The Brünig pass. Tartarin falls into the hands of Nihilists,
Disappearance of an Italian tenor and a rope made at
Avignon, Fresh exploits of the cap-sportsman. Pan! pan!
“Get in! get in!”
“But how the devil, que! am I to get in? the places are full... they
won’t make room for me.”
This was said at the extreme end of the lake of the Four Cantons,
on that shore at Alpnach, damp and soggy as a delta, where the
post-carriages wait in line to convey tourists leaving the boat to cross
the Brünig.
A fine rain like needle-points had been falling since morning; and the
worthy Tartarin, hampered by his armament, hustled by the porters and
the custom-house officials, ran from carriage to carriage, sonorous and
lumbering as that orchestra-man one sees at fairs, whose every movement
sets a-going triangles, big drums, Chinese bells, and cymbals. At all
the doors the same cry of terror, the same crabbed “Full!” growled in
all dialects, the same swelling-out of bodies and garments to take
as much room as possible and prevent the entrance of so dangerous and
resounding a companion.
The unfortunate Alpinist puffed, sweated, and replied with “_Coquin
de bon sort!_” and despairing gestures to the impatient clamour of the
convoy: “En route!.. All right!.. Andiamo!.. Vorwarts!..” The horses
pawed, the drivers swore. Finally, the manager of the post-route, a
tall, ruddy fellow in a tunic and flat cap, interfered himself, and
opening forcibly the door of a landau, the top of which was half up,
he pushed in Tartarin, hoisting him like a bundle, and then stood,
majestically, with outstretched hand for his _trinkgeld_.
Humiliated, furious with the people in the carriage who were forced
to accept him _manu militari_, Tartarin affected not to look at them,
rammed his porte-monnaie back into his pocket, wedged his ice-axe on
one side of him with ill-humoured motions and an air of determined
brutality, as if he were a passenger by the Dover steamer landing at
Calais.
“Good-morning, monsieur,” said a gentle voice he had heard already.
He raised his eyes, and sat horrified, terrified before the pretty,
round and rosy face of Sonia, seated directly in front of him, beneath
the hood of the landau, which also sheltered a tall young man, wrapped
in shawls and rugs, of whom nothing could be seen but a forehead of
livid paleness and a few thin meshes of hair, golden like the rim of
his near-sighted spectacles. A third person, whom Tartarin knew but too
well, accompanied them,--Manilof, the incendiary of the Winter Palace.
Sonia, Manilof, what a mouse-trap!
This was the moment when they meant to accomplish their threat, on that
Brünig pass, so craggy, so surrounded with abysses. And the hero, by
one of those flashes of horror which reveal the depths of danger, beheld
himself stretched on the rocks of a ravine, or swinging from the topmost
branches of an oak. Fly! yes, but where, how? The vehicles had started
in file at the sound of a trumpet, a crowd of little ragamuffins were
clambering at the doors with bunches of edelweiss. Tartarin, maddened,
had a mind to begin the attack by cleaving the head of the Cossack
beside him with his alpenstock; then, on reflection, he felt it was
more prudent to refrain. Evidently, these people would not attempt their
scheme till farther on, in regions uninhabited, and before that, there
might come means of getting out. Besides, their intentions no longer
seemed to him quite so malevolent. Sonia smiled gently upon him from her
pretty turquoise eyes, the pale young man looked pleasantly at him, and
Manilof, visibly milder, moved obligingly aside and helped him to put
his bag between them. Had they discovered their mistake by reading on
the register of the Rigi-Kulm the illustrious name of Tartarin?.. He
wished to make sure, and, familiarly, good-humouredly, he began:--
“Enchanted with this meeting, beautiful young lady... only, permit me
to introduce myself... you are ignorant with whom you have to do, _vé!_
whereas, I am perfectly aware who _you_ are.”
“Hush!” said the little Sonia, still smiling, but pointing with her
gloved finger to the seat beside the driver, where sat the tenor with
his sleeve-buttons, and another young Russian, sheltering themselves
under the same umbrella, and laughing and talking in Italian.
Between the police and the Nihilists, Tartarin did not hesitate.
“Do you know that man, _au mouain?_” he said in a low voice, putting
his head quite close to Sonia’s fresh cheeks, and seeing himself in her
clear eyes, which suddenly turned hard and savage as she answered “yes,”
with a snap of their lids.
The hero shuddered, but as one shudders at the theatre, with that
delightful creeping of the epidermis which takes you when the action
becomes Corsican, and you settle yourself in your seat to see and to
listen more attentively. Personally out of the affair, delivered from
the mortal terrors which had haunted him all night and prevented him
from swallowing his usual Swiss coffee, honey, and butter, he breathed
with free lungs, thought life good, and this little Russian irresistibly
pleasing in her travelling hat, her jersey close to the throat, tight to
the arms, and moulding her slender figure of perfect elegance. And such
a child! Child in the candour of her laugh, in the down upon her cheeks,
in the pretty grace with which she spread her shawl upon the knees of
her poor brother. “Are you comfortable?..” “You are not cold?” How could
any one suppose that little hand, so delicate beneath its chamois glove,
had had the physical force and the moral courage to kill a man?
Nor did the others of the party seem ferocious: all had the same
ingenuous laugh, rather constrained and sad on the drawn lips of the
poor invalid, and noisy in Manilof, who, very young behind his bushy
beard, gave way to explosions of mirth like a schoolboy in his holidays,
bursts of a gayety that was really exuberant.
The third companion, whom they called Boli-bine, and who talked on the
box with the tenor, amused himself much and was constantly turning back
to translate to his friends the Italian’s adventures, his successes
at the Petersburg Opera, his _bonnes fortunes_, the sleeve-buttons the
ladies had subscribed to present to him on his departure, extraordinary
buttons, with, three notes of music engraved thereon, _la do ré_
(l’adoré), which professional pun, repeated in the landau, caused such
delight, the tenor himself swelling up with pride and twirling his
moustache with so silly and conquering a look at Sonia, that Tartarin
began to ask himself whether, after all, they were not mere tourists,
and he a genuine tenor.
Meantime the carriages, going at a good pace, rolled over bridges,
skirted little lakes and flowery meads, and fine vineyards running with
water and deserted; for it was Sunday, and all the peasants whom they
met wore their gala costumes, the women with long braids of hair hanging
down their backs and silver chainlets. They began at last to mount the
road in zigzags among forests of oak and beech; little by little the
marvellous horizon displayed itself on the left; at each turn of the
zigzag, rivers, valleys with their spires pointing upward came
into view, and far away in the distance, the hoary head of the
Finsteraarhorn, whitening beneath an invisible sun.
Soon the road became gloomy, the aspect savage. On one side, heavy
shadows, a chaos of trees, twisted and gnarled on a steep slope, down
which foamed a torrent noisily; to right, an enormous rock overhanging
the road and bristling with branches that sprouted from its fissures.
They laughed no more in the landau; but they all admired, raising their
heads and trying to see the summit of this tunnel of granite.
“The forests of Atlas!.. I seem to see them again...” said Tartarin,
gravely, and then, as the remark passed unnoticed, he added: “Without
the lion’s roar, however.”
“You have heard it, monsieur?” asked Sonia.
Heard the lion, he!.. Then, with an indulgent smile: “I am Tartarin of
Tarascon, mademoiselle...”
And just see what such barbarians are! He might have said, “My name is
Dupont;” it would have been exactly the same thing to them. They were
ignorant of the name of Tartarin!
Nevertheless, he was not angry, and he answered the young lady,
who wished to know if the lion’s roar had frightened him: “No,
mademoiselle... My camel trembled between my legs, but I looked to my
priming as tranquilly as before a herd of cows... At a distance their
cry is much the same, like this, _té!_”
To give Sonia an exact impression of the thing, he bellowed in his most
sonorous voice a formidable “Meuh...” which swelled, spread, echoed and
reechoed against the rock. The horses reared; in all the carriages the
travellers sprang up alarmed, looking round for the accident, the
cause of such an uproar; but recognizing the Alpinist, whose head and
overwhelming accoutrements could be seen in the uncovered half of the
landau, they asked themselves once more: “Who is that animal?”
He, very calm, continued to give details: when to attack the beast,
where to strike him, how to despatch him, and about the diamond sight he
affixed to his carbines to enable him to aim correctly in the darkness.
The young girl listened to him, leaning forward with a little panting of
the nostrils, in deep attention.
“They say that Bombonnel still hunts; do you know him?” asked the
brother.
“Yes,” replied Tartarin, without enthusiasm... “He is not a clumsy
fellow, but we have better than he.”
A word to the wise! Then in a melancholy tone, “_Pas mouain_, they give
us strong emotions, these hunts of the great carnivora. When we have
them no longer life seems empty; we do not know how to fill it.”
Here Manilof, who understood French without speaking it, and seemed to
be listening to Tartarin very intently, his peasant forehead slashed
with the wrinkle of a great scar, said a few words, laughing, to his
friends.
“Manilof says we are all of the same brotherhood,” explained Sonia to
Tartarin... “We hunt, like you, the great wild beasts.”
“_Té!_ yes, _pardi_... wolves, white bears...”
“Yes, wolves, white bears, and other noxious animals...”
And the laughing began again, noisy, interminable, but in a sharp,
ferocious key this time, laughs that showed their teeth and reminded
Tartarin in what sad and singular company he was travelling.
Suddenly the carriages stopped. The road became steeper and made at this
spot a long circuit to reach the top of the Brünig pass, which could
also be reached on foot in twenty minutes less time through a noble
forest of birches. In spite of the rain in the morning, making the earth
sodden and slippery, the tourists nearly all left the carriages and
started, single file, along the narrow path called a _schlittage_.
From Tartarin’s landau, the last in line, all the men got out; but
Sonia, thinking the path too muddy, settled herself back in the
carriage, and as the Alpinist was getting out with the rest, a little
delayed by his equipments, she said to him in a low voice: “Stay! keep
me company...” in such a coaxing way! The poor man, quite overcome,
began immediately to forge a romance, as delightful as it was
improbable, which made his old heart beat and throb.
He was quickly undeceived when he saw the young girl leaning anxiously
forward to watch Bolibine and the Italian, who were talking eagerly
together at the opening of the path, Manilof and Boris having already
gone forward. The so-called tenor hesitated. An instinct seemed to
warn him not to risk himself alone in company with those three men.
He decided at last to go on, and Sonia looked at him as he mounted
the path, all the while stroking her cheek with a bouquet of purple
cyclamen, those mountain violets, the leaf of which is lined with the
same fresh colour as the flowers.
The landau proceeded slowly. The driver got down to walk in front with
other comrades, and the convoy of more than fifteen empty vehicles,
drawn nearer together by the steepness of the road, rolled silently
along. Tartarin, greatly agitated, and foreboding something sinister,
dared not look at his companion, so much did he fear that a word or a
look might compel him to be an actor in the drama he felt impending. But
Sonia was paying no attention to him; her eyes were rather fixed, and
she did not cease caressing the down of her skin mechanically with the
flowers.
“So,” she said at length, “so you know who we are, I and my friends...
Well, what do you think of us? What do Frenchmen think of us?”
The hero turned pale, then red. He was desirous of not offending by
rash or imprudent words such vindictive beings; on the other hand, how
consort with murderers? He got out of it by a metaphor:--
“_Différemment_, mademoiselle, you were telling me just now that we
belonged to the same brotherhood, hunters of hydras and monsters,
despots and carnivora... It is therefore to a companion of St. Hubert
that I now make answer... My sentiment is that, even against wild beasts
we should use loyal weapons... Our Jules Gérard, a famous lion-slayer,
employed explosive balls. I myself have never given in to that, I do
not use them... When I hunted the lion or the panther I planted myself
before the beast, face to face, with a good double-barrelled carbine,
and pan! pan! a ball in each eye.”
“In each eye!..” repeated Sonia.
“Never did I miss my aim.”
He affirmed it and he believed it.