Section 51

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The Capataz seized hold of the stern and blew with’ :
force. A queer, faint feeling had come over him while' he swam. He had got rid of his boots and coat in the water. He hung on for a time, regaining his breath. In the distance the transports, more in a bunch now, held on straight for Sulaco, with their air of friendly contest, of nautical sport, of a regatta; and the united smoke of their funnels drove like a thin, sulphurous fogbank right over his head. It was his daring, his courage, his act that had set these ships in motion upon the sea, hurrying on to save the lives and fortunes of the Blan- cos, the taskmasters of the people; to save the San Tomé mine; to save the children.
With a vigorous and skilful effort he clambered over the stern. The very boat! No doubt of it; no doubt whatever. It was the dinghy of the lighter No. 3— the dinghy left with Martin Decoud on the Great Isabel so that he should have some means to help himself if nothing could be done for him from the shore. And here she had come out to meet him empty and inexpli- cable. What had become of Decoud? The Capataz made a minute examination. He looked for some scratch, for some mark, for some sign. All he discov- ered was a brown stain on the gunwale abreast of the thwart. He bent his face over it and rubbed hard with his finger. Then he sat down in the stern sheets, passive, with his knees close together and legs aslant.
Streaming from head to foot, with his hair and whisk- ers hanging lank and dripping and a lustreless stare fixed upon the bottom boards, the Capataz of the Su- laco Cargadores resembled a drowned corpse come up from the bottom to idle away the sunset hour in a small boat. The excitement of his adventurous ride, the excitement of the return in time, of achievement, of success, all this excitement centred round the asso-
eS ae ee SS el ey
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ciated ideas of the great treasure and of the only other man who knew of its existence, had departed from him. To the very last moment he had been cudgelling his brains as to how he could manage to visit the Great Isabel without loss of time and undetected. For the idea of secrecy had come to be connected with the treasure so closely that even to Barrios himself he had refrained from mentioning the existence of Decoud and of the silver on the island. The letters he carried to the General, however, made brief mention of the loss of the lighter, as having its bearing upon the sit- uation in Sulaco. In the circumstances, the one- eyed tiger-slayer, scenting battle from afar, had not wasted his time in making inquiries from the messenger. In fact, Barrios, talking with Nostromo, assumed that both Don Martin Decoud and the ingots of San Tomé
‘were lost together, and Nostromo, not questioned di-
rectly, had kept silent, under the influence of some in- definable form of resentment and distrust. Let Don Martin speak of everything with his own lips—was what he told himself mentally.
And now, with the means of gaining the Great Isabel thrown thus in his way at the earliest possible moment, his excitement had departed, as when the soul takes flight leaving the body inert upon an earth it knows no more. Nostromo did not seem to know the gulf. For a long time even his eyelids did not flutter once upon the glazed emptiness of his stare. Then slowly, without a limb having stirred, without a twitch of muscle or quiver of an eyelash, an expression, a living expression came upon the still features, deep thought crept into the empty stare—as if an outcast soul, a quiet, brooding soul, finding that untenanted body in its way, had come in stealthily to take possession.
The Capataz frowned: and in the immense stillness,
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of sea, islands, and coast, of cloud forms on the sky and trails of light upon the water, the knitting of that brow had the emphasis of a powerful gesture. Nothing else budged for a long time; then the Capataz shook his head and again surrendered himself to the universal repose of all visible things. Suddenly he seized the oars, and with one movement made the dinghy spm round, head-on to the Great Isabel. But before he began to pull he bent once more over the brown stain on the gunwale.
“T know that thing,” he muttered to himself, with a sagacious jerk of the head. ‘“‘That’s blood.”
His stroke was long, vigorous, and steady. Now and then he looked over his shoulder at the Great Isabel, presenting its low cliff to his anxious gaze like an im- penetrable face. At last the stem touched the strand. He flung rather than dragged the boat up the little beach. At once, turning his back upon the sunset, he plunged with long strides into the ravine, making the water of the stream spurt and fly upwards at every step. as if spurning its shallow, clear, murmuring spirit with his feet. He wanted to save every moment of day- light.
A mass of earth, grass, and smashed bushes had fallen down very naturally from above upon the cavity under the leaning tree. Decoud had attended to the conceal- ment of the silver as instructed, using the spade with some intelligence. But Nostromo’s half-smile of ap- proval changed into a scornful curl of the lip by the sight of the spade itself flung there in full view, as if in utter carelessness or sudden panic, giving away the whole thing. Ah! They were all alike in their folly, these hombres finos that invented laws and governments and barren tasks for the people.
The Capataz picked up the spade, and with the feel of
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the handle in his palm the desire of having a look at the horse-hide boxes of treasure came upon him suddenly. In a very few strokes he uncovered the edges and cor- ners of several; then, clearing away more earth, became aware that one of them had been slashed with a knife.
He exclaimed at that discovery in a stifled voice, and dropped on his knees with a look of irrational appre- hension over one shoulder, then over the other. The stiff hide had closed, and he hesitated before he pushed his hand through the long slit and felt the ingots inside. - There they were. One, two, three. Yes, four gone.
Taken away. Four ingots. But who? Decoud? No-
body else. And why? For what purpose? For what cursed fancy? Let him explain. Four ingots carried off in a boat, and—blood!
In the face of the open gulf, the sun, clear, unclouded, unaltered, plunged into the waters in a grave and un- troubled mystery of self-immolation consummated far from all mortal eyes, with an infinite majesty of silence and peace. Four ingots short!—and blood!
The Capataz got up slowly.
“He might simply have cut his hand,” he muttered. “But, then ‘i
He sat down on the soft earth, unresisting, as if he had been chained to the treasure, his drawn-up legs clasped in his hands with an air of hopeless submission, like a slave set on guard. Once only he lifted his head smartly: the rattle of hot musketry fire had reached his ears, like pouring from on high a stream of dry peas upon a drum. After listening for a while, he said, half aloud—
“He will never come back to explain.”
And he lowered his head again.
“Tmpossible!”” he muttered, gloomily.
The sounds of firing died out. The loom of a greal
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conflagration in Sulaco flashed up red above the coast, — played on the clouds at the head of the gulf, seemed to © touch with a ruddy and sinister reflection the forms of — the Three Isabels. He never saw it, though he raised his head.
“But, then, I cannot know,” he pronounced, dis- tinctly, and remained silent and staring for hours.
He could not know. Nobody was to know. As might have been supposed, the end of Don Martin Decoud never became a subject of speculation for any one except Nostromo. Had the truth of the facts been known, there would always have remained the question, Why? Whereas the version of his death at the sinking of the lighter had no uncertainty of motive. The young apostle of Separation had died striving for his idea by an ever-lamented accident. But the truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this earth, and whom only the | simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Cos- taguanero of the boulevards had died from solitude and want of faith in himself and others.
- For some good and valid reasons beyond mere human
comprehension, the sea-birds of the gulf shun the Isa- bels. The rocky head of Azuera is their haunt, whose stony levels and chasms resound with their wild and tumultuous clamour as if they were for ever quarrelling over the legendary treasure.
At the end of his first day on the Great Isabel, Decoud, turning in his lair of coarse grass, under the shade of a tree, said to himself—
“T have not seen as much as one single bird all day.”
And he had not heard a sound, either, all day but that cae now of his own muttering voice. It had been a day of absolute silence—the first he had known in his life. And he had not slept a wink. Not for all these
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wakeful nights and the days of fighting, planning, talk- ing; not for all that last night of danger and hard physi-. cal toil upon the gulf, had he been able to close his eyes for a moment. And yet from sunrise to sunset he had been lying prone on the ground, either on his back or on his face.
He stretched himself, and with slow steps descended into the gully to spend the night by the side of the sil- ver. If Nostromo returned—as he might have done at any moment—it was there that he would look first; and night would, of course, be the proper time for an at» tempt to communicate. He remembered with profound indifference that he had not eaten anything yet since he had been left alone on the island.
He spent the night open-eyed, and when the day broke he ate something with the same indifference, The brilliant “Son Decoud,” the spoiled darling of the family, the lover of Antonia and journalist of Sulaco, was not fit to grapple with himself single-handed. Solitude from mere outward condition of existence be comes very swiftly a state of soul in which the affecta- tions of irony and scepticism have no place. It takes possession of the mind, and drives forth the thought into the exile of utter unbelief. After three days of waiting for the sight of some human face, Decoud caught himself entertaining a doubt of his own in- dividuality. It had merged into the world of cloud and water, of natural forces and forms of nature.. In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part, Decoud lost all belief in the reality of his action past and to come. On the fifth day an immense melan= choly descended upon him palpably. He resolved not to give himself up to these people in Sulaco, who
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had beset him, unreal and terrible, like jibbering and obscene spectres. He saw himself struggling feebly in their midst, and Antonia, gigantic and lovely like an allegorical statue, looking on with scornful eyes at his weakness.
Not a living being, not a speck of distant sail, ap- peared within the range of his vision; and, as if to es- cape from this solitude, he absorbed himself in his melancholy. The vague consciousness of a misdirected life given up to impulses whose memory left a bitter taste in his mouth was the first moral sentiment of his manhood. But at the same time he felt no remorse. What should he regret? He had recognized no other virtue than intelligence, and had erected passions into duties. Both his intelligence and his passion were swallowed up easily in this great unbroken solitude of waiting without faith. Sleeplessness had robbed his will of all energy, for he had not slept seven hours in the seven days. His sadness was the sadness of a scep- tical mind. He beheld the universe as a succession of incomprehensible images. Nostromo was dead. Every- thing had failed ignominiously. He no longer dared to think of Antonia. She had not survived. But if she survived he could not face her. And all exertion seemed senseless.
On the tenth day, after a night spent without even dozing off once (it had occurred to him that Antonia could not possibly have ever loved a being so impal- pable as himself), the solitude appeared like a great void, and the silence of the gulf like a tense, thin cord to which he hung suspended by both hands, without fear, without surprise, without any sort of emotion whatever. Only towards the evening, in the compara- tive relief of coolness, he began to wish that this cord would snap. He imagined it snapping with a report as
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of a pistol—a sharp, full crack. And that would be the end of him. He contemplated that eventuality with pleasure, because he dreaded the sleepless nights in which the silence, remaining unbroken in the shape of a cord to which he hung with both hands, vibrated with senseless phrases, always the same but utterly incomprehensible, about Nostromo, Antonia, Barrios, and proclamations mingled into an ironical and senseless buzzing. In the daytime he could look at the silence like a still cord stretched to breaking- point, with his life, his vain life, suspended to it like a weight.
*T wonder whether I would hear it snap before I fell,” he asked himself.
The sun was two hours above the horizon when he got up, gaunt, dirty, white-faced, and looked at it with his red-rimmed eyes. His limbs obeyed him slowly, as if full of lead, yet without tremor; and the effect of that physical condition gave to his movements an unhesi- tating, deliberate dignity. He acted as if accomplish- ing some sort of rite. He descended into the gully; for the fascination of all that silver, with its potential power, survived alone outside ‘of himself. He picked up the belt with the revolver, that was lying there, and buckled it round his waist. The cord of silence could never snap on the island. It must let him fall and sink into the sea, he thought. And sink! He was look- ing at the loose earth covering the treasure. In the sea! His aspect was that of a somnambulist. He lowered himself down on his knees slowly and went on grubbing with his fingers with industrious patience till he uncov- ered one of the boxes. Without a pause, as if doing some work done many times before, he slit it open and took four ingots, which he put in his pockets. He covered up the exposed box again and step by step
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came out of the gully. The bushes closed after him with a swish.
It was on the third day of his solitude that he had dragged the dinghy near the water with an idea of row- ing away somewhere, but had desisted partly at the whisper of lingering hope that Nostromo would return, partly from conviction of utter uselessness of all effort. Now she wanted only a slight shove to be set afloat. He had eaten a little every day after the first, and had some muscular strength left yet. Taking up the oars slowly, he pulled away from the cliff of the Great Isabel, that stood behind him warm with sunshine, ' as if with the heat of life, bathed in a rich light from head to foot as if in a radiance of hope and joy. He pulled straight towards the setting sun. When the gulf had grown dark, he ceased rowing and flung the sculls in. The hollow clatter they made in falling was the loudest noise he had ever heard in his life. It was a revelation. It seemed to recall him from far away. Actually the thought, “Perhaps I may sleep to-night,” passed through his mind. But he did not believe it. He believed in nothing; and he remained sitting on the thwart. |
The dawn from behind the mountains put a gleam into his unwinking eyes. After a clear daybreak the sun appeared splendidly above the peaks of the range. The great gulf burst into a glitter all around the boat; and in this glory of merciless solitude the silence ap- peared again before him, stretched taut like a dark, thin string.
His eyes looked at it while, without haste, he shifted his seat from the thwart to the gunwale. They looked at it fixedly, while his hand, feeling about his waist, unbuttoned the flap of the leather case, drew the re- volver, cocked it, breught it forward pointing at his
THE LIGHTHOUSE 501 breast, pulled the trigger, and, with convulsive force,
sent the still-smoking weapon hurtling through the air.
His eyes looked at it while he fell forward and hung with his breast on the gunwale and the fingers of his right hand hooked under the thwart. They looked
“It is done,’ he stammered out, in a sudden flow of blood. His last thought was: “I wonder how that Capataz died.” The stiffness of the fingers relaxed, and the lover of Antonia Avellanos rolled overboard without having heard the cord of silence snap in the solitude of the Placid Gulf, whose glittering surface remained untroubled by the fall of his body.