Part 13 (2/2)
The foremost soldier of a vanguard, the sharpshooter skirting the walls of an enemy's town, never advanced with more mistrust than the Taras-conese hero while crossing the short distance between the hotel and the post-office. At the slightest heel-tap sounding behind his own, he stopped, looked attentively at the photographs in the windows, or fingered an English or German book lying on a stall, to oblige the police spy to pa.s.s him. Or else he turned suddenly round, to stare with ferocious eyes at a stout servant-girl going to market, or some harmless tourist, a _table d'hote_ Prune, who, taking him for a madman, turned off, alarmed, from the sidewalk to avoid him.
When he reached the office, where the wickets open, rather oddly, into the street itself, Tartarin pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed, to observe the surrounding physiognomies before he himself approached: then, suddenly darting forward, he inserted his whole head and shoulders into the opening, muttered a few indistinct syllables (which they always made him repeat, to his great despair), and, possessor at last of the mysterious trust, he returned to the hotel by a great detour on the kitchen side, his hand in his pocket clutching the package of letters and papers, prepared to tear up and swallow everything at the first alarm.
Manilof and Bolibine were usually awaiting his return with the Wa.s.siliefs. They did not lodge in the hotel, out of prudence and economy. Bolibine had found work in a printing-office, and Manilof, a very clever cabinetmaker, was employed by a builder. Tartarin did not like them: one annoyed him by his grimaces and his jeering airs; the other kept looking at him savagely. Besides, they took too much s.p.a.ce in Sonia's heart.
”He is a hero!” she said of Bolibine; and she told how for three years he had printed all alone, in the very heart of St. Petersburg, a revolutionary paper. Three years without ever leaving his upper room, or showing himself at a window, sleeping at night in a great cupboard built in the wall, where the woman who lodged him locked him up till morning with his clandestine press.
And then, that life of Manilof, spent for six months in the subterranean pa.s.sages beneath the Winter Palace, watching his opportunity, sleeping at night on his provision of dynamite, which resulted in giving him frightful headaches, and nervous troubles; all this, aggravated by perpetual anxiety, sudden irruptions of the police, vaguely informed that something was plotting, and coming, suddenly and unexpectedly, to surprise the workmen employed at the Palace. On one of the rare occasions when Manilof came out of the mine, he met on the Place de l'Amiraute a delegate of the Revolutionary Committee, who asked him in a low voice, as he walked along:
”Is it finished?”
”No, not yet...” said the other, scarcely moving his lips. At last, on an evening in February, to the same question in the same words he answered, with the greatest calmness:
”It is finished...”
And almost immediately a horrible uproar confirmed his words, all the lights of the palace went out suddenly, the place was plunged into complete obscurity, rent by cries of agony and terror, the blowing of bugles, the galloping of soldiers, and firemen tearing along with their trucks.
Here Sonia interrupted her tale:
”Is it not horrible, so many human lives sacrificed, such efforts, such courage, such wasted intelligence?.. No, no, it is a bad means, these butcheries in the ma.s.s... He who should be killed always escapes... The true way, the most humane, would be to seek the czar himself as you seek the lion, fully determined, fully armed, post yourself at a window or the door of a carriage... and, when he pa.s.ses.....”
”_Be!_ yes, _certainemain_...” responded Tartarin embarra.s.sed, and pretending not to seize her meaning; then, suddenly, he would launch into a philosophical, humanitarian discussion with one of the numerous a.s.sistants. For Bolibine and Manilof were not the only visitors to the Wa.s.siliefs. Every day new faces appeared of young people, men or women, with the cut of poor students; elated teachers, blond and rosy, with the self-willed forehead and the childlike ferocity of Sonia; outlawed exiles, some of them already condemned to death, which lessened in no way their youthful expansiveness.
They laughed, they talked openly, and as most of them spoke French, Tartarin was soon at his ease. They called him ”uncle,” conscious of something childlike and artless about him that they liked. Perhaps he was over-ready with his hunting tales; turning up his sleeve to his biceps in order to show the scar of a blow from a panther's claws, or making his hearers feel beneath his beard the holes left there by the fangs of a lion; perhaps also he became too rapidly familiar with these persons, catching them round the waist, leaning on their shoulders, calling them by their Christian names after five minutes' intercourse:
”Listen, Dmitri...” ”You know me, Fedor Ivanovich...” They knew him only since yesterday, in any case; but they liked him all the same for his jovial frankness, his amiable, trustful air, and his readiness to please. They read their letters before him, planned their plots, and told their pa.s.swords to foil the police: a whole atmosphere of conspiracy which amused the imagination of the Tarasconese hero immensely: so that, however opposed by nature to acts of violence, he could not help, at times, discussing their homicidal plans, approving, criticising, and giving advice dictated by the experience of a great leader who has trod the path of war, trained to the handling of all weapons, and to hand-to-hand conflicts with wild beasts.
One day, when they told in his presence of the murder of a policeman, stabbed by a Nihilist at the theatre, Tartarin showed them how badly the blow had been struck, and gave them a lesson in knifing.
”Like this, _ve!_ from the top down. Then there's no risk of wounding yourself...”
And, excited by his own imitation:
”Let's suppose, _te!_ that I hold your despot between four eyes in a boar-hunt He is over there, where you are, Fedor, and I'm here, near this round table, each of us with our hunting-knife... Come on, monseigneur, we 'll have it out now...”
Planting himself in the middle of the salon, gathering his st.u.r.dy legs under him for a spring, and snorting like a woodchopper, he mimicked a real fight, ending by his cry of triumph as he plunged the weapon to the hilt, from the top down, _coquin de sort!_ into the bowels of his adversary.
”That's how it ought to be done, my little fellows!”
But what subsequent remorse! what anguish when, escaping from the magnetism of Sonia's blue eyes, he found himself alone, in his nightcap, alone with his reflections and his nightly gla.s.s of _eau sucree!_
_Differemment_, what was he meddling with? The czar was not his czar, decidedly, and all these matters didn't concern him in the least... And don't you see that some of these days he would be captured, extradited and delivered over to Muscovite justice... _Boufre!_ they don't joke, those Cossacks... And in the obscurity of his hotel chamber, with that horrible imaginative faculty which the horizontal position increases, there developed before him--like one of those unfolding pictures given to him in childhood--the various and terrible punishments to which he should be subjected: Tartarin in the verdigris mines, like Boris, working in water to his belly, his body ulcerated, poisoned. He escapes, he hides amid forests laden with snow, pursued by Tartars and bloodhounds trained to hunt men. Exhausted with cold and hunger, he is retaken and finally hung between two thieves, embraced by a pope with greasy hair smelling of brandy and seal-oil; while away down there, at Tarascon in the suns.h.i.+ne, the band playing of a fine Sunday, the crowd, the ungrateful crowd, are installing a radiant Costecalde in the chair of the P. C. A.
It was during the agony of one of these dreadful dreams that he uttered his cry of distress, ”Help, help, Bezuquet!” and sent to the apothecary that confidential letter, all moist with the sweat of his nightmare. But Sonia's pretty ”Good morning” beneath his window sufficed to cast him back into the weaknesses of indecision.
One evening, returning from the Kursaal to the hotel with the Wa.s.siliefs and Bolibine, after two hours of intoxicating music, the unfortunate man forgot all prudence, and the ”Sonia, I love you,” which he had so long restrained, was uttered as he pressed the arm that rested on his own.
She was not agitated. Perfectly pale, she gazed at him under the gas of the portico on which they had paused: ”Then deserve me...” she said, with a pretty enigmatical smile, a smile that gleamed upon her delicate white teeth. Tartarin was about to reply, to bind himself by an oath to some criminal madness when the porter of the hotel came up to him:
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