Apparition on the Rigi-Kulm. Who is it? What was said around
a table of six hundred covers. Rice and Prunes, An
improvised ball. The Unknown signs his name on the hotel
register, P. C. A.
On the 10th of August, 1880, at that fabled hour of the setting sun so
vaunted by the guide-books Joanne and Baedeker, an hermetic yellow fog,
complicated with a flurry of snow in white spirals, enveloped the summit
of the Rigi (_Regina monhum_) and its gigantic hotel, extraordinary to
behold on the arid waste of those heights,--that Rigi-Kulm, glassed-in
like a conservatory, massive as a citadel, where alight for a night and
a day a flock of tourists, worshippers of the sun.
While awaiting the second dinner-gong, the transient inmates of the
vast and gorgeous caravansary, half frozen in their chambers above, or
gasping on the divans of the reading-rooms in the damp heat of lighted
furnaces, were gazing, in default of the promised splendours, at the
whirling white atoms and the lighting of the great lamps on the portico,
the double glasses of which were creaking in the wind.
To climb so high, to come from all four corners of the earth to see
that... Oh, Baedeker!..
Suddenly, something emerged from the fog and advanced toward the hotel
with a rattling of metal, an exaggeration of motions, caused by strange
accessories.
At a distance of twenty feet through the fog the torpid tourists, their
noses against the panes, the _misses_ with curious little heads trimmed
like those of boys, took this apparition for a cow, and then for a
tinker bearing his utensils.
Ten feet nearer the apparition changed again, showing a crossbow on the
shoulder, and the visored cap of an archer of the middle ages, with
the visor lowered, an object even more unlikely to meet with on these
heights than a strayed cow or an ambulating tinker.
On the portico the archer was no longer anything but a fat, squat,
broad-backed man, who stopped to get breath and to shake the snow from
his leggings, made like his cap of yellow cloth, and from his knitted
comforter, which allowed scarcely more of his face to be seen than a few
tufts of grizzling beard and a pair of enormous green spectacles made as
convex as the glass of a stereoscope. An alpenstock, knapsack, coil of
rope worn in saltire, crampons and iron hooks hanging to the belt of
an English blouse with broad pleats, completed the accoutrement of this
perfect Alpinist.
On the desolate summits of Mont Blanc or the Finsteraarhorn this
clambering apparel would have seemed very natural, but on the Rigi-Kulm
ten feet from a railway track!--
The Alpinist, it is true, came from the side opposite to the station,
and the state of his leggings testified to a long march through snow and
mud.
For a moment he gazed at the hotel and its surrounding buildings,
seemingly stupefied at finding, two thousand and more yards above the
sea, a building of such importance, glazed galleries, colonnades, seven
storeys of windows, and a broad portico stretching away between two
rows of globe-lamps which gave to this mountain-summit the aspect of the
Place de l’Opéra of a winter’s evening.
But, surprised as he may have been, the people in the hotel were
more surprised still, and when he entered the immense antechamber an
inquisitive hustling took place in the doorways of all the salons:
gentlemen armed with billiard-cues, others with open newspapers, ladies
still holding their book or their work pressed forward, while in the
background, on the landing of the staircase, heads leaned over the
baluster and between the chains of the lift.
The man said aloud, in a powerful deep bass voice, the chest voice of
the South, resounding like cymbals:--
“_Coquin de bon sort!_ what an atmosphere!”
Then he stopped short, to take off his cap and his spectacles.
He was suffocating.
The dazzle of the lights, the heat of the gas and furnace, in contrast
with the cold darkness without, and this sumptuous display, these lofty
ceilings, these porters bedizened with _Regina Montium_ in letters
of gold on their naval caps, the white cravats of the waiters and the
battalion of Swiss girls in their native costumes coming forward at
sound of the gong, all these things bewildered him for a second--but
only one.
He felt himself looked at and instantly recovered his self-possession,
like a comedian facing a full house.
“Monsieur desires..?”
This was the manager of the hotel, making the inquiry with the tips of
his teeth, a very dashing manager, striped jacket, silken whiskers, the
head of a lady’s dressmaker.
