Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART FIRST: THE SILVER OF THE MINE 4. CHAPTER FOUR (continued)

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.