VIII
The Gadfly’s recovery was rapid. One afternoon in the following week Riccardo found him lying on the sofa in a Turkish dressing-gown, chatting with Martini and Galli. He even talked about going downstairs; but Riccardo merely laughed at the suggestion and asked whether he would like a tramp across the valley to Fiesole to start with.
“You might go and call on the Grassinis for a change,” he added wickedly. “I’m sure madame would be delighted to see you, especially now, when you look so pale and interesting.”
The Gadfly clasped his hands with a tragic gesture.
“Bless my soul! I never thought of that! She’d take me for one of Italy’s martyrs, and talk patriotism to me. I should have to act up to the part, and tell her I’ve been cut to pieces in an underground dungeon and stuck together again rather badly; and she’d want to know exactly what the process felt like. You don’t think she’d believe it, Riccardo? I’ll bet you my Indian dagger against the bottled tapeworm in your den that she’ll swallow the biggest lie I can invent. That’s a generous offer, and you’d better jump at it.”
“Thanks, I’m not so fond of murderous tools as you are.”
“Well, a tapeworm is as murderous as a dagger, any day, and not half so pretty.”
“But as it happens, my dear fellow, I don’t want the dagger and I do want the tapeworm. Martini, I must run off. Are you in charge of this obstreperous patient?”
“Only till three o’clock. Galli and I have to go to San Miniato, and Signora Bolla is coming till I can get back.”
“Signora Bolla!” the Gadfly repeated in a tone of dismay. “Why, Martini, this will never do! I can’t have a lady bothered over me and my ailments. Besides, where is she to sit? She won’t like to come in here.”
“Since when have you gone in so fiercely for the proprieties?” asked Riccardo, laughing. “My good man, Signora Bolla is head nurse in general to all of us. She has looked after sick people ever since she was in short frocks, and does it better than any sister of mercy I know. Won’t like to come into your room! Why, you might be talking of the Grassini woman! I needn’t leave any directions if she’s coming, Martini. Heart alive, it’s half-past two; I must be off!”
“Now, Rivarez, take your physic before she comes,” said Galli, approaching the sofa with a medicine glass.
“Damn the physic!” The Gadfly had reached the irritable stage of convalescence, and was inclined to give his devoted nurses a bad time. “W-what do you want to d-d-dose me with all sorts of horrors for now the pain is gone?”
“Just because I don’t want it to come back. You wouldn’t like it if you collapsed when Signora Bolla is here and she had to give you opium.”
“My g-good sir, if that pain is going to come back it will come; it’s not a t-toothache to be frightened away with your trashy mixtures. They are about as much use as a t-toy squirt for a house on fire. However, I suppose you must have your way.”
He took the glass with his left hand, and the sight of the terrible scars recalled Galli to the former subject of conversation.
“By the way,” he asked; “how did you get so much knocked about? In the war, was it?”
“Now, didn’t I just tell you it was a case of secret dungeons and—”
“Yes, that version is for Signora Grassini’s benefit. Really, I suppose it was in the war with Brazil?”
“Yes, I got a bit hurt there; and then hunting in the savage districts and one thing and another.”
“Ah, yes; on the scientific expedition. You can fasten your shirt; I have quite done. You seem to have had an exciting time of it out there.”
“Well, of course you can’t live in savage countries without getting a few adventures once in a way,” said the Gadfly lightly; “and you can hardly expect them all to be pleasant.”
“Still, I don’t understand how you managed to get so much knocked about unless in a bad adventure with wild beasts—those scars on your left arm, for instance.”
“Ah, that was in a puma-hunt. You see, I had fired—”
There was a knock at the door.
“Is the room tidy, Martini? Yes? Then please open the door. This is really most kind, signora; you must excuse my not getting up.”
“Of course you mustn’t get up; I have not come as a caller. I am a little early, Cesare. I thought perhaps you were in a hurry to go.”
“I can stop for a quarter of an hour. Let me put your cloak in the other room. Shall I take the basket, too?”
“Take care; those are new-laid eggs. Katie brought them in from Monte Oliveto this morning. There are some Christmas roses for you, Signor Rivarez; I know you are fond of flowers.”
She sat down beside the table and began clipping the stalks of the flowers and arranging them in a vase.
“Well, Rivarez,” said Galli; “tell us the rest of the puma-hunt story; you had just begun.”
“Ah, yes! Galli was asking me about life in South America, signora; and I was telling him how I came to get my left arm spoiled. It was in Peru. We had been wading a river on a puma-hunt, and when I fired at the beast the powder wouldn’t go off; it had got splashed with water. Naturally the puma didn’t wait for me to rectify that; and this is the result.”
“That must have been a pleasant experience.”
“Oh, not so bad! One must take the rough with the smooth, of course; but it’s a splendid life on the whole. Serpent-catching, for instance—”
He rattled on, telling anecdote after anecdote; now of the Argentine war, now of the Brazilian expedition, now of hunting feats and adventures with savages or wild beasts. Galli, with the delight of a child hearing a fairy story, kept interrupting every moment to ask questions. He was of the impressionable Neapolitan temperament and loved everything sensational. Gemma took some knitting from her basket and listened silently, with busy fingers and downcast eyes. Martini frowned and fidgeted. The manner in which the anecdotes were told seemed to him boastful and self-conscious; and, notwithstanding his unwilling admiration for a man who could endure physical pain with the amazing fortitude which he had seen the week before, he genuinely disliked the Gadfly and all his works and ways.
“It must have been a glorious life!” sighed Galli with naive envy. “I wonder you ever made up your mind to leave Brazil. Other countries must seem so flat after it!”
“I think I was happiest in Peru and Ecuador,” said the Gadfly. “That really is a magnificent tract of country. Of course it is very hot, especially the coast district of Ecuador, and one has to rough it a bit; but the scenery is superb beyond imagination.”
“I believe,” said Galli, “the perfect freedom of life in a barbarous country would attract me more than any scenery. A man must feel his personal, human dignity as he can never feel it in our crowded towns.”
“Yes,” the Gadfly answered; “that is—”
Gemma raised her eyes from her knitting and looked at him. He flushed suddenly scarlet and broke off. There was a little pause.
“Surely it is not come on again?” asked Galli anxiously.
“Oh, nothing to speak of, thanks to your s-s-soothing application that I b-b-blasphemed against. Are you going already, Martini?”
“Yes. Come along, Galli; we shall be late.”
Gemma followed the two men out of the room, and presently returned with an egg beaten up in milk.
“Take this, please,” she said with mild authority; and sat down again to her knitting. The Gadfly obeyed meekly.
For half an hour, neither spoke. Then the Gadfly said in a very low voice:
“Signora Bolla!”
She looked up. He was tearing the fringe of the couch-rug, and kept his eyes lowered.
“You didn’t believe I was speaking the truth just now,” he began.
“I had not the smallest doubt that you were telling falsehoods,” she answered quietly.
“You were quite right. I was telling falsehoods all the time.”
“Do you mean about the war?”
“About everything. I was not in that war at all; and as for the expedition, I had a few adventures, of course, and most of those stories are true, but it was not that way I got smashed. You have detected me in one lie, so I may as well confess the lot, I suppose.”
“Does it not seem to you rather a waste of energy to invent so many falsehoods?” she asked. “I should have thought it was hardly worth the trouble.”
“What would you have? You know your own English proverb: ‘Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies.’ It’s no pleasure to me to fool people that way, but I must answer them somehow when they ask what made a cripple of me; and I may as well invent something pretty while I’m about it. You saw how pleased Galli was.”
“Do you prefer pleasing Galli to speaking the truth?”
“The truth!” He looked up with the torn fringe in his hand. “You wouldn’t have me tell those people the truth? I’d cut my tongue out first!” Then with an awkward, shy abruptness:
“I have never told it to anybody yet; but I’ll tell you if you care to hear.”
She silently laid down her knitting. To her there was something grievously pathetic in this hard, secret, unlovable creature, suddenly flinging his personal confidence at the feet of a woman whom he barely knew and whom he apparently disliked.
A long silence followed, and she looked up. He was leaning his left arm on the little table beside him, and shading his eyes with the mutilated hand, and she noticed the nervous tension of the fingers and the throbbing of the scar on the wrist. She came up to him and called him softly by name. He started violently and raised his head.
“I f-forgot,” he stammered apologetically. “I was g-going to t-tell you about—”
“About the—accident or whatever it was that caused your lameness. But if it worries you—”
“The accident? Oh, the smashing! Yes; only it wasn’t an accident, it was a poker.”
She stared at him in blank amazement. He pushed back his hair with a hand that shook perceptibly, and looked up at her, smiling.
“Won’t you sit down? Bring your chair close, please. I’m so sorry I can’t get it for you. R-really, now I come to think of it, the case would have been a p-perfect t-treasure-trove for Riccardo if he had had me to treat; he has the true surgeon’s love for broken bones, and I believe everything in me that was breakable was broken on that occasion—except my neck.”
“And your courage,” she put in softly. “But perhaps you count that among your unbreakable possessions.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said; “my courage has been mended up after a fashion, with the rest of me; but it was fairly broken then, like a smashed teacup; that’s the horrible part of it. Ah—Yes; well, I was telling you about the poker.
“It was—let me see—nearly thirteen years ago, in Lima. I told you Peru was a delightful country to live in; but it’s not quite so nice for people that happen to be at low water, as I was. I had been down in the Argentine, and then in Chili, tramping the country and starving, mostly; and had come up from Valparaiso as odd-man on a cattle-boat. I couldn’t get any work in Lima itself, so I went down to the docks—they’re at Callao, you know—to try there. Well of course in all those shipping-ports there are low quarters where the seafaring people congregate; and after some time I got taken on as servant in one of the gambling hells there. I had to do the cooking and billiard-marking, and fetch drink for the sailors and their women, and all that sort of thing. Not very pleasant work; still I was glad to get it; there was at least food and the sight of human faces and sound of human tongues—of a kind. You may think that was no advantage; but I had just been down with yellow fever, alone in the outhouse of a wretched half-caste shanty, and the thing had given me the horrors. Well, one night I was told to put out a tipsy Lascar who was making himself obnoxious; he had come ashore and lost all his money and was in a bad temper. Of course I had to obey if I didn’t want to lose my place and starve; but the man was twice as strong as I—I was not twenty-one and as weak as a cat after the fever. Besides, he had the poker.”
He paused a moment, glancing furtively at her; then went on:
“Apparently he intended to put an end to me altogether; but somehow he managed to scamp his work—Lascars always do if they have a chance; and left just enough of me not smashed to go on living with.”
“Yes, but the other people, could they not interfere? Were they all afraid of one Lascar?”
He looked up and burst out laughing.
“The other people? The gamblers and the people of the house? Why, you don’t understand! They were negroes and Chinese and Heaven knows what; and I was their servant—their property. They stood round and enjoyed the fun, of course. That sort of thing counts for a good joke out there. So it is if you don’t happen to be the subject practised on.”
She shuddered.
“Then what was the end of it?”
“That I can’t tell you much about; a man doesn’t remember the next few days after a thing of that kind, as a rule. But there was a ship’s surgeon near, and it seems that when they found I was not dead, somebody called him in. He patched me up after a fashion—Riccardo seems to think it was rather badly done, but that may be professional jealousy. Anyhow, when I came to my senses, an old native woman had taken me in for Christian charity—that sounds queer, doesn’t it? She used to sit huddled up in the corner of the hut, smoking a black pipe and spitting on the floor and crooning to herself. However, she meant well, and she told me I might die in peace and nobody should disturb me. But the spirit of contradiction was strong in me and I elected to live. It was rather a difficult job scrambling back to life, and sometimes I am inclined to think it was a great deal of cry for very little wool. Anyway that old woman’s patience was wonderful; she kept me—how long was it?—nearly four months lying in her hut, raving like a mad thing at intervals, and as vicious as a bear with a sore ear between-whiles. The pain was pretty bad, you see, and my temper had been spoiled in childhood with overmuch coddling.”
“And then?”
“Oh, then—I got up somehow and crawled away. No, don’t think it was any delicacy about taking a poor woman’s charity—I was past caring for that; it was only that I couldn’t bear the place any longer. You talked just now about my courage; if you had seen me then! The worst of the pain used to come on every evening, about dusk; and in the afternoon I used to lie alone, and watch the sun get lower and lower—Oh, you can’t understand! It makes me sick to look at a sunset now!”
A long pause.
“Well, then I went up country, to see if I could get work anywhere—it would have driven me mad to stay in Lima. I got as far as Cuzco, and there—Really I don’t know why I’m inflicting all this ancient history on you; it hasn’t even the merit of being funny.”
She raised her head and looked at him with deep and serious eyes. “Please don’t talk that way,” she said.
He bit his lip and tore off another piece of the rug-fringe.
“Shall I go on?” he asked after a moment.
“If—if you will. I am afraid it is horrible to you to remember.”
“Do you think I forget when I hold my tongue? It’s worse then. But don’t imagine it’s the thing itself that haunts me so. It is the fact of having lost the power over myself.”
“I—don’t think I quite understand.”
“I mean, it is the fact of having come to the end of my courage, to the point where I found myself a coward.”
“Surely there is a limit to what anyone can bear.”
“Yes; and the man who has once reached that limit never knows when he may reach it again.”
“Would you mind telling me,” she asked, hesitating, “how you came to be stranded out there alone at twenty?”
“Very simply: I had a good opening in life, at home in the old country, and ran away from it.”
“Why?”
He laughed again in his quick, harsh way.
“Why? Because I was a priggish young cub, I suppose. I had been brought up in an over-luxurious home, and coddled and faddled after till I thought the world was made of pink cotton-wool and sugared almonds. Then one fine day I found out that someone I had trusted had deceived me. Why, how you start! What is it?”
“Nothing. Go on, please.”
“I found out that I had been tricked into believing a lie; a common bit of experience, of course; but, as I tell you, I was young and priggish, and thought that liars go to hell. So I ran away from home and plunged into South America to sink or swim as I could, without a cent in my pocket or a word of Spanish in my tongue, or anything but white hands and expensive habits to get my bread with. And the natural result was that I got a dip into the real hell to cure me of imagining sham ones. A pretty thorough dip, too—it was just five years before the Duprez expedition came along and pulled me out.”
“Five years! Oh, that is terrible! And had you no friends?”
“Friends! I”—he turned on her with sudden fierceness—“I have never had a friend!”
The next instant he seemed a little ashamed of his vehemence, and went on quickly:
“You mustn’t take all this too seriously; I dare say I made the worst of things, and really it wasn’t so bad the first year and a half; I was young and strong and I managed to scramble along fairly well till the Lascar put his mark on me. But after that I couldn’t get work. It’s wonderful what an effectual tool a poker is if you handle it properly; and nobody cares to employ a cripple.”
“What sort of work did you do?”
“What I could get. For some time I lived by odd-jobbing for the blacks on the sugar plantations, fetching and carrying and so on. It’s one of the curious things in life, by the way, that slaves always contrive to have a slave of their own, and there’s nothing a negro likes so much as a white fag to bully. But it was no use; the overseers always turned me off. I was too lame to be quick; and I couldn’t manage the heavy loads. And then I was always getting these attacks of inflammation, or whatever the confounded thing is.
“After some time I went down to the silver-mines and tried to get work there; but it was all no good. The managers laughed at the very notion of taking me on, and as for the men, they made a dead set at me.”
“Why was that?”
“Oh, human nature, I suppose; they saw I had only one hand that I could hit back with. They’re a mangy, half-caste lot; negroes and Zambos mostly. And then those horrible coolies! So at last I got enough of that, and set off to tramp the country at random; just wandering about, on the chance of something turning up.”
“To tramp? With that lame foot!”
He looked up with a sudden, piteous catching of the breath.
“I—I was hungry,” he said.
She turned her head a little away and rested her chin on one hand. After a moment’s silence he began again, his voice sinking lower and lower as he spoke:
“Well, I tramped, and tramped, till I was nearly mad with tramping, and nothing came of it. I got down into Ecuador, and there it was worse than ever. Sometimes I’d get a bit of tinkering to do—I’m a pretty fair tinker—or an errand to run, or a pigsty to clean out; sometimes I did—oh, I hardly know what. And then at last, one day—”
The slender, brown hand clenched itself suddenly on the table, and Gemma, raising her head, glanced at him anxiously. His side-face was turned towards her, and she could see a vein on the temple beating like a hammer, with quick, irregular strokes. She bent forward and laid a gentle hand on his arm.
“Never mind the rest; it’s almost too horrible to talk about.”
He stared doubtfully at the hand, shook his head, and went on steadily:
“Then one day I met a travelling variety show. You remember that one the other night; well, that sort of thing, only coarser and more indecent. The Zambos are not like these gentle Florentines; they don’t care for anything that is not foul or brutal. There was bullfighting, too, of course. They had camped out by the roadside for the night; and I went up to their tent to beg. Well, the weather was hot and I was half starved, and so—I fainted at the door of the tent. I had a trick of fainting suddenly at that time, like a boarding-school girl with tight stays. So they took me in and gave me brandy, and food, and so on; and then—the next morning—they offered me—”
Another pause.
“They wanted a hunchback, or monstrosity of some kind; for the boys to pelt with orange-peel and banana-skins—something to set the blacks laughing—You saw the clown that night—well, I was that—for two years. I suppose you have a humanitarian feeling about negroes and Chinese. Wait till you’ve been at their mercy!
“Well, I learned to do the tricks. I was not quite deformed enough; but they set that right with an artificial hump and made the most of this foot and arm—And the Zambos are not critical; they’re easily satisfied if only they can get hold of some live thing to torture—the fool’s dress makes a good deal of difference, too.
“The only difficulty was that I was so often ill and unable to play. Sometimes, if the manager was out of temper, he would insist on my coming into the ring when I had these attacks on; and I believe the people liked those evenings best. Once, I remember, I fainted right off with the pain in the middle of the performance—When I came to my senses again, the audience had got round me—hooting and yelling and pelting me with—”
“Don’t! I can’t hear any more! Stop, for God’s sake!”
She was standing up with both hands over her ears. He broke off, and, looking up, saw the glitter of tears in her eyes.
“Damn it all, what an idiot I am!” he said under his breath.
She crossed the room and stood for a little while looking out of the window. When she turned round, the Gadfly was again leaning on the table and covering his eyes with one hand. He had evidently forgotten her presence, and she sat down beside him without speaking. After a long silence she said slowly:
“I want to ask you a question.”
“Yes?” without moving.
“Why did you not cut your throat?”
He looked up in grave surprise. “I did not expect you to ask that,” he said. “And what about my work? Who would have done it for me?”
“Your work—Ah, I see! You talked just now about being a coward; well, if you have come through that and kept to your purpose, you are the very bravest man that I have ever met.”
He covered his eyes again, and held her hand in a close passionate clasp. A silence that seemed to have no end fell around them.
Suddenly a clear and fresh soprano voice rang out from the garden below, singing a verse of a doggerel French song:
“Eh, Pierrôt! Danse, Pierrôt!
Danse un peu, mon pauvre Jeannôt!
Vive la danse et l’allégresse!
Jouissons de notre bell’ jeunesse!
Si moi je pleure ou moi je soupire,
Si moi je fais la triste figure—
Monsieur, ce n’est que pour rire!
Ha! Ha, ha, ha!
Monsieur, ce n’est que pour rire!”
At the first words the Gadfly tore his hand from Gemma’s and shrank away with a stifled groan. She clasped both hands round his arm and pressed it firmly, as she might have pressed that of a person undergoing a surgical operation. When the song broke off and a chorus of laughter and applause came from the garden, he looked up with the eyes of a tortured animal.
“Yes, it is Zita,” he said slowly; “with her officer friends. She tried to come in here the other night, before Riccardo came. I should have gone mad if she had touched me!”
“But she does not know,” Gemma protested softly. “She cannot guess that she is hurting you.”
“She is like a Creole,” he answered, shuddering. “Do you remember her face that night when we brought in the beggar-child? That is how the half-castes look when they laugh.”
Another burst of laughter came from the garden. Gemma rose and opened the window. Zita, with a gold-embroidered scarf wound coquettishly round her head, was standing in the garden path, holding up a bunch of violets, for the possession of which three young cavalry officers appeared to be competing.
“Mme. Reni!” said Gemma.
Zita’s face darkened like a thundercloud. “Madame?” she said, turning and raising her eyes with a defiant look.
“Would your friends mind speaking a little more softly? Signor Rivarez is very unwell.”
The gipsy flung down her violets. “Allez-vous en!” she said, turning sharply on the astonished officers. “Vous m’embetez, messieurs!”
She went slowly out into the road. Gemma closed the window.
“They have gone away,” she said, turning to him.
“Thank you. I—I am sorry to have troubled you.”
“It was no trouble.” He at once detected the hesitation in her voice.
“ ‘But?’ ” he said. “That sentence was not finished, signora; there was an unspoken ‘but’ in the back of your mind.”
“If you look into the backs of people’s minds, you mustn’t be offended at what you read there. It is not my affair, of course, but I cannot understand—”
“My aversion to Mme. Reni? It is only when—”
“No, your caring to live with her when you feel that aversion. It seems to me an insult to her as a woman and as—”
“A woman!” He burst out laughing harshly. “Is that what you call a woman? ‘Madame, ce n’est que pour rire!’ ”
“That is not fair!” she said. “You have no right to speak of her in that way to anyone—especially to another woman!”
He turned away, and lay with wide-open eyes, looking out of the window at the sinking sun. She lowered the blind and closed the shutters, that he might not see it set; then sat down at the table by the other window and took up her knitting again.
“Would you like the lamp?” she asked after a moment.
He shook his head.
When it grew too dark to see, Gemma rolled up her knitting and laid it in the basket. For some time she sat with folded hands, silently watching the Gadfly’s motionless figure. The dim evening light, falling on his face, seemed to soften away its hard, mocking, self-assertive look, and to deepen the tragic lines about the mouth. By some fanciful association of ideas her memory went vividly back to the stone cross which her father had set up in memory of Arthur, and to its inscription:
“All thy waves and billows have gone over me.”
An hour passed in unbroken silence. At last she rose and went softly out of the room. Coming back with a lamp, she paused for a moment, thinking that the Gadfly was asleep. As the light fell on his face he turned round.
“I have made you a cup of coffee,” she said, setting down the lamp.
“Put it down a minute. Will you come here, please.”
He took both her hands in his.
“I have been thinking,” he said. “You are quite right; it is an ugly tangle I have got my life into. But remember, a man does not meet every day a woman whom he can—love; and I—I have been in deep waters. I am afraid—”
“Afraid—”
“Of the dark. Sometimes I dare not be alone at night. I must have something living—something solid beside me. It is the outer darkness, where shall be—No, no! It’s not that; that’s a sixpenny toy hell;—it’s the inner darkness. There’s no weeping or gnashing of teeth there; only silence—silence—”
His eyes dilated. She was quite still, hardly breathing till he spoke again.
“This is all mystification to you, isn’t it? You can’t understand—luckily for you. What I mean is that I have a pretty fair chance of going mad if I try to live quite alone—Don’t think too hardly of me, if you can help it; I am not altogether the vicious brute you perhaps imagine me to be.”
“I cannot try to judge for you,” she answered. “I have not suffered as you have. But—I have been in rather deep water too, in another way; and I think—I am sure—that if you let the fear of anything drive you to do a really cruel or unjust or ungenerous thing, you will regret it afterwards. For the rest—if you have failed in this one thing, I know that I, in your place, should have failed altogether—should have cursed God and died.”
He still kept her hands in his.
“Tell me,” he said very softly; “have you ever in your life done a really cruel thing?”
She did not answer, but her head sank down, and two great tears fell on his hand.
“Tell me!” he whispered passionately, clasping her hands tighter. “Tell me! I have told you all my misery.”
“Yes—once—long ago. And I did it to the person I loved best in the world.”
The hands that clasped hers were trembling violently; but they did not loosen their hold.
“He was a comrade,” she went on; “and I believed a slander against him—a common glaring lie that the police had invented. I struck him in the face for a traitor; and he went away and drowned himself. Then, two days later, I found out that he had been quite innocent. Perhaps that is a worse memory than any of yours. I would cut off my right hand to undo what it has done.”
Something swift and dangerous—something that she had not seen before—flashed into his eyes. He bent his head down with a furtive, sudden gesture and kissed the hand.
She drew back with a startled face. “Don’t!” she cried out piteously. “Please don’t ever do that again! You hurt me!”
“Do you think you didn’t hurt the man you killed?”
“The man I—killed—Ah, there is Cesare at the gate at last! I—I must go!”
When Martini came into the room he found the Gadfly lying alone with the untouched coffee beside him, swearing softly to himself in a languid, spiritless way, as though he got no satisfaction out of it.