twine itself about the weary heart of the
land.
The cafe window of the Albergo d'ltalia Una was full of sunburnt,
whiskered faces of railway men. But at the other end of the
house, the end of the Signori Inglesi, old Giorgio, at the door
with one of his girls on each side, bared his bushy head, as
white as the snows of Higuerota. Mrs. Gould stopped the carriage.
She seldom failed to speak to her protege; moreover, the
excitement, the heat, and the dust had made her thirsty. She
asked for a glass of water. Giorgio sent the children indoors for
it, and approached with pleasure expressed in his whole rugged
countenance. It was not often that he had occasion to see his
benefactress, who was also an Englishwoman--another title to his
regard. He offered some excuses for his wife. It was a bad day
with her; her oppressions--he tapped his own broad chest. She
could not move from her chair that day.
Decoud, ensconced in the corner of his seat, observed gloomily
Mrs. Gould's old revolutionist, then, offhand--
"Well, and what do you think of it all, Garibaldino?"
Old Giorgio, looking at him with some curiosity, said civilly
that the troops had marched very well. One-eyed Barrios and his
officers had done wonders with the recruits in a short time.
Those Indios, only caught the other day, had gone swinging past
in double quick time, like bersaglieri; they looked well fed,
too, and had whole uniforms. "Uniforms!" he repeated with a
half-smile of pity. A look of grim retrospect stole over his
piercing, steady eyes. It had been otherwise in his time when men
fought against tyranny, in the forests of Brazil, or on the
plains of Uruguay, starving on half-raw beef without salt, half
naked, with often only a knife tied to a stick for a weapon. "And
yet we used to prevail against the oppressor," he concluded,
proudly.
His animation fell; the slight gesture of his hand expressed
discouragement; but he added that he had asked one of the
sergeants to show him the new rifle. There was no such weapon in
his fighting days; and if Barrios could not--
"Yes, yes," broke in Don Jose, almost trembling with eagerness.
"We are safe. The good Senor Viola is a man of experience.
Extremely deadly--is it not so? You have accomplished your
mission admirably, my dear Martin."
Decoud, lolling back moodily, contemplated old Viola.
"Ah! Yes. A man of experience. But who are you for, really, in
your heart?"
Mrs. Gould leaned over to the children. Linda had brought out a
glass of water on a tray, with extreme care; Giselle presented
her with a bunch of flowers gathered hastily.
"For the people," declared old Viola, sternly.
"We are all for the people--in the end."
"Yes," muttered old Viola, savagely. "And meantime they fight for
you. Blind. Esclavos!"
At that moment young Scarfe of the railway staff emerged from the
door of the part reserved for the Signori Inglesi. He had come
down to headquarters from somewhere up the line on a light
engine, and had had just time to get a bath and change his
clothes. He was a nice boy, and Mrs. Gould welcomed him.
"It's a delightful surprise to see you, Mrs. Gould. I've just
come down. Usual luck. Missed everything, of course. This show is
just over, and I hear there has been a great dance at Don Juste
Lopez's last night. Is it true?"
"The young patricians," Decoud began suddenly in his precise
English, "have indeed been dancing before they started off to the
war with the Great Pompey."
Young Scarfe stared, astounded. "You haven't met before," Mrs.
Gould intervened. "Mr. Decoud--Mr. Scarfe."
"Ah! But we are not going to Pharsalia," protested Don Jose, with
nervous haste, also in English. "You should not jest like this,
Martin."
Antonia's breast rose and fell with a deeper breath. The young
engineer was utterly in the dark. "Great what?" he muttered,
vaguely.
"Luckily, Montero is not a Caesar," Decoud continued. "Not the
two Monteros put together would make a decent parody of a
Caesar." He crossed his arms on his breast, looking at Senor
Avellanos, who had returned to his immobility. "It is only you,
Don Jose, who are a genuine old Roman--vir Romanus--eloquent and
inflexible."
Since he had heard the name of Montero pronounced, young Scarfe
had been eager to express his simple feelings. In a loud and
youthful tone he hoped that this Montero was going to be licked
once for all and done with. There was no saying what would happen
to the railway if the revolution got the upper hand. Perhaps it
would have to be abandoned. It would not be the first railway
gone to pot in Costaguana. "You know, it's one of their so-called
national things," he ran on, wrinkling up his nose as if the word
had a suspicious flavour to his profound experience of South
American affairs. And, of course, he chatted with animation, it
had been such an immense piece of luck for him at his age to get
appointed on the staff "of a big thing like that--don't you
know." It would give him the pull over a lot of chaps all through
life, he asserted. "Therefore--down with Montero! Mrs. Gould."
His artless grin disappeared slowly before the unanimous gravity
of the faces turned upon him from the carriage; only that "old
chap," Don Jose, presenting a motionless, waxy profile, stared
straight on as if deaf. Scarfe did not know the Avellanos very
well. They did not give balls, and Antonia never appeared at a
ground-floor window, as some other young ladies used to do
attended by elder women, to chat with the caballeros on horseback
in the Calle. The stares of these creoles did not matter much;
but what on earth had come to Mrs. Gould? She said, "Go on,
Ignacio," and gave him a slow inclination of the head. He heard a
short laugh from that round-faced, Frenchified fellow. He
coloured up to the eyes, and stared at Giorgio Viola, who had
fallen back with the children, hat in hand.
"I shall want a horse presently," he said with some asperity to
the old man.
"Si, senor. There are plenty of horses," murmured the
Garibaldino, smoothing absently, with his brown hands, the two
heads, one dark with bronze glints, the other fair with a coppery
ripple, of the two girls by his side. The returning stream of
sightseers raised a great dust on the road. Horsemen noticed the
group. "Go to your mother," he said. "They are growing up as I
am growing older, and there is nobody--"
He looked at the young engineer and stopped, as if awakened from
a dream; then, folding his arms on his breast, took up his usual
position, leaning back in the doorway with an upward glance
fastened on the white shoulder of Higuerota far away.
In the carriage Martin Decoud, shifting his position as though he
could not make himself comfortable, muttered as he swayed towards
Antonia, "I suppose you hate me." Then in a loud voice he began
to congratulate Don Jose upon all the engineers being convinced
Ribierists. The interest of all those foreigners was gratifying.
"You have heard this one. He is an enlightened well-wisher. It is
pleasant to think that the prosperity of Costaguana is of some
use to the world."
"He is very young," Mrs. Gould remarked, quietly.
"And so very wise for his age," retorted Decoud. "But here we
have the naked truth from the mouth of that child. You are right,
Don Jose. The natural treasures of Costaguana are of importance
to the progressive Europe represented by this youth, just as
three hundred years ago the wealth of our Spanish fathers was a
serious object to the rest of Europe--as represented by the bold
buccaneers. There is a curse of futility upon our character: Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza, chivalry and materialism, high-sounding
sentiments and a supine morality, violent efforts for an idea and
a sullen acquiescence in every form of corruption. We convulsed
a continent for our independence only to become the passive prey
of a democratic parody, the helpless victims of scoundrels and
cut-throats, our institutions a mockery, our laws a farce--a
Guzman Bento our master! And we have sunk so low that when a man
like you has awakened our conscience, a stupid barbarian of a
Montero--Great Heavens! a Montero!--becomes a deadly danger, and
an ignorant, boastful Indio, like Barrios, is our defender."
But Don Jose, disregarding the general indictment as though he
had not heard a word of it, took up the defence of Barrios. The
man was competent enough for his special task in the plan of
campaign. It consisted in an offensive movement, with Cayta as
base, upon the flank of the Revolutionist forces advancing from
the south against Sta. Marta, which was covered by another army
with the President-Dictator in its midst. Don Jose became quite
animated with a great flow of speech, bending forward anxiously
under the steady eyes of his daughter. Decoud, as if silenced by
so much ardour, did not make a sound. The bells of the city were
striking the hour of Oracion when the carriage rolled under the
old gateway facing the harbour like a shapeless monument of
leaves and stones. The rumble of wheels under the sonorous arch
was traversed by a strange, piercing shriek, and Decoud, from his
back seat, had a view of the people behind the carriage trudging
along the road outside, all turning their heads, in sombreros and
rebozos, to look at a locomotive which rolled quickly out of
sight behind Giorgio Viola's house, under a white trail of steam
that seemed to vanish in the breathless, hysterically prolonged
scream of warlike triumph. And it was all like a fleeting vision,
the shrieking ghost of a railway engine fleeing across the frame
of the archway, behind the startled movement of the people
streaming back from a military spectacle with silent footsteps on
the dust of the road. It was a material train returning from the
Campo to the palisaded yards. The empty cars rolled lightly on
the single track; there was no rumble of wheels, no tremor of the
ground. The engine-driver, running past the Casa Viola with the
salute of an uplifted arm, checked his speed smartly before
entering the yard; and when the ear-splitting screech of the
steam-whistle for the brakes had stopped, a series of hard,
battering shocks, mingled with the clanking of chain-couplings,
made a tumult of blows and shaken fetters under the vault of the
gate.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE Gould carriage was the first to return from the harbour to
the empty town. On the ancient pavement, laid out in patterns,
sunk into ruts and holes, the portly Ignacio, mindful of the
springs of the Parisian-built landau, had pulled up to a walk,
and Decoud in his corner contemplated moodily the inner aspect of
the gate. The squat turreted sides held up between them a mass of
masonry with bunches of grass growing at the top, and a grey,
heavily scrolled, armorial shield of stone above the apex of the
arch with the arms of Spain nearly smoothed out as if in
readiness for some new device typical of the impending progress.
The explosive noise of the railway trucks seemed to augment
Decoud's irritation. He muttered something to himself, then began
to talk aloud in curt, angry phrases thrown at the silence of the
two women. They did not look at him at all; while Don Jose, with
his semi-translucent, waxy complexion, overshadowed by the soft
grey hat, swayed a little to the jolts of the carriage by the
side of Mrs. Gould.
"This sound puts a new edge on a very old truth."
Decoud spoke in French, perhaps because of Ignacio on the box
above him; the old coachman, with his broad back filling a short,
silver-braided jacket, had a big pair of ears, whose thick rims
stood well away from his cropped head.
"Yes, the noise outside the city wall is new, but the principle
is old."
He ruminated his discontent for a while, then began afresh with a
sidelong glance at Antonia--
"No, but just imagine our forefathers in morions and corselets
drawn up outside this gate, and a band of adventurers just landed
from their ships in the harbour there. Thieves, of course.
Speculators, too. Their expeditions, each one, were the
speculations of grave and reverend persons in England. That is
history, as that absurd sailor Mitchell is always saying."
"Mitchell's arrangements for the embarkation of the troops were
excellent!" exclaimed Don Jose.
"That!--that! oh, that's really the work of that Genoese seaman!
But to return to my noises; there used to be in the old days the
sound of trumpets outside that gate. War trumpets! I'm sure they
were trumpets. I have read somewhere that Drake, who was the
greatest of these men, used to dine alone in his cabin on board
ship to the sound of trumpets. In those days this town was full
of wealth. Those men came to take it. Now the whole land is like
a treasure-house, and all these people are breaking into it,
whilst we are cutting each other's throats. The only thing that
keeps them out is mutual jealousy. But they'll come to an
agreement some day--and by the time we've settled our quarrels
and become decent and honourable, there'll be nothing left for
us. It has always been the same. We are a wonderful people, but
it has always been our fate to be"--he did not say "robbed," but
added, after a pause--"exploited!"
Mrs. Gould said, "Oh, this is unjust!" And Antonia interjected,
"Don't answer him, Emilia. He is attacking me."
"You surely do not think I was attacking Don Carlos!" Decoud
answered.
And then the carriage stopped before the door of the Casa Gould.
The young man offered his hand to the ladies. They went in first
together; Don Jose walked by the side of Decoud, and the gouty
old porter tottered after them with some light wraps on his arm.
Don Jose slipped his hand under the arm of the journalist of
Sulaco.
"The Porvenir must have a long and confident article upon Barrios
and the irresistibleness of his army of Cayta! The moral effect
should be kept up in the country. We must cable encouraging
extracts to Europe and the United States to maintain a favourable
impression abroad."
Decoud muttered, "Oh, yes, we must comfort our friends, the
speculators."
The long open gallery was in shadow, with its screen of plants in
vases along the balustrade, holding out motionless blossoms, and
all the glass doors of the reception-rooms thrown open. A jingle
of spurs died out at the further end.
Basilio, standing aside against the wall, said in a soft tone to
the passing ladies, "The Senor Administrador is just back from
the mountain."
In the great sala, with its groups of ancient Spanish and modern
European furniture making as if different centres under the high
white spread of the ceiling, the silver and porcelain of the
tea-service gleamed among a cluster of dwarf chairs, like a bit
of a lady's boudoir, putting in a note of feminine and intimate
delicacy.
Don Jose in his rocking-chair placed his hat on his lap, and
Decoud walked up and down the whole length of the room, passing
between tables loaded with knick-knacks and almost disappearing
behind the high backs of leathern sofas. He was thinking of the
angry face of Antonia; he was confident that he would make his
peace with her. He had not stayed in Sulaco to quarrel with
Antonia.
Martin Decoud was angry with himself. All he saw and heard going
on around him exasperated the preconceived views of his European
civilization. To contemplate revolutions from the distance of the
Parisian Boulevards was quite another matter. Here on the spot it
was not possible to dismiss their tragic comedy with the
expression, "Quelle farce!"
The reality of the political action, such as it was, seemed
closer, and acquired poignancy by Antonia's belief in the cause.
Its crudeness hurt his feelings. He was surprised at his own
sensitiveness.
"I suppose I am more of a Costaguanero than I would have believed
possible," he thought to himself.
His disdain grew like a reaction of his scepticism against the
action into which he was forced by his infatuation for Antonia.
He soothed himself by saying he was not a patriot, but a lover.
The ladies came in bareheaded, and Mrs. Gould sank low before the
little tea-table. Antonia took up her usual place at the
reception hour--the corner of a leathern couch, with a rigid
grace in her pose and a fan in her hand. Decoud, swerving from
the straight line of his march, came to lean over the high back
of her seat.
For a long time he talked into her ear from behind, softly, with
a half smile and an air of apologetic familiarity. Her fan lay
half grasped on her knees. She never looked at him. His rapid
utterance grew more and more insistent and caressing. At last he
ventured a slight laugh.
"No, really. You must forgive me. One must be serious sometimes."
He paused. She turned her head a little; her blue eyes glided
slowly towards him, slightly upwards, mollified and questioning.
"You can't think I am serious when I call Montero a gran' bestia
every second day in the Porvenir? That is not a serious
occupation. No occupation is serious, not even when a bullet
through the heart is the penalty of failure!"
Her hand closed firmly on her fan.
"Some reason, you understand, I mean some sense, may creep into
thinking; some glimpse of truth. I mean some effective truth, for
which there is no room in politics or journalism. I happen to
have said what I thought. And you are angry! If you do me the
kindness to think a little you will see that I spoke like a
patriot."
She opened her red lips for the first time, not unkindly.
"Yes, but you never see the aim. Men must be used as they are. I
suppose nobody is really disinterested, unless, perhaps, you, Don
Martin."
"God forbid! It's the last thing I should like you to believe of
me." He spoke lightly, and paused.
She began to fan herself with a slow movement without raising her
hand. After a time he whispered passionately--
"Antonia!"
She smiled, and extended her hand after the English manner
towards Charles Gould, who was bowing before her; while Decoud,
with his elbows spread on the back of the sofa, dropped his eyes
and murmured, "Bonjour."
The Senor Administrador of the San Tome mine bent over his wife
for a moment. They exchanged a few words, of which only the
phrase, "The greatest enthusiasm," pronounced by Mrs. Gould,
could be heard.
"Yes," Decoud began in a murmur. "Even he!"
"This is sheer calumny," said Antonia, not very severely.
"You just ask him to throw his mine into the melting-pot for the
great cause," Decoud whispered.
Don Jose had raised his voice. He rubbed his hands cheerily. The
excellent aspect of the troops and the great quantity of new
deadly rifles on the shoulders of those brave men seemed to fill
him with an ecstatic confidence.
Charles Gould, very tall and thin before his chair, listened, but
nothing could be discovered in his face except a kind and
deferential attention.
Meantime, Antonia had risen, and, crossing the room, stood
looking out of one of the three long windows giving on the
street. Decoud followed her. The window was thrown open, and he
leaned against the thickness of the wall. The long folds of the
damask curtain, falling straight from the broad brass cornice,
hid him partly from the room. He folded his arms on his breast,
and looked steadily at Antonia's profile.
