Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 5. CHAPTER FIVE (continued)

They were a good sample of the cavalry of the plains with which
Pedro Montero had helped so much the victorious career of his
brother the general. The influence which that man, brought up in
coast towns, acquired in a short time over the plainsmen of the
Republic can be ascribed only to a genius for treachery of so
effective a kind that it must have appeared to those violent men
but little removed from a state of utter savagery, as the
perfection of sagacity and virtue. The popular lore of all
nations testifies that duplicity and cunning, together with
bodily strength, were looked upon, even more than courage, as
heroic virtues by primitive mankind. To overcome your adversary
was the great affair of life. Courage was taken for granted. But
the use of intelligence awakened wonder and respect. Stratagems,
providing they did not fail, were honourable; the easy massacre
of an unsuspecting enemy evoked no feelings but those of
gladness, pride, and admiration. Not perhaps that primitive men
were more faithless than their descendants of to-day, but that
they went straighter to their aim, and were more artless in their
recognition of success as the only standard of morality.

We have changed since. The use of intelligence awakens little
wonder and less respect. But the ignorant and barbarous plainsmen
engaging in civil strife followed willingly a leader who often
managed to deliver their enemies bound, as it were, into their
hands. Pedro Montero had a talent for lulling his adversaries
into a sense of security. And as men learn wisdom with extreme
slowness, and are always ready to believe promises that flatter
their secret hopes, Pedro Montero was successful time after time.
Whether only a servant or some inferior official in the
Costaguana Legation in Paris, he had rushed back to his country
directly he heard that his brother had emerged from the obscurity
of his frontier commandancia. He had managed to deceive by his
gift of plausibility the chiefs of the Ribierist movement in the
capital, and even the acute agent of the San Tome mine had failed
to understand him thoroughly. At once he had obtained an
enormous influence over his brother. They were very much alike in
appearance, both bald, with bunches of crisp hair above their
ears, arguing the presence of some negro blood. Only Pedro was
smaller than the general, more delicate altogether, with an
ape-like faculty for imitating all the outward signs of
refinement and distinction, and with a parrot-like talent for
languages. Both brothers had received some elementary instruction
by the munificence of a great European traveller, to whom their
father had been a body-servant during his journeys in the
interior of the country. In General Montero's case it enabled him
to rise from the ranks. Pedrito, the younger, incorrigibly lazy
and slovenly, had drifted aimlessly from one coast town to
another, hanging about counting-houses, attaching himself to
strangers as a sort of valet-de-place, picking up an easy and
disreputable living. His ability to read did nothing for him but
fill his head with absurd visions. His actions were usually
determined by motives so improbable in themselves as to escape
the penetration of a rational person.