 CHAPTER VIII. No doubt the initial action of Charles Gould had been helped at the beginning by a period of comparative peace which occurred just about that time, and also by the general softening of manners as compared with the epoch of civil wars whence had emerged the iron tyranny of Guzman Bento of fearful memory. In the contest that broke out at the end of his rule, which had kept peace in the country for a whole fifteen years, there was more fatuous imbecility, plenty of cruelty, and suffering still, but much less of the old-time fierce and blindly ferocious political fanaticism. It was all more vile, more base, more contemptible, and infinitely more manageable in the very outspoken cynicism of motives. It was more clearly a brazen face scramble for a constantly diminishing quantity of booty, since all enterprise had been stupidly killed in the land. Thus it came to pass that the province of Solaco, once the field of cruel party-vengences, had become in a way one of the considerable prizes of political career. The great of the earth in Santa Marta reserved the posts and the old occidental state to those nearest and dearest to them, nephews, brothers, husbands, or favorite sisters, bosom friends, trusty supporters, or prominent supporters of whom perhaps they were afraid. It was the blessed province of great opportunities and of largest salaries, for the Santomé mine had its own unofficial pay list, whose items and amounts fixed in consultation by Charles Gould and Senor Avilanos were known to a prominent businessman in the United States, who for twenty minutes or so every month gave his undivided attention to Solaco affairs. At the same time, the material interests of all sorts, backed up by the influence of the Santomé mine, were quietly gathering substance in that part of the republic. Thus, for instance, the Solaco collectorship was generally understood in the political world of the capital, to open the way to the Ministry of Finance, and so on for every official post. Then on the other hand, the despondent business circles of the republic had come to consider the Occidental province as the promised land of safety, especially if a man managed to get on good terms with the administration of the mine. Charles Gould, excellent fellow, absolutely necessary to make sure of him before taking a single step, get an introduction to him from Maraga, if you can, the agent of the King of Solaco, don't you know? No wonder, then, that Sir John, coming from Europe to smooth the path for his railway, had been meeting the name, and even the nickname, of Charles Gould at every turn in Costa Guana. The agent of the Santomé administration in Santa Marta, a polished, well-informed gentleman, Sir John thought him, had certainly helped so greatly in bringing about the presidential tour that he began to think that there was something in the faint whispers hinting at the immense occult influence of the gold concession. What was currently whispered was this, that the Santomé administration had, in part at least, financed the last revolution, which had brought into a five-year dictatorship Don Vicente Rebiera, a man of culture and of unblemished character, invested with a mandate of reform by the best elements of the state. Serious, well-informed men seemed to believe the fact, to hope for better things, for the establishment of legality, of good faith and order in public life. So much the better, then, thought Sir John. He worked always on a great scale. There was a loan to the state, and a project for systematic colonization of the Occidental Province, involved in one vast game with the construction of the National Central Railway. Good faith, order, honesty, peace, were badly wanted for this great development of material interests. Anybody on the side of these things, and especially if able to help, had an importance in Sir John's eyes. He had not been disappointed by the king of Solaco. The local difficulties had fallen away, as the engineer-in-chief had foretold they would, before Charles Gold's mediation. Sir John had been extremely fetid in Solaco, next to the president-dictator, a fact which might have accounted for the evident ill-humor General Montero displayed at lunch, given on board the Juno just before she was to sail, taking away from Solaco the president-dictator, and the distinguished foreign guests in his train. The excellentissimo, the hope of honest men, as Don Jose had addressed him in a public speech delivered in the name of the Provincial Assembly of Solaco, sat at the head of the long table. Captain Mitchell, positively stony-eyed and purple in the face with the solemnity of this historical event, occupied the foot as the representative of the OSN Company in Solaco. The hosts of that informal function, with the captain of the ship and some minor officials from the shore around him, those cheery, swarly little gentlemen cast jovial side-glances at the bottles of champagne, beginning to pop behind the guest's backs in the hands of the ship's stewards. The amber wine creamed up to the rims of the glasses. Charles Gould had his place next to a foreign envoy who, in a listless undertone, had been talking to him fitfully of hunting and shooting. The well-merished pale face, with an eyeglass and drooping yellow moustache, made the senior administrator appear, by contrast, twice as sun-baked, more flaming red, a hundred times more intensely and silently alive. John José Avelanos touched elbows with the other foreign diplomat, a dark man with a quiet, watchful, self-confident demeanor, and a touch of reserve, all etiquette being laid aside on the occasion. General Montero was the only one there in full uniform, so stiff with embroideries in front that his broad-chest seemed protected by cuirass of gold. General John, at the beginning, had got away from high places for the sake of sitting near Mrs. Gould. The great financier was trying to express to her his grateful sense of her hospitality and of his obligation to her husband's enormous influence in this part of the country. When she interrupted him by a low hash, the President was going to make an informal pronouncement. The excellentissimo was on his legs. He said only a few words, evidently deeply felt, and meant, perhaps, mostly for Avelanos, his old friend, as to the necessity of unremitting effort to secure the lasting welfare of the country emerging after this last struggle, he hoped, into a period of peace and material prosperity. Mrs. Gould, listening to the mellow, slightly mournful voice, looking at this rotund dark spectacled face, at the short body, obese to the point of infirmity, thought that this man of delicate and melancholy mind, physically almost a cripple, coming out of his retirement into a dangerous strife at the call of his fellows, had the right to speak with the authority of his self-sacrifice. And yet she was made uneasy. He was more pathetic than promising. This first civilian chief of the state, Castiguana, had ever known, pronouncing, glass in hand, his simple watch words of honesty, peace, respect for law, political good faith, abroad, and at home, the safeguards of national honour. He sat down. During the respectful, appreciative buzz of voices that followed the speech, General Montero raised a pair of heavy, drooping eyelids and rolled his eyes with a sort of uneasy dullness from face to face. The military backwards hero of the party, though secretly impressed by the sudden novelties and splendours of his position, he had never been on board a ship before, and had hardly ever seen the sea except from a distance. Defeated by a sort of instinct, the advantage, his surly unpolished attitude of a savage fighter gave him amongst all these refined, blanco aristocrats. But why was it that nobody was looking at him? He wondered to himself angrily. He was able to spell out the print of newspapers, and knew that he had performed the greatest military exploit of modern times. My husband wanted the railway. Mrs. Gold said to Sir John and the General murmur of resumed conversations. All the springs nearer the sort of future we desire for the country, which has waited for it in sorrow long enough, God knows. But I will confess that the other day during my afternoon drive, when I suddenly saw an Indian boy right out of a wood with a red flag of a surveying party in his hand, I felt something of a shock. The future means change, and utter change, and yet even here there are simple and picturesque things that one would like to preserve. Sir John listened, smiling, but it was his turn now to hush Mrs. Gold. "'General Montero is going to speak,' he whispered, and almost immediately added, in comic alarm, "'Heavens, he's going to propose my own health, I believe!' General Montero had risen with a jingle of steel scabbard and a ripple of glitter on his gold-embroidered breast. A heavy sword-hilt appeared at his side above the edge of the table. In this gorgeous uniform, with his bull-neck, his hooked nose flattened on the tip upon a blue-black-dyed moustache. He looked like a disguised and sinister vaquero. The drone of his voice had a strangely rasping soulless ring. He floundered, lowering, through a few vague sentences, then suddenly raising his big head and his voice together, burst out harshly. "'The honor of the country is in the hands of the army. I assure you I shall be faithful to it.' He hesitated till his roaming eyes met Sir John's face upon which he fixed a lurid sleepy glance, and the figure of the lately negotiated lone came into his mind. He lifted his glass. "'I drink to the health of the man who brings us a million and a half of pounds.' He tossed off his champagne and sat down heavily with a half-surprised, half-bullying look all round the faces and the profound as if appalled silence which succeeded the felicitous toast. Sir John did not move. "'I don't think I am called upon to rise,' he murmured to Mrs. Gould. That sort of thing speaks for itself. But Don Jose Avalanos came to the rescue with a short oration in which he alluded pointedly to England's goodwill towards Castiguana. "'A goodwill,' he continued, significantly, of which I, having been in my time accredited to the court of St. James, am able to speak with some knowledge.' And then Sir John thought fit to respond, which he did gracefully in bad French, punctuated by bursts of applause, and the hear-hairs of Captain Mitchell, who was able to understand a word now and then. Directly he had done the financier of railways turn to Mrs. Gould. "'You were good enough to say that you intended to ask me for something,' he reminded her gallantly. "'What is it? Be assured that any request from you would be considered in the light of a favour to myself.' She thanked him by a gracious smile. Everybody was rising from the table. "'Let us go on deck,' she proposed, where I will be able to point out to you the very object of my request. An enormous national flag of Castiguana, diagonal red and yellow, with two green palm trees in the middle, floated lazily at the main-mast head of the Juno. A multitude of fireworks, being let off in their thousands, at the water's edge, and honour the President, kept up a mysterious, crepitating noise half round the harbour. Now and then a lot of rockets, swishing upwards invisibly, detonated overhead with only a puff of smoke in the bright sky. The sounds of people could be seen between the town gate and the harbour, under the bunches of multicoloured flags fluttering on tall poles. Faint bursts of military music would be heard suddenly, and the remote sound of shouting. A knot of ragged negroes at the end of the wharf kept on loading and firing a small iron cannon time after time. A grayish haze of dust hung thin and motionless against the sun. Don Vicente Vrabiera made a few steps under the deck awning, leaning on the arm of Signor Avilanos. A wide circle was formed round him, where the mirthless smile of his dark lips and the sightless glitter of his spectacles could be seen turning amiably from side to side. The informal function arranged on purpose on board the geno to give the president, dictator, an opportunity to meet intimately some of his most notable adherents in Solaco was drawing to an end. On one side, General Montero, his bald head covered now by a plummed cocked hat, remained motionless on a skylight seat. A pair of big, gaunt-latid hands folded on the hilt of the sabre, standing upright between his legs. The white plum, the coppery tent of his broad face, the blue-black of the mustaches under the curved beak, the mass of gold on sleeves and breast, the high shining boots with enormous burrs, the working nostrils, the imbecile and domineering stare of the glorious victor of Rios Seiko, had in them something ominous and incredible. The exaggeration of a cruel caricature, the fatuity of solemn masquerading, the atrocious grotesqueness of some military idol of Aztec conception and European bedecking, awaiting the homage of worshipers. John Jose approached diplomatically this weird and inscrutable portent, and Mrs. Gould turned her fascinating eyes away at last. Charles, coming up to take leave of Sir John, heard him say as he bent over his wife's hand, "'Certainly. Of course, my dear Mrs. Gould, for a protégé of yours. Not the slightest difficulty. Consider it done.' On the shore in the same boat with the golds, John Jose Avelanos was very silent. Even in the gold carriage he did not open his lips for a long time. The mules trotted slowly away from the wharf, between the extended hands of the beggars, who, for that day, seemed to have abandoned, in a body, the portals of churches. Charles Gould sat on the back seat and looked away upon the plane. A multitude of booths made of green boughs, of rushes, of odd pieces of plank, eeked out with bits of canvas, had been erected all over it for the sale of cana, of dulces, of fruit, of cigars. Over little heaps of glowing charcoal, Indian women, squatting on mats, cooked food in black earthen pots, and boiled the water for the mate gourds, which they offered in soft caressing voices to the country people. A race course had been staked out for the vaqueros, and away to the left from where the crowd was massed thickly about a huge temporary erection, like a circus tent of wood, with a conical grass roof, came the resonant twanging of harp strings, the sharp ping of guitars, with the grave drumming throb of an Indian Gombo pulsating steadily through the shrill choruses of the dancers. Charles Gould said presently, All this piece of land belongs now to the railway company. There will be no more popular feasts held here. Mrs. Gould was rather sorry to think so. She took this opportunity to mention how she had just obtained from Sir John the promise that the house occupied by Giorgio Viola should not be interfered with. She declared she could never understand what the survey engineers ever talked of demolishing that old building. It was not in the way of the projected harbour branch of the line in the least. She stopped the carriage before the door to reassure at once the old genoese who came out bareheaded and stood by the carriage step. She talked to him in Italian, of course, and he thanked her with calm dignity. An old Garibaldino was grateful to her from the bottom of his heart for keeping the roof over the heads of his wife and children. He was too old to wander any more. "'And is it for ever, Signora?' he asked. "'For as long as you like.' "'Bene, then the place must be named. It was not worthwhile before.' He smiled ruggedly, with a running together of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. "'I shall set about the painting of the name to-morrow.' "'And what is it going to be, Giorgio?' "'Albergo di Italia una,' said the old Garibaldino, looking away for a moment. Or in memory of those who have died,' he added, then for the country stolen from us soldiers of liberty by the craft of that accursed Pied Monti's race of kings and ministers. Mrs. Gold smiled slightly, and, bending over a little, began to inquire about his wife and children. He had sent them into town on that day. The padrona was better in health, many thanks to the Signora for inquiring. People were passing in twos and threes, and whole parties of men and women attended by trotting children. A horseman, mounted on a silver gray mare, drew rain quietly in the shade of the house after taking off his hat to the party in the carriage, who returned smiles and familiar nods. Old Viola, evidently very pleased with the news he had just heard, interrupted himself for a moment to tell him rapidly that the house was secured by the kindness of the English Signora for as long as he liked to keep it. The other listened attentively, but made no response. When the carriage moved on, he took off his hat again, a gray sombrero with a silver cord and tassels. The bright colors of a Mexican Serapi twisted on the cantile. The enormous silver buttons on the embroidered leather jacket, the row of tiny silver buttons down the seam of the trousers, the snowy linen, a silk sash with embroidered ends, the silver plates on headstall and saddle, proclaimed the unapproachable style of the famous Capitas de Carcadores, a Mediterranean sailor, got up with more finished splendor than any well-to-do young ranchero of the campo had ever displayed on a high holiday. It is a great thing for me, murmured old Georgiou, still thinking of the house, for now he had grown weary of change. The Signora just said a word to the Englishman. The old Englishman, who has enough money to pay for a railway, he is going off in an hour, remarked Nostromo carelessly. Buon viaggio, then. I've guarded his bones all the way from the intrada pass down to the plain and into Sulaco, as though he had been my own father. Old Georgiou only moved his head sideways absently. Nostromo pointed after the gold's carriage, nearing the grass-grown gate and the old town wall that was like a wall of matted jungle. And I have sat alone at night with my revolver in the company's warehouse time and again by the side of that other Englishman's heap of silver, guarding it as though it had been my own. Viola seemed lost in thought. It is a great thing for me, he repeated again, as if to himself. It is, agreed the magnificent Capitaise de Cargadors calmly. Listen, Vecchio, go in and bring me out a cigar, but don't look for it in my room. There's nothing there. Viola stepped into the cafe and came out directly, still absorbed in his idea, and tenured him a cigar, mumbling thoughtfully in his moustache. Children, growing up, and girls, too, girls! He sighed and fell silent. What? Only one? remarked Nostromo, looking down with a sort of comic inquisitiveness at the unconscious old man. No matter, he added, with lofty negligence. One is enough till another is wanted. He lit it, and let the match drop from his passive fingers. Giorgio Viola looked up and said abruptly, My son would have been just such a fine young man as you, John Battista, if he had lived. What? Your son? But you are right, Pedron, if he had been like me, he would have been a man. He turned his horse slowly and paced on between the booths, checking the mare almost to a stand still, now and then for children, for the groups of people from the distant Campo who stared after him with admiration. The company's lightermen saluted him from afar, and the greatly envied Capitas de Cargadores advanced, amongst murmurs of recognition and obsequious greetings, towards the huge circus-like erection. The throng thickened. The guitars tinkled louder. Other horsemen sat motionless, smoking calmly above the heads of the crowd. It eddied and pushed before the doors of the high-roofed building, once issued a shuffle and thumping of feet in time to the dance music, vibrating and shrieking with a racking rhythm, overhung by tremendous, sustained, hollow roar of the gombo. The barbarous and imposing noise of the big drum that can madden a crowd and that even Europeans cannot hear without a strange emotion seemed to draw Nostromo onto its source, while a man wrapped up in a faded torn poncho walked by his stirrup, and buffeted right and left, begged his worship insistently for employment on the wharf. He whined, offering this in your Capitas half his daily pay for the privilege of being admitted to the swaggering fraternity of Cargadores. The other half would be enough for him, he protested. But Captain Mitchell's right-hand man, invaluable for our work, a perfectly incorruptible fellow, after looking down critically at the ragged mosso, shook his head without a word and the uproar going on around. The man fell back, and a little further on Nostromo had to pull up. From the doors of the dance hall men and women emerged, tottering, streaming with sweat, trembling in every limb, to lean, panting, with staring eyes and parted lips against the wall of the structure where the harps and guitars played on with mad speed in an incessant roll of thunder. Hundreds of pans clapped in there, voices shrieked, and then all at once would stink low, chanting in unison the refrain of a love song with a dying fall. A red flower, flung with a good aim from somewhere in the crowd, struck the wrist-blended Capitas on the cheek. He caught it as it fell neatly, but for some time did not turn his head. When at last he condescended to look round. The throng near him had parted to make way for a pretty Moranita, her hair held up by a small golden comb who was walking towards him in the open space. Her arms and neck emerged plump and bare from a snowy chemizette. The blue woolen skirt, with all the fullness gathered in front, scanty on the hips and tight across the back, disclosed the provoking action of her walk. She came straight on and laid her hand on the mare's neck with a timid, coquettish look upwards out of the corner of her eyes. Cuerrito, she murmured caressingly, why do you pretend not to see me when I pass? Because I don't love thee any more, said Nostromo deliberately after a moment of reflective silence. The hand on the mare's neck trembled suddenly. She dropped her head before all the eyes in the wide circle, formed round the generous, the terrible, the inconstant, capitas, the cargadors, and his Moranita. Nostromo, looking down, saw tears beginning to fall down her face. Has it come, then, ever beloved of my heart, she whispered, is it true? No, said Nostromo, looking away carelessly. It was a lie. I love thee as much as ever. Is that true? She could joyously. Her cheeks still wet with tears. It is true. True on the life? As true as that, but thou must not ask me to swear it on the Madonna that stands in thy room. And the capitas laughed a little in response to the grins of the crowd. She pouted, very pretty, a little uneasy. No, I will not ask for that. I can see love in your eyes. She laid her hand on his knee. Why are you trembling like this? For love, she continued, while the cavernous thundering of the Gombo went on without a pause. But if you love her as much as that, you must give your paquita a gold-mounted rosary of beads for the neck of her Madonna. No, said Nostromo, looking into her uplifted, begging eyes, which suddenly turned stony with surprise. No, then what else will your worship give me on the day of the fiesta, she asked angrily, so as not to shame me before all these people? There is no shame for thee in getting nothing from thy lover for once. True, the shame is your worships, my poor lovers. She flared up sarcastically. Laughs were heard at her anger, at her retort. What an audacious spitfire she was. The people aware of this sin were calling out urgently to others in the crowd. The circle round the silver-gray mare narrowed slowly. The girl went off a pace or two, confronting the mocking curiosity of the eyes, then flung back to the stirrup, tiptoeing her enraged face turned up to Nostromo with a pair of blazing eyes. He bent low to her in the saddle. Why, she hissed, I could stab thee to the heart. The dreaded Capitas de Cargadores, magnificent and carelessly public in his amores, flung his arm round her neck and kissed her spluttering lips. A murmur went round. A knife, he demanded at large, holding her firmly by the shoulder. Twenty blades flashed out together in the circle. A young man in holiday attire, bounding and thrust one in Nostromo's hand, and bounded back into the ranks, very proud of himself. Nostromo had not even looked at him. Stand on my foot, he commanded the girl, who, suddenly subdued, rose lightly, and when he had her up, encircling her waist, her face near to his, he pressed the knife into her little hand. No, moronita, you shall not put me to shame, he said. You shall have your present, and so that everyone should know who is your lover today, you may cut all the sober buttons off my coat. There were shouts of laughter and applause at this witty freak, while the girl passed the keen blade, and the impassive rider jingled in his palm the increasing horde of silver buttons. He eased her to the ground, with both her hands full. After whispering for a while, with a very strenuous face, she walked away, staring hotly and vanished into the crowd. The circle had broken up, and the lordly capitas decargadors, the indispensable man, the tried and trusty Nostromo, the Mediterranean sailor, commensur casually to try his luck in Castiguana, rode slowly towards the harbor. The Juno was just then swinging round, and even as Nostromo ran up again to look on, a flag ran up on the improvised flag staff, erected in an ancient and dismantled little fort at the harbor entrance. Half a battery of field guns had been hurried over there from the Sulaco barracks for the purpose of firing the regulation salutes for the president, dictator, and the war minister. As the mailboat headed through the pass, the badly timed reports announced the end of Don Vicente Ribeira's first official visits to Sulaco, and for Captain Mitchell the end of another historic occasion. Next time, when the hope of honest men was to come that way, a year and a half later, it was unofficially over the mountain tracks, fleeing after a defeat on a lame mule, to be only just saved by Nostromo from an ignominious death at the hands of a mob. It was a very different event of which Captain Mitchell used to say, it was history, history, sir, and that fellow of mine, Nostromo, you know, was right in it, absolutely making history, sir. But this event, creditable to Nostromo, was to lead immediately to another, which could not be classed either as history or as a mistake in Captain Mitchell's phraseology. He had another word for it. Sir, he used to say afterwards, that was no mistake, it was a fatality, a misfortune, pure and simple, sir, and that poor fellow of mine was right in it, right in the middle of it, a fatality, if ever there was one, and to my mind he has never been the same man since. End of Part 3, Chapter 8 Part 2, Chapter 1 of Nostromo This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mario Pineda. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. Part 2, The Isabels. Chapter 1. True good and evil report in the barring fortune of that struggle, which Don Jose had characterized in the phrase, the fate of national honesty trembles in the balance, the gold concession, imperion in imperio, had gone on working. The square mountain had gone on pouring its treasure down the wooden shoots to the unresting batteries of stamps. The lights of Santa May had twinkled night after night upon the great, limitless shadow of the camp. Every three months, the silver escort had gone down to the sea as if neither the war nor its consequences could ever affect the ancient occidental state secluded beyond its high barrier of the Cordillera. All the fighting took place on the other side of that mighty wall of serrated peaks lorded over by the white dome of Higarota and as yet unbridged by the railway, of which only the first part, the easy campo part from Sulaco of the Ibibali at the foot of the pass had been laid. Neither did the telegraph line cross the mountains yet. Its poles, like slender beacons on the plane, penetrated into the forest fringe of the foothills cut by the deep avenue of the track and its wire ended abruptly at the construction camp at a white dill table supporting the moors apparatus in a long hoth of planks with a corrugated iron roof overshadowed by gigantic cedar trees, the quarters of the engineering charge of the advance section. The harbor was visited to with the traffic and railway material and with the movements of troops along the coast. The OSN company found much occupation for its fleet. Costa Juana had no navy and apart from a few Coast Guard cutters, there were no national ships except a couple of all merchant steamers used as transports. Captain Mitchell, feeling more and more in the thick of history, found time for an hour or so during an afternoon in the drawing room of the Casa Guld where, with a strange ignorance of the real forces that work around them, he professed himself delighted to get away from the strain of affairs. He did not know what he would have done without his invaluable nostromo, he declared. Those co-founded Costa Juana politics gave him more work, he confided to Mr. Scoot, than he had bargained for. Don José Avellanos had displayed in the service of the endangered Ribera government an organized activity and an eloquence of which the egos reached over even Europe. For, after the new loan to the Ribera government, Europe had become interested in Costa Juana. Disallowed of the provincial assembly in the municipal buildings of Sulaco, with its portraits of the liberators on the walls and an old flag of Cortez, preserved in the glass case about the president's chair, had heard all these speeches. The early one containing the impassioned declaration, militarism is the enemy, the famous one of the trembling balance, delivered on the occasion of the boot for the raising of the Segundo, Segundo Sulaco Regiment in the defense of reforming government. And with the provinces again displayed their old flags, prescribing Guzmán Bentos' time, there was a strong desire to Guzmán Bentos' time. There was another of those great variations, when Don José greeted these old emblems of the War of Independence, brought out again in the name of new ideals. The old idea of federalism had disappeared. For his part he did not wish to revive all political doctrines. They were perishable, they died, but the doctrine of political rightitude was immortal. The Segundo Sulaco Regiment, to whom he was present in this flag, was going to show its value in a contest for order, peace, progress. For the establishment of national self-respect without which he declared with energy, we are a reproach and a byword amongst the powers of the world. Don José Abulianos loved his country. He had served it lavishly with his fortune during his diplomatic career, and the later story of his captivity and barbarous ill usage under Guzmán Bentos was well known to his listeners. It was a wonder that he had not been a victim of the ferocious and summary executions which marked the course of that tyranny. For Guzmán had ruled the country, with the somber imbecility of political fanaticism. The power of supreme government had become in his dull mind an object of strange worship, as if it were some sort of cruel deity. It was incarnated in himself, and in his adversaries, the federalists, were the supreme sinners, objects of hate, of harems and fear, as heretics would be to a convinced inquisitor. For years he had carried about a detail of the army of pacification all over the country, a captive band of such atrocious criminals who considered themselves most unfortunate and not having been summarily executed. It was a diminishing company of narrowly naked skeletons loaded with irons covered with dirt, with bourbon, with raw wounds, all men of position, of education, of wealth, who had learned to fight amongst themselves for scraps of rotten beef thrown to them by soldiers or to beg a negro cook for a drink of muddy water in pitiful accents. Don José Abulianus, planting his chains amongst the otters, seemed only to exist in order to prove how much hunger, pain, degradation and cruel torture a human body can stand without parting with the last spark of life. Sometimes interrogatories backed by some primitive method of torture were administered to them by a commission of officers hastily assembled in a hut of sticks and branches and made pitiless by the fear for their own lives. A lucky one or two of that spectral company of prisoners would perhaps be led tottering behind a bush to be shot by a vial of soldiers. Always an army chaplain, someone shaving dirty men, girth with a sword and with a tiny cross embroidered in white cotton on the left breast of a lieutenant's uniform, would follow, sighing right in the corner of the mouth, wooden stooling hand to hear the confession and give a solution. For the citizen subduer of the country, because my mentor was called this officially in petitions, was not averse from the exercise of rational clemency. The irregular report of the firing squad would be heard, followed sometimes by a single finishing shot. A little blueish cloud of smoke would float up above the green bushes, and the army of pacification would move on over the savannas, through the forests, crossing rivers, invading rural pueblos, devastating the haciendas of the horrid aristocrats, occupying the inland towns in the fulfillment of its patriotic mission, and living behind a united land wherein the evil tainted federalism could no longer be detected in the smoke of burning houses and the smell of spilt blood. Don Jose Avellanos had survived that time. Perhaps, when contemptuously signifying to him his release, the citizen savior of the country might have thought this benighted aristocrat too broken in health and spirit and fortune to be any longer dangerous, or perhaps it might have been a simple capris. Guzmán Bento, usually full of fanciful fears and brooding suspicions, had sudden axes of unreasonable self-confidence when he perceived himself elevated on a pinnacle of power and safety beyond the reach of mere mortal plotters. At such times, he would impossibly command the celebration of a solemn mass of thanksgiving, which would be sung in great pomp in the cathedral of Santa Marta by the trembling subservient archbishop of his creation. He heard it sitting in a gilt armchair placed before the high altar, surrounded by his civil and military head service government. The unofficial world of Santa Marta would crowd into the cathedral, for it was not quite safe for anybody to off-mark to stay away from these manifestations of presidential piety. Having those acknowledged the only power he was at all disposed to recognize as above himself, he would scatter axe of political disgrace in a sardonic wantonness of clemency. There was no other way left now to enjoy his power, but by seeing his crush adversaries crawl impotently into the light of day out of the dark, noisome cells of the ecoligio. Their harmlessness fed his insatiable vanity and they could always be gut-hold of a game. It was the rule for all the women of their families to present thanks after worshiping a special audience. The incarnation of that strange god, el gobierno supremo, received them standing, cocked head on head, and exhorted them in a menacing mutter to show their gratitude by bringing up their children in fidelity to the democratic former government, which I have established for the happiness of our country. His front teeth have been being knocked out in some accident of his former herdsman's life, his utterance was a splutter in an instinct. He had been working for costawana alone in the midst of treachery and opposition. Let it cease now, lest he should become a weary of forgiving. Don Jose Avellanos had known this forgiveness. He was broken in health and fortune, the probability enough to present a truly gratifying spectacle to the supreme chief of democratic institutions. He retired to Solaico. His wife had an estate in that province, and she nursed him back to life out of the house of death and captivity. When she died, their daughter and only child was old enough to devote herself to poor papa. Ms. Avellanos, born in Europe and educated partly in England, was a tall, grape girl with a self-possessed manner, a white, wide forehead, a wealth of rich brown hair, and blue eyes. The other young ladies of Solaico stood in awe of her character and accomplishments. She was reputed to be terribly learned and serious. As to pride, it was well known that all the corbellans were proud, and her motive was a corbellan. Don Jose Avellanos depended very much upon the devotion of his beloved Antonia. He accepted it in the benighted way of men, who, too, made in God's image, are like stone idols without sense before the smoke of certain burnt offerings. He was ruined in every way, but a man possessed of passion is not a bankrupt in life. Don Jose Avellanos desire passionately for his country, peace, prosperity, and, as the end of the preface to 50 years of miserable acid, an honorable place in the comity of civilized nations. In this last phrase, the minister of plenipotentiary, cruelly humiliated by the bad faith of his government towards the foreign bondholders, stands disclosed in the patriot. The factious turmoil of greedy factions succeeding the tyranny of Guzmán Bento seemed to bring his desire to the very door of opportunity. He was too old to descend personally into the center of the arena at Santa Marta. But the men who acted there sought his advice at every step. He himself thought that he could be most useful at an instance in Sulaco. His name, his connections, his former position, his experience commanded in respect of his class. The discovery that this man, living in dignified poverty in the Corbella and town residents opposite the Casa Gould, could dispense of material means towards the support of the coast increased his influence. It was his open letter of appeal that decided a candidature of Don Vicente Riviera for the presidency. Another of these informal state papers drawn out by Don José, this time in the shape of an address from the province, induced that a scriptulous constitutionalist to accept the extraordinary powers conferred upon him for five years by a more well-meaning boat of Congress in Santa Marta. It was a specific mandate to establish the prosperity of the people on the basis of firm peace at home and to redeem the national credit by the satisfaction of all just-claimed support. On the afternoon the news of that boat had reached Sulaco by the usual roundabout postal way through Caeta and up the coast by steamer. Don José, who had been waiting for the mail in the Gould's drawing room, got out of the rocking chair letting his head fall off his knees. He rubbed his silvery, short hair with both hands, speechless with excessive joy. Emilia, my soul, he had burst out. Let me embrace you. Let me. Captain Michel, he had he been there, would no doubt have made an apt remark about the drawn of a new era. But Don José thought something of the kind his eloquence felt him on this occasion. The inspiration of that revival of the Blanco party tottered where he stood. Mr. Scud moved forward quickly and, as she offered her cheek with a smile to her old friend, managed very cleverly to give him the support of her arm he really needed. Don José had recovered himself at once. But for a time he could do more, nothing that murmured. Oh, you two patrots, oh, you two patrots, looking from one to the other. Bake plants of an order of historical work, wearing all the devotions to the regeneration of the country he loved, would be enshrined for the reverent worship of posterity, flitted through his mind. The historian who had enough elevation of Sao to write of Guzmán Bento. Yet this monster, imprinted in the blood of his countrymen, must not be held unreservedly to the execution of future years. It appears to be true that he, too, loved his country. He had given it twelve years of peace, an absolute master of life and fortunes as he was, he died poor. His worst fall, perhaps, was not his ferocity, but his ignorance. The man who could write those of a cruel persecutor, the passage that occurs in his history of miserable, felt at the foreshadowing of success an almost boundless affection for his two helpers, for these two young people from over the sea. Just as years ago calmly, from the conviction of practical necessity, a stronger than any abstract political doctrine, Henry Gould had drawn this word, so now, the times being changed, Charles Gould had fung to silver of the Saint Tomain to the fray. The Inglis of Sulaco, the Costa Juana Englishman, of the third generation, was as far from being a political intruder as his uncle from a revolutionary Schwarzprogler. Springing from the instinctive uprightness of their natures, their action was risen. They saw an opportunity and just a weapon to hand. Charles Gould's position, a commanding position, in the background of an attempt to retrieve the peace and the credit of the Republic, was very clear. At the beginning, he had had to accommodate himself to exist in circumstances of corruption, so naively brazen as to discern the hate of a man courageous enough not to be afraid of his irresponsible potency to ruin everything he touched. It seemed to him too comfortable for hot anger even. He made use of it with a cold, fearless scorn, manifested rather than concealed by the forms of a stony courtesy which did away with much of the ignominy of the situation. At bottom, perhaps, he suffered from it, but for he was not a man of cowardly illusions, but he refused to discuss the ethical view with his wife. He trusted that, though a little disenchanted, she would be intelligent enough to understand that this character safeguarded the enterprise of their lives as much or as more than his policy. The extraordinary development of the mind had put a great power into his hands. To feel that prosperity always at the mercy of intelligent greed had grown irksome to him. To Mr. Gould, it was humiliating. At any rate, it was dangerous. In the confidential communications passing between Charles Gould, the king of Sulaco, and the head of the silver and still interests far away in California, the convictions were growing that any attempt made by men of education and integrity ought to be discreetly supported. You might tell your friend of Janus that I think so. Mr. Halroyd had written at the proper moment from his imbiolable sanctuary within the eleven-story high factory of Great Affairs. And shortly afterwards, with the credit opened by the third southern bank, located next door but one to the Halroyd building, the revered party in Costawana took a practical shape under the eye of the administrator of the Santa May mine. And, don't say, the head or the third friend of the Gould family could say, Perhaps, my dear Carlos, I shall not have believed in vain. End of Part 2, Chapter 1. Part 2, Chapter 2 of Nostromo. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mario Pineda. Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad. Part 2, The Isabels. Chapter 2. After another arm struggle, decided by Montero's victory of Rio Seco, had been added to the tale of civil wars, the honest man, as Don José called him, could breathe freely for the first time in half a century. The five-year mandate law became the basis of that regeneration, the passionate desire and hope for which had been like the elixir of everlasting youth for Don José Avellanos. And when it was suddenly, and not quite unexpectedly, endangered by that brute Montero, it was a passionate indignation that gave him a new lease of life, as it were. Already, at the time of the president dictator's visit to Sulaco, Moraga had sounded a note of warning from Santa Marta about the war minister. Montero and his brother made the subject of an earnest talk between the dictator president and the nester-inspired of the party. But Don Vicente, a doctor of philosophy from the Cordoba University, seemed to have an exaggerated respect for military ability, whose mysteriousness, since it appeared to be altogether independent of intellect, imposed upon his imagination. The victory of Rio Seco was a popular hero. His services were so recent that the president dictator quailed before the obvious charge of political ingratitude. Great generating transactions were being initiated, the fresh loan, a new railway line, a bascolonization scheme. Anything that could unsettle the public opinion in the capital was to be avoided. Don José vowed to these arguments and tried to dismiss from his mind the gold-laced port in the boots, and with a saber, made meaningless now at last, he hopped in the new order of things. Less than six months after the president dictator's visit, Sulaco learned with swift action of the military revolt in the name of national honor. The ministeral war, in a barrack-square allocation to the officers of the artillery regiment he had been inspecting, had declared the national honor sold to foreigners. The dictator, by his weak compliance with the demands of the European powers, for the settlement of long-outstanding money claims, has showed himself unfit to rule. A letter from Moraga explained afterwards that the initiative and even the very text of the incendiary allocation came in reality from the other Montero, the ex-garriero, the comandante de plaza. The energetic treatment of Dr. Monicom, sent for in haste to the mountain, who came galloping freely in the dark, saved Don José from a dangerous attack of Yondiz. After getting over the shock, Don José refused to let himself be prostrated, indeed, but a new succeeded at first. The revolt in the capital had been suppressed after a night of fighting in the streets. Unfortunately, both the Monteros had been able to make their escape south to their native province of Entre Montes. The hero of the forest march, the victor of Río Seco, had been received with frenzy reclamation in Nicoya, the provincial capital. The troops in Garrison there had gone to him in the body. The brothers were organized in an army, gathering malcontents, sending emissaries primed with patriotic lies to the people and with promises of plunder to the wild Yoneros. Even the Montero's press had come into existence, as speaking oracularly of the secret promises of support given by our great sister republic of the north against the sinister land-grabbing designs of European powers cursing in every issue the miserable Riviera, who had plotted to deliver his country bound hand and foot for a parade to foreign speculators. Sulaico, pastoral and sleepy, with its opulent campo and the rich silver mine, heard the din of arms fitfully in its fortunate isolation. It was nevertheless in the very forefront of the defense with men and money, but the bearer rumors reached it circuitiously from a broad event, so much was it cut off from the rest of the republic, not only by natural obstacles but also by the vicissitudes of the war. The Monteristos were besieging Caeta, an important postal link. The overland couriers ceased to come across the mountains and no moliteer would consent to risk the journey at last. Even Bonifacio, on one occasion, failed to return from Santa Marta, either not daring to start or perhaps captured by the parties of the enemy raiding the country between the Cordillera and the capital. Monteri's publications, however, found their way into the province mysteriously enough, and also Monteri's emissaries preaching death to aristocrats in the villages and towns of the campo. Very early at the beginning of the trouble, Hernandez, the bandit, had proposed, through the agency of an old priest of a village in the wilds, to deliver two of them to the reveredist authorities in Tororo. They had come to offer him a free pardon and a rank of colonel from General Montero, in consideration of joining the rebel army with his mounted band. No notice was taken at the time of the proposal. He was joined as an evidence of good faith to a petition praying the Sulaco assembly for permission to enlist with all his followers in the forces being then raised in Sulaco for the defense of the five-year mandate of regeneration. The petition, like everything else, had found its way into Don José's hands. He had shown to Mr. Skuld these pages of dirty grayish rough paper, perhaps looted in some village store, covered with the craved, illiterate handwriting of the old Padre, carried off from his hut by the side of a mud-walled church to be the secretary of the dreaded saltador. They had both bent in the lamp-light of the guled drawing room over the document containing the fierce and yet humble appeal of the man against the blind and stupid barbarity turning an honest ranchero into a bandit. A post-crypt of the priest stated that, but for being deprived of his liberty for 10 days, he had been treated with humanity and the respect due to his sacred calling. He had been, it appears, confessing and absolving the chief and most of the band, and he guaranteed the sincerity of their good disposition. He had distributed heavy penances, now dubbed in the way of litanies and fasts, but he argued, surely, that it would be difficult for them to make their peace with God durably till they had made peace with man. Never before, perhaps, had Hernandez's head been in less jeopardy than when he petitioned humbly for permission to buy a pardon for himself and his gang of deserters by armed service. He could range afar from the wastelands protecting his finesse unchecked because there were no trips left in the whole province. The usual garrison of Zulaiko had gone south to the war with his brass band playing the volleyball march on the bridge of one of the OSN company's steamers. The great family coaches drawn up along the shore of the harbor were made to rock on the high Lerendern Springs by the enthusiasm of the senoras and the senoritas standing up to wave their lace handkerchiefs as, lighter after lighter, packed full of troops left the end of the journey. Nostromo directed the abrogation under the superintendence of Captain Michel, red face and the sun conspicuous in a white waistcoat, representing the allied and anxious goodwill of all the material interests of civilization. General Barrios, who commanded the troops, assured Don Jose on parting that in three weeks he would have Montero in a wooden cage drawn by three pair of oxen ready for a tour through all the towns of the republic. And then, senora, he continued, bearing his curly iron gray head to Mr. Scoot in Heralondo, and then, senora, we shall convert of a source into blue shares and grow rich. Even I, myself, as soon as this little business settled, show up in the fundación, on some land I have on the Janos, and to try to make a little money in peace and quietness. Senora, you know, old Costa Juana knows, what do I say, this whole South American country knows, that Pablo Barrios has had his fill of military glory. Charles Scoot was not present at the anxious and patriotic send-off. It was not his part to see the soldiers embark, it was neither his part, nor his inclination, nor his policy. His part, his inclination, and his policy were united in one endeavor to keep unchecked the flow of treasure he had started single-handed from the reopened scar and the flank on the montain. As the mine developed, he had trained for himself some native help. There were foremen, artificers, and clerks, with Don Pepe, for the governador of the mining population. For the rest, his shoulders alone sustained the whole weight of the Imperium in Imperio, the great gaoled concession whose mere shadow had been enough to crush the life out of his fatter. Mrs. Gold had no silver mine to look after. In the general life of the gold concession, she was represented by her two lieutenants, the doctor and the priest, but she fed her woman's love of excitement on events whose significance was purified to her by the fire of her imaginative purpose. On that day, she had brought the Abidjanus, father and daughter, father and daughter, down to the harbor with her. Amongst his other activities of that stirring time, Don Jose had become the chairman of a patriotic committee which had armed a great proportion of troops in this lack of command with an improved model of a military rifle. It had been just discarded for something still more deadly by one of the great European powers. How much of the market price for secondhand weapons was covered by the voluntary contributions of the principal families and how much came from those funds Don Jose was understood to command abroad remained a secret which he alone could have disclosed. But the ricos, as the populace called them, had contributed under the pressure of their nesters and loquents. Some of the more enthusiastic ladies had been moved to bring offerings of jewels into the hands of the man who was the life and soul of the party. There were moments when both his life and his soul seemed overtaxed by so many years of underscouraged belief and regeneration. He appeared almost inanimate, sitting rigidly by the side of Mr. Scoot in the lando with his fine, old, clean-shaven face of a uniform tint as if muddled in yellow walks shaded by a soft felt hat, the dark eyes looking out fixedly. Antonia, the beautiful Antonia, as Ms. Abagianos was calling Sulaiko, leaned back, facing them and her full figure, the grave oval of her face with full red lips, made her look more mature than Mr. Scoot, with her mobile expression and small, erect person under a slightly swaying sunshade. Whenever possible, Antonia attended her fatter. Her recognized devotion witnessed the shocking effect of her scorn for the rigid conventions regulating the life of Spanish-American girlhood. And, in truth, she was no longer girlish. It was said that she often wrote state papers from her father's dictation and was allowed to read all the books in his library. At the receptions, where the situation was saved by the presence of a very decrepit old lady, a relation of the core balance, quite deaf and motionless in an armchair, Antonia could hold her own in a discussion with two or three men at a time. Obviously, she was not the girl to be content with peeping through a barred window at the cloaked figure of a lover ensconced in a doorway opposite, which is the correct form of Gustavana Kirchup. It was generally believed that with her foreign upbringing and foreign ideas that Laurence and proud Antonia would never marry, unless, indeed, she married a foreigner from Europe or North America. Now that's the like of seemed on the point of being invaded by all the world. End of part 2 chapter 2. Part 2 chapter 3 of Nostromo. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mario Pineda. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. Part 2, The Isabel's. Chapter 3. When General Barrios stopped to address Mr. Scoot, Antonia raised negligently her hand, holding an open fan, as if to shave it from the song her head, wrapped in a light lace shoal. The clear gleam of her blue eyes gliding behind the black fringe of eyelashes posed for a moment upon her fighter. Then traveled further to the figure of a young man of 30 at most, of medium height, rather thick-set, wearing a light overcoat. Bearing down with the open palm of his hand upon the knob of a flexible cane, he had been looking on from a distance. But directly, he saw himself, noticed, he approached quietly and put his elbow over the door of the lando. The shirt collar cut low in the neck, the big bow of his scrabot, the style of his clothing, from the round hat to the barnish shoes, suggested an idea of French elegance. But otherwise, he was the very type of a fair Spanish creole. The fluffy mustache and the short, curly, golden beard did not conceal his lips, rosy, flesh, almost powdered in expression. His full, round face was of that warm, healthy creole white, which is never tanned by his native sunshine. Martin de Cout was seldom exposed to the Costa Juana sun under which he was born. His people had long settled in Paris, where he had studied low, had dabbled in literature, had hoped now and then in moments of exaltation to become a poet, like that other foreigner of Spanish blood, José María Heredia. In other moments he had, to pass the time, condescended to write articles on European affairs for this seminario, the principal newspaper in Santa Marta, which printed them under the heading from our special correspondent, though the authorship was an open secret. Everybody in Costa Juana, where the tale of compatriots in Europe is jettosly kept, knew that he was the son de Cout, a talented young man, supposed to be moving in the higher spheres of society. As a matter of fact, he was an idol boulevardier in the touch with some smart journalists, made free of a few newspaper offices, and welcomed in the pleasured haunts of pressmen. This life, whose dreary superficiality is covered by the glitter of a universal plague, like the stupid clowning of a harlequin, by the spangles of a modally costume, induced in him a French justified but most unfrench cosmopolitanism, in reality a mere barren indifferentism, posing as intellectual superiority. Of his own country he used to say to his French associates, imagine an atmosphere of opera booth in which all the comic business of a stage man, brigands, etc., etc., all their farcical stilling in triwin and stabbing is done in dead earnest. It is extremely funny, the blood flows all the time, and the actors believe themselves to be influencing the fate of the universe. Of course, government in general, any government anywhere, is a thing of exquisite comicality to a discern the mind. But really, we Spanish Americans do overstep the bounds. No man of ordinary intelligence can take part in the intrigues of Jungfar's macabre. However, these reveries of whom we heard so much just now, we are really trying in their own comical way to make the country habitable, even to pay some of its debts. My friends, you had better write up, Sr. Ribera, all you can in kindness to your own bondholders. Really, if what I am told in my letters is true, there is some chance for them at last. And he would explain with a rail in Berb what Don Vicente Ribera stood for, a mournful little man oppressed by his own good intentions, the significance of battles, one Rumeau Terroir's Jungrotersk-Bernie II-Erfrereus, and the manner of the new lawn connected with railway development, and the colonization of vast trucks of land in one great financial scheme. And his French friends would remark that evidently, this little fellow, the Cue-Cue-Nézant-La-Guisine-Afflant, an important Parisian review, asked him for an article on the situation. He was composed in a serious tone and a spirit of liberty. Afterwards, he asked one of his intimates. Have you read my thing about the regeneration of Costa Juana, Jung von Blackheim? He imagined himself Parisian to the tips of his fingers, but far from being that he was in danger of remaining the sort of non-descript dilettant all his life. He had pushed the habit of universal rivalry to a point where it blinded him to the genuine impulses of his own nature. To be suddenly selected from the executive member of the patriotic small arms committee of Sulaco, seemed to him the height of the unexpected, one of those fantastic moves of which only his dear countrymen were capable. It's like a tile falling in my head, I, I, a second member. It's the first I heard of it. What do I know of military rifles? Cefi Nambulesk. He had exclaimed to his favorite sister. For the Cue family, except the old fighter and motor, used the French language amongst themselves. And you should see the explanatory and confidential letter. Eight pages of it, no less. This letter, in Antonia's handwriting, was signed by Don José, who appealed to the Jung and gifted Costa Guanero on public grounds and privately opened his heart to his talented godson, a man of wealth and leisure, with wide relations, and by his parentage and bringing up worthy of all confidence. Which means, marty commented cynically to his sister, that I am not likely to misappropriate the funds or go blabbing to our charged affair here. The whole thing was being carried out behind the back of the war minister, Montero, a mistrusted member of the Riviera government, but difficult to get rid of at once. He was not to know anything of it till the troops under Barrios's command had the new rifle in their hands. The president dictator, whose position was very difficult, was alone in the secret. How funny, commented Martin's sister and confidante to which the brother, with an arrow best Parisian black, Harvard tormented. It's immense. The idea of that chief of the station, engaged with the help of private citizens, indignant a mind under his own indispensable war minister. No, we are unapproachable. And he loved him moderately. Afterwards, his sister was surprised at the earnestness and ability he displayed in carrying out his mission, which circumstances may delicate, and his want of special knowledge render difficult. She had never seen Martin take so much trouble about anything in his whole life. It amuses me, he had explained briefly, I am beset by a lot of swindlers trying to sell all sorts of gaspine weapons. They are charming. They invite me to expensive luncheons. I keep up their hops. It's extremely entertaining. Meanwhile, the real affair is being carried through in quite another quarter. When the business was concluded, he declared suddenly his intention of seeing the precious consignment delivered safely in Sulaco. The whole burlesque business, he thought, was worth following up to the end. He mumbled his excuses, tugging at his golden bird, before the acute young lady, who, after the first wide stare of astonishment, looked at him with narrowed eyes and pronounced slowly. I believe you want to see Antonia. What Antonia asked, because the one of Bolivadir, in a bext and disdainful tone, he shrugged his shoulders and spun round on his heel. His sister called out after him judiciously. The Antonia you used to know, when she wore her hair in two plates down her back. He had known her some eight years since, shortly before the Abiganos had left Europe for good. As a tall girl of sixteen, youthfully austere, and of a character already so far, that she bentured to treat slightly his pose of disabused wisdom. On one occasion, as though she had lost all patience, she flew out adam about the aimlessness of his life and the liberty of his opinions. He was twenty then, and only son, spoiled by his adoring family. This attack disconcerted him so greatly, that he had faltered in his affectation of a mere superiority before that insignificant cheat of a schoolgirl. But the impression left was so strong, that ever since, all the girlfriends of his sisters recalled to him Antonia Abiganos by some faint resemblance, or by the great force of contrast. It was, he told himself, like a ridiculous fatality. And of course, in the news, the decudes received regularly from Costa Juana the name of their friends. The Abiganos cropped up frequently. The arrest and the abominable treatment of the ex-minister, the dangers and hardships endured by the family, its withdrawal imported to Sulaco, the death of the motor. The Monterrey's pronounceamiento had taken place before Martin de Cune reached Costa Juana. He came out in a roundabout way, through Magellan's streets, by the main line, and the west coast service of the Oesan Company. His precious consignment arrived just in time to convert the first feelings of consternation into a mood of hope and resolution. Publicly, he was made much by the familias principales. Probably, Don José, still shaken and weak, embraced him with tears in his eyes. You have come out yourself, no less because Big Peck expected from a decu. Alas, our worst fears have been realized, he moaned affectionately. And again, he hugged his godson. This was indeed the time for men of intellect and conscience to rally around in danger cause. It was then that Martin de Cune, the adopted child of Western Europe, felt the absolute change of atmosphere. He submitted to being embraced and talked to without a word. He was moved in spite of himself, by the note of passion and sorrow known on the more refined stage of European politics. But when the tall Antonia, advancing with her light step, in the dimness of the big bear-sala of the Abellanos house, offered him her hand in her emancipated way, and murmured, I am glad to see you here, Don Martin, he felt how impossible it would be to tell these two people that he had intended to go away by the next month's packet. Don Jose, meantime, continued his praises. Every accession added to public confidence and, besides, what an example to the young men at home from the brilliant defender of the country's regeneration, the worthy expounder of the party's political fate before the world. Everybody had read the magnificent article in the famous partisan review. The world was now informed, and the author's appearance at this moment was like a public act of faith. Jun Deku felt overcome by a feeling of impeach and confusion. His plan had been to return by way of the United States through California, visit Yellowstone Park, see Chicago, Niagara, have a look at Canada, perhaps made a short stay in New York, a longer one in Newport, use his letters of introduction. The pressure of Antonia's hands was so frank, the tone of her voice was so unexpectedly unchanged in its approving warmth that all he found to say after his low bow was, I am inexpressively grateful for your welcome, but why need a man be thanked for returning to his native country? I am sure Donia Antonia does not think so. Certainly not, senor, she said, with that perfectly calm openness of matter which characterized all her utterances. But when he returns, as you return, why may be glad for the sake of both? Martin Deku'd say nothing of his plans. He not only never breathed a word of them to anyone, but only a fortnight later asked the ministers of the Casa Good, where he had of course obtained admission at once, leading forward in his chair with an air of well-bred familiarity, whether she could not detect in him that day a marked change, an air, he explained, of more excellent gravity. At this, Mr. Scoot turned her face full towards him with the silent inquiry of a slightly widened eyes, and the mirror's ghost of a smile and habitual movement with her, which was very fascinating to man by something subtly devoted, finally self-forgetful in his lively rhythmness of attention. Because Deku'd continued impertably, he felt no longer an idle comber of the earth. She was, he assured her, actually beholding at that moment the journalists of Solaco. At once, Mr. Scoot glanced towards Antonia, posed upright in the corner of a high, straight-backed Spanish sofa, a large black fan waving slowly against the curves of her fine figure, the tips of a crossed fit peeping from under the hem of the black skirt. The good size also remained fixed her, while in an undertone he added that Ms. Avigianos was quite aware of his new and unexpected vocation, which in Costa Havana was generally the speciality of half-educated negroes and wholly penniless lawyers. Then, confronting with a sort of urbane and frontery, Mr. Scoot's gaze now turned sympathetically upon himself, he breathed out the words, Propatria, what had happened was that he had all at once gilded to Don José's pressing entreaties to take the direction of a newspaper that would voice the aspirations of the province. It had been Don José's old and cherished idea. The necessary plant, on a modest scale, and a large consignment of paper had been received from America some time before. The right man alone was wanted, even Sr. Moraga in Santa Marta had not been able to find one, and the matter was now become impressing. Some organ was absolutely needed to counteract the effect of the lies disseminated by the Monterey's press, the atrocious columnist, the appeals to the people calling upon them to rise with their knives in their hands and put an end once for all to the Blancos, to these Gothic remnants, to these sinister mummies, these impotent paralyticos who plotted