Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART FIRST: THE SILVER OF THE MINE 8. CHAPTER EIGHT (continued)

There were shouts of laughter and applause at this witty freak,
while the girl passed the keen blade, and the impassive rider
jingled in his palm the increasing hoard of silver buttons. He
eased her to the ground with both her hands full. After
whispering for a while with a very strenuous face, she walked
away, staring haughtily, and vanished into the crowd.

The circle had broken up, and the lordly Capataz de Cargadores,
the indispensable man, the tried and trusty Nostromo, the
Mediterranean sailor come ashore casually to try his luck in
Costaguana, rode slowly towards the harbour. The Juno was just
then swinging round; and even as Nostromo reined up again to look
on, a flag ran up on the improvised flagstaff erected in an
ancient and dismantled little fort at the harbour entrance. Half
a battery of field guns had been hurried over there from the
Sulaco barracks for the purpose of firing the regulation salutes
for the President-Dictator and the War Minister. As the mail-boat
headed through the pass, the badly timed reports announced the
end of Don Vincente Ribiera's first official visit to Sulaco, and
for Captain Mitchell the end of another "historic occasion." Next
time when the "Hope of honest men" was to come that way, a year
and a half later, it was unofficially, over the mountain tracks,
fleeing after a defeat on a lame mule, to be only just saved by
Nostromo from an ignominious death at the hands of a mob. It was
a very different event, of which Captain Mitchell used to say--

"It was history--history, sir! And that fellow of mine, Nostromo,
you know, was right in it. Absolutely making history, sir."

But this event, creditable to Nostromo, was to lead immediately
to another, which could not be classed either as "history" or as
"a mistake" in Captain Mitchell's phraseology. He had another
word for it.

"Sir" he used to say afterwards, "that was no mistake. It was a
fatality. A misfortune, pure and simple, sir. And that poor
fellow of mine was right in it--right in the middle of it! A
fatality, if ever there was one--and to my mind he has never been
the same man since."