Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
lamentations, threats, and curses apparently unmoved. But he heard of them with satisfaction. This was as it should be. He was a valuable man. What better recognition could he expect? His vanity infinitely and naively greedy, but his conceptions were limited. Afterwards his success in the work he found on shore enlarged them in the direction of personal magnificence. This sailor led a public life in his sphere. It became necessary to him. It was the breath of his nostrils. And who can say that it was not genuine distinction. It was genuine because it was based on something that was in him—his overweening vanity, which Decoud alone, thinking that he would be of use politically, had taken the trouble to find out. Each man must have some temperamental sense by which to discover himself. With Nostromo it was vanity of an artless sort. Without it he would have been nothing. It called out his recklessness, his industry, his ingenuity, and that disdain of the natives which helped him so much upon the line of his work and resembled an inborn capacity for command. It made him appear incorruptible and fierce. It made him happy also. He was disinterested with the unworldliness of a sailor, arising not so much from the absence of mercenary instincts as from sheer ignorance and carelessness for to-morrow. He was pleased with himself. It was not the cold, ferocious, and idealistic self-conceit of a man of some northern race; it was materialistic and imaginative. It was an unpractical and warm sentiment, a picturesque development of his character, the growth of an unsophisticated sense of his individuality. It was immense. It was
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