At that time Nostromo had been already long enough in the country
to raise to the highest pitch Captain Mitchell’s opinion of the
extraordinary value of his discovery. Clearly he was one of those
invaluable subordinates whom to possess is a legitimate cause of
boasting. Captain Mitchell plumed himself upon his eye for men--but
he was not selfish--and in the innocence of his pride was already
developing that mania for “lending you my Capataz de Cargadores” which
was to bring Nostromo into personal contact, sooner or later, with
every European in Sulaco, as a sort of universal factotum--a prodigy of
efficiency in his own sphere of life.
“The fellow is devoted to me, body and soul!” Captain Mitchell was
given to affirm; and though nobody, perhaps, could have explained why it
should be so, it was impossible on a survey of their relation to throw
doubt on that statement, unless, indeed, one were a bitter, eccentric
character like Dr. Monygham--for instance--whose short, hopeless laugh
expressed somehow an immense mistrust of mankind. Not that Dr. Monygham
was a prodigal either of laughter or of words. He was bitterly taciturn
when at his best. At his worst people feared the open scornfulness of
his tongue. Only Mrs. Gould could keep his unbelief in men’s motives
within due bounds; but even to her (on an occasion not connected with
Nostromo, and in a tone which for him was gentle), even to her, he had
said once, “Really, it is most unreasonable to demand that a man
should think of other people so much better than he is able to think of
himself.”
And Mrs. Gould had hastened to drop the subject. There were strange
rumours of the English doctor. Years ago, in the time of Guzman Bento,
he had been mixed up, it was whispered, in a conspiracy which was
betrayed and, as people expressed it, drowned in blood. His hair had
turned grey, his hairless, seamed face was of a brick-dust colour; the
large check pattern of his flannel shirt and his old stained Panama hat
were an established defiance to the conventionalities of Sulaco. Had
it not been for the immaculate cleanliness of his apparel he might have
been taken for one of those shiftless Europeans that are a moral eyesore
to the respectability of a foreign colony in almost every exotic part of
the world. The young ladies of Sulaco, adorning with clusters of pretty
faces the balconies along the Street of the Constitution, when they saw
him pass, with his limping gait and bowed head, a short linen jacket
drawn on carelessly over the flannel check shirt, would remark to each
other, “Here is the Senor doctor going to call on Dona Emilia. He has
got his little coat on.” The inference was true. Its deeper meaning was
hidden from their simple intelligence. Moreover, they expended no
store of thought on the doctor. He was old, ugly, learned--and a little
“loco”--mad, if not a bit of a sorcerer, as the common people suspected
him of being. The little white jacket was in reality a concession
to Mrs. Gould’s humanizing influence. The doctor, with his habit of
sceptical, bitter speech, had no other means of showing his profound
respect for the character of the woman who was known in the country as
the English Senora. He presented this tribute very seriously indeed;
it was no trifle for a man of his habits. Mrs. Gould felt that, too,
perfectly. She would never have thought of imposing upon him this marked
show of deference.
She kept her old Spanish house (one of the finest specimens in Sulaco)
open for the dispensation of the small graces of existence. She
dispensed them with simplicity and charm because she was guided by an
alert perception of values. She was highly gifted in the art of human
intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and
in the suggestion of universal comprehension. Charles Gould (the Gould
family, established in Costaguana for three generations, always went to
England for their education and for their wives) imagined that he had
fallen in love with a girl’s sound common sense like any other man,
but these were not exactly the reasons why, for instance, the whole
surveying camp, from the youngest of the young men to their mature
chief, should have found occasion to allude to Mrs. Gould’s house
so frequently amongst the high peaks of the Sierra. She would have
protested that she had done nothing for them, with a low laugh and
a surprised widening of her grey eyes, had anybody told her how
convincingly she was remembered on the edge of the snow-line above
Sulaco. But directly, with a little capable air of setting her wits to
work, she would have found an explanation. “Of course, it was such a
surprise for these boys to find any sort of welcome here. And I suppose
they are homesick. I suppose everybody must be always just a little
homesick.”
She was always sorry for homesick people.
Born in the country, as his father before him, spare and tall, with
a flaming moustache, a neat chin, clear blue eyes, auburn hair, and a
thin, fresh, red face, Charles Gould looked like a new arrival from over
the sea. His grandfather had fought in the cause of independence under
Bolivar, in that famous English legion which on the battlefield of
Carabobo had been saluted by the great Liberator as Saviours of his
country. One of Charles Gould’s uncles had been the elected President
of that very province of Sulaco (then called a State) in the days of
Federation, and afterwards had been put up against the wall of a church
and shot by the order of the barbarous Unionist general, Guzman Bento.
It was the same Guzman Bento who, becoming later Perpetual President,
famed for his ruthless and cruel tyranny, readied his apotheosis in the
popular legend of a sanguinary land-haunting spectre whose body had been
carried off by the devil in person from the brick mausoleum in the nave
of the Church of Assumption in Sta. Marta. Thus, at least, the priests
explained its disappearance to the barefooted multitude that streamed
in, awestruck, to gaze at the hole in the side of the ugly box of bricks
before the great altar.
Guzman Bento of cruel memory had put to death great numbers of people
besides Charles Gould’s uncle; but with a relative martyred in the cause
of aristocracy, the Sulaco Oligarchs (this was the phraseology of Guzman
Bento’s time; now they were called Blancos, and had given up the federal
idea), which meant the families of pure Spanish descent, considered
Charles as one of themselves. With such a family record, no one could
be more of a Costaguanero than Don Carlos Gould; but his aspect was
so characteristic that in the talk of common people he was just the
Inglez--the Englishman of Sulaco. He looked more English than a casual
tourist, a sort of heretic pilgrim, however, quite unknown in Sulaco.
He looked more English than the last arrived batch of young railway
engineers, than anybody out of the hunting-field pictures in the numbers
of Punch reaching his wife’s drawing-room two months or so after date.
It astonished you to hear him talk Spanish (Castillan, as the natives
say) or the Indian dialect of the country-people so naturally. His
accent had never been English; but there was something so indelible
in all these ancestral Goulds--liberators, explorers, coffee
planters, merchants, revolutionists--of Costaguana, that he, the only
representative of the third generation in a continent possessing its
own style of horsemanship, went on looking thoroughly English even
on horseback. This is not said of him in the mocking spirit of the
Llaneros--men of the great plains--who think that no one in the world
knows how to sit a horse but themselves. Charles Gould, to use the
suitably lofty phrase, rode like a centaur. Riding for him was not a
special form of exercise; it was a natural faculty, as walking straight
is to all men sound of mind and limb; but, all the same, when cantering
beside the rutty ox-cart track to the mine he looked in his English
clothes and with his imported saddlery as though he had come this moment
to Costaguana at his easy swift pasotrote, straight out of some green
meadow at the other side of the world.
His way would lie along the old Spanish road--the Camino Real of popular
speech--the only remaining vestige of a fact and name left by that
royalty old Giorgio Viola hated, and whose very shadow had departed from
the land; for the big equestrian statue of Charles IV. at the entrance
of the Alameda, towering white against the trees, was only known to the
folk from the country and to the beggars of the town that slept on the
steps around the pedestal, as the Horse of Stone. The other Carlos,
turning off to the left with a rapid clatter of hoofs on the disjointed
pavement--Don Carlos Gould, in his English clothes, looked as
incongruous, but much more at home than the kingly cavalier reining in
his steed on the pedestal above the sleeping leperos, with his marble
arm raised towards the marble rim of a plumed hat.
The weather-stained effigy of the mounted king, with its vague
suggestion of a saluting gesture, seemed to present an inscrutable
breast to the political changes which had robbed it of its very name;
but neither did the other horseman, well known to the people, keen and
alive on his well-shaped, slate-coloured beast with a white eye, wear
his heart on the sleeve of his English coat. His mind preserved its
steady poise as if sheltered in the passionless stability of private
and public decencies at home in Europe. He accepted with a like calm the
shocking manner in which the Sulaco ladies smothered their faces with
pearl powder till they looked like white plaster casts with beautiful
living eyes, the peculiar gossip of the town, and the continuous
political changes, the constant “saving of the country,” which to his
wife seemed a puerile and bloodthirsty game of murder and rapine played
with terrible earnestness by depraved children. In the early days of
her Costaguana life, the little lady used to clench her hands with
exasperation at not being able to take the public affairs of the country
as seriously as the incidental atrocity of methods deserved. She saw in
them a comedy of naive pretences, but hardly anything genuine except
her own appalled indignation. Charles, very quiet and twisting his long
moustaches, would decline to discuss them at all. Once, however, he
observed to her gently--
“My dear, you seem to forget that I was born here.” These few words made
her pause as if they had been a sudden revelation. Perhaps the mere
fact of being born in the country did make a difference. She had a great
confidence in her husband; it had always been very great. He had struck
her imagination from the first by his unsentimentalism, by that very
quietude of mind which she had erected in her thought for a sign of
perfect competency in the business of living. Don Jose Avellanos, their
neighbour across the street, a statesman, a poet, a man of culture, who
had represented his country at several European Courts (and had suffered
untold indignities as a state prisoner in the time of the tyrant Guzman
Bento), used to declare in Dona Emilia’s drawing-room that Carlos had
all the English qualities of character with a truly patriotic heart.
Mrs. Gould, raising her eyes to her husband’s thin, red and tan face,
could not detect the slightest quiver of a feature at what he must have
heard said of his patriotism. Perhaps he had just dismounted on his
return from the mine; he was English enough to disregard the hottest
hours of the day. Basilio, in a livery of white linen and a red sash,
had squatted for a moment behind his heels to unstrap the heavy, blunt
spurs in the patio; and then the Senor Administrator would go up the
staircase into the gallery. Rows of plants in pots, ranged on the
balustrade between the pilasters of the arches, screened the corredor
with their leaves and flowers from the quadrangle below, whose paved
space is the true hearthstone of a South American house, where the quiet
hours of domestic life are marked by the shifting of light and shadow on
the flagstones.
Senor Avellanos was in the habit of crossing the patio at five o’clock
almost every day. Don Jose chose to come over at tea-time because the
English rite at Dona Emilia’s house reminded him of the time he lived in
London as Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James. He did
not like tea; and, usually, rocking his American chair, his neat little
shiny boots crossed on the foot-rest, he would talk on and on with a
sort of complacent virtuosity wonderful in a man of his age, while he
held the cup in his hands for a long time. His close-cropped head was
perfectly white; his eyes coalblack.
On seeing Charles Gould step into the sala he would nod provisionally
and go on to the end of the oratorial period. Only then he would say--
“Carlos, my friend, you have ridden from San Tome in the heat of the
day. Always the true English activity. No? What?”
He drank up all the tea at once in one draught. This performance
was invariably followed by a slight shudder and a low, involuntary
“br-r-r-r,” which was not covered by the hasty exclamation, “Excellent!”
Then giving up the empty cup into his young friend’s hand, extended with
a smile, he continued to expatiate upon the patriotic nature of the San
Tome mine for the simple pleasure of talking fluently, it seemed, while
his reclining body jerked backwards and forwards in a rocking-chair of
the sort exported from the United States. The ceiling of the largest
drawing-room of the Casa Gould extended its white level far above
his head. The loftiness dwarfed the mixture of heavy, straight-backed
Spanish chairs of brown wood with leathern seats, and European
furniture, low, and cushioned all over, like squat little monsters
gorged to bursting with steel springs and horsehair. There were
knick-knacks on little tables, mirrors let into the wall above marble
consoles, square spaces of carpet under the two groups of armchairs,
each presided over by a deep sofa; smaller rugs scattered all over the
floor of red tiles; three windows from the ceiling down to the ground,
opening on a balcony, and flanked by the perpendicular folds of the
dark hangings. The stateliness of ancient days lingered between the four
high, smooth walls, tinted a delicate primrose-colour; and Mrs. Gould,
with her little head and shining coils of hair, sitting in a cloud of
muslin and lace before a slender mahogany table, resembled a fairy posed
lightly before dainty philtres dispensed out of vessels of silver and
porcelain.
Mrs. Gould knew the history of the San Tome mine. Worked in the early
days mostly by means of lashes on the backs of slaves, its yield had
been paid for in its own weight of human bones. Whole tribes of Indians
had perished in the exploitation; and then the mine was abandoned, since
with this primitive method it had ceased to make a profitable return,
no matter how many corpses were thrown into its maw. Then it became
forgotten. It was rediscovered after the War of Independence. An English
company obtained the right to work it, and found so rich a vein that
neither the exactions of successive governments, nor the periodical
raids of recruiting officers upon the population of paid miners they had
created, could discourage their perseverance. But in the end, during the
long turmoil of pronunciamentos that followed the death of the famous
Guzman Bento, the native miners, incited to revolt by the emissaries
sent out from the capital, had risen upon their English chiefs and
murdered them to a man. The decree of confiscation which appeared
immediately afterwards in the Diario Official, published in Sta. Marta,
began with the words: “Justly incensed at the grinding oppression of
foreigners, actuated by sordid motives of gain rather than by love for a
country where they come impoverished to seek their fortunes, the mining
population of San Tome, etc. . . .” and ended with the declaration: “The
chief of the State has resolved to exercise to the full his power
of clemency. The mine, which by every law, international, human, and
divine, reverts now to the Government as national property, shall remain
closed till the sword drawn for the sacred defence of liberal principles
has accomplished its mission of securing the happiness of our beloved
country.”
And for many years this was the last of the San Tome mine. What
advantage that Government had expected from the spoliation, it is
impossible to tell now. Costaguana was made with difficulty to pay a
beggarly money compensation to the families of the victims, and then
the matter dropped out of diplomatic despatches. But afterwards another
Government bethought itself of that valuable asset. It was an ordinary
Costaguana Government--the fourth in six years--but it judged of its
opportunities sanely. It remembered the San Tome mine with a secret
conviction of its worthlessness in their own hands, but with an
ingenious insight into the various uses a silver mine can be put to,
apart from the sordid process of extracting the metal from under the
ground. The father of Charles Gould, for a long time one of the most
wealthy merchants of Costaguana, had already lost a considerable part of
his fortune in forced loans to the successive Governments. He was a man
of calm judgment, who never dreamed of pressing his claims; and when,
suddenly, the perpetual concession of the San Tome mine was offered to
him in full settlement, his alarm became extreme. He was versed in the
ways of Governments. Indeed, the intention of this affair, though no
doubt deeply meditated in the closet, lay open on the surface of the
document presented urgently for his signature. The third and most
important clause stipulated that the concession-holder should pay at
once to the Government five years’ royalties on the estimated output of
the mine.
Mr. Gould, senior, defended himself from this fatal favour with many
arguments and entreaties, but without success. He knew nothing of
mining; he had no means to put his concession on the European market;
the mine as a working concern did not exist. The buildings had been
burnt down, the mining plant had been destroyed, the mining population
had disappeared from the neighbourhood years and years ago; the very
road had vanished under a flood of tropical vegetation as effectually
as if swallowed by the sea; and the main gallery had fallen in within a
hundred yards from the entrance. It was no longer an abandoned mine; it
was a wild, inaccessible, and rocky gorge of the Sierra, where vestiges
of charred timber, some heaps of smashed bricks, and a few shapeless
pieces of rusty iron could have been found under the matted mass of
thorny creepers covering the ground. Mr. Gould, senior, did not desire
the perpetual possession of that desolate locality; in fact, the mere
vision of it arising before his mind in the still watches of the night
had the power to exasperate him into hours of hot and agitated insomnia.
It so happened, however, that the Finance Minister of the time was a
man to whom, in years gone by, Mr. Gould had, unfortunately, declined to
grant some small pecuniary assistance, basing his refusal on the ground
that the applicant was a notorious gambler and cheat, besides being more
than half suspected of a robbery with violence on a wealthy ranchero in
a remote country district, where he was actually exercising the function
of a judge. Now, after reaching his exalted position, that politician
had proclaimed his intention to repay evil with good to Senor
Gould--the poor man. He affirmed and reaffirmed this resolution in the
drawing-rooms of Sta. Marta, in a soft and implacable voice, and
with such malicious glances that Mr. Gould’s best friends advised him
earnestly to attempt no bribery to get the matter dropped. It would have
been useless. Indeed, it would not have been a very safe proceeding.
Such was also the opinion of a stout, loud-voiced lady of French
extraction, the daughter, she said, of an officer of high rank (_officier
superieur de l’armee_), who was accommodated with lodgings within the
walls of a secularized convent next door to the Ministry of Finance.
That florid person, when approached on behalf of Mr. Gould in a proper
manner, and with a suitable present, shook her head despondently. She
was good-natured, and her despondency was genuine. She imagined she
could not take money in consideration of something she could not
accomplish. The friend of Mr. Gould, charged with the delicate mission,
used to say afterwards that she was the only honest person closely or
remotely connected with the Government he had ever met. “No go,” she
had said with a cavalier, husky intonation which was natural to her, and
using turns of expression more suitable to a child of parents unknown
than to the orphaned daughter of a general officer. “No; it’s no go. _Pas
moyen, mon garcon. C’est dommage, tout de meme. Ah! zut! Je ne vole
pas mon monde. Je ne suis pas ministre--moi! Vous pouvez emporter votre
petit sac_.”
For a moment, biting her carmine lip, she deplored inwardly the tyranny
of the rigid principles governing the sale of her influence in high
places. Then, significantly, and with a touch of impatience, “_Allez_,”
she added, “_et dites bien a votre bonhomme--entendez-vous?--qu’il faut
avaler la pilule_.”
After such a warning there was nothing for it but to sign and pay.
Mr. Gould had swallowed the pill, and it was as though it had been
compounded of some subtle poison that acted directly on his brain. He
became at once mine-ridden, and as he was well read in light literature
it took to his mind the form of the Old Man of the Sea fastened upon his
shoulders. He also began to dream of vampires. Mr. Gould exaggerated
to himself the disadvantages of his new position, because he viewed it
emotionally. His position in Costaguana was no worse than before. But
man is a desperately conservative creature, and the extravagant novelty
of this outrage upon his purse distressed his sensibilities. Everybody
around him was being robbed by the grotesque and murderous bands that
played their game of governments and revolutions after the death of
Guzman Bento. His experience had taught him that, however short
the plunder might fall of their legitimate expectations, no gang in
possession of the Presidential Palace would be so incompetent as to
suffer itself to be baffled by the want of a pretext. The first casual
colonel of the barefooted army of scarecrows that came along was able to
expose with force and precision to any mere civilian his titles to a sum
of 10,000 dollars; the while his hope would be immutably fixed upon a
gratuity, at any rate, of no less than a thousand. Mr. Gould knew that
very well, and, armed with resignation, had waited for better times. But
to be robbed under the forms of legality and business was intolerable to
his imagination. Mr. Gould, the father, had one fault in his sagacious
and honourable character: he attached too much importance to form. It is
a failing common to mankind, whose views are tinged by prejudices. There
was for him in that affair a malignancy of perverted justice which, by
means of a moral shock, attacked his vigorous physique. “It will end
by killing me,” he used to affirm many times a day. And, in fact, since
that time he began to suffer from fever, from liver pains, and mostly
from a worrying inability to think of anything else. The Finance
Minister could have formed no conception of the profound subtlety of his
revenge. Even Mr. Gould’s letters to his fourteen-year-old boy Charles,
then away in England for his education, came at last to talk of
practically nothing but the mine. He groaned over the injustice, the
persecution, the outrage of that mine; he occupied whole pages in the
exposition of the fatal consequences attaching to the possession of that
mine from every point of view, with every dismal inference, with words
of horror at the apparently eternal character of that curse. For the
Concession had been granted to him and his descendants for ever. He
implored his son never to return to Costaguana, never to claim any
part of his inheritance there, because it was tainted by the infamous
Concession; never to touch it, never to approach it, to forget that
America existed, and pursue a mercantile career in Europe. And each
letter ended with bitter self-reproaches for having stayed too long in
that cavern of thieves, intriguers, and brigands.
To be told repeatedly that one’s future is blighted because of the
possession of a silver mine is not, at the age of fourteen, a matter
of prime importance as to its main statement; but in its form it is
calculated to excite a certain amount of wonder and attention. In course
of time the boy, at first only puzzled by the angry jeremiads, but
rather sorry for his dad, began to turn the matter over in his mind in
such moments as he could spare from play and study. In about a year he
had evolved from the lecture of the letters a definite conviction
that there was a silver mine in the Sulaco province of the Republic of
Costaguana, where poor Uncle Harry had been shot by soldiers a great
many years before. There was also connected closely with that mine a
thing called the “iniquitous Gould Concession,” apparently written on
a paper which his father desired ardently to “tear and fling into the
faces” of presidents, members of judicature, and ministers of State.
And this desire persisted, though the names of these people, he noticed,
seldom remained the same for a whole year together. This desire (since
the thing was iniquitous) seemed quite natural to the boy, though why
the affair was iniquitous he did not know. Afterwards, with advancing
wisdom, he managed to clear the plain truth of the business from the
fantastic intrusions of the Old Man of the Sea, vampires, and ghouls,
which had lent to his father’s correspondence the flavour of a gruesome
Arabian Nights tale. In the end, the growing youth attained to as
close an intimacy with the San Tome mine as the old man who wrote these
plaintive and enraged letters on the other side of the sea. He had been
made several times already to pay heavy fines for neglecting to work the
mine, he reported, besides other sums extracted from him on account
of future royalties, on the ground that a man with such a valuable
concession in his pocket could not refuse his financial assistance to
the Government of the Republic. The last of his fortune was passing away
from him against worthless receipts, he wrote, in a rage, whilst he was
being pointed out as an individual who had known how to secure enormous
advantages from the necessities of his country. And the young man in
Europe grew more and more interested in that thing which could provoke
such a tumult of words and passion.
He thought of it every day; but he thought of it without bitterness. It
might have been an unfortunate affair for his poor dad, and the
whole story threw a queer light upon the social and political life of
Costaguana. The view he took of it was sympathetic to his father, yet
calm and reflective. His personal feelings had not been outraged, and it
is difficult to resent with proper and durable indignation the physical
or mental anguish of another organism, even if that other organism is
one’s own father. By the time he was twenty Charles Gould had, in his
turn, fallen under the spell of the San Tome mine. But it was another
form of enchantment, more suitable to his youth, into whose magic
formula there entered hope, vigour, and self-confidence, instead of
weary indignation and despair. Left after he was twenty to his own
guidance (except for the severe injunction not to return to Costaguana),
he had pursued his studies in Belgium and France with the idea of
qualifying for a mining engineer. But this scientific aspect of his
labours remained vague and imperfect in his mind. Mines had acquired for
him a dramatic interest. He studied their peculiarities from a personal
point of view, too, as one would study the varied characters of men. He
visited them as one goes with curiosity to call upon remarkable persons.
He visited mines in Germany, in Spain, in Cornwall. Abandoned workings
had for him strong fascination. Their desolation appealed to him like
the sight of human misery, whose causes are varied and profound. They
might have been worthless, but also they might have been misunderstood.
His future wife was the first, and perhaps the only person to detect
this secret mood which governed the profoundly sensible, almost
voiceless attitude of this man towards the world of material things. And
at once her delight in him, lingering with half-open wings like those
birds that cannot rise easily from a flat level, found a pinnacle from
which to soar up into the skies.
They had become acquainted in Italy, where the future Mrs. Gould was
staying with an old and pale aunt who, years before, had married a
middle-aged, impoverished Italian marquis. She now mourned that man, who
had known how to give up his life to the independence and unity of his
country, who had known how to be as enthusiastic in his generosity as
the youngest of those who fell for that very cause of which old Giorgio
Viola was a drifting relic, as a broken spar is suffered to float away
disregarded after a naval victory. The Marchesa led a still, whispering
existence, nun-like in her black robes and a white band over the
forehead, in a corner of the first floor of an ancient and ruinous
palace, whose big, empty halls downstairs sheltered under their painted
ceilings the harvests, the fowls, and even the cattle, together with the
whole family of the tenant farmer.
The two young people had met in Lucca. After that meeting Charles Gould
visited no mines, though they went together in a carriage, once, to see
some marble quarries, where the work resembled mining in so far that
it also was the tearing of the raw material of treasure from the earth.
Charles Gould did not open his heart to her in any set speeches. He
simply went on acting and thinking in her sight. This is the true method
of sincerity. One of his frequent remarks was, “I think sometimes that
poor father takes a wrong view of that San Tome business.” And they
discussed that opinion long and earnestly, as if they could influence a
mind across half the globe; but in reality they discussed it because the
sentiment of love can enter into any subject and live ardently in remote
phrases. For this natural reason these discussions were precious to Mrs.
Gould in her engaged state. Charles feared that Mr. Gould, senior, was
wasting his strength and making himself ill by his efforts to get rid
of the Concession. “I fancy that this is not the kind of handling it
requires,” he mused aloud, as if to himself. And when she wondered
frankly that a man of character should devote his energies to plotting
and intrigues, Charles would remark, with a gentle concern that
understood her wonder, “You must not forget that he was born there.”
She would set her quick mind to work upon that, and then make the
inconsequent retort, which he accepted as perfectly sagacious, because,
in fact, it was so--
“Well, and you? You were born there, too.”
He knew his answer.
“That’s different. I’ve been away ten years. Dad never had such a long
spell; and it was more than thirty years ago.”
She was the first person to whom he opened his lips after receiving the
news of his father’s death.
“It has killed him!” he said.
He had walked straight out of town with the news, straight out before
him in the noonday sun on the white road, and his feet had brought
him face to face with her in the hall of the ruined palazzo, a room
magnificent and naked, with here and there a long strip of damask, black
with damp and age, hanging down on a bare panel of the wall. It was
furnished with exactly one gilt armchair, with a broken back, and an
octagon columnar stand bearing a heavy marble vase ornamented with
sculptured masks and garlands of flowers, and cracked from top to
bottom. Charles Gould was dusty with the white dust of the road lying
on his boots, on his shoulders, on his cap with two peaks. Water dripped
from under it all over his face, and he grasped a thick oaken cudgel in
his bare right hand.
She went very pale under the roses of her big straw hat, gloved,
swinging a clear sunshade, caught just as she was going out to meet him
at the bottom of the hill, where three poplars stand near the wall of a
vineyard.
“It has killed him!” he repeated. “He ought to have had many years yet.
We are a long-lived family.”
She was too startled to say anything; he was contemplating with a
penetrating and motionless stare the cracked marble urn as though he
had resolved to fix its shape for ever in his memory. It was only when,
turning suddenly to her, he blurted out twice, “I’ve come to you--I’ve
come straight to you--,” without being able to finish his phrase, that
the great pitifulness of that lonely and tormented death in Costaguana
came to her with the full force of its misery. He caught hold of her
hand, raised it to his lips, and at that she dropped her parasol to pat
him on the cheek, murmured “Poor boy,” and began to dry her eyes under
the downward curve of her hat-brim, very small in her simple, white
frock, almost like a lost child crying in the degraded grandeur of the
noble hall, while he stood by her, again perfectly motionless in the
contemplation of the marble urn.
Afterwards they went out for a long walk, which was silent till he
exclaimed suddenly--
“Yes. But if he had only grappled with it in a proper way!”
And then they stopped. Everywhere there were long shadows lying on the
hills, on the roads, on the enclosed fields of olive trees; the shadows
of poplars, of wide chestnuts, of farm buildings, of stone walls; and
in mid-air the sound of a bell, thin and alert, was like the throbbing
pulse of the sunset glow. Her lips were slightly parted as though in
surprise that he should not be looking at her with his usual expression.
His usual expression was unconditionally approving and attentive. He was
in his talks with her the most anxious and deferential of dictators,
an attitude that pleased her immensely. It affirmed her power without
detracting from his dignity. That slight girl, with her little feet,
little hands, little face attractively overweighted by great coils of
hair; with a rather large mouth, whose mere parting seemed to breathe
upon you the fragrance of frankness and generosity, had the fastidious
soul of an experienced woman. She was, before all things and all
flatteries, careful of her pride in the object of her choice. But now he
was actually not looking at her at all; and his expression was tense and
irrational, as is natural in a man who elects to stare at nothing past a
young girl’s head.
“Well, yes. It was iniquitous. They corrupted him thoroughly, the poor
old boy. Oh! why wouldn’t he let me go back to him? But now I shall know
how to grapple with this.”
After pronouncing these words with immense assurance, he glanced down at
her, and at once fell a prey to distress, incertitude, and fear.
The only thing he wanted to know now, he said, was whether she did love
him enough--whether she would have the courage to go with him so far
away? He put these questions to her in a voice that trembled with
anxiety--for he was a determined man.
She did. She would. And immediately the future hostess of all the
Europeans in Sulaco had the physical experience of the earth falling
away from under her. It vanished completely, even to the very sound of
the bell. When her feet touched the ground again, the bell was still
ringing in the valley; she put her hands up to her hair, breathing
quickly, and glanced up and down the stony lane. It was reassuringly
empty. Meantime, Charles, stepping with one foot into a dry and dusty
ditch, picked up the open parasol, which had bounded away from them
with a martial sound of drum taps. He handed it to her soberly, a little
crestfallen.
They turned back, and after she had slipped her hand on his arm, the
first words he pronounced were--
“It’s lucky that we shall be able to settle in a coast town. You’ve
heard its name. It is Sulaco. I am so glad poor father did get that
house. He bought a big house there years ago, in order that there should
always be a Casa Gould in the principal town of what used to be called
the Occidental Province. I lived there once, as a small boy, with my
dear mother, for a whole year, while poor father was away in the United
States on business. You shall be the new mistress of the Casa Gould.”
And later, in the inhabited corner of the Palazzo above the vineyards,
the marble hills, the pines and olives of Lucca, he also said--
“The name of Gould has been always highly respected in Sulaco. My uncle
Harry was chief of the State for some time, and has left a great name
amongst the first families. By this I mean the pure Creole families, who
take no part in the miserable farce of governments. Uncle Harry was no
adventurer. In Costaguana we Goulds are no adventurers. He was of the
country, and he loved it, but he remained essentially an Englishman
in his ideas. He made use of the political cry of his time. It was
Federation. But he was no politician. He simply stood up for social
order out of pure love for rational liberty and from his hate of
oppression. There was no nonsense about him. He went to work in his
own way because it seemed right, just as I feel I must lay hold of that
mine.”
In such words he talked to her because his memory was very full of the
country of his childhood, his heart of his life with that girl, and his
mind of the San Tome Concession. He added that he would have to leave
her for a few days to find an American, a man from San Francisco, who
was still somewhere in Europe. A few months before he had made his
acquaintance in an old historic German town, situated in a mining
district. The American had his womankind with him, but seemed lonely
while they were sketching all day long the old doorways and the
turreted corners of the mediaeval houses. Charles Gould had with him the
inseparable companionship of the mine. The other man was interested in
mining enterprises, knew something of Costaguana, and was no stranger to
the name of Gould. They had talked together with some intimacy which
was made possible by the difference of their ages. Charles wanted now
to find that capitalist of shrewd mind and accessible character. His
father’s fortune in Costaguana, which he had supposed to be still
considerable, seemed to have melted in the rascally crucible of
revolutions. Apart from some ten thousand pounds deposited in England,
there appeared to be nothing left except the house in Sulaco, a vague
right of forest exploitation in a remote and savage district, and the
San Tome Concession, which had attended his poor father to the very
brink of the grave.
He explained those things. It was late when they parted. She had never
before given him such a fascinating vision of herself. All the eagerness
of youth for a strange life, for great distances, for a future in which
there was an air of adventure, of combat--a subtle thought of redress
and conquest, had filled her with an intense excitement, which she
returned to the giver with a more open and exquisite display of
tenderness.
He left her to walk down the hill, and directly he found himself alone
he became sober. That irreparable change a death makes in the course
of our daily thoughts can be felt in a vague and poignant discomfort
of mind. It hurt Charles Gould to feel that never more, by no effort of
will, would he be able to think of his father in the same way he used
to think of him when the poor man was alive. His breathing image was
no longer in his power. This consideration, closely affecting his own
identity, filled his breast with a mournful and angry desire for action.
In this his instinct was unerring. Action is consolatory. It is the
enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Only in the
conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates.
For his action, the mine was obviously the only field. It was imperative
sometimes to know how to disobey the solemn wishes of the dead.
He resolved firmly to make his disobedience as thorough (by way of
atonement) as it well could be. The mine had been the cause of an absurd
moral disaster; its working must be made a serious and moral success.
He owed it to the dead man’s memory. Such were the--properly
speaking--emotions of Charles Gould. His thoughts ran upon the means
of raising a large amount of capital in San Francisco or elsewhere; and
incidentally there occurred to him also the general reflection that the
counsel of the departed must be an unsound guide. Not one of them
could be aware beforehand what enormous changes the death of any given
individual may produce in the very aspect of the world.
The latest phase in the history of the mine Mrs. Gould knew from
personal experience. It was in essence the history of her married life.
The mantle of the Goulds’ hereditary position in Sulaco had descended
amply upon her little person; but she would not allow the peculiarities
of the strange garment to weigh down the vivacity of her character,
which was the sign of no mere mechanical sprightliness, but of an
eager intelligence. It must not be supposed that Mrs. Gould’s mind was
masculine. A woman with a masculine mind is not a being of
superior efficiency; she is simply a phenomenon of imperfect
differentiation--interestingly barren and without importance. Dona
Emilia’s intelligence being feminine led her to achieve the conquest of
Sulaco, simply by lighting the way for her unselfishness and sympathy.
She could converse charmingly, but she was not talkative. The wisdom of
the heart having no concern with the erection or demolition of theories
any more than with the defence of prejudices, has no random words at its
command. The words it pronounces have the value of acts of integrity,
tolerance, and compassion. A woman’s true tenderness, like the true
virility of man, is expressed in action of a conquering kind. The ladies
of Sulaco adored Mrs. Gould. “They still look upon me as something of a
monster,” Mrs. Gould had said pleasantly to one of the three gentlemen
from San Francisco she had to entertain in her new Sulaco house just
about a year after her marriage.
They were her first visitors from abroad, and they had come to look at
the San Tome mine. She jested most agreeably, they thought; and Charles
Gould, besides knowing thoroughly what he was about, had shown himself
a real hustler. These facts caused them to be well disposed towards his
wife. An unmistakable enthusiasm, pointed by a slight flavour of irony,
made her talk of the mine absolutely fascinating to her visitors, and
provoked them to grave and indulgent smiles in which there was a good
deal of deference. Perhaps had they known how much she was inspired by
an idealistic view of success they would have been amazed at the state
of her mind as the Spanish-American ladies had been amazed at the
tireless activity of her body. She would--in her own words--have
been for them “something of a monster.” However, the Goulds were in
essentials a reticent couple, and their guests departed without the
suspicion of any other purpose but simple profit in the working of a
silver mine. Mrs. Gould had out her own carriage, with two white mules,
to drive them down to the harbour, whence the Ceres was to carry them
off into the Olympus of plutocrats. Captain Mitchell had snatched at the
occasion of leave-taking to remark to Mrs. Gould, in a low, confidential
mutter, “This marks an epoch.”
Mrs. Gould loved the patio of her Spanish house. A broad flight of stone
steps was overlooked silently from a niche in the wall by a Madonna in
blue robes with the crowned child sitting on her arm. Subdued voices
ascended in the early mornings from the paved well of the quadrangle,
with the stamping of horses and mules led out in pairs to drink at the
cistern. A tangle of slender bamboo stems drooped its narrow, blade-like
leaves over the square pool of water, and the fat coachman sat muffled
up on the edge, holding lazily the ends of halters in his hand.
Barefooted servants passed to and fro, issuing from dark, low doorways
below; two laundry girls with baskets of washed linen; the baker with
the tray of bread made for the day; Leonarda--her own camerista--bearing
high up, swung from her hand raised above her raven black head, a bunch
of starched under-skirts dazzlingly white in the slant of sunshine. Then
the old porter would hobble in, sweeping the flagstones, and the
house was ready for the day. All the lofty rooms on three sides of
the quadrangle opened into each other and into the corredor, with its
wrought-iron railings and a border of flowers, whence, like the lady of
the mediaeval castle, she could witness from above all the departures
and arrivals of the Casa, to which the sonorous arched gateway lent an
air of stately importance.
She had watched her carriage roll away with the three guests from the
north. She smiled. Their three arms went up simultaneously to their
three hats. Captain Mitchell, the fourth, in attendance, had already
begun a pompous discourse. Then she lingered. She lingered, approaching
her face to the clusters of flowers here and there as if to give time
to her thoughts to catch up with her slow footsteps along the straight
vista of the corredor.
A fringed Indian hammock from Aroa, gay with coloured featherwork, had
been swung judiciously in a corner that caught the early sun; for the
mornings are cool in Sulaco. The cluster of _flor de noche buena_ blazed
in great masses before the open glass doors of the reception rooms. A
big green parrot, brilliant like an emerald in a cage that flashed like
gold, screamed out ferociously, “_Viva Costaguana!_” then called twice
mellifluously, “Leonarda! Leonarda!” in imitation of Mrs. Gould’s voice,
and suddenly took refuge in immobility and silence. Mrs. Gould reached
the end of the gallery and put her head through the door of her
husband’s room.
