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_ ALL the morning Nostromo had kept his eye from afar on the Casa
Viola, even in the thick of the hottest scrimmage near the Custom
House. "If I see smoke rising over there," he thought to himself,
"they are lost." Directly the mob had broken he pressed with a
small band of Italian workmen in that direction, which, indeed,
was the shortest line towards the town. That part of the rabble
he was pursuing seemed to think of making a stand under the
house; a volley fired by his followers from behind an aloe hedge
made the rascals fly. In a gap chopped out for the rails of the
harbour branch line Nostromo appeared, mounted on his silver-grey
mare. He shouted, sent after them one shot from his revolver, and
galloped up to the cafe window. He had an idea that old Giorgio
would choose that part of the house for a refuge.
His voice had penetrated to them, sounding breathlessly hurried:
"Hola! Vecchio! O, Vecchio! Is it all well with you in there?"
"You see--" murmured old Viola to his wife. Signora Teresa was
silent now. Outside Nostromo laughed.
"I can hear the padrona is not dead."
"You have done your best to kill me with fear," cried Signora
Teresa. She wanted to say something more, but her voice failed
her.
Linda raised her eyes to her face for a moment, but old Giorgio
shouted apologetically--
"She is a little upset."
Outside Nostromo shouted back with another laugh--
"She cannot upset me."
Signora Teresa found her voice.
"It is what I say. You have no heart--and you have no conscience,
Gian' Battista--"
They heard him wheel his horse away from the shutters. The party
he led were babbling excitedly in Italian and Spanish, inciting
each other to the pursuit. He put himself at their head, crying,
"Avanti!"
"He has not stopped very long with us. There is no praise from
strangers to be got here," Signora Teresa said tragically.
"Avanti! Yes! That is all he cares for. To be first
somewhere--somehow--to be first with these English. They will be
showing him to everybody. 'This is our Nostromo!'" She laughed
ominously. "What a name! What is that? Nostromo? He would take a
name that is properly no word from them."
Meantime Giorgio, with tranquil movements, had been unfastening
the door; the flood of light fell on Signora Teresa, with her two
girls gathered to her side, a picturesque woman in a pose of
maternal exaltation. Behind her the wall was dazzlingly white,
and the crude colours of the Garibaldi lithograph paled in the
sunshine.
Old Viola, at the door, moved his arm upwards as if referring all
his quick, fleeting thoughts to the picture of his old chief on
the wall. Even when he was cooking for the "Signori Inglesi"--the
engineers (he was a famous cook, though the kitchen was a dark
place)--he was, as it were, under the eye of the great man who
had led him in a glorious struggle where, under the walls of
Gaeta, tyranny would have expired for ever had it not been for
that accursed Piedmontese race of kings and ministers. When
sometimes a frying-pan caught fire during a delicate operation
with some shredded onions, and the old man was seen backing out
of the doorway, swearing and coughing violently in an acrid cloud
of smoke, the name of Cavour--the arch intriguer sold to kings
and tyrants--could be heard involved in imprecations against the
China girls, cooking in general, and the brute of a country where
he was reduced to live for the love of liberty that traitor had
strangled.
Then Signora Teresa, all in black, issuing from another door,
advanced, portly and anxious, inclining her fine, black-browed
head, opening her arms, and crying in a profound tone--
"Giorgio! thou passionate man! Misericordia Divina! In the sun
like this! He will make himself ill."
At her feet the hens made off in all directions, with immense
strides; if there were any engineers from up the line staying in
Sulaco, a young English face or two would appear at the
billiard-room occupying one end of the house; but at the other
end, in the cafe, Luis, the mulatto, took good care not to show
himself. The Indian girls, with hair like flowing black manes,
and dressed only in a shift and short petticoat, stared dully
from under the square-cut fringes on their foreheads; the noisy
frizzling of fat had stopped, the fumes floated upwards in
sunshine, a strong smell of burnt onions hung in the drowsy heat,
enveloping the house; and the eye lost itself in a vast flat
expanse of grass to the west, as if the plain between the Sierra
overtopping Sulaco and the coast range away there towards
Esmeralda had been as big as half the world.
Signora Teresa, after an impressive pause, remonstrated--
"Eh, Giorgio! Leave Cavour alone and take care of yourself now we
are lost in this country all alone with the two children, because
you cannot live under a king."
