Chapter 4
At the first steps he took in Algiers, Tartarin of Tarascon opened his eyes widely. Beforehand he had pictured it as an Oriental city--a fairy one, mythological, something between Constantinople and Zanzibar; but it was back into Tarascon he fell. Cafes, restaurants, wide streets, four-storey houses, a little market-place, macadamised, where the infantry band played Offenbachian polkas, whilst fashionably clad gentlemen occupied chairs, drinking beer and eating pancakes, some brilliant ladies, some shady ones, and soldiers--more soldiers--no end of soldiers, but not a solitary Turk, or, better to say, there was a solitary Turk, and that was he.
Hence he felt a little abashed about crossing the square, for everybody looked at him. The musicians stopped, the Offenbachian polka halting with one foot in the air.
With both guns on his shoulders, and the revolver flapping on his hip, as fierce and stately as Robinson Crusoe, Tartarin gravely passed through the groups; but on arriving at the hotel his powers failed him. All spun and mingled in his head: the departure from Tarascon, the harbour of Marseilles, the voyage, the Montenegrin prince, the corsairs. They had to help him up into a room and disarm and undress him. They began to talk of sending for a medical adviser; but hardly was our hero’s head upon the pillow than he set to snoring, so loudly and so heartily that the landlord judged the succour of science useless, and everybody considerately withdrew.
IV. The First Lying in Wait.
THREE o’clock was striking by the Government clock when Tartarin awoke. He had slept all the evening, night, and morning, and even a goodish piece of the afternoon. It must be granted, though, that in the last three days the red fez had caught it pretty hot and lively!
Our hero’s first thought on opening his eyes was, “I am in the land of the lions!” And--well, why should we not say it?--at the idea that lions were nigh hereabouts, within a couple of steps, almost at hand’s reach, and that he would have to disentangle a snarled skein with them, ugh! a deadly chill struck him, and he dived intrepidly under the coverlet.
But, before a moment was over, the outward gaiety, the blue sky, the glowing sun that streamed into the bedchamber, a nice little breakfast that he ate in bed, his window wide open upon the sea, the whole flavoured with an uncommonly good bottle of Crescia wine--it very speedily restored him his former pluckiness.
“Let’s out and at the lion!” he exclaimed, throwing off the clothes and briskly dressing himself.
His plan was as follows: he would go forth from the city without saying a word to a soul, plunge into the great desert, await nightfall to ambush himself, and bang away at the first lion who walked up. Then would he return to breakfast in the morning at the hotel, receive the felicitations of the natives, and hire a cart to bring in the quarry.
So he hurriedly armed himself, attached upright on his back the shelter-tent (which, when rolled up, left its centre pole sticking out a clear foot above his head), and descended to the street as stiffly as though he had swallowed it. Not caring to ask the way of anybody, from fear of letting out his project, he turned fairly to the right, and threaded the Bab-Azoon arcade to the very end, where swarms of Algerian Jews watched him pass from their corner ambushes like so many spiders; crossing the Theatre place, he entered the outer ward, and lastly came upon the dusty Mustapha highway.
Upon this was a quaint conglomeration: omnibuses, hackney coaches, corricolos, the army service waggons, huge hay-carts drawn by bullocks, squads of Chasseurs d’Afrique, droves of microscopic asses, trucks of Alsatian emigrants, spahis in scarlet cloaks--all filed by in a whirlwind cloud of dust, amidst shouts, songs, and trumpetcalls, between two rows of vile-looking booths, at the doors of which lanky Mahonnais women might be seen doing their hair, drinking-dens filled with soldiers, and shops of butchers and knackers.
“What rubbish, to din me about the Orient!” grumbled the great Tartarin; “there are not even as many Turks here as at Marseilles.”
All of a sudden he saw a splendid camel strut by him quite closely, stretching its long legs and puffing out its throat like a turkey-cock, and that made his heart throb. Camels already, eh? Lions could not be far Off now; and, indeed, in five minutes’ time he did see a whole band of lion-hunters coming his way under arms.
“Cowards!” thought our hero as he skirted them; “downright cowards, to go at a lion in companies and with dogs!”
For it never could occur to him that anything but lions were objects of the chase in Algeria. For all that, these Nimrods wore such complacent phizzes of retired tradesmen, and their style of lion-hunting with dogs and game-bags was so patriarchal, that the Tarasconian, a little perplexed, deemed it incumbent to question one of the gentlemen.
“And furthermore, comrade, is the sport good?”
“Not bad,” responded the other, regarding the speaker’s imposing warlike equipment with a scared eye.
“Killed any?”
“Rather! Not so bad--only look.” Whereupon the Algerian sportsman showed that it was rabbits and woodcock stuffing out the bag.
“What! do you call that your bag? Do you put such-like in your bag?”
“Where else should I put ‘em?”
“But it’s such little game.”
“Some run small and some run large,” observed the hunter.
In haste to catch up with his companions, he joined them with several long strides. The dauntless Tartarin remained rooted in the middle of the road with stupefaction. “Pooh!” he ejaculated, after a moment’s reflection, “these are jokers. They haven’t killed anything whatever,” and he went his way.
Already the houses became scarcer, and so did the passengers. Dark came on and objects were blurred, though Tartarin walked on for half an hour more, when he stopped, for it was night. A moonless night, too, but sprinkled with stars. On the highroad there was nobody. The hero concluded that lions are not stage-coaches, and would not of their own choice travel the main ways. So he wheeled into the fields, where there were brambles and ditches and bushes at every step, but he kept on nevertheless.
But suddenly he halted.
“I smell lions about here!” said our friend, sniffing right and left.
V. Bang, bang!
CERTAINLY a great wilderness, bristling with odd plants of that Oriental kind which look like wicked creatures. Under the feeble starlight their magnified shadows barred the ground in every way. On the right loomed up confusedly the heavy mass of a mountain--perhaps the Atlas range. On the heart-hand, the invisible sea hollowly rolling. The very spot to attract wild beasts.
With one gun laid before him and the other in his grasp, Tartarin of Tarascon went down on one knee and waited an hour, ay, a good couple, and nothing turned up. Then he bethought him how, in his books, the great lion-slayers never went out hunting without having a lamb or a kid along with them, which they tied up a space before them, and set bleating or baa-ing by jerking its foot with a string. Not having any goat, the Tarasconer had the idea of employing an imitation, and he set to crying in a tremulous voice:
“Baa-a-a!”
At first it was done very softly, because at bottom he was a little alarmed lest the lion should hear him; but as nothing came, he baa-ed more loudly. Still nothing. Losing patience, he resumed many times running at the top of his voice, till the “Baa, baa, baa!” came out with so much power that the goat began to be mistakable for a bull.
Unexpectedly, a few steps in front, some gigantic black thing appeared. He was hushed. This thing lowered its head, sniffed the ground, bounded up, rolled over, and darted off at the gallop, but returned and stopped short. Who could doubt it was the lion? for now its four short legs could plainly be seen, its formidable mane and its large eyes gleaming in the gloom.
Up went his gun into position. Fire’s the word! and bang, bang! it was done. And immediately there was a leap back and the drawing of the hunting-knife. To the Tarasconian’s shot a terrible roaring replied.
“He’s got it!” cried our good Tartarin as, steadying himself on his sturdy supporters, he prepared to receive the brute’s charge.
But it had more than its fill, and galloped off; howling. He did not budge, for he expected to see the female mate appear, as the story-books always lay it down she should.
Unhappily, no female came. After two or three hours’ waiting the Tarasconian grew tired. The ground was damp, the night was getting cool, and the sea-breeze pricked sharply.
“I have a good mind to take a nap till daylight,” he said to himself.
To avoid catching rheumatism, he had recourse to his patent tent. But here’s where Old Nick interfered! This tent was of so very ingenious a construction that he could not manage to open it. In vain did he toil over it and perspire an hour through--the confounded apparatus would not come unfolded. There are some umbrellas which amuse themselves under torrential rains with just such tricks upon you. Fairly tired out with the struggle, the victim dashed down the machine and lay upon it, swearing like the regular Southron he was. “Tar, tar, rar, tar! tar, rar, tar!”
“What on earth’s that?” wondered Tartarin, suddenly aroused.
It was the bugles of the Chasseurs d’Afrique sounding the turn-out in the Mustapha barracks. The stupefied lion-slayer rubbed his eyes, for he had believed himself out in the boundless wilderness; and do you know where he really was?--in a field of artichokes, between a cabbage-garden and a patch of beets. His Sahara grew kitchen vegetables.
Close to him, on the pretty verdant slope of Upper Mustapha, the snowy villas glowed in the rosy rising sun: anybody would believe himself in the neighbourhood of Marseilles, amongst its bastides and bastidons.
The commonplace and kitchen-gardenish aspect of this sleep-steeped country much astonished the poor man, and put him in bad humour.
“These folk are crazy,” he reasoned, “to plant artichokes in the prowling-ground of lions; for, in short, I have not been dreaming. Lions have come here, and there’s the proof.”
What he called the proof was blood-spots left behind the beast in its flight. Bending over this ruddy trail with his eye on the lookout and his revolver in his fist, the valiant Tarasconian went from artichoke to artichoke up to a little field of oats. In the trampled grass was a pool of blood, and in the midst of the pool, lying on its flank, with a large wound in the head, was a--guess what?
“A lion, of course!”
Not a bit of it! An ass!--one of those little donkeys so common in Algeria, where they are called bourriquots.
VI. Arrival of the Female--A Terrible Combat--“Game Fellows Meet Here!”
LOOKING on his hapless victim, Tartarin’s first impulse was one of vexation. There is such a wide gap between a lion and poor Jack! His second feeling was one of pity. The poor bourriquot was so pretty and looked so kindly. The hide on his still warm sides heaved and fell like waves. Tartarin knelt down, and strove with the end of his Algerian sash to stanch the blood; and all you can imagine in the way of touchingness was offered by the picture of this great man tending this little ass.
At the touch of the silky cloth the donkey, who had not twopennyworth of life in him, opened his large grey eye and winked his long ears two or three times, as much as to say, “Oh, thank you!” before a final spasm shook it from head to tail, whereafter it stirred no more.
“Noiraud! Blackey!” suddenly screamed a voice, choking with anguish, as the branches in a thicket hard by moved at the same time.
Tartarin had no more than enough time to rise and stand upon guard. This was the female!
She rushed up, fearsome and roaring, under form of an old Alsatian woman, her hair in a kerchief, armed with large red umbrella, and calling for her ass, till all the echoes of Mustapha rang. It certainly would have been better for Tartarin to have had to deal with a lioness in fury than this old virago. In vain did the luckless sportsman try to make her understand how the blunder had occurred, and he had mistaken “Noiraud” for a lion. The harridan believed he was making fun of her, and uttering energetical “Der Teufels!” fell upon our hero to bang him with the gingham. A little bewildered, Tartarin defended himself as best he could, warding off the blows with his rifle, streaming with perspiration, panting, jumping about, and crying out:
“But, Madame, but”--
Much good his buts were! Madame was dull of hearing, and her blows continued hard as ever.
Fortunately a third party arrived on the battlefield, the Alsatian’s husband, of the same race; a roadside innkeeper, as well as a very good ready-reckoner, which was better. When he saw what kind of a customer he had to deal with--a slaughterer who only wanted to pay the value of his victim--he disarmed his better-half, and they came to an understanding.
Tartarin gave two hundred francs, the donkey being worth about ten--at least that is the current price in the Arab markets. Then poor Blackey was laid to rest at the root of a fig-tree, and the Alsatian, raised to joviality by the colour of the Tarascon ducats, invited the hero to have a quencher with him in his wine-shop, which stood only a few steps off on the edge of the highway. Every Sunday the sportsmen from the city came there to regale of a morning, for the plain abounded with game, and there was no better place for rabbits for two leagues around.
“How about lions?” inquired Tartarin.
The Alsatian stared at him, greatly astounded.
“Lions!”
“Yes, lions. Don’t you see them sometimes?” resumed the poor fellow, with less confidence.
The Boniface burst out in laughter.
“Ho, ho! bless us! lions! What would we do with lions here?”
“Are there, then, none in Algeria?”
“‘Pon my faith, I never saw any, albeit I have been twenty years in the colony. Still, I believe I have heard tell of such a thing--leastwise, I fancy the newspapers said--but that is ever so much farther inland--down South, you know”--
At this point they reached the hostelry, a suburban pothouse, with a withered green bough over the door, crossed billiard-cues painted on the wall, and this harmless sign over a picture of wild rabbits, feeding:
“GAME FELLOWS MEET HERE.”
“Game fellows!” It made Tartarin think of Captain Bravida.
VII. About an Omnibus, a Moorish Beauty, and a Wreath of Jessamine.
COMMON people would have been discouraged by such a first adventure, but men of Tartarin’s mettle do not easily get cast down.
“The lions are in the South, are they?” mused the hero. “Very well, then. South I go.”
As soon as he had swallowed his last mouthful he jumped up, thanked his host, nodded good-bye to the old hag without any ill-will, dropped a final tear over the hapless Blackey, and quickly returned to Algiers, with the firm intention of packing up and starting that very day for the South.
The Mustapha highroad seemed, unfortunately, to have stretched since overnight; and what a sun and dust there were, and what a weight in that shelter-tent! Tartarin did not feel to have the courage to walk to the town, and he beckoned to the first omnibus coming along, and climbed in.
Oh, our poor Tartarin of Tarascon! how much better it would have been for his name and fame not to have stepped into that fatal ark on wheels, but to have continued on his road afoot, at the risk of falling suffocated beneath the burden of the atmosphere, the tent, and his heavy double-barrelled rifles.
When Tartarin got in the ‘bus was full. At the end, with his nose in his prayer-book, sat a large and black-bearded vicar from town; facing him was a young Moorish merchant smoking coarse cigarettes, and a Maltese sailor and four or five Moorish women muffled up in white cloths, so that only their eyes could be spied.
These ladies had been to offer up prayers in the Abdel Kader cemetery; but this funereal visit did not seem to have much saddened them, for they could be heard chuckling and chattering between themselves under their coverings whilst munching pastry. Tartarin fancied that they watched him narrowly. One in particular, seated over against him, had fixed her eyes upon his, and never took them off all the drive. Although the dame was veiled, the liveliness of the big black eyes, lengthened out by k’hol; a delightfully slender wrist loaded with gold bracelets, of which a glimpse was given from time to time among the folds; the sound of her voice, the graceful, almost childlike, movements of the head, all revealed that a young, pretty, and loveable creature bloomed underneath the veil. The unfortunate Tartarin did not know where to shrink. The fond, mute gaze of these splendrous Oriental orbs agitated him, perturbed him, and made him feel like dying with flushes of heat and fits of cold shivers.
To finish him, the lady’s slipper meddled in the onslaught: he felt the dainty thing wander and frisk about over his heavy hunting boots like a tiny red mouse. What could he do? Answer the glance and the pressure, of course. Ay, but what about the consequences? A loving intrigue in the East is a terrible matter! With his romantic southern nature, the honest Tarasconian saw himself already falling into the grip of the eunuchs, to be decapitated, or better--we mean, worse--than that, sewn up in a leather sack and sunk in the sea with his head under his arm beside him. This somewhat cooled him. In the meantime the little slipper continued its proceedings, and the eyes, widely open opposite him like twin black velvet flowers, seemed to say:
“Come, cull us!”
The ‘bus stopped on the Theatre place, at the mouth of the Rue Bab-Azoon. One by one, embedded in their voluminous trousers, and drawing their mufflers around them with wild grace, the Moorish women alighted. Tartarin’s confrontatress was the last to rise, and in doing so her countenance skimmed so closely to our hero’s that her breath enveloped him--a veritable nosegay of youth and freshness, with an indescribable after-tang of musk, jessamine, and pastry.
The Tarasconian stood out no longer. Intoxicated with love, and ready for anything, he darted out after the beauty. At the rumpling sound of his belts and boots she turned, laid a finger on her veiled mouth, as one who would say, “Hush!” and with the other hand quickly tossed him a little wreath of sweet-scented jessamine flowers. Tartarin of Tarascon stooped to pick it up; but as he was rather clumsy, and much overburdened with implements of war, the operation took rather long. When he did straighten up, with the jessamine garland upon his heart, the donatrix had vanished.
