The Gould carriage was the first to return from the harbour to the empty
town. On the ancient pavement, laid out in patterns, sunk into ruts and
holes, the portly Ignacio, mindful of the springs of the Parisian-built
landau, had pulled up to a walk, and Decoud in his corner contemplated
moodily the inner aspect of the gate. The squat turreted sides held up
between them a mass of masonry with bunches of grass growing at the top,
and a grey, heavily scrolled, armorial shield of stone above the apex of
the arch with the arms of Spain nearly smoothed out as if in readiness
for some new device typical of the impending progress.
The explosive noise of the railway trucks seemed to augment Decoud’s
irritation. He muttered something to himself, then began to talk aloud
in curt, angry phrases thrown at the silence of the two women. They did
not look at him at all; while Don Jose, with his semi-translucent, waxy
complexion, overshadowed by the soft grey hat, swayed a little to the
jolts of the carriage by the side of Mrs. Gould.
“This sound puts a new edge on a very old truth.”
Decoud spoke in French, perhaps because of Ignacio on the box above him;
the old coachman, with his broad back filling a short, silver-braided
jacket, had a big pair of ears, whose thick rims stood well away from
his cropped head.
“Yes, the noise outside the city wall is new, but the principle is old.”
He ruminated his discontent for a while, then began afresh with a
sidelong glance at Antonia--
“No, but just imagine our forefathers in morions and corselets drawn
up outside this gate, and a band of adventurers just landed from their
ships in the harbour there. Thieves, of course. Speculators, too. Their
expeditions, each one, were the speculations of grave and reverend
persons in England. That is history, as that absurd sailor Mitchell is
always saying.”
“Mitchell’s arrangements for the embarkation of the troops were
excellent!” exclaimed Don Jose.
“That!--that! oh, that’s really the work of that Genoese seaman! But
to return to my noises; there used to be in the old days the sound of
trumpets outside that gate. War trumpets! I’m sure they were trumpets. I
have read somewhere that Drake, who was the greatest of these men, used
to dine alone in his cabin on board ship to the sound of trumpets. In
those days this town was full of wealth. Those men came to take it.
Now the whole land is like a treasure-house, and all these people are
breaking into it, whilst we are cutting each other’s throats. The only
thing that keeps them out is mutual jealousy. But they’ll come to an
agreement some day--and by the time we’ve settled our quarrels and
become decent and honourable, there’ll be nothing left for us. It has
always been the same. We are a wonderful people, but it has always
been our fate to be”--he did not say “robbed,” but added, after a
pause--“exploited!”
Mrs. Gould said, “Oh, this is unjust!” And Antonia interjected, “Don’t
answer him, Emilia. He is attacking me.”
“You surely do not think I was attacking Don Carlos!” Decoud answered.
And then the carriage stopped before the door of the Casa Gould. The
young man offered his hand to the ladies. They went in first together;
Don Jose walked by the side of Decoud, and the gouty old porter tottered
after them with some light wraps on his arm.
Don Jose slipped his hand under the arm of the journalist of Sulaco.
“The Porvenir must have a long and confident article upon Barrios and
the irresistibleness of his army of Cayta! The moral effect should be
kept up in the country. We must cable encouraging extracts to Europe and
the United States to maintain a favourable impression abroad.”
Decoud muttered, “Oh, yes, we must comfort our friends, the
speculators.”
The long open gallery was in shadow, with its screen of plants in vases
along the balustrade, holding out motionless blossoms, and all the glass
doors of the reception-rooms thrown open. A jingle of spurs died out at
the further end.
Basilio, standing aside against the wall, said in a soft tone to
the passing ladies, “The Senor Administrador is just back from the
mountain.”
In the great sala, with its groups of ancient Spanish and modern
European furniture making as if different centres under the high white
spread of the ceiling, the silver and porcelain of the tea-service
gleamed among a cluster of dwarf chairs, like a bit of a lady’s boudoir,
putting in a note of feminine and intimate delicacy.
Don Jose in his rocking-chair placed his hat on his lap, and Decoud
walked up and down the whole length of the room, passing between tables
loaded with knick-knacks and almost disappearing behind the high backs
of leathern sofas. He was thinking of the angry face of Antonia; he was
confident that he would make his peace with her. He had not stayed in
Sulaco to quarrel with Antonia.
Martin Decoud was angry with himself. All he saw and heard going
on around him exasperated the preconceived views of his European
civilization. To contemplate revolutions from the distance of the
Parisian Boulevards was quite another matter. Here on the spot it was
not possible to dismiss their tragic comedy with the expression, “_Quelle
farce!_”
The reality of the political action, such as it was, seemed closer, and
acquired poignancy by Antonia’s belief in the cause. Its crudeness hurt
his feelings. He was surprised at his own sensitiveness.
“I suppose I am more of a Costaguanero than I would have believed
possible,” he thought to himself.
His disdain grew like a reaction of his scepticism against the action
into which he was forced by his infatuation for Antonia. He soothed
himself by saying he was not a patriot, but a lover.
The ladies came in bareheaded, and Mrs. Gould sank low before the little
tea-table. Antonia took up her usual place at the reception hour--the
corner of a leathern couch, with a rigid grace in her pose and a fan in
her hand. Decoud, swerving from the straight line of his march, came to
lean over the high back of her seat.
For a long time he talked into her ear from behind, softly, with a half
smile and an air of apologetic familiarity. Her fan lay half grasped on
her knees. She never looked at him. His rapid utterance grew more and
more insistent and caressing. At last he ventured a slight laugh.
“No, really. You must forgive me. One must be serious sometimes.”
He paused. She turned her head a little; her blue eyes glided slowly
towards him, slightly upwards, mollified and questioning.
“You can’t think I am serious when I call Montero a gran’ bestia
every second day in the Porvenir? That is not a serious occupation. No
occupation is serious, not even when a bullet through the heart is the
penalty of failure!”
Her hand closed firmly on her fan.
“Some reason, you understand, I mean some sense, may creep into
thinking; some glimpse of truth. I mean some effective truth, for which
there is no room in politics or journalism. I happen to have said what I
thought. And you are angry! If you do me the kindness to think a little
you will see that I spoke like a patriot.”
She opened her red lips for the first time, not unkindly.
“Yes, but you never see the aim. Men must be used as they are. I suppose
nobody is really disinterested, unless, perhaps, you, Don Martin.”
