Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) Part 60

"I am not a German," she said repeatedly to the men in uniform. "I am not German!"

For her the least important thing was to die. She was only worried for fear they might believe her of that odious nationality.

The attorney found himself in an automobile with many men whom he scarcely knew. Other vehicles were before and behind theirs. In one of them was Freya with the nuns and the priest.

A faint streak was whitening the sky, marking the points of the roofs.

Below, in the deep blackness of the streets, the renewed life of daybreak was slowly beginning. The first laborers going to their work with their hands in their pockets, and the market women returning from market pus.h.i.+ng their carts, turned their heads, following with interest this procession of swift vehicles almost all of them with men in the box seat beside the conductor. To the working-folk, this was perhaps a morning wedding.... Perhaps these were gay people coming from a nocturnal fiesta.... Several times the cortege slackened its speed, blocked by a row of heavy carts with mountains of garden-stuff.

The _maitre_, in spite of his emotions, recognized the road that the automobile was following. In the _place de la Nation_ he caught glimpses of the sculptured group, _le Triomphe de la Republique_, piercing the dripping mistiness of dawn; then the grating of the enclosure; then the long _cours de Vincennes_ and its historic fortress.

They went still further on until they reached the field of execution.

Upon getting down from the automobile, he saw an extensive plain covered with gra.s.s on which were drawn up two companies of soldiers.

Other vehicles had arrived before them. Freya detached herself from the group of persons descending from the automobile, leaving behind the nuns and the officers who were escorting her.

The light of daybreak, blue and cold as the reflection of steel, threw into relief the two ma.s.ses of armed men who formed a narrow pa.s.sageway.

At the end of this impromptu lane there was a post planted in the ground and beyond that, a dark van drawn by two horses, and various men clad in black.

The woman's approach was signalized by a voice of command, and immediately sounded the drums and trumpets at the head of the two formations. There was a rattle of guns; the soldiers were presenting arms. The martial instruments delivered the triumphal salute due to the presence of the head of a state, a general, a flag-raising.... It was an homage to Justice, majestic and severe,--a hymn to Patriotism, implacable in defense.

Recalling the white woman with deep bosom and hollow eyes that she had seen over the head of the President of the Council, the spy for a moment recognized that all this was in her honor; but afterwards, she wished to believe that the triumphal reception was for herself.... She was marching between guns, accompanied by bugle-call and drum-beat, like a queen.

To her defender, she appeared taller than ever. She seemed to have grown a palm higher because of her intense, emotional uplift. Her theatrical soul was moved just as when she used to present herself on the boards to receive applause. All these men had arisen in the middle of the night and were there on her account: the horns and the drums were sounding in order to greet her. Discipline was keeping their countenances grave and cold but she had the certain consciousness that they were finding her beautiful, and that back of many immovable eyes, desire was a.s.serting itself.

If there remained a shred of fear of losing her life, it disappeared under the caress of this false glory.... To die contemplated by so many valiant men who were rendering her the greatest of honors! She felt the necessity of being adorable, of falling into an artistic pose as though she were on a stage.

She was pa.s.sing between the two ma.s.ses of men, head erect, stepping firmly with the high-spirited tread of a G.o.ddess-huntress, sometimes casting a glance on some of the hundreds of eyes fixed upon her. The illusion of her triumph made her advance as upright and serene as though pa.s.sing the troops in review.

"Good heavens!... What poise!" exclaimed a young officer behind the lawyer, admiring Freya's serenity.

Upon approaching the post, some one read a brief doc.u.ment, a summary of the sentence,--three lines to apprise her that justice was about to be fulfilled.

The only thing about this rapid notification that annoyed her was the fear that the trumpets and drums would cease. But they continued sounding and their martial music was as comforting to her ears as a very intoxicating wine slipping through her lips.

A platoon of corporals and soldiers (twelve rifles) detached themselves from the double military ma.s.s. A sub-officer with a blond beard, small, delicate, was commanding it with an unsheathed sword. Freya contemplated him a moment, finding him interesting, while the young man avoided her glance.

With the gesture of a tragedy queen, she repelled the white handkerchief that they were offering her to bandage her eyes. She did not need it. The nuns took leave of her forever. As soon as she was alone, two gendarmes commenced to tie her with the back supported against the post.

"They say," her defender continued writing, "that one of her hands waved to me for the last time just before it was fastened down by the rope.... I saw nothing. I could not see!... It was too much for me!..."

The rest of the execution he knew only by hearsay. The trumpets and drums continued sounding. Freya, bound and intensely pale, smiled as though she were drunk. The early morning breeze waved the plumes of her hat.

When the twelve fusileers advanced placing themselves in a horizontal line eight yards distant, all of them aiming toward her heart, she appeared to wake up. She shrieked, her eyes abnormally dilated by the horror of the reality that so soon was to take place. Her cheeks were covered with tears. She tugged at the ligatures with the vigor of an epileptic.

"Pardon!... Pardon! I do not want to die!"

The sub-lieutenant raised his sword, and lowered it again rapidly.... A shot.

Freya collapsed, her body slipping the entire length of the post until it fell forward on the ground. The bullets had cut the cords that bound her.

As though it had acquired sudden life, her hat leaped from her head, flying off to fall about four yards further on. A corporal with a revolver in his right hand came forward from the shooting picket:--"the death-blow." He checked his step before the puddle of blood that was forming around the victim, pressing his lips together and averting his eyes. He then bent over her, raising with the end of the barrel the ringlets which had fallen over one of her ears. She was still breathing.... A shot in the temple. Her body contracted with a final shudder, then remained immovable with the rigidity of a corpse.

Voices were heard. The firing-squad re-formed in line, and to the rhythm of their instruments went filing past the body of the dead. From the funeral wagon two black-robed men drew out a bier of white wood.

Turning their backs upon their work, the double military ma.s.s marched toward the encampment. The ends of Justice had been served. Trumpets and drums were lost on the horizon but their sounds were still magnified by the fresh echoes of the coming morn. The corpse was despoiled of its jewels and then deposited in that poor coffin which looked so like a packing-box. The two nuns took with timidity the gems which the dead woman had given them for their works of charity. Then the lid was fastened down, shutting away forever the one who a few moments before was a woman of sumptuous charm upon whom men could not look unmoved. The four planks now guarded merely b.l.o.o.d.y rags, mutilated flesh, broken bones.

The vehicle went to the cemetery of Vincennes, to the corner in which the executed were buried.... Not a flower, not an inscription, not a cross. The lawyer himself could not be sure of finding her burial place if at any time it was necessary to seek it.... Such was the last scene in the career of this luxurious and pleasure-loving creature!... Thus had that body gone to dissolution in an unknown hole in the ground like any abandoned beast of burden!...

"She was good," said her defender, "and yet at the same time, she was a criminal. Her education was to blame. Poor woman!... They had brought her up to live in riches, and riches had always fled before her."

Then in his last lines the old _maitre_ said with melancholy, "She died thinking of you and a little of me.... We have been the last men of her existence."

This reading left Ulysses in a mournful state of stupefaction. Freya was no longer living!... He was no longer running the danger of seeing her appear on his s.h.i.+p at whatever port he might touch!...

The duality of his sentiments again surged up with violent contradiction.

"It was a good thing!" said the sailor, "how many men have died through her fault!... Her execution was inevitable. The sea must be cleared of such bandits."

And at the same time the remembrance of the delights of Naples, of that long imprisonment in a harem pervaded with unlimited sensuousness was reborn in his mind. He saw her in all the majesty of her marvelous body, just as when she was dancing or leaping from side to side of the old salon. And now this form, molded by nature in a moment of enthusiasm, was no longer in existence.... It was nothing but a ma.s.s of liquid flesh and pestilent pulp!...

He recalled her kiss, that kiss that had so electrified him, making him sink down and down through an ocean of ecstasy, like a castaway, content with his fate.... And he would never know her more!... And her mouth, with its perfume of cinnamon and incense, of Asiatic forests haunted with sensuousness and intrigue, was now ...! Ah, misery!

Suddenly he saw the profile of the dead woman with one eye turned toward him, graciously and malignly, just as the "eye of the morning"

must have looked at its mistress while uncoiling her mysterious dances in her Asiatic dwelling.

Ulysses concentrated his attention on the Phantasm's pallid brow touched by the silky caress of her curls. There he had placed his best kisses, kisses of tenderness and grat.i.tude.... But the smooth skin that had appeared made of petals of the camellia was growing dark before his eyes. It became a dark green and was oozing with blood.... Thus he had seen her that other time.... And he recalled with remorse his blow in Barcelona.... Then it opened, forming a deep hole, angular in shape like a star. Now it was the mark of the gunshot wound, the _coup de grace_ that brought the death-agony of the executed girl to its end.

Poor Freya, implacable warrior, unnerved by the battle of the s.e.xes!...

She had pa.s.sed her existence hating men yet needing them in order to live,--doing them all the harm possible and receiving it from them in sad reciprocity until finally she had perished at their hands.

It could not end in any other way. A masculine hand had opened the orifice through which was escaping the last bubble of her existence....

And the horrified captain, poring over her sad profile with its purpling temple, thought that he never would be able to blot that ghastly vision from his memory. The phantasm would diminish, becoming invisible in order to deceive him, but would surely come forth again in all his hours of pensive solitude; it was going to embitter his nights on watch, to follow him through the years like remorse.

Fortunately the exactions of real life kept repelling these sad memories.

"It was a good thing she was shot!" affirmed authoritatively within him the energetic official accustomed to command men. "What would you have done in forming a part of the tribunal that condemned her?... Just what the others did. Think of those who have died through her deviltry!...

Remember what Toni said!"

A letter from his former mate, received in the same mail with the one from Freya's defender, spoke of the abominations that submarine aggression was committing in the Mediterranean.

News of some of the crimes was beginning to be received from s.h.i.+pwrecked sailors who had succeeded in reaching the coast after long hours of struggle, or when picked up by other boats. The most of the victims, however, would remain forever unknown in the mystery of the waves. Torpedoed boats had gone to the bottom with their crews and pa.s.sengers, "without leaving any trace," and only months afterwards a part of the tragedy had become evident when the surge flung up on the coast numberless bodies impossible of identification, without even a recognizable human face.

Almost every week Toni contemplated some of these funereal gifts of the sea. At daybreak the fishermen used to find corpses tossed on the beach where the water swept the sand, resting there a few moments on the moist ground, only to be s.n.a.t.c.hed back again by another and stronger wave. Finally their backs had become imbedded on land, holding them motionless--while, from their clothing and their flesh, swarms of little fishes came forth fleeing back to the sea in search of new pastures. The revenue guards had discovered among the rocks mutilated bodies in tragic positions, with gla.s.sy eyes protruding from their sockets.

Many of them were recognized as soldiers by the tatters that revealed an old uniform, or the metal identification tags on their wrists. The sh.o.r.e folks were always talking of a transport that had been torpedoed coming from Algiers.... And mixed with the men, they were constantly finding bodies of women so disfigured that it was almost impossible to judge of their age: mothers who had their arms arched as though putting forth their utmost efforts to guard the babe that had disappeared. Many whose virginal modesty had been violated by the sea, showed naked limbs swollen and greenish, with deep bites from flesh-eating fishes. The tide had even tossed ash.o.r.e the headless body of a child a few years old.

It was more horrible, according to Toni, to contemplate this spectacle from land than when in a boat. Those on s.h.i.+ps are not able to see the ultimate consequences of the torpedoings as vividly as do those who live on the sh.o.r.e, receiving as a gift of the waves this continual consignment of victims.

The pilot had ended his letter with his usual supplications:--"Why do you persist in following the sea?... You want a vengeance that is impossible. You are one man, and your enemies are millions.... You are going to die if you persist in disregarding them. You already know that they have been hunting you for a long time. And you will not always succeed in eluding their clutches. Remember what the people say, 'He who courts danger--!' Give up the sea; return to your wife or come to us. Such a rich life as you might lead ash.o.r.e!..."