Tartarin Of Tarascon Part 5

UPON the 1st of December 18--, in clear, brilliant, splendid weather, under a south winter sun, the startled inhabitants of Ma.r.s.eilles beheld a Turk come down the Canebiere, or their Regent Street. A Turk, a regular Turk--never had such a one been seen; and yet, Heaven knows, there is no lack of Turks at Ma.r.s.eilles.

The Turk in question--have I any necessity of telling you it was the great Tartarin of Tarascon?--waddled along the quays, followed by his gun-cases, medicine-chest, and tinned comestibles, to reach the landing-stage of the Touache Company and the mail steamer the Zouave, which was to transport him over the sea.

With his ears still ringing with the home applause, intoxicated by the glare of the heavens and the reek of the sea, Tartarin fairly beamed as he stepped out with a lofty head, and between his guns on his shoulders, looking with all his eyes upon that wondrous, dazzling harbour of Ma.r.s.eilles, which he saw for the first time. The poor fellow believed he was dreaming. He fancied his name was Sinbad the Sailor, and that he was roaming in one of those fantastic cities abundant in the "Arabian Nights." As far as eye could reach there spread a forest of masts and spars, cris-crossing in every way.

Flags of all countries floated--English, American, Russian, Swedish, Greek and Tunisian.

The vessels lay alongside the wharves--ay, head on, so that their bowsprits stuck up out over the strand like rows of bayonets. Over it, too, sprawled the mermaids, G.o.ddesses, madonnas, and other figure-heads in carved and painted wood which gave names to the ships--all worn by sea-water, split, mildewed, and dripping. Ever and anon, between the hulls, a patch of harbour like watered silk splashed with oil. In the intervals of the yards and booms, what seemed swarms of flies prettily spotted the blue sky. These were the shipboys, hailing one another in all languages.

On the waterside, amidst thick green or black rivulets coming down from the soap factories loaded with oil and soda, bustled a ma.s.s of custom-house officers, messengers, porters, and truckmen with their bogheys, or trolleys, drawn by Corsican ponies.

There were shops selling quaint articles, smoky shanties where sailors were cooking their own queer messes, dealers in pipes, monkeys, parrots, ropes, sailcloth, fanciful curios, amongst which were mingled higgledy-piggledy old culverins, huge gilded lanterns, worn-out pulley-blocks, rusty flukeless anchors, chafed cordage, battered speaking-trumpets, and marine gla.s.ses almost contemporary with the Ark.

Sellers of mussels and clams squatted beside their heaps of sh.e.l.lfish and yawped their goods. Seamen rolled by with tar-pots, smoking soup-bowls, and big baskets full of cuttlefish, from which they went to wash the ink in the milky waters of the fountains.

Everywhere a prodigious collection of all kinds of goods: silks, minerals, wood in stacks, lead in pigs, cloths, sugars, caruba wood logs, colza seed, liquorice sticks, sugar-canes. The East and the West cheek by jowl, even to pyramids of Dutch cheeses which the Genoese were dyeing red by contact with their hands.

Yonder was the corn market: porters discharging sacks down the shoots of lofty elevators upon the pier, and loose grain rolling as a golden torrent through a blonde dust. Men in red skullcaps were sifting it as they caught it in large a.s.ses'-skin sieves, and loading it upon carts which took their millward way, followed by a regiment of women and youngsters with wisps and gleaning baskets. Farther on, the dry docks, where large vessels were laid low on their sides till their yards dipped in the water; they were singed with thorn-bushes to free them of sea weed; there rose an odour of pitch, and the deafening clatter of the sheathers coppering the bottoms with broad sheets of yellow metal.

At whiles a gap in between the masts, in which Tartarin could see the haven mouth, where the vessels came and went: a British frigate off for Malta, dainty and thoroughly washed down, with the officer in primrose gloves, or a large home-port brig hauling out in the midst of uproar and oaths, whilst the fat captain, in a high silk hat and frockcoat, ordered the operations in Provencal dialect. Other craft were making forth under all sail, and, still farther out, more were slowly looming up in the sunshine as if they were sailing in the air.

All the time a frightful riot, the rumbling of carts, the "Haul all, haul away!" of the shipmen, oaths, songs, steamboat whistles, the bugles and drums in Forts Saint Jean and Saint Nicolas, the bells of the Major, the Accoules, and Saint Victor; with the mistral atop of all, catching up the noises and clamour, and rolling them up together with a furious shaking, till confounded with its own voice, which intoned a mad, wild, heroic melody like a grand charging tune--one that filled hearers with a longing to be off, and the farther the better--a craving for wings.

It was to the sound of this splendid blast that the intrepid Tartarin Tarasco of Tarascon embarked for the land of lions.

EPISODE THE SECOND, AMONG "THE TURKS"

I. The Pa.s.sage--The Five Positions of the Fez--The Third Evening Out--Mercy upon us!

JOYFUL would I be, my dear readers, if I were a painter--a great artist, I mean--in order to set under your eyes, at the head of this second episode, the various positions taken by Tartarin's red cap in the three days' pa.s.sage it made on board of the Zouave, between France and Algeria.

First would I show you it at the steaming out, upon deck, arrogant and heroic as it was, forming a glory round that handsome Tarasconian head.

Next would I show you it at the harbour-mouth, when the bark began to caper upon the waves; I would depict it for you all of a quake in astonishment, and as though already experiencing the preliminary qualms of sea-sickness. Then, in the Gulf of the Lion, proportionably to the nearing the open sea, where the white caps heaved harder, I would make you behold it wrestling with the tempest, and standing on end upon the hero's cranium, with its mighty mane of blue wool bristling out in the spray and breeze. Position Fourth: at six in the afternoon, with the Corsican coast in view; the unfortunate chechia hangs over the ship's side, and lamentably stares down as though to plumb the depths of ocean. Finally and lastly, the Fifth Position: at the back of a narrow state-room, in a box-bed so small it seemed one drawer in a nest of them, something shapeless rolled on the pillow with moans of desolation.

This was the fez--the fez so defiant at the sailing, now reduced to the vulgar condition of a nightcap, and pulled down over the very ears of the head of a pallid and convulsed sufferer.

How the people of Tarascon would have kicked themselves for having constrained the great Tartarin to leave home, if they had but seen him stretched in the bunk in the dull, wan gleam through the dead-light, amid the sickly odour of cooking and wet wood--the heart-heaving perfume of mail-boats; if they had but heard him gurgle at every turn of the screw, wail for tea every five minutes, and swear at the steward in a childish treble!

On my word of honour as a story-teller, the poor Turk would have made a paste-board dummy pity him. Suddenly, overcome by the nausea, the hapless victim had not even the power to undo the Algerian girdle-cloth, or lay aside his armoury; the lumpy-handled hunting-sword pounded his ribs, and the leather revolver-case made his thigh raw. To finish him arose the taunts of Sancho-Tartarin, who never ceased to groan and inveigh:

"Well, for the biggest kind of imbecile, you are the finest specimen! I told you truly how it would be. Ha, ha! you were bound to go to Africa, of course! Well, old merriman, now you are going to Africa, how do you like it?"

The cruellest part of it was that, from the retreat where he was moaning, the hapless invalid could hear the pa.s.sengers in the grand saloon laughing, munching, singing, and playing at cards. On board the Zouave the company was as jolly as numerous, composed of officers going back to join their regiments, ladies from the Ma.r.s.eilles Alcazar Music Hall, strolling-players, a rich Mussulman returning from Mecca, and a very jocular Montenegrin prince, who favoured them with imitations of the low comedians of Paris. Not one of these jokers felt the sea-sickness, and their time was pa.s.sed in quaffing champagne with the steamer captain, a good fat born Ma.r.s.eillais, who had a wife and family as well at Algiers as at home, and who answered to the merry name of Barba.s.sou.

Tartarin of Tarascon hated this pack of wretches; their mirthfulness deepened his ails.

At length, on the third afternoon, there was such an extraordinary hullabaloo on the deck that our hero was roused out of his long torpor.

The ship's bell was ringing and the seamen's heavy boots ran over the planks.

"Go ahead! Stop her! Turn astern!" barked the hoa.r.s.e voice of Captain Barba.s.sou; and then, "Stop her dead!"

There was an abrupt check of movement, a shock, and no more, save the silent rolling of the boat from side to side like a balloon in the air.

This strange stillness alarmed the Tarasconian.

"Heaven ha' mercy upon us!" he yelled in a terrifying voice, as, recovering his strength by magic, he bounded out of his berth, and rushed upon deck with his a.r.s.enal.

II. "To arms! to arms"

ONLY the arrival, not a foundering.

The Zouave was just gliding into the roadstead--a fine one of black, deep water, but dull and still, almost deserted. On elevated ground ahead rose Algiers, the White City, with its little houses of a dead cream-colour huddling against one another lest they slid into the sea.

It was like Meudon slope with a laundress's washing hung out to dry.

Over it a vast blue satin sky--and such a blue!

A little restored from his fright, the ill.u.s.trious Tartarin gazed on the landscape, and listened with respect to the Montenegrin prince, who stood by his side, as he named the different parts of the capital, the Kasbah, the upper town, and the Rue Bab-Azoon. A very finely-brought-up prince was this Montenegrin; moreover, knowing Algeria thoroughly, and fluently speaking Arabic. Hence Tartarin thought of cultivating his acquaintance.

All at once, along the bulwark against which they were leaning, the Tarasconian perceived a row of large black hands clinging to it from over the side. Almost instantly a Negro's woolly head shot up before him, and, ere he had time to open his mouth, the deck was overwhelmed on every side by a hundred black or yellow desperadoes, half naked, hideous, and fearsome. Tartarin knew who these pirates were--"they," of course, the celebrated "they" who had too often been hunted after by him in the by-ways of Tarascon. At last they had decided to meet him face to face. At the outset surprise nailed him to the spot. But when he saw the outlaws fall upon the luggage, tear off the tarpaulin covering, and actually commence the pillage of the ship, then the hero awoke. Whipping out his hunting-sword, "To arms! to arms!" he roared to the pa.s.sengers; and away he flew, the foremost of all, upon the buccaneers. "Ques aco? What's the stir? What's the matter with you?" exclaimed Captain Barba.s.sou, coming out of the 'tweendecks.

"About time you did turn up, captain! Quick, quick, arm your men!"

"Eh, what for? dash it all!"

"Why, can't you see?"

"See what?"

"There, before you, the corsairs"

Captain Barba.s.sou stared, bewildered. At this juncture a tall blackamoor tore by with our hero's medicine-chest upon his back.

"You cut-throat! just wait for me!" yelled the Tarasconer as he ran after, with the knife uplifted.

But Barba.s.sou caught him in the spring, and holding him by the waist-sash, bade him be quiet.

"Tron de ler! by the throne on high! they're no pirates. It's long since there were any pirates hereabout. Those dark porters are light porters.

Ha, ha!"

"P--p-porters?"

"Rather, only come after the luggage to carry it ash.o.r.e. So put up your cook's galley knife, give me your ticket, and walk off behind that n.i.g.g.e.r--an honest dog, who will see you to land, and even into a hotel, if you like."