Memorable dialogue between the jungfrau and Tartarin. A
nihilist salon. The duel with hunting-knives. Frightful
nightmare, “Is it I you are seeking, messieurs?” Strange
reception given by the hotel-keeper Meyer to the Tarasconese
delegation.
Like all the other choice hotels at Interlaken, the Hôtel Jungfrau, kept
by Meyer, is situated on the Höheweg, a wide promenade between double
rows of chestnut-trees that vaguely reminded Tar-tarin of the beloved
Tour de Ville of his native town, minus the sun, the grasshoppers, and
the dust; for during his week’s sojourn at Interlaken the rain had never
ceased to fall.
He occupied a very fine chamber with a balcony on the first floor, and
trimmed his beard in the morning before a little hand-glass hanging to
the window, an old habit of his when travelling. The first object that
daily struck his eyes beyond the fields of grass and corn, the nursery
gardens, and an amphitheatre of solemn verdure in rising stages, was
the Jungfrau, lifting from the clouds her summit, like a horn, white and
pure with unbroken snow, to which was daily clinging a furtive ray of
the still invisible rising sun. Then between the white and rosy Alp
and the Alpinist a little dialogue took place regularly, which was not
without its grandeur.
“Tartarin, are you coming?” asked the Jung-frau sternly.
“Here, here...” replied the hero, his thumb under his nose and finishing
his beard as fast as possible. Then he would hastily take down his
ascensionist outfit and, swearing at himself, put it on.
“_Coquin de sort!_ there’s no name for it...”
But a soft voice rose, demure and clear among the myrtles in the border
beneath his window.
“Good-morning,” said Sonia, as he appeared upon the balcony, “the landau
is ready... Come, make haste, lazy man...”
“I ‘m coming, I ‘m coming...”
In a trice he had changed his thick flannel shirt for linen of the
finest quality, his mountain knickerbockers for a suit of serpent-green
that turned the heads of all the women in Tarascon at the Sunday
concerts.
The horses of the landau were pawing before the door; Sonia was already
installed beside Boris, paler, more emaciated day by day in spite of
the beneficent climate of Interlaken. But, regularly, at the moment of
starting, Tartarin was fated to see two forms arise from a bench on
the promenade and approach him with the heavy rolling step of mountain
bears; these were Rodolphe Kaufmann and Christian Inebnit, two famous
Grindelwald guides, engaged by Tartarin for the ascension of the
Jungfrau, who came every morning to ascertain if their monsieur were
ready to start.
The apparition of these two men, in their iron-clamped shoes and fustian
jackets worn threadbare on the back and shoulder by knapsacks and ropes,
their naïve and serious faces, and the four words of French which they
managed to splutter as they twisted their broad-brimmed hats, were a
positive torture to Tartarin. In vain he said to them: “Don’t trouble
yourselves to come; I ‘ll send for you...”
Every day he found them in the same place and got rid of them by a large
coin proportioned to the enormity of his remorse. Enchanted with
this method of “doing the Jungfrau,” the mountaineers pocketed their
_trinkgeld_ gravely, and took, with resigned step, the path to their
native village, leaving Tartarin confused and despairing at his own
weakness. Then the broad open air, the flowering plains reflected in the
limpid pupils of Sonia’s eyes, the touch of her little foot against his
boot in the carriage... The devil take that Jungfrau! The hero thought
only of his love, or rather of the mission he had given himself to
bring back into the right path that poor little Sonia, so unconsciously
criminal, cast by sisterly devotion outside of the law, and outside of
human nature.
This was the motive that kept him at Interlaken, in the same hotel as
the Wassiliefs. At his age, with his air of a good papa, he certainly
could not dream of making that poor child love him, but he saw her so
sweet, so brave, so generous to all the unfortunates of her party, so
devoted to that brother whom the mines of Siberia had sent back to her,
his body eaten with ulcers, poisoned with verdigris, and he himself
condemned to death by phthisis more surely than by any court. There was
enough in all that to touch a man!
