 | CHAPTER TEN Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard / Joseph Conrad |  |
10. CHAPTER TEN
THE next day was quiet in the morning, except for the
faint sound of firing to the northward, in the direction of
Los Hatos. Captain Mitchell had listened to it from
his balcony anxiously. The phrase, "In my delicate
position as the only consular agent then in the port,
everything, sir, everything was a just cause for anxiety,"
had its place in the more or less stereotyped relation of
the "historical events" which for the next few years was
at the service of distinguished strangers visiting Sulaco.
The mention of the dignity and neutrality of the flag,
so difficult to preserve in his position, "right in the thick
of these events between the lawlessness of that piratical
villain Sotillo and the more regularly established
but scarcely less atrocious tyranny of his Excellency
Don Pedro Montero," came next in order. Captain
Mitchell was not the man to enlarge upon mere dangers
much. But he insisted that it was a memorable day.
On that day, towards dusk, he had seen "that poor
fellow of mine — Nostromo. The sailor whom I discovered,
and, I may say, made, sir. The man of the famous
ride to Cayta, sir. An historical event, sir!"
Regarded by the O. S. N. Company as an old and
faithful servant, Captain Mitchell was allowed to attain
the term of his usefulness in ease and dignity at the head
of the enormously extended service. The augmentation
of the establishment, with its crowds of clerks, an
office in town, the old office in the harbour, the division
into departments — passenger, cargo, lighterage, and
so on — secured a greater leisure for his last years in the
Liked by the natives for his good nature and
the formality of his manner, self-important and simple,
known for years as a "friend of our country," he felt
himself a personality of mark in the town. Getting
up early for a turn in the market-place while the gigantic
shadow of Higuerota was still lying upon the fruit
and flower stalls piled up with masses of gorgeous colouring,
attending easily to current affairs, welcomed in
houses, greeted by ladies on the Alameda, with his
entry into all the clubs and a footing in the Casa Gould,
he led his privileged old bachelor, man-about-town
existence with great comfort and solemnity. But on
mail-boat days he was down at the Harbour Office at
an early hour, with his own gig, manned by a smart
crew in white and blue, ready to dash off and board
the ship directly she showed her bows between the
harbour heads.
It would be into the Harbour Office that he would
lead some privileged passenger he had brought off in his
own boat, and invite him to take a seat for a moment
while he signed a few papers. And Captain Mitchell,
seating himself at his desk, would keep on talking hospitably
—
"There isn't much time if you are to see everything
in a day. We shall be off in a moment. We'll have
lunch at the Amarilla Club — though I belong also to
the Anglo-American — mining engineers and business
men, don't you know — and to the Mirliflores as well,
a new club — English, French, Italians, all sorts — lively
young fellows mostly, who wanted to pay a compliment
to an old resident, sir. But we'll lunch at the Amarilla.
Interest you, I fancy. Real thing of the country. Men
of the first families. The President of the Occidental
Republic himself belongs to it, sir. Fine old bishop
of statuary, I believe. Cavaliere Parrochetti — you
know Parrochetti, the famous Italian sculptor — was
working here for two years — thought very highly of
our old bishop. . . . There! I am very much at
your service now."
Proud of his experience, penetrated by the sense of
historical importance of men, events, and buildings, he
talked pompously in jerky periods, with slight sweeps
of his short, thick arm, letting nothing "escape the
attention" of his privileged captive.
"Lot of building going on, as you observe. Before
the Separation it was a plain of burnt grass smothered
in clouds of dust, with an ox-cart track to our Jetty.
Nothing more. This is the Harbour Gate. Picturesque,
is it not? Formerly the town stopped short there.
We enter now the Calle de la Constitucion. Observe
the old Spanish houses. Great dignity. Eh? I suppose
it's just as it was in the time of the Viceroys, except
for the pavement. Wood blocks now. Sulaco
National Bank there, with the sentry boxes each side
of the gate. Casa Avellanos this side, with all the
ground-floor windows shuttered. A wonderful woman
lives there — Miss Avellanos — the beautiful Antonia.
A character, sir! A historical woman! Opposite
— Casa Gould. Noble gateway. Yes, the Goulds
of the original Gould Concession, that all the world
knows of now. I hold seventeen of the thousand-dollar
shares in the Consolidated San Tomé mines. All the
poor savings of my lifetime, sir, and it will be enough
to keep me in comfort to the end of my days at home
when I retire. I got in on the ground-floor, you see.
Don Carlos, great friend of mine. Seventeen shares —
quite a little fortune to leave behind one, too. I have
a niece — married a parson — most worthy man, incumbent
was never married myself. A sailor should exercise
self-denial. Standing under that very gateway, sir,
with some young engineer-fellows, ready to defend
that house where we had received so much kindness
and hospitality, I saw the first and last charge of
Pedrito's horsemen upon Barrios's troops, who had just
taken the Harbour Gate. They could not stand the
new rifles brought out by that poor Decoud. It was a
murderous fire. In a moment the street became
blocked with a mass of dead men and horses. They
never came on again."
And all day Captain Mitchell would talk like this
to his more or less willing victim —
"The Plaza. I call it magnificent. Twice the area
of Trafalgar Square."
From the very centre, in the blazing sunshine, he
pointed out the buildings —
"The Intendencia, now President's Palace — Cabildo,
where the Lower Chamber of Parliament sits. You
notice the new houses on that side of the Plaza? Compañia
Anzani, a great general store, like those coöperative
things at home. Old Anzani was murdered by the
National Guards in front of his safe. It was even for
that specific crime that the deputy Gamacho, commanding
the Nationals, a bloodthirsty and savage
brute, was executed publicly by garrotte upon the sentence
of a court-martial ordered by Barrios. Anzani's
nephews converted the business into a company.
All that side of the Plaza had been burnt; used to be
colonnaded before. A terrible fire, by the light of which
I saw the last of the fighting, the llaneros flying, the
Nationals throwing their arms down, and the miners of
San Tomé, all Indians from the Sierra, rolling by like a
torrent to the sound of pipes and cymbals, green flags
hats, on foot, on mules, on donkeys. Such a sight, sir,
will never be seen again. The miners, sir, had marched
upon the town, Don Pépé leading on his black horse,
and their very wives in the rear on burros, screaming
encouragement, sir, and beating tambourines. I remember
one of these women had a green parrot seated
on her shoulder, as calm as a bird of stone. They had
just saved their Señor Administrador; for Barrios,
though he ordered the assault at once, at night, too,
would have been too late. Pedrito Montero had Don
Carlos led out to be shot — like his uncle many years ago
— and then, as Barrios said afterwards, 'Sulaco would
not have been worth fighting for.' Sulaco without the
Concession was nothing; and there were tons and tons
of dynamite distributed all over the mountain with
detonators arranged, and an old priest, Father Romàn,
standing by to annihilate the San Tomé mine at the
first news of failure. Don Carlos had made up his
mind not to leave it behind, and he had the right
men to see to it, too."
Thus Captain Mitchell would talk in the middle of
the Plaza, holding over his head a white umbrella with a
green lining; but inside the cathedral, in the dim light,
with a faint scent of incense floating in the cool atmosphere,
and here and there a kneeling female figure,
black or all white, with a veiled head, his lowered voice
became solemn and impressive.
"Here," he would say, pointing to a niche in the wall
of the dusky aisle, "you see the bust of Don José Avellanos,
'Patriot and Statesman,' as the inscription says,
'Minister to Courts of England and Spain, etc., etc.,
died in the woods of Los Hatos worn out with his life-
long struggle for Right and Justice at the dawn of the
New Era.' A fair likeness. Parrochetti's work from
Gould. I was well acquainted with that distinguished
Spanish-American of the old school, a true Hidalgo,
beloved by everybody who knew him. The marble
medallion in the wall, in the antique style, representing
a veiled woman seated with her hands clasped loosely
over her knees, commemorates that unfortunate young
gentleman who sailed out with Nostromo on that fatal
night, sir. See, 'To the memory of Martin Decoud,
his betrothed Antonia Avellanos.' Frank, simple,
noble. There you have that lady, sir, as she is. An
exceptional woman. Those who thought she would
give way to despair were mistaken, sir. She has been
blamed in many quarters for not having taken the veil.
It was expected of her. But Doña Antonia is not the
stuff they make nuns of. Bishop Corbelàn, her uncle,
lives with her in the Corbelàn town house. He is a
fierce sort of priest, everlastingly worrying the Government
about the old Church lands and convents. I believe
they think a lot of him in Rome. Now let us go
to the Amarilla Club, just across the Plaza, to get some
lunch."
Directly outside the cathedral on the very top of the
noble flight of steps, his voice rose pompously, his arm
found again its sweeping gesture.
"Porvenir, over there on that first floor, above those
French plate-glass shop-fronts; our biggest daily. Conservative,
or, rather, I should say, Parliamentary. We
have the Parliamentary party here of which the actual
Chief of the State, Don Juste Lopez, is the head; a very
sagacious man, I think. A first-rate intellect, sir. The
Democratic party in opposition rests mostly, I am sorry
to say, on these socialistic Italians, sir, with their secret
societies, camorras, and such-like. There are lots of
Italians settled here on the railway lands, dismissed
There are whole villages of Italians on the Campo.
And the natives, too, are being drawn into these ways
. . . American bar? Yes. And over there you can
see another. New Yorkers mostly frequent that
one — Here we are at the Amarilla. Observe the
bishop at the foot of the stairs to the right as we go in."
And the lunch would begin and terminate its lavish
and leisurely course at a little table in the gallery, Captain
Mitchell nodding, bowing, getting up to speak for a
moment to different officials in black clothes, merchants
in jackets, officers in uniform, middle-aged caballeros
from the Campo — sallow, little, nervous men, and fat,
placid, swarthy men, and Europeans or North Americans
of superior standing, whose faces looked very white
amongst the majority of dark complexions and black,
glistening eyes.
Captain Mitchell would lie back in the chair, casting
around looks of satisfaction, and tender over the table a
case full of thick cigars.
"Try a weed with your coffee. Local tobacco. The
black coffee you get at the Amarilla, sir, you don't meet
anywhere in the world. We get the bean from a famous
cafeteria in the foot-hills, whose owner sends three sacks
every year as a present to his fellow members in remembrance
of the fight against Gamacho's Nationals, carried
on from these very windows by the caballeros. He was
in town at the time, and took part, sir, to the bitter end.
It arrives on three mules — not in the common way, by
rail; no fear! — right into the patio, escorted by mounted
peons, in charge of the Mayoral of his estate, who walks
upstairs, booted and spurred, and delivers it to our
committee formally with the words, 'For the sake of
those fallen on the third of May.' We call it Tres de
Mayo coffee. Taste it."
Captain Mitchell, with an expression as though making
ready to hear a sermon in a church, would lift the
tiny cup to his lips. And the nectar would be sipped
to the bottom during a restful silence in a cloud of cigar
smoke.
"Look at this man in black just going out," he would
begin, leaning forward hastily. "This is the famous
Hernandez, Minister of War. The Times' special
correspondent, who wrote that striking series of letters
calling the Occidental Republic the 'Treasure House of
the World,' gave a whole article to him and the force
he has organized — the renowned Carabineers of the
Campo."
Captain Mitchell's guest, staring curiously, would see
a figure in a long-tailed black coat walking gravely,
with downcast eyelids in a long, composed face, a
brow furrowed horizontally, a pointed head, whose
grey hair, thin at the top, combed down carefully on
all sides and rolled at the ends, fell low on the neck
and shoulders. This, then, was the famous bandit of
whom Europe had heard with interest. He put on a
high-crowned sombrero with a wide flat brim; a rosary
of wooden beads was twisted about his right wrist.
And Captain Mitchell would proceed —
"The protector of the Sulaco refugees from the rage of
Pedrito. As general of cavalry with Barrios he distinguished
himself at the storming of Tonoro, where Señor
Fuentes was killed with the last remnant of the Monterists.
He is the friend and humble servant of Bishop
Corbelàn. Hears three Masses every day. I bet
you he will step into the cathedral to say a prayer or two
on his way home to his siesta."
He took several puffs at his cigar in silence; then, in
his most important manner, pronounced:
"The Spanish race, sir, is prolific of remarkable characters
now into the billiard-room, which is cool, for a quiet
chat. There's never anybody there till after five. I
could tell you episodes of the Separationist revolution
that would astonish you. When the great heat's over,
we'll take a turn on the Alameda."
The programme went on relentless, like a law of
Nature. The turn on the Alameda was taken with
slow steps and stately remarks.
"All the great world of Sulaco here, sir." Captain
Mitchell bowed right and left with no end of formality;
then with animation, "Doña Emilia, Mrs. Gould's
carriage. Look. Always white mules. The kindest,
most gracious woman the sun ever shone upon. A
great position, sir. A great position. First lady in
Sulaco — far before the President's wife. And worthy
of it." He took off his hat; then, with a studied
change of tone, added, negligently, that the man in
black by her side, with a high white collar and a scarred,
snarly face, was Dr. Monygham, Inspector of State
Hospitals, chief medical officer of the Consolidated San
Tomé mines. "A familiar of the house. Everlastingly
there. No wonder. The Goulds made him.
Very clever man and all that, but I never liked him.
Nobody does. I can recollect him limping about the
streets in a check shirt and native sandals with a water-
melon under his arm — all he would get to eat for the
day. A big-wig now, sir, and as nasty as ever. However
. . . There's no doubt he played his part
fairly well at the time. He saved us all from the deadly
incubus of Sotillo, where a more particular man might
have failed —"
His arm went up.
"The equestrian statue that used to stand on the
pedestal over there has been removed. It was an
"There is some talk of replacing it by a marble shaft
commemorative of Separation, with angels of peace at
the four corners, and bronze Justice holding an even
balance, all gilt, on the top. Cavaliere Parrochetti
was asked to make a design, which you can see framed
under glass in the Municipal Sala. Names are to be
engraved all round the base. Well! They could do
no better than begin with the name of Nostromo. He
has done for Separation as much as anybody else, and,"
added Captain Mitchell, "has got less than many others
by it — when it comes to that." He dropped on to a
stone seat under a tree, and tapped invitingly at the
place by his side. "He carried to Barrios the letters
from Sulaco which decided the General to abandon
Cayta for a time, and come back to our help here by sea.
The transports were still in harbour fortunately. Sir,
I did not even know that my Capataz de Cargadores
was alive. I had no idea. It was Dr. Monygham
who came upon him, by chance, in the Custom House,
evacuated an hour or two before by the wretched Sotillo.
I was never told; never given a hint, nothing — as if
I were unworthy of confidence. Monygham arranged
it all. He went to the railway yards, and got admission
to the engineer-in-chief, who, for the sake of the Goulds
as much as for anything else, consented to let an engine
make a dash down the line, one hundred and eighty
miles, with Nostromo aboard. It was the only way to
get him off. In the Construction Camp at the railhead,
he obtained a horse, arms, some clothing, and
started alone on that marvellous ride — four hundred
miles in six days, through a disturbed country, ending
by the feat of passing through the Monterist lines outside
Cayta. The history of that ride, sir, would make a
most exciting book. He carried all our lives in his
not enough. Of course, he was perfectly fearless and
incorruptible. But a man was wanted that would
know how to succeed. He was that man, sir. On the
fifth of May, being practically a prisoner in the Harbour
Office of my Company, I suddenly heard the whistle
of an engine in the railway yards, a quarter of a
mile away. I could not believe my ears. I made one
jump on to the balcony, and beheld a locomotive under
a great head of steam run out of the yard gates, screeching
like mad, enveloped in a white cloud, and then, just
abreast of old Viola's inn, check almost to a standstill.
I made out, sir, a man — I couldn't tell who — dash out
of the Albergo d'ltalia Una, climb into the cab, and
then, sir, that engine seemed positively to leap clear of
the house, and was gone in the twinkling of an eye.
As you blow a candle out, sir! There was a first-rate
driver on the foot-plate, sir, I can tell you. They were
fired heavily upon by the National Guards in Rincon
and one other place. Fortunately the line had not
been torn up. In four hours they reached the Construction
Camp. Nostromo had his start. . . . The
rest you know. You've got only to look round you.
There are people on this Alameda that ride in their
carriages, or even are alive at all to-day, because years
ago I engaged a runaway Italian sailor for a foreman of
our wharf simply on the strength of his looks. And
that's a fact. You can't get over it, sir. On the seventeenth
of May, just twelve days after I saw the man
from the Casa Viola get on the engine, and wondered
what it meant, Barrios's transports were entering this
harbour, and the 'Treasure House of the World,' as
The Times man calls Sulaco in his book, was saved intact
for civilization — for a great future, sir. Pedrito,
with Hernandez on the west, and the San Tomé miners
landing. He had been sending messages to Sotillo
for a week to join him. Had Sotillo done so there
would have been massacres and proscription that would
have left no man or woman of position alive. But
that's where Dr. Monygham comes in. Sotillo, blind
and deaf to everything, stuck on board his steamer
watching the dragging for silver, which he believed to
be sunk at the bottom of the harbour. They say that
for the last three days he was out of his mind raving
and foaming with disappointment at getting nothing,
flying about the deck, and yelling curses at the boats
with the drags, ordering them in, and then suddenly
stamping his foot and crying out, 'And yet it is there!
I see it! I feel it!'
"He was preparing to hang Dr. Monygham (whom he
had on board) at the end of the after-derrick, when the
first of Barrios's transports, one of our own ships at
that, steamed right in, and ranging close alongside
opened a small-arm fire without as much preliminaries
as a hail. It was the completest surprise in the world,
sir. They were too astounded at first to bolt below.
Men were falling right and left like ninepins. It's a
miracle that Monygham, standing on the after-hatch
with the rope already round his neck, escaped being
riddled through and through like a sieve. He told me
since that he had given himself up for lost, and kept on
yelling with all the strength of his lungs: 'Hoist a white
flag! Hoist a white flag!' Suddenly an old major
of the Esmeralda regiment, standing by, unsheathed
his sword with a shriek: 'Die, perjured traitor!' and ran
Sotillo clean through the body, just before he fell himself
shot through the head."
Captain Mitchell stopped for a while.
"Begad, sir! I could spin you a yarn for hours.
for you to pass through Sulaco and not see the lights of
the San Tomé mine, a whole mountain ablaze like a
lighted palace above the dark Campo. It's a fashionable
drive. . . . But let me tell you one little
anecdote, sir; just to show you. A fortnight or more
later, when Barrios, declared Generalissimo, was gone
in pursuit of Pedrito away south, when the Provisional
Junta, with Don Juste Lopez at its head, had promulgated
the new Constitution, and our Don Carlos
Gould was packing up his trunks bound on a mission to
San Francisco and Washington (the United States, sir,
were the first great power to recognize the Occidental
Republic) — a fortnight later, I say, when we were
beginning to feel that our heads were safe on our
shoulders, if I may express myself so, a prominent man,
a large shipper by our line, came to see me on business,
and, says he, the first thing: 'I say, Captain Mitchell,
is that fellow' (meaning Nostromo) 'still the Capataz of
your Cargadores or not?' 'What's the matter?' says I.
'Because, if he is, then I don't mind; I send and receive
a good lot of cargo by your ships; but I have observed
him several days loafing about the wharf, and just now
he stopped me as cool as you please, with a request for
a cigar. Now, you know, my cigars are rather special,
and I can't get them so easily as all that.' 'I hope
you stretched a point,' I said, very gently. 'Why, yes.
But it's a confounded nuisance. The fellow's everlastingly
cadging for smokes.' Sir, I turned my eyes
away, and then asked, 'Weren't you one of the prisoners
in the Cabildo?' 'You know very well I was, and in
chains, too,' says he. 'And under a fine of fifteen
thousand dollars?' He coloured, sir, because it got
about that he fainted from fright when they came to
arrest him, and then behaved before Fuentes in a manner
there by the hair of his head, smile at his cringing.
'Yes,' he says, in a sort of shy way. 'Why?' 'Oh,
nothing. You stood to lose a tidy bit,' says I, 'even
if you saved your life. . . . But what can I do
for you?' He never even saw the point. Not he.
And that's how the world wags, sir."
He rose a little stiffly, and the drive to Rincon would
be taken with only one philosophical remark, uttered
by the merciless cicerone, with his eyes fixed upon the
lights of San Tomé, that seemed suspended in the dark
night between earth and heaven.
"A great power, this, for good and evil, sir. A great
power."
And the dinner of the Mirliflores would be eaten,
excellent as to cooking, and leaving upon the traveller's
mind an impression that there were in Sulaco many
pleasant, able young men with salaries apparently
too large for their discretion, and amongst them a few,
mostly Anglo-Saxon, skilled in the art of, as the saying
is, "taking a rise" out of his kind host.
With a rapid, jingling drive to the harbour in a two-
wheeled machine (which Captain Mitchell called a curricle)
behind a fleet and scraggy mule beaten all the
time by an obviously Neapolitan driver, the cycle
would be nearly closed before the lighted-up offices of
the O. S. N. Company, remaining open so late because
of the steamer. Nearly — but not quite.
"Ten o'clock. Your ship won't be ready to leave till
half-past twelve, if by then. Come in for a brandy-
and-soda and one more cigar."
And in the superintendent's private room the privileged
passenger by the Ceres, or Juno, or Pallas, stunned
and as it were annihilated mentally by a sudden surfeit
of sights, sounds, names, facts, and complicated information
tired child to a fairy tale; would hear a voice, familiar
and surprising in its pompousness, tell him, as if from
another world, how there was "in this very harbour"
an international naval demonstration, which put an
end to the Costaguana-Sulaco War. How the United
States cruiser, Powhattan, was the first to salute the
Occidental flag — white, with a wreath of green laurel
in the middle encircling a yellow amarilla flower. Would
hear how General Montero, in less than a month after
proclaiming himself Emperor of Costaguana, was shot
dead (during a solemn and public distribution of orders
and crosses) by a young artillery officer, the brother of
his then mistress.
"The abominable Pedrito, sir, fled the country," the
voice would say. And it would continue: "A captain
of one of our ships told me lately that he recognized
Pedrito the Guerrillero, arrayed in purple slippers and a
velvet smoking-cap with a gold tassel, keeping a disorderly
house in one of the southern ports."
"Abominable Pedrito! Who the devil was he?"
would wonder the distinguished bird of passage
hovering on the confines of waking and sleep with resolutely
open eyes and a faint but amiable curl upon his
lips, from between which stuck out the eighteenth or
twentieth cigar of that memorable day.
