“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
had broken 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.