“True,” retorted the priest. “You are ten times worse. A miracle could not convert you.”
“I certainly do not believe in miracles,” said Decoud, quietly. Father Corbelan shrugged his high, broad shoulders doubtfully.
“A sort of Frenchman — godless — a materialist,” he pronounced slowly, as if weighing the terms of a careful analysis. “Neither the son of his own country nor of any other,” he continued, thoughtfully.
“Scarcely human, in fact,” Decoud commented under his breath, his head at rest against the wall, his eyes gazing up at the ceiling.
“The victim of this faithless age,” Father Corbelan resumed in a deep but subdued voice.
“But of some use as a journalist.” Decoud changed his pose and spoke in a more animated tone. “Has your worship neglected to read the last number of the Porvenir? I assure you it is just like the others. On the general policy it continues to call Montero a gran’ bestia, and stigmatize his brother, the guerrillero, for a combination of lackey and spy. What could be more effective? In local affairs it urges the Provincial Government to enlist bodily into the national army the band of Hernandez the Robber — who is apparently the protege of the Church — or at least of the Grand Vicar. Nothing could be more sound.”
The priest nodded and turned on the heels of his square-toed shoes with big steel buckles. Again, with his hands clasped behind his back, he paced to and fro, planting his feet firmly. When he swung about, the skirt of his soutane was inflated slightly by the brusqueness of his movements.
The great sala had been emptying itself slowly. When the Gefe Politico rose to go, most of those still remaining stood up suddenly in sign of respect, and Don Jose Avellanos stopped the rocking of his chair. But the good-natured First Official made a deprecatory gesture, waved his hand to Charles Gould, and went out discreetly.
In the comparative peace of the room the screaming “Monsieur l’Administrateur” of the frail, hairy Frenchman seemed to acquire a preternatural shrillness. The explorer of the Capitalist syndicate was still enthusiastic. “Ten million dollars’ worth of copper practically in sight, Monsieur l’Administrateur. Ten millions in sight! And a railway coming — a railway! They will never believe my report. C’est trop beau.” He fell a prey to a screaming ecstasy, in the midst of sagely nodding heads, before Charles Gould’s imperturbable calm.
And only the priest continued his pacing, flinging round the skirt of his soutane at each end of his beat. Decoud murmured to him ironically: “Those gentlemen talk about their gods.”
Father Corbelan stopped short, looked at the journalist of Sulaco fixedly for a moment, shrugged his shoulders slightly, and resumed his plodding walk of an obstinate traveller.
And now the Europeans were dropping off from the group around Charles Gould till the Administrador of the Great Silver Mine could be seen in his whole lank length, from head to foot, left stranded by the ebbing tide of his guests on the great square of carpet, as it were a multi-coloured shoal of flowers and arabesques under his brown boots. Father Corbelan approached the rocking-chair of Don Jose Avellanos.
“Come, brother,” he said, with kindly brusqueness and a touch of relieved impatience a man may feel at the end of a perfectly useless ceremony. “A la Casa! A la Casa! This has been all talk. Let us now go and think and pray for guidance from Heaven.”
He rolled his black eyes upwards. By the side of the frail diplomatist — the life and soul of the party — he seemed gigantic, with a gleam of fanaticism in the glance. But the voice of the party, or, rather, its mouthpiece, the “son Decoud” from Paris, turned journalist for the sake of Antonia’s eyes, knew very well that it was not so, that he was only a strenuous priest with one idea, feared by the women and execrated by the men of the people. Martin Decoud, the dilettante in life, imagined himself to derive an artistic pleasure from watching the picturesque extreme of wrongheadedness into which an honest, almost sacred, conviction may drive a man. “It is like madness. It must be — because it’s self-destructive,” Decoud had said to himself often. It seemed to him that every conviction, as soon as it became effective, turned into that form of dementia the gods send upon those they wish to destroy. But he enjoyed the bitter flavour of that example with the zest of a connoisseur in the art of his choice. Those two men got on well together, as if each had felt respectively that a masterful conviction, as well as utter scepticism, may lead a man very far on the by-paths of political action.
Don Jose obeyed the touch of the big hairy hand. Decoud followed out the brothers-in-law. And there remained only one visitor in the vast empty sala, bluishly hazy with tobacco smoke, a heavy-eyed, round-cheeked man, with a drooping moustache, a hide merchant from Esmeralda, who had come overland to Sulaco, riding with a few peons across the coast range. He was very full of his journey, undertaken mostly for the purpose of seeing the Senor Administrador of San Tome in relation to some assistance he required in his hide-exporting business. He hoped to enlarge it greatly now that the country was going to be settled. It was going to be settled, he repeated several times, degrading by a strange, anxious whine the sonority of the Spanish language, which he pattered rapidly, like some sort of cringing jargon. A plain man could carry on his little business now in the country, and even think of enlarging it — with safety. Was it not so? He seemed to beg Charles Gould for a confirmatory word, a grunt of assent, a simple nod even.
He could get nothing. His alarm increased, and in the pauses he would dart his eyes here and there; then, loth to give up, he would branch off into feeling allusion to the dangers of his journey. The audacious Hernandez, leaving his usual haunts, had crossed the Campo of Sulaco, and was known to be lurking in the ravines of the coast range. Yesterday, when distant only a few hours from Sulaco, the hide merchant and his servants had seen three men on the road arrested suspiciously, with their horses’ heads together. Two of these rode off at once and disappeared in a shallow quebrada to the left. “We stopped,” continued the man from Esmeralda, “and I tried to hide behind a small bush. But none of my mozos would go forward to find out what it meant, and the third horseman seemed to be waiting for us to come up. It was no use. We had been seen. So we rode slowly on, trembling. He let us pass — a man on a grey horse with his hat down on his eyes — without a word of greeting; but by-and-by we heard him galloping after us. We faced about, but that did not seem to intimidate him. He rode up at speed, and touching my foot with the toe of his boot, asked me for a cigar, with a blood-curdling laugh. He did not seem armed, but when he put his hand back to reach for the matches I saw an enormous revolver strapped to his waist. I shuddered. He had very fierce whiskers, Don Carlos, and as he did not offer to go on we dared not move. At last, blowing the smoke of my cigar into the air through his nostrils, he said, ‘Senor, it would be perhaps better for you if I rode behind your party. You are not very far from Sulaco now. Go you with God.’ What would you? We went on. There was no resisting him. He might have been Hernandez himself; though my servant, who has been many times to Sulaco by sea, assured me that he had recognized him very well for the Capataz of the Steamship Company’s Cargadores. Later, that same evening, I saw that very man at the corner of the Plaza talking to a girl, a Morenita, who stood by the stirrup with her hand on the grey horse’s mane.”
“I assure you, Senor Hirsch,” murmured Charles Gould, “that you ran no risk on this occasion.”
“That may be, senor, though I tremble yet. A most fierce man — to look at. And what does it mean? A person employed by the Steamship Company talking with salteadores — no less, senor; the other horsemen were salteadores — in a lonely place, and behaving like a robber himself! A cigar is nothing, but what was there to prevent him asking me for my purse?”
“No, no, Senor Hirsch,” Charles Gould murmured, letting his glance stray away a little vacantly from the round face, with its hooked beak upturned towards him in an almost childlike appeal. “If it was the Capataz de Cargadores you met — and there is no doubt, is there? — you w
ere perfectly safe.”
“Thank you. You are very good. A very fierce-looking man, Don Carlos. He asked me for a cigar in a most familiar manner. What would have happened if I had not had a cigar? I shudder yet. What business had he to be talking with robbers in a lonely place?”
But Charles Gould, openly preoccupied now, gave not a sign, made no sound. The impenetrability of the embodied Gould Concession had its surface shades. To be dumb is merely a fatal affliction; but the King of Sulaco had words enough to give him all the mysterious weight of a taciturn force. His silences, backed by the power of speech, had as many shades of significance as uttered words in the way of assent, of doubt, of negation — even of simple comment. Some seemed to say plainly, “Think it over”; others meant clearly, “Go ahead”; a simple, low “I see,” with an affirmative nod, at the end of a patient listening half-hour was the equivalent of a verbal contract, which men had learned to trust implicitly, since behind it all there was the great San Tome mine, the head and front of the material interests, so strong that it depended on no man’s goodwill in the whole length and breadth of the Occidental Province — that is, on no goodwill which it could not buy ten times over. But to the little hook-nosed man from Esmeralda, anxious about the export of hides, the silence of Charles Gould portended a failure. Evidently this was no time for extending a modest man’s business. He enveloped in a swift mental malediction the whole country, with all its inhabitants, partisans of Ribiera and Montero alike; and there were incipient tears in his mute anger at the thought of the innumerable ox-hides going to waste upon the dreamy expanse of the Campo, with its single palms rising like ships at sea within the perfect circle of the horizon, its clumps of heavy timber motionless like solid islands of leaves above the running waves of grass. There were hides there, rotting, with no profit to anybody — rotting where they had been dropped by men called away to attend the urgent necessities of political revolutions. The practical, mercantile soul of Senor Hirsch rebelled against all that foolishness, while he was taking a respectful but disconcerted leave of the might and majesty of the San Tome mine in the person of Charles Gould. He could not restrain a heart-broken murmur, wrung out of his very aching heart, as it were.
“It is a great, great foolishness, Don Carlos, all this. The price of hides in Hamburg is gone up — up. Of course the Ribierist Government will do away with all that — when it gets established firmly. Meantime — ”
He sighed.
“Yes, meantime,” repeated Charles Gould, inscrutably.
The other shrugged his shoulders. But he was not ready to go yet. There was a little matter he would like to mention very much if permitted. It appeared he had some good friends in Hamburg (he murmured the name of the firm) who were very anxious to do business, in dynamite, he explained. A contract for dynamite with the San Tome mine, and then, perhaps, later on, other mines, which were sure to — The little man from Esmeralda was ready to enlarge, but Charles interrupted him. It seemed as though the patience of the Senor Administrador was giving way at last.
“Senor Hirsch,” he said, “I have enough dynamite stored up at the mountain to send it down crashing into the valley” — his voice rose a little — ”to send half Sulaco into the air if I liked.”
Charles Gould smiled at the round, startled eyes of the dealer in hides, who was murmuring hastily, “Just so. Just so.” And now he was going. It was impossible to do business in explosives with an Administrador so well provided and so discouraging. He had suffered agonies in the saddle and had exposed himself to the atrocities of the bandit Hernandez for nothing at all. Neither hides nor dynamite — and the very shoulders of the enterprising Israelite expressed dejection. At the door he bowed low to the engineer-in-chief. But at the bottom of the stairs in the patio he stopped short, with his podgy hand over his lips in an attitude of meditative astonishment.
“What does he want to keep so much dynamite for?” he muttered. “And why does he talk like this to me?”
The engineer-in-chief, looking in at the door of the empty sala, whence the political tide had ebbed out to the last insignificant drop, nodded familiarly to the master of the house, standing motionless like a tall beacon amongst the deserted shoals of furniture.
“Good-night, I am going. Got my bike downstairs. The railway will know where to go for dynamite should we get short at any time. We have done cutting and chopping for a while now. We shall begin soon to blast our way through.”
“Don’t come to me,” said Charles Gould, with perfect serenity. “I shan’t have an ounce to spare for anybody. Not an ounce. Not for my own brother, if I had a brother, and he were the engineer-in-chief of the most promising railway in the world.”
“What’s that?” asked the engineer-in-chief, with equanimity. “Unkindness?”
“No,” said Charles Gould, stolidly. “Policy.”
“Radical, I should think,” the engineer-in-chief observed from the doorway.
“Is that the right name?” Charles Gould said, from the middle of the room.
“I mean, going to the roots, you know,” the engineer explained, with an air of enjoyment.
“Why, yes,” Charles pronounced, slowly. “The Gould Concession has struck such deep roots in this country, in this province, in that gorge of the mountains, that nothing but dynamite shall be allowed to dislodge it from there. It’s my choice. It’s my last card to play.”
The engineer-in-chief whistled low. “A pretty game,” he said, with a shade of discretion. “And have you told Holroyd of that extraordinary trump card you hold in your hand?”
“Card only when it’s played; when it falls at the end of the game. Till then you may call it a — a — ”
“Weapon,” suggested the railway man.
“No. You may call it rather an argument,” corrected Charles Gould, gently. “And that’s how I’ve presented it to Mr. Holroyd.”
“And what did he say to it?” asked the engineer, with undisguised interest.
“He” — Charles Gould spoke after a slight pause — ”he said something about holding on like grim death and putting our trust in God. I should imagine he must have been rather startled. But then” — pursued the Administrador of the San Tome mine — ”but then, he is very far away, you know, and, as they say in this country, God is very high above.”
The engineer’s appreciative laugh died away down the stairs, where the Madonna with the Child on her arm seemed to look after his shaking broad back from her shallow niche.
CHAPTER SIX
A profound stillness reigned in the Casa Gould. The master of the house, walking along the corredor, opened the door of his room, and saw his wife sitting in a big armchair — his own smoking armchair — thoughtful, contemplating her little shoes. And she did not raise her eyes when he walked in.
“Tired?” asked Charles Gould.
“A little,” said Mrs. Gould. Still without looking up, she added with feeling, “There is an awful sense of unreality about all this.”
Charles Gould, before the long table strewn with papers, on which lay a hunting crop and a pair of spurs, stood looking at his wife: “The heat and dust must have been awful this afternoon by the waterside,” he murmured, sympathetically. “The glare on the water must have been simply terrible.”
“One could close one’s eyes to the glare,” said Mrs. Gould. “But, my dear Charley, it is impossible for me to close my eyes to our position; to this awful . . .”
She raised her eyes and looked at her husband’s face, from which all sign of sympathy or any other feeling had disappeared. “Why don’t you tell me something?” she almost wailed.
“I thought you had understood me perfectly from the first,” Charles Gould said, slowly. “I thought we had said all there was to say a long time ago. There is nothing to say now. There were things to be done. We have done them; we have gone on doing them. There is no going back now. I don’t suppose that, even from the first, there was really any possible way back. And, what’s more, we can’t even
afford to stand still.”
“Ah, if one only knew how far you mean to go,” said his wife inwardly trembling, but in an almost playful tone.
“Any distance, any length, of course,” was the answer, in a matter-of-fact tone, which caused Mrs. Gould to make another effort to repress a shudder.
She stood up, smiling graciously, and her little figure seemed to be diminished still more by the heavy mass of her hair and the long train of her gown.
“But always to success,” she said, persuasively.
Charles Gould, enveloping her in the steely blue glance of his attentive eyes, answered without hesitation —
“Oh, there is no alternative.”
He put an immense assurance into his tone. As to the words, this was all that his conscience would allow him to say.
Mrs. Gould’s smile remained a shade too long upon her lips. She murmured —
“I will leave you; I’ve a slight headache. The heat, the dust, were indeed — I suppose you are going back to the mine before the morning?”
“At midnight,” said Charles Gould. “We are bringing down the silver to-morrow. Then I shall take three whole days off in town with you.”
“Ah, you are going to meet the escort. I shall be on the balcony at five o’clock to see you pass. Till then, good-bye.”
Charles Gould walked rapidly round the table, and, seizing her hands, bent down, pressing them both to his lips. Before he straightened himself up again to his full height she had disengaged one to smooth his cheek with a light touch, as if he were a little boy.
“Try to get some rest for a couple of hours,” she murmured, with a glance at a hammock stretched in a distant part of the room. Her long train swished softly after her on the red tiles. At the door she looked back.
Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) Page 208