PART SECOND - THE ISABELS - CHAPTER VII

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_ IT WAS part of what Decoud would have called his sane materialism
that he did not believe in the possibility of friendship between
man and woman.

The one exception he allowed confirmed, he maintained, that
absolute rule. Friendship was possible between brother and
sister, meaning by friendship the frank unreserve, as before
another human being, of thoughts and sensations; all the
objectless and necessary sincerity of one's innermost life trying
to re-act upon the profound sympathies of another existence.

His favourite sister, the handsome, slightly arbitrary and
resolute angel, ruling the father and mother Decoud in the
first-floor apartments of a very fine Parisian house, was the
recipient of Martin Decoud's confidences as to his thoughts,
actions, purposes, doubts, and even failures. . . .

"Prepare our little circle in Paris for the birth of another
South American Republic. One more or less, what does it matter?
They may come into the world like evil flowers on a hotbed of
rotten institutions; but the seed of this one has germinated in
your brother's brain, and that will be enough for your devoted
assent. I am writing this to you by the light of a single
candle, in a sort of inn, near the harbour, kept by an Italian
called Viola, a protege of Mrs. Gould. The whole building, which,
for all I know, may have been contrived by a Conquistador farmer
of the pearl fishery three hundred years ago, is perfectly
silent. So is the plain between the town and the harbour; silent,
but not so dark as the house, because the pickets of Italian
workmen guarding the railway have lighted little fires all along
the line. It was not so quiet around here yesterday. We had an
awful riot--a sudden outbreak of the populace, which was not
suppressed till late today. Its object, no doubt, was loot, and
that was defeated, as you may have learned already from the
cablegram sent via San Francisco and New York last night, when
the cables were still open. You have read already there that the
energetic action of the Europeans of the railway has saved the
town from destruction, and you may believe that. I wrote out the
cable myself. We have no Reuter's agency man here. I have also
fired at the mob from the windows of the club, in company with
some other young men of position. Our object was to keep the
Calle de la Constitucion clear for the exodus of the ladies and
children, who have taken refuge on board a couple of cargo ships
now in the harbour here. That was yesterday. You should also have
learned from the cable that the missing President, Ribiera, who
had disappeared after the battle of Sta. Marta, has turned up
here in Sulaco by one of those strange coincidences that are
almost incredible, riding on a lame mule into the very midst of
the street fighting. It appears that he had fled, in company of
a muleteer called Bonifacio, across the mountains from the
threats of Montero into the arms of an enraged mob.

"The Capataz of Cargadores, that Italian sailor of whom I have
written to you before, has saved him from an ignoble death. That
man seems to have a particular talent for being on the spot
whenever there is something picturesque to be done.

"He was with me at four o'clock in the morning at the offices of
the Porvenir, where he had turned up so early in order to warn me
of the coming trouble, and also to assure me that he would keep
his Cargadores on the side of order. When the full daylight came
we were looking together at the crowd on foot and on horseback,
demonstrating on the Plaza and shying stones at the windows of
the Intendencia. Nostromo (that is the name they call him by
here) was pointing out to me his Cargadores interspersed in the
mob.

"The sun shines late upon Sulaco, for it has first to climb above
the mountains. In that clear morning light, brighter than
twilight, Nostromo saw right across the vast Plaza, at the end of
the street beyond the cathedral, a mounted man apparently in
difficulties with a yelling knot of leperos. At once he said to
me, 'That's a stranger. What is it they are doing to him?' Then
he took out the silver whistle he is in the habit of using on the
wharf (this man seems to disdain the use of any metal less
precious than silver) and blew into it twice, evidently a
preconcerted signal for his Cargadores. He ran out immediately,
and they rallied round him. I ran out, too, but was too late to
follow them and help in the rescue of the stranger, whose animal
had fallen. I was set upon at once as a hated aristocrat, and
was only too glad to get into the club, where Don Jaime Berges
(you may remember him visiting at our house in Paris some three
years ago) thrust a sporting gun into my hands. They were already
firing from the windows. There were little heaps of cartridges
lying about on the open card-tables. I remember a couple of
overturned chairs, some bottles rolling on the floor amongst the
packs of cards scattered suddenly as the caballeros rose from
their game to open fire upon the mob. Most of the young men had
spent the night at the club in the expectation of some such
disturbance. In two of the candelabra, on the consoles, the
candles were burning down in their sockets. A large iron nut,
probably stolen from the railway workshops, flew in from the
street as I entered, and broke one of the large mirrors set in
the wall. I noticed also one of the club servants tied up hand
and foot with the cords of the curtain and flung in a corner. I
have a vague recollection of Don Jaime assuring me hastily that
the fellow had been detected putting poison into the dishes at
supper. But I remember distinctly he was shrieking for mercy,
without stopping at all, continuously, and so absolutely
disregarded that nobody even took the trouble to gag him. The
noise he made was so disagreeable that I had half a mind to do it
myself. But there was no time to waste on such trifles. I took my
place at one of the windows and began firing.

"I didn't learn till later in the afternoon whom it was that
Nostromo, with his Cargadores and some Italian workmen as well,
had managed to save from those drunken rascals. That man has a
peculiar talent when anything striking to the imagination has to
be done. I made that remark to him afterwards when we met after
some sort of order had been restored in the town, and the answer
he made rather surprised me. He said quite moodily, 'And how much
do I get for that, senor?' Then it dawned upon me that perhaps
this man's vanity has been satiated by the adulation of the
common people and the confidence of his superiors!"

Decoud paused to light a cigarette, then, with his head still
over his writing, he blew a cloud of smoke, which seemed to
rebound from the paper. He took up the pencil again.

"That was yesterday evening on the Plaza, while he sat on the
steps of the cathedral, his hands between his knees, holding the
bridle of his famous silver-grey mare. He had led his body of
Cargadores splendidly all day long. He looked fatigued. I don't
know how I looked. Very dirty, I suppose. But I suppose I also
looked pleased. From the time the fugitive President had been got
off to the S. S. Minerva, the tide of success had turned against
the mob. They had been driven off the harbour, and out of the
better streets of the town, into their own maze of ruins and
tolderias. You must understand that this riot, whose primary
object was undoubtedly the getting hold of the San Tome silver
stored in the lower rooms of the Custom House (besides the
general looting of the Ricos), had acquired a political colouring
from the fact of two Deputies to the Provincial Assembly, Senores
Gamacho and Fuentes, both from Bolson, putting themselves at the
head of it--late in the afternoon, it is true, when the mob,
disappointed in their hopes of loot, made a stand in the narrow
streets to the cries of 'Viva la Libertad! Down with Feudalism!'
(I wonder what they imagine feudalism to be?) 'Down with the
Goths and Paralytics.' I suppose the Senores Gamacho and Fuentes
knew what they were doing. They are prudent gentlemen. In the
Assembly they called themselves Moderates, and opposed every
energetic measure with philanthropic pensiveness. At the first
rumours of Montero's victory, they showed a subtle change of the
pensive temper, and began to defy poor Don Juste Lopez in his
Presidential tribune with an effrontery to which the poor man
could only respond by a dazed smoothing of his beard and the
ringing of the presidential bell. Then, when the downfall of the
Ribierist cause became confirmed beyond the shadow of a doubt,
they have blossomed into convinced Liberals, acting together as
if they were Siamese twins, and ultimately taking charge, as it
were, of the riot in the name of Monterist principles.

"Their last move of eight o'clock last night was to organize
themselves into a Monterist Committee which sits, as far as I
know, in a posada kept by a retired Mexican bull-fighter, a great
politician, too, whose name I have forgotten. Thence they have
issued a communication to us, the Goths and Paralytics of the
Amarilla Club (who have our own committee), inviting us to come
to some provisional understanding for a truce, in order, they
have the impudence to say, that the noble cause of Liberty
'should not be stained by the criminal excesses of Conservative
selfishness!' As I came out to sit with Nostromo on the cathedral
steps the club was busy considering a proper reply in the
principal room, littered with exploded cartridges, with a lot of
broken glass, blood smears, candlesticks, and all sorts of
wreckage on the floor. But all this is nonsense. Nobody in the
town has any real power except the railway engineers, whose men
occupy the dismantled houses acquired by the Company for their
town station on one side of the Plaza, and Nostromo, whose
Cargadores were sleeping under the arcades along the front of
Anzani's shops. A fire of broken furniture out of the Intendencia
saloons, mostly gilt, was burning on the Plaza, in a high flame
swaying right upon the statue of Charles IV. The dead body of a
man was lying on the steps of the pedestal, his arms thrown wide
open, and his sombrero covering his face--the attention of some
friend, perhaps. The light of the flames touched the foliage of
the first trees on the Alameda, and played on the end of a side
street near by, blocked up by a jumble of ox-carts and dead
bullocks. Sitting on one of the carcasses, a lepero, muffled up,
smoked a cigarette. It was a truce, you understand. The only
other living being on the Plaza besides ourselves was a Cargador
walking to and fro, with a long, bare knife in his hand, like a
sentry before the Arcades, where his friends were sleeping. And
the only other spot of light in the dark town were the lighted
windows of the club, at the corner of the Calle."