Tartarin proposed to take them to Tarascon and settle them in a villa
full of sun at the gates of the town, that good little town where it
never rains and where life is spent in fêtes and song. And with that
he grew excited, rattled a tambourine air on the crown of his hat, and
trolled out the gay native chorus of the farandole dance:
Lagadigadeoù
La Tarasque, la Tarasque,
Lagadigadeoù
La Tarasque de Casteoù.
But while a satirical smile pinched still closer the lips of the sick
man, Sonia shook her head. Neither fêtes nor sun for her so long as the
Russians groaned beneath the yoke of the tyrant. As soon as her brother
was well--her despairing eyes said another thing--nothing could prevent
her from returning up there to suffer and die in the sacred cause.
“But, _coquin de bon sort!_” cried Tartarin, “if you blow up one tyrant
there ‘ll come another... You will have it all to do over again... And
the years will go by, _vé!_ the days for happiness and love...” His way
of saying love--_amour_--à la Tarasconese, with three r’s in it and his
eyes starting out of his head, amused the young girl; then, serious
once more, she declared she would never love any man but the one who
delivered her country. Yes, that man, were he as ugly as Bolibine, more
rustic and common than Manilof, she was ready to give herself wholly to
him, to live at his side, a free gift, as long as her youth lasted and
the man wished for her.
“Free gift!” the term used by Nihilists to express those illegal unions
they contract among themselves by reciprocal consent. And of such
primitive marriage Sonia spoke tranquilly with her virgin air before the
Tarasconese, who, worthy bourgeois, peaceful elector, was now ready
to spend his days beside that adorable girl in the said state of “free
gift” if she had not added those murderous and abominable conditions.
While they were conversing of these extremely delicate matters, the
fields, the lakes, the forests, the mountains lay spread before them,
and always at each new turn, through the cool mist of that perpetual
shower which accompanied our hero on all his excursions, the Jungfrau
raised her white crest, as if to poison by remorse those delicious
hours. They returned to breakfast at a vast _table d’hôte_ where the
Rices and Prunes continued their silent hostilities, to which Tartarin
was wholly indifferent, seated by Sonia, watching that Boris had no open
window at his back, assiduous, paternal, exhibiting all his seductions
as man of the world and his domestic qualities as an excellent
cabbage-rabbit.
After this, he took tea with the Russians in their little salon opening
on a tiny garden at the end of the terrace. Another exquisite hour for
Tartarin of intimate chat in a low voice while Boris slept on a sofa.
The hot water bubbled in the samovar; a perfume of moist flowers slipped
through the half-opened door with the blue reflection of the solanums
that were clustering about it. A little more sun, more warmth, and here
was his dream realized, his pretty Russian installed beside him, taking
care of the garden of the baobab.
Suddenly Sonia gave a jump.
“Two o’clock!.. And the letters?”
“I’m going for them,” said the good Tartarin, and, merely from the tones
of his voice and the resolute, theatrical gesture with which he buttoned
his coat and seized his cane, any one would have guessed the gravity of
the action, apparently so simple, of going to the post-office to fetch
the Wassilief letters.
Closely watched by the local authorities and the Russian police, all
Nihilists, but especially their leaders, are compelled to take certain
precautions, such as having their letters and papers addressed _poste
restante_ to simple initials.
Since their installation at Interlaken, Boris being scarcely able to
drag himself about, Tartarin, to spare Sonia the annoyance of waiting
in line before the post-office wicket exposed to inquisitive eyes, had
taken upon himself the risks and perils of this daily nuisance. The
post-office is not more than ten minutes’ walk from the hotel, in a wide
and noisy street at the end of a promenade lined with cafés, breweries,
shops for the tourists displaying alpenstocks, gaiters, straps,
opera-glasses, smoked glasses, flasks, travelling-bags, all of which
articles seemed placed there expressly to shame the renegade Alpinist.
