The catastrophe.
On a dark, dark night, moonless, starless, skyless, on the trembling
whiteness of a vast ledge of snow, slowly a long rope unrolled itself,
to which were attached in file certain timorous and very small shades,
preceded, at the distance of a hundred feet, by a lantern casting a red
light along the way. Blows of an ice-axe ringing on the hard snow, the
roll of the ice blocks thus detached, alone broke the silence of the
_névé_ on which the steps of the caravan made no sound. From minute to
minute, a cry, a smothered groan, the fall of a body on the ice, and
then immediately a strong voice sounding from the end of the rope: “Go
gently, Gonzague, and don’t fall.” For poor Bompard had made up his mind
to follow his friend Tartarin to the summit of Mont Blanc. Since two in
the morning--it was now four by the president’s repeater--the hapless
courier had groped along, a galley slave on the chain, dragged, pushed,
vacillating, balking, compelled to restrain the varied exclamations
extorted from him by his mishaps, for an avalanche was on the watch, and
the slightest concussion, a mere vibration of the crystalline air, might
send down its masses of snow and ice. To suffer in silence! what torture
to a native of Tarascon!
But the caravan halted. Tartarin asked why. A discussion in low voice
was heard; animated whisperings: “It is your companion who won’t come
on,” said the Swedish student. The order of march was broken; the human
chaplet returned upon itself, and they found themselves all at the edge
of a vast crevasse, called by the mountaineers a _roture_. Preceding
ones they had crossed by means of a ladder, over which they crawled
on their hands and knees; here the crevasse was much wider and the
ice-cliff rose on the other side to a height of eighty or a hundred
feet. It was necessary to descend to the bottom of the gully, which
grew smaller as it went down, by means of steps cut in the ice, and
to reascend in the same way on the other side. But Bompard obstinately
refused to do so.
Leaning over the abyss, which the shadows represented as bottomless, he
watched through the damp vapour the movements of the little lantern by
which the guides below were preparing the way. Tartarin, none too easy
himself, warmed his own courage by exhorting his friend: “Come now,
Gonzague, _zou!_” and then in a lower voice coaxed him to honour,
invoked the banner, Tarascon, the Club...
“Ah! _vaï_, the Club indeed!.. I don’t belong to it,” replied the other,
cynically.
Then Tartarin explained to him where to set his feet, and assured him
that nothing was easier.
“For you, perhaps, but not for me...” “But you said you had a habit of
it...” “_Bé!_ yes! habit, of course... which habit? I have so many...
habit of smoking, sleeping...” “And lying, especially,” interrupted the
president.
“Exaggerating--come now!” said Bompard, not the least in the world
annoyed.
However, after much hesitation, the threat of leaving him there all
alone decided him to go slowly, deliberately, down that terrible
miller’s ladder... The going up was more difficult, for the other face
was nearly perpendicular, smooth as marble, and higher than King Rene’s
tower at Tarascon. From below, the winking light of the guides going up,
looked like a glow-worm on the march. He was forced to follow, however,
for the snow beneath his feet was not solid, and gurgling sounds of
circulating water heard round a fissure told of more than could be seen
at the foot of that wall of ice, of depths that were sending upward the
chilling breath of subterranean abysses.
“Go gently, Gonzague, for fear of falling...” That phrase, which
Tartarin uttered with tender intonations, almost supplicating,
borrowed a solemn signification from the respective positions of the
ascensionists, clinging with feet and hands one above the other to the
wall, bound by the rope and the similarity of their movements, so that
the fall or the awkwardness of one put all in danger. And what danger!
_coquin de sort!_ It sufficed to hear fragments of the ice-wall bounding
and dashing downward with the echo of their fall to imagine the open
jaws of the monster watching there below to snap you up at the least
false step.
But what is this?.. Lo, the tall Swede, next above Tartarin, has stopped
and touches with his iron heels the cap of the P. C. A. In vain the
guides called: “Forward!..” And the president: “Go on, young man!..”
He did not stir. Stretched at full length, clinging to the ice with
careless hand, the Swede leaned down, the glimmering dawn touching his
scanty beard and giving light to the singular expression of his dilated
eyes, while he made a sign to Tartarin:--
“What a fall, hey? if one let go...”
“_Outre!_ I should say so... you would drag us all down... Go on!”
The other remained motionless.
“A fine chance to be done with life, to return into chaos through the
bowels of the earth, and roll from fissure to fissure like that bit
of ice which I kick with my foot...” And he leaned over frightfully
to watch the fragment bounding downward and echoing endlessly in the
blackness.
“Take care!..” cried Tartarin, livid with terror. Then, desperately
clinging to the oozing wall, he resumed, with hot ardour, his argument
of the night before in favour of existence. “There’s _good_ in it...
What the deuce!.. At your age, a fine young fellow like you... Don’t you
believe in love, _qué!_”
No, the Swede did not believe in it. Ideal love is a poet’s lie; the
other, only a need he had never felt...
“_Bé!_ yes! _bé!_ yes!.. It is true poets lie, they always say more than
there is; but for all that, she is nice, the _femellan_--that’s what
they call women in our parts. Besides, there’s children, pretty little
darlings that look like us.”
