the voice of the party, or, rather, its mouthpiece, the son
Decoud from Paris, turned journalist for the sake of Antonia's eyes, knew very
well that it was not so, that he was only a strenuous priest with one idea,
feared by the women and execrated by the men of the people. Martin Decoud, the
dilettante in life, imagined himself to derive an artistic pleasure from
watching the picturesque extreme of wrong-headedness into which an honest,
almost sacred, conviction may drive a man. »It is like madness. It must be -
because it's self-destructive,« Decoud had said to himself often. It seemed to
him that every conviction, as soon as it became effective, turned into that form
of dementia the gods send upon those they wish to destroy. But he enjoyed the
bitter flavour of that example with the zest of a connoisseur in the art of his
choice. Those two men got on well together, as if each had felt respectively
that a masterful conviction, as well as utter scepticism, may lead a man very
far on the by-paths of political action.
    Don José obeyed the touch of the big hairy hand. Decoud followed out the
brothers-in-law. And there remained only one visitor in the vast empty sala,
bluishly hazy with tobacco smoke, a heavy-eyed, round-cheeked man, with a
drooping moustache, a hide merchant from Esmeralda, who had come overland to
Sulaco, riding with a few peons across the coast range. He was very full of his
journey, undertaken mostly for the purpose of seeing the Señor Administrador of
San Tomé in relation to some assistance he required in his hide-exporting
business. He hoped to enlarge it greatly now that the country was going to be
settled. It was going to be settled, he repeated several times, degrading by a
strange, anxious whine the sonority of the Spanish language, which he pattered
rapidly, like some sort of cringing jargon. A plain man could carry on his
little business now in the country, and even think of enlarging it - with
safety. Was it not so? He seemed to beg Charles Gould for a confirmatory word, a
grunt of assent, a simple nod even.
    He could get nothing. His alarm increased, and in the pauses he would dart
his eyes here and there; then, loth to give up, he would branch off into feeling
allusion to the dangers of his journey. The audacious Hernandez, leaving his
usual haunts, had crossed the Campo of Sulaco, and was known to be