Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) Part 8

Cinta never said a word to influence her husband. She was the daughter of a sailor and had accepted the life of a sailor's wife. Furthermore, she looked upon matrimony in the light of the old familiar traditions:--the woman absolute mistress of the interior of the home, but trusting outside affairs to the will of the lord, the warrior, the head of the hearth, without permitting herself opinions or objections to their acts.

It was Ulysses, therefore, who decided to abandon the seafaring life.

Worked upon by the suggestions of his cousins, it needed only a little dispute with one of the directors of the s.h.i.+pping firm to make him hand in his resignation, and refuse to reconsider it, although urged by the protests and entreaties of the other stockholders.

In the first months of his existence ash.o.r.e, he was amazed at the desperate immovability of everything. The world was made up of revolting rigidity and solidity. He felt almost nauseated at seeing all his possessions remain just where he left them, without the slightest fluctuation, or the least bit of casual caprice.

In the mornings upon opening his eyes, he at first experienced the sweet sensation of irresponsible liberty. Nothing affected the fate of that house. The lives of those that were sleeping on the other floors above and below him had not been entrusted to his vigilance.... But in a few days he began to feel that there was something lacking, something which had been one of the greatest satisfactions of his existence,--the sensation of power, the enjoyment of command.

Two maids were now always hastening to him with a frightened air at the sound of his voice, or the ringing of his bell. That was all that was left to him who had commanded dozens of men of such ugliness of temper that they struck terror to all beholders when they went ash.o.r.e in the ports. n.o.body consulted him now, while on the sea everybody was seeking his counsel and many times had to interrupt his sleep. The house could go on without his making the rounds daily from the cellars to the roof, overseeing even the slightest spigot. The women who cleaned it in the mornings with their brooms were always obliging him to flee from his office. He was not permitted to make any comment nor could he extend a gold-striped arm as when he used to scold the barefooted, bare-breasted deck-swabbers, insisting that the deck should be as clean as the saloon. He felt himself belittled, laid to one side. He thought of Hercules dressed as a woman and spinning wool. His love of family life had made him renounce that of a powerful man.

Only the considerate treatment of his wife, who surrounded him with a.s.siduous care as though wis.h.i.+ng to compensate for their long separations, made the situation bearable. Furthermore, his conscience was enjoying a certain satisfaction in being a land-father, taking much interest in the life of his son who was beginning to prepare to enter the inst.i.tute, looking over his books, and aiding him in understanding the notes.

But even these pleasures were not of long duration. The family gatherings in his home or at his relatives' bored him unspeakably; so did the conversations with his cousins and nephews about profits and business deals, or about the defects of centralized tyranny. According to them, all the calamities of heaven and earth were coming from Madrid. The governor of the province was the "Consul of Spain."

These merchants interrupted their criticisms only to listen in religious silence to Wagner's music banged out on the piano by the girls of the family. A friend with a tenor voice used to sing _Lohengrin_ in Catalan. Enthusiasm made the most excitable roar, "the hymn ... the hymn!" It was not possible to misunderstand. For them there was only one hymn in existence, and in a trilling undertone they would accompany the liturgic music of _Los Segadores_ (The Reapers).

[The revolutionary song of Catalunia, originated by a band of reapers in the seventeenth century.]

Ulysses used to recall with homesickness his life as commander of a transatlantic liner,--a wide, universal life of incessant and varied horizons, and cosmopolitan crowds. He could see himself detained on deck by groups of elegant maidens who would beg him for new dances in the coming week. His footsteps were surrounded with white fluttering skirts, veils that waved like colored clouds, laughter and trills, Spanish chatter that appeared set to music:--all the frolicsome jargon of a cage of tropical birds.

Ex-presidents of the South American republics,--generals or doctors who were going to Europe to rest,--used to relate to him on the bridge, with Napoleonic gravity, the princ.i.p.al events in their history. The business men starting out for America confided to him their stupendous plans:--rivers turned from their courses, railroads built across the virgin forests, monstrous electric forces extracted from huge waterfalls varying in breadth, cities vomited from the desert in a few weeks, all the marvels of an adolescent world that desires to realize whatever its youthful imagination may conceive. He was the demi-urge of this little floating world: he disposed of joy and love as the spirit moved him.

In the scorching evenings around the equator, it was enough for him to give an order to rouse things and beings from their brutish drowsiness.

"Let the music begin, and refreshments be served." And in a few moments dancers would be revolving the whole length of the deck, and smiling lips and eyes would become brilliantly alight with illusion and desire.

Behind him, his praises were always being sounded. The matrons found him very distinguished. "It is plain to be seen that he is an exceptional person." Stewards and crew circulated exaggerated accounts of his riches and his studies. Some young girls sailing for Europe with imaginations seething with romance were very much aghast to learn that the hero was married and had a son. The solitary ladies stretched out on a _chaise-longue,_ book in hand, upon seeing him would arrange the corolla of their petticoats, hiding their legs with so much precipitation that it always left them more uncovered; then fixing upon him a languis.h.i.+ng glance, they would begin a dialogue always in the same way.

"How is it that any one so young as you has already become a captain?..."

Ah, the misery of it!... He who had gallantly pa.s.sed many years cruising from one extreme of the Atlantic to the other with a rich, gay, perfumed world, at times resisting feminine caprice through mere prudence, yielding at others with the secrecy of a discreet sailor, now found himself with no other admirers than the mediocre tribe of the Blanes, with no other hallucinations than those which his cousin the manufacturer might suggest, when waxing enthusiastic because the great apostles of politics were taking a certain interest in the captain.

Every morning, on awaking, his taste now received a rude shock. The first thing that he contemplated was a room "without personality," a dwelling that was not characteristic of him in any way, arranged by the maids with excessive cleanliness and a lack of logic that was constantly changing the situation of his things.

He recalled with longing his compact and well-ordered stateroom where there was not a piece of furniture that could escape his glance nor a drawer whose contents he did not know down to the slightest detail. His body was accustomed to slip without embarra.s.sment through the s.p.a.ces of his cabin furnis.h.i.+ngs. He had adapted himself to all incoming and outgoing angles just as the body of the mollusk adapts itself to the winding curves of its sh.e.l.ls. The cabin seemed formed by the secretions of his being. It was a covering, a sheath, that went with him from one extreme of the ocean to the other, heating itself with the high temperature of the tropics, or becoming as cosy as an Esquimo hut on approaching the polar seas.

His love for it was somewhat like that which the friar has for his cell; but this cell was a secular one, and entering it after a tempestuous night on the bridge, or a trip ash.o.r.e in most curious and foreign ports, he found it always the same, with his papers and books untouched on the table, his clothes hanging from their hooks, his photographs fixed on the walls. The daily spectacle of seas and lands was always changing--the temperature, the course of the stars, and the people that one week were bundled up in winter greatcoats, and were clad in white the week after, hunting the heavens for the new stars of another hemisphere.... Yet his cozy little stateroom was always the same, as though it were the corner of a planet apart, unaffected by the variations of this world.

Upon awaking in it, he found himself every morning enwrapped in a greenish and bland atmosphere as though he might have been sleeping in the bottom of an enchanted lake. The sun traced over the whiteness of his ceiling and sheets a restless network of gold whose meshes constantly succeeded each other. This was the reflection of the invisible water. When his s.h.i.+p was immovable in the ports, there always came in through his window the whirling noise of the cranes, the cries of the stevedores and the voices of those who were in the neighboring vessels. On the high sea the cool and murmuring silence of immensity used to fill his sleeping room. A wind of infinite purity that came perhaps from the other side of the planet--slipping past thousands of leagues, over the salty deserts without touching a single bit of corruption--would come stealing into Ferragut's throat like an effervescent wine. His chest always expanded to the impulses of this life-giving draught as his eyes roved over the sparkling, luminous blue of the horizon.

Here in his home, the first thing that he saw through the window upon awaking was a Catalunian edifice, rich and monstrous, like the palaces that the hypnotist evolves in his dreams,--an amalgamation of Persian flowers, Gothic columns, trunks of trees, with quadrupeds, reptiles and snails among the cement foliage. The paving wafted up to him through its drains the fetidity of sewers dry for lack of water; the balconies shed the dust of shaken rugs; the absurd palace appropriated, with the insolence of the new-rich, all the heaven and sun that used to belong to Ferragut.

One night he surprised his relatives by informing them that he was about to return to the sea. Cinta a.s.sented to this resolution in painful silence, as though she had foreseen it long before. It was something inevitable and fatal that she must accept. The manufacturer, Blanes, stammered with astonishment. Return to his life of adventures, when the great gentlemen of the district were becoming interested in his personality!... Perhaps in the next elections they might have made him a member of the munic.i.p.al council!

Ferragut laughed at his cousin's simplicity. He wanted to command a vessel again, but one of his own, without being obliged to consider the restrictions of the s.h.i.+p owners. He could permit himself this luxury.

It would be like an enormous yacht, ready to set forth according to his tastes and convenience, yet at the same time bringing him in untold profits. Perhaps his son might in time become director of a maritime company, this first s.h.i.+p laying the foundation of an enormous fleet in the years to come.

