CHAPTER V
DISAPPOINTED HOPES
“So your birth certificate is an unknown quantity, eh? and there’s no means of knowing what your name properly is?”
“What can that matter to you, Monsieur Moche?”
“Oh! for me, it’s nothing to me. I don’t care a hang; you’re a tremendous cute chap, that’s all I want to know; your patent of nobility you can leave with your ‘uncle,’ if that’s where you’ve deposited it, eh, my lad?”
“That’s where it is—or somewhere else, Monsieur Moche.”
“Remember, prisons keep records, now, don’t they?”
“Don’t talk about that, sir!”
“Agreed, my boy! now look’ee, for the friends of the family, for Paulet, the wench Nini, and the rest of the pals, you shall be ‘Little Tremendous,’ that’s settled. Then, if clients come to see me, well, I’ll give you a title of ceremony—d’you cotton to that?”
“I’m agreeable.”
“I shall call you ... let me see ... I’ll call you my ‘Chief of Staff.’ That’ll put a stopper on their gab.”
“No doubt it will, Monsieur Moche.”
It was in a dull, depressed, specious, fawning voice that Jérôme Fandor replied to his new “master.”
In the garret where the dreadful old fellow stored his archives, huge masses of dusty paper, cheek by jowl with all sorts of miscellaneous rubbish, worthless bric-à-brac, old worn-out furniture, clothes fit only for a hand-me-down shop, Fandor had passed a not too uncomfortable night.
Accordingly he had risen in a cheerful frame of mind. A hasty wash at a trickle of cold water that escaped with a nerve-racking noise from a leaky tap on the landing outside his door, had quite made him his own man again. Whistling a tune he had rejoined M. Moche.
“Now, sir,” he had asked, “you have work for me to do, eh, in your place of business?”
M. Moche, already ensconced in a leather armchair, from which tags of the horsehair stuffing stuck out in all directions, but which formed a permanent seat of state behind his desk, loaded with multitudinous papers, had nodded assent.
“Work? Yes, my young friend, yes; at my place there’s always work to do, only as there’s not always cash, for times are hard, we must settle about conditions. I offer you board and lodging, and now and again a bit of money ... does that suit your book?”
Jérôme Fandor would have thought himself in heaven, had not the dubious looks of the unpleasant old man driven all celestial ideas clean out of his head.
“That’ll do me,” was as much as he had cared to say.
Thereupon the worthy M. Moche had proceeded to put a number of leading questions.
What could Fandor do? Write? Yes?... Good. That was capital. He could draw, too? then he could draw signatures? in fact, copy signatures, eh? copy them, you know, eh? Yes, again? Better and better ... The old man seemed delighted.
Fandor had judicially sized up his new employer by this time; yes, there was no doubt he could be of great service to him on occasions.
Then M. Moche had asked the young man to tell him precisely who and what he was. But on that point, Fandor had proved reticent to the last degree.
“I’ve got pals,” this was all he would say, “who have nicknamed me ‘Little Tremendous,’ because I’m pretty nimble with my maulies and ain’t afraid to use ’em.”
The information was vague enough. But Moche was not the man to insist on any excessive precision of statement. He felt little doubt his new clerk must have had a somewhat chequered past. If it didn’t suit him to let out exactly who he was, well, that was his business ... And that was why Moche, after informing Fandor that he would be where clients were concerned the “Chief of Staff” in his office, addressed the young man familiarly by the name he had chosen to give himself.
“Look here, young Handy Man, I’m going to send you on an errand.”
“Very good, M’sieu Moche.”
“An errand to a pretty girl’s....”
“Better still, M’sieu Moche.”
“But no nonsense, you know! it’s a serious matter, and you must be serious. No larks with the girl, she’s going to be my tenant.”
“You’re a house owner then, M’sieu Moche?”
“Yes, my boy, a house owner, but a poor, hard-up one at that; don’t you go and think I’m a millionaire ... Anyhow, I’ve a bit of a place where the young lady in question has rented a flat.”
“And that’s where I’m to go, M’sieu Moche?”
“No, my ‘Little Tremendous,’ you’re to go to the Rue des Couronnes ... d’you hear? the Rue des Couronnes while my house stands in the Rue de l’Evangile.”
“Now I can’t quite follow you, M’sieu Moche.”
“That’s because you talk too much, my lad! Shut your trap a bit, and I’ll explain.”
“Shut it is, M’sieu Moche.”
“Good! well, here’s how it is: The lady has hired my flat; only as I can’t say if she’ll fork out the tin regularly, I should like you to go and have a look what furniture she’s got, to know if it’s good to cover the quarter’s rent.”
“Good, M’sieu Moche.”
“You twig—do what I tell you without seeming to, eh?”
“In that case, I’d want an excuse, eh?”
“I never said I couldn’t provide one, did I? Look’ee, my son, search under that green bookcase and you’ll find some patterns of wall-papers ... got ’em?”
“Yes.”
“Well, take ’em with you, young sir! For the last six months I’ve found ’em useful for the same little game. You see, I send a pal, as it might be you, to call on the guy who wants to take my rooms. He comes under pretence of offering the new tenant a choice of wall-papers; as a matter of fact, I simply use him to inspect the furniture that must guarantee the rent. As you may suppose, I never do pay for the papering. Not much! The offer’s made—and there it ends!”
Fandor showed no surprise. The business his strange employer was sending him on was of course perfectly straightforward and legitimate! Still keeping to his slangy way of speaking, Fandor merely asked:
“And what’s the name, M’sieu Moche, your dicky-bird goes by? and what’s her exact address in the Rue des Couronnes?”
M. Moche, while talking to his clerk, was busy changing his down-at-heel slippers for a pair of elastic-sided boots, obviously too small for him, the whitey-brown cracks in which he masked by smearing them with ink. He was bending down behind his desk and could not see the other’s face as he answered his last question:
“The dicky-bird, as you call her, lives, to be exact, at 142 bis Rue des Couronnes. As to her name, that’s pretty well-known, she’s the sister of a man who was murdered; you can’t help remembering about it; she’s called Mademoiselle Elisabeth Dollon—you’ll not forget?”
In a shaking voice it needed an almost superhuman effort to steady, Jérôme Fandor promised he would not forget the name! A thousand thoughts were whirling madly through his brain, his heart was still beating high with excitement, when M. Moche went on:
“Well then, hook it, my boy; here’s three half-pence for going, to pay your Underground; it’s not far, you can walk back.”
Yes, he could walk back quite well, Fandor agreed, hardly conscious of what he was saying.
Ten minutes later he was on his way to the Rue des Couronnes.
Elisabeth Dollon! He was going, he, Jérôme Fandor, to see Elisabeth Dollon! As if the past had suddenly risen before his eyes as on the film of an imaginary cinematograph of dreams, Jérôme Fandor lived again in pain and grief the torturing crises, the grim tragedies that name called back to memory, a woman’s name, the name of Elisabeth Dollon. No, never had he forgotten the pathetic heroine of those terrible days.
Elisabeth Dollon, the unhappy sister of the painter, Jacques Dollon, Fantômas’ victim, deemed by some to be himself Fantômas till the day when Juve and Fandor rehabilitated his good name, was she not the only being Fandor cherished with a fond affection? Since the first day he had learnt to know her, to appreciate the girl’s proud and tender character, Jérôme Fandor had loved her!
It was for her, to do her honour, to rescue her from the most odious entanglements, that he had in those days devoted himself, body and soul, to the task of clearing up the mysterious affair of the Messenger of Death. Twenty times over, in the course of that police investigation, Fandor and Juve had risked their lives. Juve for his part was acting more for the sake of unmasking Fantômas than for any other reason, but for Fandor, he was spurred on by the interest he felt in Elisabeth Dollon.
Once, for a moment, he had believed his dearest wishes would be fulfilled. Then, at that very instant of joyful satisfaction, an appalling catastrophe had destroyed his hopes. The prey he was tracking down escaped, and Fantômas, to crown his victory, in eluding the wiles of his two pursuers, Fandor and Juve, had the cruelty to add yet another triumph. He wrote to Elisabeth Dollon—already his victim—“Fandor is Charles Rambert; Charles Rambert is a criminal and a coward,” with the result that, terrified by this false and treacherous calumny, she avoided the young man, vanished from his life, swore she would never see him more!
And now, now when he was poor, helpless, condemned to live in company of bandits, apaches, the dregs of society, Fate gave him this sublime recompense, sending him this day to see whom? whom but Elisabeth Dollon!
“To see her, heavens! to see her! to tell her who I am, what I am, what I live for, to win a half-hour of sweet, calm converse with her, wherein to convince her of the truth, to explain to her Fantômas’ machinations, oh! it is too much happiness!” Jérôme Fandor strove to regain his self-possession, to master his nerves, but his pace was headlong as he sped to the Rue des Couronnes, where he hoped to win at last an unfeigned declaration of renewed affection from Elisabeth Dollon.
“I shall know very well,” he murmured to himself at intervals. “I shall know how to show her I love her truly. By the ardour of my words I shall gain her confidence, the confidence she must grant me, which I must have, that she may feel I speak the truth, that I am not what Fantômas has told her I was.”
Arrived at 142 bis Rue des Couronnes, Fandor found the house a crowded nest of working people’s flats. Along a narrow, fetid passage, its damp walls stained and scarred over with inscriptions indicating the names of the tenants and the different floors they occupied, Fandor penetrated to the concierge’s lodge. He tried to push open the door, but it would not yield.
“So,” thought the young man, “the woman is not within.” He called: “Anyone there?” but his voice was drowned by a deafening noise proceeding from a tiny courtyard near by.
Turning his steps in that direction, he discovered a woman busy with two sticks beating clouds of dust out of an unstitched mattress.
“The concierge?” asked the visitor.
The woman broke off her work to demand in a grumbling voice:
“What do you want with her, eh?”
“To inquire for a tenant’s rooms.”
“What tenant?”
“Mlle. Dollon.”
“Mlle. Dollon? And what may you want with her?”
Surprised at this discouraging reception, Fandor, who was anything but patience personified, merely declared:
“That I propose to tell Mlle. Dollon herself in good time.”
But the virago had picked up her sticks again, preparatory to resuming her work.
“To begin with,” she announced, “you’ll not say anything at all to her, because you’re not going up to see her.”
“Not going up to see her! and pray, why?”
“That’s the orders she’s given me—that’s why!”
“Then you are the concierge?”
“Yes, I am. What then?”
Jérôme Fandor realized he would inevitably be shown the door unless he could secure the good graces of this vixen who was so conscientious in the matter of obeying orders.
“Madam,” he now addressed her in his most winning voice, forgetting how strange it sounded for an apache, such as he looked in his disreputable clothes, to be speaking in tones of perfect politeness. “Madam, you would oblige me very greatly by informing me why Mlle. Dollon cannot receive me. I have not come to trouble her unduly. I am here to offer her a choice of wall-papers for the rooms she is moving into.”
The young man had found an excellent way to conciliate the good woman. He had called her “Madam,” whereas in the quartier she was invariably addressed as “mother” so-and-so, by reason of her enormous bulk.
“Well, my good sir,” replied the fat portress, suddenly disarmed, “I’ll tell you something; come along in to my lodge and I’ll have a peer first at your patterns, and if there’s any that look like suiting her book, I’ll go up and show her them, or you shall go up yourself. She and I have the same taste in wall-papers.”
Be sure Fandor took care to express no doubts on the latter point, albeit it struck him as highly improbable that the fat concierge should share the same tastes as the artist, Elisabeth Dollon; he readily enough agreed:
“After you, madam,”—and, preceded by the fat woman trotting along in front of him, this being her own way of moving rapidly, Fandor advanced into the concierge’s lodge.
“First of all,” began his hostess graciously, “so as our talk may go easier, I’ll tell you my name; it’s Mme. Doulenques. Now, you mustn’t bear malice because I was a bit rough with you just at first. The fact is the young lady is still upset after her adventure.”
Boiling with impatience, Fandor wished Mme. Doulenques to the devil; the all-important thing for him was to see Elisabeth. Mighty little he cared to listen to the fat creature’s babble. But there, to hustle her was impossible. He questioned:
“Her adventure? Mlle. Elisabeth Dollon?...”
“Why, yes; you haven’t heard? Ah! true, they didn’t put it in the papers. Well, just imagine, Mr. Paperer, the poor, gentle lamb, yesterday evening as she was coming home from her work, was attacked by apaches.”
“Great heavens! not seriously hurt, I trust?”
“No, not much the worse certainly, seeing as how she escaped in time; but it was touch and go; she got back here terribly upset, poor child! That’s why she won’t see anybody to-day.”
Fandor seized the opportunity to cut short the conversation.
“I see; but she will see me, for sure, as I’ve come about decorating the rooms ... what floor does she live on?”
“Fifth floor, left ... bell with a green bell-pull ... But just wait till I tell you all about it. Just think, it was on the Boulevard de Belleville it all happened.”
“Boulevard de Belleville!... yesterday evening?”
“Yes, yesterday evening—”
The young man had asked the question in such a strange voice that Mme. Doulenques felt her earlier doubts more than justified.
“Now, whatever’s the matter?” she demanded, “One would think you’d been taken ill.”
Indeed, Fandor had turned deadly pale as he listened to the woman’s story. The coincidence was so startling—Elisabeth Dollon, the very evening before, assailed by apaches on the Boulevard de Belleville; then, on the same boulevard, not far away no doubt, he, Fandor, defending an unknown woman against police officers ...
The concierge took up the tale again:
“And the worst part of the story you haven’t heard yet. Mr. Paperer—she knows the villain who assaulted her! Seems it’s one Fandor, a low fellow who once had to do with her, and who actually ... Why, what’s wrong with you now?... God bless my soul! stop him!”
Spinning round on his heels, like a madman, Jérôme Fandor had abruptly left fat Mme. Doulenques in the very middle of her narrative.
And truly it was a mad thing the journalist had been guilty of in so acting. Commonly so careful and deliberate, so much master of his feelings, for this once he had failed to govern an overmastering impulse. So Elisabeth Dollon was the workgirl he had saved the night before from the pursuit of the street patrol! And Elisabeth believed that Jérôme Fandor, whom she had had time to recognize, was one of her assailants! What cared he now for any further details Mme. Doulenques might have to give?
Elisabeth lived on the fifth floor, and thither he rushed, panting, filled with a frantic eagerness to proclaim his innocence to the woman he loved, to clear up this new, this fatal misunderstanding. While the portress, in sheer terror of the man’s strange behaviour, in the very middle of a conversation bolting away like a thief to dash up to her tenant’s rooms, was screaming hoarse, half-stifled cries for help, Jérôme Fandor sprang up the stairs four steps at a time.
Yes, there on the fifth floor he saw to his left a door with a green bell-pull beside it. He rang a peal, so loud and peremptory he could hear someone on the other side of the door hurrying forward at a run. A voice, Elisabeth’s voice, challenged:
“Who’s there? What’s wanted?”
Fandor had a gleam of common sense, enough to make him disguise his voice:
“Someone from M. Moche’s to see Mlle. Elisabeth Dollon.”
