"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.