 | Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard / Joseph Conrad |  |
1. NOSTROMO
PART FIRST
THE SILVER OF THE MINE
1. CHAPTER ONE
IN THE time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards,
the town of Sulaco — the luxuriant beauty of the
orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity — had
never been commercially anything more important than
a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides
and indigo. The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the conquerors
that, needing a brisk gale to move at all, would
lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on clipper
lines forges ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had
been barred out of Sulaco by the prevailing calms of its
vast gulf. Some harbours of the earth are made difficult
of access by the treachery of sunken rocks and the
tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an inviolable
sanctuary from the temptations of a trading
world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if
within an enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple
open to the ocean, with its walls of lofty mountains
hung with the mourning draperies of cloud.
On one side of this broad curve in the straight seaboard
of the Republic of Costaguana, the last spur of
the coast range forms an insignificant cape whose name
is Punta Mala. From the middle of the gulf the point
of the land itself is not visible at all; but the shoulder of
a steep hill at the back can be made out faintly like a
shadow on the sky.
On the other side, what seems to be an isolated patch
This is the peninsula of Azuera, a wild chaos of sharp
rocks and stony levels cut about by vertical ravines. It
lies far out to sea like a rough head of stone stretched
from a green-clad coast at the end of a slender neck of
sand covered with thickets of thorny scrub. Utterly
waterless, for the rainfall runs off at once on all sides
into the sea, it has not soil enough — it is said — to grow
a single blade of grass, as if it were blighted by a curse.
The poor, associating by an obscure instinct of consolation
the ideas of evil and wealth, will tell you that
it is deadly because of its forbidden treasures. The
common folk of the neighbourhood, peons of the
estancias, vaqueros of the seaboard plains, tame Indians
coming miles to market with a bundle of sugar-cane
or a basket of maize worth about threepence, are well
aware that heaps of shining gold lie in the gloom of the
deep precipices cleaving the stony levels of Azuera.
Tradition has it that many adventurers of olden time had
perished in the search. The story goes also that within
men's memory two wandering sailors — Americanos,
perhaps, but gringos of some sort for certain — talked
over a gambling, good-for-nothing mozo, and the three
stole a donkey to carry for them a bundle of dry sticks,
a water-skin, and provisions enough to last a few days.
Thus accompanied, and with revolvers at their belts,
they had started to chop their way with machetes
through the thorny scrub on the neck of the peninsula.
On the second evening an upright spiral of smoke (it
could only have been from their camp-fire) was seen for
the first time within memory of man standing up faintly
upon the sky above a razor-backed ridge on the stony
head. The crew of a coasting schooner, lying becalmed
three miles off the shore, stared at it with amazement
till dark. A negro fisherman, living in a lonely hut in a
for some sign. He called to his wife just as the sun
was about to set. They had watched the strange portent
with envy, incredulity, and awe.
The impious adventurers gave no other sign. The
sailors, the Indian, and the stolen burro were never
seen again. As to the mozo, a Sulaco man — his wife
paid for some masses, and the poor four-footed beast,
being without sin, had been probably permitted to die;
but the two gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to
be dwelling to this day amongst the rocks, under the
fatal spell of their success. Their souls cannot tear
themselves away from their bodies mounting guard over
the discovered treasure. They are now rich and hungry
and thirsty — a strange theory of tenacious gringo
ghosts suffering in their starved and parched flesh of
defiant heretics, where a Christian would have renounced
and been released.
These, then, are the legendary inhabitants of Azuera
guarding its forbidden wealth; and the shadow on the
sky on one side with the round patch of blue haze
blurring the bright skirt of the horizon on the other,
mark the two outermost points of the bend which bears
the name of Golfo Placido, because never a strong
wind had been known to blow upon its waters.
On crossing the imaginary line drawn from Punta
Mala to Azuera the ships from Europe bound to Sulaco
lose at once the strong breezes of the ocean. They become
the prey of capricious airs that play with them for
thirty hours at a stretch sometimes. Before them the
head of the calm gulf is filled on most days of the year
by a great body of motionless and opaque clouds. On
the rare clear mornings another shadow is cast upon the
sweep of the gulf. The dawn breaks high behind the
towering and serrated wall of the Cordillera, a clear-cut
pedestal of forest rising from the very edge of the shore.
Amongst them the white head of Higuerota rises
majestically upon the blue. Bare clusters of enormous
rocks sprinkle with tiny black dots the smooth dome of
snow.
Then, as the midday sun withdraws from the gulf
the shadow of the mountains, the clouds begin to roll
out of the lower valleys. They swathe in sombre
tatters the naked crags of precipices above the wooded
slopes, hide the peaks, smoke in stormy trails across the
snows of Higuerota. The Cordillera is gone from you
as if it had dissolved itself into great piles of grey and
black vapours that travel out slowly to seaward and
vanish into thin air all along the front before the blazing
heat of the day. The wasting edge of the cloud-bank
always strives for, but seldom wins, the middle of the
gulf. The sun — as the sailors say — is eating it up.
Unless perchance a sombre thunder-head breaks away
from the main body to career all over the gulf till it
escapes into the offing beyond Azuera, where it bursts
suddenly into flame and crashes like a sinster pirate-
ship of the air, hove-to above the horizon, engaging the
sea.
At night the body of clouds advancing higher up
the sky smothers the whole quiet gulf below with an
impenetrable darkness, in which the sound of the falling
showers can be heard beginning and ceasing abruptly —
now here, now there. Indeed, these cloudy nights are
proverbial with the seamen along the whole west coast
of a great continent. Sky, land, and sea disappear
together out of the world when the Placido — as the saying
is — goes to sleep under its black poncho. The few
stars left below the seaward frown of the vault shine
feebly as into the mouth of a black cavern. In its
sails flutter invisible above your head. The eye of God
Himself — they add with grim profanity — could not
find out what work a man's hand is doing in there; and
you would be free to call the devil to your aid with
impunity if even his malice were not defeated by such a
blind darkness.
The shores on the gulf are steep-to all round; three uninhabited
islets basking in the sunshine just outside the
cloud veil, and opposite the entrance to the harbour of
Sulaco, bear the name of "The Isabels."
There is the Great Isabel; the Little Isabel, which is
round; and Hermosa, which is the smallest.
That last is no more than a foot high, and about seven
paces across, a mere flat top of a grey rock which smokes
like a hot cinder after a shower, and where no man
would care to venture a naked sole before sunset. On
the Little Isabel an old ragged palm, with a thick bulging
trunk rough with spines, a very witch amongst palm
trees, rustles a dismal bunch of dead leaves above the
coarse sand. The Great Isabel has a spring of fresh
water issuing from the overgrown side of a ravine.
Resembling an emerald green wedge of land a mile long,
and laid flat upon the sea, it bears two forest trees standing
close together, with a wide spread of shade at the
foot of their smooth trunks. A ravine extending the
whole length of the island is full of bushes; and presenting
a deep tangled cleft on the high side spreads itself
out on the other into a shallow depression abutting
on a small strip of sandy shore.
From that low end of the Great Isabel the eye plunges
through an opening two miles away, as abrupt as if
chopped with an axe out of the regular sweep of the
coast, right into the harbour of Sulaco. It is an oblong,
lake-like piece of water. On one side the short wooded
angles to the very strand; on the other the open view
of the great Sulaco plain passes into the opal mystery
of great distances overhung by dry haze. The town of
Sulaco itself — tops of walls, a great cupola, gleams of
white miradors in a vast grove of orange trees — lies
between the mountains and the plain, at some little
distance from its harbour and out of the direct line of
sight from the sea.
2. CHAPTER TWO
THE only sign of commercial activity within the
harbour, visible from the beach of the Great Isabel, is
the square blunt end of the wooden jetty which the
Oceanic Steam Navigation Company (the O.S.N. of
familiar speech) had thrown over the shallow part of the
bay soon after they had resolved to make of Sulaco one
of their ports of call for the Republic of Costaguana.
The State possesses several harbours on its long sea-
board, but except Cayta, an important place, all are
either small and inconvenient inlets in an iron-bound
coast — like Esmeralda, for instance, sixty miles to the
south — or else mere open roadsteads exposed to the
winds and fretted by the surf.
Perhaps the very atmospheric conditions which had
kept away the merchant fleets of bygone ages induced
the O.S.N. Company to violate the sanctuary of peace
sheltering the calm existence of Sulaco. The variable
airs sporting lightly with the vast semicircle of waters
within the head of Azuera could not baffle the steam
power of their excellent fleet. Year after year the
black hulls of their ships had gone up and down
the coast, in and out, past Azuera, past the Isabels,
past Punta Mala — disregarding everything but the
tyranny of time. Their names, the names of all
mythology, became the household words of a coast that
had never been ruled by the gods of Olympus. The
Juno was known only for her comfortable cabins amid-
ships, the Saturn for the geniality of her captain and
the painted and gilt luxuriousness of her saloon, whereas
and to be avoided by coastwise passengers. The
humblest Indian in the obscurest village on the coast
was familiar with the Cerberus, a little black puffer without
charm or living accommodation to speak of, whose
mission was to creep inshore along the wooded beaches
close to mighty ugly rocks, stopping obligingly before
every cluster of huts to collect produce, down to three-
pound parcels of indiarubber bound in a wrapper of dry
grass.
And as they seldom failed to account for the smallest
package, rarely lost a bullock, and had never drowned
a single passenger, the name of the O.S.N. stood
very high for trustworthiness. People declared that
under the Company's care their lives and property
were safer on the water than in their own houses on
shore.
The O.S.N.'s superintendent in Sulaco for the whole
Costaguana section of the service was very proud of his
Company's standing. He resumed it in a saying which
was very often on his lips, "We never make mistakes."
To the Company's officers it took the form of a severe
injunction, "We must make no mistakes. I'll have
no mistakes here, no matter what Smith may do at his
end."
Smith, on whom he had never set eyes in his life, was
the other superintendent of the service, quartered some
fifteen hundred miles away from Sulaco. "Don't talk
to me of your Smith."
Then, calming down suddenly, he would dismiss the
subject with studied negligence.
"Smith knows no more of this continent than a
baby."
"Our excellent Señor Mitchell" for the business and
official world of Sulaco; "Fussy Joe" for the commanders
prided himself on his profound knowledge of men
and things in the country — cosas de Costaguana.
Amongst these last he accounted as most unfavourable
to the orderly working of his Company the frequent
changes of government brought about by revolutions
of the military type.
The political atmosphere of the Republic was
generally stormy in these days. The fugitive patriots of
the defeated party had the knack of turning up again on
the coast with half a steamer's load of small arms and
ammunition. Such resourcefulness Captain Mitchell
considered as perfectly wonderful in view of their utter
destitution at the time of flight. He had observed that
"they never seemed to have enough change about them
to pay for their passage ticket out of the country."
And he could speak with knowledge; for on a memorable
occasion he had been called upon to save the life
of a dictator, together with the lives of a few Sulaco
officials — the political chief, the director of the customs,
and the head of police — belonging to an overturned
government. Poor Señor Ribiera (such was the dictator's
name) had come pelting eighty miles over
mountain tracks after the lost battle of Socorro, in
the hope of out-distancing the fatal news — which, of
course, he could not manage to do on a lame mule. The
animal, moreover, expired under him at the end of the
Alameda, where the military band plays sometimes in
the evenings between the revolutions. "Sir," Captain
Mitchell would pursue with portentous gravity, "the
ill-timed end of that mule attracted attention to the
unfortunate rider. His features were recognized by
several deserters from the Dictatorial army amongst the
rascally mob already engaged in smashing the windows
of the Intendencia."
Early on the morning of that day the local authorities
of Sulaco had fled for refuge to the O.S.N. Company's
offices, a strong building near the shore end of the jetty,
leaving the town to the mercies of a revolutionary
rabble; and as the Dictator was execrated by the
populace on account of the severe recruitment law his
necessities had compelled him to enforce during the
struggle, he stood a good chance of being torn to
pieces. Providentially, Nostromo — invaluable fellow
— with some Italian workmen, imported to work upon
the National Central Railway, was at hand, and
managed to snatch him away — for the time at least.
Ultimately, Captain Mitchell succeeded in taking everybody
off in his own gig to one of the Company's steamers
— it was the Minerva — just then, as luck would have it,
entering the harbour.
He had to lower these gentlemen at the end of a rope
out of a hole in the wall at the back, while the mob
which, pouring out of the town, had spread itself all along
the shore, howled and foamed at the foot of the building
in front. He had to hurry them then the whole length
of the jetty; it had been a desperate dash, neck or
nothing — and again it was Nostromo, a fellow in a
thousand, who, at the head, this time, of the Company's
body of lightermen, held the jetty against the rushes of
the rabble, thus giving the fugitives time to reach the
gig lying ready for them at the other end with the
Company's flag at the stern. Sticks, stones, shots
flew; knives, too, were thrown. Captain Mitchell
exhibited willingly the long cicatrice of a cut over his
left ear and temple, made by a razor-blade fastened to a
stick — a weapon, he explained, very much in favour
with the "worst kind of nigger out here."
Captain Mitchell was a thick, elderly man, wearing
high, pointed collars and short side-whiskers, partial to
his air of pompous reserve.
"These gentlemen," he would say, staring with great
solemnity, "had to run like rabbits, sir. I ran like a
rabbit myself. Certain forms of death are — er — distasteful
to a — a — er — respectable man. They would
have pounded me to death, too. A crazy mob, sir, does
not discriminate. Under providence we owed our
preservation to my Capataz de Cargadores, as they
called him in the town, a man who, when I discovered
his value, sir, was just the bos'n of an Italian ship, a
big Genoese ship, one of the few European ships that
ever came to Sulaco with a general cargo before the
building of the National Central. He left her on
account of some very respectable friends he made here,
his own countrymen, but also, I suppose, to better himself.
Sir, I am a pretty good judge of character. I
engaged him to be the foreman of our lightermen, and
caretaker of our jetty. That's all that he was. But
without him Señor Ribiera would have been a dead
man. This Nostromo, sir, a man absolutely above
reproach, became the terror of all the thieves in the
town. We were infested, infested, overrun, sir, here at
that time by ladrones and matreros, thieves and
murderers from the whole province. On this occasion
they had been flocking into Sulaco for a week past.
They had scented the end, sir. Fifty per cent. of that
murdering mob were professional bandits from the
Campo, sir, but there wasn't one that hadn't heard of
Nostromo. As to the town leperos, sir, the sight of his
black whiskers and white teeth was enough for them.
They quailed before him, sir. That's what the force of
character will do for you."
It could very well be said that it was Nostromo alone
who saved the lives of these gentlemen. Captain Mitchell,
collapse, panting, terrified, and exasperated, but safe, on
the luxuriant velvet sofas in the first-class saloon of the
Minerva. To the very last he had been careful to address
the ex-Dictator as "Your Excellency."
"Sir, I could do no other. The man was down —
ghastly, livid, one mass of scratches."
The Minerva never let go her anchor that call. The
superintendent ordered her out of the harbour at once.
