They advise you to keep the windows shut, as you go cork-screwing up that infernal staircase. You might find it worse if you did not; it is bad enough when you do. Drifts of asphyxiating smoke, fitfully lambent, stream by the glass, and writh about and nozzle where they fancy they have detected an opening. It may not be large enough for them to enter by, but whiffs of their poisonous breath leak in, and give you a taste of what you might expect were they to find you napping. The train itself, in that choking atmosphere, seems to go weak at the wheels, and to drag itself wearily upward, as if every revolution must be its last, committing you in prospect to the alternatives of entombment in the heart of a mountain or a back-descent at rocket-speed into France. A throb as of thunderous subterranean waters fills your ears; the wind of your passage clacks like a monstrous tongue on the stony roof above you; it seems impossible that any work of man can withstand the hugeness of that deafening uproar and vibration. But it is all, of course, acoustically exaggerated to you in your confined pen. You are going up a spiral chimney, with a sufficient ventilation at the top. The clamour of your rising emerges there with the smoke and steam, and, like a piston rod, you expel them before you as you advance. And so, at last, when you have almost given up hope, a flash—and Elysium.
I think the world can give one no first experience at once so sombre and so dazzlingly impressive as that of the passage of the Col de Fréjus, with its entry from low France and emergence into high Italy. Thirty minutes are but half-an-hour out in the daylight; in the Mont Cenis tunnel they amount to a good long spell of purgatory. There the wails of the damned go past in drifts of lurid smoke, most agitating in their bearing on the fragile pane which alone separates the eternal from the temporal classes. One finds oneself hoping that the ministers of justice have fully understood their instructions about one, and that one will be permitted to reach redemption without the window being broken. Curiously, too, the system of bought indulgence strikes one for the first time as having something in it. The cost would be very small to shorten this tunnel by a spiritual mile or two.
And yet, when it is ended, one would not have had it shorter by a metre, because every foot taken from it would mean just so much ecstasy filched from one’s awakening from a nightmare. For, behold! from travelling in a steaming suffocating drain pipe, one is spat out suddenly into Paradise in winter.
After that, it seems bathos to compare the prospect with a transformation scene at a pantomime; yet, I think, perhaps, the latter analogy is the apter. The instant glide from terrific night into fairyland; the stupendous brown gullies, dripping icicles from a sabre’s length to a maypole’s; snow in fields, on slopes, in ravines, all of a blinding lustre, and stained in its shadows of a celestial blue; a world of high-lifted iridescence, streaked with gold leaf, spangled with glass dust, discharging ice-crusted torrents under archways of glittering rock, climbing peak over peak to the heaven-painted “cloth” of light, living and violet, which makes its background—that is how the vision of Italy first broke upon me, emerging from the portal of the underworld.
But, as to Geoletti, the man was translated like Bottom the weaver. If, to me, the world had suddenly sprung into a vision of “cloud-capped towers” and glittering pinnacles chiming unearthly music from diamond bells, to him it was as the thronging of old familiar spirits gathered to greet his return. He gazed and gazed, and danced on his seat, and uttered uncouth ejaculations. He hugged himself in spasms, and bit his nails, and glared with burning eyes that the rising waters of his soul could hardly quench. Have you ever seen the wild spirit of the sea wake in a captive gull when the wind came on to blow? So wrought the spirit of his mountains on Geoletti. I think there was not one of us whose soul did not respond in some measure to the tragic pathos of that revelation. For what trifling messes of pottage cannot the fool in us be induced to part with his inheritance!
But enough of all this. My theme is Cain, not Esau; murder, not mountains. The comet, slackening now in its descent, bears us down by beautiful winding valleys to the plains of Piedmont, and spent and slow at length, discharges us upon Turin and Signor Valombroso.
That was his magnificent name, no less. He was not only the first of Piedmontese detectives, but an accomplished linguist to boot, and had been engaged from London, regardless of expense, to the service of Milord Johnny di Dando. He took us all under his wing at once, Inspector Jannaway even condescendingly, and shepherded the flock of us with a masterful volubility.
He was a tiny slim-waisted man, but his chest was stupendous. He might have packed all the rest of himself into it, and still have found room for a superior conceit or two. It stood for Valombroso in Valombroso’s own opinion. The frill, or comb, which strutted from it, through the unbuttoned upper half of its owner’s neat frock coat, proclaimed him cock of the walk in his own exclusive department. In further emphasis of Valombroso’s supremacy, Valombroso’s silk hat was put at an angle on his head like an acute accent on Valombroso, and Valombroso’s moustachios, waxed into stinglike points, were accents also, acute and grave, on Valombroso’s speech, which was copious and confident. In the course, indeed, of our acquaintance, Valombroso was to convince us, in flourishing rhetoric, that in foresight, in acumen, in penetration, as also in the conquering simplicity of his system, there was no detective—save one perhaps—in all the world who could approach Valombroso.
The possible exception was the English amateur, Mr Holmes, no less. Valombroso had the greatest admiration for this certainly unique man.
“He knows very well,” he said, “that it is not the criminal who want to mystify, but the public who want to be mystified. So he keep the clue, which is the obvious one, in his own hand, and send all the newspapers astray on many false scents. Then the time come when they are lost, every Jack’s son of them, and he bring them back, very gradual and gentle, to the path which shall end to the view of Mr Holmes holding his prisoner in the handcuffs. But there he was from the first, though they knew it not. He did not want them to know, for where then would have shown his cleverness? We all scorn the obvious, do we not? It is so unexciting. There is no reputation to be gained by seizing on it—not in England. Mr Holmes adapt himself to a demand—he is very clever. But your police, they make the demand by their stupidity. ‘Look,’ they say, ‘there is a man stealing a handkerchief from a lady’s pocket! let us watch him and watch him to make sure that he does not want only to blow his nose and return it.’ But presently he steals another handkerchief, and then another, and so they say, ‘Three handkerchiefs are more than the allowance to one nose; he must be a thief; let us arrest him’; and by that time there are three ladies who are without the means to blow their noses. So again, if a murder is committed and the murderer suspect—do they arrest him and put him by the heels while they bring the charge home? Not at all; they watch that he commit himself, and they tell the newspapers in the meantime all of what they are thinking and doing so cleverly, as if that murderer was the only one out of all the country that not read the newspapers. But the public applaud, and that is enough. It is not my way. I do not walk twenty kilometres to get across the street. I say, ‘Show me my man and I go for him.’ Frankness, frankness always—that is my method. Plain dealing is the last thing the criminal expect. It is against his nature. He feels for ever in his expectation the sudden pinioning from the back. He has no fear that I shall walk up to his face and take him by the hand. Now, I say, show me this body in its cave, and I ask no more. I go straight to England to procure Mr Dalston’s extradition. It is enough for what it is until I get him here locked safe. Then I will proceed to formulate my case. It is well to bring down your bird before you put the pot on to boil.”