“Children! a source of grief. Ever since she had them my mother has done
nothing but weep.”
“Listen, Otto, you know me, my good friend...”
And with all the valorous ardour of his soul Tartarin exhausted himself
to revive and rub to life at that distance this victim of Schopenhauer
and of Hartmann, two rascals he’d like to catch at the corner of a
wood, _coquin de sort!_ and make them pay for all the harm they had done
to youth...
Represent to yourselves during this discussion the high wall of
freezing, glaucous, streaming ice touched by a pallid ray of light,
and that string of human beings glued to it in echelon, with ill-omened
rumblings rising from the yawning depth, together with the curses of the
guides and their threats to detach and abandon the travellers. Tartarin,
seeing that no argument could convince the madman or clear off his
vertigo of death, suggested to him the idea of throwing himself from
the highest peak of the Mont Blanc... That indeed! _that_ would be
worth doing, up there! A fine end among the elements... But here, at the
bottom of a cave... Ah! _vaï_, what a blunder!.. And he put such tone
into his words, brusque and yet persuasive, such conviction, that the
Swede allowed himself to be conquered, and there they were, at last, one
by one, at the top of that terrible _roture_.
They were now unroped, and a halt was called for a bite and sup. It
was daylight; a cold wan light among a circle of peaks and shafts,
overtopped by the Mont Blanc, still thousands of feet above them. The
guides were apart, gesticulating and consulting, with many shakings of
the head. Seated on the white ground, heavy and huddled up, their round
backs in their brown jackets, they looked like marmots getting ready to
hibernate. Bompard and Tartarin, uneasy, shocked, left the young Swede
to eat alone, and came up to the guides just as their leader was saying
with a grave air:--
“He is smoking his pipe; there’s no denying it.”
“Who is smoking his pipe?” asked Tartarin.
“Mont Blanc, monsieur; look there...”
And the guide pointed to the extreme top of the highest peak, where,
like a plume, a white vapour floated toward Italy.
“_Et autremain_, my good friend, when the Mont Blanc smokes his pipe,
what does that mean?”
“It means, monsieur, that there is a terrible wind on the summit, and
a snow-storm which will be down upon us before long. And I tell you,
that’s dangerous.”
“Let us go back,” said Bompard, turning green; and Tartarin added:--
“Yes, yes, certainly; no false vanity, of course.”
But here the Swedish student interfered. He had paid his money to be
taken to the top of Mont Blanc, and nothing should prevent his getting
there. He would go alone, if no one would accompany him. “Cowards!
cowards!” he added, turning to the guides; and he uttered the insult in
the same ghostly voice with which he had roused himself just before to
suicide.
“You shall see if we are cowards... Fasten to the rope and forward!”
cried the head guide. This time, it was Bompard who protested
energetically. He had had enough, and he wanted to be taken back.
Tartarin supported him vigorously.
“You see very well that that young man is insane...” he said, pointing
to the Swede, who had already started with great strides through the
heavy snow-flakes which the wind was beginning to whirl on all sides.
But nothing could stop the men who had just been called cowards. The
marmots were now wide-awake and heroic. Tartarin could not even obtain
a conductor to take him back with Bompard to the Grands-Mulets. Besides,
the way was very easy; three hours’ march, counting a detour of twenty
minutes to get round that _roture_, if they were afraid to go through it
alone.
“_Outre!_ yes, we are afraid of it...” said Bompard, without the
slightest shame; and the two parties separated.
Bompard and the P. C. A. were now alone. They advanced with caution on
the snowy desert, fastened to a rope: Tartarin first, feeling his way
gravely with his ice-axe; filled with a sense of responsibility and
finding relief in it.
“Courage! keep cool!.. We shall get out of it all right,” he called to
Bompard repeatedly. It is thus that an officer in battle, seeking to
drive away his own fear, brandishes his sword and shouts to his men:
“Forward! _s. n. de D_!.. all balls don’t kill.”
At last, here they were at the end of that horrible crevasse. From there
to the hut there were no great obstacles; but the wind blew, and blinded
them with snowy whirlwinds. Further advance was impossible for fear of
losing their way.
“Let us stop here for a moment,” said Tartarin. A gigantic _sérac_ of
ice offered them a hollow at its base. Into it they crept, spreading
down the india-rubber rug of the president and opening a flask of rum,
the sole article of provision left them by the guides. A little warmth
and comfort followed thereon, while the blows of the ice-axes, getting
fainter and fainter up the height, told them of the progress of the
expedition. They echoed in the heart of the P. C. A. like a pang of
regret for not having done the Mont Blanc to the summit.
“Who ‘ll know it?” returned Bompard, cynically. “The porters kept the
banner, and Chamonix will believe it is you.”
“You are right,” cried Tartarin, in a tone of conviction; “the honour of
Tarascon is safe...”
But the elements grew furious, the north-wind a hurricane, the snow flew
in volumes. Both were silent, haunted by sinister ideas; they remembered
those ill-omened relics in the glass case of the old inn-keeper, his
laments, the legend of that American tourist found petrified with cold
and hunger, holding in his stiffened hand a note-book, in which his
agonies were written down even to the last convulsion, which made the
pencil slip and the signature uneven.
“Have you a note-book, Gonzague?”