Those of us whom business or curiosity took to Sulaco in these years
before the first advent of the railway can remember the steadying effect
of the San Tome mine upon the life of that remote province. The outward
appearances had not changed then as they have changed since, as I am
told, with cable cars running along the streets of the Constitution, and
carriage roads far into the country, to Rincon and other villages, where
the foreign merchants and the Ricos generally have their modern villas,
and a vast railway goods yard by the harbour, which has a quay-side, a
long range of warehouses, and quite serious, organized labour troubles
of its own.
Nobody had ever heard of labour troubles then. The Cargadores of the
port formed, indeed, an unruly brotherhood of all sorts of scum, with
a patron saint of their own. They went on strike regularly (every
bull-fight day), a form of trouble that even Nostromo at the height of
his prestige could never cope with efficiently; but the morning after
each fiesta, before the Indian market-women had opened their mat
parasols on the plaza, when the snows of Higuerota gleamed pale over
the town on a yet black sky, the appearance of a phantom-like horseman
mounted on a silver-grey mare solved the problem of labour without fail.
His steed paced the lanes of the slums and the weed-grown enclosures
within the old ramparts, between the black, lightless cluster of huts,
like cow-byres, like dog-kennels. The horseman hammered with the butt of
a heavy revolver at the doors of low pulperias, of obscene lean-to sheds
sloping against the tumble-down piece of a noble wall, at the wooden
sides of dwellings so flimsy that the sound of snores and sleepy mutters
within could be heard in the pauses of the thundering clatter of his
blows. He called out men’s names menacingly from the saddle, once,
twice. The drowsy answers--grumpy, conciliating, savage, jocular, or
deprecating--came out into the silent darkness in which the horseman sat
still, and presently a dark figure would flit out coughing in the still
air. Sometimes a low-toned woman cried through the window-hole softly,
“He’s coming directly, senor,” and the horseman waited silent on a
motionless horse. But if perchance he had to dismount, then, after a
while, from the door of that hovel or of that pulperia, with a ferocious
scuffle and stifled imprecations, a cargador would fly out head first
and hands abroad, to sprawl under the forelegs of the silver-grey mare,
who only pricked forward her sharp little ears. She was used to that
work; and the man, picking himself up, would walk away hastily from
Nostromo’s revolver, reeling a little along the street and snarling low
curses. At sunrise Captain Mitchell, coming out anxiously in his night
attire on to the wooden balcony running the whole length of the O.S.N.
Company’s lonely building by the shore, would see the lighters already
under way, figures moving busily about the cargo cranes, perhaps hear
the invaluable Nostromo, now dismounted and in the checked shirt and red
sash of a Mediterranean sailor, bawling orders from the end of the jetty
in a stentorian voice. A fellow in a thousand!
The material apparatus of perfected civilization which obliterates the
individuality of old towns under the stereotyped conveniences of modern
life had not intruded as yet; but over the worn-out antiquity of Sulaco,
so characteristic with its stuccoed houses and barred windows, with
the great yellowy-white walls of abandoned convents behind the rows of
sombre green cypresses, that fact--very modern in its spirit--the San
Tome mine had already thrown its subtle influence. It had altered, too,
the outward character of the crowds on feast days on the plaza before
the open portal of the cathedral, by the number of white ponchos with a
green stripe affected as holiday wear by the San Tome miners. They had
also adopted white hats with green cord and braid--articles of good
quality, which could be obtained in the storehouse of the administration
for very little money. A peaceable Cholo wearing these colours (unusual
in Costaguana) was somehow very seldom beaten to within an inch of his
life on a charge of disrespect to the town police; neither ran he much
risk of being suddenly lassoed on the road by a recruiting party of
lanceros--a method of voluntary enlistment looked upon as almost legal
in the Republic. Whole villages were known to have volunteered for the
army in that way; but, as Don Pepe would say with a hopeless shrug to
Mrs. Gould, “What would you! Poor people! Pobrecitos! Pobrecitos! But
the State must have its soldiers.”
Thus professionally spoke Don Pepe, the fighter, with pendent
moustaches, a nut-brown, lean face, and a clean run of a cast-iron jaw,
suggesting the type of a cattle-herd horseman from the great Llanos of
the South. “If you will listen to an old officer of Paez, senores,” was
the exordium of all his speeches in the Aristocratic Club of Sulaco,
where he was admitted on account of his past services to the extinct
cause of Federation. The club, dating from the days of the proclamation
of Costaguana’s independence, boasted many names of liberators amongst
its first founders. Suppressed arbitrarily innumerable times by
various Governments, with memories of proscriptions and of at least one
wholesale massacre of its members, sadly assembled for a banquet by the
order of a zealous military commandante (their bodies were afterwards
stripped naked and flung into the plaza out of the windows by the
lowest scum of the populace), it was again flourishing, at that period,
peacefully. It extended to strangers the large hospitality of the cool,
big rooms of its historic quarters in the front part of a house, once
the residence of a high official of the Holy Office. The two wings, shut
up, crumbled behind the nailed doors, and what may be described as a
grove of young orange trees grown in the unpaved patio concealed the
utter ruin of the back part facing the gate. You turned in from the
street, as if entering a secluded orchard, where you came upon the foot
of a disjointed staircase, guarded by a moss-stained effigy of some
saintly bishop, mitred and staffed, and bearing the indignity of a
broken nose meekly, with his fine stone hands crossed on his breast. The
chocolate-coloured faces of servants with mops of black hair peeped
at you from above; the click of billiard balls came to your ears, and
ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the first sala, very stiff
upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don Pepe moving his long
moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm’s length, through an old Sta.
Marta newspaper. His horse--a stony-hearted but persevering black brute
with a hammer head--you would have seen in the street dozing motionless
under an immense saddle, with its nose almost touching the curbstone of
the sidewalk.
Don Pepe, when “down from the mountain,” as the phrase, often heard in
Sulaco, went, could also be seen in the drawing-room of the Casa Gould.
He sat with modest assurance at some distance from the tea-table.
With his knees close together, and a kindly twinkle of drollery in his
deep-set eyes, he would throw his small and ironic pleasantries into the
current of conversation. There was in that man a sort of sane, humorous
shrewdness, and a vein of genuine humanity so often found in simple
old soldiers of proved courage who have seen much desperate service. Of
course he knew nothing whatever of mining, but his employment was of a
special kind. He was in charge of the whole population in the territory
of the mine, which extended from the head of the gorge to where the cart
track from the foot of the mountain enters the plain, crossing a stream
over a little wooden bridge painted green--green, the colour of hope,
being also the colour of the mine.
It was reported in Sulaco that up there “at the mountain” Don Pepe
walked about precipitous paths, girt with a great sword and in a shabby
uniform with tarnished bullion epaulettes of a senior major. Most miners
being Indians, with big wild eyes, addressed him as Taita (father), as
these barefooted people of Costaguana will address anybody who wears
shoes; but it was Basilio, Mr. Gould’s own mozo and the head servant
of the Casa, who, in all good faith and from a sense of propriety,
announced him once in the solemn words, “El Senor Gobernador has
arrived.”
Don Jose Avellanos, then in the drawing-room, was delighted beyond
measure at the aptness of the title, with which he greeted the old major
banteringly as soon as the latter’s soldierly figure appeared in the
doorway. Don Pepe only smiled in his long moustaches, as much as to say,
“You might have found a worse name for an old soldier.”
And El Senor Gobernador he had remained, with his small jokes upon
his function and upon his domain, where he affirmed with humorous
exaggeration to Mrs. Gould--
“No two stones could come together anywhere without the Gobernador
hearing the click, senora.”
And he would tap his ear with the tip of his forefinger knowingly. Even
when the number of the miners alone rose to over six hundred he seemed
to know each of them individually, all the innumerable Joses, Manuels,
Ignacios, from the villages _primero--segundo--or tercero_ (there were
three mining villages) under his government. He could distinguish them
not only by their flat, joyless faces, which to Mrs. Gould looked
all alike, as if run into the same ancestral mould of suffering and
patience, but apparently also by the infinitely graduated shades of
reddish-brown, of blackish-brown, of coppery-brown backs, as the two
shifts, stripped to linen drawers and leather skull-caps, mingled
together with a confusion of naked limbs, of shouldered picks, swinging
lamps, in a great shuffle of sandalled feet on the open plateau before
the entrance of the main tunnel. It was a time of pause. The Indian
boys leaned idly against the long line of little cradle wagons standing
empty; the screeners and ore-breakers squatted on their heels smoking
long cigars; the great wooden shoots slanting over the edge of the
tunnel plateau were silent; and only the ceaseless, violent rush of
water in the open flumes could be heard, murmuring fiercely, with the
splash and rumble of revolving turbine-wheels, and the thudding march
of the stamps pounding to powder the treasure rock on the plateau below.
The heads of gangs, distinguished by brass medals hanging on their bare
breasts, marshalled their squads; and at last the mountain would swallow
one-half of the silent crowd, while the other half would move off in
long files down the zigzag paths leading to the bottom of the gorge.
It was deep; and, far below, a thread of vegetation winding between the
blazing rock faces resembled a slender green cord, in which three lumpy
knots of banana patches, palm-leaf roots, and shady trees marked the
Village One, Village Two, Village Three, housing the miners of the Gould
Concession.
Whole families had been moving from the first towards the spot in the
Higuerota range, whence the rumour of work and safety had spread over
the pastoral Campo, forcing its way also, even as the waters of a high
flood, into the nooks and crannies of the distant blue walls of the
Sierras. Father first, in a pointed straw hat, then the mother with the
bigger children, generally also a diminutive donkey, all under burdens,
except the leader himself, or perhaps some grown girl, the pride of the
family, stepping barefooted and straight as an arrow, with braids of
raven hair, a thick, haughty profile, and no load to carry but the small
guitar of the country and a pair of soft leather sandals tied together
on her back. At the sight of such parties strung out on the cross
trails between the pastures, or camped by the side of the royal road,
travellers on horseback would remark to each other--
“More people going to the San Tome mine. We shall see others to-morrow.”
And spurring on in the dusk they would discuss the great news of the
province, the news of the San Tome mine. A rich Englishman was going
to work it--and perhaps not an Englishman, Quien sabe! A foreigner with
much money. Oh, yes, it had begun. A party of men who had been to Sulaco
with a herd of black bulls for the next corrida had reported that from
the porch of the posada in Rincon, only a short league from the town,
the lights on the mountain were visible, twinkling above the trees. And
there was a woman seen riding a horse sideways, not in the chair seat,
but upon a sort of saddle, and a man’s hat on her head. She walked
about, too, on foot up the mountain paths. A woman engineer, it seemed
she was.
“What an absurdity! Impossible, senor!”
“_Si! Si! Una Americana del Norte_.”
“Ah, well! if your worship is informed. _Una Americana_; it need be
something of that sort.”
And they would laugh a little with astonishment and scorn, keeping a
wary eye on the shadows of the road, for one is liable to meet bad men
when travelling late on the Campo.
