 futility of lives and of deaths thrown away
in the vain endeavour to attain an enduring solution of the problem. Unlike
Decoud, Charles Gould could not play lightly a part in a tragic farce. It was
tragic enough for him in all conscience, but he could see no farcical element.
He suffered too much under a conviction of irremediable folly. He was too
severely practical and too idealistic to look upon its terrible humours with
amusement, as Martin Decoud, the imaginative materialist, was able to do in the
dry light of his scepticism. To him, as to all of us, the compromises with his
conscience appeared uglier than ever in the light of failure. His taciturnity,
assumed with a purpose, had prevented him from tampering openly with his
thoughts; but the Gould Concession had insidiously corrupted his judgment. He
might have known, he said to himself, leaning over the balustrade of the
corridor, that Ribierism could never come to anything. The mine had corrupted
his judgment by making him sick of bribing and intriguing merely to have his
work left alone from day to day. Like his father, he did not like to be robbed.
It exasperated him. He had persuaded himself that, apart from higher
considerations, the backing up of Don José's hopes of reform was good business.
He had gone forth into the senseless fray as his poor uncle, whose sword hung on
the wall of his study, had gone forth - in the defence of the commonest
decencies of organized society. Only his weapon was the wealth of the mine, more
far-reaching and subtle than an honest blade of steel fitted into a simple brass
guard.
    More dangerous to the wielder, too, this weapon of wealth, double-edged with
the cupidity and misery of mankind, steeped in all the voices of self-indulgence
as in a concoction of poisonous roots, tainting the very cause for which it is
drawn, always ready to turn awkwardly in the hand. There was nothing for it now
but to go on using it. But he promised himself to see it shattered into small
bits before he let it be wrenched from his grasp.
    After all, with his English parentage and English upbringing, he perceived
that he was an adventurer in Costaguana, the descendant of adventurers enlisted
in a foreign legion, of men who had sought fortune in a revolutionary war, who
had planned revolutions, who had believed in revolutions. For all the
uprightness of his character, he had something of an adventurer's easy morality
which takes count of personal risk in the ethical appraising of his action. He
was prepared, if