"He appeared to me in this very room like a haunting
ghost, sir" — Captain Mitchell was talking of his Nostromo
with true warmth of feeling and a touch of wistful
pride. "You may imagine, sir, what an effect it
produced on me. He had come round by sea with
Barrios, of course. And the first thing he told me after
I became fit to hear him was that he had picked up
the lighter's boat floating in the gulf! He seemed quite
overcome by the circumstance. And a remarkable
it was then sixteen days since the sinking of the silver.
At once I could see he was another man. He stared
at the wall, sir, as if there had been a spider or something
running about there. The loss of the silver
preyed on his mind. The first thing he asked me about
was whether Doña Antonia had heard yet of Decoud's
death. His voice trembled. I had to tell him that
Doña Antonia, as a matter of fact, was not back
in town yet. Poor girl! And just as I was making
ready to ask him a thousand questions, with a sudden,
'Pardon me, señor,' he cleared out of the office altogether.
I did not see him again for three days. I was
terribly busy, you know. It seems that he wandered
about in and out of the town, and on two nights turned
up to sleep in the baracoons of the railway people.
He seemed absolutely indifferent to what went on. I
asked him on the wharf, 'When are you going to take
hold again, Nostromo? There will be plenty of work
for the Cargadores presently.'
"'Señor,' says he, looking at me in a slow, inquisitive
manner, 'would it surprise you to hear that I am too
tired to work just yet? And what work could I do now?
How can I look my Cargadores in the face after losing a
lighter?'
"I begged him not to think any more about the silver,
and he smiled. A smile that went to my heart, sir. 'It
was no mistake,' I told him. 'It was a fatality. A
thing that could not be helped.' 'Si, si!" he said, and
turned away. I thought it best to leave him alone for a
bit to get over it. Sir, it took him years really, to get
over it. I was present at his interview with Don Carlos.
I must say that Gould is rather a cold man. He
had to keep a tight hand on his feelings, dealing with
thieves and rascals, in constant danger of ruin for himself
second nature. They looked at each other for a long
time. Don Carlos asked what he could do for him, in
his quiet, reserved way.
"'My name is known from one end of Sulaco to the
other,' he said, as quiet as the other. 'What more can
you do for me?' That was all that passed on that occasion.
Later, however, there was a very fine coasting
schooner for sale, and Mrs. Gould and I put our heads
together to get her bought and presented to him.
It was done, but he paid all the price back within the
next three years. Business was booming all along this
seaboard, sir. Moreover, that man always succeeded
in everything except in saving the silver. Poor Doña
Antonia, fresh from her terrible experiences in the
woods of Los Hatos, had an interview with him, too.
Wanted to hear about Decoud: what they said, what
they did, what they thought up to the last on that fatal
night. Mrs. Gould told me his manner was perfect
for quietness and sympathy. Miss Avellanos burst
into tears only when he told her how Decoud had happened
to say that his plan would be a glorious success.
. . . And there's no doubt, sir, that it is. It is a
success."
The cycle was about to close at last. And while
the privileged passenger, shivering with the pleasant
anticipations of his berth, forgot to ask himself,
"What on earth Decoud's plan could be?" Captain
Mitchell was saying, "Sorry we must part so soon.
Your intelligent interest made this a pleasant day to
me. I shall see you now on board. You had a
glimpse of the 'Treasure House of the World.' A
very good name that." And the coxswain's voice at
the door, announcing that the gig was ready, closed the
cycle.
Nostromo had, indeed, found the lighter's boat,
which he had left on the Great Isabel with Decoud,
floating empty far out in the gulf. He was then on
the bridge of the first of Barrios's transports, and within
an hour's steaming from Sulaco. Barrios, always delighted
with a feat of daring and a good judge of courage,
had taken a great liking to the Capataz. During
the passage round the coast the General kept Nostromo
near his person, addressing him frequently in that
abrupt and boisterous manner which was the sign of his
high favour.
Nostromo's eyes were the first to catch, broad on the
bow, the tiny, elusive dark speck, which, alone with the
forms of the Three Isabels right ahead, appeared on
the flat, shimmering emptiness of the gulf. There are
times when no fact should be neglected as insignificant;
a small boat so far from the land might have had some
meaning worth finding out. At a nod of consent from
Barrios the transport swept out of her course, passing
near enough to ascertain that no one manned the little
cockle-shell. It was merely a common small boat gone
adrift with her oars in her. But Nostromo, to whose
mind Decoud had been insistently present for days, had
long before recognized with excitement the dinghy of
the lighter.
There could be no question of stopping to pick up that
thing. Every minute of time was momentous with the
lives and futures of a whole town. The head of the leading
ship, with the General on board, fell off to her
course. Behind her, the fleet of transports, scattered
haphazard over a mile or so in the offing, like the finish
of an ocean race, pressed on, all black and smoking on
the western sky.
"Mi General," Nostromo's voice rang out loud, but
quiet, from behind a group of officers, "I should like to
belongs to my Company."
"And, por Dios," guffawed Barrios, in a noisy, good-
humoured voice, "you belong to me. I am going to
make you a captain of cavalry directly we get within
sight of a horse again."
"I can swim far better than I can ride, mi General,"
cried Nostromo, pushing through to the rail with a set
stare in his eyes. "Let me —"
"Let you? What a conceited fellow that is," bantered
the General, jovially, without even looking at him.
"Let him go! Ha! ha! ha! He wants me to admit
that we cannot take Sulaco without him! Ha! ha!
ha! Would you like to swim off to her, my son?"
A tremendous shout from one end of the ship to the
other stopped his guffaw. Nostromo had leaped overboard;
and his black head bobbed up far away already
from the ship. The General muttered an appalled
"Cielo! Sinner that I am!" in a thunderstruck tone.
One anxious glance was enough to show him that Nostromo
was swimming with perfect ease; and then he
thundered terribly, "No! no! We shall not stop to
pick up this impertinent fellow. Let him drown —
that mad Capataz."
Nothing short of main force would have kept Nostromo
from leaping overboard. That empty boat,
coming out to meet him mysteriously, as if rowed by
an invisible spectre, exercised the fascination of some
sign, of some warning, seemed to answer in a startling
and enigmatic way the persistent thought of a treasure
and of a man's fate. He would have leaped if there
had been death in that half-mile of water. It was as
smooth as a pond, and for some reason sharks are unknown
in the Placid Gulf, though on the other side of
the Punta Mala the coastline swarms with them.
The Capataz seized hold of the stern and blew with
force. A queer, faint feeling had come over him while
he swam. He had got rid of his boots and coat in the
water. He hung on for a time, regaining his breath. In
the distance the transports, more in a bunch now, held
on straight for Sulaco, with their air of friendly contest,
of nautical sport, of a regatta; and the united smoke of
their funnels drove like a thin, sulphurous fogbank
right over his head. It was his daring, his courage, his
act that had set these ships in motion upon the sea,
hurrying on to save the lives and fortunes of the Blancos,
the taskmasters of the people; to save the San
Tomé mine; to save the children.
With a vigorous and skilful effort he clambered over
the stern. The very boat! No doubt of it; no doubt
whatever. It was the dinghy of the lighter No. 3 —
the dinghy left with Martin Decoud on the Great Isabel
so that he should have some means to help himself if
nothing could be done for him from the shore. And
here she had come out to meet him empty and inexplicable.
What had become of Decoud? The Capataz
made a minute examination. He looked for some
scratch, for some mark, for some sign. All he discovered
was a brown stain on the gunwale abreast of the
thwart. He bent his face over it and rubbed hard
with his finger. Then he sat down in the stern sheets,
passive, with his knees close together and legs aslant.
Streaming from head to foot, with his hair and whiskers
hanging lank and dripping and a lustreless stare
fixed upon the bottom boards, the Capataz of the Sulaco
Cargadores resembled a drowned corpse come up
from the bottom to idle away the sunset hour in a small
boat. The excitement of his adventurous ride, the
excitement of the return in time, of achievement, of
success, all this excitement centred round the associated
man who knew of its existence, had departed from him.
To the very last moment he had been cudgelling his
brains as to how he could manage to visit the Great
Isabel without loss of time and undetected. For the
idea of secrecy had come to be connected with the
treasure so closely that even to Barrios himself he had
refrained from mentioning the existence of Decoud
and of the silver on the island. The letters he carried
to the General, however, made brief mention of the
loss of the lighter, as having its bearing upon the situation
in Sulaco. In the circumstances, the one-
eyed tiger-slayer, scenting battle from afar, had not
wasted his time in making inquiries from the messenger.
In fact, Barrios, talking with Nostromo, assumed that
both Don Martin Decoud and the ingots of San Tomé
were lost together, and Nostromo, not questioned directly,
had kept silent, under the influence of some indefinable
form of resentment and distrust. Let Don
Martin speak of everything with his own lips — was
what he told himself mentally.
And now, with the means of gaining the Great Isabel
thrown thus in his way at the earliest possible moment,
his excitement had departed, as when the soul takes
flight leaving the body inert upon an earth it knows no
more. Nostromo did not seem to know the gulf.
For a long time even his eyelids did not flutter once
upon the glazed emptiness of his stare. Then slowly,
without a limb having stirred, without a twitch of
muscle or quiver of an eyelash, an expression, a living
expression came upon the still features, deep thought
crept into the empty stare — as if an outcast soul, a
quiet, brooding soul, finding that untenanted body in
its way, had come in stealthily to take possession.
The Capataz frowned: and in the immense stillness
trails of light upon the water, the knitting of that brow
had the emphasis of a powerful gesture. Nothing
else budged for a long time; then the Capataz shook
his head and again surrendered himself to the universal
repose of all visible things. Suddenly he seized the
oars, and with one movement made the dinghy spin
round, head-on to the Great Isabel. But before he
began to pull he bent once more over the brown stain
on the gunwale.
"I know that thing," he muttered to himself, with a
sagacious jerk of the head. "That's blood."
His stroke was long, vigorous, and steady. Now and
then he looked over his shoulder at the Great Isabel,
presenting its low cliff to his anxious gaze like an impenetrable
face. At last the stem touched the strand.
He flung rather than dragged the boat up the little
beach. At once, turning his back upon the sunset, he
plunged with long strides into the ravine, making the
water of the stream spurt and fly upwards at every
step, as if spurning its shallow, clear, murmuring spirit
with his feet. He wanted to save every moment of daylight.
A mass of earth, grass, and smashed bushes had fallen
down very naturally from above upon the cavity under
the leaning tree. Decoud had attended to the concealment
of the silver as instructed, using the spade with
some intelligence. But Nostromo's half-smile of approval
changed into a scornful curl of the lip by the
sight of the spade itself flung there in full view, as if in
utter carelessness or sudden panic, giving away the
whole thing. Ah! They were all alike in their folly,
these hombres finos that invented laws and governments
and barren tasks for the people.
The Capataz picked up the spade, and with the feel of
horse-hide boxes of treasure came upon him suddenly.
In a very few strokes he uncovered the edges and corners
of several; then, clearing away more earth, became
aware that one of them had been slashed with a knife.
He exclaimed at that discovery in a stifled voice, and
dropped on his knees with a look of irrational apprehension
over one shoulder, then over the other. The
stiff hide had closed, and he hesitated before he pushed
his hand through the long slit and felt the ingots inside.
There they were. One, two, three. Yes, four gone.
Taken away. Four ingots. But who? Decoud? Nobody
else. And why? For what purpose? For what
cursed fancy? Let him explain. Four ingots carried
off in a boat, and — blood!
In the face of the open gulf, the sun, clear, unclouded,
unaltered, plunged into the waters in a grave and untroubled
mystery of self-immolation consummated far
from all mortal eyes, with an infinite majesty of silence
and peace. Four ingots short! — and blood!
The Capataz got up slowly.
"He might simply have cut his hand," he muttered.
"But, then —"
He sat down on the soft earth, unresisting, as if he
had been chained to the treasure, his drawn-up legs
clasped in his hands with an air of hopeless submission,
like a slave set on guard. Once only he lifted his head
smartly: the rattle of hot musketry fire had reached his
ears, like pouring from on high a stream of dry peas
upon a drum. After listening for a while, he said,
half aloud —
"He will never come back to explain."
And he lowered his head again.
"Impossible!" he muttered, gloomily.
The sounds of firing died out. The loom of a great
played on the clouds at the head of the gulf, seemed to
touch with a ruddy and sinister reflection the forms of
the Three Isabels. He never saw it, though he raised
his head.
"But, then, I cannot know," he pronounced, distinctly,
and remained silent and staring for hours.
He could not know. Nobody was to know. As
might have been supposed, the end of Don Martin
Decoud never became a subject of speculation for any
one except Nostromo. Had the truth of the facts
been known, there would always have remained the
question. Why? Whereas the version of his death
at the sinking of the lighter had no uncertainty of
motive. The young apostle of Separation had died
striving for his idea by an ever-lamented accident.
But the truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy
known but to few on this earth, and whom only the
simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanero
of the boulevards had died from solitude and
want of faith in himself and others.
For some good and valid reasons beyond mere human
comprehension, the sea-birds of the gulf shun the Isabels.
The rocky head of Azuera is their haunt, whose
stony levels and chasms resound with their wild and
tumultuous clamour as if they were for ever quarrelling
over the legendary treasure.
At the end of his first day on the Great Isabel,
Decoud, turning in his lair of coarse grass, under the
shade of a tree, said to himself —
"I have not seen as much as one single bird all day."
And he had not heard a sound, either, all day but that
one now of his own muttering voice. It had been a
day of absolute silence — the first he had known in his
life. And he had not slept a wink. Not for all these
not for all that last night of danger and hard physical
toil upon the gulf, had he been able to close his eyes
for a moment. And yet from sunrise to sunset he had
been lying prone on the ground, either on his back or on
his face.
He stretched himself, and with slow steps descended
into the gully to spend the night by the side of the silver.
If Nostromo returned — as he might have done at
any moment — it was there that he would look first;
and night would, of course, be the proper time for an attempt
to communicate. He remembered with profound
indifference that he had not eaten anything yet since
he had been left alone on the island.
He spent the night open-eyed, and when the day
broke he ate something with the same indifference.
The brilliant "Son Decoud," the spoiled darling of the
family, the lover of Antonia and journalist of Sulaco,
was not fit to grapple with himself single-handed.
Solitude from mere outward condition of existence becomes
very swiftly a state of soul in which the affectations
of irony and scepticism have no place. It takes
possession of the mind, and drives forth the thought
into the exile of utter unbelief. After three days of
waiting for the sight of some human face, Decoud
caught himself entertaining a doubt of his own individuality.
It had merged into the world of cloud
and water, of natural forces and forms of nature. In
our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion
of an independent existence as against the whole
scheme of things of which we form a helpless part.
Decoud lost all belief in the reality of his action past
and to come. On the fifth day an immense melancholy
descended upon him palpably. He resolved
not to give himself up to these people in Sulaco, who
obscene spectres. He saw himself struggling feebly in
their midst, and Antonia, gigantic and lovely like an
allegorical statue, looking on with scornful eyes at his
weakness.
Not a living being, not a speck of distant sail, appeared
within the range of his vision; and, as if to escape
from this solitude, he absorbed himself in his
melancholy. The vague consciousness of a misdirected
life given up to impulses whose memory left a bitter
taste in his mouth was the first moral sentiment of his
manhood. But at the same time he felt no remorse.
What should he regret? He had recognized no other
virtue than intelligence, and had erected passions into
duties. Both his intelligence and his passion were
swallowed up easily in this great unbroken solitude of
waiting without faith. Sleeplessness had robbed his
will of all energy, for he had not slept seven hours in
the seven days. His sadness was the sadness of a sceptical
mind. He beheld the universe as a succession of
incomprehensible images. Nostromo was dead. Everything
had failed ignominiously. He no longer dared to
think of Antonia. She had not survived. But if she
survived he could not face her. And all exertion
seemed senseless.
On the tenth day, after a night spent without even
dozing off once (it had occurred to him that Antonia
could not possibly have ever loved a being so impalpable
as himself), the solitude appeared like a great
void, and the silence of the gulf like a tense, thin cord
to which he hung suspended by both hands, without
fear, without surprise, without any sort of emotion
whatever. Only towards the evening, in the comparative
relief of coolness, he began to wish that this cord
would snap. He imagined it snapping with a report as
the end of him. He contemplated that eventuality
with pleasure, because he dreaded the sleepless nights
in which the silence, remaining unbroken in the
shape of a cord to which he hung with both hands,
vibrated with senseless phrases, always the same but
utterly incomprehensible, about Nostromo, Antonia,
Barrios, and proclamations mingled into an ironical
and senseless buzzing. In the daytime he could look
at the silence like a still cord stretched to breaking-
point, with his life, his vain life, suspended to it like a
weight.
"I wonder whether I would hear it snap before I
fell," he asked himself.
The sun was two hours above the horizon when he got
up, gaunt, dirty, white-faced, and looked at it with his
red-rimmed eyes. His limbs obeyed him slowly, as if
full of lead, yet without tremor; and the effect of that
physical condition gave to his movements an unhesitating,
deliberate dignity. He acted as if accomplishing
some sort of rite. He descended into the gully;
for the fascination of all that silver, with its potential
power, survived alone outside of himself. He picked
up the belt with the revolver, that was lying there, and
buckled it round his waist. The cord of silence could
never snap on the island. It must let him fall and
sink into the sea, he thought. And sink! He was looking
at the loose earth covering the treasure. In the sea!
His aspect was that of a somnambulist. He lowered
himself down on his knees slowly and went on grubbing
with his fingers with industrious patience till he uncovered
one of the boxes. Without a pause, as if doing
some work done many times before, he slit it open and
took four ingots, which he put in his pockets. He
covered up the exposed box again and step by step
with a swish.
It was on the third day of his solitude that he had
dragged the dinghy near the water with an idea of rowing
away somewhere, but had desisted partly at the
whisper of lingering hope that Nostromo would return,
partly from conviction of utter uselessness of all effort.
Now she wanted only a slight shove to be set afloat.
He had eaten a little every day after the first, and
had some muscular strength left yet. Taking up the
oars slowly, he pulled away from the cliff of the Great
Isabel, that stood behind him warm with sunshine,
as if with the heat of life, bathed in a rich light from
head to foot as if in a radiance of hope and joy. He
pulled straight towards the setting sun. When the gulf
had grown dark, he ceased rowing and flung the sculls
in. The hollow clatter they made in falling was the
loudest noise he had ever heard in his life. It was a
revelation. It seemed to recall him from far away,
Actually the thought, "Perhaps I may sleep to-night,"
passed through his mind. But he did not believe it.
He believed in nothing; and he remained sitting on the
thwart.
The dawn from behind the mountains put a gleam
into his unwinking eyes. After a clear daybreak the
sun appeared splendidly above the peaks of the range.
The great gulf burst into a glitter all around the boat;
and in this glory of merciless solitude the silence appeared
again before him, stretched taut like a dark,
thin string.
His eyes looked at it while, without haste, he shifted
his seat from the thwart to the gunwale. They looked
at it fixedly, while his hand, feeling about his waist,
unbuttoned the flap of the leather case, drew the revolver,
cocked it, brought it forward pointing at his
sent the still-smoking weapon hurtling through the air.
His eyes looked at it while he fell forward and hung
with his breast on the gunwale and the fingers of his
right hand hooked under the thwart. They looked —
"It is done," he stammered out, in a sudden flow of
blood. His last thought was: "I wonder how that
Capataz died." The stiffness of the fingers relaxed,
and the lover of Antonia Avellanos rolled overboard
without having heard the cord of silence snap in the
solitude of the Placid Gulf, whose glittering surface
remained untroubled by the fall of his body.
A victim of the disillusioned weariness which is the
retribution meted out to intellectual audacity, the brilliant
Don Martin Decoud, weighted by the bars of San
Tomé silver, disappeared without a trace, swallowed
up in the immense indifference of things. His sleepless,
crouching figure was gone from the side of the
San Tomé silver; and for a time the spirits of good and
evil that hover near every concealed treasure of the
earth might have thought that this one had been forgotten
by all mankind. Then, after a few days, another
form appeared striding away from the setting
sun to sit motionless and awake in the narrow black
gully all through the night, in nearly the same pose, in
the same place in which had sat that other sleepless man
who had gone away for ever so quietly in a small boat,
about the time of sunset. And the spirits of good and
evil that hover about a forbidden treasure understood
well that the silver of San Tomé was provided now with
a faithful and lifelong slave.
The magnificent Capataz de Cargadores, victim of
the disenchanted vanity which is the reward of audacious
action, sat in the weary pose of a hunted outcast
through a night of sleeplessness as tormenting as any
affair of his life. And he wondered how Decoud had
died. But he knew the part he had played himself.
First a woman, then a man, abandoned both in their
last extremity, for the sake of this accursed treasure.
It was paid for by a soul lost and by a vanished life.
The blank stillness of awe was succeeded by a gust of
immense pride. There was no one in the world but
Gian' Battista Fidanza, Capataz de Cargadores, the
incorruptible and faithful Nostromo, to pay such a
price.
He had made up his mind that nothing should be
allowed now to rob him of his bargain. Nothing. Decoud
had died. But how? That he was dead he had
not a shadow of a doubt. But four ingots? . . .
What for? Did he mean to come for more — some
other time?
The treasure was putting forth its latent power.
It troubled the clear mind of the man who had paid
the price. He was sure that Decoud was dead. The
island seemed full of that whisper. Dead! Gone!
And he caught himself listening for the swish of bushes
and the splash of the footfalls in the bed of the brook.
Dead! The talker, the novio of Doña Antonia!
"Ha!" he murmured, with his head on his knees,
under the livid clouded dawn breaking over the liberated
Sulaco and upon the gulf as gray as ashes. "It
is to her that he will fly. To her that he will fly!"
And four ingots! Did he take them in revenge, to
cast a spell, like the angry woman who had prophesied
remorse and failure, and yet had laid upon him the
task of saving the children? Well, he had saved the
children. He had defeated the spell of poverty and
starvation. He had done it all alone — or perhaps
helped by the devil. Who cared? He had done it,
San Tomé mine, which appeared to him hateful and
immense, lording it by its vast wealth over the valour,
the toil, the fidelity of the poor, over war and peace,
over the labours of the town, the sea, and the Campo.
The sun lit up the sky behind the peaks of the Cordillera.
The Capataz looked down for a time upon the
fall of loose earth, stones, and smashed bushes, concealing
the hiding-place of the silver.
"I must grow rich very slowly," he meditated, aloud.
| CHAPTER TEN Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard / Joseph Conrad | |