The relay!
This was on the market-place of a large village, at an old tavern with a worm-eaten wooden balcony, and a sign hanging to a rusty iron bracket. The file of vehicles stopped, and while the horses were being unharnessed the hungry tourists jumped hurriedly down and rushed into a room on the lower floor, painted green and smelling of mildew, where the table was laid for twenty guests. Sixty had arrived, and for five minutes nothing could be heard but a frightful tumult, cries, and a vehement altercation between the Rices and the Prunes around the compote-dishes, to the great alarm of the tavern-keeper, who lost his head (as if daily, at the same hour, the same post-carriages did not pa.s.s) and bustled about his servants, also seized with chronic bewilderment--excellent method of serving only half the dishes called for by the _carte_, and of giving change in a way that made the white sous of Switzerland count for fifty centimes. "Suppose we dine in the carriage," said Sonia, I annoyed by such confusion; and as no one had time to pay attention to them the young men themselves did the waiting.
Manilof returned with a cold leg of mutton, Bolibine with a long loaf of bread and sausages; but the best forager was Tartarin. Certainly the opportunity to get away from his companions in the bustle of relay ing was a fine one; he might at least have a.s.sured himself that the Italian had reappeared; but he never once thought of it, being solely preoccupied with Sonia"s breakfast, and in showing Manilof and the others how a Tarasconese can manage matters.
When he stepped down the portico of the hotel, gravely, with fixed eyes, bearing in his robust hands a large tray laden with plates, napkins, a.s.sorted food, and Swiss champagne in its gilt-necked bottles, Sonia clapped her hands, and congratulated him.
"How did you manage it?" she said.
"I don"t know... somehow, _te!_.. We are all like that in Tarascon."
Oh! those happy minutes! That pleasant breakfast opposite to Sonia, almost on his knees, the village market-place, like the scene of an operetta, with clumps of green trees, beneath which sparkled the gold ornaments and the muslin sleeves of the Swiss girls, walking about, two and two, like dolls!
How good the bread tasted! what savoury sausages! The heavens themselves took part in the scene, and were soft, veiled, clement; it rained, of course, but so gently, the drops so rare, though just enough to temper the Swiss champagne, always dangerous to Southern heads.
Under the veranda of the hotel, a Tyrolian quartette, two giants and two female dwarfs in resplendent and heavy rags, looking as if they had escaped from the failure of a theatre at a fair, were mingling their throat notes: "aou... aou..." with the clinking of plates and gla.s.ses.
They were ugly, stupid, motionless, straining the cords of their skinny necks. Tartarin thought them delightful, and gave them a handful of sous, to the great amazement of the villagers who surrounded the unhorsed landau.
"Vife la Vranze!" quavered a voice in the crowd, from which issued a tall old man, clothed in a singular blue coat with silver b.u.t.tons, the skirts of which swept the ground; on his head was a gigantic shako, in form like a bucket of sauerkraut, and so weighted by its enormous plume that the old man was forced to balance himself with his arms as he walked, like an acrobat.
"Old soldier... Charles X..."
Tartarin, fresh from Bompard"s revelations, began to laugh, and said in a low voice with a wink of his eye:--
"Up to _that_, old fellow..." But even so, he gave him a white sou and poured him out a b.u.mper, which the old man accepted, laughing, and winking himself, though without knowing why. Then, dislodging from a corner of his mouth an enormous china pipe, he raised his gla.s.s and drank "to the company," which confirmed Tartarin in his opinion that here was a colleague of Bompard.
No matter! one toast deserved another. So, standing up in the carriage, his gla.s.s held high, his voice strong, Tartarin brought tears to his eyes by drinking, first: To France, my country!.. next to hospitable Switzerland, which he was happy to honour publicly and thank for the generous welcome she affords to the vanquished, to the exiled of all lands. Then, lowering his voice and inclining his gla.s.s to the companions of his journey, he wished them a quick return to their country, restoration to their family, safe friends, honourable careers, and an end to all dissensions; for, he said, it is impossible to spend one"s life in eating each other up.
During the utterance of this toast Soma"s brother smiled, cold and sarcastic behind his blue spectacles; Manilof, his neck pushed forth, his swollen eyebrows emphasizing his wrinkle, seemed to be asking himself if that "big barrel" would soon be done with his gabble, while Bolibine, perched on the box, was twisting his comical yellow face, wrinkled as a Barbary ape, till he looked like one of those villanous little monkeys squatting on the shoulders of the Alpinist.
The young girl alone listened to him very seriously, striving to comprehend such a singular type of man. Did he think all that he said?
Had he done all that he related? Was he a madman, a comedian, or simply a gabbler, as Manilof in his quality of man of action insisted, giving to the word a most contemptuous signification.
The answer was given at once. His toast ended, Tartarin had just sat down when a sudden shot, a second, then a third, fired close to the tavern, brought him again to his feet, ears straining and nostrils scenting powder.
"Who fired?.. where is it?.. what is happening?.."
In his inventive noddle a whole drama was already defiling; attack on the convoy by armed bands; opportunity given him to defend the honour and life of that charming young lady. But no! the discharges only came from the Stand, where the youths of the village practise at a mark every Sunday. As the horses were not yet harnessed, Tartarin, as if carelessly, proposed to go and look at them. He had his idea, and Sonia had hers in accepting the proposal. Guided by the old soldier of Charles X. wobbling under his shako, they crossed the market-place, opening the ranks of the crowd, who followed them with curiosity.
Beneath its thatched roof and its square uprights of pine wood the Stand resembled one of our own pistol-galleries at a fair, with this difference, that the amateurs brought their own weapons, breech-loading muskets of the oldest pattern, which they managed, however, with some adroitness. Tar-tarin, his arms crossed, observed the shots, criticised them aloud, gave his advice, but did not fire himself. The Russians watched him, making signs to each other.
"Pan!.. pan!.." sneered Bolibine, making the gesture of taking aim and mimicking Tartarin"s accent. Tartarin turned round very red, and swelling with anger.
"_Parfaitemain_, young man... Pan!.. pan!.. and as often as you like."
The time to load an old double-barrelled carbine which must have served several generations of chamois hunters, and--pan!.. pan!.. T is done.
Both b.a.l.l.s are in the bull"s-eye. Hurrahs of admiration burst forth on all sides. Sonia triumphed. Bolibine laughed no more.
"But that is nothing, that!" said Tartarin; "you shall see..."
The Stand did not suffice him; he looked about for another target, and the crowd recoiled alarmed from this strange Alpinist, thick-set, savage-looking and carbine in hand, when they heard him propose to the old guard of Charles X. to break his pipe between his teeth at fifty paces. The old fellow howled in terror and plunged into the crowd, his trembling plume remaining visible above their serried heads. None the less, Tartarin felt that he must put it somewhere, that ball. "_Te!
pardi!_ as we did at Tarascon!.." And the former cap-hunter pitched his headgear high into the air with all the strength of his double muscles, shot it on the fly, and pierced it. "Bravo!" cried Sonia, sticking into the small hole made by the ball the bouquet of cyclamen with which she had stroked her cheek.
With that charming trophy in his cap Tartarin returned to the landau.
The trumpet sounded, the convoy started, the horses went rapidly down to Brienz along that marvellous corniche road, blasted in the side of the rock, separated from an abyss of over a thousand feet by single stones a couple of yards apart. But Tartarin was no longer conscious of danger; no longer did he look at the scenery--that Meyringen valley, seen through a light veil of mist, with its river in straight lines, the lake, the villages ma.s.sing themselves in the distance, and that whole horizon of mountains, of glaciers, blending at times with the clouds, displaced by the turns of the road, lost apparently, and then returning, like the shifting scenes of a stage.
Softened by tender thoughts, the hero admired the sweet child before him, reflecting that glory is only a semi-happiness, that "tis sad to grow old all alone in your greatness, like Moses, and that this fragile flower of the North transplanted into the little garden at Tarascon would brighten its monotony, and be sweeter to see and breathe than that everlasting baobab, _arbos gigantea_, diminutively confined in the mignonette pot. With her childlike eyes, and her broad brow, thoughtful and self-willed, Sonia looked at him, and she, too, dreamed--but who knows what the young girls dream of?
VII.
The nights at Tarascon, Where is he? Anxiety. The gra.s.shoppers on the promenade call for Tartarin. Martyrdom of a great Tarasconese saint. The Club of the Alpines. What was happening at the pharmacy. "Help! help! Bezuquet!"
"A letter, Monsieur Bezuquet!.. Comes from Switzerland, _ve!_..
Switzerland!" cried the postman joyously, from the other end of the little square, waving something in the air, and hurrying along in the coming darkness.
