Esteban found it intolerable that this gentleman, who was no more than a distant relative of his grandmother, should meddle in the affairs of the house, pretending to oversee him as though he were his father. But it irritated him still more to see him in a good humor and trying to be funny. It made him furious to hear his mother called "Penelope" and himself "the young Telemachus."... "Stupid, tedious old bore!"

The young Telemachus was not slow to wrath nor vengeance. From babyhood he had interrupted his play in order to "work" in the reception room near to the hatrack by the door. And the poor professor on his departure would find his hat crown dented in or its nap roughened up, or he would sally home innocently carrying spitballs on the skirts of his overcoat.

Now the boy contented himself with simply ignoring the existence of the family friend, passing in front of him without recognizing him and only greeting him when his mother ordered him to do so.

The day in which he brought the news of the return of the ship without its captain, Don Pedro made a longer visit than usual. Cinto shed two tears upon the lace, but had to stop weeping, vanquished by the good sense of her counselor.

"Why weep and get your mind overwrought with so many suppositions without foundation?... What you ought to do, my daughter, is to call in this Toni who is mate of the vessel; he must know all about it.... Perhaps he may tell you the truth."

Esteban was told to hunt him up the following day, and he quickly noticed Toni's extreme disquietude upon learning that Dona Cinta wished to talk with him. The mate left the boat in lugubrious silence as though he were being taken away to mortal torment: then he began to hum loudly, an indication that he was in deep thought.

The young Telemachus was not able to be present at the interview but he hung around the closed door and succeeded in hearing a few loud words which slipped through the cracks. His mother was speaking with greater frequency. Toni was reiterating in a dull voice the same excuse:—"I don't know. The captain will come at any moment...." But when the mate found himself outside the house, his wrath broke out against himself, against his cursed character that did not know how to lie, against all women bad and good. He believed he had said too much. That lady had the skill of a judge in getting words out of him.

That night, at the supper hour, the mother scarcely opened her mouth. Her fingers communicated a nervous trembling to the plates and forks, and she looked at her son with tragic commiseration as though she foresaw terrible troubles about to burst upon his head. She opposed a desperate silence to Esteban's questions and finally exclaimed:

"Your father is deserting us!... Your father has forgotten us!..."

And she left the dining-room to hide her overflowing tears.

The boy slept rather restlessly, but he slept. The admiration which he always felt for his father and a certain solidarity with the strong examples of his sex made him take little account of these complaints. Matters for women! His mother just didn't know how to be the wife of an extraordinary man like Captain Ferragut. He who was really a man, in spite of his few years, was going to intervene in this affair in order to show up the truth.

When Toni, from the deck of the vessel, saw the lad coming along the wharf the following morning, he was greatly tempted to hide himself.... "If Dona Cinta should call me again in order to question me!..." But he calmed himself with the thought that the boy was probably coming of his own free will to pass a few hours on the Mare Nostrum. Even so, he wished to avoid his presence as though he feared some slip in talking with him, and so pretended that he had work in the hold. Then he left the boat going to visit a friend on a steamer some distance off.

Esteban entered the galley, calling gayly to Uncle Caragol. He wasn't the same, either. His humid and reddish eyes were looking at the child with an extraordinary tenderness. Suddenly he stopped his talk with an expression of uneasiness on his face. He looked uncertainly around him, as though fearing that a precipice might open at his feet.

Never forgetful of the respect due to every visitor in his dominion, he prepared two "refrescos." He was going to treat Esteban for the first time on this return trip. On former days, incredible as it may seem, he had not thought of making even one of his delicious beverages. The return from Naples to Barcelona had been a sad one: the vessel had a funereal air without its master.

For all these reasons, Caragol's hand lavishly measured out the rum until the liquid took on a tobacco tone.

They drank.... The young Telemachus began to talk about his father when the glasses were only half empty, and the cook waved both hands in the air, giving a grunt which signified that he had no wish to bother about the captain's absence.

"Your father will return, Esteban," he added. "He will return but I don't know when. Certainly later than Toni says."

And not wishing to say more, he gulped down the rest of the glass, devoting himself hastily to the confection of the second "refresco" in order to make up for lost time.

Little by little he slipped away from the prudent barrier that was hedging in his verbosity and spoke with his old time abandon; but his flow of words did not exactly convey news.

Caragol preached morality to Ferragut's son,—morality from his standpoint, interrupted by frequent caresses of the glass.

"Esteban, my son, respect your father greatly. Imitate him as a seaman. Be good and just toward the men that you command.... But avoid the females!"

The women!... There was no better theme for his piously drunken eloquence. The world inspired his pity. It was all governed by the infernal attraction exercised by the female of the species. The men were working, struggling, and trying to grow rich and celebrated, all in order to possess one of these creatures.

"Believe me, my son, and do not imitate your father in this respect."

The old man had said too much to back out now and he had to go on, letting out the rest of it, bit by bit. Thus Esteban learned that the captain was enamored with a lady in Naples and that he had remained there pretending business matters, but in reality dominated by this woman's influence.

"Is she pretty?" asked the boy eagerly.

"Very pretty," replied Caragol. "And such odors!... And such a swishing of fine clothes!..."

Telemachus thrilled with contradictory sensations of pride and envy. He admired his father once more, but this admiration only lasted a few seconds. A new idea was taking possession of him while the cook continued:

"He will not come now. I know what these elegant females are, reeking with perfume. They are true demons that dig their nails in when they clutch, and it is necessary to cut off their hands in order to loosen them.... And the boat as useless now as though it were aground, while the others are filling themselves with gold!... Believe me, my son, this is the only truth in the world."

And he concluded by gulping in one draft all that was left in the second glass.

Meanwhile the boy was forming in his mind an idea prompted by his pleasant intoxication. What if he should go to Naples in order to bring his father back!...

At this moment everything seemed possible to him. The world was rose-colored as it always was when he looked at it, glass in hand, near to Uncle Caragol. All obstacles would turn out to be trifling: everything would arrange itself with wonderful facility. Men were able to progress by bounds.

But hours afterward when his thoughts were cleared of their beatific visions, he felt a little fearful when recollecting his absent parent. How would he receive him upon his arrival?... What excuses could he give his father for his presence in Naples?... He trembled, recalling the image of his scowling brow and angry eyes.

On the following day a sudden self-confidence replaced this uneasiness. He recalled the captain as he had seen him many times on the deck of his vessel, telling of his escapades when rowing in the harbor of Barcelona, or commenting to friends on his son's strength and intelligence. The image of the paternal hero now came to his mind with good-humored eyes and a smile passing like a fresh breeze over his face.

He would tell him the whole truth. He would make him understand that he had come to Naples just to take him away with him, like a good comrade who comes to another's rescue in time of danger. Perhaps he might be irritated and give him a blow, but he would eventually accede to his proposition.

Ferragut's character was reborn in him with all the force of decisive argument. And if the voyage should prove absurd and dangerous?... All the better! So much the better! That was enough to make him undertake it. He was a man and should know no fear.

During the next two weeks he prepared his flight. He had never taken a long journey. Only once he had accompanied his father on a flying business trip to Marseilles. It was high time that he should go out in the world like the man that he was, acquainted with almost all the cities of the earth,—through his readings.

The money question did not worry him any. Dona Cinta had it in abundance and it was easy to find her bunch of keys. An old and slow-going steamer, commanded by one of his father's friends, had just entered port and the following day would weigh anchor for Italy.

This sailor accepted the son of his old comrade without any traveling papers. He would arrange all irregularities with his friends in Genoa. Between captains they ought to exchange such services, and Ulysses Ferragut, who was awaiting his son in Naples (so Esteban told him), would not wish to waste time just because of some ridiculous, red tape formality.

Telemachus with a thousand pesetas in his pocket, extracted from a work box which his mother used as a cash box, embarked the following day. A little suit-case, taken from his home with deliberate and skillful precaution, formed his entire baggage.

From Genoa he went to Rome, and from there to Naples, with the foolhardiness of the innocent, employing Spanish and Catalan words to reinforce his scanty Italian vocabulary acquired at the opera. The only positive information that guided him on his quest of adventure was the name of the albergo on the shore of S. Lucia which Caragol had given him as his father's residence.

He sought him vainly for many days and visited in Naples the consignees who thought that the captain had returned to his country some time ago.

Not finding him, he began to be afraid. He ought to be back in Barcelona by this time and what he had begun as an heroic voyage was going to turn into a runaway, a boyish escapade. He thought of his mother who was perhaps weeping hours at a time, reading and rereading the letter that he had left for her explaining the object of his flight. Besides, Italy's intervention in the war,—an event which every one had been expecting but had supposed to be still a long way off,—had suddenly become an actual fact. What was there left for him to do in this country?... And one morning he had disappeared.

Since the hotel porter could not tell him anything more, the father, after his first impression of surprise had passed, thought it would be a good plan to visit the firm of consignees. Perhaps there they might give him some news.

The war was the only thing of interest in that office. But Ferragut, owner of a ship and a former client, was guided by the director to the employees who had received Esteban.

They did not know much about it. They recalled vaguely a young Spaniard who said that he was the captain's son and was making inquiries about him. His last visit had been two days before. He was then hesitating between returning to his country by rail or embarking in one of the three steamers that were in port ready to sail for Marseilles.

"I believe that he has gone by railroad," said one of the clerks.