He knew every port in the world, every highway of traffic, and he would be able to find the places where, lacking transportation facilities, they paid the highest freight rates. Until now he had been a salaried man, brave and care-free. He was going to begin an absolutely independent life as a speculator of the sea.

Two months afterwards he wrote from England saying that he had bought the _Fingal_, a mail packet of three thousand tons that had made trips twice a week between London and a port of Scotland.

Ulysses appeared highly delighted with the cheapness of his acquisition. The _Fingal_ had been the property of a Scotch captain who, in spite of his long illness, had never wished to give up command, dying aboard his vessel. His heirs, inland men tired by their long wait, were anxious to get rid of it at any price.

When the new proprietor entered the aft saloon surrounded with staterooms,--the only habitable place in the s.h.i.+p,--memories of the dead came forth to meet him. On the wall-panels were painted the heroes of the Scotch Iliad,--the bard Ossian with his harp, Malvina with the round arms and waving golden tresses, the undaunted warriors with their winged helmets and protruding biceps, exchanging gashes on their s.h.i.+elds while awaking the echoes of the green lochs.

A deep and spongy arm chair opened its arms before a stove. There the owner of the s.h.i.+p had pa.s.sed his last years, sick at heart and with swollen legs, directing from his seat a course that was repeated every week across the foggy winter waves tossing bits of ice s.n.a.t.c.hed from the icebergs. Near the stove was a piano and upon its top an orderly collection of musical scores yellowed by time,--_La Sonnambula, Lucia_, Romances of Tosti, Neapolitan songs, breezy and graceful melodies that the old chords of the instrument sent forth with the fragile and crystalline tinkling of an old music box. The poor old captain with sick heart and legs of stone had always turned to the sea of light for distraction. It was music that made appear in the foggy heavens the peaks of Sorrento covered with orange and lemon trees, and the coast of Sicily, perfumed by its flaming flora.

Ferragut manned his boat with friendly people. His first mate was a pilot who had begun his career in a fis.h.i.+ng smack. He came from the same village as Ulysses' ancestors, and he remembered the _Dotor_ with respect and admiration. He had known this new captain when he was a little fellow and used to go fis.h.i.+ng with his uncle. In those days Toni was already a sailor on a coast-trading vessel, and his superiority in years had then justified his using the familiar thee and thou when talking with the lad Ulysses.

Finding himself now under his orders, he wished to change his mode of address, but the captain would not permit it. Perhaps he and Toni were distant relatives,--all those living in that village of the _Marina_ had become related through long centuries of isolated existence and common danger. The entire crew, from the first engineer to the lowest seaman, showed an equal familiarity in this respect. Some were from the same land as the captain, others had been sailing a long time under his orders.

As s.h.i.+powner, Ulysses now underwent numberless experiences whose existence he had never before suspected. He went through the anguis.h.i.+ng transformation of the actor who becomes a theatrical manager, of the author who branches out into publis.h.i.+ng, of the engineer with a hobby for odd inventions who becomes the proprietor of a factory. His romantic love for the sea and its adventures was now overshadowed by the price and consumption of coal, by the maddening compet.i.tion that lowered freight rates, and by the search for new ports with fast and remunerative freight.

The _Fingal_ which had been rebaptized by its new proprietor with the name of _Mare Nostrum_, in memory of his uncle, turned out to be a dubious purchase in spite of its low price. As a navigator Ulysses had been most enthusiastic upon beholding its high and sharp prow disposed to confront the worst seas, the slenderness of the swift craft, its machinery, excessively powerful for a freight steamer,--all the conditions that had made it a mail packet for so many years. It consumed too much fuel to be a profitable investment as a transport of merchandise. The captain during his navigation could now think only of the ravenous appet.i.te of the boilers. It always seemed to him that the _Mare Nostrum_ was speeding along with excess steam.

"Half speed!" he would shout down the tube to his first engineer.

But in spite of this and many other precautions, the expense for fuel was enormously disproportioned to the tonnage of the vessel. The boat was eating up all the profits. Its speed was insignificant compared with that of a transatlantic steamer, though absurd compared with that of the merchant vessels of great hulls and little machinery that were going around soliciting cargo at any price, from all points.

A slave of the superiority of his vessel and in continual struggle with it, Ferragut had to make great efforts in order to continue sailing without actual heavy loss. All the waters of the planet now saw the _Mare Nostrum_ specializing in the rarest kind of transportation.

Thanks to this expedient, the Spanish flag waved in ports that had never seen it before.

Under this banner, he made trips through the solitary seas of Syria and Asia Minor, skirting coasts where the novelty of a s.h.i.+p with a smoke stack made the people of the Arabian villages run together in crowds.