There was a sound of a key turning in the lock and the door fell ajar, while Jérôme could faintly catch a confused clamour reaching him from the courtyard below.
“You want to see me, sir?” and cautiously the occupant of the flat—doubtless the young woman had been resting on her bed and had hurriedly thrown a peignoir round her—opened the door a little wider.
Alas! hardly had she cast eyes on the visitor before she turned livid and tried to pull the door to again, screaming: “Help! help!... you ... you, Fantômas!... Fandor!... I am undone!”
Instinctively throwing his weight against the door, Fandor endeavoured to prevent the girl from shutting him out. “For heaven’s sake,” he prayed her, “calm yourself!—yes, it is I ... I Fandor!... who loves you.... Listen to me, I beseech you!”
But with a sudden, desperate effort, Elisabeth Dollon had dragged the door to again, not without giving vent to another cry of frantic terror: “Help! it is Fantômas ... Fantômas!”
All this had occupied but a moment, and already Fandor was regaining his composure. That Elisabeth, terribly upset by last night’s violence, in which she believed him to have been concerned, took him for Fantômas, was after all of small importance. He could easily convince her of the truth. What was more serious was the monstrous folly he had committed in bolting away in that unceremonious fashion from Mme. Doulenques a moment before. Now on the stairs a prodigious uproar was swelling louder and louder, while the shrill voice of the concierge rose high above the clamour:
“A scoundrelly brigand, I tell you! one of the same lot for sure who attacked the girl yesterday!” People were thronging upstairs, heavy footsteps sounded on the boards, a crowd of neighbours was hurrying up to the scene of action.
Instinctively Fandor stepped back on the landing. For nearly six months he had been living the life of a fugitive; for all those months the unfortunate young man had known the gnawing anxieties of a never-ending flight from all whose interest it might be to discover his identity. Now, finding himself pursued, trapped on this stairway, he lost his head. Instead of quietly waiting till the concierge and her satellites came up to him and then explaining the misunderstanding, Fandor, realizing that Elisabeth would be long in recognizing her mistake, resolved to fly. Swiftly, noiselessly, nimbly, he mounted to the seventh story of the house, in the vague hope of finding a hiding-place.
Fortune favoured him. The house was an enormous block of workmen’s dwellings, made up of several separate buildings, connected together and served by several different staircases. Fandor, following the corridor running between the rooms on the topmost floor, had the luck to come upon the landing of a second flight of stairs. To make up his mind, to dart to the top, to scamper down the stairway, never stopping to know what had become of his pursuers, to dash into the street and reach the line of the outer boulevards at a run, was the work of a moment. Bathed in sweat and panting for breath, he reached the Boulevard de Belleville—and knew he was safe.
Safe, yes, but alas! atrociously disappointed. An hour ago he was on his way, in joyful anticipation, to visit Elisabeth Dollon, blessing the happy chance that was to bring him to the girl’s presence; now he had but caught a glimpse of her, had not so much as spoken with her; all he knew was that she believed him guilty of the most dreadful crimes, that she coupled his name with a name of horror, a name of blood, a name of panic terror, with the name of Fantômas! Exhausted, he sank on a bench. All day long, crushed by the hand of Fate that day by day accumulated ever-fresh calamities on his devoted head, he wandered miserably about the streets.
At nightfall he regained some degree of self-possession.
“I must think out a plan,” he told himself; “I know now where she lives, I know where she is going to live, by the Lord, I can surely contrive to clear my character in her eyes.” His aimless wanderings had led him to the neighbourhood of Père-Lachaise, and he now set out slowly and sadly on his way back to the Rue Saint-Fargeau.
“I will tell Moche,” he thought to himself, “that I waited for Elisabeth all day, and have not seen her ... or else I will assure him her furniture is good enough ... or, better still, as it’s nine o’clock at night, I will slip up to my garret, of which I have a key, without seeing my worthy master at all. To-morrow I shall be calmer, and can then see what’s best to be done.”