“God forbid! It’s the last thing I should like you to believe of me.” He
spoke lightly, and paused.
She began to fan herself with a slow movement without raising her hand.
After a time he whispered passionately--
“Antonia!”
She smiled, and extended her hand after the English manner towards
Charles Gould, who was bowing before her; while Decoud, with his
elbows spread on the back of the sofa, dropped his eyes and murmured,
“Bonjour.”
The Senor Administrador of the San Tome mine bent over his wife for
a moment. They exchanged a few words, of which only the phrase, “The
greatest enthusiasm,” pronounced by Mrs. Gould, could be heard.
“Yes,” Decoud began in a murmur. “Even he!”
“This is sheer calumny,” said Antonia, not very severely.
“You just ask him to throw his mine into the melting-pot for the great
cause,” Decoud whispered.
Don Jose had raised his voice. He rubbed his hands cheerily. The
excellent aspect of the troops and the great quantity of new deadly
rifles on the shoulders of those brave men seemed to fill him with an
ecstatic confidence.
Charles Gould, very tall and thin before his chair, listened, but
nothing could be discovered in his face except a kind and deferential
attention.
Meantime, Antonia had risen, and, crossing the room, stood looking out
of one of the three long windows giving on the street. Decoud followed
her. The window was thrown open, and he leaned against the thickness of
the wall. The long folds of the damask curtain, falling straight from
the broad brass cornice, hid him partly from the room. He folded his
arms on his breast, and looked steadily at Antonia’s profile.
The people returning from the harbour filled the pavements; the shuffle
of sandals and a low murmur of voices ascended to the window. Now and
then a coach rolled slowly along the disjointed roadway of the Calle de
la Constitucion. There were not many private carriages in Sulaco; at the
most crowded hour on the Alameda they could be counted with one glance
of the eye. The great family arks swayed on high leathern springs, full
of pretty powdered faces in which the eyes looked intensely alive
and black. And first Don Juste Lopez, the President of the Provincial
Assembly, passed with his three lovely daughters, solemn in a black
frock-coat and stiff white tie, as when directing a debate from a high
tribune. Though they all raised their eyes, Antonia did not make the
usual greeting gesture of a fluttered hand, and they affected not to
see the two young people, Costaguaneros with European manners, whose
eccentricities were discussed behind the barred windows of the first
families in Sulaco. And then the widowed Senora Gavilaso de Valdes
rolled by, handsome and dignified, in a great machine in which she used
to travel to and from her country house, surrounded by an armed retinue
in leather suits and big sombreros, with carbines at the bows of their
saddles. She was a woman of most distinguished family, proud, rich, and
kind-hearted. Her second son, Jaime, had just gone off on the Staff of
Barrios. The eldest, a worthless fellow of a moody disposition, filled
Sulaco with the noise of his dissipations, and gambled heavily at the
club. The two youngest boys, with yellow Ribierist cockades in their
caps, sat on the front seat. She, too, affected not to see the Senor
Decoud talking publicly with Antonia in defiance of every convention.
And he not even her novio as far as the world knew! Though, even in that
case, it would have been scandal enough. But the dignified old lady,
respected and admired by the first families, would have been still more
shocked if she could have heard the words they were exchanging.
“Did you say I lost sight of the aim? I have only one aim in the world.”
She made an almost imperceptible negative movement of her head, still
staring across the street at the Avellanos’s house, grey, marked with
decay, and with iron bars like a prison.
“And it would be so easy of attainment,” he continued, “this aim which,
whether knowingly or not, I have always had in my heart--ever since the
day when you snubbed me so horribly once in Paris, you remember.”
A slight smile seemed to move the corner of the lip that was on his
side.
“You know you were a very terrible person, a sort of Charlotte Corday
in a schoolgirl’s dress; a ferocious patriot. I suppose you would have
stuck a knife into Guzman Bento?”
She interrupted him. “You do me too much honour.”
“At any rate,” he said, changing suddenly to a tone of bitter levity,
“you would have sent me to stab him without compunction.”
“_Ah, par exemple!_” she murmured in a shocked tone.
“Well,” he argued, mockingly, “you do keep me here writing deadly
nonsense. Deadly to me! It has already killed my self-respect. And you
may imagine,” he continued, his tone passing into light banter, “that
Montero, should he be successful, would get even with me in the only way
such a brute can get even with a man of intelligence who condescends to
call him a gran’ bestia three times a week. It’s a sort of intellectual
death; but there is the other one in the background for a journalist of
my ability.”
“If he is successful!” said Antonia, thoughtfully.
“You seem satisfied to see my life hang on a thread,” Decoud replied,
with a broad smile. “And the other Montero, the ‘my trusted brother’ of
the proclamations, the guerrillero--haven’t I written that he was taking
the guests’ overcoats and changing plates in Paris at our Legation in
the intervals of spying on our refugees there, in the time of Rojas? He
will wash out that sacred truth in blood. In my blood! Why do you look
annoyed? This is simply a bit of the biography of one of our great men.
What do you think he will do to me? There is a certain convent wall
round the corner of the Plaza, opposite the door of the Bull Ring. You
know? Opposite the door with the inscription, _Intrada de la Sombra_.’
Appropriate, perhaps! That’s where the uncle of our host gave up his
Anglo-South-American soul. And, note, he might have run away. A man
who has fought with weapons may run away. You might have let me go
with Barrios if you had cared for me. I would have carried one of those
rifles, in which Don Jose believes, with the greatest satisfaction, in
the ranks of poor peons and Indios, that know nothing either of reason
or politics. The most forlorn hope in the most forlorn army on earth
would have been safer than that for which you made me stay here. When
you make war you may retreat, but not when you spend your time in
inciting poor ignorant fools to kill and to die.”
His tone remained light, and as if unaware of his presence she stood
motionless, her hands clasped lightly, the fan hanging down from her
interlaced fingers. He waited for a while, and then--
“I shall go to the wall,” he said, with a sort of jocular desperation.
Even that declaration did not make her look at him. Her head remained
still, her eyes fixed upon the house of the Avellanos, whose chipped
pilasters, broken cornices, the whole degradation of dignity was hidden
now by the gathering dusk of the street. In her whole figure her lips
alone moved, forming the words--
“Martin, you will make me cry.”
He remained silent for a minute, startled, as if overwhelmed by a sort
of awed happiness, with the lines of the mocking smile still stiffened
about his mouth, and incredulous surprise in his eyes. The value of a
sentence is in the personality which utters it, for nothing new can be
said by man or woman; and those were the last words, it seemed to him,
that could ever have been spoken by Antonia. He had never made it up
with her so completely in all their intercourse of small encounters; but
even before she had time to turn towards him, which she did slowly with
a rigid grace, he had begun to plead--
“My sister is only waiting to embrace you. My father is transported with
joy. I won’t say anything of my mother! Our mothers were like sisters.
There is the mail-boat for the south next week--let us go. That Moraga
is a fool! A man like Montero is bribed. It’s the practice of the
country. It’s tradition--it’s politics. Read ‘Fifty Years of Misrule.’”
“Leave poor papa alone, Don Martin. He believes--”
“I have the greatest tenderness for your father,” he began, hurriedly.
“But I love you, Antonia! And Moraga has miserably mismanaged this
business. Perhaps your father did, too; I don’t know. Montero was
bribeable. Why, I suppose he only wanted his share of this famous loan
for national development. Why didn’t the stupid Sta. Marta people give
him a mission to Europe, or something? He would have taken five years’
salary in advance, and gone on loafing in Paris, this stupid, ferocious
Indio!”
“The man,” she said, thoughtfully, and very calm before this outburst,
“was intoxicated with vanity. We had all the information, not from
Moraga only; from others, too. There was his brother intriguing, too.”
“Oh, yes!” he said. “Of course you know. You know everything. You read
all the correspondence, you write all the papers--all those State papers
that are inspired here, in this room, in blind deference to a theory
of political purity. Hadn’t you Charles Gould before your eyes? Rey de
Sulaco! He and his mine are the practical demonstration of what could
have been done. Do you think he succeeded by his fidelity to a theory of
virtue? And all those railway people, with their honest work! Of course,
their work is honest! But what if you cannot work honestly till the
thieves are satisfied? Could he not, a gentleman, have told this Sir
John what’s-his-name that Montero had to be bought off--he and all his
Negro Liberals hanging on to his gold-laced sleeve? He ought to have
been bought off with his own stupid weight of gold--his weight of gold,
I tell you, boots, sabre, spurs, cocked hat, and all.”
She shook her head slightly. “It was impossible,” she murmured.
“He wanted the whole lot? What?”
She was facing him now in the deep recess of the window, very close and
motionless. Her lips moved rapidly. Decoud, leaning his back against the
wall, listened with crossed arms and lowered eyelids. He drank the tones
of her even voice, and watched the agitated life of her throat, as if
waves of emotion had run from her heart to pass out into the air in her
reasonable words. He also had his aspirations, he aspired to carry her
away out of these deadly futilities of pronunciamientos and reforms. All
this was wrong--utterly wrong; but she fascinated him, and sometimes
the sheer sagacity of a phrase would break the charm, replace the
fascination by a sudden unwilling thrill of interest. Some women
hovered, as it were, on the threshold of genius, he reflected. They did
not want to know, or think, or understand. Passion stood for all that,
and he was ready to believe that some startlingly profound remark, some
appreciation of character, or a judgment upon an event, bordered on the
miraculous. In the mature Antonia he could see with an extraordinary
vividness the austere schoolgirl of the earlier days. She seduced his
attention; sometimes he could not restrain a murmur of assent; now and
then he advanced an objection quite seriously. Gradually they began to
argue; the curtain half hid them from the people in the sala.
Outside it had grown dark. From the deep trench of shadow between the
houses, lit up vaguely by the glimmer of street lamps, ascended the
evening silence of Sulaco; the silence of a town with few carriages,
of unshod horses, and a softly sandalled population. The windows of
the Casa Gould flung their shining parallelograms upon the house of
the Avellanos. Now and then a shuffle of feet passed below with the
pulsating red glow of a cigarette at the foot of the walls; and the
night air, as if cooled by the snows of Higuerota, refreshed their
faces.
“We Occidentals,” said Martin Decoud, using the usual term the
provincials of Sulaco applied to themselves, “have been always distinct
and separated. As long as we hold Cayta nothing can reach us. In all our
troubles no army has marched over those mountains. A revolution in the
central provinces isolates us at once. Look how complete it is now! The
news of Barrios’ movement will be cabled to the United States, and
only in that way will it reach Sta. Marta by the cable from the other
seaboard. We have the greatest riches, the greatest fertility, the
purest blood in our great families, the most laborious population. The
Occidental Province should stand alone. The early Federalism was not
bad for us. Then came this union which Don Henrique Gould resisted.
It opened the road to tyranny; and, ever since, the rest of Costaguana
hangs like a millstone round our necks. The Occidental territory is
large enough to make any man’s country. Look at the mountains! Nature
itself seems to cry to us, ‘Separate!’”
She made an energetic gesture of negation. A silence fell.
“Oh, yes, I know it’s contrary to the doctrine laid down in the ‘History
of Fifty Years’ Misrule.’ I am only trying to be sensible. But my sense
seems always to give you cause for offence. Have I startled you very
much with this perfectly reasonable aspiration?”
She shook her head. No, she was not startled, but the idea shocked her
early convictions. Her patriotism was larger. She had never considered
that possibility.
“It may yet be the means of saving some of your convictions,” he said,
prophetically.
She did not answer. She seemed tired. They leaned side by side on the
rail of the little balcony, very friendly, having exhausted politics,
giving themselves up to the silent feeling of their nearness, in one of
those profound pauses that fall upon the rhythm of passion. Towards the
plaza end of the street the glowing coals in the brazeros of the market
women cooking their evening meal gleamed red along the edge of the
pavement. A man appeared without a sound in the light of a street lamp,
showing the coloured inverted triangle of his bordered poncho, square on
his shoulders, hanging to a point below his knees. From the harbour
end of the Calle a horseman walked his soft-stepping mount, gleaming
silver-grey abreast each lamp under the dark shape of the rider.
“Behold the illustrious Capataz de Cargadores,” said Decoud, gently,
“coming in all his splendour after his work is done. The next great man
of Sulaco after Don Carlos Gould. But he is good-natured, and let me
make friends with him.”
“Ah, indeed!” said Antonia. “How did you make friends?”
“A journalist ought to have his finger on the popular pulse, and this
man is one of the leaders of the populace. A journalist ought to know
remarkable men--and this man is remarkable in his way.”
“Ah, yes!” said Antonia, thoughtfully. “It is known that this Italian
has a great influence.”
The horseman had passed below them, with a gleam of dim light on the
shining broad quarters of the grey mare, on a bright heavy stirrup, on a
long silver spur; but the short flick of yellowish flame in the dusk was
powerless against the muffled-up mysteriousness of the dark figure with
an invisible face concealed by a great sombrero.
Decoud and Antonia remained leaning over the balcony, side by side,
touching elbows, with their heads overhanging the darkness of the
street, and the brilliantly lighted sala at their backs. This was a
tete-a-tete of extreme impropriety; something of which in the whole
extent of the Republic only the extraordinary Antonia could be
capable--the poor, motherless girl, never accompanied, with a careless
father, who had thought only of making her learned. Even Decoud himself
seemed to feel that this was as much as he could expect of having her to
himself till--till the revolution was over and he could carry her off
to Europe, away from the endlessness of civil strife, whose folly seemed
even harder to bear than its ignominy. After one Montero there would
be another, the lawlessness of a populace of all colours and races,
barbarism, irremediable tyranny. As the great Liberator Bolivar had said
in the bitterness of his spirit, “America is ungovernable. Those who
worked for her independence have ploughed the sea.” He did not care, he
declared boldly; he seized every opportunity to tell her that though she
had managed to make a Blanco journalist of him, he was no patriot. First
of all, the word had no sense for cultured minds, to whom the narrowness
of every belief is odious; and secondly, in connection with the
everlasting troubles of this unhappy country it was hopelessly
besmirched; it had been the cry of dark barbarism, the cloak of
lawlessness, of crimes, of rapacity, of simple thieving.
He was surprised at the warmth of his own utterance. He had no need
to drop his voice; it had been low all the time, a mere murmur in the
silence of dark houses with their shutters closed early against the
night air, as is the custom of Sulaco. Only the sala of the Casa Gould
flung out defiantly the blaze of its four windows, the bright appeal of
light in the whole dumb obscurity of the street. And the murmur on the
little balcony went on after a short pause.
“But we are labouring to change all that,” Antonia protested. “It is
exactly what we desire. It is our object. It is the great cause. And
the word you despise has stood also for sacrifice, for courage, for
constancy, for suffering. Papa, who--”
“Ploughing the sea,” interrupted Decoud, looking down.
There was below the sound of hasty and ponderous footsteps.
“Your uncle, the grand-vicar of the cathedral, has just turned under the
gate,” observed Decoud. “He said Mass for the troops in the Plaza this
morning. They had built for him an altar of drums, you know. And they
brought outside all the painted blocks to take the air. All the wooden
saints stood militarily in a row at the top of the great flight of
steps. They looked like a gorgeous escort attending the Vicar-General. I
saw the great function from the windows of the Porvenir. He is amazing,
your uncle, the last of the Corbelans. He glittered exceedingly in his
vestments with a great crimson velvet cross down his back. And all the
time our saviour Barrios sat in the Amarilla Club drinking punch at
an open window. Esprit fort--our Barrios. I expected every moment your
uncle to launch an excommunication there and then at the black eye-patch
in the window across the Plaza. But not at all. Ultimately the troops
marched off. Later Barrios came down with some of the officers, and
stood with his uniform all unbuttoned, discoursing at the edge of the
pavement. Suddenly your uncle appeared, no longer glittering, but all
black, at the cathedral door with that threatening aspect he has--you
know, like a sort of avenging spirit. He gives one look, strides over
straight at the group of uniforms, and leads away the general by the
elbow. He walked him for a quarter of an hour in the shade of a
wall. Never let go his elbow for a moment, talking all the time with
exaltation, and gesticulating with a long black arm. It was a curious
scene. The officers seemed struck with astonishment. Remarkable man,
your missionary uncle. He hates an infidel much less than a heretic, and
prefers a heathen many times to an infidel. He condescends graciously to
call me a heathen, sometimes, you know.”
Antonia listened with her hands over the balustrade, opening and
shutting the fan gently; and Decoud talked a little nervously, as if
afraid that she would leave him at the first pause. Their comparative
isolation, the precious sense of intimacy, the slight contact of their
arms, affected him softly; for now and then a tender inflection crept
into the flow of his ironic murmurs.
“Any slight sign of favour from a relative of yours is welcome, Antonia.
And perhaps he understands me, after all! But I know him, too, our Padre
Corbelan. The idea of political honour, justice, and honesty for him
consists in the restitution of the confiscated Church property. Nothing
else could have drawn that fierce converter of savage Indians out of the
wilds to work for the Ribierist cause! Nothing else but that wild hope!
He would make a pronunciamiento himself for such an object against any
Government if he could only get followers! What does Don Carlos Gould
think of that? But, of course, with his English impenetrability, nobody
can tell what he thinks. Probably he thinks of nothing apart from his
mine; of his ‘Imperium in Imperio.’ As to Mrs. Gould, she thinks of
her schools, of her hospitals, of the mothers with the young babies, of
every sick old man in the three villages. If you were to turn your head
now you would see her extracting a report from that sinister doctor in a
check shirt--what’s his name? Monygham--or else catechising Don Pepe or
perhaps listening to Padre Roman. They are all down here to-day--all
her ministers of state. Well, she is a sensible woman, and perhaps Don
Carlos is a sensible man. It’s a part of solid English sense not to
think too much; to see only what may be of practical use at the moment.
These people are not like ourselves. We have no political reason; we
have political passions--sometimes. What is a conviction? A particular
view of our personal advantage either practical or emotional. No one is
a patriot for nothing. The word serves us well. But I am clear-sighted,
and I shall not use that word to you, Antonia! I have no patriotic
illusions. I have only the supreme illusion of a lover.”
He paused, then muttered almost inaudibly, “That can lead one very far,
though.”
Behind their backs the political tide that once in every twenty-four
hours set with a strong flood through the Gould drawing-room could
be heard, rising higher in a hum of voices. Men had been dropping in
singly, or in twos and threes: the higher officials of the province,
engineers of the railway, sunburnt and in tweeds, with the frosted head
of their chief smiling with slow, humorous indulgence amongst the young
eager faces. Scarfe, the lover of fandangos, had already slipped out in
search of some dance, no matter where, on the outskirts of the town. Don
Juste Lopez, after taking his daughters home, had entered solemnly, in a
black creased coat buttoned up under his spreading brown beard. The
few members of the Provincial Assembly present clustered at once around
their President to discuss the news of the war and the last proclamation
of the rebel Montero, the miserable Montero, calling in the name of “a
justly incensed democracy” upon all the Provincial Assemblies of the
Republic to suspend their sittings till his sword had made peace and the
will of the people could be consulted. It was practically an invitation
to dissolve: an unheard-of audacity of that evil madman.
The indignation ran high in the knot of deputies behind Jose Avellanos.
Don Jose, lifting up his voice, cried out to them over the high back
of his chair, “Sulaco has answered by sending to-day an army upon his
flank. If all the other provinces show only half as much patriotism as
we Occidentals--”
A great outburst of acclamations covered the vibrating treble of the
life and soul of the party. Yes! Yes! This was true! A great truth!
Sulaco was in the forefront, as ever! It was a boastful tumult, the
hopefulness inspired by the event of the day breaking out amongst those
caballeros of the Campo thinking of their herds, of their lands, of
the safety of their families. Everything was at stake. . . . No! It was
impossible that Montero should succeed! This criminal, this shameless
Indio! The clamour continued for some time, everybody else in the
room looking towards the group where Don Juste had put on his air of
impartial solemnity as if presiding at a sitting of the Provincial
Assembly. Decoud had turned round at the noise, and, leaning his back
on the balustrade, shouted into the room with all the strength of his
lungs, “Gran’ bestia!”
This unexpected cry had the effect of stilling the noise. All the eyes
were directed to the window with an approving expectation; but Decoud
had already turned his back upon the room, and was again leaning out
over the quiet street.
“This is the quintessence of my journalism; that is the supreme
argument,” he said to Antonia. “I have invented this definition, this
last word on a great question. But I am no patriot. I am no more of a
patriot than the Capataz of the Sulaco Cargadores, this Genoese who has
done such great things for this harbour--this active usher-in of the
material implements for our progress. You have heard Captain Mitchell
confess over and over again that till he got this man he could never
tell how long it would take to unload a ship. That is bad for progress.
You have seen him pass by after his labours on his famous horse to
dazzle the girls in some ballroom with an earthen floor. He is a
fortunate fellow! His work is an exercise of personal powers; his
leisure is spent in receiving the marks of extraordinary adulation.
And he likes it, too. Can anybody be more fortunate? To be feared and
admired is--”
“And are these your highest aspirations, Don Martin?” interrupted
Antonia.
“I was speaking of a man of that sort,” said Decoud, curtly. “The heroes
of the world have been feared and admired. What more could he want?”
Decoud had often felt his familiar habit of ironic thought fall
shattered against Antonia’s gravity. She irritated him as if she, too,
had suffered from that inexplicable feminine obtuseness which stands
so often between a man and a woman of the more ordinary sort. But he
overcame his vexation at once. He was very far from thinking Antonia
ordinary, whatever verdict his scepticism might have pronounced upon
himself. With a touch of penetrating tenderness in his voice he assured
her that his only aspiration was to a felicity so high that it seemed
almost unrealizable on this earth.
She coloured invisibly, with a warmth against which the breeze from the
sierra seemed to have lost its cooling power in the sudden melting of
the snows. His whisper could not have carried so far, though there was
enough ardour in his tone to melt a heart of ice. Antonia turned away
abruptly, as if to carry his whispered assurance into the room behind,
full of light, noisy with voices.
The tide of political speculation was beating high within the four walls
of the great sala, as if driven beyond the marks by a great gust of
hope. Don Juste’s fan-shaped beard was still the centre of loud and
animated discussions. There was a self-confident ring in all the
voices. Even the few Europeans around Charles Gould--a Dane, a couple
of Frenchmen, a discreet fat German, smiling, with down-cast eyes, the
representatives of those material interests that had got a footing in
Sulaco under the protecting might of the San Tome mine--had infused a
lot of good humour into their deference. Charles Gould, to whom they
were paying their court, was the visible sign of the stability that
could be achieved on the shifting ground of revolutions. They felt
hopeful about their various undertakings. One of the two Frenchmen,
small, black, with glittering eyes lost in an immense growth of bushy
beard, waved his tiny brown hands and delicate wrists. He had been
travelling in the interior of the province for a syndicate of European
capitalists. His forcible “_Monsieur l’Administrateur_” returning every
minute shrilled above the steady hum of conversations. He was relating
his discoveries. He was ecstatic. Charles Gould glanced down at him
courteously.
At a given moment of these necessary receptions it was Mrs. Gould’s
habit to withdraw quietly into a little drawing-room, especially her
own, next to the great sala. She had risen, and, waiting for Antonia,
listened with a slightly worried graciousness to the engineer-in-chief
of the railway, who stooped over her, relating slowly, without the
slightest gesture, something apparently amusing, for his eyes had a
humorous twinkle. Antonia, before she advanced into the room to join
Mrs. Gould, turned her head over her shoulder towards Decoud, only for a
moment.
“Why should any one of us think his aspirations unrealizable?” she said,
rapidly.
“I am going to cling to mine to the end, Antonia,” he answered, through
clenched teeth, then bowed very low, a little distantly.
The engineer-in-chief had not finished telling his amusing story.
The humours of railway building in South America appealed to his keen
appreciation of the absurd, and he told his instances of ignorant
prejudice and as ignorant cunning very well. Now, Mrs. Gould gave him
all her attention as he walked by her side escorting the ladies out of
the room. Finally all three passed unnoticed through the glass doors in
the gallery. Only a tall priest stalking silently in the noise of the
sala checked himself to look after them. Father Corbelan, whom Decoud
had seen from the balcony turning into the gateway of the Casa
Gould, had addressed no one since coming in. The long, skimpy soutane
accentuated the tallness of his stature; he carried his powerful torso
thrown forward; and the straight, black bar of his joined eyebrows, the
pugnacious outline of the bony face, the white spot of a scar on the
bluish shaven cheeks (a testimonial to his apostolic zeal from a
party of unconverted Indians), suggested something unlawful behind his
priesthood, the idea of a chaplain of bandits.
He separated his bony, knotted hands clasped behind his back, to shake
his finger at Martin.
Decoud had stepped into the room after Antonia. But he did not go far.
He had remained just within, against the curtain, with an expression of
not quite genuine gravity, like a grown-up person taking part in a game
of children. He gazed quietly at the threatening finger.
“I have watched your reverence converting General Barrios by a special
sermon on the Plaza,” he said, without making the slightest movement.
“What miserable nonsense!” Father Corbelan’s deep voice resounded all
over the room, making all the heads turn on the shoulders. “The man is a
drunkard. Senores, the God of your General is a bottle!”
His contemptuous, arbitrary voice caused an uneasy suspension of every
sound, as if the self-confidence of the gathering had been staggered by
a blow. But nobody took up Father Corbelan’s declaration.
It was known that Father Corbelan had come out of the wilds to advocate
the sacred rights of the Church with the same fanatical fearlessness
with which he had gone preaching to bloodthirsty savages, devoid
of human compassion or worship of any kind. Rumours of legendary
proportions told of his successes as a missionary beyond the eye of
Christian men. He had baptized whole nations of Indians, living with
them like a savage himself. It was related that the padre used to ride
with his Indians for days, half naked, carrying a bullock-hide shield,
and, no doubt, a long lance, too--who knows? That he had wandered
clothed in skins, seeking for proselytes somewhere near the snow line of
the Cordillera. Of these exploits Padre Corbelan himself was never known
to talk. But he made no secret of his opinion that the politicians of
Sta. Marta had harder hearts and more corrupt minds than the heathen
to whom he had carried the word of God. His injudicious zeal for the
temporal welfare of the Church was damaging the Ribierist cause. It was
common knowledge that he had refused to be made titular bishop of the
Occidental diocese till justice was done to a despoiled Church. The
political Gefe of Sulaco (the same dignitary whom Captain Mitchell saved
from the mob afterwards) hinted with naive cynicism that doubtless their
Excellencies the Ministers sent the padre over the mountains to Sulaco
in the worst season of the year in the hope that he would be frozen
to death by the icy blasts of the high paramos. Every year a few hardy
muleteers--men inured to exposure--were known to perish in that way. But
what would you have? Their Excellencies possibly had not realized what
a tough priest he was. Meantime, the ignorant were beginning to murmur
that the Ribierist reforms meant simply the taking away of the land
from the people. Some of it was to be given to foreigners who made the
railway; the greater part was to go to the padres.
These were the results of the Grand Vicar’s zeal. Even from the short
allocution to the troops on the Plaza (which only the first ranks
could have heard) he had not been able to keep out his fixed idea of
an outraged Church waiting for reparation from a penitent country. The
political Gefe had been exasperated. But he could not very well throw
the brother-in-law of Don Jose into the prison of the Cabildo. The chief
magistrate, an easy-going and popular official, visited the Casa
Gould, walking over after sunset from the Intendencia, unattended,
acknowledging with dignified courtesy the salutations of high and low
alike. That evening he had walked up straight to Charles Gould and had
hissed out to him that he would have liked to deport the Grand Vicar
out of Sulaco, anywhere, to some desert island, to the Isabels, for
instance. “The one without water preferably--eh, Don Carlos?” he had
added in a tone between jest and earnest. This uncontrollable priest,
who had rejected his offer of the episcopal palace for a residence and
preferred to hang his shabby hammock amongst the rubble and spiders of
the sequestrated Dominican Convent, had taken into his head to advocate
an unconditional pardon for Hernandez the Robber! And this was not
enough; he seemed to have entered into communication with the most
audacious criminal the country had known for years. The Sulaco police
knew, of course, what was going on. Padre Corbelan had got hold of that
reckless Italian, the Capataz de Cargadores, the only man fit for such
an errand, and had sent a message through him. Father Corbelan had
studied in Rome, and could speak Italian. The Capataz was known to visit
the old Dominican Convent at night. An old woman who served the Grand
Vicar had heard the name of Hernandez pronounced; and only last Saturday
afternoon the Capataz had been observed galloping out of town. He did
not return for two days. The police would have laid the Italian by the
heels if it had not been for fear of the Cargadores, a turbulent body of
men, quite apt to raise a tumult. Nowadays it was not so easy to govern
Sulaco. Bad characters flocked into it, attracted by the money in the
pockets of the railway workmen. The populace was made restless by Father
Corbelan’s discourses. And the first magistrate explained to Charles
Gould that now the province was stripped of troops any outbreak of
lawlessness would find the authorities with their boots off, as it were.
Then he went away moodily to sit in an armchair, smoking a long, thin
cigar, not very far from Don Jose, with whom, bending over sideways, he
exchanged a few words from time to time. He ignored the entrance of the
priest, and whenever Father Corbelan’s voice was raised behind him, he
shrugged his shoulders impatiently.
Father Corbelan had remained quite motionless for a time with that
something vengeful in his immobility which seemed to characterize all
his attitudes. A lurid glow of strong convictions gave its peculiar
aspect to the black figure. But its fierceness became softened as the
padre, fixing his eyes upon Decoud, raised his long, black arm slowly,
impressively--
“And you--you are a perfect heathen,” he said, in a subdued, deep voice.
He made a step nearer, pointing a forefinger at the young man’s breast.
Decoud, very calm, felt the wall behind the curtain with the back of his
head. Then, with his chin tilted well up, he smiled.
“Very well,” he agreed with the slightly weary nonchalance of a man well
used to these passages. “But is it perhaps that you have not discovered
yet what is the God of my worship? It was an easier task with our
Barrios.”
The priest suppressed a gesture of discouragement. “You believe neither
in stick nor stone,” he said.
“Nor bottle,” added Decoud without stirring. “Neither does the other of
your reverence’s confidants. I mean the Capataz of the Cargadores.
He does not drink. Your reading of my character does honour to your
perspicacity. But why call me a heathen?”
“True,” retorted the priest. “You are ten times worse. A miracle could
not convert you.”
“I certainly do not believe in miracles,” said Decoud, quietly. Father
Corbelan shrugged his high, broad shoulders doubtfully.
“A sort of Frenchman--godless--a materialist,” he pronounced slowly, as
if weighing the terms of a careful analysis. “Neither the son of his own
country nor of any other,” he continued, thoughtfully.
“Scarcely human, in fact,” Decoud commented under his breath, his head
at rest against the wall, his eyes gazing up at the ceiling.
“The victim of this faithless age,” Father Corbelan resumed in a deep
but subdued voice.
“But of some use as a journalist.” Decoud changed his pose and spoke
in a more animated tone. “Has your worship neglected to read the last
number of the Porvenir? I assure you it is just like the others. On
the general policy it continues to call Montero a gran’ bestia, and
stigmatize his brother, the guerrillero, for a combination of lackey
and spy. What could be more effective? In local affairs it urges the
Provincial Government to enlist bodily into the national army the band
of Hernandez the Robber--who is apparently the protege of the Church--or
at least of the Grand Vicar. Nothing could be more sound.”
The priest nodded and turned on the heels of his square-toed shoes with
big steel buckles. Again, with his hands clasped behind his back, he
paced to and fro, planting his feet firmly. When he swung about, the
skirt of his soutane was inflated slightly by the brusqueness of his
movements.
The great sala had been emptying itself slowly. When the Gefe Politico
rose to go, most of those still remaining stood up suddenly in sign of
respect, and Don Jose Avellanos stopped the rocking of his chair. But
the good-natured First Official made a deprecatory gesture, waved his
hand to Charles Gould, and went out discreetly.
In the comparative peace of the room the screaming “Monsieur
l’Administrateur” of the frail, hairy Frenchman seemed to acquire a
preternatural shrillness. The explorer of the Capitalist syndicate was
still enthusiastic. “Ten million dollars’ worth of copper practically in
sight, Monsieur l’Administrateur. Ten millions in sight! And a railway
coming--a railway! They will never believe my report. C’est trop beau.”
He fell a prey to a screaming ecstasy, in the midst of sagely nodding
heads, before Charles Gould’s imperturbable calm.
And only the priest continued his pacing, flinging round the skirt of
his soutane at each end of his beat. Decoud murmured to him ironically:
“Those gentlemen talk about their gods.”
Father Corbelan stopped short, looked at the journalist of Sulaco
fixedly for a moment, shrugged his shoulders slightly, and resumed his
plodding walk of an obstinate traveller.
And now the Europeans were dropping off from the group around Charles
Gould till the Administrador of the Great Silver Mine could be seen in
his whole lank length, from head to foot, left stranded by the
ebbing tide of his guests on the great square of carpet, as it were a
multi-coloured shoal of flowers and arabesques under his brown boots.
Father Corbelan approached the rocking-chair of Don Jose Avellanos.
“Come, brother,” he said, with kindly brusqueness and a touch of
relieved impatience a man may feel at the end of a perfectly useless
ceremony. “A la Casa! A la Casa! This has been all talk. Let us now go
and think and pray for guidance from Heaven.”
He rolled his black eyes upwards. By the side of the frail
diplomatist--the life and soul of the party--he seemed gigantic, with
a gleam of fanaticism in the glance. But the voice of the party, or,
rather, its mouthpiece, the “son Decoud” from Paris, turned journalist
for the sake of Antonia’s eyes, knew very well that it was not so, that
he was only a strenuous priest with one idea, feared by the women and
execrated by the men of the people. Martin Decoud, the dilettante in
life, imagined himself to derive an artistic pleasure from watching
the picturesque extreme of wrongheadedness into which an honest,
almost sacred, conviction may drive a man. “It is like madness. It must
be--because it’s self-destructive,” Decoud had said to himself often.
It seemed to him that every conviction, as soon as it became effective,
turned into that form of dementia the gods send upon those they wish to
destroy. But he enjoyed the bitter flavour of that example with the zest
of a connoisseur in the art of his choice. Those two men got on well
together, as if each had felt respectively that a masterful conviction,
as well as utter scepticism, may lead a man very far on the by-paths of
political action.
Don Jose obeyed the touch of the big hairy hand. Decoud followed out the
brothers-in-law. And there remained only one visitor in the vast empty
sala, bluishly hazy with tobacco smoke, a heavy-eyed, round-cheeked man,
with a drooping moustache, a hide merchant from Esmeralda, who had come
overland to Sulaco, riding with a few peons across the coast range.
He was very full of his journey, undertaken mostly for the purpose
of seeing the Senor Administrador of San Tome in relation to some
assistance he required in his hide-exporting business. He hoped to
enlarge it greatly now that the country was going to be settled. It was
going to be settled, he repeated several times, degrading by a strange,
anxious whine the sonority of the Spanish language, which he pattered
rapidly, like some sort of cringing jargon. A plain man could carry
on his little business now in the country, and even think of enlarging
it--with safety. Was it not so? He seemed to beg Charles Gould for a
confirmatory word, a grunt of assent, a simple nod even.
He could get nothing. His alarm increased, and in the pauses he would
dart his eyes here and there; then, loth to give up, he would branch
off into feeling allusion to the dangers of his journey. The audacious
Hernandez, leaving his usual haunts, had crossed the Campo of Sulaco,
and was known to be lurking in the ravines of the coast range.
Yesterday, when distant only a few hours from Sulaco, the hide merchant
and his servants had seen three men on the road arrested suspiciously,
with their horses’ heads together. Two of these rode off at once and
disappeared in a shallow quebrada to the left. “We stopped,” continued
the man from Esmeralda, “and I tried to hide behind a small bush. But
none of my mozos would go forward to find out what it meant, and the
third horseman seemed to be waiting for us to come up. It was no use. We
had been seen. So we rode slowly on, trembling. He let us pass--a man on
a grey horse with his hat down on his eyes--without a word of greeting;
but by-and-by we heard him galloping after us. We faced about, but that
did not seem to intimidate him. He rode up at speed, and touching
my foot with the toe of his boot, asked me for a cigar, with a
blood-curdling laugh. He did not seem armed, but when he put his hand
back to reach for the matches I saw an enormous revolver strapped to his
waist. I shuddered. He had very fierce whiskers, Don Carlos, and as he
did not offer to go on we dared not move. At last, blowing the smoke of
my cigar into the air through his nostrils, he said, ‘Senor, it would be
perhaps better for you if I rode behind your party. You are not very far
from Sulaco now. Go you with God.’ What would you? We went on. There
was no resisting him. He might have been Hernandez himself; though my
servant, who has been many times to Sulaco by sea, assured me that he
had recognized him very well for the Capataz of the Steamship Company’s
Cargadores. Later, that same evening, I saw that very man at the corner
of the Plaza talking to a girl, a Morenita, who stood by the stirrup
with her hand on the grey horse’s mane.”
“I assure you, Senor Hirsch,” murmured Charles Gould, “that you ran no
risk on this occasion.”
“That may be, senor, though I tremble yet. A most fierce man--to look
at. And what does it mean? A person employed by the Steamship Company
talking with salteadores--no less, senor; the other horsemen were
salteadores--in a lonely place, and behaving like a robber himself! A
cigar is nothing, but what was there to prevent him asking me for my
purse?”
“No, no, Senor Hirsch,” Charles Gould murmured, letting his glance
stray away a little vacantly from the round face, with its hooked beak
upturned towards him in an almost childlike appeal. “If it was the
Capataz de Cargadores you met--and there is no doubt, is there?--you
were perfectly safe.”
“Thank you. You are very good. A very fierce-looking man, Don Carlos. He
asked me for a cigar in a most familiar manner. What would have happened
if I had not had a cigar? I shudder yet. What business had he to be
talking with robbers in a lonely place?”
But Charles Gould, openly preoccupied now, gave not a sign, made no
sound. The impenetrability of the embodied Gould Concession had its
surface shades. To be dumb is merely a fatal affliction; but the King
of Sulaco had words enough to give him all the mysterious weight of a
taciturn force. His silences, backed by the power of speech, had as many
shades of significance as uttered words in the way of assent, of doubt,
of negation--even of simple comment. Some seemed to say plainly, “Think
it over”; others meant clearly, “Go ahead”; a simple, low “I see,” with
an affirmative nod, at the end of a patient listening half-hour was
the equivalent of a verbal contract, which men had learned to trust
implicitly, since behind it all there was the great San Tome mine, the
head and front of the material interests, so strong that it depended
on no man’s goodwill in the whole length and breadth of the Occidental
Province--that is, on no goodwill which it could not buy ten times
over. But to the little hook-nosed man from Esmeralda, anxious about
the export of hides, the silence of Charles Gould portended a failure.
Evidently this was no time for extending a modest man’s business. He
enveloped in a swift mental malediction the whole country, with all
its inhabitants, partisans of Ribiera and Montero alike; and there were
incipient tears in his mute anger at the thought of the innumerable
ox-hides going to waste upon the dreamy expanse of the Campo, with its
single palms rising like ships at sea within the perfect circle of the
horizon, its clumps of heavy timber motionless like solid islands
of leaves above the running waves of grass. There were hides there,
rotting, with no profit to anybody--rotting where they had been dropped
by men called away to attend the urgent necessities of political
revolutions. The practical, mercantile soul of Senor Hirsch rebelled
against all that foolishness, while he was taking a respectful but
disconcerted leave of the might and majesty of the San Tome mine in the
person of Charles Gould. He could not restrain a heart-broken murmur,
wrung out of his very aching heart, as it were.
“It is a great, great foolishness, Don Carlos, all this. The price of
hides in Hamburg is gone up--up. Of course the Ribierist Government will
do away with all that--when it gets established firmly. Meantime--”
He sighed.
“Yes, meantime,” repeated Charles Gould, inscrutably.
The other shrugged his shoulders. But he was not ready to go yet. There
was a little matter he would like to mention very much if permitted. It
appeared he had some good friends in Hamburg (he murmured the name
of the firm) who were very anxious to do business, in dynamite, he
explained. A contract for dynamite with the San Tome mine, and then,
perhaps, later on, other mines, which were sure to--The little man from
Esmeralda was ready to enlarge, but Charles interrupted him. It seemed
as though the patience of the Senor Administrador was giving way at
last.
“Senor Hirsch,” he said, “I have enough dynamite stored up at the
mountain to send it down crashing into the valley”--his voice rose a
little--“to send half Sulaco into the air if I liked.”
Charles Gould smiled at the round, startled eyes of the dealer in hides,
who was murmuring hastily, “Just so. Just so.” And now he was going.
It was impossible to do business in explosives with an Administrador so
well provided and so discouraging. He had suffered agonies in the saddle
and had exposed himself to the atrocities of the bandit Hernandez for
nothing at all. Neither hides nor dynamite--and the very shoulders of
the enterprising Israelite expressed dejection. At the door he bowed low
to the engineer-in-chief. But at the bottom of the stairs in the patio
he stopped short, with his podgy hand over his lips in an attitude of
meditative astonishment.
“What does he want to keep so much dynamite for?” he muttered. “And why
does he talk like this to me?”
The engineer-in-chief, looking in at the door of the empty sala, whence
the political tide had ebbed out to the last insignificant drop, nodded
familiarly to the master of the house, standing motionless like a tall
beacon amongst the deserted shoals of furniture.
“Good-night, I am going. Got my bike downstairs. The railway will know
where to go for dynamite should we get short at any time. We have done
cutting and chopping for a while now. We shall begin soon to blast our
way through.”
“Don’t come to me,” said Charles Gould, with perfect serenity. “I
shan’t have an ounce to spare for anybody. Not an ounce. Not for my own
brother, if I had a brother, and he were the engineer-in-chief of the
most promising railway in the world.”
“What’s that?” asked the engineer-in-chief, with equanimity.
“Unkindness?”
“No,” said Charles Gould, stolidly. “Policy.”
“Radical, I should think,” the engineer-in-chief observed from the
doorway.
“Is that the right name?” Charles Gould said, from the middle of the
room.
“I mean, going to the roots, you know,” the engineer explained, with an
air of enjoyment.
“Why, yes,” Charles pronounced, slowly. “The Gould Concession has struck
such deep roots in this country, in this province, in that gorge of the
mountains, that nothing but dynamite shall be allowed to dislodge it
from there. It’s my choice. It’s my last card to play.”
The engineer-in-chief whistled low. “A pretty game,” he said, with a
shade of discretion. “And have you told Holroyd of that extraordinary
trump card you hold in your hand?”
“Card only when it’s played; when it falls at the end of the game. Till
then you may call it a--a--”
“Weapon,” suggested the railway man.
“No. You may call it rather an argument,” corrected Charles Gould,
gently. “And that’s how I’ve presented it to Mr. Holroyd.”
“And what did he say to it?” asked the engineer, with undisguised
interest.
“He”--Charles Gould spoke after a slight pause--“he said something
about holding on like grim death and putting our trust in God. I should
imagine he must have been rather startled. But then”--pursued the
Administrador of the San Tome mine--“but then, he is very far away, you
know, and, as they say in this country, God is very high above.”
The engineer’s appreciative laugh died away down the stairs, where the
Madonna with the Child on her arm seemed to look after his shaking broad
back from her shallow niche.