The next day was quiet in the morning, except for the faint sound of
firing to the northward, in the direction of Los Hatos. Captain Mitchell
had listened to it from his balcony anxiously. The phrase, “In
my delicate position as the only consular agent then in the port,
everything, sir, everything was a just cause for anxiety,” had its place
in the more or less stereotyped relation of the “historical events”
which for the next few years was at the service of distinguished
strangers visiting Sulaco. The mention of the dignity and neutrality of
the flag, so difficult to preserve in his position, “right in the
thick of these events between the lawlessness of that piratical villain
Sotillo and the more regularly established but scarcely less atrocious
tyranny of his Excellency Don Pedro Montero,” came next in order.
Captain Mitchell was not the man to enlarge upon mere dangers much. But
he insisted that it was a memorable day. On that day, towards dusk,
he had seen “that poor fellow of mine--Nostromo. The sailor whom I
discovered, and, I may say, made, sir. The man of the famous ride to
Cayta, sir. An historical event, sir!”
Regarded by the O. S. N. Company as an old and faithful servant, Captain
Mitchell was allowed to attain the term of his usefulness in ease and
dignity at the head of the enormously extended service. The augmentation
of the establishment, with its crowds of clerks, an office in town, the
old office in the harbour, the division into departments--passenger,
cargo, lighterage, and so on--secured a greater leisure for his last
years in the regenerated Sulaco, the capital of the Occidental Republic.
Liked by the natives for his good nature and the formality of his
manner, self-important and simple, known for years as a “friend of our
country,” he felt himself a personality of mark in the town. Getting
up early for a turn in the market-place while the gigantic shadow of
Higuerota was still lying upon the fruit and flower stalls piled up
with masses of gorgeous colouring, attending easily to current affairs,
welcomed in houses, greeted by ladies on the Alameda, with his
entry into all the clubs and a footing in the Casa Gould, he led his
privileged old bachelor, man-about-town existence with great comfort and
solemnity. But on mail-boat days he was down at the Harbour Office at an
early hour, with his own gig, manned by a smart crew in white and
blue, ready to dash off and board the ship directly she showed her bows
between the harbour heads.
It would be into the Harbour Office that he would lead some privileged
passenger he had brought off in his own boat, and invite him to take a
seat for a moment while he signed a few papers. And Captain Mitchell,
seating himself at his desk, would keep on talking hospitably--
“There isn’t much time if you are to see everything in a day. We shall
be off in a moment. We’ll have lunch at the Amarilla Club--though I
belong also to the Anglo-American--mining engineers and business men,
don’t you know--and to the Mirliflores as well, a new club--English,
French, Italians, all sorts--lively young fellows mostly, who wanted
to pay a compliment to an old resident, sir. But we’ll lunch at the
Amarilla. Interest you, I fancy. Real thing of the country. Men of the
first families. The President of the Occidental Republic himself belongs
to it, sir. Fine old bishop with a broken nose in the patio. Remarkable
piece of statuary, I believe. Cavaliere Parrochetti--you know
Parrochetti, the famous Italian sculptor--was working here for two
years--thought very highly of our old bishop. . . . There! I am very
much at your service now.”
Proud of his experience, penetrated by the sense of historical
importance of men, events, and buildings, he talked pompously in jerky
periods, with slight sweeps of his short, thick arm, letting nothing
“escape the attention” of his privileged captive.
“Lot of building going on, as you observe. Before the Separation it
was a plain of burnt grass smothered in clouds of dust, with an ox-cart
track to our Jetty. Nothing more. This is the Harbour Gate. Picturesque,
is it not? Formerly the town stopped short there. We enter now the Calle
de la Constitucion. Observe the old Spanish houses. Great dignity. Eh? I
suppose it’s just as it was in the time of the Viceroys, except for the
pavement. Wood blocks now. Sulaco National Bank there, with the sentry
boxes each side of the gate. Casa Avellanos this side, with all the
ground-floor windows shuttered. A wonderful woman lives there--Miss
Avellanos--the beautiful Antonia. A character, sir! A historical woman!
Opposite--Casa Gould. Noble gateway. Yes, the Goulds of the original
Gould Concession, that all the world knows of now. I hold seventeen of
the thousand-dollar shares in the Consolidated San Tome mines. All the
poor savings of my lifetime, sir, and it will be enough to keep me in
comfort to the end of my days at home when I retire. I got in on the
ground-floor, you see. Don Carlos, great friend of mine. Seventeen
shares--quite a little fortune to leave behind one, too. I have a
niece--married a parson--most worthy man, incumbent of a small parish in
Sussex; no end of children. I was never married myself. A sailor should
exercise self-denial. Standing under that very gateway, sir, with some
young engineer-fellows, ready to defend that house where we had received
so much kindness and hospitality, I saw the first and last charge of
Pedrito’s horsemen upon Barrios’s troops, who had just taken the Harbour
Gate. They could not stand the new rifles brought out by that poor
Decoud. It was a murderous fire. In a moment the street became blocked
with a mass of dead men and horses. They never came on again.”
And all day Captain Mitchell would talk like this to his more or less
willing victim--
“The Plaza. I call it magnificent. Twice the area of Trafalgar Square.”
From the very centre, in the blazing sunshine, he pointed out the
buildings--
“The Intendencia, now President’s Palace--Cabildo, where the Lower
Chamber of Parliament sits. You notice the new houses on that side
of the Plaza? Compania Anzani, a great general store, like those
cooperative things at home. Old Anzani was murdered by the National
Guards in front of his safe. It was even for that specific crime that
the deputy Gamacho, commanding the Nationals, a bloodthirsty and
savage brute, was executed publicly by garrotte upon the sentence of
a court-martial ordered by Barrios. Anzani’s nephews converted the
business into a company. All that side of the Plaza had been burnt; used
to be colonnaded before. A terrible fire, by the light of which I saw
the last of the fighting, the llaneros flying, the Nationals throwing
their arms down, and the miners of San Tome, all Indians from the
Sierra, rolling by like a torrent to the sound of pipes and cymbals,
green flags flying, a wild mass of men in white ponchos and green hats,
on foot, on mules, on donkeys. Such a sight, sir, will never be seen
again. The miners, sir, had marched upon the town, Don Pepe leading on
his black horse, and their very wives in the rear on burros, screaming
encouragement, sir, and beating tambourines. I remember one of these
women had a green parrot seated on her shoulder, as calm as a bird
of stone. They had just saved their Senor Administrador; for Barrios,
though he ordered the assault at once, at night, too, would have been
too late. Pedrito Montero had Don Carlos led out to be shot--like his
uncle many years ago--and then, as Barrios said afterwards, ‘Sulaco
would not have been worth fighting for.’ Sulaco without the Concession
was nothing; and there were tons and tons of dynamite distributed all
over the mountain with detonators arranged, and an old priest, Father
Roman, standing by to annihilate the San Tome mine at the first news of
failure. Don Carlos had made up his mind not to leave it behind, and he
had the right men to see to it, too.”
Thus Captain Mitchell would talk in the middle of the Plaza, holding
over his head a white umbrella with a green lining; but inside the
cathedral, in the dim light, with a faint scent of incense floating in
the cool atmosphere, and here and there a kneeling female figure, black
or all white, with a veiled head, his lowered voice became solemn and
impressive.
“Here,” he would say, pointing to a niche in the wall of the dusky
aisle, “you see the bust of Don Jose Avellanos, ‘Patriot and Statesman,’
as the inscription says, ‘Minister to Courts of England and Spain, etc.,
etc., died in the woods of Los Hatos worn out with his lifelong struggle
for Right and Justice at the dawn of the New Era.’ A fair likeness.
Parrochetti’s work from some old photographs and a pencil sketch by Mrs.
Gould. I was well acquainted with that distinguished Spanish-American of
the old school, a true Hidalgo, beloved by everybody who knew him.
The marble medallion in the wall, in the antique style, representing
a veiled woman seated with her hands clasped loosely over her knees,
commemorates that unfortunate young gentleman who sailed out with
Nostromo on that fatal night, sir. See, ‘To the memory of Martin Decoud,
his betrothed Antonia Avellanos.’ Frank, simple, noble. There you have
that lady, sir, as she is. An exceptional woman. Those who thought she
would give way to despair were mistaken, sir. She has been blamed in
many quarters for not having taken the veil. It was expected of her. But
Dona Antonia is not the stuff they make nuns of. Bishop Corbelan, her
uncle, lives with her in the Corbelan town house. He is a fierce sort of
priest, everlastingly worrying the Government about the old Church lands
and convents. I believe they think a lot of him in Rome. Now let us go
to the Amarilla Club, just across the Plaza, to get some lunch.”
Directly outside the cathedral on the very top of the noble flight
of steps, his voice rose pompously, his arm found again its sweeping
gesture.
“Porvenir, over there on that first floor, above those French
plate-glass shop-fronts; our biggest daily. Conservative, or, rather, I
should say, Parliamentary. We have the Parliamentary party here of which
the actual Chief of the State, Don Juste Lopez, is the head; a very
sagacious man, I think. A first-rate intellect, sir. The Democratic
party in opposition rests mostly, I am sorry to say, on these
socialistic Italians, sir, with their secret societies, camorras, and
such-like. There are lots of Italians settled here on the railway lands,
dismissed navvies, mechanics, and so on, all along the trunk line. There
are whole villages of Italians on the Campo. And the natives, too, are
being drawn into these ways . . . American bar? Yes. And over there you
can see another. New Yorkers mostly frequent that one----Here we are at
the Amarilla. Observe the bishop at the foot of the stairs to the right
as we go in.”
And the lunch would begin and terminate its lavish and leisurely course
at a little table in the gallery, Captain Mitchell nodding, bowing,
getting up to speak for a moment to different officials in black
clothes, merchants in jackets, officers in uniform, middle-aged
caballeros from the Campo--sallow, little, nervous men, and fat, placid,
swarthy men, and Europeans or North Americans of superior standing,
whose faces looked very white amongst the majority of dark complexions
and black, glistening eyes.
Captain Mitchell would lie back in the chair, casting around looks of
satisfaction, and tender over the table a case full of thick cigars.
“Try a weed with your coffee. Local tobacco. The black coffee you get at
the Amarilla, sir, you don’t meet anywhere in the world. We get the bean
from a famous cafeteria in the foot-hills, whose owner sends three sacks
every year as a present to his fellow members in remembrance of the
fight against Gamacho’s Nationals, carried on from these very windows by
the caballeros. He was in town at the time, and took part, sir, to the
bitter end. It arrives on three mules--not in the common way, by rail;
no fear!--right into the patio, escorted by mounted peons, in charge of
the Mayoral of his estate, who walks upstairs, booted and spurred, and
delivers it to our committee formally with the words, ‘For the sake of
those fallen on the third of May.’ We call it Tres de Mayo coffee. Taste
it.”
Captain Mitchell, with an expression as though making ready to hear a
sermon in a church, would lift the tiny cup to his lips. And the nectar
would be sipped to the bottom during a restful silence in a cloud of
cigar smoke.
“Look at this man in black just going out,” he would begin, leaning
forward hastily. “This is the famous Hernandez, Minister of War. The
Times’ special correspondent, who wrote that striking series of letters
calling the Occidental Republic the ‘Treasure House of the World,’ gave
a whole article to him and the force he has organized--the renowned
Carabineers of the Campo.”