with foreigners for the surrender of the lands and the slavery of the people. The glamour of this negro liberalism frightened Sr. Avianos. A newspaper was the only remedy, and now that the right man had been found and decued, great black letters appeared painted between the windows above the arcaded ground floor of a house on the plaza. It was next to unsign his great important boots, silks, ironware, muslins, wooden toys, tiny silver arms, legs, heads, hearts for ex-boto offerings, rosaries, champagne, women's hats, patent medicines, even a few dusty books and paper covers, and mostly in the French language. The big black letters from the wars, Offices of the Porvenir. From these offices a single-folded sheet of Martin's journalism issued three times a week, and this sleek yellow and sunny prowling in a suit of ample black and carpet slippers before the many doors of his establishment, greeted by a deep, side-long inclination of his body, the journalist of Sulaco going to and from, on the business of his August calling. End of Part 2, Chapter 3. Chapter 4 Perhaps it was in the exercise of his calling that he had come to see the troops depart. The Porvenir of the day after next would no doubt relate the event, but its editor, leaning his side against the landow, seemed to look at nothing. The front rank of the Company of Infantry drawn up three deep across the shore end of the jetty when pressed too close would bring their bayonets to the charge ferociously with an awful rattle, and then the crowd of spectators swayed back bodily, even under the noses of the big white mules. Notwithstanding the great multitude, there was only a low muttering noise. The dust hung in a brown haze in which the horsemen, wedged in the throng here and there, towered from the hips upwards, gazing all one way over the heads. Almost every one of them had mounted a friend who steadied himself with both hands, grasping his shoulders from behind, and the rims of their hats touching made like one disc sustaining the cones of two-pointed crowns with a double face underneath. A horse mosso would ball out something to an acquaintance in the ranks, or a woman would shriek suddenly the word adios, followed by the Christian name of a man. General Barrios, in a shabby blue tunic and white peg-top trousers falling upon strange red boots, kept his head uncovered and stooped slightly, propping himself up with a thick stick. No, he had earned enough military glory to satiate any man, he insisted to Mrs. Gould, trying at the same time to put an air of gallantry into his attitude. A few jetty hairs hung sparsely from his upper lip, he had a salient nose, a thin, long jaw, and a black silk patch over one eye. His other eye, small and deep-set, twinkled erratically in all directions, aimlessly affable. The few European spectators, all men, who had naturally drifted into the neighborhood of the Gould carriage, betrayed by the solemnity of their faces their impression that the general must have had too much punch. Swedish punch imported in bottles by Ansani at the Amaria Club before he had started with his staff on a furious ride to the harbor, but Mrs. Gould bent forward, self-possessed, and declared her conviction that still more glory awaited the general in the near future. Senora, he remonstrated with great feeling, in the name of God, reflect, how can there be any glory for a man like me in overcoming that bald-headed embostero with the dyed moustaches? Pablo Ignacio Barrios, son of a village alcalde, general of division, commanding in chief the Occidental Military District, did not frequent the higher society of the town. He preferred the unceremonious gatherings of men where he could tell jaguar hunt stories, boast of his powers with the lasso, with which he could perform extremely difficult feats of the sort no married man should attempt, as the saying goes among the Janeros, relate tales of extraordinary night rides, encounters with wild bulls, struggles with crocodiles, adventures in the great forests, crossings of swollen rivers, and it was not mere boastfulness that prompted the general's reminiscences, but a genuine love of that wild life which he had led in his young days before he turned his back forever on the thatched roof of the parental Todería in the woods. Wandering away as far as Mexico, he had fought against the French by the side, as he said, of Juárez, and was the only military man of Costa Juana who had ever encountered European troops in the field. That fact shed a great luster upon his name till it became eclipsed by the rising star of Montero. All his life he had been an inveterate gambler. He eluded himself quite openly to the current story How Once, during some campaign, when in command of a brigade, he had gambled away his horses, pistols, and accoutrements to the very epaulettes, playing monte with his kernels the night before the battle. Finally he had sent under escort his sword, a presentation sword with a gold hilt, to the town in the rear of his position to be immediately pledged for 500 pesetas with a sleepy and frightened shopkeeper. By daybreak he had lost the last of that money, too, when his only remark as he rose calmly was, Now let us go and fight to the death. From that time he had become aware that a general could lead his troops into battle very well with a simple stick in his hand. It has been my custom ever since, he would say. He was always overwhelmed with debts. Even during the periods of splendor in his varied fortunes of a costa Juana general, when he held high military commands, his gold-laced uniforms were almost always in pawn with some tradesmen. And at last, to avoid the incessant difficulties of costume caused by the anxious lenders, he had assumed a disdain of military trappings, an eccentric fashion of shabby old tunics which had become like a second nature. But the faction Barrios joined needed to fear no political betrayal. He was too much of a real soldier for the ignoble traffic of buying and selling victories. A member of the foreign diplomatic body in Santa Marta had once passed a judgment upon him. Barrios is a man of perfect honesty and even of some talent for war. Ma il manc de tenue. After the triumph of the Ribiarists, he had obtained the reputedly lucrative Occidental command, mainly through the exertions of his creditors, the Santa Marta shopkeepers, all great politicians, who moved heaven and earth in his interest publicly, and privately besieged Señor Moraga, the influential agent of the Santome Mine, with the exaggerated lamentations that if the general were passed over, we shall all be ruined. An incidental but favorable mention of his name in Mr. Gould Sr.'s long correspondence with his son had something to do with his appointment too, but most of all undoubtedly his established political honesty. No one questioned the personal bravery of the tiger killer, as the populace called him. He was, however, said to be unlucky in the field, but this was to be the beginning of an era of peace. The soldiers liked him for his humane temper, which was like a strange and precious flower unexpectedly blooming on the hotbed of corrupt revolutions. And when he rode slowly through the streets during some military display, the contemptuous good humor of his solitary eye roaming over the crowds extorted the acclimations of the populace. The women of that class especially seemed positively fascinated by the long drooping nose, the peaked chin, the heavy lower lip, the black silk eye patch, and band slanting rakeishly over the forehead. His high rank always procured an audience of caballeros for his sporting stories, which he detailed very well with a simple grave enjoyment. As to the society of ladies, it was irksome by the restraints it imposed without any equivalent as far as he could see. He had not perhaps spoken three times on the whole to Mrs. Gould since he had taken up his high command, but he had observed her frequently riding with the Señor Administrador, and had pronounced that there was more sense in her little bridal hand than in all the female heads in Sulaco. His impulse had been to be very civil on parting to a woman who did not wobble in the saddle, and happened to be the wife of a personality very important to a man always short of money. He even pushed his attention so far as to desire the aid to camp at his side, a thick-set short captain with a tartar physiognomy, to bring along a corporal with a file of men in front of the carriage, lest the crowd in its backward surges should incomode the mules of the Señora. Then, turning to the small knot of silent Europeans looking on within earshot, he raised his voice protectingly. Señores, have no apprehension. Go on quietly making your ferrocarril, your railways, your telegraphs, your... There's enough wealth in Cossajuana to pay for everything, or else you would not be here, haha. Don't mind this little Picardia of my friend Montero. In a little while you shall behold his dyed moustaches through the bars of a strong wooden cage. See, Señores, fear nothing, develop the country, work, work. The little group of engineers received this exhortation without a word, and after waving his hand at them loftily, he addressed himself again to Mrs. Gould. That is what Don Jose says we must do, be enterprising, work, grow rich, to put Montero in a cage is my work, and when that insignificant piece of business is done, then, as Don Jose wishes us, we shall grow rich one and all, like so many Englishmen, because it is money that saves a country and... But a young officer in a very new uniform, hurrying up from the direction of the jetty, interrupted his interpretation of Señor Avellanos' ideals. The general made a movement of impatience. The other went on talking to him insistently, with an error of respect. The horses of the staff had been embarked, the steamer's gig was awaiting the general at the boat steps, and Barrios, after a fierce stare of his one eye, began to take leave. Don Jose roused himself for an appropriate phrase pronounced mechanically. The terrible strain of hope and fear was telling on him, and he seemed to husband the last sparks of his fire for those oratorical efforts of which even the distant Europe was to hear. Antonia, her red lips firmly closed, averted her head behind the raised fan, and young Dekoud, though he felt the girl's eyes upon him, gazed away persistently, hooked on his elbow, with a scornful and complete detachment. Mrs. Gould heroically concealed her dismay at the appearance of men and events so remote from her racial conventions, dismayed too deep to be uttered in words even to her husband. She understood his voiceless reserve better now. Their confidential intercourse fell not in moments of privacy, but precisely in public, when the quick meeting of their glances would comment upon some fresh turn of events. She had gone to his school of uncompromising silence, the only one possible, since so much that seemed shocking, weird and grotesque in the working out of their purposes had to be accepted as normal in this country. Decidedly the stately Antonia looked more mature and infinitely calm, but she would never have known how to reconcile the sudden sinkings of her heart with an amiable mobility of expression. Mrs. Gould smiled a good-bye at Barrios, nodded round to the Europeans, who raised their hat simultaneously, with an engaging invitation, I hope to see you all presently at home. Then said nervously to Dekoud, get in Don Martin, and heard him mutter to himself in French as he opened the carriage door. Le sort in les jetés. She heard him with a sort of exasperation. Nobody ought to have known better than himself that the first cast of dice had been already thrown long ago in a most desperate game. Distant acclamations, words of command yelled out, and a roll of drums on the jetty greeted the departing general. Something like a slight faintness came over her, and she looked blankly at Antonia's still face, wondering what would happen to Charlie if that absurd man failed. A la casa en nacio, she cried at the motionless broad back of the coachman, who gathered the reins without haste, mumbling to himself under his breath, si la casa, si si niña. The carriage rolled noiselessly on the soft track. The shadows fell long on the dusty little plane, interspersed with dark bushes, mounds of turned-up earth, low wooden buildings with iron roofs of the railway company, the sparse row of telegraph poles strode obliquely clear of the town, bearing a single, almost invisible wire far into the great campo, like a slender, vibrating feeler of that progress waiting outside for a moment of peace to enter and twine itself about the weary heart of the land. The cafe window of the albergo di Italia Una was full of sunburned, whiskered faces of railwaymen. But at the other end of the house, the end of the signore inglesi, old Giorgio, at the door with one of his girls on each side, bared his bushy head as white as the snows of Higuerota. Mrs. Gould stopped the carriage. She seldom failed to speak to her protégé. Moreover, the excitement, the heat, and the dust had made her thirsty. She asked for a glass of water. Giorgio sent the children indoors for it and approached with pleasure expressed in his whole rugged countenance. It was not often that he had occasion to see his benefactress, who was also an English woman, another title to his regard. He offered some excuses for his wife. It was a bad day with her, her oppressions. He tapped his own broad chest. She could not move from her chair that day. Decude ensconced in the corner of his seat, observed gloomily Mrs. Gould's old revolutionist, then, offhand, Well, and what do you think of it all, Garibaldino? Old Giorgio, looking at him with some curiosity, said civilly that the troops had marched very well. One eyed Barrios and his officers had done wonders with the recruits in a short time. Those indios, only caught the other day, had gone swinging past in double-quick time, like Bursa Ligieri. They looked well fed, too, and had whole uniforms. Uniforms, he repeated, with a half-smile of pity. A look of grim retrospect stole over his piercing, steady eyes. It had been otherwise in his time when men fought against tyranny in the forests of Brazil or on the plains of Uruguay, starving on half-raw beef without salt, half-naked, with often only a knife tied to a stick for a weapon. And yet we used to prevail against the oppressor, he concluded, proudly. His animation fell. The slight gesture of his hand expressed discouragement, but he added that he had asked one of the sergeants to show him the new rifle. There was no such weapon in his fighting days, and if Barrios could not... Yes, yes, broken, Don Jose, almost trembling with eagerness. We are safe. The good senor Viola is a man of experience. Extremely deadly, is it not so? You have accomplished your mission admirably, my dear Martin. Dekud, lolling back moodily, contemplated old Viola. Ah, yes, a man of experience. But who are you for, really, in your heart? Mrs. Gould leaned over to the children. Linda had brought out a glass of water on a tray with extreme care. Giselle presented her with a bunch of flowers gathered hastily. For the people, declared old Viola, sternly. We are all for the people, in the end. Yes, muttered old Viola savagely, and meantime they fight for you, blind, esclavos. At that moment, young Scarfe of the railway staff emerged from the door of the part reserved for the senor Ian Glacy. He had come down to headquarters from somewhere up the line on a light engine, and it had just time to get a bath and change his clothes. He was a nice boy, and Mrs. Gould welcomed him. It's a delightful surprise to see you, Mrs. Gould. I've just come down. Usual luck. Missed everything, of course. This show is just over, and I hear there has been a great dance at Don Huste Lopez's last night. Is it true? The young patricians, Dekud began suddenly in his precise English, have indeed been dancing before they started off to the war with the great Pompey. Young Scarfe stared astounded. You haven't met before, Mrs. Gould intervened. Mr. Dekud, Mr. Scarfe. Ah, but we are not going to Farsalia, protested Don Huste with nervous haste, also in English. You should not just like this, Martin. Antonia's breast rose and fell with a deeper breath. The young engineer was utterly in the dark. Great what, he muttered vaguely. Luckily, Montero is not a Caesar, Dekud continued. Not the two Monteros put together would make a decent parody of a Caesar. He crossed his arms on his breast, looking at Señor Avellanos, who had returned to his immobility. It is only you, Don Huste, who are a genuine old Roman, we are Romanus, eloquent and inflexible. Since he had heard the name of Montero pronounced, young Scarfe had been eager to express his simple feelings. In a loud and youthful tone he hoped that this Montero was going to be licked once and for all and done with. There was no saying what would happen to the railway if the revolution got the upper hand. Perhaps it would have to be abandoned. It would not be the first railway gone to Pod in Costa Juana. You know, it's one of their so-called national things, he ran on, wrinkling up his noses if the word had a suspicious flavor to his profound experience of South American affairs. And, of course, he chatted with animation. It had been such an immense piece of luck for him and his age to get appointed on the staff of a big thing like that, don't you know? It would give him the pull over a lot of chaps all through life, he asserted. Therefore, down with Montero, Mrs. Gould, his artless grin disappeared slowly before the unanimous gravity of the faces turned upon him from the carriage. Only that old chap Don Huste, presenting a motionless waxy profile, stared straight on as if deaf. Scarfe did not know the Avellanos very well. They did not give balls, and Antonia never appeared at a ground floor window as some other young ladies used to do attended by elder women to chat with the Caballeros on horseback in the calle. The stairs of these creoles did not matter much, but what on earth had come to Mrs. Gould? She said, Go on, Ignacio, and gave him a slow inclination of the head. He heard a short laugh from that round-faced French-ified fellow. He colored up to the eyes and stared at Giorgio Viola, who had fallen back with the children, had in hand. I shall want a horse presently, he said, with some asperity to the old man. Si, señor, there are plenty of horses, murmured the Garibaldinos, smoothing absently with his brown hands, the two heads, one dark with bronze glints, the other fair with a coppery ripple of the two girls by his side. The returning stream of sights here has raised a great dust on the road. Horsemen noticed the group. Go to your mother, he said. They are growing up as I am growing older, and there is nobody. He looked at the young engineer and stopped, as if awakened from a dream. Then, folding his arms on his breast, took up his usual position, leaning back in the doorway with an upward glance fastened on the white shoulder of Higuerrota far away. In the carriage, Martin de Coud, shifting his position as though he could not make himself comfortable, muttered as he swayed towards Antonia. I suppose you hate me. Then, in a loud voice, he began to congratulate Don Jose upon all the engineers being convinced Rivierists. The interest of all those foreigners was gratifying. You have heard this one, he is an enlightened well-wisher. It is pleasant to think that the prosperity of Costa Juana is of some use to the world. He is very young, Mrs. Gould remarked quietly. And so very wise for his age, retorted de Coud, but here we have the naked truth from the mouth of that child. You are right, Don Jose. The natural treasures of Costa Juana are of importance to the progressive Europe represented by this youth. Just as 300 years ago, the wealth of our Spanish fathers was a serious object to the rest of Europe, as represented by the bold buccaneers. There is a curse of futility upon our character. Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa, chivalry and materialism, high-sounding sentiments and a supine morality, violent efforts for an idea and a sullen acquiescence in every form of corruption. We convulsed a continent for our independence only to become the passive prey of a democratic parody. The helpless victims of scoundrels and cutthroats, our institutions of mockery, our laws of farce, a guzman bento, our master. And we have sunk so low that when a man like you has awakened our conscience, a stupid barbarian of a Montero, great heavens, a Montero, becomes a deadly danger and an ignorant, boastful Indio like Barrios is our defender. But Don Jose, disregarding the general indictment as though he had not heard a word of it, took up the defense of Barrios. The man was competent enough for his special task in the plan of campaign. It consisted in an offensive movement, with Caeta as base upon the flank of the revolutionist forces advancing from the south against Santa Marta, which was covered by another army with a president dictator in its midst. Don Jose became quite animated with a great flow of speech, bending forward anxiously under the steady eyes of his daughter. Dekud, as if silenced by so much ardor, did not make a sound. The bells of the city were striking the hour of Oracion when the carriage rolled under the old gateway facing the harbor like a shapeless monument of leaves and stones. The rumble of wheels under the sonorous arch was traversed by a strange piercing shriek, and Dekud, from his back seat, had a view of the people behind the carriage trudging along the road outside, all turning their heads in sombreros and rebosos to look at a locomotive which rolled quickly out of sight behind Giorgio Viola's house, under a white trail of steam that seemed to vanish in the breathless hysterically prolonged scream of warlike triumph. And it was all like a fleeting vision, the shrieking ghost of a railway engine fleeing across the frame of the archway, behind the startled movement of the people streaming back from a military spectacle with silent footsteps on the dust of the road. It was a material train returning from the compo to the palisaded yards. The empty cars rolled lightly on the single track, there was no rumble of wheels, no tremor of the ground. The engine driver, running past the Casa Viola with the salute of an uplifted arm, checked his speed smartly before entering the yard, and when the ear-splitting screech of the steam whistle for the brakes had stopped, a series of hard, battering shocks mingled with the clanking of chain couplings made a tumult of blows and shaken fetters under the vault of the gate. End Part Second Chapter Four. Recording by Nick Number.