Tartarin On The Alps Part 10

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 Brunig pa.s.s, which could also be reached on foot in twenty minutes less time through a n.o.ble 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 b.a.l.l.s. 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 nave 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 s.h.i.+ning in a face that was flayed by the briers; his beard and his long lank hair were streaming with water from the branches. Breathless, holding with his coa.r.s.e, hairy hands to the doorway, he spoke in Russian to Sonia, who turned instantly to Tartarin and said in a curt voice:--

"Your rope... quick..."

"My... my rope?.." stammered the hero.

"Quick, quick... you shall have it again in half an hour."

Offering no other explanation, she helped him with her little gloved hands to divest himself of his famous rope made in Avignon. Manilof took the coil, grunting with joy; in two bounds he sprang, with the elasticity of a wild-cat, into the thicket and disappeared.

"What has happened? What are they going to do?.. He looked ferocious..."

murmured Tartaric not daring to utter his whole thought.

Ferocious, Manilof! Ah! how plain it was he did not know him. No human being was ever better, gentler, more compa.s.sionate; and to show Tartarin a trait of that exceptionally kind nature, Sonia, with her clear, blue glance, told him how her friend, having executed a dangerous mandate of the Revolutionary Committee and jumped into the sledge which awaited him for escape, had threatened the driver to get out, cost what it might, if he persisted in whipping the horse whose fleetness alone could save him.

Tartarin thought the act worthy of antiquity. Then, having reflected on all the human lives sacrificed by that same Manilof, as conscienceless as an earthquake or a volcano in eruption, who yet would not let others hurt an animal in his presence, he questioned the young girl with an ingenuous air:--

"Were there many killed by the explosion at the Winter Palace?"

"Too many," replied Sonia, sadly; "and the only one that ought to have died escaped."

She remained silent, as if displeased, looking so pretty, her head lowered, with her long auburn eyelashes sweeping her pale rose cheeks.

Tartarin, angry with himself for having pained her, was caught once more by that charm of youth and freshness which the strange little creature shed around her.

"So, monsieur, the war that we are making seems to you unjust, inhuman?"

She said it quite close to him in a caress, as it were, of her breath and her eye; the hero felt himself weakening...

"You do not see that all means are good and legitimate to deliver a people who groan and suffocate?.."

"No doubt, no doubt..."

The young girl, growing more insistent as Tartarin weakened, went on:--

"You spoke just now of a void to be filled; does it not seem to you more n.o.ble, 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 Brunig; 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 a.s.sa.s.sins. 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.