Nostromo - A Tale of the Seaboard.pdf - Planet eBook

Giorgio’s old age. It cast a gloom because the cause seemedlost. Too many kings and emperors flourished yet in theworld which God had meant for the people. He was sadbecause of his simplicity. Though always ready to help hiscountrymen, and greatly respected by the Italian emigrantswherever he lived (in his exile he called it), he could not concealfrom himself that they cared nothing for the wrongsof down-trodden nations. They listened to his tales of warreadily, but seemed to ask themselves what he had got outof it after all. There was nothing that they could see. ‘Wewanted 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 hadbrokenoff abruptly with a jerk of the head and a movement of thearm, meaning clearly, ‘But what’s the good of talking toyou?’ they nudged each other. There was in old Giorgio anenergy of feeling, a personal quality of conviction, somethingthey called ‘terribilita’—‘an old lion,’ they used to sayof him. Some slight incident, a chance word would set himoff talking on the beach to the Italian fishermen of Maldonado,in the little shop he kept afterwards (in Valparaiso) tohis countrymen customers; of an evening, suddenly, in thecafe at one end of the Casa Viola (the other was reserved forthe English engineers) to the select clientele of engine-driversand foremen of the railway shops.With their handsome, bronzed, lean faces, shiny blackringlets, glistening eyes, broad-chested, bearded, some-