Tartarin of Tarascon Page 2

  In his left hand Tartarin took a steel-pointed knuckle-duster; in theright he carried a sword-cane; in his left pocket a life-preserver; inthe right a revolver. On his chest, betwixt outer and under garment,lay a Malay kreese. But never any poisoned arrows--they are weaponsaltogether too unfair.

  Before starting, in the silence and obscurity of his study, he exercisedhimself for a while, warding off imaginary cuts and thrusts, lunging atthe wall, and giving his muscles play; then he took his master-key andwent through the garden leisurely; without hurrying, mark you. "Cool andcalm--British courage, that is the true sort, gentlemen." At the gardenend he opened the heavy iron door, violently and abruptly so that itshould slam against the outer wall. If "they" had been skulking behindit, you may wager they would have been jam. Unhappily, they were notthere.

  The way being open, out Tartarin would sally, quickly glancing to theright and left, ere banging the door to and fastening it smartly withdouble-locking. Then, on the way.

  Not so much as a cat upon the Avignon road--all the doors closed, andno lights in the casements. All was black, except for the parish lamps,well spaced apart, blinking in the river mist.

  Calm and proud, Tartarin of Tarascon marched on in the night, ringinghis heels with regularity, and sending sparks out of the paving-stoneswith the ferule of his stick. Whether in avenues, streets, or lanes,he took care to keep in the middle of the road--an excellent method ofprecaution, allowing one to see danger coming, and, above all, to avoidany droppings from windows, as happens after dark in Tarascon and theOld Town of Edinburgh. On seeing so much prudence in Tartarin, pray donot conclude that Tartarin had any fear--dear, no! he only was on hisguard.

  The best proof that Tartarin was not scared is, that instead of going tothe club by the shortest cut, he went over the town by the longest anddarkest way round, through a mass of vile, paltry alleys, at the mouthof which the Rhone could be seen ominously gleaming. The poor knightconstantly hoped that, beyond the turn of one of these cut-throats'haunts, "they" would leap from the shadow and fall on his back. Iwarrant you, "they" would have been warmly received, though; but, alack!by reason of some nasty meanness of destiny, never indeed did Tartarinof Tarascon enjoy the luck to meet any ugly customers--not so much as adog or a drunken man--nothing at all!

  Still, there were false alarms somewhiles. He would catch a sound ofsteps and muffled voices.

  "Ware hawks!" Tartarin would mutter, and stop short, as if taking rooton the spot, scrutinising the gloom, sniffing the wind, even glueing hisear to the ground in the orthodox Red Indian mode. The steps woulddraw nearer, and the voices grow more distinct, till no more doubt waspossible. "They" were coming--in fact, here "they" were!

  Steady, with eye afire and heaving breast, Tartarin would gatherhimself like a jaguar in readiness to spring forward whilst uttering hiswar-cry, when, all of a sudden, out of the thick of the murkiness, hewould hear honest Tarasconian voices quite tranquilly hailing him with:

  "Hullo! you, by Jove! it's Tartarin! Good night, old fellow!"

  Maledictions upon it! It was the chemist Bezuquet, with his family,coming from singing their family ballad at Costecalde's.

  "Oh, good even, good even!" Tartarin would growl, furious at hisblunder, and plunging fiercely into the gloom with his cane waved onhigh.

  On arriving in the street where stood his club-house, the dauntless onewould linger yet a moment, walking up and down before the portals ereentering. But, finally, weary of awaiting "them," and certain "they"would not show "themselves," he would fling a last glare of defianceinto the shades and snarl wrathfully:

  "Nothing, nothing at all! there never is nothing!"

  Upon which double negation, which he meant as a stronger affirmative,the worthy champion would walk in to play his game of bezique with thecommandant.

  VI. The two Tartarins.

  ANSWER me, you will say, how the mischief is it that Tartarin ofTarascon never left Tarascon with all this mania for adventure, need ofpowerful sensations, and folly about travel, rides, and journeys fromthe Pole to the Equator?

  For that is a fact: up to the age of five-and-forty, the dreadlessTarasconian had never once slept outside his own room. He had not eventaken that obligatory trip to Marseilles which every sound Provencalmakes upon coming of age. The most of his knowledge included Beaucaire,and yet that's not far from Tarascon, there being merely the bridge togo over. Unfortunately, this rascally bridge has so often been blownaway by the gales, it is so long and frail, and the Rhone has sucha width at this spot that--well, faith! you understand! Tartarin ofTarascon preferred terra firma.

  We are afraid we must make a clean breast of it: in our hero there weretwo very distinct characters. Some Father of the Church has said: "Ifeel there are two men in me." He would have spoken truly in saying thisabout Tartarin, who carried in his frame the soul of Don Quixote, thesame chivalric impulses, heroic ideal, and crankiness for the grandioseand romantic; but, worse is the luck! he had not the body of thecelebrated hidalgo, that thin and meagre apology for a body, on whichmaterial life failed to take a hold; one that could get through twentynights without its breast-plate being unbuckled off, and forty-eighthours on a handful of rice. On the contrary, Tartarin's body was a stouthonest bully of a body, very fat, very weighty, most sensual and fondof coddling, highly touchy, full of low-class appetite and homelyrequirements--the short, paunchy body on stumps of the immortal SanchoPanza.

  Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in the one same man! you will readilycomprehend what a cat-and-dog couple they made! what strife! whatclapper-clawing! Oh, the fine dialogue for Lucian or Saint-Evremond towrite, between the two Tartarins--Quixote-Tartarin and Sancho-Tartarin!Quixote-Tartarin firing up on the stories of Gustave Aimard, andshouting: "Up and at 'em!" and Sancho-Tartarin thinking only of therheumatics ahead, and murmuring: "I mean to stay at home."

  THE DUET.

  QUIXOTE-TARTARIN. SANCHO-TARTARIN. (Highly excited.) (Quite calmly.) Cover yourself with glory, Tartarin, cover yourself Tartarin. with flannel.

  (Still more excitedly.) (Still more calmly.) O for the terrible double- O for the thick knitted barrelled rifle! O for waistcoats! and warm bowie-knives, lassoes, knee-caps! O for the and moccasins! welcome padded caps with ear-flaps!

  (Above all self-control.) (Ringing up the maid.) A battle-axe! fetch me a Now, then, Jeannette, do battle-axe! bring up that chocolate!

  Whereupon Jeannette would appear with an unusually good cup ofchocolate, just right in warmth, sweetly smelling, and with the playof light on watered silk upon its unctuous surface, and with succulentgrilled steak flavoured with anise-seed, which would set Sancho-Tartarinoff on the broad grin, and into a laugh that drowned the shouts ofQuixote-Tartarin.

  Thus it came about that Tartarin of Tarascon never had left Tarascon.

  VII. Tartarin--The Europeans at Shanghai--Commerce--The Tartars--CanTartarin of Tarascon be an Impostor?--The Mirage.

  UNDER one conjunction of circumstances, Tartarin did, however, oncealmost start out upon a great voyage.

  The three brothers Garcio-Camus, relatives of Tarascon, establishedin business at Shanghai, offered him the managership of one of theirbranches there. This undoubtedly presented the kind of life he hankeredafter. Plenty of active business, a whole army of under-strappers toorder about, and connections with Russia, Persia, Turkey in Asia--inshort, to be a merchant prince!

  In Tartarin's mouth, the title of Merchant Prince thundered out assomething stunning!

  The house of Garcio-Camus had the further advantage of sometimes beingfavoured with a call from the Tartars. Then the doors would be slammedshut, all the clerks flew to arms, up ran the consular flag, and zizz!phit! bang! out of the windows upon the Tartars.

  I need not tell you with what enthusiasm Quixote-Tartarin clutched thisproposition; sad to say, Sancho-Tartari
n did not see it in the samelight, and, as he was the stronger party, it never came to anything. Butin the town there was much talk about it. Would he go or would he not?"I'll lay he will!"--and "I'll wager he won't!" It was the event of theweek. In the upshot, Tartarin did not depart, but the matter redoundedto his credit none the less. Going or not going to Shanghai was all oneto Tarascon. Tartarin's journey was so much talked about that people gotto believe he had done it and returned, and at the club in the eveningmembers would actually ask for information on life at Shanghai, themanners and customs and climate, about opium, and commerce.

  Deeply read up, Tartarin would graciously furnish the particularsdesired, and, in the end, the good fellow was not quite sure himselfabout not having gone to Shanghai, so that, after relating for thehundredth time how the Tartars came down on the trading post, it wouldmost naturally happen him to add:

  "Then I made my men take up arms and hoist the consular flag, and zizz!phit! bang! out of the windows upon the Tartars."

  On hearing this, the whole club would quiver.

  "But according to that, this Tartarin of yours is an awful liar."

  "No, no, a thousand times over, no! Tartarin was no liar."

  "But the man ought to know that he has never been to Shanghai"--

  "Why, of course, he knows that; but still"--

  "But still," you see--mark that! It is high time for the law to be laiddown once for all on the reputation as drawers of the long bow whichNortherners fling at Southerners. There are no Baron Munchausens in thesouth of France, neither at Nimes nor Marseilles, Toulouse nor Tarascon.The Southerner does not deceive but is self-deceived. He does not alwaystell the cold-drawn truth, but he believes he does. His falsehood is notany such thing, but a kind of mental mirage.

  Yes, purely mirage! The better to follow me, you should actually followme into the South, and you will see I am right. You have only to look atthat Lucifer's own country, where the sun transmogrifies everything,and magnifies it beyond life-size. The little hills of Provence are nobigger than the Butte Montmartre, but they will loom up like the RockyMountains; the Square House at Nimes--a mere model to put on yoursideboard--will seem grander than St. Peter's. You will see--in brief,the only exaggerator in the South is Old Sol, for he does enlargeeverything he touches. What was Sparta in its days of splendour? apitiful hamlet. What was Athens? at the most, a second-class town; andyet in history both appear to us as enormous cities. This is a sample ofwhat the sun can do.

  Are you going to be astonished after this that the same sun falling uponTarascon should have made of an ex-captain in the Army Clothing Factory,like Bravida, the "brave commandant;" of a sprout an Indian fig-tree;and of a man who had missed going to Shanghai one who had been there?

  VIII. Mitaine's Menagerie--A Lion from the Atlas at Tarascon--A Solemnand Fearsome Confrontation.

  EXHIBITING Tartarin of Tarascon, as we are, in his private life, beforeFame kissed his brow and garlanded him with her well-worn laurel wreath,and having narrated his heroic existence in a modest state, his delightsand sorrows, his dreams and his hopes, let us hurriedly skip to thegrandest pages of his story, and to the singular event which was to givethe first flight to his incomparable career.

  It happened one evening at Costecalde the gunmaker's, where Tartarin wasengaged in showing several sportsmen the working of the needle-gun,then in its first novelty. The door suddenly flew open, and in rushed abewildered cap-popper, howling "A lion, a lion!" General was the alarm,stupor, uproar and tumult. Tartarin prepared to resist cavalry withthe bayonet, whilst Costecalde ran to shut the door. The sportsman wassurrounded and pressed and questioned, and here follows what he toldthem: Mitaine's Menagerie, returning from Beaucaire Fair, had consentedto stay over a few days at Tarascon, and was just unpacking, to set upthe show on the Castle-green, with a lot of boas, seals, crocodiles, anda magnificent lion from the Atlas Mountains.

  An African lion in Tarascon?

  Never in the memory of living man had the like been seen. Hence ourdauntless cap-poppers looked at one another how proudly! What a beamingon their sunburned visages! and in every nook of Costecalde's shop whathearty congratulatory grips of the hand were silently exchanged! Thesensation was so great and unforeseen that nobody could find a word tosay--not even Tartarin.

  Blanched and agitated, with the needle-gun still in his fist, hebrooded, erect before the counter. A lion from the Atlas Range at pistolrange from him, a couple of strides off? a lion, mind you--the beastheroic and ferocious above all others, the King of the Brute Creation,the crowning game of his fancies, something like the leading actor inthe ideal company which played such splendid tragedies in his mind'seye. A lion, heaven be thanked! and from the Atlas, to boot! It was morethan the great Tartarin could bear.

  Suddenly a flush of blood flew into his face. His eyes flashed. With oneconvulsive movement he shouldered the needle-gun, and turning towardsthe brave Commandant Bravida (formerly captain in the Army ClothingDepartment, please to remember), he thundered to him--

  "Let's go have a look at him, commandant."

