University of Virginia Library

3. 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 café 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
café 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
café over the disarranged chairs and tables to the wall
opposite. Old Giorgio had chosen that bare, white-
washed 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!"