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

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