Of evil augury, this museum is a reminder of all the catastrophes known to have taken place on the Mont Blanc for the forty years that the old man had kept the inn, and as he took them from their show-case, he related the lamentable origin of each of them... This piece of cloth and those waistcoat b.u.t.tons were the memorial of a Russian _savant_, hurled by a hurricane upon the Brenva glacier... These jaw teeth were all that remained of one of the guides of a famous caravan of eleven travellers and porters who disappeared forever in a _tourmente_ of snow... In the fading light and the pale reflection of the _neves_ against the window, the production of these mortuary relics, these monotonous recitals, had something very poignant about them, and all the more because the old man softened his quavering voice at pathetic items, and even shed tears on displaying a sc.r.a.p of green veil worn by an English lady rolled down by an avalanche in 1827.
In vain Tartarin rea.s.sured himself by dates, convinced that in those early days the Company had not yet organized the ascensions without danger; this Savoyard _vocero_ oppressed his heart, and he went to the doorway for a moment to breathe.
Night had fallen, engulfing the depths. The Bossons stood out, livid, and very close; while the Mont Blanc reared its summit, still rosy, still caressed by the departed sun. The Southerner was recovering his serenity from this smile of nature when the shadow of Bompard rose behind him.
"Is that you, Gonzague... As you see, I am getting the good of the air... He annoyed me, that old fellow, with his stories."
"Tartarin," said Bompard, squeezing the arm of the P. C. A. till he nearly ground it, "I hope that this is enough, and that you are going to put an end to this ridiculous expedition."
The great man opened wide a pair of astonished eyes.
"What stuff are you talking to me now?"
Whereupon Bompard made a terrible picture of the thousand deaths that awaited him; creva.s.ses, avalanches, hurricanes, whirlwinds...
Tartarin interrupted him:--
"Ah! _va_, you rogue; and the Company? Isn"t Mont Blanc managed like the rest?"
"Managed?. the Company?.." said Bompard, bewildered, remembering nothing whatever of his tarasconade, which Tartarin now repeated to him word for word--Switzerland a vast a.s.sociation, lease of the mountains, machinery of the creva.s.ses; on which the former courier burst out laughing.
"What! you really believed me?.. Why, that was a _galejade_ a fib...
Among us Taras-conese you ought surely to know what talking means..."
"Then," asked Tartarin, with much emotion, "the Jungfrau was not_ prepared?_"
"Of course not."
"And if the rope had broken?.."
"Ah! my poor friend..."
The hero closed his eyes, pale with retrospective terror, and for one moment he hesitated... This landscape of polar cataclysm, cold, gloomy, yawning with gulfs... those laments of the old hut-man still weeping in his ears... _Outre!_ what will they make me do?.. Then, suddenly, he thought of the _folk_ at Tarascon, of the banner to be unfurled "up there," and he said to himself that with good guides and a trusty companion like Bompard... He had done the Jungfrau... why should n"t he do Mont Blanc?
Laying his large hand on the shoulder of his friend, he began in a virile voice:--
"Listen to me, Gonzague..."
XIII.
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 _neve_ 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 ma.s.ses 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 creva.s.se, 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 creva.s.se 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! _va_, the Club indeed!.. I don"t belong to it," replied the other, cynically.
Then Tartarin explained to him where to set his feet, and a.s.sured him that nothing was easier.
"For you, perhaps, but not for me..." "But you said you had a habit of it..." "_Be!_ 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, _que!_"
No, the Swede did not believe in it. Ideal love is a poet"s lie; the other, only a need he had never felt...
"_Be!_ yes! _be!_ 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! _va_, 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..."