Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

0. Dedication and Author's Note (continued)

The fellow had actually managed to steal a lighter with silver,
and this, it seems, only because he was implicitly trusted by his
employers, who must have been singularly poor judges of
character. In the sailor's story he is represented as an
unmitigated rascal, a small cheat, stupidly ferocious, morose, of
mean appearance, and altogether unworthy of the greatness this
opportunity had thrust upon him. What was interesting was that he
would boast of it openly.

He used to say: "People think I make a lot of money in this
schooner of mine. But that is nothing. I don't care for that.
Now and then I go away quietly and lift a bar of silver. I must
get rich slowly--you understand."

There was also another curious point about the man. Once in the
course of some quarrel the sailor threatened him: "What's to
prevent me reporting ashore what you have told me about that
silver?"

The cynical ruffian was not alarmed in the least. He actually
laughed. "You fool, if you dare talk like that on shore about me
you will get a knife stuck in your back. Every man, woman, and
child in that port is my friend. And who's to prove the lighter
wasn't sunk? I didn't show you where the silver is hidden. Did
I? So you know nothing. And suppose I lied? Eh?"

Ultimately the sailor, disgusted with the sordid meanness of that
impenitent thief, deserted from the schooner. The whole episode
takes about three pages of his autobiography. Nothing to speak
of; but as I looked them over, the curious confirmation of the
few casual words heard in my early youth evoked the memories of
that distant time when everything was so fresh, so surprising, so
venturesome, so interesting; bits of strange coasts under the
stars, shadows of hills in the sunshine, men's passions in the
dusk, gossip half-forgotten, faces grown dim. . . . Perhaps,
perhaps, there still was in the world something to write about.
Yet I did not see anything at first in the mere story. A rascal
steals a large parcel of a valuable commodity--so people say.
It's either true or untrue; and in any case it has no value in
itself. To invent a circumstantial account of the robbery did not
appeal to me, because my talents not running that way I did not
think that the game was worth the candle. It was only when it
dawned upon me that the purloiner of the treasure need not
necessarily be a confirmed rogue, that he could be even a man of
character, an actor and possibly a victim in the changing scenes
of a revolution, it was only then that I had the first vision of
a twilight country which was to become the province of Sulaco,
with its high shadowy Sierra and its misty Campo for mute
witnesses of events flowing from the passions of men
short-sighted in good and evil.