Page 229 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

pleasure from watching the picturesque extreme of wrong-
headedness 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.
Don Jose obeyed the touch of the big hairy hand. De-
coud followed out the brothers-in-law. And there remained
only one visitor in the vast empty sala, bluishly hazy with
tobacco smoke, a heavy-eyed, round-cheeked man, with
a drooping moustache, a hide merchant from Esmeralda,
who had come overland to Sulaco, riding with a few pe-
ons across the coast range. He was very full of his journey,
undertaken mostly for the purpose of seeing the Senor Ad-
ministrador of San Tome in relation to some assistance he
required in his hide-exporting business. He hoped to en-
large it greatly now that the country was going to be settled.
It was going to be settled, he repeated several times, degrad-
ing by a strange, anxious whine the sonority of the Spanish
language, which he pattered rapidly, like some sort of cring-
ing jargon. A plain man could carry on his little business
now in the country, and even think of enlarging it—with
safety. Was it not so? He seemed to beg Charles Gould for a

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard