mad with love reed-wick lampreserves of Chicago.cannot tear myselfNihilistto death conditionabom in exchangefor herYou know me, Ferdiknow my liberal ideas,but from there to tzariciderrible consequencesSiberia hungadore herAh! press thy loyal handTar Tar
Memorable dialogue between the jungfrau and Tartarin. Anihilist salon. The duel with hunting-knives. Frightfulnightmare, “Is it I you are seeking, messieurs?” Strangereception given by the hotel-keeper Meyer to the Tarasconesedelegation.
Like all the other choice hotels at Interlaken, the Hôtel Jungfrau, kept by Meyer, is situated on the Höheweg, a wide promenade between double rows of chestnut-trees that vaguely reminded Tar-tarin of the beloved Tour de Ville of his native town, minus the sun, the grasshoppers, and the dust; for during his week’s sojourn at Interlaken the rain had never ceased to fall.
He occupied a very fine chamber with a balcony on the first floor, and trimmed his beard in the morning before a little hand-glass hanging to the window, an old habit of his when travelling. The first object that daily struck his eyes beyond the fields of grass and corn, the nursery gardens, and an amphitheatre of solemn verdure in rising stages, was the Jungfrau, lifting from the clouds her summit, like a horn, white and pure with unbroken snow, to which was daily clinging a furtive ray of the still invisible rising sun. Then between the white and rosy Alp and the Alpinist a little dialogue took place regularly, which was not without its grandeur.
“Tartarin, are you coming?” asked the Jung-frau sternly.
“Here, here...” replied the hero, his thumb under his nose and finishing his beard as fast as possible. Then he would hastily take down his ascensionist outfit and, swearing at himself, put it on.
“Coquin de sort!there’s no name for it...”
But a soft voice rose, demure and clear among the myrtles in the border beneath his window.
“Good-morning,” said Sonia, as he appeared upon the balcony, “the landau is ready... Come, make haste, lazy man...”
“I ‘m coming, I ‘m coming...”
In a trice he had changed his thick flannel shirt for linen of the finest quality, his mountain knickerbockers for a suit of serpent-green that turned the heads of all the women in Tarascon at the Sunday concerts.
The horses of the landau were pawing before the door; Sonia was already installed beside Boris, paler, more emaciated day by day in spite of the beneficent climate of Interlaken. But, regularly, at the moment of starting, Tartarin was fated to see two forms arise from a bench on the promenade and approach him with the heavy rolling step of mountain bears; these were Rodolphe Kaufmann and Christian Inebnit, two famous Grindelwald guides, engaged by Tartarin for the ascension of the Jungfrau, who came every morning to ascertain if their monsieur were ready to start.
The apparition of these two men, in their iron-clamped shoes and fustian jackets worn threadbare on the back and shoulder by knapsacks and ropes, their naïve and serious faces, and the four words of French which they managed to splutter as they twisted their broad-brimmed hats, were a positive torture to Tartarin. In vain he said to them: “Don’t trouble yourselves to come; I ‘ll send for you...”
Every day he found them in the same place and got rid of them by a large coin proportioned to the enormity of his remorse. Enchanted with this method of “doing the Jungfrau,” the mountaineers pocketed theirtrinkgeldgravely, and took, with resigned step, the path to their native village, leaving Tartarin confused and despairing at his own weakness. Then the broad open air, the flowering plains reflected in the limpid pupils of Sonia’s eyes, the touch of her little foot against his boot in the carriage... The devil take that Jungfrau! The hero thought only of his love, or rather of the mission he had given himself to bring back into the right path that poor little Sonia, so unconsciously criminal, cast by sisterly devotion outside of the law, and outside of human nature.
This was the motive that kept him at Interlaken, in the same hotel as the Wassiliefs. At his age, with his air of a good papa, he certainly could not dream of making that poor child love him, but he saw her so sweet, so brave, so generous to all the unfortunates of her party, so devoted to that brother whom the mines of Siberia had sent back to her, his body eaten with ulcers, poisoned with verdigris, and he himself condemned to death by phthisis more surely than by any court. There was enough in all that to touch a man!
Tartarin proposed to take them to Tarascon and settle them in a villa full of sun at the gates of the town, that good little town where it never rains and where life is spent in fêtes and song. And with that he grew excited, rattled a tambourine air on the crown of his hat, and trolled out the gay native chorus of the farandole dance:
LagadigadeoùLa Tarasque, la Tarasque,LagadigadeoùLa Tarasque de Casteoù.
But while a satirical smile pinched still closer the lips of the sick man, Sonia shook her head. Neither fêtes nor sun for her so long as the Russians groaned beneath the yoke of the tyrant. As soon as her brother was well—her despairing eyes said another thing—nothing could prevent her from returning up there to suffer and die in the sacred cause.
“But,coquin de bon sort!” cried Tartarin, “if you blow up one tyrant there ‘ll come another... You will have it all to do over again... And the years will go by,vé!the days for happiness and love...” His way of saying love—amour—à la Tarasconese, with three r’s in it and his eyes starting out of his head, amused the young girl; then, serious once more, she declared she would never love any man but the one who delivered her country. Yes, that man, were he as ugly as Bolibine, more rustic and common than Manilof, she was ready to give herself wholly to him, to live at his side, a free gift, as long as her youth lasted and the man wished for her.
“Free gift!” the term used by Nihilists to express those illegal unions they contract among themselves by reciprocal consent. And of such primitive marriage Sonia spoke tranquilly with her virgin air before the Tarasconese, who, worthy bourgeois, peaceful elector, was now ready to spend his days beside that adorable girl in the said state of “free gift” if she had not added those murderous and abominable conditions.
While they were conversing of these extremely delicate matters, the fields, the lakes, the forests, the mountains lay spread before them, and always at each new turn, through the cool mist of that perpetual shower which accompanied our hero on all his excursions, the Jungfrau raised her white crest, as if to poison by remorse those delicious hours. They returned to breakfast at a vasttable d’hôtewhere the Rices and Prunes continued their silent hostilities, to which Tartarin was wholly indifferent, seated by Sonia, watching that Boris had no open window at his back, assiduous, paternal, exhibiting all his seductions as man of the world and his domestic qualities as an excellent cabbage-rabbit.
After this, he took tea with the Russians in their little salon opening on a tiny garden at the end of the terrace. Another exquisite hour for Tartarin of intimate chat in a low voice while Boris slept on a sofa. The hot water bubbled in the samovar; a perfume of moist flowers slipped through the half-opened door with the blue reflection of the solanums that were clustering about it. A little more sun, more warmth, and here was his dream realized, his pretty Russian installed beside him, taking care of the garden of the baobab.
Suddenly Sonia gave a jump.
“Two o’clock!.. And the letters?”
“I’m going for them,” said the good Tartarin, and, merely from the tones of his voice and the resolute, theatrical gesture with which he buttoned his coat and seized his cane, any one would have guessed the gravity of the action, apparently so simple, of going to the post-office to fetch the Wassilief letters.
Closely watched by the local authorities and the Russian police, all Nihilists, but especially their leaders, are compelled to take certain precautions, such as having their letters and papers addressedposte restanteto simple initials.
Since their installation at Interlaken, Boris being scarcely able to drag himself about, Tartarin, to spare Sonia the annoyance of waiting in line before the post-office wicket exposed to inquisitive eyes, had taken upon himself the risks and perils of this daily nuisance. The post-office is not more than ten minutes’ walk from the hotel, in a wide and noisy street at the end of a promenade lined with cafés, breweries, shops for the tourists displaying alpenstocks, gaiters, straps, opera-glasses, smoked glasses, flasks, travelling-bags, all of which articles seemed placed there expressly to shame the renegade Alpinist. Tourists were defiling in caravans, with horses, guides, mules, veils green and blue, and a tintinnabulation of canteens as the animals ambled, the ice-picks marking each step on the cobble-stones. But this festive scene, hourly renewed, left Tartarin indifferent. He never even felt the fresh north wind with a touch of snow coming in gusts from the mountains, so intent was he on baffling the spies whom he supposed to be upon his traces.
The foremost soldier of a vanguard, the sharpshooter skirting the walls of an enemy’s town, never advanced with more mistrust than the Taras-conese hero while crossing the short distance between the hotel and the post-office. At the slightest heel-tap sounding behind his own, he stopped, looked attentively at the photographs in the windows, or fingered an English or German book lying on a stall, to oblige the police spy to pass him. Or else he turned suddenly round, to stare with ferocious eyes at a stout servant-girl going to market, or some harmless tourist, atable d’hôtePrune, who, taking him for a madman, turned off, alarmed, from the sidewalk to avoid him.
When he reached the office, where the wickets open, rather oddly, into the street itself, Tartarin passed and repassed, to observe the surrounding physiognomies before he himself approached: then, suddenly darting forward, he inserted his whole head and shoulders into the opening, muttered a few indistinct syllables (which they always made him repeat, to his great despair), and, possessor at last of the mysterious trust, he returned to the hotel by a great détour on the kitchen side, his hand in his pocket clutching the package of letters and papers, prepared to tear up and swallow everything at the first alarm.
Manilof and Bolibine were usually awaiting his return with the Wassiliefs. They did not lodge in the hotel, out of prudence and economy. Bolibine had found work in a printing-office, and Manilof, a very clever cabinetmaker, was employed by a builder. Tartarin did not like them: one annoyed him by his grimaces and his jeering airs; the other kept looking at him savagely. Besides, they took too much space in Sonia’s heart.
“He is a hero!” she said of Bolibine; and she told how for three years he had printed all alone, in the very heart of St. Petersburg, a revolutionary paper. Three years without ever leaving his upper room, or showing himself at a window, sleeping at night in a great cupboard built in the wall, where the woman who lodged him locked him up till morning with his clandestine press.
And then, that life of Manilof, spent for six months in the subterranean passages beneath the Winter Palace, watching his opportunity, sleeping at night on his provision of dynamite, which resulted in giving him frightful headaches, and nervous troubles; all this, aggravated by perpetual anxiety, sudden irruptions of the police, vaguely informed that something was plotting, and coming, suddenly and unexpectedly, to surprise the workmen employed at the Palace. On one of the rare occasions when Manilof came out of the mine, he met on the Place de l’Amirauté a delegate of the Revolutionary Committee, who asked him in a low voice, as he walked along:
“Is it finished?”
“No, not yet...” said the other, scarcely moving his lips. At last, on an evening in February, to the same question in the same words he answered, with the greatest calmness:
“It is finished...”
And almost immediately a horrible uproar confirmed his words, all the lights of the palace went out suddenly, the place was plunged into complete obscurity, rent by cries of agony and terror, the blowing of bugles, the galloping of soldiers, and firemen tearing along with their trucks.
Here Sonia interrupted her tale:
“Is it not horrible, so many human lives sacrificed, such efforts, such courage, such wasted intelligence?.. No, no, it is a bad means, these butcheries in the mass... He who should be killed always escapes... The true way, the most humane, would be to seek the czar himself as you seek the lion, fully determined, fully armed, post yourself at a window or the door of a carriage... and, when he passes.....”
“Bé!yes,certainemain...” responded Tartarin embarrassed, and pretending not to seize her meaning; then, suddenly, he would launch into a philosophical, humanitarian discussion with one of the numerous assistants. For Bolibine and Manilof were not the only visitors to the Wassiliefs. Every day new faces appeared of young people, men or women, with the cut of poor students; elated teachers, blond and rosy, with the self-willed forehead and the childlike ferocity of Sonia; outlawed exiles, some of them already condemned to death, which lessened in no way their youthful expansiveness.
