A Tale of the Seaboard Joseph Conrad - Penn State University

Nostromo
cess would have pleased him very much on refreshingly novel
grounds; but, on the other side of the same feeling, it was incumbent
upon him to cast it off utterly at the first sign of failure. A man
may be thrown off. The papers had unfortunately trumpeted all
over the land his journey to Costaguana. If he was pleased at the
way Charles Gould was going on, he infused an added grimness
into his assurances of support. Even at the very last interview, half
an hour or so before he rolled out of the patio, hat in hand, behind
Mrs. Gould’s white mules, he had said in Charles’s room—
“You go ahead in your own way, and I shall know how to help you
as long as you hold your own. But you may rest assured that in a
given case we shall know how to drop you in time.”
To this Charles Gould’s only answer had been: “You may begin
sending out the machinery as soon as you like.”
And the great man had liked this imperturbable assurance. The
secret of it was that to Charles Gould’s mind these uncompromising
terms were agreeable. Like this the mine preserved its identity,
with which he had endowed it as a boy; and it remained dependent
on himself alone. It was a serious affair, and he, too, took it grimly.
“Of course,” he said to his wife, alluding to this last conversation
with the departed guest, while they walked slowly up and down the
corredor, followed by the irritated eye of the parrot—”of course, a
man of that sort can take up a thing or drop it when he likes. He
will suffer from no sense of defeat. He may have to give in, or he
may have to die to-morrow, but the great silver and iron interests
will survive, and some day will get hold of Costaguana along with
the rest of the world.”
They had stopped near the cage. The parrot, catching the sound
of a word belonging to his vocabulary, was moved to interfere. Parrots
are very human.
“Viva Costaguana!” he shrieked, with intense self-assertion, and,
instantly ruffling up his feathers, assumed an air of puffed-up somnolence
behind the glittering wires.
“And do you believe that, Charley” Mrs. Gould asked. “This
seems to me most awful materialism, and—”
“My dear, it’s nothing to me,” interrupted her husband, in a reasonable
tone. “I make use of what I see. What’s it to me whether his talk is
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