He disembarked in Phoenician and Greek ports choked up with sand that had left only a few huts at the foot of mountains of ruins, and where columns of marble were still sticking up like trunks of lopped-off palm trees. He anch.o.r.ed near to the terrible breakers of the western coast of Africa under a sun which scorched the deck, in order to take on board india-rubber, ostrich feathers, and elephants' tusks, brought out in long pirogues by negro oarsmen, from a river filled with crocodiles and hippopotamuses, and bordered by groups of huts with straw cones for roofs.

When there were no more of these extraordinary voyages, the _Mare Nostrum_ turned its course towards South America, resigning itself to compet.i.tion in rates with the English and Scandinavians who are the muleteers of the ocean. His tonnage and draught permitted him to sail up the great rivers of North America, even reaching the cities of the remote interior where rows of factory chimneys smoked on the border of a fresh-water lake converted into a port.

He sailed up the ruddy Parana to Rosario and Colastine, in order to load Argentine wheat; he anch.o.r.ed in the amber waters of Uruguay opposite Paysandu and Fray Ventos, taking on board hides destined to Europe and salt for the Antilles. From the Pacific he sailed up the Guayas bordered with an equatorial vegetation, in search of cocoa from Guayaquil. His prow cut the infinite sheet of the Amazon,--dislodging gigantic tree-trunks dragged down by the inundations of the virgin forest--in order to anchor opposite Para or Manaos, taking on cargoes of tobacco and coffee. He even carried from Germany implements of war for the revolutionists of a little republic.

These trips that in other times would have awakened Ferragut's enthusiasm now resulted disastrously. After having paid all expenses and lived with maddening economy, there was scarcely anything left for the owner. Each time the freight boats were more numerous and the transportation rates cheaper. Ulysses with his elegant _Mare Nostrum_ could not compete with the southern captains, drunken and taciturn, eager to accept freight at any price in order to fill their miserable transports crawling across the ocean at the speed of a tortoise.

"I can do no more," he said sadly to his mate. "I shall simply ruin my son. If anybody will buy the _Mare Nostrum,_ I'm going to sell it."

On one of his fruitless expeditions, just when he was most discouraged, some unexpected news changed the situation for him. They had just arrived at Teneriffe with maize and bales of dry alfalfa from Argentina.

When Toni returned aboard after having cleared the vessel, he shouted in Valencian, the language of intimacy, "War, _Che_!"

Ulysses, who was pacing the bridge, received the news with indifference. "War?... What war is that?..." But upon learning that Germany and Austria had begun hostilities with France and Russia, and that England was just intervening in behalf of Belgium, the captain began quickly to calculate the political consequences of this conflagration. He could see nothing else.

Toni, less disinterested, spoke of the future of the vessel.... Their misery was at last at an end! Freightage at thirteen s.h.i.+llings a ton was going to be henceforth but a disgraceful memory. They would no longer have to plead for freight from port to port as though begging alms. Now they were on the point of achieving importance, and were going to find themselves solicited by consignors and disdainful merchants. The _Mare Nostrum_ was going to be worth its weight in gold.

Such predictions, though Ferragut refused to accept them, began to be fulfilled in a very short time. s.h.i.+ps on the ocean routes suddenly became very scarce. Some of them were taking refuge in the nearest neutral ports, fearing the enemy's cruisers. The greater part were mobilized by their governments for the enormous transportation of material that modern war exacts. The German corsairs, craftily taking advantage of the situation, were increasing with their captures the panic of the merchant marine.

The price of freight leaped from thirteen s.h.i.+llings a ton to fifty, then to seventy, and a few days later to a hundred. It couldn't climb any further, according to Captain Ferragut.

"It will climb higher yet," affirmed the first officer with cruel joy.

"We shall see tonnage at a hundred and fifty, at two hundred.... We are going to become rich!..."

And Toni always used the plural in speaking of the future riches without its ever occurring to him to ask his captain a penny more than the forty-five dollars that he was receiving each month. Ferragut's fortune and that of the s.h.i.+p, he invariably looked upon as his own, considering himself lucky if he was not out of tobacco, and could send his entire wages home to his wife and children living down there in the _Marina_.

His ambition was that of all modest sailors--to buy a plot of land and become an agriculturist in his old age. The Basque pilots used to dream of prairies and apple orchards, a little cottage on a peak and many cows. He pictured to himself a vineyard on the coast, a little white dwelling with an arbor under whose shade he could smoke his pipe while all his family, children and grandchildren, were spreading out the harvest of raisins on the frame-hurdles.