And it was not only the men that Don Pepe knew so well, but he seemed
able, with one attentive, thoughtful glance, to classify each woman,
girl, or growing youth of his domain. It was only the small fry that
puzzled him sometimes. He and the padre could be seen frequently side by
side, meditative and gazing across the street of a village at a lot
of sedate brown children, trying to sort them out, as it were, in low,
consulting tones, or else they would together put searching questions
as to the parentage of some small, staid urchin met wandering, naked and
grave, along the road with a cigar in his baby mouth, and perhaps his
mother’s rosary, purloined for purposes of ornamentation, hanging in a
loop of beads low down on his rotund little stomach. The spiritual and
temporal pastors of the mine flock were very good friends. With Dr.
Monygham, the medical pastor, who had accepted the charge from Mrs.
Gould, and lived in the hospital building, they were on not so intimate
terms. But no one could be on intimate terms with El Senor Doctor, who,
with his twisted shoulders, drooping head, sardonic mouth, and side-long
bitter glance, was mysterious and uncanny. The other two authorities
worked in harmony. Father Roman, dried-up, small, alert, wrinkled,
with big round eyes, a sharp chin, and a great snuff-taker, was an old
campaigner, too; he had shriven many simple souls on the battlefields of
the Republic, kneeling by the dying on hillsides, in the long grass, in
the gloom of the forests, to hear the last confession with the smell
of gunpowder smoke in his nostrils, the rattle of muskets, the hum
and spatter of bullets in his ears. And where was the harm if, at the
presbytery, they had a game with a pack of greasy cards in the early
evening, before Don Pepe went his last rounds to see that all the
watchmen of the mine--a body organized by himself--were at their posts?
For that last duty before he slept Don Pepe did actually gird his old
sword on the verandah of an unmistakable American white frame house,
which Father Roman called the presbytery. Near by, a long, low, dark
building, steeple-roofed, like a vast barn with a wooden cross over the
gable, was the miners’ chapel. There Father Roman said Mass every day
before a sombre altar-piece representing the Resurrection, the grey
slab of the tombstone balanced on one corner, a figure soaring upwards,
long-limbed and livid, in an oval of pallid light, and a helmeted brown
legionary smitten down, right across the bituminous foreground. “This
picture, my children, _muy linda e maravillosa_,” Father Roman would say
to some of his flock, “which you behold here through the munificence
of the wife of our Senor Administrador, has been painted in Europe, a
country of saints and miracles, and much greater than our Costaguana.”
And he would take a pinch of snuff with unction. But when once an
inquisitive spirit desired to know in what direction this Europe was
situated, whether up or down the coast, Father Roman, to conceal his
perplexity, became very reserved and severe. “No doubt it is extremely
far away. But ignorant sinners like you of the San Tome mine should
think earnestly of everlasting punishment instead of inquiring into the
magnitude of the earth, with its countries and populations altogether
beyond your understanding.”
With a “Good-night, Padre,” “Good-night, Don Pepe,” the Gobernador would
go off, holding up his sabre against his side, his body bent forward,
with a long, plodding stride in the dark. The jocularity proper to an
innocent card game for a few cigars or a bundle of yerba was replaced
at once by the stern duty mood of an officer setting out to visit the
outposts of an encamped army. One loud blast of the whistle that
hung from his neck provoked instantly a great shrilling of responding
whistles, mingled with the barking of dogs, that would calm down slowly
at last, away up at the head of the gorge; and in the stillness two
serenos, on guard by the bridge, would appear walking noiselessly
towards him. On one side of the road a long frame building--the
store--would be closed and barricaded from end to end; facing it
another white frame house, still longer, and with a verandah--the
hospital--would have lights in the two windows of Dr. Monygham’s
quarters. Even the delicate foliage of a clump of pepper trees did not
stir, so breathless would be the darkness warmed by the radiation of the
over-heated rocks. Don Pepe would stand still for a moment with the two
motionless serenos before him, and, abruptly, high up on the sheer face
of the mountain, dotted with single torches, like drops of fire fallen
from the two great blazing clusters of lights above, the ore shoots
would begin to rattle. The great clattering, shuffling noise, gathering
speed and weight, would be caught up by the walls of the gorge, and sent
upon the plain in a growl of thunder. The pasadero in Rincon swore that
on calm nights, by listening intently, he could catch the sound in his
doorway as of a storm in the mountains.
To Charles Gould’s fancy it seemed that the sound must reach the
uttermost limits of the province. Riding at night towards the mine, it
would meet him at the edge of a little wood just beyond Rincon. There
was no mistaking the growling mutter of the mountain pouring its stream
of treasure under the stamps; and it came to his heart with the
peculiar force of a proclamation thundered forth over the land and the
marvellousness of an accomplished fact fulfilling an audacious desire.
He had heard this very sound in his imagination on that far-off evening
when his wife and himself, after a tortuous ride through a strip of
forest, had reined in their horses near the stream, and had gazed for
the first time upon the jungle-grown solitude of the gorge. The head of
a palm rose here and there. In a high ravine round the corner of the
San Tome mountain (which is square like a blockhouse) the thread of a
slender waterfall flashed bright and glassy through the dark green of
the heavy fronds of tree-ferns. Don Pepe, in attendance, rode up, and,
stretching his arm up the gorge, had declared with mock solemnity,
“Behold the very paradise of snakes, senora.”
And then they had wheeled their horses and ridden back to sleep that
night at Rincon. The alcalde--an old, skinny Moreno, a sergeant of
Guzman Bento’s time--had cleared respectfully out of his house with his
three pretty daughters, to make room for the foreign senora and their
worships the Caballeros. All he asked Charles Gould (whom he took for a
mysterious and official person) to do for him was to remind the supreme
Government--El Gobierno supreme--of a pension (amounting to about a
dollar a month) to which he believed himself entitled. It had been
promised to him, he affirmed, straightening his bent back martially,
“many years ago, for my valour in the wars with the wild Indios when a
young man, senor.”
The waterfall existed no longer. The tree-ferns that had luxuriated in
its spray had died around the dried-up pool, and the high ravine was
only a big trench half filled up with the refuse of excavations and
tailings. The torrent, dammed up above, sent its water rushing along
the open flumes of scooped tree trunks striding on trestle-legs to the
turbines working the stamps on the lower plateau--the mesa grande of the
San Tome mountain. Only the memory of the waterfall, with its amazing
fernery, like a hanging garden above the rocks of the gorge, was
preserved in Mrs. Gould’s water-colour sketch; she had made it hastily
one day from a cleared patch in the bushes, sitting in the shade of
a roof of straw erected for her on three rough poles under Don Pepe’s
direction.
Mrs. Gould had seen it all from the beginning: the clearing of the
wilderness, the making of the road, the cutting of new paths up the
cliff face of San Tome. For weeks together she had lived on the spot
with her husband; and she was so little in Sulaco during that year that
the appearance of the Gould carriage on the Alameda would cause a social
excitement. From the heavy family coaches full of stately senoras and
black-eyed senoritas rolling solemnly in the shaded alley white hands
were waved towards her with animation in a flutter of greetings. Dona
Emilia was “down from the mountain.”
But not for long. Dona Emilia would be gone “up to the mountain” in a
day or two, and her sleek carriage mules would have an easy time of
it for another long spell. She had watched the erection of the first
frame-house put up on the lower mesa for an office and Don Pepe’s
quarters; she heard with a thrill of thankful emotion the first wagon
load of ore rattle down the then only shoot; she had stood by her
husband’s side perfectly silent, and gone cold all over with excitement
at the instant when the first battery of only fifteen stamps was put
in motion for the first time. On the occasion when the fires under the
first set of retorts in their shed had glowed far into the night she did
not retire to rest on the rough cadre set up for her in the as yet bare
frame-house till she had seen the first spongy lump of silver yielded to
the hazards of the world by the dark depths of the Gould Concession;
she had laid her unmercenary hands, with an eagerness that made them
tremble, upon the first silver ingot turned out still warm from the
mould; and by her imaginative estimate of its power she endowed that
lump of metal with a justificative conception, as though it were not
a mere fact, but something far-reaching and impalpable, like the true
expression of an emotion or the emergence of a principle.
Don Pepe, extremely interested, too, looked over her shoulder with a
smile that, making longitudinal folds on his face, caused it to resemble
a leathern mask with a benignantly diabolic expression.
“Would not the muchachos of Hernandez like to get hold of this
insignificant object, that looks, por Dios, very much like a piece of
tin?” he remarked, jocularly.
Hernandez, the robber, had been an inoffensive, small ranchero,
kidnapped with circumstances of peculiar atrocity from his home during
one of the civil wars, and forced to serve in the army. There his
conduct as soldier was exemplary, till, watching his chance, he killed
his colonel, and managed to get clear away. With a band of deserters,
who chose him for their chief, he had taken refuge beyond the wild and
waterless Bolson de Tonoro. The haciendas paid him blackmail in cattle
and horses; extraordinary stories were told of his powers and of his
wonderful escapes from capture. He used to ride, single-handed, into the
villages and the little towns on the Campo, driving a pack mule before
him, with two revolvers in his belt, go straight to the shop or store,
select what he wanted, and ride away unopposed because of the terror his
exploits and his audacity inspired. Poor country people he usually left
alone; the upper class were often stopped on the roads and robbed; but
any unlucky official that fell into his hands was sure to get a severe
flogging. The army officers did not like his name to be mentioned in
their presence. His followers, mounted on stolen horses, laughed at the
pursuit of the regular cavalry sent to hunt them down, and whom they
took pleasure to ambush most scientifically in the broken ground of
their own fastness. Expeditions had been fitted out; a price had been
put upon his head; even attempts had been made, treacherously of course,
to open negotiations with him, without in the slightest way affecting
the even tenor of his career. At last, in true Costaguana fashion, the
Fiscal of Tonoro, who was ambitious of the glory of having reduced the
famous Hernandez, offered him a sum of money and a safe conduct out of
the country for the betrayal of his band. But Hernandez evidently was
not of the stuff of which the distinguished military politicians and
conspirators of Costaguana are made. This clever but common device
(which frequently works like a charm in putting down revolutions) failed
with the chief of vulgar Salteadores. It promised well for the Fiscal at
first, but ended very badly for the squadron of lanceros posted (by the
Fiscal’s directions) in a fold of the ground into which Hernandez had
promised to lead his unsuspecting followers They came, indeed, at the
appointed time, but creeping on their hands and knees through the bush,
and only let their presence be known by a general discharge of firearms,
which emptied many saddles. The troopers who escaped came riding very
hard into Tonoro. It is said that their commanding officer (who, being
better mounted, rode far ahead of the rest) afterwards got into a state
of despairing intoxication and beat the ambitious Fiscal severely with
the flat of his sabre in the presence of his wife and daughters,
for bringing this disgrace upon the National Army. The highest civil
official of Tonoro, falling to the ground in a swoon, was further kicked
all over the body and rowelled with sharp spurs about the neck and
face because of the great sensitiveness of his military colleague.
This gossip of the inland Campo, so characteristic of the rulers of the
country with its story of oppression, inefficiency, fatuous methods,
treachery, and savage brutality, was perfectly known to Mrs. Gould.
That it should be accepted with no indignant comment by people of
intelligence, refinement, and character as something inherent in the
nature of things was one of the symptoms of degradation that had the
power to exasperate her almost to the verge of despair. Still looking at
the ingot of silver, she shook her head at Don Pepe’s remark--
“If it had not been for the lawless tyranny of your Government, Don
Pepe, many an outlaw now with Hernandez would be living peaceably and
happy by the honest work of his hands.”
“Senora,” cried Don Pepe, with enthusiasm, “it is true! It is as if God
had given you the power to look into the very breasts of people. You
have seen them working round you, Dona Emilia--meek as lambs, patient
like their own burros, brave like lions. I have led them to the very
muzzles of guns--I, who stand here before you, senora--in the time of
Paez, who was full of generosity, and in courage only approached by the
uncle of Don Carlos here, as far as I know. No wonder there are bandits
in the Campo when there are none but thieves, swindlers, and sanguinary
macaques to rule us in Sta. Marta. However, all the same, a bandit is a
bandit, and we shall have a dozen good straight Winchesters to ride with
the silver down to Sulaco.”
Mrs. Gould’s ride with the first silver escort to Sulaco was the closing
episode of what she called “my camp life” before she had settled in her
town-house permanently, as was proper and even necessary for the wife of
the administrator of such an important institution as the San Tome mine.
For the San Tome mine was to become an institution, a rallying point
for everything in the province that needed order and stability to live.
Security seemed to flow upon this land from the mountain-gorge. The
authorities of Sulaco had learned that the San Tome mine could make it
worth their while to leave things and people alone. This was the nearest
approach to the rule of common-sense and justice Charles Gould felt it
possible to secure at first. In fact, the mine, with its organization,
its population growing fiercely attached to their position of privileged
safety, with its armoury, with its Don Pepe, with its armed body of
serenos (where, it was said, many an outlaw and deserter--and even some
members of Hernandez’s band--had found a place), the mine was a power in
the land. As a certain prominent man in Sta. Marta had exclaimed with
a hollow laugh, once, when discussing the line of action taken by the
Sulaco authorities at a time of political crisis--
“You call these men Government officials? They? Never! They are
officials of the mine--officials of the Concession--I tell you.”
The prominent man (who was then a person in power, with a lemon-coloured
face and a very short and curly, not to say woolly, head of hair) went
so far in his temporary discontent as to shake his yellow fist under the
nose of his interlocutor, and shriek--
“Yes! All! Silence! All! I tell you! The political Gefe, the chief of
the police, the chief of the customs, the general, all, all, are the
officials of that Gould.”
Thereupon an intrepid but low and argumentative murmur would flow on
for a space in the ministerial cabinet, and the prominent man’s passion
would end in a cynical shrug of the shoulders. After all, he seemed
to say, what did it matter as long as the minister himself was not
forgotten during his brief day of authority? But all the same, the
unofficial agent of the San Tome mine, working for a good cause, had
his moments of anxiety, which were reflected in his letters to Don Jose
Avellanos, his maternal uncle.
“No sanguinary macaque from Sta. Marta shall set foot on that part of
Costaguana which lies beyond the San Tome bridge,” Don Pepe used to
assure Mrs. Gould. “Except, of course, as an honoured guest--for our
Senor Administrador is a deep politico.” But to Charles Gould, in
his own room, the old Major would remark with a grim and soldierly
cheeriness, “We are all playing our heads at this game.”
Don Jose Avellanos would mutter “Imperium in imperio, Emilia, my soul,”
with an air of profound self-satisfaction which, somehow, in a curious
way, seemed to contain a queer admixture of bodily discomfort. But that,
perhaps, could only be visible to the initiated. And for the initiated
it was a wonderful place, this drawing-room of the Casa Gould, with its
momentary glimpses of the master--El Senor Administrador--older, harder,
mysteriously silent, with the lines deepened on his English, ruddy,
out-of-doors complexion; flitting on his thin cavalryman’s legs across
the doorways, either just “back from the mountain” or with jingling
spurs and riding-whip under his arm, on the point of starting “for the
mountain.” Then Don Pepe, modestly martial in his chair, the llanero who
seemed somehow to have found his martial jocularity, his knowledge
of the world, and his manner perfect for his station, in the midst of
savage armed contests with his kind; Avellanos, polished and familiar,
the diplomatist with his loquacity covering much caution and wisdom in
delicate advice, with his manuscript of a historical work on Costaguana,
entitled “Fifty Years of Misrule,” which, at present, he thought it was
not prudent (even if it were possible) “to give to the world”;
these three, and also Dona Emilia amongst them, gracious, small,
and fairy-like, before the glittering tea-set, with one common
master-thought in their heads, with one common feeling of a tense
situation, with one ever-present aim to preserve the inviolable
character of the mine at every cost. And there was also to be seen
Captain Mitchell, a little apart, near one of the long windows, with an
air of old-fashioned neat old bachelorhood about him, slightly pompous,
in a white waistcoat, a little disregarded and unconscious of it;
utterly in the dark, and imagining himself to be in the thick of things.
The good man, having spent a clear thirty years of his life on the high
seas before getting what he called a “shore billet,” was astonished at
the importance of transactions (other than relating to shipping) which
take place on dry land. Almost every event out of the usual daily
course “marked an epoch” for him or else was “history”; unless with his
pomposity struggling with a discomfited droop of his rubicund, rather
handsome face, set off by snow-white close hair and short whiskers, he
would mutter--
“Ah, that! That, sir, was a mistake.”
The reception of the first consignment of San Tome silver for shipment
to San Francisco in one of the O.S.N. Co.’s mail-boats had, of course,
“marked an epoch” for Captain Mitchell. The ingots packed in boxes of
stiff ox-hide with plaited handles, small enough to be carried easily by
two men, were brought down by the serenos of the mine walking in careful
couples along the half-mile or so of steep, zigzag paths to the foot of
the mountain. There they would be loaded into a string of two-wheeled
carts, resembling roomy coffers with a door at the back, and harnessed
tandem with two mules each, waiting under the guard of armed and mounted
serenos. Don Pepe padlocked each door in succession, and at the signal
of his whistle the string of carts would move off, closely surrounded by
the clank of spur and carbine, with jolts and cracking of whips, with a
sudden deep rumble over the boundary bridge (“into the land of thieves
and sanguinary macaques,” Don Pepe defined that crossing); hats bobbing
in the first light of the dawn, on the heads of cloaked figures;
Winchesters on hip; bridle hands protruding lean and brown from under
the falling folds of the ponchos. The convoy skirting a little wood,
along the mine trail, between the mud huts and low walls of Rincon,
increased its pace on the camino real, mules urged to speed, escort
galloping, Don Carlos riding alone ahead of a dust storm affording a
vague vision of long ears of mules, of fluttering little green and white
flags stuck upon each cart; of raised arms in a mob of sombreros with
the white gleam of ranging eyes; and Don Pepe, hardly visible in the
rear of that rattling dust trail, with a stiff seat and impassive face,
rising and falling rhythmically on an ewe-necked silver-bitted black
brute with a hammer head.
The sleepy people in the little clusters of huts, in the small ranches
near the road, recognized by the headlong sound the charge of the San
Tome silver escort towards the crumbling wall of the city on the Campo
side. They came to the doors to see it dash by over ruts and stones,
with a clatter and clank and cracking of whips, with the reckless rush
and precise driving of a field battery hurrying into action, and the
solitary English figure of the Senor Administrador riding far ahead in
the lead.
In the fenced roadside paddocks loose horses galloped wildly for a
while; the heavy cattle stood up breast deep in the grass, lowing
mutteringly at the flying noise; a meek Indian villager would glance
back once and hasten to shove his loaded little donkey bodily against a
wall, out of the way of the San Tome silver escort going to the sea; a
small knot of chilly leperos under the Stone Horse of the Alameda would
mutter: “Caramba!” on seeing it take a wide curve at a gallop and dart
into the empty Street of the Constitution; for it was considered the
correct thing, the only proper style by the mule-drivers of the San Tome
mine to go through the waking town from end to end without a check in
the speed as if chased by a devil.
The early sunshine glowed on the delicate primrose, pale pink, pale
blue fronts of the big houses with all their gates shut yet, and no face
behind the iron bars of the windows. In the whole sunlit range of empty
balconies along the street only one white figure would be visible
high up above the clear pavement--the wife of the Senor
Administrador--leaning over to see the escort go by to the harbour, a
mass of heavy, fair hair twisted up negligently on her little head, and
a lot of lace about the neck of her muslin wrapper. With a smile to her
husband’s single, quick, upward glance, she would watch the whole thing
stream past below her feet with an orderly uproar, till she answered
by a friendly sign the salute of the galloping Don Pepe, the stiff,
deferential inclination with a sweep of the hat below the knee.
The string of padlocked carts lengthened, the size of the escort grew
bigger as the years went on. Every three months an increasing stream of
treasure swept through the streets of Sulaco on its way to the strong
room in the O.S.N. Co.’s building by the harbour, there to await
shipment for the North. Increasing in volume, and of immense value also;
for, as Charles Gould told his wife once with some exultation, there had
never been seen anything in the world to approach the vein of the
Gould Concession. For them both, each passing of the escort under the
balconies of the Casa Gould was like another victory gained in the
conquest of peace for Sulaco.
No doubt the initial action of Charles Gould had been helped at the
beginning by a period of comparative peace which occurred just about
that time; and also by the general softening of manners as compared with
the epoch of civil wars whence had emerged the iron tyranny of Guzman
Bento of fearful memory. In the contests that broke out at the end of
his rule (which had kept peace in the country for a whole fifteen years)
there was more fatuous imbecility, plenty of cruelty and suffering
still, but much less of the old-time fierce and blindly ferocious
political fanaticism. It was all more vile, more base, more
contemptible, and infinitely more manageable in the very outspoken
cynicism of motives. It was more clearly a brazen-faced scramble for a
constantly diminishing quantity of booty; since all enterprise had been
stupidly killed in the land. Thus it came to pass that the province of
Sulaco, once the field of cruel party vengeances, had become in a way
one of the considerable prizes of political career. The great of the
earth (in Sta. Marta) reserved the posts in the old Occidental State
to those nearest and dearest to them: nephews, brothers, husbands
of favourite sisters, bosom friends, trusty supporters--or prominent
supporters of whom perhaps they were afraid. It was the blessed province
of great opportunities and of largest salaries; for the San Tome mine
had its own unofficial pay list, whose items and amounts, fixed in
consultation by Charles Gould and Senor Avellanos, were known to a
prominent business man in the United States, who for twenty minutes or
so in every month gave his undivided attention to Sulaco affairs. At
the same time the material interests of all sorts, backed up by the
influence of the San Tome mine, were quietly gathering substance in that
part of the Republic. If, for instance, the Sulaco Collectorship was
generally understood, in the political world of the capital, to open the
way to the Ministry of Finance, and so on for every official post, then,
on the other hand, the despondent business circles of the Republic had
come to consider the Occidental Province as the promised land of safety,
especially if a man managed to get on good terms with the administration
of the mine. “Charles Gould; excellent fellow! Absolutely necessary to
make sure of him before taking a single step. Get an introduction to
him from Moraga if you can--the agent of the King of Sulaco, don’t you
know.”
No wonder, then, that Sir John, coming from Europe to smooth the path
for his railway, had been meeting the name (and even the nickname) of
Charles Gould at every turn in Costaguana. The agent of the San Tome
Administration in Sta. Marta (a polished, well-informed gentleman, Sir
John thought him) had certainly helped so greatly in bringing about the
presidential tour that he began to think that there was something in
the faint whispers hinting at the immense occult influence of the Gould
Concession. What was currently whispered was this--that the San Tome
Administration had, in part, at least, financed the last revolution,
which had brought into a five-year dictatorship Don Vincente Ribiera, a
man of culture and of unblemished character, invested with a mandate
of reform by the best elements of the State. Serious, well-informed
men seemed to believe the fact, to hope for better things, for the
establishment of legality, of good faith and order in public life. So
much the better, then, thought Sir John. He worked always on a great
scale; there was a loan to the State, and a project for systematic
colonization of the Occidental Province, involved in one vast scheme
with the construction of the National Central Railway. Good faith,
order, honesty, peace, were badly wanted for this great development of
material interests. Anybody on the side of these things, and especially
if able to help, had an importance in Sir John’s eyes. He had not been
disappointed in the “King of Sulaco.” The local difficulties had fallen
away, as the engineer-in-chief had foretold they would, before Charles
Gould’s mediation. Sir John had been extremely feted in Sulaco, next
to the President-Dictator, a fact which might have accounted for the
evident ill-humour General Montero displayed at lunch given on board
the Juno just before she was to sail, taking away from Sulaco the
President-Dictator and the distinguished foreign guests in his train.
The Excellentissimo (“the hope of honest men,” as Don Jose had addressed
him in a public speech delivered in the name of the Provincial Assembly
of Sulaco) sat at the head of the long table; Captain Mitchell,
positively stony-eyed and purple in the face with the solemnity of
this “historical event,” occupied the foot as the representative of the
O.S.N. Company in Sulaco, the hosts of that informal function, with the
captain of the ship and some minor officials from the shore around him.
Those cheery, swarthy little gentlemen cast jovial side-glances at the
bottles of champagne beginning to pop behind the guests’ backs in the
hands of the ship’s stewards. The amber wine creamed up to the rims of
the glasses.
Charles Gould had his place next to a foreign envoy, who, in a listless
undertone, had been talking to him fitfully of hunting and shooting.
The well-nourished, pale face, with an eyeglass and drooping yellow
moustache, made the Senor Administrador appear by contrast twice as
sunbaked, more flaming red, a hundred times more intensely and silently
alive. Don Jose Avellanos touched elbows with the other foreign
diplomat, a dark man with a quiet, watchful, self-confident demeanour,
and a touch of reserve. All etiquette being laid aside on the occasion,
General Montero was the only one there in full uniform, so stiff with
embroideries in front that his broad chest seemed protected by a cuirass
of gold. Sir John at the beginning had got away from high places for the
sake of sitting near Mrs. Gould.
The great financier was trying to express to her his grateful sense
of her hospitality and of his obligation to her husband’s “enormous
influence in this part of the country,” when she interrupted him by a
low “Hush!” The President was going to make an informal pronouncement.
The Excellentissimo was on his legs. He said only a few words, evidently
deeply felt, and meant perhaps mostly for Avellanos--his old friend--as
to the necessity of unremitting effort to secure the lasting welfare of
the country emerging after this last struggle, he hoped, into a period
of peace and material prosperity.
Mrs. Gould, listening to the mellow, slightly mournful voice, looking
at this rotund, dark, spectacled face, at the short body, obese to the
point of infirmity, thought that this man of delicate and melancholy
mind, physically almost a cripple, coming out of his retirement into a
dangerous strife at the call of his fellows, had the right to speak with
the authority of his self-sacrifice. And yet she was made uneasy. He
was more pathetic than promising, this first civilian Chief of the
State Costaguana had ever known, pronouncing, glass in hand, his simple
watchwords of honesty, peace, respect for law, political good faith
abroad and at home--the safeguards of national honour.
He sat down. During the respectful, appreciative buzz of voices that
followed the speech, General Montero raised a pair of heavy, drooping
eyelids and rolled his eyes with a sort of uneasy dullness from face
to face. The military backwoods hero of the party, though secretly
impressed by the sudden novelties and splendours of his position (he
had never been on board a ship before, and had hardly ever seen the sea
except from a distance), understood by a sort of instinct the advantage
his surly, unpolished attitude of a savage fighter gave him amongst all
these refined Blanco aristocrats. But why was it that nobody was looking
at him? he wondered to himself angrily. He was able to spell out the
print of newspapers, and knew that he had performed the “greatest
military exploit of modern times.”
“My husband wanted the railway,” Mrs. Gould said to Sir John in the
general murmur of resumed conversations. “All this brings nearer the
sort of future we desire for the country, which has waited for it in
sorrow long enough, God knows. But I will confess that the other day,
during my afternoon drive when I suddenly saw an Indian boy ride out
of a wood with the red flag of a surveying party in his hand, I felt
something of a shock. The future means change--an utter change. And yet
even here there are simple and picturesque things that one would like to
preserve.”
Sir John listened, smiling. But it was his turn now to hush Mrs. Gould.
“General Montero is going to speak,” he whispered, and almost
immediately added, in comic alarm, “Heavens! he’s going to propose my
own health, I believe.”
General Montero had risen with a jingle of steel scabbard and a ripple
of glitter on his gold-embroidered breast; a heavy sword-hilt appeared
at his side above the edge of the table. In this gorgeous uniform, with
his bull neck, his hooked nose flattened on the tip upon a blue-black,
dyed moustache, he looked like a disguised and sinister vaquero.
The drone of his voice had a strangely rasping, soulless ring. He
floundered, lowering, through a few vague sentences; then suddenly
raising his big head and his voice together, burst out harshly--
“The honour of the country is in the hands of the army. I assure you
I shall be faithful to it.” He hesitated till his roaming eyes met Sir
John’s face upon which he fixed a lurid, sleepy glance; and the figure
of the lately negotiated loan came into his mind. He lifted his glass.
“I drink to the health of the man who brings us a million and a half of
pounds.”
He tossed off his champagne, and sat down heavily with a half-surprised,
half-bullying look all round the faces in the profound, as if appalled,
silence which succeeded the felicitous toast. Sir John did not move.
“I don’t think I am called upon to rise,” he murmured to Mrs. Gould.
“That sort of thing speaks for itself.” But Don Jose Avellanos came
to the rescue with a short oration, in which he alluded pointedly to
England’s goodwill towards Costaguana--“a goodwill,” he continued,
significantly, “of which I, having been in my time accredited to the
Court of St. James, am able to speak with some knowledge.”
Only then Sir John thought fit to respond, which he did gracefully in
bad French, punctuated by bursts of applause and the “Hear! Hears!”
of Captain Mitchell, who was able to understand a word now and then.
Directly he had done, the financier of railways turned to Mrs. Gould--
“You were good enough to say that you intended to ask me for something,”
he reminded her, gallantly. “What is it? Be assured that any request
from you would be considered in the light of a favour to myself.”
She thanked him by a gracious smile. Everybody was rising from the
table.
“Let us go on deck,” she proposed, “where I’ll be able to point out to
you the very object of my request.”
An enormous national flag of Costaguana, diagonal red and yellow, with
two green palm trees in the middle, floated lazily at the mainmast head
of the Juno. A multitude of fireworks being let off in their thousands
at the water’s edge in honour of the President kept up a mysterious
crepitating noise half round the harbour. Now and then a lot of rockets,
swishing upwards invisibly, detonated overhead with only a puff of smoke
in the bright sky. Crowds of people could be seen between the town gate
and the harbour, under the bunches of multicoloured flags fluttering on
tall poles. Faint bursts of military music would be heard suddenly, and
the remote sound of shouting. A knot of ragged negroes at the end of the
wharf kept on loading and firing a small iron cannon time after time. A
greyish haze of dust hung thin and motionless against the sun.
Don Vincente Ribiera made a few steps under the deck-awning, leaning on
the arm of Senor Avellanos; a wide circle was formed round him, where
the mirthless smile of his dark lips and the sightless glitter of his
spectacles could be seen turning amiably from side to side. The
informal function arranged on purpose on board the Juno to give the
President-Dictator an opportunity to meet intimately some of his most
notable adherents in Sulaco was drawing to an end. On one side, General
Montero, his bald head covered now by a plumed cocked hat, remained
motionless on a skylight seat, a pair of big gauntleted hands folded
on the hilt of the sabre standing upright between his legs. The white
plume, the coppery tint of his broad face, the blue-black of the
moustaches under the curved beak, the mass of gold on sleeves and
breast, the high shining boots with enormous spurs, the working
nostrils, the imbecile and domineering stare of the glorious victor of
Rio Seco had in them something ominous and incredible; the exaggeration
of a cruel caricature, the fatuity of solemn masquerading, the atrocious
grotesqueness of some military idol of Aztec conception and European
bedecking, awaiting the homage of worshippers. Don Jose approached
diplomatically this weird and inscrutable portent, and Mrs. Gould turned
her fascinated eyes away at last.
Charles, coming up to take leave of Sir John, heard him say, as he bent
over his wife’s hand, “Certainly. Of course, my dear Mrs. Gould, for a
protege of yours! Not the slightest difficulty. Consider it done.”
Going ashore in the same boat with the Goulds, Don Jose Avellanos was
very silent. Even in the Gould carriage he did not open his lips for
a long time. The mules trotted slowly away from the wharf between the
extended hands of the beggars, who for that day seemed to have abandoned
in a body the portals of churches. Charles Gould sat on the back seat
and looked away upon the plain. A multitude of booths made of green
boughs, of rushes, of odd pieces of plank eked out with bits of canvas
had been erected all over it for the sale of cana, of dulces, of fruit,
of cigars. Over little heaps of glowing charcoal Indian women, squatting
on mats, cooked food in black earthen pots, and boiled the water for the
mate gourds, which they offered in soft, caressing voices to the country
people. A racecourse had been staked out for the vaqueros; and away to
the left, from where the crowd was massed thickly about a huge temporary
erection, like a circus tent of wood with a conical grass roof, came the
resonant twanging of harp strings, the sharp ping of guitars, with the
grave drumming throb of an Indian gombo pulsating steadily through the
shrill choruses of the dancers.