The Son of Clemenceau. Александр Дюма-сын
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Название: The Son of Clemenceau
Автор: Александр Дюма-сын
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4064066399320
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"Major von Sendlingen!" repeated the audience, shocked, as the officer had been seen but the night previously among them in lusty life, and death is a spectre most terrible in a saloon of mirth and carousal.
After that general exclamation, a silence ensued; one that meant acquiescence in the proceedings of the police.
"I must have killed him," thought the student. "This is a black prospect! I had better have quitted the hall and profited by the invitation of refuge which Herr Daniels offered me."
For the moment, he could take no part, though he could not doubt that Baboushka would denounce him—a stranger, and the principal in the duel with canes. His cloak would help toward the identification and unless the hag's crew had abstracted it, it would be forthcoming, he doubted not.
Indeed, elevated on her perch, able to see the faces of all around her, the hag's aged but brilliant eyes rapidly scanned those nearest her in wider and wider circles. All at once they became fixed upon Claudius, and by instinct, the neighbors fell away from him so that he was isolated. She extended her arm with an unnatural vigor, and in a voice also unexpectedly strong with malice, cried:
"That is he! there you have the slayer of poor Major von Sendlingen!"
At that very moment, a shrill, ear-splitting whistle sounded; and the gas-jets all over the hall went out too simultaneously for the act not to be that of a hand at the inlet from the street-main. Claudius heard the soldiers and policemen buffeting the people to scramble over the benches toward him. He had but a single road to a possible escape: by the little door in the wall through which Rebecca Daniels had ushered him into the auditorium. He stooped as he turned, to elude any outstretched hands, drove himself like a wedge through the compacted mass of frightened spectators and, spite of the gloom, the deeper because of the glare preceding it, he reached the egress. The uninitiated would never have suspected its existence, for the actors and staff of the establishment alone had the right and knowledge to use it.
"Lights, lights!" the functionaries were shouting.
By the time matches were struck and lanterns brought into the scene of confusion, Claudius had opened the panel, leaped through and closed it. He did not dally in the passage, but hastened to follow the walled-in road as well as he might by which he had penetrated the theatrical region.
At the dividing-line, where the path parted to the men's and to the ladies' dressing-rooms, he perceived a ghostly figure in the obscurity which also prevailed here from the general extinction of the illuminant. He was about shrinking back and fleeing in another direction when eyes blazed in the dark like a cat's, and the sweet, unmistakable voice of the singer, who had enthralled him, ejaculated:
"As God lives, it is you!"
"Suppose it is I!" he returned, impatiently. "Stand aside, or—"
"You must not pass here!" she returned, laying her hands on his lifted arm.
"Must not? We shall see about that!" and he repulsed her violently.
"No, no; you are too hasty! I mean that would be a fatal course. Here, here!" seizing him again and dragging him with her. "You were right to kill that ruffian! to cane him to death—like the Russian grand-dukes, he was not born to die by the sword. To abduct one woman while paying court to another, the traitor! But, never heed that! He is punished, and you must be saved. Here is an outlet: pursue the passage to the end and leave the town!"
"But I—"
"How can you repay me? Bah! repay me in the other world—below, with a drop of cold water when I parch!" And with a dulcet yet demoniacal laugh, the singular creature pushed him into a lightless lobby, slammed a door and seemed to run away, singing the refrain of the waltz which was to haunt him forever-more.
CHAPTER V.
UNDER MUNICH.
After an instant's reflection in the impenetrable shades, Claudius concluded to follow the advice of the variety theatre's prima donna. While a stranger to the City of Breweries, he knew that its predestination toward thirst was due to its being the site of an ancient rock-salt mine. In other cities, subterraneans were melodramatic; here, a labyrinth under the surface and at the level of the dancing and drinking cellars was so natural that a child of Munich, dropped into a well, would have no misgivings as to his worming his way up into the outer air.
At the worst, when pressed by hunger, he could no doubt make an appeal to the mounted patrol by night or the foot-passengers by day, whom he would hear overhead, and be released from this living burial at the cost of the imprisonment and trial which he had temporarily evaded.
Remembering that he had a box of cigar-lights, and regretting again the want of the cloak so useful in these damp passages, he lighted a match and began his flight by the sole opening that he spied. An odor of sausages, cheese and coarse tobacco was here and there strong, and he correctly divined that at these points, fugitives, probably from the same enemy as he fled, had recently made halts. Once assured that he was in a kind of thoroughfare, though one for the nefarious, he felt bolder and more hopeful about reaching a desirable goal.
He did not pause to think, as he continued, choosing, where there was a bifurcation, the most trampled corridor, hewn originally by the miners' pick. But he had much on his mind for future elaboration. Heretofore no man could have lived a less eventful life, passed among books, globes, drawing tools and lecture notes. In a few hours the change was great. The quiet student, with no aspirations but the completion of his wandering-year in Italian picture-galleries, had become a fugitive from justice, and on the hands, groping in a lugubrious earthen alley, were the stains of a fellow-creature's blood. Then, too, the singular friendships he had formed, the old Jew and his daughter, who were awaiting him—and this still more remarkable creature who had glanced across his path, like the divinities from above in antique poems, to point out the safe retreat.
But too long a time elapsed without his finding such an evidence of his security as he had too confidently expected. He might have mistaken the true line, for while at any point of divergence there were marks in the earth, where traces of saline flows still glistened, and even stones and bits of stick placed in cavities in the manner of the gypsy clues familiar to social outcasts, he could not interpret them; for once, his university education proved faulty.
A new alarm arose from the presence of swarms of rats; larger and more hideous than their fellows of which one catches a fleeting view in houses and in the streets, they seemed to be less afraid of the lord of creation than fables teach. They scuttled off in front of him, it is true, but he began to think that they followed him when he went by. One ray of comfort came in the two beliefs that his flashing matches frightened them, and that, for certain portions of the way, well-regulated droves of the vermin had districts assigned them; those that ventured in chase of him too far were beaten back by those on whose grounds they rashly trespassed.
This latter consolation was lost almost at the same time as the other: his stock of fuses ran out, while with the last flash he feared that he saw a larger mass than ever before in his track. The rats had united to overwhelm him.
Seized with panic, spite of his philosophy, dropping the all but empty wax-light case in his haste, he dashed madly forward, groping to save his head and shoulders from contact with the capacious gallery sides, but unable to take a step with any certainty how it would end. Fortunately, he had strayed back СКАЧАТЬ