Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 2. CHAPTER TWO (continued)

"Is he actually keeping you?" shouted the chief engineer, whose
single eyeglass glittered in the firelight.

An officer from the top of the stairs was shouting urgently,
"Bring them all up--all three."

In the clamour of voices and the rattle of arms, Captain Mitchell
made himself heard imperfectly: "By heavens! the fellow has
stolen my watch."

The engineer-in-chief on the staircase resisted the pressure long
enough to shout, "What? What did you say?"

"My chronometer!" Captain Mitchell yelled violently at the very
moment of being thrust head foremost through a small door into a
sort of cell, perfectly black, and so narrow that he fetched up
against the opposite wall. The door had been instantly slammed.
He knew where they had put him. This was the strong room of the
Custom House, whence the silver had been removed only a few hours
earlier. It was almost as narrow as a corridor, with a small
square aperture, barred by a heavy grating, at the distant end.
Captain Mitchell staggered for a few steps, then sat down on the
earthen floor with his back to the wall. Nothing, not even a
gleam of light from anywhere, interfered with Captain Mitchell's
meditation. He did some hard but not very extensive thinking. It
was not of a gloomy cast. The old sailor, with all his small
weaknesses and absurdities, was constitutionally incapable of
entertaining for any length of time a fear of his personal
safety. It was not so much firmness of soul as the lack of a
certain kind of imagination--the kind whose undue development
caused intense suffering to Senor Hirsch; that sort of
imagination which adds the blind terror of bodily suffering and
of death, envisaged as an accident to the body alone,
strictly--to all the other apprehensions on which the sense of
one's existence is based. Unfortunately, Captain Mitchell had not
much penetration of any kind; characteristic, illuminating
trifles of expression, action, or movement, escaped him
completely. He was too pompously and innocently aware of his own
existence to observe that of others. For instance, he could not
believe that Sotillo had been really afraid of him, and this
simply because it would never have entered into his head to shoot
any one except in the most pressing case of self-defence. Anybody
could see he was not a murdering kind of man, he reflected quite
gravely. Then why this preposterous and insulting charge? he
asked himself. But his thoughts mainly clung around the
astounding and unanswerable question: How the devil the fellow
got to know that the silver had gone off in the lighter? It was
obvious that he had not captured it. And, obviously, he could not
have captured it! In this last conclusion Captain Mitchell was
misled by the assumption drawn from his observation of the
weather during his long vigil on the wharf. He thought that there
had been much more wind than usual that night in the gulf;
whereas, as a matter of fact, the reverse was the case.