“You spoke just now of a void to be filled; does it not seem to you more
noble, more interesting to risk your life for a great cause than to risk
it in slaying lions or scaling glaciers?”
“The fact is,” said Tartarin, intoxicated, losing his head and mad with
an irresistible desire to take and kiss that ardent, persuasive little
hand which she laid upon his arm, as she had done once before, up there,
on the Rigi when he put on her shoe. Finally, unable to resist, and
seizing the little gloved hand between both his own,--
“Listen, Sonia,” he said, in a good hearty voice, paternal and
familiar... “Listen, Sonia...”
A sudden stop of the landau interrupted him. They had reached the summit
of the Brünig; travellers and drivers were getting into their carriages
to catch up lost time and reach, at a gallop, the next village where the
convoy was to breakfast and relay. The three Russians took their places,
but that of the Italian tenor remained unoccupied.
“That gentleman got into one of the first carriages,” said Boris to the
driver, who asked about him; then, addressing Tartarin, whose uneasiness
was visible:--
“We must ask him for your rope; he chose to keep it with him.”
Thereupon, fresh laughter in the landau, and the resumption for poor
Tartarin of horrid perplexity, not knowing what to think or believe in
presence of the good-humour and ingenuous countenances of the suspected
assassins. Sonia, while wrapping up her invalid in cloaks and plaids,
for the air on the summit was all the keener from the rapidity with
which the carriages were now driven, related in Russian her conversation
with Tartarin, uttering his pan! pan! with a pretty intonation which
her companions repeated after her, two of them admiring the hero, while
Manilof shook his head incredulously.
The relay!
This was on the market-place of a large village, at an old tavern with
a worm-eaten wooden balcony, and a sign hanging to a rusty iron
bracket. The file of vehicles stopped, and while the horses were being
unharnessed the hungry tourists jumped hurriedly down and rushed into a
room on the lower floor, painted green and smelling of mildew, where
the table was laid for twenty guests. Sixty had arrived, and for five
minutes nothing could be heard but a frightful tumult, cries, and
a vehement altercation between the Rices and the Prunes around the
compote-dishes, to the great alarm of the tavern-keeper, who lost his
head (as if daily, at the same hour, the same post-carriages did
not pass) and bustled about his servants, also seized with chronic
bewilderment--excellent method of serving only half the dishes called
for by the _carte_, and of giving change in a way that made the white
sous of Switzerland count for fifty centimes. “Suppose we dine in the
carriage,” said Sonia, I annoyed by such confusion; and as no one had
time to pay attention to them the young men themselves did the waiting.
Manilof returned with a cold leg of mutton, Bolibine with a long loaf
of bread and sausages; but the best forager was Tartarin. Certainly the
opportunity to get away from his companions in the bustle of relay ing
was a fine one; he might at least have assured himself that the
Italian had reappeared; but he never once thought of it, being solely
preoccupied with Sonia’s breakfast, and in showing Manilof and the
others how a Tarasconese can manage matters.
When he stepped down the portico of the hotel, gravely, with fixed eyes,
bearing in his robust hands a large tray laden with plates, napkins,
assorted food, and Swiss champagne in its gilt-necked bottles, Sonia
clapped her hands, and congratulated him.
“How did you manage it?” she said.
“I don’t know... somehow, _té!_.. We are all like that in Tarascon.”
Oh! those happy minutes! That pleasant breakfast opposite to Sonia,
almost on his knees, the village market-place, like the scene of an
operetta, with clumps of green trees, beneath which sparkled the gold
ornaments and the muslin sleeves of the Swiss girls, walking about, two
and two, like dolls!
How good the bread tasted! what savoury sausages! The heavens themselves
took part in the scene, and were soft, veiled, clement; it rained, of
course, but so gently, the drops so rare, though just enough to temper
the Swiss champagne, always dangerous to Southern heads.
Under the veranda of the hotel, a Tyrolian quartette, two giants and
two female dwarfs in resplendent and heavy rags, looking as if they had
escaped from the failure of a theatre at a fair, were mingling their
throat notes: “aou... aou...” with the clinking of plates and glasses.
They were ugly, stupid, motionless, straining the cords of their skinny
necks. Tartarin thought them delightful, and gave them a handful
of sous, to the great amazement of the villagers who surrounded the
unhorsed landau.
“Vife la Vranze!” quavered a voice in the crowd, from which issued a
tall old man, clothed in a singular blue coat with silver buttons, the
skirts of which swept the ground; on his head was a gigantic shako, in
form like a bucket of sauerkraut, and so weighted by its enormous plume
that the old man was forced to balance himself with his arms as he
walked, like an acrobat.
“Old soldier... Charles X...”
Tartarin, fresh from Bompard’s revelations, began to laugh, and said in
a low voice with a wink of his eye:--
“Up to _that_, old fellow...” But even so, he gave him a white sou
and poured him out a bumper, which the old man accepted, laughing, and
winking himself, though without knowing why. Then, dislodging from a
corner of his mouth an enormous china pipe, he raised his glass and
drank “to the company,” which confirmed Tartarin in his opinion that
here was a colleague of Bompard.