Tourists were defiling in caravans, with horses, guides, mules, veils
green and blue, and a tintinnabulation of canteens as the animals
ambled, the ice-picks marking each step on the cobble-stones. But this
festive scene, hourly renewed, left Tartarin indifferent. He never even
felt the fresh north wind with a touch of snow coming in gusts from the
mountains, so intent was he on baffling the spies whom he supposed to be
upon his traces.
The foremost soldier of a vanguard, the sharpshooter skirting the
walls of an enemy’s town, never advanced with more mistrust than the
Taras-conese hero while crossing the short distance between the hotel
and the post-office. At the slightest heel-tap sounding behind his own,
he stopped, looked attentively at the photographs in the windows, or
fingered an English or German book lying on a stall, to oblige the
police spy to pass him. Or else he turned suddenly round, to stare with
ferocious eyes at a stout servant-girl going to market, or some harmless
tourist, a _table d’hôte_ Prune, who, taking him for a madman, turned
off, alarmed, from the sidewalk to avoid him.
When he reached the office, where the wickets open, rather oddly,
into the street itself, Tartarin passed and repassed, to observe the
surrounding physiognomies before he himself approached: then, suddenly
darting forward, he inserted his whole head and shoulders into the
opening, muttered a few indistinct syllables (which they always made him
repeat, to his great despair), and, possessor at last of the mysterious
trust, he returned to the hotel by a great détour on the kitchen side,
his hand in his pocket clutching the package of letters and papers,
prepared to tear up and swallow everything at the first alarm.
Manilof and Bolibine were usually awaiting his return with the
Wassiliefs. They did not lodge in the hotel, out of prudence and
economy. Bolibine had found work in a printing-office, and Manilof, a
very clever cabinetmaker, was employed by a builder. Tartarin did not
like them: one annoyed him by his grimaces and his jeering airs; the
other kept looking at him savagely. Besides, they took too much space in
Sonia’s heart.
“He is a hero!” she said of Bolibine; and she told how for three
years he had printed all alone, in the very heart of St. Petersburg, a
revolutionary paper. Three years without ever leaving his upper room, or
showing himself at a window, sleeping at night in a great cupboard built
in the wall, where the woman who lodged him locked him up till morning
with his clandestine press.
And then, that life of Manilof, spent for six months in the subterranean
passages beneath the Winter Palace, watching his opportunity, sleeping
at night on his provision of dynamite, which resulted in giving him
frightful headaches, and nervous troubles; all this, aggravated by
perpetual anxiety, sudden irruptions of the police, vaguely informed
that something was plotting, and coming, suddenly and unexpectedly,
to surprise the workmen employed at the Palace. On one of the rare
occasions when Manilof came out of the mine, he met on the Place de
l’Amirauté a delegate of the Revolutionary Committee, who asked him in a
low voice, as he walked along:
“Is it finished?”
“No, not yet...” said the other, scarcely moving his lips. At last,
on an evening in February, to the same question in the same words he
answered, with the greatest calmness:
“It is finished...”
And almost immediately a horrible uproar confirmed his words, all the
lights of the palace went out suddenly, the place was plunged into
complete obscurity, rent by cries of agony and terror, the blowing of
bugles, the galloping of soldiers, and firemen tearing along with their
trucks.
Here Sonia interrupted her tale:
“Is it not horrible, so many human lives sacrificed, such efforts, such
courage, such wasted intelligence?.. No, no, it is a bad means, these
butcheries in the mass... He who should be killed always escapes... The
true way, the most humane, would be to seek the czar himself as you seek
the lion, fully determined, fully armed, post yourself at a window or
the door of a carriage... and, when he passes.....”
“_Bé!_ yes, _certainemain_...” responded Tartarin embarrassed, and
pretending not to seize her meaning; then, suddenly, he would launch
into a philosophical, humanitarian discussion with one of the numerous
assistants. For Bolibine and Manilof were not the only visitors to the
Wassiliefs. Every day new faces appeared of young people, men or women,
with the cut of poor students; elated teachers, blond and rosy, with
the self-willed forehead and the childlike ferocity of Sonia; outlawed
exiles, some of them already condemned to death, which lessened in no
way their youthful expansiveness.
They laughed, they talked openly, and as most of them spoke French,
Tartarin was soon at his ease. They called him “uncle,” conscious of
something childlike and artless about him that they liked. Perhaps he
was over-ready with his hunting tales; turning up his sleeve to his
biceps in order to show the scar of a blow from a panther’s claws, or
making his hearers feel beneath his beard the holes left there by the
fangs of a lion; perhaps also he became too rapidly familiar with these
persons, catching them round the waist, leaning on their shoulders,
calling them by their Christian names after five minutes’ intercourse:
“Listen, Dmitri...” “You know me, Fédor Ivanovich...” They knew him only
since yesterday, in any case; but they liked him all the same for
his jovial frankness, his amiable, trustful air, and his readiness to
please. They read their letters before him, planned their plots,
and told their passwords to foil the police: a whole atmosphere
of conspiracy which amused the imagination of the Tarasconese hero
immensely: so that, however opposed by nature to acts of violence, he
could not help, at times, discussing their homicidal plans, approving,
criticising, and giving advice dictated by the experience of a great
leader who has trod the path of war, trained to the handling of all
weapons, and to hand-to-hand conflicts with wild beasts.
One day, when they told in his presence of the murder of a policeman,
stabbed by a Nihilist at the theatre, Tartarin showed them how badly the
blow had been struck, and gave them a lesson in knifing.
“Like this, _vé!_ from the top down. Then there’s no risk of wounding
yourself...”
And, excited by his own imitation:
“Let’s suppose, _té!_ that I hold your despot between four eyes in a
boar-hunt He is over there, where you are, Fédor, and I’m here,
near this round table, each of us with our hunting-knife... Come on,
monseigneur, we ‘ll have it out now...”
Planting himself in the middle of the salon, gathering his sturdy legs
under him for a spring, and snorting like a woodchopper, he mimicked a
real fight, ending by his cry of triumph as he plunged the weapon to
the hilt, from the top down, _coquin de sort!_ into the bowels of his
adversary.
“That’s how it ought to be done, my little fellows!”
But what subsequent remorse! what anguish when, escaping from the
magnetism of Sonia’s blue eyes, he found himself alone, in his nightcap,
alone with his reflections and his nightly glass of _eau sucrée!_
_Différemment_, what was he meddling with? The czar was not his czar,
decidedly, and all these matters didn’t concern him in the least... And
don’t you see that some of these days he would be captured, extradited
and delivered over to Muscovite justice... _Boufre!_ they don’t joke,
those Cossacks... And in the obscurity of his hotel chamber, with that
horrible imaginative faculty which the horizontal position increases,
there developed before him--like one of those unfolding pictures given
to him in childhood--the various and terrible punishments to which
he should be subjected: Tartarin in the verdigris mines, like Boris,
working in water to his belly, his body ulcerated, poisoned. He
escapes, he hides amid forests laden with snow, pursued by Tartars and
bloodhounds trained to hunt men. Exhausted with cold and hunger, he is
retaken and finally hung between two thieves, embraced by a pope with
greasy hair smelling of brandy and seal-oil; while away down there, at
Tarascon in the sunshine, the band playing of a fine Sunday, the crowd,
the ungrateful crowd, are installing a radiant Costecalde in the chair
of the P. C. A.
It was during the agony of one of these dreadful dreams that he uttered
his cry of distress, “Help, help, Bézuquet!” and sent to the apothecary
that confidential letter, all moist with the sweat of his nightmare. But
Sonia’s pretty “Good morning” beneath his window sufficed to cast him
back into the weaknesses of indecision.
One evening, returning from the Kursaal to the hotel with the Wassiliefs
and Bolibine, after two hours of intoxicating music, the unfortunate man
forgot all prudence, and the “Sonia, I love you,” which he had so long
restrained, was uttered as he pressed the arm that rested on his own.
She was not agitated. Perfectly pale, she gazed at him under the gas
of the portico on which they had paused: “Then deserve me...” she said,
with a pretty enigmatical smile, a smile that gleamed upon her delicate
white teeth. Tartarin was about to reply, to bind himself by an oath to
some criminal madness when the porter of the hotel came up to him:
“There are persons waiting for you, upstairs... some gentlemen... They
want you.”
“Want me!.. _Outre!_.. What for?” And No. 1 of his folding series
appeared before him: Tartarin captured, extradited... Of course he was
frightened, but his attitude was heroic. Quickly detaching himself from
Sonia: “Fly, save yourself!” he said to her in a smothered voice. Then
he mounted the stairs as if to the scaffold, his head high, his eyes
proud, but so disturbed in mind that he was forced to cling to the
baluster.
As he entered the corridor, he saw persons grouped at the farther end
of it before his door, looking through the keyhole, rapping, and calling
out: “Hey! Tartarin...”
He made two steps forward, and said, with parched lips: “Is it I whom
you are seeking, messieurs?”
“_Te! pardi_, yes, my president!.”
And a little old man, alert and wiry, dressed in gray, and apparently
bringing on his coat, his hat, his gaiters and his long and pendent
moustache all the dust of his native town, fell upon the neck of the
hero and rubbed against his smooth fat cheeks the withered leathery skin
of the retired captain of equipment.
“Bravida!.. not possible!.. Excourbaniès too!.. and who is that over
there?..”
A bleating answered: “Dear ma-a-aster!..” and the pupil advanced,
banging against the wall a sort of long fishing-rod with a packet at one
end wrapped in gray paper, and oilcloth tied round it with string.
“Hey! _vè!_ why it’s Pascalon... Embrace me, little one... What’s that
you are carrying?.. Put it down...”
“The paper... take off the paper!..” whispered Bravida. The youth undid
the roll with a rapid hand and the Tarasconese banner was displayed to
the eyes of the amazed Tartarin.
The delegates took off their hats.
“President”--the voice of Bravida trembled solemnly--“you asked for the
banner and we have brought it, _té!_”
The president opened a pair of eyes as round as apples: “I! I asked for
it?”
“What! you did not ask for it? Bézuquet said so.
“Yes, yes, _certainemain_...” said Tartarin, suddenly enlightened by
the mention of Bézuquet. He understood all and guessed the rest, and,
tenderly moved by the ingenious lie of the apothecary to recall him to
a sense of duty and honour, he choked, and stammered in his short beard:
“Ah! my children, how kind you are! What good you have done me!”
“_Vive le présidain!_” yelped Pascalon, brandishing the oriflamme.
Excourbaniès’ gong responded, rolling its war-cry (” Ha! ha! ha! _fen
dé brut_..”) to the very cellars of the hotel. Doors opened, inquisitive
heads protruded on every floor and then disappeared, alarmed, before
that standard and the dark and hairy men who were roaring singular
words and tossing their arms in the air. Never had the peaceable Hôtel
Jungfrau been subjected to such a racket.
“Come into my room,” said Tartarin, rather disconcerted. He was feeling
about in the darkness to find matches when an authoritative rap on the
door made it open of itself to admit the consequential, yellow, and
puffy face of the innkeeper Meyer. He was about to enter, but stopped
short before the darkness of the room, and said with closed teeth:
“Try to keep quiet... or I ‘ll have you taken up by the police...”
A grunt as of wild bulls issued from the shadow at that brutal term
“taken up.” The hotel-keeper recoiled one step, but added: “It is known
who you are; they have their eye upon you; for my part, I don’t want any
more such persons in my house!..”
“Monsieur Meyer,” said Tartarin, gently, politely, but very firmly...
“Send me my bill... These gentlemen and myself start to-morrow morning
for the Jungfrau.”
O native soil! O little country within a great one! by only hearing the
Tarasconese accent, quivering still with the air of that beloved land
beneath the azure folds of its banner, behold Tartarin, delivered from
love and its snares and restored to his friends, his mission, his glory.