Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART SECOND: THE ISABELS 5. CHAPTER FIVE (continued)

"Oh, yes!" he said. "Of course you know. You know everything. You
read all the correspondence, you write all the papers--all those
State papers that are inspired here, in this room, in blind
deference to a theory of political purity. Hadn't you Charles
Gould before your eyes? Rey de Sulaco! He and his mine are the
practical demonstration of what could have been done. Do you
think he succeeded by his fidelity to a theory of virtue? And all
those railway people, with their honest work! Of course, their
work is honest! But what if you cannot work honestly till the
thieves are satisfied? Could he not, a gentleman, have told this
Sir John what's-his-name that Montero had to be bought off--he
and all his Negro Liberals hanging on to his gold-laced sleeve?
He ought to have been bought off with his own stupid weight of
gold--his weight of gold, I tell you, boots, sabre, spurs, cocked
hat, and all."

She shook her head slightly. "It was impossible," she murmured.

"He wanted the whole lot? What?"

She was facing him now in the deep recess of the window, very
close and motionless. Her lips moved rapidly. Decoud, leaning his
back against the wall, listened with crossed arms and lowered
eyelids. He drank the tones of her even voice, and watched the
agitated life of her throat, as if waves of emotion had run from
her heart to pass out into the air in her reasonable words. He
also had his aspirations, he aspired to carry her away out of
these deadly futilities of pronunciamientos and reforms. All this
was wrong--utterly wrong; but she fascinated him, and sometimes
the sheer sagacity of a phrase would break the charm, replace the
fascination by a sudden unwilling thrill of interest. Some women
hovered, as it were, on the threshold of genius, he reflected.
They did not want to know, or think, or understand. Passion stood
for all that, and he was ready to believe that some startlingly
profound remark, some appreciation of character, or a judgment
upon an event, bordered on the miraculous. In the mature Antonia
he could see with an extraordinary vividness the austere
schoolgirl of the earlier days. She seduced his attention;
sometimes he could not restrain a murmur of assent; now and then
he advanced an objection quite seriously. Gradually they began to
argue; the curtain half hid them from the people in the sala.