"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 tea-cup; 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 sea-faring 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 pigstye 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 bull-fighting, 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, Pierrot! Danse, Pierrot! Danse un peu, mon pauvre Jeannot! Vive la
danse et l'allegresse! 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 thunder-cloud. "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 clown 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
PART II: CHAPTER IX.
A FEW days later, the Gadfly, still rather pale and limping more than
usual, entered the reading room of the public library and asked for Cardinal
Montanelli's sermons. Riccardo, who was reading at a table near him, looked
up. He liked the Gadfly very much, but could not digest this one trait in
him--this curious personal maliciousness.
"Are you preparing another volley against that unlucky Cardinal?" he
asked half irritably.
"My dear fellow, why do you a-a-always attribute evil m-m-motives to
people? It's m-most unchristian. I am preparing an essay on contemporary
theology for the n-n-new paper."
"What new paper?" Riccardo frowned. It was perhaps an open secret that
a new press-law was expected and that the Opposition was preparing to
astonish the town with a radical newspaper; but still it was, formally, a
secret.
"The Swindlers' Gazette, of course, or the Church Calendar."
"Sh-sh! Rivarez, we are disturbing the other readers."
"Well then, stick to your surgery, if that's your subject, and
l-l-leave me to th-theology-- that's mine. I d-d-don't interfere with your
treatment of broken bones, though I know a p-p-precious lot more about them
than you do."
He sat down to his volume of sermons with an intent and preoccupied
face. One of the librarians came up to him.
"Signor Rivarez! I think you were in the Duprez expedition, exploring
the tributaries of the Amazon? Perhaps you will kindly help us in a
difficulty. A lady has been inquiring for the records of the expedition, and
they are at the binder's."
"What does she want to know?"
"Only in what year the expedition started and when it passed through
Ecuador."
"It started from Paris in the autumn of 1837, and passed through Quito
in April, 1838. We were three years in Brazil; then went down to Rio and got
back to Paris in the summer of 1841. Does the lady want the dates of the
separate discoveries?"
"No, thank you; only these. I have written them down. Beppo, take this
paper to Signora Bolla, please. Many thanks, Signor Rivarez. I am sorry to
have troubled you."
The Gadfly leaned back in his chair with a perplexed frown. What did
she want the dates for? When they passed through Ecuador----
Gemma went home with the slip of paper in her hand. April, 1838--and
Arthur had died in May, 1833. Five years--
She began pacing up and down her room. She had slept badly the last few
nights, and there were dark shadows under her eyes.
Five years;--and an "overluxurious home"-- and "someone he had trusted
had deceived him" --had deceived him--and he had found it out----
She stopped and put up both hands to her head. Oh, this was utterly
mad--it was not possible--it was absurd----
And yet, how they had dragged that harbour!
Five years--and he was "not twenty-one" when the Lascar---- Then he
must have been nineteen when he ran away from home. Had he not said: "A year
and a half----" Where did he get those blue eyes from, and that nervous
restlessness of the fingers? And why was he so bitter against Montanelli?
Five years--five years------
If she could but know that he was drowned--if she could but have seen
the body; some day, surely, the old wound would have left off aching, the
old memory would have lost its terrors. Perhaps in another twenty years she
would have learned to look back without shrinking.
All her youth had been poisoned by the thought of what she had done.
Resolutely, day after day and year after year, she had fought against the
demon of remorse. Always she had remembered that her work lay in the future;
always had shut her eyes and ears to the haunting spectre of the past. And
day after day, year after year, the image of the drowned body drifting out
to sea had never left her, and the bitter cry that she could not silence had
risen in her heart: "I have killed Arthur! Arthur is dead!" Sometimes it had
seemed to her that her burden was too heavy to be borne.
Now she would have given half her life to have that burden back again.
If she had killed him-- that was a familiar grief; she had endured it too
long to sink under it now. But if she had driven him, not into the water but
into------ She sat down, covering her eyes with both hands. And her life had
been darkened for his sake, because he was dead! If she had brought upon him
nothing worse than death----
Steadily, pitilessly she went back, step by step, through the hell of
his past life. It was as vivid to her as though she had seen and felt it
all; the helpless shivering of the naked soul, the mockery that was bitterer
than death, the horror of loneliness, the slow, grinding, relentless agony.
It was as vivid as if she had sat beside him in the filthy Indian hut; as if
she had suffered with him in the silver-mines, the coffee fields, the
horrible variety show--
The variety show---- No, she must shut out that image, at least; it was
enough to drive one mad to sit and think of it.
She opened a little drawer in her writing-desk. It contained the few
personal relics which she could not bring herself to destroy. She was not
given to the hoarding up of sentimental trifles; and the preservation of
these keepsakes was a concession to that weaker side of her nature which she
kept under with so steady a hand. She very seldom allowed herself to look at
them.
Now she took them out, one after another: Giovanni's first letter to
her, and the flowers that had lain in his dead hand; a lock of her baby's
hair and a withered leaf from her father's grave. At the back of the drawer
was a miniature portrait of Arthur at ten years old--the only existing
likeness of him.
She sat down with it in her hands and looked at the beautiful childish
head, till the face of the real Arthur rose up afresh before her. How clear
it was in every detail! The sensitive lines of the mouth, the wide, earnest
eyes, the seraphic purity of expression--they were graven in upon her
memory, as though he had died yesterday. Slowly the blinding tears welled up
and hid the portrait.
Oh, how could she have thought such a thing! It was like sacrilege even
to dream of this bright, far-off spirit, bound to the sordid miseries of
life. Surely the gods had loved him a little, and had let him die young!
Better a thousand times that he should pass into utter nothingness than that
he should live and be the Gadfly--the Gadfly, with his faultless neckties
and his doubtful witticisms, his bitter tongue and his ballet girl! No, no!
It was all a horrible, senseless fancy; and she had vexed her heart with
vain imaginings. Arthur was dead.
"May I come in?" asked a soft voice at the door.
She started so that the portrait fell from her hand, and the Gadfly,
limping across the room, picked it up and handed it to her.
"How you startled me!" she said.
"I am s-so sorry. Perhaps I am disturbing you?"
"No. I was only turning over some old things."
She hesitated for a moment; then handed him back the miniature.
"What do you think of that head?"
While he looked at it she watched his face as though her life depended
upon its expression; but it was merely negative and critical.
"You have set me a difficult task," he said. "The portrait is faded,
and a child's face is always hard to read. But I should think that child
would grow into an unlucky man, and the wisest thing he could do would be to
abstain from growing into a man at all."
"Why?"
"Look at the line of the under-lip. Th-th-that is the sort of nature
that feels pain as pain and wrong as wrong; and the world has no r-r-room
for such people; it needs people who feel nothing but their work."
"Is it at all like anyone you know?"
He looked at the portrait more closely.
"Yes. What a curious thing! Of course it is; very like."
"Like whom?"
"C-c-cardinal Montan-nelli. I wonder whether his irreproachable
Eminence has any nephews, by the way? Who is it, if I may ask?"
"It is a portrait, taken in childhood, of the friend I told you about
the other day----"
"Whom you killed?"
She winced in spite of herself. How lightly, how cruelly he used that
dreadful word!
"Yes, whom I killed--if he is really dead."
"If?"
She kept her eyes on his face.
"I have sometimes doubted," she said. "The body was never found. He may
have run away from home, like you, and gone to South America."
"Let us hope not. That would be a bad memory to carry about with you. I
have d-d-done some hard fighting in my t-time, and have sent m-more than one
man to Hades, perhaps; but if I had it on my conscience that I had sent any
l-living thing to South America, I should sleep badly----"
"Then do you believe," she interrupted, coming nearer to him with
clasped hands, "that if he were not drowned,--if he had been through your
experience instead,--he would never come back and let the past go? Do you
believe he would NEVER forget? Remember, it has cost me something, too.
Look!"
She pushed back the heavy waves of hair from her forehead. Through the
black locks ran a broad white streak.
There was a long silence.
"I think," the Gadfly said slowly, "that the dead are better dead.
Forgetting some things is a difficult matter. And if I were in the place of
your dead friend, I would s-s-stay dead. The REVENANT is an ugly spectre."
She put the portrait back into its drawer and locked the desk.
"That is hard doctrine," she said. "And now we will talk about
something else."
"I came to have a little business talk with you, if I may--a private
one, about a plan that I have in my head."
She drew a chair to the table and sat down. "What do you think of the
projected press-law?" he began, without a trace of his usual stammer.
"What I think of it? I think it will not be of much value, but half a
loaf is better than no bread."
"Undoubtedly. Then do you intend to work on one of the new papers these
good folk here are preparing to start?"
"I thought of doing so. There is always a great deal of practical work
to be done in starting any paper--printing and circulation arrangements
and----"
"How long are you going to waste your mental gifts in that fashion?"
"Why 'waste'?"
"Because it is waste. You know quite well that you have a far better
head than most of the men you are working with, and you let them make a
regular drudge and Johannes factotum of you. Intellectually you are as far
ahead of Grassini and Galli as if they were schoolboys; yet you sit
correcting their proofs like a printer's devil."
"In the first place, I don't spend all my time in correcting proofs;
and moreover it seems to me that you exaggerate my mental capacities. They
are by no means so brilliant as you think."
"I don't think them brilliant at all," he answered quietly; "but I do
think them sound and solid, which is of much more importance. At those
dreary committee meetings it is always you who put your finger on the weak
spot in everybody's logic."
"You are not fair to the others. Martini, for instance, has a very
logical head, and there is no doubt about the capacities of Fabrizi and
Lega. Then Grassini has a sounder knowledge of Italian economic statistics
than any official in the country, perhaps."
"Well, that's not saying much; but let us lay them and their capacities
aside. The fact remains that you, with such gifts as you possess, might do
more important work and fill a more responsible post than at present."
"I am quite satisfied with my position. The work I am doing is not of
very much value, perhaps, but we all do what we can."
"Signora Bolla, you and I have gone too far to play at compliments and
modest denials now. Tell me honestly, do you recognize that you are using up
your brain on work which persons inferior to you could do as well?"
"Since you press me for an answer--yes, to some extent."
"Then why do you let that go on?"
No answer.
"Why do you let it go on?"
"Because--I can't help it."
"Why?"
She looked up reproachfully. "That is unkind --it's not fair to press
me so."
"But all the same you are going to tell me why."
"If you must have it, then--because my life has been smashed into
pieces, and I have not the energy to start anything REAL, now. I am about
fit to be a revolutionary cab-horse, and do the party's drudge-work. At
least I do it conscientiously, and it must be done by somebody."
"Certainly it must be done by somebody; but not always by the same
person."
"It's about all I'm fit for."
He looked at her with half-shut eyes, inscrutably. Presently she raised
her head.
"We are returning to the old subject; and this was to be a business
talk. It is quite useless, I assure you, to tell me I might have done all
sorts of things. I shall never do them now. But I may be able to help you in
thinking out your plan. What is it?"
"You begin by telling me that it is useless for me to suggest anything,
and then ask what I want to suggest. My plan requires your help in action,
not only in thinking out."
"Let me hear it and then we will discuss."
"Tell me first whether you have heard anything about schemes for a
rising in Venetia."
"I have heard of nothing but schemes for risings and Sanfedist plots
ever since the amnesty, and I fear I am as sceptical about the one as about
the other."
"So am I, in most cases; but I am speaking of really serious
preparations for a rising of the whole province against the Austrians. A
good many young fellows in the Papal States--particularly in the Four
Legations--are secretly preparing to get across there and join as
volunteers. And I hear from my friends in the Romagna----"
"Tell me," she interrupted, "are you quite sure that these friends of
yours can be trusted?"
"Quite sure. I know them personally, and have worked with them."
"That is, they are members of the 'sect' to which you belong? Forgive
my scepticism, but I am always a little doubtful as to the accuracy of
information received from secret societies. It seems to me that the
habit----"
"Who told you I belonged to a 'sect'?" he interrupted sharply.
"No one; I guessed it."
"Ah!" He leaned back in his chair and looked at her, frowning. "Do you
always guess people's private affairs?" he said after a moment.
"Very often. I am rather observant, and have a habit of putting things
together. I tell you that so that you may be careful when you don't want me
to know a thing."
"I don't mind your knowing anything so long as it goes no further. I
suppose this has not----"
She lifted her head with a gesture of half-offended surprise. "Surely
that is an unnecessary question!" she said.
"Of course I know you would not speak of anything to outsiders; but I
thought that perhaps, to the members of your party----"
"The party's business is with facts, not with my personal conjectures
and fancies. Of course I have never mentioned the subject to anyone."
"Thank you. Do you happen to have guessed which sect I belong to?"
"I hope--you must not take offence at my frankness; it was you who
started this talk, you know---- I do hope it is not the 'Knifers.'"
"Why do you hope that?"
"Because you are fit for better things."
"We are all fit for better things than we ever do. There is your own
answer back again. However, it is not the 'Knifers' that I belong to, but
the 'Red Girdles.' They are a steadier lot, and take their work more
seriously."
"Do you mean the work of knifing?"
"That, among other things. Knives are very useful in their way; but
only when you have a good, organized propaganda behind them. That is what I
dislike in the other sect. They think a knife can settle all the world's
difficulties; and that's a mistake. It can settle a good many, but not all."
"Do you honestly believe that it settles any?"
He looked at her in surprise.
"Of course," she went on, "it eliminates, for the moment, the practical
difficulty caused by the presence of a clever spy or objectionable official;
but whether it does not create worse difficulties in place of the one
removed is another question. It seems to me like the parable of the swept
and garnished house and the seven devils. Every assassination only makes the
police more vicious and the people more accustomed to violence and
brutality, and the last state of the community may be worse than the first."
"What do you think will happen when the revolution comes? Do you
suppose the people won't have to get accustomed to violence then? War is
war."
"Yes, but open revolution is another matter. It is one moment in the
people's life, and it is the price we have to pay for all our progress. No
doubt fearful things will happen; they must in every revolution. But they
will be isolated facts--exceptional features of an exceptional moment. The
horrible thing about this promiscuous knifing is that it becomes a habit.
The people get to look upon it as an every-day occurrence, and their sense
of the sacredness of human life gets blunted. I have not been much in the
Romagna, but what little I have seen of the people has given me the
impression that they have got, or are getting, into a mechanical habit of
violence."
"Surely even that is better than a mechanical habit of obedience and
submission."
"I don't think so. All mechanical habits are bad and slavish, and this
one is ferocious as well. Of course, if you look upon the work of the
revolutionist as the mere wresting of certain definite concessions from the
government, then the secret sect and the knife must seem to you the best
weapons, for there is nothing else which all governments so dread. But if
you think, as I do, that to force the government's hand is not an end in
itself, but only a means to an end, and that what we really need to reform
is the relation between man and man, then you must go differently to work.
Accustoming ignorant people to the sight of blood is not the way to raise
the value they put on human life."
"And the value they put on religion?"
"I don't understand."
He smiled.
"I think we differ as to where the root of the mischief lies. You place
it in a lack of appreciation of the value of human life."
"Rather of the sacredness of human personality."
"Put it as you like. To me the great cause of our muddles and mistakes
seems to lie in the mental disease called religion."
"Do you mean any religion in particular?"
"Oh, no! That is a mere question of external symptoms. The disease
itself is what is called a religious attitude of mind. It is the morbid
desire to set up a fetich and adore it, to fall down and worship something.
It make