Confidences in a tunnel.
“Switzerland, in our day, _vé!_ Monsieur Tar-tarin, is nothing more than
a vast Kursaal, open from June to September, a panoramic casino, where
people come from all four quarters of the globe to amuse themselves, and
which is manipulated and managed by a Company _richissime_ by hundreds
of thousands of millions, which has its offices in London and Geneva.
It costs money, you may be sure, to lease and brush up and trick out all
this territory, lakes, forests, mountains, cascades, and to keep a whole
people of employés, supernumeraries, and what not, and set up miraculous
hotels on the highest summits, with gas, telegraphs, telephones...”
“That, at least, is true,” said Tartarin, thinking aloud, and
remembering the Rigi.
“True!.. But you have seen nothing yet... Go on through the country and
you ‘ll not find one corner that is n’t engineered and machine-worked
like the under stage of the Opera,--cascades lighted _à giorno_,
turnstiles at the entrance to the glaciers, and loads of railways,
hydraulic and funicular, for ascensions. To be sure, the Company, in
view of its clients the English and American climbers, keeps up on the
noted mountains, Jungfrau, Monk, Finsteraarhorn, an appearance of danger
and desolation, though in reality there is no more risk there than
elsewhere...”
“But the crevasses, my good fellow, those horrible crevasses... Suppose
one falls into them?”
“You fall on snow, Monsieur Tartarin, and you don’t hurt yourself, and
there is always at the bottom a porter, a hunter, at any rate some one,
who picks you up, shakes and brushes you, and asks graciously: ‘Has
monsieur any baggage?’”
“What stuff are you telling me now, Gonzague?”
Bompard redoubled in gravity.
“The keeping up of those crevasses is one of the heaviest expenses of
the Company.”
Silence fell for a moment under the tunnel, the surroundings of which
were quieting down. No more varied fireworks, Bengal lights, or boats
on the water; but the moon had risen and made another conventional
landscape, bluish, liquides-cent, with masses of impenetrable shadow...
Tartarin hesitated to believe his companion on his word. Nevertheless,
he reflected on the extraordinary things he had seen in four days--the
sun on the Rigi, the farce of William Tell--and Bompard’s inventions
seemed to him all the more probable because in every Tarasconese the
braggart is leashed with a gull.
“_Différemment_, my good friend, how do you explain certain awful
catastrophes... that of the Matterhorn, for instance?..”
“It is sixteen years since that happened; the Company was not then
constituted, Monsieur Tartarin.”
“But last year, the accident on the Wetterhorn, two guides buried with
their travellers!..”
“Must, sometimes, _té, pardi!_.. you understand... whets the
Alpinists... The English won’t come to mountains now where heads are not
broke... The Wetterhorn had been running down for some time, but after
that little item in the papers the receipts went up at once.”
“Then the two guides?..”
“They are just as safe as the travellers; only they are kept out of
sight, supported in foreign parts, for six months... A puff like that
costs dear, but the Company is rich enough to afford it.”
“Listen to me, Gonzague...”
Tartarin had risen, one hand on Bompard’s shoulder.
“You would not wish to have any misfortune happen to me, _que?_.. Well,
then! speak to me frankly... you know my capacities as an Alpinist; they
are moderate.”
“Very moderate, that’s true.”
“Do you think, nevertheless, that I could, without too much danger,
undertake the ascension of the Jungfrau?”
“I ‘ll answer for it, my head in the fire, Monsieur Tartarin... You have
only to trust to your guide, _vé!_”
“And if I turn giddy?”
“Shut your eyes.”
“And if I slip?”
“Let yourself go... just as they do on the stage... sort of
trap-doors... there ‘s no risk...”
“Ah! if I could have you there to tell me all that, to keep repeating it
to me... Look here, my good fellow, make an effort, and come with me.”
Bompard desired nothing better, _pécaïré!_ but he had those Peruvians on
his hands for the rest of the season; and, replying to his old friend,
who expressed surprise at seeing him accept the functions of a courier,
a subaltern,--
“I could n’t help myself, Monsieur Tartarin,” he said. “It is in our
engagement. The Company has the right to employ us as it pleases.”
On which he began to count upon his fingers his varied avatars during
the last three years... guide in the Oberland, performer on the Alpine
horn, chamois-hunter, veteran soldier of Charles X., Protestant pastor
on the heights...
“_Quès aco?_” demanded Tartarin, astonished.
“_Bé!_ yes,” replied the other, composedly. “When you travel in German
Switzerland you will see pastors preaching on giddy heights, standing
on rocks or rustic pulpits of the trunks of trees. A few shepherds and
cheese-makers, their leather caps in their hands, and women with their
heads dressed up in the costume of the canton group themselves about in
picturesque attitudes; the scenery is pretty, the pastures green, or
the harvest just over, cascades to the road, and flocks with their bells
ringing every note on the mountain. All that, _vé_ that’s decorative,
suggestive. Only, none but the employés of the Company, guides, pastors,
couriers, hotel-keepers are in the secret, and it is their interest not
to let it get wind, for fear of startling the clients.”
The Alpinist was dumfounded, silent--in him the acme of stupefaction. In
his heart, whatever doubt he may have had as to Bompard’s veracity, he
felt himself comforted and calmed as to Alpine ascensions, and presently
the conversation grew joyous. The two friends talked of Tarascon, of
their good, hearty laughs in the olden time when both were younger.
“Apropos of _galéjade_ [jokes],” said Tartarin, suddenly, “they played
me a fine one on the Rigi-Kulm... Just imagine that this morning...” and
he told of the letter gummed to his glass, reciting it with emphasis:
“‘Devil of a Frenchman’... A hoax, of course, _que?_”
“May be... who knows?..” said Bompard, seeming to take the matter
more seriously. He asked if Tartarin during his stay on the Rigi had
relations with any one, and whether he had n’t said a word too much.
“Ha! _vaï!_ a word too much! as if one even opened one’s mouth among
those English and Germans, mute as carp under pretence of good manners!”
On reflection, however, he did remember having clinched a matter, and
sharply too! with a species of Cossack, a certain Mi... Milanof.
“Manilof,” corrected Bompard.
“Do you know him?.. Between you and me, I think that Manilof had a spite
against me about a little Russian girl...”
“Yes, Sonia... “murmured Bompard.
“Do you know her too? Ah! my friend, a pearl! a pretty little gray
partridge!”
“Sonia Wassilief... It was she who killed with one shot of her revolver
in the open that General Felianine, the president of the Council of War
which condemned her brother to perpetual exile.”
Sonia an assassin? that child, that little blond fairy!.. Tartarin could
not believe it. But Bompard gave precise particulars and details of the
affair--which, indeed, is very well known. Sonia had lived for the
last two years in Zurich, where her brother Boris, having escaped from
Siberia, joined her, his lungs gone; and during the summers she took him
for better air to the mountains. Bompard had often met them, attended
by friends who were all exiles, conspirators. The Wassiliefs, very
intelligent, very energetic, and still possessed of some fortune, were
at the head of the Nihilist party, with Bolibine, the man who murdered
the prefect of police, and this very Manilof, who blew up the Winter
Palace last year.
“_Boufre!_” exclaimed Tartarin, “one meets with queer neighbours on the
Rigi.”
But here’s another thing. Bompard took it into his head that Tartarin’s
letter came from these young people; it was just like their Nihilist
proceedings. The czar, every morning, found warnings in his study, under
his napkin...
“But,” said Tartarin, turning pale, “why such threats? What have I done
to them?”
Bompard thought they must have taken him for a spy.
“A spy! I!
“_Be!_ yes.” In all the Nihilist centres, at Zurich, Lausanne, Geneva,
Russia maintained at great cost, a numerous body of spies; in fact, for
some time past she had had in her service the former chief of the French
Imperial police, with a dozen Corsicans, who followed and watched all
Russian exiles, and took countless disguises in order to detect them.
The costume of the Alpinist, his spectacles, his accent, were quite
enough to confound him in their minds with those agents.
“_Coquin de sort!_ now I think of it,” said Tartarin, “they had at their
heels the whole time a rascally Italian tenor... undoubtedly a spy...
_Différemment_, what must I do?”
“Above all things, never put yourself in the way of those people again;
now that they have warned you they will do you harm...”
“Ha! _vaï! harm!_.. The first one that comes near me I shall cleave his
head with my ice-axe.”
And in the gloom of the tunnel the eyes of the Tarasconese hero glared.
But Bompard, less confident than he, knew well that the hatred of
Nihilists is terrible; it attacks from below, it undermines, and plots.
It is all very well to be a _lapin_ like the president, but you had
better beware of that inn bed you sleep in, and the chair you sit upon,
and the rail of the steamboat, which will give way suddenly and drop
you to death. And think of the cooking-dishes prepared, the glass rubbed
over with invisible poison!
“Beware of the kirsch in your flask, and the frothing milk that cow-man
in sabots brings you. They stop at nothing, I tell you.”
“If so, what’s to be done! I’m doomed!” groaned Tartarin; then, grasping
the hand of his companion:--
“Advise me, Gonzague.”
After a moment’s reflection, Bompard traced out to him a programme. To
leave the next day, early, cross the lake and the Brünig pass, and sleep
at Interlaken. The next day, to Grindelwald and the Little Scheideck.
And the day after, the JUNGFRAU! After that, home to Tarascon, without
losing an hour, or looking back.
“I ‘ll start to-morrow, Gonzague...” declared the hero, in a virile
voice, with a look of terror at the mysterious horizon, now dim in the
darkness, and at the lake which seemed to him to harbour all treachery
beneath the glassy calm of its pale reflections.