The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, Sax Rohmer [nonfiction book recommendations .txt] 📗
- Author: Sax Rohmer
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of bare soles pattering upon the path outside stole to me.
Two runners, I thought there were, so that four dacoits must
have been upon our trail. The room was full of pungent smoke.
I staggered to my feet as the gray figure with the revolver
turned towards me. Something familiar there was in that long,
gray garment, and now I perceived why I had thought so.
It was my gray rain-coat.
“Karamaneh,” I whispered.
And Smith, with difficulty, supporting himself upright, and holding
fast to the ledge beside the door, muttered something hoarsely,
which sounded like “God bless her!”
The girl, trembling now, placed her hands upon my shoulders with that quaint,
pathetic gesture peculiarly her own.
“I followed you,” she said. “Did you not know I should follow you?
But I had to hide because of another who was following also.
I had but just reached this place when I saw you running towards me.”
She broke off and turned to Smith.
“This is your pistol,” she said naively. “I found it in your bag.
Will you please take it!”
He took it without a word. Perhaps he could not trust himself to speak.
“Now go. Hurry!” she said. “You are not safe yet.”
“But you?” I asked.
“You have failed,” she replied. “I must go back to him.
There is no other way.”
Strangely sick at heart for a man who has just had a miraculous
escape from death, I opened the door. Coatless, disheveled figures,
my friend and I stepped out into the moonlight.
Hideous under the pale rays lay the two dead men,
their glazed eyes upcast to the peace of the blue heavens.
Karamaneh had shot to kill, for both had bullets in their brains.
If God ever planned a more complex nature than hers—a nature more
tumultuous with conflicting passions, I cannot conceive of it.
Yet her beauty was of the sweetest; and in some respects she
had the heart of a child—this girl who could shoot so straight.
“We must send the police tonight,” said Smith.
“Or the papers—”
“Hurry,” came the girl’s voice commandingly from the darkness
of the cottage.
It was a singular situation. My very soul rebelled against it.
But what could we do?
“Tell us where we can communicate,” began Smith.
“Hurry. I shall be suspected. Do you want him to kill me!”
We moved away. All was very still now, and the lights glimmered
faintly ahead. Not a wisp of cloud brushed the moon’s disk.
“Good-night, Karamaneh,” I whispered softly.
TO pursue further the adventure on the marshes would be a task
at once useless and thankless. In its actual and in its dramatic
significance it concluded with our parting from Karamaneh.
And in that parting I learned what Shakespeare meant
by “Sweet Sorrow.”
There was a world, I learned, upon the confines of which I stood,
a world whose very existence hitherto had been unsuspected.
Not the least of the mysteries which peeped from the darkness was
the mystery of the heart of Karamaneh. I sought to forget her.
I sought to remember her. Indeed, in the latter task I found
one more congenial, yet, in the direction and extent of the ideas
which it engendered, one that led me to a precipice.
East and West may not intermingle. As a student of
world-policies, as a physician, I admitted, could not deny,
that truth. Again, if Karamaneh were to be credited,
she had come to Fu-Manchu a slave; had fallen into the hands
of the raiders; had crossed the desert with the slave-drivers;
had known the house of the slave-dealer. Could it be?
With the fading of the crescent of Islam I had thought such
things to have passed.
But if it were so?
At the mere thought of a girl so deliciously beautiful in the brutal
power of slavers, I found myself grinding my teeth—closing my eyes
in a futile attempt to blot out the pictures called up.
Then, at such times, I would find myself discrediting her story.
Again, I would find myself wondering, vaguely, why such problems
persistently haunted my mind. But, always, my heart had an answer.
And I was a medical man, who sought to build up a family practice!—
who, in short, a very little time ago, had thought himself past
the hot follies of youth and entered upon that staid phase of life
wherein the daily problems of the medical profession hold absolute
sway and such seductive follies as dark eyes and red lips find—
no place—are excluded!
But it is foreign from the purpose of this plain record to
enlist sympathy for the recorder. The topic upon which, here,
I have ventured to touch was one fascinating enough to me;
I cannot hope that it holds equal charm for any other.
Let us return to that which it is my duty to narrate and let
us forget my brief digression.
It is a fact, singular, but true, that few Londoners know London.
Under the guidance of my friend, Nayland Smith, I had learned,
since his return from Burma, how there are haunts in the very heart
of the metropolis whose existence is unsuspected by all but the few;
places unknown even to the ubiquitous copy-hunting pressman.
Into a quiet thoroughfare not two minutes’ walk from
the pulsing life of Leicester Square, Smith led the way.
Before a door sandwiched in between two dingy shop-fronts
he paused and turned to me.
“Whatever you see or hear,” he cautioned, “express no surprise.”
A cab had dropped us at the corner. We both wore dark suits and fez
caps with black silk tassels. My complexion had been artificially
reduced to a shade resembling the deep tan of my friend’s. He rang
the bell beside the door.
