Page 282 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

the paper was going through the press. And it is curious to
have met a man for whom the value of life seems to consist
in personal prestige.
‘I am waiting for him here now. On arriving at the posa-
da kept by Viola we found the children alone down below,
and the old Genoese shouted to his countryman to go and
fetch the doctor. Otherwise we would have gone on to the
wharf, where it appears Captain Mitchell with some volun-
teer Europeans and a few picked Cargadores are loading the
lighter with the silver that must be saved from Montero’s
clutches in order to be used for Montero’s defeat. Nostro-
mo galloped furiously back towards the town. He has been
long gone already. This delay gives me time to talk to you.
By the time this pocket-book reaches your hands much will
have happened. But now it is a pause under the hovering
wing of death in this silent house buried in the black night,
with this dying woman, the two children crouching with-
out a sound, and that old man whom I can hear through
the thickness of the wall passing up and down with a light
rubbing noise no louder than a mouse. And I, the only other
with them, don’t really know whether to count myself with
the living or with the dead. ‘Quien sabe?’ as the people here
are prone to say in answer to every question. But no! feel-
ing for you is certainly not dead, and the whole thing, the
house, the dark night, the silent children in this dim room,
my very presence here—all this is life, must be life, since it
is so much like a dream.’
With the writing of the last line there came upon Decoud
a moment of sudden and complete oblivion. He swayed over

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