Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART FIRST: THE SILVER OF THE MINE 6. CHAPTER SIX (continued)

Of course, he was too great a man to be questioned as to his
motives, even by his intimates. The outside world was at liberty
to wonder respectfully at the hidden meaning of his actions. He
was so great a man that his lavish patronage of the "purer forms
of Christianity" (which in its naive form of church-building
amused Mrs. Gould) was looked upon by his fellow-citizens as the
manifestation of a pious and humble spirit. But in his own
circles of the financial world the taking up of such a thing as
the San Tome mine was regarded with respect, indeed, but rather
as a subject for discreet jocularity. It was a great man's
caprice. In the great Holroyd building (an enormous pile of
iron, glass, and blocks of stone at the corner of two streets,
cobwebbed aloft by the radiation of telegraph wires) the heads of
principal departments exchanged humorous glances, which meant
that they were not let into the secrets of the San Tome business.
The Costaguana mail (it was never large--one fairly heavy
envelope) was taken unopened straight into the great man's room,
and no instructions dealing with it had ever been issued thence.
The office whispered that he answered personally--and not by
dictation either, but actually writing in his own hand, with pen
and ink, and, it was to be supposed, taking a copy in his own
private press copy-book, inaccessible to profane eyes. Some
scornful young men, insignificant pieces of minor machinery in
that eleven-storey-high workshop of great affairs, expressed
frankly their private opinion that the great chief had done at
last something silly, and was ashamed of his folly; others,
elderly and insignificant, but full of romantic reverence for the
business that had devoured their best years, used to mutter
darkly and knowingly that this was a portentous sign; that the
Holroyd connection meant by-and-by to get hold of the whole
Republic of Costaguana, lock, stock, and barrel. But, in fact,
the hobby theory was the right one. It interested the great man
to attend personally to the San Tome mine; it interested him so
much that he allowed this hobby to give a direction to the first
complete holiday he had taken for quite a startling number of
years. He was not running a great enterprise there; no mere
railway board or industrial corporation. He was running a man! A
success would have pleased him very much on refreshingly novel
grounds; but, on the other side of the same feeling, it was
incumbent upon him to cast it off utterly at the first sign of
failure. A man may be thrown off. The papers had unfortunately
trumpeted all over the land his journey to Costaguana. If he was
pleased at the way Charles Gould was going on, he infused an
added grimness into his assurances of support. Even at the very
last interview, half an hour or so before he rolled out of the
patio, hat in hand, behind Mrs. Gould's white mules, he had said
in Charles's room--