The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu (21 page)

I suppose I did not awake very readily. Following the nervous
vigilance of the past six months, my tired nerves, in the enjoyment
of this relaxation, were rapidly recuperating. I no longer feared
to awake to find a knife at my throat, no longer dreaded the
darkness as a foe.

So that the voice may have been calling (indeed, had been
calling) for some time, and of this I had been hazily conscious
before finally I awoke. Then, ere the new sense of security came to
reassure me, the old sense of impending harm set my heart leaping
nervously. There is always a certain physical panic attendant upon
such awakening in the still of night, especially in novel
surroundings. Now, I sat up abruptly, clutching at the rail of my
berth and listening.

There was a soft thudding on my cabin door, and a voice, low and
urgent, was crying my name.

Through the open porthole the moonlight streamed into my room,
and save for a remote and soothing throb, inseparable from the
progress of a great steamship, nothing else disturbed the
stillness; I might have floated lonely upon the bosom of the
Mediterranean. But there was the drumming on the door again, and
the urgent appeal:

"Dr. Petrie! Dr. Petrie!"

I threw off the bedclothes and stepped on to the floor of the
cabin, fumbling hastily for my slippers. A fear that something was
amiss, that some aftermath, some wraith of the dread Chinaman, was
yet to come to disturb our premature peace, began to haunt me. I
threw open the door.

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!"

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.