No cargo could be landed, of course, and the passengers
for Sulaco naturally refused to go ashore. They could
hear the firing and see plainly the fight going on at the
edge of the water. The repulsed mob devoted its
energies to an attack upon the Custom House, a dreary,
unfinished-looking structure with many windows two
hundred yards away from the O.S.N. Offices, and the
only other building near the harbour. Captain Mitchell,
after directing the commander of the Minerva
to land "these gentlemen" in the first port of call outside
Costaguana, went back in his gig to see what could
be done for the protection of the Company's property.
That and the property of the railway were preserved by
the European residents; that is, by Captain Mitchell
himself and the staff of engineers building the road,
aided by the Italian and Basque workmen who rallied
faithfully round their English chiefs. The Company's
lightermen, too, natives of the Republic, behaved very
well under their Capataz. An outcast lot of very mixed
blood, mainly negroes, everlastingly at feud with the
other customers of low grog shops in the town, they
embraced with delight this opportunity to settle their
personal scores under such favourable auspices. There
was not one of them that had not, at some time or
other, looked with terror at Nostromo's revolver poked
very close at his face, or been otherwise daunted by
their Capataz was, they said, too scornful in his temper
ever to utter abuse, a tireless taskmaster, and the more
to be feared because of his aloofness. And behold!
there he was that day, at their head, condescending to
make jocular remarks to this man or the other.
Such leadership was inspiriting, and in truth all the
harm the mob managed to achieve was to set fire to one
— only one — stack of railway-sleepers, which, being
creosoted, burned well. The main attack on the rail-
way yards, on the O.S.N. Offices, and especially on the
Custom House, whose strong room, it was well known,
contained a large treasure in silver ingots, failed completely.
Even the little hotel kept by old Giorgio,
standing alone halfway between the harbour and the
town, escaped looting and destruction, not by a miracle,
but because with the safes in view they had neglected it
at first, and afterwards found no leisure to stop. Nostromo,
with his Cargadores, was pressing them too hard
then.
3. CHAPTER THREE
IT MIGHT have been said that there he was only protecting
his own. From the first he had been admitted
to live in the intimacy of the family of the hotel-keeper
who was a countryman of his. Old Giorgio Viola, a
Genoese with a shaggy white leonine head — often called
simply "the Garibaldino" (as Mohammedans are
called after their prophet) — was, to use Captain Mitchell's
own words, the "respectable married friend" by
whose advice Nostromo had left his ship to try for a run
of shore luck in Costaguana.
The old man, full of scorn for the populace, as your
austere republican so often is, had disregarded the
preliminary sounds of trouble. He went on that day
as usual pottering about the "casa" in his slippers,
muttering angrily to himself his contempt of the non-
political nature of the riot, and shrugging his shoulders.
In the end he was taken unawares by the out-rush of
the rabble. It was too late then to remove his family,
and, indeed, where could he have run to with the portly
Signora Teresa and two little girls on that great plain?
So, barricading every opening, the old man sat down
sternly in the middle of the darkened café with an old
shot-gun on his knees. His wife sat on another chair by
his side, muttering pious invocations to all the saints of
the calendar.
The old republican did not believe in saints, or in
prayers, or in what he called "priest's religion."
Liberty and Garibaldi were his divinities; but he
matters a lofty and silent attitude.
His two girls, the eldest fourteen, and the other two
years younger, crouched on the sanded floor, on each
side of the Signora Teresa, with their heads on their
mother's lap, both scared, but each in her own way, the
dark-haired Linda indignant and angry, the fair Giselle,
the younger, bewildered and resigned. The Patrona
removed her arms, which embraced her daughters, for a
moment to cross herself and wring her hands hurriedly.
She moaned a little louder.
"Oh! Gian' Battista, why art thou not here? Oh!
why art thou not here?"
She was not then invoking the saint himself, but
calling upon Nostromo, whose patron he was. And
Giorgio, motionless on the chair by her side, would be
provoked by these reproachful and distracted appeals.
"Peace, woman! Where's the sense of it? There's
his duty," he murmured in the dark; and she would
retort, panting —
"Eh! I have no patience. Duty! What of the
woman who has been like a mother to him? I bent my
knee to him this morning; don't you go out, Gian'
Battista — stop in the house, Battistino — look at those
two little innocent children!"
Mrs. Viola was an Italian, too, a native of Spezzia,
and though considerably younger than her husband,
already middle-aged. She had a handsome face, whose
complexion had turned yellow because the climate of
Sulaco did not suit her at all. Her voice was a rich
contralto. When, with her arms folded tight under her
ample bosom, she scolded the squat, thick-legged China
girls handling linen, plucking fowls, pounding corn in
wooden mortars amongst the mud outbuildings at the
back of the house, she could bring out such an impassioned,
watch-dog bolted into his kennel with a great rattle.
Luis, a cinnamon-coloured mulatto with a sprouting
moustache and thick, dark lips, would stop sweeping the
café with a broom of palm-leaves to let a gentle shudder
run down his spine. His languishing almond eyes
would remain closed for a long time.
This was the staff of the Casa Viola, but all these
people had fled early that morning at the first sounds
of the riot, preferring to hide on the plain rather than
trust themselves in the house; a preference for which
they were in no way to blame, since, whether true or not,
it was generally believed in the town that the Garibaldino
had some money buried under the clay floor of the
kitchen. The dog, an irritable, shaggy brute, barked
violently and whined plaintively in turns at the back,
running in and out of his kennel as rage or fear prompted
him.
Bursts of great shouting rose and died away, like wild
gusts of wind on the plain round the barricaded house;
the fitful popping of shots grew louder above the yelling.
Sometimes there were intervals of unaccountable stillness
outside, and nothing could have been more gaily
peaceful than the narrow bright lines of sunlight from
the cracks in the shutters, ruled straight across the
café over the disarranged chairs and tables to the wall
opposite. Old Giorgio had chosen that bare, white-
washed room for a retreat. It had only one window,
and its only door swung out upon the track of thick
dust fenced by aloe hedges between the harbour and
the town, where clumsy carts used to creak along behind
slow yokes of oxen guided by boys on horseback.
In a pause of stillness Giorgio cocked his gun. The
ominous sound wrung a low moan from the rigid figure
of the woman sitting by his side. A sudden outbreak
to a confused murmur of growls. Somebody ran along;
the loud catching of his breath was heard for an instant
passing the door; there were hoarse mutters and footsteps
near the wall; a shoulder rubbed against the
shutter, effacing the bright lines of sunshine pencilled
across the whole breadth of the room. Signora Teresa's
arms thrown about the kneeling forms of her daughters
embraced them closer with a convulsive pressure.
The mob, driven away from the Custom House, had
broken up into several bands, retreating across the plain
in the direction of the town. The subdued crash of
irregular volleys fired in the distance was answered by
faint yells far away. In the intervals the single shots
rang feebly, and the low, long, white building blinded in
every window seemed to be the centre of a turmoil
widening in a great circle about its closed-up silence.
But the cautious movements and whispers of a routed
party seeking a momentary shelter behind the wall
made the darkness of the room, striped by threads of
quiet sunlight, alight with evil, stealthy sounds. The
Violas had them in their ears as though invisible
ghosts hovering about their chairs had consulted in
mutters as to the advisability of setting fire to this
foreigner's casa.
It was trying to the nerves. Old Viola had risen
slowly, gun in hand, irresolute, for he did not see how he
could prevent them. Already voices could be heard
talking at the back. Signora Teresa was beside herself
with terror.
"Ah! the traitor! the traitor!" she mumbled, almost
inaudibly. "Now we are going to be burnt; and I
bent my knee to him. No! he must run at the heels of
his English."
She seemed to think that Nostromo's mere presence
she, too, was under the spell of that reputation the Capataz
de Cargadores had made for himself by the waterside,
along the railway line, with the English and with
the populace of Sulaco. To his face, and even against
her husband, she invariably affected to laugh it to scorn,
sometimes good-naturedly, more often with a curious
bitterness. But then women are unreasonable in their
opinions, as Giorgio used to remark calmly on fitting
occasions. On this occasion, with his gun held at
ready before him, he stooped down to his wife's head,
and, keeping his eyes steadfastly on the barricaded
door, he breathed out into her ear that Nostromo would
have been powerless to help. What could two men
shut up in a house do against twenty or more bent upon
setting fire to the roof? Gian' Battista was thinking of
the casa all the time, he was sure.
"He think of the casa! He!" gasped Signora Viola,
crazily. She struck her breast with her open hands.
"I know him. He thinks of nobody but himself."
A discharge of firearms near by made her throw her
head back and close her eyes. Old Giorgio set his
teeth hard under his white moustache, and his eyes began
to roll fiercely. Several bullets struck the end of
the wall together; pieces of plaster could be heard
falling outside; a voice screamed "Here they come!"
and after a moment of uneasy silence there was a rush
of running feet along the front.
Then the tension of old Giorgio's attitude relaxed,
and a smile of contemptuous relief came upon his lips
of an old fighter with a leonine face. These were not a
people striving for justice, but thieves. Even to defend
his life against them was a sort of degradation for
a man who had been one of Garibaldi's immortal
thousand in the conquest of Sicily. He had an immense
who did not know the meaning of the word "liberty."
He grounded his old gun, and, turning his head,
glanced at the coloured lithograph of Garibaldi in a
black frame on the white wall; a thread of strong sunshine
cut it perpendicularly. His eyes, accustomed to
the luminous twilight, made out the high colouring of
the face, the red of the shirt, the outlines of the square
shoulders, the black patch of the Bersagliere hat with
cock's feathers curling over the crown. An immortal
hero! This was your liberty; it gave you not only life,
but immortality as well!
For that one man his fanaticism had suffered no
diminution. In the moment of relief from the apprehension
of the greatest danger, perhaps, his family
had been exposed to in all their wanderings, he had
turned to the picture of his old chief, first and only,
then laid his hand on his wife's shoulder.
The children kneeling on the floor had not moved.
Signora Teresa opened her eyes a little, as though he
had awakened her from a very deep and dreamless
slumber. Before he had time in his deliberate way to
say a reassuring word she jumped up, with the children
clinging to her, one on each side, gasped for breath, and
let out a hoarse shriek.
It was simultaneous with the bang of a violent blow
struck on the outside of the shutter. They could hear
suddenly the snorting of a horse, the restive tramping of
hoofs on the narrow, hard path in front of the house; the
toe of a boot struck at the shutter again; a spur jingled
at every blow, and an excited voice shouted, "Hola!
hola, in there!"
4. CHAPTER FOUR
ALL the morning Nostromo had kept his eye from afar
on the Casa Viola, even in the thick of the hottest scrimmage
near the Custom House. "If I see smoke rising
over there," he thought to himself, "they are lost."
Directly the mob had broken he pressed with a small
band of Italian workmen in that direction, which, indeed,
was the shortest line towards the town. That
part of the rabble he was pursuing seemed to think of
making a stand under the house; a volley fired by his
followers from behind an aloe hedge made the rascals
fly. In a gap chopped out for the rails of the harbour
branch line Nostromo appeared, mounted on his
silver-grey mare. He shouted, sent after them one
shot from his revolver, and galloped up to the café
window. He had an idea that old Giorgio would
choose that part of the house for a refuge.
His voice had penetrated to them, sounding breathlessly
hurried: "Hola! Vecchio! O, Vecchio! Is it all
well with you in there?"
"You see —" murmured old Viola to his wife.
Signora Teresa was silent now. Outside Nostromo
laughed.
"I can hear the padrona is not dead."
"You have done your best to kill me with fear," cried
Signora Teresa. She wanted to say something more,
but her voice failed her.
Linda raised her eyes to her face for a moment, but
old Giorgio shouted apologetically —
"She is a little upset."
Outside Nostromo shouted back with another
laugh —
"She cannot upset me."
Signora Teresa found her voice.
"It is what I say. You have no heart — and you
have no conscience, Gian' Battista —"
They heard him wheel his horse away from the
shutters. The party he led were babbling excitedly in
Italian and Spanish, inciting each other to the pursuit.
He put himself at their head, crying, "Avanti!"
"He has not stopped very long with us. There is no
praise from strangers to be got here," Signora Teresa
said tragically. "Avanti! Yes! That is all he cares
for. To be first somewhere — somehow — to be first
with these English. They will be showing him to
everybody. 'This is our Nostromo!'" She laughed
ominously. "What a name! What is that? Nostromo?
He would take a name that is properly no
word from them."
Meantime Giorgio, with tranquil movements, had
been unfastening the door; the flood of light fell on
Signora Teresa, with her two girls gathered to her side,
a picturesque woman in a pose of maternal exaltation.
Behind her the wall was dazzlingly white, and the
crude colours of the Garibaldi lithograph paled in the
sunshine.
Old Viola, at the door, moved his arm upwards as if
referring all his quick, fleeting thoughts to the picture
of his old chief on the wall. Even when he was cooking
for the "Signori Inglesi" — the engineers (he was a
famous cook, though the kitchen was a dark place) — he
was, as it were, under the eye of the great man who had
led him in a glorious struggle where, under the walls
of Gaeta, tyranny would have expired for ever had it not
been for that accursed Piedmontese race of kings and
during a delicate operation with some shredded onions,
and the old man was seen backing out of the doorway,
swearing and coughing violently in an acrid cloud of
smoke, the name of Cavour — the arch intriguer sold to
kings and tyrants — could be heard involved in imprecations
against the China girls, cooking in general,
and the brute of a country where he was reduced to live
for the love of liberty that traitor had strangled.
Then Signora Teresa, all in black, issuing from
another door, advanced, portly and anxious, inclining
her fine, black-browed head, opening her arms, and
crying in a profound tone —
"Giorgio! thou passionate man! Misericordia
Divina! In the sun like this! He will make himself
ill."
At her feet the hens made off in all directions, with
immense strides; if there were any engineers from up
the line staying in Sulaco, a young English face or two
would appear at the billiard-room occupying one end of
the house; but at the other end, in the café, Luis, the
mulatto, took good care not to show himself. The
Indian girls, with hair like flowing black manes, and
dressed only in a shift and short petticoat, stared dully
from under the square-cut fringes on their foreheads;
the noisy frizzling of fat had stopped, the fumes floated
upwards in sunshine, a strong smell of burnt onions
hung in the drowsy heat, enveloping the house; and the
eye lost itself in a vast flat expanse of grass to the west,
as if the plain between the Sierra overtopping Sulaco
and the coast range away there towards Esmeralda had
been as big as half the world.
Signora Teresa, after an impressive pause, remonstrated
—
"Eh, Giorgio! Leave Cavour alone and take care of
with the two children, because you cannot live under a
king."
And while she looked at him she would sometimes put
her hand hastily to her side with a short twitch of her
fine lips and a knitting of her black, straight eyebrows
like a flicker of angry pain or an angry thought on her
handsome, regular features.
It was pain; she suppressed the twinge. It had come
to her first a few years after they had left Italy to emigrate
to America and settle at last in Sulaco after
wandering from town to town, trying shopkeeping in a
small way here and there; and once an organized enterprise
of fishing — in Maldonado — for Giorgio, like the
great Garibaldi, had been a sailor in his time.
Sometimes she had no patience with pain. For years
its gnawing had been part of the landscape embracing
the glitter of the harbour under the wooded spurs of the
range; and the sunshine itself was heavy and dull —
heavy with pain — not like the sunshine of her girlhood,
in which middle-aged Giorgio had wooed her gravely
and passionately on the shores of the gulf of Spezzia.
