Page 259 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

were doing. They are prudent gentlemen. In the Assembly
they called themselves Moderates, and opposed every en-
ergetic measure with philanthropic pensiveness. At the first
rumours of Montero’s victory, they showed a subtle change
of the pensive temper, and began to defy poor Don Juste Lo-
pez in his Presidential tribune with an effrontery to which
the poor man could only respond by a dazed smoothing
of his beard and the ringing of the presidential bell. Then,
when the downfall of the Ribierist cause became confirmed
beyond the shadow of a doubt, they have blossomed into
convinced Liberals, acting together as if they were Siamese
twins, and ultimately taking charge, as it were, of the riot in
the name of Monterist principles.
‘Their last move of eight o’clock last night was to organize
themselves into a Monterist Committee which sits, as far as
I know, in a posada kept by a retired Mexican bull-fighter, a
great politician, too, whose name I have forgotten. Thence
they have issued a communication to us, the Goths and Par-
alytics of the Amarilla Club (who have our own committee),
inviting us to come to some provisional understanding for
a truce, in order, they have the impudence to say, that the
noble cause of Liberty ‘should not be stained by the crimi-
nal excesses of Conservative selfishness!’ As I came out to
sit with Nostromo on the cathedral steps the club was busy
considering a proper reply in the principal room, littered
with exploded cartridges, with a lot of broken glass, blood
smears, candlesticks, and all sorts of wreckage on the floor.
But all this is nonsense. Nobody in the town has any real
power except the railway engineers, whose men occupy the

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard