“Give me a cigarette, darling,” Moneen, curled up in her deep chair like a Persian kitten on its cushion, extended a bare, scented arm toward her big, handsome husband.
Dougal McDougal proffered her a hammered silver tray of Deities, while de Grandin, not to be outdone in gallantry, leaped nimbly to his feet, snapped his silver pocket lighter into flame and held the blue-blazing wick out to her till she set her cigarette aglow.
“Beg pardon, sir,” Tompkins, McDougal’s irreproachable butler, bowed deferentially from the arched doorway, “there’s a gentleman here—a foreign gentleman—who insists on seeing Doctor de Grandin at once. He won’t give his name, sir,—”
Quick steps sounded on the polished floor of the hall and an undersized individual shouldered the butler aside with a lack of ceremony I should never have essayed, then glanced menacingly about the room.
On second glance I realized my impression of the visitor’s diminutive stature was an error. Rather, he was a giant in miniature. His very lack of height gave the impression of material equilibrium and tremendous physical force. His shoulders were unusually broad and his chest abnormally deep. One felt instinctively that the thews of his arms were massive as those of a gladiator and his torso sheathed in muscle like that of a professional wrestler. A mop of iron-gray hair was brushed back in a pompadour from his wide brow, and a curling white mustache adorned his upper lip, while a wisp of white imperial depended from his sharply pointed chin. But the most startling thing about him was his cold, pale face—a face with the pallor of a statue—from which there burned a pair of big, deep-set dark eyes beneath horizontal parentheses of intensely black and bushy brows.
Once more the stranger gazed threateningly about; then, as his glowing eyes rested on de Grandin, he announced ominously: “I am here!”
Jules de Grandin’s face went blank with amazement, almost with dismay, then lit up with an expression of diabolical savagery. “Morbleau, it is the assassin!” he exclaimed incredulously, leaping from his seat and putting himself in a posture of defense.
“Apache!” the stranger ground the insult between strong, white teeth which flashed with animal-like ferocity.
“Stealer of superannuated horses!” de Grandin countered, advancing a threatening step toward the other.
“Pickpocket, burglar, highwayman, cut-throat, everything which is execrable!” shouted the intruder with a furious scowl as he shook clenched fists in de Grandin’s face.
“Embrasse moi!” they cried in chorus, and flung themselves into each other’s arms like sweethearts reunited after long parting. For a moment they embraced, kissing each other’s cheeks, pounding each other’s shoulders with affectionate fists, exchanging the deadliest insults in gamin French. Then, remembering himself, de Grandin put the other from him and turned to us with a ceremonious bow.
“Monsieur and Madame McDougal, Doctor Trowbridge,” he announced with stilted formality, “I have the very great honor to present Monsieur Georges Jean Joseph Marie Renouard, Inspecteur du Service de Sûreté Général, and the cleverest man in all the world—except myself. Georges, abominable stealer-of-blind-men’s sous that you are, permit that I introduce Monsieur and Madame Dougal McDougal, my host and hostess, and Doctor Samuel Trowbridge, skilled physician and as noble a fellow as ever did honor to the sacred name of friend. It is with him I have lived since coming to this country.”
Inspecteur Renouard bent forward in a jack-knife bow as he raised Moneen’s hand to his lips, bowed again to McDougal, then took my hand in a grip which nearly paralysed the muscle of my forearm.
“I am delight’,” he assured us. “Monsieur Trowbridge, your taste in permitting this one to reside beneath your roof is execrable, no less, but he is clever—almost as clever as I—and doubtless he has imposed on you to make you think him an honest fellow. Eh bien, I have arrived at last like Nemesis to spoil his little game. Me, I shall show him in his true colors, no less!” Having thus unburdened himself, he lapsed into a seat upon the divan, accepted a liqueur, folded his large white hands demurely in his lap and gazed from one of us to the other with a quick, bird-like glance which seemed to take minute inventory of everything it fell upon.
“And what fortunate wind blows you here, mon brave?” de Grandin asked at length. “Well I know it is no peaceful mission you travel on, for you were ever the stormy petrel. Tell me, is excitement promised? I grow weary of this so uneventful American life.”