"You go in at once, Giorgio," she directed. "One
would think you do not wish to have any pity on me —
with four Signori Inglesi staying in the house."
"Va bene, va bene," Giorgio would mutter.
He obeyed. The Signori Inglesi would require their
midday meal presently. He had been one of the
immortal and invincible band of liberators who had
made the mercenaries of tyranny fly like chaff before a
hurricane, "un uragano terribile." But that was before
he was married and had children; and before tyranny
had reared its head again amongst the traitors who had
imprisoned Garibaldi, his hero.
There were three doors in the front of the house, and
another of them with his big bush of white hair, his
arms folded, his legs crossed, leaning back his leonine
head against the side, and looking up the wooded
slopes of the foothills at the snowy dome of Higuerota.
The front of his house threw off a black long rectangle
of shade, broadening slowly over the soft ox-cart track.
Through the gaps, chopped out in the oleander hedges,
the harbour branch railway, laid out temporarily on the
level of the plain, curved away its shining parallel ribbons
on a belt of scorched and withered grass within
sixty yards of the end of the house. In the evening
the empty material trains of flat cars circled round the
dark green grove of Sulaco, and ran, undulating slightly
with white jets of steam, over the plain towards the
Casa Viola, on their way to the railway yards by
the harbour. The Italian drivers saluted him from the
foot-plate with raised hand, while the negro brakesmen
sat carelessly on the brakes, looking straight forward,
with the rims of their big hats flapping in the wind. In
return Giorgio would give a slight sideways jerk of the
head, without unfolding his arms.
On this memorable day of the riot his arms were not
folded on his chest. His hand grasped the barrel of the
gun grounded on the threshold; he did not look up once
at the white dome of Higuerota, whose cool purity
seemed to hold itself aloof from a hot earth. His eyes
examined the plain curiously. Tall trails of dust subsided
here and there. In a speckless sky the sun hung
clear and blinding. Knots of men ran headlong; others
made a stand; and the irregular rattle of firearms
came rippling to his ears in the fiery, still air. Single
figures on foot raced desperately. Horsemen galloped
towards each other, wheeled round together, separated
at speed. Giorgio saw one fall, rider and horse disappearing
movements of the animated scene were like the passages
of a violent game played upon the plain by dwarfs
mounted and on foot, yelling with tiny throats, under
the mountain that seemed a colossal embodiment of
silence. Never before had Giorgio seen this bit of plain
so full of active life; his gaze could not take in all its
details at once; he shaded his eyes with his hand, till
suddenly the thundering of many hoofs near by startled
him.
A troop of horses had broken out of the fenced paddock
of the Railway Company. They came on like a
whirlwind, and dashed over the line snorting, kicking,
squealing in a compact, piebald, tossing mob of bay,
brown, grey backs, eyes staring, necks extended, nostrils
red, long tails streaming. As soon as they had
leaped upon the road the thick dust flew upwards from
under their hoofs, and within six yards of Giorgio only
a brown cloud with vague forms of necks and cruppers
rolled by, making the soil tremble on its passage.
Viola coughed, turning his face away from the dust,
and shaking his head slightly.
"There will be some horse-catching to be done before
to-night," he muttered.
In the square of sunlight falling through the door
Signora Teresa, kneeling before the chair, had bowed
her head, heavy with a twisted mass of ebony hair
streaked with silver, into the palm of her hands. The
black lace shawl she used to drape about her face had
dropped to the ground by her side. The two girls had
got up, hand-in-hand, in short skirts, their loose hair
falling in disorder. The younger had thrown her arm
across her eyes, as if afraid to face the light. Linda,
with her hand on the other's shoulder, stared fearlessly.
Viola looked at his children.
energetic in expression, it had the immobility of a
carving. It was impossible to discover what he thought.
Bushy grey eyebrows shaded his dark glance.
"Well! And do you not pray like your mother?"
Linda pouted, advancing her red lips, which were
almost too red; but she had admirable eyes, brown, with
a sparkle of gold in the irises, full of intelligence and
meaning, and so clear that they seemed to throw a glow
upon her thin, colourless face. There were bronze
glints in the sombre clusters of her hair, and the eye-
lashes, long and coal black, made her complexion appear
still more pale.
"Mother is going to offer up a lot of candles in the
church. She always does when Nostromo has been
away fighting. I shall have some to carry up to the
Chapel of the Madonna in the Cathedral."
She said all this quickly, with great assurance, in an
animated, penetrating voice. Then, giving her sister's
shoulder a slight shake, she added —
"And she will be made to carry one, too!"
"Why made?" inquired Giorgio, gravely. "Does
she not want to?"
"She is timid," said Linda, with a little burst of
laughter. "People notice her fair hair as she goes along
with us. They call out after her, 'Look at the Rubia!
Look at the Rubiacita!' They call out in the streets.
She is timid."
"And you? You are not timid — eh?" the father
pronounced, slowly.
She tossed back all her dark hair.
"Nobody calls out after me."
Old Giorgio contemplated his children thoughtfully.
There was two years difference between them. They
had been born to him late, years after the boy had died.
Gian' Battista — he whom the English called Nostromo;
but as to his daughters, the severity of his temper, his
advancing age, his absorption in his memories, had prevented
his taking much notice of them. He loved his
children, but girls belong more to the mother, and much
of his affection had been expended in the worship and
service of liberty.
When quite a youth he had deserted from a ship trading
to La Plata, to enlist in the navy of Montevideo,
then under the command of Garibaldi. Afterwards,
in the Italian legion of the Republic struggling against
the encroaching tyranny of Rosas, he had taken part,
on great plains, on the banks of immense rivers, in the
fiercest fighting perhaps the world had ever known.
He had lived amongst men who had declaimed about
liberty, suffered for liberty, died for liberty, with a
desperate exaltation, and with their eyes turned
towards an oppressed Italy. His own enthusiasm had
been fed on scenes of carnage, on the examples of lofty
devotion, on the din of armed struggle, on the inflamed
language of proclamations. He had never parted from
the chief of his choice — the fiery apostle of independence
— keeping by his side in America and in Italy till after
the fatal day of Aspromonte, when the treachery of
kings, emperors, and ministers had been revealed to the
world in the wounding and imprisonment of his hero — a
catastrophe that had instilled into him a gloomy doubt
of ever being able to understand the ways of Divine
justice.
He did not deny it, however. It required patience,
he would say. Though he disliked priests, and would
not put his foot inside a church for anything, he believed
in God. Were not the proclamations against tyrants
addressed to the peoples in the name of God and liberty?
sometimes. In Sicily, an Englishman who had turned
up in Palermo after its evacuation by the army of the
king, had given him a Bible in Italian — the publication
of the British and Foreign Bible Society, bound in a
dark leather cover. In periods of political adversity,
in the pauses of silence when the revolutionists issued
no proclamations, Giorgio earned his living with the
first work that came to hand — as sailor, as dock labourer
on the quays of Genoa, once as a hand on a farm in
the hills above Spezzia — and in his spare time he
studied the thick volume. He carried it with him into
battles. Now it was his only reading, and in order not
to be deprived of it (the print was small) he had consented
to accept the present of a pair of silver-mounted
spectacles from Señora Emilia Gould, the wife of
the Englishman who managed the silver mine in
the mountains three leagues from the town. She was
the only Englishwoman in Sulaco.
Giorgio Viola had a great consideration for the
English. This feeling, born on the battlefields of
Uruguay, was forty years old at the very least. Several
of them had poured their blood for the cause of freedom
in America, and the first he had ever known he remembered
by the name of Samuel; he commanded a
negro company under Garibaldi, during the famous
siege of Montevideo, and died heroically with his
negroes at the fording of the Boyana. He, Giorgio, had
reached the rank of ensign-alferez-and cooked for the
general. Later, in Italy, he, with the rank of lieutenant,
rode with the staff and still cooked for the general. He
had cooked for him in Lombardy through the whole
campaign; on the march to Rome he had lassoed his
beef in the Campagna after the American manner; he
had been wounded in the defence of the Roman Republic;
general, carried out of the woods the inanimate body of
the general's wife into the farmhouse where she died,
exhausted by the hardships of that terrible retreat.
He had survived that disastrous time to attend his
general in Palermo when the Neapolitan shells from the
castle crashed upon the town. He had cooked for him
on the field of Volturno after fighting all day. And
everywhere he had seen Englishmen in the front rank
of the army of freedom. He respected their nation because
they loved Garibaldi. Their very countesses
and princesses had kissed the general's hands in London,
it was said. He could well believe it; for the nation was
noble, and the man was a saint. It was enough to look
once at his face to see the divine force of faith in him
and his great pity for all that was poor, suffering, and
oppressed in this world.
The spirit of self-forgetfulness, the simple devotion to
a vast humanitarian idea which inspired the thought
and stress of that revolutionary time, had left its mark
upon Giorgio in a sort of austere contempt for all
personal advantage. This man, whom the lowest class
in Sulaco suspected of having a buried hoard in his
kitchen, had all his life despised money. The leaders of
his youth had lived poor, had died poor. It had been a
habit of his mind to disregard to-morrow. It was
engendered partly by an existence of excitement,
adventure, and wild warfare. But mostly it was a
matter of principle. It did not resemble the carelessness
of a condottiere, it was a puritanism of conduct,
born of stern enthusiasm like the puritanism of religion.
This stern devotion to a cause had cast a gloom upon
Giorgio's old age. It cast a gloom because the cause
seemed lost. Too many kings and emperors flourished
yet in the world which God had meant for the people.
ready to help his countrymen, and greatly respected by
the Italian emigrants wherever he lived (in his exile he
called it), he could not conceal from himself that they
cared nothing for the wrongs of down-trodden nations.
They listened to his tales of war readily, but seemed to
ask themselves what he had got out of it after all.
There was nothing that they could see. "We wanted
nothing, we suffered for the love of all humanity!" he
cried out furiously sometimes, and the powerful voice,
the blazing eyes, the shaking of the white mane, the
brown, sinewy hand pointing upwards as if to call
heaven to witness, impressed his hearers. After the old
man hadbroken off abruptly with a jerk of the head and
a movement of the arm, meaning clearly, "But what's
the good of talking to you?" they nudged each other.
There was in old Giorgio an energy of feeling, a personal
quality of conviction, something they called "terribilità"
-"an old lion," they used to say of him. Some
slight incident, a chance word would set him off talking
on the beach to the Italian fishermen of Maldonado, in
the little shop he kept afterwards (in Valparaiso) to his
countrymen customers; of an evening, suddenly, in the
café at one end of the Casa Viola (the other was reserved
for the English engineers) to the select clientèle of
engine-drivers and foremen of the railway shops.
With their handsome, bronzed, lean faces, shiny
black ringlets, glistening eyes, broad-chested, bearded,
sometimes a tiny gold ring in the lobe of the ear,
the aristocracy of the railway works listened to him,
turning away from their cards or dominoes. Here
and there a fair-haired Basque studied his hand
meantime, waiting without protest. No native of
Costaguana intruded there. This was the Italian
stronghold. Even the Sulaco policemen on a night
saddle to glance through the window at the heads in a
fog of smoke; and the drone of old Giorgio's declamatory
narrative seemed to sink behind them into the plain.
Only now and then the assistant of the chief of police,
some broad-faced, brown little gentleman, with a great
deal of Indian in him, would put in an appearance.
Leaving his man outside with the horses he advanced
with a confident, sly smile, and without a word up to the
long trestle table. He pointed to one of the bottles
on the shelf; Giorgio, thrusting his pipe into his mouth
abruptly, served him in person. Nothing would be
heard but the slight jingle of the spurs. His glass
emptied, he would take a leisurely, scrutinizing look all
round the room, go out, and ride away slowly, circling
towards the town.
5. CHAPTER FIVE
IN THIS way only was the power of the local authorities
vindicated amongst the great body of strong-
limbed foreigners who dug the earth, blasted the
rocks, drove the engines for the "progressive and
patriotic undertaking." In these very words eighteen
months before the Excellentissimo Señor don Vincente
Ribiera, the Dictator of Costaguana, had described the
National Central Railway in his great speech at the
turning of the first sod.
He had come on purpose to Sulaco, and there was a
one-o'clock dinner-party, a convité offered by the O.S.N.
Company on board the Juno after the function on shore.
Captain Mitchell had himself steered the cargo lighter,
all draped with flags, which, in tow of the Juno's steam
launch, took the Excellentissimo from the jetty to the
ship. Everybody of note in Sulaco had been invited —
the one or two foreign merchants, all the representatives
of the old Spanish families then in town, the great
owners of estates on the plain, grave, courteous, simple
men, caballeros of pure descent, with small hands and
feet, conservative, hospitable, and kind. The Occidental
Province was their stronghold; their Blanco
party had triumphed now; it was their President-
Dictator, a Blanco of the Blancos, who sat smiling
urbanely between the representatives of two friendly
foreign powers. They had come with him from Sta.
Marta to countenance by their presence the enterprise
in which the capital of their countries was engaged.
The only lady of that company was Mrs. Gould, the
silver mine. The ladies of Sulaco were not advanced
enough to take part in the public life to that extent.
They had come out strongly at the great ball at the
Intendencia the evening before, but Mrs. Gould alone
had appeared, a bright spot in the group of black coats
behind the President-Dictator, on the crimson cloth-
covered stage erected under a shady tree on the shore
of the harbour, where the ceremony of turning the first
sod had taken place. She had come off in the cargo
lighter, full of notabilities, sitting under the flutter of
gay flags, in the place of honour by the side of Captain
Mitchell, who steered, and her clear dress gave the only
truly festive note to the sombre gathering in the long,
gorgeous saloon of the Juno.
The head of the chairman of the railway board (from
London), handsome and pale in a silvery mist of white
hair and clipped beard, hovered near her shoulder
attentive, smiling, and fatigued. The journey from
London to Sta. Marta in mail boats and the special
carriages of the Sta. Marta coast-line (the only railway
so far) had been tolerable — even pleasant — quite tolerable.
But the trip over the mountains to Sulaco was
another sort of experience, in an old diligencia over impassable
roads skirting awful precipices.
"We have been upset twice in one day on the brink of
very deep ravines," he was telling Mrs. Gould in an
undertone. "And when we arrived here at last I don't
know what we should have done without your hospitality.
What an out-of-the-way place Sulaco is! —
and for a harbour, too! Astonishing!"
"Ah, but we are very proud of it. It used to be
historically important. The highest ecclesiastical court
for two viceroyalties, sat here in the olden time," she
instructed him with animation.
"I am impressed. I didn't mean to be disparaging.
You seem very patriotic."
"The place is lovable, if only by its situation. Perhaps
you don't know what an old resident I am."
"How old, I wonder," he murmured, looking at her
with a slight smile. Mrs. Gould's appearance was
made youthful by the mobile intelligence of her face.
"We can't give you your ecclesiastical court back again;
but you shall have more steamers, a railway, a telegraph-cable
— a future in the great world which is worth
infinitely more than any amount of ecclesiastical past.
You shall be brought in touch with something greater
than two viceroyalties. But I had no notion that a
place on a sea-coast could remain so isolated from the
world. If it had been a thousand miles inland now — most
remarkable! Has anything ever happened here for a
hundred years before to-day?"
While he talked in a slow, humorous tone, she kept
her little smile. Agreeing ironically, she assured him
that certainly not — nothing ever happened in Sulaco.
Even the revolutions, of which there had been two
in her time, had respected the repose of the place.
Their course ran in the more populous southern parts
of the Republic, and the great valley of Sta. Marta,
which was like one great battlefield of the parties,
with the possession of the capital for a prize and
an outlet to another ocean. They were more advanced
over there. Here in Sulaco they heard only the echoes
of these great questions, and, of course, their official
world changed each time, coming to them over their
rampart of mountains which he himself had traversed
in an old diligencia, with such a risk to life and limb.
The chairman of the railway had been enjoying her
hospitality for several days, and he was really grateful
for it. It was only since he had left Sta. Marta that he
on the background of his exotic surroundings. In the
capital he had been the guest of the Legation, and had
been kept busy negotiating with the members of Don
Vincente's Government — cultured men, men to whom
the conditions of civilized business were not unknown.
What concerned him most at the time was the
acquisition of land for the railway. In the Sta. Marta
Valley, where there was already one line in existence,
the people were tractable, and it was only a matter of
price. A commission had been nominated to fix the
values, and the difficulty resolved itself into the judicious
influencing of the Commissioners. But in Sulaco —
the Occidental Province for whose very development
the railway was intended — there had been trouble. It
had been lying for ages ensconced behind its natural
barriers, repelling modern enterprise by the precipices
of its mountain range, by its shallow harbour opening
into the everlasting calms of a gulf full of clouds, by
the benighted state of mind of the owners of its fertile
territory — all these aristocratic old Spanish families, all
those Don Ambrosios this and Don Fernandos that, who
seemed actually to dislike and distrust the coming of the
railway over their lands. It had happened that some of
the surveying parties scattered all over the province had
been warned off with threats of violence. In other cases
outrageous pretensions as to price had been raised.
But the man of railways prided himself on being equal to
every emergency. Since he was met by the inimical
sentiment of blind conservatism in Sulaco he would
meet it by sentiment, too, before taking his stand on his
right alone. The Government was bound to carry out
its part of the contract with the board of the new
railway company, even if it had to use force for the
purpose. But he desired nothing less than an armed
were much too vast and far-reaching, and too promising
to leave a stone unturned; and so he imagined to get
the President-Dictator over there on a tour of ceremonies
and speeches, culminating in a great function
at the turning of the first sod by the harbour shore.
After all he was their own creature — that Don Vincente.
He was the embodied triumph of the best elements in
the State. These were facts, and, unless facts meant
nothing, Sir John argued to himself, such a man's influence
must be real, and his personal action would
produce the conciliatory effect he required. He had
succeeded in arranging the trip with the help of a very
clever advocate, who was known in Sta. Marta as the
agent of the Gould silver mine, the biggest thing in
Sulaco, and even in the whole Republic. It was indeed
a fabulously rich mine. Its so-called agent, evidently a
man of culture and ability, seemed, without official
position, to possess an extraordinary influence in the
highest Government spheres. He was able to assure
Sir John that the President-Dictator would make the
journey. He regretted, however, in the course of the
same conversation, that General Montero insisted upon
going, too.
General Montero, whom the beginning of the struggle
had found an obscure army captain employed on the
wild eastern frontier of the State, had thrown in his lot
with the Ribiera party at a moment when special
circumstances had given that small adhesion a fortuitous
importance. The fortunes of war served him
marvellously, and the victory of Rio Seco (after a day
of desperate fighting) put a seal to his success. At the
end he emerged General, Minister of War, and the
military head of the Blanco party, although there was
nothing aristocratic in his descent. Indeed, it was said
by the munificence of a famous European traveller, in
whose service their father had lost his life. Another
story was that their father had been nothing but a charcoal
burner in the woods, and their mother a baptised
Indian woman from the far interior.
However that might be, the Costaguana Press was in
the habit of styling Montero's forest march from his
commandancia to join the Blanco forces at the beginning
of the troubles, the "most heroic military exploit
of modern times." About the same time, too, his
brother had turned up from Europe, where he had gone
apparently as secretary to a consul. Having, however,
collected a small band of outlaws, he showed some
talent as guerilla chief and had been rewarded at the
pacification by the post of Military Commandant of the
capital.
The Minister of War, then, accompanied the Dictator.
The board of the O.S.N. Company, working hand-
in-hand with the railway people for the good of the Republic,
had on this important occasion instructed
Captain Mitchell to put the mail-boat Juno at the
disposal of the distinguished party. Don Vincente,
journeying south from Sta. Marta, had embarked at
Cayta, the principal port of Costaguana, and came to
Sulaco by sea. But the chairman of the railway
company had courageously crossed the mountains in a
ramshackle diligencia, mainly for the purpose of meeting
his engineer-in-chief engaged in the final survey of the
road.
For all the indifference of a man of affairs to nature,
whose hostility can always be overcome by the resources
of finance, he could not help being impressed
by his surroundings during his halt at the surveying
camp established at the highest point his railway was to
to see the last dying glow of sunlight upon the snowy
flank of Higuerota. Pillared masses of black basalt
framed like an open portal a portion of the white field
lying aslant against the west. In the transparent air
of the high altitudes everything seemed very near,
steeped in a clear stillness as in an imponderable liquid;
and with his ear ready to catch the first sound of the
expected diligencia the engineer-in-chief, at the door of a
hut of rough stones, had contemplated the changing
hues on the enormous side of the mountain, thinking
that in this sight, as in a piece of inspired music, there
could be found together the utmost delicacy of shaded
expression and a stupendous magnificence of effect.
Sir John arrived too late to hear the magnificent and
inaudible strain sung by the sunset amongst the high
peaks of the Sierra. It had sung itself out into the
breathless pause of deep dusk before, climbing down the
fore wheel of the diligencia with stiff limbs, he shook
hands with the engineer.
They gave him his dinner in a stone hut like a cubical
boulder, with no door or windows in its two openings;
a bright fire of sticks (brought on muleback from the
first valley below) burning outside, sent in a wavering
glare; and two candles in tin candlesticks — lighted, it
was explained to him, in his honour — stood on a sort of
rough camp table, at which he sat on the right hand of
the chief. He knew how to be amiable; and the young
men of the engineering staff, for whom the surveying of
the railway track had the glamour of the first steps on
the path of life, sat there, too, listening modestly, with
their smooth faces tanned by the weather, and very
pleased to witness so much affability in so great a man.
Afterwards, late at night, pacing to and fro outside,
he had a long talk with his chief engineer. He knew
which their gifts, as elementally different as fire and
water, had worked in conjunction. From the contact
of these two personalities, who had not the same vision
of the world, there was generated a power for the world's
service — a subtle force that could set in motion mighty
machines, men's muscles, and awaken also in human
breasts an unbounded devotion to the task. Of the
young fellows at the table, to whom the survey of the
track was like the tracing of the path of life, more than
one would be called to meet death before the work was
done. But the work would be done: the force would be
almost as strong as a faith. Not quite, however. In
the silence of the sleeping camp upon the moonlit
plateau forming the top of the pass like the floor of a
vast arena surrounded by the basalt walls of precipices,
two strolling figures in thick ulsters stood still, and the
voice of the engineer pronounced distinctly the words —
"We can't move mountains!"
Sir John, raising his head to follow the pointing
gesture, felt the full force of the words. The white
Higuerota soared out of the shadows of rock and earth
like a frozen bubble under the moon. All was still, till
near by, behind the wall of a corral for the camp animals,
built roughly of loose stones in the form of a
circle, a pack mule stamped his forefoot and blew
heavily twice.
The engineer-in-chief had used the phrase in answer
to the chairman's tentative suggestion that the tracing
of the line could, perhaps, be altered in deference to the
prejudices of the Sulaco landowners. The chief engineer
believed that the obstinacy of men was the lesser
obstacle. Moreover, to combat that they had the great
influence of Charles Gould, whereas tunnelling under
Higuerota would have been a colossal undertaking.
"Ah, yes! Gould. What sort of a man is he?"
Sir John had heard much of Charles Gould in Sta.
Marta, and wanted to know more. The engineer-in-
chief assured him that the administrator of the San
Tomé silver mine had an immense influence over all
these Spanish Dons. He had also one of the best
houses in Sulaco, and the Gould hospitality was beyond
all praise.
"They received me as if they had known me for
years," he said. "The little lady is kindness personified.
I stayed with them for a month. He helped
me to organize the surveying parties. His practical
ownership of the San Tomé silver mine gives him a
special position. He seems to have the ear of every
provincial authority apparently, and, as I said, he can
wind all the hidalgos of the province round his little
finger. If you follow his advice the difficulties will fall
away, because he wants the railway. Of course, you
must be careful in what you say. He's English, and
besides he must be immensely wealthy. The Holroyd
house is in with him in that mine, so you may imagine
—"
He interrupted himself as, from before one of the
little fires burning outside the low wall of the corral,
arose the figure of a man wrapped in a poncho up to the
neck. The saddle which he had been using for a pillow
made a dark patch on the ground against the red glow of
embers.
"I shall see Holroyd himself on my way back through
the States," said Sir John. "I've ascertained that he,
too, wants the railway."
The man who, perhaps disturbed by the proximity of
the voices, had arisen from the ground, struck a match
to light a cigarette. The flame showed a bronzed,
black-whiskered face, a pair of eyes gazing straight;
laid his head again on the saddle.
"That's our camp-master, whom I must send back to
Sulaco now we are going to carry our survey into the
Sta. Marta Valley," said the engineer. "A most useful
fellow, lent me by Captain Mitchell of the O.S.N.
Company. It was very good of Mitchell. Charles
Gould told me I couldn't do better than take advantage
of the offer. He seems to know how to rule all these
muleteers and peons. We had not the slightest trouble
with our people. He shall escort your diligencia right
into Sulaco with some of our railway peons. The road
is bad. To have him at hand may save you an upset
or two. He promised me to take care of your person
all the way down as if you were his father."
This camp-master was the Italian sailor whom all the
Europeans in Sulaco, following Captain Mitchell's
mispronunciation, were in the habit of calling Nostromo.
And indeed, taciturn and ready, he did take
excellent care of his charge at the bad parts of the road,
as Sir John himself acknowledged to Mrs. Gould afterwards.
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.
7. CHAPTER SEVEN
"MRS. GOULD was too intelligently sympathetic not
to share that feeling. It made life exciting, and she
was too much of a woman not to like excitement. But
it frightened her, too, a little; and when Don José
Avellanos, rocking in the American chair, would go so
far as to say, "Even, my dear Carlos, if you had failed;
even if some untoward event were yet to destroy your
work — which God forbid! — you would have deserved
well of your country," Mrs. Gould would look up from
the tea-table profoundly at her unmoved husband
stirring the spoon in the cup as though he had not heard
a word.
Not that Don José anticipated anything of the sort.
He could not praise enough dear Carlos's tact and
courage. His English, rock-like quality of character
was his best safeguard, Don José affirmed; and, turning
to Mrs. Gould, "As to you, Emilia, my soul" — he would
address her with the familiarity of his age and old
friendship — "you are as true a patriot as though you
had been born in our midst."
This might have been less or more than the truth.
Mrs. Gould, accompanying her husband all over the
province in the search for labour, had seen the land
with a deeper glance than a trueborn Costaguanera
could have done. In her travel-worn riding habit, her
face powdered white like a plaster cast, with a further
protection of a small silk mask during the heat of the
day, she rode on a well-shaped, light-footed pony in the
centre of a little cavalcade. Two mozos de campo,
in white embroidered calzoneras, leather jackets and
striped ponchos, rode ahead with carbines across their
shoulders, swaying in unison to the pace of the horses.
A tropilla of pack mules brought up the rear in charge of
a thin brown muleteer, sitting his long-eared beast very
near the tail, legs thrust far forward, the wide brim of
his hat set far back, making a sort of halo for his head.
An old Costaguana officer, a retired senior major of
humble origin, but patronized by the first families on
account of his Blanco opinions, had been recommended
by Don José for commissary and organizer of that
expedition. The points of his grey moustache hung far
below his chin, and, riding on Mrs. Gould's left hand,
he looked about with kindly eyes, pointing out the
features of the country, telling the names of the little
pueblos and of the estates, of the smooth-walled
haciendas like long fortresses crowning the knolls above
the level of the Sulaco Valley. It unrolled itself, with
green young crops, plains, woodland, and gleams of
water, park-like, from the blue vapour of the distant
sierra to an immense quivering horizon of grass and sky,
where big white clouds seemed to fall slowly into the
darkness of their own shadows.
Men ploughed with wooden ploughs and yoked oxen,
small on a boundless expanse, as if attacking immensity
itself. The mounted figures of vaqueros galloped in
the distance, and the great herds fed with all their
horned heads one way, in one single wavering line as far
as eye could reach across the broad potreros. A spreading
cotton-wool tree shaded a thatched ranche by the
road; the trudging files of burdened Indians taking off
their hats, would lift sad, mute eyes to the cavalcade
raising the dust of the crumbling camino real made by
the hands of their enslaved forefathers. And Mrs.
to the soul of the land in the tremendous disclosure
of this interior unaffected by the slight European veneer
of the coast towns, a great land of plain and mountain
and people, suffering and mute, waiting for the future
in a pathetic immobility of patience.
She knew its sights and its hospitality, dispensed with
a sort of slumbrous dignity in those great houses presenting
long, blind walls and heavy portals to the wind-
swept pastures. She was given the head of the tables,
where masters and dependants sat in a simple and
patriarchal state. The ladies of the house would talk
softly in the moonlight under the orange trees of the
courtyards, impressing upon her the sweetness of their
voices and the something mysterious in the quietude
of their lives. In the morning the gentlemen, well
mounted in braided sombreros and embroidered riding
suits, with much silver on the trappings of their horses,
would ride forth to escort the departing guests before
committing them, with grave good-byes, to the care of
God at the boundary pillars of their estates. In all
these households she could hear stories of political
outrage; friends, relatives, ruined, imprisoned, killed in
the battles of senseless civil wars, barbarously executed
in ferocious proscriptions, as though the government of
the country had been a struggle of lust between bands
of absurd devils let loose upon the land with sabres and
uniforms and grandiloquent phrases. And on all the
lips she found a weary desire for peace, the dread of
officialdom with its nightmarish parody of administration
without law, without security, and without justice.
She bore a whole two months of wandering very well;
she had that power of resistance to fatigue which one
discovers here and there in some quite frail-looking
women with surprise — like a state of possession by a
major — after much display of solicitude for the
delicate lady, had ended by conferring upon her the
name of the "Never-tired Señora." Mrs. Gould was
indeed becoming a Costaguanera. Having acquired
in Southern Europe a knowledge of true peasantry, she
was able to appreciate the great worth of the people. She
saw the man under the silent, sad-eyed beast of burden.
She saw them on the road carrying loads, lonely figures
upon the plain, toiling under great straw hats, with
their white clothing flapping about their limbs in the
wind; she remembered the villages by some group of
Indian women at the fountain impressed upon her
memory, by the face of some young Indian girl with a
melancholy and sensual profile, raising an earthenware
vessel of cool water at the door of a dark hut with a
wooden porch cumbered with great brown jars. The
solid wooden wheels of an ox-cart, halted with its shafts
in the dust, showed the strokes of the axe; and a party
of charcoal carriers, with each man's load resting above
his head on the top of the low mud wall, slept stretched
in a row within the strip of shade.