The people returning from the harbour filled the pavements; the
shuffle of sandals and a low murmur of voices ascended to the
window. Now and then a coach rolled slowly along the disjointed
roadway of the Calle de la Constitucion. There were not many
private carriages in Sulaco; at the most crowded hour on the
Alameda they could be counted with one glance of the eye. The
great family arks swayed on high leathern springs, full of pretty
powdered faces in which the eyes looked intensely alive and
black. And first Don Juste Lopez, the President of the Provincial
Assembly, passed with his three lovely daughters, solemn in a
black frock-coat and stiff white tie, as when directing a debate
from a high tribune. Though they all raised their eyes, Antonia
did not make the usual greeting gesture of a fluttered hand, and
they affected not to see the two young people, Costaguaneros with
European manners, whose eccentricities were discussed behind the
barred windows of the first families in Sulaco. And then the
widowed Senora Gavilaso de Valdes rolled by, handsome and
dignified, in a great machine in which she used to travel to and
from her country house, surrounded by an armed retinue in leather
suits and big sombreros, with carbines at the bows of their
saddles. She was a woman of most distinguished family, proud,
rich, and kind-hearted. Her second son, Jaime, had just gone off
on the Staff of Barrios. The eldest, a worthless fellow of a
moody disposition, filled Sulaco with the noise of his
dissipations, and gambled heavily at the club. The two youngest
boys, with yellow Ribierist cockades in their caps, sat on the
front seat. She, too, affected not to see the Senor Decoud
talking publicly with Antonia in defiance of every convention.
And he not even her novio as far as the world knew! Though, even
in that case, it would have been scandal enough. But the
dignified old lady, respected and admired by the first families,
would have been still more shocked if she could have heard the
words they were exchanging.
"Did you say I lost sight of the aim? I have only one aim in the
world."
She made an almost imperceptible negative movement of her head,
still staring across the street at the Avellanos's house, grey,
marked with decay, and with iron bars like a prison.
"And it would be so easy of attainment," he continued, "this aim
which, whether knowingly or not, I have always had in my
heart--ever since the day when you snubbed me so horribly once in
Paris, you remember."
A slight smile seemed to move the corner of the lip that was on
his side.
"You know you were a very terrible person, a sort of Charlotte
Corday in a schoolgirl's dress; a ferocious patriot. I suppose
you would have stuck a knife into Guzman Bento?"
She interrupted him. "You do me too much honour."
"At any rate," he said, changing suddenly to a tone of bitter
levity, "you would have sent me to stab him without compunction."
"Ah, par exemple!" she murmured in a shocked tone.
"Well," he argued, mockingly, "you do keep me here writing deadly
nonsense. Deadly to me! It has already killed my self-respect.
And you may imagine," he continued, his tone passing into light
banter, "that Montero, should he be successful, would get even
with me in the only way such a brute can get even with a man of
intelligence who condescends to call him a gran' bestia three
times a week. It's a sort of intellectual death; but there is the
other one in the background for a journalist of my ability."
"If he is successful!" said Antonia, thoughtfully.
"You seem satisfied to see my life hang on a thread," Decoud
replied, with a broad smile. "And the other Montero, the 'my
trusted brother' of the proclamations, the guerrillero--haven't I
written that he was taking the guests' overcoats and changing
plates in Paris at our Legation in the intervals of spying on our
refugees there, in the time of Rojas? He will wash out that
sacred truth in blood. In my blood! Why do you look annoyed? This
is simply a bit of the biography of one of our great men. What do
you think he will do to me? There is a certain convent wall round
the corner of the Plaza, opposite the door of the Bull Ring. You
know? Opposite the door with the inscription, Intrada de la
Sombra.' Appropriate, perhaps! That's where the uncle of our host
gave up his Anglo-South-American soul. And, note, he might have
run away. A man who has fought with weapons may run away. You
might have let me go with Barrios if you had cared for me. I
would have carried one of those rifles, in which Don Jose
believes, with the greatest satisfaction, in the ranks of poor
peons and Indios, that know nothing either of reason or politics.
The most forlorn hope in the most forlorn army on earth would
have been safer than that for which you made me stay here. When
you make war you may retreat, but not when you spend your time in
inciting poor ignorant fools to kill and to die."
His tone remained light, and as if unaware of his presence she
stood motionless, her hands clasped lightly, the fan hanging down
from her interlaced fingers. He waited for a while, and then--
"I shall go to the wall," he said, with a sort of jocular
desperation.
Even that declaration did not make her look at him. Her head
remained still, her eyes fixed upon the house of the Avellanos,
whose chipped pilasters, broken cornices, the whole degradation
of dignity was hidden now by the gathering dusk of the street. In
her whole figure her lips alone moved, forming the words--
"Martin, you will make me cry."
He remained silent for a minute, startled, as if overwhelmed by a
sort of awed happiness, with the lines of the mocking smile still
stiffened about his mouth, and incredulous surprise in his eyes.
The value of a sentence is in the personality which utters it,
for nothing new can be said by man or woman; and those were the
last words, it seemed to him, that could ever have been spoken by
Antonia. He had never made it up with her so completely in all
their intercourse of small encounters; but even before she had
time to turn towards him, which she did slowly with a rigid
grace, he had begun to plead--
"My sister is only waiting to embrace you. My father is
transported with joy. I won't say anything of my mother! Our
mothers were like sisters. There is the mail-boat for the south
next week--let us go. That Moraga is a fool! A man like Montero
is bribed. It's the practice of the country. It's tradition
--it's politics. Read 'Fifty Years of Misrule.'"
"Leave poor papa alone, Don Martin. He believes--"
"I have the greatest tenderness for your father," he began,
hurriedly. "But I love you, Antonia! And Moraga has miserably
mismanaged this business. Perhaps your father did, too; I don't
know. Montero was bribeable. Why, I suppose he only wanted his
share of this famous loan for national development. Why didn't
the stupid Sta. Marta people give him a mission to Europe, or
something? He would have taken five years' salary in advance, and
gone on loafing in Paris, this stupid, ferocious Indio!"
"The man," she said, thoughtfully, and very calm before this
outburst, "was intoxicated with vanity. We had all the
information, not from Moraga only; from others, too. There was
his brother intriguing, too."
"Oh, yes!" he said. "Of course you know. You know everything. You
read all the correspondence, you write all the papers--all those
State papers that are inspired here, in this room, in blind
deference to a theory of political purity. Hadn't you Charles
Gould before your eyes? Rey de Sulaco! He and his mine are the
practical demonstration of what could have been done. Do you
think he succeeded by his fidelity to a theory of virtue? And all
those railway people, with their honest work! Of course, their
work is honest! But what if you cannot work honestly till the
thieves are satisfied? Could he not, a gentleman, have told this
Sir John what's-his-name that Montero had to be bought off--he
and all his Negro Liberals hanging on to his gold-laced sleeve?
He ought to have been bought off with his own stupid weight of
gold--his weight of gold, I tell you, boots, sabre, spurs, cocked
hat, and all."
She shook her head slightly. "It was impossible," she murmured.
"He wanted the whole lot? What?"
She was facing him now in the deep recess of the window, very
close and motionless. Her lips moved rapidly. Decoud, leaning his
back against the wall, listened with crossed arms and lowered
eyelids. He drank the tones of her even voice, and watched the
agitated life of her throat, as if waves of emotion had run from
her heart to pass out into the air in her reasonable words. He
also had his aspirations, he aspired to carry her away out of
these deadly futilities of pronunciamientos and reforms. All this
was wrong--utterly wrong; but she fascinated him, and sometimes
the sheer sagacity of a phrase would break the charm, replace the
fascination by a sudden unwilling thrill of interest. Some women
hovered, as it were, on the threshold of genius, he reflected.
They did not want to know, or think, or understand. Passion stood
for all that, and he was ready to believe that some startlingly
profound remark, some appreciation of character, or a judgment
upon an event, bordered on the miraculous. In the mature Antonia
he could see with an extraordinary vividness the austere
schoolgirl of the earlier days. She seduced his attention;
sometimes he could not restrain a murmur of assent; now and then
he advanced an objection quite seriously. Gradually they began to
argue; the curtain half hid them from the people in the sala.
Outside it had grown dark. From the deep trench of shadow between
the houses, lit up vaguely by the glimmer of street lamps,
ascended the evening silence of Sulaco; the silence of a town
with few carriages, of unshod horses, and a softly sandalled
population. The windows of the Casa Gould flung their shining
parallelograms upon the house of the Avellanos. Now and then a
shuffle of feet passed below with the pulsating red glow of a
cigarette at the foot of the walls; and the night air, as if
cooled by the snows of Higuerota, refreshed their faces.
"We Occidentals," said Martin Decoud, using the usual term the
provincials of Sulaco applied to themselves, "have been always
distinct and separated. As long as we hold Cayta nothing can
reach us. In all our troubles no army has marched over those
mountains. A revolution in the central provinces isolates us at
once. Look how complete it is now! The news of Barrios' movement
will be cabled to the United States, and only in that way will it
reach Sta. Marta by the cable from the other seaboard. We have
the greatest riches, the greatest fertility, the purest blood in
our great families, the most laborious population. The Occidental
Province should stand alone. The early Federalism was not bad for
us. Then came this union which Don Henrique Gould resisted. It
opened the road to tyranny; and, ever since, the rest of
Costaguana hangs like a millstone round our necks. The Occidental
territory is large enough to make any man's country. Look at the
mountains! Nature itself seems to cry to us, 'Separate!'"
She made an energetic gesture of negation. A silence fell.
"Oh, yes, I know it's contrary to the doctrine laid down in the
'History of Fifty Years' Misrule.' I am only trying to be
sensible. But my sense seems always to give you cause for
offence. Have I startled you very much with this perfectly
reasonable aspiration?"
She shook her head. No, she was not startled, but the idea
shocked her early convictions. Her patriotism was larger. She had
never considered that possibility.
"It may yet be the means of saving some of your convictions," he
said, prophetically.
She did not answer. She seemed tired. They leaned side by side on
the rail of the little balcony, very friendly, having exhausted
politics, giving themselves up to the silent feeling of their
nearness, in one of those profound pauses that fall upon the
rhythm of passion. Towards the plaza end of the street the
glowing coals in the brazeros of the market women cooking their
evening meal gleamed red along the edge of the pavement. A man
appeared without a sound in the light of a street lamp, showing
the coloured inverted triangle of his bordered poncho, square on
his shoulders, hanging to a point below his knees. From the
harbour end of the Calle a horseman walked his soft-stepping
mount, gleaming silver-grey abreast each lamp under the dark
shape of the rider.
"Behold the illustrious Capataz de Cargadores," said Decoud,
gently, "coming in all his splendour after his work is done. The
next great man of Sulaco after Don Carlos Gould. But he is
good-natured, and let me make friends with him."
"Ah, indeed!" said Antonia. "How did you make friends?"
"A journalist ought to have his finger on the popular pulse, and
this man is one of the leaders of the populace. A journalist
ought to know remarkable men--and this man is remarkable in his
way."
"Ah, yes!" said Antonia, thoughtfully. "It is known that this
Italian has a great influence."
The horseman had passed below them, with a gleam of dim light on
the shining broad quarters of the grey mare, on a bright heavy
stirrup, on a long silver spur; but the short flick of yellowish
flame in the dusk was powerless against the muffled-up
mysteriousness of the dark figure with an invisible face
concealed by a great sombrero.
Decoud and Antonia remained leaning over the balcony, side by
side, touching elbows, with their heads overhanging the darkness
of the street, and the brilliantly lighted sala at their backs.
This was a tete-a-tete of extreme impropriety; something of which
in the whole extent of the Republic only the extraordinary
Antonia could be capable--the poor, motherless girl, never
accompanied, with a careless father, who had thought only of
making her learned. Even Decoud himself seemed to feel that this
was as much as he could expect of having her to himself
till--till the revolution was over and he could carry her off to
Europe, away from the endlessness of civil strife, whose folly
seemed even harder to bear than its ignominy. After one Montero
there would be another, the lawlessness of a populace of all
colours and races, barbarism, irremediable tyranny. As the great
Liberator Bolivar had said in the bitterness of his spirit,
"America is ungovernable. Those who worked for her independence
have ploughed the sea." He did not care, he declared boldly; he
seized every opportunity to tell her that though she had managed
to make a Blanco journalist of him, he was no patriot. First of
all, the word had no sense for cultured minds, to whom the
narrowness of every belief is odious; and secondly, in connection
with the everlasting troubles of this unhappy country it was
hopelessly besmirched; it had been the cry of dark barbarism, the
cloak of lawlessness, of crimes, of rapacity, of simple thieving.
He was surprised at the warmth of his own utterance. He had no
need to drop his voice; it had been low all the time, a mere
murmur in the silence of dark houses with their shutters closed
early against the night air, as is the custom of Sulaco. Only the
sala of the Casa Gould flung out defiantly the blaze of its four
windows, the bright appeal of light in the whole dumb obscurity
of the street. And the murmur on the little balcony went on after
a short pause.
"But we are labouring to change all that," Antonia protested. "It
is exactly what we desire. It is our object. It is the great
cause. And the word you despise has stood also for sacrifice, for
courage, for constancy, for suffering. Papa, who--"
"Ploughing the sea," interrupted Decoud, looking down.
There was below the sound of hasty and ponderous footsteps.
"Your uncle, the grand-vicar of the cathedral, has just turned
under the gate," observed Decoud. "He said Mass for the troops in
the Plaza this morning. They had built for him an altar of
drums, you know. And they brought outside all the painted blocks
to take the air. All the wooden saints stood militarily in a row
at the top of the great flight of steps. They looked like a
gorgeous escort attending the Vicar-General. I saw the great
function from the windows of the Porvenir. He is amazing, your
uncle, the last of the Corbelans. He glittered exceedingly in his
vestments with a great crimson velvet cross down his back. And
all the time our saviour Barrios sat in the Amarilla Club
drinking punch at an open window. Esprit fort--our Barrios. I
expected every moment your uncle to launch an excommunication
there and then at the black eye-patch in the window across the
Plaza. But not at all. Ultimately the troops marched off. Later
Barrios came down with some of the officers, and stood with his
uniform all unbuttoned, discoursing at the edge of the pavement.
Suddenly your uncle appeared, no longer glittering, but all
black, at the cathedral door with that threatening aspect he
has--you know, like a sort of avenging spirit. He gives one look,
strides over straight at the group of uniforms, and leads away
the general by the elbow. He walked him for a quarter of an hour
in the shade of a wall. Never let go his elbow for a moment,
talking all the time with exaltation, and gesticulating with a
long black arm. It was a curious scene. The officers seemed
struck with astonishment. Remarkable man, your missionary uncle.
He hates an infidel much less than a heretic, and prefers a
heathen many times to an infidel. He condescends graciously to
call me a heathen, sometimes, you know."
Antonia listened with her hands over the balustrade, opening and
shutting the fan gently; and Decoud talked a little nervously, as
if afraid that she would leave him at the first pause. Their
comparative isolation, the precious sense of intimacy, the slight
contact of their arms, affected him softly; for now and then a
tender inflection crept into the flow of his ironic murmurs.
"Any slight sign of favour from a relative of yours is welcome,
Antonia. And perhaps he understands me, after all! But I know
him, too, our Padre Corbelan. The idea of political honour,
justice, and honesty for him consists in the restitution of the
confiscated Church property. Nothing else could have drawn that
fierce converter of savage Indians out of the wilds to work for
the Ribierist cause! Nothing else but that wild hope! He would
make a pronunciamiento himself for such an object against any
Government if he could only get followers! What does Don Carlos
Gould think of that? But, of course, with his English
impenetrability, nobody can tell what he thinks. Probably he
thinks of nothing apart from his mine; of his 'Imperium in
Imperio.' As to Mrs. Gould, she thinks of her schools, of her
hospitals, of the mothers with the young babies, of every sick
old man in the three villages. If you were to turn your head now
you would see her extracting a report from that sinister doctor
in a check shirt--what's his name? Monygham--or else catechising
Don Pepe or perhaps listening to Padre Roman. They are all down
here to-day--all her ministers of state. Well, she is a sensible
woman, and perhaps Don Carlos is a sensible man. It's a part of
solid English sense not to think too much; to see only what may
be of practical use at the moment. These people are not like
ourselves. We have no political reason; we have political
passions--sometimes. What is a conviction? A particular view of
our personal advantage either practical or emotional. No one is
a patriot for nothing. The word serves us well. But I am
clear-sighted, and I shall not use that word to you, Antonia! I
have no patriotic illusions. I have only the supreme illusion of
a lover."
He paused, then muttered almost inaudibly, "That can lead one
very far, though."
Behind their backs the political tide that once in every
twenty-four hours set with a strong flood through the Gould
drawing-room could be heard, rising higher in a hum of voices.
Men had been dropping in singly, or in twos and threes: the
higher officials of the province, engineers of the railway,
sunburnt and in tweeds, with the frosted head of their chief
smiling with slow, humorous indulgence amongst the young eager
faces. Scarfe, the lover of fandangos, had already slipped out in
search of some dance, no matter where, on the outskirts of the
town. Don Juste Lopez, after taking his daughters home, had
entered solemnly, in a black creased coat buttoned up under his
spreading brown beard. The few members of the Provincial Assembly
present clustered at once around their President to discuss the
news of the war and the last proclamation of the rebel Montero,
the miserable Montero, calling in the name of "a justly incensed
democracy" upon all the Provincial Assemblies of the Republic to
suspend their sittings till his sword had made peace and the will
of the people could be consulted. It was practically an
invitation to dissolve: an unheard-of audacity of that evil
madman.
The indignation ran high in the knot of deputies behind Jose
Avellanos. Don Jose, lifting up his voice, cried out to them over
the high back of his chair, "Sulaco has answered by sending
to-day an army upon his flank. If all the other provinces show
only half as much patriotism as we Occidentals--"
A great outburst of acclamations covered the vibrating treble of
the life and soul of the party. Yes! Yes! This was true! A great
truth! Sulaco was in the forefront, as ever! It was a boastful
tumult, the hopefulness inspired by the event of the day breaking
out amongst those caballeros of the Campo thinking of their
herds, of their lands, of the safety of their families.
Everything was at stake. . . . No! It was impossible that Montero
should succeed! This criminal, this shameless Indio! The clamour
continued for some time, everybody else in the room looking
towards the group where Don Juste had put on his air of impartial
solemnity as if presiding at a sitting of the Provincial
Assembly. Decoud had turned round at the noise, and, leaning his
back on the balustrade, shouted into the room with all the
strength of his lungs, "Gran' bestia!"
This unexpected cry had the effect of stilling the noise. All the
eyes were directed to the window with an approving expectation;
but Decoud had already turned his back upon the room, and was
again leaning out over the quiet street.
"This is the quintessence of my journalism; that is the supreme
argument," he said to Antonia. "I have invented this definition,
this last word on a great question. But I am no patriot. I am no
more of a patriot than the Capataz of the Sulaco Cargadores, this
Genoese who has done such great things for this harbour--this
active usher-in of the material implements for our progress. You
have heard Captain Mitchell confess over and over again that till
he got this man he could never tell how long it would take to
unload a ship. That is bad for progress. You have seen him pass
by after his labours on his famous horse to dazzle the girls in
some ballroom with an earthen floor. He is a fortunate fellow!
His work is an exercise of personal powers; his leisure is spent
in receiving the marks of extraordinary adulation. And he likes
it, too. Can anybody be more fortunate? To be feared and admired
is--"
"And are these your highest aspirations, Don Martin?" interrupted
Antonia.
"I was speaking of a man of that sort," said Decoud, curtly. "The
heroes of the world have been feared and admired. What more could
he want?"
Decoud had often felt his familiar habit of ironic thought fall
shattered against Antonia's gravity. She irritated him as if she,
too, had suffered from that inexplicable feminine obtuseness
which stands so often between a man and a woman of the more
ordinary sort. But he overcame his vexation at once. He was very
far from thinking Antonia ordinary, whatever verdict his
scepticism might have pronounced upon himself. With a touch of
penetrating tenderness in his voice he assured her that his only
aspiration was to a felicity so high that it seemed almost
unrealizable on this earth.
She coloured invisibly, with a warmth against which the breeze
from the sierra seemed to have lost its cooling power in the
sudden melting of the snows. His whisper could not have carried
so far, though there was enough ardour in his tone to melt a
heart of ice. Antonia turned away abruptly, as if to carry his
whispered assurance into the room behind, full of light, noisy
with voices.
The tide of political speculation was beating high within the
four walls of the great sala, as if driven beyond the marks by a
great gust of hope. Don Juste's fan-shaped beard was still the
centre of loud and animated discussions. There was a
self-confident ring in all the voices. Even the few Europeans
around Charles Gould--a Dane, a couple of Frenchmen, a discreet
fat German, smiling, with down-cast eyes, the representatives of
those material interests that had got a footing in Sulaco under
the protecting might of the San Tome mine--had infused a lot of
good humour into their deference. Charles Gould, to whom they
were paying their court, was the visible sign of the stability
that could be achieved on the shifting ground of revolutions.
They felt hopeful about their various undertakings. One of the
two Frenchmen, small, black, with glittering eyes lost in an
immense growth of bushy beard, waved his tiny brown hands and
delicate wrists. He had been travelling in the interior of the
province for a syndicate of European capitalists. His forcible
"Monsieur l' Administrateur" returning every minute shrilled
above the steady hum of conversations. He was relating his
discoveries. He was ecstatic. Charles Gould glanced down at him
courteously.
At a given moment of these necessary receptions it was Mrs.
Gould's habit to withdraw quietly into a little drawing-room,
especially her own, next to the great sala. She had risen, and,
waiting for Antonia, listened with a slightly worried
graciousness to the engineer-in-chief of the railway, who stooped
over her, relating slowly, without the slightest gesture,
something apparently amusing, for his eyes had a humorous
twinkle. Antonia, before she advanced into the room to join Mrs.
Gould, turned her head over her shoulder towards Decoud, only for
a moment.
"Why should any one of us think his aspirations unrealizable?"
she said, rapidly.
"I am going to cling to mine to the end, Antonia," he answered,
through clenched teeth, then bowed very low, a little distantly.
The engineer-in-chief had not finished telling his amusing story.
The humours of railway building in South America appealed to his
keen appreciation of the absurd, and he told his instances of
ignorant prejudice and as ignorant cunning very well. Now, Mrs.
Gould gave him all her attention as he walked by her side
escorting the ladies out of the room. Finally all three passed
unnoticed through the glass doors in the gallery. Only a tall
priest stalking silently in the noise of the sala checked himself
to look after them. Father Corbelan, whom Decoud had seen from
the balcony turning into the gateway of the Casa Gould, had
addressed no one since coming in. The long, skimpy soutane
accentuated the tallness of his stature; he carried his powerful
torso thrown forward; and the straight, black bar of his joined
eyebrows, the pugnacious outline of the bony face, the white spot
of a scar on the bluish shaven cheeks (a testimonial to his
apostolic zeal from a party of unconverted Indians), suggested
something unlawful behind his priesthood, the idea of a chaplain
of bandits.
He separated his bony, knotted hands clasped behind his back, to
shake his finger at Martin.
Decoud had stepped into the room after Antonia. But he did not
go far. He had remained just within, against the curtain, with an
expression of not quite genuine gravity, like a grown-up person
taking part in a game of children. He gazed quietly at the
threatening finger.
"I have watched your reverence converting General Barrios by a
special sermon on the Plaza," he said, without making the
slightest movement.
"What miserable nonsense!" Father Corbelan's deep voice resounded
all over the room, making all the heads turn on the shoulders.
"The man is a drunkard. Senores, the God of your General is a
bottle!"
His contemptuous, arbitrary voice caused an uneasy suspension of
every sound, as if the self-confidence of the gathering had been
staggered by a blow. But nobody took up Father Corbelan's
declaration.
It was known that Father Corbelan had come out of the wilds to
advocate the sacred rights of the Church with the same fanatical
fearlessness with which he had gone preaching to bloodthirsty
savages, devoid of human compassion or worship of any kind.
Rumours of legendary proportions told of his successes as a
missionary beyond the eye of Christian men. He had baptized whole
nations of Indians, living with them like a savage himself. It
was related that the padre used to ride with his Indians for
days, half naked, carrying a bullock-hide shield, and, no doubt,
a long lance, too--who knows? That he had wandered clothed in
skins, seeking for proselytes somewhere near the snow line of the
Cordillera. Of these exploits Padre Corbelan himself was never
known to talk. But he made no secret of his opinion that the
politicians of Sta. Marta had harder hearts and more corrupt
minds than the heathen to whom he had carried the word of God.
His injudicious zeal for the temporal welfare of the Church was
damaging the Ribierist cause. It was common knowledge that he had
refused to be made titular bishop of the Occidental diocese till
justice was done to a despoiled Church. The political Gefe of
Sulaco (the same dignitary whom Captain Mitchell saved from the
mob afterwards) hinted with naive cynicism that doubtless their
Excellencies the Ministers sent the padre over the mountains to
Sulaco in the worst season of the year in the hope that he would
be frozen to death by the icy blasts of the high paramos. Every
year a few hardy muleteers--men inured to exposure--were known to
perish in that way. But what would you have? Their Excellencies
possibly had not realized what a tough priest he was. Meantime,
the ignorant were beginning to murmur that the Ribierist reforms
meant simply the taking away of the land from the people. Some
of it was to be given to foreigners who made the railway; the
greater part was to go to the padres.
These were the results of the Grand Vicar's zeal. Even from the
short allocution to the troops on the Plaza (which only the first
ranks could have heard) he had not been able to keep out his
fixed idea of an outraged Church waiting for reparation from a
penitent country. The political Gefe had been exasperated. But
he could not very well throw the brother-in-law of Don Jose into
the prison of the Cabildo. The chief magistrate, an easy-going
and popular official, visited the Casa Gould, walking over after
sunset from the Intendencia, unattended, acknowledging with
dignified courtesy the salutations of high and low alike. That
evening he had walked up straight to Charles Gould and had hissed
out to him that he would have liked to deport the Grand Vicar out
of Sulaco, anywhere, to some desert island, to the Isabels, for
instance. "The one without water preferably--eh, Don Carlos?" he
had added in a tone between jest and earnest. This uncontrollable
priest, who had rejected his offer of the episcopal palace for a
residence and preferred to hang his shabby hammock amongst the
rubble and spiders of the sequestrated Dominican Convent, had
taken into his head to advocate an unconditional pardon for
Hernandez the Robber! And this was not enough; he seemed to have
entered into communication with the most audacious criminal the
country had known for years. The Sulaco police knew, of course,
what was going on. Padre Corbelan had got hold of that reckless
Italian, the Capataz de Cargadores, the only man fit for such an
errand, and had sent a message through him. Father Corbelan had
studied in Rome, and could speak Italian. The Capataz was known
to visit the old Dominican Convent at night. An old woman who
served the Grand Vicar had heard the name of Hernandez
pronounced; and only last Saturday afternoon the Capataz had been
observed galloping out of town. He did not return for two days.
The police would have laid the Italian by the heels if it had not
been for fear of the Cargadores, a turbulent body of men, quite
apt to raise a tumult. Nowadays it was not so easy to govern
Sulaco. Bad characters flocked into it, attracted by the money in
the pockets of the railway workmen. The populace was made
restless by Father Corbelan's discourses. And the first
magistrate explained to Charles Gould that now the province was
stripped of troops any outbreak of lawlessness would find the
authorities with their boots off, as it were.
Then he went away moodily to sit in an armchair, smoking a long,
thin cigar, not very far from Don Jose, with whom, bending over
sideways, he exchanged a few words from time to time. He ignored
the entrance of the priest, and whenever Father Corbelan's voice
was raised behind him, he shrugged his shoulders impatiently.
Father Corbelan had remained quite motionless for a time with
that something vengeful in his immobility which seemed to
characterize all his attitudes. A lurid glow of strong
convictions gave its peculiar aspect to the black figure. But its
fierceness became softened as the padre, fixing his eyes upon
Decoud, raised his long, black arm slowly, impressively--
"And you--you are a perfect heathen," he said, in a subdued, deep
voice.
He made a step nearer, pointing a forefinger at the young man's
breast. Decoud, very calm, felt the wall behind the curtain with
the back of his head. Then, with his chin tilted well up, he
smiled.
"Very well," he agreed with the slightly weary nonchalance of a
man well used to these passages. "But is it perhaps that you have
not discovered yet what is the God of my worship? It was an
easier task with our Barrios."
The priest suppressed a gesture of discouragement. "You believe
neither in stick nor stone," he said.
"Nor bottle," added Decoud without stirring. "Neither does the
other of your reverence's confidants. I mean the Capataz of the
Cargadores. He does not drink. Your reading of my character does
honour to your perspicacity. But why call me a heathen?"
"True," retorted the priest. "You are ten times worse. A miracle
could not convert you."
"I certainly do not believe in miracles," said Decoud, quietly.
Father Corbelan shrugged his high, broad shoulders doubtfully.
"A sort of Frenchman--godless--a materialist," he pronounced
slowly, as if weighing the terms of a careful analysis. "Neither
the son of his own country nor of any other," he continued,
thoughtfully.
"Scarcely human, in fact," Decoud commented under his breath, his
head at rest against the wall, his eyes gazing up at the ceiling.
"The victim of this faithless age," Father Corbelan resumed in a
deep but subdued voice.
"But of some use as a journalist." Decoud changed his pose and
spoke in a more animated tone. "Has your worship neglected to
read the last number of the Porvenir? I assure you it is just
like the others. On the general policy it continues to call
Montero a gran' bestia, and stigmatize his brother, the
guerrillero, for a combination of lackey and spy. What could be
more effective? In local affairs it urges the Provincial
Government to enlist bodily into the national army the band of
Hernandez the Robber--who is apparently the protege of the
Church--or at least of the Grand Vicar. Nothing could be more
sound."
The priest nodded and turned on the heels of his square-toed
shoes with big steel buckles. Again, with his hands clasped
behind his back, he paced to and fro, planting his feet firmly.
When he swung about, the skirt of his soutane was inflated
slightly by the brusqueness of his movements.
The great sala had been emptying itself slowly. When the Gefe
Politico rose to go, most of those still remaining stood up
suddenly in sign of respect, and Don Jose Avellanos stopped the
rocking of his chair. But the good-natured First Official made a
deprecatory gesture, waved his hand to Charles Gould, and went
out discreetly.
In the comparative peace of the room the screaming "Monsieur
l'Administrateur" of the frail, hairy Frenchman seemed to acquire
a preternatural shrillness. The explorer of the Capitalist
syndicate was still enthusiastic. "Ten million dollars' worth of
copper practically in sight, Monsieur l'Administrateur. Ten
millions in sight! And a railway coming--a railway! They will
never believe my report. C'est trop beau." He fell a prey to a
screaming ecstasy, in the midst of sagely nodding heads, before
Charles Gould's imperturbable calm.
And only the priest continued his pacing, flinging round the
skirt of his soutane at each end of his beat. Decoud murmured to
him ironically: "Those gentlemen talk about their gods."
Father Corbelan stopped short, looked at the journalist of Sulaco
fixedly for a moment, shrugged his shoulders slightly, and
resumed his plodding walk of an obstinate traveller.
And now the Europeans were dropping off from the group around
Charles Gould till the Administrador of the Great Silver Mine
could be seen in his whole lank length, from head to foot, left
stranded by the ebbing tide of his guests on the great square of
carpet, as it were a multi-coloured shoal of flowers and
arabesques under his brown boots. Father Corbelan approached the
rocking-chair of Don Jose Avellanos.
"Come, brother," he said, with kindly brusqueness and a touch of
relieved impatience a man may feel at the end of a perfectly
useless ceremony. "A la Casa! A la Casa! This has been all talk.
Let us now go and think and pray for guidance from Heaven."
He rolled his black eyes upwards. By the side of the frail
diplomatist--the life and soul of the party--he seemed gigantic,
with a gleam of fanaticism in the glance. But the voice of the
party, or, rather, its mouthpiece, the "son Decoud" from Paris,
turned journalist for the sake of Antonia's eyes, knew very well
that it was not so, that he was only a strenuous priest with one
idea, feared by the women and execrated by the men of the people.
Martin Decoud, the dilettante in life, imagined himself to derive
an artistic pleasure from watching the picturesque extreme of
wrongheadedness into which an honest, almost sacred, conviction
may drive a man. "It is like madness. It must be--because it's
self-destructive," Decoud had said to himself often. It seemed to
him that every conviction, as soon as it became effective, turned
into that form of dementia the gods send upon those they wish to
destroy. But he enjoyed the bitter flavour of that example with
the zest of a connoisseur in the art of his choice. Those two men
got on well together, as if each had felt respectively that a
masterful conviction, as well as utter scepticism, may lead a man
very far on the by-paths of political action.
Don Jose obeyed the touch of the big hairy hand. Decoud followed
out the brothers-in-law. And there remained only one visitor in
the vast empty sala, bluishly hazy with tobacco smoke, a
heavy-eyed, round-cheeked man, with a drooping moustache, a hide
merchant from Esmeralda, who had come overland to Sulaco, riding
with a few peons across the coast range. He was very full of his
journey, undertaken mostly for the purpose of seeing the Senor
Administrador of San Tome in relation to some assistance he
required in his hide-exporting business. He hoped to enlarge it
greatly now that the country was going to be settled. It was
going to be settled, he repeated several times, degrading by a
strange, anxious whine the sonority of the Spanish language,
which he pattered rapidly, like some sort of cringing jargon. A
plain man could carry on his little business now in the country,
and even think of enlarging it--with safety. Was it not so? He
seemed to beg Charles Gould for a confirmatory word, a grunt of
assent, a simple nod even.
He could get nothing. His alarm increased, and in the pauses he
would dart his eyes here and there; then, loth to give up, he
would branch off into feeling allusion to the dangers of his
journey. The audacious Hernandez, leaving his usual haunts, had
crossed the Campo of Sulaco, and was known to be lurking in the
ravines of the coast range. Yesterday, when distant only a few
hours from Sulaco, the hide merchant and his servants had seen
three men on the road arrested suspiciously, with their horses'
heads together. Two of these rode off at once and disappeared in
a shallow quebrada to the left. "We stopped," continued the man
from Esmeralda, "and I tried to hide behind a small bush. But
none of my mozos would go forward to find out what it meant, and
the third horseman seemed to be waiting for us to come up. It was
no use. We had been seen. So we rode slowly on, trembling. He
let us pass--a man on a grey horse with his hat down on his
eyes--without a word of greeting; but by-and-by we heard him
galloping after us. We faced about, but that did not seem to
intimidate him. He rode up at speed, and touching my foot with
the toe of his boot, asked me for a cigar, with a blood-curdling
laugh. He did not seem armed, but when he put his hand back to
reach for the matches I saw an enormous revolver strapped to his
waist. I shuddered. He had very fierce whiskers, Don Carlos, and
as he did not offer to go on we dared not move. At last, blowing
the smoke of my cigar into the air through his nostrils, he said,
'Senor, it would be perhaps better for you if I rode behind your
party. You are not very far from Sulaco now. Go you with God.'
What would you? We went on. There was no resisting him. He might
have been Hernandez himself; though my servant, who has been many
times to Sulaco by sea, assured me that he had recognized him
very well for the Capataz of the Steamship Company's Cargadores.
Later, that same evening, I saw that very man at the corner of
the Plaza talking to a girl, a Morenita, who stood by the stirrup
with her hand on the grey horse's mane."
"I assure you, Senor Hirsch," murmured Charles Gould, "that you
ran no risk on this occasion."
"That may be, senor, though I tremble yet. A most fierce man--to
look at. And what does it mean? A person employed by the
Steamship Company talking with salteadores--no less, senor; the
other horsemen were salteadores--in a lonely place, and behaving
like a robber himself! A cigar is nothing, but what was there to
prevent him asking me for my purse?"
"No, no, Senor Hirsch," Charles Gould murmured, letting his
glance stray away a little vacantly from the round face, with its
hooked beak upturned towards him in an almost childlike appeal.
"If it was the Capataz de Cargadores you met--and there is no
doubt, is there? --you were perfectly safe."
"Thank you. You are very good. A very fierce-looking man, Don
Carlos. He asked me for a cigar in a most familiar manner. What
would have happened if I had not had a cigar? I shudder yet. What
business had he to be talking with robbers in a lonely place?"
But Charles Gould, openly preoccupied now, gave not a sign, made
no sound. The impenetrability of the embodied Gould Concession
had its surface shades. To be dumb is merely a fatal affliction;
but the King of Sulaco had words enough to give him all the
mysterious weight of a taciturn force. His silences, backed by
the power of speech, had as many shades of significance as
uttered words in the way of assent, of doubt, of negation--even
of simple comment. Some seemed to say plainly, "Think it over";
others meant clearly, "Go ahead"; a simple, low "I see," with an
affirmative nod, at the end of a patient listening half-hour was
the equivalent of a verbal contract, which men had learned to
trust implicitly, since behind it all there was the great San
Tome mine, the head and front of the material interests, so
strong that it depended on no man's goodwill in the whole length
and breadth of the Occidental Province--that is, on no goodwill
which it could not buy ten times over. But to the little
hook-nosed man from Esmeralda, anxious about the export of hides,
the silence of Charles Gould portended a failure. Evidently this
was no time for extending a modest man's business. He enveloped
in a swift mental malediction the whole country, with all its
inhabitants, partisans of Ribiera and Montero alike; and there
were incipient tears in his mute anger at the thought of the
innumerable ox-hides going to waste upon the dreamy expanse of
the Campo, with its single palms rising like ships at sea within
the perfect circle of the horizon, its clumps of heavy timber
motionless like solid islands of leaves above the running waves
of grass. There were hides there, rotting, with no profit to
anybody--rotting where they had been dropped by men called away
to attend the urgent necessities of political revolutions. The
practical, mercantile soul of Senor Hirsch rebelled against all
that foolishness, while he was taking a respectful but
disconcerted leave of the might and majesty of the San Tome mine
in the person of Charles Gould. He could not restrain a
heart-broken murmur, wrung out of his very aching heart, as it
were.
"It is a great, great foolishness, Don Carlos, all this. The
price of hides in Hamburg is gone up--up. Of course the Ribierist
Government will do away with all that--when it gets established
firmly. Meantime--"
He sighed.
"Yes, meantime," repeated Charles Gould, inscrutably.
The other shrugged his shoulders. But he was not ready to go yet.
There was a little matter he would like to mention very much if
permitted. It appeared he had some good friends in Hamburg (he
murmured the name of the firm) who were very anxious to do
business, in dynamite, he explained. A contract for dynamite with
the San Tome mine, and then, perhaps, later on, other mines,
which were sure to--The little man from Esmeralda was ready to
enlarge, but Charles interrupted him. It seemed as though the
patience of the Senor Administrador was giving way at last.
"Senor Hirsch," he said, "I have enough dynamite stored up at the
mountain to send it down crashing into the valley"--his voice
rose a little--"to send half Sulaco into the air if I liked."
Charles Gould smiled at the round, startled eyes of the dealer in
hides, who was murmuring hastily, "Just so. Just so." And now he
was going. It was impossible to do business in explosives with an
Administrador so well provided and so discouraging. He had
suffered agonies in the saddle and had exposed himself to the
atrocities of the bandit Hernandez for nothing at all. Neither
hides nor dynamite--and the very shoulders of the enterprising
Israelite expressed dejection. At the door he bowed low to the
engineer-in-chief. But at the bottom of the stairs in the patio
he stopped short, with his podgy hand over his lips in an
attitude of meditative astonishment.
"What does he want to keep so much dynamite for?" he muttered.
"And why does he talk like this to me?"
The engineer-in-chief, looking in at the door of the empty sala,
whence the political tide had ebbed out to the last insignificant
drop, nodded familiarly to the master of the house, standing
motionless like a tall beacon amongst the deserted shoals of
furniture.
"Good-night, I am going. Got my bike downstairs. The railway
will know where to go for dynamite should we get short at any
time. We have done cutting and chopping for a while now. We shall
begin soon to blast our way through."
"Don't come to me," said Charles Gould, with perfect serenity. "I
shan't have an ounce to spare for anybody. Not an ounce. Not for
my own brother, if I had a brother, and he were the
engineer-in-chief of the most promising railway in the world."
"What's that?" asked the engineer-in-chief, with equanimity.
"Unkindness?"
"No," said Charles Gould, stolidly. "Policy."
"Radical, I should think," the engineer-in-chief observed from
the doorway.
"Is that the right name?" Charles Gould said, from the middle of
the room.
"I mean, going to the roots, you know," the engineer explained,
with an air of enjoyment.
"Why, yes," Charles pronounced, slowly. "The Gould Concession has
struck such deep roots in this country, in this province, in that
gorge of the mountains, that nothing but dynamite shall be
allowed to dislodge it from there. It's my choice. It's my last
card to play."
The engineer-in-chief whistled low. "A pretty game," he said,
with a shade of discretion. "And have you told Holroyd of that
extraordinary trump card you hold in your hand?"
"Card only when it's played; when it falls at the end of the
game. Till then you may call it a--a--"
"Weapon," suggested the railway man.
"No. You may call it rather an argument," corrected Charles
Gould, gently. "And that's how I've presented it to Mr. Holroyd."
"And what did he say to it?" asked the engineer, with undisguised
interest.
"He"--Charles Gould spoke after a slight pause--"he said
something about holding on like grim death and putting our trust
in God. I should imagine he must have been rather startled. But
then"--pursued the Administrador of the San Tome mine--"but then,
he is very far away, you know, and, as they say in this country,
God is very high above."
The engineer's appreciative laugh died away down the stairs,
where the Madonna with the Child on her arm seemed to look after
his shaking broad back from her shallow niche.
CHAPTER SIX
A PROFOUND stillness reigned in the Casa Gould. The master of
the house, walking along the corredor, opened the door of his
room, and saw his wife sitting in a big armchair--his own smoking
armchair--thoughtful, contemplating her little shoes. And she did
not raise her eyes when he walked in.
"Tired?" asked Charles Gould.
"A little," said Mrs. Gould. Still without looking up, she added
with feeling, "There is an awful sense of unreality about all
this."
Charles Gould, before the long table strewn with papers, on which
lay a hunting crop and a pair of spurs, stood looking at his
wife: "The heat and dust must have been awful this afternoon by
the waterside," he murmured, sympathetically. "The glare on the
water must have been simply terrible."
"One could close one's eyes to the glare," said Mrs. Gould.
"But, my dear Charley, it is impossible for me to close my eyes
to our position; to this awful . . ."
She raised her eyes and looked at her husband's face, from which
all sign of sympathy or any other feeling had disappeared. "Why
don't you tell me something?" she almost wailed.
"I thought you had understood me perfectly from the first,"
Charles Gould said, slowly. "I thought we had said all there was
to say a long time ago. There is nothing to say now. There were
things to be done. We have done them; we have gone on doing
them. There is no going back now. I don't suppose that, even
from the first, there was really any possible way back. And,
what's more, we can't even afford to stand still."
"Ah, if one only knew how far you mean to go," said his wife.
inwardly trembling, but in an almost playful tone.
"Any distance, any length, of course," was the answer, in a
matter-of-fact tone, which caused Mrs. Gould to make another
effort to repress a shudder.
She stood up, smiling graciously, and her little figure seemed to
be diminished still more by the heavy mass of her hair and the
long train of her gown.
"But always to success," she said, persuasively.
Charles Gould, enveloping her in the steely blue glance of his
attentive eyes, answered without hesitation--
"Oh, there is no alternative."
He put an immense assurance into his tone. As to the words, this
was all that his conscience would allow him to say.
Mrs. Gould's smile remained a shade too long upon her lips. She
murmured--
"I will leave you; I've a slight headache. The heat, the dust,
were indeed--I suppose you are going back to the mine before the
morning?"
"At midnight," said Charles Gould. "We are bringing down the
silver to-morrow. Then I shall take three whole days off in town
with you."
"Ah, you are going to meet the escort. I shall be on the balcony
at five o'clock to see you pass. Till then, good-bye."
Charles Gould walked rapidly round the table, and, seizing her
hands, bent down, pressing them both to his lips. Before he
straightened himself up again to his full height she had
disengaged one to smooth his cheek with a light touch, as if he
were a little boy.
"Try to get some rest for a couple of hours," she murmured, with
a glance at a hammock stretched in a distant part of the room.
Her long train swished softly after her on the red tiles. At the
door she looked back.
Two big lamps with unpolished glass globes bathed in a soft and
abundant light the four white walls of the room, with a glass
case of arms, the brass hilt of Henry Gould's cavalry sabre on
its square of velvet, and the water-colour sketch of the San Tome
gorge. And Mrs. Gould, gazing at the last in its black wooden
frame, sighed out--
"Ah, if we had left it alone, Charley!"
"No," Charles Gould said, moodily; "it was impossible to leave it
alone."
"Perhaps it was impossible," Mrs. Gould admitted, slowly. Her
lips quivered a little, but she smiled with an air of dainty
bravado. "We have disturbed a good many snakes in that Paradise,
Charley, haven't we?"
"Yes, I remember," said Charles Gould, "it was Don Pepe who
called the gorge the Paradise of snakes. No doubt we have
disturbed a great many. But remember, my dear, that it is not now
as it was when you made that sketch." He waved his hand towards
the small water-colour hanging alone upon the great bare wall.
"It is no longer a Paradise of snakes. We have brought mankind
into it, and we cannot turn our backs upon them to go and begin a
new life elsewhere."
He confronted his wife with a firm, concentrated gaze, which Mrs.
Gould returned with a brave assumption of fearlessness before she
went out, closing the door gently after her.
In contrast with the white glaring room the dimly lit corredor
had a restful mysteriousness of a forest glade, suggested by the
stems and the leaves of the plants ranged along the balustrade of
the open side. In the streaks of light falling through the open
doors of the reception-rooms, the blossoms, white and red and
pale lilac, came out vivid with the brilliance of flowers in a
stream of sunshine; and Mrs. Gould, passing on, had the vividness
of a figure seen in the clear patches of sun that chequer the
gloom of open glades in the woods. The stones in the rings upon
her hand pressed to her forehead glittered in the lamplight
abreast of the door of the sala.
"Who's there?" she asked, in a startled voice. "Is that you,
Basilio?" She looked in, and saw Martin Decoud walking about,
with an air of having lost something, amongst the chairs and
tables.
"Antonia has forgotten her fan in here," said Decoud, with a
strange air of distraction; "so I entered to see."
But, even as he said this, he had obviously given up his search,
and walked straight towards Mrs. Gould, who looked at him with
doubtful surprise.
"Senora," he began, in a low voice.
"What is it, Don Martin?" asked Mrs. Gould. And then she added,
with a slight laugh, "I am so nervous to-day," as if to explain
the eagerness of the question.
"Nothing immediately dangerous," said Decoud, who now could not
conceal his agitation. "Pray don't distress yourself. No, really,
you must not distress yourself."
Mrs. Gould, with her candid eyes very wide open, her lips
composed into a smile, was steadying herself with a little
bejewelled hand against the side of the door.
"Perhaps you don't know how alarming you are, appearing like this
unexpectedly--"
"I! Alarming!" he protested, sincerely vexed and surprised. "I
assure you that I am not in the least alarmed myself. A fan is
lost; well, it will be found again. But I don't think it is here.
It is a fan I am looking for. I cannot understand how Antonia
could--Well! Have you found it, amigo?"
"No, senor," said behind Mrs. Gould the soft voice of Basilio,
the head servant of the Casa. "I don't think the senorita could
have left it in this house at all."
"Go and look for it in the patio again. Go now, my friend; look
for it on the steps, under the gate; examine every flagstone;
search for it till I come down again. . . . That fellow"--he
addressed himself in English to Mrs. Gould--"is always stealing
up behind one's back on his bare feet. I set him to look for that
fan directly I came in to justify my reappearance, my sudden
return."
He paused and Mrs. Gould said, amiably, "You are always welcome."
She paused for a second, too. "But I am waiting to learn the
cause of your return."
Decoud affected suddenly the utmost nonchalance.
"I can't bear to be spied upon. Oh, the cause? Yes, there is a
cause; there is something else that is lost besides Antonia's
favourite fan. As I was walking home after seeing Don Jose and
Antonia to their house, the Capataz de Cargadores, riding down
the street, spoke to me."
"Has anything happened to the Violas?" inquired Mrs. Gould.
"The Violas? You mean the old Garibaldino who keeps the hotel
where the engineers live? Nothing happened there. The Capataz
said nothing of them; he only told me that the telegraphist of
the Cable Company was walking on the Plaza, bareheaded, looking
out for me. There is news from the interior, Mrs. Gould. I
should rather say rumours of news."
"Good news?" said Mrs. Gould in a low voice.
"Worthless, I should think. But if I must define them, I would
say bad. They are to the effect that a two days' battle had been
fought near Sta. Marta, and that the Ribierists are defeated. It
must have happened a few days ago--perhaps a week. The rumour has
just reached Cayta, and the man in charge of the cable station
there has telegraphed the news to his colleague here. We might
just as well have kept Barrios in Sulaco."
"What's to be done now?" murmured Mrs. Gould.
"Nothing. He's at sea with the troops. He will get to Cayta in a
couple of days' time and learn the news there. What he will do
then, who can say? Hold Cayta? Offer his submission to Montero?
Disband his army--this last most likely, and go himself in one of
the O.S.N. Company's steamers, north or south--to Valparaiso or
to San Francisco, no matter where. Our Barrios has a great
practice in exiles and repatriations, which mark the points in
the political game."
Decoud, exchanging a steady stare with Mrs. Gould, added,
tentatively, as it were, "And yet, if we had could have been
done."
"Montero victorious, completely victorious!" Mrs. Gould breathed
out in a tone of unbelief.
"A canard, probably. That sort of bird is hatched in great
numbers in such times as these. And even if it were true? Well,
let us put things at their worst, let us say it is true."
"Then everything is lost," said Mrs. Gould, with the calmness of
despair.
Suddenly she seemed to divine, she seemed to see Decoud's
tremendous excitement under its cloak of studied carelessness. It
was, indeed, becoming visible in his audacious and watchful
stare, in the curve, half-reckless, half-contemptuous, of his
lips. And a French phrase came upon them as if, for this
Costaguanero of the Boulevard, that had been the only forcible
language--
"Non, Madame. Rien n'est perdu."
It electrified Mrs. Gould out of her benumbed attitude, and she
said, vivaciously--
"What would you think of doing?"
But already there was something of mockery in Decoud's suppressed
excitement.
"What would you expect a true Costaguanero to do? Another
revolution, of course. On my word of honour, Mrs. Gould, I
believe I am a true hijo del pays, a true son of the country,
whatever Father Corbelan may say. And I'm not so much of an
unbeliever as not to have faith in my own ideas, in my own
remedies, in my own desires."
"Yes," said Mrs. Gould, doubtfully.
"You don't seem convinced," Decoud went on again in French. "Say,
then, in my passions."
Mrs. Gould received this addition unflinchingly. To understand it
thoroughly she did not require to hear his muttered assurance--
"There is nothing I would not do for the sake of Antonia. There
is nothing I am not prepared to undertake. There is no risk I am
not ready to run."
Decoud seemed to find a fresh audacity in this voicing of his
thoughts. "You would not believe me if I were to say that it is
the love of the country which--"
She made a sort of discouraged protest with her arm, as if to
express that she had given up expecting that motive from any one.
"A Sulaco revolution," Decoud pursued in a forcible undertone.