After having written so far, Don Martin Decoud, the exotic dandy
of the Parisian boulevard, got up and walked across the sanded
floor of the cafe at one end of the Albergo of United Italy, kept
by Giorgio Viola, the old companion of Garibaldi. The highly
coloured lithograph of the Faithful Hero seemed to look dimly, in
the light of one candle, at the man with no faith in anything
except the truth of his own sensations. Looking out of the
window, Decoud was met by a darkness so impenetrable that he
could see neither the mountains nor the town, nor yet the
buildings near the harbour; and there was not a sound, as if the
tremendous obscurity of the Placid Gulf, spreading from the
waters over the land, had made it dumb as well as blind.
Presently Decoud felt a light tremor of the floor and a distant
clank of iron. A bright white light appeared, deep in the
darkness, growing bigger with a thundering noise. The rolling
stock usually kept on the sidings in Rincon was being run back to
the yards for safe keeping. Like a mysterious stirring of the
darkness behind the headlight of the engine, the train passed in
a gust of hollow uproar, by the end of the house, which seemed to
vibrate all over in response. And nothing was clearly visible
but, on the end of the last flat car, a negro, in white trousers
and naked to the waist, swinging a blazing torch basket
incessantly with a circular movement of his bare arm. Decoud did
not stir.

Behind him, on the back of the chair from which he had risen,
hung his elegant Parisian overcoat, with a pearl-grey silk
lining. But when he turned back to come to the table the
candlelight fell upon a face that was grimy and scratched. His
rosy lips were blackened with heat, the smoke of gun-powder. Dirt
and rust tarnished the lustre of his short beard. His shirt
collar and cuffs were crumpled; the blue silken tie hung down his
breast like a rag; a greasy smudge crossed his white brow. He had
not taken off his clothing nor used water, except to snatch a
hasty drink greedily, for some forty hours. An awful restlessness
had made him its own, had marked him with all the signs of
desperate strife, and put a dry, sleepless stare into his eyes.
He murmured to himself in a hoarse voice, "I wonder if there's
any bread here," looked vaguely about him, then dropped into the
chair and took the pencil up again. He became aware he had not
eaten anything for many hours.

It occurred to him that no one could understand him so well as
his sister. In the most sceptical heart there lurks at such
moments, when the chances of existence are involved, a desire to
leave a correct impression of the feelings, like a light by which
the action may be seen when personality is gone, gone where no
light of investigation can ever reach the truth which every death
takes out of the world. Therefore, instead of looking for
something to eat, or trying to snatch an hour or so of sleep,
Decoud was filling the pages of a large pocket-book with a letter
to his sister.

In the intimacy of that intercourse he could not keep out his
weariness, his great fatigue, the close touch of his bodily
sensations. He began again as if he were talking to her. With
almost an illusion of her presence, he wrote the phrase, "I am
very hungry."

"I have the feeling of a great solitude around me," he continued.
"Is it, perhaps, because I am the only man with a definite idea
in his head, in the complete collapse of every resolve,
intention, and hope about me? But the solitude is also very
real. All the engineers are out, and have been for two days,
looking after the property of the National Central Railway, of
that great Costaguana undertaking which is to put money into the
pockets of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Americans, Germans, and God
knows who else. The silence about me is ominous. There is above
the middle part of this house a sort of first floor, with narrow
openings like loopholes for windows, probably used in old times
for the better defence against the savages, when the persistent
barbarism of our native continent did not wear the black coats of
politicians, but went about yelling, half-naked, with bows and
arrows in its hands. The woman of the house is dying up there, I
believe, all alone with her old husband. There is a narrow
staircase, the sort of staircase one man could easily defend
against a mob, leading up there, and I have just heard, through
the thickness of the wall, the old fellow going down into their
kitchen for something or other. It was a sort of noise a mouse
might make behind the plaster of a wall. All the servants they
had ran away yesterday and have not returned yet, if ever they
do. For the rest, there are only two children here, two girls.
The father has sent them downstairs, and they have crept into
this cafe, perhaps because I am here. They huddle together in a
corner, in each other's arms; I just noticed them a few minutes
ago, and I feel more lonely than ever."

Decoud turned half round in his chair, and asked, "Is there any
bread here?"

Linda's dark head was shaken negatively in response, above the
fair head of her sister nestling on her breast.

"You couldn't get me some bread?" insisted Decoud. The child did
not move; he saw her large eyes stare at him very dark from the
corner. "You're not afraid of me?" he said.

"No," said Linda, "we are not afraid of you. You came here with
Gian' Battista."

"You mean Nostromo?" said Decoud.

"The English call him so, but that is no name either for man or
beast," said the girl, passing her hand gently over her sister's
hair.

"But he lets people call him so," remarked Decoud.

"Not in this house," retorted the child.

"Ah! well, I shall call him the Capataz then."

Decoud gave up the point, and after writing steadily for a while
turned round again.

"When do you expect him back?" he asked.

"After he brought you here he rode off to fetch the Senor Doctor
from the town for mother. He will be back soon."

"He stands a good chance of getting shot somewhere on the road,"
Decoud murmured to himself audibly; and Linda declared in her
high-pitched voice--

"Nobody would dare to fire a shot at Gian' Battista."

"You believe that," asked Decoud, "do you?"

"I know it," said the child, with conviction. "There is no one in
this place brave enough to attack Gian' Battista."

"It doesn't require much bravery to pull a trigger behind a
bush," muttered Decoud to himself. "Fortunately, the night is
dark, or there would be but little chance of saving the silver of
the mine."

He turned again to his pocket-book, glanced back through the
pages, and again started his pencil.

"That was the position yesterday, after the Minerva with the
fugitive President had gone out of harbour, and the rioters had
been driven back into the side lanes of the town. I sat on the
steps of the cathedral with Nostromo, after sending out the cable
message for the information of a more or less attentive world.
Strangely enough, though the offices of the Cable Company are in
the same building as the Porvenir, the mob, which has thrown my
presses out of the window and scattered the type all over the
Plaza, has been kept from interfering with the instruments on the
other side of the courtyard. As I sat talking with Nostromo,
Bernhardt, the telegraphist, came out from under the Arcades with
a piece of paper in his hand. The little man had tied himself up
to an enormous sword and was hung all over with revolvers. He is
ridiculous, but the bravest German of his size that ever tapped
the key of a Morse transmitter. He had received the message from
Cayta reporting the transports with Barrios's army just entering
the port, and ending with the words, 'The greatest enthusiasm
prevails.' I walked off to drink some water at the fountain, and
I was shot at from the Alameda by somebody hiding behind a tree.
But I drank, and didn't care; with Barrios in Cayta and the great
Cordillera between us and Montero's victorious army I seemed,
notwithstanding Messrs. Gamacho and Fuentes, to hold my new State
in the hollow of my hand. I was ready to sleep, but when I got as
far as the Casa Gould I found the patio full of wounded laid out
on straw. Lights were burning, and in that enclosed courtyard on
that hot night a faint odour of chloroform and blood hung about.
At one end Doctor Monygham, the doctor of the mine, was dressing
the wounds; at the other, near the stairs, Father Corbelan,
kneeling, listened to the confession of a dying Cargador. Mrs.
Gould was walking about through these shambles with a large
bottle in one hand and a lot of cotton wool in the other. She
just looked at me and never even winked. Her camerista was
following her, also holding a bottle, and sobbing gently to
herself.

"I busied myself for some time in fetching water from the cistern
for the wounded. Afterwards I wandered upstairs, meeting some of
the first ladies of Sulaco, paler than I had ever seen them
before, with bandages over their arms. Not all of them had fled
to the ships. A good many had taken refuge for the day in the
Casa Gould. On the landing a girl, with her hair half down, was
kneeling against the wall under the niche where stands a Madonna
in blue robes and a gilt crown on her head. I think it was the
eldest Miss Lopez; I couldn't see her face, but I remember
looking at the high French heel of her little shoe. She did not
make a sound, she did not stir, she was not sobbing; she remained
there, perfectly still, all black against the white wall, a
silent figure of passionate piety. I am sure she was no more
frightened than the other white-faced ladies I met carrying
bandages. One was sitting on the top step tearing a piece of
linen hastily into strips--the young wife of an elderly man of
fortune here. She interrupted herself to wave her hand to my
bow, as though she were in her carriage on the Alameda. The women
of our country are worth looking at during a revolution. The
rouge and pearl powder fall off, together with that passive
attitude towards the outer world which education, tradition,
custom impose upon them from the earliest infancy. I thought of
your face, which from your infancy had the stamp of intelligence
instead of that patient and resigned cast which appears when some
political commotion tears down the veil of cosmetics and usage.

"In the great sala upstairs a sort of Junta of Notables was
sitting, the remnant of the vanished Provincial Assembly. Don
Juste Lopez had had half his beard singed off at the muzzle of a
trabuco loaded with slugs, of which every one missed him,
providentially. And as he turned his head from side to side it
was exactly as if there had been two men inside his frock-coat,
one nobly whiskered and solemn, the other untidy and scared.

