Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

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

"I assure you, Senor Hirsch," murmured Charles Gould, "that you
ran no risk on this occasion."

"That may be, senor, though I tremble yet. A most fierce man--to
look at. And what does it mean? A person employed by the
Steamship Company talking with salteadores--no less, senor; the
other horsemen were salteadores--in a lonely place, and behaving
like a robber himself! A cigar is nothing, but what was there to
prevent him asking me for my purse?"

"No, no, Senor Hirsch," Charles Gould murmured, letting his
glance stray away a little vacantly from the round face, with its
hooked beak upturned towards him in an almost childlike appeal.
"If it was the Capataz de Cargadores you met--and there is no
doubt, is there? --you were perfectly safe."

"Thank you. You are very good. A very fierce-looking man, Don
Carlos. He asked me for a cigar in a most familiar manner. What
would have happened if I had not had a cigar? I shudder yet. What
business had he to be talking with robbers in a lonely place?"

But Charles Gould, openly preoccupied now, gave not a sign, made
no sound. The impenetrability of the embodied Gould Concession
had its surface shades. To be dumb is merely a fatal affliction;
but the King of Sulaco had words enough to give him all the
mysterious weight of a taciturn force. His silences, backed by
the power of speech, had as many shades of significance as
uttered words in the way of assent, of doubt, of negation--even
of simple comment. Some seemed to say plainly, "Think it over";
others meant clearly, "Go ahead"; a simple, low "I see," with an
affirmative nod, at the end of a patient listening half-hour was
the equivalent of a verbal contract, which men had learned to
trust implicitly, since behind it all there was the great San
Tome mine, the head and front of the material interests, so
strong that it depended on no man's goodwill in the whole length
and breadth of the Occidental Province--that is, on no goodwill
which it could not buy ten times over. But to the little
hook-nosed man from Esmeralda, anxious about the export of hides,
the silence of Charles Gould portended a failure. Evidently this
was no time for extending a modest man's business. He enveloped
in a swift mental malediction the whole country, with all its
inhabitants, partisans of Ribiera and Montero alike; and there
were incipient tears in his mute anger at the thought of the
innumerable ox-hides going to waste upon the dreamy expanse of
the Campo, with its single palms rising like ships at sea within
the perfect circle of the horizon, its clumps of heavy timber
motionless like solid islands of leaves above the running waves
of grass. There were hides there, rotting, with no profit to
anybody--rotting where they had been dropped by men called away
to attend the urgent necessities of political revolutions. The
practical, mercantile soul of Senor Hirsch rebelled against all
that foolishness, while he was taking a respectful but
disconcerted leave of the might and majesty of the San Tome mine
in the person of Charles Gould. He could not restrain a
heart-broken murmur, wrung out of his very aching heart, as it
were.