The old waiter who came to meet them on the little sloping footpath made the identical grimace as soon as he spied Ferragut. "I have whatever the gentleman may need." And crossing a low, embowered terrace with various unoccupied tables, he opened a door and bade them enter a room having only one window.

Freya went instinctively toward it like an insect toward the light, leaving behind her the damp and gloomy room whose paper was hanging loose at intervals. "How beautiful!" The gulf pictured through the window appeared like an unframed canvas,--the original, alive and palpitating,--of the infinite copies throughout the world.

Meanwhile the captain, while informing himself of the available dishes, was secretly following the discreet sign language of the waiter. With one hand he was holding the door half open, his fingers fumbling with an enormous archaic bolt on the under side which had belonged to a much larger door and looked as though it were going to fall from the wood because of its excessive size.... Ferragut surmised that this bolt was going to count heavily, with all its weight, in the bill for dinner.

Freya interrupted her contemplation of the panorama on feeling Ferragut's lips trying to caress her neck.

"None of that, Captain!... You know well enough what we have agreed.

Remember that I have accepted your invitation on the condition that you leave me in peace."

She permitted his kiss to pa.s.s across her cheek, even reaching her mouth. This caress was already an accepted thing. As it had the force of custom, she did not resist it, remembering the preceding ones, but fear of his abusing it made her withdraw from the window.

"Let us examine the enchanted palace which my true love has promised me," she said gayly in order to distract Ulysses from his insistence.

In the center there was a table made of planks badly planed and with rough legs. The covers and the dishes would hide this horror. Pa.s.sing her eyes scrutinizingly over the old seats, the walls with their loose papering and the chromos in greenish frames, she spied something dark, rectangular and deep occupying one corner of the room. She did not know whether it was a divan, a bed or a funeral catafalque. The shabby covers that were spread over it reminded one of the beds of the barracks or of the prison.

"Ah, no!..." Freya made one bound toward the door. She would never be able to eat beside that filthy piece of furniture which had come from the sc.u.m of Naples. "Ah, no! How loathesome!"

Ulysses was standing near the door, fearing that Freya's discoveries might go further, and hiding with his back that bolt which was the waiter's pride. He stammered excuses but she mistook his insistence, thinking that he was trying to lock her in.

"Captain, let me pa.s.s!" she said in an angry voice. "You do not know me. That kind of thing is for others.... Back, if you do not wish me to consider you the lowest kind of fellow...."

And she pushed him as she went out, in spite of the fact that Ulysses was letting her pa.s.s freely, reiterating his excuses and laying all the responsibility on the stupidity of the servant.

She stopped under the arbor, suddenly tranquillized upon finding herself with her back to the room.

"What a den!"... she said. "Come over here, Ferragut. We shall be much more comfortable in the open air looking at the gulf. Come, now, and don't be babyish!... All is forgotten. You were not to blame."

The old waiter, who was returning with table-covers and dishes, did not betray the slightest astonishment at seeing the pair installed on the terrace. He was accustomed to these surprises and evaded the lady's eye like a convicted criminal, looking at the gentleman with the forlorn air which he always employed when announcing that there was no more of some dish on the bill of fare. His gestures of quiet protection were trying to console Ferragut for his failure. "Patience and tenacity!"...

He had seen much greater difficulties overcome by his clientele.

Before serving dinner he placed upon the table, in the guise of an aperitive, a fat-bellied bottle of native wine, a nectar from the slopes of Vesuvius with a slight taste of sulphur. Freya was thirsty and was suspicious of the water of the _trattoria_. Ulysses must forget his recent mortification.... And the two made their libations to the G.o.ds, with an unmixed drink in which not a drop of water cut the jeweled transparency of the precious wine.

A group of singers and dancers now invaded the terrace. A coppery-hued girl, handsome and dirty, with wavy hair, great gold hoops in her ears and an ap.r.o.n of many colored stripes, was dancing under the arbor, waving on high a tambourine that was almost the size of a parasol. Two bow-legged youngsters, dressed like ancient lazzarones in red caps, were accompanying with shouts the agitated dance of the _tarantella_.

The gulf was taking on a pinkish light under the oblique rays of the sun, as though there were growing within it immense groves of coral.

The blue of the sky had also turned rosy and the mountain seemed aflame in the afterglow. The plume of Vesuvius was less white than in the morning; its nebulous column, streaked with reddish flutings by the dying light, appeared to be reflecting its interior fire.

Ulysses felt the friendly placidity that a landscape contemplated in childhood always inspires. Many a time he had seen this same panorama with its dancing girls and its volcano there in his old home at Valencia; he had seen it on the fans called "Roman Style" that his father used to collect.

Freya felt as moved as her companion. The blue of the gulf was of an extreme intensity in the parts not reflected by the sun; the coast appeared of ochre; although the houses had tawdry facades, all these discordant elements were now blended and interfused in subdued and exquisite harmony. The shrubbery was trembling rhythmically under the breeze. The very air was musical, as though in its waves were vibrating the strings of invisible harps.

This was for Freya the true Greece imagined by the poets, not the island of burned-out rocks denuded of vegetation that she had seen and heard spoken of in her excursions through the h.e.l.lenic archipelago.

"To live here the rest of my life!" she murmured with misty eyes. "To die here, forgotten, alone, happy!..."

Ferragut also would like to die in Naples ... but with her!... And his quick and exuberant imagination described the delights of life for the two,--a life of love and mystery in some one of the little villas, with a garden peeping out over the sea on the slopes of Posilipo.

The dancers had pa.s.sed down to the lower terrace where the crowd was greater. New customers were entering, almost all in pairs, as the day was fading. The waiter had ushered some highly-painted women with enormous hats, followed by some young men, into the locked dining-room.

Through the half-open door came the noise of pursuit, collision and rebound with brutal roars of laughter.

Freya turned her back, as if the memory of her pa.s.sage through that den offended her.

The old waiter now devoted himself to them, beginning to serve dinner.

To the bottle of Vesuvian wine had succeeded another kind, gradually losing its contents.

The two ate little but felt a nervous thirst which made them frequently reach out their hands toward the gla.s.s. The wine was depressing to Freya. The sweetness of the twilight seemed to make it ferment, giving it the acrid perfume of sad memories.

The sailor felt arising within him the aggressive fever of temperate men when becoming intoxicated. Had he been with a man he would have started a violent discussion on any pretext whatever. He did not relish the oysters, the sailor's soup, the lobster, everything that another time, eaten alone or with a pa.s.sing friend in the same site, would have appeared to him as delicacies.

He was looking at Freya with enigmatical eyes while, in his thought, wrath was beginning to bubble. He almost hated her on recalling the arrogance with which she had treated him, fleeing from that room.

"Hypocrite!..." She was just amusing herself with him. She was a playful and ferocious cat prolonging the death-agony of the mouse caught in her claws. In his brain a brutal voice was saying, as though counseling a murder: "This will be her last day!... I'll finish her to-day!... No more after to-day!..." After several repet.i.tions, he was disposed to the greatest violence in order to extricate himself from a situation which he thought ridiculous.

And she, ignorant of her companion's thought, deceived by the impa.s.siveness of his countenance, continued chatting with her glance fixed on the horizon, talking in an undertone as though she were recounting to herself her illusions.

The momentary suggestion of living in a cottage of Posilipo, completely alone, an existence of monastic isolation with all the conveniences of modern life, was dominating her like an obsession.

"And yet, after all," she continued, "this atmosphere is not favorable to solitude; this landscape is for love. To grow old slowly, two who love each other, before the eternal beauty of the gulf!... What a pity that I have never been really loved!..."

This was an offense against Ulysses who expressed his annoyance with all the aggressiveness that was seething beneath his bad humor. How about him?... Was he not loving her and disposed to prove it to her by all manner of sacrifices?...

Sacrifices as proof of love always left this woman cold, accepting them with a skeptical gesture.

"All men have told me the same thing," she added; "they all promise to kill themselves if I do not love them.... And with the most of them it is nothing more than a phrase of pa.s.sionate rhetoric. And what if they did kill themselves really? What does that prove?... To leave life on the spur of a moment that gives no opportunity for repentance;--a simple nervous flash, a posture many times a.s.sumed simply for what people will say, with the frivolous pride of an actor who likes to pose in graceful att.i.tudes. I know what all that means. A man once killed himself for me...."

On hearing these last words Ferragut jerked himself out of his sullen silence. A malicious voice was chanting in his brain, "Now there are three!..."

"I saw him dying," she continued, "on a bed of the hotel. He had a red spot like a star on the bandage of his forehead,--the hole of the pistol shot. He died clutching my hands, swearing that he loved me and that he had killed himself for me ... a tiresome, horrible scene....

And nevertheless I am sure that he was deceiving himself, that he did not love me. He killed himself through wounded vanity on seeing that I would have nothing to do with him,--just for stubbornness, for theatrical effect, influenced by his readings.... He was a Roumanian tenor. That was in Russia.... I have been an actress a part of my life...."

The sailor wished to express the astonishment that the different changes of this mysterious wandering existence, always showing a new facet, were producing in him; but he contained himself in order to listen better to the cruel counsels of the malignant voice speaking within his thoughts.... He was not trying to kill himself for her.

Quite the contrary! His moody aggressiveness was considering her as the next victim. There was in his eyes something of the dead _Triton_ when in pursuit of a distant woman's skirt on the coast.

Freya continued speaking.

"To kill one's self is not a proof of love. They all promise me the sacrifice of their existence from the very first words. Men don't know any other song. Don't imitate them, Captain."

She remained pensive a long time. Twilight was rapidly falling; half the sky was of amber and the other half of a midnight blue in which the first stars were beginning to twinkle. The gulf was drowsing under the leaden coverlet of its water, exhaling a mysterious freshness that was spreading to the mountains and trees. All the landscape appeared to be acquiring the fragility of crystal. The silent air was trembling with exaggerated resonance, repeating the fall of an oar in the boats that, small as flies, were slipping along under the sky arching above the gulf, and prolonging the feminine and invisible voices pa.s.sing through the groves on the heights.

The waiter went from table to table, distributing candles enclosed in paper shades. The mosquitoes and moths, revived by the twilight, were buzzing around these red and yellow flowers of light.

Her voice was again sounding in the twilight air with the vagueness of one speaking in a dream.

"There is a sacrifice greater than that of life,--the only one that can convince a woman that she is beloved. What does life signify to a man like you?... Your profession puts it in danger every day and I believe you capable of risking your life, when tired of land, for the slightest motive...."

She paused again and then continued.

"Honor is worth more than life for certain men,--respectability, the preservation of the place that they occupy. Only the man that would risk his honor and position for me, who would descend to the lowest depths without losing his will to live, would ever be able to convince me.... That indeed would be a sacrifice!"