Page 379 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

tutionally incapable of entertaining for any length of time
a fear of his personal safety. It was not so much firmness of
soul as the lack of a certain kind of imagination—the kind
whose undue development caused intense suffering to Senor
Hirsch; that sort of imagination which adds the blind terror
of bodily suffering and of death, envisaged as an accident
to the body alone, strictly—to all the other apprehensions
on which the sense of one’s existence is based. Unfortunate-
ly, Captain Mitchell had not much penetration of any kind;
characteristic, illuminating trifles of expression, action, or
movement, escaped him completely. He was too pompously
and innocently aware of his own existence to observe that
of others. For instance, he could not believe that Sotillo had
been really afraid of him, and this simply because it would
never have entered into his head to shoot any one except
in the most pressing case of self-defence. Anybody could
see he was not a murdering kind of man, he reflected quite
gravely. Then why this preposterous and insulting charge?
he asked himself. But his thoughts mainly clung around the
astounding and unanswerable question: How the devil the
fellow got to know that the silver had gone off in the lighter?
It was obvious that he had not captured it. And, obviously,
he could not have captured it! In this last conclusion Cap-
tain Mitchell was misled by the assumption drawn from
his observation of the weather during his long vigil on the
wharf. He thought that there had been much more wind
than usual that night in the gulf; whereas, as a matter of fact,
the reverse was the case.
‘How in the name of all that’s marvellous did that con-

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard