Chapter 6

“It’s I, Monsieur Tartarin. Don’t you recognise me? I am the old stage-coach who used to do the road betwixt Nimes and Tarascon twenty year agone. How many times I have carried you and your friends when you went to shoot at caps over Joncquieres or Bellegarde way! I did not know you again at the first, on account of your Turk’s cap and the flesh you have accumulated; but as soon as you began snoring--what a rascal is good-luck!--I twigged you straight away.”

“All right, that’s all right enough!” observed the Tarasconian, a shade vexed; but softening, he added, “But to the point, my poor old girl; whatever did you come out here for?”

“Pooh! my good Monsieur Tartarin, I assure you I never came of my own free will. As soon as the Beaucaire railway was finished I was considered good for nought, and shipped away into Algeria. And I am not the only one either! Bless you, next to all the old stage-coaches of France have been packed off like me. We were regarded as too much the conservative--‘the slow-coaches’--d’ye see, and now we are here leading the life of a dog. This is what you in France call the Algerian railways.”

Here the ancient vehicle heaved a long-drawn sigh before proceeding. “My wheels and linchpin! Monsieur Tartarin, how I regret my lovely Tarascon! That was the good time for me, when I was young!--You ought to have seen me starting off in the morning, washed with no stint of water and all a-shine, with my wheels freshly varnished, my lamps blazing like a brace of suns, and my boot always rubbed up with oil! It was indeed lovely when the postillion cracked his whip to the tune of ‘Lagadigadeou, the Tarasque! the Tarasque!’ and the guard, his horn in its sling and laced cap cocked well over one ear, chucking his little dog, always in a fury, upon the top, climbed up himself with a shout: ‘Right-away!’

“Then would my four horses dash off to the medley of bells, barks, and horn-blasts, and the windows fly open for all Tarascon to look with pride upon the royal mail coach dart over the king’s highway.

“What a splendid road that was, Monsieur Tartarin, broad and well kept, with its mile-stones, its little heaps of road-metal at regular distances, and its pretty clumps of vines and olive-trees on either hand! Then, again, the roadside inns so close together, and the changes of horses every five minutes! And what jolly, honest chaps my patrons were!--village mayors and parish priests going up to Nimes to see their prefect or bishop, taffety-weavers returning openly from the Mazet, collegians out on holiday leave, peasants in worked smock-frocks, all fresh shaven for the occasion that morning; and up above, on the top, you gentlemen-sportsmen, always in high spirits, and singing each your own family ballad to the stars as you came back in the dark.

“Deary me! it’s a change of times now! Lord knows what rubbish I am carting here, come from nobody guesses where! They fill me with small deer, these negroes, Bedouin Arabs, swashbucklers, adventurers from every land, and ragged settlers who poison me with their pipes, and all jabbering a language that the Tower of Babel itself could make nothing of! And, furthermore, you should see how they treat me--I mean, how they never treat me: never a brush or a wash. They begrudge me grease for my axles. Instead of my good fat quiet horses of other days, little Arab ponies, with the devil in their frames, who fight and bite, caper as they run like so many goats, and break my splatterboard all to smithereens with their lashing out behind. Ouch! ouch! there they are at it again!

“And such roads! Just here it is bearable, because we are near the governmental headquarters; but out a bit there’s nothing, Monsieur--not the ghost of a road at all. We get along as best we can over hill and dale, over dwarf palms and mastic-trees. Ne’er a fixed change of horses, the stopping being at the whim of the guard, now at one farm, again at another.

“Somewhiles this rogue goes a couple of leagues out of the way to have a glass of absinthe or champoreau with a chum. After which, ‘Crack on, postillion!’ to make up for the lost time. Though the sun be broiling and the dust scorching, we whip on! We catch in the scrub and spill over, but whip on! We swim rivers, we catch cold, we get swamped, we drown, but whip! whip! whip! Then in the evening, streaming--a nice thing for my age, with my rheumatics--I have to sleep in the open air of some caravanseral yard, open to all the winds. In the dead o’ night jackals and hyaenas come sniffing of my body; and the marauders who don’t like dews get into my compartment to keep warm.

“Such is the life I lead, my poor Monsieur Tartarin, and that I shall lead to the day when--burnt up by the sun and rotted by the damp nights until unable to do anything else, I shall fall in some spot of bad road, where the Arabs will boil their kouskous with the bones of my old carcass”--

“Blidah! Blidah!” called out the guard as he opened the door.

II. A little gentleman drops in and “drops upon” Tartarin.

VAGUELY through the mud-dimmed glass Tartarin of Tarascon caught a glimpse of a second-rate but pretty town market-place, regular in shape, surrounded by colonnades and planted with orange-trees, in the midst of which what seemed toy leaden soldiers were going through the morning exercise in the clear roseate mist. The cafes were shedding their shutters. In one corner there was a vegetable market. It was bewitching, but it did not smack of lions yet.

“To the South! farther to the South!” muttered the good old desperado, sinking back in his corner.

At this moment the door opened. A puff of fresh air rushed in, bearing upon its wings, in the perfume of the orange-blossoms, a little person in a brown frock-coat, old and dry, wrinkled and formal, his face no bigger than your fist, his neckcloth of black silk five fingers wide, a notary’s letter-case, and umbrella--the very picture of a village solicitor.

On perceiving the Tarasconian’s warlike equipment, the little gentleman, who was seated over against him, appeared excessively surprised, and set to studying him with burdensome persistency.

The horses were taken out and the fresh ones put in, whereupon the coach started off again. The little weasel still gazed at Tartarin, who in the end took snuff at it.

“Does this astonish you?” he demanded, staring the little gentleman full in the face in his turn.

“Oh, dear, no! it only annoys me,” responded the other, very tranquilly.

And the fact is, that, with his shelter-tent, revolvers, pair of guns in their cases, and hunting-knife, not to speak of his natural corpulence, Tartarin of Tarascon did take up a lot of room.

The little gentleman’s reply angered him.

“Do you by any chance fancy that I am going lion-hunting with your umbrella?” queried the great man haughtily.

The little man looked at his umbrella, smiled blandly, and still with the same lack of emotion, inquired:

“Oho, then you are Monsieur”--

“Tartarin of Tarascon, lion-killer!”

In uttering these words the dauntless son of Tarascon shook the blue tassel of his fez like a mane.

Through the vehicle was a spell of stupefaction.

The Trappist brother crossed himself, the dubious women uttered little screams of affright, and the Orleansville photographer bent over towards the lion-slayer, already cherishing the unequalled honour of taking his likeness.

The little gentleman, though, was not awed.

“Do you mean to say that you have killed many lions, Monsieur Tartarin?” he asked, very quietly.

The Tarasconian received his charge in the handsomest manner.

“Is it many have I killed, Monsieur? I wish you had only as many hairs on your head as I have killed of them.”

All the coach laughed on observing three yellow bristles standing up on the little gentleman’s skull.

In his turn, the Orleansville photographer struck in:

“Yours must be a terrible profession, Monsieur Tartarin. You must pass some ugly moments sometimes. I have heard that poor Monsieur Bombonnel”--“Oh, yes, the panther-killer,” said Tartarin, rather disdainfully.

“Do you happen to be acquainted with him?” inquired the insignificant person.

“Eh! of course! Know him? Why, we have been out on the hunt over twenty times together.”

The little gentleman smiled.

“So you also hunt panthers, Monsieur Tartarin?” he asked.

“Sometimes, just for pastime,” said the fiery Tarasconian. “But,” he added, as he tossed his head with a heroic movement that inflamed the hearts of the two sweethearts of the regiment, “that’s not worth lion-hunting.”

“When all’s said and done,” ventured the photographer, “a panther is nothing but a big cat.”

“Right you are!” said Tartarin, not sorry to abate the celebrated Bombonnel’s glory a little, particularly in the presence of ladies.

Here the coach stopped. The conductor came to open the door, and addressed the insignificant little gentleman most respectfully, saying:

“We have arrived, Monsieur.”

The little gentleman got up, stepped out, and said, before the door was closed again:

“Will you allow me to give you a bit of advice, Monsieur Tartarin?”

“What is it, Monsieur?”

“Faith! you wear the look of a good sort of fellow, so I would, rather than not, let you have it. Get you back quickly to Tarascon, Monsieur Tartarin, for you are wasting your time here. There do remain a few panthers in the colony, but, out upon the big cats! they are too small game for you. As for lion-hunting, that’s all over. There are none left in Algeria, my friend Chassaing having lately knocked over the last.”

Upon which the little gentleman saluted, closed the door, and trotted away chuckling, with his document-wallet and umbrella.

“Guard,” asked Tartarin, screwing up his face contemptuously, “who under the sun is that poor little mannikin?”

“What! don’t you know him? Why, that there’s Monsieur Bombonnel!”

III. A Monastery of Lions.

AT Milianah, Tartarin of Tarascon alighted, leaving the stage-coach to continue its way towards the South.

Two days’ rough jolting, two nights spent with eyes open to spy out of window if there were not discoverable the dread figure of a lion in the fields beyond the road--so much sleeplessness well deserved some hours repose. Besides, if we must tell everything, since his misadventure with Bombonnel, the outspoken Tartarin felt ill at ease, notwithstanding his weapons, his terrifying visage, and his red cap, before the Orleansville photographer and the two ladies fond of the military.

So he proceeded through the broad streets of Milianah, full of fine trees and fountains; but whilst looking up a suitable hotel, the poor fellow could not help musing over Bombonnel’s words. Suppose they were true! Suppose there were no more lions in Algeria? What would be the good then of so much running about and fatigue?

Suddenly, at the turn of a street, our hero found himself face to face with--with what? Guess! “A donkey, of course!” A donkey? A splendid lion this time, waiting before a coffee-house door, royally sitting up on his hind-quarters, with his tawny mane gleaming in the sun.

“What possessed them to tell me that there were no more of them?” exclaimed the Tarasconian, as he made a backward jump.

On hearing this outcry the lion lowered his head, and taking up in his mouth a wooden bowl that was before him on the footway, humbly held it out towards Tartarin, who was immovable with stupefaction. A passing Arab tossed a copper into the bowl, and the lion wagged his tail. Thereupon Tartarin understood it all. He saw what emotion had prevented him previously perceiving: that the crowd was gathered around a poor tame blind lion, and that two stalwart Negroes, armed with staves, were marching him through the town as a Savoyard does a marmot.

The blood of Tarascon boiled over at once.

“Wretches that you are!” he roared in a voice of thunder, “thus to debase such noble beasts!”

Springing to the lion, he wrenched the loathsome bowl from between his royal jaws. The two Africans, believing they had a thief to contend with, rushed upon the foreigner with uplifted cudgels. There was a dreadful conflict: the blackamoors smiting, the women screaming, and the youngsters laughing. An old Jew cobbler bleated out of the hollow of his stall, “Dake him to the shustish of the beace!” The lion himself; in his dark state, tried to roar as his hapless champion, after a desperate struggle, rolled on the ground among the spilt pence and the sweepings.

At this juncture a man cleft the throng, made the Negroes stand back with a word, and the women and urchins with a wave of the hand, lifted up Tartarin, brushed him down, shook him into shape, and sat him breathless upon a corner-post.

“What, prince, is it you?” said the good Tartarin, rubbing his ribs.

“Yes, indeed, it is I, my valiant friend. As soon as your letter was received, I entrusted Baya to her brother, hired a post-chaise, flew fifty leagues as fast as a horse could go, and here I am, just in time to snatch you from the brutality of these ruffians. What have you done, in the name of just Heaven, to bring this ugly trouble upon you?”

“What done, prince? It was too much for me to see this unfortunate lion with a begging-bowl in his mouth, humiliated, conquered, buffeted about, set up as a laughing-stock to all this Moslem rabble”--

“But you are wrong, my noble friend. On the contrary, this lion is an object of respect and adoration. This is a sacred beast who belongs to a great monastery of lions, founded three hundred years ago by Mahomet Ben Aouda, a kind of fierce and forbidding La Trappe, full of roarings and wild-beastly odours, where strange monks rear and feed lions by hundreds, and send them out all over Northern Africa, accompanied by begging brothers. The alms they receive serve for the maintenance of the monastery and its mosques; and the two Negroes showed so much displeasure just now because it was their conviction that the lion under their charge would forthwith devour them if a single penny of their collection were lost or stolen through any fault of theirs.”

On hearing this incredible and yet veracious story Tartarin of Tarascon was delighted, and sniffed the air noisily. “What pleases me in this,” he remarked, as the summing up of his opinion, “is that, whether Monsieur Bombonnel likes it or not, there are still lions in Algeria.”--

“I should think there were!” ejaculated the prince enthusiastically. “We will start to-morrow beating up the Shelliff Plain, and you will see lions enough!”

“What, prince! have you an intention to go a-hunting, too?”

“Of course! Do you think I am going to leave you to march by yourself into the heart of Africa, in the midst of ferocious tribes of whose languages and usages you are ignorant! No, no, illustrious Tartarin, I shall quit you no more. Go where you will, I shall make one of the party.”

“O Prince! prince!”

The beaming Tartarin hugged the devoted Gregory to his breast at the proud thought of his going to have a foreign prince to accompany him in his hunting, after the example of Jules Gerard, Bombonnel, and other famous lion-slayers.

IV. The Caravan on the March.

LEAVING Milianah at the earliest hour next morning, the intrepid Tartarin and the no less intrepid Prince Gregory descended towards the Shelliff Plain through a delightful gorge shaded with jessamine, carouba, tuyas, and wild olive-trees, between hedges of little native gardens and thousands of merry, lively rills which scampered down from rock to rock with a singing splash--a bit of landscape meet for the Lebanon.

As much loaded with arms as the great Tartarin, Prince Gregory had, over and above that, donned a queer but magnificent military cap, all covered with gold lace and a trimming of oak-leaves in silver cord, which gave His Highness the aspect of a Mexican general or a railway station-master on the banks of the Danube.

This plague of a cap much puzzled the beholder; and as he timidly craved some explanation, the prince gravely answered:

“It is a kind of headgear indispensable for travel in Algeria.”

Whilst brightening up the peak with a sweep of his sleeve, he instructed his simple companion in the important part which the military cap plays in the French connection with the Arabs, and the terror this article of army insignia alone has the privilege of inspiring, so that the Civil Service has been obliged to put all its employees in caps, from the extra-copyist to the receiver-general. To govern Algeria (the prince is still speaking) there is no need of a strong head, or even of any head at all. A military cap does it alone, if showy and belaced, and shining at the top of a non-human pole, like Gessler’s.

Thus chatting and philosophising, the caravan proceeded. The barefooted porters leaped from rock to rock with ape-like screams. The guncases clanked, and the guns themselves flashed. The natives who were passing, salaamed to the ground before the magic cap. Up above, on the ramparts of Milianah, the head of the Arab Department, who was out for an airing with his wife, hearing these unusual noises, and seeing the weapons gleam between the branches, fancied there was a revolt, and ordered the drawbridge to be raised, the general alarm to be sounded, and the whole town put under a state of siege. A capital commencement for the caravan!

Unfortunately, before the day ended, things went wrong. Of the black luggage-bearers, one was doubled up with atrocious colics from having eaten the diachylon out of the medicine-chest: another fell on the roadside dead drunk with camphorated brandy; the third, carrier of the travelling-album, deceived by the gilding on the clasps into the persuasion that he was flying with the treasures of Mecca, ran off into the Zaccar on his best legs.

This required consideration. The caravan halted, and held a council in the broken shadow of an old fig-tree.

“It’s my advice that we turn up Negro porters from this evening forward,” said the prince, trying without success to melt a cake of compressed meat in an improved patent triple-bottomed sauce-pan. “There is, haply, an Arab trader quite near here. The best thing to do is to stop there, and buy some donkeys.”

“No, no; no donkeys,” quickly interrupted Tartarin, becoming quite red at memory of Noiraud. “How can you expect,” he added, hypocrite that he was, “that such little beasts could carry all our apparatus?”

The prince smiled.

“You are making a mistake, my illustrious friend. However weakly and meagre the Algerian bourriquot may appear to you, he has solid loins. He must have them so to support all that he does. Just ask the Arabs. Hark to how they explain the French colonial organisation. ‘On the top,’ they say, ‘is Mossoo, the Governor, with a heavy club to rap the staff; the staff, for revenge, canes the soldier; the soldier clubs the settler, and he hammers the Arab; the Arab smites the Negro, the Negro beats the Jew, and he takes it out of the donkey. The poor bourriquot having nobody to belabour, arches up his back and bears it all.’ You see clearly now that he can bear your boxes.”

“All the same,” remonstrated Tartarin, “it strikes me that jackasses will not chime in nicely with the effect of our caravan. I want something more Oriental. For instance, if we could only get a camel”--

“As many as you like,” said His Highness; and off they started for the Arab mart.

It was held a few miles away, on the banks of the Shelliff. There were five or six thousand Arabs in tatters here, grovelling in the sunshine and noisily trafficking, amid jars of black olives, pots of honey, bags of spices; and great heaps of cigars; huge fires were roasting whole sheep, basted with butter; in open air slaughter-houses stark naked Negroes, with ruddy arms and their feet in gore, were cutting up kids hanging from crosspoles, with small knives.

In one corner, under a tent patched with a thousand colours, a Moorish clerk of the market in spectacles scrawled in a large book. Here was a cluster of men shouting with rage: it was a spinning-jenny game, set on a corn-measure, and Kabyles were ready to cut one another’s throats over it. Yonder were laughs and contortions of delight: it was a Jew trader on a mule drowning in the Shelliff. Then there were dogs, scorpions, ravens, and flies--rather flies than anything else.

But a plentiful lack of camels abounded. They finally unearthed one, though, of which the M’zabites were trying to get rid--the real ship of the desert, the classical, standard camel, bald, woe-begone, with a long Bedouin head, and its hump, become limp in consequence of unduly long fasts, hanging melancholically on one side.

Tartarin considered it so handsome that he wanted the entire party to get upon it. Still his Oriental craze!

The beast knelt down for them to strap on the boxes.

The prince enthroned himself on the animal’s neck. For the sake of the greater majesty, Tartarin got them to hoist him on the top of the hump between two boxes, where, proud, and cosily settled down, he saluted the whole market with a lofty wave of the hand, and gave the signal of departure.

Thunderation! if the people of Tarascon could only have seen him!

The camel rose, straightened up its long knotty legs, and stepped out.

Oh, stupor! At the end of a few strides Tartarin felt he was losing colour, and the heroic chechia assumed one by one its former positions in the days of sailing in the Zouave. This devil’s own camel pitched and tossed like a frigate.

“Prince! prince!” gasped Tartarin pallid as a ghost, as he clung to the dry tuft of the hump, “prince, let’s get down. I find--I feel that I m-m-must get off; or I shall disgrace France.”

A deal of good that talk was--the camel was on the go, and nothing could stop it. Behind it raced four thousand barefooted Arabs, waving their hands and laughing like mad, so that they made six hundred thousand white teeth glitter in the sun.

The great man of Tarascon had to resign himself to circumstances. He sadly collapsed on the hump, where the fez took all the positions it fancied, and France was disgraced.

V. The Night-watch in a Poison-tree Grove.

SWEETLY picturesque as was their new steed, our lion-hunters had to give it up, purely out of consideration for the red cap, of course. So they continued the journey on foot as before, the caravan tranquilly proceeding southwardly by short stages, the Tarasconian in the van, the Montenegrin in the rear, and the camel, with the weapons in their cases, in the ranks.

The expedition lasted nearly a month.

During that seeking for lions which he never found, the dreadful Tartarin roamed from douar to douar on the immense plain of the Shelliff, through the odd but formidable French Algeria, where the old Oriental perfumes are complicated by a strong blend of absinthe and the barracks, Abraham and “the Zouzou” mingled, something fairy-tale-like and simply burlesque, like a page of the Old Testament related by Tommy Atkins.

A curious sight for those who have eyes that can see.

A wild and corrupted people whom we are civilising by teaching them our vices. The ferocious and uncontrolled authority of grotesque bashaws, who gravely use their grand cordons of the Legion of Honour as handkerchiefs, and for a mere yea or nay order a man to be bastinadoed. It is the justice of the conscienceless, bespectacled cadis under the palm-tree, Maw-worms of the Koran and Law, who dream languidly of promotion and sell their decrees, as Esau did his birthright, for a dish of lentils or sweetened kouskous. Drunken and libertine cadis are they, formerly servants to some General Yusuf or the like, who get intoxicated on champagne, along with laundresses from Port Mahon, and fatten on roast mutton, whilst before their tents the whole tribe waste away with hunger, and fight with the harriers for the bones of the lordly feast.