"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 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 hells 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 ashore 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 nobody 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.
"If--if you will. I am afraid it is horrible to you to remember."
"Do you think I forget when I hold my tongue? It's worse then. But don't imagine it's the thing itself that haunts me so. It is the fact of having lost the power over myself."
"I--don't think I quite understand."
"I mean, it is the fact of having come to the end of my courage, to the point where I found myself a coward."
"Surely there is a limit to what anyone can bear."
"Yes; and the man who has once reached that limit never knows when he may reach it again."
"Would you mind telling me," she asked, hesitating, "how you came to be stranded out there alone at twenty?"
"Very simply: I had a good opening in life, at home in the old country, and ran away from it."
"Why?"
He laughed again in his quick, harsh way.
"Why? Because I was a priggish young cub, I suppose. I had been brought up in an over-luxurious home, and coddled and faddled after till I thought the world was made of pink cotton-wool and sugared almonds. Then one fine day I found out that someone I had trusted had deceived me. Why, how you start! What is it?"
"Nothing. Go on, please."
"I found out that I had been tricked into believing a lie; a common bit of experience, of course; but, as I tell you, I was young and priggish, and thought that liars go to hell. So I ran away from home and plunged into South America to sink or swim as I could, without a cent in my pocket or a word of Spanish in my tongue, or anything but white hands and expensive habits to get my bread with. And the natural result was that I got a dip into the real hell to cure me of imagining sham ones. A pretty thorough dip, too--it was just five years before the Duprez expedition came along and pulled me out."
"Five years! Oh, that is terrible! And had you no friends?"
"Friends! I"--he turned on her with sudden fierceness--"I have NEVER had a friend!"
The next instant he seemed a little ashamed of his vehemence, and went on quickly:
"You mustn't take all this too seriously; I dare say I made the worst of things, and really it wasn't so bad the first year and a half; I was young and strong and I managed to scramble along fairly well till the Lascar put his mark on me. But after that I couldn't get work. It's wonderful what an effectual tool a poker is if you handle it properly; and nobody cares to employ a cripple."
"What sort of work did you do?"
"What I could get. For some time I lived by odd-jobbing for the blacks on the sugar plantations, fetching and carrying and so on. It's one of the curious things in life, by the way, that slaves always contrive to have a slave of their own, and there's nothing a negro likes so much as a white fag to bully. But it was no use; the overseers always turned me off. I was too lame to be quick; and I couldn't manage the heavy loads. And then I was always getting these attacks of inflammation, or whatever the confounded thing is.