The Alpinist, not disturbed, asked for a room, “A good little room,
_au mouain?_” perfectly at ease with that majestic manager, as if with a
former schoolmate.
But he came near being angry when a Bernese servant-girl, advancing,
candle in hand, and stiff in her gilt stomacher and puffed muslin
sleeves, inquired if Monsieur would be pleased to take the lift. The
proposal to commit a crime would not have made him more indignant.
“A lift! he!.. for him!..” And his cry, his gesture, set all his metals
rattling.
Quickly appeased, however, he said to the maiden, in an amiable tone:
“_Pedibusse cum jambisse_, my pretty little cat...” And he went up
behind her, his broad back filling the stairway, parting the persons he
met on his way, while throughout the hotel the clamorous questions ran:
“Who is he? What’s this?” muttered in the divers languages of all four
quarters of the globe. Then the second dinner-gong sounded, and nobody
thought any longer of this extraordinary personage.
A sight to behold, that dining-room of the Rigi-Kulm.
Six hundred covers around an immense horseshoe table, where tall,
shallow dishes of rice and of prunes, alternating in long files with
green plants, reflected in their dark or transparent sauces the flame of
the candles in the chandeliers and the gilding of the panelled ceiling.
As in all Swiss _tables d’hôte_, rice and prunes divided the dinner into
two rival factions, and merely by the looks of hatred or of hankering
cast upon those dishes it was easy to tell to which party the guests
belonged. The Rices were known by their anaemic pallor, the Prunes by
their congested skins.
That evening the latter were the most numerous, counting among them
several important personalities, European celebrities, such as the great
historian Astier-Réhu, of the French Academy, Baron von Stolz, an
old Austro-Hungarian diplomat, Lord Chipendale (?), a member of the
Jockey-Club and his niece (h’m, h’m!), the illustrious doctor-professor
Schwanthaler, from the University of Bonn, a Peruvian general with eight
young daughters.
To these the Rices could only oppose as a picket-guard a Belgian senator
and his family, Mme. Schwanthaler, the professor’s wife, and an Italian
tenor, returning from Russia, who displayed his cuffs, with buttons as
big as saucers, upon the tablecloth.
It was these opposing currents which no doubt caused the stiffness
and embarrassment of the company. How else explain the silence of six
hundred half-frozen, scowling, distrustful persons, and the sovereign
contempt they appeared to affect for one another? A superficial observer
might perhaps have attributed this stiffness to stupid Anglo-Saxon
haughtiness which, nowadays, gives the tone in all countries to the
travelling world.
No! no! Beings with human faces are not born to hate one another thus at
first sight, to despise each other with their very noses, lips, and eyes
for lack of a previous introduction. There must be another cause.
Rice and Prunes, I tell you. There you have the explanation of the
gloomy silence weighing upon this dinner at the Rigi-Kulm, which,
considering the number and international variety of the guests, ought to
have been lively, tumultuous, such as we imagine the repasts at the foot
of the Tower of Babel to have been.
The Alpinist entered the room, a little overcome by this refectory of
monks, apparently doing penance beneath the glare of chandeliers; he
coughed noisily without any one taking notice of him, and seated himself
in his place of last-comer at the end of the room. Divested of his
accoutrements, he was now a tourist like any other, but of aspect more
amiable, bald, barrel-bellied, his beard pointed and bunchy, his nose
majestic, his eyebrows thick and ferocious, overhanging the glance of a
downright good fellow.
Rice or Prunes? No one knew as yet.
Hardly was he installed before he became uneasy, and leaving his place
with an alarming bound: “Ouf! what a draught!” he said aloud, as he
sprang to an empty chair with its back laid over on the table.
He was stopped by the Swiss maid on duty--from the canton of Uri, that
one--silver chains and white muslin chemisette.
“Monsieur, this place is engaged...”
Then a young lady, seated next to the chair, of whom the Alpinist could
see only her blond hair rising from the whiteness of virgin snows, said,
without turning round, and with a foreign accent:
“That place is free; my brother is ill, and will not be down.”
“Ill?..” said the Alpinist, seating himself, with an anxious, almost
affectionate manner... “Ill? Not dangerously, _au moins_.”
He said _au mouain_, and the word recurred in all his remarks, with
other vocable parasites, such as _hé, que, téy zou, vé, vaï, et
autrement, différemment_, etc., still further emphasized by a Southern
accent, displeasing, apparently, to the young lady, for she answered
with a glacial glance of a black blue, the blue of an abyss.
His neighbour on the right had nothing encouraging about him either;
this was the Italian tenor, a gay bird with a low forehead, oily pupils,
and the moustache of a matador, which he twirled with nervous fingers
at being thus separated from his pretty neighbour. But the good Alpinist
had a habit of talking as he ate; it was necessary for his health.
“_Vé!_ the pretty buttons...” he said to himself, aloud, eying the cuffs
of his neighbour. “Notes of music, inlaid in jasper--why, the effect is
_charmain!_..”
His metallic voice rang on the silence, but found no echo.
“Surely monsieur is a singer, _que?_”
“_Non capisco_,” growled the Italian into his moustache.
For a moment the man resigned himself to devour without uttering a word,
but the morsels choked him. At last, as his opposite neighbour, the
Austro-Hungarian diplomat, endeavoured to reach the mustard-pot with the
tips of his shaky old fingers, covered with mittens, he passed it to him
obligingly. “Happy to serve you, Monsieur le baron,” for he had heard
some one call him so.
Unfortunately, poor M. de Stoltz, in spite of his shrewd and knowing air
contracted in diplomatic juggling, had now lost both words and ideas,
and was travelling among the mountains for the special purpose of
recovering them. He opened his eyes wide upon that unknown face, and
shut them again without a word. It would have taken ten old diplomats of
his present intellectual force to have constructed in common a formula
of thanks.
At this fresh failure the Alpinist made a terrible grimace, and the
abrupt manner in which he seized the bottle standing near him might have
made one fear he was about to cleave the already cracked head of the
diplomatist Not so! It was only to offer wine to his pretty neighbour,
who did not hear him, being absorbed by a semi-whispered conversation in
a soft and lively foreign warble with two young men seated next to her.
She bent to them, and grew animated. Little frizzles of hair were seen
shining in the light against a dainty, transparent, rosy ear... Polish,
Russian, Norwegian?.. from the North certainly; and a pretty song of
those distant lands coming to his lips, the man of the South began
tranquilly to hum:--
O coumtesso gento,
Estelo dou Nord,
Que la neu argento,
Qu’ Amour friso en or. {*}
* O pretty countess,
Light of the North,
Which the snow silvers,
And Love curls in gold.
(Frédéric Mistral.)
The whole table turned round; they thought him mad. He coloured,
subsided into his plate, and did not issue again except to repulse
vehemently one of the sacred compote-dishes that was handed to him.
“Prunes! again!.. Never in my life!”
This was too much.
A grating of chairs was heard. The academician, Lord Chipendale (?),
the Bonn professor, and other notabilities rose, and left the room as if
protesting.
The Rices followed almost immediately, on see-tog the second
compote-dish rejected as violently as the first.
Neither Rice nor Prunes!.. then what?..
All withdrew; and it was truly glacial, that silent defile of scornful
noses and mouths with their corners disdainfully turned down at the
luckless man, who was left alone in the vast gorgeous dining-room,
engaged in sopping his bread in his wine after the fashion of his
country, crushed beneath the weight of universal disdain.
My friends, let us never despise any one. Contempt is the resource
of parvenus, prigs, ugly folk, and fools; it is the mask behind which
nonentity shelters itself, and sometimes blackguardism; it dispenses
with mind, judgment, and good-will. All humpbacked persons are
contemptuous; all crooked noses wrinkle with disdain when they see a
straight one.
He knew that, this worthy Alpinist. Having passed, by several years, his
“fortieth,” that landing on the fourth storey where man discovers and
picks up the magic key which opens life to its recesses, and reveals its
monotonous and deceptive labyrinth; conscious, moreover, of his value,
of the importance of his mission, and of the great name he bore, he
cared nothing for the opinion of such persons as these. He knew that he
need only name himself and cry out “‘Tis I...” to change to grovelling
respect those haughty lips; but he found his incognito amusing.
