Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

J >> Joseph Conrad >> Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard


And as they seldom failed to account for the smallest package, rarely
lost a bullock, and had never drowned a single passenger, the name of
the O.S.N. stood very high for trustworthiness. People declared that
under the Company's care their lives and property were safer on the
water than in their own houses on shore.

The O.S.N.'s superintendent in Sulaco for the whole Costaguana section
of the service was very proud of his Company's standing. He resumed it
in a saying which was very often on his lips, "We never make mistakes."
To the Company's officers it took the form of a severe injunction, "We
must make no mistakes. I'll have no mistakes here, no matter what Smith
may do at his end."

Smith, on whom he had never set eyes in his life, was the other
superintendent of the service, quartered some fifteen hundred miles away
from Sulaco. "Don't talk to me of your Smith."

Then, calming down suddenly, he would dismiss the subject with studied
negligence.

"Smith knows no more of this continent than a baby."

"Our excellent Senor Mitchell" for the business and official world of
Sulaco; "Fussy Joe" for the commanders of the Company's ships, Captain
Joseph Mitchell prided himself on his profound knowledge of men and
things in the country--cosas de Costaguana. Amongst these last he
accounted as most unfavourable to the orderly working of his Company
the frequent changes of government brought about by revolutions of the
military type.

The political atmosphere of the Republic was generally stormy in these
days. The fugitive patriots of the defeated party had the knack of
turning up again on the coast with half a steamer's load of small arms
and ammunition. Such resourcefulness Captain Mitchell considered as
perfectly wonderful in view of their utter destitution at the time of
flight. He had observed that "they never seemed to have enough change
about them to pay for their passage ticket out of the country." And
he could speak with knowledge; for on a memorable occasion he had been
called upon to save the life of a dictator, together with the lives of a
few Sulaco officials--the political chief, the director of the customs,
and the head of police--belonging to an overturned government. Poor
Senor Ribiera (such was the dictator's name) had come pelting eighty
miles over mountain tracks after the lost battle of Socorro, in the hope
of out-distancing the fatal news--which, of course, he could not manage
to do on a lame mule. The animal, moreover, expired under him at the end
of the Alameda, where the military band plays sometimes in the evenings
between the revolutions. "Sir," Captain Mitchell would pursue with
portentous gravity, "the ill-timed end of that mule attracted attention
to the unfortunate rider. His features were recognized by several
deserters from the Dictatorial army amongst the rascally mob already
engaged in smashing the windows of the Intendencia."

Early on the morning of that day the local authorities of Sulaco had
fled for refuge to the O.S.N. Company's offices, a strong building
near the shore end of the jetty, leaving the town to the mercies of a
revolutionary rabble; and as the Dictator was execrated by the populace
on account of the severe recruitment law his necessities had compelled
him to enforce during the struggle, he stood a good chance of being
torn to pieces. Providentially, Nostromo--invaluable fellow--with some
Italian workmen, imported to work upon the National Central Railway,
was at hand, and managed to snatch him away--for the time at least.
Ultimately, Captain Mitchell succeeded in taking everybody off in his
own gig to one of the Company's steamers--it was the Minerva--just then,
as luck would have it, entering the harbour.

He had to lower these gentlemen at the end of a rope out of a hole in
the wall at the back, while the mob which, pouring out of the town, had
spread itself all along the shore, howled and foamed at the foot of the
building in front. He had to hurry them then the whole length of the
jetty; it had been a desperate dash, neck or nothing--and again it was
Nostromo, a fellow in a thousand, who, at the head, this time, of the
Company's body of lightermen, held the jetty against the rushes of the
rabble, thus giving the fugitives time to reach the gig lying ready
for them at the other end with the Company's flag at the stern. Sticks,
stones, shots flew; knives, too, were thrown. Captain Mitchell exhibited
willingly the long cicatrice of a cut over his left ear and temple, made
by a razor-blade fastened to a stick--a weapon, he explained, very much
in favour with the "worst kind of nigger out here."

Captain Mitchell was a thick, elderly man, wearing high, pointed collars
and short side-whiskers, partial to white waistcoats, and really very
communicative under his air of pompous reserve.

"These gentlemen," he would say, staring with great solemnity, "had
to run like rabbits, sir. I ran like a rabbit myself. Certain forms of
death are--er--distasteful to a--a--er--respectable man. They would have
pounded me to death, too. A crazy mob, sir, does not discriminate. Under
providence we owed our preservation to my Capataz de Cargadores, as they
called him in the town, a man who, when I discovered his value, sir, was
just the bos'n of an Italian ship, a big Genoese ship, one of the few
European ships that ever came to Sulaco with a general cargo before the
building of the National Central. He left her on account of some very
respectable friends he made here, his own countrymen, but also, I
suppose, to better himself. Sir, I am a pretty good judge of character.
I engaged him to be the foreman of our lightermen, and caretaker of our
jetty. That's all that he was. But without him Senor Ribiera would have
been a dead man. This Nostromo, sir, a man absolutely above reproach,
became the terror of all the thieves in the town. We were infested,
infested, overrun, sir, here at that time by ladrones and matreros,
thieves and murderers from the whole province. On this occasion they
had been flocking into Sulaco for a week past. They had scented the end,
sir. Fifty per cent. of that murdering mob were professional bandits
from the Campo, sir, but there wasn't one that hadn't heard of Nostromo.
As to the town leperos, sir, the sight of his black whiskers and white
teeth was enough for them. They quailed before him, sir. That's what the
force of character will do for you."

It could very well be said that it was Nostromo alone who saved the
lives of these gentlemen. Captain Mitchell, on his part, never left them
till he had seen them collapse, panting, terrified, and exasperated,
but safe, on the luxuriant velvet sofas in the first-class saloon of the
Minerva. To the very last he had been careful to address the ex-Dictator
as "Your Excellency."

"Sir, I could do no other. The man was down--ghastly, livid, one mass of
scratches."

The Minerva never let go her anchor that call. The superintendent
ordered her out of the harbour at once. No cargo could be landed, of
course, and the passengers for Sulaco naturally refused to go ashore.
They could hear the firing and see plainly the fight going on at the
edge of the water. The repulsed mob devoted its energies to an attack
upon the Custom House, a dreary, unfinished-looking structure with many
windows two hundred yards away from the O.S.N. Offices, and the only
other building near the harbour. Captain Mitchell, after directing the
commander of the Minerva to land "these gentlemen" in the first port of
call outside Costaguana, went back in his gig to see what could be done
for the protection of the Company's property. That and the property
of the railway were preserved by the European residents; that is, by
Captain Mitchell himself and the staff of engineers building the road,
aided by the Italian and Basque workmen who rallied faithfully round
their English chiefs. The Company's lightermen, too, natives of the
Republic, behaved very well under their Capataz. An outcast lot of
very mixed blood, mainly negroes, everlastingly at feud with the other
customers of low grog shops in the town, they embraced with delight
this opportunity to settle their personal scores under such favourable
auspices. There was not one of them that had not, at some time or other,
looked with terror at Nostromo's revolver poked very close at his face,
or been otherwise daunted by Nostromo's resolution. He was "much of a
man," their Capataz was, they said, too scornful in his temper ever to
utter abuse, a tireless taskmaster, and the more to be feared because
of his aloofness. And behold! there he was that day, at their head,
condescending to make jocular remarks to this man or the other.

Such leadership was inspiriting, and in truth all the harm the
mob managed to achieve was to set fire to one--only one--stack of
railway-sleepers, which, being creosoted, burned well. The main attack
on the railway yards, on the O.S.N. Offices, and especially on the
Custom House, whose strong room, it was well known, contained a large
treasure in silver ingots, failed completely. Even the little hotel kept
by old Giorgio, standing alone halfway between the harbour and the town,
escaped looting and destruction, not by a miracle, but because with the
safes in view they had neglected it at first, and afterwards found no
leisure to stop. Nostromo, with his Cargadores, was pressing them too
hard then.



CHAPTER THREE

It might have been said that there he was only protecting his own. From
the first he had been admitted to live in the intimacy of the family
of the hotel-keeper who was a countryman of his. Old Giorgio Viola,
a Genoese with a shaggy white leonine head--often called simply "the
Garibaldino" (as Mohammedans are called after their prophet)--was, to
use Captain Mitchell's own words, the "respectable married friend" by
whose advice Nostromo had left his ship to try for a run of shore luck
in Costaguana.

