The Gadfly by Ethel Voynich (top fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

“There is something the matter with you,” she said gently. He pulled a leaf from the flower in his buttonhole, and began tearing it to pieces. Who was it that he was so oddly like? Someone who had that same trick of the fingers and hurried, nervous gesture.

“I am in trouble,” he said, looking down at his hands and speaking in a hardly audible voice. “I⁠—don’t want to be alone this evening. Will you come?”

“Yes, certainly, unless you would rather go to my lodgings.”

“No; come and dine with me at a restaurant. There’s one on the Signoria. Please don’t refuse, now; you’ve promised!”

They went into a restaurant, where he ordered dinner, but hardly touched his own share, and remained obstinately silent, crumbling the bread over the cloth, and fidgeting with the fringe of his table napkin. Gemma felt thoroughly uncomfortable, and began to wish she had refused to come; the silence was growing awkward; yet she could not begin to make small-talk with a person who seemed to have forgotten her presence. At last he looked up and said abruptly:

“Would you like to see the variety show?”

She stared at him in astonishment. What had he got into his head about variety shows?

“Have you ever seen one?” he asked before she had time to speak.

“No; I don’t think so. I didn’t suppose they were interesting.”

“They are very interesting. I don’t think anyone can study the life of the people without seeing them. Let us go back to the Porta alla Croce.”

When they arrived the mountebanks had set up their tent beside the town gate, and an abominable scraping of fiddles and banging of drums announced that the performance had begun.

The entertainment was of the roughest kind. A few clowns, harlequins, and acrobats, a circus-rider jumping through hoops, the painted columbine, and the hunchback performing various dull and foolish antics, represented the entire force of the company. The jokes were not, on the whole, coarse or offensive; but they were very tame and stale, and there was a depressing flatness about the whole thing. The audience laughed and clapped from their innate Tuscan courtesy; but the only part which they seemed really to enjoy was the performance of the hunchback, in which Gemma could find nothing either witty or skilful. It was merely a series of grotesque and hideous contortions, which the spectators mimicked, holding up children on their shoulders that the little ones might see the “ugly man.”

“Signor Rivarez, do you really think this attractive?” said Gemma, turning to the Gadfly, who was standing beside her, his arm round one of the wooden posts of the tent. “It seems to me⁠—”

She broke off and remained looking at him silently. Except when she had stood with Montanelli at the garden gate in Leghorn, she had never seen a human face express such fathomless, hopeless misery. She thought of Dante’s hell as she watched him.

Presently the hunchback, receiving a kick from one of the clowns, turned a somersault and tumbled in a grotesque heap outside the ring. A dialogue between two clowns began, and the Gadfly seemed to wake out of a dream.

“Shall we go?” he asked; “or would you like to see more?”

“I would rather go.”

They left the tent, and walked across the dark green to the river. For a few moments neither spoke.

“What did you think of the show?” the Gadfly asked presently.

“I thought it rather a dreary business; and part of it seemed to me positively unpleasant.”

“Which part?”

“Well, all those grimaces and contortions. They are simply ugly; there is nothing clever about them.”

“Do you mean the hunchback’s performance?”

Remembering his peculiar sensitiveness on the subject of his own physical defects, she had avoided mentioning this particular bit of the entertainment; but now that he had touched upon the subject himself, she answered: “Yes; I did not like that part at all.”

“That was the part the people enjoyed most.”

“I dare say; and that is just the worst thing about it.”

“Because it was inartistic?”

“N-no; it was all inartistic. I meant⁠—because it was cruel.”

He smiled.

“Cruel? Do you mean to the hunchback?”

“I mean⁠—Of course the man himself was quite indifferent; no doubt, it is to him just a way of getting a living, like the circus-rider’s way or the columbine’s. But the thing makes one feel unhappy. It is humiliating; it is the degradation of a human being.”

“He probably is not any more degraded than he was to start with. Most of us are degraded in one way or another.”

“Yes; but this⁠—I dare say you will think it an absurd prejudice; but a human body, to me, is a sacred thing; I don’t like to see it treated irreverently and made hideous.”

“And a human soul?”

He had stopped short, and was standing with one hand on the stone balustrade of the embankment, looking straight at her.

“A soul?” she repeated, stopping in her turn to look at him in wonder.

He flung out both hands with a sudden, passionate gesture.

“Has it never occurred to you that that miserable clown may have a soul⁠—a living, struggling, human soul, tied down into that crooked hulk of a body and forced to slave for it? You that are so tenderhearted to everything⁠—you that pity the body in its fool’s dress and bells⁠—have you never thought of the wretched soul that has not even motley to cover its horrible nakedness? Think of it shivering with cold, stilled with shame and misery, before all those people⁠—feeling their jeers that cut like a whip⁠—their laughter, that burns like red-hot iron on the bare flesh! Think of it looking round⁠—so helpless before them all⁠—for the mountains that will not fall on it⁠—for the rocks that have not the heart to cover it⁠—envying the rats that can creep into some hole in the earth and hide; and remember that a soul is dumb⁠—it has no voice to cry out⁠—it must endure, and endure, and endure. Oh! I’m talking nonsense! Why on earth don’t you laugh? You have no sense of humour!”

Slowly and in