Sónnica. Vicente Blasco Ibanez
heed to my surroundings."
She told him the story of her life. They called her Bacchis, and she was uncertain what was her native land. No doubt she was born in some other port, for she vaguely remembered in her childhood a long voyage in a ship. Her mother must have been a lupa also, and she herself the result of a meeting with a mariner. The name of Bacchis, which had been given her when she was little, had been borne by many famous courtesans of Greece. No doubt she had been sold to some old woman by the pilot who had brought her to Saguntum, and, while still a child, long before coming to maturity, was visited in the old woman's hut by aged merchants of the port or libertines of the city.
When her owner died she became a lupa, and passed into submission to mariners, fishermen, shepherds from the mountains, and to all the brutal horde which swarmed around the port. She was not yet twenty, but she was aged, disfigured, wasted by excesses and by blows. She had always seen the city from a distance. She had only entered it twice. The lupas were not tolerated there. They were allowed to remain near the fane of Aphrodite, as a guarantee of the security of Saguntum, that thus the rabble which came to the port from all lands might be held at a distance, but in the city the Iberians of cleanly habits became indignant at the mere sight of the wantons, and the corrupt Greeks were too refined in their tastes to feel pity for those sellers of the body who fell like beasts beside the roadway for a bunch of grapes or a handful of nuts.
There in the shadow of the temple of Aphrodite she had spent her life, ever awaiting new ships and new men, hairy and obscene, brutal as satyrs, made ferocious by the abstinence of the sea, to be at last assassinated in some mariners' fight, or found the victim of hunger, dead beside some abandoned boat.
"And you—who are you?" Bacchis asked at last. "What is your name?"
"My name is Actæon; my native land is Athens. I have traveled over the world; in some parts I have been a soldier, in others a navigator; I have fought, I have trafficked, and I have even written verses, and discussed with philosophers things which you do not understand. I have been rich many times, and now you give me food. That is all my story."
Bacchis looked at him with eyes full of admiration, divining through his concise words a past crammed with adventures, with terrible dangers and prodigious changes of fortune. She thought of the deeds of Achilles, and of the adventurous life of Ulysses, so often heard in the verses declaimed by Greek mariners when they were drunk.
The courtesan, reclining on the Greek's breast, fondled his hair. The Greek, grateful, smiled fraternally on Bacchis, with indifference, as if she were a child.
Two mariners came out from among the huts, and began to stagger along the wharf. A penetrating howl, which seemed to cleave the air, sounded close to Actæon's ears. His companion, impelled by habit, with the instinct of the vendor who sees a customer in the distance, had arisen to her feet.
"I will return, my master. I had almost forgotten the terrible Lais. I must give her her money before the sun rises. She will beat me as she has done before if I do not fulfill my promise. Wait for me here."
Repeating her wild howl, she went in search of the sailors, who had stopped, hailing the "she-wolf's" cries with loud laughter and obscene words.
When the Greek found himself alone, his hunger placated, he felt a certain disgust in thinking of his recent adventure. Actæon the Athenian, he for whom the richest hetæræ of the beautiful city used to dispute in the Cerameicus, protected and adored by a strumpet of the port! To avoid meeting her again he hurriedly left the temple steps, losing himself in the streets by the harbor.
Again he stopped before the hostelry in the doorway of which he had experienced the torment of hunger. The sailors were in the midst of an orgy. The tavern keeper could barely command respect behind the counter. The slaves, terrified by blows, had taken refuge in the kitchen. Some amphoræ lay broken on the floor letting the wine escape like streams of blood, and the drunken men wallowed in the gurgling liquid as it soaked into the earthen floor, calling for drinks of which they had vaguely heard on distant voyages, or for fantastic dishes conceived by the little tyrants of Asia. One Herculean Egyptian was running on all fours imitating the growl of the jackal, and biting the women who had entered the tavern. Some negroes were disporting with feminine movements, as if hypnotized by the whirling of the umbilical dance. In the corners, on the stone benches, men and women embraced in the crude light of the torches; the smell of bare and sweaty flesh mingled with the aroma of wine; in the atmosphere of viands and of wild-beast odor, seamen, forgetting shame, committed crimes peculiar to the aberration of the epoch.
In the midst of this disorder a few men stood motionless near the counter, arguing with apparent calmness. They were two Roman soldiers, an old Carthaginian mariner, and a Celtiberian. The torpid slowness of their words, which in their anger acquired flute-like tones, their inflamed and blood-shot eyes, and their hawk-like noses, seeming to grow sharper as they talked, revealed that terrible drunkenness, stubborn and quarrelsome, which culminates in murder.
The Roman was telling of his presence in the combat on the Ægates islands, fourteen years before.
"I know you," he said insolently to the Carthaginian. "You are a republic of merchants born for lying and bad faith. If someone who knows how to sell at top prices and cheat the buyer is wanted, I agree that you stand first; but talking of soldiers, of men, we are the best, we sons of Rome, who grasp the plow in one hand and the lance in the other."
He proudly raised his round head with its close-cropped hair and shaven cheeks, on which the chin-straps of his helmet had worn hard calloused lines.
Actæon looked through the window at the Celtiberian, the only one of the group who remained silent, but who had his glittering eyes fastened upon the bare neck showing above the Roman legionary's bronze corselet, as if attracted by the coarse veins outlined beneath the skin. Surely the Greek had seen those eyes before; they were like an old acquaintance whose name one cannot recall. There was something artificial about his person, which the Greek divined with his keen perception.
"I would swear by Mercury that that man is not what he pretends to be. He looks something more than a shepherd, and the bronze color of his face is not that of the Celtiberians, no matter how sunburned they may be. Perhaps that long hair which falls around his shoulders is false——"
He was unable to observe him longer because of the dispute between the legionary and the old Carthaginian, who gradually approached each other to hear better in the midst of the clamor which reigned in the tavern.
"I also was on that sad expedition to the Ægates," said the Carthaginian; "there is where I received this wound that crosses my face. It is true that you conquered us; but what does that show? Many times did I see your ships flee before ours, and more than once I counted Roman corpses by the hundred on the fields of Sicily. Ah, if Hanno had not arrived too late that day of the combat at the islands! If Hamilcar had only had reinforcements!"
"Hamilcar!" disdainfully exclaimed the Roman. "A great chief who had to sue for peace! A merchant turned warrior!"
And he laughed with the insolence of the strong, not fearing the anger of the old Carthaginian, who began to stammer an answer.
The Celtiberian, who had remained silent, laid his hand upon the old man.
"Silence, Carthaginian! The Roman is right. You are peddlers incapable of measuring up with them in war. You love money too much to dominate by the sword. But Carthage is not made of those of your breed; there are others born there who will know how to stand up before those peasants of Italy!"
The Roman, seeing the rustic intervene in the dispute, became still more arrogant and insolent.
"And who can that be?" he shouted scornfully. "The son of Hamilcar? That youngster who they say had a slave for a mother?"
"Those who founded your city, Roman, were sons of a prostitute, and the day is not far distant when the horse of Carthage shall trample under foot the wolf of Romulus!"
The legionary arose trembling with fury, feeling for his sword, but he suddenly gave a savage growl and fell, pressing his hands against his throat.
Actæon had seen the