The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu
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Sax Rohmer >> The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu
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Upon the gleaming deck, blackly outlined against a wondrous sky, stood
a man who wore a blue greatcoat over his pyjamas, and whose
unstockinged feet were thrust into red slippers. It was Platts, the
Marconi operator.
"I'm awfully sorry to disturb you, Dr. Petrie," he said, "and I was
even less anxious to arouse your neighbor; but somebody seems to be
trying to get a message, presumably urgent, through to you."
"To me!" I cried.
"I cannot make it out," admitted Platts, running his fingers through
disheveled hair, "but I thought it better to arouse you. Will you come
up?"
I turned without a word, slipped into my dressing-gown, and with
Platts passed aft along the deserted deck. The sea was as calm as a
great lake. Ahead, on the port bow, an angry flambeau burned redly
beneath the peaceful vault of the heavens. Platts nodded absently in
the direction of the weird flames.
"Stromboli," he said; "we shall be nearly through the Straits by
breakfast-time."
We mounted the narrow stair to the Marconi deck. At the table sat
Platts' assistant with the Marconi attachment upon his head--an
apparatus which always set me thinking of the electric chair.
"Have you got it?" demanded my companion as we entered the room.
"It's still coming through," replied the other without moving, "but in
the same jerky fashion. Every time I get it, it seems to have gone
back to the beginning--just Dr. Petrie--Dr. Petrie."
He began to listen again for the elusive message. I turned to Platts.
"Where is it being sent from?" I asked.
Platts shook his head.
"That's the mystery," he declared. "Look!"--and he pointed to the
table; "according to the Marconi chart, there's a Messagerie boat due
west between us and Marseilles, and the homeward-bound P. & O. which
we passed this morning must be getting on that way also, by now. The
Isis is somewhere ahead, but I've spoken to all these, and the message
comes from none of them."
"Then it may come from Messina."
"It doesn't come from Messina," replied the man at the table,
beginning to write rapidly.
Platts stepped forward and bent over the message which the other was
writing.
"Here it is!" he cried, excitedly; "we're getting it."
Stepping in turn to the table, I leaned over between the two and read
these words as the operator wrote them down:
Dr. Petrie--my shadow . . .
I drew a quick breath and gripped Platts' shoulder harshly. His
assistant began fingering the instrument with irritation.
"Lost it again!" he muttered.
"This message," I began . . .
But again the pencil was traveling over the paper:
--lies upon you all . . . end of message.
The operator stood up and unclasped the receivers from his ears.
There, high above the sleeping ship's company, with the carpet of the
blue Mediterranean stretched indefinitely about us, we three stood
looking at one another. By virtue of a miracle of modern science, some
one, divided from me by mile upon mile of boundless ocean, had spoken
--and had been heard.
"Is there no means of learning," I said, "from whence this message
emanated?"
Platts shook his head, perplexedly.
"They gave no code word," he said. "God knows who they were. It's a
strange business and a strange message. Have you any sort of idea, Dr.
Petrie, respecting the identity of the sender?"
I stared him hard in the face; an idea had mechanically entered my
mind, but one of which I did not choose to speak, since it was opposed
to human possibility.
But, had I not seen with my own eyes the bloody streak across his
forehead as the shot fired by Karamaneh entered his high skull, had I
not known, so certainly as it is given to man to know, that the giant
intellect was no more, the mighty will impotent, I should have
replied:
"The message is from Dr. Fu-Manchu!"
My reflections were rudely terminated and my sinister thoughts given
new stimulus, by a loud though muffled cry which reached me from
somewhere in the ship, below. Both my companions started as violently
as I, whereby I knew that the mystery of the wireless message had not
been without its effect upon their minds also. But whereas they paused
in doubt, I leaped from the room and almost threw myself down the
ladder.
It was Karamaneh who had uttered that cry of fear and horror!
Although I could perceive no connection betwixt the strange message
and the cry in the night, intuitively I linked them, intuitively I
knew that my fears had been well-grounded; that the shadow of
Fu-Manchu still lay upon us.
Karamaneh occupied a large stateroom aft on the main deck; so that I
had to descend from the upper deck on which my own room was situated
to the promenade deck, again to the main deck and thence proceed
nearly the whole length of the alleyway.
Karamaneh and her brother, Aziz, who occupied a neighboring room, met
me, near the library. Karamaneh's eyes were wide with fear; her
peerless coloring had fled, and she was white to the lips. Aziz, who
wore a dressing-gown thrown hastily over his night attire, had his arm
protectively about the girl's shoulders.
"The mummy!" she whispered tremulously--"the mummy!"
There came a sound of opening doors, and several passengers, whom
Karamaneh cries had alarmed, appeared in various stages of undress. A
stewardess came running from the far end of the alleyway, and I found
time to wonder at my own speed; for, starting from the distant Marconi
deck, yet I had been the first to arrive upon the scene.
Stacey, the ship's doctor, was quartered at no great distance from the
spot, and he now joined the group. Anticipating the question which
trembled upon the lips of several of those about me:
"Come to Dr. Stacey's room," I said, taking Karamaneh arm; "we will
give you something to enable you to sleep." I turned to the group. "My
patient has had severe nerve trouble," I explained, "and has developed
somnambulistic tendencies."
I declined the stewardess' offer of assistance, with a slight shake of
the head, and shortly the four of us entered the doctor's cabin, on
the deck above. Stacey carefully closed the door. He was an old fellow
student of mine, and already he knew much of the history of the
beautiful Eastern girl and her brother Aziz.
"I fear there's mischief afoot, Petrie," he said.
"Thanks to your presence of mind, the ship's gossips need know nothing
of it."
I glanced at Karamaneh who, since the moment of my arrival had never
once removed her gaze from me; she remained in that state of passive
fear in which I had found her, the lovely face pallid; and she stared
at me fixedly in a childish, expressionless way which made me fear
that the shock to which she had been subjected, whatever its nature,
had caused a relapse into that strange condition of forgetfulness from
which a previous shock had aroused her. I could see that Stacey shared
my view, for:
"Something has frightened you," he said gently, seating himself on the
arm of Karamaneh's chair and patting her hand as if to reassure her.
"Tell us all about it."
For the first time since our meeting that night, the girl turned her
eyes from me and glanced up at Stacey, a sudden warm blush stealing
over her face and throat and as quickly departing, to leave her even
more pale than before. She grasped Stacey's hand in both her own--and
looked again at me.
"Send for Mr. Nayland Smith without delay!" she said, and her sweet
voice was slightly tremulous. "He must be put on his guard!"
I started up.
"Why?" I said. "For God's sake tell us what has happened!"
Aziz who evidently was as anxious as myself for information, and who
now knelt at his sister's feet looking at her with that strange love,
which was almost adoration, in his eyes, glanced back at me and nodded
his head rapidly.
"Something"--Karamaneh paused, shuddering violently--"some dreadful
thing, like a mummy escaped from its tomb, came into my room to-night
through the porthole . . ."
"Through the porthole?" echoed Stacey, amazedly.
"Yes, yes, through the porthole! A creature tall and very, very thin.
He wore wrappings--yellow wrappings--swathed about his head, so that
only his eyes, his evil gleaming eyes, were visible. . . . From waist
to knees he was covered, also, but his body, his feet, and his legs
were bare . . ."
"Was he--?" I began . . .
"He was a brown man, yes,"--Karamaneh divining my question, nodded, and
the shimmering cloud of her wonderful hair, hastily confined, burst
free and rippled about her shoulders. "A gaunt, fleshless brown man,
who bent, and writhed bony fingers--so!"
"A thug!" I cried.
"He--it--the mummy thing--would have strangled me if I had slept, for
he crouched over the berth--seeking--seeking . . ."
I clenched my teeth convulsively.
"But I was sitting up--"
"With the light on?" interrupted Stacey in surprise.
"No," added Karamaneh; "the light was out." She turned her eyes toward
me, as the wonderful blush overspread her face once more. "I was
sitting thinking. It all happened within a few seconds, and quite
silently. As the mummy crouched over the berth, I unlocked the door
and leaped out into the passage. I think I screamed; I did not mean
to. Oh, Dr. Stacey, there is not a moment to spare! Mr. Nayland Smith
must be warned immediately. Some horrible servant of Dr. Fu-Manchu is
on the ship!"
CHAPTER XXXII
THE TRAGEDY
Nayland Smith leaned against the edge of the dressing-table, attired
in pyjamas. The little stateroom was hazy with smoke, and my friend
gripped the charred briar between his teeth and watched the blue-gray
clouds arising from the bowl, in an abstracted way. I knew that he was
thinking hard, and from the fact that he had exhibited no surprise
when I had related to him the particular's of the attack upon
Karamaneh I judged that he had half anticipated something of the kind.
Suddenly he stood up, staring at me fixedly.
