Nostromo Joseph Conrad (best large ereader .TXT) 📖

is nothing, but what was there to prevent him asking me for my purse?”

“No, no, señor 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 señor 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 heartbroken 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 señor administrador was giving way at last.

“Señor 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.