Sax Rohmer - THE YELLOW CLAW

The disturbed novelist, as a man in a dream, turned, retraced his steps,

and closed the outer door of the flat. Then, rubbing his chin more

vigorously than ever and only desisting from this exercise to fumble in

his dishevelled hair, he walked back into the study, whose Athenean calm

had thus mysteriously been violated.

Two minutes to midnight; the most respectable flat in respectable

Westminster; a lonely and very abstracted novelist--and a pale-faced,

beautiful woman, enveloped in costly furs, sitting staring with fearful

eyes straight before her. This was such a scene as his sense of the

proprieties and of the probabilities could never have permitted Henry

Leroux to create.

His visitor kept moistening her dry lips and swallowing, emotionally.

Standing at a discreet distance from her:--

“Madam,” began Leroux, nervously.

She waved her hand, enjoining him to silence, and at the same time

intimating that she would explain herself directly speech became

possible. Whilst she sought to recover her composure, Leroux, gradually

forcing himself out of the dreamlike state, studied her with a sort of

anxious curiosity.

It now became apparent to him that his visitor was no more than

twenty-five or twenty-six years of age, but illness or trouble, or both

together, had seared and marred her beauty. Amid the auburn masses of

her hair, gleamed streaks, not of gray, but of purest white. The low

brow was faintly wrinkled, and the big--unnaturally big--eyes were

purple shaded; whilst two heavy lines traced their way from the corner

of the nostrils to the corner of the mouth--of the drooping mouth with

the bloodless lips.

Her pallor became more strange and interesting the longer he studied it;

for, underlying the skin was a yellow tinge which he found inexplicable,

but which he linked in his mind with the contracted pupils of her eyes,

seeking vainly for a common cause.

He had a hazy impression that his visitor, beneath her furs, was most

inadequately clothed; and seeking confirmation of this, his gaze strayed

downward to where one little slippered foot peeped out from the civet

furs.

Leroux suppressed a gasp. He had caught a glimpse of a bare ankle!

He crossed to his writing-table, and seated himself, glancing sideways

at this living mystery. Suddenly she began, in a voice tremulous and

scarcely audible:--

“Mr. Leroux, at a great--at a very great personal risk, I have come

to-night. What I have to ask of you--to entreat of you, will... will”...

Two bare arms emerged from the fur, and she began clutching at her

throat and bosom as though choking--dying.

Leroux leapt up and would have run to her; but forcing a ghastly smile,

she waved him away again.

“It is all right,” she muttered, swallowing noisily. But frightful

spasms of pain convulsed her, contorting her pale face.

“Some brandy--!” cried Leroux, anxiously.

“If you please,” whispered the visitor.

She dropped her arms and fell back upon the chesterfield, insensible.

Leroux clutched at the corner of the writing-table to steady himself

and stood there looking at the deathly face. Under the most favorable

circumstances, he was no man of action, although in common with the rest

of his kind he prided himself upon the possession of that presence of

mind which he lacked. It was a situation which could not have alarmed

“Martin Zeda,” but it alarmed, immeasurably, nay, struck inert with

horror, Martin Zeda's creator.

Then, in upon Leroux's mental turmoil, a sensible idea intruded itself.

“Dr. Cumberly!” he muttered. “I hope to God he is in!”

Without touching the recumbent form upon the chesterfield, without

seeking to learn, without daring to learn, if she lived or had died,

Leroux, the tempo of his life changed to a breathless gallop, rushed

out of the study, across the entrance hail, and, throwing wide the flat

door, leapt up the stair to the flat above--that of his old friend, Dr.

Cumberly.

The patter of the slippered feet grew faint upon the stair; then, as

Leroux reached the landing above, became inaudible altogether.

In Leroux's study, the table-clock ticked merrily on, seeming to hasten

its ticking as the hand crept around closer and closer to midnight.

The mosaic shade of the lamp mingled reds and blues and greens upon the

white ceiling above and poured golden light upon the pages of manuscript

strewn about beneath it. This was a typical work-room of a literary man

having the ear of the public--typical in every respect, save for the

fur-clad figure outstretched upon the settee.

And now the peeping light indiscreetly penetrated to the hem of a silken

garment revealed by some disarrangement of the civet fur. To the eye

of an experienced observer, had such an observer been present in Henry

Leroux's study, this billow of silk and lace behind the sheltering fur

must have proclaimed itself the edge of a night-robe, just as the ankle

beneath had proclaimed itself to Henry Leroux's shocked susceptibilities

to be innocent of stocking.

Thirty seconds were wanted to complete the cycle of the day, when one of

the listless hands thrown across the back of the chesterfield opened and

closed spasmodically. The fur at the bosom of the midnight visitor began

rapidly to rise and fall.

Then, with a choking cry, the woman struggled upright; her hair, hastily

dressed, burst free of its bindings and poured in gleaming cascade down

about her shoulders.

Clutching with one hand at her cloak in order to keep it wrapped about

her, and holding the other blindly before her, she rose, and with that

same odd, groping movement, began to approach the writing-table. The

pupils of her eyes were mere pin-points now; she shuddered convulsively,

and her skin was dewed with perspiration. Her breath came in agonized

gasps.

“God!--I... am dying... and I cannot--tell him!” she breathed.

Feverishly, weakly, she took up a pen, and upon a quarto page, already

half filled with Leroux's small, neat, illegible writing, began to

scrawl a message, bending down, one hand upon the table, and with her

whole body shaking.

Some three or four wavering lines she had written, when intimately,

for the flat of Henry Leroux in Palace Mansions lay within sight of the

clock-face--Big Ben began to chime midnight.

The writer started back and dropped a great blot of ink upon the paper;

then, realizing the cause of the disturbance, forced herself to continue

her task.

The chime being completed: ONE! boomed the clock; TWO!... THREE! ...

FOUR!...

The light in the entrance-hall went out!

FIVE! boomed Big Ben;--SIX!... SEVEN!...

A hand, of old ivory hue, a long, yellow, clawish hand, with part of a

sinewy forearm, crept in from the black lobby through the study doorway

and touched the electric switch!

EIGHT!...

The study was plunged in darkness!

Uttering a sob--a cry of agony and horror that came from her very

soul--the woman stood upright and turned to face toward the door,

clutching the sheet of paper in one rigid hand.

Through the leaded panes of the window above the writing-table swept

a silvern beam of moonlight. It poured, searchingly, upon the fur-clad

figure swaying by the table; cutting through the darkness of the room

like some huge scimitar, to end in a pallid pool about the woman's