Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

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

Decoud and Antonia remained leaning over the balcony, side by
side, touching elbows, with their heads overhanging the darkness
of the street, and the brilliantly lighted sala at their backs.
This was a tete-a-tete of extreme impropriety; something of which
in the whole extent of the Republic only the extraordinary
Antonia could be capable--the poor, motherless girl, never
accompanied, with a careless father, who had thought only of
making her learned. Even Decoud himself seemed to feel that this
was as much as he could expect of having her to himself
till--till the revolution was over and he could carry her off to
Europe, away from the endlessness of civil strife, whose folly
seemed even harder to bear than its ignominy. After one Montero
there would be another, the lawlessness of a populace of all
colours and races, barbarism, irremediable tyranny. As the great
Liberator Bolivar had said in the bitterness of his spirit,
"America is ungovernable. Those who worked for her independence
have ploughed the sea." He did not care, he declared boldly; he
seized every opportunity to tell her that though she had managed
to make a Blanco journalist of him, he was no patriot. First of
all, the word had no sense for cultured minds, to whom the
narrowness of every belief is odious; and secondly, in connection
with the everlasting troubles of this unhappy country it was
hopelessly besmirched; it had been the cry of dark barbarism, the
cloak of lawlessness, of crimes, of rapacity, of simple thieving.

He was surprised at the warmth of his own utterance. He had no
need to drop his voice; it had been low all the time, a mere
murmur in the silence of dark houses with their shutters closed
early against the night air, as is the custom of Sulaco. Only the
sala of the Casa Gould flung out defiantly the blaze of its four
windows, the bright appeal of light in the whole dumb obscurity
of the street. And the murmur on the little balcony went on after
a short pause.

"But we are labouring to change all that," Antonia protested. "It
is exactly what we desire. It is our object. It is the great
cause. And the word you despise has stood also for sacrifice, for
courage, for constancy, for suffering. Papa, who--"

"Ploughing the sea," interrupted Decoud, looking down.