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chief of the police, the chief of the customs, the general, all,
all, are the officials of that Gould.’
Thereupon an intrepid but low and argumentative mur-
mur would flow on for a space in the ministerial cabinet,
and the prominent man’s passion would end in a cynical
shrug of the shoulders. After all, he seemed to say, what did
it matter as long as the minister himself was not forgotten
during his brief day of authority? But all the same, the unof-
ficial agent of the San Tome mine, working for a good cause,
had his moments of anxiety, which were reflected in his let-
ters to Don Jose Avellanos, his maternal uncle.
‘No sanguinary macaque from Sta. Marta shall set foot
on that part of Costaguana which lies beyond the San Tome
bridge,’ Don Pepe used to assure Mrs. Gould. ‘Except, of
course, as an honoured guest—for our Senor Administra-
dor is a deep politico.’ But to Charles Gould, in his own
room, the old Major would remark with a grim and soldier-
ly cheeriness, ‘We are all playing our heads at this game.’
Don Jose Avellanos would mutter ‘Imperium in imperio,
Emilia, my soul,’ with an air of profound self-satisfaction
which, somehow, in a curious way, seemed to contain a
queer admixture of bodily discomfort. But that, perhaps,
could only be visible to the initiated. And for the initiat-
ed it was a wonderful place, this drawing-room of the Casa
Gould, with its momentary glimpses of the master—El
Senor Administrador—older, harder, mysteriously silent,
with the lines deepened on his English, ruddy, out-of-doors
complexion; flitting on his thin cavalryman’s legs across the
doorways, either just ‘back from the mountain’ or with jin-

1 Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard