Sax Rohmer
The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu
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Inhaltsverzeichnis
Titel Sax Rohmer The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu Dieses ebook wurde erstellt bei
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
Impressum neobooks
The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu
Author: Sax Rohmer
Release Date: May 24, 2008 [EBook #173]
[Last updated: October 13, 2012]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INSIDIOUS DR. FU-MANCHU ***
This etext was updated by Stewart A. Levin of Englewood, CO.
"A GENTLEMAN to see you, Doctor."
From across the common a clock sounded the half-hour.
"Ten-thirty!" I said. "A late visitor. Show him up, if you please."
I pushed my writing aside and tilted the lamp-shade, as footsteps
sounded on the landing. The next moment I had jumped to my feet, for a
tall, lean man, with his square-cut, clean-shaven face sun-baked to the
hue of coffee, entered and extended both hands, with a cry:
"Good old Petrie! Didn't expect me, I'll swear!"
It was Nayland Smith--whom I had thought to be in Burma!
"Smith," I said, and gripped his hands hard, "this is a delightful
surprise! Whatever--however--"
"Excuse me, Petrie!" he broke in. "Don't put it down to the sun!" And
he put out the lamp, plunging the room into darkness.
I was too surprised to speak.
"No doubt you will think me mad," he continued, and, dimly, I could see
him at the window, peering out into the road, "but before you are many
hours older you will know that I have good reason to be cautious. Ah,
nothing suspicious! Perhaps I am first this time." And, stepping back
to the writing-table he relighted the lamp.
"Mysterious enough for you?" he laughed, and glanced at my unfinished
MS. "A story, eh? From which I gather that the district is beastly
healthy--what, Petrie? Well, I can put some material in your way that,
if sheer uncanny mystery is a marketable commodity, ought to make you
independent of influenza and broken legs and shattered nerves and all
the rest."
I surveyed him doubtfully, but there was nothing in his appearance to
justify me in supposing him to suffer from delusions. His eyes were
too bright, certainly, and a hardness now had crept over his face. I
got out the whisky and siphon, saying:
"You have taken your leave early?"
"I am not on leave," he replied, and slowly filled his pipe. "I am on
duty."
"On duty!" I exclaimed. "What, are you moved to London or something?"
"I have got a roving commission, Petrie, and it doesn't rest with me
where I am to-day nor where I shall be to-morrow."
There was something ominous in the words, and, putting down my glass,
its contents untasted, I faced round and looked him squarely in the
eyes. "Out with it!" I said. "What is it all about?"
Smith suddenly stood up and stripped off his coat. Rolling back his
left shirt-sleeve he revealed a wicked-looking wound in the fleshy part
of the forearm. It was quite healed, but curiously striated for an
inch or so around.
"Ever seen one like it?" he asked.
"Not exactly," I confessed. "It appears to have been deeply
cauterized."
"Right! Very deeply!" he rapped. "A barb steeped in the venom of a
hamadryad went in there!"
A shudder I could not repress ran coldly through me at mention of that
most deadly of all the reptiles of the East.
"There's only one treatment," he continued, rolling his sleeve down
again, "and that's with a sharp knife, a match, and a broken cartridge.
I lay on my back, raving, for three days afterwards, in a forest that
stank with malaria, but I should have been lying there now if I had
hesitated. Here's the point. It was not an accident!"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that it was a deliberate attempt on my life, and I am hard upon
the tracks of the man who extracted that venom--patiently, drop by
drop--from the poison-glands of the snake, who prepared that arrow, and
who caused it to be shot at me."
"What fiend is this?"
"A fiend who, unless my calculations are at fault is now in London, and
who regularly wars with pleasant weapons of that kind. Petrie, I have
traveled from Burma not in the interests of the British Government
merely, but in the interests of the entire white race, and I honestly
believe--though I pray I may be wrong--that its survival depends
largely upon the success of my mission."
To say that I was perplexed conveys no idea of the mental chaos created
by these extraordinary statements, for into my humdrum suburban life
Nayland Smith had brought fantasy of the wildest. I did not know what
to think, what to believe.
"I am wasting precious time!" he rapped decisively, and, draining his
glass, he stood up. "I came straight to you, because you are the only
man I dare to trust. Except the big chief at headquarters, you are the
only person in England, I hope, who knows that Nayland Smith has
quitted Burma. I must have someone with me, Petrie, all the time--it's
imperative! Can you put me up here, and spare a few days to the
strangest business, I promise you, that ever was recorded in fact or
fiction?"
I agreed readily enough, for, unfortunately, my professional duties
were not onerous.
"Good man!" he cried, wringing my hand in his impetuous way. "We start
now."
"What, to-night?"
"To-night! I had thought of turning in, I must admit. I have not
dared to sleep for forty-eight hours, except in fifteen-minute
stretches. But there is one move that must be made to-night and
immediately. I must warn Sir Crichton Davey."
"Sir Crichton Davey--of the India--"
"Petrie, he is a doomed man! Unless he follows my instructions without
question, without hesitation--before Heaven, nothing can save him! I
do not know when the blow will fall, how it will fall, nor from whence,
but I know that my first duty is to warn him. Let us walk down to the
corner of the common and get a taxi."
How strangely does the adventurous intrude upon the humdrum; for, when
it intrudes at all, more often than not its intrusion is sudden and
unlooked for. To-day, we may seek for romance and fail to find it:
unsought, it lies in wait for us at most prosaic corners of life's
highway.
The drive that night, though it divided the drably commonplace from the
wildly bizarre--though it was the bridge between the ordinary and the
outre--has left no impression upon my mind. Into the heart of a weird
mystery the cab bore me; and in reviewing my memories of those days I
wonder that the busy thoroughfares through which we passed did not
display before my eyes signs and portents--warnings.
It was not so. I recall nothing of the route and little of import that
passed between us (we both were strangely silent, I think) until we
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