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

tutionally incapable of entertaining for any length of timea fear of his personal safety. It was not so much firmness ofsoul as the lack of a certain kind of imagination—the kindwhose undue development caused intense suffering to SenorHirsch; that sort of imagination which adds the blind terrorof bodily suffering and of death, envisaged as an accidentto the body alone, strictly—to all the other apprehensionson which the sense of one’s existence is based. Unfortunately,Captain Mitchell had not much penetration of any kind;characteristic, illuminating trifles of expression, action, ormovement, escaped him completely. He was too pompouslyand innocently aware of his own existence to observe thatof others. For instance, he could not believe that Sotillo hadbeen really afraid of him, and this simply because it wouldnever have entered into his head to shoot any one exceptin the most pressing case of self-defence. Anybody couldsee he was not a murdering kind of man, he reflected quitegravely. Then why this preposterous and insulting charge?he asked himself. But his thoughts mainly clung around theastounding and unanswerable question: How the devil thefellow 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 CaptainMitchell was misled by the assumption drawn fromhis observation of the weather during his long vigil on thewharf. He thought that there had been much more windthan 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-