Nostromo - Joseph Conrad (books to read fiction .TXT) 📗

“Begad, sir! I could spin you a yarn for hours. But it’s time we started off to Rincon. It would not do for you to pass through Sulaco and not see the lights of the San Tome mine, a whole mountain ablaze like a lighted palace above the dark campo. It’s a fashionable drive⁠ ⁠… But let me tell you one little anecdote, sir; just to show you. A fortnight or more later, when Barrios, declared Generalissimo, was gone in pursuit of Pedrito away south, when the Provisional Junta, with Don Juste Lopez at its head, had promulgated the new Constitution, and our Don Carlos Gould was packing up his trunks bound on a mission to San Francisco and Washington (the United States, sir, were the first great power to recognize the Occidental Republic)⁠—a fortnight later, I say, when we were beginning to feel that our heads were safe on our shoulders, if I may express myself so, a prominent man, a large shipper by our line, came to see me on business, and, says he, the first thing: ‘I say, Captain Mitchell, is that fellow’ (meaning Nostromo) ‘still the capataz of your cargadores or not?’ ‘What’s the matter?’ says I. ‘Because, if he is, then I don’t mind; I send and receive a good lot of cargo by your ships; but I have observed him several days loafing about the wharf, and just now he stopped me as cool as you please, with a request for a cigar. Now, you know, my cigars are rather special, and I can’t get them so easily as all that.’ ‘I hope you stretched a point,’ I said, very gently. ‘Why, yes. But it’s a confounded nuisance. The fellow’s everlastingly cadging for smokes.’ Sir, I turned my eyes away, and then asked, ‘Weren’t you one of the prisoners in the cabildo?’ ‘You know very well I was, and in chains, too,’ says he. ‘And under a fine of fifteen thousand dollars?’ He coloured, sir, because it got about that he fainted from fright when they came to arrest him, and then behaved before Fuentes in a manner to make the very policianos, who had dragged him there by the hair of his head, smile at his cringing. ‘Yes,’ he says, in a sort of shy way. ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, nothing. You stood to lose a tidy bit,’ says I, ‘even if you saved your life⁠ ⁠… But what can I do for you?’ He never even saw the point. Not he. And that’s how the world wags, sir.”

He rose a little stiffly, and the drive to Rincon would be taken with only one philosophical remark, uttered by the merciless cicerone, with his eyes fixed upon the lights of San Tome, that seemed suspended in the dark night between earth and heaven.

“A great power, this, for good and evil, sir. A great power.”

And the dinner of the Mirliflores would be eaten, excellent as to cooking, and leaving upon the traveller’s mind an impression that there were in Sulaco many pleasant, able young men with salaries apparently too large for their discretion, and amongst them a few, mostly Anglo-Saxon, skilled in the art of, as the saying is, “taking a rise” out of his kind host.

With a rapid, jingling drive to the harbour in a two-wheeled machine (which Captain Mitchell called a curricle) behind a fleet and scraggy mule beaten all the time by an obviously Neapolitan driver, the cycle would be nearly closed before the lighted-up offices of the O.S.N. Company, remaining open so late because of the steamer. Nearly⁠—but not quite.

“Ten o’clock. Your ship won’t be ready to leave till half-past twelve, if by then. Come in for a brandy-and-soda and one more cigar.”

And in the superintendent’s private room the privileged passenger by the Ceres, or Juno, or Pallas, stunned and as it were annihilated mentally by a sudden surfeit of sights, sounds, names, facts, and complicated information imperfectly apprehended, would listen like a tired child to a fairy tale; would hear a voice, familiar and surprising in its pompousness, tell him, as if from another world, how there was “in this very harbour” an international naval demonstration, which put an end to the Costaguana-Sulaco War. How the United States cruiser, Powhattan, was the first to salute the Occidental flag⁠—white, with a wreath of green laurel in the middle encircling a yellow amarilla flower. Would hear how General Montero, in less than a month after proclaiming himself Emperor of Costaguana, was shot dead (during a solemn and public distribution of orders and crosses) by a young artillery officer, the brother of his then mistress.

“The abominable Pedrito, sir, fled the country,” the voice would say. And it would continue: “A captain of one of our ships told me lately that he recognized Pedrito the Guerrillero, arrayed in purple slippers and a velvet smoking-cap with a gold tassel, keeping a disorderly house in one of the southern ports.”

“Abominable Pedrito! Who the devil was he?” would wonder the distinguished bird of passage hovering on the confines of waking and sleep with resolutely open eyes and a faint but amiable curl upon his lips, from between which stuck out the eighteenth or twentieth cigar of that memorable day.

“He appeared to me in this very room like a haunting ghost, sir”⁠—Captain Mitchell was talking of his Nostromo with true warmth of feeling and a touch of wistful pride. “You may imagine, sir, what an effect it produced on me. He had come round by sea with Barrios, of course. And the first thing he told me after I became fit to hear him was that he had picked up the lighter’s boat floating in the gulf! He seemed quite overcome by the circumstance. And a remarkable enough circumstance it was, when you remember that it was then sixteen days since the sinking of the silver. At once I could see he was another man. He stared at the wall, sir, as