Section 24

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_ “Their last move of eight o’clock last night was te — 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 non- sense. 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 Carga- dores 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 carcases, 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,
a ol
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like a sentry before the Arcades, where his friends were sleeping. And the only other spot of light in the dark town were the lighted windows of the club, at the corner of the Calle.” ;
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. Look- ing 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. ob- | scurity 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 move- ment 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
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was grimy and scratched. His rosy lips were blackened with heat, the smoke of gun-powder. Dirt and rust tarnished the lustre of his short beard. His shirt collar — and cuffs were crumpled; the blue silken tie hung down his breast like a rag; a greasy smudge crossed his white brow. He had not taken off his clothing nor used — water, except to snatch a hasty drink greedily, for some forty hours. An awful restlessness had made him its — own, had marked him with all the signs of desperate © strife, and put a dry, sleepless stare into his eyes. He — murmured to himself in a hoarse voice, “I wonder if © there’s any bread here,” looked vaguely about him, then dropped into the chair and took the pencil up again. He became aware he had not eaten anything for many — hours. x
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.”
*“T 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?
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But the solitude is also very real. All the engineers are cut, and have been for two days, looking after the property of the National Central Railway, of that great Costaguana undertaking which is to put money into the pockets of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Americans, Germans, and God knows who else. The silence about me is ominous. ‘There is above the middle part of this house a sort of first floor, with narrow openings like loopholes for windows, probably used in old times for the better defence against the savages, when the per- sistent barbarism of our native continent did not wear the | black coats of politicians, but went about yelling, half- naked, with bows and arrows in its hands. The woman of the house is dying up there, I believe, all alone with her old husband. ‘There is a narrow staircase, the sort of staircase one man could easily defend against a mob, leading up there, and I have just heard, through the thickness of the wall, the old fellow going down into their kitchen for something or other. It was a sort of noise a mouse might make behind the plaster of a wall. All the servants they had ran away yesterday and have not returned yet, if ever they do. For the rest, there are only two children here, two girls. T he father has sent them downstairs, and they have crept into this café, perhaps because I am here. They huddle together jn a corner, in each other’s arms; I just noticed them a few minutes ago, and I feel more lonely than ever.” 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.
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“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 Sefior 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?”
‘*T 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. ‘‘Fortu- nately, 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.
(bbe tees
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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, notwith- standing 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 Corbelan, 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.
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“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 re- mained 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, to- gether 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
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he turned his head from side to side it was exactly as if there had been two men inside his frock-coat, one nobly whiskered and solemn, the other untidy and scared.
“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 preser- vation 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 va-
pour.
“1 walked up to the table blindly, as though I had been drunk. ‘You are deliberating upon surrender,” T 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, mut- tering, ‘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 float- ing 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 meané
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| to you, to your women, to your children, to your property?’
“JT 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 him- self, 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. J 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 be- fore I came to this Italian’s posada, where the ubiqui- tous 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 declazations, must have abhorred. I had ex-