# Nostromo/Part Three/Chapter 8

VIII
AFTER landing from his swim, Nostromo had scrambled up, all dripping, into the main quadrangle of the old fort, and there, among ruined bits of walls and rotting remnants of roofs and sheds, he had slept the day through. He had slept in the shadow of the mountains, in the white blaze of noon, in the stillness and solitude of that overgrown piece of land between the nearly closed oval of the harbor and the spacious semicircle of the gulf. He lay as if dead. A rey-zamuro, appearing like a tiny black speck in the blue, stooped, circling prudently with a stealthiness of flight startling in a bird of that great size. The shadow of his pearly white body, of his black-tipped wings, fell on the grass no more silently than he alighted himself on a hillock of rubbish within three yards of that man lying as still as a corpse. He stretched his bare neck, craned his bald head, loathsome in the brilliance of varied coloring, with an air of voracious anxiety towards the promising stillness of that prostrate body. Then sinking his head deeply into his soft plumage he settled himself to wait. The first thing upon which Nostromo's eyes fell on waking was this patient watcher for the signs of death and corruption. When the man got up the vulture hopped away in great, sidelong, fluttering jumps. He lingered ​for a while morose and reluctant before he rose, circling noiselessly with a sinister droop of beak and claws.
Long after he had vanished the capataz of the cargadores, lifting his eyes up to the sky, muttered, "I am not dead yet."
Nostromo was some time, in regaining his hold on the world. It had slipped from him completely in the deep slumber of more than twelve hours. It had been like a break of continuity in the chain of experience; he had to find himself in time and space, to think of the hour and the place of his return. It was a novelty. He was one of those efficient sailors who generally wake up from a dead sleep with their wits in complete working order. The capataz of the cargadores had been a good man on board ship. He had been a good foremast-hand and a first-rate boatswain. From the conditions of sea-life that sort of excellence brings no prize but an exaggerated consciousness of one's value and the confidence of one's superiors. The captain of the Genoese ship from which he had deserted had gone about tearing his gray hairs with grief and exasperation. He did it very publicly, being an Italian and unashamed of genuine emotions. He mingled imprecations against ingratitude with words of regret at his loss before the people on the wharf, before the lightermen discharging the cargo; in the O.S.N. office before Captain Mitchell, who was sympathetic in a way, but considered him in the end an awful and ridiculous nuisance and was glad to see his back for the last time.
Nostromo, in close hiding in a back room of a pulperia for the three days before the ship sailed, heard of ​lamentations, threats, and curses apparently unmoved. But he heard of them with satisfaction. This was as it should be. He was a valuable man. What better recognition could he expect? His vanity infinitely and naively greedy, but his conceptions were limited. Afterwards his success in the work he found on shore enlarged them in the direction of personal magnificence. This sailor led a public life in his sphere. It became necessary to him. It was the breath of his nostrils. And who can say that it was not genuine distinction. It was genuine because it was based on something that was in him—his overweening vanity, which Decoud alone, thinking that he would be of use politically, had taken the trouble to find out. Each man must have some temperamental sense by which to discover himself. With Nostromo it was vanity of an artless sort. Without it he would have been nothing. It called out his recklessness, his industry, his ingenuity, and that disdain of the natives which helped him so much upon the line of his work and resembled an inborn capacity for command. It made him appear incorruptible and fierce. It made him happy also. He was disinterested with the unworldliness of a sailor, arising not so much from the absence of mercenary instincts as from sheer ignorance and carelessness for to-morrow. He was pleased with himself. It was not the cold, ferocious, and idealistic self-conceit of a man of some northern race; it was materialistic and imaginative. It was an unpractical and warm sentiment, a picturesque development of his character, the growth of an unsophisticated sense of his individuality. It was immense. It was ​fostered by Captain Mitchell's absurd pride in his foreman, the varied use made of his handiness, and the appreciative grunts and nods of the silent old Viola, to whose exalted sentiments every sort of faithfulness appealed greatly.
The capataz of the Sulaco cargadores had lived in splendor and publicity up to the very moment, as it were, when he took charge of the lighter containing the treasure in silver ingots.
The last act he had performed in Sulaco was in complete harmony with his vanity, and as such perfectly genuine. He had given his last quarter-dollar to an old woman moaning with the grief and fatigue of a dismal search under the arch of the ancient gate. Performed in obscurity and without witnesses, it had still the characteristics of splendor and publicity, and was in strict keeping with his reputation. But this awakening, in solitude but for the watchful vulture, among the ruins of the fort, had no such characteristics. His first confused feeling was exactly this that it was not in keeping. It was more like the end of things. The necessity of living concealed somehow, for God knows how long, which assailed him on his return to consciousness, made everything that had gone before for years appear vain and foolish, like a flattering dream come suddenly to an end.
He climbed the crumbling slope of the rampart and, putting aside the bushes, looked upon the harbor. He saw a couple of ships at anchor upon the sheet of water reflecting the last gleams of light, and Sotillo's steamer moored to the jetty. And behind the pale, long front of the custom-house there appeared the extent of the ​town, like a grove of thick timber on the plain, with a gateway in front and the cupolas, towers, and miradors rising above the trees, all dark, as if surrendered already to the night. The thought that it was no longer open to him to ride through the streets, recognized by every one, great and little, as he used to do every evening on his way to play monte in the posada of the Mexican Domingo; or to sit in the place of honor, listening to songs and looking at dances, made it appear to him as a town that had no existence.
For a long time he gazed on, then let the parted bushes spring back, and crossing over to the other side of the fort, surveyed the vaster emptiness of the great gulf. The Isabels stood out heavily upon the narrowing long band of red in the west, which gleamed low between their black shapes; and the capataz thought of Decoud alone there with the treasure. That man was the only one who cared whether he fell into the hands of the Monterists or not, the capataz reflected bitterly. And that merely would be an anxiety for his own sake. As to the rest, they neither knew nor cared. What he had heard Giorgio Viola say once was very true. Kings, ministers, aristocrats, the rich in general, kept the people in poverty and subjection; they kept them as they kept dogs, to fight and hunt for their service. The darkness of the sky had descended to the line of the horizon, enveloping the whole gulf. the islets, and the lover of Antonia, alone with the treasure on the Great Isabel. The capataz of the cargadores, turning his back on these things invisible and existing, sat down and took his face between his fists. He felt the pinch of poverty for the first time in his life. To find him​self without money after a run of bad luck at monte in the low, smoky room of Domingo's posada, where the fraternity of cargadores gambled, sang, and danced of an evening; to remain with empty pockets after a burst of public generosity to some peyne d'oro girl or other (for whom he did not care), had none of the humiliation of destitution. He remained rich in glory and reputation. But since it was no longer possible for him to parade the streets of the town and be hailed with respect in the usual haunts of his leisure, this sailor felt himself destitute indeed.
His mouth was dry. It was dry with heavy sleep and extremely anxious thinking as it had never been dry before. It may be said that Nostromo tasted the dust and ashes of the fruit of life into which he had bitten deeply in his hunger for praise. Without removing his head from between his fists he tried to spit before him—"Tfui"—and muttered a curse upon the selfishness of all the rich people.
In this harbor, at the foot of immense mountains that outlined their peaks among the kindled swarm of stars; on this smooth, half-wild sheet of black water, serene in its loneliness, whose future of crowded prosperity was being settled not so much by the industry as by the fears, necessities and crimes of men short-sighted in good and evil, the two solitary foreign ships had hoisted their riding-lights, according to rule. But Nostromo gave no second look to the harbor. Those two ships were present enough to his mind. Either would have been a refuge. It would have been no feat for him to swim off to them. One of them was an Italian bark which had brought a cargo ​of timber from Puget Sound for the railway. He knew her men; in his quality of foreman of all the work done in the harbor he had been able to oblige her captain in some small matter relating to the filling of his water-tanks. Bronzed, black-whiskered, and stately, with the impressive gravity of a man too powerful to unbend, he had been invited more than once to drink a glass of Italian vermouth in her cabin. It was well known among ship-masters trading along the seaboard that, as a matter of sound policy, the capataz of the cargadores in Sulaco should be propitiated by small civilities, which he seemed to expect as his due. For in truth, being implicitly trusted by Captain Mitchell, he had, as somebody said, the whole harbor in his pocket. For the rest, an excellent fellow, quite straightforward, everybody agreed.