Captain Mitchell’s guest, staring curiously, would see a figure in a
long-tailed black coat walking gravely, with downcast eyelids in a long,
composed face, a brow furrowed horizontally, a pointed head, whose grey
hair, thin at the top, combed down carefully on all sides and rolled at
the ends, fell low on the neck and shoulders. This, then, was the famous
bandit of whom Europe had heard with interest. He put on a high-crowned
sombrero with a wide flat brim; a rosary of wooden beads was twisted
about his right wrist. And Captain Mitchell would proceed--
“The protector of the Sulaco refugees from the rage of Pedrito. As
general of cavalry with Barrios he distinguished himself at the storming
of Tonoro, where Senor Fuentes was killed with the last remnant of the
Monterists. He is the friend and humble servant of Bishop Corbelan.
Hears three Masses every day. I bet you he will step into the cathedral
to say a prayer or two on his way home to his siesta.”
He took several puffs at his cigar in silence; then, in his most
important manner, pronounced:
“The Spanish race, sir, is prolific of remarkable characters in every
rank of life. . . . I propose we go now into the billiard-room, which is
cool, for a quiet chat. There’s never anybody there till after five.
I could tell you episodes of the Separationist revolution that would
astonish you. When the great heat’s over, we’ll take a turn on the
Alameda.”
The programme went on relentless, like a law of Nature. The turn on the
Alameda was taken with slow steps and stately remarks.
“All the great world of Sulaco here, sir.” Captain Mitchell bowed right
and left with no end of formality; then with animation, “Dona Emilia,
Mrs. Gould’s carriage. Look. Always white mules. The kindest, most
gracious woman the sun ever shone upon. A great position, sir. A great
position. First lady in Sulaco--far before the President’s wife. And
worthy of it.” He took off his hat; then, with a studied change of tone,
added, negligently, that the man in black by her side, with a high white
collar and a scarred, snarly face, was Dr. Monygham, Inspector of State
Hospitals, chief medical officer of the Consolidated San Tome mines. “A
familiar of the house. Everlastingly there. No wonder. The Goulds made
him. Very clever man and all that, but I never liked him. Nobody does. I
can recollect him limping about the streets in a check shirt and native
sandals with a watermelon under his arm--all he would get to eat for the
day. A big-wig now, sir, and as nasty as ever. However . . . There’s no
doubt he played his part fairly well at the time. He saved us all from
the deadly incubus of Sotillo, where a more particular man might have
failed----”
His arm went up.
“The equestrian statue that used to stand on the pedestal over there
has been removed. It was an anachronism,” Captain Mitchell commented,
obscurely. “There is some talk of replacing it by a marble shaft
commemorative of Separation, with angels of peace at the four corners,
and bronze Justice holding an even balance, all gilt, on the top.
Cavaliere Parrochetti was asked to make a design, which you can see
framed under glass in the Municipal Sala. Names are to be engraved all
round the base. Well! They could do no better than begin with the name
of Nostromo. He has done for Separation as much as anybody else, and,”
added Captain Mitchell, “has got less than many others by it--when it
comes to that.” He dropped on to a stone seat under a tree, and tapped
invitingly at the place by his side. “He carried to Barrios the letters
from Sulaco which decided the General to abandon Cayta for a time, and
come back to our help here by sea. The transports were still in harbour
fortunately. Sir, I did not even know that my Capataz de Cargadores was
alive. I had no idea. It was Dr. Monygham who came upon him, by chance,
in the Custom House, evacuated an hour or two before by the wretched
Sotillo. I was never told; never given a hint, nothing--as if I were
unworthy of confidence. Monygham arranged it all. He went to the railway
yards, and got admission to the engineer-in-chief, who, for the sake of
the Goulds as much as for anything else, consented to let an engine
make a dash down the line, one hundred and eighty miles, with Nostromo
aboard. It was the only way to get him off. In the Construction Camp
at the railhead, he obtained a horse, arms, some clothing, and started
alone on that marvellous ride--four hundred miles in six days, through
a disturbed country, ending by the feat of passing through the Monterist
lines outside Cayta. The history of that ride, sir, would make a
most exciting book. He carried all our lives in his pocket. Devotion,
courage, fidelity, intelligence were not enough. Of course, he was
perfectly fearless and incorruptible. But a man was wanted that would
know how to succeed. He was that man, sir. On the fifth of May, being
practically a prisoner in the Harbour Office of my Company, I suddenly
heard the whistle of an engine in the railway yards, a quarter of a mile
away. I could not believe my ears. I made one jump on to the balcony,
and beheld a locomotive under a great head of steam run out of the yard
gates, screeching like mad, enveloped in a white cloud, and then, just
abreast of old Viola’s inn, check almost to a standstill. I made out,
sir, a man--I couldn’t tell who--dash out of the Albergo d’ltalia Una,
climb into the cab, and then, sir, that engine seemed positively to leap
clear of the house, and was gone in the twinkling of an eye. As you blow
a candle out, sir! There was a first-rate driver on the foot-plate, sir,
I can tell you. They were fired heavily upon by the National Guards in
Rincon and one other place. Fortunately the line had not been torn
up. In four hours they reached the Construction Camp. Nostromo had his
start. . . . The rest you know. You’ve got only to look round you. There
are people on this Alameda that ride in their carriages, or even are
alive at all to-day, because years ago I engaged a runaway Italian
sailor for a foreman of our wharf simply on the strength of his looks.
And that’s a fact. You can’t get over it, sir. On the seventeenth of
May, just twelve days after I saw the man from the Casa Viola get on the
engine, and wondered what it meant, Barrios’s transports were entering
this harbour, and the ‘Treasure House of the World,’ as The Times man
calls Sulaco in his book, was saved intact for civilization--for a
great future, sir. Pedrito, with Hernandez on the west, and the San Tome
miners pressing on the land gate, was not able to oppose the landing. He
had been sending messages to Sotillo for a week to join him. Had Sotillo
done so there would have been massacres and proscription that would have
left no man or woman of position alive. But that’s where Dr. Monygham
comes in. Sotillo, blind and deaf to everything, stuck on board his
steamer watching the dragging for silver, which he believed to be sunk
at the bottom of the harbour. They say that for the last three days he
was out of his mind raving and foaming with disappointment at getting
nothing, flying about the deck, and yelling curses at the boats with the
drags, ordering them in, and then suddenly stamping his foot and crying
out, ‘And yet it is there! I see it! I feel it!’