"They raised a cry of 'Decoud! Don Martin!' at my entrance. I
asked them, 'What are you deliberating upon, gentlemen?' There
did not seem to be any president, though Don Jose Avellanos sat
at the head of the table. They all answered together, 'On the
preservation of life and property.' 'Till the new officials
arrive,' Don Juste explained to me, with the solemn side of his
face offered to my view. It was as if a stream of water had been
poured upon my glowing idea of a new State. There was a hissing
sound in my ears, and the room grew dim, as if suddenly filled
with vapour.

"I walked up to the table blindly, as though I had been drunk.
'You are deliberating upon surrender,' I said. They all sat
still, with their noses over the sheet of paper each had before
him, God only knows why. Only Don Jose hid his face in his hands,
muttering, 'Never, never!' But as I looked at him, it seemed to
me that I could have blown him away with my breath, he looked so
frail, so weak, so worn out. Whatever happens, he will not
survive. The deception is too great for a man of his age; and
hasn't he seen the sheets of 'Fifty Years of Misrule,' which we
have begun printing on the presses of the Porvenir, littering the
Plaza, floating in the gutters, fired out as wads for trabucos
loaded with handfuls of type, blown in the wind, trampled in the
mud? I have seen pages floating upon the very waters of the
harbour. It would be unreasonable to expect him to survive. It
would be cruel.

"'Do you know,' I cried, 'what surrender means to you, to your
women, to your children, to your property?'

"I declaimed for five minutes without drawing breath, it seems to
me, harping on our best chances, on the ferocity of Montero, whom
I made out to be as great a beast as I have no doubt he would
like to be if he had intelligence enough to conceive a systematic
reign of terror. And then for another five minutes or more I
poured out an impassioned appeal to their courage and manliness,
with all the passion of my love for Antonia. For if ever man
spoke well, it would be from a personal feeling, denouncing an
enemy, defending himself, or pleading for what really may be
dearer than life. My dear girl, I absolutely thundered at them.
It seemed as if my voice would burst the walls asunder, and when
I stopped I saw all their scared eyes looking at me dubiously.
And that was all the effect I had produced! Only Don Jose's head
had sunk lower and lower on his breast. I bent my ear to his
withered lips, and made out his whisper, something like, 'In
God's name, then, Martin, my son!' I don't know exactly. There
was the name of God in it, I am certain. It seems to me I have
caught his last breath--the breath of his departing soul on his
lips.

"He lives yet, it is true. I have seen him since; but it was only
a senile body, lying on its back, covered to the chin, with open
eyes, and so still that you might have said it was breathing no
longer. I left him thus, with Antonia kneeling by the side of the
bed, just before I came to this Italian's posada, where the
ubiquitous death is also waiting. But I know that Don Jose has
really died there, in the Casa Gould, with that whisper urging me
to attempt what no doubt his soul, wrapped up in the sanctity of
diplomatic treaties and solemn declarations, must have abhorred.
I had exclaimed very loud, 'There is never any God in a country
where men will not help themselves.'

"Meanwhile, Don Juste had begun a pondered oration whose solemn
effect was spoiled by the ridiculous disaster to his beard. I did
not wait to make it out. He seemed to argue that Montero's (he
called him The General) intentions were probably not evil,
though, he went on, 'that distinguished man' (only a week ago we
used to call him a gran' bestia) 'was perhaps mistaken as to the
true means.' As you may imagine, I didn't stay to hear the rest.
I know the intentions of Montero's brother, Pedrito, the
guerrillero, whom I exposed in Paris, some years ago, in a cafe
frequented by South American students, where he tried to pass
himself off for a Secretary of Legation. He used to come in and
talk for hours, twisting his felt hat in his hairy paws, and his
ambition seemed to become a sort of Duc de Morny to a sort of
Napoleon. Already, then, he used to talk of his brother in
inflated terms. He seemed fairly safe from being found out,
because the students, all of the Blanco families, did not, as you
may imagine, frequent the Legation. It was only Decoud, a man
without faith and principles, as they used to say, that went in
there sometimes for the sake of the fun, as it were to an
assembly of trained monkeys. I know his intentions. I have seen
him change the plates at table. Whoever is allowed to live on in
terror, I must die the death.

"No, I didn't stay to the end to hear Don Juste Lopez trying to
persuade himself in a grave oration of the clemency and justice,
and honesty, and purity of the brothers Montero. I went out
abruptly to seek Antonia. I saw her in the gallery. As I opened
the door, she extended to me her clasped hands.

"'What are they doing in there?' she asked.

"'Talking,' I said, with my eyes looking into hers.

"'Yes, yes, but--'

"'Empty speeches,' I interrupted her. 'Hiding their fears behind
imbecile hopes. They are all great Parliamentarians there--on the
English model, as you know.' I was so furious that I could hardly
speak. She made a gesture of despair.

"Through the door I held a little ajar behind me, we heard Dun
Juste's measured mouthing monotone go on from phrase to phrase,
like a sort of awful and solemn madness.

"'After all, the Democratic aspirations have, perhaps, their
legitimacy. The ways of human progress are inscrutable, and if
the fate of the country is in the hand of Montero, we ought--'

"I crashed the door to on that; it was enough; it was too much.
There was never a beautiful face expressing more horror and
despair than the face of Antonia. I couldn't bear it; I seized
her wrists.

"'Have they killed my father in there?' she asked.

"Her eyes blazed with indignation, but as I looked on,
fascinated, the light in them went out.

"'It is a surrender,' I said. And I remember I was shaking her
wrists I held apart in my hands. 'But it's more than talk. Your
father told me to go on in God's name.'

"My dear girl, there is that in Antonia which would make me
believe in the feasibility of anything. One look at her face is
enough to set my brain on fire. And yet I love her as any other
man would--with the heart, and with that alone. She is more to me
than his Church to Father Corbelan (the Grand Vicar disappeared
last night from the town; perhaps gone to join the band of
Hernandez). She is more to me than his precious mine to that
sentimental Englishman. I won't speak of his wife. She may have
been sentimental once. The San Tome mine stands now between
those two people. 'Your father himself, Antonia,' I repeated;
'your father, do you understand? has told me to go on.'

"She averted her face, and in a pained voice--

"'He has?' she cried. 'Then, indeed, I fear he will never speak
again.'

"She freed her wrists from my clutch and began to cry in her
handkerchief. I disregarded her sorrow; I would rather see her
miserable than not see her at all, never any more; for whether I
escaped or stayed to die, there was for us no coming together, no
future. And that being so, I had no pity to waste upon the
passing moments of her sorrow. I sent her off in tears to fetch
Dona Emilia and Don Carlos, too. Their sentiment was necessary to
the very life of my plan; the sentimentalism of the people that
will never do anything for the sake of their passionate desire,
unless it comes to them clothed in the fair robes of an idea.

"Late at night we formed a small junta of four--the two women,
Don Carlos, and myself--in Mrs. Gould's blue-and-white boudoir.

"El Rey de Sulaco thinks himself, no doubt, a very honest man.
And so he is, if one could look behind his taciturnity. Perhaps
he thinks that this alone makes his honesty unstained. Those
Englishmen live on illusions which somehow or other help them to
get a firm hold of the substance. When he speaks it is by a rare
'yes' or 'no' that seems as impersonal as the words of an oracle.
But he could not impose on me by his dumb reserve. I knew what he
had in his head; he has his mine in his head; and his wife had
nothing in her head but his precious person, which he has bound
up with the Gould Concession and tied up to that little woman's
neck. No matter. The thing was to make him present the affair to
Holroyd (the Steel and Silver King) in such a manner as to secure
his financial support. At that time last night, just twenty-four
hours ago, we thought the silver of the mine safe in the Custom
House vaults till the north-bound steamer came to take it away.
And as long as the treasure flowed north, without a break, that
utter sentimentalist, Holroyd, would not drop his idea of
introducing, not only justice, industry, peace, to the benighted
continents, but also that pet dream of his of a purer form of
Christianity. Later on, the principal European really in Sulaco,
the engineer-in-chief of the railway, came riding up the Calle,
from the harbour, and was admitted to our conclave. Meantime, the
Junta of the Notables in the great sala was still deliberating;
only, one of them had run out in the corredor to ask the servant
whether something to eat couldn't be sent in. The first words the
engineer-in-chief said as he came into the boudoir were, 'What is
your house, dear Mrs. Gould? A war hospital below, and apparently
a restaurant above. I saw them carrying trays full of good
things into the sala.'

"'And here, in this boudoir,' I said, 'you behold the inner
cabinet of the Occidental Republic that is to be.'

"He was so preoccupied that he didn't smile at that, he didn't
even look surprised.

"He told us that he was attending to the general dispositions for
the defence of the railway property at the railway yards when he
was sent for to go into the railway telegraph office. The
engineer of the railhead, at the foot of the mountains, wanted to
talk to him from his end of the wire. There was nobody in the
office but himself and the operator of the railway telegraph, who
read off the clicks aloud as the tape coiled its length upon the
floor. And the purport of that talk, clicked nervously from a
wooden shed in the depths of the forests, had informed the chief
that President Ribiera had been, or was being, pursued. This was
news, indeed, to all of us in Sulaco. Ribiera himself, when
rescued, revived, and soothed by us, had been inclined to think
that he had not been pursued.

"Ribiera had yielded to the urgent solicitations of his friends,
and had left the headquarters of his discomfited army alone,
under the guidance of Bonifacio, the muleteer, who had been
willing to take the responsibility with the risk. He had departed
at daybreak of the third day. His remaining forces had melted
away during the night. Bonifacio and he rode hard on horses
towards the Cordillera; then they obtained mules, entered the
passes, and crossed the Paramo of Ivie just before a freezing
blast swept over that stony plateau, burying in a drift of snow
the little shelter-hut of stones in which they had spent the
night. Afterwards poor Ribiera had many adventures, got
separated from his guide, lost his mount, struggled down to the
Campo on foot, and if he had not thrown himself on the mercy of a
ranchero would have perished a long way from Sulaco. That man,
who, as a matter of fact, recognized him at once, let him have a
fresh mule, which the fugitive, heavy and unskilful, had ridden
to death. And it was true he had been pursued by a party
commanded by no less a person than Pedro Montero, the brother of
the general. The cold wind of the Paramo luckily caught the
pursuers on the top of the pass. Some few men, and all the
animals, perished in the icy blast. The stragglers died, but the
main body kept on. They found poor Bonifacio lying half-dead at
the foot of a snow slope, and bayoneted him promptly in the true
Civil War style. They would have had Ribiera, too, if they had
not, for some reason or other, turned off the track of the old
Camino Real, only to lose their way in the forests at the foot of
the lower slopes. And there they were at last, having stumbled
in unexpectedly upon the construction camp. The engineer at the
railhead told his chief by wire that he had Pedro Montero
absolutely there, in the very office, listening to the clicks. He
was going to take possession of Sulaco in the name of the
Democracy. He was very overbearing. His men slaughtered some of
the Railway Company's cattle without asking leave, and went to
work broiling the meat on the embers. Pedrito made many pointed
inquiries as to the silver mine, and what had become of the
product of the last six months' working. He had said
peremptorily, "Ask your chief up there by wire, he ought to know;
tell him that Don Pedro Montero, Chief of the Campo and Minister
of the Interior of the new Government, desires to be correctly
informed.'

"He had his feet wrapped up in blood-stained rags, a lean,
haggard face, ragged beard and hair, and had walked in limping,
with a crooked branch of a tree for a staff. His followers were
perhaps in a worse plight, but apparently they had not thrown
away their arms, and, at any rate, not all their ammunition.
Their lean faces filled the door and the windows of the telegraph
hut. As it was at the same time the bedroom of the
engineer-in-charge there, Montero had thrown himself on his clean
blankets and lay there shivering and dictating requisitions to be
transmitted by wire to Sulaco. He demanded a train of cars to be
sent down at once to transport his men up.

"'To this I answered from my end,' the engineer-in-chief related
to us, 'that I dared not risk the rolling-stock in the interior,
as there had been attempts to wreck trains all along the line
several times. I did that for your sake, Gould,' said the chief
engineer. 'The answer to this was, in the words of my
subordinate, "The filthy brute on my bed said, 'Suppose I were to
have you shot?'" To which my subordinate, who, it appears, was
himself operating, remarked that it would not bring the cars up.
Upon that, the other, yawning, said, "Never mind, there is no
lack of horses on the Campo." And, turning over, went to sleep on
Harris's bed.'

"This is why, my dear girl, I am a fugitive to-night. The last
wire from railhead says that Pedro Montero and his men left at
daybreak, after feeding on asado beef all night. They took all
the horses; they will find more on the road; they'll be here in
less than thirty hours, and thus Sulaco is no place either for me
or the great store of silver belonging to the Gould Concession.

"But that is not the worst. The garrison of Esmeralda has gone
over to the victorious party. We have heard this by means of the
telegraphist of the Cable Company, who came to the Casa Gould in
the early morning with the news. In fact, it was so early that
the day had not yet quite broken over Sulaco. His colleague in
Esmeralda had called him up to say that the garrison, after
shooting some of their officers, had taken possession of a
Government steamer laid up in the harbour. It is really a heavy
blow for me. I thought I could depend on every man in this
province. It was a mistake. It was a Monterist Revolution in
Esmeralda, just such as was attempted in Sulaco, only that that
one came off. The telegraphist was signalling to Bernhardt all
the time, and his last transmitted words were, 'They are bursting
in the door, and taking possession of the cable office. You are
cut off. Can do no more.'

"But, as a matter of fact, he managed somehow to escape the
vigilance of his captors, who had tried to stop the communication
with the outer world. He did manage it. How it was done I don't
know, but a few hours afterwards he called up Sulaco again, and
what he said was, 'The insurgent army has taken possession of the
Government transport in the bay and are filling her with troops,
with the intention of going round the coast to Sulaco. Therefore
look out for yourselves. They will be ready to start in a few
hours, and may be upon you before daybreak.'

"This is all he could say. They drove him away from his
instrument this time for good, because Bernhardt has been calling
up Esmeralda ever since without getting an answer."

After setting these words down in the pocket-book which he was
filling up for the benefit of his sister, Decoud lifted his head
to listen. But there were no sounds, neither in the room nor in
the house, except the drip of the water from the filter into the
vast earthenware jar under the wooden stand. And outside the
house there was a great silence. Decoud lowered his head again
over the pocket-book.

"I am not running away, you understand," he wrote on. "I am
simply going away with that great treasure of silver which must
be saved at all costs. Pedro Montero from the Campo and the
revolted garrison of Esmeralda from the sea are converging upon
it. That it is there lying ready for them is only an accident.
The real objective is the San Tome mine itself, as you may well
imagine; otherwise the Occidental Province would have been, no
doubt, left alone for many weeks, to be gathered at leisure into
the arms of the victorious party. Don Carlos Gould will have
enough to do to save his mine, with its organization and its
people; this 'Imperium in Imperio,' this wealth-producing thing,
to which his sentimentalism attaches a strange idea of justice.
He holds to it as some men hold to the idea of love or revenge.
Unless I am much mistaken in the man, it must remain inviolate or
perish by an act of his will alone. A passion has crept into his
cold and idealistic life. A passion which I can only comprehend
intellectually. A passion that is not like the passions we know,
we men of another blood. But it is as dangerous as any of ours.

"His wife has understood it, too. That is why she is such a good
ally of mine. She seizes upon all my suggestions with a sure
instinct that in the end they make for the safety of the Gould
Concession. And he defers to her because he trusts her perhaps,
but I fancy rather as if he wished to make up for some subtle
wrong, for that sentimental unfaithfulness which surrenders her
happiness, her life, to the seduction of an idea. The little
woman has discovered that he lives for the mine rather than for
her. But let them be. To each his fate, shaped by passion or
sentiment. The principal thing is that she has backed up my
advice to get the silver out of the town, out of the country, at
once, at any cost, at any risk. Don Carlos' mission is to
preserve unstained the fair fame of his mine; Mrs. Gould's
mission is to save him from the effects of that cold and
overmastering passion, which she dreads more than if it were an
infatuation for another woman. Nostromo's mission is to save the
silver. The plan is to load it into the largest of the Company's
lighters, and send it across the gulf to a small port out of
Costaguana territory just on the other side the Azuera, where the
first northbound steamer will get orders to pick it up. The
waters here are calm. We shall slip away into the darkness of the
gulf before the Esmeralda rebels arrive; and by the time the day
breaks over the ocean we shall be out of sight, invisible, hidden
by Azuera, which itself looks from the Sulaco shore like a faint
blue cloud on the horizon.

"The incorruptible Capataz de Cargadores is the man for that
work; and I, the man with a passion, but without a mission, I go
with him to return--to play my part in the farce to the end, and,
if successful, to receive my reward, which no one but Antonia can
give me.

"I shall not see her again now before I depart. I left her, as I
have said, by Don Jose's bedside. The street was dark, the houses
shut up, and I walked out of the town in the night. Not a single
street-lamp had been lit for two days, and the archway of the
gate was only a mass of darkness in the vague form of a tower, in
which I heard low, dismal groans, that seemed to answer the
murmurs of a man's voice.

"I recognized something impassive and careless in its tone,
characteristic of that Genoese sailor who, like me, has come
casually here to be drawn into the events for which his
scepticism as well as mine seems to entertain a sort of passive
contempt. The only thing he seems to care for, as far as I have
been able to discover, is to be well spoken of. An ambition fit
for noble souls, but also a profitable one for an exceptionally
intelligent scoundrel. Yes. His very words, 'To be well spoken
of. Si, senor.' He does not seem to make any difference between
speaking and thinking. Is it sheer naiveness or the practical
point of view, I wonder? Exceptional individualities always
interest me, because they are true to the general formula
expressing the moral state of humanity.

