Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) Part 14

They were in one of the avenues of the promenade. Through the palm trees and glossy magnolias the luminous gulf could be seen on one side, and on the other the handsome edifices of the beach of Chiaja. Some ragged urchins kept running around them and following them, until they took refuge in an ornamental little white temple at the end of the avenue.

"Very well, then, enamored sea-wolf," continued Freya; "you need not sleep, you need not eat, you may kill yourself if the fancy strikes you; but I am not able to love you; I shall never love you. You may give up all hope; life is not mere diversion and I have other more serious occupations that absorb all my time."

In spite of the playful smile with which she accompanied these words, Ferragut surmised a very firm will.

"Then," he said in despair, "it will all be useless?... Even though I make the greatest sacrifices?... Even though I give proofs of love greater than you have ever known?..."

"All useless," she replied roundly, without a sign of a smile.

They paused before the ornamental little temple-shaped building, with its dome supported by white columns and a railing around it. The bust of Virgil adorned the center,--an enormous head of somewhat feminine beauty.

The poet had died in Naples in "Sweet Parthenope," on his return from Greece and his body, turned to dust, was perhaps mingled with the soil of this garden. The Neapolitan people of the Middle Ages had attributed to him all kinds of wonderful things, even transforming the poet into a powerful magician. The wizard Virgil in one night had constructed the _Castello dell' Ovo_, placing it with his own hands upon a great egg (_Ovo_) that was floating in the sea. He also had opened with his magic blasts the tunnel of Posilipo near which are a vineyard and a tomb visited for centuries as the last resting place of the poet. Little scamps, playing around the railing, used to hurl papers and stones inside the temple. The white head of the powerful sorcerer attracted them and at the same time filled them with admiration and fear.

"Thus far and no further," ordered Freya. "You will continue on your way. I am going to the high part of Chiaja.... But before separating as good friends, you are going to give me your word not to follow me, not to importune me with your amorous attentions, not to mix yourself in my life."

Ulysses did not reply, hanging his head in genuine dismay. To his disillusion was added the sting of wounded pride. He who had imagined such very different things when they should see each other again together, alone!...

Freya pitied his sadness.

"Don't be a Baby!... This will soon pa.s.s. Think of your business affairs, and of your family waiting for you over there in Spain....

Besides, the world is full of women; I'm not the only one."

But Ferragut interrupted her. "Yes, she was the only one!... The only one!..." And he said it with a conviction that awakened another one of her compa.s.sionate smiles.

This man's tenacity was beginning to irritate her.

"Captain, I know your type very well. You are an egoist, like all other men. Your boat is tied up in the harbor because of an accident; you've got to remain ash.o.r.e a month; you meet on one of your trips a woman who is idiot enough to admit that she remembers meeting you at other times, and you say to yourself, Magnificent occasion to while away agreeably a tedious period of waiting!...' If I should yield to your desire, within a few weeks, as soon as your boat was ready, the hero of my love, the knight of my dreams, would betake himself to the sea, saying as a parting salute: 'Adieu, simpleton!'"

Ulysses protested with energy. No: he wished that his boat might never be repaired. He was computing with agony the days that remained. If it were necessary, he would abandon it, remaining forever in Naples.

"And what have I to do in Naples?" interrupted Freya. "I am a mere bird of pa.s.sage here, just as you are. We knew each other on the seas of another hemisphere, and we have just happened to run across each other here in Italy. Next time, if we ever meet again, it will be in j.a.pan or Canada or the Cape.... Go on your way, you enamored old shark, and let me go mine. Imagine to yourself that we are two boats that have met when becalmed, have signaled each other, have exchanged greetings, have wished each other good luck, and afterwards have continued on our way, perhaps never to see each other again."

Ferragut shook his head negatively. Such a thing could not be, he could not resign himself to losing sight of her forever.

"These men!" she continued, each time a little more irritated. "You all imagine that things must be arranged entirely according to your caprices. 'Because I desire thee, thou must be mine....' And what if I don't want to?... And if I don't feel any necessity of being loved?...

If I wish only to live in liberty, with no other love than that which I feel for myself?..."

She considered it a great misfortune to be a woman. She always envied men for their independence. They could hold themselves aloof, abstaining from the pa.s.sions that waste life, without anybody's coming to importune them in their retreat. They were at liberty to go wherever they wanted to, to travel the wide world over, without leaving behind their footsteps a wake of solicitors.

"You appear to me, Captain, a very charming man. The other day I was delighted to meet you; it was an apparition from the past; I saw in you the joy of my youth that is beginning to fade away, and the melancholy of certain recollections.... And nevertheless, I am going to end by hating you. Do you hear me, you tedious old Argonaut?... I shall loathe you because you will not be a mere friend; because you know only how to talk everlastingly about the same thing; because you are a person out of a novel, a Latin, very interesting, perhaps, to other women,--but insufferable to me."

Her face contracted with a gesture of scorn and pity. "Ah, those Latins!..."

"They're all the same,--Spaniards, Italians, Frenchmen.... They were born for the same thing. They hardly meet an attractive woman but they believe that they are evading their obligations if they do not beg for her love and what comes afterward.... Cannot a man and woman simply be friends? Couldn't you be just a good comrade and treat me as a companion?"

Ferragut protested energetically. No; no, he couldn't. He loved her and, after being repelled with such cruelty, his love would simply go on increasing. He was sure of that.

A nervous tremor made Freya's voice sharp and cutting, and her eyes took on a dangerous gleam. She looked at her companion as though he were an enemy whose death she longed for.

"Very well, then, if you must know it. I abominate all men; I abominate them, because I know them so well. I would like the death of all of them, of every one!... The evil that they have wrought in my life!... I would like to be immensely beautiful, the handsomest woman on earth, and to possess the intellect of all the sages concentrated in my brain, to be rich and to be a queen, in order that all the men of the world, crazy with desire, would come to prostrate themselves before me.... And I would lift up my feet with their iron heels, and I would go trampling over them, crus.h.i.+ng their heads ... so ... and so ... and so!..."

She struck the sands of the garden with the soles of her little shoes.

An hysterical sneer distorted her mouth.

"Perhaps I might make an exception of you.... You who, with all your braggart arrogance, are, after all, outright and simple-hearted. I believe you capable of a.s.suring a woman of all kinds of love-lies ...

believing them yourself most of all. But the others!... _Ay, the others!_... How I hate them!..."

She looked over toward the palace of the Aquarium, glistening white between the colonnade of trees.

"I would like to be," she continued pensively, "one of those animals of the sea that can cut with their claws, that have arms like scissors, saws, pincers ... that devour their own kind, and absorb everything around them."

Then she looked at the branch of a tree from which were hanging several silver threads, sustaining insects with active tentacles.

"I would like to be a spider, an enormous spider, that all men might be drawn to my web as irresistibly as flies. With what satisfaction would I crunch them between my claws! How I would fasten my mouth against their hearts!... And I would suck them.... I would suck them until there wasn't a drop of blood left, tossing away then their empty carca.s.ses!..."

Ulysses began to wonder if he had fallen in love with a crazy woman.

His disquietude, his surprise and questioning eyes gradually restored Freya's serenity.

She pa.s.sed one hand across her forehead, as though awakening from a nightmare and wis.h.i.+ng to banish remembrance with this gesture. Her glance became calmer.

"Good-by, Ferragut; do not make me talk any more. You will soon doubt my reason.... You are doing so already. We shall be friends, just friends and nothing more. It is useless to think of anything else....

Do not follow me.... We shall see each other.... I shall hunt you up.... Good-by!... Good-by!"

And although Ferragut felt tempted to follow her, he remained motionless, seeing her hurry rapidly away, as though fleeing from the words that she had just let fall before the little temple of the poet.

CHAPTER V

THE AQUARIUM OF NAPLES

In spite of her promise, Freya made no effort to meet the sailor. "We shall see each other.... I shall hunt you up." But it was Ferragut who did the hunting, stationing himself around the hotel.

"How crazy I was the other morning!... I wonder what you could have thought of me!" she said the first time that she spoke to him again.

Not every day did Ulysses have the pleasure of a conversation which invariably developed from the _Via Partenope_ to Virgil's monument. The most of the mornings he used to wait in vain opposite the oyster stands, listening to the musicians who were bombarding the closed windows of the hotel with their sentimental romances and mandolins.

Freya would not appear.

His impatience usually dragged Ulysses back to the hotel in order to beg information of the porter. Animated by the hope of a new bill, the flunkey would go to the telephone and inquire of the servants on the upper floor. And then with a sad and obsequious smile, as though lamenting his own words: "The _signora_ is not in. The _signora_ has pa.s.sed the night outside of the _albergo_." And Ferragut would go away furious.

Sometimes he would go to see how the repairs were getting on in his boat,--an excellent pretext for venting his wrath on somebody. On other mornings he would go to the garden of the beach of Chiaja,--to the very same places through which he had strolled with Freya. He was always looking for her to appear from one moment to another. Everything 'round about suggested some reminder of her. Trees and benches, pavements and electric lights knew her perfectly because of having formed a part of her regular walk.

Becoming convinced that he was waiting in vain, a last hope made him glance toward the white building of the Aquarium. Freya had frequently mentioned it. She was accustomed to amuse herself, oftentimes pa.s.sing entire hours there, contemplating the life of the inhabitants of the sea. And Ferragut blinked involuntarily as he pa.s.sed rapidly from the garden boiling under the sun into the shadow of the damp galleries with no other illumination than that of the daylight which penetrated to the interior of the Aquarium,--a light that, seen through the water and the gla.s.s, took on a mysterious tone, the green and diffused tint of the subsea depths.

This visit enabled him to kill time more placidly. There came to his mind old readings confirmed now by direct vision. He was not the kind of sailor that sails along regardless of what exists under his keel. He wanted to know the mysteries of the immense blue palace over whose roof he was usually navigating, devoting himself to the study of oceanography, the most recent of sciences.

Upon taking his first steps in the Aquarium, he immediately pictured the marine depths which exploration had divided and charted so unequally. Near the sh.o.r.es, in the zone called "the littoral" where the rivers empty, the materials of nourishment were acc.u.mulated by the impulse of the tides and currents, and there flourished sub-aquatic vegetation. This was the zone of the great fish and reached down to within two hundred fathoms of the bottom,--a depth to which the sun's rays never penetrate. Beyond that there was no light; plant life disappeared and with it the herbivorous animals.