CHAPTER I
A MIDNIGHT SUMMONS
“When did you last hear from Nayland Smith?” asked my visitor.
I paused, my hand on the syphon, reflecting for a moment.
“Two months ago,” I said; “he’s a poor correspondent and rather soured, I fancy.”
“What—a woman or something?”
“Some affair of that sort. He’s such a reticent beggar, I really know very little about it.”
I placed a whisky and soda before the Rev. J. D. Eltham, also sliding the tobacco jar nearer to his hand. The refined and sensitive face of the clergy-man offered no indication of the truculent character of the man. His scanty fair hair, already gray over the temples, was silken and soft-looking; in appearance he was indeed a typical English churchman; but in China he had been known as “the fighting missionary,” and had fully deserved the title. In fact, this peaceful-looking gentleman had directly brought about the Boxer Risings!
“You know,” he said, in his clerical voice, but meanwhile stuffing tobacco into an old pipe with fierce energy, “I have often wondered, Petrie—I have never left off wondering—”
“What?”
“That accursed Chinaman! Since the cellar place beneath the site of the burnt-out cottage in Dulwich Village—I have wondered more than ever.”
He lighted his pipe and walked to the hearth to throw the match in the grate.
“You see,” he continued, peering across at me in his oddly nervous way, “one never knows, does one? If I thought that Dr. Fu-Manchu lived; if I seriously suspected that that stupendous intellect, that wonderful genius, Petrie, er—” he hesitated characteristically—“survived, I should feel it my duty—”
“Well?” I said, leaning my elbows on the table and smiling slightly.
“If that Satanic genius were not indeed destroyed, then the peace of the world, may be threatened anew at any moment!”
He was becoming excited, shooting out his jaw in the truculent manner I knew, and snapping his fingers to emphasize his words; a man composed of the oddest complexities that ever dwelt beneath a clerical frock.
“He may have got back to China, Doctor!” he cried, and his eyes had the fighting glint in them. “Could you rest in peace if you thought that he lived? Should you not fear for your life every time that a night-call took you out alone? Why, man alive, it is only two years since he was here among us, since we were searching every shadow for those awful green eyes! What became of his band of assassins—his stranglers, his dacoits, his damnable poisons and insects and what-not—the army of creatures—”
He paused, taking a drink.
“You—” he hesitated diffidently—“searched in Egypt with Nayland Smith, did you not?”
I nodded.
“Contradict me if I am wrong,” he continued; “but my impression is that you were searching for the girl—the girl—Karamaneh, I think she was called?”
“Yes,” I replied shortly; “but we could find no trace—no trace.”
“You—er—were interested?”
“More than I knew,” I replied, “until I realized that I had—lost her.”
“I never met Karamaneh, but from your account, and from others, she was quite unusually—”
“She was very beautiful,” I said, and stood up, for I was anxious to terminate that phase of the conversation.
Eltham regarded me sympathetically; he knew something of my search with Nayland Smith for the dark-eyed, Eastern girl who had brought romance into my drab life; he knew that I treasured my memories of her as I loathed and abhorred those of the fiendish, brilliant Chinese doctor who had been her master.
Eltham began to pace up and down the rug, his pipe bubbling furiously; and something in the way he carried his head reminded me momentarily of Nayland Smith. Certainly, between this pink-faced clergyman, with his deceptively mild appearance, and the gaunt, bronzed, and steely-eyed Burmese commissioner, there was externally little in common; but it was some little nervous trick in his carriage that conjured up through the smoky haze one distant summer evening when Smith had paced that very room as Eltham paced it now, when before my startled eyes he had rung up the curtain upon the savage drama in which, though I little suspected it then, Fate had cast me for a leading role.
I wondered if Eltham’s thoughts ran parallel with mine. My own were centered upon the unforgettable figure of the murderous Chinaman. These words, exactly as Smith had used them, seemed once again to sound in my ears: “Imagine a person tall, lean, and feline, high shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long magnetic eyes of the true cat green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science, past and present, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the ‘Yellow Peril’ incarnate in one man.”
This visit of Eltham’s no doubt was responsible for my mood; for this singular clergyman had played his part in the drama of two years ago.
“I should like to see Smith again,” he said suddenly; “it seems a pity that a man like that should be buried in Burma. Burma makes a mess of the best of men, Doctor. You said he was not married?”
“No,” I replied shortly, “and is never likely to be, now.”
“Ah, you hinted at something of the kind.”
“I know very little of it. Nayland Smith is not the kind of man to talk much.”
“Quite so—quite so! And, you know, Doctor, neither am I; but”—he was growing painfully embarrassed—“it may be your due—I—er—I have a correspondent, in the interior of China—”
“Well?” I said, watching him in sudden eagerness.
“Well, I would not desire to raise—vain hopes—nor to occasion, shall I say, empty fears; but—er…no, Doctor!” He flushed like a girl—“It was wrong of me to open this conversation. Perhaps, when I know more—will you forget my words, for the time?”
The telephone bell rang.
“Hullo!” cried Eltham—“hard luck, Doctor!”—but I could see that he welcomed the interruption. “Why!” he added, “it is one o’clock!”
I went to the telephone.
“Is that Dr. Petrie?” inquired a woman’s voice.
“Yes; who is speaking?”
“Mrs. Hewett has been taken more seriously ill. Could you come at once?”
“Certainly,” I replied, for Mrs. Hewett was not only a profitable patient but an estimable lady—“I shall be with you in a quarter of an hour.”
I hung up the receiver.
“Something urgent?” asked Eltham, emptying his pipe.
“Sounds like it. You had better turn in.”
“I should much prefer to walk over with you, if it would not be intruding. Our conversation has ill prepared me for sleep.”
“Right!” I said; for I welcomed his company; and three minutes later we were striding across the deserted common.
A sort of mist floated amongst the trees, seeming in the moonlight like a veil draped from trunk to trunk, as in silence we passed the Mound pond, and struck out for the north side of the common.
I suppose the presence of Eltham and the irritating recollection of his half-confidence were the responsible factors, but my mind persistently dwelt upon the subject of Fu-Manchu and the atrocities which he had committed during his sojourn in England. So actively was my imagination at work that I felt again the menace which so long had hung over me; I felt as though that murderous yellow cloud still cast its shadow upon England. And I found myself longing for the company