Section 44

A fire built against the staircase had burnt down impotently to a low heap of embers. The hard wood had failed to catch; only a few steps at the bottom smouldered, with a creeping glow of sparks defining their charred edges. At the top he saw a streak of light from an open door. It fell upon the vast landing, all foggy with a slow drift of smoke. That was the room. He climbed the stairs, then checked himself, because he had seen within the shadow of a man cast upon one of the walls. It was a shapeless, high- shouldered shadow of somebody standing still, with lowered head, out of his line of sight. The Capataz, re- membering that he was totally unarmed, stepped aside, and, effacing himself upright in a dark corner, waited with his eyes fixed on the door.
The whole enormous ruined barrack of a place, un- finished, without ceilings under its lofty roof, was per- vaded by the smoke swaying to and fro in the faint cross draughts playing in the obscurity of many lofty rooms and barnlike passages. Once one of the swinging shutters came against the wall with a single sharp crack, as if pushed by an impatient hand. A piece of paper scurried out from somewhere, rustling along the land- ing. The man, whoever he was, did not darken the lighted doorway. Twice the Capataz, advancing a couple of steps out of his corner, craned his neck in the hope of catching sight of what he could be at, so quietly, in there. But every time he saw only the dis- torted shadow of broad shoulders and bowed head.
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He was doing appirently nothing, and stirred not from the spot, as though he were meditating—or, per- haps, reading a paper. And not a sound issued from the room.
Once more the Capataz stepped back. He wondered who it was—some Monterist? But he dreaded to show himself. To discover his presence on. shore, unless after many days, would, he believed, endanger the treasure. With his own knowledge possessing his whole soul, it seemed impossible that anybody in Sulaco should fail to jump at the right surmise. After a couple of weeks or so it would be different. Who could tell he kad not returned overland from some port beyond the limits of the Republic? The existence of the treasure confused his thoughts with a peculiar sort of anxiety, as though his life had become bound up with it. U xendered him timorous for a moment before that enigmatic, lighted door. Devil take the fellow! ~He did not want to see him. There would be nothing to learn from his face, known or unknown. He was a fool to waste his time there in waiting.
Less than five minutes after entering the place the Capataz began his retreat. He got away down the stairs with perfect success, gave one upward look over his shoulder at the light on the landing, and ran stealth- ily across the hall. But at the very moment he was turn- ing out of the great door, with his mind fixed upon es- caping the notice of the man upstairs, somebody he had not heard coming briskly along the front ran full into him. Both muttered a stifled exclamation of surprise, and leaped back and stood still, each indistinct to the other. Nostromo was silent. The other man spoke first, in an amazed and deadened tone.
**Who are you?”
Already Nostromo had seemed to recognize Dr.
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Monygham. He had no doubt now. He hesitated the space of a second. The idea of bolting without a word presented itself to his mind. No use! An in- explicable repugnance to pronounce the name by which he was known kept him silent a little longer. At last he said in a low voice—
“A Cargador.”
He walked up to the other. Dr. Monygham had received a shock. He flung his arms up and cried out his wonder aloud, forgetting himself before the marvel of this meeting. Nostromo angrily warned him to mod- erate his voice. The Custom House was not so deserted as it looked. There was somebody in the lighted room above.
There is no more evanescent quality in an accom- plished fact than its wonderfulness. Solicited inces- santly by the considerations affecting its fears and desires, the human mind turns naturally away from the marvellous side of events. And it was in the most natural way possible that the doctor asked this man whom only two minutes before he believed to have been drowned in the gulf—
“You have seen somebody up there? Have you?”
“No, I have not seen him.”
“Then how do you know?”
“T was running away from his shadow when we met.”
“His shadow?”
“Yes. His shadow in the lighted room,” said Nos- tromo, in a contemptuous tone. Leaning back with folded arms at the foot of the immense building, he dropped his head, biting his lips slightly, and not look- ing at the doctor. ‘‘Now,” he thought to himself, “he will begin asking me about the treasure.”
But the doctor’s thoughts were concerned with an
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event not as marvellous as Nostromo’s appearance, but in itself much less clear. Why had Sotillo taken himself off with his whole command with this sudden- ness and secrecy? What did this move portend?
However, it dawned upon the doctor that the man
, — ET al ed el Se
upstairs was one of the officers left behind by the dis- _
appointed colonel to communicate with him.
“I believe he is waiting for me,” he said.
“It is possible.”
“T must see. Do not go away yet, Capataz.”
““Go away where?” muttered Nostromo.
Already the doctor had left him. He remained leaning against the wall, staring at the dark water of
the harbour; the shrilling of cicalas filled his ears. An.
invincible vagueness coming over his thoughts took from them all power to determine his will.
“Capataz! Capataz!’? the doctor’s voice called urgently from above.
The sense of betrayal and ruin floated upon his som- bre indifference as upon a sluggish sea of pitch. But he stepped out from under the wall, and, looking up, saw Dr. Monygham leaning out of a lighted window.
“Come up and see what Sotillo has done. You need not fear the man up here.”
He answered by a slight, bitter laugh. Fear a man! The Capataz of the Sulaco Cargadores fear a man! It angered him that anybody should suggest such a thing. It angered him to be disarmed and skulking and in danger because of the accursed treasure, which was of so little account to the people who had tied it round his neck. He could not shake off the worry of it. To Nostromo the doctor represented all these people. . . . And he had never even asked after it. Not a word of inquiry about the most desperate undertaking of his life.
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Thinking these thoughts, Nostromo passed again through the cavernous hall, where the smoke was con- siderably thinned, and went up the stairs, not so warm to his feet now, towards the streak of light at the top. The doctor appeared in it for a moment, agitated and impatient.
“Come up! Come up!”
At the moment of crossing the doorway the Capataz experienced a shock of surprise. The man had not moved. He saw his shadow in the same place. He started, then stepped in with a feeling of being about to solve a mystery.
It was very simple. For an infinitesimal fraction of a second, against the light of two flaring and guttering candles, through a blue, pungent, thin haze which made his eyes smart, he saw the man standing, as he had imagined him, with his back to the door, casting an enormous and distorted shadow upon the wall. Swifter than a flash of lightning followed the impression of his constrained, toppling attitude—the shoulders project- ing forward, the head sunk low upon the breast. Then he distinguished the arms behind his back, and wrenched so terribly that the two clenched fists, lashed together, had been forced up higher than the shoulder-blades. From there his eyes traced in one instantaneous glance the hide rope going upwards from the tied wrists over a heavy beam and down to a staple in the wall. He did not want to look at the rigid legs, at the feet hanging down nervelessly, with their bare toes some six inches above the floor, to know that the man had been given the estrapade till he had swooned. His first impulse was to dash forward and sever the rope at one blow. He felt for his knife. He had no knife—not even a knife. He stood quivering, and the doctor, perched on the edge of the table, facing thoughtfully the cruel
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and lamentable sight, his chin in his hand, uttered, without stirring—
“Tortured—and shot dead through the breast— getting cold.”
This information calmed the Capataz. One of the candles flickering in the socket went out. ‘Who did this?”’ he asked.
*Sotillo, I tell you. Whoelse? Tortured—of course. But why shot?’ The doctor looked fixedly at Nos-_ tromo, who shrugged his shoulders slightly. “And mark, shot suddenly, on impulse. It is evident. I wish I had his secret.”
Nostromo had advanced, and stooped slightly to look. ‘‘I seem to have scen that face somewhere,” he muttered. ‘‘Who is he?”
The doctor turned his eyes upon him again. “I may yet come to envying his fate. What do you think of that, Capataz, eh?” .
But Nostromo did not even hear these words. Seizing the remaining light, he thrust it under the drooping head. The doctor sat oblivious, with a lost gaze. Then the heavy iron candlestick, as if struck out of Nostromo’s hand, clattered on the floor.
“Hullo!” exclaimed the doctor, looking up with a start. He could hear the Capataz stagger against the table and gasp. In the sudden extinction of the light within, the dead blackness sealing the window- frames became alive with stars to his sight.
*‘Of course, of course,” the doctor muttered to himself in English. “Enoughtomake him jump out of his skin.”
Nostromo’s heart seemed to force itself into his throat. His head swam. Hirsch! The man was Hirsch! — He held on tight to the edge of the table.
“But he was hiding in the lighter,” he almost shouted. His voice fell. “In the lighter, and—and. *
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‘And Sotillo brought him in,” said the doctor. “He _ isno more startling to you than you were to me. What _ I want to know is how he induced some compassionate soul to shoot him.” ~ “So Sotillo knows equable voice.
“Everything!” interrupted the doctor.
The Capataz was heard striking the table with his fist. “‘Everything? What are you saying, there? Everything? Know everything? It is impossible! Everything?”
“Of course. What do you mean by impossible? I tell you I have heard this Hirsch questioned last night, here, in this very room. He knew your name, Decoud’s name, and all about the loading of the silver. . . . The lighter was cut in two. He was grovelling in ab- ject terror before Sotillo, but he remembered that much. What do you want more? He knew least about him- self. They found him clinging to their anchor. He must have caught at it just as the lighter went to the bottom.”
““Went to the bottom?” repeated Nostromo, slowly. “Sotillo believes that? Bueno!”
The doctor, a little impatiently, was unable to imagine what else could anybody believe. Yes, Sotillo believed that the lighter was sunk, and the Capataz de Cargadores, together with Martin Decoud and per- haps one or two other political fugitives, had been drowned.
“T told you well, sefior doctor,” remarked Nostromo at that point, “that Sotillo did not know everything.” “Eh? What do you mean?”
“He did not know I was not dead.” ‘Neither did we.” “And you did not care—none of you caballeros on
** began Nostromo, in a more
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the wharf—once you got off a man of flesh and blood like yourselves on a fool’s business that could not end well.”
“You forget, Capataz, I was not on the wharf. AndI did not think well of the business. So you need not taunt me. I tell you what, man, we had but little leis- ure to think of the dead. Death stands near behind us all. You were gone.”
“T went, indeed!’ broke in Nostromo. ‘And for the sake of what—tell me?”
‘Ah! that is your own affair,” the doctor said, roughly. *Do not ask me.”
Their flowing murmurs paused in the dark. Perched on the edge of the table with slightly averted faces, they felt their shoulders touch, and their eyes remained directed towards an upright shape nearly lost in the obscurity of the inner part of the room, that with pro- jecting head and shoulders, in ghastly immobility, seemed intent on catching every word.
“Muy bien!”’ Nostromo muttered at last. “So be it. Teresa was right. It is my own affair.”
“Teresa is dead,’ remarked the doctor, absently, while his mind followed a new line of thought suggested by what might have been called Nostromo’s return to life. “‘She died, the poor woman.”
“Without a priest?” the Capataz asked, anxiously.
“What a question! Who could have got a priest for her last night?”
“May God keep her soul!’ ejaculated Nostromo, with a gloomy and hopeless fervour which had no time to surprise Dr. Monygham, before, reverting to their previous conversation, he continued in a sinister tone, “Si, sefior doctor. As you were saying, it is my own affair. A very desperate affair.”
“There are no two men in this part of the world that
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THE LIGHTHOUSE 431 could have saved themselves by swimming as you have done,” the doctor said, admiringly.
And again there was silence between those two men. They were both reflecting, and the diversity of their natures made their thoughts born from their meeting swing afar from each other. The doctor, impelled to risky action by his loyalty to the Goulds, wondered with thankfulness at the chain of accident which had brought that man back where he would be of the great- est use in the work of saving the San Tomé mine. The doctor was loyal to the mine. It presented itself to his fifty-years’ old eyes in the shape of a little woman in a soft dress with a long train, with a head attractively overweighted by a great mass of fair hair and the deli- eate preciousness of her inner worth, partaking of a gem and a flower, revealed in every attitude of her person. As the dangers thickened round the San Tomé mine this illusion acquired force, permanency, and authority. It claimed him at last! This claim, ex- alted by a spiritual detachment from the usual sanctions of hope and reward, made Dr. Monygham’s thinking, acting, individuality extremely dangerous to himself and to others, all his scruples vanishing in the proud feeling that his devotion was the only thing that stood between an admirable woman and a frightful disaster.
It was a sort of intoxication which made him utterly indifferent to Decoud’s fate, but left his wits perfectly clear for the appreciation of Decoud’s political idea. Tt was a good idea—and Barrios was the only instrument of its realization. The doctor’s soul, withered and shrunk by the shame of a moral disgrace, became im- placable in the expansion of its tenderness. Nostromo’s return was providential. He did not think of hira humanely, as of a fellow-creature just escaped from the
jaws of death. The Capataz for him was the only
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possible messenger to Cayta. The very man. The ~ doctor’s misanthropic mistrust of mankind (the bitterer because based on personal failure) did not lift him sufficiently above common weaknesses. He was under the spell of an established reputation. Trumpeted by Captain Mitchell, grown in repetition, and fixed — in general assent, Nostromo’s faithfulness had never — been questioned by Dr. Monygham as a fact. It was not likely to be questioned now he stood in desperate need of it himself. Dr. Monygham was human; he accepted the popular conception of the Capataz’s incorruptibility simply because no word or fact had ever contradicted a mere affirmation. It seemed to be
a part of the man, like his whiskers or his teeth. It was impossible to conceive him otherwise. The ques- _ tion was whether he would consent to go on such a dangerous and desperate errand. The doctor was ob- servant enough to have become aware from the first of something peculiar in the man’s temper. He was no doubt sore about the loss of the silver.
“Tt will be necessary to take him into my fullest con- fidence,” he said to himself, with a certain acuteness of insight into the nature he had to deal with.
On Nostromo’s side the silence had been full of black irresolution, anger, and mistrust. He was the first to break it, however.
“The swimming was no great matter,” he said. “It is what went before—and what comes after that x
He did not quite finish what he meant to say, break- ing off short, as though his thought had butted against a solid obstacle. The doctor’s mind pursued its own schemes with Machiavellian subtlety. He said as sympathetically as he was able—
“Tt is unfortunate, Capataz. But no one would think of blaming you. Very mnfortunate. To begin
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with, the treasure ought never to have left the mountain. But it was Decoud who—— however, he is dead. There is no need to talk of him.” )
“No,” assented Nostromo, as the doctor paused, “there is no need to talk of dead men. But I am not dead yet.”