Nostromo E-Book

Joseph Conrad

• Herausgeber: Infilaindiana Edizioni
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Nostromo – A Tale of the Seaboard is a novel, originally published serially for T.P.’s Weekly in1904, set in Costaguana, an imaginary country of South America that in its description recalls Colombia. Two characters dominate the plot: Mrs. Gould, who owns a silver-minig concession near the city of Sulaco, and the anti-hero Nostromo, an Italian expatriate. After Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness this novel marks the end of the first part of Conrad’s literary production.
This ebook contains the Author’s Note at the first edition in which Conrad explains the origins of this novel.

Joseph Conrad (Berdychiv, December 3, 1857 – Bishopsbourne, August 3, 1924) was a polish writer naturalized british. He is considered one of the most important modern writers in the english language.

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Introduction

Nostromo – A Tale of the Seaboard is a novel, originally published serially for T.P.’s Weekly in1904, set in Costaguana, an imaginary country of South America that in its description recalls Colombia. Two characters dominate the plot: Mrs. Gould, who owns a silver-minig concession near the city of Sulaco, and the anti-hero Nostromo, an Italian expatriate. After Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness this novel marks the end of the first part of Conrad’s literary production.

This ebook contains the Author’s Note at the first edition in which Conrad explains the origins of this novel.

Joseph Conrad (Berdychiv, December 3, 1857 – Bishopsbourne, August 3, 1924) was a polish writer naturalized british. He is considered one of the most important modern writers in the english language.

Nostromo

A Tale of the Seaboard

By

Joseph Conrad

So foul a sky clears not without a storm

Shakespeare

To John Galsworthy

Author’s note

“Nostromo” is the most anxiously meditated of the longer novels which

belong to the period following upon the publication of the “Typhoon”

volume of short stories.

I don’t mean to say that I became then conscious of any impending change

in my mentality and in my attitude towards the tasks of my writing

life. And perhaps there was never any change, except in that mysterious,

extraneous thing which has nothing to do with the theories of art; a

subtle change in the nature of the inspiration; a phenomenon for which I

can not in any way be held responsible. What, however, did cause me some

concern was that after finishing the last story of the “Typhoon” volume

it seemed somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write

about.

This so strangely negative but disturbing mood lasted some little

time; and then, as with many of my longer stories, the first hint for

“Nostromo” came to me in the shape of a vagrant anecdote completely

destitute of valuable details.

As a matter of fact in 1875 or ‘6, when very young, in the West Indies

or rather in the Gulf of Mexico, for my contacts with land were short,

few, and fleeting, I heard the story of some man who was supposed to

have stolen single-handed a whole lighter-full of silver, somewhere on

the Tierra Firme seaboard during the troubles of a revolution.

On the face of it this was something of a feat. But I heard no details,

and having no particular interest in crime qua crime I was not likely to

keep that one in my mind. And I forgot it till twenty-six or seven

years afterwards I came upon the very thing in a shabby volume picked

up outside a second-hand book-shop. It was the life story of an American

seaman written by himself with the assistance of a journalist. In the

course of his wanderings that American sailor worked for some months on

board a schooner, the master and owner of which was the thief of whom I

had heard in my very young days. I have no doubt of that because there

could hardly have been two exploits of that peculiar kind in the same

part of the world and both connected with a South American revolution.

The fellow had actually managed to steal a lighter with silver, and

this, it seems, only because he was implicitly trusted by his employers,

who must have been singularly poor judges of character. In the sailor’s

story he is represented as an unmitigated rascal, a small cheat,

stupidly ferocious, morose, of mean appearance, and altogether unworthy

of the greatness this opportunity had thrust upon him. What was

interesting was that he would boast of it openly.

He used to say: “People think I make a lot of money in this schooner of

mine. But that is nothing. I don’t care for that. Now and then I go

away quietly and lift a bar of silver. I must get rich slowly – you

understand.”

There was also another curious point about the man. Once in the course

of some quarrel the sailor threatened him: “What’s to prevent me

reporting ashore what you have told me about that silver?”

The cynical ruffian was not alarmed in the least. He actually laughed.

“You fool, if you dare talk like that on shore about me you will get a

knife stuck in your back. Every man, woman, and child in that port is

my friend. And who’s to prove the lighter wasn’t sunk? I didn’t show you

where the silver is hidden. Did I? So you know nothing. And suppose I

lied? Eh?”

Ultimately the sailor, disgusted with the sordid meanness of that

impenitent thief, deserted from the schooner. The whole episode takes

about three pages of his autobiography. Nothing to speak of; but as I

looked them over, the curious confirmation of the few casual words

heard in my early youth evoked the memories of that distant time when

everything was so fresh, so surprising, so venturesome, so interesting;

bits of strange coasts under the stars, shadows of hills in the

sunshine, men’s passions in the dusk, gossip half-forgotten, faces grown

dim… Perhaps, perhaps, there still was in the world something to

write about. Yet I did not see anything at first in the mere story. A

rascal steals a large parcel of a valuable commodity – so people say.

It’s either true or untrue; and in any case it has no value in itself.

To invent a circumstantial account of the robbery did not appeal to me,

because my talents not running that way I did not think that the game

was worth the candle. It was only when it dawned upon me that the

purloiner of the treasure need not necessarily be a confirmed rogue,

that he could be even a man of character, an actor and possibly a victim

in the changing scenes of a revolution, it was only then that I had the

first vision of a twilight country which was to become the province

of Sulaco, with its high shadowy Sierra and its misty Campo for mute

witnesses of events flowing from the passions of men short-sighted in

good and evil.

Such are in very truth the obscure origins of “Nostromo” – the book. From

that moment, I suppose, it had to be. Yet even then I hesitated, as if

warned by the instinct of self-preservation from venturing on a distant

and toilsome journey into a land full of intrigues and revolutions. But

it had to be done.

It took the best part of the years 1903-4 to do; with many intervals

of renewed hesitation, lest I should lose myself in the ever-enlarging

vistas opening before me as I progressed deeper in my knowledge of the

country. Often, also, when I had thought myself to a standstill over the

tangled-up affairs of the Republic, I would, figuratively speaking, pack

my bag, rush away from Sulaco for a change of air and write a few pages

of the “Mirror of the Sea.” But generally, as I’ve said before, my

sojourn on the Continent of Latin America, famed for its hospitality,

lasted for about two years. On my return I found (speaking somewhat in

the style of Captain Gulliver) my family all well, my wife heartily

glad to learn that the fuss was all over, and our small boy considerably

grown during my absence.

My principal authority for the history of Costaguana is, of course, my

venerated friend, the late Don Jose Avellanos, Minister to the Courts of

England and Spain, etc., etc., in his impartial and eloquent “History of

Fifty Years of Misrule.” That work was never published – the reader will

discover why – and I am in fact the only person in the world possessed

of its contents. I have mastered them in not a few hours of earnest

meditation, and I hope that my accuracy will be trusted. In justice to

myself, and to allay the fears of prospective readers, I beg to point

out that the few historical allusions are never dragged in for the

sake of parading my unique erudition, but that each of them is closely

related to actuality; either throwing a light on the nature of current

events or affecting directly the fortunes of the people of whom I speak.

As to their own histories I have tried to set them down, Aristocracy

and People, men and women, Latin and Anglo-Saxon, bandit and politician,

with as cool a hand as was possible 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 Tome 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 the horizon from within the monkish hood shadowing his

face, he would utter the usual exordium of his remorseless wisdom: “_Vous

autres gentilhommes!_” in a caustic tone that hangs on my ear yet. Like

Nostromo! “You _hombres finos!_” Very much like Nostromo. But Dominic the

Corsican nursed a certain pride of ancestry from which my Nostromo is

free; for Nostromo’s lineage had to be more ancient still. He is a man

with the weight of countless generations behind him and no parentage to

boast of… Like the People.

In his firm grip on the earth he inherits, in his improvidence and

generosity, in his lavishness with his gifts, in his manly vanity, in

the obscure sense of his greatness and in his faithful devotion with

something despairing as well as desperate in its impulses, he is a Man

of the People, their very own unenvious force, disdaining to lead but

ruling from within. Years afterwards, grown older as the famous Captain

Fidanza, with a stake in the country, going about his many affairs

followed by respectful glances in the modernized streets of Sulaco,

calling on the widow of the cargador, attending the Lodge, listening in

unmoved silence to anarchist speeches at the meeting, the enigmatical

patron of the new revolutionary agitation, the trusted, the wealthy

comrade Fidanza with the knowledge of his moral ruin locked up in his

breast, he remains essentially a Man of the People. In his mingled

love and scorn of life and in the bewildered conviction of having been

betrayed, of dying betrayed he hardly knows by what or by whom, he is

still of the People, their undoubted Great Man – with a private history

of his own.

One more figure of those stirring times I would like to mention: and

that is Antonia Avellanos – the “beautiful Antonia.” Whether she is a

possible variation of Latin-American girlhood I wouldn’t dare to affirm.

But, for me, she is. Always a little in the background by the side of

her father (my venerated friend) I hope she has yet relief enough to

make intelligible what I am going to say. Of all the people who had seen

with me the birth of the Occidental Republic, she is the only one

who has kept in my memory the aspect of continued life. Antonia the

Aristocrat and Nostromo the Man of the People are the artisans of the

New Era, the true creators of the New State; he by his legendary and

daring feat, she, like a woman, simply by the force of what she is:

the only being capable of inspiring a sincere passion in the heart of a

trifler.

If anything could induce me to revisit Sulaco (I should hate to see all

these changes) it would be Antonia. And the true reason for that – why

not be frank about it? – the true reason is that I have modelled her on

my first love. How we, a band of tallish schoolboys, the chums of

her two brothers, how we used to look up to that girl just out of the

schoolroom herself, as the standard-bearer of a faith to which we all

were born but which she alone knew how to hold aloft with an unflinching

hope! She had perhaps more glow and less serenity in her soul than

Antonia, but she was an uncompromising Puritan of patriotism with no

taint of the slightest worldliness in her thoughts. I was not the only

one in love with her; but it was I who had to hear oftenest her scathing

criticism of my levities – very much like poor Decoud – or stand the

brunt of her austere, unanswerable invective. She did not quite

understand – but never mind. That afternoon when I came in, a shrinking

yet defiant sinner, to say the final good-bye I received a hand-squeeze

that made my heart leap and saw a tear that took my breath away. She was

softened at the last as though she had suddenly perceived (we were such

children still!) that I was really going away for good, going very far

away – even as far as Sulaco, lying unknown, hidden from our eyes in the

darkness of the Placid Gulf.

That’s why I long sometimes for another glimpse of the “beautiful

Antonia” (or can it be the Other?) moving in the dimness of the great

cathedral, saying a short prayer at the tomb of the first and last

Cardinal-Archbishop of Sulaco, standing absorbed in filial devotion

before the monument of Don Jose Avellanos, and, with a lingering,

tender, faithful glance at the medallion-memorial to Martin Decoud,

going out serenely into the sunshine of the Plaza with her upright

carriage and her white head; a relic of the past disregarded by men

awaiting impatiently the Dawns of other New Eras, the coming of more

Revolutions.

But this is the idlest of dreams; for I did understand perfectly well

at the time that the moment the breath left the body of the Magnificent

Capataz, the Man of the People, freed at last from the toils of love and

wealth, there was nothing more for me to do in Sulaco.

J. C.

October, 1917.

Part first

The Silver of the Mine

Chapter one

In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of

Sulaco – the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its

antiquity – had never been commercially anything more important than a

coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo.

The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the conquerors that, needing a brisk

gale to move at all, would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on

clipper lines forges ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had been

barred out of Sulaco by the prevailing calms of its vast gulf. Some

harbours of the earth are made difficult of access by the treachery

of sunken rocks and the tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an

inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in

the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous

semi-circular and unroofed temple open to the ocean, with its walls of

lofty mountains hung with the mourning draperies of cloud.

On one side of this broad curve in the straight seaboard of the Republic

of Costaguana, the last spur of the coast range forms an insignificant

cape whose name is Punta Mala. From the middle of the gulf the point of

the land itself is not visible at all; but the shoulder of a steep hill

at the back can be made out faintly like a shadow on the sky.

On the other side, what seems to be an isolated patch of blue mist

floats lightly on the glare of the horizon. This is the peninsula

of Azuera, a wild chaos of sharp rocks and stony levels cut about by

vertical ravines. It lies far out to sea like a rough head of stone

stretched from a green-clad coast at the end of a slender neck of

sand covered with thickets of thorny scrub. Utterly waterless, for the

rainfall runs off at once on all sides into the sea, it has not soil

enough – it is said – to grow a single blade of grass, as if it were

blighted by a curse. The poor, associating by an obscure instinct of

consolation the ideas of evil and wealth, will tell you that it is

deadly because of its forbidden treasures. The common folk of the

neighbourhood, peons of the estancias, vaqueros of the seaboard plains,

tame Indians coming miles to market with a bundle of sugar-cane or a

basket of maize worth about threepence, are well aware that heaps of

shining gold lie in the gloom of the deep precipices cleaving the stony

levels of Azuera. Tradition has it that many adventurers of olden time

had perished in the search. The story goes also that within men’s memory

two wandering sailors – Americanos, perhaps, but gringos of some sort for

certain – talked over a gambling, good-for-nothing mozo, and the three

stole a donkey to carry for them a bundle of dry sticks, a water-skin,

and provisions enough to last a few days. Thus accompanied, and with

revolvers at their belts, they had started to chop their way with

machetes through the thorny scrub on the neck of the peninsula.

On the second evening an upright spiral of smoke (it could only have

been from their camp-fire) was seen for the first time within memory of

man standing up faintly upon the sky above a razor-backed ridge on the

stony head. The crew of a coasting schooner, lying becalmed three miles

off the shore, stared at it with amazement till dark. A negro fisherman,

living in a lonely hut in a little bay near by, had seen the start and

was on the lookout for some sign. He called to his wife just as the

sun was about to set. They had watched the strange portent with envy,

incredulity, and awe.

The impious adventurers gave no other sign. The sailors, the Indian,

and the stolen burro were never seen again. As to the mozo, a Sulaco

man – his wife paid for some masses, and the poor four-footed beast,

being without sin, had been probably permitted to die; but the two

gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to be dwelling to this day

amongst the rocks, under the fatal spell of their success. Their souls

cannot tear themselves away from their bodies mounting guard over the

discovered treasure. They are now rich and hungry and thirsty – a strange

theory of tenacious gringo ghosts suffering in their starved and parched

flesh of defiant heretics, where a Christian would have renounced and

been released.

These, then, are the legendary inhabitants of Azuera guarding its

forbidden wealth; and the shadow on the sky on one side with the round

patch of blue haze blurring the bright skirt of the horizon on the

other, mark the two outermost points of the bend which bears the name of

Golfo Placido, because never a strong wind had been known to blow upon

its waters.

On crossing the imaginary line drawn from Punta Mala to Azuera the

ships from Europe bound to Sulaco lose at once the strong breezes of the

ocean. They become the prey of capricious airs that play with them for

thirty hours at a stretch sometimes. Before them the head of the calm

gulf is filled on most days of the year by a great body of motionless

and opaque clouds. On the rare clear mornings another shadow is cast

upon the sweep of the gulf. The dawn breaks high behind the towering

and serrated wall of the Cordillera, a clear-cut vision of dark peaks

rearing their steep slopes on a lofty pedestal of forest rising from the

very edge of the shore. Amongst them the white head of Higuerota rises

majestically upon the blue. Bare clusters of enormous rocks sprinkle

with tiny black dots the smooth dome of snow.

Then, as the midday sun withdraws from the gulf the shadow of the

mountains, the clouds begin to roll out of the lower valleys. They

swathe in sombre tatters the naked crags of precipices above the wooded

slopes, hide the peaks, smoke in stormy trails across the snows of

Higuerota. The Cordillera is gone from you as if it had dissolved itself

into great piles of grey and black vapours that travel out slowly to

seaward and vanish into thin air all along the front before the blazing

heat of the day. The wasting edge of the cloud-bank always strives for,

but seldom wins, the middle of the gulf. The sun – as the sailors say – is

eating it up. Unless perchance a sombre thunder-head breaks away from

the main body to career all over the gulf till it escapes into the

offing beyond Azuera, where it bursts suddenly into flame and crashes

like a sinster pirate-ship of the air, hove-to above the horizon,

engaging the sea.

At night the body of clouds advancing higher up the sky smothers the

whole quiet gulf below with an impenetrable darkness, in which the sound

of the falling showers can be heard beginning and ceasing abruptly – now

here, now there. Indeed, these cloudy nights are proverbial with the

seamen along the whole west coast of a great continent. Sky, land, and

sea disappear together out of the world when the Placido – as the saying

is – goes to sleep under its black poncho. The few stars left below the

seaward frown of the vault shine feebly as into the mouth of a black

cavern. In its vastness your ship floats unseen under your feet, her

sails flutter invisible above your head. The eye of God Himself – they

add with grim profanity – could not find out what work a man’s hand is

doing in there; and you would be free to call the devil to your aid with

impunity if even his malice were not defeated by such a blind darkness.

The shores on the gulf are steep-to all round; three uninhabited islets

basking in the sunshine just outside the cloud veil, and opposite the

entrance to the harbour of Sulaco, bear the name of “The Isabels.”

There is the Great Isabel; the Little Isabel, which is round; and

Hermosa, which is the smallest.

That last is no more than a foot high, and about seven paces across,

a mere flat top of a grey rock which smokes like a hot cinder after

a shower, and where no man would care to venture a naked sole before

sunset. On the Little Isabel an old ragged palm, with a thick bulging

trunk rough with spines, a very witch amongst palm trees, rustles a

dismal bunch of dead leaves above the coarse sand. The Great Isabel has

a spring of fresh water issuing from the overgrown side of a ravine.

Resembling an emerald green wedge of land a mile long, and laid flat

upon the sea, it bears two forest trees standing close together, with

a wide spread of shade at the foot of their smooth trunks. A ravine

extending the whole length of the island is full of bushes; and

presenting a deep tangled cleft on the high side spreads itself out on

the other into a shallow depression abutting on a small strip of sandy

shore.

From that low end of the Great Isabel the eye plunges through an opening

two miles away, as abrupt as if chopped with an axe out of the regular

sweep of the coast, right into the harbour of Sulaco. It is an oblong,

lake-like piece of water. On one side the short wooded spurs and valleys

of the Cordillera come down at right angles to the very strand; on

the other the open view of the great Sulaco plain passes into the opal

mystery of great distances overhung by dry haze. The town of Sulaco

itself – tops of walls, a great cupola, gleams of white miradors in a

vast grove of orange trees – lies between the mountains and the plain,

at some little distance from its harbour and out of the direct line of

sight from the sea.

Chapter two

The only sign of commercial activity within the harbour, visible from

the beach of the Great Isabel, is the square blunt end of the wooden

jetty which the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company (the O.S.N. of familiar

speech) had thrown over the shallow part of the bay soon after they had

resolved to make of Sulaco one of their ports of call for the Republic

of Costaguana. The State possesses several harbours on its long

seaboard, but except Cayta, an important place, all are either small

and inconvenient inlets in an iron-bound coast – like Esmeralda, for

instance, sixty miles to the south – or else mere open roadsteads exposed

to the winds and fretted by the surf.

Perhaps the very atmospheric conditions which had kept away the

merchant fleets of bygone ages induced the O.S.N. Company to violate the

sanctuary of peace sheltering the calm existence of Sulaco. The variable

airs sporting lightly with the vast semicircle of waters within the head

of Azuera could not baffle the steam power of their excellent fleet.

Year after year the black hulls of their ships had gone up and down

the coast, in and out, past Azuera, past the Isabels, past Punta

Mala – disregarding everything but the tyranny of time. Their names, the

names of all mythology, became the household words of a coast that had

never been ruled by the gods of Olympus. The Juno was known only for

her comfortable cabins amidships, the Saturn for the geniality of her

captain and the painted and gilt luxuriousness of her saloon, whereas

the Ganymede was fitted out mainly for cattle transport, and to be

avoided by coastwise passengers. The humblest Indian in the obscurest

village on the coast was familiar with the Cerberus, a little black

puffer without charm or living accommodation to speak of, whose mission

was to creep inshore along the wooded beaches close to mighty ugly

rocks, stopping obligingly before every cluster of huts to collect

produce, down to three-pound parcels of indiarubber bound in a wrapper

of dry grass.

And as they seldom failed to account for the smallest package, rarely

lost a bullock, and had never drowned a single passenger, the name of

the O.S.N. stood very high for trustworthiness. People declared that

under the Company’s care their lives and property were safer on the

water than in their own houses on shore.

The O.S.N.’s superintendent in Sulaco for the whole Costaguana section

of the service was very proud of his Company’s standing. He resumed it

in a saying which was very often on his lips, “We never make mistakes.”

To the Company’s officers it took the form of a severe injunction, “We

must make no mistakes. I’ll have no mistakes here, no matter what Smith

may do at his end.”

Smith, on whom he had never set eyes in his life, was the other

superintendent of the service, quartered some fifteen hundred miles away

from Sulaco. “Don’t talk to me of your Smith.”

Then, calming down suddenly, he would dismiss the subject with studied

negligence.

“Smith knows no more of this continent than a baby.”

“Our excellent Senor Mitchell” for the business and official world of

Sulaco; “Fussy Joe” for the commanders of the Company’s ships, Captain

Joseph Mitchell prided himself on his profound knowledge of men and

things in the country – cosas de Costaguana. Amongst these last he

accounted as most unfavourable to the orderly working of his Company

the frequent changes of government brought about by revolutions of the

military type.

The political atmosphere of the Republic was generally stormy in these

days. The fugitive patriots of the defeated party had the knack of

turning up again on the coast with half a steamer’s load of small arms

and ammunition. Such resourcefulness Captain Mitchell considered as

perfectly wonderful in view of their utter destitution at the time of

flight. He had observed that “they never seemed to have enough change

about them to pay for their passage ticket out of the country.” And

he could speak with knowledge; for on a memorable occasion he had been

called upon to save the life of a dictator, together with the lives of a

few Sulaco officials – the political chief, the director of the customs,

and the head of police – belonging to an overturned government. Poor

Senor Ribiera (such was the dictator’s name) had come pelting eighty

miles over mountain tracks after the lost battle of Socorro, in the hope

of out-distancing the fatal news – which, of course, he could not manage

to do on a lame mule. The animal, moreover, expired under him at the end

of the Alameda, where the military band plays sometimes in the evenings

between the revolutions. “Sir,” Captain Mitchell would pursue with

portentous gravity, “the ill-timed end of that mule attracted attention

to the unfortunate rider. His features were recognized by several

deserters from the Dictatorial army amongst the rascally mob already

engaged in smashing the windows of the Intendencia.”

Early on the morning of that day the local authorities of Sulaco had

fled for refuge to the O.S.N. Company’s offices, a strong building

near the shore end of the jetty, leaving the town to the mercies of a

revolutionary rabble; and as the Dictator was execrated by the populace

on account of the severe recruitment law his necessities had compelled

him to enforce during the struggle, he stood a good chance of being

torn to pieces. Providentially, Nostromo – invaluable fellow – with some

Italian workmen, imported to work upon the National Central Railway,

was at hand, and managed to snatch him away – for the time at least.

Ultimately, Captain Mitchell succeeded in taking everybody off in his

own gig to one of the Company’s steamers – it was the Minerva – just then,

as luck would have it, entering the harbour.

He had to lower these gentlemen at the end of a rope out of a hole in

the wall at the back, while the mob which, pouring out of the town, had

spread itself all along the shore, howled and foamed at the foot of the

building in front. He had to hurry them then the whole length of the

jetty; it had been a desperate dash, neck or nothing – and again it was

Nostromo, a fellow in a thousand, who, at the head, this time, of the

Company’s body of lightermen, held the jetty against the rushes of the

rabble, thus giving the fugitives time to reach the gig lying ready

for them at the other end with the Company’s flag at the stern. Sticks,

stones, shots flew; knives, too, were thrown. Captain Mitchell exhibited

willingly the long cicatrice of a cut over his left ear and temple, made

by a razor-blade fastened to a stick – a weapon, he explained, very much

in favour with the “worst kind of nigger out here.”

Captain Mitchell was a thick, elderly man, wearing high, pointed collars

and short side-whiskers, partial to white waistcoats, and really very

communicative under his air of pompous reserve.

“These gentlemen,” he would say, staring with great solemnity, “had

to run like rabbits, sir. I ran like a rabbit myself. Certain forms of

death are – er – distasteful to a – a – er – respectable man. They would have

pounded me to death, too. A crazy mob, sir, does not discriminate. Under

providence we owed our preservation to my Capataz de Cargadores, as they

called him in the town, a man who, when I discovered his value, sir, was

just the bos’n of an Italian ship, a big Genoese ship, one of the few

European ships that ever came to Sulaco with a general cargo before the

building of the National Central. He left her on account of some very

respectable friends he made here, his own countrymen, but also, I

suppose, to better himself. Sir, I am a pretty good judge of character.

I engaged him to be the foreman of our lightermen, and caretaker of our

jetty. That’s all that he was. But without him Senor Ribiera would have

been a dead man. This Nostromo, sir, a man absolutely above reproach,

became the terror of all the thieves in the town. We were infested,

infested, overrun, sir, here at that time by ladrones and matreros,

thieves and murderers from the whole province. On this occasion they

had been flocking into Sulaco for a week past. They had scented the end,

sir. Fifty per cent. of that murdering mob were professional bandits

from the Campo, sir, but there wasn’t one that hadn’t heard of Nostromo.

As to the town leperos, sir, the sight of his black whiskers and white

teeth was enough for them. They quailed before him, sir. That’s what the

force of character will do for you.”

It could very well be said that it was Nostromo alone who saved the

lives of these gentlemen. Captain Mitchell, on his part, never left them

till he had seen them collapse, panting, terrified, and exasperated,

but safe, on the luxuriant velvet sofas in the first-class saloon of the

Minerva. To the very last he had been careful to address the ex-Dictator

as “Your Excellency.”

“Sir, I could do no other. The man was down – ghastly, livid, one mass of

scratches.”

The Minerva never let go her anchor that call. The superintendent

ordered her out of the harbour at once. No cargo could be landed, of

course, and the passengers for Sulaco naturally refused to go ashore.

They could hear the firing and see plainly the fight going on at the

edge of the water. The repulsed mob devoted its energies to an attack

upon the Custom House, a dreary, unfinished-looking structure with many

windows two hundred yards away from the O.S.N. Offices, and the only

other building near the harbour. Captain Mitchell, after directing the

commander of the Minerva to land “these gentlemen” in the first port of

call outside Costaguana, went back in his gig to see what could be done

for the protection of the Company’s property. That and the property

of the railway were preserved by the European residents; that is, by

Captain Mitchell himself and the staff of engineers building the road,

aided by the Italian and Basque workmen who rallied faithfully round

their English chiefs. The Company’s lightermen, too, natives of the

Republic, behaved very well under their Capataz. An outcast lot of

very mixed blood, mainly negroes, everlastingly at feud with the other

customers of low grog shops in the town, they embraced with delight

this opportunity to settle their personal scores under such favourable

auspices. There was not one of them that had not, at some time or other,

looked with terror at Nostromo’s revolver poked very close at his face,

or been otherwise daunted by Nostromo’s resolution. He was “much of a

man,” their Capataz was, they said, too scornful in his temper ever to

utter abuse, a tireless taskmaster, and the more to be feared because

of his aloofness. And behold! there he was that day, at their head,

condescending to make jocular remarks to this man or the other.

Such leadership was inspiriting, and in truth all the harm the

mob managed to achieve was to set fire to one – only one – stack of

railway-sleepers, which, being creosoted, burned well. The main attack

on the railway yards, on the O.S.N. Offices, and especially on the

Custom House, whose strong room, it was well known, contained a large

treasure in silver ingots, failed completely. Even the little hotel kept

by old Giorgio, standing alone halfway between the harbour and the town,

escaped looting and destruction, not by a miracle, but because with the

safes in view they had neglected it at first, and afterwards found no

leisure to stop. Nostromo, with his Cargadores, was pressing them too

hard then.

Chapter three

It might have been said that there he was only protecting his own. From

the first he had been admitted to live in the intimacy of the family

of the hotel-keeper who was a countryman of his. Old Giorgio Viola,

a Genoese with a shaggy white leonine head – often called simply “the

Garibaldino” (as Mohammedans are called after their prophet) – was, to

use Captain Mitchell’s own words, the “respectable married friend” by

whose advice Nostromo had left his ship to try for a run of shore luck

in Costaguana.

The old man, full of scorn for the populace, as your austere republican

so often is, had disregarded the preliminary sounds of trouble. He

went on that day as usual pottering about the “casa” in his slippers,

muttering angrily to himself his contempt of the non-political nature of

the riot, and shrugging his shoulders. In the end he was taken unawares

by the out-rush of the rabble. It was too late then to remove his

family, and, indeed, where could he have run to with the portly Signora

Teresa and two little girls on that great plain? So, barricading every

opening, the old man sat down sternly in the middle of the darkened cafe

with an old shot-gun on his knees. His wife sat on another chair by his

side, muttering pious invocations to all the saints of the calendar.

The old republican did not believe in saints, or in prayers, or in

what he called “priest’s religion.” Liberty and Garibaldi were his

divinities; but he tolerated “superstition” in women, preserving in

these matters a lofty and silent attitude.

His two girls, the eldest fourteen, and the other two years younger,

crouched on the sanded floor, on each side of the Signora Teresa, with

their heads on their mother’s lap, both scared, but each in her own

way, the dark-haired Linda indignant and angry, the fair Giselle, the

younger, bewildered and resigned. The Patrona removed her arms, which

embraced her daughters, for a moment to cross herself and wring her

hands hurriedly. She moaned a little louder.

“Oh! Gian’ Battista, why art thou not here? Oh! why art thou not here?”

She was not then invoking the saint himself, but calling upon Nostromo,

whose patron he was. And Giorgio, motionless on the chair by her side,

would be provoked by these reproachful and distracted appeals.

“Peace, woman! Where’s the sense of it? There’s his duty,” he murmured

in the dark; and she would retort, panting –

“Eh! I have no patience. Duty! What of the woman who has been like a

mother to him? I bent my knee to him this morning; don’t you go out,

Gian’ Battista – stop in the house, Battistino – look at those two little

innocent children!”

Mrs. Viola was an Italian, too, a native of Spezzia, and though

considerably younger than her husband, already middle-aged. She had a

handsome face, whose complexion had turned yellow because the climate

of Sulaco did not suit her at all. Her voice was a rich contralto. When,

with her arms folded tight under her ample bosom, she scolded the squat,

thick-legged China girls handling linen, plucking fowls, pounding corn

in wooden mortars amongst the mud outbuildings at the back of the house,

she could bring out such an impassioned, vibrating, sepulchral note that

the chained watch-dog bolted into his kennel with a great rattle. Luis,

a cinnamon-coloured mulatto with a sprouting moustache and thick, dark

lips, would stop sweeping the cafe with a broom of palm-leaves to let

a gentle shudder run down his spine. His languishing almond eyes would

remain closed for a long time.

This was the staff of the Casa Viola, but all these people had fled

early that morning at the first sounds of the riot, preferring to hide

on the plain rather than trust themselves in the house; a preference for

which they were in no way to blame, since, whether true or not, it

was generally believed in the town that the Garibaldino had some money

buried under the clay floor of the kitchen. The dog, an irritable,

shaggy brute, barked violently and whined plaintively in turns at the

back, running in and out of his kennel as rage or fear prompted him.

Bursts of great shouting rose and died away, like wild gusts of wind on

the plain round the barricaded house; the fitful popping of shots

grew louder above the yelling. Sometimes there were intervals of

unaccountable stillness outside, and nothing could have been more gaily

peaceful than the narrow bright lines of sunlight from the cracks in the

shutters, ruled straight across the cafe over the disarranged chairs

and tables to the wall opposite. Old Giorgio had chosen that bare,

whitewashed room for a retreat. It had only one window, and its only

door swung out upon the track of thick dust fenced by aloe hedges

between the harbour and the town, where clumsy carts used to creak along

behind slow yokes of oxen guided by boys on horseback.

In a pause of stillness Giorgio cocked his gun. The ominous sound wrung

a low moan from the rigid figure of the woman sitting by his side. A

sudden outbreak of defiant yelling quite near the house sank all at once

to a confused murmur of growls. Somebody ran along; the loud catching of

his breath was heard for an instant passing the door; there were hoarse

mutters and footsteps near the wall; a shoulder rubbed against the

shutter, effacing the bright lines of sunshine pencilled across the

whole breadth of the room. Signora Teresa’s arms thrown about the

kneeling forms of her daughters embraced them closer with a convulsive

pressure.

The mob, driven away from the Custom House, had broken up into several

bands, retreating across the plain in the direction of the town. The

subdued crash of irregular volleys fired in the distance was answered by

faint yells far away. In the intervals the single shots rang feebly, and

the low, long, white building blinded in every window seemed to be

the centre of a turmoil widening in a great circle about its closed-up

silence. But the cautious movements and whispers of a routed party

seeking a momentary shelter behind the wall made the darkness of the

room, striped by threads of quiet sunlight, alight with evil, stealthy

sounds. The Violas had them in their ears as though invisible ghosts

hovering about their chairs had consulted in mutters as to the

advisability of setting fire to this foreigner’s casa.

It was trying to the nerves. Old Viola had risen slowly, gun in hand,

irresolute, for he did not see how he could prevent them. Already voices

could be heard talking at the back. Signora Teresa was beside herself

with terror.

“Ah! the traitor! the traitor!” she mumbled, almost inaudibly. “Now we

are going to be burnt; and I bent my knee to him. No! he must run at the

heels of his English.”

She seemed to think that Nostromo’s mere presence in the house would

have made it perfectly safe. So far, she, too, was under the spell of

that reputation the Capataz de Cargadores had made for himself by

the waterside, along the railway line, with the English and with the

populace of Sulaco. To his face, and even against her husband, she

invariably affected to laugh it to scorn, sometimes good-naturedly,

more often with a curious bitterness. But then women are unreasonable in

their opinions, as Giorgio used to remark calmly on fitting occasions.

On this occasion, with his gun held at ready before him, he stooped down

to his wife’s head, and, keeping his eyes steadfastly on the barricaded

door, he breathed out into her ear that Nostromo would have been

powerless to help. What could two men shut up in a house do against

twenty or more bent upon setting fire to the roof? Gian’ Battista was

thinking of the casa all the time, he was sure.

“He think of the casa! He!” gasped Signora Viola, crazily. She struck

her breast with her open hands. “I know him. He thinks of nobody but

himself.”

A discharge of firearms near by made her throw her head back and close

her eyes. Old Giorgio set his teeth hard under his white moustache, and

his eyes began to roll fiercely. Several bullets struck the end of the

wall together; pieces of plaster could be heard falling outside; a voice

screamed “Here they come!” and after a moment of uneasy silence there

was a rush of running feet along the front.

Then the tension of old Giorgio’s attitude relaxed, and a smile of

contemptuous relief came upon his lips of an old fighter with a leonine

face. These were not a people striving for justice, but thieves. Even to

defend his life against them was a sort of degradation for a man who had

been one of Garibaldi’s immortal thousand in the conquest of Sicily. He

had an immense scorn for this outbreak of scoundrels and leperos, who

did not know the meaning of the word “liberty.”

He grounded his old gun, and, turning his head, glanced at the coloured

lithograph of Garibaldi in a black frame on the white wall; a thread

of strong sunshine cut it perpendicularly. His eyes, accustomed to the

luminous twilight, made out the high colouring of the face, the red of

the shirt, the outlines of the square shoulders, the black patch of the

Bersagliere hat with cock’s feathers curling over the crown. An immortal

hero! This was your liberty; it gave you not only life, but immortality

as well!

For that one man his fanaticism had suffered no diminution. In the

moment of relief from the apprehension of the greatest danger, perhaps,

his family had been exposed to in all their wanderings, he had turned to

the picture of his old chief, first and only, then laid his hand on his

wife’s shoulder.

The children kneeling on the floor had not moved. Signora Teresa opened

her eyes a little, as though he had awakened her from a very deep and

dreamless slumber. Before he had time in his deliberate way to say a

reassuring word she jumped up, with the children clinging to her, one on

each side, gasped for breath, and let out a hoarse shriek.

It was simultaneous with the bang of a violent blow struck on the

outside of the shutter. They could hear suddenly the snorting of a

horse, the restive tramping of hoofs on the narrow, hard path in front

of the house; the toe of a boot struck at the shutter again; a spur

jingled at every blow, and an excited voice shouted, “Hola! hola, in

there!”

Chapter four

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