"Your tact has saved the situation, Petrie," he snapped. "It failed
you momentarily, though, when you proposed to me just now that we
should muster the lascars for inspection. Our game is to pretend that
we know nothing--that we believe Karamaneh to have had a bad dream."
"But, Smith," I began--
"It would be useless, Petrie," he interrupted me. "You cannot suppose
that I overlooked the possibility of some creature of the doctor's
being among the lascars. I can assure you that not one of them answers
to the description of the midnight assailant. From the girl's account
we have to look (discarding the idea of a revivified mummy) for a man
of unusual height--and there's no lascar of unusual height on board;
and from the visible evidence, that he entered the stateroom through
the porthole, we have to look for a man more than normally thin. In a
word, the servant of Dr. Fu-Manchu who attempted the life of Karamaneh
is either in hiding on the ship, or, if visible, is disguised."
With his usual clarity of vision, Nayland Smith had visualized the
facts of the case; I passed in mental survey each one of the
passengers, and those of the crew whose appearances were familiar to
me, with the result that I had to admit the justice of my friend's
conclusions. Smith began to pace the narrow strip of carpet between
the dressing-table and the door. Suddenly he began again. "From our
knowledge of Fu-Manchu and of the group surrounding him (and, don't
forget, surviving him)--we may further assume that the wireless
message was no gratuitous piece of melodrama, but that it was directed
to a definite end. Let us endeavor to link up the chain a little. You
occupy an upper deck berth; so do I. Experience of the Chinaman has
formed a habit in both of us; that of sleeping with closed windows.
Your port was fastened and so was my own. Karamaneh is quartered on
the main deck, and her brother's stateroom opens into the same
alleyway. Since the ship is in the Straits of Messina, and the glass
set fair, the stewards have not closed the portholes nightly at
present. We know that that of Karamaneh's stateroom was open.
Therefore, in any attempt upon our quartet, Karamaneh would
automatically be selected for the victim, since failing you or myself
she may be regarded as being the most obnoxious to Dr. Fu-Manchu."
I nodded comprehendingly. Smith's capacity for throwing the white
light of reason into the darkest places often amazed me.
"You may have noticed," he continued, "that Karamaneh's room is
directly below your own. In the event of any outcry, you would be
sooner upon the scene than I should, for instance, because I sleep on
the opposite side of the ship. This circumstance I take to be the
explanation of the wireless message, which, because of its hesitancy
(a piece of ingenuity very characteristic of the group), led to your
being awakened and invited up to the Marconi deck; in short, it gave
the would-be assassin a better chance of escaping before your
arrival."
I watched my friend in growing wonder. The strange events, seemingly
having no link, took their places in the drama, and became well-
ordered episodes in a plot that only a criminal genius could have
devised. As I studied the keen, bronzed face, I realized to the full
the stupendous mental power of Dr. Fu-Manchu, measuring it by the
criterion of Nayland Smith's. For the cunning Chinaman, in a sense,
had foiled this brilliant man before me, whereby, if by nought else, I
might know him a master of his evil art.
"I regard the episode," continued Smith, "as a posthumous attempt of
the doctor's; a legacy of hate which may prove more disastrous than
any attempt made upon us by Fu-Manchu in life. Some fiendish member of
the murder group is on board the ship. We must, as always, meet guile
with guile. There must be no appeal to the captain, no public
examination of passengers and crew. One attempt has failed; I do not
doubt that others will be made. At present, you will enact the role of
physician-in-attendance upon Karamaneh, and will put it about for whom
it may interest that a slight return of her nervous trouble is causing
her to pass uneasy nights. I can safely leave this part of the case to
you, I think?"
I nodded rapidly.
"I haven't troubled to make inquiries," added Smith, "but I think it
probable that the regulation respecting closed ports will come into
operation immediately we have passed the Straits, or at any rate
immediately there is any likelihood of bad weather."
"You mean--"
"I mean that no alteration should be made in our habits. A second
attempt along similar lines is to be apprehended--to-night. After that
we may begin to look out for a new danger."
"I pray we may avoid it," I said fervently.
As I entered the saloon for breakfast in the morning, I was subjected
to solicitous inquiries from Mrs. Prior, the gossip of the ship. Her
room adjoined Karamaneh's and she had been one of the passengers
aroused by the girl's cries in the night. Strictly adhering to my
role, I explained that my patient was threatened with a second nervous
breakdown, and was subject to vivid and disturbing dreams. One or two
other inquiries I met in the same way, ere escaping to the corner
table reserved to us.
