IT WAS part of what Decoud would have called his
sane materialism that he did not believe in the possibility
of friendship between man and woman.
The one exception he allowed confirmed, he maintained,
that absolute rule. Friendship was possible
between brother and sister, meaning by friendship the
frank unreserve, as before another human being, of
thoughts and sensations; all the objectless and necessary
sincerity of one's innermost life trying to react
upon the profound sympathies of another existence.
His favourite sister, the handsome, slightly arbitrary
and resolute angel, ruling the father and mother Decoud
in the first-floor apartments of a very fine Parisian
house, was the recipient of Martin Decoud's confidences
as to his thoughts, actions, purposes, doubts,
and even failures. . . .
"Prepare our little circle in Paris for the birth of
another South American Republic. One more or less,
what does it matter? They may come into the world
like evil flowers on a hotbed of rotten institutions; but
the seed of this one has germinated in your brother's
brain, and that will be enough for your devoted assent.
I am writing this to you by the light of a single
candle, in a sort of inn, near the harbour, kept by an
Italian called Viola, a protégé of Mrs. Gould. The whole building, which, for all I know, may have been contrived by a Conquistador farmer of the pearl fishery three hundred years ago, is perfectly silent. So is the plain between the town and the harbour; silent, -224- but not so dark as the house, because the pickets of Italian workmen guarding the railway have lighted little fires all along the line. It was not so quiet around here yesterday. We had an awful riot -- a sudden outbreak of the populace, which was not suppressed till late to- day. Its object, no doubt, was loot, and that was defeated, as you may have learned already from the cablegram sent via San Francisco and New York last night, when the cables were still open. You have read already there that the energetic action of the Europeans of the railway has saved the town from destruction, and you may believe that. I wrote out the cable myself. We have no Reuter's agency man here. I have also fired at the mob from the windows of the club, in company with some other young men of position. Our object was to keep the Calle de la Constitucion clear for the exodus of the ladies and children, who have taken refuge on board a couple of cargo ships now in the harbour here. That was yesterday. You should also have learned from the cable that the missing President, Ribiera, who had disappeared after the battle of Sta. Marta, has turned up here in Sulaco by one of those strange coincidences that are almost incredible, riding on a lame mule into the very midst of the street fighting. It appears that he had fled, in company of a muleteer called Bonifacio, across the mountains from the threats of Montero into the arms of an enraged mob.
"The Capataz of Cargadores, that Italian sailor of
whom I have written to you before, has saved him from
an ignoble death. That man seems to have a particular
talent for being on the spot whenever there is something
picturesque to be done.
"He was with me at four o'clock in the morning at the
offices of the Porvenir, where he had turned up so early -225- in order to warn me of the coming trouble, and also to assure me that he would keep his Cargadores on the side of order. When the full daylight came we were looking together at the crowd on foot and on horseback, demonstrating on the Plaza and shying stones at the windows of the Intendencia. Nostromo (that is the name they call him by here) was pointing out to me his Cargadores interspersed in the mob.
"The sun shines late upon Sulaco, for it has first to
climb above the mountains. In that clear morning
light, brighter than twilight, Nostromo saw right across
the vast Plaza, at the end of the street beyond the
cathedral, a mounted man apparently in difficulties with
a yelling knot of leperos. At once he said to me, 'That's
a stranger. What is it they are doing to him?' Then
he took out the silver whistle he is in the habit of using
on the wharf (this man seems to disdain the use of any
metal less precious than silver) and blew into it twice,
evidently a preconcerted signal for his Cargadores. He
ran out immediately, and they rallied round him. I
ran out, too, but was too late to follow them and help
in the rescue of the stranger, whose animal had fallen.
I was set upon at once as a hated aristocrat, and was
only too glad to get into the club, where Don Jaime
Berges (you may remember him visiting at our house
in Paris some three years ago) thrust a sporting gun into
my hands. They were already firing from the windows.
There were little heaps of cartridges lying about on the
open card-tables. I remember a couple of overturned
chairs, some bottles rolling on the floor amongst the
packs of cards scattered suddenly as the caballeros
rose from their game to open fire upon the mob. Most
of the young men had spent the night at the club in the
expectation of some such disturbance. In two of the
candelabra, on the consoles, the candles were burning
"I didn't learn till later in the afternoon whom it was
that Nostromo, with his Cargadores and some Italian
workmen as well, had managed to save from those
drunken rascals. That man has a peculiar talent when
anything striking to the imagination has to be done. I
made that remark to him afterwards when we met after
some sort of order had been restored in the town, and
the answer he made rather surprised me. He said quite
moodily, 'And how much do I get for that, señor?'
Then it dawned upon me that perhaps this man's vanity
has been satiated by the adulation of the common
people and the confidence of his superiors!"
Decoud paused to light a cigarette, then, with his
head still over his writing, he blew a cloud of smoke,
which seemed to rebound from the paper. He took
up the pencil again.
"That was yesterday evening on the Plaza, while he
sat on the steps of the cathedral, his hands between his
knees, holding the bridle of his famous silver-grey mare.
He had led his body of Cargadores splendidly all day
"Their last move of eight o'clock last night was to
organize themselves into a Monterist Committee which
sits, as far as I know, in a posada kept by a retired
Mexican bull-fighter, a great politician, too, whose
name I have forgotten. Thence they have issued a
communication to us, the Goths and Paralytics of the
Amarilla Club (who have our own committee), inviting
us to come to some provisional understanding for a
truce, in order, they have the impudence to say, that
the noble cause of Liberty 'should not be stained by the
criminal excesses of Conservative selfishness!' As I
came out to sit with Nostromo on the cathedral steps
the club was busy considering a proper reply in the
principal room, littered with exploded cartridges, with
a lot of broken glass, blood smears, candlesticks, and all
sorts of wreckage on the floor. But all this is nonsense.
Nobody in the town has any real power except
the railway engineers, whose men occupy the dismantled
houses acquired by the Company for their town station
on one side of the Plaza, and Nostromo, whose Cargadores
were sleeping under the arcades along the front of
Anzani's shops. A fire of broken furniture out of the
Intendencia saloons, mostly gilt, was burning on the
Plaza, in a high flame swaying right upon the statue of
Charles IV. The dead body of a man was lying on the
steps of the pedestal, his arms thrown wide open, and
his sombrero covering his face -- the attention of some
friend, perhaps. The light of the flames touched the
foliage of the first trees on the Alameda, and played on
the end of a side street near by, blocked up by a jumble
of ox-carts and dead bullocks. Sitting on one of the
carcasses, a lepero, muffled up, smoked a cigarette. It
was a truce, you understand. The only other living
being on the Plaza besides ourselves was a Cargador
walking to and fro, with a long, bare knife in his hand,
After having written so far, Don Martin Decoud, the
exotic dandy of the Parisian boulevard, got up and
walked across the sanded floor of the café at one end of
the Albergo of United Italy, kept by Giorgio Viola, the
old companion of Garibaldi. The highly coloured
lithograph of the Faithful Hero seemed to look dimly,
in the light of one candle, at the man with no faith in
anything except the truth of his own sensations. Looking
out of the window, Decoud was met by a darkness so
impenetrable that he could see neither the mountains
nor the town, nor yet the buildings near the harbour;
and there was not a sound, as if the tremendous obscurity
of the Placid Gulf, spreading from the waters
over the land, had made it dumb as well as blind.
Presently Decoud felt a light tremor of the floor and a
distant clank of iron. A bright white light appeared,
deep in the darkness, growing bigger with a thundering
noise. The rolling stock usually kept on the sidings in
Rincon was being run back to the yards for safe keeping.
Like a mysterious stirring of the darkness behind the
headlight of the engine, the train passed in a gust of
hollow uproar, by the end of the house, which seemed to
vibrate all over in response. And nothing was clearly
visible but, on the end of the last flat car, a negro, in
white trousers and naked to the waist, swinging a
blazing torch basket incessantly with a circular movement
of his bare arm. Decoud did not stir.
Behind him, on the back of the chair from which he
had risen, hung his elegant Parisian overcoat, with a
pearl-grey silk lining. But when he turned back to
come to the table the candlelight fell upon a face that
It occurred to him that no one could understand him
so well as his sister. In the most sceptical heart there
lurks at such moments, when the chances of existence
are involved, a desire to leave a correct impression of
the feelings, like a light by which the action may be
seen when personality is gone, gone where no light of
investigation can ever reach the truth which every
death takes out of the world. Therefore, instead of
looking for something to eat, or trying to snatch an hour
or so of sleep, Decoud was filling the pages of a large
pocket-book with a letter to his sister.
In the intimacy of that intercourse he could not keep
out his weariness, his great fatigue, the close touch of his
bodily sensations. He began again as if he were talking
to her. With almost an illusion of her presence, he
wrote the phrase, "I am very hungry."
"I have the feeling of a great solitude around me,"
he continued. "Is it, perhaps, because I am the only
man with a definite idea in his head, in the complete
collapse of every resolve, intention, and hope about me?
Decoud turned half round in his chair, and asked,
"Is there any bread here?"
Linda's dark head was shaken negatively in response,
above the fair head of her sister nestling on her breast.
"You couldn't get me some bread?" insisted Decoud.
The child did not move; he saw her large eyes stare at
him very dark from the corner. "You're not afraid
of me?" he said.
"No," said Linda, "we are not afraid of you. You
came here with Gian' Battista."
"You mean Nostromo?" said Decoud.
"The English call him so, but that is no name either
for man or beast," said the girl, passing her hand gently
over her sister's hair.
"But he lets people call him so," remarked Decoud.
"Not in this house," retorted the child.
"Ah! well, I shall call him the Capataz then."
Decoud gave up the point, and after writing steadily
for a while turned round again.
"When do you expect him back?" he asked.
"After he brought you here he rode off to fetch the
Señor Doctor from the town for mother. He will be
back soon."
"He stands a good chance of getting shot somewhere
on the road," Decoud murmured to himself audibly; and
Linda declared in her high-pitched voice --
"Nobody would dare to fire a shot at Gian' Battista."
"You believe that," asked Decoud, "do you?"
"I know it," said the child, with conviction. "There
is no one in this place brave enough to attack Gian'
Battista."
"It doesn't require much bravery to pull a trigger
behind a bush," muttered Decoud to himself. "Fortunately,
the night is dark, or there would be but little
chance of saving the silver of the mine."
He turned again to his pocket-book, glanced back
through the pages, and again started his pencil.
"That was the position yesterday, after the Minerva with the fugitive President had gone out of harbour, and the rioters had been driven back into the side lanes of the town. I sat on the steps of the cathedral with Nostromo, after sending out the cable message for the information of a more or less attentive world. -233- Strangely enough, though the offices of the Cable Company are in the same building as the Porvenir, the mob, which has thrown my presses out of the window and scattered the type all over the Plaza, has been kept from interfering with the instruments on the other side of the courtyard. As I sat talking with Nostromo, Bernhardt, the telegraphist, came out from under the Arcades with a piece of paper in his hand. The little man had tied himself up to an enormous sword and was hung all over with revolvers. He is ridiculous, but the bravest German of his size that ever tapped the key of a Morse transmitter. He had received the message from Cayta reporting the transports with Barrios's army just entering the port, and ending with the words, 'The greatest enthusiasm prevails.' I walked off to drink some water at the fountain, and I was shot at from the Alameda by somebody hiding behind a tree. But I drank, and didn't care; with Barrios in Cayta and the great Cordillera between us and Montero's victorious army I seemed, notwithstanding Messrs. Gamacho and Fuentes, to hold my new State in the hollow of my hand. I was ready to sleep, but when I got as far as the Casa Gould I found the patio full of wounded laid out on straw. Lights were burning, and in that enclosed courtyard on that hot night a faint odour of chloroform and blood hung about. At one end Doctor Monygham, the doctor of the mine, was dressing the wounds; at the other, near the stairs, Father Corbelàn, kneeling, listened to the confession of a dying Cargador. Mrs. Gould was walking about through these shambles with a large bottle in one hand and a lot of cotton wool in the other. She just looked at me and never even winked. Her camerista was following her, also holding a bottle, and sobbing gently to herself. -234-
"I busied myself for some time in fetching water
from the cistern for the wounded. Afterwards I
wandered upstairs, meeting some of the first ladies of
Sulaco, paler than I had ever seen them before, with
bandages over their arms. Not all of them had fled to
the ships. A good many had taken refuge for the day
in the Casa Gould. On the landing a girl, with her hair
half down, was kneeling against the wall under the niche
where stands a Madonna in blue robes and a gilt crown
on her head. I think it was the eldest Miss Lopez;
I couldn't see her face, but I remember looking at the
high French heel of her little shoe. She did not make a
sound, she did not stir, she was not sobbing; she remained
there, perfectly still, all black against the
white wall, a silent figure of passionate piety. I am
sure she was no more frightened than the other white-
faced ladies I met carrying bandages. One was sitting
on the top step tearing a piece of linen hastily into strips
-- the young wife of an elderly man of fortune here.
She interrupted herself to wave her hand to my bow, as
though she were in her carriage on the Alameda. The
women of our country are worth looking at during a
revolution. The rouge and pearl powder fall off, together
with that passive attitude towards the outer
world which education, tradition, custom impose upon
them from the earliest infancy. I thought of your face,
which from your infancy had the stamp of intelligence
instead of that patient and resigned cast which appears
when some political commotion tears down the veil of
cosmetics and usage.
