“Thanks, yer ’Onor,” said the sailor, pulling at his forelock. The two men walked away, while Hurree Chuckerjee and Higginson stepped fully into the room, closing the door, the former remaining near the threshold all the while playing nervously with the butt of his revolver while the latter walked up to Marie.
“Now, lydy,” he said in a loud voice, “I ’ad a long talk with the judge, and I promised ’im I would myke yer ’fess up. Now—come through!”
“I don’t know you!”
“Aw, ’ow yer ’urts my feelings!”
“Leave me alone!”
“Look a-’ere!” Higginson sat down close to Marie and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Wot ho, but ye’re a bloomin’ good actress!”
“Am I not?” Marie whispered back.
“Right-o! I got yer note, lydy—and now—wot are we goin’ to do with it—as the monkey sed when ’e ’ad grabbed the red-’ot poker?”
So they conversed in low, tense accents for several minutes, while Mr. Hurree Chuckerjee looked on, wild-eyed, staring, all the nerves in his cowardly baboo body writhing as he saw the powerful play of the back muscles beneath the sailor’s thin shirt. He touched the sacred wool thread of his caste that circled his obese waist, and he prayed silently but fervently to an assortment of his favorite Hindu deities. For he knew these rough seafaring sahibs, and he did not trust them—no—not at all. Which proved that he had more than a little common sense as well as, evidently, more than a little experience on docks and waterfronts in the days before he left Calcutta for a life of adventure in yellow China.
But, alter all, it appeared that Mr. Hurree Chuckerjee’s fears had been groundless. For just at that moment Higginson turned away from the girl and walked up to him, a sunny smile in his watery blue eyes and a laugh on his lips.
“Mister ’Indu,” he said, “it’s done!” “Yes-s-s, sahib?”
“Right-o! The little lydy ’as decided to jolly well spill the truth. ’Aven’t you, Miss Campbell?”
“Oh, yes,” she said demurely. “And now for me interview with the judge,” the sailor went on as he crossed to the threshold.
“The third door, eh, Mr. ’Indu?”
“No!” cried the latter, waving pudgy, excited hands. “The fourth! The judge warned you most especially, Higginson sahib!”
“That’s so,” admitted the able-bodied seaman. “Forgetful ’Arry—that’s wot me shipmates calls me, when they don’t call me Truthful ’Arry.”
“You must not make a mistake about the door!” implored the baboo.
“I ’opes as I won’t. Wot’s behind that other door, Cully, that ye’re all so bloody well frightened about it?”
“Nothing, sahib.”
“Right o! Secret diplomacy—wot?”
“You must be careful,” repeated the baboo. “Perhaps I had better come with you part of the way—until you meet the guards.”
“I do think you ’ad better. Although,”—the sailor hesitated—“are you allowed to leave this ’ere lydy alone?”
“It is against regulation fifteen, paragraph eight. But, sahib, the windows are barred and I shall lock the door. For the first time in my life I shall therefore not adhere strictly to the printed regulations.”
“Yer are a broad-minded josser!” came the hearty reply “Let’s go!” And Higginson put his left arm through the baboo’s right with a friendly smile, and then, the very next moment, before the latter knew what was occurring and how, it seemed to him that an entire firmament filled with a million blight stars was bursting somewhere in the back cells of his brain while a terrible pain shot knife-like through his eyes.
What had really happened was that Higginson had suddenly reverted to the shirtsleeves diplomacy and tactics of the quarterdeck. With great rapidity he had drawn his left arm from the baboo’s right, had turned with catlike agility, had thrust his left hand into the baboo’s eye, his right into his throat, and the man went down as though he had been struck by a high-power bullet.
“Quick! We ain’t got much time!”
* * * *
Higginson turned to the girl, and, with her help, inside of a few seconds they gagged the baboo securely with the sailor’s handkerchief and the girl’s gloves. Working feverishly, they tore the waist-shawl from the unconscious man and, with that and the sailor’s coat and belt, tied him hand and foot. Then the sailor helped himself to the baboo’s revolver and motioned to Marie to follow him.
“If we meet the guards, it’ll be all right. The judge told them to let me pass—and that goes for you, too. We only ’ave one chance.”
“You mean—that third door beyond the turning they all seem so scared about?”
“Right-o!”—as his hand turned the knob. “’Ere we go, all aboard for Blackpool! Step out plucky and unconcerned-like.”
“I will.”
They left the room, quickly closing the door behind them, and a few steps farther down the corridor they met one of the guards, a big, red-faced Tatar in full uniform and heavily armed. Higginson walked up to him casually.
“Did the judge tell you—”
“All light. Top-side plenty good!” came the reply in pidgin-English, and the Tatar soldier kept on his way, unsuspectingly turning his back while the sailor whispered rapidly to the girl:
“Sorry I ain’t got no time to fool with Queensberry rules. I got to treat ’im as I did ’is nibs back in yer room. Can’t afford to have ’im prowlin’ round—”
Again, with tremendous agility, he turned. Up flashed his right hand which held the revolver, the steel butt hitting the Tatar on the lower part of the brain. The man went down without a sound.
“Got to shyke a leg!” said Higginson to Marie, the light of battle in his blue eyes. “Ain’t got no time to tie and gag ’im. Still—that sleepin’ powder I administered to ’is bean will keep ’im in the arms of Murphy for a jolly good while.”
“You are such a sweet and peaceful soul, Mr. Higginson!” smiled the girl.
“I am!” maintained the sailor stoutly. “Peaceful ’Arry—that’s wot me pals calls me. I’m a bleedin’ lamb until some blighter steps on me toes—” He interrupted himself, pointed. “Look! ’Ere’s the turning!” They made it at a run, hand in hand. There was no other guard about. “Now, then—” as they stopped in front of the third door.
“Shall we—” breathed Marie, wondering what lay beyond the threshold.
“We bloomin’ well got to!” replied the sailor. “It’s our only chance, lydy.” He touched the door rather gingerly. “Mebbe I was a fool doin’ wot yer arsked me in that there note yer wrote on the cigarette-box! Well—never mind. I likes the color of yer eyes. Come; step into me parlor.” The door opened easily enough. He peered in “Gawd—ain’t it dark? Well—can’t be ’elped. In we pops!”
They crossed the threshold. Groping with his fingers, he found that the door had an automatic latch on the inside. He snapped it shut, then turned away from the door, Marie at his side, both feeling warily with their feet.
“Stairs!” she whispered, her heart beating like a trip-hammer.
“Right-o!”
They groped their way down the stairs slowly, carefully, perhaps a couple of dozen steps, worn slippery and hollow as by the tread of hundreds of naked feet, down, straight down. There was not even the faintest ray of light, and the air was heavy, terribly oppressive, stagnant. But they held on their course, carefully setting foot before foot, hands stretched out at right angles from their bodies to give warning of unfamiliar objects, and finally they landed dead against a wall.
“Wot now?” asked Higginson.
“Let’s see.”
Presently, by groping tentatively here and there, they discovered that they had debouched on a narrow landing which stretched right and left. Which way should they go, they wondered. They had to turn somewhere, and so they chose the left, for no particular reason. But often since Marie speculated what would have happene
d to them and how the whole adventure would have ended had they gone the other way.
Still they kept on, the sailor in front, Marie following, until suddenly there was a dull noise, Higginson let out an oath.
“Gawd! That hurts!”
It appeared that he had struck his forehead a terrific bump against a low beam that barred the way. He leaned down and investigated.
“There’s space beyond. Careful, lydy!”
Bending down, they stepped under the beam and, by feeling, found that they were in a small cubicle, less than five feet in height and no bigger than six or seven feet square. The road seemed to end there. They crouched low, wondering what next to do.
“I’m goin’ to strike a match,” whispered the sailor.
“You think you’d better?”
“Ain’t nothing else to do. Got to.”
Up flared the match with a brutal lemon flare, and they looked about quickly. There was no door—nothing, except—
“Look!” said Marie, and pointed at the low ceiling where, square in the center, a curved metal handle was protruding. The match flickered out. “What now?” asked Marie.
“Got to try the ’andle, lydy,” said Higginson, with British stoicism.
A jerk and twist—and suddenly half the ceiling slid to one side, into a well-oiled groove, sending down a flood of haggard light.
“Come on!” said the sailor, and he lifted the girl through the hole in the ceiling and followed after.
* * * *
The room in which they found themselves was empty. It was lit by the dull-red, scanty glow which came from an open-work silver brazier swinging on delicate jeweled chains from the vaulted ceiling. A tiny window was set high on a wall, and a door led. away from the left. On the wall opposite, another window, lower than the first and larger in size, was boarded by heavy wooden planks painted with bright and intricate designs of snarling golden dragons in a tossing sea of crimson and black. Higginson studied the first window speculatively.
“Too ’igh up,” he decided, “even for an able-bodied seaman, and too small to crawl through—chiefly you in your evenin’ dress, lydy—why, it’d rip to shreds!”
“Let’s investigate the other window.”
* * * *
After a few minutes’ examination they found a small crack in the boarding and, since the sailor’s knife had been confiscated in prison, they used woman’s favorite weapon, a hairpin, until they had enlarged the crack sufficiently to look through. At first, they saw nothing except a mass of varicolored incense smoke. But presently Marie’s eyes grew used to it. She stared—and let out a scream, which she quickly suppressed.
“Wot’s wrong?” asked Higginson.
“Nothing much—only, I think, by escaping from the prison, we rather jumped from the frying-pan, into the fire. Look!” She pointed through the thin crack. “It’s the Temple of Horrors!”
“’Orrors is bloomin’ well right,” admitted Higginson as, emerging from the swirls of incense smoke, he saw looming up ghastly images of people being killed by slow Chinese tortures; as presently, even as they watched, a farther door opened into the temple and, with a savage thumping of drums, a clash of cymbals and a shrilling of reed pipes, a procession of masked Chinese priests entered, led by a giant high priest who was naked to the waist.
They were followed by a dozen torch-bearers, their flaming torches lighting up the interior with many colors. Then came a procession of soldiers. They were officers, judging from the embroidered, insignia on their tunics, and they bore swords and pistols and daggers which, as if asking for divine blessing, they deposited at the feet of the idols, while, at the same moment, a chant arose, rather a long-drawn wail, in Chinese monosyllables. The high priest turned. He faced the crowd. He lifted his hands in an annular, straight up-and-down motion, commanding silence, which dropped like a pall. Then he bowed three times before a great statue of the Buddha. Another priest handed him a human skull on gold chains that was filled with burning embers. He blew upon them till they shot forth tongues of vermilion light. He bowed again, and like a herald, roared out a single Tatar word:
“Kieng-sse!”
“Kieng-sse!” The crowd took up the word in a mad, whirling chorus, and the sailor clutched Marie’s arm.
“I knows that word!” he whispered raucously. “I’ve picked up a bit of Mongol lingo ’ere and there. A sacrifice—that’s wot the word means! That sanguinary blighter is arskin’ for a sacrifice! I knows wot ’e’s drivin’ at! I fought in the Boxer war. Lydy—this ’ere ain’t no plyce for two peaceful Anglo-Saxons!” He dragged her away. “Wot’ll we do?”
“The door!” She pointed at it.
“And then wot?”
“Carry on, Mr. Higginson!”
“You’re a brick, Miss Campbell!”
“And you’re a peach, Mr. Higginson!”
He gave a gallant flourish.
“I always did like Yanks, Miss Campbell.”
“Sure I am one?”
“My word—ain’t you? Can a duck swim? If you ain’t a Yank, then George Washington was an Eyetalian!” And Marie could have hugged him for the remark.
They crossed to the door, opened it carefully, listened, looked. There was no sound. Then they stepped out into another corridor, bright-lit with swinging yellow lamps. It was really more than a corridor—more like a long hall, very high, with a vaulted ceiling. Up to a height of seven feet the walls were covered with stucco, white on white, ivory and snowy enamel skillfully blended with shiny white lac, and overlaid with a silver-threaded spider’s web of arabesques, as exquisite as the finest Mechlin lace, and of Sanskrit quotations in the Devanagari script, showing that the temple had been built many, many centuries earlier, in the golden days when Hindu priests first brought the peaceful words of the Lord Gautama Buddha from across the Himalayas and before the Mongols twisted the gentle message according to their tortuous, mazed mentality. The upper part of the walls, too, must have been decorated by ancient Indian craftsmen. For above the white stucco was a procession, a panorama of conventionalized Hindu frescoes—an epitome, a résumé of all Hindustan’s myths and faiths and legends and superstitions.
The tale of a nation’s life, Asia’s civilization and faith—yes, and crimes and virtues and sufferings, here, in front of them, and Higginson was strangely silent, while a thought came over Marie that here she was an intruder, not physically but mentally.
“What can we do?” she asked out loud. “Hobson’s choice, don’t you think, Mr. Higginson?”
“Right-o!”
So they walked on, down that everlasting corridor, with all Asia’s gods jeering at them from the wall paintings, and looking left and right for a door, a window or some other avenue of escape, when very suddenly Marie was startled into complete immobility.
* * * *
Directly in front of them the corridor came to an end, or, rather, it broadened out, swept out into a circular hall, the walls covered with slabs of delicate marble carved so that they looked like sculptured embroideries, with splendid Pekingese furniture of black teakwood, a profusion of enameled-silver ornaments, and the floor covered with huge Ming rugs of orange, gold, and imperial yellow.
“Gawd!” whispered Higginson.
Marie was near fainting. She steadied herself by clutching frantically the sailor’s strong arm.
And yet the thing which had stirred them so profoundly was only a face—that of an old man, wrinkled, brown, immobile on a scrawny neck, which was like the slimy stalk of some poisonous, incredible jungle flower, the body, arms and legs wrapped in layers of thin muslin, sitting upright on a great chair of carved rosewood that was filled with a profusion of pillows in embroidered imperial Chien-lung silk.
A hard face to picture, to describe, as Marie saw it there, suddenly, with a saraband of purple shadows bringing it into stark relief—it would take the hand of a Rodin to clout and shape the meaning of it, the taint of death, the fl
avor of dread tortures which surrounded it like a miasmic haze. The face of a sensual, plague-spotted, latter-day Roman emperor it seemed to her, blended with the unhuman, meditating, crushing calm of a Chinese sage—heavy-jowled, thin-lipped, terribly broad across the temples, and with an expression in the pin-points of the black eyes like the sins of a slaughtered soul. All Marie could see and feel was the existence of those features in front of her—grotesque, monstrous, unhuman—and she wanted to shriek—she wanted to beat them into raw, bleeding pulp!
Perhaps the whole sensation, the whole flash of emotions lasted only a moment. Perhaps it was contained in the fraction of the second it took her and the sailor to pass from the corridor, properly speaking, into the hall. At all events, suddenly she was herself again, and she could tell by Higginson’s tautening biceps beneath the pressure of her fingers that he, too, was regaining a semblance of composure.
She now jerked her wits into a fair imitation of nerve-control and, side by side with Higginson, took a few steps forward, slowly and deliberately, until she was within a few feet of the face. And then, all at once, it lost its stark immobility. The thin lips trembled and curled. They laughed—yet it was not exactly a laugh—rather a harsh, ghastly, scraping sort of cachinnation.
“Wot ho!” cried the sailor, with hysterical, forced gaiety. “I thought as yer were a bleedin’ mummy, me lad!”
And then the lips opened over toothless gums and pronounced words in good English:
“Ah—Miss Campbell!”
Her answer came stammering, ludicrously inadequate:
“Oh—you—you know—who—I—?”
“Who you are? Of course. Am I not the Chuen to yan of this temple—of all our sacred brotherhood? I know a great many things—some of which I should know—and some of which,”—again he laughed thinly, mockingly—“I should not know. And I am glad, very glad indeed, that you decided to come here to me of your own free will. Your reward will be resplendent. I punish—yes—harshly. But I also reward—generously!” And the thin lips held a tremendous, rather heroic earnestness.
Adventure Tales, Volume 5 Page 16
