Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

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

Father Corbelan stopped short, looked at the journalist of Sulaco
fixedly for a moment, shrugged his shoulders slightly, and
resumed his plodding walk of an obstinate traveller.

And now the Europeans were dropping off from the group around
Charles Gould till the Administrador of the Great Silver Mine
could be seen in his whole lank length, from head to foot, left
stranded by the ebbing tide of his guests on the great square of
carpet, as it were a multi-coloured shoal of flowers and
arabesques under his brown boots. Father Corbelan approached the
rocking-chair of Don Jose Avellanos.

"Come, brother," he said, with kindly brusqueness and a touch of
relieved impatience a man may feel at the end of a perfectly
useless ceremony. "A la Casa! A la Casa! This has been all talk.
Let us now go and think and pray for guidance from Heaven."

He rolled his black eyes upwards. By the side of the frail
diplomatist--the life and soul of the party--he seemed gigantic,
with a gleam of fanaticism in the glance. But the voice of the
party, or, rather, its mouthpiece, the "son Decoud" from Paris,
turned journalist for the sake of Antonia's eyes, knew very well
that it was not so, that he was only a strenuous priest with one
idea, feared by the women and execrated by the men of the people.
Martin Decoud, the dilettante in life, imagined himself to derive
an artistic pleasure from watching the picturesque extreme of
wrongheadedness into which an honest, almost sacred, conviction
may drive a man. "It is like madness. It must be--because it's
self-destructive," Decoud had said to himself often. It seemed to
him that every conviction, as soon as it became effective, turned
into that form of dementia the gods send upon those they wish to
destroy. But he enjoyed the bitter flavour of that example with
the zest of a connoisseur in the art of his choice. Those two men
got on well together, as if each had felt respectively that a
masterful conviction, as well as utter scepticism, may lead a man
very far on the by-paths of political action.