The Gadfly quotes

“You spoke just now of what Christ would have said—” Montanelli began slowly; but Arthur interrupted him:

“Christ said: ‘He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.’ ”

Montanelli leaned his arm against a branch, and shaded his eyes with one hand.

He had grown up beside the Mediterranean, and was accustomed to blue ripples; but he had a positive passion for swiftly moving water, and the hurried rushing of the glacier stream delighted him beyond measure.

“It is so much in earnest,” he said.

Early on the following morning they started for Chamonix. Arthur was in very high spirits while driving through the fertile valley country;

“Padre!” Arthur rose, shuddering, and drew back from the precipice. “It is like hell.”

“No, my son,” Montanelli answered softly, “it is only like a human soul.”

“The souls of them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death?”

“There is nothing to tell, dear Padre; I have not bound myself, but I am bound.”

“What is the use of vows? They are not what binds people. If you feel in a certain way about a thing, that binds you to it; if you don’t feel that way, nothing else can bind you.”

“Do you mean, then, that this thing—this—feeling is quite irrevocable? Arthur, have you thought what you are saying?”

Arthur turned round and looked straight into Montanelli’s eyes.

“Padre, you asked me if I could trust you. Can you not trust me, too? Indeed, if there were anything to tell, I would tell it to you; but there is no use in talking about these things. I have not forgotten what you said to me that night; I shall never forget it. But I must go my way and follow the light that I see.”

Montanelli picked a rose from the bush, pulled off the petals one by one, and tossed them into the water.

“I say; this is an infernally awkward business. I’m very sorry about it.”

Arthur looked up with a face as serene as a summer morning.

“You have always been good to me,” he said. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. I shall be safe enough.”

“Lorenzo Montanelli.” For a moment he stared at the writing; then, without a word, refolded the paper and laid it down. James rose and took his wife by the arm.

“There, Julia, that will do. Just go downstairs now; it’s late, and I want to talk a little business with Arthur. It won’t interest you.”

She glanced up at her husband; then back at Arthur, who was silently staring at the floor.

“Just like a hysterical woman,” he muttered, turning, with a contemptuous shrug of his shoulders, to tramp impatiently up and down the room. “Really, Arthur, you’re worse than Julia; there, stop laughing! I can’t wait about here all night.”

He might as well have asked the crucifix to come down from its pedestal.

Arthur was past caring for remonstrances or exhortations; he only laughed, and laughed, and laughed without end.

The untried universe might prove a dismal hole, but it could hardly be more flat and sordid than the corner which he was leaving behind him. There was nothing to regret; nothing to look back upon.

It had been a pestilent little stagnant world, full of squalid lies and clumsy cheats and foul-smelling ditches that were not even deep enough to drown a man.

He walked along the canal bank, and came out upon the tiny square by the Medici palace. It was here that Gemma had run up to him with her vivid face, her outstretched hands.

The hold was not only damp and dark, but intolerably foul. At first Arthur instinctively drew back, half choked by the stench of raw hides and rancid oil. Then he remembered the “punishment cell,” and descended the ladder, shrugging his shoulders.

Life is pretty much the same everywhere, it seemed; ugly, putrid, infested with vermin, full of shameful secrets and dark corners.

Still, life is life, and he must make the best of it.

“Believe me,” she said, “that if I were ferocious enough to think of such things I should not be childish enough to talk about them.

But the deadliest weapon I know is ridicule.

If you can once succeed in rendering the Jesuits ludicrous, in making people laugh at them and their claims, you have conquered them without bloodshed.”

but I think, of the two, I like the Russian variety best—it’s so thorough. If Russia had to depend on flowers and skies for her supremacy instead of on powder and shot, how long do you think ‘mon prince’ would k-keep that Polish fortress?”

“I think,” she answered coldly, “that we can hold our personal opinions without ridiculing a woman whose guests we are.”

“Ah, yes! I f-forgot the obligations of hospitality here in Italy; they are a wonderfully hospitable people, these Italians. I’m sure the Austrians find them so. Won’t you sit down?”

For the rest, he was as swarthy as a mulatto, and, notwithstanding his lameness, as agile as a cat.

His whole personality was oddly suggestive of a black jaguar.

The forehead and left cheek were terribly disfigured by the long crooked scar of the old sabre-cut; and she had already noticed that, when he began to stammer in speaking, that side of his face was affected with a nervous twitch.

Presently he began again in his soft, murmuring purr (

“Just the voice a jaguar would talk in, if it could speak and were in a good humour,”

Gemma said to herself with rising irritation).

“You had a talk with him, didn’t you? What did you think of him?”

“Oh, Cesare, I didn’t think anything except how glad I was to see the last of him. I never met anyone so fearfully tiring. He gave me a headache in ten minutes. He is like an incarnate demon of unrest.”

“I thought you wouldn’t like him; and, to tell the truth, no more do I. The man’s as slippery as an eel; I don’t trust him.”

“Yes, of course, you are perfectly right. The thing’s written like a café chantant skit, not a political satire. But what’s a man to do? If I write decently the public won’t understand it; they will say it’s dull if it isn’t spiteful enough.”

“Don’t you think spitefulness manages to be dull when we get too much of it?”

He threw a keen, rapid glance at her, and burst out laughing.

“At any rate,” he said, “if Monsignor Montanelli is not himself a scoundrel, he is a tool in scoundrelly hands. It is all one to me which he is—and to my friends across the frontier.

A stone in the path may have the best intentions, but it must be kicked out of the path, for all that.

Allow me, signora!” He rang the bell, and, limping to the door, opened it for her to pass out.

Gemma went out into the street, pondering anxiously. “My friends across the frontier”—who were they? And how was the stone to be kicked out of the path?

If with satire only, why had he said it with such dangerous eyes?

“Gemma, dear,” he said after a moment; “are you going to let that miserable business haunt you all your life? We have all made mistakes when we were seventeen.”

“We have not all killed our dearest friend when we were seventeen,” she answered wearily

; and, leaning her arm on the stone balustrade of the bridge, looked down into the river. Martini held his tongue; he was almost afraid to speak to her when this mood was on her.

“How do you know it?”

“Because he told me so.”

“He told you? Montanelli? Gemma, what do you mean?”

“From Holy Writ, my dear sir. If the Gospel is to be trusted, even the most respectable of all Ghosts had a f-f-fancy for capricious alliances.

Now, honesty and c-c-cardinals⁠—that seems to me a somewhat capricious alliance, and rather an uncomfortable one, like shrimps and liquorice.

Ah, Signor Martini, and Signora Bolla! Lovely weather after the rain, is it not? Have you been to hear the n-new Savonarola, too?”

His savage attacks upon Montanelli had annoyed even his admirers; and Galli himself, who at first had been inclined to uphold everything the witty satirist said or did, began to acknowledge with an aggrieved air that Montanelli had better have been left in peace.

“Decent cardinals are none so plenty. One might treat them politely when they do turn up.”

The only person who, apparently, remained quite indifferent to the storm of caricatures and pasquinades was Montanelli himself. It seemed, as Martini said, hardly worth while to expend one’s energy in ridiculing a man who took it so good-humouredly.

The whole thing was full of offensive personal allusions and hints of the most risky nature, and all Florence felt the satire to be both ungenerous and unfair.

And yet all Florence laughed.

There was something so irresistible in the Gadfly’s grave absurdities that those who most disapproved of and disliked him laughed as immoderately at all his squibs as did his warmest partisans.

The Gadfly looked up with a sudden flash of anger.

“It is hungry,” he said fiercely. “You don’t know what that means, do you?”

“Signor Rivarez,” interposed Gemma, coming forward, “my lodgings are quite close. Let us take the child in there. Then, if you cannot find a vettura, I will manage to put it up for the night.”

“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:

“I want to ask you a question.”

“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?”

He was quite unprepared for such a scene as this and at a loss how to answer her. Yes, Gemma was right; he had got his life into a tangle that he would have hard work to undo.

“Sit down and let us talk about it quietly,” he said, coming back after a moment.

“I think we have misunderstood each other; of course I should not have laughed if I had thought you were serious. Try to tell me plainly what is troubling you; and then, if there is any misunderstanding, we may be able to clear it up.”

Montanelli turned round and looked at the Governor with an expression which his face did not often wear.

“I am a minister of religion,” he said; “not a police-spy; and eavesdropping forms no part of my professional duties.”

“I—I didn’t mean to give offence—”

He stood up again and spoke to himself, aloud and distinctly:

“I am not ill; I have no time to be ill. I have those bars to file, and I am not going to be ill.”

Then he began to file.

A quarter-past ten—half-past ten—a quarter to eleven—He filed and filed, and every grating scrape of the iron was as though someone were filing on his body and brain.

“I wonder which will be filed through first,” he said to himself with a little laugh; “I or the bars?”

And he set his teeth and went on filing.

The Gadfly raised himself on one arm, and took the shaking hands in his.

“Padre, will you never understand that I am not really drowned?”

The hands grew suddenly cold and stiff. For a moment everything was dead with silence, and then Montanelli knelt down and hid his face on the Gadfly’s breast.

“Oh, hush, carino! What is all that now?

We have been like two children lost in the dark, mistaking one another for phantoms.

Now we have found each other, and have come out into the light. My poor boy, how changed you are—how changed you are!

Montanelli slowly rose. The very soul in him withered with dread, and he seemed to shrivel up bodily, and to grow feeble, and old, and wilted, like a leaf that the frost has touched.

He had awaked out of his dream, and the outer darkness was staring in upon an empty place.

“Arthur, have just a little mercy on me—”

And now, when I come back, I find Him still in my place—this sham victim that was crucified for six hours, forsooth, and rose again from the dead!

Padre, I have been crucified for five years, and I, too, have risen from the dead.

What are you going to do with me? What are you going to do with me?”

What have you to do with this dead world of priests and idols? They are full of the dust of bygone ages; they are rotten; they are pestilent and foul! Come out of this plague-stricken Church—come away with us into the light!

Padre, it is we that are life and youth; it is we that are the everlasting springtime; it is we that are the future!

Padre, the dawn is close upon us—will you miss your part in the sunrise? Wake up, and let us forget the horrible nightmares—wake up, and we will begin our life again!

His voice died away into the empty stillness without response. Only the mocking devil awoke again in the Gadfly.

“ ‘C-c-call him louder; perchance he s-s-sleepeth’⁠—”

Montanelli started up as if he had been struck. For a moment he stood looking straight before him;—then he sat down on the edge of the pallet, covered his face with both hands, and burst into tears.

“I am an atheist. I want nothing but to be left in peace.”

He said it in a dull, quiet voice, without defiance or irritation; and turned slowly away.

At the door he stopped again.