  "Here, here, I say! that's my gun--my needle-gun you are carrying off,"timidly ventured the wary Costecalde; but Tartarin had already got roundthe corner, with all the cap-poppers proudly lock-stepping behind him.

  When they arrived at the menagerie, they found a goodly number of peoplethere. Tarascon, heroic but too long deprived of sensational shows, hadrushed upon Mitaine's portable theatre, and had taken it by storm. Hencethe voluminous Madame Mitaine was highly contented. In an Arab costume,her arms bare to the elbow, iron anklets on, a whip in one hand and aplucked though live pullet in the other, the noted lady was doing thehonours of the booth to the Tarasconians; and, as she also had "doublemuscles," her success was almost as great as her animals.

  The entrance of Tartarin with the gun on his shoulder was a damper.

  All our good Tarasconians, who had been quite tranquilly strollingbefore the cages, unarmed and with no distrust, without even any ideaof danger, felt momentary apprehension, naturally enough, on beholdingtheir mighty Tartarin rush into the enclosure with his formidable engineof war. There must be something to fear when a hero like he was, cameweaponed; so, in a twinkling, all the space along the cage fronts wascleared. The youngsters burst out squalling for fear, and the womenlooked round for the nearest way out. The chemist Bezuquet made offaltogether, alleging that he was going home for his gun.

  Gradually, however, Tartarin's bearing restored courage. With headerect, the intrepid Tarasconian slowly and calmly made the circuitof the booth, passing the seal's tank without stopping, glancingdisdainfully on the long box filled with sawdust in which the boa woulddigest its raw fowl, and going to take his stand before the lion's cage.

  A terrible and solemn confrontation, this! The lion of Tarascon and thelion of Africa face to face!

  On the one part, Tartarin erect, with his hamstrings in tension, andhis arms folded on his gun barrel; on the other, the lion, a giganticspecimen, humped up in the straw, with blinking orbs and brutish mien,resting his huge muzzle and tawny full-bottomed wig on his forepaws.Both calm in their gaze.

  Singular thing! whether the needle-gun had given him "the needle," ifthe popular idiom is admissible, or that he scented an enemy ofhis race, the lion, who had hitherto regarded the Tarasconians withsovereign scorn, and yawned in their faces, was all at once affected byire. At first he sniffed; then he growled hollowly, stretching out hisclaws; rising, he tossed his head, shook his mane, opened a capaciousmaw, and belched a deafening roar at Tartarin.

  A yell of fright responded, as Tarascon precipitated itself madlytowards the exit, women and children, lightermen, cap-poppers, even thebrave Commandant Bravida himself. But, alone, Tartarin of Tarasconhad not budged. There he stood, firm and resolute, before the cage,lightnings in his eyes, and on his lip that gruesome grin with whichall the town was familiar. In a moment's time, when all the cap-poppers,some little fortified by his bearing and the strength of the bars,re-approached their
leader, they heard him mutter, as he stared Leo outof countenance:

  "Now, this is something like a hunt!"

  All the rest of that day, never a word farther could they draw fromTartarin of Tarascon.

  IX. Singular effects of Mental Mirage.

  CONFINING his remarks to the sentence last recorded, Tartarin hadunfortunately still said overmuch.

  On the morrow, there was nothing talked about through town but thenear-at-hand departure of Tartarin for Algeria and lion-hunting. Youare all witness, dear readers, that the honest fellow had not breatheda word on that head; but, you know, the mirage had its usual effect. Inbrief, all Tarascon spoke of nothing but the departure.

  On the Old Walk, at the club, in Costecalde's, friends accosted oneanother with a startled aspect:

  "And furthermore, you know the news, at least?"

  "And furthermore, rather? Tartarin's setting out, at least?"

  For at Tarascon all phrases begin with "and furthermore," and concludewith "at least," with a strong local accent. Hence, on this occasionmore than upon others, these peculiarities rang out till the windowsshivered.

  The most surprised of men in the town on hearing that Tartarin wasgoing away to Africa, was Tartarin himself. But only see what vanity is!Instead of plumply answering that he was not going at all, and had noteven had the intention, poor Tartarin, on the first of them mentioningthe journey to him, observed with a neat little evasive air, "Aha!maybe I shall--but I do not say as much." The second time; a trifle morefamiliarised with the idea, he replied, "Very likely;" and the thirdtime, "It's certain."