The reality of the political action, such as it was, seemed closer, and acquired poignancy by Antonia’s belief in the cause. Its crudeness hurt his feelings. He was surprised at his own sensitiveness.
“I suppose I am more of a Costaguanero than I would have believed possible,” he thought to himself.
His disdain grew like a reaction of his scepticism against the action into which he was forced by his infatuation for Antonia. He soothed himself by saying he was not a patriot, but a lover.
The ladies came in bareheaded, and Mrs. Gould sank low before the little tea-table. Antonia took up her usual place at the reception hour — the corner of a leathern couch, with a rigid grace in her pose and a fan in her hand. Decoud, swerving from the straight line of his march, came to lean over the high back of her seat.
For a long time he talked into her ear from behind, softly, with a half smile and an air of apologetic familiarity. Her fan lay half grasped on her knees. She never looked at him. His rapid utterance grew more and more insistent and caressing. At last he ventured a slight laugh.
“No, really. You must forgive me. One must be serious sometimes.” He paused. She turned her head a little; her blue eyes glided slowly towards him, slightly upwards, mollified and questioning.
“You can’t think I am serious when I call Montero a gran’ bestia every second day in the Porvenir? That is not a serious occupation. No occupation is serious, not even when a bullet through the heart is the penalty of failure!”
Her hand closed firmly on her fan.
“Some reason, you understand, I mean some sense, may creep into thinking; some glimpse of truth. I mean some effective truth, for which there is no room in politics or journalism. I happen to have said what I thought. And you are angry! If you do me the kindness to think a little you will see that I spoke like a patriot.”
She opened her red lips for the first time, not unkindly.
“Yes, but you never see the aim. Men must be used as they are. I suppose nobody is really disinterested, unless, perhaps, you, Don Martin.”
“God forbid! It’s the last thing I should like you to believe of me.” He spoke lightly, and paused.
She began to fan herself with a slow movement without raising her hand. After a time he whispered passionately —
“Antonia!”
She smiled, and extended her hand after the English manner towards Charles Gould, who was bowing before her; while Decoud, with his elbows spread on the back of the sofa, dropped his eyes and murmured, “Bonjour.”
The Senor Administrador of the San Tome mine bent over his wife for a moment. They exchanged a few words, of which only the phrase, “The greatest enthusiasm,” pronounced by Mrs. Gould, could be heard.
“Yes,” Decoud began in a murmur. “Even he!”
“This is sheer calumny,” said Antonia, not very severely.
“You just ask him to throw his mine into the melting-pot for the great cause,” Decoud whispered.
Don Jose had raised his voice. He rubbed his hands cheerily. The excellent aspect of the troops and the great quantity of new deadly rifles on the shoulders of those brave men seemed to fill him with an ecstatic confidence.
Charles Gould, very tall and thin before his chair, listened, but nothing could be discovered in his face except a kind and deferential attention.
Meantime, Antonia had risen, and, crossing the room, stood looking out of one of the three long windows giving on the street. Decoud followed her. The window was thrown open, and he leaned against the thickness of the wall. The long folds of the damask curtain, falling straight from the broad brass cornice, hid him partly from the room. He folded his arms on his breast, and looked steadily at Antonia’s profile.
The people returning from the harbour filled the pavements; the shuffle of sandals and a low murmur of voices ascended to the window. Now and then a coach rolled slowly along the disjointed roadway of the Calle de la Constitucion. There were not many private carriages in Sulaco; at the most crowded hour on the Alameda they could be counted with one glance of the eye. The great family arks swayed on high leathern springs, full of pretty powdered faces in which the eyes looked intensely alive and black. And first Don Juste Lopez, the President of the Provincial Assembly, passed with his three lovely daughters, solemn in a black frock-coat and stiff white tie, as when directing a debate from a high tribune. Though they all raised their eyes, Antonia did not make the usual greeting gesture of a fluttered hand, and they affected not to see the two young people, Costaguaneros with European manners, whose eccentricities were discussed behind the barred windows of the first families in Sulaco. And then the widowed Senora Gavilaso de Valdes rolled by, handsome and dignified, in a great machine in which she used to travel to and from her country house, surrounded by an armed retinue in leather suits and big sombreros, with carbines at the bows of their saddles. She was a woman of most distinguished family, proud, rich, and kind-hearted. Her second son, Jaime, had just gone off on the Staff of Barrios. The eldest, a worthless fellow of a moody disposition, filled Sulaco with the noise of his dissipations, and gambled heavily at the club. The two youngest boys, with yellow Ribierist cockades in their caps, sat on the front seat. She, too, affected not to see the Senor Decoud talking publicly with Antonia in defiance of every convention. And he not even her novio as far as the world knew! Though, even in that case, it would have been scandal enough. But the dignified old lady, respected and admired by the first families, would have been still more shocked if she could have heard the words they were exchanging.
“Did you say I lost sight of the aim? I have only one aim in the world.”
She made an almost imperceptible negative movement of her head, still staring across the street at the Avellanos’s house, grey, marked with decay, and with iron bars like a prison.
“And it would be so easy of attainment,” he continued, “this aim which, whether knowingly or not, I have always had in my heart — ever since the day when you snubbed me so horribly once in Paris, you remember.”
A slight smile seemed to move the corner of the lip that was on his side.
“You know you were a very terrible person, a sort of Charlotte Corday in a schoolgirl’s dress; a ferocious patriot. I suppose you would have stuck a knife into Guzman Bento?”
She interrupted him. “You do me too much honour.”
“At any rate,” he said, changing suddenly to a tone of bitter levity, “you would have sent me to stab him without compunction.”
“Ah, par exemple!” she murmured in a shocked tone.
“Well,” he argued, mockingly, “you do keep me here writing deadly nonsense. Deadly to me! It has already killed my self-respect. And you may imagine,” he continued, his tone passing into light banter, “that Montero, should he be successful, would get even with me in the only way such a brute can get even with a man of intelligence who condescends to call him a gran’ bestia three times a week. It’s a sort of intellectual death; but there is the other one in the background for a journalist of my ability.”
“If he is successful!” said Antonia, thoughtfully.
“You seem satisfied to see my life hang on a thread,” Decoud replied, with a broad smile. “And the other Montero, the ‘my trusted brother’ of the proclamations, the guerrillero — haven’t I written that he was taking the guests’ overcoats and changing plates in Paris at our Legation in the intervals of spying on our refugees there, in the time of Rojas? He will wash out that sacred truth in blood. In my blood! Why do you look annoyed? This is simply a bit of the biography of one of our great men. What do you think he will do to me? There is a certain convent wall round the corner of the Plaza, opposite the door of the Bull Ring. You know? Opposite the door with the inscription, Intrada de la Sombra.’ Appropriate, perhaps! That’s where the uncle of our host gave up his Anglo-South-American soul. And, note, he might have run away. A man who has fought with weapons may run away. You might have let me go with Barrios if you had cared for me. I would have carried one
of those rifles, in which Don Jose believes, with the greatest satisfaction, in the ranks of poor peons and Indios, that know nothing either of reason or politics. The most forlorn hope in the most forlorn army on earth would have been safer than that for which you made me stay here. When you make war you may retreat, but not when you spend your time in inciting poor ignorant fools to kill and to die.”
His tone remained light, and as if unaware of his presence she stood motionless, her hands clasped lightly, the fan hanging down from her interlaced fingers. He waited for a while, and then —
“I shall go to the wall,” he said, with a sort of jocular desperation.
Even that declaration did not make her look at him. Her head remained still, her eyes fixed upon the house of the Avellanos, whose chipped pilasters, broken cornices, the whole degradation of dignity was hidden now by the gathering dusk of the street. In her whole figure her lips alone moved, forming the words —
“Martin, you will make me cry.”
He remained silent for a minute, startled, as if overwhelmed by a sort of awed happiness, with the lines of the mocking smile still stiffened about his mouth, and incredulous surprise in his eyes. The value of a sentence is in the personality which utters it, for nothing new can be said by man or woman; and those were the last words, it seemed to him, that could ever have been spoken by Antonia. He had never made it up with her so completely in all their intercourse of small encounters; but even before she had time to turn towards him, which she did slowly with a rigid grace, he had begun to plead —
“My sister is only waiting to embrace you. My father is transported with joy. I won’t say anything of my mother! Our mothers were like sisters. There is the mail-boat for the south next week — let us go. That Moraga is a fool! A man like Montero is bribed. It’s the practice of the country. It’s tradition — it’s politics. Read ‘Fifty Years of Misrule.’“
“Leave poor papa alone, Don Martin. He believes — ”
“I have the greatest tenderness for your father,” he began, hurriedly. “But I love you, Antonia! And Moraga has miserably mismanaged this business. Perhaps your father did, too; I don’t know. Montero was bribeable. Why, I suppose he only wanted his share of this famous loan for national development. Why didn’t the stupid Sta. Marta people give him a mission to Europe, or something? He would have taken five years’ salary in advance, and gone on loafing in Paris, this stupid, ferocious Indio!”
“The man,” she said, thoughtfully, and very calm before this outburst, “was intoxicated with vanity. We had all the information, not from Moraga only; from others, too. There was his brother intriguing, too.”
“Oh, yes!” he said. “Of course you know. You know everything. You read all the correspondence, you write all the papers — all those State papers that are inspired here, in this room, in blind deference to a theory of political purity. Hadn’t you Charles Gould before your eyes? Rey de Sulaco! He and his mine are the practical demonstration of what could have been done. Do you think he succeeded by his fidelity to a theory of virtue? And all those railway people, with their honest work! Of course, their work is honest! But what if you cannot work honestly till the thieves are satisfied? Could he not, a gentleman, have told this Sir John what’s-his-name that Montero had to be bought off — he and all his Negro Liberals hanging on to his gold-laced sleeve? He ought to have been bought off with his own stupid weight of gold — his weight of gold, I tell you, boots, sabre, spurs, cocked hat, and all.”
She shook her head slightly. “It was impossible,” she murmured.
“He wanted the whole lot? What?”
She was facing him now in the deep recess of the window, very close and motionless. Her lips moved rapidly. Decoud, leaning his back against the wall, listened with crossed arms and lowered eyelids. He drank the tones of her even voice, and watched the agitated life of her throat, as if waves of emotion had run from her heart to pass out into the air in her reasonable words. He also had his aspirations, he aspired to carry her away out of these deadly futilities of pronunciamientos and reforms. All this was wrong — utterly wrong; but she fascinated him, and sometimes the sheer sagacity of a phrase would break the charm, replace the fascination by a sudden unwilling thrill of interest. Some women hovered, as it were, on the threshold of genius, he reflected. They did not want to know, or think, or understand. Passion stood for all that, and he was ready to believe that some startlingly profound remark, some appreciation of character, or a judgment upon an event, bordered on the miraculous. In the mature Antonia he could see with an extraordinary vividness the austere schoolgirl of the earlier days. She seduced his attention; sometimes he could not restrain a murmur of assent; now and then he advanced an objection quite seriously. Gradually they began to argue; the curtain half hid them from the people in the sala.
Outside it had grown dark. From the deep trench of shadow between the houses, lit up vaguely by the glimmer of street lamps, ascended the evening silence of Sulaco; the silence of a town with few carriages, of unshod horses, and a softly sandalled population. The windows of the Casa Gould flung their shining parallelograms upon the house of the Avellanos. Now and then a shuffle of feet passed below with the pulsating red glow of a cigarette at the foot of the walls; and the night air, as if cooled by the snows of Higuerota, refreshed their faces.
“We Occidentals,” said Martin Decoud, using the usual term the provincials of Sulaco applied to themselves, “have been always distinct and separated. As long as we hold Cayta nothing can reach us. In all our troubles no army has marched over those mountains. A revolution in the central provinces isolates us at once. Look how complete it is now! The news of Barrios’ movement will be cabled to the United States, and only in that way will it reach Sta. Marta by the cable from the other seaboard. We have the greatest riches, the greatest fertility, the purest blood in our great families, the most laborious population. The Occidental Province should stand alone. The early Federalism was not bad for us. Then came this union which Don Henrique Gould resisted. It opened the road to tyranny; and, ever since, the rest of Costaguana hangs like a millstone round our necks. The Occidental territory is large enough to make any man’s country. Look at the mountains! Nature itself seems to cry to us, ‘Separate!’“
She made an energetic gesture of negation. A silence fell.
“Oh, yes, I know it’s contrary to the doctrine laid down in the ‘History of Fifty Years’ Misrule.’ I am only trying to be sensible. But my sense seems always to give you cause for offence. Have I startled you very much with this perfectly reasonable aspiration?”
She shook her head. No, she was not startled, but the idea shocked her early convictions. Her patriotism was larger. She had never considered that possibility.
“It may yet be the means of saving some of your convictions,” he said, prophetically.
She did not answer. She seemed tired. They leaned side by side on the rail of the little balcony, very friendly, having exhausted politics, giving themselves up to the silent feeling of their nearness, in one of those profound pauses that fall upon the rhythm of passion. Towards the plaza end of the street the glowing coals in the brazeros of the market women cooking their evening meal gleamed red along the edge of the pavement. A man appeared without a sound in the light of a street lamp, showing the coloured inverted triangle of his bordered poncho, square on his shoulders, hanging to a point below his knees. From the harbour end of the Calle a horseman walked his soft-stepping mount, gleaming silver-grey abreast each lamp under the dark shape of the rider.
“Behold the illustrious Capataz de Cargadores,” said Decoud, gently, “coming in all his splendour after his work is done. The next great man of Sulaco after Don Carlos Gould. But he is good-natured, and let me make friends with him.”
“Ah, indeed!” said Antonia. “How did you make friends?”
“A journalist ought to have his finger on the popular pulse, and this man is one of the leaders of the populace. A journalist ought to know remarkable me
n — and this man is remarkable in his way.”
“Ah, yes!” said Antonia, thoughtfully. “It is known that this Italian has a great influence.”
The horseman had passed below them, with a gleam of dim light on the shining broad quarters of the grey mare, on a bright heavy stirrup, on a long silver spur; but the short flick of yellowish flame in the dusk was powerless against the muffled-up mysteriousness of the dark figure with an invisible face concealed by a great sombrero.
Decoud and Antonia remained leaning over the balcony, side by side, touching elbows, with their heads overhanging the darkness of the street, and the brilliantly lighted sala at their backs. This was a tete-a-tete of extreme impropriety; something of which in the whole extent of the Republic only the extraordinary Antonia could be capable — the poor, motherless girl, never accompanied, with a careless father, who had thought only of making her learned. Even Decoud himself seemed to feel that this was as much as he could expect of having her to himself till — till the revolution was over and he could carry her off to Europe, away from the endlessness of civil strife, whose folly seemed even harder to bear than its ignominy. After one Montero there would be another, the lawlessness of a populace of all colours and races, barbarism, irremediable tyranny. As the great Liberator Bolivar had said in the bitterness of his spirit, “America is ungovernable. Those who worked for her independence have ploughed the sea.” He did not care, he declared boldly; he seized every opportunity to tell her that though she had managed to make a Blanco journalist of him, he was no patriot. First of all, the word had no sense for cultured minds, to whom the narrowness of every belief is odious; and secondly, in connection with the everlasting troubles of this unhappy country it was hopelessly besmirched; it had been the cry of dark barbarism, the cloak of lawlessness, of crimes, of rapacity, of simple thieving.
Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) Page 206