THE TRAGEDY
Nayland Smith leant 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-grey
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 particulars of the attack upon
Kâramanèh, 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 Kâramanèh 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 port-hole, 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 Kâramanèh
is either in hiding in the ship, or if visible, is disguised."
With his usual clarity, 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 endeavour to link up the chain a
little. You occupy an upper-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. Kâramanèh 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 port-holes nightly
at present. We know that that of Kâramanèh's stateroom was open.
Therefore, in any attempt upon our quarter, Kâramanèh 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 Kâramanèh'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 place 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 naught 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 rôle of
physician-in-attendance upon Kâramanèh, 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 Kâramanèh's, and she had been one of the passengers
aroused by the girl's cries in the night. Strictly adhering to my
rôle, 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 ostracise Kâramanèh and
Azîz, 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 Kâramanèh 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
Kâramanèh, 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 learnt later that he had explored the lascars' quarters, the
forecastle, the engine-room, and had even descended to the stoke-hold;
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 sank 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 grey 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.