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.