A Tale of the Seaboard Joseph Conrad - Penn State University

Joseph Conrad
had never seen Martin take so much trouble about anything in his
whole life.
“It amuses me,” he had explained, briefly. “I am beset by a lot of
swindlers trying to sell all sorts of gaspipe weapons. They are charming;
they invite me to expensive luncheons; I keep up their hopes;
it’s extremely entertaining. Meanwhile, the real affair is being carried
through in quite another quarter.”
When the business was concluded he declared suddenly his intention
of seeing the precious consignment delivered safely in Sulaco.
The whole burlesque business, he thought, was worth following up
to the end. He mumbled his excuses, tugging at his golden beard,
before the acute young lady who (after the first wide stare of astonishment)
looked at him with narrowed eyes, and pronounced
slowly—
“I believe you want to see Antonia.”
“What Antonia” asked the Costaguana boulevardier, in a vexed
and disdainful tone. He shrugged his shoulders, and spun round on
his heel. His sister called out after him joyously—
“The Antonia you used to know when she wore her hair in two
plaits down her back.”
He had known her some eight years since, shortly before the
Avellanos had left Europe for good, as a tall girl of sixteen, youthfully
austere, and of a character already so formed that she ventured
to treat slightingly his pose of disabused wisdom. On one occasion,
as though she had lost all patience, she flew out at him about the
aimlessness of his life and the levity of his opinions. He was twenty
then, an only son, spoiled by his adoring family. This attack disconcerted
him so greatly that he had faltered in his affectation of amused
superiority before that insignificant chit of a school-girl. But the
impression left was so strong that ever since all the girl friends of his
sisters recalled to him Antonia Avellanos by some faint resemblance,
or by the great force of contrast. It was, he told himself, like a ridiculous
fatality. And, of course, in the news the Decouds received
regularly from Costaguana, the name of their friends, the Avellanos,
cropped up frequently—the arrest and the abominable treatment
of the ex-Minister, the dangers and hardships endured by the family,
its withdrawal in poverty to Sulaco, the death of the mother.
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