VIII. Ye Lions of the Atlas, repose in peace!
LIONS of the Atlas, sleep!--sleep tranquilly at the back of your lairs amid the aloes and cacti. For a few days to come, any way, Tartarin of Tarascon will not massacre you. For the time being, all his warlike paraphernalia, gun-cases, medicine chest, alimentary preserves, dwelt peacefully under cover in a corner of room 36 in the Hotel de l’Europe.
Sleep with no fear, great red lions, the Tarasconian is engaged in looking up that Moorish charmer. Since the adventure in the omnibus, the unfortunate swain perpetually fancied he felt the fidgeting of that pretty red mouse upon his huge backwoods trapper’s foot; and the sea-breeze fanning his lips was ever scented, do what he would, with a love-exciting odour of sweet cakes and patchouli.
He hungered for his indispensable light of the harem! and he meant to behold her anew.
But it was no joke of a task. To find one certain person in a city of a hundred thousand souls, only known by the eyes, breath, and slipper,--none but a son of Tarascon, panoplied by love, would be capable of attempting such an adventure.
The plague is that, under their broad white mufflers, all the Moorish women resemble one another; besides, they do not go about much, and to see them, a man has to climb up into the native or upper town, the city of the “Turks,” and that is a regular cut-throat’s den.
Little black alleys, very narrow, climbing perpendicularly up between mysterious house-walls, whose roofs lean to touching and form a tunnel; low doors, and sad, silent little casements well barred and grated. Moreover, on both hands, stacks of darksome stalls, wherein ferocious “Turks” smoked long pipes stuck between glittering teeth in piratical heads with white eyes, and mumbled in undertones as if hatching wicked attacks.
To say that Tartarin traversed this grisly place without any emotion would be putting forth falsehood. On the contrary, he was much affected, and the stout fellow only went up the obscure lanes, where his corporation took up all the width, with the utmost precaution, his eye skinned, and his finger on his revolver trigger, in the same manner as he went to the clubhouse at Tarascon. At any moment he expected to have a whole gang of eunuchs and janissaries drop upon his back, yet the longing to behold that dark damsel again gave him a giant’s strength and boldness.
For a full week the undaunted Tartarin never quitted the high town. Yes; for all that period he might have been seen cooling his heels before the Turkish bath-houses, awaiting the hour when the ladies came forth in troops, shivering and still redolent of soap and hot water; or squatting at the doorways of mosques, puffing and melting in trying to get out of his big boots in order to enter the temples.
Betimes at nightfall, when he was returning heart-broken at not having discovered anything at either bagnio or mosque, our man from Tarascon, in passing mansions, would hear monotonous songs, smothered twanging of guitars, thumping of tambourines, and feminine laughter-peals, which would make his heart beat.
“Haply she is there!” he would say to himself.
Thereupon, granting the street was unpeopled, he would go up to one of these dwellings, lift the heavy knocker of the low postern, and timidly rap. The songs and merriment would instantly cease. There would be audible behind the wall nothing excepting low, dull flutterings as in a slumbering aviary.
“Let’s stick to it, old boy,” our hero would think. “Something will befall us yet.”
What most often befell him was the contents of the cold-water jug on the head, or else peel of oranges and Barbary figs; never anything more serious.
Well might the lions of the Atlas Mountains doze in peace.
IX. Prince Gregory of Montenegro.
IT was two long weeks that the unfortunate Tartarin had been seeking his Algerian flame, and most likely he would have been seeking after her to this day if the little god kind to lovers had not come to his help under the shape of a Montenegrin nobleman.
It happened as follows.
Every Saturday night in winter there is a masked ball at the Grand Theatre of Algiers, just as at the Paris Opera-House. It is the undying and ever-tasteless county fancy dress ball--very few people on the floor, several castaways from the Parisian students’ ballrooms or midnight dance-houses, Joans of Arc following the army, faded characters out of the Java costume-book of 1840, and half-a-dozen laundress’s underlings who are aiming to make loftier conquests, but still preserve a faint perfume of their former life--garlic and saffron sauce. The real spectacle is not there, but in the green-room, transformed for the nonce into a hall of green cloth or gaming saloon.