Section 6

once, “Really, it is most unreasonable to demand that a ©
44
THE SILVER OF THE MINE 45
man should think of other people so much better than _ he is able to think of himself.” ___And Mrs. Gould had hastened to drop the subject. _ There were strange rumours of the English doctor. ; Years ago, in the time of Guzman Bento, he had been ; mixed up, it was whispered, in a conspiracy which was betrayed and, as people expressed it, drowned in blood. His hair had turned grey, his hairless, seamed face was of a brick-dust colour; the large check pattern of his _ flannel shirt and his old stained Panama hat were an "established defiance to the conventionalities of Sulaco. Had it not been for the immaculate cleanliness of his apparel he might have been taken for one of those | shiftless Europeans that are a moral eyesore to the _ respectability of a foreign colony in almost every exotic part of the world. The young ladies of Sulaco, adorn- _ ing with clusters of pretty faces the balconies along the _ Street of the Constitution, when they saw him pass, : with his limping gait and bowed head, a short linen _ jacket drawn on carelessly over the flannel check shirt, _ would remark to each other, “‘Here is the Sefior doctor - going to call on Dofia Emilia. He has got his little coat on.”” The inference wastrue. Its deeper meaning was hidden from their simple intelligence. Moreover. they expended no store of thought on the doctor. He was old, ugly, learned—and a little “‘loco’"—mad, if not a bit of a sorcerer, as the common people suspected him of being. The little white jacket was in reality a con- cession to Mrs; Gould’s humanizing influence. The doctor, with his habit of sceptical, bitter speech, had no other means of showing his profound respect for the character of the woman who was known in the country as the English Sefiora. He presented this tribute very seriously indeed; it was no trifle for a man of his habits. Mrs. Gould felt that, too, perfectly.
46 NOSTROMO
She would never have thought of imposing upon him this marked show of deference.
She kept her old Spanish house (one of the finest specimens in Sulaco) open for the dispensation of the small graces of existence. She dispensed them with
: °°
;
q :
simplicity and charm because she was guided by an ©
alert perception of values. She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal comprehension. Charles Gould (the Gould family, established in Costaguana for three generations, always went to England for their education and for their wives) imagined that he had fallen in love with a
girl’s sound common sense like any other man, but these _
were not exactly the reasons why, for instance, the whole surveying camp, from the youngest of the young men to their mature chief, should have found occasion to allude to Mrs. Gould’s house so frequently amongst the high peaks of the Sierra. She would have pro- tested that she had done nothing for them, with a low laugh and a surprised widening of her grey eyes, had anybody told her how convincingly she was remem- bered on the edge of the snow-line above Sulaco. But directly, with a little capable air of setting her wits to work, she would have found an explanation. “Of course, it was such a surprise for these boys to find any sort of welcome here. And I suppose they are home- sick. I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.”’ She was always sorry for homesick people.
Born in the country, as his father before him, spare
and tall, with a flaming moustache, a neat chin, clear blue eyes, auburn hair, and a thin, fresh, red face, Charles Gould looked like a new arrival from over the sea. His grandfather had fought in the cause of
THE SILVER OF THE MINE 47
_ independence under Bolivar, in that famous English _ legion which on the battlefield of Carabobo had been
* TS See taeeayeye «+
saluted by the great Liberator as Saviours of his country. One of Charles Gould’s uncles had been the elected President of that very province of Sulaco (then called a State) in the days of Federation, and after- wards had been put up against the wall of a church and shot by the order of the barbarous Unionist general, Guzman Bento. It was the same Guzman Bento who, becoming later Perpetual President, famed for his ruth- less and cruel tyranny, reached his apotheosis in the popular legend of a sanguinary land-haunting spectre whose body had been carried off by the devil in person from the brick mausoleum in the nave of the Church of Assumption in Sta. Marta. Thus, at least, the priests explained its disappearance to the barefooted multi- tude that streamed in, awestruck, to gaze at the hole in the side of the ugly box of bricks before the great altar.
Guzman Bento of cruel memory had put to death great numbers of people besides Charles Gould’s uncle; but with a relative martyred in the cause of aristocracy, the Sulaco Oligarchs (this was the phraseology of Guz- man Bento’s time; now they were called Blancos, and had given up the federal idea), which meant the families of pure Spanish descent, considered Charles as one of themselves. With such a family record, no one could be more of a Costaguanero than Don Carlos Gould; but his aspect was so characteristic that in the talk of common people he was just the Inglez—the English- man of Sulaco. He looked more English than a casual tourist, a sort of heretic pilgrim, however, quite un- known in Sulaco. He looked more English than the last arrived batch of young railway engineers, than anybody out of the hunting-field pictures in the num~- bers of Punch reaching his wife’s drawing-room twa
48 NOSTROMO
months or so after date. It astonished you to hear him talk Spanish (Castillan, as the natives say) or the Indian dialect of the country-people so naturally. His accent had never been English; but there was something so indelible in all these ancestral Goulds—liberators, explorers, coffee planters, merchants, revolutionists— of Costaguana, that he, the only representative of the third generation in a continent possessing its own style of horsemanship, went on looking thoroughly English even on horseback. This is not said of him in the mocking spirit of the Llaneros—men of the great plains —who think that no one in the world knows how to sit a horse but themselves. Charles Gould, to use the suitably lofty phrase, rode like a centaur. Riding
7 4
”
Se
for him was not a special form of exercise; it was a
natural faculty, as walking straight is to all men sound of mind and limb; but, all the same, when cantering beside the rutty ox-cart track to the mine he looked in his English clothes and with his imported saddlery as though he had come this moment to Costaguana at his easy swift pasotrote, straight out of some green meadow at the other side of the world.
His way would lie along the old Spanish road—the
Camino Real of popular speech—the only remaining ©
vestige of a fact and name left by that royalty old Giorgio Viola hated, and whose very shadow had de- parted from the land; for the big equestrian statue of Charles IV at the entrance of the Alameda, towering white against the trees, was only known to the folk from the country and to the beggars of the town that slept on the steps around the pedestal, as the Horse of Stone. The other Carlos, turning off to the left with a rapid clatter of hoofs on the disjointed pave- ment—Don Carlos Gould, in his English clothes, looked as Incongruovs, but much more at home than the kingly
~
THE SILVER OF THE MINE 49
cavalier reining in his steed on the pedestal above the sleeping leperos, with his marble arm raised towards ’ the marble rim of a plumed hat.
The weather-stained effigy of the mounted king, with its vague suggestion of a saluting gesture, seemed to present an inscrutable breast to the political changes which had robbed it of its very name; but neither did the other horseman, well known to the people, keen and alive on his well-shaped, slate-coloured beast with a white eye, wear his heart on the sleeve of his English coat. His mind preserved its steady poise as if shel- tered in the passionless stability of private and public, decencies at home in Europe. He accepted with a like calm the shocking manner in which the Sulaco ladies smothered their faces with pearl powder till they looked like white plaster casts with beautiful living eyes, the peculiar gossip of the town, and the continuous political changes, the constant “saving of the country,” which to his wife seemed a puerile and bloodthirsty game of murder and rapine played with terrible earnest- ness by depraved children. In the early days of her Costaguana life, the little lady used to clench her hands with exasperation at not being able to take the public affairs of the country as seriously as the incidental atrocity of methods deserved. She saw in them a comedy of naive pretences, but hardly anything genuine except her own appalled indignation. Charles, very quiet and twisting his long moustaches, would decline to discuss them at all. Once, however, he observed tc her gently—
““My dear, you seem to forget that I was born here.”
These few words made her pause as if they had been a sudden revelation. Perhaps the mere fact of being born in the country did make a difference. She had a great confidence in her husband; it had always been
50 NOSTROMO_
very great. He had struck her imagination from the first by his unsentimentalism, by that very quietude of mind which she had erected in her thought for a sign of
perfect competency in the business of living. Don —
José Avellanos, their neighbour across the street, a statesman, a poet, a man of culture, who had repre- sented his country at several European Courts (and had suffered untold indignities as a state prisoner in the time of the tyrant Guzman Bento), used to declare in Dofia Emilia’s drawing-room that Carlos had all the English qualities of character with a truly patriotic heart. i
Mrs. Gould, raising her eyes to her husband’s thin,
——.
red and tan face, could not detect the slightest quiver of _
a feature at what he must have heard said of his’ patriotism. Perhaps he had just dismounted on his return from the mine; he was English enough to dis- regard the hottest hours of the day. Basilio, ina livery of white linen and a red sash, had squatted for a moment behind his heels to unstrap the heavy, blunt spurs in the patio; and then the Sefior Administrator would go up the staircase into the gallery. Rows of plants in pots, ranged on the balustrade between the pilasters of the arches, screened the corrédor with their leaves and flowers from the quadrangle below, whose paved space is the true hearthstone of a South American house, where the quiet hours of domestic life are marked by the shifting of light and shadow on the flagstones. Sefior Avellanos was in the habit of crossing the patic at five o’clock almost every day. Don José chose to come over at tea-time because the English rite at Dofia Emilia’s house reminded him of the time he lived in London as Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James. He did not like tea; and, usually, rocking his American chair, his neat little shiny boots crossed on
-—
THE SILVER OF THE MINE 5}
_ the foot-rest, he would talk on and on with a sort of complacent virtuosity wonderful in a man of his age, _ while he held the cup in his hands for a long time. His shina head was perfectly white; his eyes coal- _ black.
On seeing Charles Gould step into the sala he would nod provisionally and go on to the end of the oratorial ( period. Only then he would say— _
“Carlos, my friend, you have ridden from San Tomé _ in the heat of the day. Always the true English activity. No? What?”
_ _ He drank up all the tea at once in one draught. This _ performance was invariably followed by a slight shudder and alow, involuntary “‘br-r-r-r,” which was not covered by the hasty exclamation, “Excellent!”
Then giving up the empty cup into his young friend’s hand, extended with a smile, he continued to expatiate upon the patriotic nature of the San T omé mine for the simple pleasure of talking fluently, it seemed, while his reclining body jerked backwards and forwards in a rocking-chair of the sort exported from the United States. The ceiling of the largest drawing-room of the Casa Gould extended its white level far above his head. The loftiness dwarfed the mixture of heavy, straight- backed Spanish chairs of brown wood with leathern seats, and European furniture, low, and cushioned all over, like squat little monsters gorged to bursting with steel springs and horsehair. There were knick-knacks on little tables, mirrors let into the wall above marble consoles, square spaces of carpet under the two groups of armchairs, each presided over by a deep sofa; smaller rugs scattered all over the floor of red tiles; three win- dows from the ceiling down to the ground, opening on a baleony, and flanked by the perpendicular folds of the cark hangizgs. The stateliness of ancient days lingered
52 NOSTROMO
between the four high, smooth walls, tinted a delicate primrose-colour; and Mrs. Gould, with her little head and shining coils of hair, sitting in a cloud of muslin and lace before a slender mahogany table, resembled a fairy posed lightly before dainty philtres dispensed out of vessels of silver and porcelain. |
Mrs. Gould knew the history of the San Tomé mine. Worked in the early days mostly by means of lashes on the backs of slaves, its yield had been paid for in its own weight of human bones. Whole tribes of Indians had perished in the exploitation; and then the mine was abandoned, since with this primitive method it had ceased to make a profitable return, no matter how many corpses were thrown into itsmaw. Then it became for- gotten. It was rediscovered after the War of Indepen- dence. An English company obtained the right to work it, and found so rich a vein that neither the ex- actions of successive governments, nor the periodical raids of recruiting officers upon the population of paid miners they had created, could discourage their per- severance. But in the end, during the long turmoil of pronunciamentos that followed the death of the famous Guzman Bento, the native miners, incited to revolt by the emissaries sent out from the capital, had risen upon their English chiefs and murdered them toa man. The decree of confiscation which appeared immediately afterwards in the Diario Official, published in Sta. Marta, began with the words: “J ustly incensed at the grinding oppression of foreigners, actuated by sordid motives of gain rather than by love for a country where they come impoverished to seek their fortunes, the mining population of San Tomé, etc. . . .” and ended with the declaration: “‘ The chief of the State has resolved to exercise to the full his power of clemency. The mine, which by every law, international, human,
ld ale ere
-
* THE SILVER OF THE MINE 53
and divine, reverts now to the Government as national property, shall remain closed till the sword drawn for the sacred defence of liberal principles has accomplished its mission of securing the happiness of our beloved country.”
And for many years this was the last of the San Tomé mine. What advantage that Government had ex- pected from the spoliation, it is impossible to tell now. Costaguana was made with difficulty to pay a beggarly money compensation to the families of the victims, and then the matter dropped out of diplomatic despatches. But afterwards another Government bethought itself of that valuable asset. It was an ordinary Costaguana Government—the fourth in six years—but it judged of its opportunities sanely. It remembered the San Tomé mine with a secret conviction of its worthlessness in their own hands, but with an ingenious insight into the various uses a silver mine can be put to, apart from the sordid process of extracting the metal from under the ground. The father of Charles Gould, for a long time one of the most wealthy merchants of Costaguana, had already lost a considerable part of his fortune in forced loans to the successive Governments. He was a man of calm judgment, who never dreamed of pressing his claims; and when, suddenly, the perpetual con- cession of the San Tomé mine was offered to him in full settlement, his alarm became extreme. He was versed in the ways of Governments. Indeed, the intention of this affair, though no doubt deeply meditated in the closet, lay open on the surface of the document pre- sented urgently for his signature. The third and most important clause stipulated that the concession-holder should pay at once to the Government five years’ royalties on the estimated output of the mine.
Mr. Gould, senior, defended himself from this fatal
54 NOSTROMO
favour with many arguments and entreaties, but with- out success. He knew nothing of mining; he had no means to put his concession on the European market; the mine as a working concern did not exist. The buildings had been burnt down, the mining plant had been destroyed, the mining population had disappeared from the neighbourhood years and years ago; the very road had vanished under a flood of tropical vegetation as effectually as if swallowed by the sea; and the main gallery had fallen in within a hundred yards from the entrance. It was no longer an abandoned mine; it was a wild, inaccessible, and rocky gorge of the Sierra, where vestiges of charred timber, some heaps of smashed bricks, and a few shapeless pieces of rusty iron could have been found under the matted mass of thorny creepers covering the ground. Mr. Gould, senior, did not desire the perpetual possession of that desolate locality; in fact, the mere vision of it arising before his mind in the still watches of the night had the power to exasperate him into hours of hot and agitated insomnia.