Page 46 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

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 con-
ceal 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 wit-
ness, 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, some-
thing 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 Maldo-
nado, 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-driv-
ers and foremen of the railway shops.
With their handsome, bronzed, lean faces, shiny black
ringlets, glistening eyes, broad-chested, bearded, some-