Tartarin On The Alps Part 3

Suddenly Tartarin entered, loaded with rugs, carpet-bag in hand, and so pale, so discomposed, that the apothecary, with that fiery local imagination from which the pharmacy was no preservative, jumped to the conclusion of some alarming misadventure and was terrified. "Unhappy man!" he cried, "what is it?.. you are poisoned?.. Quick! quick! some ipeca..."

And he sprang forward, bustling among his bottles. To stop him, Tartarin was forced to catch him round the waist. "Listen to me, _que diable!_"

and his voice grated with the vexation of an actor whose entrance has been made to miss fire. As soon as the apothecary was rendered motionless behind the counter by an iron wrist, Tartarin said in a low voice:--

"Are we alone, Bezuquet?"

"_Be_! yes," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the other, looking about in vague alarm...

"Pascalon has gone to bed." [ Pascalon was his pupil.] "Mamma too; why do you ask?"

"Shut the shutters," commanded Tartarin, without replying; "we might be seen from without."

Bezuquet obeyed, trembling. An old bachelor, living with his mother, whom he never quitted, he had all the gentleness and timidity of a girl, contrasting oddly with his swarthy skin, his hairy lips, his great hooked nose above a spreading moustache; in short, the head of an Algerine pirate before the conquest. These ant.i.theses are frequent in Tarascon, where heads have too much character, Roman or Saracen, heads with the expression of models for a school of design, but quite out of place in bourgeois trades among the manners and customs of a little town.

For instance, Excourbanies, who has all the air of a _conquistador_, companion of Pizarro, rolls flaming eyes in selling haberdashery to induce the purchase of two sous' worth of thread. And Bezuquet, labelling liquorice and _sirupus gummi_, resembles an old sea-rover of the Barbary coast.

When the shutters were put up and secured by iron bolts and transversal bars, "Listen, Ferdinand..." said Tartarin, who was fond of calling people by their Christian names. And thereupon he unbosomed himself, emptied his heart full of bitterness at the ingrat.i.tude of his compatriots, related the manoeuvres of "c.o.c.k-leg," the trick about to be played upon him at the coming elections, and the manner in which he expected to parry the blow.

Before all else, the matter must be kept very secret; it must not be revealed until the moment when success was a.s.sured, unless some unforeseen accident, one of those frightful catastrophes--"Hey, Bezuquet! don't whistle in that way when I talk to you."

This was one of the apothecary's ridiculous habits. Not talkative by nature (a negative quality seldom met with in Tarascon, and which won him this confidence of the president), his thick lips, always in the form of an O, had a habit of perpetually whistling that gave him an appearance of laughing in the nose of the world, even on the gravest occasions.

So that, while the hero made allusion to his possible death, saying, as he laid upon the counter a large sealed envelope, "This is my last will and testament, Bezuquet; it is you whom I have chosen as testamentary executor..." "Hui... hui... hui..." whistled the apothecary, carried away by his mania, while at heart he was deeply moved and fully conscious of the grandeur of his role.

Then, the hour of departure being at hand, he desired to drink to the enterprise, "something good, _que?_ a gla.s.s of the elixir of Garus, hey?" After several closets had been opened and searched, he remembered that mamma had the keys of the Garus. To get them it would be necessary to awaken her and tell who was there. The elixir was therefore changed to a gla.s.s of the _sirop de Calabre_, a summer drink, inoffensive and modest, which Bezuquet invented, advertising it in the _Forum_ as follows: _Sirop de Calabre, ten sous a bottle, including the gla.s.s (verre)_. "Sirop de Cadavre, including the worms (_vers_)," said that infernal Costecalde, who spat upon all success. But, after all, that horrid play upon words only served to swell the sale, and the Tarasconese to this day delight in their _sirop de cadavre_.

Libations made and a few last words exchanged, they embraced, Bezuquet whistling as usual in his moustache, adown which rolled great tears.

"Adieu, _au mouain_"... said Tartarin in a rough tone, feeling that he was about to weep himself, and as the shutter of the door had been lowered the hero was compelled to creep out of the pharmacy on his hands and knees.

This was one of the trials of the journey now about to begin.

Three days later he landed in Vitznau at the foot of the Rigi. As the mountain for his debut, the Rigi had attracted him by its low alt.i.tude (5900 feet, about ten times that of Mount Terrible, the highest of the Alpines) and also on account of the splendid panorama to be seen from the summit--the Bernese Alps marshalled in line, all white and rosy, around the lakes, awaiting the moment when the great ascensionist should cast his ice-axe upon one of them.

Certain of being recognized on the way and perhaps followed--'t was a foible of his to believe that throughout all France his fame was as great and popular as it was at Tarascon--he had made a great detour before entering Switzerland and did not don his accoutrements until after he had crossed the frontier. Luckily for him; for never could his armament have been contained in one French railway-carriage.

But, however convenient the Swiss compartments might be, the Alpinist, hampered with utensils to which he was not, as yet, accustomed, crushed toe-nails with his crampons, harpooned travellers who came in his way with the point of his alpenstock, and wherever he went, in the stations, the steamers, and the hotel salons, he excited as much amazement as he did maledictions, avoidance, and angry looks, which he could not explain to himself though his affectionate and communicative nature suffered from them. To complete his discomfort, the sky was always gray, with flocks of clouds and a driving rain.

It rained at Bale, on the little white houses, washed and rewashed by the hands of a maid and the waters of heaven. It rained at Lucerne, on the quay where the trunks and boxes appeared to be saved, as it were, from s.h.i.+pwreck, and when he arrived at the station of Vitznau, on the sh.o.r.e of the lake of the Four-Cantons, the same deluge was descending on the verdant slopes of the Rigi, straddled by inky clouds and striped with torrents that leaped from rock to rock in cascades of misty sleet, bringing down as they came the loose stones and the pine-needles. Never had Tartarin seen so much water.

He entered an inn and ordered a _cafe au lait_ with honey and b.u.t.ter, the only really good things he had as yet tasted during his journey.

Then, reinvigorated, and his beard sticky with honey, cleaned on a corner of his napkin, he prepared to attempt his first ascension.

"_Et autremain_" he asked, as he s.h.i.+fted his knapsack, "how long does it take to ascend the Rigi?"

"One hour, one hour and a quarter, monsieur; but make haste about it; the train is just starting."

"A train upon the Rigi!.. you are joking!.."

Through the leaded panes of the tavern window he was shown the train that was really starting. Two great covered carriages, windowless, pushed by a locomotive with a short, corpulent chimney, in shape like a saucepan, a monstrous insect, clinging to the mountain and clambering, breathless up its vertiginous slopes.

The two Tartarins, cabbage and warren, both, at the same instant, revolted at the thought of going up in that hideous mechanism. One of them thought it ridiculous to climb the Alps in a lift; as for the other, those aerial bridges on which the track was laid, with the prospect of a fall of 4000 feet at the slightest derailment, inspired him with all sorts of lamentable reflections, justified by the little cemetery of Vitzgau, the white tombs of which lay huddled together at the foot of the slope, like linen spread out to bleach in the yard of a wash-house. Evidently the cemetery is there by way of precaution, so that, in case of accident, the travellers may drop on the very spot.

"I'll go afoot," the valiant Tarasconese said to himself; "'twill exercise me... zou!"

And he started, wholly preoccupied with manoeuvring his alpenstock in presence of the staff of the hotel, collected about the door and shouting directions to him about the path, to which he did not listen.

He first followed an ascending road, paved with large irregular, pointed stones like a lane at the South, and bordered with wooden gutters to carry off the rains.

To right and left were great orchards, fields of rank, lush gra.s.s crossed by the same wooden conduits for irrigation through hollowed trunks of trees. All this made a constant rippling from top to bottom of the mountain, and every time that the ice-axe of the Alpinist became hooked as he walked along in the lower branches of an oak or a walnut-tree, his cap crackled as if beneath the nozzle of a watering-pot.

"Diou! what a lot of water!" sighed the man of the South. But it was much worse when the pebbly path abruptly ceased and he was forced to puddle along in the torrent or jump from rock to rock to save his gaiters. Then a shower joined in, penetrating, steady, and seeming to get colder the higher he went. When he stopped to recover breath he could hear nothing else than a vast noise of waters in which he seemed to be sunk, and he saw, as he turned round, the clouds descending into the lake in delicate long filaments of spun gla.s.s through which the chalets of Vitznau shone like freshly varnished toys.

Men and children pa.s.sed him with lowered heads and backs bent beneath hods of white-wood, containing provisions for some villa or _pension_, the balconies of which could be distinguished on the slopes.

"Rigi-Kulm?" asked Tartarin, to be sure he was heading in the right direction. But his extraordinary equipment, especially, that knitted m.u.f.fler which masked his face, cast terror along the way, and all whom he addressed only opened their eyes wide and hastened their steps without replying.

Soon these encounters became rare. The last human being whom he saw was an old woman was.h.i.+ng her linen in the hollowed trunk of a tree under the shelter of an enormous red umbrella, planted in the ground.

"Rigi-Kulm?" asked the Alpinist.

The old woman raised an idiotic, cadaverous face, with a goitre swaying upon her throat as large as the rustic bell of a Swiss cow. Then, after gazing at him for a long time, she was seized with inextinguishable laughter, which stretched her mouth from ear to ear, wrinkled up the corners of her little eyes, and every time she opened them the sight of Tartarin, planted before her with his ice-axe on his shoulder, redoubled her joy.

"_Tron de l'air!_" growled the Tarasconese, "lucky for her that she's a woman..." Snorting with anger, he continued his way and lost it in a pine-wood, where his boots slipped on the oozing moss.

Beyond this point the landscape changed. No more paths, or trees, or pastures. Gloomy, denuded slopes, great boulders of rock which he scaled on his knees for fear of falling; sloughs full of yellow mud, which he crossed slowly, feeling before him with his alpenstock and lifting his feet like a knife-grinder. At every moment he looked at the compa.s.s hanging to his broad watch-ribbon; but whether it were the alt.i.tude or the variations of the temperature, the needle seemed untrue. And how could he find his bearings in a thick yellow fog that hindered him from seeing ten steps about him--steps that were now, within a moment, covered with an icy glaze that made the ascent more difficult.

Suddenly he stopped; the ground whitened vaguely before him... Look out for your eyes!..

He had come to the region of snows...

Immediately he pulled out his spectacles, took them from their case, and settled them securely on his nose. The moment was a solemn one. Slightly agitated, yet proud all the same, it seemed to Tar-tarin that in one bound he had risen 3000 feet toward the summits and his greatest dangers.

He now advanced with more precaution, dreaming of creva.s.ses and fissures such as the books tell of, and cursing in the depths of his heart those people at the inn who advised him to mount straight and take no guide.

After all, perhaps he had mistaken the mountain! More than six hours had he tramped, and the Rigi required only three. The wind blew, a chilling wind that whirled the snow in that crepuscular fog.

Night was about to overtake him. Where find a hut? or even a projecting rock to shelter him? All of a sudden, he saw before his nose on the arid, naked plain a species of wooden chalet, bearing, on a long placard in gigantic type, these letters, which he deciphered with difficulty: PHO... TO... GRA... PHIE DU RI... GI KULM. At the same instant the vast hotel with its three hundred windows loomed up before him between the great lamp-posts, the globes of which were now being lighted in the fog.

III.

An alarm on the Rigi. "Keep cool! Keep cool!" The Alpine horn. What Tartarin saw, on awaking, in his looking-gla.s.s, Perplexity. A guide is ordered by telephone.

"Ques aco?.. Qui vive?" cried Tartarin, ears alert and eyes straining hard into the darkness.

Feet were running through the hotel, doors were slamming, breathless voices were crying: "Make haste! make haste!.." while without was ringing what seemed to be a trumpet-call, as flashes of flame illumined both panes and curtains.

Fire!..