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

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