Since everything seemed lost in Sulaco (and that was the feeling of his waking), the idea of leaving the country altogether had presented itself to Nostromo. In that ship they would have given him shelter and a passage, and have landed him in Italy ultimately. At that thought he had seen, like the beginning of another dream, a vision of steep and tideless shores, with dark pines on the heights and white houses low down near a very blue sea. He saw the quays of a big port where the coasting feluccas, with their lateen-sails outspread like motionless wings, enter, gliding silently between the end of long moles of squared blocks that project angularly towards each other, hugging a cluster of shipping, to the superb bosom of a hill covered with palaces. He remembered these sights not without some filial emotion, though he had been habitually and ​severely beaten as a boy on one of these feluccas by his uncle, a short-necked, shaven Genoese with a deliberate and distrustful manner, who (he firmly believed) had cheated him out of his orphan's inheritance. But it is mercifully decreed that the evils of the past should appear but faintly in retrospect. Under the sense of loneliness, abandonment, and failure, the idea of return to these things appeared tolerable. But what! Return? With bare feet and head, with one check shirt and a pair of cotton calzoneros for all worldly possessions?
The renowned capataz, his elbows on his knees and a fist dug into each cheek, laughed with self-derision, as he had spat with disgust, straight out before him into the night. The confused and intimate impressions of universal dissolution which beset a subjective nature at any strong check to its ruling passion had a bitterness approaching that of death itself. And no wonder with no intellectual existence or moral strain to carry on his individuality, unscathed, over the abyss left by the collapse of his vanity; for even that had been simply sensuous and picturesque, and could not exist apart from outward show. He was like many other men of southern races in whom the complexity of simple conceptions is much more apparent than real. He was simple. He was as ready to become the prey of any belief, superstition, or desire as a child.
The facts of his situation he could appreciate like a man with a distinct experience of the country. He saw them clearly. He was as if sobered after a long bout of intoxication. His fidelity had been taken ​advantage of. He had persuaded the body of cargadores to side with the Blancos against the rest of the !c; he had had interviews with Don José; he had been made use of by Father Corbelan for negotiating with Hernandez; it was known that Don Martin Decoud had admitted him to a sort of intimacy so that he had been free of the offices of the Porvenir. All these things had flattered him in the usual way. What did he care about their politics. Nothing at all. And at the end of it all, Nostromo here and Nostromo there, where is Nostromo? Nostromo can do this and that; work all day and ride about at night—behold! he found himself a marked Ribierist for any sort of vengeance Gamacho, for instance, would choose to take, now the Montero party had, after all, mastered the town. The Europeans had given up; the cabalileros had given up. Don Martin had indeed explained it was only temporary; that he was going to bring Barrios to the rescue. Where was that now—with Don Martin (whose ironic manner of talk had always made the capataz feel vaguely uneasy) stranded on the Great Isabel. Everybody had given up Even Don Carlos had given up. The hurried removal of the treasure out to sea meant nothing else than that. The capataz de cargadores, in a revulsion of subjectiveness, exasperated almost to insanity, beheld all his world without faith and courage. He had been betrayed!
With the boundless shadows of the sea behind him. out of his silence and immobility, facing the lofty shapes of the lower peaks crowded around the white, misty sheen of Higuerota, Nostromo laughed aloud ​again, sprang abruptly to his feet and stood still. He must go. But where?
"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 café 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 were 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 consist​ency he referred everything to himself. She had been a woman of good counsel always. And the bereaved oltl 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 unintelligence. 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 free thought 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 of 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 harbor. 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 palmaries, who brought sometimes a load of cocoa-nuts to the town for sale. He lived without a woman in an open shed, with a perpetual fire of dry sticks smouldering in front, near an old canoe lying bottom up on the beach. He could be easily avoided.
The barking of the dogs about that man's rancho 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, 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 harbor. 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 harbor 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 harbor 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 left, towards the jetty and the harbor, the scene of his daily labors. 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 harbor 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 burned down im potently to a low heap of embers. The hard wood hal failed to catch; only a few steps at the bottom smouldered, with a creeping glow of sparks defining tlu-ir 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 a 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, un​finished, 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 would 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. Aft 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 up-stairs, 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 to be. 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 reappearance, 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 up-stairs 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 harbor; 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 slove a mystery.
It was very simple. For an infinitesimal fraction of a second, against the light of two flaring and gut- tering 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 clinched 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 upward 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? Knows 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 of the cargadores, together with Martin Decoud and perhaps one or two other political fugitives, had been drowned.
"I told you well, Señor Doctor," remarked Nostromo, at that piont, "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 have her soul!" ejaculated Nostromo, ​with a gloomy and hopeless fervor which had no time to surprise Dr. Monygham before, reverting to their previous conversation, he continued in a sinister tone, "Si, Señor 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.
​ 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 struck 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:
"It is unfortunate, capataz. But no one would think of blaming you. Very unfortunate. To begin with, the treasure ought never to have left the mountain. But it was Decoud who— However, he is dead. There is no need to talk of him."
"No," assented Nostromo, as the doctor paused, "there is no need to talk of dead men. But I am not dead yet."
"You are all right. Only a man of your intrepidity could have saved himself."
In this Dr. Monygham was sincere. He esteemed highly the intrepidity of that man, whom he valued but little, being disillusioned as to mankind in general because of the particular instance in which his own manhood had failed. Having had to encounter single-handed during his period of eclipse many physical dangers, he was well aware of the most dangerous element common to them all—of the crushing, paralyzing sense of human littleness, which is what really defeats a man struggling with natural forces, alone, ​far from the eyes of his fellows. He was eminently (it to appreciate the mental image he made for himself of the capataz, after hours of tension and anxiety precipitated suddenly into an abyss of waters and darkness, without earth or sky, and confronting it not only with an undismayed mind but with sensible success. Of course the man was an incomparable swimmer, that was known; but the doctor judged that this instance testified to a still greater intrepidity of spirit. It was pleasing to him; he augured well from it for the success of the arduous mission with which he meant to intrust the capataz, so marvellously restored to usefulness. And in a tone vaguely gratified he observed:
"It must have been terribly dark!"
"It was the worst darkness of the Golfo," the capataz assented, briefly. He was mollified by what seemed a sign of some faint interest in such things as had befallen him, and , dropped a few descriptive phrases with an affected and curt nonchalance. At that moment he felt communicative. He expected the continuance of that interest which, whether accepted or rejected, would have restored to him his personality—the only thing lost in that desperate affair. But the doctor, engrossed by a desperate adventure of his own, was terrible in the pursuit of his idea. He let an exclamation of regret escape him.
"I could almost wish you had shouted and shown a light."
This unexpected utterance astounded the capataz by its character of cold-blooded atrocity. It was as much as to say: "I wish you had shown vourself a ​coward; I wish you had had your throat cut for your pains." Naturally he referred it to himself, whereas it related only to the silver, being uttered simply and with many mental reservations. Surprise and rage rendered him speechless, and the doctor pursued, practically unheard by Nostromo, whose stirred blood was beating violently in his ears:
"For I am convinced Sotillo in possession of the silver would have turned short round and made for some small port abroad. Economically it would have been wasteful, but still less wasteful than having it sunk. It was the next best thing to having it at hand in some safe place and using part of it to buy up Sotillo. But I doubt whether Don Carlos would have ever made up his mind to it. He is not fit for Costaguana, and that is a fact, capataz."
The capataz had mastered the fury that was like a tempest in his ears in time to hear the name of Don Carlos. He seemed to have come out of it a changed man—a man who spoke thoughtfully in a soft and even voice.
"And would Don Carlos have been content if I had surrendered this treasure?"
"I should not wonder if they were all of that way of thinking now," the doctor said, grimly. "I was never consulted. Decoud had it his own way. Their eyes are opened by this time, I should think. I for one know that if that silver turned up this- moment miraculously ashore, I would give it to Sotillo. And as things stand I would be approved."
"Turned up miraculously," repeated the capataz, very low; then raised his voice. "That, señor, would ​be a greater miracle than any saint could perform."
"I believe you, capataz," said the doctor, dryly. lie went on to develop his view of Sotillo's dangerous influence upon the situation. And the capataz, listening as if in a dream, felt himself of as little account as the iiulistiiu t. motionless shape of the dead man whom he saw upright under the beam, with his air of listening also, disregarded, forgotten, like a terrible example of neglect.
"Is it for an unconsidered and foolish whim that they came to me, then?" he interrupted, suddenly. "Had I not done enough for them to be of some account, por Dios? Is it that the hombres finos—the gentlemen—need not think as long as there is a man of the people ready to risk his body and soul? Or, perhaps, we have no souls—like dogs."
"There was Decoud, too, with his plan," the doctor reminded him again.
"Si! And the rich man in San Francisco who had something to do with that treasure, too—what do I know? No! I have heard too many things. It seems to me that everything is permitted to the rich."
"I understand, capataz," the doctor began.
"What capataz?" broke in Nostromo, in a forcible but even voice. "The capataz is undone, destroyed. There is no capataz. Oh no! You will find the capataz no more."
"Come, this is childish," remonstrated the doctor; and the other calmed down suddenly.
"I have been indeed like a little child," he muttered. And as his eyes met again the shape of the murdered ​man suspended in his awful immobility, which seemed the uncomplaining immobility of attention, he asked, wondering gently:
"Why did Sotillo give the estrapade to this pitiful wretch? Do you know? No torture could have been worse than his fear. Killing I can understand. His anguish was intolerable to behold. But why should he torment him like this? He could tell no more."
"No. He could tell nothing more. Any sane man would have seen that. He had told him everything. But I tell you what it is, capataz; Sotillo would not believe what he was told. Not everything."
"What is it he would not believe? I cannot understand."
"I can, because I have seen the man. He refuses to believe that the treasure is lost."
"What?" the capataz cried out, in a discomposed tone.
"That startles you—eh?"
"Am I to understand, señor," Nostromo went on, in a deliberate and, as it were, watchful tone, "that Sotillo thinks the treasure has been saved by some means?"
​ "But he is devoid of sense. He is the greatest imbecile that ever called himself a colonel in this country of evil," growled Nostromo.
"He is no more unreasonable than many sensible men," said the doctor. "He has convinced himself that the treasure can be found because he desires passionately to possess himself of it. And he is also afraid of officers turning upon him and going over to Pedrito, whom he has not the courage either to fight or trust. Do you see that, capataz? He need fear no desertion as long as some hope remains of that enormous plunder turning up. I have made it my business to keep this very hope up."
"You have!" the capataz de cargadores repeated cautiously. "Well, that is wonderful. And how long do you think you are going to keep it up?"
"As long as I can."
"What does that mean?"
"I can tell you exactly. As long as I live," the doctor retorted, in a stubborn voice. Then in a few words he described the story of his arrrest and the circumstances of his release. "I was going back to that silly scoundrel when we met," he concluded.
Nostromo had listened with profound attention. "You have made up your mind, then, to a speedy death," he muttered through his clinched teeth.
"Perhaps! my illustrious capataz," the doctor said, testily. "You are not the only one here who can look an ugly death in the face."
​"And that is my affair," said the doctor, curtly.
"As taking out the accursed silver to sea was my affair," retorted Nostromo. "I see. Bueno! Each of us has his reasons. But you were the last man I conversed with before I started, and you talked to me as if I were a fool."
Nostromo had a great distaste for the doctor's sardonic treatment of his great reputation. Decoud's faintly ironic recognition used to make him uneasy; but the familiarity of a man like Don Martin was flattering, whereas the doctor was a nobody. He could remember him a penniless outcast slinking about the streets of Sulaco without a single friend or acquaintance till Don Carlos Gould took him into the service of the mine.
"You may be very wise," he went on, thoughtfully, staring into the obscurity of the room pervaded by the grewsome enigma of the tortured and murdered Hirsch. "But I am not such a 'fool as when I started. I have learned one thing since, and that is that you are a dangerous man."
Dr. Monygham was too startled to do more than exclaim:
"What is it you say?"
"If he could speak he would say the same thing," pursued Nostromo, with a nod of his shadowy head silhouetted against the starlit window.
"I do not understand you," said Dr. Monygham, faintly.
​ The doctor started at the suggestion. But his devotion, absorbing all his sensibilities, had left his heart steeled against remorse and pity. Still, for complete relief, he felt the necessity of repelling it loudly and contemptuously.
"Bah! You dare to tell me that, with a man like Sotillo. I confess I did not give a thought to Hirsch. If I had it would have been useless. Anybody can see that the luckless wretch was doomed from the moment he caught hold of the anchor. He was doomed, I tell you! Just as I myself am doomed—most probably."
This is what Dr. Monygham said in answer to Nostromo's remark, which was plausible enough to prick his conscience. He was not a callous man. But the necessity, the magnitude, the importance of the task he had taken upon himself dwarfed all merely humane considerations. He had undertaken it in a fanatical spirit. He did not like it. To lie, to deceive, to circumvent even the basest of mankind was odious to him. It was odious to him by training, instinct, and tradition. To do these things in the character of a traitor was abhorrent to his nature and terrible to his feelings. He had made that sacrifice in a spirit of abasement. He had said to himself, bitterly: "I am the only one fit for that dirty work." And he believed this. He was not subtle. His simplicity was such that though he had no sort of heroic idea of seeking death, the risk, deadly enough, to which he exposed himself had a sustaining and comforting effect. To that spiritual state the fate of Hirsch presented itself as part of the general atrocity of things. He consid​considered that episode practically. What did it mean? Was it a sign of some dangerous change in Sotillo's delusion? That the man should have been killed like this was what the doctor could not understand.
"Yes. But why shot?" he murmured to himself.