“Tiens,” Renouard laughed. “I think we shall soon see much excitement—plenty—mon petit coq. As yet I have not recovered my land legs after traveling clear about the earth in search of one who is the Devil’s other self, but tomorrow the hunt begins afresh, and then—who knows? Yes. Certainly.” He nodded gravely to us in turn; then: “Clear from Cambodia I come, my friend, upon the trail of the cleverest and wickedest of clever-wicked fellows—and a lady.”
“A lady?” de Grandin’s blue eyes lit up with interest. “You amaze me.”
“Prepare for more amazement, then, mon vieux; she is a runaway lady, young, beautiful, ravissante”—he gathered his fingers at his lips and wafted a kiss gently toward the ceiling—“a runaway bayadère from the great temple of Angkor, no less!”
“Mordieu, you excite me! What has she done?”
“Run away, decamped; skipped!”
“Précisément, great stupid-head; but why should you, an inspector of the secret police, pursue her?”
“She ran away from the temple—” Renouard began again, and:
“Bête, repeat that so senseless statement but one more time and I shall give myself the pleasure of twisting your entirely empty head from off your deformed shoulders!” de Grandin broke in furiously.
“—and he whom I seek ran after her,” his colleague continued imperturbably. “Voilà tout. It is once again a case of cherchez la femme.”
“Oh, how interesting!” Moneen exclaimed. “Won’t you tell us more, Inspector Renouard?”
Frenchmen are seldom importuned in vain by pretty women. The Inspector was no exception. “Do you know Cambodia, by any unhappy chance?” he asked, flashing his gleaming eyes appreciatively at the length of silk-sheathed leg Moneen displayed as she sat one foot doubled under her, the other hanging toward the floor.
We shook our heads, and he continued: “It is the hottest spot upon the earth, mes amis—hot and wet. Always the humidity hovers near one hundred per cent. Your clothes are soaked with perspiration in a few minutes, and will not dry out overnight. Sheets and bedding are useless for the same reason, and one learns to sleep on tightly stretched matting on bare boards. Clothing mildews and wounds never heal. It is the only land where snakes large enough to kill by constriction are also venomous, and its spiders’ bites make that of the tarantula seem harmless by comparison. The natives sleep all day and emerge at night like bats, cats and owls. It is a land unfit for white men.”
“But this temple dancer—this Oriental girl?” Moneen insisted. “Why do you follow her here?”
“She is no Oriental, Madame; she, too, is white.”
“White? A temple dancing-girl? How—”
The Inspector lit a cigarette before replying: “The Angkor temple is the great cathedral of Buddhism in Southern Asia. But it is a Buddhism gone to seed and overgrown with strange rites, even as the Lamist Buddhism of Tibet is bastardized. Very well. This temple of Angkor is a vast stone structure with sculptured terraces, fountains and houses for the priests and sacred dancers. All ceremonies are held outdoors, the terraces being the scene of the rites. The debased Buddhism is a religion of the dance. Its services are largely composed of most beautiful and extremely intricate dances which often last for days on end, nor are they meaningless or merely ritualistic. By no means. Like those of the devil-dancers of the North, these ceremonies of the South have meaning—definite meaning. Every movement of arms, legs, head, eye and lips, down to the very angle of hands and feet, conveys a word or phrase or sentence to those who watch and understand as clearly as the so
ldier’s semaphore flags convey a meaning to the military observer. It is kind of stenography of motion.
“Now it can easily be imagined that such skill is not acquired overnight. No, the dancers are trained almost from the cradle. They are under the absolute control of the priests. The smallest infraction of a temple rule, or even the whim of a holy man, and sentence is forthwith passed and the unfortunate dancer dies slowly and in circumstances of great elaboration and discomfort.
“So much by way of prologue. Now for this runaway young lady: Twenty years ago a young and earnest man from your country named Joseph Crownshield came to Cambodia to preach the Word of God as expounded by authority of the Mennonite Church to the benighted followers of Buddha. Hélas, while his zeal was great, his judgment was small. He committed two great errors, first in coming to Cambodia at all, second in having with him his young wife.
“The priests of Angkor did not relish the things which this Monsieur Crownshield said. They relished even less what he did, for he was earnest, and began to convert the natives, and gifts for the great temple were less plentiful.
“The young man died. A snake bit him as he was about to enter his bath. Snakes have no business in the bathroom, but—his household servants were, of course, Cambodians, and the priesthood numbered expert snake-charmers among its personnel. At any rate, he died.
“Misfortunes seldom come singly. Two days later the church and parsonage burned down, and in the smoking ruins was found the body of a woman. Madame Crownshield? Perhaps. Who can say? At all events, the body was interred beside the missionary’s and life went on as usual. But sixteen years later came rumors to the French gendarmerie of a dancer in the temple, a girl who danced like a flame in the wind, like a moonbeam on flowing water, like the twinkling of a star at midnight. And, rumor said, though her hair was black it was fine as split-silk, not coarse like that of the native women, and her skin was fair as milk and her eyes blue as violets in springtime.
“Devotees of the temple are not supposed to speak to outsiders; the penalty of an unguarded tongue is lingering death, but—the ear of the Sûreté is keen and its arm is very long. We learned that rumor was well founded. Within the temple there was such a one, and she was even as rumor described her. Though she never emerged from her dwelling-place within the sacred edifice, her presence there was definitely established. Unquestionably she was white; equally beyond question she had no business where she was, but—” He paused, spreading his hands and puffing our his cheeks. “It is not wise to trifle with the religion of the natives,” he ended simply.
“But who was she?” Moneen asked.
“Parbleu, I would give my tongue to the cat if I could answer you,” the Inspector returned. “The Sûreté found itself against a wall of stone more stubborn than that of which the temple was composed. In that God-detested land we learn much. If one fasts long enough he will hear voices and see visions. The poisons of certain drugs and the toxins of certain fevers have the same effect. Occasionally ‘the Spirit of Budda’ permeates the soul of a white man—more frequently a white woman—in the tropics. The accumulated toxic effect of the climate leads him—or her—to give up the materialistic, cleanly civilization of the West and retire to a life of squalor, filth and contemplation as a devotee of some Eastern faith. Had this happened here? Was this girl self-devoted as a dancer in the temple? Had her mother, perhaps, devoted herself years ago, and had the child been born and reared in the shadow of the temple idols? One wonders.”
“But surely you investigated?” Moneen pursued.
“But naturally, Madame. I am Renouard; I do not do things by the half. No.
“To the Angkor temple I went and demanded sight of her. ‘There is no such person here,’ I was assured.
“‘You lie,’ I answered courteously, ‘and unless you bring her to me forthwith, I shall come in for her.’
“Eh bien, Messieurs,” he turned to us with a chuckle, “the Frenchman is logical. He harbors no illusions about the love of subject peoples. Nor does he seek to conciliate them. Love him they may not, but fear and respect him they must. My hint was sufficient—especially as two platoons of gendarmerie, a howitzer and machine-guns were there to give it point. The lady whose existence had been denied so vehemently, a moment before was straightway brought to me.
“Beyond doubt she was pure European. Her hair was black and gently waved, her skin was white as curdled cream, her eyes were blue as—Parbleu, Madame”—he gazed at Moneen McDougal with wide-open eyes, as though he saw her for the first time—“she was much like you!”
I thought I saw a shiver of terror ripple through Moneen’s lithe form, but her husband’s hearty laugh relieved the tension. “Well, who was she?” he asked.
“Le bon Dieu knows,” Renouard returned. “Although I made the ape-faced priests retire so that we might converse unheard, they had either terrified the girl that she dared not speak or she was actually unable to inform me. I spoke to her in every language that I know—and they are many—but only the lingo of the Khmer could she understand or speak. Her name, she said, was Thi-bah, she was a sacred dancer in the temple, and she remembered no other world. She had always lived there. Of her parentage she could not speak, for father or mother she had never known. And at the end she joined hands together palm to palm, the fingers pointing downward—which is the symbol of submission—and begged I would permit her to go back to her place among the temple women. Sacré nom! What is one to do in such circumstances? Nothing!
“That is what I did. I retired in chagrin and she returned to her cell within the temple.”
“Bien oui,” de Grandin tweaked the needle points of his little blond mustache and grinned impishly at the Inspector, “but a tale half told is poorly told, my friend. What of this other one, this so clever-devilish fellow whom you trail while he trails the runaway lady? Hein?”
Renouard joined his square-tipped fingers end to end and pursed his lips judicially. “Oui-da,” he admitted, “that is the other half of the tale, indeed. Very well; regardez-moi bien: In Cochin China in the days before the Great War there lived a certain gentleman named Sun Ah Poy. He was, as you may gather from his name, Chinese, but his family had been resident in Saigon for generations. The Sun family is so numerous in China that to bear the name means little more than for a Frenchman to be called DuPont, or an Englishman Smith or an Irishman Murphy. Nevertheless, all these names have had their famous representatives, as you will recall when you think of your great colonizer, Captain John Smith, and the illustrious Albert of the present generation. Also you will remember China’s first president was Doctor Sun Yat Sen.
“This Sun Ah Poy was no shopkeeping son of a coolie father, he was an educated gentleman, a man of great wealth, taught by private tutors in the learning of the East and holding a diploma from the Sorbonne. His influence with the native population was phenomenal, and his opinions were eagerly sought and highly regarded by the conseil privé. He wore the ribbon of the Legion of Honor for distinguished service to the Republic. This, then, was the man who a few days before the Armistice went up-country to supervise an elephant hunt.
“A savage old tusker had been roped between two trained beasts and was being led into the stockade when, without warning, he broke his fetters and charged. The elephant on which Doctor Sun was seated was directly in the maddened brute’s path. In a moment the runaway beast had seized the unfortunate man in his trunk, snatched him from his saddle and hurled him forty feet through the air, crashing him into the wall of the stockade.
“Medicine and surgery did their best. Sun Ah Poy lived, hélas! When he rose from his hospital bed it was with body and mind hopelessly crippled. The physical injury was apparent to all, the mental ailment we were to find out to our cost. Insubordination broke out among the natives, French officers were openly disobeyed, criminals were permitted to escape from prison, laborers on the public works were assaulted and beaten, sometimes killed; the process of criminal jurisprudence broke down completely, for witnes
ses could not be made to testify; gendarmes went forth to make arrests and came back feet first; examining magistrates who prosecuted investigations with honest thoroughness died mysteriously, and most opportunely for the criminals—official records of the police disappeared from their files overnight. It was all too obvious that outlawry had raised its red standard and hurled defiance at authority.
“In Paris this would have been bad. In Asia it was unspeakable, for the white man must keep his prestige at all costs. Once he ‘loses face’ his power over the natives is gone. What was he to do?
“At length, like men of sound discretion, the Government put the case in my charge. I considered it. From all angles I viewed it. What did I see? A single dominating intelligence seemed guiding all the lawlessness, an intelligence which knew beforehand what plans Government made. I cast about for suspects, and my eye fell on three, Sun Ah Poy and two others. He seemed least likely of the three, but he enjoyed our confidence, and it lay within his power to thwart our plans if he so desired. Therefore I laid my trap. I called three councils of war, to each of which a different suspect was invited. At these councils I outlined my plans for raiding certain known centers of the criminal elements. The first two raids were successful. We caught our game red-handed. The third raid was a glorious failure. Only a brightly glowing campfire and a deserted encampment waited for the gendarmes. It was of this raid I had spoken to Doctor Sun.
“Proof? Not in English courts, nor American; but this was under French jurisdiction. We do not let the guilty escape through fear of affronting the possibly innocent. No. I issued a warrant for Doctor’s Sun’s apprehension.
“That evening, as I sat within my cabinet, I heard a clicking-scratching on the matting-covered floor. Sapristi! Toward me there charged full-tilt a giant tarantula, the greatest, most revolting-looking spider I had ever seen! Now, it is seldom that these brutes attack a man who does not annoy them; that they should deliberately attack an inoffensive, passive person is almost beyond experience; yet though I sat quiescent at my table, this one made for me as though he had a personal feud to settle. Fortunately for me, I was wearing my belt, and with a single motion I leaped upon the table, drew my pistol and fired. My bullet crushed the creature and I breathed again. But that night as I rode home to my quarters a second poison-spider dropped from a tree-bough into my rickshaw. I struck it with my walking-stick, and killed it, but my escape was of the narrowest. When I went into my bathroom I found a small but very venomous serpent coiled, ready to receive me.
The Dark Angel Page 3