They laughed, they talked openly, and as most of them spoke French, Tartarin was soon at his ease. They called him “uncle,” conscious of something childlike and artless about him that they liked. Perhaps he was over-ready with his hunting tales; turning up his sleeve to his biceps in order to show the scar of a blow from a panther’s claws, or making his hearers feel beneath his beard the holes left there by the fangs of a lion; perhaps also he became too rapidly familiar with these persons, catching them round the waist, leaning on their shoulders, calling them by their Christian names after five minutes’ intercourse:
“Listen, Dmitri...” “You know me, Fédor Ivanovich...” They knew him only since yesterday, in any case; but they liked him all the same for his jovial frankness, his amiable, trustful air, and his readiness to please. They read their letters before him, planned their plots, and told their passwords to foil the police: a whole atmosphere of conspiracy which amused the imagination of the Tarasconese hero immensely: so that, however opposed by nature to acts of violence, he could not help, at times, discussing their homicidal plans, approving, criticising, and giving advice dictated by the experience of a great leader who has trod the path of war, trained to the handling of all weapons, and to hand-to-hand conflicts with wild beasts.
One day, when they told in his presence of the murder of a policeman, stabbed by a Nihilist at the theatre, Tartarin showed them how badly the blow had been struck, and gave them a lesson in knifing.
“Like this,vé!from the top down. Then there’s no risk of wounding yourself...”
And, excited by his own imitation:
“Let’s suppose,té!that I hold your despot between four eyes in a boar-hunt He is over there, where you are, Fédor, and I’m here, near this round table, each of us with our hunting-knife... Come on, monseigneur, we ‘ll have it out now...”
Planting himself in the middle of the salon, gathering his sturdy legs under him for a spring, and snorting like a woodchopper, he mimicked a real fight, ending by his cry of triumph as he plunged the weapon to the hilt, from the top down,coquin de sort!into the bowels of his adversary.
“That’s how it ought to be done, my little fellows!”
But what subsequent remorse! what anguish when, escaping from the magnetism of Sonia’s blue eyes, he found himself alone, in his nightcap, alone with his reflections and his nightly glass ofeau sucrée!
Différemment, what was he meddling with? The czar was not his czar, decidedly, and all these matters didn’t concern him in the least... And don’t you see that some of these days he would be captured, extradited and delivered over to Muscovite justice...Boufre!they don’t joke, those Cossacks... And in the obscurity of his hotel chamber, with that horrible imaginative faculty which the horizontal position increases, there developed before him—like one of those unfolding pictures given to him in childhood—the various and terrible punishments to which he should be subjected: Tartarin in the verdigris mines, like Boris, working in water to his belly, his body ulcerated, poisoned. He escapes, he hides amid forests laden with snow, pursued by Tartars and bloodhounds trained to hunt men. Exhausted with cold and hunger, he is retaken and finally hung between two thieves, embraced by a pope with greasy hair smelling of brandy and seal-oil; while away down there, at Tarascon in the sunshine, the band playing of a fine Sunday, the crowd, the ungrateful crowd, are installing a radiant Costecalde in the chair of the P. C. A.
It was during the agony of one of these dreadful dreams that he uttered his cry of distress, “Help, help, Bézuquet!” and sent to the apothecary that confidential letter, all moist with the sweat of his nightmare. But Sonia’s pretty “Good morning” beneath his window sufficed to cast him back into the weaknesses of indecision.
One evening, returning from the Kursaal to the hotel with the Wassiliefs and Bolibine, after two hours of intoxicating music, the unfortunate man forgot all prudence, and the “Sonia, I love you,” which he had so long restrained, was uttered as he pressed the arm that rested on his own. She was not agitated. Perfectly pale, she gazed at him under the gas of the portico on which they had paused: “Then deserve me...” she said, with a pretty enigmatical smile, a smile that gleamed upon her delicate white teeth. Tartarin was about to reply, to bind himself by an oath to some criminal madness when the porter of the hotel came up to him:
“There are persons waiting for you, upstairs... some gentlemen... They want you.”
“Want me!..Outre!.. What for?” And No. 1 of his folding series appeared before him: Tartarin captured, extradited... Of course he was frightened, but his attitude was heroic. Quickly detaching himself from Sonia: “Fly, save yourself!” he said to her in a smothered voice. Then he mounted the stairs as if to the scaffold, his head high, his eyes proud, but so disturbed in mind that he was forced to cling to the baluster.
As he entered the corridor, he saw persons grouped at the farther end of it before his door, looking through the keyhole, rapping, and calling out: “Hey! Tartarin...”
He made two steps forward, and said, with parched lips: “Is it I whom you are seeking, messieurs?”
“Te! pardi, yes, my president!.”
And a little old man, alert and wiry, dressed in gray, and apparently bringing on his coat, his hat, his gaiters and his long and pendent moustache all the dust of his native town, fell upon the neck of the hero and rubbed against his smooth fat cheeks the withered leathery skin of the retired captain of equipment.
“Bravida!.. not possible!.. Excourbaniès too!.. and who is that over there?..”
A bleating answered: “Dear ma-a-aster!..” and the pupil advanced, banging against the wall a sort of long fishing-rod with a packet at one end wrapped in gray paper, and oilcloth tied round it with string.
“Hey!vè!why it’s Pascalon... Embrace me, little one... What’s that you are carrying?.. Put it down...”
“The paper... take off the paper!..” whispered Bravida. The youth undid the roll with a rapid hand and the Tarasconese banner was displayed to the eyes of the amazed Tartarin.
The delegates took off their hats.
“President”—the voice of Bravida trembled solemnly—“you asked for the banner and we have brought it,té!”
The president opened a pair of eyes as round as apples: “I! I asked for it?”
“What! you did not ask for it? Bézuquet said so.
“Yes, yes,certainemain...” said Tartarin, suddenly enlightened by the mention of Bézuquet. He understood all and guessed the rest, and, tenderly moved by the ingenious lie of the apothecary to recall him to a sense of duty and honour, he choked, and stammered in his short beard: “Ah! my children, how kind you are! What good you have done me!”
“Vive le présidain!” yelped Pascalon, brandishing the oriflamme. Excourbaniès’ gong responded, rolling its war-cry (” Ha! ha! ha!fen dé brut..”) to the very cellars of the hotel. Doors opened, inquisitive heads protruded on every floor and then disappeared, alarmed, before that standard and the dark and hairy men who were roaring singular words and tossing their arms in the air. Never had the peaceable Hôtel Jungfrau been subjected to such a racket.
“Come into my room,” said Tartarin, rather disconcerted. He was feeling about in the darkness to find matches when an authoritative rap on the door made it open of itself to admit the consequential, yellow, and puffy face of the innkeeper Meyer. He was about to enter, but stopped short before the darkness of the room, and said with closed teeth:
“Try to keep quiet... or I ‘ll have you taken up by the police...”
A grunt as of wild bulls issued from the shadow at that brutal term “taken up.” The hotel-keeper recoiled one step, but added: “It is known who you are; they have their eye upon you; for my part, I don’t want any more such persons in my house!..”
“Monsieur Meyer,” said Tartarin, gently, politely, but very firmly... “Send me my bill... These gentlemen and myself start to-morrow morning for the Jungfrau.”
O native soil! O little country within a great one! by only hearing the Tarasconese accent, quivering still with the air of that beloved land beneath the azure folds of its banner, behold Tartarin, delivered from love and its snares and restored to his friends, his mission, his glory.
And now,zou!
At the “Faithful Chamois.”
The next day it was charming, that trip on foot from Interlaken to Grindelwald, where they were, in passing, to take guides for the Little Scheideck; charming, that triumphal march of the P. C. A., restored to his trappings and mountain habiliments, leaning on one side on the lean little shoulder of Commander Bravida, and on the other, the robust arm of Excourbaniès, proud, both of them, to be nearest to him, to support their dear president, to carry his ice-axe, his knapsack, his alpenstock, while sometimes before, sometimes behind or on their flanks the fanatical Pascalon gambolled like a puppy, his banner duly rolled up into a package to avoid the tumultuous scenes of the night before.
The gayety of his companions, the sense of duty accomplished, the Jungfrau all white upon the sky, over there, like a vapour—nothing short of all this could have made the hero forget what he left behind him, for ever and ever it may be, and without farewell. However, at the last houses of Interlaken his eyelids swelled and, still walking on, he poured out his feelings in turn into the bosom of Excourbanîès: “Listen, Spiridion,” or that of Bravida: “You know me, Placide...” For, by an irony on nature, that indomitable warrior was called Placide, and that rough buffalo, with all his instincts material, Spiridion.
Unhappily, the Tarasconese race, more gallant than sentimental, never takes its love-affairs very seriously. “Whoso loses a woman and ten sous, is to be pitied about the money...” replied the sententious Placide to Tartarin’s tale, and Spiridion thought exactly like him. As for the innocent Pascalon, he was horribly afraid of women, and reddened to the ears when the name of the Little Scheideck was uttered before him, thinking some lady of flimsy morals was referred to. The poor lover was therefore reduced to keep his confidences to himself, and console himself alone—which, after all, is the surest way.
But what grief could have resisted the attractions of the way through that narrow, deep and sombre valley, where they walked on the banks of a winding river all white with foam, rumbling with an echo like thunder among the pine-woods which skirted both its shores.
The Tarasconese delegation, their heads in the air, advanced with a sort of religious awe and admiration, like the comrades of Sinbad the Sailor when they stood before the mangoes, the cotton-trees, and all the giant flora of the Indian coasts. Knowing nothing but their own little bald and stony mountains they had never imagined there could be so many trees together or such tall ones.
“That is nothing, as yet... wait till you see the Jungfrau,” said the P. C. A., who enjoyed their amazement and felt himself magnified in their eyes.
At the same time, as if to brighten the scene and humanize its solemn note, cavalcades went by them, great landaus going at full speed, with veils floating from the doorways where curious heads leaned out to look at the delegation pressing round its president. From point to point along the roadside were booths spread with knick-knacks of carved wood, while young girls, stiff in their laced bodices, their striped skirts and broad-brimmed straw hats, were offering bunches of strawberries and edelweiss. Occasionally, an Alpine horn sent among the mountains its melancholy ritornello, swelling, echoing from gorge to gorge, and slowly diminishing, like a cloud that dissolves into vapour.
“‘T is fine, ‘t is like an organ,” murmured Pascalon, his eyes moist, in ecstasy, like the stained-glass saint of a church window. Excourbaniès roared, undiscouraged, and the echoes repeated, till sight and sound were lost, his Tarasconese intonations: “Ha! ha! ha!fen dé brut!”
But people grow weary after marching for two hours through the same sort of decorative scene, however well it may be organized, green on blue, glaciers in the distance, and all things sonorous as a musical clock. The dash of the torrents, the singers in triplets, the sellers of carved objects, the little flower-girls, soon became intolerable to our friends,—above all, the dampness, the steam rising in this species of tunnel, the soaked soil full of water-plants, where never had the sun penetrated.
“It is enough to give one a pleurisy,” said Bravida, turning up the collar of his coat. Then weariness set in, hunger, ill-humour. They could find no inn; and presently Excourbaniès and Bravida, having stuffed themselves with strawberries, began to suffer cruelly. Pascalon himself, that angel, bearing not only the banner, but the ice-axe, the knapsack, the alpenstock, of which the others had rid themselves basely upon him, even Pascalon had lost his gayety and ceased his lively gambolling.
At a turn of the road, after they had just crossed the Lutschine by one of those covered bridges that are found in regions of deep snow, a loud blast on a horn greeted them.
“Ah!vaï, enough!.. enough!” howled the exasperated delegation.
The man, a giant, ensconced by the roadside, let go an enormous trumpet of pine wood reaching to the ground and ending there in a percussion-box, which gave to this prehistoric instrument the sonorousness of a piece of artillery.
“Ask him if he knows of an inn,” said the president to Excourbaniès, who, with enormous cheek and a small pocket dictionary undertook, now that they were in German Switzerland, to serve the delegation as interpreter. But before he could pull out his dictionary the man replied in very good French:
“An inn, messieurs? Why certainly... The ‘Faithful Chamois’ is close by; allow me to show you the place.”
On the way, he told them he had lived in Paris for several years, as commissionnaire at the corner of the rue Vivienne.
“Another employé of the Company,parbleu!” thought Tartarin, leaving his friends to be surprised. However, Bompard’s comrade was very useful, for, in spite of its French sign,Le Chamois Fidèlethe people of the “Faithful Chamois” could speak nothing but a horrible German patois.
Presently, the Tarasconese delegation, seated around an enormous potato omelet, recovered both the health and the good-humour as essential to Southerners as the sun of their skies. They drank deep, they ate solidly. After many toasts to the president and his coming ascension, Tartarin, who had puzzled over the tavern-sign ever since his arrival, inquired of the horn-player, who was breaking a crust in a corner of the room:
“So you have chamois here, it seems?.. I thought there were none left in Switzerland.”
The man winked:
“There are not many, but enough to let you see them now and then.”
“Shoot them, is what he wants,vé” said Pas-calon, full of enthusiasm; “never did the president miss a shot!”
Tartarin regretted that he had not brought his carbine.
“Wait a minute, and I ‘ll speak to the landlord.”
It so happened that the landlord was an old chamois hunter; he offered his gun, his powder, his buck-shot, and even himself as guide to a haunt he knew.
“Forward,zou!” cried Tartarin, granting to his happy Alpinists the opportunity to show off the prowess of their chief. It was only a slight delay, after all; the Jungfrau lost nothing by waiting.
Leaving the inn at the back, they had only to walk through an orchard, no bigger than the garden of a station-master, before they found themselves on a mountain, gashed with great crevasses, among the fir-trees and underbrush.
The innkeeper took the advance, and the Taras-conese presently saw him far up the height, waving his arms and throwing stones, no doubt to rouse the chamois. They rejoined him with much pain and difficulty over that rocky slope, hard especially to persons who had just been eating and were as little used to climbing as these good Alpinists of Tarascon. The air was heavy, moreover, with a tempest breath that was slowly rolling the clouds along the summits above their heads.
“Boufre!” groaned Bravida.
Excourbaniès growled: “Outre!”
“What shall I be made to say!” added the gentle, bleating Pascalon.
But the guide having, by a violent gesture, ordered them to hold their tongues, and not to stir, Tartarin remarked, “Never speak under arms,” with a sternness that rebuked every one, although the president alone had a weapon. They stood stock still, holding their breaths. Suddenly, Pas-calon cried out:
“Véthe chamois,vé..”
About three hundred feet above them, the upright horns, the light buff coat and the four feet gathered together of the pretty creature stood defined like a carved image at the edge of the rock, looking at them fearlessly. Tartarin brought his piece to his shoulder methodically, as his habit was, and was just about to fire when the chamois disappeared.
“It is your fault,” said the Commander to Pascalon... “you whistled... and that frightened him.”
“I whistled!.. I?”
“Then it was Spiridion...”
“Ah,vaï!never in my life.”
Nevertheless, they had all heard a whistle, strident, prolonged. The president settled the question by relating how the chamois, at the approach of enemies, gives a sharp danger signal through the nostrils. That devil of a Tartarin knew everything about this kind of hunt, as about all others!
At the call of their guide they started again; but the acclivity became steeper and steeper, the rocks more ragged, with bogs between them to right and left. Tartarin kept the lead, turning constantly to help the delegates, holding out his hand or his carbine: “Your hand, your hand, if you don’t mind,” cried honest Bravida, who was very much afraid of loaded weapons.
Another sign of the guide, another stop of the delegation, their noses in the air.
“I felt a drop!” murmured the Commander, very uneasy. At the same instant the thunder growled, but louder than the thunder roared the voice of Excourbaniès: “Fire, Tartarin!” and the chamois bounded past them, crossing the ravine like a golden flash, too quickly for Tartarin to take aim, but not so fast that they did not hear that whistle of his nostrils.
“I ‘ll have him yet,coquin de sort!” cried the president, but the delegates protested. Excourbaniès, becoming suddenly very sour, demanded if he had sworn to exterminate them.
“Dear ma-a-aster,” bleated Pascalon, timidly, “I have heard say that chamois if you corner them in abysses turn at bay against the hunter and are very dangerous.”
“Then don’t let us corner him!” said Bravida hastily.
Tartarin called them milksops. But while they were arguing, suddenly, abruptly, they all disappeared from one another’s gaze in a warm thick vapour that smelt of sulphur, through which they sought each other, calling:
“Hey! Tartarin.”
“Are you there, Placide?”
“Ma-a-as-ter!”
“Keep cool! Keep cool!”
A regular panic. Then a gust of wind broke through the mist and whirled it away like a torn veil clinging to the briers, through which a zigzag flash of lightning fell at their feet with a frightful clap of thunder. “My cap!” cried Spiridion, as the tempest bared his head, its hairs erect and crackling with electric sparks. They were in the very heart of the storm, the forge itself of Vulcan. Bravida was the first to fly, at full speed, the rest of the delegation flew behind him, when a cry from the president, who thought of everything, stopped them:
“Thunder!.. beware of the thunder!..”
At any rate, outside of the very real danger of which he warned them, there was no possibility of running on those steep and gullied slopes, now transformed into torrents, into cascades, by the pouring rain. The return was awful, by slow steps under that crazy cliff, amid the sharp, short flashes of lightning followed by explosions, slipping, falling, and forced at times to halt. Pascalon crossed himself and invoked aloud, as at Tarascon: “Sainte Marthe and Sainte Hélène, Sainte Marie-Madeleine,” while Excourbaniès swore: “Coquin de sort!” and Bravida, the rearguard, looked back in trepidation:
“What the devil is that behind us?.. It is galloping... it is whistling... there, it has stopped...”
The idea of a furious chamois flinging itself upon its hunters was in the mind of the old warrior. In a low voice, in order not to alarm the others, he communicated his fears to Tartarin, who bravely took his place as the rearguard and marched along, soaked to the skin, his head high, with that mute determination which is given by the imminence of danger. But when he reached the inn and saw his dear Alpinists under shelter, drying their wet things, which smoked around a huge porcelain stove in a first floor chamber, to which rose an odour of grog already ordered, the president shivered and said, looking very pale: “I believe I have taken cold.”
“Taken cold!” No question now of starting again; the delegation asked only for rest Quick, a bed was warmed, they hurried the hot wine grog, and after his second glass the president felt throughout his comfort-loving body a warmth, a tingling that augured well. Two pillows at his back, a “plumeau” on his feet, his muffler round his head, he experienced a delightful sense of well-being in listening to the roaring of the storm, inhaling that good pine odour of the rustic little room with its wooden walls and leaden panes, and in looking at his dear Alpinists, gathered, glass in hand, around his bed in the anomalous character given to their Gallic, Roman or Saracenic types by the counterpanes, curtains, and carpets in which they were bundled while their own clothes steamed before the stove. Forgetful of himself, he questioned each of them in a sympathetic voice:
“Are you well, Placide?.. Spiridion, you seemed to be suffering just now?..”
No, Spiridion suffered no longer, all that had passed away on seeing the president so ill. Bravida, who adapted moral truths to the proverbs of his nation, added cynically: “Neighbour’s ill comforts, and even cures.” Then they talked of their hunt, exciting one another with the recollection of certain dangerous episodes, such as the moment when the animal turned upon them furiously; and without complicity of lying, in fact, most ingenuously, they fabricated the fable they afterwards related on their return to Tarascon.
Suddenly, Pascalon, who had been sent in search of another supply of grog, reappeared in terror, one arm out of the blue-flowered curtain that he gathered about him with the chaste gesture of a Polyeucte. He was more than a second before he could articulate, in a whisper, breathlessly: “The chamois!..”
“Well, what of the chamois?..”
“He’s down there, in the kitchen... warming himself...”
“Ah!vaï...”
“You are joking...”
“Suppose you go and see, Placide.”
Bravida hesitated. Excourbaniès descended on the tips of his toes, but returned almost immediately, his face convulsed... More and more astounding!.. the chamois was drinking grog.
They certainly owed it to him, poor beast, after the wild run he had been made to take on the mountain, dispatched and recalled by his master, who, as a usual thing, put him through his evolutions in the house, to show to tourists how easily a chamois could be trained.
“It is overwhelming!” said Bravida, making no further effort at comprehension; as for Tartarin, he dragged the muffler over his eyes like a nightcap to hide from the delegates the soft hilarity that overcame him at encountering wherever he went the dodges and the performers of Bompard’s Switzerland.
The ascension of the Jungfrau. Vé! the oxen. The Kennedycrampons will not work. Nor the reedlamp either. Apparitionof masked men at the chalet of the Alpine Club. Thepresident in a crevasse. On the summit. Tartarin becomes agod.
Great influx, that morning, to the Hôtel Bellevue on the Little Scheideck. In spite of the rain and the squalls, tables had been laid outside in the shelter of the veranda, amid a great display of alpenstocks, flasks, telescopes, cuckoo clocks in carved wood, so that tourists could, while breakfasting, contemplate at a depth of six thousand feet before them the wonderful valley of Grindel-wald on the left, that of Lauterbrunnen on the right, and opposite, within gunshot as it seemed, the immaculate, grandiose slopes of the Jungfrau, itsnévés, glaciers, all that reverberating whiteness which illumines the air about it, making glasses more transparent, and linen whiter.
But now, for a time, general attention was attracted to a noisy, bearded caravan, which had just arrived on horse, mule, and donkey-back, also in achaise à porteurs, who had prepared themselves to climb the mountain by a copious breakfast, and were now in a state of hilarity, the racket of which contrasted with the bored and solemn airs of the very distinguished Rices and Prunes collected on the Scheideck, such as: Lord Chipendale, the Belgian senator and his family, the Austro-Hungarian diplomat, and several others. It would certainly have been supposed that the whole party of these bearded men sitting together at table were about to attempt the ascension, for one and all were busy with preparations for departure, rising, rushing about to give directions to the guides, inspecting the provisions, and calling to each other from end to end of the terrace in stentorian tones.
“Hey! Placide,vé!the cooking-pan, see if it is in the knapsack!.. Don’t forget the reed-lamp,au mouain.”
Not until the actual departure took place was it seen that, of all the caravan, only one was to make the ascension: but which one?
“Children, are we ready?” said the good Tar-tarin in a joyous, triumphant voice, in which not a shade of anxiety trembled at the possible dangers of the trip—his last doubt as to the Company’s manipulation of Switzerland being dissipated that very morning before the two glaciers of Grindel-wald each protected by a wicket and a turnstile, with this inscription “Entrance to the glacier: one franc fifty.”
He could, therefore, enjoy without anxiety this departure in apotheosis, the joy of feeling himself looked at, envied, admired by those bold little misses in boys’ caps who laughed at him so prettily on the Rigi-Kulm, and were now enthusiastically comparing his short person with the enormous mountain he was about to climb. One drew his portrait in her album, another sought the honour of touching his alpenstock. “Tchemppegne!.. Tchemppegne!..” called out of a sudden a tall, funereal Englishman with a brick-coloured skin, coming up to him, bottle and glass in hand. Then, after obliging the hero to drink with him:
“Lord Chipendale, sir... And you?”
“Tartarin of Tarascon.”
“Oh! yes... Tartarine... Capital name for a horse,” said the lord, who must have been one of those great turfmen across the Channel.
The Austro-Hungarian diplomat also came to press the Alpinist’s hand between his mittens, remembering vaguely to have seen him somewhere. “Enchanted!.. enchanted!..” he enunciated several times, and then, not knowing how to get out of it, he added: “My compliments to madame...” his social formula for cutting short presentations.
But the guides were impatient; they must reach before nightfall the hut of the Alpine Club, where they were to sleep for the first stage, and there was not a minute to lose. Tartarin felt it, saluted all with a circular gesture, smiled at the malicious misses, and then, in a voice of thunder, commanded:
“Pascalon, the banner!”
It waved to the breeze; the Southerners took off their hats, for they love theatricals at Tarascon; and at the cry, a score of times repeated: “Long live the president!.. Long live Tartarin!.. Ah! ah!..fen dé brut!..” the column moved off, the two guides in front carrying the knapsack, the provisions, and a supply of wood; then came Pascalon bearing the oriflamme, and lastly the P. C. A. with the delegates who proposed to accompany him as far as the glacier of the Guggi.
Thus deployed in procession, bearing its flapping flag along the sodden way beneath those barren or snowy crests, the cortège vaguely recalled the funeral marches of an All Souls’ day in the country.
Suddenly the Commander cried out, alarmed: “Vé!those oxen!”
Some cattle were now seen browsing the short grass in the hollows of the ground. The former captain of equipment had a nervous and quite insurmountable terror of those animals, and as he could not be left alone the delegation was forced to stop. Pascalon transmitted the standard to the guides. Then, with a last embrace, hasty injunctions, and one eye on the cows:
“Adieu, adieu,qué!”
“No imprudence,au mouain...” they parted. As for proposing to the president to go up with him, no one even thought of it; ‘twas so high,boufre!And the nearer they came to it the higher it grew, the abysses were more abysmal, the peaks bristled up in a white chaos, which looked to be insurmountable. It was better to look at the ascension from the Scheideck.
In all his life, naturally, the president of the Club of the Alpines had never set foot on a glacier. There is nothing of that sort on the mountainettes of Tarascon, little hills as balmy and dry as a packet of lavender; and yet the approaches to the Guggi gave him the impression of having already seen them, and wakened recollections of hunts in Provence at the end of the Camargue, near to the sea. The same turf always getting shorter and parched, as if seared by fire. Here and there were puddles of water, infiltrations of the ground betrayed by puny reeds, then came the moraine, like a sandy dune full of broken shells and cinders, and, far at the end, the glacier, with its blue-green waves crested with white and rounded in form, a silent, congealed ground-swell. The wind which came athwart it, whistling and strong, had the same biting, salubrious freshness as his own sea-breeze.
“No, thank you... I have my crampons...” said Tartarin to the guide, who offered him woollen socks to draw on over his boots; “Kennedy crampons... perfected... very convenient...” He shouted, as if to a deaf person, in order to make himself understood by Christian Inebnit, who knew no more French than his comrade Kaufmann; and then the P. C. A. sat down upon the moraine and strapped on a species of sandal with three enormous and very strong iron spikes. He had practised them a hundred times, these Kennedy crampons, manoeuvring them in the garden of the baobab; nevertheless, the present effect was unexpected. Beneath the weight of the hero the spikes were driven into the ice with such force that all efforts to withdraw them were vain. Behold him, therefore, nailed to the glacier, sweating, swearing, making with arms and alpenstock most desperate gymnastics and reduced finally to shouting for his guides, who had gone forward, convinced that they had to do with an experienced Alpinist.
Under the impossibility of uprooting him, they undid the straps, and, the crampons, abandoned in the ice, being replaced by a pair of knitted socks, the president continued his way, not without much difficulty and fatigue. Unskilful in holding his stick, his legs stumbled over it, then its iron point skated and dragged him along if he leaned upon it too heavily. He tried the ice-axe—still harder to manoeuvre, the swell of the glacier increasing by degrees, and pressing up, one above another, its motionless waves with all the appearance of a furious and petrified tempest.
Apparent immobility only, for hollow crackings, subterranean gurgles, enormous masses of ice displacing themselves slowly, as if moved by the machinery of a stage, indicated the inward life of this frozen mass and its treacherous elements. To the eyes of our Alpinist, wherever he cast his axe crevasses were opening, bottomless pits, where masses of ice in fragments rolled indefinitely. The hero fell repeatedly; once to his middle in one of those greenish gullies, where his broad shoulders alone kept him from going to the bottom.
On seeing him so clumsy, and yet so tranquil, so sure of himself, laughing, singing, gesticulating, as he did while breakfasting, the guides imagined that Swiss champagne had made an impression upon him. What else could they suppose of the president of an Alpine Club, a renowned ascensionist, of whom his friends spoke only with “Ahs!” and exultant gestures. After taking him each by the arm with the respectful firmness of policemen putting into a carriage an overcome heir to a title, they endeavoured, by the help of monosyllables and gestures, to rouse his mind to a sense of the dangers of the route, the necessity of reaching the hut before nightfall, with threats of crevasses, cold, avalanches. Finally, with the point of their ice-picks they showed him the enormous accumulation of ice, ofnévénot yet transformed into glacier rising before them to the zenith in blinding repetition.
But the worthy Tartarin laughed at all that: “Ha!vaï!crevasses!.. Ha!vaï!those avalanches!..” and he burst out laughing, winked his eye, and prodded their sides with his elbows to let them know they could not fool him, forhewas in the secret of the comedy.
The guides at last ended by making merry with the Tarasconese songs, and when they rested a moment on a solid block to let their monsieur get his breath, they yodelled in the Swiss way, though not too loudly, for fear of avalanches, nor very long, for time was getting on. They knew the coming of night by the sharper cold, but especially by the singular change in hue of these snows and ice-packs, heaped-up, overhanging, which always keep, even under misty skies, a rainbow tinge of colour until the daylight fades, rising higher and higher to the vanishing summits, where the snows take on the livid, spectral tints of the lunar universe. Pallor, petrifaction, silence, death itself. And the good Tartarin, so warm, so living, was beginning to lose his liveliness when the distant cry of a bird, the note of a “snow partridge” brought back before his eyes a baked landscape, a copper-coloured setting sun, and a band of Taras-conese sportsmen, mopping their faces, seated on their empty game-bags, in the slender shade of an olive-tree. The recollection was a comfort to him.
At the same moment Kaufmann pointed to something that looked like a faggot of wood on the snow. ‘T was the hut. It seemed as if they could get to it in a few strides, but, in point of fact, it took a good half-hour’s walking. One of the guides went on ahead to light the fire. Darkness had now come on; the north wind rattled on the cadaverous way, and Tartarin, no longer paying attention to anything, supported by the stout arm of the mountaineer, stumbled and bounded along without a dry thread on him in spite of the falling temperature. All of a sudden a flame shot up before him, together with an appetizing smell of onion soup.
They were there.
