Nostromo, Joseph Conrad [manga ebook reader txt] 📗

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.”

Part II The Isabels I

Through good and evil report in the varying fortune of that struggle which Don Jose had characterized in the phrase, “the fate of national honesty trembles in the balance,” the Gould Concession, imperium 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 San Tome had twinkled night after night upon the great, limitless shadow of the campo; 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 Higuerota and as yet unbreached by the railway, of which only the first part, the easy campo part from Sulaco to the Ivie Valley 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 plain, penetrated into the forest fringe of the foothills cut by the deep avenue of the track; and its wire ended abruptly in the construction camp at a white deal table supporting a Morse apparatus, in a long hut of planks with a corrugated iron roof overshadowed by gigantic cedar trees⁠—the quarters of the engineer in charge of the advance section.

The harbour was busy, too, with the traffic in railway material, and with the movements of troops along the coast. The O.S.N. Company found much occupation for its fleet. Costaguana had no navy, and, apart from a few coastguard cutters, there were no national ships except a couple of old 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 Gould, where, with a strange ignorance of the real forces at work around him, 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 confounded Costaguana politics gave him more work⁠—he confided to Mrs. Gould⁠—than he had bargained for.

Don Jose Avellanos had displayed in the service of the endangered Ribiera government an organizing activity and an eloquence of which the echoes reached even Europe. For, after the new loan to the Ribiera government, Europe had become interested in Costaguana. The sala 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 a glass case above 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 vote for the raising of a second Sulaco regiment in the defence of the reforming government; and when the provinces again displayed their old flags (proscribed in Guzman Bento’s time) there was another of those great orations, when Don Jose 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 old political doctrines. They were perishable. They died. But the doctrine of political rectitude was immortal. The second Sulaco regiment, to whom he was presenting this flag, was going to show its valour 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 Jose Avellanos 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 Guzman Bento 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 Guzman had ruled the country with the sombre 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 his adversaries, the federalists, were the supreme sinners, objects of hate, abhorrence, and fear, as heretics would be to a convinced inquisitor. For years he had carried about at the tail of the Army of Pacification, all over the country, a captive band of such atrocious criminals, who considered themselves most unfortunate at not having been summarily executed. It was a diminishing company of nearly naked skeletons, loaded with irons, covered with dirt, with vermin, with raw wounds, all men of position, of education, of wealth, who had learned to fight amongst themselves for scraps of rotten beef