Section 25

THE ISABELS 931
claimed very loud, “There is never any God in a country where men will not help themselves.’
“Meanwhile, Don Juste had begun a pondered ora- tion 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 ca!l 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 Mon- tero’s brother, Pedrito, the guerrillero, whom I ex-
_ posed 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.
288 NOSTROMO
“* 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 Don Juste’s measured mouthing monotone go on from phrase to phrase, like a sort of awful and solemn madness.
“A fter 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
**T 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.
“Tt 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 Corbelan (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
THE ISABELS 239
of his wife. She may have been sentimental once. The San Tomé mine stands now between those two peo- ple. ‘Your father himself, Antonia,’ I repeated; ‘your father, do you understand? has told me to go on.’
“‘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 ery 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 Dofia Emilia and Don Carlos, too. Their sentiment was necessary to the very life of my plan; the senti- mentalism 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.
“E] 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
240 NOSTROMO
him present the affair to Holroyd (the Steel and Silver
King) in such a manner as to secure his financial sup- port. At that time last night, just twenty-four hours ago, we thought the silver of the mine safe in the Custom House vaults till the north-bound steamer came to take it away. And as long as the treasure flowed north, without a break, that utter sentimentalist, Holroyd, would not drop his idea of introducing, not only justice, industry, peace, to the benighted con- tinents, but also that pet dream of his of a purer form of Christianity. Later on, the principal European really in Sulaco, the engineer-in-chief of the railway, came riding up the Calle, from the harbour, and was admitted to our conclave. Meantime, the Junta of the Notables in the great sala was still deliberating; only, one of them had run out in the corredor to ask the servant whether something to eat couldn’t be sent in.. The first words the engineer-in-chief said as he came into the boudoir were, ‘What is your house, dear Mrs. Gould? A war hospital below, and apparently a restaurant above. I saw them carrying trays full of good things into the sala.’
““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 genera) 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 tength upon the floor. And the purport of that talk,
| THE ISABELS 241
vlicked nervously from a wooden shed in the depths of the forests, had informed the chief that President Ribiera had been, or was being, pursued. This was news, indeed, to all of us in Sulaco. Ribiera himself, when rescued, revived, and soothed by us, had been in- clined to think that he had not been pursued. “‘Ribiera had yielded to the urgent solicitations of his friends, and had left the headquarters of. his dis- eomfited army alone, under the guidance of Bonifacio, the muleteer, who had been willing to take the re- sponsibility 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 ob- tained 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 com- manded 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
242 NOSTROMO
the track of the old Camino Real, only to lose their way in the forests at the foot of the lower slopes. And there they were at last, having stumbled in unex- pectedly upon the construction camp. The engineer at the railhead told his chief by wire that he had Pedre Montero absolutely there, in the very office, listening to the clicks. He was going to take possession of Sulaco in the name of the Democracy. He was very overbear- ing. His men slaughtered some of the Railway Com- pany’s cattle without asking leave, and went to work broiling the meat on the embers. Pedrito made many pointed inquiries as to the silver mine, and what had become of the product of the last six months’ working. He had said peremptorily, “Ask your chief up there by wire, he ought to know; tell him that Don Pedro Montero, Chief of the Campo and Minister of the Interior of the new Government, desires to be correctly informed.’
“He had his feet wrapped up in blood-stained rags, @ 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 dic- tating 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
= THE ISABELS 243
foryoursake, Gould,’ saidthechiefengineer. “Theanswer to this was, in the words of my subordinate, “The filthy brute on my bed said, ‘Suppose I were to have you shot??” To which my subordinate, who, it appears, was himself operating, remarked that it would not bring the cars up. Upon that, the other, yawning, said, ‘““Never mind, there is no lack of horses on the ee | And, turning over, went to sleep on Harris’s ed.
“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 Esmer- alda 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
244 NOSTROMO
escape the vigilance of his captors, who had tried te stop the communication with the outer world. He did manage it. How it was done I don’t know, but a few hours afterwards he called up Sulaco again, and what he said was, ‘The insurgent army has taken possession of the Government transport in the bay and are filling her with troops, with the intention of going round the coast to Sulaco. Therefore look out for yourselves, They will be ready to start in a few hours, and may be upon you before daybreak.’
“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 get- ting an answer.”
After setting these words down in the pocket-book which hewasfilling 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.
“T am not running away, you understand,” he wrote on. “Iam 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 ‘Im- perium in Imperio,’ this wealth-producing thing, te
é) ia ee oils 2e ae ee
THE ISABELS 45
which his sentimentalism attaches a strange idea of justice. He holds to it as some men hold to the idea of love or revenge. Unless I am much mistaken in the man, it must remain inviolate or perish by an act of his will alone. A passion has crept into his cold and idealistic life. A passion which I can only comprehend intellectually. A passion that is not like the passions we know, we men of another blood. But it is as dangerous as any of ours.
“THis wife has understood it, too. That is why she is such a good ally of mine. She seizes upon all my sug- gestions 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 anidea. ‘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 pre- serve 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 dark- ness of the gulf before the Esmeralda rebels arrive; and by the time the day breaks over the ocean we shail be