CHAPTER XI
THE WHITE PEACOCK
Nayland Smith wasted no time in pursuing the plan of campaign which he
had mentioned to Inspector Weymouth. Less than forty-eight hours after
quitting the house of the murdered Slattin I found myself bound along
Whitechapel Road upon strange enough business.
A very fine rain was falling, which rendered it difficult to see
clearly from the windows; but the weather apparently had little effect
upon the commercial activities of the district. The cab was threading
a hazardous way through the cosmopolitan throng crowding the street.
On either side of me extended a row of stalls, seemingly established
in opposition to the more legitimate shops upon the inner side of the
pavement.
Jewish hawkers, many of them in their shirt-sleeves, acclaimed the
rarity of the bargains which they had to offer; and, allowing for the
difference of costume, these tireless Israelites, heedless of climatic
conditions, sweating at their mongery, might well have stood, not in
a squalid London thoroughfare, but in an equally squalid market-street
of the Orient.
They offered linen and fine raiment; from foot-gear to hair-oil their
wares ranged. They enlivened their auctioneering with conjuring tricks
and witty stories, selling watches by the aid of legerdemain, and
fancy vests by grace of a seasonable anecdote.
Poles, Russians, Serbs, Roumanians, Jews of Hungary, and Italians of
Whitechapel mingled in the throng. Near East and Far East rubbed
shoulders. Pidgin English contested with Yiddish for the ownership of
some tawdry article offered by an auctioneer whose nationality defied
conjecture, save that always some branch of his ancestry had drawn
nourishment from the soil of Eternal Judæa.
Some wearing men's caps, some with shawls thrown over their oily
locks, and some, more true to primitive instincts, defying,
bare-headed, the unkindly elements, bedraggled women—more often than
not burdened with muffled infants—crowded the pavements and the
roadway, thronged about the stalls like white ants about some choicer
carrion.
And the fine drizzling rain fell upon all alike, pattering upon the
hood of the taxi-cab; trickling down the front windows; glistening
upon the unctuous hair of those in the street who were hatless; dewing
the bare arms of the auctioneers, and dripping, melancholy, from the
tarpaulin coverings of the stalls. Heedless of the rain above and of
the mud beneath, North, South, East and West mingled their cries,
their bids, their blandishments, their raillery, mingled their persons
in that joyless throng.
Sometimes a yellow face showed close to one of the streaming windows;
sometimes a black-eyed, pallid face, but never a face wholly sane and
healthy. This was an underworld where squalor and vice went hand in
hand through the beautiless streets, a melting-pot of the world's
outcasts; this was the shadowland which last night had swallowed up
Nayland Smith.
Ceaselessly I peered to right and left, searching amid that
rain-soaked company for any face known to me. Whom I expected to find
there, I know not, but I should have counted it no matter for surprise
had I detected amid that ungracious ugliness the beautiful face of
Kâramanèh, the Eastern slave-girl, the leering yellow face of a
Burmese dacoit, the gaunt, bronze features of Nayland Smith; a hundred
times I almost believed that I had seen the ruddy countenance of
Inspector Weymouth, and once (at what instant my heart seemed to stand
still) I suffered from the singular delusion that the oblique green
eyes of Dr. Fu-Manchu peered out from the shadows between two stalls.
It was mere phantasy, of course, the sick imaginings of a mind
overwrought. I had not slept and had scarcely tasted food for more
than thirty hours; for, following up a faint clue supplied by Burke,
Slattin's man, and, like his master, an ex-officer of New York Police,
my friend, Nayland Smith, on the previous evening, had set out in
quest of some obscene den where the man called Shen-Yan—former keeper
of an opium shop—was now said to be in hiding. Shen-Yan we knew to be
a creature of the Chinese doctor, and only a most urgent call had
prevented me from joining Smith upon this promising, though hazardous
expedition.
At any rate, Fate willing it so, he had gone without me; and
now—although Inspector Weymouth, assisted by a number of C.I.D. men,
was sweeping the district about me—to the time of my departure
nothing whatever had been heard of Smith. The ordeal of waiting
finally had proved too great to be borne. With no definite idea of
what I proposed to do, I had thrown myself into the search, filled
with such dreadful apprehensions as I hope never again to experience.
I did not know the exact situation of the place to which Smith was
gone, for owing to the urgent case which I have mentioned, I had been
absent at the time of his departure; nor could Scotland Yard enlighten
me upon this point. Weymouth was in charge of the case—under Smith's
direction—and since the inspector had left the Yard, early that
morning, he had disappeared as completely as Smith, no report having
been received from him.
As my driver turned into the black mouth of a narrow, ill-lighted
street, and the glare and clamour of the greater thoroughfare died
behind me, I sank into the corner of the cab burdened with such a
sense of desolation as mercifully comes but rarely.
We were heading now for that strange settlement off the West India
Dock Road, which, bounded by Limehouse Causeway and Pennyfields, and
narrowly confined within four streets, composes an unique Chinatown, a
miniature of that at Liverpool, and of the greater one in San
Francisco. Inspired with an idea which promised hopefully, I raised
the speaking-tube:
"Take me first to the River Police Station," I directed; "along
Ratcliffe Highway."
The man turned and nodded comprehendingly, as I could see through the
wet pane.
Presently we swerved to the right and into an even narrower street.
This inclined in an easterly direction, and proved to communicate with
a wide thoroughfare along which passed brilliantly lighted electric
trams. I had lost all sense of direction, and when, swinging to the
left and to the right again, I looked through the window and perceived
that we were before the door of the Police Station, I was dully
surprised.
In quite mechanical fashion I entered the depôt. Inspector Ryman, our
associate in one of the darkest episodes of the campaign with the
Yellow Doctor two years before, received me in his office.
By a negative shake of the head, he answered my unspoken question.
"The ten o'clock boat is lying off the Stone Stairs, doctor," he said,
"and co-operating with some of the Scotland Yard men who are dragging
that district—"
I shuddered at the word "dragging"; Ryman had not used it literally,
but nevertheless it had conjured up a dread possibility—a possibility
in accordance with the methods of Dr. Fu-Manchu. All within space of
an instant I saw the tide of Limehouse Reach, the Thames lapping about
the green-coated timbers of a dock pier; and
rising—falling—sometimes disclosing to the pallid light a rigid
hand, sometimes a horribly bloated face—I saw the body of Nayland
Smith at the mercy of those oily waters. Ryman continued:
"There is a launch out, too, patrolling the riverside from here to
Tilbury. Another lies at the breakwater." He jerked his thumb over his
shoulder. "Should you care to take a run down and see for yourself?"
"No, thanks," I replied, shaking my head. "You are doing all that can
be done. Can you give me the address of the place to which Mr. Smith
went last night?"
"Certainly," said Ryman; "I thought you knew it. You remember
Shen-Yan's place—by Limehouse Basin? Well, farther east—east of the
Causeway, between Gill Street and Three Colt Street—is a block of
wooden buildings. You recall them?"
"Yes," I replied. "Is the man established there again, then?"
"It appears so, but although you have evidently not been informed of
the fact, Weymouth raided the establishment in the early hours of this
morning!"
"Well?" I cried.
"Unfortunately with no result," continued the inspector. "The
notorious Shen-Yan was missing, and although there is no real doubt
that the place is used as a gaming-house, not a particle of evidence
to that effect could be obtained. Also—there was no sign of Mr.
Nayland Smith, and no sign of the American Burke, who had led him to
the place."
"Is it certain that they went there?"
"Two C.I.D. men, who were shadowing, actually saw the pair of them
enter. A signal had been arranged, but it was never given; and at
about half-past four the place was raided."
"Surely some arrests were made?"
"But there was no evidence!" cried Ryman. "Every inch of the
rat-burrow was searched. The Chinese gentleman who posed as the
proprietor of what he claimed to be a respectable lodging-house,
offered every facility to the police. What could we do?"
"I take it that the place is being watched?"
"Certainly," said Ryman. "Both from the river and from the shore. Oh!
they are not there! God knows where they are, but they are not
there!"
I stood for a moment in silence, endeavouring to determine my course;
then, telling Ryman that I hoped to see him later, I walked out slowly
into the rain and mist, and nodding to the taxi-driver to proceed to
our original destination, I re-entered the cab.
As we moved off, the lights of the River Police depôt were swallowed
up in the humid murk, and again I found myself being carried through
the darkness of those narrow streets, which, like a maze, hold secret
within their Labyrinth mysteries great, and at least as foul, as that
of Parsiphaë.
The marketing centres I had left far behind me; to my right stretched
the broken range of riverside buildings, and beyond them flowed the
Thames, a stream heavily burdened with secrets as ever were Tiber or
Tigris. On my left, occasional flickering lights broke through the
mist, for the most part the lights of taverns; and saving these rents
in the veil, the darkness was punctuated with nothing but the faint
and yellow luminance of the street lamps.
Ahead was a black mouth, which promised to swallow me up as it had
swallowed up my friend.
In short, what with my lowered condition, and consequent frame of
mind, and what with the traditions, for me inseparable from that
gloomy quarter of London, I was in the grip of a shadowy menace which
at any moment might become tangible—I perceived, in the most
commonplace objects, the yellow hand of Dr. Fu-Manchu.
When the cab stopped in a place of utter darkness, I aroused myself
with an effort, opened the door, and stepped out into the mud of a
narrow lane. A high brick wall frowned upon me from one side, and,
dimly perceptible, there towered a smoke stack beyond. On my right
uprose the side of a wharf building, shadowly, and some distance
ahead, almost obscured by the drizzling rain, a solitary lamp
flickered.
I turned up the collar of my raincoat, shivering, as much at the
prospect as from physical chill.
"You will wait here," I said to the man; and, feeling in my
breast-pocket, I added: "If you hear the note of a whistle, drive on
and rejoin me."
He listened attentively and with a certain eagerness. I had selected
him that night for the reason that he had driven Smith and myself on
previous occasions and had proved himself a man of intelligence.
Transferring a Browning pistol from my hip-pocket to that of my
raincoat, I trudged on into the mist.
The headlights of the taxi were swallowed up behind me, and just
abreast of the street lamp I stood listening.
Save for the dismal sound of rain, and the trickling of water along
the gutters, all about me was silent. Sometimes this silence would be
broken by the distant, muffled note of a steam siren; and always,
forming a sort of background to the near stillness, was the remote din
of riverside activity.
I walked on to the corner just beyond the lamp. This was the street in
which the wooden buildings were situated. I had expected to detect
some evidences of surveillance, but if any were indeed being observed,
it was effectively masked. Not a living creature was visible, peer as
I would.
Plans I had none, and perceiving that the street was empty, and that
no lights showed in any of the windows, I passed on, only to find that
I had entered a cul-de-sac.
A rickety gate gave access to a descending flight of stone steps, the
bottom invisible in the denser shadows of an archway, beyond which, I
doubted not, lay the river.
Still uninspired by any definite design, I tried the gate and found
that it was unlocked. Like some wandering soul, as it has since seemed
to me, I descended. There was a lamp over the archway, but the glass
was broken, and the rain apparently had extinguished the light; as I
passed under it, I could hear the gas whistling from the burner.
Continuing my way, I found myself upon a narrow wharf with the Thames
flowing gloomily beneath me. A sort of fog hung over the river,
shutting me in. Then came an incident.
Suddenly, quite near, there arose a weird and mournful cry—a cry
indescribable, and inexpressibly uncanny!
I started back so violently that how I escaped falling into the river
I do not know to this day. That cry, so eerie and so wholly
unexpected, had unnerved me; and realizing the nature of my
surroundings, and the folly of my presence alone in such a place, I
began to edge back towards the foot of the steps, away from the thing
that cried; when —a great white shape uprose like a phantom before
me!...
There are few men, I suppose, whose lives have been crowded with so
many eerie happenings as mine, but this phantom thing which grew out
of the darkness, which seemed about to envelop me, takes rank in my
memory amongst the most fearsome apparitions which I have witnessed.
I know that I was frozen with a sort of supernatural terror. I stood
there, my hands clenched, staring—staring—at that white shape, which
seemed to float.
And as I stared, every nerve in my body thrilling, I distinguished the
outline of the phantom. With a subdued cry, I stepped forward. A new
sensation claimed me. In that one stride I passed from the horrible to
the bizarre.
I found myself confronted with something tangible certainly, but
something whose presence in that place was utterly extravagant—could
only be reconcilable in the dreams of an opium slave.
Was I awake? was I sane? Awake and sane beyond doubt, but surely
moving, not in the purlieus of Limehouse, but in the fantastic realms
of fairyland.
Swooping, with open arms, I rounded up in an angle against the
building and gathered in this screaming thing which had inspired in me
so keen a terror.
The great, ghostly fan was closed as I did so, and I stumbled back
towards the stair with my struggling captive tucked under my arm; I
mounted into one of London's darkest slums, carrying a beautiful white
peacock!