No matter! one toast deserved another. So, standing up in the carriage,
his glass held high, his voice strong, Tartarin brought tears to his
eyes by drinking, first: To France, my country!.. next to hospitable
Switzerland, which he was happy to honour publicly and thank for the
generous welcome she affords to the vanquished, to the exiled of
all lands. Then, lowering his voice and inclining his glass to the
companions of his journey, he wished them a quick return to their
country, restoration to their family, safe friends, honourable careers,
and an end to all dissensions; for, he said, it is impossible to spend
one’s life in eating each other up.
During the utterance of this toast Soma’s brother smiled, cold and
sarcastic behind his blue spectacles; Manilof, his neck pushed forth,
his swollen eyebrows emphasizing his wrinkle, seemed to be asking
himself if that “big barrel” would soon be done with his gabble, while
Bolibine, perched on the box, was twisting his comical yellow face,
wrinkled as a Barbary ape, till he looked like one of those villanous
little monkeys squatting on the shoulders of the Alpinist.
The young girl alone listened to him very seriously, striving to
comprehend such a singular type of man. Did he think all that he said?
Had he done all that he related? Was he a madman, a comedian, or simply
a gabbler, as Manilof in his quality of man of action insisted, giving
to the word a most contemptuous signification.
The answer was given at once. His toast ended, Tartarin had just sat
down when a sudden shot, a second, then a third, fired close to the
tavern, brought him again to his feet, ears straining and nostrils
scenting powder.
“Who fired?.. where is it?.. what is happening?..”
In his inventive noddle a whole drama was already defiling; attack on
the convoy by armed bands; opportunity given him to defend the honour
and life of that charming young lady. But no! the discharges only came
from the Stand, where the youths of the village practise at a mark
every Sunday. As the horses were not yet harnessed, Tartarin, as if
carelessly, proposed to go and look at them. He had his idea, and Sonia
had hers in accepting the proposal. Guided by the old soldier of Charles
X. wobbling under his shako, they crossed the market-place, opening the
ranks of the crowd, who followed them with curiosity.
Beneath its thatched roof and its square uprights of pine wood the
Stand resembled one of our own pistol-galleries at a fair, with this
difference, that the amateurs brought their own weapons, breech-loading
muskets of the oldest pattern, which they managed, however, with some
adroitness. Tar-tarin, his arms crossed, observed the shots, criticised
them aloud, gave his advice, but did not fire himself. The Russians
watched him, making signs to each other.
“Pan!.. pan!..” sneered Bolibine, making the gesture of taking aim
and mimicking Tartarin’s accent. Tartarin turned round very red, and
swelling with anger.
“_Parfaitemain_, young man... Pan!.. pan!.. and as often as you like.”
The time to load an old double-barrelled carbine which must have served
several generations of chamois hunters, and--pan!.. pan!.. T is done.
Both balls are in the bull’s-eye. Hurrahs of admiration burst forth on
all sides. Sonia triumphed. Bolibine laughed no more.
“But that is nothing, that!” said Tartarin; “you shall see...”
The Stand did not suffice him; he looked about for another target,
and the crowd recoiled alarmed from this strange Alpinist, thick-set,
savage-looking and carbine in hand, when they heard him propose to the
old guard of Charles X. to break his pipe between his teeth at fifty
paces. The old fellow howled in terror and plunged into the crowd, his
trembling plume remaining visible above their serried heads. None the
less, Tartarin felt that he must put it somewhere, that ball. “_Té!
pardi!_ as we did at Tarascon!..” And the former cap-hunter pitched his
headgear high into the air with all the strength of his double muscles,
shot it on the fly, and pierced it. “Bravo!” cried Sonia, sticking into
the small hole made by the ball the bouquet of cyclamen with which she
had stroked her cheek.
With that charming trophy in his cap Tartarin returned to the landau.
The trumpet sounded, the convoy started, the horses went rapidly down to
Brienz along that marvellous corniche road, blasted in the side of the
rock, separated from an abyss of over a thousand feet by single stones
a couple of yards apart. But Tartarin was no longer conscious of danger;
no longer did he look at the scenery--that Meyringen valley, seen
through a light veil of mist, with its river in straight lines, the
lake, the villages massing themselves in the distance, and that whole
horizon of mountains, of glaciers, blending at times with the clouds,
displaced by the turns of the road, lost apparently, and then returning,
like the shifting scenes of a stage.
Softened by tender thoughts, the hero admired the sweet child before
him, reflecting that glory is only a semi-happiness, that ‘tis sad to
grow old all alone in your greatness, like Moses, and that this fragile
flower of the North transplanted into the little garden at Tarascon
would brighten its monotony, and be sweeter to see and breathe than
that everlasting baobab, _arbos gigantea_, diminutively confined in the
mignonette pot. With her childlike eyes, and her broad brow, thoughtful
and self-willed, Sonia looked at him, and she, too, dreamed--but who
knows what the young girls dream of?