Nostromo - A Tale of the Seaboard.pdf - Planet eBook

pleasure from watching the picturesque extreme of wrongheadednessinto which an honest, almost sacred, convictionmay drive a man. ‘It is like madness. It must be—becauseit’s self-destructive,’ Decoud had said to himself often. Itseemed to him that every conviction, as soon as it becameeffective, turned into that form of dementia the gods sendupon those they wish to destroy. But he enjoyed the bitterflavour of that example with the zest of a connoisseur in theart of his choice. Those two men got on well together, asif each had felt respectively that a masterful conviction, aswell as utter scepticism, may lead a man very far on the bypathsof political action.Don Jose obeyed the touch of the big hairy hand. Decoudfollowed out the brothers-in-law. And there remainedonly one visitor in the vast empty sala, bluishly hazy withtobacco smoke, a heavy-eyed, round-cheeked man, witha drooping moustache, a hide merchant from Esmeralda,who had come overland to Sulaco, riding with a few peonsacross the coast range. He was very full of his journey,undertaken mostly for the purpose of seeing the Senor Administradorof San Tome in relation to some assistance herequired in his hide-exporting business. He hoped to enlargeit greatly now that the country was going to be settled.It was going to be settled, he repeated several times, degradingby a strange, anxious whine the sonority of the Spanishlanguage, which he pattered rapidly, like some sort of cringingjargon. A plain man could carry on his little businessnow in the country, and even think of enlarging it—withsafety. Was it not so? He seemed to beg Charles Gould for a