Almost immediately it was opened by a negro woman—gross, hideously ugly.
Smith uttered something in voluble Arabic. As a linguist his
attainments were a constant source of surprise. The jargons
of the East, Far and Near, he spoke as his mother tongue.
The woman immediately displayed the utmost servility, ushering us
into an ill-lighted passage, with every evidence of profound respect.
Following this passage, and passing an inner door,
from beyond whence proceeded bursts of discordant music,
we entered a little room bare of furniture, with coarse matting
for mural decorations, and a patternless red carpet on the floor.
In a niche burned a common metal lamp.
The negress left us, and close upon her departure entered a very aged man
with a long patriarchal beard, who greeted my friend with dignified courtesy.
Following a brief conversation, the aged Arab—for such he appeared to be—
drew aside a strip of matting, revealing a dark recess. Placing his finger
upon his lips, he silently invited us to enter.
We did so, and the mat was dropped behind us. The sounds of crude
music were now much plainer, and as Smith slipped a little shutter
aside I gave a start of surprise.
Beyond lay a fairly large apartment, having divans or low seats around
three of its walls. These divans were occupied by a motley company
of Turks, Egyptians, Greeks, and others; and I noted two Chinese.
Most of them smoked cigarettes, and some were drinking.
A girl was performing a sinuous dance upon the square carpet occupying
the center of the floor, accompanied by a young negro woman upon
a guitar and by several members of the assembly who clapped their
hands to the music or hummed a low, monotonous melody.
Shortly after our entrance into the passage the dance terminated,
and the dancer fled through a curtained door at the farther end of the room.
A buzz of conversation arose.
“It is a sort of combined Wekaleh and place of entertainment for a certain
class of Oriental residents in, or visiting, London,” Smith whispered.
“The old gentleman who has just left us is the proprietor or host.
I have been here before on several occasions, but have always drawn blank.”
He was peering out eagerly into the strange clubroom.
“Whom do you expect to find here?” I asked.
“It is a recognized meeting-place,” said Smith in my ear.
“It is almost a certainty that some of the Fu-Manchu group
use it at times.”
Curiously I surveyed all these faces which were visible from the spy-hole.
My eyes rested particularly upon the two Chinamen.
“Do you recognize anyone?” I whispered.
“S-sh!”
Smith was craning his neck so as to command a sight of the doorway.
He obstructed my view, and only by his tense attitude and some
subtle wave of excitement which he communicated to me did I know
that a new arrival was entering. The hum of conversation died away,
and in the ensuing silence I heard the rustle of draperies.
The newcomer was a woman, then. Fearful of making any noise I yet
managed to get my eyes to the level of the shutter.
A woman in an elegant, flame-colored opera cloak was crossing the floor
and coming in the direction of the spot where we were concealed.
She wore a soft silk scarf about her head, a fold partly draped across
her face. A momentary view I had of her—and wildly incongruous
she looked in that place—and she had disappeared from sight,
having approached someone invisible who sat upon the divan immediately
beneath our point of vantage.
From the way in which the company gazed towards her, I divined that she
was no habitue of the place, but that her presence there was as greatly
surprising to those in the room as it was to me.
Whom could she be, this elegant lady who visited such a haunt—
who, it would seem, was so anxious to disguise her identity,
but who was dressed for a society function rather than for a
midnight expedition of so unusual a character?
I began a whispered question, but Smith tugged at my arm to silence me.
His excitement was intense. Had his keener powers enabled him
to recognize the unknown?
A faint but most peculiar perfume stole to my nostrils, a perfume
which seemed to contain the very soul of Eastern mystery.
Only one woman known to me used that perfume—Karamaneh.
Then it was she!
At last my friend’s vigilance had been rewarded. Eagerly I bent forward.
Smith literally quivered in anticipation of a discovery. Again the strange
perfume was wafted to our hiding-place; and, glancing neither to right
nor left, I saw Karamaneh—for that it was she I no longer doubted—
recross the room and disappear.
“The man she spoke to,” hissed Smith. “We must see him!
We must have him!”
He pulled the mat aside and stepped out into the anteroom.
It was empty. Down the passage he led, and we were almost come
to the door of the big room when it was thrown open and a man came
rapidly out, opened the street door before Smith could reach him,
and was gone, slamming it fast.
I can swear that we were not four seconds behind him, but when we gained
the street it was empty. Our quarry had disappeared as if by magic.
A big car was just turning the corner towards Leicester Square.
“That is the girl,” rapped Smith; “but where in Heaven’s
name is the man to whom she brought the message?
I would give a hundred pounds to know what business is afoot.
To think that we have had such an opportunity and have
thrown it away!”
Angry and nonplused he stood at the corner, looking in the direction
of the crowded thoroughfare into which
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