"He joined me on the harbour road after I had passed them under
the dark archway without stopping. It was a woman in trouble he
had been talking to. Through discretion I kept silent while he
walked by my side. After a time he began to talk himself. It was
not what I expected. It was only an old woman, an old lace-maker,
in search of her son, one of the street-sweepers employed by the
municipality. Friends had come the day before at daybreak to the
door of their hovel calling him out. He had gone with them, and
she had not seen him since; so she had left the food she had been
preparing half-cooked on the extinct embers and had crawled out
as far as the harbour, where she had heard that some town mozos
had been killed on the morning of the riot. One of the Cargadores
guarding the Custom House had brought out a lantern, and had
helped her to look at the few dead left lying about there. Now
she was creeping back, having failed in her search. So she sat
down on the stone seat under the arch, moaning, because she was
very tired. The Capataz had questioned her, and after hearing her
broken and groaning tale had advised her to go and look amongst
the wounded in the patio of the Casa Gould. He had also given her
a quarter dollar, he mentioned carelessly."

"'Why did you do that?' I asked. 'Do you know her?'

"'No, senor. I don't suppose I have ever seen her before. How
should I? She has not probably been out in the streets for years.
She is one of those old women that you find in this country at
the back of huts, crouching over fireplaces, with a stick on the
ground by their side, and almost too feeble to drive away the
stray dogs from their cooking-pots. Caramba! I could tell by her
voice that death had forgotten her. But, old or young, they like
money, and will speak well of the man who gives it to them.' He
laughed a little. 'Senor, you should have felt the clutch of her
paw as I put the piece in her palm.' He paused. 'My last, too,'
he added.

"I made no comment. He's known for his liberality and his bad
luck at the game of monte, which keeps him as poor as when he
first came here.

"'I suppose, Don Martin,' he began, in a thoughtful, speculative
tone, 'that the Senor Administrador of San Tome will reward me
some day if I save his silver?'

"I said that it could not be otherwise, surely. He walked on,
muttering to himself. 'Si, si, without doubt, without doubt; and,
look you, Senor Martin, what it is to be well spoken of! There is
not another man that could have been even thought of for such a
thing. I shall get something great for it some day. And let it
come soon,' he mumbled. 'Time passes in this country as quick as
anywhere else.'

"This, soeur cherie, is my companion in the great escape for the
sake of the great cause. He is more naive than shrewd, more
masterful than crafty, more generous with his personality than
the people who make use of him are with their money. At least,
that is what he thinks himself with more pride than sentiment. I
am glad I have made friends with him. As a companion he acquires
more importance than he ever had as a sort of minor genius in his
way--as an original Italian sailor whom I allowed to come in in
the small hours and talk familiarly to the editor of the Porvenir
while the paper was going through the press. And it is curious to
have met a man for whom the value of life seems to consist in
personal prestige.

"I am waiting for him here now. On arriving at the posada kept by
Viola we found the children alone down below, and the old Genoese
shouted to his countryman to go and fetch the doctor. Otherwise
we would have gone on to the wharf, where it appears Captain
Mitchell with some volunteer Europeans and a few picked
Cargadores are loading the lighter with the silver that must be
saved from Montero's clutches in order to be used for Montero's
defeat. Nostromo galloped furiously back towards the town. He has
been long gone already. This delay gives me time to talk to you.
By the time this pocket-book reaches your hands much will have
happened. But now it is a pause under the hovering wing of death
in this silent house buried in the black night, with this dying
woman, the two children crouching without a sound, and that old
man whom I can hear through the thickness of the wall passing up
and down with a light rubbing noise no louder than a mouse. And
I, the only other with them, don't really know whether to count
myself with the living or with the dead. 'Quien sabe?' as the
people here are prone to say in answer to every question. But no!
feeling for you is certainly not dead, and the whole thing, the
house, the dark night, the silent children in this dim room, my
very presence here--all this is life, must be life, since it is
so much like a dream."

With the writing of the last line there came upon Decoud a moment
of sudden and complete oblivion. He swayed over the table as if
struck by a bullet. The next moment he sat up, confused, with the
idea that he had heard his pencil roll on the floor. The low door
of the cafe, wide open, was filled with the glare of a torch in
which was visible half of a horse, switching its tail against the
leg of a rider with a long iron spur strapped to the naked heel.
The two girls were gone, and Nostromo, standing in the middle of
the room, looked at him from under the round brim of the sombrero
low down over his brow.

"I have brought that sour-faced English doctor in Senora Gould's
carriage," said Nostromo. "I doubt if, with all his wisdom, he
can save the Padrona this time. They have sent for the children.
A bad sign that."

He sat down on the end of a bench. "She wants to give them her
blessing, I suppose."

Dazedly Decoud observed that he must have fallen sound asleep,
and Nostromo said, with a vague smile, that he had looked in at
the window and had seen him lying still across the table with his
head on his arms. The English senora had also come in the
carriage, and went upstairs at once with the doctor. She had told
him not to wake up Don Martin yet; but when they sent for the
children he had come into the cafe.

The half of the horse with its half of the rider swung round
outside the door; the torch of tow and resin in the iron basket
which was carried on a stick at the saddle-bow flared right into
the room for a moment, and Mrs. Gould entered hastily with a
very white, tired face. The hood of her dark, blue cloak had
fallen back. Both men rose.

"Teresa wants to see you, Nostromo," she said. The Capataz did
not move. Decoud, with his back to the table, began to button up
his coat.

"The silver, Mrs. Gould, the silver," he murmured in English.
"Don't forget that the Esmeralda garrison have got a steamer.
They may appear at any moment at the harbour entrance."

"The doctor says there is no hope," Mrs. Gould spoke rapidly,
also in English. "I shall take you down to the wharf in my
carriage and then come back to fetch away the girls." She changed
swiftly into Spanish to address Nostromo. "Why are you wasting
time? Old Giorgio's wife wishes to see you."

"I am going to her, senora," muttered the Capataz. Dr. Monygham
now showed himself, bringing back the children. To Mrs. Gould's
inquiring glance he only shook his head and went outside at once,
followed by Nostromo.

The horse of the torch-bearer, motionless, hung his head low, and
the rider had dropped the reins to light a cigarette. The glare
of the torch played on the front of the house crossed by the big
black letters of its inscription in which only the word ITALIA
was lighted fully. The patch of wavering glare reached as far as
Mrs. Gould's carriage waiting on the road, with the yellow-faced,
portly Ignacio apparently dozing on the box. By his side Basilio,
dark and skinny, held a Winchester carbine in front of him, with
both hands, and peered fearfully into the darkness. Nostromo
touched lightly the doctor's shoulder.

"Is she really dying, senor doctor?"

"Yes," said the doctor, with a strange twitch of his scarred
cheek. "And why she wants to see you I cannot imagine."

"She has been like that before," suggested Nostromo, looking
away.

"Well, Capataz, I can assure you she will never be like that
again," snarled Dr. Monygham. "You may go to her or stay away.
There is very little to be got from talking to the dying. But she
told Dona Emilia in my hearing that she has been like a mother to
you ever since you first set foot ashore here."

"Si! And she never had a good word to say for me to anybody. It
is more as if she could not forgive me for being alive, and such
a man, too, as she would have liked her son to be."

"Maybe!" exclaimed a mournful deep voice near them. "Women have
their own ways of tormenting themselves." Giorgio Viola had come
out of the house. He threw a heavy black shadow in the
torchlight, and the glare fell on his big face, on the great
bushy head of white hair. He motioned the Capataz indoors with
his extended arm.

Dr. Monygham, after busying himself with a little medicament box
of polished wood on the seat of the landau, turned to old Giorgio
and thrust into his big, trembling hand one of the
glass-stoppered bottles out of the case.

"Give her a spoonful of this now and then, in water," he said.
"It will make her easier."

"And there is nothing more for her?" asked the old man,
patiently.

"No. Not on earth," said the doctor, with his back to him,
clicking the lock of the medicine case.

Nostromo slowly crossed the large kitchen, all dark but for the
glow of a heap of charcoal under the heavy mantel of the
cooking-range, where water was boiling in an iron pot with a loud
bubbling sound. Between the two walls of a narrow staircase a
bright light streamed from the sick-room above; and the
magnificent Capataz de Cargadores stepping noiselessly in soft
leather sandals, bushy whiskered, his muscular neck and bronzed
chest bare in the open check shirt, resembled a Mediterranean
sailor just come ashore from some wine or fruit-laden felucca. At
the top he paused, broad shouldered, narrow hipped and supple,
looking at the large bed, like a white couch of state, with a
profusion of snowy linen, amongst which the Padrona sat unpropped
and bowed, her handsome, black-browed face bent over her chest. A
mass of raven hair with only a few white threads in it covered
her shoulders; one thick strand fallen forward half veiled her
cheek. Perfectly motionless in that pose, expressing physical
anxiety and unrest, she turned her eyes alone towards Nostromo.

The Capataz had a red sash wound many times round his waist, and
a heavy silver ring on the forefinger of the hand he raised to
give a twist to his moustache.

"Their revolutions, their revolutions," gasped Senora Teresa.
"Look, Gian' Battista, it has killed me at last!"

Nostromo said nothing, and the sick woman with an upward glance
insisted. "Look, this one has killed me, while you were away
fighting for what did not concern you, foolish man."

"Why talk like this?" mumbled the Capataz between his teeth.
"Will you never believe in my good sense? It concerns me to keep
on being what I am: every day alike."

"You never change, indeed," she said, bitterly. "Always thinking
of yourself and taking your pay out in fine words from those who
care nothing for you."

There was between them an intimacy of antagonism as close in its
way as the intimacy of accord and affection. He had not walked
along the way of Teresa's expectations. It was she who had
encouraged him to leave his ship, in the hope of securing a
friend and defender for the girls. The wife of old Giorgio was
aware of her precarious health, and was haunted by the fear of
her aged husband's loneliness and the unprotected state of the
children. She had wanted to annex that apparently quiet and
steady young man, affectionate and pliable, an orphan from his
tenderest age, as he had told her, with no ties in Italy except
an uncle, owner and master of a felucca, from whose ill-usage he
had run away before he was fourteen. He had seemed to her
courageous, a hard worker, determined to make his way in the
world. From gratitude and the ties of habit he would become like
a son to herself and Giorgio; and then, who knows, when Linda had
grown up. . . . Ten years' difference between husband and wife
was not so much. Her own great man was nearly twenty years older
than herself. Gian' Battista was an attractive young fellow,
besides; attractive to men, women, and children, just by that
profound quietness of personality which, like a serene twilight,
rendered more seductive the promise of his vigorous form and the
resolution of his conduct.

Old Giorgio, in profound ignorance of his wife's views and hopes,
had a great regard for his young countryman. "A man ought not to
be tame," he used to tell her, quoting the Spanish proverb in
defence of the splendid Capataz. She was growing jealous of his
success. He was escaping from her, she feared. She was practical,
and he seemed to her to be an absurd spendthrift of these
qualities which made him so valuable. He got too little for them.
He scattered them with both hands amongst too many people, she
thought. He laid no money by. She railed at his poverty, his
exploits, his adventures, his loves and his reputation; but in
her heart she had never given him up, as though, indeed, he had
been her son.

Even now, ill as she was, ill enough to feel the chill, black
breath of the approaching end, she had wished to see him. It was
like putting out her benumbed hand to regain her hold. But she
had presumed too much on her strength. She could not command her
thoughts; they had become dim, like her vision. The words
faltered on her lips, and only the paramount anxiety and desire
of her life seemed to be too strong for death.

The Capataz said, "I have heard these things many times. You are
unjust, but it does not hurt me. Only now you do not seem to have
much strength to talk, and I have but little time to listen. I am
engaged in a work of very great moment."

She made an effort to ask him whether it was true that he had
found time to go and fetch a doctor for her. Nostromo nodded
affirmatively.

She was pleased: it relieved her sufferings to know that the man
had condescended to do so much for those who really wanted his
help. It was a proof of his friendship. Her voice become
stronger.

"I want a priest more than a doctor," she said, pathetically. She
did not move her head; only her eyes ran into the corners to
watch the Capataz standing by the side of her bed. "Would you go
to fetch a priest for me now? Think! A dying woman asks you!"

Nostromo shook his head resolutely. He did not believe in priests
in their sacerdotal character. A doctor was an efficacious
person; but a priest, as priest, was nothing, incapable of doing
either good or harm. Nostromo did not even dislike the sight of
them as old Giorgio did. The utter uselessness of the errand was
what struck him most.

"Padrona," he said, "you have been like this before, and got
better after a few days. I have given you already the very last
moments I can spare. Ask Senora Gould to send you one."

He was feeling uneasy at the impiety of this refusal. The
Padrona believed in priests, and confessed herself to them. But
all women did that. It could not be of much consequence. And yet
his heart felt oppressed for a moment--at the thought what
absolution would mean to her if she believed in it only ever so
little. No matter. It was quite true that he had given her
already the very last moment he could spare.

"You refuse to go?" she gasped. "Ah! you are always yourself,
indeed."

"Listen to reason, Padrona," he said. "I am needed to save the
silver of the mine. Do you hear? A greater treasure than the one
which they say is guarded by ghosts and devils on Azuera. It is
true. I am resolved to make this the most desperate affair I was
ever engaged on in my whole life."

She felt a despairing indignation. The supreme test had failed.
Standing above her, Nostromo did not see the distorted features
of her face, distorted by a paroxysm of pain and anger. Only she
began to tremble all over. Her bowed head shook. The broad
shoulders quivered.

"Then God, perhaps, will have mercy upon me! But do you look to
it, man, that you get something for yourself out of it, besides
the remorse that shall overtake you some day."

She laughed feebly. "Get riches at least for once, you
indispensable, admired Gian' Battista, to whom the peace of a
dying woman is less than the praise of people who have given you
a silly name--and nothing besides--in exchange for your soul and
body."

The Capataz de Cargadores swore to himself under his breath.

"Leave my soul alone, Padrona, and I shall know how to take care
of my body. Where is the harm of people having need of me? What
are you envying me that I have robbed you and the children of?
Those very people you are throwing in my teeth have done more for
old Giorgio than they ever thought of doing for me."

He struck his breast with his open palm; his voice had remained
low though he had spoken in a forcible tone. He twisted his
moustaches one after another, and his eyes wandered a little
about the room.

"Is it my fault that I am the only man for their purposes? What
angry nonsense are you talking, mother? Would you rather have me
timid and foolish, selling water-melons on the market-place or
rowing a boat for passengers along the harbour, like a soft
Neapolitan without courage or reputation? Would you have a young
man live like a monk? I do not believe it. Would you want a monk
for your eldest girl? Let her grow. What are you afraid of? You
have been angry with me for everything I did for years; ever
since you first spoke to me, in secret from old Giorgio, about
your Linda. Husband to one and brother to the other, did you say?
Well, why not! I like the little ones, and a man must marry some
time. But ever since that time you have been making little of me
to everyone. Why? Did you think you could put a collar and chain
on me as if I were one of the watch-dogs they keep over there in
the railway yards? Look here, Padrona, I am the same man who came
ashore one evening and sat down in the thatched ranche you lived
in at that time on the other side of the town and told you all
about himself. You were not unjust to me then. What has happened
since? I am no longer an insignificant youth. A good name,
Giorgio says, is a treasure, Padrona."

"They have turned your head with their praises," gasped the sick
woman. "They have been paying you with words. Your folly shall
betray you into poverty, misery, starvation. The very leperos
shall laugh at you--the great Capataz."

Nostromo stood for a time as if struck dumb. She never looked at
him. A self-confident, mirthless smile passed quickly from his
lips, and then he backed away. His disregarded figure sank down
beyond the doorway. He descended the stairs backwards, with the
usual sense of having been somehow baffled by this woman's
disparagement of this reputation he had obtained and desired to
keep.

Downstairs in the big kitchen a candle was burning, surrounded by
the shadows of the walls, of the ceiling, but no ruddy glare
filled the open square of the outer door. The carriage with Mrs.
Gould and Don Martin, preceded by the horseman bearing the torch,
had gone on to the jetty. Dr. Monygham, who had remained, sat on
the corner of a hard wood table near the candlestick, his seamed,
shaven face inclined sideways, his arms crossed on his breast,
his lips pursed up, and his prominent eyes glaring stonily upon
the floor of black earth. Near the overhanging mantel of the
fireplace, where the pot of water was still boiling violently,
old Giorgio held his chin in his hand, one foot advanced, as if
arrested by a sudden thought.

"Adios, viejo," said Nostromo, feeling the handle of his revolver
in the belt and loosening his knife in its sheath. He picked up a
blue poncho lined with red from the table, and put it over his
head. "Adios, look after the things in my sleeping-room, and if
you hear from me no more, give up the box to Paquita. There is
not much of value there, except my new serape from Mexico, and a
few silver buttons on my best jacket. No matter! The things
will look well enough on the next lover she gets, and the man
need not be afraid I shall linger on earth after I am dead, like
those Gringos that haunt the Azuera."

Dr. Monygham twisted his lips into a bitter smile. After old
Giorgio, with an almost imperceptible nod and without a word, had
gone up the narrow stairs, he said--

"Why, Capataz! I thought you could never fail in anything."

Nostromo, glancing contemptuously at the doctor, lingered in the
doorway rolling a cigarette, then struck a match, and, after
lighting it, held the burning piece of wood above his head till
the flame nearly touched his fingers.

"No wind!" he muttered to himself. "Look here, senor--do you know
the nature of my undertaking?"

Dr. Monygham nodded sourly.

"It is as if I were taking up a curse upon me, senor doctor. A
man with a treasure on this coast will have every knife raised
against him in every place upon the shore. You see that, senor
doctor? I shall float along with a spell upon my life till I meet
somewhere the north-bound steamer of the Company, and then indeed
they will talk about the Capataz of the Sulaco Cargadores from
one end of America to another."

Dr. Monygham laughed his short, throaty laugh. Nostromo turned
round in the doorway.

"But if your worship can find any other man ready and fit for
such business I will stand back. I am not exactly tired of my
life, though I am so poor that I can carry all I have with myself
on my horse's back."

"You gamble too much, and never say 'no' to a pretty face,
Capataz," said Dr. Monygham, with sly simplicity. "That's not
the way to make a fortune. But nobody that I know ever suspected
you of being poor. I hope you have made a good bargain in case
you come back safe from this adventure."

"What bargain would your worship have made?" asked Nostromo,
blowing the smoke out of his lips through the doorway.

Dr. Monygham listened up the staircase for a moment before he
answered, with another of his short, abrupt laughs--

"Illustrious Capataz, for taking the curse of death upon my back,
as you call it, nothing else but the whole treasure would do."

Nostromo vanished out of the doorway with a grunt of discontent
at this jeering answer. Dr. Monygham heard him gallop away.
Nostromo rode furiously in the dark. There were lights in the
buildings of the O.S.N. Company near the wharf, but before he got
there he met the Gould carriage. The horseman preceded it with
the torch, whose light showed the white mules trotting, the
portly Ignacio driving, and Basilio with the carbine on the box.
From the dark body of the landau Mrs. Gould's voice cried, "They
are waiting for you, Capataz!" She was returning, chilly and
excited, with Decoud's pocket-book still held in her hand. He
had confided it to her to send to his sister. "Perhaps my last
words to her," he had said, pressing Mrs. Gould's hand.

The Capataz never checked his speed. At the head of the wharf
vague figures with rifles leapt to the head of his horse; others
closed upon him--cargadores of the company posted by Captain
Mitchell on the watch. At a word from him they fell back with
subservient murmurs, recognizing his voice. At the other end of
the jetty, near a cargo crane, in a dark group with glowing
cigars, his name was pronounced in a tone of relief. Most of the
Europeans in Sulaco were there, rallied round Charles Gould, as
if the silver of the mine had been the emblem of a common cause,
the symbol of the supreme importance of material interests. They
had loaded it into the lighter with their own hands. Nostromo
recognized Don Carlos Gould, a thin, tall shape standing a little
apart and silent, to whom another tall shape, the
engineer-in-chief, said aloud, "If it must be lost, it is a
million times better that it should go to the bottom of the sea."

Martin Decoud called out from the lighter, "Au revoir, messieurs,
till we clasp hands again over the new-born Occidental Republic."
Only a subdued murmur responded to his clear, ringing tones; and
then it seemed to him that the wharf was floating away into the
night; but it was Nostromo, who was already pushing against a
pile with one of the heavy sweeps. Decoud did not move; the
effect was that of being launched into space. After a splash or
two there was not a sound but the thud of Nostromo's feet leaping
about the boat. He hoisted the big sail; a breath of wind fanned
Decoud's cheek. Everything had vanished but the light of the
lantern Captain Mitchell had hoisted upon the post at the end of
the jetty to guide Nostromo out of the harbour.

The two men, unable to see each other, kept silent till the
lighter, slipping before the fitful breeze, passed out between
almost invisible headlands into the still deeper darkness of the
gulf. For a time the lantern on the jetty shone after them. The
wind failed, then fanned up again, but so faintly that the big,
half-decked boat slipped along with no more noise than if she had
been suspended in the air.

"We are out in the gulf now," said the calm voice of Nostromo. A
moment after he added, "Senor Mitchell has lowered the light."

"Yes," said Decoud; "nobody can find us now."

A great recrudescence of obscurity embraced the boat. The sea in
the gulf was as black as the clouds above. Nostromo, after
striking a couple of matches to get a glimpse of the boat-compass
he had with him in the lighter, steered by the feel of the wind
on his cheek.

It was a new experience for Decoud, this mysteriousness of the
great waters spread out strangely smooth, as if their
restlessness had been crushed by the weight of that dense night.
The Placido was sleeping profoundly under its black poncho.

The main thing now for success was to get away from the coast and
gain the middle of the gulf before day broke. The Isabels were
somewhere at hand. "On your left as you look forward, senor,"
said Nostromo, suddenly. When his voice ceased, the enormous
stillness, without light or sound, seemed to affect Decoud's
senses like a powerful drug. He didn't even know at times whether
he were asleep or awake. Like a man lost in slumber, he heard
nothing, he saw nothing. Even his hand held before his face did
not exist for his eyes. The change from the agitation, the
passions and the dangers, from the sights and sounds of the
shore, was so complete that it would have resembled death had it
not been for the survival of his thoughts. In this foretaste of
eternal peace they floated vivid and light, like unearthly clear
dreams of earthly things that may haunt the souls freed by death
from the misty atmosphere of regrets and hopes. Decoud shook
himself, shuddered a bit, though the air that drifted past him
was warm. He had the strangest sensation of his soul having just
returned into his body from the circumambient darkness in which
land, sea, sky, the mountains, and the rocks were as if they had
not been.

Nostromo's voice was speaking, though he, at the tiller, was also
as if he were not. "Have you been asleep, Don Martin? Caramba! If
it were possible I would think that I, too, have dozed off. I
have a strange notion somehow of having dreamt that there was a
sound of blubbering, a sound a sorrowing man could make,
somewhere near this boat. Something between a sigh and a sob."

"Strange!" muttered Decoud, stretched upon the pile of treasure
boxes covered by many tarpaulins. "Could it be that there is
another boat near us in the gulf? We could not see it, you know."

Nostromo laughed a little at the absurdity of the idea. They
dismissed it from their minds. The solitude could almost be felt.
And when the breeze ceased, the blackness seemed to weigh upon
Decoud like a stone.

"This is overpowering," he muttered. "Do we move at all,
Capataz?"

"Not so fast as a crawling beetle tangled in the grass," answered
Nostromo, and his voice seemed deadened by the thick veil of
obscurity that felt warm and hopeless all about them. There were
long periods when he made no sound, invisible and inaudible as if
he had mysteriously stepped out of the lighter.

In the featureless night Nostromo was not even certain which way
the lighter headed after the wind had completely died out. He
peered for the islands. There was not a hint of them to be seen,
as if they had sunk to the bottom of the gulf. He threw himself
down by the side of Decoud at last, and whispered into his ear
that if daylight caught them near the Sulaco shore through want
of wind, it would be possible to sweep the lighter behind the
cliff at the high end of the Great Isabel, where she would lie
concealed. Decoud was surprised at the grimness of his anxiety.
To him the removal of the treasure was a political move. It was
necessary for several reasons that it should not fall into the
hands of Montero, but here was a man who took another view of
this enterprise. The Caballeros over there did not seem to have
the slightest idea of what they had given him to do. Nostromo, as
if affected by the gloom around, seemed nervously resentful.
Decoud was surprised. The Capataz, indifferent to those dangers
that seemed obvious to his companion, allowed himself to become
scornfully exasperated by the deadly nature of the trust put, as
a matter of course, into his hands. It was more dangerous,
Nostromo said, with a laugh and a curse, than sending a man to
get the treasure that people said was guarded by devils and
ghosts in the deep ravines of Azuera. "Senor," he said, "we must
catch the steamer at sea. We must keep out in the open looking
for her till we have eaten and drunk all that has been put on
board here. And if we miss her by some mischance, we must keep
away from the land till we grow weak, and perhaps mad, and die,
and drift dead, until one or another of the steamers of the
Compania comes upon the boat with the two dead men who have saved
the treasure. That, senor, is the only way to save it; for, don't
you see? for us to come to the land anywhere in a hundred miles
along this coast with this silver in our possession is to run the
naked breast against the point of a knife. This thing has been
given to me like a deadly disease. If men discover it I am dead,
and you, too, senor, since you would come with me. There is
enough silver to make a whole province rich, let alone a seaboard
pueblo inhabited by thieves and vagabonds. Senor, they would
think that heaven itself sent these riches into their hands, and
would cut our throats without hesitation. I would trust no fair
words from the best man around the shores of this wild gulf.
Reflect that, even by giving up the treasure at the first demand,
we would not be able to save our lives. Do you understand this,
or must I explain?"

"No, you needn't explain," said Decoud, a little listlessly. "I
can see it well enough myself, that the possession of this
treasure is very much like a deadly disease for men situated as
we are. But it had to be removed from Sulaco, and you were the
man for the task."

"I was; but I cannot believe," said Nostromo, "that its loss
would have impoverished Don Carlos Gould very much. There is more
wealth in the mountain. I have heard it rolling down the shoots
on quiet nights when I used to ride to Rincon to see a certain
girl, after my work at the harbour was done. For years the rich
rocks have been pouring down with a noise like thunder, and the
miners say that there is enough at the heart of the mountain to
thunder on for years and years to come. And yet, the day before
yesterday, we have been fighting to save it from the mob, and
to-night I am sent out with it into this darkness, where there is
no wind to get away with; as if it were the last lot of silver on
earth to get bread for the hungry with. Ha! ha! Well, I am going
to make it the most famous and desperate affair of my life--wind
or no wind. It shall be talked about when the little children are
grown up and the grown men are old. Aha! the Monterists must not
get hold of it, I am told, whatever happens to Nostromo the
Capataz; and they shall not have it, I tell you, since it has
been tied for safety round Nostromo's neck."

"I see it," murmured Decoud. He saw, indeed, that his companion
had his own peculiar view of this enterprise.

Nostromo interrupted his reflections upon the way men's qualities
are made use of, without any fundamental knowledge of their
nature, by the proposal they should slip the long oars out and
sweep the lighter in the direction of the Isabels. It wouldn't do
for daylight to reveal the treasure floating within a mile or so
of the harbour entrance. The denser the darkness generally, the
smarter were the puffs of wind on which he had reckoned to make
his way; but tonight the gulf, under its poncho of clouds,
remained breathless, as if dead rather than asleep.

Don Martin's soft hands suffered cruelly, tugging at the thick
handle of the enormous oar. He stuck to it manfully, setting his
teeth. He, too, was in the toils of an imaginative existence, and
that strange work of pulling a lighter seemed to belong naturally
to the inception of a new state, acquired an ideal meaning from
his love for Antonia. For all their efforts, the heavily laden
lighter hardly moved. Nostromo could be heard swearing to himself
between the regular splashes of the sweeps. "We are making a
crooked path," he muttered to himself. "I wish I could see the
islands."

In his unskilfulness Don Martin over-exerted himself. Now and
then a sort of muscular faintness would run from the tips of his
aching fingers through every fibre of his body, and pass off in a
flush of heat. He had fought, talked, suffered mentally and
physically, exerting his mind and body for the last forty-eight
hours without intermission. He had had no rest, very little food,
no pause in the stress of his thoughts and his feelings. Even his
love for Antonia, whence he drew his strength and his
inspiration, had reached the point of tragic tension during their
hurried interview by Don Jose's bedside. And now, suddenly, he
was thrown out of all this into a dark gulf, whose very gloom,
silence, and breathless peace added a torment to the necessity
for physical exertion. He imagined the lighter sinking to the
bottom with an extraordinary shudder of delight. "I am on the
verge of delirium," he thought. He mastered the trembling of all
his limbs, of his breast, the inward trembling of all his body
exhausted of its nervous force.

"Shall we rest, Capataz?" he proposed in a careless tone. "There
are many hours of night yet before us."

"True. It is but a mile or so, I suppose. Rest your arms, senor,
if that is what you mean. You will find no other sort of rest, I
can promise you, since you let yourself be bound to this treasure
whose loss would make no poor man poorer. No, senor; there is no
rest till we find a north-bound steamer, or else some ship finds
us drifting about stretched out dead upon the Englishman's
silver. Or rather--no; por Dios! I shall cut down the gunwale
with the axe right to the water's edge before thirst and hunger
rob me of my strength. By all the saints and devils I shall let
the sea have the treasure rather than give it up to any stranger.
Since it was the good pleasure of the Caballeros to send me off
on such an errand, they shall learn I am just the man they take
me for."

Decoud lay on the silver boxes panting. All his active sensations
and feelings from as far back as he could remember seemed to him
the maddest of dreams. Even his passionate devotion to Antonia
into which he had worked himself up out of the depths of his
scepticism had lost all appearance of reality. For a moment he
was the prey of an extremely languid but not unpleasant
indifference.

"I am sure they didn't mean you to take such a desperate view of
this affair," he said.

"What was it, then? A joke?" snarled the man, who on the
pay-sheets of the O.S.N. Company's establishment in Sulaco was
described as "Foreman of the wharf" against the figure of his
wages. "Was it for a joke they woke me up from my sleep after two
days of street fighting to make me stake my life upon a bad card?
Everybody knows, too, that I am not a lucky gambler."

"Yes, everybody knows of your good luck with women, Capataz,"
Decoud propitiated his companion in a weary drawl.

"Look here, senor," Nostromo went on. "I never even remonstrated
about this affair. Directly I heard what was wanted I saw what a
desperate affair it must be, and I made up my mind to see it out.
Every minute was of importance. I had to wait for you first.
Then, when we arrived at the Italia Una, old Giorgio shouted to
me to go for the English doctor. Later on, that poor dying woman
wanted to see me, as you know. Senor, I was reluctant to go. I
felt already this cursed silver growing heavy upon my back, and I
was afraid that, knowing herself to be dying, she would ask me to
ride off again for a priest. Father Corbelan, who is fearless,
would have come at a word; but Father Corbelan is far away, safe
with the band of Hernandez, and the populace, that would have
liked to tear him to pieces, are much incensed against the
priests. Not a single fat padre would have consented to put his
head out of his hiding-place to-night to save a Christian soul,
except, perhaps, under my protection. That was in her mind. I
pretended I did not believe she was going to die. Senor, I
refused to fetch a priest for a dying woman . . ."

Decoud was heard to stir.

"You did, Capataz!" he exclaimed. His tone changed. "Well, you
know--it was rather fine."

"You do not believe in priests, Don Martin? Neither do I. What
was the use of wasting time? But she--she believes in them. The
thing sticks in my throat. She may be dead already, and here we
are floating helpless with no wind at all. Curse on all
superstition. She died thinking I deprived her of Paradise, I
suppose. It shall be the most desperate affair of my life."

Decoud remained lost in reflection. He tried to analyze the
sensations awaked by what he had been told. The voice of the
Capataz was heard again:

"Now, Don Martin, let us take up the sweeps and try to find the
Isabels. It is either that or sinking the lighter if the day
overtakes us. We must not forget that the steamer from Esmeralda
with the soldiers may be coming along. We will pull straight on
now. I have discovered a bit of a candle here, and we must take
the risk of a small light to make a course by the boat compass.
There is not enough wind to blow it out--may the curse of Heaven
fall upon this blind gulf!"

A small flame appeared burning quite straight. It showed
fragmentarily the stout ribs and planking in the hollow, empty
part of the lighter. Decoud could see Nostromo standing up to
pull. He saw him as high as the red sash on his waist, with a
gleam of a white-handled revolver and the wooden haft of a long
knife protruding on his left side. Decoud nerved himself for the
effort of rowing. Certainly there was not enough wind to blow the
candle out, but its flame swayed a little to the slow movement of
the heavy boat. It was so big that with their utmost efforts they
could not move it quicker than about a mile an hour. This was
sufficient, however, to sweep them amongst the Isabels long
before daylight came. There was a good six hours of darkness
before them, and the distance from the harbour to the Great
Isabel did not exceed two miles. Decoud put this heavy toil to
the account of the Capataz's impatience. Sometimes they paused,
and then strained their ears to hear the boat from Esmeralda. In
this perfect quietness a steamer moving would have been heard
from far off. As to seeing anything it was out of the question.
They could not see each other. Even the lighter's sail, which
remained set, was invisible. Very often they rested.

"Caramba!" said Nostromo, suddenly, during one of those intervals
when they lolled idly against the heavy handles of the sweeps.
"What is it? Are you distressed, Don Martin?"

Decoud assured him that he was not distressed in the least.
Nostromo for a time kept perfectly still, and then in a whisper
invited Martin to come aft.

With his lips touching Decoud's ear he declared his belief that
there was somebody else besides themselves upon the lighter.
Twice now he had heard the sound of stifled sobbing.

"Senor," he whispered with awed wonder, "I am certain that there
is somebody weeping in this lighter."

Decoud had heard nothing. He expressed his incredulity. However,
it was easy to ascertain the truth of the matter.

"It is most amazing," muttered Nostromo. "Could anybody have
concealed himself on board while the lighter was lying alongside
the wharf?"

"And you say it was like sobbing?" asked Decoud, lowering his
voice, too. "If he is weeping, whoever he is he cannot be very
dangerous."

Clambering over the precious pile in the middle, they crouched
low on the foreside of the mast and groped under the half-deck.
Right forward, in the narrowest part, their hands came upon the
limbs of a man, who remained as silent as death. Too startled
themselves to make a sound, they dragged him aft by one arm and
the collar of his coat. He was limp--lifeless.

The light of the bit of candle fell upon a round, hook-nosed face
with black moustaches and little side-whiskers. He was extremely
dirty. A greasy growth of beard was sprouting on the shaven parts
of the cheeks. The thick lips were slightly parted, but the eyes
remained closed. Decoud, to his immense astonishment, recognized
Senor Hirsch, the hide merchant from Esmeralda. Nostromo, too,
had recognized him. And they gazed at each other across the body,
lying with its naked feet higher than its head, in an absurd
pretence of sleep, faintness, or death. _

Read next: PART SECOND - THE ISABELS: CHAPTER VIII

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