Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

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


"There is no mistake. They keep us and encourage us as if we were dogs
born to fight and hunt for them. The vecchio is right," he said, slowly
and scathingly. He remembered old Giorgio taking his pipe out of his
mouth to throw these words over his shoulder at the cafe, full of
engine-drivers and fitters from the railway workshops. This image fixed
his wavering purpose. He would try to find old Giorgio if he could. God
knows what might have happened to him! He made a few steps, then stopped
again and shook his head. To the left and right, in front and behind
him, the scrubby bush rustled mysteriously in the darkness.

"Teresa was right, too," he added in a low tone touched with awe. He
wondered whether she was dead in her anger with him or still alive. As
if in answer to this thought, half of remorse and half of hope, with
a soft flutter and oblique flight, a big owl, whose appalling cry:
"Ya-acabo! Ya-acabo!--it is finished; it is finished"--announces
calamity and death in the popular belief, drifted vaguely like a large
dark ball across his path. In the downfall of all the realities that
made his force, he was affected by the superstition, and shuddered
slightly. Signora Teresa must have died, then. It could mean nothing
else. The cry of the ill-omened bird, the first sound he was to hear on
his return, was a fitting welcome for his betrayed individuality. The
unseen powers which he had offended by refusing to bring a priest to a
dying woman were lifting up their voice against him. She was dead. With
admirable and human consistency he referred everything to himself. She
had been a woman of good counsel always. And the bereaved old Giorgio
remained stunned by his loss just as he was likely to require the advice
of his sagacity. The blow would render the dreamy old man quite stupid
for a time.

As to Captain Mitchell, Nostromo, after the manner of trusted
subordinates, considered him as a person fitted by education perhaps
to sign papers in an office and to give orders, but otherwise of no use
whatever, and something of a fool. The necessity of winding round his
little finger, almost daily, the pompous and testy self-importance of
the old seaman had grown irksome with use to Nostromo. At first it had
given him an inward satisfaction. But the necessity of overcoming small
obstacles becomes wearisome to a self-confident personality as much by
the certitude of success as by the monotony of effort. He mistrusted
his superior's proneness to fussy action. That old Englishman had no
judgment, he said to himself. It was useless to suppose that, acquainted
with the true state of the case, he would keep it to himself. He would
talk of doing impracticable things. Nostromo feared him as one
would fear saddling one's self with some persistent worry. He had no
discretion. He would betray the treasure. And Nostromo had made up his
mind that the treasure should not be betrayed.

The word had fixed itself tenaciously in his intelligence. His
imagination had seized upon the clear and simple notion of betrayal to
account for the dazed feeling of enlightenment as to being done for, of
having inadvertently gone out of his existence on an issue in which his
personality had not been taken into account. A man betrayed is a man
destroyed. Signora Teresa (may God have her soul!) had been right. He
had never been taken into account. Destroyed! Her white form sitting
up bowed in bed, the falling black hair, the wide-browed suffering
face raised to him, the anger of her denunciations appeared to him now
majestic with the awfulness of inspiration and of death. For it was not
for nothing that the evil bird had uttered its lamentable shriek over
his head. She was dead--may God have her soul!

Sharing in the anti-priestly freethought of the masses, his mind used
the pious formula from the superficial force of habit, but with a
deep-seated sincerity. The popular mind is incapable of scepticism;
and that incapacity delivers their helpless strength to the wiles of
swindlers and to the pitiless enthusiasms of leaders inspired by visions
of a high destiny. She was dead. But would God consent to receive her
soul? She had died without confession or absolution, because he had
not been willing to spare her another moment of his time. His scorn of
priests as priests remained; but after all, it was impossible to know
whether what they affirmed was not true. Power, punishment, pardon,
are simple and credible notions. The magnificent Capataz de Cargadores,
deprived of certain simple realities, such as the admiration of women,
the adulation of men, the admired publicity of his life, was ready to
feel the burden of sacrilegious guilt descend upon his shoulders.

Bareheaded, in a thin shirt and drawers, he felt the lingering warmth of
the fine sand under the soles of his feet. The narrow strand gleamed
far ahead in a long curve, defining the outline of this wild side of the
harbour. He flitted along the shore like a pursued shadow between the
sombre palm-groves and the sheet of water lying as still as death on his
right hand. He strode with headlong haste in the silence and solitude
as though he had forgotten all prudence and caution. But he knew that on
this side of the water he ran no risk of discovery. The only inhabitant
was a lonely, silent, apathetic Indian in charge of the palmarias, who
brought sometimes a load of cocoanuts to the town for sale. He lived
without a woman in an open shed, with a perpetual fire of dry sticks
smouldering near an old canoe lying bottom up on the beach. He could be
easily avoided.

The barking of the dogs about that man's ranche was the first thing that
checked his speed. He had forgotten the dogs. He swerved sharply, and
plunged into the palm-grove, as into a wilderness of columns in an
immense hall, whose dense obscurity seemed to whisper and rustle faintly
high above his head. He traversed it, entered a ravine, and climbed to
the top of a steep ridge free of trees and bushes.

From there, open and vague in the starlight, he saw the plain between
the town and the harbour. In the woods above some night-bird made a
strange drumming noise. Below beyond the palmaria on the beach, the
Indian's dogs continued to bark uproariously. He wondered what had upset
them so much, and, peering down from his elevation, was surprised to
detect unaccountable movements of the ground below, as if several oblong
pieces of the plain had been in motion. Those dark, shifting patches,
alternately catching and eluding the eye, altered their place always
away from the harbour, with a suggestion of consecutive order and
purpose. A light dawned upon him. It was a column of infantry on a night
march towards the higher broken country at the foot of the hills. But he
was too much in the dark about everything for wonder and speculation.

The plain had resumed its shadowy immobility. He descended the ridge and
found himself in the open solitude, between the harbour and the town.
Its spaciousness, extended indefinitely by an effect of obscurity,
rendered more sensible his profound isolation. His pace became slower.
No one waited for him; no one thought of him; no one expected or wished
his return. "Betrayed! Betrayed!" he muttered to himself. No one
cared. He might have been drowned by this time. No one would have
cared--unless, perhaps, the children, he thought to himself. But they
were with the English signora, and not thinking of him at all.

He wavered in his purpose of making straight for the Casa Viola. To what
end? What could he expect there? His life seemed to fail him in all
its details, even to the scornful reproaches of Teresa. He was
aware painfully of his reluctance. Was it that remorse which she had
prophesied with, what he saw now, was her last breath?

Meantime, he had deviated from the straight course, inclining by a sort
of instinct to the right, towards the jetty and the harbour, the scene
of his daily labours. The great length of the Custom House loomed up all
at once like the wall of a factory. Not a soul challenged his approach,
and his curiosity became excited as he passed cautiously towards the
front by the unexpected sight of two lighted windows.

They had the fascination of a lonely vigil kept by some mysterious
watcher up there, those two windows shining dimly upon the harbour in
the whole vast extent of the abandoned building. The solitude could
almost be felt. A strong smell of wood smoke hung about in a thin haze,
which was faintly perceptible to his raised eyes against the glitter
of the stars. As he advanced in the profound silence, the shrilling of
innumerable cicalas in the dry grass seemed positively deafening to his
strained ears. Slowly, step by step, he found himself in the great hall,
sombre and full of acrid smoke.

A fire built against the staircase had burnt down impotently to a low
heap of embers. The hard wood had failed to catch; only a few steps at
the bottom smouldered, with a creeping glow of sparks defining their
charred edges. At the top he saw a streak of light from an open door. It
fell upon the vast landing, all foggy with a slow drift of smoke. That
was the room. He climbed the stairs, then checked himself, because he
had seen within the shadow of a man cast upon one of the walls. It was
a shapeless, high-shouldered shadow of somebody standing still, with
lowered head, out of his line of sight. The Capataz, remembering that he
was totally unarmed, stepped aside, and, effacing himself upright in a
dark corner, waited with his eyes fixed on the door.

The whole enormous ruined barrack of a place, unfinished, without
ceilings under its lofty roof, was pervaded by the smoke swaying to and
fro in the faint cross draughts playing in the obscurity of many lofty
rooms and barnlike passages. Once one of the swinging shutters came
against the wall with a single sharp crack, as if pushed by an impatient
hand. A piece of paper scurried out from somewhere, rustling along the
landing. The man, whoever he was, did not darken the lighted doorway.
Twice the Capataz, advancing a couple of steps out of his corner,
craned his neck in the hope of catching sight of what he could be at,
so quietly, in there. But every time he saw only the distorted shadow
of broad shoulders and bowed head. He was doing apparently nothing, and
stirred not from the spot, as though he were meditating--or, perhaps,
reading a paper. And not a sound issued from the room.

Once more the Capataz stepped back. He wondered who it was--some
Monterist? But he dreaded to show himself. To discover his presence
on shore, unless after many days, would, he believed, endanger the
treasure. With his own knowledge possessing his whole soul, it seemed
impossible that anybody in Sulaco should fail to jump at the right
surmise. After a couple of weeks or so it would be different. Who could
tell he had not returned overland from some port beyond the limits of
the Republic? The existence of the treasure confused his thoughts with
a peculiar sort of anxiety, as though his life had become bound up with
it. It rendered him timorous for a moment before that enigmatic, lighted
door. Devil take the fellow! He did not want to see him. There would be
nothing to learn from his face, known or unknown. He was a fool to waste
his time there in waiting.

Less than five minutes after entering the place the Capataz began his
retreat. He got away down the stairs with perfect success, gave one
upward look over his shoulder at the light on the landing, and ran
stealthily across the hall. But at the very moment he was turning out of
the great door, with his mind fixed upon escaping the notice of the man
upstairs, somebody he had not heard coming briskly along the front ran
full into him. Both muttered a stifled exclamation of surprise, and
leaped back and stood still, each indistinct to the other. Nostromo was
silent. The other man spoke first, in an amazed and deadened tone.

"Who are you?"

Already Nostromo had seemed to recognize Dr. Monygham. He had no doubt
now. He hesitated the space of a second. The idea of bolting without a
word presented itself to his mind. No use! An inexplicable repugnance
to pronounce the name by which he was known kept him silent a little
longer. At last he said in a low voice--

"A Cargador."

He walked up to the other. Dr. Monygham had received a shock. He flung
his arms up and cried out his wonder aloud, forgetting himself before
the marvel of this meeting. Nostromo angrily warned him to moderate
his voice. The Custom House was not so deserted as it looked. There was
somebody in the lighted room above.

There is no more evanescent quality in an accomplished fact than its
wonderfulness. Solicited incessantly by the considerations affecting
its fears and desires, the human mind turns naturally away from the
marvellous side of events. And it was in the most natural way possible
that the doctor asked this man whom only two minutes before he believed
to have been drowned in the gulf--

"You have seen somebody up there? Have you?"

"No, I have not seen him."

"Then how do you know?"

"I was running away from his shadow when we met."

"His shadow?"

"Yes. His shadow in the lighted room," said Nostromo, in a contemptuous
tone. Leaning back with folded arms at the foot of the immense building,
he dropped his head, biting his lips slightly, and not looking at the
doctor. "Now," he thought to himself, "he will begin asking me about the
treasure."

But the doctor's thoughts were concerned with an event not as marvellous
as Nostromo's appearance, but in itself much less clear. Why had Sotillo
taken himself off with his whole command with this suddenness and
secrecy? What did this move portend? However, it dawned upon the
doctor that the man upstairs was one of the officers left behind by the
disappointed colonel to communicate with him.

"I believe he is waiting for me," he said.

"It is possible."

"I must see. Do not go away yet, Capataz."

"Go away where?" muttered Nostromo.

Already the doctor had left him. He remained leaning against the wall,
staring at the dark water of the harbour; the shrilling of cicalas
filled his ears. An invincible vagueness coming over his thoughts took
from them all power to determine his will.

"Capataz! Capataz!" the doctor's voice called urgently from above.

The sense of betrayal and ruin floated upon his sombre indifference as
upon a sluggish sea of pitch. But he stepped out from under the wall,
and, looking up, saw Dr. Monygham leaning out of a lighted window.

"Come up and see what Sotillo has done. You need not fear the man up
here."

He answered by a slight, bitter laugh. Fear a man! The Capataz of the
Sulaco Cargadores fear a man! It angered him that anybody should suggest
such a thing. It angered him to be disarmed and skulking and in danger
because of the accursed treasure, which was of so little account to the
people who had tied it round his neck. He could not shake off the worry
of it. To Nostromo the doctor represented all these people. . . . And
he had never even asked after it. Not a word of inquiry about the most
desperate undertaking of his life.

Thinking these thoughts, Nostromo passed again through the cavernous
hall, where the smoke was considerably thinned, and went up the stairs,
not so warm to his feet now, towards the streak of light at the top. The
doctor appeared in it for a moment, agitated and impatient.

"Come up! Come up!"

At the moment of crossing the doorway the Capataz experienced a shock of
surprise. The man had not moved. He saw his shadow in the same place.
He started, then stepped in with a feeling of being about to solve a
mystery.

It was very simple. For an infinitesimal fraction of a second, against
the light of two flaring and guttering candles, through a blue, pungent,
thin haze which made his eyes smart, he saw the man standing, as he
had imagined him, with his back to the door, casting an enormous and
distorted shadow upon the wall. Swifter than a flash of lightning
followed the impression of his constrained, toppling attitude--the
shoulders projecting forward, the head sunk low upon the breast. Then
he distinguished the arms behind his back, and wrenched so terribly that
the two clenched fists, lashed together, had been forced up higher than
the shoulder-blades. From there his eyes traced in one instantaneous
glance the hide rope going upwards from the tied wrists over a heavy
beam and down to a staple in the wall. He did not want to look at the
rigid legs, at the feet hanging down nervelessly, with their bare toes
some six inches above the floor, to know that the man had been given the
estrapade till he had swooned. His first impulse was to dash forward and
sever the rope at one blow. He felt for his knife. He had no knife--not
even a knife. He stood quivering, and the doctor, perched on the edge of
the table, facing thoughtfully the cruel and lamentable sight, his chin
in his hand, uttered, without stirring--

"Tortured--and shot dead through the breast--getting cold."

This information calmed the Capataz. One of the candles flickering in
the socket went out. "Who did this?" he asked.

"Sotillo, I tell you. Who else? Tortured--of course. But why shot?" The
doctor looked fixedly at Nostromo, who shrugged his shoulders slightly.
"And mark, shot suddenly, on impulse. It is evident. I wish I had his
secret."

Nostromo had advanced, and stooped slightly to look. "I seem to have
seen that face somewhere," he muttered. "Who is he?"

The doctor turned his eyes upon him again. "I may yet come to envying
his fate. What do you think of that, Capataz, eh?"

But Nostromo did not even hear these words. Seizing the remaining light,
he thrust it under the drooping head. The doctor sat oblivious, with
a lost gaze. Then the heavy iron candlestick, as if struck out of
Nostromo's hand, clattered on the floor.

"Hullo!" exclaimed the doctor, looking up with a start. He could hear
the Capataz stagger against the table and gasp. In the sudden extinction
of the light within, the dead blackness sealing the window-frames became
alive with stars to his sight.

"Of course, of course," the doctor muttered to himself in English.
"Enough to make him jump out of his skin."

Nostromo's heart seemed to force itself into his throat. His head swam.
Hirsch! The man was Hirsch! He held on tight to the edge of the table.

"But he was hiding in the lighter," he almost shouted His voice fell.
"In the lighter, and--and--"

"And Sotillo brought him in," said the doctor. "He is no more startling
to you than you were to me. What I want to know is how he induced some
compassionate soul to shoot him."

"So Sotillo knows--" began Nostromo, in a more equable voice.

"Everything!" interrupted the doctor.

The Capataz was heard striking the table with his fist. "Everything?
What are you saying, there? Everything? Know everything? It is
impossible! Everything?"

"Of course. What do you mean by impossible? I tell you I have heard
this Hirsch questioned last night, here, in this very room. He knew your
name, Decoud's name, and all about the loading of the silver. . . .
The lighter was cut in two. He was grovelling in abject terror before
Sotillo, but he remembered that much. What do you want more? He knew
least about himself. They found him clinging to their anchor. He must
have caught at it just as the lighter went to the bottom."

"Went to the bottom?" repeated Nostromo, slowly. "Sotillo believes that?
Bueno!"

The doctor, a little impatiently, was unable to imagine what else could
anybody believe. Yes, Sotillo believed that the lighter was sunk, and
the Capataz de Cargadores, together with Martin Decoud and perhaps one
or two other political fugitives, had been drowned.

"I told you well, senor doctor," remarked Nostromo at that point, "that
Sotillo did not know everything."

"Eh? What do you mean?"

"He did not know I was not dead."

"Neither did we."

"And you did not care--none of you caballeros on the wharf--once you got
off a man of flesh and blood like yourselves on a fool's business that
could not end well."

"You forget, Capataz, I was not on the wharf. And I did not think well
of the business. So you need not taunt me. I tell you what, man, we had
but little leisure to think of the dead. Death stands near behind us
all. You were gone."

"I went, indeed!" broke in Nostromo. "And for the sake of what--tell
me?"

"Ah! that is your own affair," the doctor said, roughly. "Do not ask
me."

Their flowing murmurs paused in the dark. Perched on the edge of the
table with slightly averted faces, they felt their shoulders touch, and
their eyes remained directed towards an upright shape nearly lost in the
obscurity of the inner part of the room, that with projecting head and
shoulders, in ghastly immobility, seemed intent on catching every word.

"Muy bien!" Nostromo muttered at last. "So be it. Teresa was right. It
is my own affair."

"Teresa is dead," remarked the doctor, absently, while his mind
followed a new line of thought suggested by what might have been called
Nostromo's return to life. "She died, the poor woman."

"Without a priest?" the Capataz asked, anxiously.

"What a question! Who could have got a priest for her last night?"

"May God keep her soul!" ejaculated Nostromo, with a gloomy and hopeless
fervour which had no time to surprise Dr. Monygham, before, reverting to
their previous conversation, he continued in a sinister tone, "Si,
senor doctor. As you were saying, it is my own affair. A very desperate
affair."

"There are no two men in this part of the world that could have saved
themselves by swimming as you have done," the doctor said, admiringly.

And again there was silence between those two men. They were both
reflecting, and the diversity of their natures made their thoughts born
from their meeting swing afar from each other. The doctor, impelled to
risky action by his loyalty to the Goulds, wondered with thankfulness at
the chain of accident which had brought that man back where he would be
of the greatest use in the work of saving the San Tome mine. The doctor
was loyal to the mine. It presented itself to his fifty-years' old eyes
in the shape of a little woman in a soft dress with a long train, with
a head attractively overweighted by a great mass of fair hair and the
delicate preciousness of her inner worth, partaking of a gem and
a flower, revealed in every attitude of her person. As the dangers
thickened round the San Tome mine this illusion acquired force,
permanency, and authority. It claimed him at last! This claim, exalted
by a spiritual detachment from the usual sanctions of hope and reward,
made Dr. Monygham's thinking, acting, individuality extremely dangerous
to himself and to others, all his scruples vanishing in the proud
feeling that his devotion was the only thing that stood between an
admirable woman and a frightful disaster.

It was a sort of intoxication which made him utterly indifferent to
Decoud's fate, but left his wits perfectly clear for the appreciation
of Decoud's political idea. It was a good idea--and Barrios was the only
instrument of its realization. The doctor's soul, withered and shrunk by
the shame of a moral disgrace, became implacable in the expansion of its
tenderness. Nostromo's return was providential. He did not think of him
humanely, as of a fellow-creature just escaped from the jaws of death.
The Capataz for him was the only possible messenger to Cayta. The very
man. The doctor's misanthropic mistrust of mankind (the bitterer because
based on personal failure) did not lift him sufficiently above common
weaknesses. He was under the spell of an established reputation.
Trumpeted by Captain Mitchell, grown in repetition, and fixed in
general assent, Nostromo's faithfulness had never been questioned by Dr.
Monygham as a fact. It was not likely to be questioned now he stood in
desperate need of it himself. Dr. Monygham was human; he accepted the
popular conception of the Capataz's incorruptibility simply because no
word or fact had ever contradicted a mere affirmation. It seemed to be
a part of the man, like his whiskers or his teeth. It was impossible to
conceive him otherwise. The question was whether he would consent to
go on such a dangerous and desperate errand. The doctor was observant
enough to have become aware from the first of something peculiar in the
man's temper. He was no doubt sore about the loss of the silver.

"It will be necessary to take him into my fullest confidence," he said
to himself, with a certain acuteness of insight into the nature he had
to deal with.

On Nostromo's side the silence had been full of black irresolution,
anger, and mistrust. He was the first to break it, however.

"The swimming was no great matter," he said. "It is what went
before--and what comes after that--"

He did not quite finish what he meant to say, breaking off short, as
though his thought had butted against a solid obstacle. The doctor's
mind pursued its own schemes with Machiavellian subtlety. He said as
sympathetically as he was able--