Charles Gould, with one foot on a low wooden stool, was already
strapping his spurs. He wanted to hurry back to the mine. Mrs. Gould,
without coming in, glanced about the room. One tall, broad bookcase,
with glass doors, was full of books; but in the other, without shelves,
and lined with red baize, were arranged firearms: Winchester carbines,
revolvers, a couple of shot-guns, and even two pairs of double-barrelled
holster pistols. Between them, by itself, upon a strip of scarlet
velvet, hung an old cavalry sabre, once the property of Don Enrique
Gould, the hero of the Occidental Province, presented by Don Jose
Avellanos, the hereditary friend of the family.
Otherwise, the plastered white walls were completely bare, except for
a water-colour sketch of the San Tome mountain--the work of Dona Emilia
herself. In the middle of the red-tiled floor stood two long tables
littered with plans and papers, a few chairs, and a glass show-case
containing specimens of ore from the mine. Mrs. Gould, looking at all
these things in turn, wondered aloud why the talk of these wealthy and
enterprising men discussing the prospects, the working, and the safety
of the mine rendered her so impatient and uneasy, whereas she could talk
of the mine by the hour with her husband with unwearied interest and
satisfaction. And dropping her eyelids expressively, she added--
“What do you feel about it, Charley?”
Then, surprised at her husband’s silence, she raised her eyes, opened
wide, as pretty as pale flowers. He had done with the spurs, and,
twisting his moustache with both hands, horizontally, he contemplated
her from the height of his long legs with a visible appreciation of her
appearance. The consciousness of being thus contemplated pleased Mrs.
Gould.
“They are considerable men,” he said.
“I know. But have you listened to their conversation? They don’t seem to
have understood anything they have seen here.”
“They have seen the mine. They have understood that to some purpose,”
Charles Gould interjected, in defence of the visitors; and then his
wife mentioned the name of the most considerable of the three. He was
considerable in finance and in industry. His name was familiar to many
millions of people. He was so considerable that he would never have
travelled so far away from the centre of his activity if the doctors had
not insisted, with veiled menaces, on his taking a long holiday.
“Mr. Holroyd’s sense of religion,” Mrs. Gould pursued, “was shocked
and disgusted at the tawdriness of the dressed-up saints in the
cathedral--the worship, he called it, of wood and tinsel. But it seemed
to me that he looked upon his own God as a sort of influential partner,
who gets his share of profits in the endowment of churches. That’s a
sort of idolatry. He told me he endowed churches every year, Charley.”
“No end of them,” said Mr. Gould, marvelling inwardly at the mobility
of her physiognomy. “All over the country. He’s famous for that sort of
munificence.” “Oh, he didn’t boast,” Mrs. Gould declared, scrupulously.
“I believe he’s really a good man, but so stupid! A poor Chulo who
offers a little silver arm or leg to thank his god for a cure is as
rational and more touching.”
“He’s at the head of immense silver and iron interests,” Charles Gould
observed.
“Ah, yes! The religion of silver and iron. He’s a very civil man, though
he looked awfully solemn when he first saw the Madonna on the staircase,
who’s only wood and paint; but he said nothing to me. My dear Charley,
I heard those men talk among themselves. Can it be that they really wish
to become, for an immense consideration, drawers of water and hewers of
wood to all the countries and nations of the earth?”
“A man must work to some end,” Charles Gould said, vaguely.
Mrs. Gould, frowning, surveyed him from head to foot. With his riding
breeches, leather leggings (an article of apparel never before seen in
Costaguana), a Norfolk coat of grey flannel, and those great flaming
moustaches, he suggested an officer of cavalry turned gentleman farmer.
This combination was gratifying to Mrs. Gould’s tastes. “How thin the
poor boy is!” she thought. “He overworks himself.” But there was no
denying that his fine-drawn, keen red face, and his whole, long-limbed,
lank person had an air of breeding and distinction. And Mrs. Gould
relented.
“I only wondered what you felt,” she murmured, gently.
During the last few days, as it happened, Charles Gould had been kept
too busy thinking twice before he spoke to have paid much attention to
the state of his feelings. But theirs was a successful match, and he had
no difficulty in finding his answer.
“The best of my feelings are in your keeping, my dear,” he said,
lightly; and there was so much truth in that obscure phrase that he
experienced towards her at the moment a great increase of gratitude and
tenderness.
Mrs. Gould, however, did not seem to find this answer in the least
obscure. She brightened up delicately; already he had changed his tone.
“But there are facts. The worth of the mine--as a mine--is beyond doubt.
It shall make us very wealthy. The mere working of it is a matter of
technical knowledge, which I have--which ten thousand other men in the
world have. But its safety, its continued existence as an enterprise,
giving a return to men--to strangers, comparative strangers--who invest
money in it, is left altogether in my hands. I have inspired confidence
in a man of wealth and position. You seem to think this perfectly
natural--do you? Well, I don’t know. I don’t know why I have; but it is
a fact. This fact makes everything possible, because without it I would
never have thought of disregarding my father’s wishes. I would never
have disposed of the Concession as a speculator disposes of a valuable
right to a company--for cash and shares, to grow rich eventually if
possible, but at any rate to put some money at once in his pocket. No.
Even if it had been feasible--which I doubt--I would not have done so.
Poor father did not understand. He was afraid I would hang on to the
ruinous thing, waiting for just some such chance, and waste my life
miserably. That was the true sense of his prohibition, which we have
deliberately set aside.”
They were walking up and down the corredor. Her head just reached to his
shoulder. His arm, extended downwards, was about her waist. His spurs
jingled slightly.
“He had not seen me for ten years. He did not know me. He parted from me
for my sake, and he would never let me come back. He was always talking
in his letters of leaving Costaguana, of abandoning everything and
making his escape. But he was too valuable a prey. They would have
thrown him into one of their prisons at the first suspicion.”
His spurred feet clinked slowly. He was bending over his wife as they
walked. The big parrot, turning its head askew, followed their pacing
figures with a round, unblinking eye.
“He was a lonely man. Ever since I was ten years old he used to talk to
me as if I had been grown up. When I was in Europe he wrote to me every
month. Ten, twelve pages every month of my life for ten years. And,
after all, he did not know me! Just think of it--ten whole years away;
the years I was growing up into a man. He could not know me. Do you
think he could?”
Mrs. Gould shook her head negatively; which was just what her husband
had expected from the strength of the argument. But she shook her
head negatively only because she thought that no one could know her
Charles--really know him for what he was but herself. The thing was
obvious. It could be felt. It required no argument. And poor Mr. Gould,
senior, who had died too soon to ever hear of their engagement, remained
too shadowy a figure for her to be credited with knowledge of any sort
whatever.
“No, he did not understand. In my view this mine could never have been
a thing to sell. Never! After all his misery I simply could not have
touched it for money alone,” Charles Gould pursued: and she pressed her
head to his shoulder approvingly.
These two young people remembered the life which had ended wretchedly
just when their own lives had come together in that splendour of hopeful
love, which to the most sensible minds appears like a triumph of good
over all the evils of the earth. A vague idea of rehabilitation had
entered the plan of their life. That it was so vague as to elude the
support of argument made it only the stronger. It had presented itself
to them at the instant when the woman’s instinct of devotion and the
man’s instinct of activity receive from the strongest of illusions their
most powerful impulse. The very prohibition imposed the necessity of
success. It was as if they had been morally bound to make good their
vigorous view of life against the unnatural error of weariness and
despair. If the idea of wealth was present to them it was only in so
far as it was bound with that other success. Mrs. Gould, an orphan from
early childhood and without fortune, brought up in an atmosphere of
intellectual interests, had never considered the aspects of great
wealth. They were too remote, and she had not learned that they were
desirable. On the other hand, she had not known anything of absolute
want. Even the very poverty of her aunt, the Marchesa, had nothing
intolerable to a refined mind; it seemed in accord with a great grief:
it had the austerity of a sacrifice offered to a noble ideal. Thus even
the most legitimate touch of materialism was wanting in Mrs. Gould’s
character. The dead man of whom she thought with tenderness (because
he was Charley’s father) and with some impatience (because he had been
weak), must be put completely in the wrong. Nothing else would do
to keep their prosperity without a stain on its only real, on its
immaterial side!