“He was preparing to hang Dr. Monygham (whom he had on board) at the end
of the after-derrick, when the first of Barrios’s transports, one of our
own ships at that, steamed right in, and ranging close alongside opened
a small-arm fire without as much preliminaries as a hail. It was the
completest surprise in the world, sir. They were too astounded at first
to bolt below. Men were falling right and left like ninepins. It’s a
miracle that Monygham, standing on the after-hatch with the rope already
round his neck, escaped being riddled through and through like a sieve.
He told me since that he had given himself up for lost, and kept on
yelling with all the strength of his lungs: ‘Hoist a white flag! Hoist
a white flag!’ Suddenly an old major of the Esmeralda regiment, standing
by, unsheathed his sword with a shriek: ‘Die, perjured traitor!’ and ran
Sotillo clean through the body, just before he fell himself shot through
the head.”
Captain Mitchell stopped for a while.
“Begad, sir! I could spin you a yarn for hours. But it’s time we started
off to Rincon. It would not do for you to pass through Sulaco and not
see the lights of the San Tome mine, a whole mountain ablaze like a
lighted palace above the dark Campo. It’s a fashionable drive. . . . But
let me tell you one little anecdote, sir; just to show you. A fortnight
or more later, when Barrios, declared Generalissimo, was gone in pursuit
of Pedrito away south, when the Provisional Junta, with Don Juste Lopez
at its head, had promulgated the new Constitution, and our Don Carlos
Gould was packing up his trunks bound on a mission to San Francisco
and Washington (the United States, sir, were the first great power to
recognize the Occidental Republic)--a fortnight later, I say, when we
were beginning to feel that our heads were safe on our shoulders, if
I may express myself so, a prominent man, a large shipper by our line,
came to see me on business, and, says he, the first thing: ‘I say,
Captain Mitchell, is that fellow’ (meaning Nostromo) ‘still the Capataz
of your Cargadores or not?’ ‘What’s the matter?’ says I. ‘Because, if
he is, then I don’t mind; I send and receive a good lot of cargo by your
ships; but I have observed him several days loafing about the wharf,
and just now he stopped me as cool as you please, with a request for a
cigar. Now, you know, my cigars are rather special, and I can’t get them
so easily as all that.’ ‘I hope you stretched a point,’ I said,
very gently. ‘Why, yes. But it’s a confounded nuisance. The fellow’s
everlastingly cadging for smokes.’ Sir, I turned my eyes away, and then
asked, ‘Weren’t you one of the prisoners in the Cabildo?’ ‘You know very
well I was, and in chains, too,’ says he. ‘And under a fine of fifteen
thousand dollars?’ He coloured, sir, because it got about that he
fainted from fright when they came to arrest him, and then behaved
before Fuentes in a manner to make the very policianos, who had dragged
him there by the hair of his head, smile at his cringing. ‘Yes,’ he
says, in a sort of shy way. ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, nothing. You stood to lose a
tidy bit,’ says I, ‘even if you saved your life. . . . But what can I do
for you?’ He never even saw the point. Not he. And that’s how the world
wags, sir.”
He rose a little stiffly, and the drive to Rincon would be taken with
only one philosophical remark, uttered by the merciless cicerone, with
his eyes fixed upon the lights of San Tome, that seemed suspended in the
dark night between earth and heaven.
“A great power, this, for good and evil, sir. A great power.”
And the dinner of the Mirliflores would be eaten, excellent as to
cooking, and leaving upon the traveller’s mind an impression that there
were in Sulaco many pleasant, able young men with salaries apparently
too large for their discretion, and amongst them a few, mostly
Anglo-Saxon, skilled in the art of, as the saying is, “taking a rise”
out of his kind host.
With a rapid, jingling drive to the harbour in a two-wheeled machine
(which Captain Mitchell called a curricle) behind a fleet and scraggy
mule beaten all the time by an obviously Neapolitan driver, the cycle
would be nearly closed before the lighted-up offices of the O. S. N.
Company, remaining open so late because of the steamer. Nearly--but not
quite.
“Ten o’clock. Your ship won’t be ready to leave till half-past twelve,
if by then. Come in for a brandy-and-soda and one more cigar.”
And in the superintendent’s private room the privileged passenger by the
Ceres, or Juno, or Pallas, stunned and as it were annihilated mentally
by a sudden surfeit of sights, sounds, names, facts, and complicated
information imperfectly apprehended, would listen like a tired child
to a fairy tale; would hear a voice, familiar and surprising in its
pompousness, tell him, as if from another world, how there was “in this
very harbour” an international naval demonstration, which put an end to
the Costaguana-Sulaco War. How the United States cruiser, Powhattan, was
the first to salute the Occidental flag--white, with a wreath of green
laurel in the middle encircling a yellow amarilla flower. Would hear how
General Montero, in less than a month after proclaiming himself Emperor
of Costaguana, was shot dead (during a solemn and public distribution
of orders and crosses) by a young artillery officer, the brother of his
then mistress.
“The abominable Pedrito, sir, fled the country,” the voice would say.
And it would continue: “A captain of one of our ships told me lately
that he recognized Pedrito the Guerrillero, arrayed in purple slippers
and a velvet smoking-cap with a gold tassel, keeping a disorderly house
in one of the southern ports.”
“Abominable Pedrito! Who the devil was he?” would wonder the
distinguished bird of passage hovering on the confines of waking and
sleep with resolutely open eyes and a faint but amiable curl upon his
lips, from between which stuck out the eighteenth or twentieth cigar of
that memorable day.
“He appeared to me in this very room like a haunting ghost,
sir”--Captain Mitchell was talking of his Nostromo with true warmth of
feeling and a touch of wistful pride. “You may imagine, sir, what an
effect it produced on me. He had come round by sea with Barrios, of
course. And the first thing he told me after I became fit to hear him
was that he had picked up the lighter’s boat floating in the gulf!
He seemed quite overcome by the circumstance. And a remarkable enough
circumstance it was, when you remember that it was then sixteen days
since the sinking of the silver. At once I could see he was another man.
He stared at the wall, sir, as if there had been a spider or something
running about there. The loss of the silver preyed on his mind. The
first thing he asked me about was whether Dona Antonia had heard yet of
Decoud’s death. His voice trembled. I had to tell him that Dona Antonia,
as a matter of fact, was not back in town yet. Poor girl! And just as I
was making ready to ask him a thousand questions, with a sudden, ‘Pardon
me, senor,’ he cleared out of the office altogether. I did not see him
again for three days. I was terribly busy, you know. It seems that he
wandered about in and out of the town, and on two nights turned up
to sleep in the baracoons of the railway people. He seemed absolutely
indifferent to what went on. I asked him on the wharf, ‘When are you
going to take hold again, Nostromo? There will be plenty of work for the
Cargadores presently.’
“‘Senor,’ says he, looking at me in a slow, inquisitive manner, ‘would
it surprise you to hear that I am too tired to work just yet? And what
work could I do now? How can I look my Cargadores in the face after
losing a lighter?’
“I begged him not to think any more about the silver, and he smiled. A
smile that went to my heart, sir. ‘It was no mistake,’ I told him. ‘It
was a fatality. A thing that could not be helped.’ ‘Si, si!” he said,
and turned away. I thought it best to leave him alone for a bit to get
over it. Sir, it took him years really, to get over it. I was present
at his interview with Don Carlos. I must say that Gould is rather a cold
man. He had to keep a tight hand on his feelings, dealing with thieves
and rascals, in constant danger of ruin for himself and wife for so many
years, that it had become a second nature. They looked at each other for
a long time. Don Carlos asked what he could do for him, in his quiet,
reserved way.
“‘My name is known from one end of Sulaco to the other,’ he said, as
quiet as the other. ‘What more can you do for me?’ That was all that
passed on that occasion. Later, however, there was a very fine coasting
schooner for sale, and Mrs. Gould and I put our heads together to get
her bought and presented to him. It was done, but he paid all the price
back within the next three years. Business was booming all along this
seaboard, sir. Moreover, that man always succeeded in everything
except in saving the silver. Poor Dona Antonia, fresh from her terrible
experiences in the woods of Los Hatos, had an interview with him, too.
Wanted to hear about Decoud: what they said, what they did, what they
thought up to the last on that fatal night. Mrs. Gould told me his
manner was perfect for quietness and sympathy. Miss Avellanos burst into
tears only when he told her how Decoud had happened to say that his plan
would be a glorious success. . . . And there’s no doubt, sir, that it
is. It is a success.”
The cycle was about to close at last. And while the privileged
passenger, shivering with the pleasant anticipations of his berth,
forgot to ask himself, “What on earth Decoud’s plan could be?” Captain
Mitchell was saying, “Sorry we must part so soon. Your intelligent
interest made this a pleasant day to me. I shall see you now on board.
You had a glimpse of the ‘Treasure House of the World.’ A very good name
that.” And the coxswain’s voice at the door, announcing that the gig was
ready, closed the cycle.
Nostromo had, indeed, found the lighter’s boat, which he had left on
the Great Isabel with Decoud, floating empty far out in the gulf. He was
then on the bridge of the first of Barrios’s transports, and within an
hour’s steaming from Sulaco. Barrios, always delighted with a feat of
daring and a good judge of courage, had taken a great liking to the
Capataz. During the passage round the coast the General kept Nostromo
near his person, addressing him frequently in that abrupt and boisterous
manner which was the sign of his high favour.
Nostromo’s eyes were the first to catch, broad on the bow, the tiny,
elusive dark speck, which, alone with the forms of the Three Isabels
right ahead, appeared on the flat, shimmering emptiness of the gulf.
There are times when no fact should be neglected as insignificant;
a small boat so far from the land might have had some meaning worth
finding out. At a nod of consent from Barrios the transport swept out
of her course, passing near enough to ascertain that no one manned the
little cockle-shell. It was merely a common small boat gone adrift with
her oars in her. But Nostromo, to whose mind Decoud had been insistently
present for days, had long before recognized with excitement the dinghy
of the lighter.
There could be no question of stopping to pick up that thing. Every
minute of time was momentous with the lives and futures of a whole town.
The head of the leading ship, with the General on board, fell off to her
course. Behind her, the fleet of transports, scattered haphazard over a
mile or so in the offing, like the finish of an ocean race, pressed on,
all black and smoking on the western sky.
“Mi General,” Nostromo’s voice rang out loud, but quiet, from behind a
group of officers, “I should like to save that little boat. Por Dios, I
know her. She belongs to my Company.”
“And, por Dios,” guffawed Barrios, in a noisy, good-humoured voice, “you
belong to me. I am going to make you a captain of cavalry directly we
get within sight of a horse again.”
“I can swim far better than I can ride, mi General,” cried Nostromo,
pushing through to the rail with a set stare in his eyes. “Let me----”
“Let you? What a conceited fellow that is,” bantered the General,
jovially, without even looking at him. “Let him go! Ha! ha! ha! He wants
me to admit that we cannot take Sulaco without him! Ha! ha! ha! Would
you like to swim off to her, my son?”
A tremendous shout from one end of the ship to the other stopped his
guffaw. Nostromo had leaped overboard; and his black head bobbed up far
away already from the ship. The General muttered an appalled “Cielo!
Sinner that I am!” in a thunderstruck tone. One anxious glance was
enough to show him that Nostromo was swimming with perfect ease; and
then he thundered terribly, “No! no! We shall not stop to pick up this
impertinent fellow. Let him drown--that mad Capataz.”
Nothing short of main force would have kept Nostromo from leaping
overboard. That empty boat, coming out to meet him mysteriously, as if
rowed by an invisible spectre, exercised the fascination of some sign,
of some warning, seemed to answer in a startling and enigmatic way the
persistent thought of a treasure and of a man’s fate. He would have
leaped if there had been death in that half-mile of water. It was as
smooth as a pond, and for some reason sharks are unknown in the Placid
Gulf, though on the other side of the Punta Mala the coastline swarms
with them.
The Capataz seized hold of the stern and blew with force. A queer, faint
feeling had come over him while he swam. He had got rid of his boots and
coat in the water. He hung on for a time, regaining his breath. In
the distance the transports, more in a bunch now, held on straight for
Sulaco, with their air of friendly contest, of nautical sport, of
a regatta; and the united smoke of their funnels drove like a thin,
sulphurous fogbank right over his head. It was his daring, his courage,
his act that had set these ships in motion upon the sea, hurrying on
to save the lives and fortunes of the Blancos, the taskmasters of the
people; to save the San Tome mine; to save the children.
With a vigorous and skilful effort he clambered over the stern. The
very boat! No doubt of it; no doubt whatever. It was the dinghy of the
lighter No. 3--the dinghy left with Martin Decoud on the Great Isabel so
that he should have some means to help himself if nothing could be done
for him from the shore. And here she had come out to meet him empty
and inexplicable. What had become of Decoud? The Capataz made a minute
examination. He looked for some scratch, for some mark, for some sign.
All he discovered was a brown stain on the gunwale abreast of the
thwart. He bent his face over it and rubbed hard with his finger. Then
he sat down in the stern sheets, passive, with his knees close together
and legs aslant.
Streaming from head to foot, with his hair and whiskers hanging lank
and dripping and a lustreless stare fixed upon the bottom boards, the
Capataz of the Sulaco Cargadores resembled a drowned corpse come up from
the bottom to idle away the sunset hour in a small boat. The excitement
of his adventurous ride, the excitement of the return in time,
of achievement, of success, all this excitement centred round the
associated ideas of the great treasure and of the only other man who
knew of its existence, had departed from him. To the very last moment
he had been cudgelling his brains as to how he could manage to visit
the Great Isabel without loss of time and undetected. For the idea of
secrecy had come to be connected with the treasure so closely that even
to Barrios himself he had refrained from mentioning the existence of
Decoud and of the silver on the island. The letters he carried to the
General, however, made brief mention of the loss of the lighter, as
having its bearing upon the situation in Sulaco. In the circumstances,
the one-eyed tiger-slayer, scenting battle from afar, had not wasted his
time in making inquiries from the messenger. In fact, Barrios, talking
with Nostromo, assumed that both Don Martin Decoud and the ingots of San
Tome were lost together, and Nostromo, not questioned directly, had kept
silent, under the influence of some indefinable form of resentment and
distrust. Let Don Martin speak of everything with his own lips--was what
he told himself mentally.
And now, with the means of gaining the Great Isabel thrown thus in his
way at the earliest possible moment, his excitement had departed, as
when the soul takes flight leaving the body inert upon an earth it knows
no more. Nostromo did not seem to know the gulf. For a long time even
his eyelids did not flutter once upon the glazed emptiness of his stare.
Then slowly, without a limb having stirred, without a twitch of muscle
or quiver of an eyelash, an expression, a living expression came upon
the still features, deep thought crept into the empty stare--as if an
outcast soul, a quiet, brooding soul, finding that untenanted body in
its way, had come in stealthily to take possession.
The Capataz frowned: and in the immense stillness of sea, islands, and
coast, of cloud forms on the sky and trails of light upon the water, the
knitting of that brow had the emphasis of a powerful gesture. Nothing
else budged for a long time; then the Capataz shook his head and again
surrendered himself to the universal repose of all visible things.
Suddenly he seized the oars, and with one movement made the dinghy spin
round, head-on to the Great Isabel. But before he began to pull he bent
once more over the brown stain on the gunwale.
“I know that thing,” he muttered to himself, with a sagacious jerk of
the head. “That’s blood.”
His stroke was long, vigorous, and steady. Now and then he looked
over his shoulder at the Great Isabel, presenting its low cliff to his
anxious gaze like an impenetrable face. At last the stem touched the
strand. He flung rather than dragged the boat up the little beach. At
once, turning his back upon the sunset, he plunged with long strides
into the ravine, making the water of the stream spurt and fly upwards at
every step, as if spurning its shallow, clear, murmuring spirit with his
feet. He wanted to save every moment of daylight.
A mass of earth, grass, and smashed bushes had fallen down very
naturally from above upon the cavity under the leaning tree. Decoud had
attended to the concealment of the silver as instructed, using the spade
with some intelligence. But Nostromo’s half-smile of approval changed
into a scornful curl of the lip by the sight of the spade itself flung
there in full view, as if in utter carelessness or sudden panic, giving
away the whole thing. Ah! They were all alike in their folly, these
hombres finos that invented laws and governments and barren tasks for
the people.
The Capataz picked up the spade, and with the feel of the handle in his
palm the desire of having a look at the horse-hide boxes of treasure
came upon him suddenly. In a very few strokes he uncovered the edges and
corners of several; then, clearing away more earth, became aware that
one of them had been slashed with a knife.
He exclaimed at that discovery in a stifled voice, and dropped on his
knees with a look of irrational apprehension over one shoulder, then
over the other. The stiff hide had closed, and he hesitated before he
pushed his hand through the long slit and felt the ingots inside. There
they were. One, two, three. Yes, four gone. Taken away. Four ingots.
But who? Decoud? Nobody else. And why? For what purpose? For what cursed
fancy? Let him explain. Four ingots carried off in a boat, and--blood!
In the face of the open gulf, the sun, clear, unclouded, unaltered,
plunged into the waters in a grave and untroubled mystery of
self-immolation consummated far from all mortal eyes, with an infinite
majesty of silence and peace. Four ingots short!--and blood!
The Capataz got up slowly.
“He might simply have cut his hand,” he muttered. “But, then----”
He sat down on the soft earth, unresisting, as if he had been chained
to the treasure, his drawn-up legs clasped in his hands with an air of
hopeless submission, like a slave set on guard. Once only he lifted his
head smartly: the rattle of hot musketry fire had reached his ears, like
pouring from on high a stream of dry peas upon a drum. After listening
for a while, he said, half aloud--
“He will never come back to explain.”
And he lowered his head again.
“Impossible!” he muttered, gloomily.
The sounds of firing died out. The loom of a great conflagration in
Sulaco flashed up red above the coast, played on the clouds at the head
of the gulf, seemed to touch with a ruddy and sinister reflection the
forms of the Three Isabels. He never saw it, though he raised his head.
“But, then, I cannot know,” he pronounced, distinctly, and remained
silent and staring for hours.
He could not know. Nobody was to know. As might have been supposed, the
end of Don Martin Decoud never became a subject of speculation for any
one except Nostromo. Had the truth of the facts been known, there would
always have remained the question. Why? Whereas the version of his death
at the sinking of the lighter had no uncertainty of motive. The young
apostle of Separation had died striving for his idea by an ever-lamented
accident. But the truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known
but to few on this earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to
withstand. The brilliant Costaguanero of the boulevards had died from
solitude and want of faith in himself and others.
For some good and valid reasons beyond mere human comprehension, the
sea-birds of the gulf shun the Isabels. The rocky head of Azuera is
their haunt, whose stony levels and chasms resound with their wild
and tumultuous clamour as if they were for ever quarrelling over the
legendary treasure.
At the end of his first day on the Great Isabel, Decoud, turning in his
lair of coarse grass, under the shade of a tree, said to himself--
“I have not seen as much as one single bird all day.”
And he had not heard a sound, either, all day but that one now of his
own muttering voice. It had been a day of absolute silence--the first
he had known in his life. And he had not slept a wink. Not for all these
wakeful nights and the days of fighting, planning, talking; not for all
that last night of danger and hard physical toil upon the gulf, had he
been able to close his eyes for a moment. And yet from sunrise to sunset
he had been lying prone on the ground, either on his back or on his
face.
He stretched himself, and with slow steps descended into the gully to
spend the night by the side of the silver. If Nostromo returned--as he
might have done at any moment--it was there that he would look first;
and night would, of course, be the proper time for an attempt to
communicate. He remembered with profound indifference that he had not
eaten anything yet since he had been left alone on the island.
He spent the night open-eyed, and when the day broke he ate something
with the same indifference. The brilliant “Son Decoud,” the spoiled
darling of the family, the lover of Antonia and journalist of Sulaco,
was not fit to grapple with himself single-handed. Solitude from mere
outward condition of existence becomes very swiftly a state of soul in
which the affectations of irony and scepticism have no place. It takes
possession of the mind, and drives forth the thought into the exile of
utter unbelief. After three days of waiting for the sight of some
human face, Decoud caught himself entertaining a doubt of his own
individuality. It had merged into the world of cloud and water, of
natural forces and forms of nature. In our activity alone do we find
the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the
whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part. Decoud lost all
belief in the reality of his action past and to come. On the fifth day
an immense melancholy descended upon him palpably. He resolved not to
give himself up to these people in Sulaco, who had beset him, unreal and
terrible, like jibbering and obscene spectres. He saw himself struggling
feebly in their midst, and Antonia, gigantic and lovely like an
allegorical statue, looking on with scornful eyes at his weakness.
Not a living being, not a speck of distant sail, appeared within
the range of his vision; and, as if to escape from this solitude,
he absorbed himself in his melancholy. The vague consciousness of a
misdirected life given up to impulses whose memory left a bitter taste
in his mouth was the first moral sentiment of his manhood. But at the
same time he felt no remorse. What should he regret? He had recognized
no other virtue than intelligence, and had erected passions into duties.
Both his intelligence and his passion were swallowed up easily in this
great unbroken solitude of waiting without faith. Sleeplessness had
robbed his will of all energy, for he had not slept seven hours in the
seven days. His sadness was the sadness of a sceptical mind. He beheld
the universe as a succession of incomprehensible images. Nostromo was
dead. Everything had failed ignominiously. He no longer dared to think
of Antonia. She had not survived. But if she survived he could not face
her. And all exertion seemed senseless.
On the tenth day, after a night spent without even dozing off once (it
had occurred to him that Antonia could not possibly have ever loved
a being so impalpable as himself), the solitude appeared like a great
void, and the silence of the gulf like a tense, thin cord to which he
hung suspended by both hands, without fear, without surprise, without
any sort of emotion whatever. Only towards the evening, in the
comparative relief of coolness, he began to wish that this cord would
snap. He imagined it snapping with a report as of a pistol--a sharp,
full crack. And that would be the end of him. He contemplated that
eventuality with pleasure, because he dreaded the sleepless nights in
which the silence, remaining unbroken in the shape of a cord to which he
hung with both hands, vibrated with senseless phrases, always the same
but utterly incomprehensible, about Nostromo, Antonia, Barrios, and
proclamations mingled into an ironical and senseless buzzing. In the
daytime he could look at the silence like a still cord stretched to
breaking-point, with his life, his vain life, suspended to it like a
weight.
“I wonder whether I would hear it snap before I fell,” he asked himself.
