A WOMAN’S SELF-SACRIFICE
The ferry-boat that plies between the bank of the lake and the Ile de
Beauté on which the Restaurant Azaïs stands had not actually touched
the landing-stage before M. Havard, standing up on one of the thwarts
of the boat, in which indeed he was the only passenger, leapt ashore,
in a paroxysm of nervous excitement.
“What am I going to find here?” thought the Chief of the Criminal
Bureau, “what fresh difficulties am I to be faced with, agitated as I
am, and really not knowing what to do? Then how simply grotesque the
visit I paid along with the Minister of Justice to that impossible
person Tom Bob—grotesque to the uttermost degree! I arrive with a
companion who is to be incognito; before I have been there three
minutes the man addresses him by his name! I come to charge him with
crimes committed at the Grand Duchess Alexandra’s house; he has never
set foot inside the place! Then, to crown all, he is rung up by
Fantômas, offering him contemptuously a petty piece of revenge—by way
of annoying the Department! Then presently, when we reach the prison,
it is to find Juve wounded and declaring he knows no more about it than
we do!”
M. Havard, so formal and precise a man, so staid and deliberate as a
rule, was for the moment so enraged he entirely forgot his dignity and
dashed helter skelter, running like a schoolboy, across the little
terrace separating the Restaurant Azaïs from the lakeside. There were
only a few diners that evening occupying the tables, and already the
majority were hurrying for the ferry-boat, that was making ready, after
landing the Chief on the island, to re-cross to the mainland. Only one
man remained seated at a table at the farthest end of the restaurant,
where he was finishing his meal. M. Havard recognized this solitary
diner at once and ran up to him.
“Well?” he panted.
Tom Bob lifted his head and recognized the newcomer. Speaking in his
quietest tones: “Oh! so there you are, M. Havard?” he observed.
“Yes ... well?” again asked the Chief.
“Take a chair, Monsieur Havard; you’ll help me drink my coffee? No?”
M. Havard was boiling over. “The devil take your coffee!” he shouted.
“Have you seen anything?”
Still quite unmoved, Tom Bob shrugged.
“I have seen,” he said, “that the cooking here is quite decently good
and that it’s an excellent place for eating a quiet dinner.”
“Devil take you and your dinner! Come now, answer me seriously ...
Fantômas?”
“Fantômas has not come yet.”
M. Havard heaved a sigh of relief, and at last allowed himself to sink
into the chair Tom Bob had pushed forward for him.
“Not come yet!” he exclaimed, “ah, well, I’m rather relieved after all.
It was just a joker then?”
“A joker! Whom d’you mean?”
“Egad, why, the man who ’phoned you!”
“I don’t think so.”
“Still—as nothing has happened.”
Tom Bob called the waiter. “Bring the cigars,” he ordered. Then,
turning again to the Head of the Criminal Bureau:
“Well, Monsieur Havard,” he said, “if nothing has happened, I fancy
that’s because the time hasn’t come yet for anything to happen, that’s
all.”
M. Havard growled out: “You think the ...”
“I think ... ’pon my word! Monsieur Havard, I think the wisest thing
to do is to wait patiently. Anyway, Fantômas strikes me as being
quite a man of the world. If he really means to destroy the charming
surroundings where he has brought me for this little dinner, I think he
has had the politeness to wait till I have finished. It was the least
he could do.”
But M. Havard failed to appreciate the American detective’s irony.
Interrupting him in the middle of his sentence, he sprang from his
chair, and slapping his forehead:
“And my men?” he cried, “I must make sure they are there.”
“What men?”
“The officers.”
“You’ve sent police-officers here?”
“Ten inspectors from the Bureau, yes!”
An amused smile flitted over the detective’s lips as he looked at
M. Havard whimsically.
“By the Lord!” he cried, “if I was Fantômas, I should be flattered; at
a telephone ring from him, you set a little army in motion, Monsieur
Havard! It’s a pretty compliment, d’you know, on your part.”
But M. Havard would hear no more.
“It’s a compliment, or it’s not a compliment,” he struck in in a dry
tone that, he hoped, would cut short the American’s irony. “Anyhow,
this is the way it is; you, if by any chance you succeeded in
catching one glimpse of Fantômas, they’d all be shouting _wonderful!
miraculous!_ If I were to arrest him, why, they’d just say it was all
in the day’s work; now, as I don’t arrest him, they throw stones at
me!... Meet you again, directly, I’m off to see if my men are posted.”
M. Havard took three steps to go, then thinking better of it and coming
up to Tom Bob again:
“Look here,” he excused himself, “I was a bit blunt with you; but
you mustn’t be angry, for some while back I’ve had good cause to be
irritable, you’ll admit that?”
“I do,” Tom Bob agreed.
“Then forgive me! Now tell me—you’ve done some smart things since your
arrival in this country, I can’t deny you’re clever—tell me, have you
any idea what Fantômas may try to do this evening?”
Tom Bob was evidently too good-hearted and too nice a fellow not to
commiserate the bad temper M. Havard suffered from, for it was in a
very cordial tone this time that he answered the Chief of the Criminal
Bureau:
“I can form no supposition on that point—nay, I will go further, and
admit there’s something that worries me ...”
“What is it?”
“This; if Fantômas has invited us here, it is because he is quite
confident we are not likely either to guess or parry the blow he is
preparing. Moreover, I’ve been engaged since I got here, in making a
cursory investigation, and having learnt nothing ...”
But M. Havard, to the last degree perplexed, had become deeply buried
in his own thoughts.
“For my own part,” he admitted, “do you know what it is worries me?”
“No! What does?”
“I keep asking myself whether Fantômas has not enticed us here, has not
enticed you here in particular, you, Tom Bob, on purpose to have a free
hand at some other spot in the city which it was his pleasure perhaps
to visit.”
Tom Bob too, debated the supposition M. Havard had just formulated.
“No, that would not be playing fair,” he said at last; “and Fantômas
has never been dishonourable. No, I can’t believe he would do that.”
M. Havard shrugged his shoulders by way of answer; he distrusted the
American’s psychological acumen.
After a short silence, M. Havard resumed:
“Well, as you please, Monsieur Bob, but my opinion is that for
to-night, either we are the victims of some practical joker, or in any
case the affair is off. Fantômas must have seen that my officers were
here in force. For my part, I am going to take a turn to look after my
men; I know where they are, hidden about the island. Then I shall take
the ferry again and so back to the Prefecture. Will you join me?”
Tom Bob shook his head.
“No,” he declared, “I shall spend the night here. I make it a point to
keep my tryst with Fantômas. However, M. Havard, I will go with you in
the boat as far as the other bank; that will give me the pleasure of
another row on this pretty lake, a perfect jewel at this time of an
evening, the finest thing of its kind, surely, in Paris.”
Still in a hurry, M. Havard did not stop to listen to the American’s
praises of the Bois de Boulogne. He crossed the little wooden bridge
joining the two parts of the island, made sure that the officers he had
sent there in the afternoon were at their posts, ordered them to keep
a most careful watch all night on the lake and its approaches, then
made his way back to Tom Bob.
“You are coming?”
“I am quite ready.”
The detective got up, paid the bill for his dinner, and took another
cigar, while M. Havard, faithful to his usual habits, refused the
Havana Tom Bob offered him and drew a cigarette from his case. The two
police-officials left the restaurant and made for the landing, where
the ferry-boat was again putting in.
“Get in,” M. Havard urged the American.
“After you!” protested the Head of the Criminal Bureau. “Halloa, have
you a light about you? Will you pass me a match, I haven’t got one.”
Tom Bob looked at his cigar. “I’m not well alight myself,” he said,
and pulling a box of vestas from his pocket, he lit one, handed it to
M. Havard, then took it back and applied it to his own cigar; then, as
the match was beginning to burn his fingers, he tossed it into the lake.
But then, suddenly, with terrifying intensity, with an incredible
rapidity, a fantastic, unheard-of, appalling thing happened. The very
instant the burning match touched the water, the lake caught fire and
blazed up fiercely, giving off dense clouds of smoke and sending up
huge flickering flames of red and blue that instantly covered the whole
surface with a sheet of fire.
Fortunately Tom Bob had managed to grip M. Havard by the arm and drag
him back from the boat he was just getting into, and both started
running breathlessly for the middle of the island, accompanied as they
went by the various employés of the _Azaïs_, the manager and a few
customers who were still on the premises, all flying headlong before
the flames. The sight was fairylike, unforgettable, but tragic to the
last degree. The whole lake indeed was a veritable sea of fire, which
the eye could not pierce. From this gigantic brazier a sooty smoke went
up in swirling eddies, instantly veiling the sky with thick, heavy
clouds. The heat was terrific, so intense that the sweat rolled in
torrents down the faces of the unfortunates imprisoned on the island.
The air indeed was almost unbreathable. All round the party branches
kept breaking off the trees and the smaller boughs beginning to flare
up, while the shrubs dipping in the water were in turn taking fire.
“We are done for!” groaned M. Havard. But Tom Bob preserved his
presence of mind.
“To the middle of the island!” he shouted; “come this way,”—and he led
all his companions to the centre of the little island. Once there, he
proceeded to calm their apprehensions.
“Keep cool!” he said, “keep cool! If the lake is on fire, there can be
only one explanation, that they’ve emptied over the surface barrels of
naphtha or petroleum. Egad! Fantômas can’t be far; it’s a miracle we
have escaped, Monsieur Havard; I imagine he was only waiting for both
of us to be in the boat between the bank and the island to put a light
to his naphtha and roast us to death.”
“Yes, indeed,” M. Havard agreed, “a minute more and we were dead men.”
Tom Bob shook his head gravely. “If only there are no fatalities,” he
said. “Look, it strikes me the flames are not so fierce now? Evidently
the layer of naphtha cannot have been very thick. Yes, the flames are
dropping, but ... but ...”—as he spoke, fearful screams broke out
coming from a little further away. M. Havard and the detective looked
at each other in consternation. The cries grew louder and louder, and
with one impulse the two men dashed to the rescue. They had distinctly
heard the words:
“Help! help!... Fantômas! Fantômas! Fantômas is here!”
While M. Havard and the unlucky Tom Bob were in such imminent peril
from the monstrous audacity of the ever elusive brigand, while the lake
was taking fire with alarming rapidity, a tragedy had been enacting on
its banks.
It was the day after the Grand Duchess Alexandra’s ball, and that very
evening Lady Beltham, in fulfilment of her promise to Fandor, was to go
and see Elisabeth Dollon to assure her of the journalist’s innocence.
Fandor never doubted that the great lady would keep her engagement and
find some way of meeting the girl. After the furious dagger thrust,
against which his coat of mail had so fortunately protected him, after
his flight from the grand duchess’s, a flight that lady had in fact
facilitated, the journalist could no longer doubt that Fantômas had
been really present at that festivity. And from that moment the death
of the unfortunate police-officer was no riddle to him—Joffre had
fallen by the hand of Fantômas. This fresh murder in no way surprised
him.
Accordingly Jérôme Fandor, anxious above all things to meet Elisabeth
Dollon and secure a renewal of the girl’s favour, had all the afternoon
been watching for Lady Beltham’s arrival at the lake in the Bois. But
it was only at nine in the evening that she arrived, and Fandor had
of course taken care not to reveal his presence just then. When Lady
Beltham should be returning and re-crossing the lake, then he would
go to her and thank her and ask her if he might now go to Elisabeth
to find her convinced of his innocence; for the moment it was very
necessary to keep concealed.
But just as the boat reached the landing place of the Restaurant Azaïs,
Fandor, who was still prowling on the road beside the lake, caught
sight of M. Havard’s figure, and Tom Bob with him, both evidently
intending to take the ferry on their way back to Paris.
Then in an instant came a flash, a blaze, an impassable wall of fire
separating the journalist from the island and the restaurant. Like
a madman, the unhappy man ran along the bank, wringing his hands
in despair. But what could he do? what could he do? In an agony he
pictured the terrible position, perhaps the fatal position ... in which
the wretches now on the island might find themselves.
“Elisabeth!” he cried, “Elisabeth, oh! we are under a curse!”
Fandor in fact was asking himself if the fire was not going to reach
the island, if indeed the island itself, drenched with petroleum, was
not blazing too; if Elisabeth were not doomed to die by that awful
death, the death that is worse than a thousand deaths, death by fire!
Fandor could divine the whole villainous plot. No, it was no mere
coincidence that the lake should take fire at the very moment Elisabeth
learned that he was innocent. Not a doubt of it this was another of the
horrid acts of cruelty Fantômas loved. Fantômas had willed Elisabeth
should die at that precise moment. Yes, for he knew all, he had learned
the _rendez-vous_ arranged with the grand duchess, for had he not
been present at the whole conversation between Fandor and the great
lady, when Fandor merely supposed he was looking at one of the many
reflections in the mirrors ornamenting the walls of the winter garden.
The lake had been burning for nearly three minutes. Suddenly Fandor
made up his mind; throwing off his coat, the brave young man ran to the
bank of the lake, whose waters were still blazing; his face was pale,
but a look of determination flashed in his eyes as he plunged into the
torrent of fire!
“I will swim under water,” the daring fellow told himself. “No, I
cannot let Elisabeth perish so; if she is to die, I will die near her,
with her!”
It was a heroic but a mad venture. The channel separating the mainland
from the island was broad, and half way across, he had no breath left
and must at any cost come to the surface, magnificent swimmer though
he was. The water was still blazing. Barely had he time to snatch a
mouthful of mephitic, scarce breathable air, when he must dive under
again on pain of being burnt alive.
“Ten strokes more!... five more ... three more!”—his knees grazed the
bottom, he had reached the shore!
Panting, breathless, Fandor climbed on the bank, grievously
hurt, bleeding, half dead; but he was near his goal. He cried,
“Elisabeth!”—and in the distance, his eyes still dazzled with the glare
of the fire, the journalist seemed to see a woman’s form. He staggered
towards her, a haggard, terrifying figure. But no sooner was he near
the girl, for it was really she, flying with Lady Beltham before the
advancing flames—she had taken refuge there—than he started back,
struck with consternation.
Lady Beltham had not yet had time to speak to Elisabeth Dollon, and the
girl, seeing this dreadful apparition rise before her, Fandor, pale and
bleeding, had screamed out in frantic terror:
“Fantômas! Fantômas! it is Fantômas!”
“Where is he gone!” Lady Beltham eagerly questioned M. Havard and
Tom Bob, who had run up on hearing the cries. She had not recognized
Fandor, but on the other hand she knew it was not Fantômas who had
shown himself. Instinctively she pointed in the direction in which the
journalist had taken to flight.
Thereupon followed a veritable man-hunt, duly organized. Blowing a
shrill whistle, M. Havard called up his men, scattered more or less
everywhere about the island.
“Fantômas is there” he yelled, “he has just swum over.... Dead or alive
he must be taken, dead or alive!”
Not a clump of trees but was searched. The waters of the lake, no
longer aflame, looked dark and gloomy as before, clouds of soot made
the air oppressive to breathe, the only light to help the officers
in their frantic search came from some trees that were still burning
on the bank of the lake. From all sides sounded cries, shouts,
exclamations. For Fandor was now in full flight before the pursuing
myrmidons of the law.
What did it all mean? He was far from having any clear conception of
this. Once more Fantômas had laid his plans marvellously well; once
more Fortune had favoured him. He it was, Fandor could surely guess,
who had contrived that Tom Bob and M. Havard were on the island at the
very moment the lake was to burst into flame. Fantômas had of course
felt no doubt that Fandor, prowling about the neighbourhood waiting to
know the result of Lady Beltham’s visit, would be one of the first to
make a dash for the island. In this way he would tumble into a regular
trap.
Fandor was in full flight, seeing everywhere men hunting for him,
revolver in hand, for the scattered conflagrations, dying down one by
one, still afforded some light.
“By the Lord!” he thought to himself, “I have no choice. I must take
to the water, stay as long as possible out in the middle of the lake;
it’ll be the devil’s own luck if I don’t manage to put them off the
scent.” But at that moment a ball whistled past his ear. He had
imprudently come too close, an officer had caught sight of him and
fired.
“Damnation!” muttered the young man, springing back sharply, “it seems
a price is set on my head.”
“There! there, I tell you! God Almighty, give me a revolver!” The
pursuit was still hot, when suddenly a splash was heard in the water.
The police officers gathered in a crowd; “He’ll get away! and never a
boat!”
But one of the men was equal to the occasion; “‘Dead or alive!’
M. Havard told us we were to capture Fantômas dead or alive! By God!
it was childish to spare his life when we had him at our mercy. A
volley!” cried the man, “Fire, all together!”
His advice was followed, the officers fired off their revolvers at a
venture in the direction of the splash. And next instant, drowning the
sound of the shots, a sharp cry rang through the night:
“Help!... oh!... help!”
“Hit! Fantômas is hit!”
But Tom Bob was already making for the restaurant at a run. A boat lay
high and dry on the bank; swiftly he dragged it to the water’s edge,
sprang in, and in a few strokes of the oars was at the spot the cries
had come from.
“Fantômas” he yelled—he could be clearly heard from the
shore—“Fantômas! surrender!”
Other boats came up; each second seemed an eternity. But now M. Havard,
leaning over the side of his boat, gripped a dark shape struggling in
the water; “I’ve got him!” Then in triumph, he shouted an order to the
officer who was at the oars:
“Row, my man, bring us to the shore!... there, beside that tree, it is
still burning, so we shall see plain, anyhow!... he must be seriously
wounded, he has stopped struggling.”
But as the boat entered the zone illuminated by the blazing tree,
M. Havard, still holding the mysterious human body he had gripped in
the darkness, could not check an exclamation of dismay.
“Oh! curses on it! curses on it! It is not Fantômas! It is not the man!
it is a woman!”
Others helped, and the inert form was soon carried ashore.
Then suddenly, Lady Beltham, who had looked on in frenzied distress at
all this scene of horror, came forward, a tragic figure, her eyes wide
with terror.
“Oh! it is horrible,” she groaned, falling on her knees beside the
half-drowned woman’s body, “it is horrible, she tried to save him, to
put them off the scent! They have killed an innocent woman! they have
killed Elisabeth Dollon!”