That iron-bound code of conduct which rules the Anglo-Indian, in the
first days of the voyage had threatened to ostracize Karamaneh and
Aziz, by reason of the Eastern blood to which their brilliant but
peculiar type of beauty bore witness. Smith's attitude, however--and,
in a Burmese commissioner, it constituted something of a law--had done
much to break down the barriers; the extraordinary beauty of the girl
had done the rest. So that now, far from finding themselves shunned,
the society of Karamaneh and her romantic-looking brother was
universally courted. The last inquiry that morning, respecting my
interesting patient, came from the bishop of Damascus, a benevolent
old gentleman whose ancestry was not wholly innocent of Oriental
strains, and who sat at a table immediately behind me. As I settled
down to my porridge, he turned his chair slightly and bent to my ear.
"Mrs. Prior tells me that your charming friend was disturbed last
night," he whispered. "She seems rather pale this morning; I sincerely
trust that she is suffering no ill-effect."
I swung around, with a smile. Owing to my carelessness, there was a
slight collision, and the poor bishop, who had been invalided to
England after typhoid, in order to undergo special treatment,
suppressed an exclamation of pain, although his fine dark eyes gleamed
kindly upon me through the pebbles of his gold-rimmed pince-nez.
Indeed, despite his Eastern blood, he might have posed for a Sadler
picture, his small and refined features seeming out of place above the
bulky body.
"Can you forgive my clumsiness," I began--
But the bishop raised his small, slim fingered hand of old ivory hue,
deprecatingly.
His system was supercharged with typhoid bacilli, and, as sometimes
occurs, the superfluous "bugs" had sought exit. He could only walk
with the aid of two stout sticks, and bent very much at that. His left
leg had been surgically scraped to the bone, and I appreciated the
exquisite torture to which my awkwardness had subjected him. But he
would entertain no apologies, pressing his inquiry respecting
Karamaneh in the kindly manner which had made him so deservedly
popular on board.
"Many thanks for your solicitude," I said; "I have promised her sound
repose to-night, and since my professional reputation is at stake, I
shall see that she secures it."
In short, we were in pleasant company, and the day passed happily
enough and without notable event. Smith spent some considerable time
with the chief officer, wandering about unfrequented parts of the
ship. I learned later that he had explored the lascars' quarters, the
forecastle, the engine-room, and had even descended to the stokehold;
but this was done so unostentatiously that it occasioned no comment.
With the approach of evening, in place of that physical contentment
which usually heralds the dinner-hour, at sea, I experienced a fit of
the seemingly causeless apprehension which too often in the past had
harbingered the coming of grim events; which I had learnt to associate
with the nearing presence of one of Fu-Manchu's death-agents. In view
of the facts, as I afterwards knew them to be, I cannot account for
this.
Yet, in an unexpected manner, my forebodings were realized. That night
I was destined to meet a sorrow surpassing any which my troubled life
had known. Even now I experience great difficulty in relating the
matters which befell, in speaking of the sense of irrevocable loss
which came to me. Briefly, then, at about ten minutes before the
dining hour, whilst all the passengers, myself included, were below,
dressing, a faint cry arose from somewhere aft on the upper deck--a
cry which was swiftly taken up by other voices, so that presently a
deck steward echoed it immediately outside my own stateroom:
"Man overboard! Man overboard!"
All my premonitions rallying in that one sickening moment, I sprang
out on the deck, half dressed as I was, and leaping past the boat
which swung nearly opposite my door, craned over the rail, looking
astern.
For a long time I could detect nothing unusual. The engine-room
telegraph was ringing--and the motion of the screws momentarily
ceased; then, in response to further ringing, recommenced, but so as
to jar the whole structure of the vessel; whereby I knew that the
engines were reversed. Peering intently into the wake of the ship, I
was but dimly aware of the ever growing turmoil around me, of the
swift mustering of a boat's crew, of the shouted orders of the
third-officer. Suddenly I saw it--the sight which was to haunt me for
succeeding days and nights.
Half in the streak of the wake and half out of it, I perceived the
sleeve of a white jacket, and, near to it, a soft felt hat. The sleeve
rose up once into clear view, seemed to describe a half-circle in the
air then sink back again into the glassy swell of the water. Only the
hat remained floating upon the surface.
By the evidence of the white sleeve alone I might have remained
unconvinced, although upon the voyage I had become familiar enough
with the drill shooting-jacket, but the presence of the gray felt hat
was almost conclusive.
The man overboard was Nayland Smith!
I cannot hope, writing now, to convey in any words at my command, a
sense, even remote, of the utter loneliness which in that dreadful
moment closed coldly down upon me.
To spring overboard to the rescue was a natural impulse, but to have
obeyed it would have been worse than quixotic. In the first place, the
drowning man was close upon half a mile astern; in the second place,
others had seen the hat and the white coat as clearly as I; among them
the third-officer, standing upright in the stern of the boat--which,
with commendable promptitude had already been swung into the water.
The steamer was being put about, describing a wide arc around the
little boat dancing on the deep blue rollers. . . .
Of the next hour, I cannot bear to write at all. Long as I had known
him, I was ignorant of my friend's powers as a swimmer, but I judged
that he must have been a poor one from the fact that he had sunk so
rapidly in a calm sea. Except the hat, no trace of Nayland Smith
remained when the boat got to the spot.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE MUMMY
Dinner was out of the question that night for all of us. Karamaneh who
had spoken no word, but, grasping my hands, had looked into my
eyes--her own glassy with unshed tears--and then stolen away to her
cabin, had not since reappeared. Seated upon my berth, I stared
unseeingly before me, upon a changed ship, a changed sea and sky upon
another world. The poor old bishop, my neighbor, had glanced in
several times, as he hobbled by, and his spectacles were unmistakably
humid; but even he had vouchsafed no word, realizing that my sorrow
was too deep for such consolation.
When at last I became capable of connected thought, I found myself
faced by a big problem. Should I place the facts of the matter, as I
knew them to be, before the captain? or could I hope to apprehend
Fu-Manchu's servant by the methods suggested by my poor friend? That
Smith's death was an accident, I did not believe for a moment; it was
impossible not to link it with the attempt upon Karamaneh. In my
misery and doubt, I determined to take counsel with Dr. Stacey. I
stood up, and passed out on to the deck.
Those passengers whom I met on my way to his room regarded me in
respectful silence. By contrast, Stacey's attitude surprised and even
annoyed me.
"I'd be prepared to stake all I possess--although it's not much," he
said, "that this was not the work of your hidden enemy."
He blankly refused to give me his reasons for the statement and
strongly advised me to watch and wait but to make no communication to
the captain.
At this hour I can look back and savor again something of the profound
dejection of that time. I could not face the passengers; I even
avoided Karamaneh and Aziz. I shut myself in my cabin and sat staring
aimlessly into the growing darkness. The steward knocked, once,
inquiring if I needed anything, but I dismissed him abruptly. So I
passed the evening and the greater part of the night.
Those groups of promenaders who passed my door, invariably were
discussing my poor friend's tragic end; but as the night wore on, the
deck grew empty, and I sat amid a silence that in my miserable state I
welcomed more than the presence of any friend, saving only the one
whom I should never welcome again.
Since I had not counted the bells, to this day I have only the vaguest
idea respecting the time whereat the next incident occurred which it
is my duty to chronicle. Perhaps I was on the verge of falling asleep,
seated there as I was; at any rate, I could scarcely believe myself
awake, when, unheralded by any footsteps to indicate his coming, some
one who seemed to be crouching outside my stateroom, slightly raised
himself and peered in through the porthole--which I had not troubled
to close.
He must have been a fairly tall man to have looked in at all, and
although his features were indistinguishable in the darkness, his
outline, which was clearly perceptible against the white boat beyond,
was unfamiliar to me. He seemed to have a small, and oddly swathed
head, and what I could make out of the gaunt neck and square shoulders
in some way suggested an unnatural thinness; in short, the smudgy
silhouette in the porthole was weirdly like that of a mummy!
For some moments I stared at the apparition; then, rousing myself from
the apathy into which I had sunk, I stood up very quickly and stepped
across the room. As I did so the figure vanished, and when I threw
open the door and looked out upon the deck . . . the deck was wholly
untenanted!
I realized at once that it would be useless, even had I chosen the
course, to seek confirmation of what I had seen from the officer on
the bridge: my own berth, together with the one adjoining--that of the
bishop--was not visible from the bridge.
For some time I stood in my doorway, wondering in a disinterested
fashion which now I cannot explain, if the hidden enemy had revealed
himself to me, or if disordered imagination had played me a trick.
Later, I was destined to know the truth of the matter, but when at
last I fell into a troubled sleep, that night, I was still in some
doubt upon the point.
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