An alarm on the Rigi. “Keep cool! Keep cool!” The Alpine
horn. What Tartarin saw, on awaking, in his looking-glass,
Perplexity. A guide is ordered by telephone.
“Quès aco?.. Quî vive?” cried Tartarin, ears alert and eyes straining
hard into the darkness.
Feet were running through the hotel, doors were slamming, breathless
voices were crying: “Make haste! make haste!..” while without was
ringing what seemed to be a trumpet-call, as flashes of flame illumined
both panes and curtains.
Fire!..
At a bound he was out of bed, shod, clothed, and running headlong
down the staircase, where the gas still burned and a rustling swarm of
_misses_ were descending, with hair put up in haste, and they themselves
swathed in shawls and red woollen jackets, or anything else that came to
hand as they jumped out of bed.
Tartarin, to fortify himself and also to reassure the young ladies,
cried out, as he rushed on, hustling everybody: “Keep cool! Keep cool!”
in the voice of a gull, pallid, distraught, one of those voices that we
hear in dreams sending chills down the back of the bravest man. Now, can
you understand those young _misses_, who laughed as they looked at him
and seemed to think it very funny? Girls have no notion of danger, at
that age!..
Happily, the old diplomatist came along behind them, very cursorily
clothed in a top-coat below which appeared his white drawers with
trailing ends of tape-string.
Here was a man, at last!..
Tartarin ran to him waving his arms: “Ah! Monsieur le baron, what a
disaster!.. Do you know about it?.. Where is it?.. How did it take?..”
“Who? What?” stuttered the terrified baron, not understanding.
“Why, the fire...”
“What fire?..”
The poor man’s countenance was so inexpressibly vacant and stupid that
Tartarin abandoned him and rushed away abruptly to “organize help...”
“Help!” repeated the baron, and after him four or five waiters,
sound asleep on their feet in the antechamber, looked at one another
completely bewildered and echoed, “Help!..”
At the first step that Tartarin made out-of-doors he saw his error.
Not the slightest conflagration! Only savage cold, and pitchy darkness,
scarcely lighted by the resinous torches that were being carried hither
and thither, casting on the snow long, blood-coloured traces.
On the steps of the portico, a performer on the Alpine horn was
bellowing his modulated moan, that monotonous _rànz des vaches_ on three
notes, with which the Rigi-Kulm is wont to waken the worshippers of the
sun and announce to them the rising of their star.
_It is said_ that it shows itself, sometimes, on rising, at the extreme
top of the mountain behind the hotel. To get his bearings, Tartarin had
only to follow the long peal of the misses’ laughter which now went past
him. But he walked more slowly, still full of sleep and his legs heavy
with his six hours’ climb.
“Is that you, Manilof?..” said a clear voice from the darkness, the
voice of a woman. “Help me... I have lost my shoe.”
He recognized at once the foreign warble of his pretty little neighbour
at the dinner-table, whose delicate silhouette he now saw in the first
pale gleam of the coming sun.
“It is not Manilof, mademoiselle, but if I can be useful to you...”
She gave a little cry of surprise and alarm as she made a recoiling
gesture that Tartarin did not perceive, having already stooped to feel
about the short and crackling grass around them.
“_Té, pardi!_ here it is!” he cried joyfully. He shook the dainty shoe
which the snow had powdered, and putting a knee to earth, most gallantly
in the snow and the dampness, he asked, for all reward, the honour of
replacing it on Cinderella’s foot.
She, more repellent than in the tale, replied with a very curt “no;” and
endeavoured, by hopping on one foot, to reinstate her silk stocking
in its little bronze shoe; but in that she could never have succeeded
without the help of the hero, who was greatly moved by feeling for an
instant that delicate hand upon his shoulder.
“You have good eyes,” she said, by way of thanks as they now walked side
by side, and feeling their way.
“The habit of watching for game, mademoiselle.”
“Ah! you are a sportsman?”
She said it with an incredulous, satirical, accent Tartarin had only
to name himself in order to convince her, but, like the bearers of all
illustrious names, he preferred discretion, coquetry. So, wishing to
graduate the surprise, he answered:--
“I am a sportsman, _efféctivemain_.”