Nothing can be more rudimentary than these halting-places established on the mountains by the Alpine Club of Switzerland. A single room, in which an inclined plane of hard wood serves as a bed and takes up nearly all the space, leaving but little for the stove and the long table, screwed to the floor like the benches that are round it. The table was already laid; three bowls, pewter spoons, the reed-lamp to heat the coffee, two cans of Chicago preserved meats already opened. Tartarin thought the dinner delicious although the fumes of the onion soup infected the atmosphere, and the famous spirit-lamp, which ought to have made its pint of coffee in three minutes, refused to perform its functions.
At the dessert he sang; that was his only means of conversing with his guides. He sang them the airs of his native land:La Tarasque, andLes Filles d’Avignon. To which the guides responded with local songs in German patois:Mi Vater isch en Appenzeller... aou... aou... Worthy fellows with hard, weather-beaten features as if cut from the rock, beards in the hollows that looked like moss and those clear eyes, used to great spaces, like the eyes of sailors. The same sensation of the sea and the open, which he had felt just now on approaching Guggi, Tartarin again felt here, in presence of these mariners of the glacier in this close cabin, low and smoky, the regular forecastle of a ship; in the dripping of the snow from the roof as it melted with the warmth; in the great gusts of wind, shaking everything, cracking the boards, fluttering the flame of the lamp, and falling abruptly into vast, unnatural silence, like the end of the world.
They had just finished dinner when heavy steps upon the ringing path and voices were heard approaching. Violent blows with the butt end of some weapon shook the door. Tartarin, greatly excited, looked at his guides... A nocturnal attack on these heights!.. The blows redoubled. “Who goes there?” cried the hero, jumping for his ice-axe; but already the hut was invaded by two gigantic Yankees, in white linen masks, their clothing soaked with snow and sweat, and behind them guides, porters, a whole caravan, on its return from ascending the Jungfrau.
“You are welcome, milords,” said Tartarin, with a liberal, dispensing gesture, of which the milords showed not the slightest need in making themselves free of everything. In a trice the table was surrounded, the dishes removed, the bowls and spoons rinsed in hot water for the use of the new arrivals (according to established custom in Alpine huts); the boots of the milords smoked before the stove, while they themselves, bare-footed, their feet wrapped in straw, were sprawling at their ease before a fresh onion soup.
Father and son, these two Americans; two red-haired giants, with heads of pioneers, hard and self-reliant. One of them, the elder, had two dilated eyes, almost white, in a bloated, sun-burned, fissured face, and presently, by the hesitating way in which he groped for his bowl and spoon, and the care with which his son looked after him, Tartarin became aware that this was the famous blind Alpinist of whom he had been told, not believing the tale, at the Hôtel Bellevue; a celebrated climber in his youth, who now, in spite of his sixty years and his infirmity, was going over with his son the scenes of his former exploits. He had already done the Wetterhorn and the Jungfrau, and was intending to attack the Matterhorn and the Mont Blanc, declaring that the air upon summits, that glacial breath with its taste of snow, caused him inexpressible joy, and a perfect recall of his lost vigour.
“Différemment,” asked Tartarin of one of the porters, for the Yankees were not communicative, and answered only by a “yes” or a “no” to all his advances “différemmentinasmuch as he can’t see, how does he manage at the dangerous places?”
“Oh! he has got the mountaineer’s foot; besides, his son watches over him, and places his heels... And it is a fact that he has never had an accident.”
“All the more because accidents in Switzerland are never very terrible,qué?” With a comprehending smile to the puzzled porter, Tartarin, more and more convinced that the “whole thing wasblague,” stretched himself out on the plank rolled in his blanket, the muffler up to his eyes, and went to sleep, in spite of the light, the noise, the smoke of the pipes and the smell of the onion soup...
“Mossié!.. Mossié!..”
One of his guides was shaking him for departure, while the other poured boiling coffee into the bowls. A few oaths and the groans of sleepers whom Tartarin crushed on his way to the table, and then to the door. Abruptly he found himself outside, stung by the cold, dazzled by the fairy-like reflections of the moon upon that white expanse, those motionless congealed cascades, where the shadow of the peaks, theaiguilles, theséracs, were sharply defined in the densest black. No longer the sparkling chaos of the afternoon, nor the livid rising upward of the gray tints of evening, but a strange irregular city of darksome alleys, mysterious passages, doubtful corners between marble monuments and crumbling ruins—a dead city, with broad desert spaces.
Two o’clock! By walking well they could be at the top by mid-day. “Zou!” said the P. C. A., very lively, and dashing forward, as if to the assault. But his guides stopped him. They must be roped for the dangerous passages.
“Ah!vaï, roped!.. Very good, if that amuses you.”
Christian Inebnit took the lead, leaving twelve feet of rope between himself and Tartarin, who was separated by the same length from the second guide who carried the provisions and the banner. The hero kept his footing better than he did the day before; and confidence in the Company must indeed have been strong, for he did not take seriously the difficulties of the path—if we can call a path the terrible ridge of ice along which they now advanced with precaution, a ridge but a few feet wide and so slippery that Christian was forced to cut steps with his ice-axe.
The line of the ridge sparkled between two depths of abysses on either side. But if you think that Tartarin was frightened, not at all! Scarcely did he feel the little quiver of the cuticle of a freemason novice when subjected to his opening test. He placed his feet most precisely in the holes which the first guide cut for them, doing all that he saw the guide do, as tranquil as he was in the garden of the baobab when he practised around the margin of the pond, to the terror of the goldfish. At one place the ridge became so narrow that he was forced to sit astride of it, and while they went slowly forward, helping themselves with their hands, a loud detonation echoed up, on their right, from beneath them. “Avalanche!” said Inebnit, keeping motionless till the repercussion of the echoes, numerous, grandiose, filling the sky, died away at last in a long roll of thunder in the far distance, where the final detonation was lost. After which, silence once more covered all as with a winding-sheet.
The ridge passed, they went up anévéthe slope of which was rather gentle but its length interminable. They had been climbing nearly an hour when a slender pink line began to define the summits far, far above their heads. It was the dawn, thus announcing itself. Like a true Southerner, enemy to shade, Tartarin trolled out his liveliest song: