Mare Nostrum (Our Sea)

"I wonder when they're going to execute that spy!… If she were a poor woman with children and needed to earn their bread, they would have shot her long ago…. But she is an elegant cocotte and with jewels. Perhaps she has bewitched some of the cabinet ministers. We are going to see her on the street now almost any day…. And my son who died at Verdun!…"

The prisoner, as though divining this public indignation, began to consider her death very near losing, little by little, that love of existence which had made her burst forth into lies and delirious protests. In vain the maître held out hopes of pardon.

"It is useless: I must die…. I ought to be shot…. I have done so much mischief…. It horrifies even me to remember all the crimes named in that sentence…. And there are still others that they don't know!… Solitude has made me see myself just as I am. What shame!… I ought to perish; I have ruined everything…. What is there left for me to do in the world?…"

"And it was then, my dear sir," continued the attorney, in his letter, "that she spoke to me of you, of the way in which you had known each other, of the harm which she had done you unconsciously."

Convinced of the uselessness of his efforts to save her life, the maître had solicited one last favor of the tribunal. Freya was very desirous that he should accompany her at the moment of her execution, as this would maintain her serenity. Those in the government had promised their colleague in the forum, to send opportune notice that he might be present at the fulfillment of the sentence.

It was at three o'clock in the morning and while he was in the deepest sleep that some messengers, sent by the prefecture of police, awakened him. The execution was to take place at daybreak: this was a decision reached at the last moment in order that the reporters might learn too late of the event.

An automobile took him with the messengers to the prison of St. Lazare, across silent and shadowy Paris. Only a few hooded street lamps were cutting with their sickly light the darkness of the streets. In the prison they were joined by other functionaries and many chiefs and officers who represented military justice. The condemned woman was still sleeping in her cell, ignorant of what was about to occur.

Those charged with awakening her, gloomy and timid, were marching in line through the corridors of the jail, bumping into one another in their nervous precipitation.

The door was opened. Under the regulation light Freya was on her bed, with closed eyes. Upon opening them and finding herself surrounded by men, her face was convulsed with terror.

"Courage, Freya!" said the prison warden. "The appeal for pardon has been denied."

"Courage, my daughter," added the priest of the establishment, starting the beginning of a discourse.

Her terror, due to the rude surprise of awakening with the brain still paralyzed, lasted but a few seconds. Upon collecting her thoughts, serenity returned to her face.

"I must die?" she asked. "The hour has already come?… Very well, then: let them shoot me. Here I am."

Some of the men turned their heads, and so averted their glance…. She had to get out of the bed in the presence of the two watchmen. This precaution was so that she might not attempt to take her life. She even asked the lawyer to remain in the cell as though in this way she wished to lessen the annoyance of dressing herself before strangers.

Upon reaching this passage in his letter, Ferragut realized the pity and admiration of the maître who had seen her preparing the last toilet of her life.

"Adorable creature! So beautiful!… She was born for love and luxury, yet was going to die, torn by bullets like a rude soldier…."

The precautions adopted by her coquetry appeared to him admirable. She wanted to die as she had lived, placing on her person the best that she possessed. Therefore, suspecting the nearness of her execution, she had a few days before reclaimed the jewels and the gown that she was wearing when arrest prevented her returning to Brest.

Her defender described her "with a dress of pearl gray silk, bronze stockings and low shoes, a great-coat of furs, and a large hat with plumes. Besides, the necklace of pearls was on her bosom, emeralds in her ears and all her diamonds on her fingers."

A sad smile curled her lips upon trying to look at herself in the window panes, still black with the darkness of night, which served her as a mirror.

"I die in my uniform like a soldier," she said to her lawyer.

Then in the ante-chamber of the prison, under the crude artificial light, this plumed woman, covered with jewels, her clothing exhaling a subtle perfume, memory of happier days, turned without any embarrassment toward the men clad in black and in blue uniforms.

Two religious sisters who accompanied her appeared more moved than she. They were trying to exhort her and at the same time were struggling to keep back the tears…. The priest was no less touched. He had attended other criminals, but they were men…. To assist to a decent death a beautiful perfumed woman scintillating with precious stones, as though she were going to ride in an automobile to a fashionable tea!…

The week before she had been in doubt as to whether to receive a Calvinist pastor or a Catholic priest. In her cosmopolitan life of uncertain nationality she had never taken the time to decide about any religion for herself. Finally she had selected the latter on account of its being more simple intellectually, more liberal and approachable….

Several times when the priest was trying to console her, she interrupted him as though she were the one charged with inspiring courage.

"To die is not so terrible as it appears when seen afar off!… I feel ashamed when I think of the fears that I have passed through, of the tears that I have shed…. It turns out to be much more simple than I had believed…. We all have to die!"

They read to her the sentence refusing the appeal for pardon. Then they offered her a pen that she might sign it.

A colonel told her that there were still a few moments at her disposition in which to write to her family, her friends, or to make her last will….

"To whom shall I write?" said Freya. "I haven't a single friend in the world…."

"Then it was," continued the lawyer, "that she took the pen as if a recollection had occurred to her, and traced some few lines…. Then she tore up the paper and came toward me. She was thinking of you, Captain: her last letter was for you and she left it unfinished, fearing that it might never reach your hands. Besides, she wasn't equal to writing; her pulse was nervous: she preferred to talk…. She asked me to send you a long, very long letter, telling about her last moments, and I had to swear to her that I would carry out her request."

From that time on the maître had seen things badly. Emotion was perturbing his sensibilities, but there yet lived in his mind Freya's last words on coming out of the jail.

"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 pushing 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 maître, 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 grass 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 masses of armed men who formed a narrow passageway. 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 asserting 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 passing between the two masses of men, head erect, stepping firmly with the high-spirited tread of a goddess-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 passing 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 document, 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 mass. 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 mass 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 bloody 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 maître 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 ship 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 mass 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 gratitude…. 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 grâce that brought the death-agony of the executed girl to its end.

Poor Freya, implacable warrior, unnerved by the battle of the sexes!… She had passed 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 shipwrecked 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 passengers, "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 snatched 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 glassy 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 shore 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 ashore 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 ships are not able to see the ultimate consequences of the torpedoings as vividly as do those who live on the shore, 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 ashore!…"

For a few hours Ferragut was of Toni's opinion. His reckless undertaking was bound to come to a bad end. His enemies knew him, were lying in wait for him, and were many arrayed against one who was living alone on his ship with a crew of men of a different nationality. Aside from the few who had always loved him, nobody would lament his death. He did not belong to any of the nations at war; he was a species of privateer bound not to begin an attack. He was even less,—an officer carrying supplies under the protection of a neutral flag. This flag was not deceiving anybody. His enemies knew the ship, seeking for it with more determination than if he were with the Allied fleets. Even in his own country, there were many people in sympathy with the German Empire who would celebrate joyously the disappearance of the Mare Nostrum and its captain.

Freya's death had depressed his spirits more than he had imagined possible. He had gloomy presentiments; perhaps his next journey might be his last.

"You are going to die!" cried an anguished voice in his brain. "You'll die very soon if you do not retire from the sea."

And to Ferragut the queerest thing about the warning was that this counselor had the voice of the one who had always egged him on to foolish adventures,—the one that had hurled him into danger for the mere pleasure of discounting it, the one that had made him follow Freya even after knowing her vile profession.

On the other hand the voice of prudence, always cautious and temperate, was now showing an heroic tranquillity, speaking like a man of peace who considers his obligations superior to his life.

"Be calm, Ferragut; you have sold your person with your boat, and they have given you millions for it. You must carry through what you have promised even though it may send you out of existence…. The Mare Nostrum cannot sail without a Spanish captain. If you abandon it, you will have to find another captain. You will run away through fear and put in your place a man who has to face death in order to maintain his family. Glorious achievement, that! … while you would be on land, rich and safe!… And what are you going to do on land, you coward?"

His egoism hardly knew how to reply to such a question. He recalled with antipathy his bourgeois existence over there in Barcelona, before buying the steamer. He was a man of action and could live only when occupied in risky enterprises.

He would be bored to death on land and at the same time would be considered belittled, degraded, like one who comes down to an inferior grade in a country of hierarchies. The captain of a romantic, adventurous life would be converted into a real estate proprietor, knowing no other struggles than those which he might sustain with his tenants. Perhaps, in order to avoid a commonplace existence, he might invest his capital in navigation, the only business that he knew well. He might become a ship-owner acquiring new vessels and, little by little, because of the necessity of keeping a sharp watch over them, would eventually renew his voyages…. Well, then, why should he abandon the Mare Nostrum?