The sun was two hours above the horizon when he got up, gaunt, dirty,
white-faced, and looked at it with his red-rimmed eyes. His limbs obeyed
him slowly, as if full of lead, yet without tremor; and the effect
of that physical condition gave to his movements an unhesitating,
deliberate dignity. He acted as if accomplishing some sort of rite. He
descended into the gully; for the fascination of all that silver, with
its potential power, survived alone outside of himself. He picked up the
belt with the revolver, that was lying there, and buckled it round his
waist. The cord of silence could never snap on the island. It must let
him fall and sink into the sea, he thought. And sink! He was looking at
the loose earth covering the treasure. In the sea! His aspect was that
of a somnambulist. He lowered himself down on his knees slowly and went
on grubbing with his fingers with industrious patience till he uncovered
one of the boxes. Without a pause, as if doing some work done many
times before, he slit it open and took four ingots, which he put in his
pockets. He covered up the exposed box again and step by step came out
of the gully. The bushes closed after him with a swish.
It was on the third day of his solitude that he had dragged the dinghy
near the water with an idea of rowing away somewhere, but had desisted
partly at the whisper of lingering hope that Nostromo would return,
partly from conviction of utter uselessness of all effort. Now she
wanted only a slight shove to be set afloat. He had eaten a little every
day after the first, and had some muscular strength left yet. Taking up
the oars slowly, he pulled away from the cliff of the Great Isabel, that
stood behind him warm with sunshine, as if with the heat of life, bathed
in a rich light from head to foot as if in a radiance of hope and joy.
He pulled straight towards the setting sun. When the gulf had grown
dark, he ceased rowing and flung the sculls in. The hollow clatter they
made in falling was the loudest noise he had ever heard in his life. It
was a revelation. It seemed to recall him from far away, Actually the
thought, “Perhaps I may sleep to-night,” passed through his mind. But he
did not believe it. He believed in nothing; and he remained sitting on
the thwart.
The dawn from behind the mountains put a gleam into his unwinking eyes.
After a clear daybreak the sun appeared splendidly above the peaks of
the range. The great gulf burst into a glitter all around the boat; and
in this glory of merciless solitude the silence appeared again before
him, stretched taut like a dark, thin string.
His eyes looked at it while, without haste, he shifted his seat from
the thwart to the gunwale. They looked at it fixedly, while his hand,
feeling about his waist, unbuttoned the flap of the leather case, drew
the revolver, cocked it, brought it forward pointing at his breast,
pulled the trigger, and, with convulsive force, sent the still-smoking
weapon hurtling through the air. His eyes looked at it while he fell
forward and hung with his breast on the gunwale and the fingers of his
right hand hooked under the thwart. They looked----
“It is done,” he stammered out, in a sudden flow of blood. His last
thought was: “I wonder how that Capataz died.” The stiffness of the
fingers relaxed, and the lover of Antonia Avellanos rolled overboard
without having heard the cord of silence snap in the solitude of the
Placid Gulf, whose glittering surface remained untroubled by the fall of
his body.
A victim of the disillusioned weariness which is the retribution meted
out to intellectual audacity, the brilliant Don Martin Decoud, weighted
by the bars of San Tome silver, disappeared without a trace, swallowed
up in the immense indifference of things. His sleepless, crouching
figure was gone from the side of the San Tome silver; and for a time the
spirits of good and evil that hover near every concealed treasure of
the earth might have thought that this one had been forgotten by all
mankind. Then, after a few days, another form appeared striding away
from the setting sun to sit motionless and awake in the narrow black
gully all through the night, in nearly the same pose, in the same place
in which had sat that other sleepless man who had gone away for ever so
quietly in a small boat, about the time of sunset. And the spirits of
good and evil that hover about a forbidden treasure understood well that
the silver of San Tome was provided now with a faithful and lifelong
slave.
The magnificent Capataz de Cargadores, victim of the disenchanted vanity
which is the reward of audacious action, sat in the weary pose of a
hunted outcast through a night of sleeplessness as tormenting as any
known to Decoud, his companion in the most desperate affair of his life.
And he wondered how Decoud had died. But he knew the part he had
played himself. First a woman, then a man, abandoned both in their last
extremity, for the sake of this accursed treasure. It was paid for by
a soul lost and by a vanished life. The blank stillness of awe was
succeeded by a gust of immense pride. There was no one in the world but
Gian’ Battista Fidanza, Capataz de Cargadores, the incorruptible and
faithful Nostromo, to pay such a price.
He had made up his mind that nothing should be allowed now to rob him of
his bargain. Nothing. Decoud had died. But how? That he was dead he had
not a shadow of a doubt. But four ingots? . . . What for? Did he mean to
come for more--some other time?
The treasure was putting forth its latent power. It troubled the clear
mind of the man who had paid the price. He was sure that Decoud was
dead. The island seemed full of that whisper. Dead! Gone! And he
caught himself listening for the swish of bushes and the splash of the
footfalls in the bed of the brook. Dead! The talker, the novio of Dona
Antonia!
“Ha!” he murmured, with his head on his knees, under the livid clouded
dawn breaking over the liberated Sulaco and upon the gulf as gray as
ashes. “It is to her that he will fly. To her that he will fly!”
And four ingots! Did he take them in revenge, to cast a spell, like the
angry woman who had prophesied remorse and failure, and yet had laid
upon him the task of saving the children? Well, he had saved the
children. He had defeated the spell of poverty and starvation. He had
done it all alone--or perhaps helped by the devil. Who cared? He had
done it, betrayed as he was, and saving by the same stroke the San Tome
mine, which appeared to him hateful and immense, lording it by its vast
wealth over the valour, the toil, the fidelity of the poor, over war and
peace, over the labours of the town, the sea, and the Campo.
The sun lit up the sky behind the peaks of the Cordillera. The Capataz
looked down for a time upon the fall of loose earth, stones, and smashed
bushes, concealing the hiding-place of the silver.
“I must grow rich very slowly,” he meditated, aloud.