Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) Part 18

She was speaking between her teeth, with emotional pauses, admiring the ferocity of the cuttlefish, grieving that she did not possess their vigor and their cruelty.

"If I could only be like them!... To be able to go through the streets ... through the world, stretching out my talons!... To devour!... to devour! They would struggle uselessly to free themselves from the winding of my tentacles.... To absorb them!... To eat them!... To cause them to disappear!..."

Ulysses beheld her as on that first day near the temple of the poet, possessed with a fierce wrath against men, longing extravagantly for their extermination.

Their digestion finished, the polypi had begun to swim around, and were now horizontal skeins, fluting the tank with elegance. They appeared like torpedo boats with a conical prow, dragging along the heavy, thick and long hair of their tentacles. Their excited appet.i.te made them glide through the water in all directions, seeking new victims.

Freya protested. The guard had only brought them dead bodies. What she wanted was the struggle, the sacrifice, the death. The bits of sardine were a meal without substance for these bandits that had zest only for food seasoned with a.s.sa.s.sination.

As though the pulps had understood her complaints, they had fallen on the sandy bottom, flaccid, inert, breathing through their funnels.

A little crab began to descend at the end of a thread desperately moving its claws.

Freya pressed still closer to Ulysses, excited at the thought of the approaching spectacle. One of the bags, transformed into a star, suddenly leaped forward. Its arms writhed like serpents seeking the recent arrival. In vain the guard pulled the thread up, wis.h.i.+ng to prolong the chase. The tentacles clamped their irresistible openings upon the body of the victim, pulling upon the line with such force that it broke, the octopus falling on the bottom with his prey.

Freya clapped her hands in applause.

"Bravo!..." She was exceedingly pale, though a feverish heat was coursing through her body.

She leaned toward the crystal in order to see better the devouring activity of that pyramidal stomach which had on its sharp point a diminutive parrot head with two ferocious eyes and around its base the twisted skeins of its arms full of projecting disks. With these it pressed the crab against its mouth, injecting under its sh.e.l.l the venomous output of its salivary glands, paralyzing thus every movement of existence. Then it swallowed its prey slowly with the deglut.i.tion of a boa constrictor.

"How beautiful it is!" she said.

The other beasts also seized their live victims, paralyzed and devoured them, moving their flabby bodies in order to permit the pa.s.sage of their swelling nutritive waves and clouds of various colors.

Then the guard tossed in a crab, but one without any string whatever.

Freya screamed with enthusiasm.

This was the kind of hunt that takes place in the ferocious mystery of the sea, a race with death, a destruction preceded with emotional agony and hazards. The poor crustacean, divining its danger, was swimming towards the rocks hoping to take refuge in the nearest crevice. A polypus came up behind it, whilst the others continued their digestion.

"It's escaping!... It's escaping!" cried Freya, palpitating with interest.

The crab scrambled through the stones, sheltering itself in their windings. The polypus was no longer swimming; it was running like a terrestrial animal, climbing over the rocks by its armed extremities, which were now serving as apparatus of locomotion. It was the struggle of a tiger with a mouse. When the crab had half of its body already hidden within the green lichens of a hole, one of the heavy serpents fell upon its back clutching it with the irresistible suction of his air-holes, and causing it to disappear within his skein of tentacles.

"Ah!" sighed Freya, throwing herself back as though she were going to faint on Ulysses' breast.

He shuddered, feeling that a serpentine band of tremulous pressure had encircled his body. The acts of that unbalanced creature were fraying his nerves.

He felt as though a monster of the same cla.s.s as those in the tank but much larger--a gigantic octopus from the oceanic depths--must have slipped treacherously behind him and was clutching him in one of its tentacles. He could feel the pressure of its feelers around his waist, growing closer and more ferocious.

Freya was holding him captive with one of her arms. She had wound herself tightly around him and was clasping his waist with all her force, as though trying to break his vigorous body in two.

Then he saw the head of this woman approaching him with an aggressive swiftness as if she were going to bite him.... Her enlarged eyes, tearful and misty, appeared to be far off, very far off. Perhaps she was not even looking at him.... Her trembling mouth, bluish with emotion, a round and protruding mouth like an absorbing duct, was seeking the sailor's mouth, taking possession of it and devouring it with her lips.

It was the kiss of a cupping-gla.s.s, long, dominating, painful. Ulysses realized that he had never before been kissed in this way. The water from that mouth surging across her row of teeth, discharged itself in his like swift poison. A shudder unfamiliar until then ran the entire length of his back, making him close his eyes.

He felt as if all his interior had turned to liquid. He had a presentiment that his life was going to date from this kiss, that with it was going to begin a new existence, that he never would be able to free himself from these deadly and caressing lips with their faint savor of cinnamon, of incense, of Asiatic forests haunted with sensuousness and intrigue.

And he let himself be dragged down by the caress of this wild beast, with thought lost and body inert and resigned, like a castaway who descends and descends the infinite strata of the abyss without ever reaching bottom.

CHAPTER VI

THE WILES OF CIRCE

After that kiss, the lover believed that all his desires were about to be immediately realized. The most difficult part of the road was already pa.s.sed. But with Freya one always had to expect something absurd and inconceivable.

The midday gun aroused them from a rapture that had lasted but a few seconds as long as years. The steps of the guard, growing nearer all the time, finally separated the two and unlocked their arms.

Freya was the first to calm herself. Only a slight haze flitted across her pupils now, like the vapor from a recently extinguished fire.

"Good-by.... They are waiting for me."

And she went out from the Aquarium followed by Ferragut, still stammering and tremulous. The questions and pet.i.tions with which he pursued her while crossing the promenade were of no avail.

"So far and no further," she said at one of the cross streets of Chiaja. "We shall see one another.... I formally promise you that....

Now leave me."

And she disappeared with the firm step of a handsome huntress, as serene of countenance as though not recalling the slightest recollection of her primitive, pa.s.sional paroxysm.

This time she fulfilled her promise. Ferragut saw her every day.

They met in the mornings near the hotel, and sometimes she came down into the dining-room, exchanging smiles and glances with the sailor, who fortunately was sitting at a distant table. Then they took strolls and chatted together, Freya laughing good-naturedly at the amorous vows of the captain.... And that was all.

With a woman's skillfulness in sounding a man's depth and penetrating into his secrets,--keeping fast-locked and unapproachable her own,--she gradually informed herself of the incidents and adventures in the life of Ulysses. Vainly he spoke, in a natural reciprocity, of the island of Java, of the mysterious dances before Siva, of the journeys through the lakes of the Andes. Freya had to make an effort to recall them. "Ah!...

Yes!" And after giving this distracted exclamation for every answer, she would continue the process of delving eagerly into the former life of her lover. Ulysses sometimes began to wonder if that embrace in the Aquarium could have occurred in his dreams.

One morning the captain managed to bring about the realization of one of his ambitions. He was jealous of the unknown friends that were lunching with Freya. In vain she affirmed that the doctor was the only companion of the hours that she pa.s.sed outside of the hotel. In order to tranquillize himself, the sailor insisted that the widow should accept his invitations. They ought to extend their strolls; they ought to visit the beautiful outskirts of Naples, lunching in their gay little _trattorias_ or eating-houses.

They ascended together the funicular road of Monte Vomero to the heights crowned by the castle of S. Elmo and the monastery of S.

Martino. After admiring in the museum of the abbey the artistic souvenirs of the Bourbon domination and that of Murat, they entered into a nearby _trattoria_ with tables placed on an esplanade from whose balconies they could take in the unforgetable spectacle of the gulf, seeing Vesuvius in the distance and the chain of mountains smoking on the horizon like an immovable succession of dark rose-colored waves.

Naples was extended in horseshoe form on the bow-shaped border of the sea tossing up from its enormous white ma.s.s, as though they were bits of foam, the cl.u.s.ters of houses in the suburbs.

A swarthy oysterman, slender, with eyes like live coals, and enormous mustaches, had his stand at the door of the restaurant, offering c.o.c.kles and sh.e.l.l fish of strong odor that had been half a week perhaps in ascending from the city to the heights of Vomero. Freya jested about the oysterman's typical good looks and the languis.h.i.+ng glances that he was forever casting toward all the ladies that entered the establishment ... a prime discovery for a tourist anxious for adventures in local color.

In the background a small orchestra was accompanying a tenor voice or was playing alone, enlarging upon the melodies and amplifying the measures with Neapolitan exaggeration.

Freya felt a childish hilarity upon seating herself at the table, seeing over the cloth the luminous summit. Bisected in the foreground by a crystal vase full of flowers, the distant panorama of the city, the gulf, and its capes spread itself before her eager eyes. The air on this peak enchanted her after two weeks pa.s.sed without stirring outside of Naples. The harps and violins gave the situation a pathetic thrill and served as a background for conversation, just as the vague murmurs of a hidden orchestra give the effect in the theater of psalmody or of melancholy verses moving the listener to tears.

They ate with the nervousness which joy supplies. At some tables further on a young man and woman were forgetting the courses in order to clasp hands underneath the cloth and place knee against knee with frenzied pressure. The two were smiling, looking at the landscape and then at each other. Perhaps they were foreigners recently married, perhaps fugitive lovers, realizing in this picturesque spot the billing and cooing so many times antic.i.p.ated in their distant courts.h.i.+p.

Two English doctors from a hospital s.h.i.+p, white haired and uniformed, were disregarding their repast in order to paint directly in their alb.u.ms, with a childish painstaking crudeness, the same panorama that was portrayed on the postal cards offered for sale at the door of the restaurant.

A fat-bellied bottle with a petticoat of straw and a long neck attracted Freya's hands to the table. She ridiculed the sobriety of Ferragut, who was diluting with water the reddish blackness of the Italian wine.