Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) Part 11

She was a dainty ash-blonde with a high color in striking contrast to her general delicacy of tone. Her great, almond-shaped, black eyes appeared like those of an Oriental dancer, and were yet further prolonged by skillful retouching of shadows that augmented the seductive contrast with her dull gold hair.

The whiteness of her skin became very evident when her arm showed outside her sleeve and at the opening of her low-necked dress. But this whiteness was now temporarily effaced by a ruddy mask. Her vigorous beauty had been fearlessly exposed to the sun and the breath of the sea, and a scarlet triangle emphasized the sweet curve of her bosom, accentuating the low cut of her gown. Upon her sunburned throat a necklace of pearls hung in moonlight drops. Further up, in a face tanned by the inclemency of the weather, the mouth parted its two scarlet, bow-shaped lips with an audacious and serene smile, showing the reflection of her strong and handsome teeth.

Ferragut reviewed his past without finding a single woman that could be exactly compared with her. The distant perfume of her person and her genteel elegance reminded him of certain dubious ladies who were always traveling alone when he was captain of the transatlantic liners. But these acquaintances had been so rapid and were so far away!... Never in his history as a world-rover had he had the good luck to chance upon a woman just like this one.

Again exchanging glances with her, he felt that throb in the heart and flash in the brain which accompany a lightning-like and unexpected discovery... He had known that woman: he could not recall where he had seen her, but he was sure that he must have known her.

Her face told his memory nothing, but those eyes had exchanged glances with his on other occasions. In vain he reflected, concentrating his thoughts.... And the queer thing about it all was that, by some mysterious perception, he became absolutely certain that she was doing the same thing at the very same moment. She also had recognized him, and was evidently making great effort to give him a name and place in her memory. He had only to notice the frequency with which she turned her eyes toward him and her new smile, more confident and spontaneous, such as she would give to an old friend.

Had her dragon not been present, they would have talked together enthusiastically, instinctively, like two restless, curious beings wis.h.i.+ng to clear up the mystery; but the gold-rimmed gla.s.ses were always gleaming authoritatively and inimically, coming between the two.

Several times the fat lady spoke in a language that reached Ferragut confusedly and which was not English, and their dinner was hardly finished before they disappeared just as they had done in the streets of Pompeii,--the older one evidently influencing the other with her iron will.

The following morning they all met again in a first-cla.s.s coach in the station of Salerno. Undoubtedly they had the same destination. As Ferragut began to greet them, the hostile dame deigned to return his salutation, looking then at her companion with a questioning expression. The sailor guessed that during the night they had been discussing him while he, under the same roof, had been struggling uselessly, before falling asleep, to concentrate his recollections.

He never knew with certainty just how the conversation began. He found himself suddenly talking in English with the younger one, just as on the preceding morning. She, with the audacity that quickly makes the best of a dubious situation, asked him if he was a sailor. And upon receiving an affirmative response, she then asked if he was Spanish.

"Yes, Spanish."

Ferragut's answer was followed by a triumphant glance toward the chaperone, who seemed to relax a little and lose her hostile att.i.tude.

And for the first time she smiled upon the captain with her mouth of bluish-rose color, her white skin sprinkled with yellow, and her gla.s.ses of phosph.o.r.escent splendor.

Meanwhile, the young woman was talking on and on, verifying her extraordinary powers of memory.

She had traveled all over the world without forgetting a single one of the places which she had seen. She was able to repeat the t.i.tles of the eighty great hotels in which those who make the world's circuit may stay. Upon meeting with an old traveling companion, she always recognized his face immediately, no matter how short a time she had seen him, and oftentimes she could even recall his name. This last was what she had been puzzling over, wrinkling her brows with the mental effort.

"You are a captain?... Your name is?..."

And she smiled suddenly as her doubts came to an end.

"Your name is," she said positively, "Captain Ulysses Ferragut."

In long and agreeable silence she relished the sailor's astonishment.

Then, as though she pitied his stupefaction, she made further explanations. She had made a trip from Buenos Ayres to Barcelona in a steams.h.i.+p which he had commanded.

"That was six years ago," she added. "No; seven years ago."

Ferragut, who had been the first to suspect a former acquaintance, could not recall this woman's name and place among the innumerable pa.s.sengers that filled his memory. He thought, nevertheless, that he must lie for gallantry's sake, insisting that he remembered her well.

"No, Captain; you do not remember me. I was accompanied by my husband and you never looked at me.... All your attentions on that trip were devoted to a very handsome widow from Brazil."

She said this in Spanish, a smooth, sing-song Spanish learned in South America, to which her foreign accent contributed a certain childish charm. Then she added coquettishly:

"I know you, Captain. Always the same!... That affair of the rose at Pompeii was very well done.... It was just like you."

The grave lady of the gla.s.ses, finding herself forgotten, and unable to understand a word of the new language employed in the conversation, now spoke aloud, rolling her eyes in her enthusiasm.

"Oh, Spain!..." she said in English. "The land of knightly gentlemen.... Cervantes ... Lope!... The Cid!..."

She stopped hunting for more celebrities. Suddenly she seized the sailor's arm, exclaiming as energetically as though she had just made a discovery through the little door of the coach. "Calderon de la Barca!"

Ferragut saluted her. "Yes, Senora." After that the younger woman thought that it was necessary to present her companion.

"Doctor Fedelmann.... A very wise woman distinguished in philology and literature."

After clasping the doctor's hand, Ferragut indiscreetly set himself to work to gather information.

"The Senora is German?" he said in Spanish to the younger one.

The gold-rimmed spectacles appeared to guess the question and shot a restless gleam at her companion.

"No," she replied. "My friend is a Russian, or rather a Pole."

"And you, are you Polish, too?" continued the sailor.

"No, I am Italian."

In spite of the a.s.surance with which she said this, Ferragut felt tempted to exclaim, "You little liar!" Then, as he gazed upon the full, black, audacious eyes fixed upon him, he began to doubt.... Perhaps she was telling the truth.

Again he found himself interrupted by the wordiness of the doctor. She was now speaking in French, repeating her eulogies on Ferragut's country. She could read Castilian in the cla.s.sic works, but she would not venture to speak it. "Ah, Spain! Country of n.o.ble traditions...."

And then, seeking to relieve these eulogies by some strong contrast, she twisted her face into a wrathful expression.

The train was running along the coast, having on one side the blue desert of the Gulf of Salerno, and on the other the red and green mountains dotted with white villages and hamlets. The doctor took it all in with her gleaming gla.s.ses.

"A country of bandits," she said, clenching her fists. "Country of mandolin-tw.a.n.gers, without honor and without grat.i.tude!..."

The girl laughed at this outburst with that hilarity of light-heartedness in which no impressions are durable, considering as of no importance anything which does not bear directly upon its own egoism.

From a few words that the two ladies let fall, Ulysses inferred that they had been living in Rome and had only been in Naples a short time, perhaps against their will. The younger one was well acquainted with the country, and her companion was taking advantage of this enforced journey in order to see what she had so many times admired in books.

The three alighted in the station of Battipaglia in order to take the train for Paestum. It was a rather long wait, and the sailor invited them to go into the restaurant, a little wooden shanty impregnated with the double odor of resin and wine.

This shack reminded both Ferragut and the young woman of the houses improvised on the South American deserts; and again they began to speak of their oceanic voyage. She finally consented to satisfy the captain's curiosity.

"My husband was a professor, a scholar like the doctor.... We were a year in Patagonia, making scientific explorations."

She had made the dangerous journey through an ocean of desert plains that had spread themselves out before them as the expedition advanced; she had slept in ranch houses whose roofs shed bloodthirsty insects; she had traveled on horseback through whirlwinds of sand that had shaken her from the saddle; she had suffered the tortures of hunger and thirst when losing the way, and she had pa.s.sed nights in intemperate weather with no other bed than her poncho and the trappings of the horses. Thus they had explored those lakes of the Andes between Argentina and Chile that guard in their pure and untouched desert solitude the mystery of the earliest days of creation.

Rovers over these virgin lands, shepherds and bandits, used to talk of glimpses of gigantic animals at nightfall on the sh.o.r.es of the lakes devouring entire meadows with one gulp; and the doctor, like many other sages, had believed in the possibility of finding a surviving prehistoric animal, a beast of the monstrous herds anterior to the coming of man, still dwelling in this unexplored section of the planet.

They saw skeletons dozens of yards long in the foot-hills of the Cordilleras so frequently agitated by volcanic cataclysms. In the neighborhood of the lakes the guides pointed out to them the hides of devoured herds, and enormous mountains of dried material that appeared to have been deposited by some monster. But no matter how far they penetrated into the solitude, they were always unable to find any living descendant of prehistoric fauna.

The sailor listened absent-mindedly, thinking of something else that was quickening his curiosity.

"And you, what is your name?" he said suddenly.

The two women laughed at this question, amusing because so unexpected.

"Call me Freya. It is a Wagnerian name. It means the earth, and at the same time liberty.... Do you like Wagner?"