Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (262 page)

“No, no, Senor Hirsch,” Charles Gould murmured, letting his glance stray away a little vacantly from the round face, with its hooked beak upturned towards him in an almost childlike appeal. “If it was the Capataz de Cargadores you met — and there is no doubt, is there? — you were perfectly safe.”

“Thank you. You are very good. A very fierce-looking man, Don Carlos. He asked me for a cigar in a most familiar manner. What would have happened if I had not had a cigar? I shudder yet. What business had he to be talking with robbers in a lonely place?”

But Charles Gould, openly preoccupied now, gave not a sign, made no sound. The impenetrability of the embodied Gould Concession had its surface shades. To be dumb is merely a fatal affliction; but the King of Sulaco had words enough to give him all the mysterious weight of a taciturn force. His silences, backed by the power of speech, had as many shades of significance as uttered words in the way of assent, of doubt, of negation — even of simple comment. Some seemed to say plainly, “Think it over”; others meant clearly, “Go ahead”; a simple, low “I see,” with an affirmative nod, at the end of a patient listening half-hour was the equivalent of a verbal contract, which men had learned to trust implicitly, since behind it all there was the great San Tome mine, the head and front of the material interests, so strong that it depended on no man’s goodwill in the whole length and breadth of the Occidental Province — that is, on no goodwill which it could not buy ten times over. But to the little hook-nosed man from Esmeralda, anxious about the export of hides, the silence of Charles Gould portended a failure. Evidently this was no time for extending a modest man’s business. He enveloped in a swift mental malediction the whole country, with all its inhabitants, partisans of Ribiera and Montero alike; and there were incipient tears in his mute anger at the thought of the innumerable ox-hides going to waste upon the dreamy expanse of the Campo, with its single palms rising like ships at sea within the perfect circle of the horizon, its clumps of heavy timber motionless like solid islands of leaves above the running waves of grass. There were hides there, rotting, with no profit to anybody — rotting where they had been dropped by men called away to attend the urgent necessities of political revolutions. The practical, mercantile soul of Senor Hirsch rebelled against all that foolishness, while he was taking a respectful but disconcerted leave of the might and majesty of the San Tome mine in the person of Charles Gould. He could not restrain a heart-broken murmur, wrung out of his very aching heart, as it were.

“It is a great, great foolishness, Don Carlos, all this. The price of hides in Hamburg is gone up — up. Of course the Ribierist Government will do away with all that — when it gets established firmly. Meantime — ”

He sighed.

“Yes, meantime,” repeated Charles Gould, inscrutably.

The other shrugged his shoulders. But he was not ready to go yet. There was a little matter he would like to mention very much if permitted. It appeared he had some good friends in Hamburg (he murmured the name of the firm) who were very anxious to do business, in dynamite, he explained. A contract for dynamite with the San Tome mine, and then, perhaps, later on, other mines, which were sure to — The little man from Esmeralda was ready to enlarge, but Charles interrupted him. It seemed as though the patience of the Senor Administrador was giving way at last.

“Senor Hirsch,” he said, “I have enough dynamite stored up at the mountain to send it down crashing into the valley” — his voice rose a little — ”to send half Sulaco into the air if I liked.”

Charles Gould smiled at the round, startled eyes of the dealer in hides, who was murmuring hastily, “Just so. Just so.” And now he was going. It was impossible to do business in explosives with an Administrador so well provided and so discouraging. He had suffered agonies in the saddle and had exposed himself to the atrocities of the bandit Hernandez for nothing at all. Neither hides nor dynamite — and the very shoulders of the enterprising Israelite expressed dejection. At the door he bowed low to the engineer-in-chief. But at the bottom of the stairs in the patio he stopped short, with his podgy hand over his lips in an attitude of meditative astonishment.

“What does he want to keep so much dynamite for?” he muttered. “And why does he talk like this to me?”

The engineer-in-chief, looking in at the door of the empty sala, whence the political tide had ebbed out to the last insignificant drop, nodded familiarly to the master of the house, standing motionless like a tall beacon amongst the deserted shoals of furniture.

“Good-night, I am going. Got my bike downstairs. The railway will know where to go for dynamite should we get short at any time. We have done cutting and chopping for a while now. We shall begin soon to blast our way through.”

“Don’t come to me,” said Charles Gould, with perfect serenity. “I shan’t have an ounce to spare for anybody. Not an ounce. Not for my own brother, if I had a brother, and he were the engineer-in-chief of the most promising railway in the world.”

“What’s that?” asked the engineer-in-chief, with equanimity. “Unkindness?”

“No,” said Charles Gould, stolidly. “Policy.”

“Radical, I should think,” the engineer-in-chief observed from the doorway.

“Is that the right name?” Charles Gould said, from the middle of the room.

“I mean, going to the roots, you know,” the engineer explained, with an air of enjoyment.

“Why, yes,” Charles pronounced, slowly. “The Gould Concession has struck such deep roots in this country, in this province, in that gorge of the mountains, that nothing but dynamite shall be allowed to dislodge it from there. It’s my choice. It’s my last card to play.”

The engineer-in-chief whistled low. “A pretty game,” he said, with a shade of discretion. “And have you told Holroyd of that extraordinary trump card you hold in your hand?”

“Card only when it’s played; when it falls at the end of the game. Till then you may call it a — a — ”

“Weapon,” suggested the railway man.

“No. You may call it rather an argument,” corrected Charles Gould, gently. “And that’s how I’ve presented it to Mr. Holroyd.”

“And what did he say to it?” asked the engineer, with undisguised interest.

“He” — Charles Gould spoke after a slight pause — ”he said something about holding on like grim death and putting our trust in God. I should imagine he must have been rather startled. But then” — pursued the Administrador of the San Tome mine — ”but then, he is very far away, you know, and, as they say in this country, God is very high above.”

The engineer’s appreciative laugh died away down the stairs, where the Madonna with the Child on her arm seemed to look after his shaking broad back from her shallow niche.

CHAPTER SIX

A profound stillness reigned in the Casa Gould. The master of the house, walking along the corredor, opened the door of his room, and saw his wife sitting in a big armchair — his own smoking armchair — thoughtful, contemplating her little shoes. And she did not raise her eyes when he walked in.

“Tired?” asked Charles Gould.

“A little,” said Mrs. Gould. Still without looking up, she added with feeling, “There is an awful sense of unreality about all this.”

Charles Gould, before the long table strewn with papers, on which lay a hunting crop and a pair of spurs, stood looking at his wife: “The heat and dust must have been awful this afternoon by the waterside,” he murmured, sympathetically. “The glare on the water must have been simply terrible.”

“One could close one’s eyes to the glare,” said Mrs. Gould. “But, my dear Charley, it is impossible for me to close my eyes to our position; to this awful . . .”

She raised her eyes and looked at her husband’s face, from which all sign of sympathy or any other feeling had disappeared. “Why don’t you tell me something?” she almost wailed.

“I thought you had understood me perfectly from the first,” Charles Gould said, slowly. “I thought we had said all there was to say a long time ago. There is nothing to say now. There were things to be done. We have done them; we have gone on doing them. There is no going back now. I don’t suppose that, even from the first, there was really any possible way back. And, what’s more, we can’t even afford to stand still.”

“Ah, if one only knew how far you mean to go,” said his wife inwardly trembling, but in an almost playful tone.

“Any distance, any length, of course,” was the answer, in a matter-of-fact tone, which caused Mrs. Gould to make another effort to repress a shudder.

She stood up, smiling graciously, and her little figure seemed to be diminished still more by the heavy mass of her hair and the long train of her gown.

“But always to success,” she said, persuasively.

Charles Gould, enveloping her in the steely blue glance of his attentive eyes, answered without hesitation —

“Oh, there is no alternative.”

He put an immense assurance into his tone. As to the words, this was all that his conscience would allow him to say.

Mrs. Gould’s smile remained a shade too long upon her lips. She murmured —

“I will leave you; I’ve a slight headache. The heat, the dust, were indeed — I suppose you are going back to the mine before the morning?”

“At midnight,” said Charles Gould. “We are bringing down the silver to-morrow. Then I shall take three whole days off in town with you.”

“Ah, you are going to meet the escort. I shall be on the balcony at five o’clock to see you pass. Till then, good-bye.”

Charles Gould walked rapidly round the table, and, seizing her hands, bent down, pressing them both to his lips. Before he straightened himself up again to his full height she had disengaged one to smooth his cheek with a light touch, as if he were a little boy.

“Try to get some rest for a couple of hours,” she murmured, with a glance at a hammock stretched in a distant part of the room. Her long train swished softly after her on the red tiles. At the door she looked back.

Two big lamps with unpolished glass globes bathed in a soft and abundant light the four white walls of the room, with a glass case of arms, the brass hilt of Henry Gould’s cavalry sabre on its square of velvet, and the water-colour sketch of the San Tome gorge. And Mrs. Gould, gazing at the last in its black wooden frame, sighed out —

“Ah, if we had left it alone, Charley!”

“No,” Charles Gould said, moodily; “it was impossible to leave it alone.”

“Perhaps it was impossible,” Mrs. Gould admitted, slowly. Her lips quivered a little, but she smiled with an air of dainty bravado. “We have disturbed a good many snakes in that Paradise, Charley, haven’t we?”

“Yes, I remember,” said Charles Gould, “it was Don Pepe who called the gorge the Paradise of snakes. No doubt we have disturbed a great many. But remember, my dear, that it is not now as it was when you made that sketch.” He waved his hand towards the small water-colour hanging alone upon the great bare wall. “It is no longer a Paradise of snakes. We have brought mankind into it, and we cannot turn our backs upon them to go and begin a new life elsewhere.”

He confronted his wife with a firm, concentrated gaze, which Mrs. Gould returned with a brave assumption of fearlessness before she went out, closing the door gently after her.

In contrast with the white glaring room the dimly lit corredor had a restful mysteriousness of a forest glade, suggested by the stems and the leaves of the plants ranged along the balustrade of the open side. In the streaks of light falling through the open doors of the reception-rooms, the blossoms, white and red and pale lilac, came out vivid with the brilliance of flowers in a stream of sunshine; and Mrs. Gould, passing on, had the vividness of a figure seen in the clear patches of sun that chequer the gloom of open glades in the woods. The stones in the rings upon her hand pressed to her forehead glittered in the lamplight abreast of the door of the sala.

“Who’s there?” she asked, in a startled voice. “Is that you, Basilio?” She looked in, and saw Martin Decoud walking about, with an air of having lost something, amongst the chairs and tables.

“Antonia has forgotten her fan in here,” said Decoud, with a strange air of distraction; “so I entered to see.”

But, even as he said this, he had obviously given up his search, and walked straight towards Mrs. Gould, who looked at him with doubtful surprise.

“Senora,” he began, in a low voice.

“What is it, Don Martin?” asked Mrs. Gould. And then she added, with a slight laugh, “I am so nervous to-day,” as if to explain the eagerness of the question.

“Nothing immediately dangerous,” said Decoud, who now could not conceal his agitation. “Pray don’t distress yourself. No, really, you must not distress yourself.”

Mrs. Gould, with her candid eyes very wide open, her lips composed into a smile, was steadying herself with a little bejewelled hand against the side of the door.

“Perhaps you don’t know how alarming you are, appearing like this unexpectedly — ”

“I! Alarming!” he protested, sincerely vexed and surprised. “I assure you that I am not in the least alarmed myself. A fan is lost; well, it will be found again. But I don’t think it is here. It is a fan I am looking for. I cannot understand how Antonia could — Well! Have you found it, amigo?”

“No, senor,” said behind Mrs. Gould the soft voice of Basilio, the head servant of the Casa. “I don’t think the senorita could have left it in this house at all.”

“Go and look for it in the patio again. Go now, my friend; look for it on the steps, under the gate; examine every flagstone; search for it till I come down again. . . . That fellow” — he addressed himself in English to Mrs. Gould — ”is always stealing up behind one’s back on his bare feet. I set him to look for that fan directly I came in to justify my reappearance, my sudden return.”

He paused and Mrs. Gould said, amiably, “You are always welcome.” She paused for a second, too. “But I am waiting to learn the cause of your return.”

Decoud affected suddenly the utmost nonchalance.

“I can’t bear to be spied upon. Oh, the cause? Yes, there is a cause; there is something else that is lost besides Antonia’s favourite fan. As I was walking home after seeing Don Jose and Antonia to their house, the Capataz de Cargadores, riding down the street, spoke to me.”