The apothecary, who took the air, as they say, of an evening before his door in his shirt-sleeves, gave a jump, seized the letter with feverish hands and carried it into his lair among the varied odours of elixirs and dried herbs, but did not open it till the postman had departed, refreshed by a gla.s.s of that delicious _sirop de cadavre_ in recompense for what he brought.
Fifteen days had Bezuquet expected it, this letter from Switzerland, fifteen days of agonized watching! And here it was. Merely from looking at the cramped and resolute little writing on the envelope, the postmark "Interlaken" and the broad purple stamp of the "Hotel Jungfrau, kept by Meyer," the tears filled his eyes, and the heavy moustache of the Barbary corsair through which whispered softly the idle whistle of a kindly soul, quivered.
"_Confidential. Destroy when read._" Those words, written large at the head of the page, in the telegraphic style of the pharmacopoeia ("external use; shake before using") troubled him to the point of making him read aloud, as one does in a bad dream: "_Fearful things are happening to me_..." In the salon beside the pharmacy where she was taking her little nap after supper, Mme. Bezuquet, _mere_, might hear him, or the pupil whose pestle was pounding its regular blows in the big marble mortar of the laboratory. Bezuquet continued his reading in a low voice, beginning it over again two or three times, very pale, his hair literally standing on end. Then, with a rapid look about him, _cra cra_... and the letter in a thousand sc.r.a.ps went into the waste-paper basket; but there it might be found, and pieced together, and as he was stooping to gather up the fragments a quavering voice called to him:
"_Ve!_ Ferdinand, are you there?" "Yes, mamma," replied the unlucky corsair, curdling with fear, the whole of his long body on its hands and knees beneath the desk. "What are you doing, my treasure?" "I am... h"m, I am making Mile. Tournatoire"s eye-salve."
Mamma went to sleep again, the pupil"s pestle, suspended for a moment, began once more its slow clock movement, while Bezuquet walked up and down before his door in the deserted little square, turning pink or green according as he pa.s.sed before one or other of his bottles. From time to time he threw up his arms, uttering disjointed words: "Unhappy man!.. lost... fatal love... how can we extricate him?" and, in spite of his trouble of mind, accompanying with a lively whistle the bugle "taps"
of a dragoon regiment echoing among the plane-trees of the Tour de Ville.
"_He!_ good night, Bezuquet," said a shadow hurrying along in the ash-coloured twilight.
"Where are you going, Pegoulade?"
"To the Club, _pardi!_.. Night session... they are going to discuss Tartarin and the presidency... You ought to come."
"_Te!_ yes, I "ll come..." said the apothecary vehemently, a providential idea darting through his mind. He went in, put on his frock-coat, felt in its pocket to a.s.sure himself that his latchkey was there, and also the American tomahawk, without which no Tarasconese whatsoever would risk himself in the streets after "taps." Then he called: "Pascalon!.. Pascalon!.." but not too loudly, for fear of waking the old lady.
Almost a child, though bald, wearing all his hair in his curly blond beard, Pascalon the pupil had the ardent soul of a partizan, a dome-like forehead, the eyes of crazy goat, and on his chubby cheeks the delicate tints of a shiny crusty Beaucaire roll. On all the grand Alpine excursions it was to him that the Club entrusted its banner, and his childish soul had vowed to the P. C. A. a fanatical worship, the burning, silent adoration of a taper consuming itself before an altar in the Easter season.
"Pascalon," said the apothecary in a low voice, and so close to him that the bristle of his moustache p.r.i.c.ked his ear. "I have news of Tartarin... It is heart-breaking..."
Seeing him turn pale, he added:
"Courage, child! all can be repaired... _Differemment_ I confide to you the pharmacy... If any one asks you for a.r.s.enic, don"t give it; opium, don"t give that either, nor rhubarb... don"t give anything. If I am not in by ten o"clock, lock the door and go to bed."
With intrepid step, he plunged into the darkness, not once looking back, which allowed Pascalon to spring at the waste-paper basket, turn it over and over with feverish eager hands and finally tip out its contents on the leather of the desk to see if no sc.r.a.p remained of the mysterious letter brought by the postman.
To those who know Tarasconese excitability, it is easy to imagine the frantic condition of the little town after Tartarin"s abrupt disappearance. _Et autrement, pas moins, differemment_, they lost their heads, all the more because it was the middle of August and their brains boiled in the sun till their skulls were fit to crack. From morning till night they talked of nothing else; that one name "Tartarin" alone was heard on the pinched lips of the elderly ladies in hoods, in the rosy mouths of grisettes, their hair tied up with velvet ribbons: