第39章

For the San Tome mine was to become an institution, a rallying-point for everything in the province that needed order and stability to live. Security seemed to flow upon this land from the mountaingorge. The authorities of Sulaco had learned that the San Tome mine could make it worth their while to leave things and people alone. This was the nearest approach to the rule of common sense and justice Charles Gould felt it possible to secure at first. In fact, the mine, with its organization, its population growing fiercely attached to their position of privileged safety, with its armoury, with its Don Pepe, with its armed body of serenos (where, it was said, many an outlaw and deserter -- and even some members of Hernandez's band -- had found a place), the mine was a power in the land. As a certain prominent man in Sta Marta had exclaimed with a hollow laugh, once, when discussing the line of action taken by the Sulaco authorities at a time of political crisis:

`You call these men Government officials? They? Never! They are officials of the mine -- officials of the Concession -- I tell you.'

The prominent man (who was then a person in power, with a lemon-coloured face and a very short and curly, not to say woolly, head of hair) went so far in his temporary discontent as to shake his yellow fist under the nose of his interlocutor, and shriek:

`Yes! All! Silence! All! I tell you! The political jefe , the chief of the police, the chief of the customs, the general, all, all are the officials of that Gould.'

Thereupon an intrepid but low and argumentative murmur would flow on for a space in the ministerial cabinet, and the prominent man's passion would end in a cynical shrug of the shoulders. After all, he seemed to say, what did it matter as long as the minister himself was not forgotten during his brief day of authority? But all the same, the unofficial agent of the San Tome mine, working for a good cause, had his moments of anxiety, which were reflected in his letters to Don Jose Avellanos, his maternal uncle.

`No sanguinary macaque from Sta Marta shall set foot on that part of Costaguana which lies beyond the San Tome bridge,' Don Pepe used to assure Mrs Gould. `Except, of course, as an honoured guest -- for our Senor Administrador is a deep politico .' But to Charles Gould, in his own room, the old Major would remark with a grim and soldierly cheeriness, `We are all playing our heads at this game.'

Don Jose Avellanos would mutter ` Imperium in imperio , Emilia, my soul,' with an air of profound self-satisfaction which, somehow, in a curious way, seemed to contain a queer admixture of bodily discomfort.

But that, perhaps, could only be visible to the initiated.

And for the initiated it was a wonderful place, this drawing-room of the Casa Gould, with its momentary glimpses of the master -- El Senor Administrador -- older, harder, mysteriously silent, with the lines deepened on his English, ruddy, out-of-doors complexion; flitting on his thin cavalryman's legs across the doorways, either just `back from the mountain' or with jingling spurs and riding-whip under his arm, on the point of starting `for the mountain'. Then Don Pepe, modestly martial in his chair, the Ilanero who seemed somehow to have found his martial jocularity, his knowledge of the world, and his manner perfect for his station, in the midst of savage armed contests with his kind; Avellanos, polished and familiar, the diplomatist with his loquacity covering much caution and wisdom in delicate advice, with his manuscript of a historical work on Costaguana, entitled Fifty Years of Misrule , which, at present, he thought it was not prudent (even if it were possible) `to give to the world'; these three, and also Dona Emiliaamongst them, gracious, small, and fairy-like, before the glittering tea-set, with one common master-thought in their heads, with one common feeling of a tense situation, with one ever-present aim to preserve the inviolable character of the mine at every cost. And there was also to be seen Captain Mitchell, a little apart, near one of the long windows, with an air of old-fashioned neat old bachelorhood about him, slightly pompous, in a white waistcoat, a little disregarded and unconscious of it; utterly in the dark, and imagining himself to be in the thick of things. The good man, having spent a clear thirty years of his life on the high seas before getting what he called a `shore billet', was astonished at the importance of transactions (other than relating to shipping) which take place on dry land. Almost every event out of the usual daily course `marked an epoch'

for him or else was `history'; unless with his pomposity struggling with a discomfited droop of his rubicund, rather handsome face, set off by snow-white close hair and short whiskers, he would mutter:

`Ah, that! That, sir, was a mistake.'

The reception of the first consignment of San Tome silver for shipment to San Francisco in one of O.S.N. Company's mailboats had, of course, `marked an epoch' for Captain Mitchell. The ingots packed in boxes of stiff ox-hide with plaited handles, small enough to be carried easily by two men, were brought down by the serenos of the mine walking in careful couples down the half mile or so of steep, zigzag paths to the foot of the mountain.