The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu
Southery, I waited through ten such seconds of suspense as I have
rarely known.
The spear of light plunged into the well of darkness again.
Lord Southery, Smith and myself were hidden by the angle of the wall;
but full upon the purplish face of Mr. Henderson the beam shone. In
some way it penetrated to the murk in his mind; and he awakened from
his swoon with a hoarse cry, struggled to his feet, and stood looking
up the stair in a sort of frozen horror.
Smith was past him at a bound. Something flashed towards him as the
light was extinguished. I saw him duck, and heard the knife ring upon
the floor.
I managed to move sufficiently to see at the top, as I fired up the
stairs, the yellow face of Dr. Fu-Manchu, to see the gleaming,
chatoyant eyes, greenly terrible, as they sought to pierce the gloom.
A flying figure was racing up, three steps at a time (that of a brown
man scantily clad). He stumbled and fell, by which I knew that he was
hit; but went on again, Smith hard on his heels.
"Mr. Henderson!" I cried, "relight the lantern and take charge of Lord
Southery. Here is my flask on the floor. I rely upon you."
Smith's revolver spoke again as I went bounding up the stair. Black
against the square of moonlight I saw him stagger, I saw him fall. As
he fell, for the third time, I heard the crack of his revolver.
Instantly I was at his side. Somewhere along the black aisle beneath
the trees receding footsteps pattered.
"Are you hurt, Smith?" I cried anxiously.
He got upon his feet.
"He has a dacoit with him," he replied, and showed me the long curved
knife which he held in his hand, a full inch of the blade bloodstained.
"A near thing for me, Petrie."
I heard the whir of a restarted motor.
"We have lost him," said Smith.
"But we have saved Lord Southery," I said. "Fu-Manchu will credit us
with a skill as great as his own."
"We must get to the car," Smith muttered, "and try to overtake them.
Ugh! my left arm is useless."
"It would be mere waste of time to attempt to overtake them," I argued,
"for we have no idea in which direction they will proceed."
"I have a very good idea," snapped Smith. "Stradwick Hall is less than
ten miles from the coast. There is only one practicable means of
conveying an unconscious man secretly from here to London."
"You think he meant to take him from here to London?"
"Prior to shipping him to China; I think so. His clearing-house is
probably on the Thames."
"A boat?"
"A yacht, presumably, is lying off the coast in readiness. Fu-Manchu
may even have designed to ship him direct to China."
Lord Southery, a bizarre figure, my traveling coat wrapped about him,
and supported by his solicitor, who was almost as pale as himself,
emerged from the vault into the moonlight.
"This is a triumph for you, Smith," I said.
The throb of Fu-Manchu's car died into faintness and was lost in the
night's silence.
"Only half a triumph," he replied. "But we still have another
chance--the raid on his house. When will the word come from Karamaneh?"
Southery spoke in a weak voice.
"Gentlemen," he said, "it seems I am raised from the dead."
It was the weirdest moment of the night wherein we heard that newly
buried man speak from the mold of his tomb.
"Yes," replied Smith slowly, "and spared from the fate of Heaven alone
knows how many men of genius. The yellow society lacks a Southery, but
that Dr. Fu-Manchu was in Germany three years ago I have reason to
believe; so that, even without visiting the grave of your great
Teutonic rival, who suddenly died at about that time, I venture to
predict that they have a Von Homber. And the futurist group in China
knows how to MAKE men work!"
CHAPTER XXIV
FROM the rescue of Lord Southery my story bears me mercilessly on to
other things. I may not tarry, as more leisurely penmen, to round my
incidents; they were not of my choosing. I may not pause to make you
better acquainted with the figure of my drama; its scheme is none of
mine. Often enough, in those days, I found a fitness in the lines of
Omar:
We are no other than a moving show
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show.
But "the Master of the Show," in this case, was Dr. Fu-Manchu!
I have been asked many times since the days with which these records
deal: Who WAS Dr. Fu-Manchu? Let me confess here that my final answer
must be postponed. I can only indicate, at this place, the trend of my
reasoning, and leave my reader to form whatever conclusion he pleases.
What group can we isolate and label as responsible for the overthrow of
the Manchus? The casual student of modern Chinese history will reply:
"Young China." This is unsatisfactory. What do we mean by Young
China? In my own hearing Fu-Manchu had disclaimed, with scorn,
association with the whole of that movement; and assuming that the name
were not an assumed one, he clearly can have been no anti-Manchu, no
Republican.
The Chinese Republican is of the mandarin class, but of a new
generation which veneers its Confucianism with Western polish. These
youthful and unbalanced reformers, in conjunction with older but no
less ill-balanced provincial politicians, may be said to represent
Young China. Amid such turmoils as this we invariably look for, and
invariably find, a Third Party. In my opinion, Dr. Fu-Manchu was one
of the leaders of such a party.
Another question often put to me was: Where did the Doctor hide during
the time that he pursued his operations in London? This is more
susceptible of explanation. For a time Nayland Smith supposed, as I
did myself, that the opium den adjacent to the old Ratcliff Highway was
the Chinaman's base of operations; later we came to believe that the
mansion near Windsor was his hiding-place, and later still, the hulk
lying off the downstream flats. But I think I can state with
confidence that the spot which he had chosen for his home was neither
of these, but the East End riverside building which I was the first to
enter. Of this I am all but sure; for the reason that it not only was
the home of Fu-Manchu, of Karamaneh, and of her brother, Aziz, but the
home of something else--of something which I shall speak of later.
The dreadful tragedy (or series of tragedies) which attended the raid
upon the place will always mark in my memory the supreme horror of a
horrible case. Let me endeavor to explain what occurred.
By the aid of Karamaneh, you have seen how we had located the whilom
warehouse, which, from the exterior, was so drab and dreary, but which
within was a place of wondrous luxury. At the moment selected by our
beautiful accomplice, Inspector Weymouth and a body of detectives
entirely surrounded it; a river police launch lay off the wharf which
opened from it on the river-side; and this upon a singularly black
night, than which a better could not have been chosen.
"You will fulfill your promise to me?" said Karamaneh, and looked up
into my face.
She was enveloped in a big, loose cloak, and from the shadow of the
hood her wonderful eyes gleamed out like stars.
"What do you wish us to do?" asked Nayland Smith.
"You--and Dr. Petrie," she replied swiftly, "must enter first, and
bring out Aziz. Until he is safe--until he is out of that place--you
are to make no attempt upon--"
"Upon Dr. Fu-Manchu?" interrupted Weymouth; for Karamaneh hesitated to
pronounce the dreaded name, as she always did. "But how can we be sure
that there is no trap laid for us?"
The Scotland Yard man did not entirely share my confidence in the
integrity of this Eastern girl whom he knew to have been a creature of
the Chinaman's.
"Aziz lies in the private room," she explained eagerly, her old accent
more noticeable than usual. "There is only one of the Burmese men in
the house, and he--he dare not enter without orders!"
"But Fu-Manchu?"
"We have nothing to fear from him. He will be your prisoner within ten
minutes from now! I have no time for words--you must believe!" She
stamped her foot impatiently. "And the dacoit?" snapped Smith.
"He also."
"I think perhaps I'd better come in, too," said Weymouth slowly.
Karamaneh shrugged her shoulders with quick impatience, and unlocked
the door in the high brick wall which divided the gloomy, evil-smelling
court from the luxurious apartments of Dr. Fu-Manchu.
"Make no noise," she warned. And Smith and myself followed her along
the uncarpeted passage beyond.
Inspector Weymouth, with a final word of instruction to his second in
command, brought up the rear. The door was reclosed; a few paces
farther on a second was unlocked. Passing through a small room,
unfurnished, a farther passage led us to a balcony. The transition was
startling.
Darkness was about us now, and silence: a perfumed, slumberous
darkness--a silence full of mystery. For, beyond the walls of the
apartment whereon we looked down waged the unceasing battle of sounds
that is the hymn of the great industrial river. About the scented
confines which bounded us now floated the smoke-laden vapors of the
Lower Thames.
From the metallic but infinitely human clangor of dock-side life, from
the unpleasant but homely odors which prevail where ships swallow in
and belch out the concrete evidences of commercial prosperity, we had
come into this incensed stillness, where one shaded lamp painted dim
enlargements of its Chinese silk upon the nearer walls, and left the
greater part of the room the darker for its contrast.
Nothing of the Thames-side activity--of the riveting and scraping--the
bumping of bales--the bawling of orders--the hiss of steam--penetrated
to this perfumed place. In the pool of tinted light lay the deathlike
figure of a dark-haired boy, Karamaneh's muffled form bending over him.
"At last I stand in the house of Dr. Fu-Manchu!" whispered Smith.
Despite the girl's assurance, we knew that proximity to the sinister
Chinaman must be fraught with danger. We stood, not in the lion's den,
but in the serpent's lair.
From the time when Nayland Smith had come from Burma in pursuit of this
advance-guard of a cogent Yellow Peril, the face of Dr. Fu-Manchu
rarely had been absent from my dreams day or night. The millions might
sleep in peace--the millions in whose cause we labored!--but we who
knew the reality of the danger knew that a veritable octopus had
fastened upon England--a yellow octopus whose head was that of Dr.
Fu-Manchu, whose tentacles were dacoity, thuggee, modes of death,
secret and swift, which in the darkness plucked men from life and left
no clew behind.
"Karamaneh!" I called softly.
The muffled form beneath the lamp turned so that the soft light fell
upon the lovely face of the slave girl. She who had been a pliant
instrument in the hands of Fu-Manchu now was to be the means whereby
society should be rid of him.
She raised her finger warningly; then beckoned me to approach.
My feet sinking in the rich pile of the carpet, I came through the
gloom of the great apartment in to the patch of light, and, Karamaneh
beside me, stood looking down upon the boy. It was Aziz, her brother;
dead so far as Western lore had power to judge, but kept alive in that
deathlike trance by the uncanny power of the Chinese doctor.
"Be quick," she said; "be quick! Awaken him! I am afraid."
From the case which I carried I took out a needle-syringe and a phial
containing a small quantity of amber-hued liquid. It was a drug not to
be found in the British Pharmacopoeia. Of its constitution I knew
nothing. Although I had had the phial in my possession for some days I
had not dared to devote any of its precious contents to analytical