 in the heat and clash of my own conflicting
emotions. And after all this is also the story of their conflicts. It is for the
reader to say how far they are deserving of interest in their actions and in the
secret purposes of their hearts revealed in the bitter necessities of the time.
I confess that, for me, that time is the time of firm friendships and
unforgotten hospitalities. And in my gratitude I must mention here Mrs. Gould,
the first lady of Sulaco, whom we may safely leave to the secret devotion of Dr.
Monygham, and Charles Gould, the Idealist-creator of Material Interests whom we
must leave to his Mine - from which there is no escape in this world.
    About Nostromo, the second of the two racially and socially contrasted men,
both captured by the silver of the San Tomé Mine, I feel bound to say something
more.
    I did not hesitate to make that central figure an Italian. First of all the
thing is perfectly credible: Italians were swarming into the Occidental Province
at the time, as anybody who will read further can see; and secondly, there was
no one who could stand so well by the side of Giorgio Viola the Garibaldino, the
Idealist of the old, humanitarian revolutions. For myself I needed there a man
of the People as free as possible from his class-conventions and all settled
modes of thinking. This is not a side snarl at conventions. My reasons were not
moral but artistic. Had he been an Anglo-Saxon he would have tried to get into
local politics. But Nostromo does not aspire to be a leader in a personal game.
He does not want to raise himself above the mass. He is content to feel himself
a power - within the People.
    But mainly Nostromo is what he is because I received the inspiration for him
in my early days from a Mediterranean sailor. Those who have read certain pages
of mine will see at once what I mean when I say that Dominic, the padrone of the
Tremolino, might under given circumstances have been a Nostromo. At any rate
Dominic would have understood the younger man perfectly - if scornfully. He and
I were engaged together in a rather absurd adventure, but the absurdity does not
matter. It is a real satisfaction to think that in my very young days there
must, after all, have been something in me worthy to command that man's
half-bitter fidelity, his half-ironic devotion. Many of Nostromo's speeches I
have heard first in Dominic's voice. His hand on the tiller and his fearless
eyes roaming