The heavy stonework of bridges and churches left
by the conquerors proclaimed the disregard of human
labour, the tribute-labour of vanished nations. The
power of king and church was gone, but at the sight of
some heavy ruinous pile overtopping from a knoll the
low mud walls of a village, Don Pépé would interrupt
the tale of his campaigns to exclaim —
"Poor Costaguana! Before, it was everything for
the Padres, nothing for the people; and now it is everything
for those great politicos in Sta. Marta, for negroes
and thieves."
Charles talked with the alcaldes, with the fiscales,
with the principal people in towns, and with the
districts offered him escorts — for he could show an
authorization from the Sulaco political chief of the day.
How much the document had cost him in gold twenty-
dollar pieces was a secret between himself, a great man
in the United States (who condescended to answer the
Sulaco mail with his own hand), and a great man of
another sort, with a dark olive complexion and shifty
eyes, inhabiting then the Palace of the Intendencia in
Sulaco, and who piqued himself on his culture and
Europeanism generally in a rather French style because
he had lived in Europe for some years — in exile,
he said. However, it was pretty well known that just
before this exile he had incautiously gambled away all
the cash in the Custom House of a small port where a
friend in power had procured for him the post of sub-
collector. That youthful indiscretion had, amongst
other inconveniences, obliged him to earn his living
for a time as a café waiter in Madrid; but his talents
must have been great, after all, since they had enabled
him to retrieve his political fortunes so splendidly.
Charles Gould, exposing his business with an imperturbable
steadiness, called him Excellency.
The provincial Excellency assumed a weary superiority,
tilting his chair far back near an open window
in the true Costaguana manner. The military band
happened to be braying operatic selections on the plaza
just then, and twice he raised his hand imperatively for
silence in order to listen to a favourite passage.
"Exquisite, delicious!" he murmured; while Charles
Gould waited, standing by with inscrutable patience.
"Lucia, Lucia di Lammermoor! I am passionate for
music. It transports me. Ha! the divine — ha! —
Mozart. Si! divine . . . What is it you were
saying?"
Of course, rumours had reached him already of the
newcomer's intentions. Besides, he had received an
official warning from Sta. Marta. His manner was
intended simply to conceal his curiosity and impress
his visitor. But after he had locked up something
valuable in the drawer of a large writing-desk in a distant
part of the room, he became very affable, and
walked back to his chair smartly.
"If you intend to build villages and assemble a
population near the mine, you shall require a decree
of the Minister of the Interior for that," he suggested
in a business-like manner.
"I have already sent a memorial," said Charles
Gould, steadily, "and I reckon now confidently upon
your Excellency's favourable conclusions."
The Excellency was a man of many moods. With
the receipt of the money a great mellowness had descended
upon his simple soul. Unexpectedly he fetched
a deep sigh.
"Ah, Don Carlos! What we want is advanced men
like you in the province. The lethargy — the lethargy
of these aristocrats! The want of public spirit! The
absence of all enterprise! I, with my profound studies
in Europe, you understand —"
With one hand thrust into his swelling bosom, he
rose and fell on his toes, and for ten minutes, almost
without drawing breath, went on hurling himself
intellectually to the assault of Charles Gould's polite
silence; and when, stopping abruptly, he fell back into
his chair, it was as though he had been beaten off from
a fortress. To save his dignity he hastened to dismiss
this silent man with a solemn inclination of the head
and the words, pronounced with moody, fatigued condescension
—
"You may depend upon my enlightened goodwill
it."
He took up a paper fan and began to cool himself with
a consequential air, while Charles Gould bowed and
withdrew. Then he dropped the fan at once, and
stared with an appearance of wonder and perplexity at
the closed door for quite a long time. At last he
shrugged his shoulders as if to assure himself of his disdain.
Cold, dull. No intellectuality. Red hair. A
true Englishman. He despised him.
His face darkened. What meant this unimpressed
and frigid behaviour? He was the first of the successive
politicians sent out from the capital to rule the
Occidental Province whom the manner of Charles
Gould in official intercourse was to strike as offensively
independent.
Charles Gould assumed that if the appearance of
listening to deplorable balderdash must form part of the
price he had to pay for being left unmolested, the obligation
of uttering balderdash personally was by no means
included in the bargain. He drew the line there. To
these provincial autocrats, before whom the peaceable
population of all classes had been accustomed to
tremble, the reserve of that English-looking engineer
caused an uneasiness which swung to and fro between
cringing and truculence. Gradually all of them discovered
that, no matter what party was in power, that
man remained in most effective touch with the higher
authorities in Sta. Marta.
This was a fact, and it accounted perfectly for the
Goulds being by no means so wealthy as the engineer-in-
chief on the new railway could legitimately suppose.
Following the advice of Don José Avellanos, who was a
man of good counsel (though rendered timid by his
horrible experiences of Guzman Bento's time), Charles
gossip of the foreign residents there he was known
(with a good deal of seriousness underlying the irony)
by the nickname of "King of Sulaco." An advocate of
the Costaguana Bar, a man of reputed ability and good
character, member of the distinguished Moraga family
possessing extensive estates in the Sulaco Valley, was
pointed out to strangers, with a shade of mystery and
respect, as the agent of the San Tomé mine — "political,
you know." He was tall, black-whiskered, and discreet.
It was known that he had easy access to ministers,
and that the numerous Costaguana generals were
always anxious to dine at his house. Presidents
granted him audience with facility. He corresponded
actively with his maternal uncle, Don José Avellanos;
but his letters — unless those expressing formally his
dutiful affection — were seldom entrusted to the Costaguana
Post Office. There the envelopes are opened,
indiscriminately, with the frankness of a brazen and
childish impudence characteristic of some Spanish-
American Governments. But it must be noted that at
about the time of the re-opening of the San Tomé mine
the muleteer who had been employed by Charles Gould
in his preliminary travels on the Campo added his small
train of animals to the thin stream of traffic carried
over the mountain passes between the Sta. Marta upland
and the Valley of Sulaco. There are no travellers
by that arduous and unsafe route unless under very
exceptional circumstances, and the state of inland
trade did not visibly require additional transport
facilities; but the man seemed to find his account in it.
A few packages were always found for him whenever he
took the road. Very brown and wooden, in goatskin
breeches with the hair outside, he sat near the tail of
his own smart mule, his great hat turned against the
humming day after day a love-song in a plaintive key,
or, without a change of expression, letting out a yell at
his small tropilla in front. A round little guitar hung
high up on his back; and there was a place scooped out
artistically in the wood of one of his pack-saddles where
a tightly rolled piece of paper could be slipped in, the
wooden plug replaced, and the coarse canvas nailed on
again. When in Sulaco it was his practice to smoke and
doze all day long (as though he had no care in the world)
on a stone bench outside the doorway of the Casa
Gould and facing the windows of the Avellanos house.
Years and years ago his mother had been chief laundry-
woman in that family — very accomplished in the matter
of clear-starching. He himself had been born on
one of their haciendas. His name was Bonifacio, and
Don José, crossing the street about five o'clock to call on
Doña Emilia, always acknowledged his humble salute
by some movement of hand or head. The porters of
both houses conversed lazily with him in tones of grave
intimacy. His evenings he devoted to gambling and
to calls in a spirit of generous festivity upon the peyne
d'oro girls in the more remote side-streets of the town.
But he, too, was a discreet man.
8. CHAPTER EIGHT
THOSE of us whom business or curiosity took to
Sulaco in these years before the first advent of the railway
can remember the steadying effect of the San
Tomé mine upon the life of that remote province. The
outward appearances had not changed then as they
have changed since, as I am told, with cable cars
running along the streets of the Constitution, and
carriage roads far into the country, to Rincon and other
villages, where the foreign merchants and the Ricos
generally have their modern villas, and a vast rail-way
goods yard by the harbour, which has a quay-side, a
long range of warehouses, and quite serious, organized
labour troubles of its own.
Nobody had ever heard of labour troubles then. The
Cargadores of the port formed, indeed, an unruly
brotherhood of all sorts of scum, with a patron saint
of their own. They went on strike regularly (every
bull-fight day), a form of trouble that even Nostromo
at the height of his prestige could never cope with
efficiently; but the morning after each fiesta, before the
Indian market-women had opened their mat parasols
on the plaza, when the snows of Higuerota gleamed
pale over the town on a yet black sky, the appearance
of a phantom-like horseman mounted on a silver-grey
mare solved the problem of labour without fail. His
steed paced the lanes of the slums and the weed-grown
enclosures within the old ramparts, between the black,
lightless cluster of huts, like cow-byres, like dog-
kennels. The horseman hammered with the butt of a
lean-to sheds sloping against the tumble-down
piece of a noble wall, at the wooden sides of dwellings so
flimsy that the sound of snores and sleepy mutters
within could be heard in the pauses of the thundering
clatter of his blows. He called out men's names
menacingly from the saddle, once, twice. The drowsy
answers — grumpy, conciliating, savage, jocular, or
deprecating — came out into the silent darkness in which
the horseman sat still, and presently a dark figure would
flit out coughing in the still air. Sometimes a low-
toned woman cried through the window-hole softly,
"He's coming directly, señor," and the horseman waited
silent on a motionless horse. But if perchance he had
to dismount, then, after a while, from the door of that
hovel or of that pulperia, with a ferocious scuffle and
stifled imprecations, a cargador would fly out head
first and hands abroad, to sprawl under the forelegs of
the silver-grey mare, who only pricked forward her
sharp little ears. She was used to that work; and the
man, picking himself up, would walk away hastily from
Nostromo's revolver, reeling a little along the street
and snarling low curses. At sunrise Captain Mitchell,
coming out anxiously in his night attire on to the
wooden balcony running the whole length of the O.S.N.
Company's lonely building by the shore, would see
the lighters already under way, figures moving busily
about the cargo cranes, perhaps hear the invaluable
Nostromo, now dismounted and in the checked shirt
and red sash of a Mediterranean sailor, bawling orders
from the end of the jetty in a stentorian voice. A
fellow in a thousand!
The material apparatus of perfected civilization
which obliterates the individuality of old towns under
the stereotyped conveniences of modern life had not
Sulaco, so characteristic with its stuccoed houses and
barred windows, with the great yellowy-white walls of
abandoned convents behind the rows of sombre green
cypresses, that fact — very modern in its spirit — the
San Tomé mine had already thrown its subtle influence.
It had altered, too, the outward character of the
crowds on feast days on the plaza before the open portal
of the cathedral, by the number of white ponchos with a
green stripe affected as holiday wear by the San Tomé
miners. They had also adopted white hats with green
cord and braid — articles of good quality, which could
be obtained in the storehouse of the administration for
very little money. A peaceable Cholo wearing these
colours (unusual in Costaguana) was somehow very
seldom beaten to within an inch of his life on a charge of
disrespect to the town police; neither ran he much risk
of being suddenly lassoed on the road by a recruiting
party of lanceros — a method of voluntary enlistment
looked upon as almost legal in the Republic. Whole
villages were known to have volunteered for the army
in that way; but, as Don Pépé would say with a hopeless
shrug to Mrs. Gould, "What would you! Poor
people! Pobrecitos! Pobrecitos! But the State must
have its soldiers."
Thus professionally spoke Don Pépé, the fighter, with
pendent moustaches, a nut-brown, lean face, and a
clean run of a cast-iron jaw, suggesting the type of a
cattle-herd horseman from the great Llanos of the
South. "If you will listen to an old officer of Paez,
señores," was the exordium of all his speeches in the
Aristocratic Club of Sulaco, where he was admitted on
account of his past services to the extinct cause of
Federation. The club, dating from the days of the
proclamation of Costaguana's independence, boasted
Suppressed arbitrarily innumerable times by various
Governments, with memories of proscriptions and of at
least one wholesale massacre of its members, sadly
assembled for a banquet by the order of a zealous
military commandante (their bodies were afterwards
stripped naked and flung into the plaza out of the windows
by the lowest scum of the populace), it was again
flourishing, at that period, peacefully. It extended to
strangers the large hospitality of the cool, big rooms of
its historic quarters in the front part of a house, once the
residence of a high official of the Holy Office. The two
wings, shut up, crumbled behind the nailed doors, and
what may be described as a grove of young orange trees
grown in the unpaved patio concealed the utter ruin of
the back part facing the gate. You turned in from the
street, as if entering a secluded orchard, where you came
upon the foot of a disjointed staircase, guarded by a
moss-stained effigy of some saintly bishop, mitred and
staffed, and bearing the indignity of a broken nose
meekly, with his fine stone hands crossed on his breast.
The chocolate-coloured faces of servants with mops of
black hair peeped at you from above; the click of
billiard balls came to your ears, and ascending the
steps, you would perhaps see in the first sala, very stiff
upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don Pépé
moving his long moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm's
length, through an old Sta. Marta newspaper. His
horse — a stony-hearted but persevering black brute
with a hammer head — you would have seen in the
street dozing motionless under an immense saddle, with
its nose almost touching the curbstone of the sidewalk.
Don Pépé, when "down from the mountain," as the
phrase, often heard in Sulaco, went, could also be seen
in the drawing-room of the Casa Gould. He sat with
With his knees close together, and a kindly twinkle of
drollery in his deep-set eyes, he would throw his small
and ironic pleasantries into the current of conversation.
There was in that man a sort of sane, humorous shrewdness,
and a vein of genuine humanity so often found in
simple old soldiers of proved courage who have seen
much desperate service. Of course he knew nothing
whatever of mining, but his employment was of a special
kind. He was in charge of the whole population in the
territory of the mine, which extended from the head of
the gorge to where the cart track from the foot of the
mountain enters the plain, crossing a stream over a
little wooden bridge painted green — green, the colour of
hope, being also the colour of the mine.
It was reported in Sulaco that up there "at the mountain"
Don Pépé walked about precipitous paths, girt
with a great sword and in a shabby uniform with
tarnished bullion epaulettes of a senior major. Most
miners being Indians, with big wild eyes, addressed him
as Taita (father), as these barefooted people of Costaguana
will address anybody who wears shoes; but it was
Basilio, Mr. Gould's own mozo and the head servant of
the Casa, who, in all good faith and from a sense of
propriety, announced him once in the solemn words,
"El Señor Gobernador has arrived."
Don José Avellanos, then in the drawing-room, was
delighted beyond measure at the aptness of the title,
with which he greeted the old major banteringly as
soon as the latter's soldierly figure appeared in the doorway.
Don Pépé only smiled in his long moustaches, as
much as to say, "You might have found a worse name
for an old soldier."
And El Señor Gobernador he had remained, with his
small jokes upon his function and upon his domain,
Gould —
"No two stones could come together anywhere without
the Gobernador hearing the click, señora."
And he would tap his ear with the tip of his forefinger
knowingly. Even when the number of the miners alone
rose to over six hundred he seemed to know each of them
individually, all the innumerable Josés, Manuels,
Ignacios, from the villages primero — segundo — or
tercero (there were three mining villages) under his
government. He could distinguish them not only by
their flat, joyless faces, which to Mrs. Gould looked all
alike, as if run into the same ancestral mould of suffering
and patience, but apparently also by the infinitely
graduated shades of reddish-brown, of blackish-brown,
of coppery-brown backs, as the two shifts, stripped to
linen drawers and leather skull-caps, mingled together
with a confusion of naked limbs, of shouldered picks,
swinging lamps, in a great shuffle of sandalled feet on
the open plateau before the entrance of the main
tunnel. It was a time of pause. The Indian boys
leaned idly against the long line of little cradle wagons
standing empty; the screeners and ore-breakers squatted
on their heels smoking long cigars; the great wooden
shoots slanting over the edge of the tunnel plateau were
silent; and only the ceaseless, violent rush of water in
the open flumes could be heard, murmuring fiercely,
with the splash and rumble of revolving turbine-
wheels, and the thudding march of the stamps pounding
to powder the treasure rock on the plateau below.
The heads of gangs, distinguished by brass medals
hanging on their bare breasts, marshalled their squads;
and at last the mountain would swallow one-half of the
silent crowd, while the other half would move off in long
files down the zigzag paths leading to the bottom of the
winding between the blazing rock faces resembled
a slender green cord, in which three lumpy knots of
banana patches, palm-leaf roots, and shady trees
marked the Village One, Village Two, Village Three,
housing the miners of the Gould Concession.
Whole families had been moving from the first
towards the spot in the Higuerota range, whence the
rumour of work and safety had spread over the pastoral
Campo, forcing its way also, even as the waters of a high
flood, into the nooks and crannies of the distant blue
walls of the Sierras. Father first, in a pointed straw
hat, then the mother with the bigger children, generally
also a diminutive donkey, all under burdens, except the
leader himself, or perhaps some grown girl, the pride of
the family, stepping barefooted and straight as an
arrow, with braids of raven hair, a thick, haughty profile,
and no load to carry but the small guitar of the
country and a pair of soft leather sandals tied together
on her back. At the sight of such parties strung out on
the cross trails between the pastures, or camped by the
side of the royal road, travellers on horseback would
remark to each other —
"More people going to the San Tomé mine. We
shall see others to-morrow."
And spurring on in the dusk they would discuss the
great news of the province, the news of the San Tomé
mine. A rich Englishman was going to work it — and
perhaps not an Englishman, Quien sabe! A foreigner
with much money. Oh, yes, it had begun. A party of
men who had been to Sulaco with a herd of black bulls
for the next corrida had reported that from the porch
of the posada in Rincon, only a short league from the
town, the lights on the mountain were visible, twinkling
above the trees. And there was a woman seen riding
of saddle, and a man's hat on her head. She walked
about, too, on foot up the mountain paths. A woman
engineer, it seemed she was.
"What an absurdity! Impossible, señor!"
"Si! Si! Una Americana del Norte."
"Ah, well! if your worship is informed. Una Americana;
it need be something of that sort."
And they would laugh a little with astonishment and
scorn, keeping a wary eye on the shadows of the road,
for one is liable to meet bad men when travelling late on
the Campo.
And it was not only the men that Don Pépé knew so
well, but he seemed able, with one attentive, thoughtful
glance, to classify each woman, girl, or growing youth
of his domain. It was only the small fry that puzzled
him sometimes. He and the padre could be seen
frequently side by side, meditative and gazing across the
street of a village at a lot of sedate brown children, trying
to sort them out, as it were, in low, consulting tones,
or else they would together put searching questions as
to the parentage of some small, staid urchin met
wandering, naked and grave, along the road with a
cigar in his baby mouth, and perhaps his mother's
rosary, purloined for purposes of ornamentation, hanging
in a loop of beads low down on his rotund little
stomach. The spiritual and temporal pastors of the
mine flock were very good friends. With Dr. Monygham,
the medical pastor, who had accepted the charge
from Mrs. Gould, and lived in the hospital building,
they were on not so intimate terms. But no one could
be on intimate terms with El Señor Doctor, who, with
his twisted shoulders, drooping head, sardonic mouth,
and side-long bitter glance, was mysterious and uncanny.
The other two authorities worked in harmony.
with big round eyes, a sharp chin, and a great snuff-
taker, was an old campaigner, too; he had shriven
many simple souls on the battlefields of the Republic,
kneeling by the dying on hillsides, in the long grass,
in the gloom of the forests, to hear the last confession
with the smell of gunpowder smoke in his nostrils, the
rattle of muskets, the hum and spatter of bullets in his
ears. And where was the harm if, at the presbytery,
they had a game with a pack of greasy cards in the
early evening, before Don Pépé went his last rounds to
see that all the watchmen of the mine — a body organized
by himself — were at their posts? For that last
duty before he slept Don Pépé did actually gird his old
sword on the verandah of an unmistakable American
white frame house, which Father Roman called the
presbytery. Near by, a long, low, dark building,
steeple-roofed, like a vast barn with a wooden cross
over the gable, was the miners' chapel. There Father
Roman said Mass every day before a sombre altar-
piece representing the Resurrection, the grey slab of the
tombstone balanced on one corner, a figure soaring upwards,
long-limbed and livid, in an oval of pallid light,
and a helmeted brown legionary smitten down, right
across the bituminous foreground. "This picture, my
children, muy linda e maravillosa," Father Roman would
say to some of his flock, "which you behold here through
the munificence of the wife of our Señor Administrador,
has been painted in Europe, a country of saints and
miracles, and much greater than our Costaguana."
And he would take a pinch of snuff with unction. But
when once an inquisitive spirit desired to know in what
direction this Europe was situated, whether up or down
the coast, Father Roman, to conceal his perplexity, became
very reserved and severe. "No doubt it is
the San Tomé mine should think earnestly of ever-
lasting punishment instead of inquiring into the
magnitude of the earth, with its countries and populations
altogether beyond your understanding."
With a "Good-night, Padre," "Good-night, Don
Pépé," the Gobernador would go off, holding up his
sabre against his side, his body bent forward, with a
long, plodding stride in the dark. The jocularity
proper to an innocent card game for a few cigars or a
bundle of yerba was replaced at once by the stern duty
mood of an officer setting out to visit the outposts of an
encamped army. One loud blast of the whistle that
hung from his neck provoked instantly a great shrilling
of responding whistles, mingled with the barking of
dogs, that would calm down slowly at last, away up at
the head of the gorge; and in the stillness two serenos,
on guard by the bridge, would appear walking noiselessly
towards him. On one side of the road a long
frame building — the store — would be closed and barricaded
from end to end; facing it another white frame
house, still longer, and with a verandah — the hospital —
would have lights in the two windows of Dr. Monygham's
quarters. Even the delicate foliage of a clump of
pepper trees did not stir, so breathless would be the
darkness warmed by the radiation of the over-heated
rocks. Don Pépé would stand still for a moment with
the two motionless serenos before him, and, abruptly,
high up on the sheer face of the mountain, dotted with
single torches, like drops of fire fallen from the two great
blazing clusters of lights above, the ore shoots would
begin to rattle. The great clattering, shuffling noise,
gathering speed and weight, would be caught up by the
walls of the gorge, and sent upon the plain in a growl of
thunder. The pasadero in Rincon swore that on calm
in his doorway as of a storm in the mountains.
To Charles Gould's fancy it seemed that the sound
must reach the uttermost limits of the province. Riding
at night towards the mine, it would meet him at the
edge of a little wood just beyond Rincon. There was
no mistaking the growling mutter of the mountain
pouring its stream of treasure under the stamps; and it
came to his heart with the peculiar force of a proclamation
thundered forth over the land and the marvellousness
of an accomplished fact fulfilling an audacious
desire. He had heard this very sound in his imagination
on that far-off evening when his wife and himself,
after a tortuous ride through a strip of forest,
had reined in their horses near the stream, and had
gazed for the first time upon the jungle-grown solitude
of the gorge. The head of a palm rose here
and there. In a high ravine round the corner of the
San Tomé mountain (which is square like a block-
house) the thread of a slender waterfall flashed bright
and glassy through the dark green of the heavy fronds
of tree-ferns. Don Pépé, in attendance, rode up,
and, stretching his arm up the gorge, had declared
with mock solemnity, "Behold the very paradise of
snakes, señora."
And then they had wheeled their horses and ridden
back to sleep that night at Rincon. The alcalde — an
old, skinny Moreno, a sergeant of Guzman Bento's
time — had cleared respectfully out of his house with his
three pretty daughters, to make room for the foreign
señora and their worships the Caballeros. All he asked
Charles Gould (whom he took for a mysterious and
official person) to do for him was to remind the supreme
Government — El Gobierno supreme — of a pension
(amounting to about a dollar a month) to which he
him, he affirmed, straightening his bent back martially,
"many years ago, for my valour in the wars with the
wild Indios when a young man, señor."
The waterfall existed no longer. The tree-ferns that
had luxuriated in its spray had died around the dried-
up pool, and the high ravine was only a big trench half
filled up with the refuse of excavations and tailings.
The torrent, dammed up above, sent its water rushing
along the open flumes of scooped tree trunks striding on
trestle-legs to the turbines working the stamps on the
lower plateau — the mesa grande of the San Tomé
mountain. Only the memory of the waterfall, with its
amazing fernery, like a hanging garden above the rocks
of the gorge, was preserved in Mrs. Gould's water-
colour sketch; she had made it hastily one day from a
cleared patch in the bushes, sitting in the shade of a
roof of straw erected for her on three rough poles under
Don Pépé's direction.
Mrs. Gould had seen it all from the beginning: the
clearing of the wilderness, the making of the road, the
cutting of new paths up the cliff face of San Tomé. For
weeks together she had lived on the spot with her husband;
and she was so little in Sulaco during that year
that the appearance of the Gould carriage on the
Alameda would cause a social excitement. From the
heavy family coaches full of stately señoras and black-
eyed señoritas rolling solemnly in the shaded alley white
hands were waved towards her with animation in a
flutter of greetings. Doña Emilia was "down from the
mountain."
But not for long. Doña Emilia would be gone "up to
the mountain" in a day or two, and her sleek carriage
mules would have an easy time of it for another long
spell. She had watched the erection of the first frame-
Pépé's quarters; she heard with a thrill of thankful
emotion the first wagon load of ore rattle down the then
only shoot; she had stood by her husband's side perfectly
silent, and gone cold all over with excitement at
the instant when the first battery of only fifteen stamps
was put in motion for the first time. On the occasion
when the fires under the first set of retorts in their shed
had glowed far into the night she did not retire to rest
on the rough cadre set up for her in the as yet bare
frame-house till she had seen the first spongy lump of
silver yielded to the hazards of the world by the dark
depths of the Gould Concession; she had laid her unmercenary
hands, with an eagerness that made them
tremble, upon the first silver ingot turned out still warm
from the mould; and by her imaginative estimate of its
power she endowed that lump of metal with a justificative
conception, as though it were not a mere fact,
but something far-reaching and impalpable, like the
true expression of an emotion or the emergence of a
principle.
Don Pépé, extremely interested, too, looked over her
shoulder with a smile that, making longitudinal folds
on his face, caused it to resemble a leathern mask with a
benignantly diabolic expression.
"Would not the muchachos of Hernandez like to get
hold of this insignificant object, that looks, por Dios,
very much like a piece of tin?" he remarked, jocularly.
Hernandez, the robber, had been an inoffensive, small
ranchero, kidnapped with circumstances of peculiar
atrocity from his home during one of the civil wars, and
forced to serve in the army. There his conduct as
soldier was exemplary, till, watching his chance, he
killed his colonel, and managed to get clear away. With
a band of deserters, who chose him for their chief, he had
Tonoro. The haciendas paid him blackmail in cattle
and horses; extraordinary stories were told of his powers
and of his wonderful escapes from capture. He used
to ride, single-handed, into the villages and the little
towns on the Campo, driving a pack mule before him,
with two revolvers in his belt, go straight to the shop or
store, select what he wanted, and ride away unopposed
because of the terror his exploits and his audacity inspired.
Poor country people he usually left alone; the
upper class were often stopped on the roads and robbed;
but any unlucky official that fell into his hands was sure
to get a severe flogging. The army officers did not like
his name to be mentioned in their presence. His
followers, mounted on stolen horses, laughed at the pursuit
of the regular cavalry sent to hunt them down, and
whom they took pleasure to ambush most scientifically
in the broken ground of their own fastness. Expeditions
had been fitted out; a price had been put upon his
head; even attempts had been made, treacherously of
course, to open negotiations with him, without in the
slightest way affecting the even tenor of his career. At
last, in true Costaguana fashion, the Fiscal of Tonoro,
who was ambitious of the glory of having reduced the
famous Hernandez, offered him a sum of money and a
safe conduct out of the country for the betrayal of his
band. But Hernandez evidently was not of the stuff
of which the distinguished military politicians and
conspirators of Costaguana are made. This clever but
common device (which frequently works like a charm
in putting down revolutions) failed with the chief of
vulgar Salteadores. It promised well for the Fiscal at
first, but ended very badly for the squadron of lanceros
posted (by the Fiscal's directions) in a fold of the ground
into which Hernandez had promised to lead his unsuspecting
time, but creeping on their hands and knees
through the bush, and only let their presence be known
by a general discharge of firearms, which emptied
many saddles. The troopers who escaped came riding
very hard into Tonoro. It is said that their commanding
officer (who, being better mounted, rode far ahead of the
rest) afterwards got into a state of despairing intoxication
and beat the ambitious Fiscal severely with
the flat of his sabre in the presence of his wife and
daughters, for bringing this disgrace upon the National
Army. The highest civil official of Tonoro, falling to
the ground in a swoon, was further kicked all over the
body and rowelled with sharp spurs about the neck and
face because of the great sensitiveness of his military
colleague. This gossip of the inland Campo, so
characteristic of the rulers of the country with its
story of oppression, inefficiency, fatuous methods,
treachery, and savage brutality, was perfectly known
to Mrs. Gould. That it should be accepted with no
indignant comment by people of intelligence, refinement,
and character as something inherent in the nature of
things was one of the symptoms of degradation that had
the power to exasperate her almost to the verge of
despair. Still looking at the ingot of silver, she shook
her head at Don Pépé's remark —
"If it had not been for the lawless tyranny of your
Government, Don Pépé, many an outlaw now with
Hernandez would be living peaceably and happy by the
honest work of his hands."
"Señora," cried Don Pépé, with enthusiasm, "it is
true! It is as if God had given you the power to look
into the very breasts of people. You have seen them
working round you, Doña Emilia — meek as lambs,
patient like their own burros, brave like lions. I have
here before you, señora — in the time of Paez, who was
full of generosity, and in courage only approached by
the uncle of Don Carlos here, as far as I know. No
wonder there are bandits in the Campo when there are
none but thieves, swindlers, and sanguinary macaques
to rule us in Sta. Marta. However, all the same, a
bandit is a bandit, and we shall have a dozen good
straight Winchesters to ride with the silver down to
Sulaco."
Mrs. Gould's ride with the first silver escort to Sulaco
was the closing episode of what she called "my camp
life" before she had settled in her town-house permanently,
as was proper and even necessary for the wife
of the administrator of such an important institution as
the San Tomé mine. For the San Tomé mine was to
become an institution, a rallying point for everything
in the province that needed order and stability to live.
