"I suppose you won't have time to drop in here in the course of the evening, will you, Rivarez?" asked Riccardo, as he opened the door for them.
The Gadfly looked back over his shoulder, laughing. "I, my dear fellow? I'm going to see the variety show!"
"What a strange creature that is; and what an odd affection for mountebanks!" said Riccardo, coming back to his visitors.
"Case of a fellow-feeling, I should think," said Martini; "the man's a mountebank himself, if ever I saw one."
"I wish I could think he was only that," Fabrizi interposed, with a grave face. "If he is a mountebank I am afraid he's a very dangerous one."
"Dangerous in what way?"
"Well, I don't like those mysterious little pleasure trips that he is so fond of taking. This is the third time, you know; and I don't believe he has been in Pisa at all."
"I suppose it is almost an open secret that it's into the mountains he goes," said Sacconi. "He has hardly taken the trouble to deny that he is still in relations with the smugglers he got to know in the Savigno affair, and it's quite natural he should take advantage of their friendship to get his leaflets across the Papal frontier."
"For my part," said Riccardo; "what I wanted to talk to you about is this very question. It occurred to me that we could hardly do better than ask Rivarez to undertake the management of our own smuggling. That press at Pistoja is very inefficiently managed, to my thinking; and the way the leaflets are taken across, always rolled in those everlasting cigars, is more than primitive."
"It has answered pretty well up till now," said Martini contumaciously. He was getting wearied of hearing Galli and Riccardo always put the Gadfly forward as a model to copy, and inclined to think that the world had gone well enough before this "lackadaisical buccaneer" turned up to set everyone to rights.
"It has answered so far well that we have been satisfied with it for want of anything better; but you know there have been plenty of arrests and confiscations. Now I believe that if Rivarez undertook the business for us, there would be less of that."
"Why do you think so?"
"In the first place, the smugglers look upon us as strangers to do business with, or as sheep to fleece, whereas Rivarez is their personal friend, very likely their leader, whom they look up to and trust. You may be sure every smuggler in the Apennines will do for a man who was in the Savigno revolt what he will not do for us. In the next place, there's hardly a man among us that knows the mountains as Rivarez does. Remember, he has been a fugitive among them, and knows the smugglers' paths by heart. No smuggler would dare to cheat him, even if he wished to, and no smuggler could cheat him if he dared to try."
"Then is your proposal that we should ask him to take over the whole management of our literature on the other side of the frontier--distribution, addresses, hiding-places, everything--or simply that we should ask him to put the things across for us?"
"Well, as for addresses and hiding-places, he probably knows already all the ones that we have and a good many more that we have not. I don't suppose we should be able to teach him much in that line. As for distribution, it's as the others prefer, of course. The important question, to my mind, is the actual smuggling itself. Once the books are safe in Bologna, it's a comparatively simple matter to circulate them."
"For my part," said Martini, "I am against the plan. In the first place, all this about his skilfulness is mere conjecture; we have not actually seen him engaged in frontier work and do not know whether he keeps his head in critical moments."
"Oh, you needn't have any doubt of that!" Riccardo put in. "The history of the Savigno affair proves that he keeps his head."
"And then," Martini went on; "I do not feel at all inclined, from what little I know of Rivarez, to intrust him with all the party's secrets. He seems to me feather-brained and theatrical. To give the whole management of a party's contraband work into a man's hands is a serious matter. Fabrizi, what do you think?"
"If I had only such objections as yours, Martini," replied the professor, "I should certainly waive them in the case of a man really possessing, as Rivarez undoubtedly does, all the qualifications Riccardo speaks of. For my part, I have not the slightest doubt as to either his courage, his honesty, or his presence of mind; and that he knows both mountains and mountaineers we have had ample proof. But there is another objection. I do not feel sure that it is only for the smuggling of pamphlets he goes into the mountains. I have begun to doubt whether he has not another purpose. This is, of course, entirely between ourselves. It is a mere suspicion. It seems to me just possible that he is in connexion with some one of the 'sects,' and perhaps with the most dangerous of them."
"Which one do you mean--the 'Red Girdles'?"
"No; the 'Occoltellatori.'"
"The 'Knifers'! But that is a little body of outlaws--peasants, most of them, with neither education nor political experience."
"So were the insurgents of Savigno; but they had a few educated men as leaders, and this little society may have the same. And remember, it's pretty well known that most of the members of those more violent sects in the Romagna are survivors of the Savigno affair, who found themselves too weak to fight the Churchmen in open insurrection, and so have fallen back on assassination. Their hands are not strong enough for guns, and they take to knives instead."
"But what makes you suppose Rivarez to be connected with them?"
"I don't suppose, I merely suspect. In any case, I think we had better find out for certain before we intrust our smuggling to him. If he attempted to do both kinds of work at once he would injure our party most terribly; he would simply destroy its reputation and accomplish nothing. However, we will talk of that another time. I wanted to speak to you about the news from Rome. It is said that a commission is to be appointed to draw up a project for a municipal constitution."
CHAPTER VI.
GEMMA and the Gadfly walked silently along the Lung'Arno. His feverish talkativeness seemed to have quite spent itself; he had hardly spoken a word since they left Riccardo's door, and Gemma was heartily glad of his silence. She always felt embarrassed in his company, and to-day more so than usual, for his strange behaviour at the committee meeting had greatly perplexed her.
By the Uffizi palace he suddenly stopped and turned to her.
"Are you tired?"
"No; why?"
"Nor especially busy this evening?"
"No."
"I want to ask a favour of you; I want you to come for a walk with me."
"Where to?"
"Nowhere in particular; anywhere you like."
"But what for?"
He hesitated.
"I--can't tell you--at least, it's very difficult; but please come if you can."
He raised his eyes suddenly from the ground, and she saw how strange their expression was.
"There is something the matter with you," she said gently. He pulled a leaf from the flower in his button-hole, 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 tender-hearted 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 dead silence she turned and walked on along the river side. During the whole evening it had not once occurred to her to connect his trouble, whatever it might be, with the variety show; and now that some dim picture of his inner life had been revealed to her by this sudden outburst, she could not find, in her overwhelming pity for him, one word to say. He walked on beside her, with his head turned away, and looked into the water.
"I want you, please, to understand," he began suddenly, turning to her with a defiant air, "that everything I have just been saying to you is pure imagination. I'm rather given to romancing, but I don't like people to take it seriously."
She made no answer, and they walked on in silence. As they passed by the gateway of the Uffizi, he crossed the road and stooped down over a dark bundle that was lying against the railings.
"What is the matter, little one?" he asked, more gently than she had ever heard him speak. "Why don't you go home?"