"In the great sala upstairs a sort of Junta of Notables
was sitting, the remnant of the vanished Provincial
Assembly. Don Juste Lopez had had half his beard
singed off at the muzzle of a trabuco loaded with slugs,
of which every one missed him, providentially. And as
"They raised a cry of 'Decoud! Don Martin!' at
my entrance. I asked them, 'What are you deliberating
upon, gentlemen?' There did not seem to be any
president, though Don José Avellanos sat at the head of
the table. They all answered together, 'On the preservation
of life and property.' 'Till the new officials
arrive,' Don Juste explained to me, with the solemn
side of his face offered to my view. It was as if a
stream of water had been poured upon my glowing idea
of a new State. There was a hissing sound in my ears,
and the room grew dim, as if suddenly filled with vapour.
"I walked up to the table blindly, as though I had
been drunk. 'You are deliberating upon surrender,'
I said. They all sat still, with their noses over the
sheet of paper each had before him, God only knows
why. Only Don José hid his face in his hands, muttering,
'Never, never!' But as I looked at him, it
seemed to me that I could have blown him away with
my breath, he looked so frail, so weak, so worn out.
Whatever happens, he will not survive. The deception
is too great for a man of his age; and hasn't he seen the
sheets of 'Fifty Years of Misrule,' which we have begun
printing on the presses of the Porvenir, littering the Plaza, floating in the gutters, fired out as wads for trabucos loaded with handfuls of type, blown in the wind, trampled in the mud? I have seen pages floating upon the very waters of the harbour. It would be unreasonable to expect him to survive. It would be cruel.
"'Do you know,' I cried, 'what surrender means
"I declaimed for five minutes without drawing
breath, it seems to me, harping on our best chances, on
the ferocity of Montero, whom I made out to be as
great a beast as I have no doubt he would like to be if he
had intelligence enough to conceive a systematic reign
of terror. And then for another five minutes or more
I poured out an impassioned appeal to their courage
and manliness, with all the passion of my love for
Antonia. For if ever man spoke well, it would be from
a personal feeling, denouncing an enemy, defending himself,
or pleading for what really may be dearer than
life. My dear girl, I absolutely thundered at them. It
seemed as if my voice would burst the walls asunder,
and when I stopped I saw all their scared eyes looking
at me dubiously. And that was all the effect I had
produced! Only Don José's head had sunk lower and
lower on his breast. I bent my ear to his withered lips,
and made out his whisper, something like, 'In God's
name, then, Martin, my son!' I don't know exactly.
There was the name of God in it, I am certain. It
seems to me I have caught his last breath -- the breath
of his departing soul on his lips.
"He lives yet, it is true. I have seen him since; but
it was only a senile body, lying on its back, covered to
the chin, with open eyes, and so still that you might
have said it was breathing no longer. I left him thus,
with Antonia kneeling by the side of the bed, just before
I came to this Italian's posada, where the ubiquitous
death is also waiting. But I know that Don José
has really died there, in the Casa Gould, with that
whisper urging me to attempt what no doubt his soul,
wrapped up in the sanctity of diplomatic treaties and
solemn declarations, must have abhorred. I had exclaimed
"Meanwhile, Don Juste had begun a pondered oration
whose solemn effect was spoiled by the ridiculous
disaster to his beard. I did not wait to make it out.
He seemed to argue that Montero's (he called him The
General) intentions were probably not evil, though, he
went on, 'that distinguished man' (only a week ago we
used to call him a gran' bestia) 'was perhaps mistaken as to the true means.' As you may imagine, I didn't stay to hear the rest. I know the intentions of Montero's brother, Pedrito, the guerrillero, whom I exposed in Paris, some years ago, in a café frequented by South American students, where he tried to pass himself off for a Secretary of Legation. He used to come in and talk for hours, twisting his felt hat in his hairy paws, and his ambition seemed to become a sort of Duc de Morny to a sort of Napoleon. Already, then, he used to talk of his brother in inflated terms. He seemed fairly safe from being found out, because the students, all of the Blanco families, did not, as you may imagine, frequent the Legation. It was only Decoud, a man without faith and principles, as they used to say, that went in there sometimes for the sake of the fun, as it were to an assembly of trained monkeys. I know his intentions. I have seen him change the plates at table. Whoever is allowed to live on in terror, I must die the death.
"No, I didn't stay to the end to hear Don Juste Lopez
trying to persuade himself in a grave oration of the
clemency and justice, and honesty, and purity of the
brothers Montero. I went out abruptly to seek
Antonia. I saw her in the gallery. As I opened the
door, she extended to me her clasped hands.
"'What are they doing in there?' she asked.
"'Talking,' I said, with my eyes looking into hers.
"'Yes, yes, but -- '
"'Empty speeches,' I interrupted her. 'Hiding
their fears behind imbecile hopes. They are all great
Parliamentarians there -- on the English model, as you
know.' I was so furious that I could hardly speak.
She made a gesture of despair.
"Through the door I held a little ajar behind me, we
heard Dun Juste's measured mouthing monotone go on
from phrase to phrase, like a sort of awful and solemn
madness.
"'After all, the Democratic aspirations have, perhaps,
their legitimacy. The ways of human progress are
inscrutable, and if the fate of the country is in the hand
of Montero, we ought -- '
"I crashed the door to on that; it was enough; it was
too much. There was never a beautiful face expressing
more horror and despair than the face of Antonia. I
couldn't bear it; I seized her wrists.
"'Have they killed my father in there?' she asked.
"Her eyes blazed with indignation, but as I looked
on, fascinated, the light in them went out.
"'It is a surrender,' I said. And I remember I was
shaking her wrists I held apart in my hands. 'But it's
more than talk. Your father told me to go on in God's
name.'
"My dear girl, there is that in Antonia which would
make me believe in the feasibility of anything. One
look at her face is enough to set my brain on fire. And
yet I love her as any other man would -- with the heart,
and with that alone. She is more to me than his Church
to Father Corbelàn (the Grand Vicar disappeared last
night from the town; perhaps gone to join the band
of Hernandez). She is more to me than his precious
mine to that sentimental Englishman. I won't speak
"She averted her face, and in a pained voice --
"'He has?' she cried. 'Then, indeed, I fear he will
never speak again.'
"She freed her wrists from my clutch and began to
cry in her handkerchief. I disregarded her sorrow; I
would rather see her miserable than not see her at all,
never any more; for whether I escaped or stayed to die,
there was for us no coming together, no future. And
that being so, I had no pity to waste upon the passing
moments of her sorrow. I sent her off in tears to fetch
Doña Emilia and Don Carlos, too. Their sentiment
was necessary to the very life of my plan; the sentimentalism
of the people that will never do anything for
the sake of their passionate desire, unless it comes to
them clothed in the fair robes of an idea.
"Late at night we formed a small junta of four -- the
two women, Don Carlos, and myself -- in Mrs. Gould's
blue-and-white boudoir.
"El Rey de Sulaco thinks himself, no doubt, a very
honest man. And so he is, if one could look behind his
taciturnity. Perhaps he thinks that this alone makes
his honesty unstained. Those Englishmen live on
illusions which somehow or other help them to get a
firm hold of the substance. When he speaks it is by
a rare 'yes' or 'no' that seems as impersonal as the
words of an oracle. But he could not impose on me by
his dumb reserve. I knew what he had in his head; he
has his mine in his head; and his wife had nothing in her
head but his precious person, which he has bound up
with the Gould Concession and tied up to that little
woman's neck. No matter. The thing was to make
"'And here, in this boudoir,' I said, 'you behold the
inner cabinet of the Occidental Republic that is to be.'
"He was so preoccupied that he didn't smile at that,
he didn't even look surprised.
"He told us that he was attending to the general
dispositions for the defence of the railway property at
the railway yards when he was sent for to go into the
railway telegraph office. The engineer of the railhead,
at the foot of the mountains, wanted to talk to him from
his end of the wire. There was nobody in the office
but himself and the operator of the railway telegraph,
who read off the clicks aloud as the tape coiled its
length upon the floor. And the purport of that talk,
"Ribiera had yielded to the urgent solicitations of
his friends, and had left the headquarters of his discomfited
army alone, under the guidance of Bonifacio,
the muleteer, who had been willing to take the responsibility
with the risk. He had departed at day-
break of the third day. His remaining forces had
melted away during the night. Bonifacio and he rode
hard on horses towards the Cordillera; then they obtained
mules, entered the passes, and crossed the
Paramo of Ivie just before a freezing blast swept over
that stony plateau, burying in a drift of snow the little
shelter-hut of stones in which they had spent the night.
Afterwards poor Ribiera had many adventures, got
separated from his guide, lost his mount, struggled down
to the Campo on foot, and if he had not thrown himself
on the mercy of a ranchero would have perished a long
way from Sulaco. That man, who, as a matter of fact,
recognized him at once, let him have a fresh mule, which
the fugitive, heavy and unskilful, had ridden to death.
And it was true he had been pursued by a party commanded
by no less a person than Pedro Montero, the
brother of the general. The cold wind of the Paramo
luckily caught the pursuers on the top of the pass.
Some few men, and all the animals, perished in the icy
blast. The stragglers died, but the main body kept on.
They found poor Bonifacio lying half-dead at the foot
of a snow slope, and bayoneted him promptly in the
true Civil War style. They would have had Ribiera,
too, if they had not, for some reason or other, turned off
"He had his feet wrapped up in blood-stained rags, a
lean, haggard face, ragged beard and hair, and had
walked in limping, with a crooked branch of a tree for
a staff. His followers were perhaps in a worse plight,
but apparently they had not thrown away their arms,
and, at any rate, not all their ammunition. Their lean
faces filled the door and the windows of the telegraph
hut. As it was at the same time the bedroom of the
engineer-in-charge there, Montero had thrown himself
on his clean blankets and lay there shivering and dictating
requisitions to be transmitted by wire to Sulaco.
He demanded a train of cars to be sent down at once to
transport his men up.
"'To this I answered from my end,' the engineer-in-
chief related to us, 'that I dared not risk the rolling-
stock in the interior, as there had been attempts to
wreck trains all along the line several times. I did that
"This is why, my dear girl, I am a fugitive to-night.
The last wire from railhead says that Pedro Montero
and his men left at daybreak, after feeding on asado
beef all night. They took all the horses; they will find
more on the road; they'll be here in less than thirty
hours, and thus Sulaco is no place either for me or the
great store of silver belonging to the Gould Concession.
"But that is not the worst. The garrison of Esmeralda
has gone over to the victorious party. We have
heard this by means of the telegraphist of the Cable
Company, who came to the Casa Gould in the early
morning with the news. In fact, it was so early that
the day had not yet quite broken over Sulaco. His
colleague in Esmeralda had called him up to say that
the garrison, after shooting some of their officers, had
taken possession of a Government steamer laid up in
the harbour. It is really a heavy blow for me. I
thought I could depend on every man in this province.
It was a mistake. It was a Monterist Revolution in
Esmeralda, just such as was attempted in Sulaco, only
that that one came off. The telegraphist was signalling to Bernhardt all the time, and his last transmitted words were, 'They are bursting in the door, and taking possession of the cable office. You are cut off. Can do no more.'
"But, as a matter of fact, he managed somehow to
"This is all he could say. They drove him away from
his instrument this time for good, because Bernhardt
has been calling up Esmeralda ever since without getting
an answer."
After setting these words down in the pocket-book
which he was filling up for the benefit of his sister, Decoud
lifted his head to listen. But there were no sounds,
neither in the room nor in the house, except the drip of
the water from the filter into the vast earthenware jar
under the wooden stand. And outside the house there
was a great silence. Decoud lowered his head again
over the pocket-book.
"I am not running away, you understand," he wrote
on. "I am simply going away with that great treasure
of silver which must be saved at all costs. Pedro
Montero from the Campo and the revolted garrison of
Esmeralda from the sea are converging upon it. That
it is there lying ready for them is only an accident. The
real objective is the San Tomé mine itself, as you may
well imagine; otherwise the Occidental Province would
have been, no doubt, left alone for many weeks, to be
gathered at leisure into the arms of the victorious party.
Don Carlos Gould will have enough to do to save his
mine, with its organization and its people; this 'Imperium
in Imperio,' this wealth-producing thing, to
"His wife has understood it, too. That is why she is
such a good ally of mine. She seizes upon all my suggestions
with a sure instinct that in the end they make
for the safety of the Gould Concession. And he defers
to her because he trusts her perhaps, but I fancy
rather as if he wished to make up for some subtle wrong,
for that sentimental unfaithfulness which surrenders
her happiness, her life, to the seduction of an idea. The
little woman has discovered that he lives for the mine
rather than for her. But let them be. To each his
fate, shaped by passion or sentiment. The principal
thing is that she has backed up my advice to get the
silver out of the town, out of the country, at once, at
any cost, at any risk. Don Carlos' mission is to preserve
unstained the fair fame of his mine; Mrs. Gould's
mission is to save him from the effects of that cold and
overmastering passion, which she dreads more than if it
were an infatuation for another woman. Nostromo's
mission is to save the silver. The plan is to load it into
the largest of the Company's lighters, and send it across
the gulf to a small port out of Costaguana territory just
on the other side the Azuera, where the first north-
bound steamer will get orders to pick it up. The
waters here are calm. We shall slip away into the darkness
of the gulf before the Esmeralda rebels arrive; and
by the time the day breaks over the ocean we shall be
"The incorruptible Capataz de Cargadores is the man
for that work; and I, the man with a passion, but without
a mission, I go with him to return -- to play my part
in the farce to the end, and, if successful, to receive my
reward, which no one but Antonia can give me.
"I shall not see her again now before I depart. I
left her, as I have said, by Don José's bedside. The
street was dark, the houses shut up, and I walked out
of the town in the night. Not a single street-lamp had
been lit for two days, and the archway of the gate was
only a mass of darkness in the vague form of a tower, in
which I heard low, dismal groans, that seemed to answer
the murmurs of a man's voice.
"I recognized something impassive and careless in its
tone, characteristic of that Genoese sailor who, like me,
has come casually here to be drawn into the events for
which his scepticism as well as mine seems to entertain
a sort of passive contempt. The only thing he seems to
care for, as far as I have been able to discover, is to be
well spoken of. An ambition fit for noble souls, but
also a profitable one for an exceptionally intelligent
scoundrel. Yes. His very words, 'To be well spoken
of. Si, señor.' He does not seem to make any dif-.
ference between speaking and thinking. Is it sheer
naïveness or the practical point of view, I wonder?
Exceptional individualities always interest me, because
they are true to the general formula expressing the
moral state of humanity.
"He joined me on the harbour road after I had
passed them under the dark archway without stopping.
It was a woman in trouble he had been talking to.
Through discretion I kept silent while he walked by my
"'Why did you do that?' I asked. 'Do you know
her?'
"'No, señor. I don't suppose I have ever seen her
before. How should I? She has not probably been
out in the streets for years. She is one of those old
women that you find in this country at the back of huts,
crouching over fireplaces, with a stick on the ground by
their side, and almost too feeble to drive away the
stray dogs from their cooking-pots. Caramba! I
could tell by her voice that death had forgotten her.
But, old or young, they like money, and will speak well
of the man who gives it to them.' He laughed a little.
'Señor, you should have felt the clutch of her paw as I
put the piece in her palm.' He paused. 'My last, too,'
he added.
"I made no comment. He's known for his liberality
and his bad luck at the game of monte, which keeps him
as poor as when he first came here.
"'I suppose, Don Martin,' he began, in a thoughtful,
speculative tone, 'that the Señor Administrador of San
Tomé will reward me some day if I save his silver?'
"I said that it could not be otherwise, surely. He
walked on, muttering to himself. 'Si, si, without doubt,
without doubt; and, look you, Señor Martin, what it is
to be well spoken of! There is not another man that
could have been even thought of for such a thing. I
shall get something great for it some day. And let it
come soon,' he mumbled. 'Time passes in this country
as quick as anywhere else.'
"This, soeur chérie, is my companion in the great escape for the sake of the great cause. He is more naïve than shrewd, more masterful than crafty, more generous with his personality than the people who make use of him are with their money. At least, that is what he thinks himself with more pride than sentiment. I am glad I have made friends with him. As a companion he acquires more importance than he ever had as a sort of minor genius in his way -- as an original Italian sailor whom I allowed to come in in the small hours and talk familiarly to the editor of the Porvenir while the paper was going through the press. And it is curious to have met a man for whom the value of life seems to consist in personal prestige.
"I am waiting for him here now. On arriving at
the posada kept by Viola we found the children alone
down below, and the old Genoese shouted to his
countryman to go and fetch the doctor. Otherwise we
would have gone on to the wharf, where it appears
Captain Mitchell with some volunteer Europeans and a
few picked Cargadores are loading the lighter with the
With the writing of the last line there came upon
Decoud a moment of sudden and complete oblivion.
He swayed over the table as if struck by a bullet. The
next moment he sat up, confused, with the idea that he
had heard his pencil roll on the floor. The low door of
the café, wide open, was filled with the glare of a torch in
which was visible half of a horse, switching its tail
against the leg of a rider with a long iron spur strapped
to the naked heel. The two girls were gone, and
Nostromo, standing in the middle of the room, looked
at him from under the round brim of the sombrero low
down over his brow.
"I have brought that sour-faced English doctor in
Señora Gould's carriage," said Nostromo. "I doubt if,
with all his wisdom, he can save the Padrona this time.
They have sent for the children. A bad sign that."
He sat down on the end of a bench. "She wants to
give them her blessing, I suppose."
Dazedly Decoud observed that he must have fallen
sound asleep, and Nostromo said, with a vague smile,
that he had looked in at the window and had seen him
lying still across the table with his head on his arms.
The English señora had also come in the carriage, and
went upstairs at once with the doctor. She had told
him not to wake up Don Martin yet; but when they sent
for the children he had come into the café.
The half of the horse with its half of the rider swung
round outside the door; the torch of tow and resin in the
iron basket which was carried on a stick at the saddle-
bow flared right into the room for a moment, and Mrs.
Gould entered hastily with a very white, tired face.
The hood of her dark, blue cloak had fallen back. Both
men rose.
"Teresa wants to see you, Nostromo," she said.
The Capataz did not move. Decoud, with his back
to the table, began to button up his coat.
"The silver, Mrs. Gould, the silver," he murmured in
English. "Don't forget that the Esmeralda garrison
have got a steamer. They may appear at any moment
at the harbour entrance."
"The doctor says there is no hope," Mrs. Gould spoke
rapidly, also in English. "I shall take you down to the
wharf in my carriage and then come back to fetch away
the girls." She changed swiftly into Spanish to address
Nostromo. "Why are you wasting time? Old Giorgio's
wife wishes to see you."
"I am going to her, señora," muttered the Capataz.
Dr. Monygham now showed himself, bringing back
the children. To Mrs. Gould's inquiring glance he only
shook his head and went outside at once, followed by
Nostromo.
The horse of the torch-bearer, motionless, hung his
head low, and the rider had dropped the reins to light
a cigarette. The glare of the torch played on the front
of the house crossed by the big black letters of its inscription
in which only the word ITALIA was lighted
fully. The patch of wavering glare reached as far as
Mrs. Gould's carriage waiting on the road, with the
yellow-faced, portly Ignacio apparently dozing on the
box. By his side Basilio, dark and skinny, held a
Winchester carbine in front of him, with both hands,
and peered fearfully into the darkness. Nostromo
touched lightly the doctor's shoulder.
"Is she really dying, señor doctor?"
"Yes," said the doctor, with a strange twitch of his
scarred cheek. "And why she wants to see you I cannot
imagine."
"She has been like that before," suggested Nostromo,
looking away.
"Well, Capataz, I can assure you she will never be
like that again," snarled Dr. Monygham. "You may
go to her or stay away. There is very little to be got
from talking to the dying. But she told Doña Emilia
in my hearing that she has been like a mother to you
ever since you first set foot ashore here."
"Si! And she never had a good word to say for me
to anybody. It is more as if she could not forgive me
for being alive, and such a man, too, as she would have
liked her son to be."
"Maybe!" exclaimed a mournful deep voice near
them. "Women have their own ways of tormenting
themselves." Giorgio Viola had come out of the house.
He threw a heavy black shadow in the torchlight, and
the glare fell on his big face, on the great bushy head of
white hair. He motioned the Capataz indoors with
his extended arm.
Dr. Monygham, after busying himself with a little
medicament box of polished wood on the seat of the
landau, turned to old Giorgio and thrust into his big,
trembling hand one of the glass-stoppered bottles out
of the case.
"Give her a spoonful of this now and then, in water,"
he said. "It will make her easier."
"And there is nothing more for her?" asked the old
man, patiently.
"No. Not on earth," said the doctor, with his back
to him, clicking the lock of the medicine case.
Nostromo slowly crossed the large kitchen, all dark
but for the glow of a heap of charcoal under the heavy
mantel of the cooking-range, where water was boiling in
an iron pot with a loud bubbling sound. Between the
two walls of a narrow staircase a bright light streamed
from the sick-room above; and the magnificent Capataz
de Cargadores stepping noiselessly in soft leather
sandals, bushy whiskered, his muscular neck and
bronzed chest bare in the open check shirt, resembled
a Mediterranean sailor just come ashore from some
wine or fruit-laden felucca. At the top he paused,
broad shouldered, narrow hipped and supple, looking
at the large bed, like a white couch of state, with a
profusion of snowy linen, amongst which the Padrona
sat unpropped and bowed, her handsome, black-browed
face bent over her chest. A mass of raven hair with
only a few white threads in it covered her shoulders;
one thick strand fallen forward half veiled her cheek.
Perfectly motionless in that pose, expressing physical
anxiety and unrest, she turned her eyes alone towards
Nostromo.
The Capataz had a red sash wound many times round
his waist, and a heavy silver ring on the forefinger of the
hand he raised to give a twist to his moustache.
"Their revolutions, their revolutions," gasped Señora
Teresa. "Look, Gian' Battista, it has killed me at
last!"
Nostromo said nothing, and the sick woman with an
upward glance insisted. "Look, this one has killed
me, while you were away fighting for what did not
concern you, foolish man."
"Why talk like this?" mumbled the Capataz between
his teeth. "Will you never believe in my good sense?
It concerns me to keep on being what I am: every day
alike."
"You never change, indeed," she said, bitterly. "Always
thinking of yourself and taking your pay out in
fine words from those who care nothing for you."
There was between them an intimacy of antagonism
as close in its way as the intimacy of accord and affection.
He had not walked along the way of Teresa's
expectations. It was she who had encouraged him to
leave his ship, in the hope of securing a friend and defender
for the girls. The wife of old Giorgio was aware
of her precarious health, and was haunted by the fear
of her aged husband's loneliness and the unprotected
state of the children. She had wanted to annex that apparently
quiet and steady young man, affectionate and
pliable, an orphan from his tenderest age, as he had
told her, with no ties in Italy except an uncle, owner
and master of a felucca, from whose ill-usage he had
run away before he was fourteen. He had seemed to
her courageous, a hard worker, determined to make his
way in the world. From gratitude and the ties of
habit he would become like a son to herself and Giorgio;
and then, who knows, when Linda had grown up. . . .
Ten years' difference between husband and wife was not
so much. Her own great man was nearly twenty years
older than herself. Gian' Battista was an attractive
Old Giorgio, in profound ignorance of his wife's views
and hopes, had a great regard for his young countryman.
"A man ought not to be tame," he used to tell her,
quoting the Spanish proverb in defence of the splendid
Capataz. She was growing jealous of his success. He
was escaping from her, she feared. She was practical,
and he seemed to her to be an absurd spendthrift
of these qualities which made him so valuable. He got
too little for them. He scattered them with both
hands amongst too many people, she thought. He laid
no money by. She railed at his poverty, his exploits,
his adventures, his loves and his reputation; but in her
heart she had never given him up, as though, indeed, he
had been her son.
Even now, ill as she was, ill enough to feel the chill,
black breath of the approaching end, she had wished to
see him. It was like putting out her benumbed hand to
regain her hold. But she had presumed too much on
her strength. She could not command her thoughts;
they had become dim, like her vision. The words faltered
on her lips, and only the paramount anxiety and
desire of her life seemed to be too strong for death.
The Capataz said, "I have heard these things many
times. You are unjust, but it does not hurt me. Only
now you do not seem to have much strength to talk, and
I have but little time to listen. I am engaged in a work
of very great moment."
She made an effort to ask him whether it was true that
he had found time to go and fetch a doctor for her.
Nostromo nodded affirmatively.
She was pleased: it relieved her sufferings to know
that the man had condescended to do so much for those
who really wanted his help. It was a proof of his
friendship. Her voice become stronger.
"I want a priest more than a doctor," she said,
pathetically. She did not move her head; only her
eyes ran into the corners to watch the Capataz
standing by the side of her bed. "Would you go to
fetch a priest for me now? Think! A dying woman
asks you!"
Nostromo shook his head resolutely. He did not
believe in priests in their sacerdotal character. A
doctor was an efficacious person; but a priest, as priest,
was nothing, incapable of doing either good or harm.
Nostromo did not even dislike the sight of them as old
Giorgio did. The utter uselessness of the errand was
what struck him most.
"Padrona," he said, "you have been like this before,
and got better after a few days. I have given you
already the very last moments I can spare. Ask
Señora Gould to send you one."
He was feeling uneasy at the impiety of this refusal.
The Padrona believed in priests, and confessed herself
to them. But all women did that. It could not be of
much consequence. And yet his heart felt oppressed
for a moment -- at the thought what absolution would
mean to her if she believed in it only ever so little. No
matter. It was quite true that he had given her already
the very last moment he could spare.
"You refuse to go?" she gasped. "Ah! you are
always yourself, indeed."
"Listen to reason, Padrona," he said. "I am needed
to save the silver of the mine. Do you hear? A
greater treasure than the one which they say is guarded
by ghosts and devils on Azuera. It is true. I am resolved
She felt a despairing indignation. The supreme test
had failed. Standing above her, Nostromo did not
see the distorted features of her face, distorted by a
paroxysm of pain and anger. Only she began to
tremble all over. Her bowed head shook. The broad
shoulders quivered.
"Then God, perhaps, will have mercy upon me!
But do you look to it, man, that you get something for
yourself out of it, besides the remorse that shall overtake
you some day."
She laughed feebly. "Get riches at least for once,
you indispensable, admired Gian' Battista, to whom
the peace of a dying woman is less than the praise of
people who have given you a silly name -- and nothing
besides -- in exchange for your soul and body."
The Capataz de Cargadores swore to himself under
his breath.
"Leave my soul alone, Padrona, and I shall know
how to take care of my body. Where is the harm of
people having need of me? What are you envying me
that I have robbed you and the children of? Those
very people you are throwing in my teeth have done
more for old Giorgio than they ever thought of doing
for me."
He struck his breast with his open palm; his
voice had remained low though he had spoken in a
forcible tone. He twisted his moustaches one after
another, and his eyes wandered a little about the
room.
"Is it my fault that I am the only man for their purposes?
What angry nonsense are you talking, mother?
Would you rather have me timid and foolish, selling
water-melons on the market-place or rowing a boat for
"They have turned your head with their praises,"
gasped the sick woman. "They have been paying you
with words. Your folly shall betray you into poverty,
misery, starvation. The very leperos shall laugh at
you -- the great Capataz."
Nostromo stood for a time as if struck dumb. She
never looked at him. A self-confident, mirthless smile
passed quickly from his lips, and then he backed away.
His disregarded figure sank down beyond the doorway.
He descended the stairs backwards, with the usual sense
of having been somehow baffled by this woman's disparagement
of this reputation he had obtained and
desired to keep.
Downstairs in the big kitchen a candle was burning,
surrounded by the shadows of the walls, of the ceiling,
"Adios, viejo," said Nostromo, feeling the handle of his revolver in the belt and loosening his knife in its sheath. He picked up a blue poncho lined with red from the table, and put it over his head. "Adios, look after the things in my sleeping-room, and if you hear from me no more, give up the box to Paquita. There is not much of value there, except my new serape from Mexico, and a few silver buttons on my best jacket. No matter! The things will look well enough on the next lover she gets, and the man need not be afraid I shall linger on earth after I am dead, like those Gringos that haunt the Azuera."
Dr. Monygham twisted his lips into a bitter smile.
After old Giorgio, with an almost imperceptible nod and
without a word, had gone up the narrow stairs, he
said --
"Why, Capataz! I thought you could never fail in
anything."
Nostromo, glancing contemptuously at the doctor,
lingered in the doorway rolling a cigarette, then struck a
match, and, after lighting it, held the burning piece of
wood above his head till the flame nearly touched his
fingers.
"No wind!" he muttered to himself. "Look here,
señor -- do you know the nature of my undertaking?"
Dr. Monygham nodded sourly.
"It is as if I were taking up a curse upon me, señor
doctor. A man with a treasure on this coast will have
every knife raised against him in every place upon the
shore. You see that, señor doctor? I shall float
along with a spell upon my life till I meet somewhere the
north-bound steamer of the Company, and then indeed
they will talk about the Capataz of the Sulaco Cargadores
from one end of America to another."
Dr. Monygham laughed his short, throaty laugh.
Nostromo turned round in the doorway.
"But if your worship can find any other man ready
and fit for such business I will stand back. I am not
exactly tired of my life, though I am so poor that I can
carry all I have with myself on my horse's back."
"You gamble too much, and never say 'no' to a pretty
face, Capataz," said Dr. Monygham, with sly simplicity.
"That's not the way to make a fortune. But
nobody that I know ever suspected you of being poor.
I hope you have made a good bargain in case you come
back safe from this adventure."
"What bargain would your worship have made?"
asked Nostromo, blowing the smoke out of his lips
through the doorway.
Dr. Monygham listened up the staircase for a moment
before he answered, with another of his short,
abrupt laughs --
"Illustrious Capataz, for taking the curse of death
upon my back, as you call it, nothing else but the whole
treasure would do."
Nostromo vanished out of the doorway with a grunt
of discontent at this jeering answer. Dr. Monygham
heard him gallop away. Nostromo rode furiously in
The Capataz never checked his speed. At the head
of the wharf vague figures with rifles leapt to the head of
his horse; others closed upon him -- cargadores of the
company posted by Captain Mitchell on the watch. At
a word from him they fell back with subservient murmurs,
recognizing his voice. At the other end of the
jetty, near a cargo crane, in a dark group with glowing
cigars, his name was pronounced in a tone of relief.
Most of the Europeans in Sulaco were there, rallied
round Charles Gould, as if the silver of the mine had
been the emblem of a common cause, the symbol of the
supreme importance of material interests. They had
loaded it into the lighter with their own hands. Nostromo
recognized Don Carlos Gould, a thin, tall shape
standing a little apart and silent, to whom another tall
shape, the engineer-in-chief, said aloud, "If it must be
lost, it is a million times better that it should go to the
bottom of the sea."
Martin Decoud called out from the lighter, "Au
revoir, messieurs, till we clasp hands again over the
new-born Occidental Republic." Only a subdued murmur
responded to his clear, ringing tones; and then it
seemed to him that the wharf was floating away into the
The two men, unable to see each other, kept silent till
the lighter, slipping before the fitful breeze, passed out
between almost invisible headlands into the still deeper
darkness of the gulf. For a time the lantern on the
jetty shone after them. The wind failed, then fanned
up again, but so faintly that the big, half-decked boat
slipped along with no more noise than if she had been
suspended in the air.
"We are out in the gulf now," said the calm voice of
Nostromo. A moment after he added, "Señor Mitchell
has lowered the light."
"Yes," said Decoud; "nobody can find us now."
A great recrudescence of obscurity embraced the
boat. The sea in the gulf was as black as the clouds
above. Nostromo, after striking a couple of matches
to get a glimpse of the boat-compass he had with
him in the lighter, steered by the feel of the wind on his
cheek.
It was a new experience for Decoud, this mysteriousness
of the great waters spread out strangely smooth, as
if their restlessness had been crushed by the weight of
that dense night. The Placido was sleeping profoundly
under its black poncho.
The main thing now for success was to get away from
the coast and gain the middle of the gulf before day
Nostromo's voice was speaking, though he, at the
tiller, was also as if he were not. "Have you been
asleep, Don Martin? Caramba! If it were possible I would think that I, too, have dozed off. I have a strange notion somehow of having dreamt that there was a sound of blubbering, a sound a sorrowing man could make, somewhere near this boat. Something between a sigh and a sob."
"Strange!" muttered Decoud, stretched upon the
pile of treasure boxes covered by many tarpaulins.
"Could it be that there is another boat near us in the
gulf? We could not see it, you know."
Nostromo laughed a little at the absurdity of the idea.
They dismissed it from their minds. The solitude
"This is overpowering," he muttered. "Do we
move at all, Capataz?"
"Not so fast as a crawling beetle tangled in the
grass," answered Nostromo, and his voice seemed
deadened by the thick veil of obscurity that felt
warm and hopeless all about them. There were long
periods when he made no sound, invisible and inaudible
as if he had mysteriously stepped out of the lighter.
In the featureless night Nostromo was not even certain
which way the lighter headed after the wind had
completely died out. He peered for the islands. There
was not a hint of them to be seen, as if they had sunk to
the bottom of the gulf. He threw himself down by the
side of Decoud at last, and whispered into his ear that
if daylight caught them near the Sulaco shore through
want of wind, it would be possible to sweep the lighter
behind the cliff at the high end of the Great Isabel,
where she would lie concealed. Decoud was surprised
at the grimness of his anxiety. To him the removal
of the treasure was a political move. It was necessary
for several reasons that it should not fall into the hands
of Montero, but here was a man who took another
view of this enterprise. The Caballeros over there did
not seem to have the slightest idea of what they had
given him to do. Nostromo, as if affected by the gloom
around, seemed nervously resentful. Decoud was
surprised. The Capataz, indifferent to those dangers
that seemed obvious to his companion, allowed himself
to become scornfully exasperated by the deadly nature
of the trust put, as a matter of course, into his hands.
It was more dangerous, Nostromo said, with a laugh
and a curse, than sending a man to get the treasure
that people said was guarded by devils and ghosts in the
"No, you needn't explain," said Decoud, a little
listlessly. "I can see it well enough myself, that the
possession of this treasure is very much like a deadly
disease for men situated as we are. But it had to be removed
from Sulaco, and you were the man for the task."
"I was; but I cannot believe," said Nostromo, "that
its loss would have impoverished Don Carlos Gould
very much. There is more wealth in the mountain. I
have heard it rolling down the shoots on quiet nights
when I used to ride to Rincon to see a certain girl,
after my work at the harbour was done. For years
"I see it," murmured Decoud. He saw, indeed, that
his companion had his own peculiar view of this enterprise.
Nostromo interrupted his reflections upon the way
men's qualities are made use of, without any fundamental
knowledge of their nature, by the proposal
they should slip the long oars out and sweep the
lighter in the direction of the Isabels. It wouldn't
do for daylight to reveal the treasure floating within a
mile or so of the harbour entrance. The denser the
darkness generally, the smarter were the puffs of wind
on which he had reckoned to make his way; but tonight
the gulf, under its poncho of clouds, remained
breathless, as if dead rather than asleep.
Don Martin's soft hands suffered cruelly, tugging
at the thick handle of the enormous oar. He stuck
to it manfully, setting his teeth. He, too, was in the
toils of an imaginative existence, and that strange work
of pulling a lighter seemed to belong naturally to the
In his unskilfulness Don Martin over-exerted himself.
Now and then a sort of muscular faintness would run
from the tips of his aching fingers through every fibre
of his body, and pass off in a flush of heat. He had
fought, talked, suffered mentally and physically,
exerting his mind and body for the last forty-eight hours
without intermission. He had had no rest, very little
food, no pause in the stress of his thoughts and his
feelings. Even his love for Antonia, whence he drew
his strength and his inspiration, had reached the point
of tragic tension during their hurried interview by Don
José's bedside. And now, suddenly, he was thrown
out of all this into a dark gulf, whose very gloom, silence,
and breathless peace added a torment to the
necessity for physical exertion. He imagined the
lighter sinking to the bottom with an extraordinary
shudder of delight. "I am on the verge of delirium,"
he thought. He mastered the trembling of all his
limbs, of his breast, the inward trembling of all his
body exhausted of its nervous force.
"Shall we rest, Capataz?" he proposed in a careless
tone. "There are many hours of night yet before us."
"True. It is but a mile or so, I suppose. Rest your
arms, señor, if that is what you mean. You will find
no other sort of rest, I can promise you, since you let
yourself be bound to this treasure whose loss would
make no poor man poorer. No, señor; there is no rest
till we find a north-bound steamer, or else some ship
Decoud lay on the silver boxes panting. All his
active sensations and feelings from as far back as he
could remember seemed to him the maddest of dreams.
Even his passionate devotion to Antonia into which he
had worked himself up out of the depths of his scepticism
had lost all appearance of reality. For a moment
he was the prey of an extremely languid but not unpleasant
indifference.
"I am sure they didn't mean you to take such a
desperate view of this affair," he said.
"What was it, then? A joke?" snarled the man, who
on the pay-sheets of the O.S.N. Company's establishment
in Sulaco was described as "Foreman of the
wharf" against the figure of his wages. "Was it for a
joke they woke me up from my sleep after two days of
street fighting to make me stake my life upon a bad
card? Everybody knows, too, that I am not a lucky
gambler."
"Yes, everybody knows of your good luck with
women, Capataz," Decoud propitiated his companion
in a weary drawl.
"Look here, señor," Nostromo went on. "I never
even remonstrated about this affair. Directly I heard
what was wanted I saw what a desperate affair it must
be, and I made up my mind to see it out. Every
minute was of importance. I had to wait for you first.
Decoud was heard to stir.
"You did, Capataz!" he exclaimed. His tone
changed. "Well, you know -- it was rather fine."
"You do not believe in priests, Don Martin? Neither
do I. What was the use of wasting time? But she --
she believes in them. The thing sticks in my throat.
She may be dead already, and here we are floating helpless
with no wind at all. Curse on all superstition.
She died thinking I deprived her of Paradise, I suppose.
It shall be the most desperate affair of my life."
Decoud remained lost in reflection. He tried to
analyze the sensations awaked by what he had been
told. The voice of the Capataz was heard again:
"Now, Don Martin, let us take up the sweeps and try
to find the Isabels. It is either that or sinking the
lighter if the day overtakes us. We must not forget
that the steamer from Esmeralda with the soldiers may
be coming along. We will pull straight on now. I have
A small flame appeared burning quite straight. It
showed fragmentarily the stout ribs and planking in the
hollow, empty part of the lighter. Decoud could see
Nostromo standing up to pull. He saw him as high as
the red sash on his waist, with a gleam of a white-
handled revolver and the wooden haft of a long knife
protruding on his left side. Decoud nerved himself for
the effort of rowing. Certainly there was not enough
wind to blow the candle out, but its flame swayed a
little to the slow movement of the heavy boat. It was
so big that with their utmost efforts they could not
move it quicker than about a mile an hour. This was
sufficient, however, to sweep them amongst the Isabels
long before daylight came. There was a good six hours
of darkness before them, and the distance from the
harbour to the Great Isabel did not exceed two miles.
Decoud put this heavy toil to the account of the
Capataz's impatience. Sometimes they paused, and
then strained their ears to hear the boat from Esmeralda.
In this perfect quietness a steamer moving
would have been heard from far off. As to seeing anything
it was out of the question. They could not see
each other. Even the lighter's sail, which remained
set, was invisible. Very often they rested.
"Caramba!" said Nostromo, suddenly, during one of
those intervals when they lolled idly against the heavy
handles of the sweeps. "What is it? Are you distressed,
Don Martin?"
Decoud assured him that he was not distressed in the
least. Nostromo for a time kept perfectly still, and
then in a whisper invited Martin to come aft.
With his lips touching Decoud's ear he declared his
belief that there was somebody else besides themselves
upon the lighter. Twice now he had heard the sound of
stifled sobbing.
"Señor," he whispered with awed wonder, "I am
certain that there is somebody weeping in this lighter."
Decoud had heard nothing. He expressed his incredulity.
However, it was easy to ascertain the truth
of the matter.
"It is most amazing," muttered Nostromo. "Could
anybody have concealed himself on board while the
lighter was lying alongside the wharf?"
"And you say it was like sobbing?" asked Decoud,
lowering his voice, too. "If he is weeping, whoever he
is he cannot be very dangerous."
Clambering over the precious pile in the middle, they
crouched low on the foreside of the mast and groped
under the half-deck. Right forward, in the narrowest
part, their hands came upon the limbs of a man, who
remained as silent as death. Too startled themselves
to make a sound, they dragged him aft by one arm and
the collar of his coat. He was limp -- lifeless.
The light of the bit of candle fell upon a round,
hook-nosed face with black moustaches and little side-
whiskers. He was extremely dirty. A greasy growth of
beard was sprouting on the shaven parts of the cheeks.
The thick lips were slightly parted, but the eyes remained
closed. Decoud, to his immense astonishment,
recognized Señor Hirsch, the hide merchant from
Esmeralda. Nostromo, too, had recognized him. And
they gazed at each other across the body, lying with its
naked feet higher than its head, in an absurd pretence of
sleep, faintness, or death.