Charles Gould, on his part, had been obliged to keep the idea of wealth
well to the fore; but he brought it forward as a means, not as an end.
Unless the mine was good business it could not be touched. He had to
insist on that aspect of the enterprise. It was his lever to move
men who had capital. And Charles Gould believed in the mine. He
knew everything that could be known of it. His faith in the mine was
contagious, though it was not served by a great eloquence; but business
men are frequently as sanguine and imaginative as lovers. They are
affected by a personality much oftener than people would suppose; and
Charles Gould, in his unshaken assurance, was absolutely convincing.
Besides, it was a matter of common knowledge to the men to whom he
addressed himself that mining in Costaguana was a game that could be
made considerably more than worth the candle. The men of affairs knew that
very well. The real difficulty in touching it was elsewhere. Against
that there was an implication of calm and implacable resolution in
Charles Gould’s very voice. Men of affairs venture sometimes on acts
that the common judgment of the world would pronounce absurd; they make
their decisions on apparently impulsive and human grounds. “Very well,”
had said the considerable personage to whom Charles Gould on his way
out through San Francisco had lucidly exposed his point of view. “Let us
suppose that the mining affairs of Sulaco are taken in hand. There would
then be in it: first, the house of Holroyd, which is all right; then,
Mr. Charles Gould, a citizen of Costaguana, who is also all right; and,
lastly, the Government of the Republic. So far this resembles the first
start of the Atacama nitrate fields, where there was a financing house,
a gentleman of the name of Edwards, and--a Government; or, rather, two
Governments--two South American Governments. And you know what came of
it. War came of it; devastating and prolonged war came of it, Mr. Gould.
However, here we possess the advantage of having only one South
American Government hanging around for plunder out of the deal. It is an
advantage; but then there are degrees of badness, and that Government is
the Costaguana Government.”
Thus spoke the considerable personage, the millionaire endower of
churches on a scale befitting the greatness of his native land--the same
to whom the doctors used the language of horrid and veiled menaces. He
was a big-limbed, deliberate man, whose quiet burliness lent to an ample
silk-faced frock-coat a superfine dignity. His hair was iron grey, his
eyebrows were still black, and his massive profile was the profile of
a Caesar’s head on an old Roman coin. But his parentage was German and
Scotch and English, with remote strains of Danish and French blood,
giving him the temperament of a Puritan and an insatiable imagination
of conquest. He was completely unbending to his visitor, because of the
warm introduction the visitor had brought from Europe, and because of
an irrational liking for earnestness and determination wherever met, to
whatever end directed.
“The Costaguana Government shall play its hand for all it’s worth--and
don’t you forget it, Mr. Gould. Now, what is Costaguana? It is the
bottomless pit of 10 per cent. loans and other fool investments.
European capital has been flung into it with both hands for years. Not
ours, though. We in this country know just about enough to keep indoors
when it rains. We can sit and watch. Of course, some day we shall step
in. We are bound to. But there’s no hurry. Time itself has got to wait
on the greatest country in the whole of God’s Universe. We shall be
giving the word for everything: industry, trade, law, journalism, art,
politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith’s Sound,
and beyond, too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North
Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in hand the outlying
islands and continents of the earth. We shall run the world’s business
whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it--and neither
can we, I guess.”
By this he meant to express his faith in destiny in words suitable to
his intelligence, which was unskilled in the presentation of general
ideas. His intelligence was nourished on facts; and Charles Gould, whose
imagination had been permanently affected by the one great fact of a
silver mine, had no objection to this theory of the world’s future.
If it had seemed distasteful for a moment it was because the sudden
statement of such vast eventualities dwarfed almost to nothingness the
actual matter in hand. He and his plans and all the mineral wealth of
the Occidental Province appeared suddenly robbed of every vestige of
magnitude. The sensation was disagreeable; but Charles Gould was not
dull. Already he felt that he was producing a favourable impression; the
consciousness of that flattering fact helped him to a vague smile, which
his big interlocutor took for a smile of discreet and admiring assent.
He smiled quietly, too; and immediately Charles Gould, with that mental
agility mankind will display in defence of a cherished hope, reflected
that the very apparent insignificance of his aim would help him to
success. His personality and his mine would be taken up because it was
a matter of no great consequence, one way or another, to a man who
referred his action to such a prodigious destiny. And Charles Gould was
not humiliated by this consideration, because the thing remained as
big as ever for him. Nobody else’s vast conceptions of destiny could
diminish the aspect of his desire for the redemption of the San Tome
mine. In comparison to the correctness of his aim, definite in space and
absolutely attainable within a limited time, the other man appeared for
an instant as a dreamy idealist of no importance.
The great man, massive and benignant, had been looking at him
thoughtfully; when he broke the short silence it was to remark that
concessions flew about thick in the air of Costaguana. Any simple soul
that just yearned to be taken in could bring down a concession at the
first shot.
“Our consuls get their mouths stopped with them,” he continued, with a
twinkle of genial scorn in his eyes. But in a moment he became grave.
“A conscientious, upright man, that cares nothing for boodle, and keeps
clear of their intrigues, conspiracies, and factions, soon gets his
passports. See that, Mr. Gould? Persona non grata. That’s the reason our
Government is never properly informed. On the other hand, Europe must be
kept out of this continent, and for proper interference on our part the
time is not yet ripe, I dare say. But we here--we are not this country’s
Government, neither are we simple souls. Your affair is all right. The
main question for us is whether the second partner, and that’s you, is
the right sort to hold his own against the third and unwelcome partner,
which is one or another of the high and mighty robber gangs that run the
Costaguana Government. What do you think, Mr. Gould, eh?”
He bent forward to look steadily into the unflinching eyes of Charles
Gould, who, remembering the large box full of his father’s letters, put
the accumulated scorn and bitterness of many years into the tone of his
answer--
“As far as the knowledge of these men and their methods and their
politics is concerned, I can answer for myself. I have been fed on
that sort of knowledge since I was a boy. I am not likely to fall into
mistakes from excess of optimism.”
“Not likely, eh? That’s all right. Tact and a stiff upper lip is what
you’ll want; and you could bluff a little on the strength of your
backing. Not too much, though. We will go with you as long as the thing
runs straight. But we won’t be drawn into any large trouble. This is the
experiment which I am willing to make. There is some risk, and we will
take it; but if you can’t keep up your end, we will stand our loss, of
course, and then--we’ll let the thing go. This mine can wait; it has
been shut up before, as you know. You must understand that under no
circumstances will we consent to throw good money after bad.”
Thus the great personage had spoken then, in his own private office, in
a great city where other men (very considerable in the eyes of a vain
populace) waited with alacrity upon a wave of his hand. And rather more
than a year later, during his unexpected appearance in Sulaco, he had
emphasized his uncompromising attitude with a freedom of sincerity
permitted to his wealth and influence. He did this with the less
reserve, perhaps, because the inspection of what had been done, and more
still the way in which successive steps had been taken, had impressed
him with the conviction that Charles Gould was perfectly capable of
keeping up his end.
“This young fellow,” he thought to himself, “may yet become a power in
the land.”
This thought flattered him, for hitherto the only account of this young
man he could give to his intimates was--
“My brother-in-law met him in one of these one-horse old German towns,
near some mines, and sent him on to me with a letter. He’s one of the
Costaguana Goulds, pure-bred Englishmen, but all born in the country.
His uncle went into politics, was the last Provincial President of
Sulaco, and got shot after a battle. His father was a prominent business
man in Sta. Marta, tried to keep clear of their politics, and died
ruined after a lot of revolutions. And that’s your Costaguana in a
nutshell.”
Of course, he was too great a man to be questioned as to his motives,
even by his intimates. The outside world was at liberty to wonder
respectfully at the hidden meaning of his actions. He was so great a man
that his lavish patronage of the “purer forms of Christianity” (which in
its naive form of church-building amused Mrs. Gould) was looked upon by
his fellow-citizens as the manifestation of a pious and humble spirit.
But in his own circles of the financial world the taking up of such a
thing as the San Tome mine was regarded with respect, indeed, but rather
as a subject for discreet jocularity. It was a great man’s caprice. In
the great Holroyd building (an enormous pile of iron, glass, and blocks
of stone at the corner of two streets, cobwebbed aloft by the radiation
of telegraph wires) the heads of principal departments exchanged
humorous glances, which meant that they were not let into the secrets
of the San Tome business. The Costaguana mail (it was never large--one
fairly heavy envelope) was taken unopened straight into the great man’s
room, and no instructions dealing with it had ever been issued thence.
The office whispered that he answered personally--and not by dictation
either, but actually writing in his own hand, with pen and ink, and, it
was to be supposed, taking a copy in his own private press copy-book,
inaccessible to profane eyes. Some scornful young men, insignificant
pieces of minor machinery in that eleven-storey-high workshop of great
affairs, expressed frankly their private opinion that the great chief
had done at last something silly, and was ashamed of his folly; others,
elderly and insignificant, but full of romantic reverence for the
business that had devoured their best years, used to mutter darkly and
knowingly that this was a portentous sign; that the Holroyd connection
meant by-and-by to get hold of the whole Republic of Costaguana, lock,
stock, and barrel. But, in fact, the hobby theory was the right one. It
interested the great man to attend personally to the San Tome mine; it
interested him so much that he allowed this hobby to give a direction to
the first complete holiday he had taken for quite a startling number
of years. He was not running a great enterprise there; no mere railway
board or industrial corporation. He was running a man! A success would
have pleased him very much on refreshingly novel grounds; but, on the
other side of the same feeling, it was incumbent upon him to cast it
off utterly at the first sign of failure. A man may be thrown off. The
papers had unfortunately trumpeted all over the land his journey to
Costaguana. If he was pleased at the way Charles Gould was going on, he
infused an added grimness into his assurances of support. Even at the
very last interview, half an hour or so before he rolled out of the
patio, hat in hand, behind Mrs. Gould’s white mules, he had said in
Charles’s room--
“You go ahead in your own way, and I shall know how to help you as long
as you hold your own. But you may rest assured that in a given case we
shall know how to drop you in time.”
To this Charles Gould’s only answer had been: “You may begin sending out
the machinery as soon as you like.”
And the great man had liked this imperturbable assurance. The secret
of it was that to Charles Gould’s mind these uncompromising terms were
agreeable. Like this the mine preserved its identity, with which he had
endowed it as a boy; and it remained dependent on himself alone. It was
a serious affair, and he, too, took it grimly.
“Of course,” he said to his wife, alluding to this last conversation
with the departed guest, while they walked slowly up and down the
corredor, followed by the irritated eye of the parrot--“of course, a
man of that sort can take up a thing or drop it when he likes. He will
suffer from no sense of defeat. He may have to give in, or he may have
to die to-morrow, but the great silver and iron interests will survive,
and some day will get hold of Costaguana along with the rest of the
world.”
They had stopped near the cage. The parrot, catching the sound of a word
belonging to his vocabulary, was moved to interfere. Parrots are very
human.
“Viva Costaguana!” he shrieked, with intense self-assertion, and,
instantly ruffling up his feathers, assumed an air of puffed-up
somnolence behind the glittering wires.
“And do you believe that, Charley?” Mrs. Gould asked. “This seems to me
most awful materialism, and--”
“My dear, it’s nothing to me,” interrupted her husband, in a reasonable
tone. “I make use of what I see. What’s it to me whether his talk is the
voice of destiny or simply a bit of clap-trap eloquence? There’s a good
deal of eloquence of one sort or another produced in both Americas. The
air of the New World seems favourable to the art of declamation. Have
you forgotten how dear Avellanos can hold forth for hours here--?”
“Oh, but that’s different,” protested Mrs. Gould, almost shocked. The
allusion was not to the point. Don Jose was a dear good man, who talked
very well, and was enthusiastic about the greatness of the San Tome
mine. “How can you compare them, Charles?” she exclaimed, reproachfully.
“He has suffered--and yet he hopes.”
The working competence of men--which she never questioned--was very
surprising to Mrs. Gould, because upon so many obvious issues they
showed themselves strangely muddle-headed.
Charles Gould, with a careworn calmness which secured for him at once
his wife’s anxious sympathy, assured her that he was not comparing. He
was an American himself, after all, and perhaps he could understand both
kinds of eloquence--“if it were worth while to try,” he added, grimly.
But he had breathed the air of England longer than any of his people had
done for three generations, and really he begged to be excused. His
poor father could be eloquent, too. And he asked his wife whether she
remembered a passage in one of his father’s last letters where Mr.
Gould had expressed the conviction that “God looked wrathfully at these
countries, or else He would let some ray of hope fall through a rift in
the appalling darkness of intrigue, bloodshed, and crime that hung over
the Queen of Continents.”
Mrs. Gould had not forgotten. “You read it to me, Charley,” she
murmured. “It was a striking pronouncement. How deeply your father must
have felt its terrible sadness!”
“He did not like to be robbed. It exasperated him,” said Charles Gould.
“But the image will serve well enough. What is wanted here is law, good
faith, order, security. Any one can declaim about these things, but I
pin my faith to material interests. Only let the material interests once
get a firm footing, and they are bound to impose the conditions on
which alone they can continue to exist. That’s how your money-making is
justified here in the face of lawlessness and disorder. It is justified
because the security which it demands must be shared with an oppressed
people. A better justice will come afterwards. That’s your ray of hope.”
His arm pressed her slight form closer to his side for a moment. “And
who knows whether in that sense even the San Tome mine may not become
that little rift in the darkness which poor father despaired of ever
seeing?”
She glanced up at him with admiration. He was competent; he had given a
vast shape to the vagueness of her unselfish ambitions.
“Charley,” she said, “you are splendidly disobedient.”
He left her suddenly in the corredor to go and get his hat, a soft, grey
sombrero, an article of national costume which combined unexpectedly
well with his English get-up. He came back, a riding-whip under his arm,
buttoning up a dogskin glove; his face reflected the resolute nature of
his thoughts. His wife had waited for him at the head of the stairs, and
before he gave her the parting kiss he finished the conversation--
“What should be perfectly clear to us,” he said, “is the fact that there
is no going back. Where could we begin life afresh? We are in now for
all that there is in us.”
He bent over her upturned face very tenderly and a little remorsefully.
Charles Gould was competent because he had no illusions. The Gould
Concession had to fight for life with such weapons as could be found at
once in the mire of a corruption that was so universal as almost to lose
its significance. He was prepared to stoop for his weapons. For a moment
he felt as if the silver mine, which had killed his father, had decoyed
him further than he meant to go; and with the roundabout logic of
emotions, he felt that the worthiness of his life was bound up with
success. There was no going back.