The old man, full of scorn for the populace, as your austere republican
so often is, had disregarded the preliminary sounds of trouble. He
went on that day as usual pottering about the "casa" in his slippers,
muttering angrily to himself his contempt of the non-political nature of
the riot, and shrugging his shoulders. In the end he was taken unawares
by the out-rush of the rabble. It was too late then to remove his
family, and, indeed, where could he have run to with the portly Signora
Teresa and two little girls on that great plain? So, barricading every
opening, the old man sat down sternly in the middle of the darkened cafe
with an old shot-gun on his knees. His wife sat on another chair by his
side, muttering pious invocations to all the saints of the calendar.

The old republican did not believe in saints, or in prayers, or in
what he called "priest's religion." Liberty and Garibaldi were his
divinities; but he tolerated "superstition" in women, preserving in
these matters a lofty and silent attitude.

His two girls, the eldest fourteen, and the other two years younger,
crouched on the sanded floor, on each side of the Signora Teresa, with
their heads on their mother's lap, both scared, but each in her own
way, the dark-haired Linda indignant and angry, the fair Giselle, the
younger, bewildered and resigned. The Patrona removed her arms, which
embraced her daughters, for a moment to cross herself and wring her
hands hurriedly. She moaned a little louder.

"Oh! Gian' Battista, why art thou not here? Oh! why art thou not here?"

She was not then invoking the saint himself, but calling upon Nostromo,
whose patron he was. And Giorgio, motionless on the chair by her side,
would be provoked by these reproachful and distracted appeals.

"Peace, woman! Where's the sense of it? There's his duty," he murmured
in the dark; and she would retort, panting--

"Eh! I have no patience. Duty! What of the woman who has been like a
mother to him? I bent my knee to him this morning; don't you go out,
Gian' Battista--stop in the house, Battistino--look at those two little
innocent children!"

Mrs. Viola was an Italian, too, a native of Spezzia, and though
considerably younger than her husband, already middle-aged. She had a
handsome face, whose complexion had turned yellow because the climate
of Sulaco did not suit her at all. Her voice was a rich contralto. When,
with her arms folded tight under her ample bosom, she scolded the squat,
thick-legged China girls handling linen, plucking fowls, pounding corn
in wooden mortars amongst the mud outbuildings at the back of the house,
she could bring out such an impassioned, vibrating, sepulchral note that
the chained watch-dog bolted into his kennel with a great rattle. Luis,
a cinnamon-coloured mulatto with a sprouting moustache and thick, dark
lips, would stop sweeping the cafe with a broom of palm-leaves to let
a gentle shudder run down his spine. His languishing almond eyes would
remain closed for a long time.

This was the staff of the Casa Viola, but all these people had fled
early that morning at the first sounds of the riot, preferring to hide
on the plain rather than trust themselves in the house; a preference for
which they were in no way to blame, since, whether true or not, it
was generally believed in the town that the Garibaldino had some money
buried under the clay floor of the kitchen. The dog, an irritable,
shaggy brute, barked violently and whined plaintively in turns at the
back, running in and out of his kennel as rage or fear prompted him.

Bursts of great shouting rose and died away, like wild gusts of wind on
the plain round the barricaded house; the fitful popping of shots
grew louder above the yelling. Sometimes there were intervals of
unaccountable stillness outside, and nothing could have been more gaily
peaceful than the narrow bright lines of sunlight from the cracks in the
shutters, ruled straight across the cafe over the disarranged chairs
and tables to the wall opposite. Old Giorgio had chosen that bare,
whitewashed room for a retreat. It had only one window, and its only
door swung out upon the track of thick dust fenced by aloe hedges
between the harbour and the town, where clumsy carts used to creak along
behind slow yokes of oxen guided by boys on horseback.

In a pause of stillness Giorgio cocked his gun. The ominous sound wrung
a low moan from the rigid figure of the woman sitting by his side. A
sudden outbreak of defiant yelling quite near the house sank all at once
to a confused murmur of growls. Somebody ran along; the loud catching of
his breath was heard for an instant passing the door; there were hoarse
mutters and footsteps near the wall; a shoulder rubbed against the
shutter, effacing the bright lines of sunshine pencilled across the
whole breadth of the room. Signora Teresa's arms thrown about the
kneeling forms of her daughters embraced them closer with a convulsive
pressure.

The mob, driven away from the Custom House, had broken up into several
bands, retreating across the plain in the direction of the town. The
subdued crash of irregular volleys fired in the distance was answered by
faint yells far away. In the intervals the single shots rang feebly, and
the low, long, white building blinded in every window seemed to be
the centre of a turmoil widening in a great circle about its closed-up
silence. But the cautious movements and whispers of a routed party
seeking a momentary shelter behind the wall made the darkness of the
room, striped by threads of quiet sunlight, alight with evil, stealthy
sounds. The Violas had them in their ears as though invisible ghosts
hovering about their chairs had consulted in mutters as to the
advisability of setting fire to this foreigner's casa.

It was trying to the nerves. Old Viola had risen slowly, gun in hand,
irresolute, for he did not see how he could prevent them. Already voices
could be heard talking at the back. Signora Teresa was beside herself
with terror.

"Ah! the traitor! the traitor!" she mumbled, almost inaudibly. "Now we
are going to be burnt; and I bent my knee to him. No! he must run at the
heels of his English."

She seemed to think that Nostromo's mere presence in the house would
have made it perfectly safe. So far, she, too, was under the spell of
that reputation the Capataz de Cargadores had made for himself by
the waterside, along the railway line, with the English and with the
populace of Sulaco. To his face, and even against her husband, she
invariably affected to laugh it to scorn, sometimes good-naturedly,
more often with a curious bitterness. But then women are unreasonable in
their opinions, as Giorgio used to remark calmly on fitting occasions.
On this occasion, with his gun held at ready before him, he stooped down
to his wife's head, and, keeping his eyes steadfastly on the barricaded
door, he breathed out into her ear that Nostromo would have been
powerless to help. What could two men shut up in a house do against
twenty or more bent upon setting fire to the roof? Gian' Battista was
thinking of the casa all the time, he was sure.

"He think of the casa! He!" gasped Signora Viola, crazily. She struck
her breast with her open hands. "I know him. He thinks of nobody but
himself."

A discharge of firearms near by made her throw her head back and close
her eyes. Old Giorgio set his teeth hard under his white moustache, and
his eyes began to roll fiercely. Several bullets struck the end of the
wall together; pieces of plaster could be heard falling outside; a voice
screamed "Here they come!" and after a moment of uneasy silence there
was a rush of running feet along the front.

Then the tension of old Giorgio's attitude relaxed, and a smile of
contemptuous relief came upon his lips of an old fighter with a leonine
face. These were not a people striving for justice, but thieves. Even to
defend his life against them was a sort of degradation for a man who had
been one of Garibaldi's immortal thousand in the conquest of Sicily. He
had an immense scorn for this outbreak of scoundrels and leperos, who
did not know the meaning of the word "liberty."

He grounded his old gun, and, turning his head, glanced at the coloured
lithograph of Garibaldi in a black frame on the white wall; a thread
of strong sunshine cut it perpendicularly. His eyes, accustomed to the
luminous twilight, made out the high colouring of the face, the red of
the shirt, the outlines of the square shoulders, the black patch of the
Bersagliere hat with cock's feathers curling over the crown. An immortal
hero! This was your liberty; it gave you not only life, but immortality
as well!

For that one man his fanaticism had suffered no diminution. In the
moment of relief from the apprehension of the greatest danger, perhaps,
his family had been exposed to in all their wanderings, he had turned to
the picture of his old chief, first and only, then laid his hand on his
wife's shoulder.

The children kneeling on the floor had not moved. Signora Teresa opened
her eyes a little, as though he had awakened her from a very deep and
dreamless slumber. Before he had time in his deliberate way to say a
reassuring word she jumped up, with the children clinging to her, one on
each side, gasped for breath, and let out a hoarse shriek.

It was simultaneous with the bang of a violent blow struck on the
outside of the shutter. They could hear suddenly the snorting of a
horse, the restive tramping of hoofs on the narrow, hard path in front
of the house; the toe of a boot struck at the shutter again; a spur
jingled at every blow, and an excited voice shouted, "Hola! hola, in
there!"



CHAPTER FOUR

All the morning Nostromo had kept his eye from afar on the Casa Viola,
even in the thick of the hottest scrimmage near the Custom House. "If
I see smoke rising over there," he thought to himself, "they are lost."
Directly the mob had broken he pressed with a small band of Italian
workmen in that direction, which, indeed, was the shortest line towards
the town. That part of the rabble he was pursuing seemed to think of
making a stand under the house; a volley fired by his followers from
behind an aloe hedge made the rascals fly. In a gap chopped out for
the rails of the harbour branch line Nostromo appeared, mounted on
his silver-grey mare. He shouted, sent after them one shot from his
revolver, and galloped up to the cafe window. He had an idea that old
Giorgio would choose that part of the house for a refuge.

His voice had penetrated to them, sounding breathlessly hurried: "Hola!
Vecchio! O, Vecchio! Is it all well with you in there?"

"You see--" murmured old Viola to his wife. Signora Teresa was silent
now. Outside Nostromo laughed.

"I can hear the padrona is not dead."

"You have done your best to kill me with fear," cried Signora Teresa.
She wanted to say something more, but her voice failed her.

Linda raised her eyes to her face for a moment, but old Giorgio shouted
apologetically--

"She is a little upset."

Outside Nostromo shouted back with another laugh--

"She cannot upset me."

Signora Teresa found her voice.

"It is what I say. You have no heart--and you have no conscience, Gian'
Battista--"

They heard him wheel his horse away from the shutters. The party he led
were babbling excitedly in Italian and Spanish, inciting each other to
the pursuit. He put himself at their head, crying, "Avanti!"

"He has not stopped very long with us. There is no praise from strangers
to be got here," Signora Teresa said tragically. "Avanti! Yes! That is
all he cares for. To be first somewhere--somehow--to be first with these
English. They will be showing him to everybody. 'This is our Nostromo!'"
She laughed ominously. "What a name! What is that? Nostromo? He would
take a name that is properly no word from them."

Meantime Giorgio, with tranquil movements, had been unfastening the
door; the flood of light fell on Signora Teresa, with her two girls
gathered to her side, a picturesque woman in a pose of maternal
exaltation. Behind her the wall was dazzlingly white, and the crude
colours of the Garibaldi lithograph paled in the sunshine.

Old Viola, at the door, moved his arm upwards as if referring all his
quick, fleeting thoughts to the picture of his old chief on the wall.
Even when he was cooking for the "Signori Inglesi"--the engineers (he
was a famous cook, though the kitchen was a dark place)--he was, as
it were, under the eye of the great man who had led him in a glorious
struggle where, under the walls of Gaeta, tyranny would have expired
for ever had it not been for that accursed Piedmontese race of kings
and ministers. When sometimes a frying-pan caught fire during a delicate
operation with some shredded onions, and the old man was seen backing
out of the doorway, swearing and coughing violently in an acrid cloud
of smoke, the name of Cavour--the arch intriguer sold to kings and
tyrants--could be heard involved in imprecations against the China
girls, cooking in general, and the brute of a country where he was
reduced to live for the love of liberty that traitor had strangled.

Then Signora Teresa, all in black, issuing from another door, advanced,
portly and anxious, inclining her fine, black-browed head, opening her
arms, and crying in a profound tone--

"Giorgio! thou passionate man! Misericordia Divina! In the sun like
this! He will make himself ill."

At her feet the hens made off in all directions, with immense strides;
if there were any engineers from up the line staying in Sulaco, a young
English face or two would appear at the billiard-room occupying one end
of the house; but at the other end, in the cafe, Luis, the mulatto, took
good care not to show himself. The Indian girls, with hair like flowing
black manes, and dressed only in a shift and short petticoat, stared
dully from under the square-cut fringes on their foreheads; the noisy
frizzling of fat had stopped, the fumes floated upwards in sunshine,
a strong smell of burnt onions hung in the drowsy heat, enveloping the
house; and the eye lost itself in a vast flat expanse of grass to the
west, as if the plain between the Sierra overtopping Sulaco and the
coast range away there towards Esmeralda had been as big as half the
world.

Signora Teresa, after an impressive pause, remonstrated--

"Eh, Giorgio! Leave Cavour alone and take care of yourself now we are
lost in this country all alone with the two children, because you cannot
live under a king."

And while she looked at him she would sometimes put her hand hastily
to her side with a short twitch of her fine lips and a knitting of
her black, straight eyebrows like a flicker of angry pain or an angry
thought on her handsome, regular features.

It was pain; she suppressed the twinge. It had come to her first a few
years after they had left Italy to emigrate to America and settle at
last in Sulaco after wandering from town to town, trying shopkeeping
in a small way here and there; and once an organized enterprise of
fishing--in Maldonado--for Giorgio, like the great Garibaldi, had been a
sailor in his time.