The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer (best novels for teenagers TXT) 📖

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 riverside; 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 dockside 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 purposes.

The amber drops spelled life for the boy Aziz, spelled success

for the mission of Nayland Smith, spelled ruin for

the fiendish Chinaman.

 

I raised the white coverlet. The boy, fully dressed,

lay with his arms crossed upon his breast. I discerned the mark

of previous injections as, charging the syringe from the phial,

I made what I hoped would be the last of such experiments upon him.

I would have given half of my small worldly possessions to have

known the real nature of the drug which was now coursing through

the veins of Aziz—which was tinting the grayed face with the olive

tone of life; which, so far as my medical training bore me,

was restoring the dead to life.

 

But such was not the purpose of my visit. I was come to remove from

the house of Dr. Fu-Manchu the living chain which bound Karamaneh to him.

The boy alive and free, the Doctor’s hold upon the slave girl would be broken.

 

My lovely companion, her hands convulsively clasped, knelt and devoured

with her eyes the face of the boy who was passing through the most

amazing physiological change in the history of therapeutics.

The peculiar perfume which she wore—which seemed to be a part of her—

which always I associated with her—was faintly perceptible.

Karamaneh was breathing rapidly.

 

“You have nothing to fear,” I whispered; “see, he is reviving.

In a few moments all will be well with him.”

 

The hanging lamp with its garishly colored shade swung gently above us,

wafted, it seemed, by some draught which passed through the apartment.

The boy’s heavy lids began to quiver, and Karamaneh nervously clutched

my arm, and held me so whilst we watched for the long-lashed eyes to open.

The stillness of the place was positively unnatural; it seemed inconceivable

that all about us was the discordant activity of the commercial East End.

Indeed, this eerie silence was becoming oppressive; it began positively

to appall me.

 

Inspector Weymouth’s wondering face peeped over my shoulder.