Page 262 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

vaguely about him, then dropped into the chair and took
the pencil up again. He became aware he had not eaten any-
thing for many hours.
It occurred to him that no one could understand him so
well as his sister. In the most sceptical heart there lurks at
such moments, when the chances of existence are involved,
a desire to leave a correct impression of the feelings, like a
light by which the action may be seen when personality is
gone, gone where no light of investigation can ever reach
the truth which every death takes out of the world. There-
fore, instead of looking for something to eat, or trying to
snatch an hour or so of sleep, Decoud was filling the pages
of a large pocket-book with a letter to his sister.
In the intimacy of that intercourse he could not keep
out his weariness, his great fatigue, the close touch of his
bodily sensations. He began again as if he were talking to
her. With almost an illusion of her presence, he wrote the
phrase, ‘I am very hungry.’
‘I have the feeling of a great solitude around me,’ he con-
tinued. ‘Is it, perhaps, because I am the only man with a
definite idea in his head, in the complete collapse of every
resolve, intention, and hope about me? But the solitude is
also very real. All the engineers are out, and have been for
two days, looking after the property of the National Cen-
tral Railway, of that great Costaguana undertaking which
is to put money into the pockets of Englishmen, Frenchmen,
Americans, Germans, and God knows who else. The silence
about me is ominous. There is above the middle part of this
house a sort of first floor, with narrow openings like loop-

1