Section 50

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pocket. Devotion, courage, fidelity, intelligence were not enough. Of course, he was perfectly fearless and incorruptible. But a man was wanted that would know how to succeed. He was that man, sir. On the fifth of May, being practically a prisoner in the Har- bour Office of my Company, I suddenly heard the whis- tle of an engine in the railway yards, a quarter of a mile away. I could not believe my ears. I made one jump on to the balcony, and beheld a locomotive under a great head of steam run out of the yard gates, screech- ing like mad, enveloped in a white cloud, and then, just abreast of old Viola’s inn, check almost to a standstill. I made out, sir, a man—I couldn’t tell who—dash out of the Albergo d’Italia Una, climb into the cab, and then, sir, that engine seemed positively to leap clear of the house, and was gone in the twinkling of an eye. As you blow a candle out, sir! There was a first-rate driver on the foot-plate, sir, I can tell you. They were fired heavily upon by the National Guards in Rincon and one other place. Fortunately the line had not been tornup. In four hours they reached the Construc- tion Camp. Nostromo had his start. . . . The rest you know. You’ve got only to look round you. There are people on this Alameda that ride in their carriages, or even are alive at all to-day, because years ago I engaged a runaway Italian sailor for a foreman of our wharf simply on the strength of his looks. And that’s a fact. You can’t get over it, sir. On the seven- teenth of May, just twelve days after I saw the man from the Casa Viola get on the engine, and wondered what it meant, Barrios’s transports were entering this harbour, and the ‘Treasure House of the World,’ as The Times man calls Sulaco in his book, was saved in- tact for civilization—for a great future, sir. Pedrito, with Hernandez on the west, and the San Tomé miners
a
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)
landing. He had been sending messages to Sotillo for a week to join him. Had Sotillo done so there would have been massacres and proscription that would have left no man or woman of position alive. But that’s where Dr. Monygham comes in. Sotillo, blind and deaf to everything, stuck on board his steamer watching the dragging for silver, which he believed to be sunk at the bottom of the harbour. They say that for the last three days he was out of his mind raving
:
pressing on the land gate, was not able to oppose the —
and foaming with disappointment at getting nothing, ~
flying about the deck, and yelling curses at the boats
with the drags, ordering them in, and then suddenly — stamping his foot and crying out, ‘And yet it is there! —
I see it! I feel it!’
“He was preparing to hang Dr. Monygham (whom he —
had on board) at the end of the after-derrick, when the
first of Barrios’s transports, one of our own ships at —
that, steamed right in, and ranging close alongside opened a small-arm fire without as much preliminaries ‘asa hail. It was the completest surprise in the world, sir. They were too astounded at first to bolt below.
Men were falling right and left like ninepins. It’s a ©
miracle that Monygham, standing on the after-hatch with the rope already round his neck, escaped being riddled through and through like a sieve. He told me since that he had given himself up for lost, and kept on yelling with all the strength of his lungs: ‘Hoist a white flag! Hoist a white flag!’ Suddenly an old major of the Esmeralda regiment, standing by, unsheathed
his sword with a shriek: ‘Die, perjured traitor!’ and ran —
Sotillo clean through the body, just before he fell him- self shot through the head.”’
Captain Mitchell stopped for a while.
“Begad, sir! I could spin you a yarn for hours,
for you to pass through Sulaco and not see the lights of the San Tomé mine, a whole mountain ablaze like a
THE LIGHTHOUSE 485 But it’s time we started off to Rincon. It would not do
lighted palace above the dark Campo. It’s a fash- jonable drive. . . . But let me tell you one little anecdote, sir; just to show you. A fortnight or more later, when Barrios, declared Generalissimo, was gone in pursuit of Pedrito away south, when the Provisional Junta, with Don Juste Lopez at its head, had promul- gated the new Constitution, and our Don Carlos Gould was packing up his trunks bound on a mission to San Francisco and Washington (the United States, sir, were the first great power to recognize the Occidental Republic)—a fortnight later, I say, when we were beginning to feel that our heads were safe on our shoulders, if I may express myself so, a prominent man, a large shipper by our line, came to see,me on business, and, says he, the first thing: ‘I say, Captain Mitchell, is that fellow’ (meaning Nostromo) ‘still the Capataz of your Cargadores or not?’ ‘What’s the matter?’ says I. ‘Because, if he is, then I don’t mind; I send and receive a good lot of cargo by your ships; but I have observed him several days loafing about the wharf, and just now he stopped me as cool as you please, with a request for a cigar. Now, you know, my cigars are rather special, and I can’t get them so easily as all that.’ ‘I hope you stretched a point,’ I said, very gently. ‘Why, yes. But it’s a confounded nuisance. The fellow’s ever- lastingly cadging for smokes.’ Sir, I turned my eyes away, and then asked, ‘Weren’t you one of the prisoners in the Cabildo?’? ‘You know very well I was, and in chains, too,’ says he. ‘And under a fine of fifteen thousand dollars?’ He coloured, sir, because it got about that he fainted from fright when they came to arrest him, and then behaved before Fuentes in a man-
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a ner to make the very policianos, who had dragged him there by the hair of his head, smile at his cringing. ~ “Yes,” he says, in a sort of shy way. ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, — nothing. You stood to lose a tidy bit,’ says I, ‘even if you saved your life. . . . But what can I do for you?’ He never even saw the point. Not he. © And that’s how the world wags, sir.” ‘
He rose a little stiffly, and the drive to Rincon would be taken with only one philosophical remark, uttered | by the merciless cicerone, with his eyes fixed upon the © lights of San Tomé, that seemed suspended in the dark - night between earth and heaven.
“A great power, this, for good and evil, sir. A great power.”
And the dinner of the Mirliflores would be eaten, excellent as to cooking, and leaving upon the traveller’s — mind an impression that there were in Sulaco many pleasant, able young men with salaries apparently too large for their discretion, and amongst them a few, mostly Anglo-Saxon, skilled in the art of, as the saying is, “taking a rise’’ out of his kind host.
With a rapid, jingling drive to the harbour in a two- wheeled machine (which Captain Mitchell called a cur- ricle) behind a fleet and scraggy mule beaten all the time by an obviously Neapolitan driver, the cycle would be nearly closed before the lighted-up offices of the O. S. N. Company, remaining open so late because of the steamer. Nearly—but not quite.
“Ten o’clock. Your ship won’t be ready to leave till half-past twelve, if by then. Come in for a brandy- and-soda and one more cigar.”
And in the superintendent’s private room the privi- leged passenger by the Ceres, or Juno, or Pallas, stunned and as it were annihilated mentally by a sudden surfeit of sights, sounds, names, facts, and complicated infor-
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mation imperfectly apprehended, would listen like a tired child to a fairy tale; would hear a voice, familiar and surprising in its pompousness, tell him, as if from another world, how there was “in this very harbour” an international naval demonstration, which put an end to the Costaguana-Sulaco War. How the United States cruiser, Powhattan, was the first to salute the Occidental flag—white, with a wreath of green laurel in the middle encircling a yellow amarilla flower. Would hear how General Montero, in less than a month after proclaiming himself Emperor of Costaguana, was shot dead (during a solemn and public distribution of orders and crosses) by a young artillery officer, the brother of his then mistress.
“The abominable Pedrito, sir, fled the country,” the voice would say. And it would continue: “A captain of one of our ships told me lately that he recognized Pedrito the Guerrillero, arrayed in purple slippers and a velvet smoking-cap with a gold tassel, keeping a dis- orderly house in one of the southern ports.”
“Abominable Pedrito! Who the devil was he?” would wonder the distinguished bird of passage hovering on the confines of waking and sleep with reso- lutely open eyes and a faint but amiable curl upon his lips, from between which stuck out the eighteenth or twentieth cigar of that memorable day.
“He appeared to me in this very room like a haunting ghost, sir’—Captain Mitchell was talking of his Nos- tromo with true warmth of feeling and a touch of wist- ful pride. “You may imagine, sir, what an effect it produced on me. He had come round by sea with Barrios, of course. And the first thing he told me after I became fit to hear him was that he had picked up the lighter’s boat floating in the gulf! He seemed quite overcome by the circumstance. And a remarkable
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enough circumstance it was, when you remember that it was then sixteer lays since the sinking of the silver. At once I could see he was another man. He stared at the wall, sir, as if there had been a spider or some- thing running about there. The loss of the silver preyed on his mind. The first thing he asked me about was whether Dojia Antonia had heard yet of Decoud’s death. His voice trembled. I had to tell him that Dofia Antonia, as a matter of fact, was not back in town yet. Poor girl! And just as I was making ready to ask him a thousand questions, with a sudden, ‘Pardon me, sefior,’ he cleared out of the office alto- gether. I did not see him again for three days. I waz terribly busy, you know. It seems that he wandered about in and out of the town, and on two nights turned up to sleep in the baracoons of the railway people. He seemed absolutely indifferent to what went on. I asked him on the wharf, ‘When are you going to take hold again, Nostromo? There will be plenty of work for the Cargadores presently.’
“Sefior,’ says he, looking at me in a slow, inquisitive manner, ‘would it surprise you to hear that I am too tired to work just yet? And what work could I do now? How can I look my Cargadores in the face after losing a lighter?’
“T begged him not to think any more about the silver, and he smiled. A smile that went to my heart, sir. ‘It was no mistake,’ I told him. ‘It was a fatality. A thing that could not be helped.’ ‘Si, st!’ he said, and turned away. I thought it best to leave him alone for a bit to get over it. Sir, it took him years really, to get over it. I was present at his interview with Don Car- los. I must say that Gould is rather a cold man. He had to keep a tight hand on his feelings, dealing with thieves and rascals, in constant danger of ruin for him-
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self and wife for so many years, that it had become a second nature. They looked at each other for a long time. Don Carlos asked what he could do for him, in his quiet, reserved way. '
- “My name is known from one end of Sulaco to the other,’ he said, as quiet as the other. ‘What more can you do for me?’ That was all that passed on that occa- sion. Later, however, there was a very fine coasting schooner for sale, and Mrs. Gould and I put our heads together to get her bought and presented to him. Tt was done, but he paid all the price back within the next three years. Business was booming all along this seaboard, sir. Moreover, that man always succeeded in everything except in saving the silver. Poor Dofia Antonia, fresh from her terrible experiences in the woods of Los Hatos, had an interview with him, too. Wanted to hear about Decoud: what they said, what. they did, what they thought up to the last on that fatal, night. Mrs. Gould told me his manner was perfect for quietness and sympathy. Miss Avellanos burst into tears only when he told her how Decoud had hap- pened to say that his plan would be a glorious success.
. , .. And there’s no doubt, sir, that itis. It is @
success.”
The cycle was about to close at last. And while the privileged passenger, shivering with the pleasant anticipations of his berth, forgot to ask himself, “What on earth Decoud’s plan could be?” Captain Mitchell was saying, “Sorry we must part so soon. Your intelligent interest made this a pleasant day to me. I shall see you now on board. You had a glimpse of the ‘Treasure House of the World.’ A very good name that.” And the coxswain’s voice at the door, announcing that the gig was ready, closed the
.evele.
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Nostromo had, indeed, found the lighter’s boat, which he had left on the Great Isabel with Decoud, — floating empty far out in the gulf. He was then on the bridge of the first of Barrios’s transports, and within an hour’s steaming from Sulaco. Barrios, always de- lighted with a feat of daring and a good judge of cour- — age, had taken a great liking to the Capataz. During the passage round the coast the General kept Nostromo — near his person, addressing him frequently in that abrupt and boisterous manner which was the sign of his high favour.
Nostromo’s eyes were the first to catch, broad on the bow, the tiny, elusive dark speck, which, alone with the forms of the Three Isabels right ahead, appeared on the flat, shimmering emptiness of the gulf. There are times when no fact should be neglected as insignificant; a small boat so far from the land might have had some meaning worth finding out. At a nod of consent from Barrios the transport swept out of her course, passing near enough to ascertain that no one manned the little cockle-shell. It was merely a common small boat gone adrift with her oars in her. But Nostromo, to whose mind Decoud had been insistently present for days, had long before recognized with excitement the dinghy of the ligkter.
There could be no question of stopping to pick up that thing. Every minute of time was momentous with the lives and futures of a whole town. The head of thelead- ing ship, with the General on board, fell off to her course. Behind her, the fleet of transports, scattered haphazard over a mile or so in the offing, like the finish of an ocean race, pressed on, all black and smoking on the western sky.
**Mi General,’? Nostromo’s voice rang out loud, but quiet, from behind a group of officers, “I should like to
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THE LIGHTHOUSE 491
save that little boat. Por Dios, I know her. She belongs to my Company.”
“And, por Dios,” guffawed Barrios, in a noisy, good- humoured voice, “you belong to me. I am going to make you a captain of cavalry directly we get within sight of a horse again.”
f “*T can swim far better than I can ride, mi General,” cried Nostromo, pushing through to the rail with a set stare in his eyes. “Let me——”
“Let you? What a conceited fellow that is,’ ban- tered the General, jovially, without even looking at him. “Let him go! Ha! ha! ha! He wants me to admit that we cannot take Sulaco without him! Ha! ha! hha! Would you like to swim off to her, my son?”
A tremendous shout from one end of the ship to the other stopped his guffaw. Nostromo had leaped over- board; and his black head bobbed up far away already from the ship. The General muttered an appalled “Crelo! Sinner that I am!” in a thunderstruck tone. One anxious glance was enough ta show him that Nos- tromo was swimming with perfect ease; and then he thundered terribly, “No! no! We shall not stop to pick up this impertinent fellow. Let him drown— that mad Capataz.” ;
Nothing short of main force would have kept Nos- tromo from leaping overboard. That empty boat, coming out to meet him mysteriously, as if rowed by an invisible spectre, exercised the fascination of some sign, of some warning, seemed to answer in a startling and enigmatic way the persistent thought of a treasure and of a man’s fate. He would have leaped if there had been death in that half-mile of water. It was as smooth as a pond, and for some reason sharks are un- known in the Placid Gulf, though on the other side of the Punta Mala the coastline swarms with them.