Nostromo — Part 3: Chapter 10 pt 2

“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 curricle) 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 privileged 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 information 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 disorderly 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 resolutely 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 Nostromo with true warmth of feeling and a touch of wistful 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 enough circumstance it was, when you remember that it was then sixteen days 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 something running about there.

The loss of the silver preyed on his mind.

The first thing he asked me about was whether Dona Antonia had heard yet of Decoud’s death.

His voice trembled.

I had to tell him that Dona 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, senor,’ he cleared out of the office altogether.

I did not see him again for three days.

I was 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.

’ “‘Senor,’ 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?

’ “I 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, si!

” 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 Carlos.

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 himself 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 occasion.

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.

It 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 Dona 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 happened to say that his plan would be a glorious success.

.

.

.

And there’s no doubt, sir, that it is.

It is a 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 cycle.

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 delighted with a feat of daring and a good judge of courage, 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 lighter.

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 the leading 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 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.

” “I 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,” bantered 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!

ha!

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 overboard; and his black head bobbed up far away already from the ship.

The General muttered an appalled “Cielo!

Sinner that I am!

” in a thunderstruck tone.

One anxious glance was enough to show him that Nostromo 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 Nostromo 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 unknown in the Placid Gulf, though on the other side of the Punta Mala the coastline swarms with them.

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 Blancos, the taskmasters of the people; to save the San Tome 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 inexplicable.

What had become of Decoud?

The Capataz made a minute examination.

He looked for some scratch, for some mark, for some sign.

All he discovered 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 whiskers hanging lank and dripping and a lustreless stare fixed upon the bottom boards, the Capataz of the Sulaco 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 associated 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 situation 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 Tome were lost together, and Nostromo, not questioned directly, had kept silent, under the influence of some indefinable 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 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 spin round, head-on to the Great Isabel.

But before he began to pull he bent once more over the brown stain on the gunwale.

“I 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 impenetrable 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 daylight.

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 concealment of the silver as instructed, using the spade with some intelligence.

But Nostromo’s half-smile of approval 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 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 corners 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 apprehension 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?

Nobody 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 untroubled 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----” 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.

“Impossible!

” he muttered, gloomily.

The sounds of firing died out.

The loom of a great 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, distinctly, 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 Costaguanero 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 Isabels.

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-- “I have not seen as much as one single bird all day.

” And he had not heard a sound, either, all day but that one 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 wakeful nights and the days of fighting, planning, talking; not for all that last night of danger and hard physical 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 silver.

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 attempt 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 becomes very swiftly a state of soul in which the affectations 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 individuality.

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 melancholy descended upon him palpably.

He resolved not to give himself up to these people in Sulaco, who 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, appeared within the range of his vision; and, as if to escape 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 sceptical mind.

He beheld the universe as a succession of incomprehensible images.

Nostromo was dead.

Everything 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 impalpable 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 comparative relief of coolness, he began to wish that this cord would snap.

He imagined it snapping with a report as 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.

“I 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 unhesitating, deliberate dignity.

He acted as if accomplishing 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 looking 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 uncovered 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 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 rowing 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 appeared 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 revolver, cocked it, brought it forward pointing at his 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.

A victim of the disillusioned weariness which is the retribution meted out to intellectual audacity, the brilliant Don Martin Decoud, weighted by the bars of San Tome silver, disappeared without a trace, swallowed up in the immense indifference of things.

His sleepless, crouching figure was gone from the side of the San Tome silver; and for a time the spirits of good and evil that hover near every concealed treasure of the earth might have thought that this one had been forgotten by all mankind.

Then, after a few days, another form appeared striding away from the setting sun to sit motionless and awake in the narrow black gully all through the night, in nearly the same pose, in the same place in which had sat that other sleepless man who had gone away for ever so quietly in a small boat, about the time of sunset.

And the spirits of good and evil that hover about a forbidden treasure understood well that the silver of San Tome was provided now with a faithful and lifelong slave.

The magnificent Capataz de Cargadores, victim of the disenchanted vanity which is the reward of audacious action, sat in the weary pose of a hunted outcast through a night of sleeplessness as tormenting as any known to Decoud, his companion in the most desperate affair of his life.

And he wondered how Decoud had died.

But he knew the part he had played himself.

First a woman, then a man, abandoned both in their last extremity, for the sake of this accursed treasure.

It was paid for by a soul lost and by a vanished life.