And while she looked at him she would sometimes put her hand
hastily to her side with a short twitch of her fine lips and a
knitting of her black, straight eyebrows like a flicker of angry
pain or an angry thought on her handsome, regular features.
It was pain; she suppressed the twinge. It had come to her first
a few years after they had left Italy to emigrate to America and
settle at last in Sulaco after wandering from town to town,
trying shopkeeping in a small way here and there; and once an
organized enterprise of fishing--in Maldonado--for Giorgio, like
the great Garibaldi, had been a sailor in his time.
Sometimes she had no patience with pain. For years its gnawing
had been part of the landscape embracing the glitter of the
harbour under the wooded spurs of the range; and the sunshine
itself was heavy and dull--heavy with pain--not like the
sunshine of her girlhood, in which middle-aged Giorgio had wooed
her gravely and passionately on the shores of the gulf of
Spezzia.
"You go in at once, Giorgio," she directed. "One would think you
do not wish to have any pity on me--with four Signori Inglesi
staying in the house." "Va bene, va bene," Giorgio would mutter.
He obeyed. The Signori Inglesi would require their midday meal
presently. He had been one of the immortal and invincible band
of liberators who had made the mercenaries of tyranny fly like
chaff before a hurricane, "un uragano terribile." But that was
before he was married and had children; and before tyranny had
reared its head again amongst the traitors who had imprisoned
Garibaldi, his hero.
There were three doors in the front of the house, and each
afternoon the Garibaldino could be seen at one or another of them
with his big bush of white hair, his arms folded, his legs
crossed, leaning back his leonine head against the side, and
looking up the wooded slopes of the foothills at the snowy dome
of Higuerota. The front of his house threw off a black long
rectangle of shade, broadening slowly over the soft ox-cart
track. Through the gaps, chopped out in the oleander hedges, the
harbour branch railway, laid out temporarily on the level of the
plain, curved away its shining parallel ribbons on a belt of
scorched and withered grass within sixty yards of the end of the
house. In the evening the empty material trains of flat cars
circled round the dark green grove of Sulaco, and ran, undulating
slightly with white jets of steam, over the plain towards the
Casa Viola, on their way to the railway yards by the harbour. The
Italian drivers saluted him from the foot-plate with raised hand,
while the negro brakesmen sat carelessly on the brakes, looking
straight forward, with the rims of their big hats flapping in the
wind. In return Giorgio would give a slight sideways jerk of the
head, without unfolding his arms.
On this memorable day of the riot his arms were not folded on his
chest. His hand grasped the barrel of the gun grounded on the
threshold; he did not look up once at the white dome of
Higuerota, whose cool purity seemed to hold itself aloof from a
hot earth. His eyes examined the plain curiously. Tall trails of
dust subsided here and there. In a speckless sky the sun hung
clear and blinding. Knots of men ran headlong; others made a
stand; and the irregular rattle of firearms came rippling to his
ears in the fiery, still air. Single figures on foot raced
desperately. Horsemen galloped towards each other, wheeled round
together, separated at speed. Giorgio saw one fall, rider and
horse disappearing as if they had galloped into a chasm, and the
movements of the animated scene were like the passages of a
violent game played upon the plain by dwarfs mounted and on foot,
yelling with tiny throats, under the mountain that seemed a
colossal embodiment of silence. Never before had Giorgio seen
this bit of plain so full of active life; his gaze could not take
in all its details at once; he shaded his eyes with his hand,
till suddenly the thundering of many hoofs near by startled him.
A troop of horses had broken out of the fenced paddock of the
Railway Company. They came on like a whirlwind, and dashed over
the line snorting, kicking, squealing in a compact, piebald,
tossing mob of bay, brown, grey backs, eyes staring, necks
extended, nostrils red, long tails streaming. As soon as they had
leaped upon the road the thick dust flew upwards from under their
hoofs, and within six yards of Giorgio only a brown cloud with
vague forms of necks and cruppers rolled by, making the soil
tremble on its passage.
Viola coughed, turning his face away from the dust, and shaking
his head slightly.
"There will be some horse-catching to be done before to-night,"
he muttered.
In the square of sunlight falling through the door Signora
Teresa, kneeling before the chair, had bowed her head, heavy with
a twisted mass of ebony hair streaked with silver, into the palm
of her hands. The black lace shawl she used to drape about her
face had dropped to the ground by her side. The two girls had got
up, hand-in-hand, in short skirts, their loose hair falling in
disorder. The younger had thrown her arm across her eyes, as if
afraid to face the light. Linda, with her hand on the other's
shoulder, stared fearlessly. Viola looked at his children. The
sun brought out the deep lines on his face, and, energetic in
expression, it had the immobility of a carving. It was impossible
to discover what he thought. Bushy grey eyebrows shaded his dark
glance.
"Well! And do you not pray like your mother?"
Linda pouted, advancing her red lips, which were almost too red;
but she had admirable eyes, brown, with a sparkle of gold in the
irises, full of intelligence and meaning, and so clear that they
seemed to throw a glow upon her thin, colourless face. There were
bronze glints in the sombre clusters of her hair, and the
eyelashes, long and coal black, made her complexion appear still
more pale.
"Mother is going to offer up a lot of candles in the church. She
always does when Nostromo has been away fighting. I shall have
some to carry up to the Chapel of the Madonna in the Cathedral."
She said all this quickly, with great assurance, in an animated,
penetrating voice. Then, giving her sister's shoulder a slight
shake, she added--
"And she will be made to carry one, too!"
"Why made?" inquired Giorgio, gravely. "Does she not want to?"
"She is timid," said Linda, with a little burst of laughter.
"People notice her fair hair as she goes along with us. They call
out after her, 'Look at the Rubia! Look at the Rubiacita!' They
call out in the streets. She is timid."
"And you? You are not timid--eh?" the father pronounced, slowly.
She tossed back all her dark hair.
"Nobody calls out after me."
Old Giorgio contemplated his children thoughtfully. There was
two years difference between them. They had been born to him
late, years after the boy had died. Had he lived he would have
been nearly as old as Gian' Battista--he whom the English called
Nostromo; but as to his daughters, the severity of his temper,
his advancing age, his absorption in his memories, had prevented
his taking much notice of them. He loved his children, but girls
belong more to the mother, and much of his affection had been
expended in the worship and service of liberty.
When quite a youth he had deserted from a ship trading to La
Plata, to enlist in the navy of Montevideo, then under the
command of Garibaldi. Afterwards, in the Italian legion of the
Republic struggling against the encroaching tyranny of Rosas, he
had taken part, on great plains, on the banks of immense rivers,
in the fiercest fighting perhaps the world had ever known. He
had lived amongst men who had declaimed about liberty, suffered
for liberty, died for liberty, with a desperate exaltation, and
with their eyes turned towards an oppressed Italy. His own
enthusiasm had been fed on scenes of carnage, on the examples of
lofty devotion, on the din of armed struggle, on the inflamed
language of proclamations. He had never parted from the chief of
his choice--the fiery apostle of independence--keeping by his
side in America and in Italy till after the fatal day of
Aspromonte, when the treachery of kings, emperors, and ministers
had been revealed to the world in the wounding and imprisonment
of his hero--a catastrophe that had instilled into him a gloomy
doubt of ever being able to understand the ways of Divine
justice.
He did not deny it, however. It required patience, he would say.
Though he disliked priests, and would not put his foot inside a
church for anything, he believed in God. Were not the
proclamations against tyrants addressed to the peoples in the
name of God and liberty? "God for men--religions for women," he
muttered sometimes. In Sicily, an Englishman who had turned up in
Palermo after its evacuation by the army of the king, had given
him a Bible in Italian--the publication of the British and
Foreign Bible Society, bound in a dark leather cover. In periods
of political adversity, in the pauses of silence when the
revolutionists issued no proclamations, Giorgio earned his living
with the first work that came to hand--as sailor, as dock
labourer on the quays of Genoa, once as a hand on a farm in the
hills above Spezzia--and in his spare time he studied the thick
volume. He carried it with him into battles. Now it was his only
reading, and in order not to be deprived of it (the print was
small) he had consented to accept the present of a pair of
silver-mounted spectacles from Senora Emilia Gould, the wife of
the Englishman who managed the silver mine in the mountains three
leagues from the town. She was the only Englishwoman in Sulaco.
Giorgio Viola had a great consideration for the English. This
feeling, born on the battlefields of Uruguay, was forty years old
at the very least. Several of them had poured their blood for the
cause of freedom in America, and the first he had ever known he
remembered by the name of Samuel; he commanded a negro company
under Garibaldi, during the famous siege of Montevideo, and died
heroically with his negroes at the fording of the Boyana. He,
Giorgio, had reached the rank of ensign-alferez-and cooked for
the general. Later, in Italy, he, with the rank of lieutenant,
rode with the staff and still cooked for the general. He had
cooked for him in Lombardy through the whole campaign; on the
march to Rome he had lassoed his beef in the Campagna after the
American manner; he had been wounded in the defence of the Roman
Republic; he was one of the four fugitives who, with the general,
carried out of the woods the inanimate body of the general's wife
into the farmhouse where she died, exhausted by the hardships of
that terrible retreat. He had survived that disastrous time to
attend his general in Palermo when the Neapolitan shells from the
castle crashed upon the town. He had cooked for him on the field
of Volturno after fighting all day. And everywhere he had seen
Englishmen in the front rank of the army of freedom. He respected
their nation because they loved Garibaldi. Their very countesses
and princesses had kissed the general's hands in London, it was
said. He could well believe it; for the nation was noble, and the
man was a saint. It was enough to look once at his face to see
the divine force of faith in him and his great pity for all that
was poor, suffering, and oppressed in this world.
The spirit of self-forgetfulness, the simple devotion to a vast
humanitarian idea which inspired the thought and stress of that
revolutionary time, had left its mark upon Giorgio in a sort of
austere contempt for all personal advantage. This man, whom the
lowest class in Sulaco suspected of having a buried hoard in his
kitchen, had all his life despised money. The leaders of his
youth had lived poor, had died poor. It had been a habit of his
mind to disregard to-morrow. It was engendered partly by an
existence of excitement, adventure, and wild warfare. But mostly
it was a matter of principle. It did not resemble the
carelessness of a condottiere, it was a puritanism of conduct,
born of stern enthusiasm like the puritanism of religion.
This stern devotion to a cause had cast a gloom upon Giorgio's
old age. It cast a gloom because the cause seemed lost. Too many
kings and emperors flourished yet in the world which God had
meant for the people. He was sad because of his simplicity.
Though always ready to help his countrymen, and greatly respected
by the Italian emigrants wherever he lived (in his exile he
called it), he could not conceal from himself that they cared
nothing for the wrongs of down-trodden nations. They listened to
his tales of war readily, but seemed to ask themselves what he
had got out of it after all. There was nothing that they could
see. "We wanted nothing, we suffered for the love of all
humanity!" he cried out furiously sometimes, and the powerful
voice, the blazing eyes, the shaking of the white mane, the
brown, sinewy hand pointing upwards as if to call heaven to
witness, impressed his hearers. After the old man hadbroken off
abruptly with a jerk of the head and a movement of the arm,
meaning clearly, "But what's the good of talking to you?" they
nudged each other. There was in old Giorgio an energy of
feeling, a personal quality of conviction, something they called
"terribilita"--"an old lion," they used to say of him. Some
slight incident, a chance word would set him off talking on the
beach to the Italian fishermen of Maldonado, in the little shop
he kept afterwards (in Valparaiso) to his countrymen customers;
of an evening, suddenly, in the cafe at one end of the Casa Viola
(the other was reserved for the English engineers) to the select
clientele of engine-drivers and foremen of the railway shops.
With their handsome, bronzed, lean faces, shiny black ringlets,
glistening eyes, broad-chested, bearded, sometimes a tiny gold
ring in the lobe of the ear, the aristocracy of the railway works
listened to him, turning away from their cards or dominoes. Here
and there a fair-haired Basque studied his hand meantime, waiting
without protest. No native of Costaguana intruded there. This was
the Italian stronghold. Even the Sulaco policemen on a night
patrol let their horses pace softly by, bending low in the saddle
to glance through the window at the heads in a fog of smoke; and
the drone of old Giorgio's declamatory narrative seemed to sink
behind them into the plain. Only now and then the assistant of
the chief of police, some broad-faced, brown little gentleman,
with a great deal of Indian in him, would put in an appearance.
Leaving his man outside with the horses he advanced with a
confident, sly smile, and without a word up to the long trestle
table. He pointed to one of the bottles on the shelf; Giorgio,
thrusting his pipe into his mouth abruptly, served him in person.
Nothing would be heard but the slight jingle of the spurs. His
glass emptied, he would take a leisurely, scrutinizing look all
round the room, go out, and ride away slowly, circling towards
the town. _
Read next: PART FIRST - THE SILVER OF THE MINE: CHAPTER V
Read previous: PART FIRST - THE SILVER OF THE MINE: CHAPTER III
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