"The Great Cause may be served here, on the very spot of its
inception, in the place of its birth, Mrs. Gould."
Frowning, and biting her lower lip thoughtfully, she made a step
away from the door.
"You are not going to speak to your husband?" Decoud arrested her
anxiously.
"But you will need his help?"
"No doubt," Decoud admitted without hesitation. "Everything
turns upon the San Tome mine, but I would rather he didn't know
anything as yet of my--my hopes."
A puzzled look came upon Mrs. Gould's face, and Decoud,
approaching, explained confidentially--
"Don't you see, he's such an idealist."
Mrs. Gould flushed pink, and her eyes grew darker at the same
time.
"Charley an idealist!" she said, as if to herself, wonderingly.
"What on earth do you mean?"
"Yes," conceded Decoud, "it's a wonderful thing to say with the
sight of the San Tome mine, the greatest fact in the whole of
South America, perhaps, before our very eyes. But look even at
that, he has idealized this fact to a point--" He paused. "Mrs.
Gould, are you aware to what point he has idealized the
existence, the worth, the meaning of the San Tome mine? Are you
aware of it?"
He must have known what he was talking about.
The effect he expected was produced. Mrs. Gould, ready to take
fire, gave it up suddenly with a low little sound that resembled
a moan.
"What do you know?" she asked in a feeble voice.
"Nothing," answered Decoud, firmly. "But, then, don't you see,
he's an Englishman?"
"Well, what of that?" asked Mrs. Gould.
"Simply that he cannot act or exist without idealizing every
simple feeling, desire, or achievement. He could not believe his
own motives if he did not make them first a part of some fairy
tale. The earth is not quite good enough for him, I fear. Do you
excuse my frankness? Besides, whether you excuse it or not, it is
part of the truth of things which hurts the--what do you call
them?--the Anglo-Saxon's susceptibilities, and at the present
moment I don't feel as if I could treat seriously either his
conception of things or--if you allow me to say so--or yet
yours."
Mrs. Gould gave no sign of being offended. "I suppose Antonia
understands you thoroughly?"
"Understands? Well, yes. But I am not sure that she approves.
That, however, makes no difference. I am honest enough to tell
you that, Mrs. Gould."
"Your idea, of course, is separation," she said.
"Separation, of course," declared Martin. "Yes; separation of the
whole Occidental Province from the rest of the unquiet body. But
my true idea, the only one I care for, is not to be separated
from Antonia."
"And that is all?" asked Mrs. Gould, without severity.
"Absolutely. I am not deceiving myself about my motives. She
won't leave Sulaco for my sake, therefore Sulaco must leave the
rest of the Republic to its fate. Nothing could be clearer than
that. I like a clearly defined situation. I cannot part with
Antonia, therefore the one and indivisible Republic of Costaguana
must be made to part with its western province. Fortunately it
happens to be also a sound policy. The richest, the most fertile
part of this land may be saved from anarchy. Personally, I care
little, very little; but it's a fact that the establishment of
Montero in power would mean death to me. In all the proclamations
of general pardon which I have seen, my name, with a few others,
is specially excepted. The brothers hate me, as you know very
well, Mrs. Gould; and behold, here is the rumour of them having
won a battle. You say that supposing it is true, I have plenty of
time to run away."
The slight, protesting murmur on the part of Mrs. Gould made him
pause for a moment, while he looked at her with a sombre and
resolute glance.
"Ah, but I would, Mrs. Gould. I would run away if it served that
which at present is my only desire. I am courageous enough to say
that, and to do it, too. But women, even our women, are
idealists. It is Antonia that won't run away. A novel sort of
vanity."
"You call it vanity," said Mrs. Gould, in a shocked voice.
"Say pride, then, which. Father Corbelan would tell you, is a
mortal sin. But I am not proud. I am simply too much in love to
run away. At the same time I want to live. There is no love for a
dead man. Therefore it is necessary that Sulaco should not
recognize the victorious Montero."
"And you think my husband will give you his support?"
"I think he can be drawn into it, like all idealists, when he
once sees a sentimental basis for his action. But I wouldn't
talk to him. Mere clear facts won't appeal to his sentiment. It
is much better for him to convince himself in his own way. And,
frankly, I could not, perhaps, just now pay sufficient respect to
either his motives or even, perhaps, to yours, Mrs. Gould."
It was evident that Mrs. Gould was very determined not to be
offended. She smiled vaguely, while she seemed to think the
matter over. As far as she could judge from the girl's
half-confidences, Antonia understood that young man. Obviously
there was promise of safety in his plan, or rather in his idea.
Moreover, right or wrong, the idea could do no harm. And it was
quite possible, also, that the rumour was false.
"You have some sort of a plan," she said.
"Simplicity itself. Barrios has started, let him go on then; he
will hold Cayta, which is the door of the sea route to Sulaco.
They cannot send a sufficient force over the mountains. No; not
even to cope with the band of Hernandez. Meantime we shall
organize our resistance here. And for that, this very Hernandez
will be useful. He has defeated troops as a bandit; he will no
doubt accomplish the same thing if he is made a colonel or even a
general. You know the country well enough not to be shocked by
what I say, Mrs. Gould. I have heard you assert that this poor
bandit was the living,breathing example of cruelty, injustice,
stupidity, and oppression, that ruin men's souls as well as their
fortunes in this country. Well, there would be some poetical
retribution in that man arising to crush the evils which had
driven an honest ranchero into a life of crime. A fine idea of
retribution in that, isn't there?"
Decoud had dropped easily into English, which he spoke with
precision, very correctly, but with too many z sounds.
"Think also of your hospitals, of your schools, of your ailing
mothers and feeble old men, of all that population which you and
your husband have brought into the rocky gorge of San Tome. Are
you not responsible to your conscience for all these people? Is
it not worth while to make another effort, which is not at all so
desperate as it looks, rather than--"
Decoud finished his thought with an upward toss of the arm,
suggesting annihilation; and Mrs. Gould turned away her head with
a look of horror.
"Why don't you say all this to my husband?" she asked, without
looking at Decoud, who stood watching the effect of his words.
"Ah! But Don Carlos is so English," he began. Mrs. Gould
interrupted--
"Leave that alone, Don Martin. He's as much a Costaguanero--No!
He's more of a Costaguanero than yourself."
"Sentimentalist, sentimentalist," Decoud almost cooed, in a tone
of gentle and soothing deference. "Sentimentalist, after the
amazing manner of your people. I have been watching El Rey de
Sulaco since I came here on a fool's errand, and perhaps impelled
by some treason of fate lurking behind the unaccountable turns of
a man's life. But I don't matter, I am not a sentimentalist, I
cannot endow my personal desires with a shining robe of silk and
jewels. Life is not for me a moral romance derived from the
tradition of a pretty fairy tale. No, Mrs. Gould; I am practical.
I am not afraid of my motives. But, pardon me, I have been rather
carried away. What I wish to say is that I have been observing. I
won't tell you what I have discovered--"
"No. That is unnecessary," whispered Mrs. Gould, once more
averting her head.
"It is. Except one little fact, that your husband does not like
me. It's a small matter, which, in the circumstances, seems to
acquire a perfectly ridiculous importance. Ridiculous and
immense; for, clearly, money is required for my plan," he
reflected; then added, meaningly, "and we have two
sentimentalists to deal with."
"I don't know that I understand you, Don Martin," said Mrs.
Gould, coldly, preserving the low key of their conversation.
"But, speaking as if I did, who is the other?"
"The great Holroyd in San Francisco, of course," Decoud
whispered, lightly. "I think you understand me very well. Women
are idealists; but then they are so perspicacious."
But whatever was the reason of that remark, disparaging and
complimentary at the same time, Mrs. Gould seemed not to pay
attention to it. The name of Holroyd had given a new tone to her
anxiety.
"The silver escort is coming down to the harbour tomorrow; a
whole six months' working, Don Martin!" she cried in dismay.
"Let it come down, then," breathed out Decoud, earnestly, almost
into her ear.
"But if the rumour should get about, and especially if it turned
out true, troubles might break out in the town," objected Mrs.
Gould.
Decoud admitted that it was possible. He knew well the town
children of the Sulaco Campo: sullen, thievish, vindictive, and
bloodthirsty, whatever great qualities their brothers of the
plain might have had. But then there was that other
sentimentalist, who attached a strangely idealistic meaning to
concrete facts. This stream of silver must be kept flowing north
to return in the form of financial backing from the great house
of Holroyd. Up at the mountain in the strong room of the mine the
silver bars were worth less for his purpose than so much lead,
from which at least bullets may be run. Let it come down to the
harbour, ready for shipment.
The next north-going steamer would carry it off for the very
salvation of the San Tome mine, which had produced so much
treasure. And, moreover, the rumour was probably false, he
remarked, with much conviction in his hurried tone.
"Besides, senora," concluded Decoud, "we may suppress it for many
days. I have been talking with the telegraphist in the middle of
the Plaza Mayor; thus I am certain that we could not have been
overheard. There was not even a bird in the air near us. And
also let me tell you something more. I have been making friends
with this man called Nostromo, the Capataz. We had a
conversation this very evening, I walking by the side of his
horse as he rode slowly out of the town just now. He promised me
that if a riot took place for any reason--even for the most
political of reasons, you understand--his Cargadores, an
important part of the populace, you will admit, should be found
on the side of the Europeans."
"He has promised you that?" Mrs. Gould inquired, with interest.
"What made him make that promise to you?"
"Upon my word, I don't know," declared Decoud, in a slightly
surprised tone. "He certainly promised me that, but now you ask
me why, I could not tell you his reasons. He talked with his
usual carelessness, which, if he had been anything else but a
common sailor, I would call a pose or an affectation."
Decoud, interrupting himself, looked at Mrs. Gould curiously.
"Upon the whole," he continued, "I suppose he expects something
to his advantage from it. You mustn't forget that he does not
exercise his extraordinary power over the lower classes without a
certain amount of personal risk and without a great profusion in
spending his money. One must pay in some way or other for such a
solid thing as individual prestige. He told me after we made
friends at a dance, in a Posada kept by a Mexican just outside
the walls, that he had come here to make his fortune. I suppose
he looks upon his prestige as a sort of investment."
"Perhaps he prizes it for its own sake," Mrs. Gould said in a
tone as if she were repelling an undeserved aspersion. "Viola,
the Garibaldino, with whom he has lived for some years, calls him
the Incorruptible."
"Ah! he belongs to the group of your proteges out there towards
the harbour, Mrs. Gould. Muy bien. And Captain Mitchell calls
him wonderful. I have heard no end of tales of his strength, his
audacity, his fidelity. No end of fine things. H'm!
incorruptible! It is indeed a name of honour for the Capataz of
the Cargadores of Sulaco. Incorruptible! Fine, but vague.
However, I suppose he's sensible, too. And I talked to him upon
that sane and practical assumption."
"I prefer to think him disinterested, and therefore trustworthy,"
Mrs. Gould said, with the nearest approach to curtness it was in
her nature to assume.
"Well, if so, then the silver will be still more safe. Let it
come down, senora. Let it come down, so that it may go north and
return to us in the shape of credit."
Mrs. Gould glanced along the corredor towards the door of her
husband's room. Decoud, watching her as if she had his fate in
her hands, detected an almost imperceptible nod of assent. He
bowed with a smile, and, putting his hand into the breast pocket
of his coat, pulled out a fan of light feathers set upon painted
leaves of sandal-wood. "I had it in my pocket," he murmured,
triumphantly, "for a plausible pretext." He bowed again.
"Good-night, senora."
Mrs. Gould continued along the corredor away from her husband's
room. The fate of the San Tome mine was lying heavy upon her
heart. It was a long time now since she had begun to fear it. It
had been an idea. She had watched it with misgivings turning into
a fetish, and now the fetish had grown into a monstrous and
crushing weight. It was as if the inspiration of their early
years had left her heart to turn into a wall of silver-bricks,
erected by the silent work of evil spirits, between her and her
husband. He seemed to dwell alone within a circumvallation of
precious metal, leaving her outside with her school, her
hospital, the sick mothers and the feeble old men, mere
insignificant vestiges of the initial inspiration. "Those poor
people!" she murmured to herself.
Below she heard the voice of Martin Decoud in the patio speaking
loudly:
"I have found Dona Antonia's fan, Basilio. Look. here it is!"
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT WAS part of what Decoud would have called his sane materialism
that he did not believe in the possibility of friendship between
man and woman.
The one exception he allowed confirmed, he maintained, that
absolute rule. Friendship was possible between brother and
sister, meaning by friendship the frank unreserve, as before
another human being, of thoughts and sensations; all the
objectless and necessary sincerity of one's innermost life trying
to re-act upon the profound sympathies of another existence.
His favourite sister, the handsome, slightly arbitrary and
resolute angel, ruling the father and mother Decoud in the
first-floor apartments of a very fine Parisian house, was the
recipient of Martin Decoud's confidences as to his thoughts,
actions, purposes, doubts, and even failures. . . .
"Prepare our little circle in Paris for the birth of another
South American Republic. One more or less, what does it matter?
They may come into the world like evil flowers on a hotbed of
rotten institutions; but the seed of this one has germinated in
your brother's brain, and that will be enough for your devoted
assent. I am writing this to you by the light of a single
candle, in a sort of inn, near the harbour, kept by an Italian
called Viola, a protege of Mrs. Gould. The whole building, which,
for all I know, may have been contrived by a Conquistador farmer
of the pearl fishery three hundred years ago, is perfectly
silent. So is the plain between the town and the harbour; silent,
but not so dark as the house, because the pickets of Italian
workmen guarding the railway have lighted little fires all along
the line. It was not so quiet around here yesterday. We had an
awful riot--a sudden outbreak of the populace, which was not
suppressed till late today. Its object, no doubt, was loot, and
that was defeated, as you may have learned already from the
cablegram sent via San Francisco and New York last night, when
the cables were still open. You have read already there that the
energetic action of the Europeans of the railway has saved the
town from destruction, and you may believe that. I wrote out the
cable myself. We have no Reuter's agency man here. I have also
fired at the mob from the windows of the club, in company with
some other young men of position. Our object was to keep the
Calle de la Constitucion clear for the exodus of the ladies and
children, who have taken refuge on board a couple of cargo ships
now in the harbour here. That was yesterday. You should also have
learned from the cable that the missing President, Ribiera, who
had disappeared after the battle of Sta. Marta, has turned up
here in Sulaco by one of those strange coincidences that are
almost incredible, riding on a lame mule into the very midst of
the street fighting. It appears that he had fled, in company of
a muleteer called Bonifacio, across the mountains from the
threats of Montero into the arms of an enraged mob.
"The Capataz of Cargadores, that Italian sailor of whom I have
written to you before, has saved him from an ignoble death. That
man seems to have a particular talent for being on the spot
whenever there is something picturesque to be done.
"He was with me at four o'clock in the morning at the offices of
the Porvenir, where he had turned up so early in order to warn me
of the coming trouble, and also to assure me that he would keep
his Cargadores on the side of order. When the full daylight came
we were looking together at the crowd on foot and on horseback,
demonstrating on the Plaza and shying stones at the windows of
the Intendencia. Nostromo (that is the name they call him by
here) was pointing out to me his Cargadores interspersed in the
mob.
"The sun shines late upon Sulaco, for it has first to climb above
the mountains. In that clear morning light, brighter than
twilight, Nostromo saw right across the vast Plaza, at the end of
the street beyond the cathedral, a mounted man apparently in
difficulties with a yelling knot of leperos. At once he said to
me, 'That's a stranger. What is it they are doing to him?' Then
he took out the silver whistle he is in the habit of using on the
wharf (this man seems to disdain the use of any metal less
precious than silver) and blew into it twice, evidently a
preconcerted signal for his Cargadores. He ran out immediately,
and they rallied round him. I ran out, too, but was too late to
follow them and help in the rescue of the stranger, whose animal
had fallen. I was set upon at once as a hated aristocrat, and
was only too glad to get into the club, where Don Jaime Berges
(you may remember him visiting at our house in Paris some three
years ago) thrust a sporting gun into my hands. They were already
firing from the windows. There were little heaps of cartridges
lying about on the open card-tables. I remember a couple of
overturned chairs, some bottles rolling on the floor amongst the
packs of cards scattered suddenly as the caballeros rose from
their game to open fire upon the mob. Most of the young men had
spent the night at the club in the expectation of some such
disturbance. In two of the candelabra, on the consoles, the
candles were burning down in their sockets. A large iron nut,
probably stolen from the railway workshops, flew in from the
street as I entered, and broke one of the large mirrors set in
the wall. I noticed also one of the club servants tied up hand
and foot with the cords of the curtain and flung in a corner. I
have a vague recollection of Don Jaime assuring me hastily that
the fellow had been detected putting poison into the dishes at
supper. But I remember distinctly he was shrieking for mercy,
without stopping at all, continuously, and so absolutely
disregarded that nobody even took the trouble to gag him. The
noise he made was so disagreeable that I had half a mind to do it
myself. But there was no time to waste on such trifles. I took my
place at one of the windows and began firing.
"I didn't learn till later in the afternoon whom it was that
Nostromo, with his Cargadores and some Italian workmen as well,
had managed to save from those drunken rascals. That man has a
peculiar talent when anything striking to the imagination has to
be done. I made that remark to him afterwards when we met after
some sort of order had been restored in the town, and the answer
he made rather surprised me. He said quite moodily, 'And how much
do I get for that, senor?' Then it dawned upon me that perhaps
this man's vanity has been satiated by the adulation of the
common people and the confidence of his superiors!"
Decoud paused to light a cigarette, then, with his head still
over his writing, he blew a cloud of smoke, which seemed to
rebound from the paper. He took up the pencil again.
"That was yesterday evening on the Plaza, while he sat on the
steps of the cathedral, his hands between his knees, holding the
bridle of his famous silver-grey mare. He had led his body of
Cargadores splendidly all day long. He looked fatigued. I don't
know how I looked. Very dirty, I suppose. But I suppose I also
looked pleased. From the time the fugitive President had been got
off to the S. S. Minerva, the tide of success had turned against
the mob. They had been driven off the harbour, and out of the
better streets of the town, into their own maze of ruins and
tolderias. You must understand that this riot, whose primary
object was undoubtedly the getting hold of the San Tome silver
stored in the lower rooms of the Custom House (besides the
general looting of the Ricos), had acquired a political colouring
from the fact of two Deputies to the Provincial Assembly, Senores
Gamacho and Fuentes, both from Bolson, putting themselves at the
head of it--late in the afternoon, it is true, when the mob,
disappointed in their hopes of loot, made a stand in the narrow
streets to the cries of 'Viva la Libertad! Down with Feudalism!'
(I wonder what they imagine feudalism to be?) 'Down with the
Goths and Paralytics.' I suppose the Senores Gamacho and Fuentes
knew what they were doing. They are prudent gentlemen. In the
Assembly they called themselves Moderates, and opposed every
energetic measure with philanthropic pensiveness. At the first
rumours of Montero's victory, they showed a subtle change of the
pensive temper, and began to defy poor Don Juste Lopez in his
Presidential tribune with an effrontery to which the poor man
could only respond by a dazed smoothing of his beard and the
ringing of the presidential bell. Then, when the downfall of the
Ribierist cause became confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt,
they have blossomed into convinced Liberals, acting together as
if they were Siamese twins, and ultimately taking charge, as it
were, of the riot in the name of Monterist principles.
"Their last move of eight o'clock last night was to organize
themselves into a Monterist Committee which sits, as far as I
know, in a posada kept by a retired Mexican bull-fighter, a great
politician, too, whose name I have forgotten. Thence they have
issued a communication to us, the Goths and Paralytics of the
Amarilla Club (who have our own committee), inviting us to come
to some provisional understanding for a truce, in order, they
have the impudence to say, that the noble cause of Liberty
'should not be stained by the criminal excesses of Conservative
selfishness!' As I came out to sit with Nostromo on the cathedral
steps the club was busy considering a proper reply in the
principal room, littered with exploded cartridges, with a lot of
broken glass, blood smears, candlesticks, and all sorts of
wreckage on the floor. But all this is nonsense. Nobody in the
town has any real power except the railway engineers, whose men
occupy the dismantled houses acquired by the Company for their
town station on one side of the Plaza, and Nostromo, whose
Cargadores were sleeping under the arcades along the front of
Anzani's shops. A fire of broken furniture out of the Intendencia
saloons, mostly gilt, was burning on the Plaza, in a high flame
swaying right upon the statue of Charles IV. The dead body of a
man was lying on the steps of the pedestal, his arms thrown wide
open, and his sombrero covering his face--the attention of some
friend, perhaps. The light of the flames touched the foliage of
the first trees on the Alameda, and played on the end of a side
street near by, blocked up by a jumble of ox-carts and dead
bullocks. Sitting on one of the carcasses, a lepero, muffled up,
smoked a cigarette. It was a truce, you understand. The only
other living being on the Plaza besides ourselves was a Cargador
walking to and fro, with a long, bare knife in his hand, like a
sentry before the Arcades, where his friends were sleeping. And
the only other spot of light in the dark town were the lighted
windows of the club, at the corner of the Calle."
After having written so far, Don Martin Decoud, the exotic dandy
of the Parisian boulevard, got up and walked across the sanded
floor of the cafe at one end of the Albergo of United Italy, kept
by Giorgio Viola, the old companion of Garibaldi. The highly
coloured lithograph of the Faithful Hero seemed to look dimly, in
the light of one candle, at the man with no faith in anything
except the truth of his own sensations. Looking out of the
window, Decoud was met by a darkness so impenetrable that he
could see neither the mountains nor the town, nor yet the
buildings near the harbour; and there was not a sound, as if the
tremendous obscurity of the Placid Gulf, spreading from the
waters over the land, had made it dumb as well as blind.
Presently Decoud felt a light tremor of the floor and a distant
clank of iron. A bright white light appeared, deep in the
darkness, growing bigger with a thundering noise. The rolling
stock usually kept on the sidings in Rincon was being run back to
the yards for safe keeping. Like a mysterious stirring of the
darkness behind the headlight of the engine, the train passed in
a gust of hollow uproar, by the end of the house, which seemed to
vibrate all over in response. And nothing was clearly visible
but, on the end of the last flat car, a negro, in white trousers
and naked to the waist, swinging a blazing torch basket
incessantly with a circular movement of his bare arm. Decoud did
not stir.
Behind him, on the back of the chair from which he had risen,
hung his elegant Parisian overcoat, with a pearl-grey silk
lining. But when he turned back to come to the table the
candlelight fell upon a face that was grimy and scratched. His
rosy lips were blackened with heat, the smoke of gun-powder. Dirt
and rust tarnished the lustre of his short beard. His shirt
collar and cuffs were crumpled; the blue silken tie hung down his
breast like a rag; a greasy smudge crossed his white brow. He had
not taken off his clothing nor used water, except to snatch a
hasty drink greedily, for some forty hours. An awful restlessness
had made him its own, had marked him with all the signs of
desperate strife, and put a dry, sleepless stare into his eyes.
He murmured to himself in a hoarse voice, "I wonder if there's
any bread here," looked vaguely about him, then dropped into the
chair and took the pencil up again. He became aware he had not
eaten anything for many hours.
It occurred to him that no one could understand him so well as
his sister. In the most sceptical heart there lurks at such
moments, when the chances of existence are involved, a desire to
leave a correct impression of the feelings, like a light by which
the action may be seen when personality is gone, gone where no
light of investigation can ever reach the truth which every death
takes out of the world. Therefore, instead of looking for
something to eat, or trying to snatch an hour or so of sleep,
Decoud was filling the pages of a large pocket-book with a letter
to his sister.
In the intimacy of that intercourse he could not keep out his
weariness, his great fatigue, the close touch of his bodily
sensations. He began again as if he were talking to her. With
almost an illusion of her presence, he wrote the phrase, "I am
very hungry."
"I have the feeling of a great solitude around me," he continued.
"Is it, perhaps, because I am the only man with a definite idea
in his head, in the complete collapse of every resolve,
intention, and hope about me? But the solitude is also very
real. All the engineers are out, and have been for two days,
looking after the property of the National Central Railway, of
that great Costaguana undertaking which is to put money into the
pockets of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Americans, Germans, and God
knows who else. The silence about me is ominous. There is above
the middle part of this house a sort of first floor, with narrow
openings like loopholes for windows, probably used in old times
for the better defence against the savages, when the persistent
barbarism of our native continent did not wear the black coats of
politicians, but went about yelling, half-naked, with bows and
arrows in its hands. The woman of the house is dying up there, I
believe, all alone with her old husband. There is a narrow
staircase, the sort of staircase one man could easily defend
against a mob, leading up there, and I have just heard, through
the thickness of the wall, the old fellow going down into their
kitchen for something or other. It was a sort of noise a mouse
might make behind the plaster of a wall. All the servants they
had ran away yesterday and have not returned yet, if ever they
do. For the rest, there are only two children here, two girls.
The father has sent them downstairs, and they have crept into
this cafe, perhaps because I am here. They huddle together in a
corner, in each other's arms; I just noticed them a few minutes
ago, and I feel more lonely than ever."
Decoud turned half round in his chair, and asked, "Is there any
bread here?"
Linda's dark head was shaken negatively in response, above the
fair head of her sister nestling on her breast.
"You couldn't get me some bread?" insisted Decoud. The child did
not move; he saw her large eyes stare at him very dark from the
corner. "You're not afraid of me?" he said.
"No," said Linda, "we are not afraid of you. You came here with
Gian' Battista."
"You mean Nostromo?" said Decoud.
"The English call him so, but that is no name either for man or
beast," said the girl, passing her hand gently over her sister's
hair.
"But he lets people call him so," remarked Decoud.
"Not in this house," retorted the child.
"Ah! well, I shall call him the Capataz then."
Decoud gave up the point, and after writing steadily for a while
turned round again.
"When do you expect him back?" he asked.
"After he brought you here he rode off to fetch the Senor Doctor
from the town for mother. He will be back soon."
"He stands a good chance of getting shot somewhere on the road,"
Decoud murmured to himself audibly; and Linda declared in her
high-pitched voice--
"Nobody would dare to fire a shot at Gian' Battista."
"You believe that," asked Decoud, "do you?"
"I know it," said the child, with conviction. "There is no one in
this place brave enough to attack Gian' Battista."
"It doesn't require much bravery to pull a trigger behind a
bush," muttered Decoud to himself. "Fortunately, the night is
dark, or there would be but little chance of saving the silver of
the mine."
He turned again to his pocket-book, glanced back through the
pages, and again started his pencil.
"That was the position yesterday, after the Minerva with the
fugitive President had gone out of harbour, and the rioters had
been driven back into the side lanes of the town. I sat on the
steps of the cathedral with Nostromo, after sending out the cable
message for the information of a more or less attentive world.
Strangely enough, though the offices of the Cable Company are in
the same building as the Porvenir, the mob, which has thrown my
presses out of the window and scattered the type all over the
Plaza, has been kept from interfering with the instruments on the
other side of the courtyard. As I sat talking with Nostromo,
Bernhardt, the telegraphist, came out from under the Arcades with
a piece of paper in his hand. The little man had tied himself up
to an enormous sword and was hung all over with revolvers. He is
ridiculous, but the bravest German of his size that ever tapped
the key of a Morse transmitter. He had received the message from
Cayta reporting the transports with Barrios's army just entering
the port, and ending with the words, 'The greatest enthusiasm
prevails.' I walked off to drink some water at the fountain, and
I was shot at from the Alameda by somebody hiding behind a tree.
But I drank, and didn't care; with Barrios in Cayta and the great
Cordillera between us and Montero's victorious army I seemed,
notwithstanding Messrs. Gamacho and Fuentes, to hold my new State
in the hollow of my hand. I was ready to sleep, but when I got as
far as the Casa Gould I found the patio full of wounded laid out
on straw. Lights were burning, and in that enclosed courtyard on
that hot night a faint odour of chloroform and blood hung about.
At one end Doctor Monygham, the doctor of the mine, was dressing
the wounds; at the other, near the stairs, Father Corbelan,
kneeling, listened to the confession of a dying Cargador. Mrs.
Gould was walking about through these shambles with a large
bottle in one hand and a lot of cotton wool in the other. She
just looked at me and never even winked. Her camerista was
following her, also holding a bottle, and sobbing gently to
herself.
"I busied myself for some time in fetching water from the cistern
for the wounded. Afterwards I wandered upstairs, meeting some of
the first ladies of Sulaco, paler than I had ever seen them
before, with bandages over their arms. Not all of them had fled
to the ships. A good many had taken refuge for the day in the
Casa Gould. On the landing a girl, with her hair half down, was
kneeling against the wall under the niche where stands a Madonna
in blue robes and a gilt crown on her head. I think it was the
eldest Miss Lopez; I couldn't see her face, but I remember
looking at the high French heel of her little shoe. She did not
make a sound, she did not stir, she was not sobbing; she remained
there, perfectly still, all black against the white wall, a
silent figure of passionate piety. I am sure she was no more
frightened than the other white-faced ladies I met carrying
bandages. One was sitting on the top step tearing a piece of
linen hastily into strips--the young wife of an elderly man of
fortune here. She interrupted herself to wave her hand to my
bow, as though she were in her carriage on the Alameda. The women
of our country are worth looking at during a revolution. The
rouge and pearl powder fall off, together with that passive
attitude towards the outer world which education, tradition,
custom impose upon them from the earliest infancy. I thought of
your face, which from your infancy had the stamp of intelligence
instead of that patient and resigned cast which appears when some
political commotion tears down the veil of cosmetics and usage.
"In the great sala upstairs a sort of Junta of Notables was
sitting, the remnant of the vanished Provincial Assembly. Don
Juste Lopez had had half his beard singed off at the muzzle of a
trabuco loaded with slugs, of which every one missed him,
providentially. And as he turned his head from side to side it
was exactly as if there had been two men inside his frock-coat,
one nobly whiskered and solemn, the other untidy and scared.
"They raised a cry of 'Decoud! Don Martin!' at my entrance. I
asked them, 'What are you deliberating upon, gentlemen?' There
did not seem to be any president, though Don Jose Avellanos sat
at the head of the table. They all answered together, 'On the
preservation of life and property.' 'Till the new officials
arrive,' Don Juste explained to me, with the solemn side of his
face offered to my view. It was as if a stream of water had been
poured upon my glowing idea of a new State. There was a hissing
sound in my ears, and the room grew dim, as if suddenly filled
with vapour.
"I walked up to the table blindly, as though I had been drunk.
'You are deliberating upon surrender,' I said. They all sat
still, with their noses over the sheet of paper each had before
him, God only knows why. Only Don Jose hid his face in his hands,
muttering, 'Never, never!' But as I looked at him, it seemed to
me that I could have blown him away with my breath, he looked so
frail, so weak, so worn out. Whatever happens, he will not
survive. The deception is too great for a man of his age; and
hasn't he seen the sheets of 'Fifty Years of Misrule,' which we
have begun printing on the presses of the Porvenir, littering the
Plaza, floating in the gutters, fired out as wads for trabucos
loaded with handfuls of type, blown in the wind, trampled in the
mud? I have seen pages floating upon the very waters of the
harbour. It would be unreasonable to expect him to survive. It
would be cruel.
"'Do you know,' I cried, 'what surrender means to you, to your
women, to your children, to your property?'
"I declaimed for five minutes without drawing breath, it seems to
me, harping on our best chances, on the ferocity of Montero, whom
I made out to be as great a beast as I have no doubt he would
like to be if he had intelligence enough to conceive a systematic
reign of terror. And then for another five minutes or more I
poured out an impassioned appeal to their courage and manliness,
with all the passion of my love for Antonia. For if ever man
spoke well, it would be from a personal feeling, denouncing an
enemy, defending himself, or pleading for what really may be
dearer than life. My dear girl, I absolutely thundered at them.
It seemed as if my voice would burst the walls asunder, and when
I stopped I saw all their scared eyes looking at me dubiously.
And that was all the effect I had produced! Only Don Jose's head
had sunk lower and lower on his breast. I bent my ear to his
withered lips, and made out his whisper, something like, 'In
God's name, then, Martin, my son!' I don't know exactly. There
was the name of God in it, I am certain. It seems to me I have
caught his last breath--the breath of his departing soul on his
lips.
"He lives yet, it is true. I have seen him since; but it was only
a senile body, lying on its back, covered to the chin, with open
eyes, and so still that you might have said it was breathing no
longer. I left him thus, with Antonia kneeling by the side of the
bed, just before I came to this Italian's posada, where the
ubiquitous death is also waiting. But I know that Don Jose has
really died there, in the Casa Gould, with that whisper urging me
to attempt what no doubt his soul, wrapped up in the sanctity of
diplomatic treaties and solemn declarations, must have abhorred.
I had exclaimed very loud, 'There is never any God in a country
where men will not help themselves.'
"Meanwhile, Don Juste had begun a pondered oration whose solemn
effect was spoiled by the ridiculous disaster to his beard. I did
not wait to make it out. He seemed to argue that Montero's (he
called him The General) intentions were probably not evil,
though, he went on, 'that distinguished man' (only a week ago we
used to call him a gran' bestia) 'was perhaps mistaken as to the
true means.' As you may imagine, I didn't stay to hear the rest.
I know the intentions of Montero's brother, Pedrito, the
guerrillero, whom I exposed in Paris, some years ago, in a cafe
frequented by South American students, where he tried to pass
himself off for a Secretary of Legation. He used to come in and
talk for hours, twisting his felt hat in his hairy paws, and his
ambition seemed to become a sort of Duc de Morny to a sort of
Napoleon. Already, then, he used to talk of his brother in
inflated terms. He seemed fairly safe from being found out,
because the students, all of the Blanco families, did not, as you
may imagine, frequent the Legation. It was only Decoud, a man
without faith and principles, as they used to say, that went in
there sometimes for the sake of the fun, as it were to an
assembly of trained monkeys. I know his intentions. I have seen
him change the plates at table. Whoever is allowed to live on in
terror, I must die the death.
"No, I didn't stay to the end to hear Don Juste Lopez trying to
persuade himself in a grave oration of the clemency and justice,
and honesty, and purity of the brothers Montero. I went out
abruptly to seek Antonia. I saw her in the gallery. As I opened
the door, she extended to me her clasped hands.
"'What are they doing in there?' she asked.
"'Talking,' I said, with my eyes looking into hers.
"'Yes, yes, but--'
"'Empty speeches,' I interrupted her. 'Hiding their fears behind
imbecile hopes. They are all great Parliamentarians there--on the
English model, as you know.' I was so furious that I could hardly
speak. She made a gesture of despair.
"Through the door I held a little ajar behind me, we heard Dun
Juste's measured mouthing monotone go on from phrase to phrase,
like a sort of awful and solemn madness.
"'After all, the Democratic aspirations have, perhaps, their
legitimacy. The ways of human progress are inscrutable, and if
the fate of the country is in the hand of Montero, we ought--'
"I crashed the door to on that; it was enough; it was too much.
There was never a beautiful face expressing more horror and
despair than the face of Antonia. I couldn't bear it; I seized
her wrists.
"'Have they killed my father in there?' she asked.
"Her eyes blazed with indignation, but as I looked on,
fascinated, the light in them went out.
"'It is a surrender,' I said. And I remember I was shaking her
wrists I held apart in my hands. 'But it's more than talk. Your
father told me to go on in God's name.'
"My dear girl, there is that in Antonia which would make me
believe in the feasibility of anything. One look at her face is
enough to set my brain on fire. And yet I love her as any other
man would--with the heart, and with that alone. She is more to me
than his Church to Father Corbelan (the Grand Vicar disappeared
last night from the town; perhaps gone to join the band of
Hernandez). She is more to me than his precious mine to that
sentimental Englishman. I won't speak of his wife. She may have
been sentimental once. The San Tome mine stands now between
those two people. 'Your father himself, Antonia,' I repeated;
'your father, do you understand? has told me to go on.'
"She averted her face, and in a pained voice--
"'He has?' she cried. 'Then, indeed, I fear he will never speak
again.'
"She freed her wrists from my clutch and began to cry in her
handkerchief. I disregarded her sorrow; I would rather see her
miserable than not see her at all, never any more; for whether I
escaped or stayed to die, there was for us no coming together, no
future. And that being so, I had no pity to waste upon the
passing moments of her sorrow. I sent her off in tears to fetch
Dona Emilia and Don Carlos, too. Their sentiment was necessary to
the very life of my plan; the sentimentalism of the people that
will never do anything for the sake of their passionate desire,
unless it comes to them clothed in the fair robes of an idea.
"Late at night we formed a small junta of four--the two women,
Don Carlos, and myself--in Mrs. Gould's blue-and-white boudoir.
"El Rey de Sulaco thinks himself, no doubt, a very honest man.
And so he is, if one could look behind his taciturnity. Perhaps
he thinks that this alone makes his honesty unstained. Those
Englishmen live on illusions which somehow or other help them to
get a firm hold of the substance. When he speaks it is by a rare
'yes' or 'no' that seems as impersonal as the words of an oracle.
But he could not impose on me by his dumb reserve. I knew what he
had in his head; he has his mine in his head; and his wife had
nothing in her head but his precious person, which he has bound
up with the Gould Concession and tied up to that little woman's
neck. No matter. The thing was to make him present the affair to
Holroyd (the Steel and Silver King) in such a manner as to secure
his financial support. At that time last night, just twenty-four
hours ago, we thought the silver of the mine safe in the Custom
House vaults till the north-bound steamer came to take it away.
And as long as the treasure flowed north, without a break, that
utter sentimentalist, Holroyd, would not drop his idea of
introducing, not only justice, industry, peace, to the benighted
continents, but also that pet dream of his of a purer form of
Christianity. Later on, the principal European really in Sulaco,
the engineer-in-chief of the railway, came riding up the Calle,
from the harbour, and was admitted to our conclave. Meantime, the
Junta of the Notables in the great sala was still deliberating;
only, one of them had run out in the corredor to ask the servant
whether something to eat couldn't be sent in. The first words the
engineer-in-chief said as he came into the boudoir were, 'What is
your house, dear Mrs. Gould? A war hospital below, and apparently
a restaurant above. I saw them carrying trays full of good
things into the sala.'
"'And here, in this boudoir,' I said, 'you behold the inner
cabinet of the Occidental Republic that is to be.'
"He was so preoccupied that he didn't smile at that, he didn't
even look surprised.
"He told us that he was attending to the general dispositions for
the defence of the railway property at the railway yards when he
was sent for to go into the railway telegraph office. The
engineer of the railhead, at the foot of the mountains, wanted to
talk to him from his end of the wire. There was nobody in the
office but himself and the operator of the railway telegraph, who
read off the clicks aloud as the tape coiled its length upon the
floor. And the purport of that talk, clicked nervously from a
wooden shed in the depths of the forests, had informed the chief
that President Ribiera had been, or was being, pursued. This was
news, indeed, to all of us in Sulaco. Ribiera himself, when
rescued, revived, and soothed by us, had been inclined to think
that he had not been pursued.
"Ribiera had yielded to the urgent solicitations of his friends,
and had left the headquarters of his discomfited army alone,
under the guidance of Bonifacio, the muleteer, who had been
willing to take the responsibility with the risk. He had departed
at daybreak of the third day. His remaining forces had melted
away during the night. Bonifacio and he rode hard on horses
towards the Cordillera; then they obtained mules, entered the
passes, and crossed the Paramo of Ivie just before a freezing
blast swept over that stony plateau, burying in a drift of snow
the little shelter-hut of stones in which they had spent the
night. Afterwards poor Ribiera had many adventures, got
separated from his guide, lost his mount, struggled down to the
Campo on foot, and if he had not thrown himself on the mercy of a
ranchero would have perished a long way from Sulaco. That man,
who, as a matter of fact, recognized him at once, let him have a
fresh mule, which the fugitive, heavy and unskilful, had ridden
to death. And it was true he had been pursued by a party
commanded by no less a person than Pedro Montero, the brother of
the general. The cold wind of the Paramo luckily caught the
pursuers on the top of the pass. Some few men, and all the
animals, perished in the icy blast. The stragglers died, but the
main body kept on. They found poor Bonifacio lying half-dead at
the foot of a snow slope, and bayoneted him promptly in the true
Civil War style. They would have had Ribiera, too, if they had
not, for some reason or other, turned off the track of the old
Camino Real, only to lose their way in the forests at the foot of
the lower slopes. And there they were at last, having stumbled
in unexpectedly upon the construction camp. The engineer at the
railhead told his chief by wire that he had Pedro Montero
absolutely there, in the very office, listening to the clicks. He
was going to take possession of Sulaco in the name of the
Democracy. He was very overbearing. His men slaughtered some of
the Railway Company's cattle without asking leave, and went to
work broiling the meat on the embers. Pedrito made many pointed
inquiries as to the silver mine, and what had become of the
product of the last six months' working. He had said
peremptorily, "Ask your chief up there by wire, he ought to know;
tell him that Don Pedro Montero, Chief of the Campo and Minister
of the Interior of the new Government, desires to be correctly
informed.'
"He had his feet wrapped up in blood-stained rags, a lean,
haggard face, ragged beard and hair, and had walked in limping,
with a crooked branch of a tree for a staff. His followers were
perhaps in a worse plight, but apparently they had not thrown
away their arms, and, at any rate, not all their ammunition.
Their lean faces filled the door and the windows of the telegraph
hut. As it was at the same time the bedroom of the
engineer-in-charge there, Montero had thrown himself on his clean
blankets and lay there shivering and dictating requisitions to be
transmitted by wire to Sulaco. He demanded a train of cars to be
sent down at once to transport his men up.
"'To this I answered from my end,' the engineer-in-chief related
to us, 'that I dared not risk the rolling-stock in the interior,
as there had been attempts to wreck trains all along the line
several times. I did that for your sake, Gould,' said the chief
engineer. 'The answer to this was, in the words of my
subordinate, "The filthy brute on my bed said, 'Suppose I were to
have you shot?'" To which my subordinate, who, it appears, was
himself operating, remarked that it would not bring the cars up.
Upon that, the other, yawning, said, "Never mind, there is no
lack of horses on the Campo." And, turning over, went to sleep on
Harris's bed.'
"This is why, my dear girl, I am a fugitive to-night. The last
wire from railhead says that Pedro Montero and his men left at
daybreak, after feeding on asado beef all night. They took all
the horses; they will find more on the road; they'll be here in
less than thirty hours, and thus Sulaco is no place either for me
or the great store of silver belonging to the Gould Concession.
"But that is not the worst. The garrison of Esmeralda has gone
over to the victorious party. We have heard this by means of the
telegraphist of the Cable Company, who came to the Casa Gould in
the early morning with the news. In fact, it was so early that
the day had not yet quite broken over Sulaco. His colleague in
Esmeralda had called him up to say that the garrison, after
shooting some of their officers, had taken possession of a
Government steamer laid up in the harbour. It is really a heavy
blow for me. I thought I could depend on every man in this
province. It was a mistake. It was a Monterist Revolution in
Esmeralda, just such as was attempted in Sulaco, only that that
one came off. The telegraphist was signalling to Bernhardt all
the time, and his last transmitted words were, 'They are bursting
in the door, and taking possession of the cable office. You are
cut off. Can do no more.'
"But, as a matter of fact, he managed somehow to escape the
vigilance of his captors, who had tried to stop the communication
with the outer world. He did manage it. How it was done I don't
know, but a few hours afterwards he called up Sulaco again, and
what he said was, 'The insurgent army has taken possession of the
Government transport in the bay and are filling her with troops,
with the intention of going round the coast to Sulaco. Therefore
look out for yourselves. They will be ready to start in a few
hours, and may be upon you before daybreak.'
"This is all he could say. They drove him away from his
instrument this time for good, because Bernhardt has been calling
up Esmeralda ever since without getting an answer."
After setting these words down in the pocket-book which he was
filling up for the benefit of his sister, Decoud lifted his head
to listen. But there were no sounds, neither in the room nor in
the house, except the drip of the water from the filter into the
vast earthenware jar under the wooden stand. And outside the
house there was a great silence. Decoud lowered his head again
over the pocket-book.
"I am not running away, you understand," he wrote on. "I am
simply going away with that great treasure of silver which must
be saved at all costs. Pedro Montero from the Campo and the
revolted garrison of Esmeralda from the sea are converging upon
it. That it is there lying ready for them is only an accident.
The real objective is the San Tome mine itself, as you may well
imagine; otherwise the Occidental Province would have been, no
doubt, left alone for many weeks, to be gathered at leisure into
the arms of the victorious party. Don Carlos Gould will have
enough to do to save his mine, with its organization and its
people; this 'Imperium in Imperio,' this wealth-producing thing,
to which his sentimentalism attaches a strange idea of justice.
He holds to it as some men hold to the idea of love or revenge.
Unless I am much mistaken in the man, it must remain inviolate or
perish by an act of his will alone. A passion has crept into his
cold and idealistic life. A passion which I can only comprehend
intellectually. A passion that is not like the passions we know,
we men of another blood. But it is as dangerous as any of ours.
"His wife has understood it, too. That is why she is such a good
ally of mine. She seizes upon all my suggestions with a sure
instinct that in the end they make for the safety of the Gould
Concession. And he defers to her because he trusts her perhaps,
but I fancy rather as if he wished to make up for some subtle
wrong, for that sentimental unfaithfulness which surrenders her
happiness, her life, to the seduction of an idea. The little
woman has discovered that he lives for the mine rather than for
her. But let them be. To each his fate, shaped by passion or
sentiment. The principal thing is that she has backed up my
advice to get the silver out of the town, out of the country, at
once, at any cost, at any risk. Don Carlos' mission is to
preserve unstained the fair fame of his mine; Mrs. Gould's
mission is to save him from the effects of that cold and
overmastering passion, which she dreads more than if it were an
infatuation for another woman. Nostromo's mission is to save the
silver. The plan is to load it into the largest of the Company's
lighters, and send it across the gulf to a small port out of
Costaguana territory just on the other side the Azuera, where the
first northbound steamer will get orders to pick it up. The
waters here are calm. We shall slip away into the darkness of the
gulf before the Esmeralda rebels arrive; and by the time the day
breaks over the ocean we shall be out of sight, invisible, hidden
by Azuera, which itself looks from the Sulaco shore like a faint
blue cloud on the horizon.
"The incorruptible Capataz de Cargadores is the man for that
work; and I, the man with a passion, but without a mission, I go
with him to return--to play my part in the farce to the end, and,
if successful, to receive my reward, which no one but Antonia can
give me.
"I shall not see her again now before I depart. I left her, as I
have said, by Don Jose's bedside. The street was dark, the houses
shut up, and I walked out of the town in the night. Not a single
street-lamp had been lit for two days, and the archway of the
gate was only a mass of darkness in the vague form of a tower, in
which I heard low, dismal groans, that seemed to answer the
murmurs of a man's voice.
"I recognized something impassive and careless in its tone,
characteristic of that Genoese sailor who, like me, has come
casually here to be drawn into the events for which his
scepticism as well as mine seems to entertain a sort of passive
contempt. The only thing he seems to care for, as far as I have
been able to discover, is to be well spoken of. An ambition fit
for noble souls, but also a profitable one for an exceptionally
intelligent scoundrel. Yes. His very words, 'To be well spoken
of. Si, senor.' He does not seem to make any difference between
speaking and thinking. Is it sheer naiveness or the practical
point of view, I wonder? Exceptional individualities always
interest me, because they are true to the general formula
expressing the moral state of humanity.
"He joined me on the harbour road after I had passed them under
the dark archway without stopping. It was a woman in trouble he
had been talking to. Through discretion I kept silent while he
walked by my side. After a time he began to talk himself. It was
not what I expected. It was only an old woman, an old lace-maker,
in search of her son, one of the street-sweepers employed by the
municipality. Friends had come the day before at daybreak to the
door of their hovel calling him out. He had gone with them, and
she had not seen him since; so she had left the food she had been
preparing half-cooked on the extinct embers and had crawled out
as far as the harbour, where she had heard that some town mozos
had been killed on the morning of the riot. One of the Cargadores
guarding the Custom House had brought out a lantern, and had
helped her to look at the few dead left lying about there. Now
she was creeping back, having failed in her search. So she sat
down on the stone seat under the arch, moaning, because she was
very tired. The Capataz had questioned her, and after hearing her
broken and groaning tale had advised her to go and look amongst
the wounded in the patio of the Casa Gould. He had also given her
a quarter dollar, he mentioned carelessly."
"'Why did you do that?' I asked. 'Do you know her?'
"'No, senor. I don't suppose I have ever seen her before. How
should I? She has not probably been out in the streets for years.
She is one of those old women that you find in this country at
the back of huts, crouching over fireplaces, with a stick on the
ground by their side, and almost too feeble to drive away the
stray dogs from their cooking-pots. Caramba! I could tell by her
voice that death had forgotten her. But, old or young, they like
money, and will speak well of the man who gives it to them.' He
laughed a little. 'Senor, you should have felt the clutch of her
paw as I put the piece in her palm.' He paused. 'My last, too,'
he added.
"I made no comment. He's known for his liberality and his bad
luck at the game of monte, which keeps him as poor as when he
first came here.
"'I suppose, Don Martin,' he began, in a thoughtful, speculative
tone, 'that the Senor Administrador of San Tome will reward me
some day if I save his silver?'
"I said that it could not be otherwise, surely. He walked on,
muttering to himself. 'Si, si, without doubt, without doubt; and,
look you, Senor Martin, what it is to be well spoken of! There is
not another man that could have been even thought of for such a
thing. I shall get something great for it some day. And let it
come soon,' he mumbled. 'Time passes in this country as quick as
anywhere else.'
"This, soeur cherie, is my companion in the great escape for the
sake of the great cause. He is more naive than shrewd, more
masterful than crafty, more generous with his personality than
the people who make use of him are with their money. At least,
that is what he thinks himself with more pride than sentiment. I
am glad I have made friends with him. As a companion he acquires
more importance than he ever had as a sort of minor genius in his
way--as an original Italian sailor whom I allowed to come in in
the small hours and talk familiarly to the editor of the Porvenir
while the paper was going through the press. And it is curious to
have met a man for whom the value of life seems to consist in
personal prestige.
"I am waiting for him here now. On arriving at the posada kept by
Viola we found the children alone down below, and the old Genoese
shouted to his countryman to go and fetch the doctor. Otherwise
we would have gone on to the wharf, where it appears Captain
Mitchell with some volunteer Europeans and a few picked
Cargadores are loading the lighter with the silver that must be
saved from Montero's clutches in order to be used for Montero's
defeat. Nostromo galloped furiously back towards the town. He has
been long gone already. This delay gives me time to talk to you.
By the time this pocket-book reaches your hands much will have
happened. But now it is a pause under the hovering wing of death
in this silent house buried in the black night, with this dying
woman, the two children crouching without a sound, and that old
man whom I can hear through the thickness of the wall passing up
and down with a light rubbing noise no louder than a mouse. And
I, the only other with them, don't really know whether to count
myself with the living or with the dead. 'Quien sabe?' as the
people here are prone to say in answer to every question. But no!
feeling for you is certainly not dead, and the whole thing, the
house, the dark night, the silent children in this dim room, my
very presence here--all this is life, must be life, since it is
so much like a dream."
With the writing of the last line there came upon Decoud a moment
of sudden and complete oblivion. He swayed over the table as if
struck by a bullet. The next moment he sat up, confused, with the
idea that he had heard his pencil roll on the floor. The low door
of the cafe, wide open, was filled with the glare of a torch in
which was visible half of a horse, switching its tail against the
leg of a rider with a long iron spur strapped to the naked heel.
The two girls were gone, and Nostromo, standing in the middle of
the room, looked at him from under the round brim of the sombrero
low down over his brow.
"I have brought that sour-faced English doctor in Senora Gould's
carriage," said Nostromo. "I doubt if, with all his wisdom, he
can save the Padrona this time. They have sent for the children.
A bad sign that."
He sat down on the end of a bench. "She wants to give them her
blessing, I suppose."
Dazedly Decoud observed that he must have fallen sound asleep,
and Nostromo said, with a vague smile, that he had looked in at
the window and had seen him lying still across the table with his
head on his arms. The English senora had also come in the
carriage, and went upstairs at once with the doctor. She had told
him not to wake up Don Martin yet; but when they sent for the
children he had come into the cafe.
The half of the horse with its half of the rider swung round
outside the door; the torch of tow and resin in the iron basket
which was carried on a stick at the saddle-bow flared right into
the room for a moment, and Mrs. Gould entered hastily with a
very white, tired face. The hood of her dark, blue cloak had
fallen back. Both men rose.
"Teresa wants to see you, Nostromo," she said. The Capataz did
not move. Decoud, with his back to the table, began to button up
his coat.
"The silver, Mrs. Gould, the silver," he murmured in English.
"Don't forget that the Esmeralda garrison have got a steamer.
They may appear at any moment at the harbour entrance."
"The doctor says there is no hope," Mrs. Gould spoke rapidly,
also in English. "I shall take you down to the wharf in my
carriage and then come back to fetch away the girls." She changed
swiftly into Spanish to address Nostromo. "Why are you wasting
time? Old Giorgio's wife wishes to see you."
"I am going to her, senora," muttered the Capataz. Dr. Monygham
now showed himself, bringing back the children. To Mrs. Gould's
inquiring glance he only shook his head and went outside at once,
followed by Nostromo.
The horse of the torch-bearer, motionless, hung his head low, and
the rider had dropped the reins to light a cigarette. The glare
of the torch played on the front of the house crossed by the big
black letters of its inscription in which only the word ITALIA
was lighted fully. The patch of wavering glare reached as far as
Mrs. Gould's carriage waiting on the road, with the yellow-faced,
portly Ignacio apparently dozing on the box. By his side Basilio,
dark and skinny, held a Winchester carbine in front of him, with
both hands, and peered fearfully into the darkness. Nostromo
touched lightly the doctor's shoulder.
"Is she really dying, senor doctor?"
"Yes," said the doctor, with a strange twitch of his scarred
cheek. "And why she wants to see you I cannot imagine."
"She has been like that before," suggested Nostromo, looking
away.
"Well, Capataz, I can assure you she will never be like that
again," snarled Dr. Monygham. "You may go to her or stay away.
There is very little to be got from talking to the dying. But she
told Dona Emilia in my hearing that she has been like a mother to
you ever since you first set foot ashore here."
"Si! And she never had a good word to say for me to anybody. It
is more as if she could not forgive me for being alive, and such
a man, too, as she would have liked her son to be."
"Maybe!" exclaimed a mournful deep voice near them. "Women have
their own ways of tormenting themselves." Giorgio Viola had come
out of the house. He threw a heavy black shadow in the
torchlight, and the glare fell on his big face, on the great
bushy head of white hair. He motioned the Capataz indoors with
his extended arm.
Dr. Monygham, after busying himself with a little medicament box
of polished wood on the seat of the landau, turned to old Giorgio
and thrust into his big, trembling hand one of the
glass-stoppered bottles out of the case.
"Give her a spoonful of this now and then, in water," he said.
"It will make her easier."
"And there is nothing more for her?" asked the old man,
patiently.
"No. Not on earth," said the doctor, with his back to him,
clicking the lock of the medicine case.
Nostromo slowly crossed the large kitchen, all dark but for the
glow of a heap of charcoal under the heavy mantel of the
cooking-range, where water was boiling in an iron pot with a loud
bubbling sound. Between the two walls of a narrow staircase a
bright light streamed from the sick-room above; and the
magnificent Capataz de Cargadores stepping noiselessly in soft
leather sandals, bushy whiskered, his muscular neck and bronzed
chest bare in the open check shirt, resembled a Mediterranean
sailor just come ashore from some wine or fruit-laden felucca. At
the top he paused, broad shouldered, narrow hipped and supple,
looking at the large bed, like a white couch of state, with a
profusion of snowy linen, amongst which the Padrona sat unpropped
and bowed, her handsome, black-browed face bent over her chest. A
mass of raven hair with only a few white threads in it covered
her shoulders; one thick strand fallen forward half veiled her
cheek. Perfectly motionless in that pose, expressing physical
anxiety and unrest, she turned her eyes alone towards Nostromo.
The Capataz had a red sash wound many times round his waist, and
a heavy silver ring on the forefinger of the hand he raised to
give a twist to his moustache.
"Their revolutions, their revolutions," gasped Senora Teresa.
"Look, Gian' Battista, it has killed me at last!"
Nostromo said nothing, and the sick woman with an upward glance
insisted. "Look, this one has killed me, while you were away
fighting for what did not concern you, foolish man."
"Why talk like this?" mumbled the Capataz between his teeth.
"Will you never believe in my good sense? It concerns me to keep
on being what I am: every day alike."
"You never change, indeed," she said, bitterly. "Always thinking
of yourself and taking your pay out in fine words from those who
care nothing for you."
There was between them an intimacy of antagonism as close in its
way as the intimacy of accord and affection. He had not walked
along the way of Teresa's expectations. It was she who had
encouraged him to leave his ship, in the hope of securing a
friend and defender for the girls. The wife of old Giorgio was
aware of her precarious health, and was haunted by the fear of
her aged husband's loneliness and the unprotected state of the
children. She had wanted to annex that apparently quiet and
steady young man, affectionate and pliable, an orphan from his
tenderest age, as he had told her, with no ties in Italy except
an uncle, owner and master of a felucca, from whose ill-usage he
had run away before he was fourteen. He had seemed to her
courageous, a hard worker, determined to make his way in the
world. From gratitude and the ties of habit he would become like
a son to herself and Giorgio; and then, who knows, when Linda had
grown up. . . . Ten years' difference between husband and wife
was not so much. Her own great man was nearly twenty years older
than herself. Gian' Battista was an attractive young fellow,
besides; attractive to men, women, and children, just by that
profound quietness of personality which, like a serene twilight,
rendered more seductive the promise of his vigorous form and the
resolution of his conduct.
Old Giorgio, in profound ignorance of his wife's views and hopes,
had a great regard for his young countryman. "A man ought not to
be tame," he used to tell her, quoting the Spanish proverb in
defence of the splendid Capataz. She was growing jealous of his
success. He was escaping from her, she feared. She was practical,
and he seemed to her to be an absurd spendthrift of these
qualities which made him so valuable. He got too little for them.
He scattered them with both hands amongst too many people, she
thought. He laid no money by. She railed at his poverty, his
exploits, his adventures, his loves and his reputation; but in
her heart she had never given him up, as though, indeed, he had
been her son.
Even now, ill as she was, ill enough to feel the chill, black
breath of the approaching end, she had wished to see him. It was
like putting out her benumbed hand to regain her hold. But she
had presumed too much on her strength. She could not command her
thoughts; they had become dim, like her vision. The words
faltered on her lips, and only the paramount anxiety and desire
of her life seemed to be too strong for death.
The Capataz said, "I have heard these things many times. You are
unjust, but it does not hurt me. Only now you do not seem to have
much strength to talk, and I have but little time to listen. I am
engaged in a work of very great moment."
She made an effort to ask him whether it was true that he had
found time to go and fetch a doctor for her. Nostromo nodded
affirmatively.
She was pleased: it relieved her sufferings to know that the man
had condescended to do so much for those who really wanted his
help. It was a proof of his friendship. Her voice become
stronger.
"I want a priest more than a doctor," she said, pathetically. She
did not move her head; only her eyes ran into the corners to
watch the Capataz standing by the side of her bed. "Would you go
to fetch a priest for me now? Think! A dying woman asks you!"
Nostromo shook his head resolutely. He did not believe in priests
in their sacerdotal character. A doctor was an efficacious
person; but a priest, as priest, was nothing, incapable of doing
either good or harm. Nostromo did not even dislike the sight of
them as old Giorgio did. The utter uselessness of the errand was
what struck him most.
"Padrona," he said, "you have been like this before, and got
better after a few days. I have given you already the very last
moments I can spare. Ask Senora Gould to send you one."
He was feeling uneasy at the impiety of this refusal. The
Padrona believed in priests, and confessed herself to them. But
all women did that. It could not be of much consequence. And yet
his heart felt oppressed for a moment--at the thought what
absolution would mean to her if she believed in it only ever so
little. No matter. It was quite true that he had given her
already the very last moment he could spare.
"You refuse to go?" she gasped. "Ah! you are always yourself,
indeed."
"Listen to reason, Padrona," he said. "I am needed to save the
silver of the mine. Do you hear? A greater treasure than the one
which they say is guarded by ghosts and devils on Azuera. It is
true. I am resolved to make this the most desperate affair I was
ever engaged on in my whole life."
She felt a despairing indignation. The supreme test had failed.
Standing above her, Nostromo did not see the distorted features
of her face, distorted by a paroxysm of pain and anger. Only she
began to tremble all over. Her bowed head shook. The broad
shoulders quivered.
"Then God, perhaps, will have mercy upon me! But do you look to
it, man, that you get something for yourself out of it, besides
the remorse that shall overtake you some day."
She laughed feebly. "Get riches at least for once, you
indispensable, admired Gian' Battista, to whom the peace of a
dying woman is less than the praise of people who have given you
a silly name--and nothing besides--in exchange for your soul and
body."
The Capataz de Cargadores swore to himself under his breath.
"Leave my soul alone, Padrona, and I shall know how to take care
of my body. Where is the harm of people having need of me? What
are you envying me that I have robbed you and the children of?
Those very people you are throwing in my teeth have done more for
old Giorgio than they ever thought of doing for me."
He struck his breast with his open palm; his voice had remained
low though he had spoken in a forcible tone. He twisted his
moustaches one after another, and his eyes wandered a little
about the room.
"Is it my fault that I am the only man for their purposes? What
angry nonsense are you talking, mother? Would you rather have me
timid and foolish, selling water-melons on the market-place or
rowing a boat for passengers along the harbour, like a soft
Neapolitan without courage or reputation? Would you have a young
man live like a monk? I do not believe it. Would you want a monk
for your eldest girl? Let her grow. What are you afraid of? You
have been angry with me for everything I did for years; ever
since you first spoke to me, in secret from old Giorgio, about
your Linda. Husband to one and brother to the other, did you say?
Well, why not! I like the little ones, and a man must marry some
time. But ever since that time you have been making little of me
to everyone. Why? Did you think you could put a collar and chain
on me as if I were one of the watch-dogs they keep over there in
the railway yards? Look here, Padrona, I am the same man who came
ashore one evening and sat down in the thatched ranche you lived
in at that time on the other side of the town and told you all
about himself. You were not unjust to me then. What has happened
since? I am no longer an insignificant youth. A good name,
Giorgio says, is a treasure, Padrona."
"They have turned your head with their praises," gasped the sick
woman. "They have been paying you with words. Your folly shall
betray you into poverty, misery, starvation. The very leperos
shall laugh at you--the great Capataz."
Nostromo stood for a time as if struck dumb. She never looked at
him. A self-confident, mirthless smile passed quickly from his
lips, and then he backed away. His disregarded figure sank down
beyond the doorway. He descended the stairs backwards, with the
usual sense of having been somehow baffled by this woman's
disparagement of this reputation he had obtained and desired to
keep.
Downstairs in the big kitchen a candle was burning, surrounded by
the shadows of the walls, of the ceiling, but no ruddy glare
filled the open square of the outer door. The carriage with Mrs.
Gould and Don Martin, preceded by the horseman bearing the torch,
had gone on to the jetty. Dr. Monygham, who had remained, sat on
the corner of a hard wood table near the candlestick, his seamed,
shaven face inclined sideways, his arms crossed on his breast,
his lips pursed up, and his prominent eyes glaring stonily upon
the floor of black earth. Near the overhanging mantel of the
fireplace, where the pot of water was still boiling violently,
old Giorgio held his chin in his hand, one foot advanced, as if
arrested by a sudden thought.
"Adios, viejo," said Nostromo, feeling the handle of his revolver
in the belt and loosening his knife in its sheath. He picked up a
blue poncho lined with red from the table, and put it over his
head. "Adios, look after the things in my sleeping-room, and if
you hear from me no more, give up the box to Paquita. There is
not much of value there, except my new serape from Mexico, and a
few silver buttons on my best jacket. No matter! The things
will look well enough on the next lover she gets, and the man
need not be afraid I shall linger on earth after I am dead, like
those Gringos that haunt the Azuera."
Dr. Monygham twisted his lips into a bitter smile. After old
Giorgio, with an almost imperceptible nod and without a word, had
gone up the narrow stairs, he said--
"Why, Capataz! I thought you could never fail in anything."
Nostromo, glancing contemptuously at the doctor, lingered in the
doorway rolling a cigarette, then struck a match, and, after
lighting it, held the burning piece of wood above his head till
the flame nearly touched his fingers.
"No wind!" he muttered to himself. "Look here, senor--do you know
the nature of my undertaking?"
Dr. Monygham nodded sourly.
"It is as if I were taking up a curse upon me, senor doctor. A
man with a treasure on this coast will have every knife raised
against him in every place upon the shore. You see that, senor
doctor? I shall float along with a spell upon my life till I meet
somewhere the north-bound steamer of the Company, and then indeed
they will talk about the Capataz of the Sulaco Cargadores from
one end of America to another."
Dr. Monygham laughed his short, throaty laugh. Nostromo turned
round in the doorway.
"But if your worship can find any other man ready and fit for
such business I will stand back. I am not exactly tired of my
life, though I am so poor that I can carry all I have with myself
on my horse's back."
"You gamble too much, and never say 'no' to a pretty face,
Capataz," said Dr. Monygham, with sly simplicity. "That's not
the way to make a fortune. But nobody that I know ever suspected
you of being poor. I hope you have made a good bargain in case
you come back safe from this adventure."
"What bargain would your worship have made?" asked Nostromo,
blowing the smoke out of his lips through the doorway.
Dr. Monygham listened up the staircase for a moment before he
answered, with another of his short, abrupt laughs--
"Illustrious Capataz, for taking the curse of death upon my back,
as you call it, nothing else but the whole treasure would do."
Nostromo vanished out of the doorway with a grunt of discontent
at this jeering answer. Dr. Monygham heard him gallop away.
Nostromo rode furiously in the dark. There were lights in the
buildings of the O.S.N. Company near the wharf, but before he got
there he met the Gould carriage. The horseman preceded it with
the torch, whose light showed the white mules trotting, the
portly Ignacio driving, and Basilio with the carbine on the box.
From the dark body of the landau Mrs. Gould's voice cried, "They
are waiting for you, Capataz!" She was returning, chilly and
excited, with Decoud's pocket-book still held in her hand. He
had confided it to her to send to his sister. "Perhaps my last
words to her," he had said, pressing Mrs. Gould's hand.
The Capataz never checked his speed. At the head of the wharf
vague figures with rifles leapt to the head of his horse; others
closed upon him--cargadores of the company posted by Captain
Mitchell on the watch. At a word from him they fell back with
subservient murmurs, recognizing his voice. At the other end of
the jetty, near a cargo crane, in a dark group with glowing
cigars, his name was pronounced in a tone of relief. Most of the
Europeans in Sulaco were there, rallied round Charles Gould, as
if the silver of the mine had been the emblem of a common cause,
the symbol of the supreme importance of material interests. They
had loaded it into the lighter with their own hands. Nostromo
recognized Don Carlos Gould, a thin, tall shape standing a little
apart and silent, to whom another tall shape, the
engineer-in-chief, said aloud, "If it must be lost, it is a
million times better that it should go to the bottom of the sea."
Martin Decoud called out from the lighter, "Au revoir, messieurs,
till we clasp hands again over the new-born Occidental Republic."
Only a subdued murmur responded to his clear, ringing tones; and
then it seemed to him that the wharf was floating away into the
night; but it was Nostromo, who was already pushing against a
pile with one of the heavy sweeps. Decoud did not move; the
effect was that of being launched into space. After a splash or
two there was not a sound but the thud of Nostromo's feet leaping
about the boat. He hoisted the big sail; a breath of wind fanned
Decoud's cheek. Everything had vanished but the li |
