 | CHAPTER SIX Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard / Joseph Conrad |  |
6. 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
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 Señor doctor
going to call on Doña 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 Señora. He presented this
tribute very seriously indeed; it was no trifle for a man
of his habits. Mrs. Gould felt that, too, perfectly.
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 home-
sick. 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
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
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
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 naïve 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
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
José 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
Doña 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 Señor 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.
Señor Avellanos was in the habit of crossing the patio
at five o'clock almost every day. Don José chose to
come over at tea-time because the English rite at Doña
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
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 coal-
black.
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 Tomé
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 Tomé 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
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 Tomé 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 Tomé, 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,
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 Tomé
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 Tomé
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 Tomé 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
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 Señor 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
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 supérieur de l'armée), 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 garçon.
C'est dommage, tout de même. 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 à 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
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
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
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 Tomé 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
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 Tomé 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,
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 Tomé 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.
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
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 Tomé
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
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 mediæval
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 Tomé 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
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
phenomenon of imperfect differentiation — interestingly
barren and without importance. Doña 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 Tomé 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
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 mediæval 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 José Avellanos, the
hereditary friend of the family.
Otherwise, the plastered white walls were completely
bare, except for a water-colour sketch of the San Tomé
mountain — the work of Doña 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
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,
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
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
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
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
Cæsar'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
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
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
Tomé 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
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
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 naïve 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 Tomé 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
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 Tomé 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
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
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 José was a dear good man, who talked very well,
and was enthusiastic about the greatness of the San
Tomé 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
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 Tomé 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
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 round-
about logic of emotions, he felt that the worthiness of
his life was bound up with success. There was no
going back.
| CHAPTER SIX Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard / Joseph Conrad | |