Tartarin on the Alps, Alphonse Daudet [digital e reader .TXT] 📗

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 Bruenig 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, _ve!_ 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 re_ (l'adore), 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, _te!_"
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."
"_Te!_ 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 Bruenig 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:--
"_Differemment_, 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 Gerard, 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.
The young girl looked at him with naive admiration, thinking aloud:--
"That must certainly be the surest way."
A sudden rending of the branches and the underbrush, and the thicket parted above them, so quickly and in so feline a way that Tartarin, his head now full of hunting adventures, might have thought himself still on the watch in the Zaccar. But Manilof sprang from the slope, noiselessly, and close to the carriage. His small, cunning eyes were shining in a face that was flayed by the briers; his beard and his long