The Gadfly Part 30

"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 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 h.e.l.ls 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 ash.o.r.e 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 n.o.body 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.