He suffered only at not being able to talk, to make a noise, unbosom
himself, press hands, lean familiarly on shoulders, and call men by
their Christian names. That is what oppressed him on the Rigi-Kulm.
Oh! above all, not being able to speak.
“I shall have dyspepsia as sure as fate,” said the poor devil, wandering
about the hotel and not knowing what to do with himself.
He entered a café, vast and deserted as a church on a week day, called
the waiter, “My good friend,” and ordered “a mocha without sugar,
_que’_.” And as the waiter did not ask, “Why no sugar?” the Alpinist
added quickly, “‘Tis a habit I acquired in Africa, at the period of my
great hunts.”
He was about to recount them, but the waiter had fled on his phantom
slippers to Lord Chipendale, stranded, full length, upon a sofa and
crying, in mournful tones: “Tchempègne!.. tchempègne!..” The cork flew
with its silly noise, and nothing more was heard save the gusts of wind
in the monumental chimney and the hissing click of the snow against the
panes.
Very dismal too was the reading-room; all the journals in hand, hundreds
of heads bent down around the long green tables beneath the reflectors.
From time to time a yawn, a cough, the rustle of a turned leaf; and
soaring high above the calm of this hall of study, erect and motionless,
their backs to the stove, both solemn and both smelling equally musty,
were the two pontiffs of official history, Astier-Réhu and Schwanthaler,
whom a singular fatality had brought face to face on the summit of the
Rigi, after thirty years of insults and of rending each other to
shreds in explanatory notes referring to “Schwanthaler, jackass,” “_vir
ineptissimus_, Astier-Réhu.”
You can imagine the reception which the kindly Alpinist received on
drawing up a chair for a bit of instructive conversation in that chimney
corner. From the height of these two caryatides there fell upon him
suddenly one of those currents of air of which he was so afraid.
He rose, paced the hall, as much to warm himself as to recover
self-confidence, and opened the bookcase. A few English novels lay
scattered about in company with several heavy Bibles and tattered
volumes of the Alpine Club. He took up one of the latter, and carried
it off to read in bed, but was forced to leave it at the door, the rules
not allowing the transference of the library to the chambers.
Then, still continuing to wander about, he opened the door of the
billiard-room, where the Italian tenor, playing alone, was producing
effects of torso and cuffs for the edification of their pretty
neighbour, seated on a divan, between the two young men, to whom she was
reading a letter. On the entrance of the Alpinist she stopped, and one
of the young men rose, the taller, a sort of moujik, a dog-man, with
hairy paws, and long, straight, shining black hair joining an unkempt
beard. He made two steps in the direction of the new-comer, looked at
him provocatively, and so fiercely that the worthy Alpinist, without
demanding an explanation, made a prudent and judicious half-turn to the
right.
“_Différemment_, they are not affable, these Northerners,” he said
aloud; and he shut the door noisily, to prove to that savage that he was
not afraid of him.
The salon remained as a last refuge; he went there... _Coquin de
sort!_... The morgue, my good friends, the morgue of the Saint-Bernard
where the monks expose the frozen bodies found beneath the snows in
the various attitudes in which congealing death has stiffened them, can
alone describe that salon of the Rigi-Kulm.
All those numbed, mute women, in groups upon the circular sofas, or
isolated and fallen into chairs here and there; all those misses,
motionless be-. neath the lamps on the round tables, still holding in
their hands the book or the work they were employed on when the cold
congealed them. Among them were the daughters of the general, eight
little Peruvians with saffron skins, their features convulsed, the vivid
ribbons on their gowns contrasting with the dead-leaf tones of English
fashions; poor little _sunny-climes_, easy to imagine as laughing and
frolicking beneath their cocoa-trees and now more distressing
to behold than the rest in their glacial, mute condition. In the
background, before the piano, was the death-mask of the old diplomat,
his mittened hands resting inert upon the keyboard, the yellowing tones
of which were reflected on his face.
Betrayed by his strength and his memory, lost in a polka of his own
composition, beginning it again and again, unable to remember its
conclusion, the unfortunate Stoltz had gone to sleep while playing,
and with him all the ladies on the Rigi, nodding, as they slumbered,
romantic curls, or those peculiar lace caps, in shape like the crust of
a vol-au-vent, that English dames affect, and which seem to be part of
the canf of travelling.
The entrance of the Alpinist did not awaken them, and he himself had
dropped upon a divan, overcome by such icy discouragement, when the
sound of vigorous, joyous chords burst from the vestibule; where three
“musicos,” harp, flute, and violin, ambulating minstrels with pitiful
faces, and long overcoats flapping their legs, who infest the Swiss
hostelries, had just arrived with their instruments.
At the very first notes our man sprang up as if galvanized.
“_Zou!_ bravo!.. forward, music!”
And off he went, opening the great doors, feting the musicians, soaking
them with champagne, drunk himself without drinking a drop, solely with
the music which brought him back to life. He mimicked the piston, he
mimicked the harp, he snapped his fingers over his head, and rolled his
eyes and danced his steps, to the utter stupefaction of the tourists
running in from all sides at the racket. Then suddenly, as the
exhilarated musicos struck up a Strauss waltz with the fury of true
tziganes, the Alpinist, perceiving in the doorway the wife of Professor
Schwanthaler, a rotund little Viennese with mischievous eyes, still
youthful in spite of her powdered gray hair, he sprang up her, caught
her by the waist, and whirled her into the room, crying put to the
others; “Come on! come on! let us waltz!”
The impetus was given, the hotel thawed and twirled, carried off its
centre. People danced in the vestibule, in the salon, round the long
green table of the reading-room. ‘Twas that devil of a man who set fire
to ice. He, however, danced no more, being out of breath at the end of
a couple of turns; but he guided his ball, urged the musicians, coupled
the dancers, cast into the arms of the Bonn professor an elderly
Englishwoman; and into those of the austere Astier-Réhu the friskiest
of the Peruvian damsels. Resistance was impossible. From that terrible
Alpinist issued I know not what mysterious aura which lightened and
buoyed up every one. And _zou! zou! zou!_ No more contempt and disdain.
Neither Rice nor Prunes, only waltzers. Presently the madness spread;
it reached the upper storeys, and up through the well of the staircase
could be seen to the sixth-floor landing the heavy and high-coloured
skirts of the Swiss maids on duty, twirling with the stiffness of
automatons before a musical chalet.
Ah! the wind may blow without and shake the lamp-posts, make the
telegraph wires groan, and whirl the snow in spirals across that
desolate summit Within all are warm, all are comforted, and remain so
for that one night.
“_Différemment_, I must go to bed, myself,” thought the worthy Alpinist,
a prudent man, coming from a country where every one packs and unpacks
himself rapidly. Laughing in his grizzled beard, he slipped away,
covertly escaping Madame Schwanthaler, who was seeking to hook him again
ever since that initial waltz.
He took his key and his bedroom candle; then, on the first landing, he
paused a moment to enjoy his work and to look at the mass of congealed
ones whom he had forced to thaw and amuse themselves.
A Swiss maid approached him all breathless from the waltz, and said,
presenting a pen and the hotel register:--
“Might I venture to ask t_mossié_ to be so good as to sign his name?”
He hesitated a moment. Should he, or should he not preserve his
incognito?
After all, what matter! Supposing that the news of his presence on the
Rigi should reach _down there_, no one would know what he had come to
do in Switzerland. And besides, it would be so droll to see, to-morrow
morning, the stupor of those “Inglichemans” when they should learn the
truth... For that Swiss girl, of course, would not hold her tongue...
What surprise, what excitement throughout the hotel!..
“Was it really he?.. he?.. himself?..” These reflections, rapid and
vibrant, passed through his head like the notes of a violin in an
orchestra. He took the pen, and with careless hand he signed, beneath
Schwanthaler, Astier-Réhu, and other notabilities, the name that
eclipsed them all, his name; then he went to his room, without so much
as glancing round to see the effect, of which he was sure.
Behind him the Swiss maid looked at the name: