Page 39 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

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 tem-
porarily 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,

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard