Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

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

And it was not only the men that Don Pepe knew so well, but he
seemed able, with one attentive, thoughtful glance, to classify
each woman, girl, or growing youth of his domain. It was only the
small fry that puzzled him sometimes. He and the padre could be
seen frequently side by side, meditative and gazing across the
street of a village at a lot of sedate brown children, trying to
sort them out, as it were, in low, consulting tones, or else they
would together put searching questions as to the parentage of
some small, staid urchin met wandering, naked and grave, along
the road with a cigar in his baby mouth, and perhaps his mother's
rosary, purloined for purposes of ornamentation, hanging in a
loop of beads low down on his rotund little stomach. The
spiritual and temporal pastors of the mine flock were very good
friends. With Dr. Monygham, the medical pastor, who had accepted
the charge from Mrs. Gould, and lived in the hospital building,
they were on not so intimate terms. But no one could be on
intimate terms with El Senor Doctor, who, with his twisted
shoulders, drooping head, sardonic mouth, and side-long bitter
glance, was mysterious and uncanny. The other two authorities
worked in harmony. Father Roman, dried-up, small, alert,
wrinkled, with big round eyes, a sharp chin, and a great
snuff-taker, was an old campaigner, too; he had shriven many
simple souls on the battlefields of the Republic, kneeling by the
dying on hillsides, in the long grass, in the gloom of the
forests, to hear the last confession with the smell of gunpowder
smoke in his nostrils, the rattle of muskets, the hum and spatter
of bullets in his ears. And where was the harm if, at the
presbytery, they had a game with a pack of greasy cards in the
early evening, before Don Pepe went his last rounds to see that
all the watchmen of the mine--a body organized by himself--were
at their posts? For that last duty before he slept Don Pepe did
actually gird his old sword on the verandah of an unmistakable
American white frame house, which Father Roman called the
presbytery. Near by, a long, low, dark building, steeple-roofed,
like a vast barn with a wooden cross over the gable, was the
miners' chapel. There Father Roman said Mass every day before a
sombre altar-piece representing the Resurrection, the grey slab
of the tombstone balanced on one corner, a figure soaring
upwards, long-limbed and livid, in an oval of pallid light, and a
helmeted brown legionary smitten down, right across the
bituminous foreground. "This picture, my children, muy linda e
maravillosa," Father Roman would say to some of his flock, "which
you behold here through the munificence of the wife of our Senor
Administrador, has been painted in Europe, a country of saints
and miracles, and much greater than our Costaguana." And he would
take a pinch of snuff with unction. But when once an inquisitive
spirit desired to know in what direction this Europe was
situated, whether up or down the coast, Father Roman, to conceal
his perplexity, became very reserved and severe. "No doubt it is
extremely far away. But ignorant sinners like you of the San Tome
mine should think earnestly of everlasting punishment instead of
inquiring into the magnitude of the earth, with its countries and
populations altogether beyond your understanding."