Section 14

Charles, coming up to take leave of Sir John, heard him say, as he bent over his wife’s hand, “Certainly. Of course, my dear Mrs. Gould, for a protégé of yours! Not the slightest difficulty. Consider it done.” }
¢ THE SILVER OF THE MINE 123
- Going ashore in the same boat with the Goulds, Don José Avellanos was very silent. Even in the Gould earriage he did not open his lips for a long time. The ‘mules trotted slowly away from the wharf between the extended hands of the beggars, who for that day seemed to have abandoned in a body the portals of churches. Charles Gould sat on the back seat and looked away
upon the plain. A multitude of booths made of green boughs, of rushes, of odd pieces of plank eked out with bits of canvas had been erected all over it for the sale of cana, of dulces, of fruit, of cigars. Over little heaps of glowing charcoal Indian women, squatting on mats, cooked food in black earthen pots, and boiled the water for the maté gourds, which they offered in soft, caressing
- voices to the country people. A racecourse had been staked out for the vaqueros; and away to the left, from where the crowd was massed thickly about a huge temporary erection, like a circus tent of wood with a conical grass roof, came the resonant twanging of harp strings, the sharp ping of guitars, with the grave drum- ming throb of an Indian gombo pulsating steadily through the shrill choruses of the dancers.
Charles Gould said presently—
“All this piece of land belongs now to the Railway Company. There will be no more popular feasts held here.”
Mrs. Gould was rather sorry to think so. She took this opportunity to mention how she had just obtained from Sir John the promise that the house occupied by Giorgio Viola should not be interfered with. She declared she could never understand why the survey engineers ever talked of demolishing that old building. It was not in the way of the projected harbour branch of the line in the least.
She stopped the carriage before the door to reassure at
124 NOSTROMO
once the old Genoese, who came out bare-headed and stood by the carriage step. She talked to him in
Italian, of course, and he thanked her with calm dignity. An old Garibaldino was grateful to her from the bottom of his heart for keeping the roof over the heads of his wife and children. He was too old to wander any more.
“And is it for ever, signora?” he asked.
“For as long as you like.”
“Bene. Then the place must be named. It was not worth while before.”’
He smiled ruggedly, with a running together of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “I shall set about the painting of the name to-morrow.”
“And what is it going to be, Giorgio?”
“Albergo d'Italia Una,” said the old Garibaldino, —
looking away for a moment. “More in memory of those who have died,” he added, “than for the country stolen from us soldiers of liberty by the craft of that accursed Piedmontese race of kings and ministers.”
Mrs. Gould smiled slightly, and, bending over a little, began to inquire about his wife and children. He had sent them into town on that day. The padrona was better in health; many thanks to the signora for inquiring.
People were passing in twos and threes, in whole parties of men and women attended by trotting chil- dren. A horseman mounted on a silver-grey mare drew rein quietly in the shade of the house after taking off his hat to the party in the carriage, who returned smiles and familiar nods. Old Viola, evidently very pleased with the news he had just heard, interrupted himself for 4 moment to tell him rapidly that the house was secured, by the kindness of the English signora, for as long as he
liked to keep it. The other listened attentively, but.
made no response.
Ate te te ae eee
- \
; THE SILVER OF THE MINE 125 When the carriage moved on he took off his hat again,
a grey sombrero with a silver cord and tassels. The bright colours of a Mexican serape twisted on the cantle, the enormous silver buttons on the embroidered leather jacket, the row of tiny silver buttons down the seam of the trousers, the snowy linen, a silk sash with embroidered
ends, the silver plates on headstall and saddle, proclaimed the unapproachable style of the famous Capataz de Cargadores—a Mediterranean sailor—got up with more finished splendour than any well-to-do young ranchero of the Campo had ever displayed on a high holiday.
“Tt is a great thing for me,” murmured old Giorgio, still thinking of the house, for now he had grown weary of change. “The signora just said a word te the Englishman.” ~
“The old Englishman who has enough money to pay for a railway? He is going off in an hour,” remarked ‘Nostromo, carelessly. ‘Buon viaggio, then. I’ve guarded his bones all the way from the Entrada pass down to the plain and into Sulaco, as though he had been my own father.”
Old Giorgio only moved his head sideways absently. Nostromo pointed after the Goulds’ carriage, nearing the grass-grown gate in the old town wall that was like a wall of matted jungle.
“And I have sat alone at night with my revolver in the Company’s warehouse time and again by the side of that other Englishman’s heap of silver, guarding it as though it had been my own.”
Viola seemed lost in thought. “It isa great thing for me,” he repeated again, as if to himself.
“Tt is,’ agreed the magnificent Capataz de Carga~- dores, calmly. “Listen, Vecchio—go in and bring me out a cigar, but don’t look for it in my room. There’s nothing there.”
126 NOSTROMO _ Viola stepped into the café and came out directly, still absorbed in his idea, and tendered him a cigar, mumbling thoughtfully in his moustache, ‘Children growing up—and girls, too! Girls!” He sighed and fell silent.
“What, only one?” remarked Nostromo, looking
down with a sort of comic inquisitiveness at the un- conscious old man. ‘No matter,” he added, with lofty hegligence; “one is enough till another is wanted.” . He lit it and let the match drop from his passive fingers. Giorgio Viola looked up, and said abruptly— _ “My son would have been just such a fine young man as you, Gian’ Battista, if he had lived.”
“What? Your son? But you are right, padrone- If he had been like me he would have been a man.”
He turned his horse slowly, and paced on between the booths, checking the mare almost to a standstill now ‘and then for children, for the groups of people from the distant Campo, who stared after him with admiration. The Company’s lightermen saluted him from afar; and the greatly envied Capataz de Cargadores advanced, amongst murmurs of recognition and obsequious greet- ings, towards the huge circus-like erection. The throng thickened; the guitars tinkled louder; other horsemen sat motionless, smoking calmly above the heads of the crowd; it eddied and pushed before the doors of the high-roofed building, whence issued a shuffle and thumping of feet in time to the dance music vibrating and shrieking with a racking rhythm, overhung by the tremendous, sustained, hollow roar of the gombo. The barbarous and imposing noise of the big drum, that can madden a crowd, and that even Europeans cannot hear without a strange emotion, seemed to draw Nostromo on to its source, while a man, wrapped up in a faded, torn poncho, walked by his stirrup, and,
4 THE SILVER OF THE MINE 127
buffeted right and left, begged “his worship” in- sistently for employment on the wharf. He whined, offering the Sefior Capataz half his daily pay for the privilege of being admitted to the swaggering fraternity of Cargadores; the other half would be enough for him, he protested. But Captain Mitchell’s right-hand man— “invaluable for our work—a perfectly incorruptible fellow” —after looking down critically at the ragged mozo, shook his head without a word in the uproar going on around.
The man fell back; and a little further on Nostromo had to pull up. From the doors of the dance hall men and women emerged tottering, streaming with sweat, trembling in every limb, to lean, panting, with staring eyes and parted lips, against the wall of the structure, where the harps and guitars played on with mad speed in an incessant roll of thunder. Hundreds of hands clapped in there; voices shrieked, and then all at once would sink low, chanting in unison the refrain of a love song, with a dying fall. A red flower, flung with a good aim from somewhere in the crowd, struck the resplen- dent Capataz on the cheek.
He caught it as it fell, neatiy, but for some time did not turn his head. When at last he condescended to look round, the throng near him had parted to make way for a pretty Morenita, her hair held up by a small golden comb, who was walking towards him in the open space.
Her arms and neck emerged plump and bare from a snowy chemisette; the blue woollen skirt, with all the fullness gathered in front, scanty on the hips and tight across the back, disclosed the provoking action of her walk. She came straight on and laid her hand on the mare’s neck with a timid, coquettish look upwards out of the corner of her eyes.
128 NOSTROMO
“Querido,” she murmured, caressingly, ““why do you pretend not to see me when I pass?”
“Because I don’t love thee any more,” said Nostromo, deliberately, after a moment of reflective silence.
The hand on the mare’s neck trembled suddenly. She dropped her head before all the eyes in the wide circle formed round the generous, the terrible, the in- constant Capataz de Cargadores, and his Morenita.
Nostromo, looking down, saw tears beginning to fall down her face.
‘Has it come, then, ever beloved of my heart?” she whispered. “Is it true?”
“No,” said Nostromo, looking away carelessly. “It was a lie. I love thee as much as ever.”
“Is that true?” she cooed, joyously, her cheeks still wet with tears.
“Tt is true.”
“True on the life?”
‘As true as that; but thou must not ask me to swear it on the Madonna that stands in thy room.” And the Capataz laughed a little in response to the grins of the crowd.
She pouted—very pretty—a little uneasy.
“No, I will not ask for that. I can see love in your eyes.” She laid her hand on his knee. ‘‘ Why are you trembling like this? From love?” she continued, while the cavernous thundering of the gombo went on without a pause. ‘But if you love her as much as that, you must give your Paquita a gold-mounted rosary of beads for the neck of her Madonna.”
“No,” said Nostromo, looking into her uplifted, begging eyes, which suddenly turned stony with surprise.
“No? Then what else will your worship give me on the day of the fiesta?” she asked, angrily; “so as not te shame me before all these people.”
i tt ie ie
y 4
THE SILVER OF THE MINE 129 “There is no shame for thee in getting nothing from
thy lover for once.”
“True! The shame is your worship’s—my poor lover’s,”’ she flared up, sarcastically.
Laughs were heard at her anger, at her retort. What an audacious spitfire she was! The people aware of this scene were calling out urgently to others in the crowd. The circle round the silver-grey mare narrowed slowly.
The girl went off a pace or two, confronting the mock- ing curiosity of the eyes, then flung back to the stirrup, tiptoeing, her enraged face turned up to Nostromo with a pair of blazing eyes. He bent low to her in the sad- dle.
“Juan,” she hissed, “I could stab thee to the heart!”
The dreaded Capataz de Cargadores, magnificent and carelessly public in his amours, flung his arm round her neck and kissed her spluttering lips. A murmur went round.
“A knife!” he demanded at large, holding her firmly
_ by the shoulder.
Twenty blades flashed out together in the circle. A young man in holiday attire, bounding in, thrust one in Nostromo’s hand and bounded back into the ranks, very proud of himself. Nostromo had not even looked at him. “Stand on my foot,” he commanded the girl, who, suddenly subdued, rose lightly, and when he had her up, encircling her waist, her face near to his, he pressed the knife into her little hand.
“No, Morenita! You shall not put me to shame,” he said. ‘You shall have your present; and so that everyone should know who is your lover to-day, you may cut all the silver buttons off my coat.”
There were shouts of laughter and applause at this
130 NOSTROMO
witty freak, while the girl passed the keen blade, and the impassive rider jingled in his palm the increasing hoard of silver buttons. He eased her to the ground with both her hands full. After whispering for a while with a very strenuous face, she walked away, staring haughtily, and vanished into the crowd.
The circle had broken up, and the lordly Capataz de Cargadores, the indispensable man, the tried and trusty Nostromo, the Mediterranean sailor come ashore casually to try his luck in Costaguana, rode slowly towards the harbour. The Juno was just then swing- ing round; and even as Nostromo reined up again to look on, a flag ran up on the improvised flagstaff erected in an ancient and dismantled little fort at the harbour entrance. Half a battery of field guns had been hur- ried over there from the Sulaco barracks for’ the purpose of firing the regulation salutes for the President- Dictator and the War Minister. As the mail-boat headed through the pass, the badly timed reports announced the end of Don Vincente Ribiera’s first official visit to Sulaco, and for Captain Mitchell the end of another “historic occasion.” Next time when the “Hope of honest men” was to come that way, a year and a half later, it was unofficially, over the mountain tracks, fleeing after a defeat on a lame mule, to be only just saved by Nostromo from an ignominious death at the hands of a mob. It was a very different event, of which Captain Mitchell used to say—
- “Tt was history—history, sir! And that fellow of mine, Nostromo, you know, was right in it. Absolutely making history, sir.”
But this event, creditable to Nostromo, was to lead immediately to another, which could not be classed either as “history” or as “a mistake” in Captain Mitchell’s phraseology. He had another word for it.
e }
THE SILVER OF THE MINE 131
“Sir,” he used to say afterwards, “that was no mis-
take. It was a fatality. A misfortune, pure and simple, sir. And that poor fellow of mine was right in
it—right in the middle of it! A fatality, if ever there
_ was one—and to my mind he has never been the same man since.”
i oe "
_-- PART SECOND ; — «THE ISABELS Ss
SF ’ a 7 eG a.» “2 a ae hea. a a # ay ie ag ae a =
(4O9aR TiAG
Sit@sa;, Zit
zs a 2 2
CHAPTER ONE
THROUGH good and evil report in the varying fortune of that struggle which Don José had characterized in the phrase, “the fate of national honesty trembles in the balance,” the Gould Concession, “Imperium in Im- perio,’ had gone on working; the square mountain had gone on pouring its treasure down the wooden shoots to the unresting batteries of stamps; the lights of San Tomé had twinkled night after night upon the great, limitless shadow of the Campo; every three months the silver escort had gone down to the sea as if neither the war nor its consequences could ever affect the ancient Occidental State secluded beyond its high barrier of the Cordillera. All the fighting took place on the other side of that mighty wall of serrated peaks lorded over by the white dome of Higuerota and as yet unbreached by the railway, of which only the first part, the easy Campo part from Sulaco to the Ivie Valley at the foot of the pass, had been laid. Neither did the telegraph line cross the mountains yet; its poles, like slender beacons on the plain, penetrated into the forest iringe of the foot-hills cut by the deep avenue of the track; and its wire ended abruptly in the construction camp at a white deal table supporting a Morse ap- paratus, in a long hut of planks with a corrugated iron roof overshadowed by gigantic cedar trees—the quar- ters of the engineer in charge of the advance section.
The harbour was busy, too, with the traffic in rail- way material, and with the movements of troops along the coast. The O.S.N. Company found much occupa-
135
136 NOSTROMO
tion for its fleet. Costaguana had no navy, and, apart from a few coastguard cutters, there were no national ships except a couple of old merchant steamers used as transports.
Captain Mitchell, feeling more and more in the thick of history, found time for an hour or so during an afternoon in the drawing-room of the Casa Gould, where, with a strange ignorance of the real forces at work around him, he professed himself delighted to get away from the strain of affairs. He did not know what he would have done without his invaluable Nostromo, he declared. Those confounded Costaguana politics gave him more work—he confided to Mrs. Gould— than he had bargained for.
Don José Avellanos had displayed in the service of the endangered Ribiera Government an organizing activity and an eloquence of which the echoes reached even Europe. For, after the new loan to the Ribiera Govern- ment, Europe had become interested in Costaguana. The Sala of the Provincial Assembly (in the Municipal Buildings of Sulaco), with its portraits of the Liberators on the walls and an old flag of Cortez preserved in a glass case above the President’s chair, had heard all these speeches—the early one containing the im- passioned declaration “Militarism is the enemy,” the famous one of the “trembling balance” delivered on the occasion of the vote for the raising of a second Sulaco regiment in the defence of the reforming Govern- ment; and when the provinces again displayed their old flags (proscribed in Guzman Bento’s time) there was another of those great orations, when Don José greeted these old emblems of the war of Independence, brought out again in the name of new Ideals. The old idea of Federalism had disappeared. For his part he did not wish to revive old political doctrines. ‘They