Another of the office force supported his companion's supposition with a positive affirmation in order to attract the attention of his chief. He was sure of his departure by land. He himself had helped him to calculate what the trip to Barcelona would cost him.

Ferragut did not wish to know more. He must get away as soon as possible. This inexplicable voyage of his son filled him with remorse and immeasurable alarm. He wondered what could have occurred in his home....

The director of the offices pointed out to him a French steamer from Suez that was sailing that very afternoon to Marseilles, and took upon himself all the arrangements concerning his passage and recommendation to the captain. There only remained four hours before the boat's departure, and Ulysses, after collecting his valises and sending them aboard, took a last stroll through all the places where he had lived with Freya. Adieu, gardens of the Villa Nazionale and white Aquarium!... Farewell, albergo!...

His son's mysterious presence in Naples had intensified his disgust at the German girl's flight. He thought sadly of lost love, but at the same time he thought with dolorous suspense of what might greet him when reentering his home.

A little before sunset the French steamer weighed anchor. It had been many years since Ulysses had sailed as a simple passenger. Entirely out of his element, he wandered over the decks and among the crowds of tourists. Force of habit drew him to the bridge, talking with the captain and the officers, who from his very first words recognized his professional genius.

Realizing that he was no more than an intruder in this place, and annoyed at finding himself on a bridge from which he could not give a single order, he descended to the lower decks, examining the groups of passengers. They were mostly French, coming from Indo-China. On prow and poop there were quartered four companies of Asiatic sharpshooters,—little, yellowish, with oblique eyes and voices like the miauling of cats. They were going to the war. Their officers lived in the staterooms in the center of the ship, taking with them their families who had acquired a foreign aspect during their long residence in the colonies.

Ulysses saw ladies clad in white stretched out on their steamer chairs, having themselves fanned by their little Chinese pages; he saw bronzed and weather-beaten soldiers who appeared disgusted yet galvanized by the war that was snatching them from their Asiatic siesta, and children,—many children—delighted to go to France, the country of their dreams, forgetting in their happiness that their fathers were probably going to their death.

The passage could not have been smoother. The Mediterranean was like a silver plain in the moonlight. From the invisible coast came warm puffs of garden perfumes. The groups on deck reminded one another, with selfish satisfaction, of the great dangers that threatened the people embarking in the North Sea, harassed by German submarines. Fortunately the Mediterranean was free from such calamity. The English had so well guarded the port of Gibraltar that it was all a tranquil lake dominated by the Allies.

Before going to bed, the captain entered a room on the upper deck where was installed the wireless telegraph outfit. The hissing as of frying oil that the apparatus was sending out attracted him. The operator, a young Englishman, took off his nickel band with two earphones. Greatly bored by his isolation, he was trying to distract himself by conversing with the operators on the other vessels that came within the radius of his apparatus. They kept in constant communication like a group of comrades making the same trip and conversing placidly together.

From time to time the operator, advised by the sparking of his induction coils, would put on the diadem with ear pieces in order to listen to his far-away comrades.

"It is the man on the Californian bidding me goodnight," he said after one of these calls. "He is going to bed. There's no news."

And the young man eulogized Mediterranean navigation. At the outbreak of the war, he had been on another vessel going from London to New York and he recalled the unquiet nights, the days of anxious vigilance, searching the sea and the atmosphere, fearing from one moment to another the appearance of a periscope upon the waters, or the electric warning of a steamer torpedoed by the submarine. On this sea, one could live as tranquilly as in times of peace.

Ferragut suspected that the poor operator was very anxious to enjoy the delights of such tranquillity. His companion in service was snoring in a nearby cabin and he was anxious to imitate him, putting his head down on the table of the apparatus.... "Until to-morrow!"

The captain also fell asleep as soon as he had stretched himself out on the narrow ledge in his stateroom. His sleep was all in one piece, gloomy and complete, without sudden surprises or visions. Just as he was feeling that only a few moments had passed by, he was violently awakened as though some one had given him a shove. In the dim light he could make out only the round glass of the port hole, tenuously blue and veiled by the humidity of the maritime dew, like a tearful eye.

Day was breaking and something extraordinary had just occurred on the boat. Ferragut was accustomed to sleep with the lightness of a captain who needs to awaken opportunely. A mysterious perception of danger had cut short his repose. He distinguished over his head the patter of quick runnings the whole length of the deck; he heard voices. While dressing as quickly as possible he realized that the rudder was working violently, and that the vessel was changing its course.

Coming up on deck, one glance was sufficient to convince him that the ship was not running any danger. Everything about it presented a normal aspect. The sea, still dark, was gently lapping the sides of the vessel which continued going forward with regular motion. The decks were cleared of passengers. They were all sleeping in their staterooms. Only on the bridge he saw a group of persons:—the captain and all the officers, some of them dressed very lightly as though they had been roused from slumber.

Passing by the wireless office, he obtained an explanation of the matter. The youth of the night before was near the door and his companion was now wearing the head phone and tapping the keys of the apparatus, listening and replying to invisible boats.

An half hour before, just as the English operator was going off guard and giving place to his just awakened companion, a signal had kept him in his seat. The Californian was sending out by wireless the danger call, the S.O.S., that is only employed when a ship needs help. Then in the space of a few seconds a mysterious voice had spread its tragic story over hundreds of miles. A submersible had just appeared a short distance from the Californian and had fired several shells at it. The English boat was trying to escape, relying on its superior speed. Then the submarine had fired a torpedo....

All this had occurred in twenty minutes. Suddenly the echoes of the distant tragedy were extinguished as the communication was cut off. A prolonged, intense, sibilant buzzing in the apparatus, and—nothing!... Absolute silence.

The operator now on duty responded with negative movements to his companion's inquiring glances. He could hear nothing but the dialogue between the boats that had received the same warning. They too were alarmed by the sudden silence, and were changing their course going, like the French steamer, toward the place where the Californian had met the submersible.

"Can it be that they are already in the Mediterranean!" the operator exclaimed with astonishment on finishing his report. "How could the submarines possibly get 'way down here?..."

Ferragut did not dare to go up on the bridge. He was afraid that the glances of those men of the sea might fasten themselves accusingly upon him. He believed that they could read his thoughts.

A passenger ship had just been sunk at a relatively short distance from the boat on which he was traveling. Perhaps von Kramer was the author of the crime. With good reason he had charged Ulysses to tell his compatriots that they would soon hear of his exploits. And Ferragut had aided in the preparation of this maritime barbarity!...

"What have you done? What have you done?" wrathfully demanded his mental voice of good counsel.

An hour afterward he felt ashamed to remain on deck. In spite of the captain's orders, the news had got out and was circulating among the staterooms. Entire families were rushing up on deck, frightened out of the calmness usually reigning on the boat, arranging their clothes with precipitation, and struggling to adjust to their bodies the life-preservers which they were trying on for the first time. The children were howling, terrified by the alarm of their parents. Some nervous women were shedding tears without any apparent cause. The boat was going toward the place where the other one had been torpedoed, and that was enough to make the alarmists imagine that the enemy would remain absolutely motionless in the same place, awaiting their arrival in order to repeat their attack.

Hundreds of eyes were fixed on the sea, scrutinizing the surface of the waves, believing every object which they saw,—bits of wood, seaweed or crates floating on the surface of the water,—to be the top of a periscope.

The officials of the battalion of snipers had gone to prow and poop in order to maintain discipline among their men. But the Asiatics, scornful of death, had not abandoned their serene apathy. Some merely looked out over the sea with a childish curiosity, anxious to become acquainted with this new diabolical toy, invented by the superior races. On the decks reserved for first class passengers astonishment was as great as the uneasiness.

"Submarines in the Mediterranean!... But is it possible?..."

Those last to awake appeared very incredulous and could only be convinced of what had occurred when they heard the news from the boat's crew.

Ferragut wandered around like a soul in torment. Remorse made him hide himself in his stateroom. These people with their complaints and their comments were causing him great annoyance. Soon he found that he could not remain in this isolation. He needed to see and to know,—like a criminal who returns to the place where he has committed his crime.

At midday they began to see on the horizon various little clouds. They were the ships hastening from all sides, attracted by this unexpected attack.

The French boat that was sailing ahead of them suddenly moderated its speed. They had come into the zone of the shipwreck. In the lookouts were sailors exploring the sea and shouting the orders that guided the steamer's course. During these evolutions, there began to slip past the vessel's sides the remains of the tragic event.

The two rows of heads lined up on the different decks saw life preservers floating by empty, a boat with its keel in the air, and bits of wood belonging to a raft evidently constructed in great haste and never finished.

Suddenly a howl from a thousand voices, followed by a funereal silence.... The body of a woman lying on some planks passed by. One of her legs was thrust into a gray silk stocking, her head was hanging on the opposite side, spreading its blonde locks over the water like a bunch of gilded seaweed.

Her firm and juvenile bust was visible through the opening of a drenched nightgown which was outlining her body with unavoidable immodesty. She had been surprised by the shipwreck at the very moment that she had been trying to dress; perhaps terror had made her throw herself into the sea. Death had twisted her face with a horrible contraction, exposing the teeth. One side of her face was swollen from some blow.

Looking over the shoulders of two ladies who were trembling and leaning against the deck-railing, Ferragut caught a glimpse of this corpse. In his turn the vigorous sailor trembled like a woman, and his eyes filmed with mistiness. He simply could not look at it!... And again he went down into his stateroom to hide himself.

An Italian torpedo-destroyer was maneuvering among the remains of the shipwreck, as though seeking the footprints of the author of the crime. The steamers stopped their circular course of exploration to lower the lifeboats into the water and collect the corpses and bodies of the living near to death.

The captain in his desperate imprisonment heard new shrieks announcing an extraordinary event. Again the cruel necessity of knowing what it could be dragged him from his stateroom!

A boat full of people had been found by the steamer. The other ships were also meeting little by little the rest of the life boats occupied by the survivors of the catastrophe. The general rescue was going to be a very short piece of work.

The most agile of the shipwrecked people, on reaching the deck, found themselves surrounded by sympathetic groups lamenting their misfortune and at the same time offering them hot drinks. Others, after staggering a few steps as though intoxicated, collapsed on the benches. Some had to be hoisted from the bottom of the boat and carried in a chair to the ship's hospital.

Various British soldiers, serene and phlegmatic, upon climbing on deck asked for a pipe and began to smoke vigorously. Other shipwrecked people, lightly clad, simply rolled themselves up in shawls, beginning the account of the catastrophe as minutely and serenely as though they were in a parlor. A period of ten hours in the crowded narrowness of the boat, drifting at random in the hope of aid, had not broken down their energy.

The women showed greater desperation. Ferragut saw in the center of a group of ladies a young English girl, blond, slender, elegant, who was sobbing and stammering explanations. She had found herself in a launch, separated from her parents, without knowing how. Perhaps they were dead by this time. Her slight hope was that they might have sought refuge in some other boat and been picked up by any one of the steamers that had happened to see them.

A desperate grief, noisy, meridional, silenced with its meanings the noise of conversation. There had just climbed aboard a poor Italian woman carrying a baby in her arms.

"Figlia mia!... Mia figlia!..." she was wailing with disheveled hair and eyes swollen by weeping.

In the moment of the shipwreck she had lost a little girl, eight years old, and upon finding herself in the French steamer, she went instinctively toward the prow in search of the same spot which she had occupied on the other ship, as though expecting to find her daughter there. Her agonized voice penetrated down the stairway: "Figlia mia!... Mia figlia!"

Ulysses could not stand it. That voice hurt him, as though its piercing cry were clawing at his brain.

He approached a group in the center of which was a young barefooted lad in trousers and shirt open at the breast who was talking and talking, wrapping himself from time to time in a shawl that some one had placed upon his shoulders.

He was describing in a mixture of French and Italian the loss of the Californian.

He had been awakened by hearing the first shot fired by the submersible against his steamer. The chase had lasted half an hour.

The most audacious and curious were on the decks and believed their salvation already sure as they saw their ship leaving its enemy behind. Suddenly a black line had cut the sea, something like a long thorn with splinters of foam which was advancing at a dizzying speed, in bold relief against the water.... Then came a blow on the hull of the vessel which had made it shudder from stem to stern, not a single plate nor screw escaping tremendous dislocation.... Then a volcanic explosion, a gigantic hatchet of smoke and flames, a yellowish cloud in which were flying dark objects:—fragments of metal and of wood, human bodies blown to bits.... The eyes of the narrator gleamed with an insane light as he recalled the tragic sight.

"A friend of mine, a boy from my own country," he continued, sighing, "had just left me in order to see the submersible better and he put himself exactly in the path of the explosion.... He disappeared as suddenly as if he had been blotted out. I saw him and I did not see him.... He exploded in a thousand bits, as though he had had a bomb within his body."

And the shipwrecked man, obsessed by this recollection, could hardly attach any importance to the scenes following,—the struggle of the crowds to gain the boats, the efforts of the officers to maintain order, the death of many that, crazy with desperation, had thrown themselves into the sea, the tragic waiting huddled in barks that were with great difficulty lowered to the water, fearing a second shipwreck as soon as they touched the waves.

The steamer had disappeared in a few moments,—its prow sinking in the waters and then its smokestacks taking on a vertical position almost like the leaning tower of Pisa, and its rudders turning crazily as the shuddering ship went down.

The narrator began to be left alone. Other shipwrecked folk, telling their doleful tales at the same time, were now attracting the curious.

Ferragut looked at this young man. His physical type and his accent made him surmise that he was a compatriot.

"You are Spanish?"

The shipwrecked man replied affirmatively.

"A Catalan?" continued Ulysses in the Catalan idiom.

A fresh oratorical vehemence galvanized the shipwrecked boy. "The gentleman is a Catalan also?"... And smiling upon Ferragut as though he were a celestial apparition, he again began the story of his misfortunes.

He was a commercial traveler from Barcelona, and in Naples he had taken the sea route because it had seemed to him the more rapid one, avoiding the railroads congested by Italian mobilization.

"Were there other Spaniards traveling on your boat?" Ulysses continued inquiring.

"Only one: my friend, that boy of whom I was just speaking. The explosion of the torpedo blew him into bits. I saw him...."

The captain felt his remorse constantly increasing. A compatriot, a poor young fellow, had perished through his fault!...

The salesman also seemed to be suffering a twinge of conscience. He was holding himself responsible for his companion's death. He had only met him in Naples a few days before, but they were united by the close brotherhood of young compatriots who had run across each other far from their country.

They had both been born in Barcelona. The poor lad, almost a child, had wanted to return by land and he had carried him off with him at the last hour, urging upon him the advantages of a trip by sea. Whoever would have imagined that the German submarines were in the Mediterranean! The traveling man persisted in his remorse. He could not forget that half-grown lad who, in order to make the voyage in his company, had gone to meet his death.

"I met him in Naples, hunting everywhere for his father."

"Ah!..."

Ulysses uttered this exclamation with his neck violently outstretched, as though he were trying to loosen his skull from the rest of his body. His eyes were protruding from their sockets.

"The father," continued the youth, "commands a ship.... He is Captain Ulysses Ferragut."

An outcry.... The people ran.... A man had just fallen heavily, his body rebounding on the deck.



CHAPTER IX

THE ENCOUNTER AT MARSEILLES

Toni, who abominated railway journeys on account of his torpid immovability, now had to abandon the Mare Nostrum and suffer the torture of remaining twelve hours crowded in with strange persons.

Ferragut was sick in a hotel in the harbor of Marseilles. They had taken him off of a French boat coming from Naples, crushed with silent melancholia. He wished to die. During the trip they had to keep sharp watch so that he could not repeat his attempts at suicide. Several times he had tried to throw himself into the water.

Toni learned of it from the captain of a Spanish vessel that had just arrived from Marseilles exactly one day after the newspapers of Barcelona had announced the death of Esteban Ferragut in the torpedoing of the Californian. The commercial traveler was still relating everywhere his version of the event, concluding it now with his melodramatic meeting with the father, the latter's fatal fall on receiving the news, and desperation upon recovering consciousness.

The first mate had hastened to present himself at his captain's home. All the Blanes were there, surrounding Cinta and trying to console her.

"My son!... My son!..." the mother was groaning, writhing on the sofa.

And the family chorus drowned her laments, overwhelming her with a flood of fantastic consolations and recommendations of resignation. She ought to think of the father: she was not alone in the world as she was affirming: besides her own family, she had her husband.

Toni entered just at that moment.

"His father!" she cried in desperation. "His father!..."

And she fastened her eyes on the mate as though trying to speak to him with them. Toni knew better than anyone what that father was, and for what reason he had remained in Naples. It was his fault that the boy had undertaken the crazy journey at whose end death was awaiting him..... The devout Cinta looked upon this misfortune as a chastisement from God, always complicated and mysterious in His designs. Divinity, in order to make the father expiate his crimes, had killed the son without thinking of the mother upon whom the blow rebounded.

Toni went away. He could not endure the glances and the allusions made by Dona Cinta. And as though this emotion were not enough, he received the news a few hours later of his captain's wretched condition,—news which obliged him to make the trip to Marseilles immediately.

On entering the quarters of the hotel frequented by the officials of merchant vessels, he found Ferragut seated near a balcony from which could be seen the entire harbor.

He was limp and flabby, with eyes sunken and faded, beard unkempt, and a manifest disregard of his personal appearance.

"Toni!... Toni!"

He embraced his mate, moistening his neck with tears. For the first time he began to weep and this appeared to give him a certain relief. The presence of his faithful officer brought him back to life. Forgotten memories of business journeys crowded in his mind. Toni resuscitated all his past energies. It was as though the Mare Nostrum had come in search of him.

He felt shame and remorse. This man knew his secret: he was the only one to whom he had spoken of supplying the German submarines.

"My poor Esteban!... My son!"

He did not hesitate to admit the fatal relationship between the death of his son and that illegal trip whose memory was weighing him down like a monstrous crime. But Toni was discreet. He lamented the death of Esteban like a misfortune in which the father had not had any part.

"I also have lost sons.... And I know that nothing is gained by giving up to despair.... Cheer up!"

He never said a word of all that had happened before the tragic event. Had not Ferragut known his mate so well, he might have believed that he had entirely forgotten it. Not the slightest gesture, not a gleam in his eyes, revealed the awakening of that malign recollection. His only anxiety was that the captain should soon regain his health....

Reanimated by the presence and words of this prudent companion, Ulysses recovered his strength and a few days after, abandoned the room in which he had believed he was going to die, turning his steps toward Barcelona.

He entered his home with a foreboding that almost made him tremble. The sweet Cinta, considered until then with the protecting superiority of the Orientals who do not recognize a soul in woman, now inspired him with a certain fear. What would she say on seeing him?...

She said nothing of what he had feared. She permitted herself to be embraced, and drooping her head, burst into desperate weeping, as though the presence of her husband brought into higher relief the image of her son whom she would never see again. Then she dried her tears, and paler and sadder than ever, continued her habitual life.

Ferragut saw her as serene as a school-mistress, with her two little nieces seated at her feet, keeping on with her eternal lace-work. She forgot it only in order to attend to the care of her husband, occupying herself with the very slightest details of his existence. That was her duty. From childhood, she had known what are the obligations of the wife of the captain of a ship when he stops at home for a few days, like a bird of passage. But back of such attentions, Ulysses divined the presence of an immovable obstacle. It was something enormous and transparent that had interposed itself between the two. They saw each other but without being able to touch each other. They were separated by a distance, as hard and luminous as a diamond, that made every attempt at drawing nearer together useless.

Cinta never smiled. Her eyes were dry, trying not to weep while her husband was near her, but giving herself up freely to grief when she was alone. Her duty was to make his existence bearable, hiding her thoughts.

But this prudence of a good house-mistress was trampling under foot their conjugal life of former times. One day Ferragut, with a return of his old affection, and desiring to illuminate Cinta's twilight existence with a pale ray of sunlight, ventured to caress her as in the early days of their marriage. She drew herself up, modest and offended, as though she had just received an insult. She escaped from his arms with the energy of one who is repelling an outrage.

Ulysses looked upon a new woman, intensely pale, of an almost olive countenance, the nose curved with wrath and a flash of madness in her eyes. All that she was guarding in the depths of her thoughts came forth, boiling over, expelled in a hoarse voice charged with tears.

"No, no!... We shall live together, because you are my husband and God commands that it shall be so; but I no longer love you: I cannot love you.... The wrong that you have done me!... I who loved you so much!... However much you may hunt in your voyages and in your wicked adventures, you will never find a woman that loves you as your wife has loved you."

Her past of modest and submissive affection, of supine and tolerant fidelity, now issued from her mouth in one interminable complaint.

"From our home my thoughts have followed you in all your voyages, although I knew your forgetfulness and your infidelity. All the papers found in your pockets, and photographs lost among your books, the allusions of your comrades, your smiles of pride, the satisfied air with which you many times returned, the series of new manners and additional care of your person that you did not have when you left, told me all.... I also suspected in your bold caresses the hidden presence of other women who lived far away on the other side of the world."

She stopped her turbulent language for a few moments, letting the blush which her memories evoked fade away.

"I loathed it all," she continued. "I know the men of the sea; I am a sailor's daughter. Many times I saw my mother weeping and pitied her simplicity. There is no use weeping for what men do in distant lands. It is always bitter enough for a woman who loves her husband, but it has no bad consequences and must be pardoned.... But now.... Now!..."

The wife became irritated on recalling his recent infidelities.... Her rivals were not the public women of the great ports, nor the tourists who could give only a few days of love, like an alms which they tossed without stopping their progress. Now he had become enamored with the enthusiasm of a husky boy with an elegant and handsome dame, with a foreign woman who had made him forget his business, abandon his ship, and remain away, as though renouncing his family forever.... And poor Esteban, orphaned by his father's forgetfulness, had gone in search of him, with the adventurous impetuosity inherited from his ancestors: and death, a horrible death, had come to meet him on the road.

Something more than the grief of the outraged wife vibrated in Cinta's laments. It was the rivalry with that woman of Naples, whom she believed a great lady with all the attractions of wealth and high birth. She envied her superior weapons of seduction; she raged at her own modesty and humility as a home-keeping woman.

"I was resolved to ignore it all," she continued. "I had one consolation,—my son. What did it matter to me what you did?... You were far off, and my son was living at my side.... And now I shall never see him again!... My fate is to live eternally alone. You know very well that I shall not be a mother again,—that I cannot give you another son.... And it was you, you! who have robbed me of the only thing that I had!..."

Her imagination invented the most improbable reasons for explaining to herself this unjust loss.

"God wished to punish you for your bad life and has therefore killed Esteban, and is slowly killing me.... When I learned of his death I wished to throw myself off the balcony. I am still living because I am a Christian, but what an existence awaits me! What a life for you if you are really a father!... Think that your son might still be existing if you had not remained in Naples."

Ferragut was a pitiful object. He hung his head without strength to repeat the confused and lying protests with which he had received his wife's first words.

"If she knew all the truth!" the voice of remorse kept saying in his brain.

He was thinking with horror of what Cinta could say if she knew the magnitude of his sin. Fortunately she was ignorant of the fact that he had been of assistance to the assassins of their son.... And the conviction that she never would know it made him admit her words with silent humility,—the humility of the criminal who hears himself accused of an offense by a judge ignorant of a still greater offense.

Cinta finished speaking in a discouraged and gloomy tone. She was exhausted. Her wrath faded out, consumed by its own violence. Her sobs cut short her words. Her husband would never again be the same man to her; the body of their son was always interposing between the two.

"I shall never be able to love you.... What have you done, Ulysses? What have you done that I should have such a horror of you?... When I am alone I weep: my sadness is great, but I admit my sorrow with resignation, as a thing inevitable.... As soon as I hear your footsteps, the truth springs forth. I realize that my son has died because of you, that he would still be living had he not gone in search of you, trying to make you realize that you were a father and what you owe to us.... And when I think of that I hate you, I hate you!... You have murdered my son! My only consolation is in the belief that if you have any conscience you will suffer even more than I."

Ferragut came out from this horrible scene with the conviction that he would have to go away. That home was no longer his, neither was his wife his. The reminder of death filled everything, intervening between him and Cinta, pushing him away, forcing him again on the sea. His vessel was the only refuge for the rest of his life, and he must resort to it like the great criminals of other centuries who had taken refuge in the isolation of monasteries.

He needed to vent his wrath on somebody, to find some responsible person whom he might blame for his misfortunes. Cinta had revealed herself to him as an entirely new being. He would never have suspected such energy of character, such passionate vehemence, in his sweet, obedient, little wife. She must have some counselor who was encouraging her complaints and making her speak badly of her husband.

And he fixed upon Don Pedro, the professor, because there was still deep within him a certain dislike of the man since the days of his courtship. Besides, it offended him to see him in his home with a certain air of a noble personage whose virtue served as foil for the sins and shortcomings of the master of the house.

The professor evidently considered Ferragut on a level with all the famous Don Juans,—liberal and care-free when in far-away homes, punctilious and suspiciously correct in his own.

"That old blatherskite!" said Ulysses to himself, "is in love with Cinta. It is a platonic passion: with him, it couldn't be anything else. But it annoys me greatly.... I'm going to say a few things to him."

Don Pedro, who was continuing his daily visits in order to console the mother, speaking of poor Esteban as though he were his own son, and casting servile smiles upon the captain, found himself intercepted by him one afternoon, on the landing of the stairway.

The sailor aged suddenly while talking, and his features were accented with a vigorous ugliness. At that moment he looked exactly like his uncle, the Triton.

With a threatening voice, he recalled a classic passage well known to the professor. His namesake, old Ulysses, upon returning to his palace, had found Penelope surrounded with suitors and had ended by hanging them on tenterhooks.

"Wasn't that the way of it, Professor?... I do not find here more than one suitor, but this Ulysses swears to you that he will hang him in the same way if he finds him again in his home."

Don Pedro fled. He had always found the rude heroes of the Odyssey very interesting, but in verse and on paper. In reality they now seemed to him most dangerous brutes, and he wrote a letter to Cinta telling her that he would suspend his visits until her husband should have returned to sea.

This insult increased the wife's distant bearing. She resented it as an offense against herself. After having made her lose her son, Ulysses was terrifying her only friend.

The captain felt obliged to go. By staying in that hostile atmosphere, which was only sharpening his remorse, he would pile one error upon another. Nothing but action could make him forget.

One day he announced to Toni that in a few hours he was going to weigh anchor. He had offered his services to the allied navies in order to carry food to the fleet in the Dardanelles. The Mare Nostrum would transport eatables, arms, munitions, aeroplanes.

Toni attempted objection. It would be easy to find trips equally productive and much less dangerous; they might go to America....

"And my revenge?" interrupted Ferragut. "I am going to dedicate the rest of my life to doing all the evil that I can to the assassins of my son. The Allies need boats, I'm going to give them mine and my person."

Knowing what was troubling his mate, he added, "Besides, they pay well. These trips are very remunerative.... They will give me whatever I ask."

For the first time in his existence on board the Mare Nostrum, the mate made a scornful gesture regarding the value of the cargo.

"I almost forgot," continued Ulysses, smiling in spite of his sadness. "This trip flatters your ideals.... We are going to work for the Republic."

They went to England and, taking on their cargo, set forth for the Dardanelles. Ferragut wished to sail alone without the protection of the destroyers that were escorting the convoys.

He knew the Mediterranean well. Besides, he was from a neutral country and the Spanish flag was flying from the poop of his vessel. This abuse of his flag did not produce the slightest remorse, nor did it appear as disloyal to him. The German corsairs were coming closer to their prey, displaying neutral flags, in order to deceive. The submarines were remaining hidden behind pacific sailing ships in order to rise up suddenly near defenseless vessels. The most felonious proceedings of the ancient pirates had been resuscitated by the German fleet.

He was not afraid of the submarines. He trusted in the speed of the Mare Nostrum and in his lucky star.

"And if any of them should cross our path," he said to his second, "just let them go before the prow!"

He wished this so that he could send his vessel upon the submersible at full speed, daring it to come on.

The Mediterranean was no longer the same sea that it had been months before when the captains knew all its secrets; he could no longer live on it as confidently as in the house of a friend.

He stayed in his stateroom only to sleep. He and Toni spent long hours on the bridge talking without seeing each other, with their eyes turned on the sea, scanning the heaving blue surface. All the crew, excepting those that were resting, felt the necessity of keeping the same watch.

In the daytime the slightest discovery would send the alarm from prow to poop. All the refuse of the sea, that weeks before had splashed unnoticed near the sides of the vessel, now provoked cries of attention, and many arms were outstretched, pointing it out. Bits of sticks, empty preserve cans sparkling in the sunlight, bunches of seaweed, a sea gull with outspread wings letting itself rock on the waves; everything made them think of the periscopes of the submarine coming up to the water's level.

At night time the vigilance was even greater. To the danger of submersibles must also be added that of collision. The warships and the allied transports were traveling with few lights or completely dark. The sentinels on the bridge were no longer scanning the surface of the sea with its pale phosphorescence. Their gaze explored the horizon, fearing that before the prow there might suddenly surge up an enormous, swift, black form, vomited forth by the darkness.

If at any time the captain tarried in his stateroom, instantly that fatal memory came to his mind.

"Esteban!... My son!..."

And his eyes were full of tears.

Remorse and wrath made him plan tremendous vengeance. He was convinced that it would be impossible to carry it through, but it was a momentary consolation to his meridional character predisposed to the most bloody revenge.

One day, running over some forgotten papers in a suit-case, he came across Freya's portrait. Upon seeing her audacious smile and her calm eyes fixed upon him, he felt within him a shameful reversion. He admired the beauty of this apparition, a thrill passing over his body as their past intercourse recurred to him.... And at the same time that other Ferragut existing within him thrilled with the murderous violence of the Oriental who considers death as the only means of vengeance. She was to blame for it all. "Ah!... Tal"

He tore up the photograph, but then he put the fragments together again and finally placed them among his papers.

His wrath was changing its objective. Freya really was not the principal person guilty of Esteban's death. He was thinking of that other one, of the pretended diplomat, of that von Kramer who perhaps had directed the torpedo which had blown his son to atoms.... Would he not raise the devil if he could meet him sometime?... What happiness if these two should find themselves face to face!

Finally he avoided the solitude of a stateroom that tormented him with desires of impotent revenge. Near Toni on deck or on the bridge he felt better.... And with a humble condescension, such as his mate had never known before, he would talk and talk, enjoying the attention of his simple-hearted listener, just as though he were telling marvelous stories to a circle of children.

In the Strait of Gibraltar he explained to him the great currents sent by the ocean into the Mediterranean, at certain times aiding the screw-propeller in the propulsion of the vessel.

Without this Atlantic current the mare nostrum, which lost through atmospheric evaporation much more water than the rains and rivers could bring to it, would become dry in a few centuries. It had been calculated that it might disappear in about four hundred and seventy years, leaving as evidence of its former existence a stratum, of salt fifty-two meters thick.

In its deep bosom were born great and numerous springs of fresh water, on the coast of Asia Minor, in Morea, Dalmatia and southern Italy; it received besides a considerable contribution from the Black Sea, which on returning to the Mediterranean accumulated from the rains and the discharge of its rivers, more water than it lost by evaporation, sending it across the Bosporous and the Dardenelles in the form of a superficial current. But all these tributaries, enormous as they were, sank into insignificance when compared with the renovation of the oceanic currents.

The waters of the Atlantic poured into the Mediterranean so riotously that neither contrary winds nor reflex motion could stop them. Sailboats sometimes had to wait entire months for a strong breeze that would enable them to conquer the impetuous mouth of the strait.

"I know that very well," said Toni. "Once going to Cuba we were in sight of Gibraltar more than fifty days, going backwards and forwards until a favorable wind enabled us to overcome the current and go out into the great sea."

"Just such a current," added Ferragut, "was one of the causes that hastened the decadence of the Mediterranean navies in the sixteenth century. They had to go to the recently discovered Indies, and the Catalan or the Genoese ships would remain here in the strait weeks and weeks, struggling with the wind and the contrary current while the Galicians, the Basques, the French and the English who had left their ports at the same time were already nearing America.... Fortunately, navigation by steam has now equalized all that."

Toni was silently admiring his captain. What he must have learned in those books that filled the stateroom!...

It was in the Mediterranean that men had first entrusted themselves to the waves. Civilization emanated from India, but the Asiatic peoples were not able to master the art of navigation in their few seas whose coasts were very far apart and where the monsoons of the Indian Ocean blew six months together in one direction and six months in another.

Not until he reached the Mediterranean by overland emigration did the white man wish to become a sailor. This sea that, compared with others, is a simple lake sown with archipelagoes, offered a good school. To whatever wind he might set his sails, he would be sure to reach some hospitable shore. The fresh and irregular breezes revolved with the sun at certain times of the year. The hurricane whirled across its bowl, but never stopped. There were no tides. Its harbors and water-ways were never dry. Its coasts and islands were often so close together that you could see from one to the other; its lands, beloved of heaven, were recipients of the sun's sweetest smiles.

Ferragut recalled the men who had plowed this sea in centuries so remote that history makes no mention of them. The only traces of their existence now extant were the nuraghs of Sardinia and the talayots of the Balearic Islands,—gigantic tables formed with blocks, barbaric altars of enormous rocks which recalled the Celtic obelisks and sepulchral monuments of the Breton coast. These obscure people had passed from isle to isle, from the extreme of the Mediterranean to the strait which is its door.

The captain could imagine their rude craft made from trunks of trees roughly planed, propelled by one oar, or rather by the stroke of a stick, with no other aid than a single rudimentary sail spread to the fresh breeze. The navy of the first Europeans had been like that of the savages of the oceanic islands whose flotillas of tree trunks are still actually going from archipelago to archipelago.

Thus they had dared to sally forth from the coast, to lose sight of land, to venture forth into the blue desert, advised of the existence of islands by the vaporous knobs of the mountains which were outlined on the horizon at sunset. Every advance of this hesitating marine over the Mediterranean had represented greater expenditure of audacity and energy than the discovery of America or the first voyage around the world.... These primitive sailors did not go forth alone to their adventures on the sea; they were nations en masse, they carried with them families and animals. Once installed on an island, the tribes sent forth fragments of their own life, going to colonize other nearby lands across the waves.

Ulysses and his mate thought much about the great catastrophes ignored by history—the tempest surprising the sailing exodus, entire fleets of rough rafts swallowed up by the abyss in a few moments, families dying clinging to their domestic animals,—whenever they attempted a new advance of their rudimentary civilization.

In order to form some idea of what these little embarkations were, Ferragut would recall the fleets of Homeric form, created many centuries afterwards. The winds used to impose a religious terror on those warriors of the sea, reunited in order to fall upon Troy. Their ships remained chained an entire year in the harbor of Aulis and, through fear of the hostility of the wind and in order to placate the divinity of the Mediterranean, they sacrificed the life of a virgin.

All was danger and mystery in the kingdom of the waves. The abysses roared, the rocks moaned; on the ledges were singing sirens who, with their music, attracted ships in order to dash them to pieces. There was not an island without its particular god, without its monster and cyclops, or its magician contriving artifices.

Before domesticating the elements, mankind had attributed to them their most superstitious fears.

A material factor had powerfully influenced the dangers of Mediterranean life. The sand, moved by the caprice of the current, was constantly ruining the villages or raising them to peaks of unexpected prosperity. Cities celebrated in history were to-day no more than streets of ruins at the foot of a hillock crowned with the remains of a Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine or Saracen castle, or with a fortress contemporary with the Crusades. In other centuries these had been famous ports; before their walls had taken place naval battles; now from their ruined acropolis one could scarcely see the Mediterranean except as a light blue belt at the end of a low and marshy plain. The accumulating sand had driven the sea back miles.... On the other hand, inland cities had come to be places of embarkation because of the continual perforation of the waves that were forcing their way in.

The wickedness of mankind had imitated the destructive work of nature. When a maritime republic conquered a rival republic, the first thing that it thought of was to obstruct its harbor with sand and stones in order to divert the course of its waters so as to convert it into an inland city, thereby ruining its fleets and its traffic. The Genoese, triumphant over Pisa, stopped up its harbor with the sands of the Arno; and the city of the first conquerors of Mallorca, of the navigators to the Holy Land, of the Knights of St. Stephen, guardians of the Mediterranean, came to be Pisa the Dead,—a settlement that knew the sea only by hearsay.

"Sand," continued Ferragut, "has changed the commercial routes and historic destinies of the Mediterranean."

Of the many deeds which had stretched along the scenes of the mare nostrum, the most famous in the captain's opinion was the unheard-of epic of Roger de Flor which he had known from childhood through the stories told him by the poet Labarta, by the Triton, and by that poor secretary who was always dreaming of the great past of the Catalan marine.

All the world was now talking about the blockade of the Dardanelles. The boats that furrowed the Mediterranean, merchant vessels as well as battleships, were furthering the great military operation that was developing opposite Gallipoli. The name of the long, narrow maritime pass which separates Europe and Asia was in every mouth. To-day the eyes of mankind were converged on this point just as, in remote centuries, they had been fixed on the war of Troy.

"We also have been there," said Ferragut with pride. "The Dardanelles have been frequented for many years by the Catalans and the Aragonese. Gallipoli was one of our cities governed by the Valencian, Ramon Muntaner."

And he began the story of the Almogavars in the Orient, that romantic Odyssey across the ancient Asiatic provinces of the Roman Empire that ended only with the founding of the Spanish duchy of Athens and Neopatria in the city of Pericles and Minerva. The chronicles of the Oriental Middle Ages, the books of Byzantine chivalry, the fantastic tales of the Arab do not contain more improbable and dramatic adventures than the warlike enterprises of these Argonauts coming from the valleys of the Pyrenees, from the banks of the Ebro, and from the Moorish gardens of Valencia.

"Eighty years," said Ferragut, terminating his account of the glorious adventures of Roger de Flor around Gallipoli, "the Spanish duchy of Athens and Neopatria flourished. Eighty years the Catalans governed these lands."

And he pointed out on the horizon the place where the red haze of distant promontories and mountains outlined the Grecian land.

Such a duchy was in reality a republic. Athens and Thebes were administered in accordance with the laws of Aragon and its code was "The book of Usages and Customs of the City of Barcelona." The Catalan tongue ruled as the official language in the country of Demosthenes, and the rude Almogavars married with the highest ladies of the country.

The Parthenon was still intact as in the glorious times of ancient Athens. The august monument of Minerva converted into a Christian church, had not undergone any other modification than that of seeing a new goddess on its altars, La Virgen Santisima.

And in this thousand-year-old temple of sovereign beauty the Te Deum was sung for eighty years in honor of the Aragonese dukes, and the clergy preached in the Catalan tongue.

The republic of adventurers did not bother with constructing nor creating. There does not remain on the Grecian land any trace of their dominion,—edifices, seals, nor coins. Only a few noble families, especially in the islands, took the Catalan patronym.

"Although they yet remember us confusedly, they do remember us," said Ferragut. "'May the vengeance of the Catalans overtake you' was for many centuries the worst of curses in Greece."

Thus terminated the most glorious and bloody of the Mediterranean adventures of the Middle Ages,—the clash of western crudeness, almost savage but frank and noble, against the refined malice and decadent civilization of the Greeks,—childish and old at the same time,—which survived in Byzantium.

Ferragut felt a pleasure in these relations of imperial splendor, palaces of gold, epic encounters and furious frays, while his ship was navigating through the black night and bounding over the dark sea accompanied by the throbbing of machinery and the noisy thrum of the screw, at times out of the water during the furious rocking from prow to poop.

They were in the worst place in the Mediterranean where the winds coming from the narrow passage of the Adriatic, from the steppes of Asia Minor, from the African deserts and from the gap of Gibraltar tempestuously mingled their atmospheric currents. The waters boxed in among the numerous islands of the Grecian archipelago were writhing in opposite directions, enraged and clashing against the ledges on the coast with a retrograding violence that converted them into a furious surge.

The captain, hooded like a friar and bowed before the wind that was striving to snatch him from the bridge, kept talking and talking to his mate, standing immovable near him and also covered with a waterproof coat that was spouting moisture from every fold. The rain was streaking with light, cobwebby lines the slaty darkness, of the night. The two sailors felt as though icy nettles were falling upon face and hands across the darkness.

Twice they anchored near the island of Tenedos, seeing the movable archipelago of ironclads enveloped in floating veils of smoke. There came to their ears, like incessant thunderings, the echo of the cannons that were roaring at the entrance of the Dardanelles.

From afar off they perceived the sensation caused by the loss of some English and French ships. The current of the Black Sea was the best armor for the defenders of this aquatic defile against the attacks of the fleets. They had only to throw into the strait a quantity of floating mines and the blue river which slipped by the Dardanelles would drag these toward the boats, destroying them with an infernal explosion. On the coast of Tenedos the Hellenic women with their floating hair were tossing flowers into the sea in memory of the victims, with a theatrical grief similar to that of the heroines of ancient Troy whose ramparts were buried in the hills opposite.

The third trip in mid-winter was a very hard one, and at the end of a rainy night, when the faint streaks of dawn were beginning to dissipate the sluggish shadows, the Mare Nostrum arrived at the roadstead of Salonica.

Only once had Ferragut been in this port, many years before, when it still belonged to the Turks. At first he saw only some lowlands on which twinkled the last gleams from the lighthouses. Then he recognized the roadstead, a vast aquatic extension with a frame of sandy bars and pools reflecting the uncertain life of daybreak. The recently awakened sea-gulls were flying in groups over the immense marine bowl. At the mouth of the Vardar the fresh-water fowls were starting up with noisy cries, or standing on the edge of the bank immovable upon their long legs.

Opposite the prow, a city was rising up out of the albuminous waves of fog. In a bit of the clear, blue sky appeared various minarets, their peaks sparkling with the fires of Aurora. As the vessel advanced, the morning clouds vanished, and Salonica became entirely visible from the cluster of huts at her wharves to the ancient castle topping the heights, a fortress of ruddy towers, low and strong.

Near the water's edge, the entire length of the harbor, were the European constructions, commercial houses with gold-lettered signs, hotels, banks, moving-picture shows, concert halls, and a massive tower with another smaller one upon it,—the so-called White Tower, a remnant of the Byzantine fortifications.

In this European conglomerate were dark gaps, open passageways, the mouths of sloping streets climbing to the hillock above, crossing the Grecian, Mohammedan and Jewish quarters until they reached a table-land covered with lofty edifices between dark points of cypress.

The religious diversity of the Oriental Mediterranean made Salonica bristle with cupolas and towers. The Greek temple threw into prominence the gilded bulbs of its roof; the Catholic church made the cross glisten from the peak of its bell-tower; the synagogue of geometrical forms overflowed in a succession of terraces; the Mohammedan minaret formed a colonnade, white, sharp and slender. Modern life had added factory chimneys and the arms of steam-cranes which gave an anachronistic effect to this decoration of an Oriental harbor. Around the city and its acropolis was the plain which lost itself in the horizon,—a plain that Ferragut, on a former voyage, had seen desolate and monotonous, with few houses and sparsely cultivated, with no other Vegetation except that in the little oases of the Mohammedan cemetery. This desert extended to Greece and Servia or to the borders of Bulgaria and Turkey.

Now the brownish-gray steppes coming out from the fleecy fog of daybreak were palpitating with new life. Thousands and thousands of men were encamped around the city, occupying new villages made of canvas, rectangular streets of tents, cities of wooden cabins, and constructions as big as churches whose canvas walls were trembling under the violent squalls of wind.

Through his glasses, Ulysses could see warlike hosts occupied with the business of caring for strings of riderless horses that were going to watering places, parks of artillery with their cannon upraised like the tubes of a telescope, enormous birds with yellow wings that were trying to skip along the earth's surface with a noisy bumping, gradually reappearing in space with their waxy wings glistening in the first shafts of sunlight.

All the allied army of the Orient returning from the bloody and mistaken adventure of the Dardanelles or proceeding from Marseilles and Gibraltar were massing themselves around Salonica.

The Mare Nostrum anchored at the wharves filled with boxes and bales. War had given a much greater activity to this port than in times of peace. Steamers of all the allied and neutral flags were unloading eatables and military materials.

They were coming from every continent, from every ocean, drawn thither by the tremendous necessities of a modern army. They were unloading harvests from entire provinces, unending herds of oxen and horses, tons upon tons of steel, prepared for deadly work, and human crowds lacking only a tail of women and children to be like the great martial exoduses of history. Then taking on board the residuum of war, arms needing repair, wounded men, they would begin their return trip.

These cargoes quietly transported through the darkness in spite of bad times and the submarine threats, were preparing the ultimate victory. Many of these steamers were formerly luxurious vessels, but now commandeered by military necessity, were dirty and greasy and used as cargo boats. Lined up, drowsing along the docks, ready to begin their work, were new hospital ships, the more fortunate transatlantic liners that still retained a certain trace of their former condition, quite clean with a red cross painted on their sides and another on their smokestacks.

Some of the transports had reached Salonica most miraculously. Their crews would relate with the fatalistic serenity of men of the sea how the torpedo had passed at a short distance from their hulls. A damaged steamer lay on its side, with only the keel submerged, all its red exterior exposed to the air; on its water-line there had opened a breach, angular in outline. Upon looking from the deck into the depths of its hold filled with water, there might be seen a great gash in its side like the mouth of a luminous cavern.

Ferragut, while his boat was discharging its cargo under Toni's supervision, passed his days ashore, visiting the city.

From the very first moment he was attracted by the narrow lanes of the Turkish quarters—their white houses with protruding balconies covered with latticed blinds like cages painted red; the little mosques with their patios of cypresses and fountains of melancholy tinkling; the tombs of Mohammedan dervishes in kiosks which block the streets under the pale reflection of a lamp; the women veiled with their black firadjes; and the old men who, silent and thoughtful under their scarlet caps, pass along swaying to the staggering of the ass on which they are mounted.

The great Roman way between Rome and Byzantium, the ancient road of the blue flagstones, passed through a street of modern Salonica. Still a part of its pavement remained and appeared gloriously obstructed by an arch of triumph near whose weatherbeaten stone base were working barefooted bootblacks wearing the scarlet fez.

An endless variety of uniforms filed through the streets, and this diversity in attire as well as the ethnical difference in the men who wore it was very noticeable. The soldiers of France and the British Isles touched elbows with the foreign troops. The allied governments had sent out a call to the professional combatants and volunteers of their colonies. The black sharpshooters from the center of Africa showed their smiling teeth of marble to the bronze giants with huge white turbans who had come from India. The hunters from the glacial plains of Canada were fraternizing with the volunteers from Australia and New Zealand.

The cataclysm of the world war had dragged mankind from the antipodes to this drowsy little corner of Greece where were again repeated the invasions of remote centuries which had made ancient Thessalonica bow to the conquest of Bulgarians, Byzantians, Saracens, and Turks.

The crews of the battleships in the roadstead had just added to this medley of uniforms the monotonous note of their midnight blue, almost like that of all the navies of the world.... And to the military amalgamation was also added the picturesque variety of civil dress,—the hybrid character of the neighborhood of Salonica, composed of various races and religions that were mingled together without confusing their individuality. Files of black tunics and hats with brimless crowns passed through the streets, near the Catholic priests or the rabbis with their long, loose gowns. In the outskirts might be seen men almost naked, with no other clothing than a sheep-skin tunic, guiding flocks of pigs, just like the shepherds in the Odyssey. Dervishes, with their aspect of dementia, chanted motionless in a crossway, enveloped in clouds of flies, awaiting the aid of the good believers.

A great part of the population was composed of Israelitish descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal. The oldest and most conservative were clad just like their remote ancestors with large kaftans striped with striking colors. The women, when not imitating the European fashions, usually wore a picturesque garment that recalled the Spanish apparel of the Middle Ages. Here they were not mere brokers or traders as in the rest of the world. The necessities of the city dominated by them had made them pick up all the professions, becoming artisans, fishermen, boatmen, porters and stevedores of the harbor. They still kept the Castilian tongue as the language of the hearth like an original flag whose waving reunited their scattered souls,—a Castilian in the making, soft and without consistency like one newly-born.

"Are you a Spaniard?" they said brokenly to Captain Ferragut. "My ancestors were born there. It is a beautiful land."

But they did not wish to return to it. The country of their grandsires inspired a certain amount of terror in them, and they feared that upon seeing them return, the present-day Spaniards would banish the bullfights and reestablish the Inquisition, organizing an auto de fe every Sunday.

Hearing them speak his language, the captain recalled a certain date—1492. In the very year that Christopher Columbus had made his first voyage, discovering the Indies, the Jews were expelled from the Spanish peninsula, and Nebrija brought out the first Castilian grammar. These Spaniards had left their native land months before their idiom had been codified for the first time.

A sailor of Genoa, an old friend of Ulysses, took him to one of the harbor cafes, where the merchant captains used to gather together. These were the only ones wearing civilian clothes among the crowds of land and sea officers who crowded the divans, obstructed the tables, and grouped themselves before the doorway.

These Mediterranean vagabonds who oftentimes could not converse together because of the diversity of their native idiom, instinctively sought each other out, keeping near together in a fraternal silence. Their passive heroism was in many instances more admirable than that of the men of war, who were able to return blow for blow. All the officers of the different fleets, seated near them, had at their disposition cannon, ram, torpedo, great speed and aerial telegraphy. These valorous muleteers of the sea defied the enemy in defenseless boats without wireless and without cannons. Sometimes when searching all the men of the crew, not a single revolver would be found among them, and yet these brave fellows were daring the greatest adventures with professional fatalism, and trusting to luck.

In the social groups of the cafe the captains would sometimes relate their encounters on the sea, the unexpected appearance of a submarine, the torpedo missing aim a few yards away, the flight at full speed while being shelled by their pursuers. They would flame up for an instant upon recalling their danger, and then relapse into indifference and fatalism.

"If I've got to die by drowning," they would always conclude, "it would be useless for me to try to avoid it."

And they would hasten their departure in order to return a month later transporting a regular fortune in their vessel, completely alone, preferring free and wary navigation to the journey in convoy, slipping along from island to island and from coast to coast in order to outwit the submersibles.

They were far more concerned about the state of their ships, that for more than a year had not been cleaned, than about the dangers of navigation. The captains of the great liners lamented their luxurious staterooms converted into dormitories for the troops, their polished decks that had been turned into stables, their dining-room where they used to sit among people in dress suits and low-neck gowns, which had now to be sprayed with every class of disinfectant in order to repel the invasion of vermin, and the animal odors of so many men and beasts crowded together.

The decline of the ships appeared to be reflected in the bearing of their captains, more careless than before, worse dressed, with the military slovenliness of the trench-fighter, and with calloused hands as badly cared for as those of a stevedore.

Among the naval men also there were some who had completely neglected their appearance. These were the commanders of "chaluteros," little ocean fishing steamers armed with a quickfirer, which had come into the Mediterranean to pursue the submersible. They wore oilskins and tarpaulins, just like the North Sea fishermen, smacking of fuel and tempestuous water. They would pass weeks and weeks on the sea whatever the weather, sleeping in the bottom of the hold that smelled offensively of rancid fish, keeping on patrol no matter how the tempest might roar, bounding from wave to wave like a cork from a bottle, in order to repeat the exploits of the ancient corsairs.

Ferragut had a relative in the army which was assembling at Salonica making ready for the inland march. As he did not wish to go away without seeing the lad he passed several mornings making investigations in the offices of the general staff.

This relative was his nephew, a son of Blanes, the manufacturer of knit goods, who had fled from Barcelona at the outbreak of the war with other boys devoted to singing Los Segadores and perturbing the tranquillity of the "Consul of Spain" sent by Madrid. The son of the pacific Catalan citizen had enlisted in the battalion of the Foreign Legion made up to a great extent of Spaniards and Spanish-Americans.

Blanes had asked the captain to see his son. He was sad yet at the same time proud of this romantic adventure blossoming out so unexpectedly in the utilitarian and monotonous existence of the family. A boy that had such a great future in his father's factory!... And then he had related to Ulysses with shaking voice and moist eyes the achievements of his son,—wounded in Champagne, two citations and the Croix de Guerre. Who would ever have imagined that he could be such a hero!... Now his battalion was in Salonica after having fought in the Dardanelles.

"See if you can't bring him back with you," repeated Blanes. "Tell him that his mother is going to die of grief.... You can do so much!"

But all that Captain Ferragut could do was to obtain a permit and an old automobile with which to visit the encampment of the legionaries.

The arid plain around Salonica was crossed by numerous roads. The trains of artillery, the rosaries of automobiles, were rolling over recently opened roads that the rain had converted into mire. The mud was the worst calamity that could befall this plain, so extremely dusty in dry weather.

Ferragut passed two long hours, going from encampment to encampment, before reaching his destination. His vehicle frequently had to stop in order to make way for interminable files of trucks. At other times machine-guns, big guns dragged by tractors, and provision cars with pyramids of sacks and boxes, blocked their road.

On all sides were thousands and thousands of soldiers of different colors and races. The captain recalled the great invasions of history—Xerxes, Alexander, Genghis-Khan, all the leaders of men who had made their advance carrying villages en masse behind their horses, transforming the servants of the earth into fighters. There lacked only the soldierly women, the swarms of children, to complete exactly the resemblance to the martial exoduses of the past.

In half an hour more he was able to embrace his nephew, who was with two other volunteers, an Andulasian and a South American,—the three united by brotherhood of birth and by their continual familiarity with death.

Ferragut took them to the canteen of a trader established near the cantonment. The customers were seated under a sail-cloth awning before boxes that had contained munitions and were converted into office tables. This discomfort was surpassed by the prices. In no Palace Hotel would drink have cost such an extraordinary sum.

In a few moments the sailor felt a fraternal affection for these three youths to whom he gave the nickname of the "Three Musketeers," He wished to treat them to the very best which the canteen afforded, so the proprietor produced a bottle of champagne or rather ptisan from Rheims, presenting it as though it were an elixir fabricated of gold.

The amber liquid, bubbling in the glasses, seemed to bring the three youths back to their former existence. Boiled by the sun and the inclemency of the weather, habituated to the hard life of war, they had almost forgotten the softness and luxuriant conveniences of former years.

Ulysses examined them attentively. In the course of the campaign they had grown with youth's last rapid growth. Their arms were sticking out to an ungainly degree from the sleeves of their coats, already too short for them. The rude gymnastic exercise of the marches, with the management of the shovel, had broadened their wrists and calloused their hands.

The memory of his own son surged up in his memory. If only he could see him thus, made into a soldier like his cousin! See him enduring all the hardships of military existence ... but living!

In order not to be too greatly moved, he drank and paid close attention to what the three youths were saying. Blanes, the legionary, as romantic as the son of a merchant bent upon adventure should be, was talking of the daring deeds of the troops of the Orient with all the enthusiasm of his twenty-two years. There wasn't time to throw themselves upon the Bulgarians with bayonets and arrive at Adrianopolis. As a Catalan, this war in Macedonia was touching him very close.

"We are going to avenge Roger de Flor," he said gravely.

And his uncle wanted to weep and to laugh before this simple faith comparable only to the retrospective memory of the poet Labarta and that village secretary who was always lamenting the remote defeat of Ponza.

Blanes explained like a knight-errant the impulse that had called him to the war. He wanted to fight for the liberty of all oppressed nations, for the resurrection of all forgotten nationalities,—Poles, Czechs, Jugo-Slavs.... And very simply, as though he were saying something indisputable, he included Catalunia among the people who were weeping tears of blood under the lashes of the tyrant. Thereupon his companion, the Andalusian, burst forth indignantly. They passed their time arguing furiously, exchanging insults and continually seeking each other's company as though they couldn't live apart.

The Andalusian was not battling for the liberty of this or that people. He had a longer range of vision. He was not near-sighted and egoistic like his friend, "the Catalan." He was giving his blood in order that the whole world might be free and that all monarchies should disappear.

"I am battling for France because it is the country of the great Revolution. Its former history makes no difference to me, for we still have kings of our own, but dating from the 14th of July, whatever France is, I consider mine and the property of all mankind."

He stopped a few seconds, searching for a more concrete affirmation.

"I am fighting, Captain, because of Danton and Hoche."

Ferragut in his imagination saw the white, disheveled hair of Michelet and the romantic foretop of Lamartine upon a double pedestal of volumes which used to contain the story-poem of the Revolution.

"And I am also fighting for France," concluded the lad triumphantly, "because it is the country of Victor Hugo."

Ulysses suspected that this twenty-year-old Republican was probably hiding in his knapsack a blank book full of original verses written in lead pencil.

The South American, accustomed to the disputes of his two companions, looked at his black fingernails with the melancholy desperation of a prophet contemplating his country in ruins. Blanes, the son of a middle-class citizen, used to admire him for his more distinguished family. The day of the mobilization he had gone to Paris in an automobile of fifty horse-power to enroll as a volunteer; he and his chauffeur had enlisted together. Then he had donated his luxurious vehicle to the cause.

He had wished to be a soldier because all the young fellows in his club were leaving for the war. Furthermore, he felt greatly flattered that his latest sweetheart, seeing him in uniform, should devote a few tears of admiration and astonishment to him. He had felt the necessity of producing a touching effect upon all the ladies that had danced the tango with him up to the week before. Besides that, the millions of his grandfather, "the Galician," held rather tight by his father, the Creole, were slipping through his hands.

"This experience is lasting too long, Captain."

In the beginning he had believed in a six months' war. The shells didn't trouble him much; for him the terrible things were the vermin, the impossibility of changing his clothing, and being deprived of his daily bath. If he could ever have supposed!...

And he summed up his enthusiasm with this affirmation:

"I am fighting for France because it is a chic country. Only in Paris do the women know how to dress. Those Germans, no matter how much they try, will always be very ordinary."

It was not necessary to add anything to this. All had been said.

The three recalled the hellish months suffered recently in the Dardanelles, in a space of three miles conquered by the bayonet. A rain of projectiles had fallen incessantly upon them. They had had to live underground like moles and, even so, the explosion of the great shells sometimes reached them.

In this tongue of land opposite Troy through which had slipped the remote history of humanity, their shovels, on opening the trenches, had stumbled upon the rarest finds. One day Blanes and his companions had excavated pitchers, statuettes, and plates centuries old. At other times, when opening trenches that had served as cemeteries for Turks, they had hacked into repulsive bits of pulp exhaling an insufferable odor. Self-defense had obliged the legionaries to live with their faces on a level with the corpses that were piled up in the vertical yard of removed earth.

"The dead are like the truffles in a pie," said the South American. "An entire day I had to remain with my nose touching the intestines of a Turk who had died two weeks before.... No, war is not chic, Captain, no matter how much they talk of heroism and sublime things in the newspapers and books."

Ulysses wished to see the three musketeers again before leaving Salonica, but the battalion had broken camp and was now situated several kilometers further inland, opposite the first Bulgarian lines. The enthusiastic Blanes had already fired his gun against the assassins of Roger de Flor.

In the middle of November the Mare Nostrum arrived at Marseilles. Its captain always felt a certain admiration upon doubling Cape Croisette, and noting the vast maritime curves opening out before the prow. In the center of it was an abrupt and bare hill, jutting into the sea, sustaining on its peak the basilica and square-sided tower of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde.

Marseilles was the metropolis of the Mediterranean, the terminal for all the navigators of the mare nostrum. In its bay with choppy waves were various yellowish islands fringed with foam and upon one of these the strong towers of the romantic Chateau d'If.

All the crew, from Ferragut down to the lowest seaman, used to look upon this city somewhat as their own when they saw, appearing in the background of the bay, its forests of masts and its conglomeration of gray edifices upon which sparkled the Byzantian domes of the new cathedral. Around Marseilles there opened out a semi-circle of dry and barren heights brightly colored by the sun of Provence and spotted by white cottages and hamlets, and the pleasure villas of the merchants of the city. On beyond this semi-circle the horizon was bounded by an amphitheater of rugged and gloomy mountains.

On former trips the sight of the gigantic gilded Virgin which glistened like a shaft of fire on the top of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde shed an atmosphere of joy over the bridge of the vessel.

"Marseilles, Toni," the captain used to say gayly. "I invite you to a bouillabaisse at Pascal's."

And Toni's hairy countenance would break into a greedy smile, seeing in anticipation the famous restaurant of the port, its twilight shadows smelling of shell-fish and spicy sauces, and upon the table the deep dish of fish with its succulent broth tinged with saffron.

But now Ulysses had lost his vigorous joy in living. He looked at the city with kindly but sad eyes. He could see himself disembarking there that last time, sick, without will-power, overwhelmed by the tragic disappearance of his son.

The Mare Nostrum approached the mouth of the old harbor having at its right the batteries of the Phare. This old port was the most interesting souvenir of ancient Marseilles, penetrating like an aquatic knife into the heart of its clustered homes. The city extended along the wharves. It was an enormous stretch of water into which all the streets flowed; but its area was now so insufficient for the maritime traffic that eight new harbors were gradually covering the north shore of the bay.

An interminable jetty, a breakwater longer than the city itself, was parallel to the coast, and in the space between the shore and this obstacle which made the waves foam and roar were eight roomy communicating harbors stretching from Joliette at the entrance to the one which, farthest away, is connected inland by the great subterranean canal, putting the city in communication with the Rhone.

Ferragut had seen anchored in this succession of harbors the navies of every land and even of every epoch. Near to the enormous transatlantic liners were some very ancient tartans and some Greek boats, heavy and of archaic form, which recalled the fleets described in the Iliad.

On the wharves swarmed all kinds of Mediterranean men,—Greeks from the continent and from the islands, Levantines from the coast of Asia, Spaniards, Italians, Algerians, Moroccans, Egyptians. Many had kept their original costume and to this varied picturesque garb was united a diversity of tongues, some of them mysterious and well-nigh extinct. As though infected by the oral confusion, the French themselves began to forget their native language, speaking the dialect of Marseilles, which preserves indelible traces of its Greek origin.

The Mare Nostrum crossed the outer port, the inner harbor of Joliette, and slipped slowly along past groups of pedestrians and carts that were waiting the closing of the steel drawbridge now opening before their prow. Then they cast anchor in the basin of Arenc near the docks.

When Ferragut could go ashore he noticed the great transformation which this port had undergone in war times.

The traffic of the times of peace with its infinite variety of wares no longer existed. On the wharves there were piled up only the monotonous and uniform loads of provisions and war material.

The legions of longshoremen had also disappeared. They were all in the trenches. The sidewalks were now swept by women, and squads of Senegalese sharpshooters were unloading the cargoes,—shivering with cold in the sunny winter days, and bent double as though dying under the rain or the breeze of the Mistral. They were working with red caps pulled down over their ears, and at the slightest suspension of their labor would hasten to put their hands in the pockets of their coats. Sometimes when formed in vociferating groups around a case that four men could have moved in ordinary times, the passing of a woman or a vehicle would make them neglect their work, their diabolical faces filled with childish curiosity.

The unloaded cargoes piled up the same articles on the principal docks,—wheat, much wheat, sulphur and saltpeter for the composition of explosive material. On other piers were lined up, by the thousands, pairs of gray wheels, the support of cannons and trucks; boxes as big as dwellings that contained aeroplanes; huge pieces of steel that served as scaffolding for heavy artillery; great boxes of guns and cartridges; huge cases of preserved food and sanitary supplies,—all the provisioning of the army struggling in the extreme end of the Mediterranean.

Various squads of men, preceded and followed by bayonets, were marching with rhythmic tread from one port to another. They were German prisoners,—rosy and happy, in spite of their captivity, still wearing their uniforms of green cabbage color, with round caps on their shaved heads. They were going to work on the vessels, loading and unloading the material that was to serve for the extermination of their compatriots and friends.

The ships at the docks seemed to be increasing in size, for on arrival they had extended only a few yards above the wharf; but now that their cargo was piled up on land, they appeared like towering fortresses. Two-thirds of the hull, usually hidden in the water, were now in evidence, showing the bright red of their curved shell. Only the keel kept itself in the water. The upper third, that which remained visible above the line of flotation in ordinary times, was now a simple black cornice that capped the long purple walls. The masts and smokestacks diminished by this transformation appeared to belong to other smaller boats.

Each of these merchant and peaceful steamers carried a quickfirer at the stern in order to protect itself from the submarine corsairs. England and France had mobilized their tramp ships and were beginning to supply them with means of defense. Some of them had not been able to mount their cannon upon a fixed gun carriage, and so carried a field gun with its mouth sticking out between the wheels bolted to the deck.