Security seemed to flow upon this land from the
mountain-gorge. The authorities of Sulaco had learned
that the San Tomé mine could make it worth their while
to leave things and people alone. This was the nearest
approach to the rule of common-sense and justice
Charles Gould felt it possible to secure at first. In fact,
the mine, with its organization, its population growing
fiercely attached to their position of privileged safety,
with its armoury, with its Don Pépé, with its armed
body of serenos (where, it was said, many an outlaw and
deserter — and even some members of Hernandez's
band — had found a place), the mine was a power in the
land. As a certain prominent man in Sta. Marta had
exclaimed with a hollow laugh, once, when discussing
the line of action taken by the Sulaco authorities at a
time of political crisis —
"You call these men Government officials? They?
Concession — I tell you."
The prominent man (who was then a person in power,
with a lemon-coloured face and a very short and curly,
not to say woolly, head of hair) went so far in his
temporary discontent as to shake his yellow fist under
the nose of his interlocutor, and shriek —
"Yes! All! Silence! All! I tell you! The political
Géfé, the chief of the police, the chief of the customs, the
general, all, all, are the officials of that Gould."
Thereupon an intrepid but low and argumentative
murmur would flow on for a space in the ministerial
cabinet, and the prominent man's passion would end
in a cynical shrug of the shoulders. After all, he seemed
to say, what did it matter as long as the minister himself
was not forgotten during his brief day of authority?
But all the same, the unofficial agent of the San Tomé
mine, working for a good cause, had his moments of
anxiety, which were reflected in his letters to Don José
Avellanos, his maternal uncle.
"No sanguinary macaque from Sta. Marta shall set
foot on that part of Costaguana which lies beyond the
San Tomé bridge," Don Pépé used to assure Mrs.
Gould. "Except, of course, as an honoured guest —
for our Señor Administrador is a deep politico." But
to Charles Gould, in his own room, the old Major would
remark with a grim and soldierly cheeriness, "We are
all playing our heads at this game."
Don José Avellanos would mutter "Imperium in
imperio, Emilia, my soul," with an air of profound self-
satisfaction which, somehow, in a curious way, seemed
to contain a queer admixture of bodily discomfort.
But that, perhaps, could only be visible to the initiated.
And for the initiated it was a wonderful place, this
drawing-room of the Casa Gould, with its momentary
older, harder, mysteriously silent, with the lines
deepened on his English, ruddy, out-of-doors complexion;
flitting on his thin cavalryman's legs across the
doorways, either just "back from the mountain"
or with jingling spurs and riding-whip under his arm, on
the point of starting "for the mountain." Then
Don Pépé, modestly martial in his chair, the llanero
who seemed somehow to have found his martial
jocularity, his knowledge of the world, and his manner
perfect for his station, in the midst of savage armed
contests with his kind; Avellanos, polished and
familiar, the diplomatist with his loquacity covering
much caution and wisdom in delicate advice, with his
manuscript of a historical work on Costaguana,
entitled "Fifty Years of Misrule," which, at present, he
thought it was not prudent (even if it were possible)
"to give to the world"; these three, and also Doña
Emilia amongst them, gracious, small, and fairy-like,
before the glittering tea-set, with one common master-
thought in their heads, with one common feeling of a
tense situation, with one ever-present aim to preserve
the inviolable character of the mine at every cost.
And there was also to be seen Captain Mitchell, a
little apart, near one of the long windows, with an air
of old-fashioned neat old bachelorhood about him,
slightly pompous, in a white waistcoat, a little disregarded
and unconscious of it; utterly in the dark, and
imagining himself to be in the thick of things. The
good man, having spent a clear thirty years of his life
on the high seas before getting what he called a "shore
billet," was astonished at the importance of transactions
(other than relating to shipping) which take
place on dry land. Almost every event out of the
usual daily course "marked an epoch" for him or else
with a discomfited droop of his rubicund, rather handsome
face, set off by snow-white close hair and short
whiskers, he would mutter —
"Ah, that! That, sir, was a mistake."
The reception of the first consignment of San Tomé
silver for shipment to San Francisco in one of the O.S.N.
Co.'s mail-boats had, of course, "marked an epoch" for
Captain Mitchell. The ingots packed in boxes of stiff
ox-hide with plaited handles, small enough to be carried
easily by two men, were brought down by the serenos of
the mine walking in careful couples along the half-
mile or so of steep, zigzag paths to the foot of the
mountain. There they would be loaded into a string
of two-wheeled carts, resembling roomy coffers with a
door at the back, and harnessed tandem with two
mules each, waiting under the guard of armed and
mounted serenos. Don Pépé padlocked each door in
succession, and at the signal of his whistle the string of
carts would move off, closely surrounded by the clank
of spur and carbine, with jolts and cracking of whips,
with a sudden deep rumble over the boundary bridge
("into the land of thieves and sanguinary macaques,"
Don Pépé defined that crossing); hats bobbing in the
first light of the dawn, on the heads of cloaked figures;
Winchesters on hip; bridle hands protruding lean and
brown from under the falling folds of the ponchos. The
convoy skirting a little wood, along the mine trail, between
the mud huts and low walls of Rincon, increased
its pace on the camino real, mules urged to speed, escort
galloping, Don Carlos riding alone ahead of a dust storm
affording a vague vision of long ears of mules, of fluttering
little green and white flags stuck upon each cart;
of raised arms in a mob of sombreros with the white
gleam of ranging eyes; and Don Pépé, hardly visible in
impassive face, rising and falling rhythmically on an
ewe-necked silver-bitted black brute with a hammer
head.
The sleepy people in the little clusters of huts, in the
small ranches near the road, recognized by the headlong
sound the charge of the San Tomé silver escort towards
the crumbling wall of the city on the Campo side.
They came to the doors to see it dash by over ruts and
stones, with a clatter and clank and cracking of whips,
with the reckless rush and precise driving of a field
battery hurrying into action, and the solitary English
figure of the Señor Administrador riding far ahead in
the lead.
In the fenced roadside paddocks loose horses galloped
wildly for a while; the heavy cattle stood up breast deep
in the grass, lowing mutteringly at the flying noise; a
meek Indian villager would glance back once and
hasten to shove his loaded little donkey bodily against
a wall, out of the way of the San Tomé silver escort
going to the sea; a small knot of chilly leperos under the
Stone Horse of the Alameda would mutter: "Caramba!"
on seeing it take a wide curve at a gallop and dart into
the empty Street of the Constitution; for it was considered
the correct thing, the only proper style by the
mule-drivers of the San Tomé mine to go through the
waking town from end to end without a check in the
speed as if chased by a devil.
The early sunshine glowed on the delicate primrose,
pale pink, pale blue fronts of the big houses with all
their gates shut yet, and no face behind the iron bars
of the windows. In the whole sunlit range of empty
balconies along the street only one white figure would be
visible high up above the clear pavement — the wife of
the Señor Administrador — leaning over to see the escort
up negligently on her little head, and a lot of lace about
the neck of her muslin wrapper. With a smile to her
husband's single, quick, upward glance, she would watch
the whole thing stream past below her feet with an
orderly uproar, till she answered by a friendly sign the
salute of the galloping Don Pépé, the stiff, deferential
inclination with a sweep of the hat below the knee.
The string of padlocked carts lengthened, the size of
the escort grew bigger as the years went on. Every
three months an increasing stream of treasure swept
through the streets of Sulaco on its way to the strong
room in the O.S.N. Co.'s building by the harbour,
there to await shipment for the North. Increasing in
volume, and of immense value also; for, as Charles
Gould told his wife once with some exultation, there had
never been seen anything in the world to approach the
vein of the Gould Concession. For them both, each
passing of the escort under the balconies of the Casa
Gould was like another victory gained in the conquest
of peace for Sulaco.
No doubt the initial action of Charles Gould had been
helped at the beginning by a period of comparative
peace which occurred just about that time; and also by
the general softening of manners as compared with the
epoch of civil wars whence had emerged the iron
tyranny of Guzman Bento of fearful memory. In the
contests that broke out at the end of his rule (which had
kept peace in the country for a whole fifteen years)
there was more fatuous imbecility, plenty of cruelty and
suffering still, but much less of the old-time fierce and
blindly ferocious political fanaticism. It was all more
vile, more base, more contemptible, and infinitely more
manageable in the very outspoken cynicism of motives.
It was more clearly a brazen-faced scramble for a constantly
had been stupidly killed in the land. Thus it
came to pass that the province of Sulaco, once the field
of cruel party vengeances, had become in a way one of
the considerable prizes of political career. The great of
the earth (in Sta. Marta) reserved the posts in the old
Occidental State to those nearest and dearest to them:
nephews, brothers, husbands of favourite sisters, bosom
friends, trusty supporters — or prominent supporters of
whom perhaps they were afraid. It was the blessed
province of great opportunities and of largest salaries;
for the San Tomé mine had its own unofficial pay list,
whose items and amounts, fixed in consultation by
Charles Gould and Señor Avellanos, were known to a
prominent business man in the United States, who for
twenty minutes or so in every month gave his undivided
attention to Sulaco affairs. At the same time the
material interests of all sorts, backed up by the influence
of the San Tomé mine, were quietly gathering
substance in that part of the Republic. If, for instance,
the Sulaco Collectorship was generally understood, in
the political world of the capital, to open the way to the
Ministry of Finance, and so on for every official post,
then, on the other hand, the despondent business circles
of the Republic had come to consider the Occidental
Province as the promised land of safety, especially if a
man managed to get on good terms with the administration
of the mine. "Charles Gould; excellent fellow!
Absolutely necessary to make sure of him before taking
a single step. Get an introduction to him from Moraga
if you can — the agent of the King of Sulaco, don't you
know."
No wonder, then, that Sir John, coming from Europe
to smooth the path for his railway, had been meeting the
name (and even the nickname) of Charles Gould at
Administration in Sta. Marta (a polished, well-informed
gentleman, Sir John thought him) had certainly helped
so greatly in bringing about the presidential tour that he
began to think that there was something in the faint
whispers hinting at the immense occult influence of
the Gould Concession. What was currently whispered
was this — that the San Tomé Administration had, in
part, at least, financed the last revolution, which had
brought into a five-year dictatorship Don Vincente
Ribiera, a man of culture and of unblemished character,
invested with a mandate of reform by the best elements
of the State. Serious, well-informed men seemed to
believe the fact, to hope for better things, for the
establishment of legality, of good faith and order in
public life. So much the better, then, thought Sir John.
He worked always on a great scale; there was a loan to
the State, and a project for systematic colonization of
the Occidental Province, involved in one vast scheme
with the construction of the National Central Railway.
Good faith, order, honesty, peace, were badly wanted
for this great development of material interests. Anybody
on the side of these things, and especially if able
to help, had an importance in Sir John's eyes. He had
not been disappointed in the "King of Sulaco." The
local difficulties had fallen away, as the engineer-in-chief
had foretold they would, before Charles Gould's mediation.
Sir John had been extremely fêted in Sulaco,
next to the President-Dictator, a fact which might have
accounted for the evident ill-humour General Montero
displayed at lunch given on board the Juno just before
she was to sail, taking away from Sulaco the President-
Dictator and the distinguished foreign guests in his
train.
The Excellentissimo ("the hope of honest men," as
in the name of the Provincial Assembly of Sulaco) sat at
the head of the long table; Captain Mitchell, positively
stony-eyed and purple in the face with the solemnity of
this "historical event," occupied the foot as the representative
of the O.S.N. Company in Sulaco, the hosts of
that informal function, with the captain of the ship and
some minor officials from the shore around him. Those
cheery, swarthy little gentlemen cast jovial side-glances
at the bottles of champagne beginning to pop behind
the guests' backs in the hands of the ship's stewards.
The amber wine creamed up to the rims of the glasses.
Charles Gould had his place next to a foreign envoy,
who, in a listless undertone, had been talking to him
fitfully of hunting and shooting. The well-nourished,
pale face, with an eyeglass and drooping yellow moustache,
made the Señor Administrador appear by contrast
twice as sunbaked, more flaming red, a hundred
times more intensely and silently alive. Don José
Avellanos touched elbows with the other foreign diplomat,
a dark man with a quiet, watchful, self-confident
demeanour, and a touch of reserve. All etiquette being
laid aside on the occasion, General Montero was the
only one there in full uniform, so stiff with embroideries
in front that his broad chest seemed protected by a
cuirass of gold. Sir John at the beginning had got
away from high places for the sake of sitting near Mrs.
Gould.
The great financier was trying to express to her his
grateful sense of her hospitality and of his obligation to
her husband's "enormous influence in this part of the
country," when she interrupted him by a low "Hush!"
The President was going to make an informal pronouncement.
The Excellentissimo was on his legs. He said only a
mostly for Avellanos — his old friend — as to the necessity
of unremitting effort to secure the lasting welfare of the
country emerging after this last struggle, he hoped, into
a period of peace and material prosperity.
Mrs. Gould, listening to the mellow, slightly mournful
voice, looking at this rotund, dark, spectacled face,
at the short body, obese to the point of infirmity,
thought that this man of delicate and melancholy mind,
physically almost a cripple, coming out of his retirement
into a dangerous strife at the call of his fellows,
had the right to speak with the authority of his self-
sacrifice. And yet she was made uneasy. He was
more pathetic than promising, this first civilian Chief of
the State Costaguana had ever known, pronouncing,
glass in hand, his simple watchwords of honesty, peace,
respect for law, political good faith abroad and at
home — the safeguards of national honour.
He sat down. During the respectful, appreciative
buzz of voices that followed the speech, General
Montero raised a pair of heavy, drooping eyelids and
rolled his eyes with a sort of uneasy dullness from face
to face. The military backwoods hero of the party,
though secretly impressed by the sudden novelties and
splendours of his position (he had never been on board a
ship before, and had hardly ever seen the sea except
from a distance), understood by a sort of instinct the
advantage his surly, unpolished attitude of a savage
fighter gave him amongst all these refined Blanco
aristocrats. But why was it that nobody was looking
at him? he wondered to himself angrily. He was able
to spell out the print of newspapers, and knew that he
had performed the "greatest military exploit of modern
times."
"My husband wanted the railway," Mrs. Gould said
"All this brings nearer the sort of future we
desire for the country, which has waited for it in sorrow
long enough, God knows. But I will confess that the
other day, during my afternoon drive when I suddenly
saw an Indian boy ride out of a wood with the red flag of
a surveying party in his hand, I felt something of a
shock. The future means change — an utter change.
And yet even here there are simple and picturesque
things that one would like to preserve."
Sir John listened, smiling. But it was his turn now
to hush Mrs. Gould.
"General Montero is going to speak," he whispered,
and almost immediately added, in comic alarm, "Heavens!
he's going to propose my own health, I believe."
General Montero had risen with a jingle of steel
scabbard and a ripple of glitter on his gold-embroidered
breast; a heavy sword-hilt appeared at his side above
the edge of the table. In this gorgeous uniform, with
his bull neck, his hooked nose flattened on the tip upon
a blue-black, dyed moustache, he looked like a disguised
and sinister vaquero. The drone of his voice had a
strangely rasping, soulless ring. He floundered, lowering,
through a few vague sentences; then suddenly
raising his big head and his voice together, burst out
harshly —
"The honour of the country is in the hands of the
army. I assure you I shall be faithful to it." He
hesitated till his roaming eyes met Sir John's face upon
which he fixed a lurid, sleepy glance; and the figure of
the lately negotiated loan came into his mind. He
lifted his glass. "I drink to the health of the man who
brings us a million and a half of pounds."
He tossed off his champagne, and sat down heavily
with a half-surprised, half-bullying look all round the
succeeded the felicitous toast. Sir John did not move.
"I don't think I am called upon to rise," he murmured
to Mrs. Gould. "That sort of thing speaks for
itself." But Don José Avellanos came to the rescue
with a short oration, in which he alluded pointedly to
England's goodwill towards Costaguana — "a goodwill,"
he continued, significantly, "of which I, having been in
my time accredited to the Court of St. James, am able
to speak with some knowledge."
Only then Sir John thought fit to respond, which he
did gracefully in bad French, punctuated by bursts of
applause and the "Hear! Hears!" of Captain Mitchell,
who was able to understand a word now and then.
Directly he had done, the financier of railways turned to
Mrs. Gould —
"You were good enough to say that you intended to
ask me for something," he reminded her, gallantly.
"What is it? Be assured that any request from you
would be considered in the light of a favour to myself."
She thanked him by a gracious smile. Everybody
was rising from the table.
"Let us go on deck," she proposed, "where I'll be
able to point out to you the very object of my request."
An enormous national flag of Costaguana, diagonal
red and yellow, with two green palm trees in the middle,
floated lazily at the mainmast head of the Juno. A
multitude of fireworks being let off in their thousands
at the water's edge in honour of the President kept up a
mysterious crepitating noise half round the harbour.
Now and then a lot of rockets, swishing upwards invisibly,
detonated overhead with only a puff of smoke
in the bright sky. Crowds of people could be seen
between the town gate and the harbour, under the
bunches of multicoloured flags fluttering on tall poles.
and the remote sound of shouting. A knot of ragged
negroes at the end of the wharf kept on loading and
firing a small iron cannon time after time. A greyish
haze of dust hung thin and motionless against the sun.
Don Vincente Ribiera made a few steps under the
deck-awning, leaning on the arm of Señor Avellanos; a
wide circle was formed round him, where the mirthless
smile of his dark lips and the sightless glitter of his
spectacles could be seen turning amiably from side to
side. The informal function arranged on purpose on
board the Juno to give the President-Dictator an opportunity
to meet intimately some of his most notable
adherents in Sulaco was drawing to an end. On one
side, General Montero, his bald head covered now by a
plumed cocked hat, remained motionless on a skylight
seat, a pair of big gauntleted hands folded on the hilt
of the sabre standing upright between his legs. The
white plume, the coppery tint of his broad face, the
blue-black of the moustaches under the curved beak,
the mass of gold on sleeves and breast, the high shining
boots with enormous spurs, the working nostrils, the
imbecile and domineering stare of the glorious victor
of Rio Seco had in them something ominous and incredible;
the exaggeration of a cruel caricature, the
fatuity of solemn masquerading, the atrocious grotesqueness
of some military idol of Aztec conception and
European bedecking, awaiting the homage of worshippers.
Don José approached diplomatically this
weird and inscrutable portent, and Mrs. Gould turned
her fascinated eyes away at last.
Charles, coming up to take leave of Sir John, heard
him say, as he bent over his wife's hand, "Certainly.
Of course, my dear Mrs. Gould, for a protégé of yours!
Not the slightest difficulty. Consider it done."
Going ashore in the same boat with the Goulds, Don
José Avellanos was very silent. Even in the Gould
carriage he did not open his lips for a long time. The
mules trotted slowly away from the wharf between the
extended hands of the beggars, who for that day seemed
to have abandoned in a body the portals of churches.
Charles Gould sat on the back seat and looked away
upon the plain. A multitude of booths made of green
boughs, of rushes, of odd pieces of plank eked out with
bits of canvas had been erected all over it for the sale of
cana, of dulces, of fruit, of cigars. Over little heaps of
glowing charcoal Indian women, squatting on mats,
cooked food in black earthen pots, and boiled the water
for the maté gourds, which they offered in soft, caressing
voices to the country people. A racecourse had been
staked out for the vaqueros; and away to the left, from
where the crowd was massed thickly about a huge
temporary erection, like a circus tent of wood with a
conical grass roof, came the resonant twanging of harp
strings, the sharp ping of guitars, with the grave drumming
throb of an Indian gombo pulsating steadily
through the shrill choruses of the dancers.
Charles Gould said presently —
"All this piece of land belongs now to the Railway
Company. There will be no more popular feasts held
here."
Mrs. Gould was rather sorry to think so. She took
this opportunity to mention how she had just obtained
from Sir John the promise that the house occupied by
Giorgio Viola should not be interfered with. She
declared she could never understand why the survey
engineers ever talked of demolishing that old building.
It was not in the way of the projected harbour branch
of the line in the least.
She stopped the carriage before the door to reassure at
stood by the carriage step. She talked to him in
Italian, of course, and he thanked her with calm dignity.
An old Garibaldino was grateful to her from the bottom
of his heart for keeping the roof over the heads of his
wife and children. He was too old to wander any more.
"And is it for ever, signora?" he asked.
"For as long as you like."
"Bene. Then the place must be named, It was not
worth while before."
He smiled ruggedly, with a running together of
wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. "I shall set about
the painting of the name to-morrow."
"And what is it going to be, Giorgio?"
"Albergo d'Italia Una," said the old Garibaldino,
looking away for a moment. "More in memory of
those who have died," he added, "than for the country
stolen from us soldiers of liberty by the craft of that
accursed Piedmontese race of kings and ministers."
Mrs. Gould smiled slightly, and, bending over a
little, began to inquire about his wife and children. He
had sent them into town on that day. The padrona
was better in health; many thanks to the signora for
inquiring.
People were passing in twos and threes, in whole
parties of men and women attended by trotting children.
A horseman mounted on a silver-grey mare drew
rein quietly in the shade of the house after taking off his
hat to the party in the carriage, who returned smiles
and familiar nods. Old Viola, evidently very pleased
with the news he had just heard, interrupted himself for
a moment to tell him rapidly that the house was secured,
by the kindness of the English signora, for as long as he
liked to keep it. The other listened attentively, but
made no response.
When the carriage moved on he took off his hat again,
a grey sombrero with a silver cord and tassels. The
bright colours of a Mexican serape twisted on the cantle,
the enormous silver buttons on the embroidered leather
jacket, the row of tiny silver buttons down the seam of the
trousers, the snowy linen, a silk sash with embroidered
ends, the silver plates on headstall and saddle, proclaimed
the unapproachable style of the famous Capataz de
Cargadores — a Mediterranean sailor — got up with more
finished splendour than any well-to-do young ranchero
of the Campo had ever displayed on a high holiday.
"It is a great thing for me," murmured old Giorgio,
still thinking of the house, for now he had grown weary
of change. "The signora just said a word to the
Englishman."
"The old Englishman who has enough money to pay
for a railway? He is going off in an hour," remarked
Nostromo, carelessly. "Buon viaggio, then. I've
guarded his bones all the way from the Entrada pass
down to the plain and into Sulaco, as though he had
been my own father."
Old Giorgio only moved his head sideways absently.
Nostromo pointed after the Goulds' carriage, nearing
the grass-grown gate in the old town wall that was like
a wall of matted jungle.
"And I have sat alone at night with my revolver in
the Company's warehouse time and again by the side of
that other Englishman's heap of silver, guarding it as
though it had been my own."
Viola seemed lost in thought. "It is a great thing for
me," he repeated again, as if to himself.
"It is," agreed the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores,
calmly. "Listen, Vecchio — go in and bring me,
out a cigar, but don't look for it in my room. There's
nothing there."
still absorbed in his idea, and tendered him a cigar,
mumbling thoughtfully in his moustache, "Children
growing up — and girls, too! Girls!" He sighed and
fell silent.
"What, only one?" remarked Nostromo, looking
down with a sort of comic inquisitiveness at the unconscious
old man. "No matter," he added, with lofty
negligence; "one is enough till another is wanted."
He lit it and let the match drop from his passive
fingers. Giorgio Viola looked up, and said abruptly —
"My son would have been just such a fine young man
as you, Gian' Battista, if he had lived."
"What? Your son? But you are right, padrone.
If he had been like me he would have been a man."
He turned his horse slowly, and paced on between the
booths, checking the mare almost to a standstill now
and then for children, for the groups of people from the
distant Campo, who stared after him with admiration.
The Company's lightermen saluted him from afar; and
the greatly envied Capataz de Cargadores advanced,
amongst murmurs of recognition and obsequious greetings,
towards the huge circus-like erection. The throng
thickened; the guitars tinkled louder; other horsemen
sat motionless, smoking calmly above the heads of the
crowd; it eddied and pushed before the doors of the
high-roofed building, whence issued a shuffle and
thumping of feet in time to the dance music vibrating
and shrieking with a racking rhythm, overhung by the
tremendous, sustained, hollow roar of the gombo. The
barbarous and imposing noise of the big drum, that
can madden a crowd, and that even Europeans cannot
hear without a strange emotion, seemed to draw
Nostromo on to its source, while a man, wrapped up in
a faded, torn poncho, walked by his stirrup, and,
for employment on the wharf. He whined,
offering the Señor Capataz half his daily pay for the
privilege of being admitted to the swaggering fraternity
of Cargadores; the other half would be enough for him,
he protested. But Captain Mitchell's right-hand man —
"invaluable for our work — a perfectly incorruptible
fellow" — after looking down critically at the ragged
mozo, shook his head without a word in the uproar
going on around.
The man fell back; and a little further on Nostromo
had to pull up. From the doors of the dance hall men
and women emerged tottering, streaming with sweat,
trembling in every limb, to lean, panting, with staring
eyes and parted lips, against the wall of the structure,
where the harps and guitars played on with mad speed
in an incessant roll of thunder. Hundreds of hands
clapped in there; voices shrieked, and then all at once
would sink low, chanting in unison the refrain of a love
song, with a dying fall. A red flower, flung with a good
aim from somewhere in the crowd, struck the resplendent
Capataz on the cheek.
He caught it as it fell, neatly, but for some time did
not turn his head. When at last he condescended to
look round, the throng near him had parted to make
way for a pretty Morenita, her hair held up by a small
golden comb, who was walking towards him in the open
space.
Her arms and neck emerged plump and bare from a
snowy chemisette; the blue woollen skirt, with all the
fullness gathered in front, scanty on the hips and tight
across the back, disclosed the provoking action of her
walk. She came straight on and laid her hand on the
mare's neck with a timid, coquettish look upwards out
of the corner of her eyes.
"Querido," she murmured, caressingly, "why do you
pretend not to see me when I pass?"
"Because I don't love thee any more," said Nostromo,
deliberately, after a moment of reflective silence.
The hand on the mare's neck trembled suddenly.
She dropped her head before all the eyes in the wide
circle formed round the generous, the terrible, the inconstant
Capataz de Cargadores, and his Morenita.
Nostromo, looking down, saw tears beginning to
fall down her face.
"Has it come, then, ever beloved of my heart?" she
whispered. "Is it true?"
"No," said Nostromo, looking away carelessly. "It
was a lie. I love thee as much as ever."
"Is that true?" she cooed, joyously, her cheeks still
wet with tears.
"It is true."
"True on the life?"
"As true as that; but thou must not ask me to swear
it on the Madonna that stands in thy room." And the
Capataz laughed a little in response to the grins of the
crowd.
She pouted — very pretty — a little uneasy.
"No, I will not ask for that. I can see love in your
eyes." She laid her hand on his knee. "Why are you
trembling like this? From love?" she continued,
while the cavernous thundering of the gombo went on
without a pause. "But if you love her as much as that,
you must give your Paquita a gold-mounted rosary of
beads for the neck of her Madonna."
"No," said Nostromo, looking into her uplifted,
begging eyes, which suddenly turned stony with surprise.
"No? Then what else will your worship give me on
the day of the fiesta?" she asked, angrily; "so as not to
shame me before all these people."
"There is no shame for thee in getting nothing from
thy lover for once."
"True! The shame is your worship's — my poor
lover's," she flared up, sarcastically.
Laughs were heard at her anger, at her retort. What
an audacious spitfire she was! The people aware of
this scene were calling out urgently to others in the
crowd. The circle round the silver-grey mare narrowed
slowly.
The girl went off a pace or two, confronting the mocking
curiosity of the eyes, then flung back to the stirrup,
tiptoeing, her enraged face turned up to Nostromo with
a pair of blazing eyes. He bent low to her in the saddle.
"Juan," she hissed, "I could stab thee to the heart!"
The dreaded Capataz de Cargadores, magnificent and
carelessly public in his amours, flung his arm round her
neck and kissed her spluttering lips. A murmur went
round.
"A knife!" he demanded at large, holding her firmly
by the shoulder.
Twenty blades flashed out together in the circle. A
young man in holiday attire, bounding in, thrust one in
Nostromo's hand and bounded back into the ranks, very
proud of himself. Nostromo had not even looked at
him.
"Stand on my foot," he commanded the girl, who,
suddenly subdued, rose lightly, and when he had her up,
encircling her waist, her face near to his, he pressed the
knife into her little hand.
"No, Morenita! You shall not put me to shame,"
he said. "You shall have your present; and so that
everyone should know who is your lover to-day, you
may cut all the silver buttons off my coat."
There were shouts of laughter and applause at this
the impassive rider jingled in his palm the increasing
hoard of silver buttons. He eased her to the ground
with both her hands full. After whispering for a while
with a very strenuous face, she walked away, staring
haughtily, and vanished into the crowd.
The circle had broken up, and the lordly Capataz de
Cargadores, the indispensable man, the tried and trusty
Nostromo, the Mediterranean sailor come ashore
casually to try his luck in Costaguana, rode slowly
towards the harbour. The Juno was just then swinging
round; and even as Nostromo reined up again to
look on, a flag ran up on the improvised flagstaff erected
in an ancient and dismantled little fort at the harbour
entrance. Half a battery of field guns had been hurried
over there from the Sulaco barracks for the
purpose of firing the regulation salutes for the President-
Dictator and the War Minister. As the mail-boat
headed through the pass, the badly timed reports
announced the end of Don Vincente Ribiera's first
official visit to Sulaco, and for Captain Mitchell the end
of another "historic occasion." Next time when the
"Hope of honest men" was to come that way, a year
and a half later, it was unofficially, over the mountain
tracks, fleeing after a defeat on a lame mule, to be only
just saved by Nostromo from an ignominious death at
the hands of a mob. It was a very different event, of
which Captain Mitchell used to say —
"It was history — history, sir! And that fellow of
mine, Nostromo, you know, was right in it. Absolutely
making history, sir."
But this event, creditable to Nostromo, was to lead
immediately to another, which could not be classed
either as "history" or as "a mistake" in Captain
Mitchell's phraseology. He had another word for it.
"Sir" he used to say afterwards, "that was no mistake.
It was a fatality. A misfortune, pure and
simple, sir. And that poor fellow of mine was right in
it — right in the middle of it! A fatality, if ever there
was one — and to my mind he has never been the same
man since."
| Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard / Joseph Conrad | |