Kitabı oku: «Mare Nostrum (Our Sea)», sayfa 29
CHAPTER XII
AMPHITRITE!… AMPHITRITE!
The Mare Nostrum made another trip from Marseilles to Salonica.
Before sailing, Ferragut hunted vainly through the Paris periodicals for fresh news of Freya. For some days past, the attention of the public had been so distracted by various other events that for the time being the spy was forgotten.
On arriving at Salonica, he made discreet inquiries among his military and marine friends in the harbor cafés. Hardly any one had ever heard the name of Freya Talberg. Those who had read it in the newspapers merely replied with indifference.
"I know who she is: she is a spy who was an actress,—a woman with a certain chic. I think that they've shot her…. I don't know certainly, but they ought to have shot her."
They had more important things to think about. A spy!… On all sides they were discovering the intrigues of German espionage. They had to shoot a great many…. And immediately they forgot this affair in order to speak of the difficulties of the war that were threatening them and their comrades-at-arms.
When Ferragut returned to Marseilles two months afterwards, he was still ignorant as to whether his former mistress was yet among the living.
The first evening that he met his old comrade, the captain, in the café of the Cannebière, he skillfully guided the conversation around until he could bring out naturally the question in the back of his mind: "What was the fate of that Freya Talberg that there was so much talk about in the newspapers before I went to Salonica?…"
The Marseillaise had to make an effort to recall her.
"Ah, yes!… The boche spy," he said after a long pause. "They shot her some weeks ago. The papers said little of her death,—just a few lines. Such people don't deserve any more…."
Ferragut's friend had two sons in the army; a nephew had died in the trenches, another, a mate aboard a transport, had just perished in a torpedo attack. The old man was passing many nights without sleeping thinking of his sons battling at the front. And this uneasiness gave a hard and ferocious tone to his patriotic enthusiasm.
"It's a good thing she is dead…. She was a woman, and shooting a woman is a painful thing. It is always repugnant to be obliged to treat them like men…. But according to what they tell me, this individual with her spy-information brought about the torpedoing of sixteen vessels…. Ah, the wicked beast!…"
And he said no more, changing the subject. Every one evinced the same revulsion on recalling the spy.
Ferragut eventually shared the same sentiments, his brain having divested itself of the contradictory duality which had attended all the critical moments of his existence. Remembering only her crimes, he hated Freya. As a man of the sea, he recalled his nameless fellow-sailors killed by torpedoes. This woman had indirectly prepared the ground for many assassinations…. And at the same time he recalled another image of her as the mistress who knew so well how to keep him spellbound by her artifices in the old palace of Naples, making that voluptuous prison her best souvenir.
"Let's think no more about her," he said to himself energetically. "She has died…. She does not exist."
But not even after her death did she leave him in peace. Remembrance of her soon came surging back, binding her to him with a tragic interest.
The very evening that he was talking with his friend in the café of the Cannebière, he went to the post office to get the mail which had been forwarded to him at Marseilles. They gave him a great package of letters and newspapers. By the handwriting on the envelopes, and the postmarks on the postals, he tried to make out who was writing to him:—one letter only from his wife, evidently but a single sheet, judging from its slender flexibility, three very bulky ones from Toni,—a species of diary in which he continued relating his purchases, his crops, his hope of seeing the captain,—all this mixed in with abundant news about the war, and the wretched condition of the people. There were, besides, various sheets from the banking establishments at Barcelona, rendering Ferragut an account of the investment of his capital.
At the foot of the staircase he completed his examination of the outside of his correspondence. It was just what was always awaiting him on his return from his voyages.
He was about to put the package in his pocket and continue on his way when his attention was attracted by a voluminous envelope in an unknown handwriting, registered in Paris….
Curiosity made him open it immediately and he found in his hand a regular sheaf of loose leaves, a long account that far exceeded the limits of a letter. He looked at the engraved letter-head and then at the signature. The writer was a lawyer in Paris, and Ferragut suspected by the luxurious paper and address that he must be a celebrated maître. He even recalled having run across his name somewhere in the newspapers.
Then and there he began reading the first page, anxious to know why this distinguished personage had written to him. But he had scarcely run his eyes over some of the sheets before he stopped his reading. He had come across the name of Freya Talberg. This lawyer had been her defender before the Council of War.
Ferragut hastened to put the letter in a safe place, and curb his impatience. He felt that necessity for silent isolation and absolute solitude which a reader, anxious to delve into a new book, experiences. This bundle of papers doubtless contained for him the most interesting of stories.
Returning to his ship, the road seemed to him far longer than at other times. He longed to lock himself in his stateroom, away from all curiosity as though he were about to perform some mysterious rite.
Freya was not in existence. She had disappeared from the world in the infamous manner in which criminals disappear,—doubly condemned since even her memory was hateful to the people; and Ferragut within a few moments was going to resurrect her like a ghost, in the floating house that she had visited on two occasions. He now might know the last hours of her existence wrapped in disreputable mystery; he could violate the will of her judges who had condemned her to lose her life and after death to perish from every one's memory. With eager avidity he seated himself before his cabin table, arranging the contents of the envelope in order;—more than twelve sheets, written on both sides, and several newspaper clippings. In these clippings he saw portraits of Freya, a hard and blurred likeness which he could recognize only by her name underneath. He also beheld the portrait of her defender,—an old lawyer of fastidious aspect with white locks carefully combed, and sharp eyes.
From the very first lines, Ferragut suspected that the maître could neither write nor speak except in the most approved literary form. His letter was a moderated and correct account in which all emotion, however keen it might have been, was discreetly controlled so as not to disorganize the sweep of a majestic style.
He began by explaining that his professional duty had made him decide to defend this spy. She was in need of a lawyer; she was a foreigner; public opinion, influenced by the exaggerated accounts given by the newspapers of her beauty and her jewels, was ferociously inimical, demanding her immediate punishment. Nobody had wished to take charge of her defense. And for this very reason he had accepted it without fear of unpopularity.
Ferragut believed that this sacrifice might be attributed to the impulse of a gallant old beau, attracted to Freya because of her beauty. Besides, this criminal process represented a typical Parisian incident and might give a certain romantic notoriety to the one intervening in its developments.
A few paragraphs further on the sailor became convinced that the maître had fallen in love with his client. This woman even in her dying moments shed around her most amazing powers of seduction. The professional success anticipated by the lawyer disappeared on his first questioning. Defense of Freya would be impossible. When he questioned her regarding the events of her former life, she either wept for every answer, or else remained silent, immovable, with as unconcerned a glance as though the fate of some other woman were at stake.
The military judges did not need her confessions: they knew, detail for detail, all her existence during the war and in the last years of peace. Never had the police agents abroad worked with such rapidity and success. Mysterious and omnipotent good fortune had crowned every investigation. They knew all of Freya's doings. They had even received from a secret agent exact data regarding her personality, the number by which she was represented in the director's office at Berlin, the salary that she was paid, as well as her reports during the past month. Documents written by her personally, of an irrefutable culpability, had poured in without any one's knowing from what point they were sent or by whom.
Every time that the judge had placed before Freya's eyes one of these proofs, she looked at her lawyer in desperation.
"It is they!" she moaned. "They who desire my death!"
Her defender was of the same opinion. The police had learned of her presence in France by a letter that her superiors in Barcelona had sent, stupidly disguised, written with regard to a code whose mystery had been discovered some time before by the French counter-spies. To the maître it was only too evident that some mysterious power had wished to rid itself of this woman, dispatching her to an enemy's country, intending to send her to death.
Ulysses suspected in the defender a state of mind similar to his own,—the same duality that had tormented him in all his relations with Freya.
"I, sir," wrote the lawyer, "have suffered much. One of my sons, an officer, died in the battle of the Aisne. Others very close to me, nephews and pupils, died in Verdun and with the expeditionary army of the Orient…."
As a Frenchman, he had felt an irresistible aversion upon becoming convinced that Freya was a spy who had done great harm to his country…. Then as a man, he had commiserated her inconsequence, her contradictory and frivolous character, amounting almost to a crime, and her egoism as a beautiful woman and lover of luxury that had made her willing to suffer moral vileness in exchange for creature comfort.
Her story had attracted the lawyer with the palpitating interest of a novel of adventure. Commiseration had finally developed the vehemence of a love affair. Besides, the knowledge that the exploiters of this woman were the ones that had denounced her, had aroused his knightly enthusiasm in the defense of her indefensible cause.
Appearance before the Council of War had proved painful and dramatic. Freya, who until then, had seemed brutalized by the regime of the prison, roused herself upon being confronted by a dozen grave and uniformed men.
Her first moves were those of every handsome and coquettish female. She knew perfectly well her physical influence. These soldiers transformed into judges were recalling those other flirts that she had seen at the teas and grand balls at the hotels…. What Frenchman can resist feminine attraction?…
She had smiled, she had replied to the first questions with graceful modesty, fixing her wickedly guileless eyes upon the officials seated behind the presidential table, and on those other men in blue uniform, charged with accusing her or reading the documents of her prosecution.
But something cold and hostile existed in the atmosphere and paralyzed her smiles, leaving her words without echo and making ineffectual the splendors of her eyes. All foreheads were bowed under the weight of severe thought: all the men in that instant appeared thirty years older. They simply would not see such a one as she was, however much effort she might make. They had left their admiration and their desires on the other side of the door.
Freya perceived that she had ceased to be a woman and was no more than one accused. Another of her sex, an irresistible rival, was now engrossing everything, binding these men with a profound and austere love. Instinct made her regard fixedly the white matron of grave countenance whose vigorous bust appeared over the head of the president. She was Patriotism, Justice, the Republic, contemplating with her vague and hollow eyes this female of flesh and blood who was beginning to tremble upon realizing her situation.
"I do not want to die!" cried Freya, suddenly abandoning her seductions and becoming a poor, wretched creature crazed by fear. "I am innocent."
She lied with the absurd and barefaced illogicalness of one finding herself in danger of death. It was necessary to re-read her first declarations, which she was now denying, of presenting afresh the material proofs whose existence she did not wish to admit, of making her entire past file by supported by that irrefutable data of anonymous origin.
"It is they who have done it all!… They have mis-represented me!…
Since they have brought about my ruin, I am going to tell what I know."
In his account the lawyer passed lightly over what had occurred in the Council of War. Professional secrecy and patriotic interest prevented greater explicitness. The session had lasted from morning till night, Freya revealing to her judges all that she knew…. Then her defender had spoken for five hours, trying to establish a species of interchange in the application of the penalty. The guilt of this woman was undeniable and the wickedness that she had carried through was very great, but they should spare her life in exchange for her important confessions…. Besides, the inconsequence of her character should be taken into consideration … also, that vengeance of which the enemy had made her the victim….
With Freya he had waited, until well on into the night, the decision of the tribunal. The defendant appeared animated by hope. She had become a woman again: she was talking placidly with him and smiling at the gendarmes and eulogizing the army…. "Frenchmen, gentlemen, were incapable of killing a woman…."
The maître was not surprised at the sad and furrowed brows of the officers as they came out from their deliberations. They appeared discontented with their recent vote, and yet at the same time showed the serenity of a tranquil countenance. They were soldiers who had just fulfilled their full duty, suppressing every purely masculine instinct. The one deputed to read the sentence swelled his voice with a fictitious energy…. "Death!…" After a long enumeration of crimes Freya was condemned to be shot:—she had given information to the enemy that represented the loss of thousands of men and boats, torpedoed because of her reports, on which had perished defenseless families.
The spy nodded her head upon listening to her own acts, for the first time appreciating their enormity and recognizing the justice of their tremendous punishment. But at the same time she was relying upon a good-natured reprieve in exchange for all which she had revealed, upon a gallant clemency … because she was she.
As the fatal word sounded, she uttered a cry, became ashy pale, and leaned upon the lawyer for support.
"I do not want to die!… I ought not to die!… I am innocent."
She continued shrieking her innocence, without giving any other proof of it than the desperate instinct of self-preservation. With the credulity of one who wishes to save herself, she accepted all the problematical consolations of her defender. There remained the last recourse of appealing to the mercy of the President of the Republic: perhaps he might pardon her…. And she signed this appeal with sudden hope.
The lawyer managed to delay the fulfillment of the sentence for two months, visiting many of his colleagues who were political personages. The desire of saving the life of his client was tormenting him as an obsession. He had devoted all his activity and his personal influence to this affair.
"In love!… In love, as you were!" said, with scornful accent, the voice of Ferragut's prudent counselor.
The periodicals were protesting against this delay in the execution of the sentence. The name of Freya Talberg was beginning to be heard in conversation as an argument against the weakness of the government. The women were the most implacable.
One day, in the Palace of Justice, the maître Became convinced of this general animosity that was pushing the defendant toward the day of execution. The woman who had charge of the gowns, a verbose old wife, on a familiar footing with the illustrious lawyers, had rudely made known their opinions.
"I wonder when they're going to execute that spy!… If she were a poor woman with children and needed to earn their bread, they would have shot her long ago…. But she is an elegant cocotte and with jewels. Perhaps she has bewitched some of the cabinet ministers. We are going to see her on the street now almost any day…. And my son who died at Verdun!…"
The prisoner, as though divining this public indignation, began to consider her death very near losing, little by little, that love of existence which had made her burst forth into lies and delirious protests. In vain the maître held out hopes of pardon.
"It is useless: I must die…. I ought to be shot…. I have done so much mischief…. It horrifies even me to remember all the crimes named in that sentence…. And there are still others that they don't know!… Solitude has made me see myself just as I am. What shame!… I ought to perish; I have ruined everything…. What is there left for me to do in the world?…"
"And it was then, my dear sir," continued the attorney, in his letter, "that she spoke to me of you, of the way in which you had known each other, of the harm which she had done you unconsciously."
Convinced of the uselessness of his efforts to save her life, the maître had solicited one last favor of the tribunal. Freya was very desirous that he should accompany her at the moment of her execution, as this would maintain her serenity. Those in the government had promised their colleague in the forum, to send opportune notice that he might be present at the fulfillment of the sentence.
It was at three o'clock in the morning and while he was in the deepest sleep that some messengers, sent by the prefecture of police, awakened him. The execution was to take place at daybreak: this was a decision reached at the last moment in order that the reporters might learn too late of the event.
An automobile took him with the messengers to the prison of St. Lazare, across silent and shadowy Paris. Only a few hooded street lamps were cutting with their sickly light the darkness of the streets. In the prison they were joined by other functionaries and many chiefs and officers who represented military justice. The condemned woman was still sleeping in her cell, ignorant of what was about to occur.
Those charged with awakening her, gloomy and timid, were marching in line through the corridors of the jail, bumping into one another in their nervous precipitation.
The door was opened. Under the regulation light Freya was on her bed, with closed eyes. Upon opening them and finding herself surrounded by men, her face was convulsed with terror.
"Courage, Freya!" said the prison warden. "The appeal for pardon has been denied."
"Courage, my daughter," added the priest of the establishment, starting the beginning of a discourse.
Her terror, due to the rude surprise of awakening with the brain still paralyzed, lasted but a few seconds. Upon collecting her thoughts, serenity returned to her face.
"I must die?" she asked. "The hour has already come?… Very well, then: let them shoot me. Here I am."
Some of the men turned their heads, and so averted their glance…. She had to get out of the bed in the presence of the two watchmen. This precaution was so that she might not attempt to take her life. She even asked the lawyer to remain in the cell as though in this way she wished to lessen the annoyance of dressing herself before strangers.
Upon reaching this passage in his letter, Ferragut realized the pity and admiration of the maître who had seen her preparing the last toilet of her life.
"Adorable creature! So beautiful!… She was born for love and luxury, yet was going to die, torn by bullets like a rude soldier…."
The precautions adopted by her coquetry appeared to him admirable. She wanted to die as she had lived, placing on her person the best that she possessed. Therefore, suspecting the nearness of her execution, she had a few days before reclaimed the jewels and the gown that she was wearing when arrest prevented her returning to Brest.
Her defender described her "with a dress of pearl gray silk, bronze stockings and low shoes, a great-coat of furs, and a large hat with plumes. Besides, the necklace of pearls was on her bosom, emeralds in her ears and all her diamonds on her fingers."
A sad smile curled her lips upon trying to look at herself in the window panes, still black with the darkness of night, which served her as a mirror.
"I die in my uniform like a soldier," she said to her lawyer.
Then in the ante-chamber of the prison, under the crude artificial light, this plumed woman, covered with jewels, her clothing exhaling a subtle perfume, memory of happier days, turned without any embarrassment toward the men clad in black and in blue uniforms.
Two religious sisters who accompanied her appeared more moved than she. They were trying to exhort her and at the same time were struggling to keep back the tears…. The priest was no less touched. He had attended other criminals, but they were men…. To assist to a decent death a beautiful perfumed woman scintillating with precious stones, as though she were going to ride in an automobile to a fashionable tea!…
The week before she had been in doubt as to whether to receive a Calvinist pastor or a Catholic priest. In her cosmopolitan life of uncertain nationality she had never taken the time to decide about any religion for herself. Finally she had selected the latter on account of its being more simple intellectually, more liberal and approachable….
Several times when the priest was trying to console her, she interrupted him as though she were the one charged with inspiring courage.
"To die is not so terrible as it appears when seen afar off!… I feel ashamed when I think of the fears that I have passed through, of the tears that I have shed…. It turns out to be much more simple than I had believed…. We all have to die!"
They read to her the sentence refusing the appeal for pardon. Then they offered her a pen that she might sign it.
A colonel told her that there were still a few moments at her disposition in which to write to her family, her friends, or to make her last will….
"To whom shall I write?" said Freya. "I haven't a single friend in the world…."
"Then it was," continued the lawyer, "that she took the pen as if a recollection had occurred to her, and traced some few lines…. Then she tore up the paper and came toward me. She was thinking of you, Captain: her last letter was for you and she left it unfinished, fearing that it might never reach your hands. Besides, she wasn't equal to writing; her pulse was nervous: she preferred to talk…. She asked me to send you a long, very long letter, telling about her last moments, and I had to swear to her that I would carry out her request."
From that time on the maître had seen things badly. Emotion was perturbing his sensibilities, but there yet lived in his mind Freya's last words on coming out of the jail.
"I am not a German," she said repeatedly to the men in uniform. "I am not German!"
For her the least important thing was to die. She was only worried for fear they might believe her of that odious nationality.
The attorney found himself in an automobile with many men whom he scarcely knew. Other vehicles were before and behind theirs. In one of them was Freya with the nuns and the priest.
A faint streak was whitening the sky, marking the points of the roofs. Below, in the deep blackness of the streets, the renewed life of daybreak was slowly beginning. The first laborers going to their work with their hands in their pockets, and the market women returning from market pushing their carts, turned their heads, following with interest this procession of swift vehicles almost all of them with men in the box seat beside the conductor. To the working-folk, this was perhaps a morning wedding…. Perhaps these were gay people coming from a nocturnal fiesta…. Several times the cortege slackened its speed, blocked by a row of heavy carts with mountains of garden-stuff.
The maître, in spite of his emotions, recognized the road that the automobile was following. In the place de la Nation he caught glimpses of the sculptured group, le Triomphe de la Republique, piercing the dripping mistiness of dawn; then the grating of the enclosure; then the long cours de Vincennes and its historic fortress.
They went still further on until they reached the field of execution.
Upon getting down from the automobile, he saw an extensive plain covered with grass on which were drawn up two companies of soldiers. Other vehicles had arrived before them. Freya detached herself from the group of persons descending from the automobile, leaving behind the nuns and the officers who were escorting her.
The light of daybreak, blue and cold as the reflection of steel, threw into relief the two masses of armed men who formed a narrow passageway. At the end of this impromptu lane there was a post planted in the ground and beyond that, a dark van drawn by two horses, and various men clad in black.
The woman's approach was signalized by a voice of command, and immediately sounded the drums and trumpets at the head of the two formations. There was a rattle of guns; the soldiers were presenting arms. The martial instruments delivered the triumphal salute due to the presence of the head of a state, a general, a flag-raising…. It was an homage to Justice, majestic and severe,—a hymn to Patriotism, implacable in defense.
Recalling the white woman with deep bosom and hollow eyes that she had seen over the head of the President of the Council, the spy for a moment recognized that all this was in her honor; but afterwards, she wished to believe that the triumphal reception was for herself…. She was marching between guns, accompanied by bugle-call and drum-beat, like a queen.
To her defender, she appeared taller than ever. She seemed to have grown a palm higher because of her intense, emotional uplift. Her theatrical soul was moved just as when she used to present herself on the boards to receive applause. All these men had arisen in the middle of the night and were there on her account: the horns and the drums were sounding in order to greet her. Discipline was keeping their countenances grave and cold but she had the certain consciousness that they were finding her beautiful, and that back of many immovable eyes, desire was asserting itself.
If there remained a shred of fear of losing her life, it disappeared under the caress of this false glory…. To die contemplated by so many valiant men who were rendering her the greatest of honors! She felt the necessity of being adorable, of falling into an artistic pose as though she were on a stage.
She was passing between the two masses of men, head erect, stepping firmly with the high-spirited tread of a goddess-huntress, sometimes casting a glance on some of the hundreds of eyes fixed upon her. The illusion of her triumph made her advance as upright and serene as though passing the troops in review.
"Good heavens!… What poise!" exclaimed a young officer behind the lawyer, admiring Freya's serenity.
Upon approaching the post, some one read a brief document, a summary of the sentence,—three lines to apprise her that justice was about to be fulfilled.
The only thing about this rapid notification that annoyed her was the fear that the trumpets and drums would cease. But they continued sounding and their martial music was as comforting to her ears as a very intoxicating wine slipping through her lips.
A platoon of corporals and soldiers (twelve rifles) detached themselves from the double military mass. A sub-officer with a blond beard, small, delicate, was commanding it with an unsheathed sword. Freya contemplated him a moment, finding him interesting, while the young man avoided her glance.
With the gesture of a tragedy queen, she repelled the white handkerchief that they were offering her to bandage her eyes. She did not need it. The nuns took leave of her forever. As soon as she was alone, two gendarmes commenced to tie her with the back supported against the post.
"They say," her defender continued writing, "that one of her hands waved to me for the last time just before it was fastened down by the rope…. I saw nothing. I could not see!… It was too much for me!…"
The rest of the execution he knew only by hearsay. The trumpets and drums continued sounding. Freya, bound and intensely pale, smiled as though she were drunk. The early morning breeze waved the plumes of her hat.
When the twelve fusileers advanced placing themselves in a horizontal line eight yards distant, all of them aiming toward her heart, she appeared to wake up. She shrieked, her eyes abnormally dilated by the horror of the reality that so soon was to take place. Her cheeks were covered with tears. She tugged at the ligatures with the vigor of an epileptic.
"Pardon!… Pardon! I do not want to die!"
The sub-lieutenant raised his sword, and lowered it again rapidly…. A shot.
Freya collapsed, her body slipping the entire length of the post until it fell forward on the ground. The bullets had cut the cords that bound her.
As though it had acquired sudden life, her hat leaped from her head, flying off to fall about four yards further on. A corporal with a revolver in his right hand came forward from the shooting picket:—"the death-blow." He checked his step before the puddle of blood that was forming around the victim, pressing his lips together and averting his eyes. He then bent over her, raising with the end of the barrel the ringlets which had fallen over one of her ears. She was still breathing…. A shot in the temple. Her body contracted with a final shudder, then remained immovable with the rigidity of a corpse.
