Mare Nostrum (Our Sea)

CHAPTER X

IN BARCELONA

Four months later Captain Ferragut was in Barcelona.

During the interval he had made three trips to Salonica, and on the second had to appear before a naval captain of the army of the Orient. The French officer was informed of his former expeditions for the victualing of the allied troops. He knew his name and looked upon him as does a judge interested in the accused. He had received from Marseilles a long telegram with reference to Ferragut. A spy submitted to military justice was accusing him of having carried supplies to the German submarines.

"How about that, Captain?…"

Ulysses hesitated, looking at the official's grave face, framed by a grey beard. This man inspired his confidence. He could respond negatively to such questions; it would be difficult for the German to prove his affirmation; but he preferred to tell the truth, with the simplicity of one who does not try to hide his faults, describing himself just as he had been,—blind with lust, dragged down by the amorous artifices of an adventuress.

"The women!… Ah, the women!" murmured the French chief with the melancholy smile of a magistrate who does not lose sight of human weaknesses and has participated in them.

Nevertheless Ferragut's transgression was of gravest importance. He had aided in staging the submarine attack in the Mediterranean…. But when the Spanish captain related how he had been one of the first victims, how his son had died in the torpedoing of the Californian, the judge appeared touched, looking at him less severely.

Then Ferragut related his encounter with the spy in the harbor of Marseilles.

"I have sworn," he said finally, "to devote my ship and my life to causing all the harm possible to the murderers of my son…. That man is denouncing me in order to avenge himself. I realize that my headlong blindness dragged me to a crime that I shall never forget. I am sufficiently punished in the death of my son…. But that does not matter; let them sentence me, too."

The chief remained sunk in deep reflection, forehead in hand and elbow on the table. Ferragut recognized here military justice, expeditious, intuitive, passional, attentive to the sentiments that have scarcely any weight in other tribunals, judging by the action of conscience more than by the letter of the law, and capable of shooting a man with the same dispatch that he would employ in setting him at liberty.

When the eyes of the judge again fixed themselves upon him, they had an indulgent light. He had been guilty, not on account of money nor treason, but crazed by a woman. Who has not something like this in his own history?… "Ah, the women!" repeated the Frenchman, as though lamenting the most terrible form of enslavement…. But the victim had already suffered enough in the loss of his son. Besides, they owed to him the discovery and arrest of an important spy.

"Your hand, Captain," he concluded, holding out his own. "All that we have said will be just between ourselves. It is a sacred, confessional secret. I will arrange it with the Council of War…. You may continue lending your services to our cause."

And Ferragut was not annoyed further about the affair of Marseilles. Perhaps they were watching him discreetly and keeping sight of him in order to convince themselves of his entire innocence; but this suspected vigilance never made itself felt nor occasioned him any trouble.

On the third trip to Salonica the French captain saw him once at a distance, greeting him with a grave smile which showed that he no longer was thinking of him as a possible spy.

Upon its return, the Mare Nostrum anchored at Barcelona to take on cloth for the army service, and other industrial articles of which the troops of the Orient stood in need. Ferragut did not make this trip for mercantile reasons. An affectionate interest was drawing him there…. He needed to see Cinta, feeling that in his soul the past was again coming to life.

The image of his wife, vivacious and attractive, as in the early years of their marriage, kept rising before him. It was not a resurrection of the old love; that would have been impossible…. But his remorse made him see her, idealized by distance, with all her qualities of a sweet and modest woman.

He wished to reëstablish the cordial relations of other times, to have all the past pardoned, so that she would no longer look at him with hatred, believing him responsible for the death of her son.

In reality she was the only woman who had loved him sincerely, as she was able to love, without violence or passional exaggeration, and with the tranquillity of a comrade. The other women no longer existed. They were a troop of shadows that passed through his memory like specters of visible shape but without color. As for that last one, that Freya whom bad luck had put in his way—… How the captain hated her! How he wished to meet her and return a part of the harm she had done him!…

Upon seeing his wife, Ulysses imagined that no time had passed by. He found her just as at parting, with her two nieces seated at her feet, making interminable, complicated blonde lace upon the cylindrical pillows supported on their knees.

The only novelty of the captain's stay in this dwelling of monastic calm was that Don Pedro abstained from his visits. Cinta received her husband with a pallid smile. In that smile he suspected the work of time. She had continued thinking of her son every hour, but with a resignation that was drying her tears and permitting her to continue the deliberate mechanicalness of existence. Furthermore, she wished to remove the impression of the angry words, inspired by grief,—the remembrance of that scene of rebellion in which she had arisen like a wrathful accuser against the father. And Ferragut for some days believed that he was living just as in past years when he had not yet bought the Mare Nostrum and was planning to remain always ashore. Cinta was attentive to his wishes and obedient as a Christian wife ought to be. Her words and acts revealed a desire to forget, to make herself agreeable.

But something was lacking that had made the past so sweet. The cordiality of youth could not be resuscitated. The remembrance of the son was always intervening between the two, hardly ever leaving their thoughts. And so it would always be!

Since that house could no longer be a real home to him, he again began to await impatiently the hour of sailing. His destiny was to live henceforth on the ship, to pass the rest of his days upon the waves like the accursed captain of the Dutch legend, until the pallid virgin wrapped in black veils—Death—should come to rescue him.

While the steamer finished loading he strolled through the city visiting his cousins, the manufacturers, or remaining idly in the cafés. He looked with interest on the human current passing through the Ramblas in which were mingled the natives of the country and the picturesque and absurd medley brought in by the war.

The first thing that Ferragut noticed was the visible diminution of German refugees.

Months before he had met them everywhere, filling the hotels and monopolizing the cafés,—their green hats and open-neck shirts making them recognized immediately. The German women in showy and extravagant gowns, were everywhere kissing each other when meeting, and talking in shrieks. The German tongue, confounded with the Catalan and the Castilian, seemed to have become naturalized. On the roads and mountains could be seen rows of bare-throated boys with heads uncovered, staff in hand, and Alpine knapsack on the back, occupying their leisure with pleasure excursions that were at the same time, perhaps, a foresighted study.

These Germans had all come from South America,—especially from Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. From Barcelona they had, at the beginning of the war, tried to return to their own country but were now interned, unable to continue their voyage for fear of the French and English cruisers patrolling the Mediterranean.

At first no one had wished to take the trouble to settle down in this land, and they had all clustered together in sight of the sea with the hope of being the first to embark at the very moment that the road of navigation might open for them.

The war was going to be very short…. Exceedingly short! The Kaiser and his irresistible army would require but six months to impose their rule upon all Europe. The Germans enriched by commerce were lodged in the hotels. The poor who had been working in the new world as farmers or shop clerks were quartered in a slaughter house on the outskirts. Some, who were musicians, had acquired old instruments and, forming strolling street bands, were imploring alms for their roarings from village to village.

But the months were passing by, the war was being prolonged, and nobody could now discern the end. The number of those taking arms against the medieval imperialism of Berlin was constantly growing greater, and the German refugees, finally convinced that their wait was going to be a very long one, were scattering themselves through the interior of the state, hunting a more satisfying and less expensive existence. Those who had been living in luxurious hotels were establishing themselves in villas and chalets of the suburbs; the poor, tired of the rations of the slaughter-house, were exerting themselves to find jobs in the public works of the interior.

Many were still remaining in Barcelona, meeting together in certain beer gardens to read the home periodicals and talk mysteriously of the works of war.

Ferragut recognized them at once upon passing them in the Rambla. Some were dealers, traders established for a long time in the country, bragging of their Catalan connections with that lying facility of adaptability peculiar to their race. Others came from South America and were associated with those in Barcelona by the free-masonry of comradeship and patriotic interest. But they were all Germans, and that was enough to make the captain immediately recall his son, planning bloody vengeance. He sometimes wished to have in his arm all the blind forces of Nature in order to blot out his enemies with one blow. It annoyed him to see them established in his country, to have to pass them daily without protest and without aggression, respecting them because the laws demanded it.

He used to like to stroll among the flower stands of the Rambla, between the two walls of recently-cut flowers that were still guarding in their corollas the dews of daybreak. Each iron table was a pyramid formed of all the hues of the rainbow and all the fragrance that the earth can bring forth.

The fine weather was beginning. The trees of the Ramblas were covering themselves with leaves and in their shady branches were twittering thousands of birds with the deafening tenacity of the crickets.

The captain found special enjoyment in surveying the ladies in lace mantillas who were selecting bouquets in the refreshing atmosphere. No situation, however anguished it might be, ever left him insensible to feminine attractions.

One morning, passing slowly through the crowds, he noticed that a woman was following him. Several times she crossed his path, smiling at him, hunting a pretext for beginning conversation. Such insistence was not particularly gratifying to his pride; for she was a female of protruding bust and swaying hips, a cook with a basket on her arm, like many others who were passing through the Rambla in order to add a bunch of flowers to the daily purchase of eatables.

Finding that the sailor was not moved by her smiles nor the glances from her sharp eyes, she planted herself before him, speaking to him in Catalan.

"Excuse me, sir, but are you not a ship captain named Don Ulysses?…"

This started the conversation. The cook, convinced that it was he, continued talking with a mysterious smile. A most beautiful lady was desirous of seeing him…. And she gave him the address of a towered villa situated at the foot of Tibidabo in a recently constructed district. He could make his visit at three in the afternoon.

"Come, sir," she added with a look of sweet promise. "You will never regret the trip."

All questions were useless. The woman would say no more. The only thing that could be gathered from her evasive answers was that the person sending her had left her upon seeing the captain.

When the messenger had gone away he wished to follow her. But the fat old wife shook her head repeatedly. Her astuteness was quite accustomed to eluding pursuit, and without Ferragut's knowing exactly how, she slipped away, mingling with the groups near the Plaza of Catalunia.

"I shall not go," was the first thing that Ferragut said on finding himself alone.

He knew just what that invitation signified. He recalled an infinite number of former unconfessable friendships that he had had in Barcelona,—women that he had met in other times, between voyages, without any passion whatever, but through his vagabond curiosity, anxious for novelty. Perhaps some one of these had seen him in the Rambla, sending this intermediary in order to renew the old relations. The captain probably enjoyed the fame of a rich man now that everybody was commenting upon the amazingly good business transacted by the proprietors of ships.

"I shall not go," he again told himself energetically. He considered it useless to bother about this interview, to encounter the mercenary smile of a familiar but forgotten acquaintance.

But the insistence of the recollection and the very tenacity with which he kept repeating to himself his promise not to keep the tryst, made Ferragut begin to suspect that it might be just as well to go after all.

After luncheon his will-power weakened. He didn't know what to do with himself during the afternoon. His only distraction was to visit his cousins in their counting-houses, or to meander through the Rambla. Why not go?… Perhaps he might be mistaken, and the interview might prove an interesting one. At all events, he would have the chance of retiring after a brief conversation about the past…. His curiosity was becoming excited by the mystery.

And at three in the afternoon he took a street car that conducted him to the new districts springing up around the base of Tibidabo.

The commercial bourgeoisie had covered these lands with an architectural efflorescence, legitimate daughter of their dreams. Shopkeepers and manufacturers had wished to have here a pleasure house, traditionally called a torre, in order to rest on Sundays and at the same time make a show of their wealth with these Gothic, Arabic, Greek, and Persian creations. The most patriotic were relying on the inspiration of native architects who had invented a Catalan art with pointed arches, battlements, and ducal coronets. These medieval coronets, which were repeated even on the peaks of the chimney pots, were the everlasting decorative motif of an industrial city little given to dreams and lusting for lucre.

Ferragut advanced through the solitary street between two rows of freshly transplanted trees that were just sending forth their first growth. He looked at the façades of the torres made of blocks of cement imitating the stone of the old fortresses, or with tiles which represented fantastic landscapes, absurd flowers, bluish, glazed nymphs.

Upon getting out of the street car he made a resolution. He would look at the outside only of the house. Perhaps that would aid him in discovering the woman! Then he would just continue on his way.

But on reaching the torre, whose number he still kept in mind, and pausing a few seconds before its architecture of a feudal castle whose interior was probably like that of the beer gardens, he saw the door opening, and appearing in it the same woman that had talked with him in the flower Rambla.