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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'The Thunder Dragon Gate,' Talbot Mundy transports readers to the enigmatic landscapes of Tibet, where ancient mysticism intertwines with adventure and intrigue. Through a vivid and immersive narrative style characterized by richly descriptive prose, Mundy explores themes of spirituality, cultural conflict, and the quest for enlightenment. Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century colonialism, the book's intricate plot weaves together elements of action, esoteric wisdom, and moral dilemmas, inviting readers to ponder the intersection of the physical and the spiritual realms. Talbot Mundy, a British-American writer with a profound interest in Eastern philosophy and culture, draws on his extensive travels and experiences in India and the Himalayas to craft this compelling tale. His personal fascination with adventure and the mystique of the East is evident in his work, which often reflects his quest for understanding amidst the complexities of life. Mundy'Äôs writing is not merely escapist; it serves as a mirror to the conflicts of the period, particularly regarding Western perceptions of the East. For readers captivated by tales of adventure that delve into spiritual exploration, 'The Thunder Dragon Gate' is a must-read. Mundy's masterful storytelling coupled with his deep understanding of cultural nuances makes this book not only an engaging read but also a thought-provoking exploration of the human condition. Dive into this extraordinary journey and uncover the layers of meaning that lie within.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Thunder Dragon Gate
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1. "Country of origin—Tibet; home town Lhasa."
IT was one of those days when not even Cockneys like London. Spring had made a false start. Fog, wind, rain, sleet, and a prevalent stench of damp wool. Even the street noises sounded flat and discouraged. Big Ben was invisible through the fog from Trafalgar Square, and the lions around Nelson's monument with rain streaming from their granite flanks resembled mythical ocean monsters. Lights in the windows of Cockspur Street suggested warmth, and there was a good smell of hot bread and pastry exuding through the doors of tea shops, but that only made the streets feel more unpleasant.
Tom Grayne turned up his overcoat collar, stuck his hands in his pockets, and without particular malice cursed the umbrellas of passers-by.
No one noticed him much. He was fairly big, tolerably well dressed. He was obviously in the pink of condition; he walked with the gait of a man who knows where he is going, and why, and what he will do when he gets there—the unhurried, slow-looking but devouring stride of a man who has walked great distances.
A policeman with the water streaming from his black cape nodded to him.
"Oh, hello Smithers. Nice day for your job!"
"H-awful! But we 'as to get used to it."
"When do they close the Aliens Registration Office at Bow Street?"
"Five o'clock I think, but you've plenty of time. I didn't know you were a foreigner."
"American, born in London, Smithers. Dual citizenship. Two sets of very suspicious officials to convince I'm not a traitor to the human race."
Tom Grayne grinned, but as a matter of fact he savagely resented the indignity of having to report in person and register his address every month. He had a right to British citizenship if he should choose to claim it. He chose not. As he saw it, he had a right to be and to do what he pleased, and to go where he pleased, provided he didn't make a nuisance of himself. He detested bureaucracy, hated to ask favors, loathed having to explain himself, and liked people who didn't put on artificial lugs.
He wasn't unreasonable about anything else, so far as he knew, but by the time he turned out of the Strand toward Bow Street police station he was feeling hostile, and he was glad of it. He wanted to punch somebody. But there was nobody to punch except a few poor devils trudging through the rain, and a policeman leading along a prisoner. One does not punch policemen profitably, and besides, a police man especially in London is what he pretends to be, so he doesn't stir antagonism, or shouldn't. But the smug stride of that particular one, and the melancholy resignation of his prisoner, who trudged beside him un-handcuffed, goaded Tom's already pugnacious disposition and aroused his sympathy at the same time. He felt an almost irresistible impulse to horn in and be a nuisance.
Even so, he might have gone about his own business, down in the basement, but there was something familiar about the prisoner's appearance that held his attention. He hesitated. He didn't recognize the prisoner. He had never seen him before; he was positive about that. But he felt the same sort of wordless and unreasoned impulse that makes a man choose something unusual for dinner. He followed through the main door to the desk, where an alert-looking sergeant stood ready to book the new arrival. Tom was just in time to overhear the charge. Then he knew instantly that his hunch had been right. Memory overflowed.
"Thö-pa-ga—of the Josays Sept of the Kyungpo—whatever that means—country of origin Tibet—home town Lhasa."
"How d'you spell it? Here, give me that warrant. Go on."
"Last known address—"
"Yes, all right, that's written here."
"Charged with noncompliance with the Aliens Registration Act, under section—"
"Yes, that's on the warrant."
"Arrested at eighty-eight Oxted Street."
"Say anything?"
"Said nothing."
"All right. Cell eighteen."
"Bail!" said Tom Grayne, suddenly, as if he were making the high bid at an auction.
"Who are you, sir?"
Before Tom could answer a man entered who looked much more Mongolian than the prisoner. The prisoner might have passed for a New Orleans quarter-breed at first glance. He was a good-looking fellow, with a sad face and an air of patient resignation. But this other man looked like a devil. His head was framed in the hood of a long, black, glistening waterproof. He had brilliant, sunken eyes, high cheek-bones and a skin like dirty parchment. He was several inches more than six feet tall, and fairly broad in proportion. More like a figure of death than a human being. He spoke rapidly to the prisoner, who stared sullenly but didn't answer. The desk-sergeant caught one word, thrice repeated:
"Shang-shang? Sounds like Chinese."
Tom unbuttoned his overcoat in an unconscious gesture. This was something he could lend a hand at. He interpreted:
"Tibetan. Something like a cross between a harpy and a nightmare, with eight legs."
"Is there one in the Zoo?" the sergeant asked.
"No, nor in Nuttall's Dictionary. A shang-shang is employed by magicians in Tibet to terrify people to death and then to hound them into hell after death."
"Never heard of that one," said the sergeant, "although we've some strange superstitions in London—more than you might suppose. We had some witches in here a week ago, arrested for alleged practises that 'ud make your hair stand on end if you weren't used to horrors—and bunkum."
Slowly, in Tibetan, through thin peculiarly mobile lips that seemed to enjoy the flavor of the words, and with his face thrust close to Tom Grayne's, the man who looked like death spoke:
"You-who-know-the-meaning-of-a-shang-shang—if-you- do-not-wish-to-add-experience-to-hearsay—let-alone-that- one-who-is-a-stranger-to-you!"
"Go to hell," Tom answered, in plain English. He added the equivalent in the Tibetan language.
"What's your name, you?" said the sergeant.
The tall Tibetan produced a soiled card from an inner pocket. The sergeant laid it on the desk and speared it with a pencil-point.
"Doctor Noropa, eh? What kind of doctor? Medicine? Law? Music? Philosophy? We'd a man in here the other day who called himself a doctor of blackmail. What do you want here? You a friend of the prisoner?"
Instead of answering, the tall man turned and walked out. The sergeant wrote on a slip of paper the name and address that were on the card and handed the paper to a man in uniform at a desk behind him.
"Check that. Have him followed. Step lively.—And now you, sir"—he stared penetratingly at Tom Grayne—"I think you mentioned bail. Are you a householder?"
"No. Is there any charge against the prisoner besides not having registered as an alien?"
"No, not at present. But that one's serious. He's liable to imprisonment and subsequent deportation. If you're not a householder—"
"Phone," said Tom Grayne. He went to the coin-in-the-slot machine, in the booth in the corner. The prisoner laid the contents of his pockets on the desk; he had been marched off to a cell before Tom was out of the booth.
"Sergeant, I have phoned to Professor Mayor at an address in Bloomsbury. He will be here with a solicitor's clerk as fast as a taxi can bring him."
"Professor Mayor, eh?" The sergeant's manner changed perceptibly. "Of Bloomsbury? Not Clarence Mayor? The Home Office Expert?"
"British Museum—specialist on Tibetan manuscripts and works of art."
"That's the man. The Home Office calls him in on special cases. Does he know the prisoner?"
"I think not. But he is as interested as I am."
"What makes you so interested, if I may ask?"
"Tibet is my subject."
"Ever been there?"
"Yes."
"Oh."
Tom Grayne went outside, and below to the basement. He reported no change of address. There was no one else in the office. The uniformed clerk behind the long counter was civil and inclined to make conversation:
"With all the hotels and boarding-houses there are in London, I can't help wondering why you stay at that ad dress, sir. Not that it's any concern of mine. I'm merely curious."
"I don't mind telling you," said Tom Grayne. "It's inexpensive and I can live there as I please. I live hard, so as to keep fit. There are no luxuries in the country I hope to re visit before long, and the climate might easily kill a man who'd lived soft. I even practise not eating for days at a time."
"Some folk," said the clerk, "starve 'emselves just to annoy the police. We'd one man in the cells who wouldn't eat because, he said, he was a high-caste Hindu, but he turned out to be a Scotch bigamist."
Tom returned to the upstairs office and waited for Mayor, who came in presently wiping rain from gold-rimmed spectacles and followed by a stoop-shouldered lawyer's clerk in a bowler hat, who went straight to the desk.
"Silly fellow!" said Mayor, wiping his pinkish, boyish-looking old cheeks with a big silk handkerchief. "Befriending shang-shang victims? What next? Thö-pa-ga, you say his name is? Wasn't he at Oxford?"
"Yes. I thought you'd be interested."
"If I weren't, I shouldn't have left a comfortable fireside, tea, buttered toast and a book."
"Come and have supper at my place and we'll find out why this fellow was in hiding."
"Good heavens! Your place? You live in a fish-shed, don't you?"
"Not quite. I can make you comfortable. Good grub. I have a notion it might be dangerous to take him to your house."
"Dampness—fog—rats! Tom Grayne, I haven't your fortitude. However, perhaps it's wiser. Very well. I'll risk my health and my opinion of you."
The formalities of bailing out the prisoner took time. Mayor was at the desk for several minutes. After that, he went into the phone booth, talked for a long time and emerged chuckling as if he had played a good joke.
"Can you accommodate four, Tom? I've invited O'Mally."
"Who is O'Mally?"
"Horace Farquarson O'Mally of Harley Street, you ignoramus. Consulting physician to half the crowned heads and multimillionaires in the world."
"Okay. What's he good at?"
"He likes Chateau Yquem. You'll have to stop and get some at a place I'll show you. He can smell a vintage from a mile off."
Thö-pa-ga was under bail by the time O'Mally arrived, very fashionably dressed. Top hat, spats, a monocle. He looked as tough as a prize-fighter, with Chesterfieldian manners.
"Came away in the middle of an operation, I suppose?" said Mayor. "Or did you leave another death-bed?"
"Who told you my patients ever die?" O'Mally answered, in a voice like a disciplined thunder-storm. "Is this the man?" He refixed his monocle, stared at Thö-pa-ga for about two electric seconds, and then faced Tom Grayne.
"Our host," said Mayor.
"I have heard of you," said O'Mally. "How do you do?" He shook hands.
"Don't you tell him how you are," said Mayor. "Let him find out. He will cut you open if you let him."
No one spoke to Thö-pa-ga; he stood looking orientally calm, incurious, melancholy. The solicitor's clerk snapped his little handbag shut and vanished into the rain.
"My car is waiting," said O'Mally.
Mayor laughed: "I once rode in a royal wheelbarrow. I knew a gardener at Windsor Castle when I was a small boy. I know how to behave. My feet are wet; will they ruin the carpet?"
O'Mally and Mayor raised their hats to the Law, or the desk, or the King or somebody—perhaps to the sergeant; he looked pleased. Tom Grayne thrust his arm through Thö-pa-ga's and followed, into a Rolls Royce limousine that bore an almost microscopical coat of arms on the door panel.
CHAPTER 2. "Thö-Pa-Ga is Time-Is-Come."
ALL London was streaming homeward for the night. The limousine with its oddly assorted passengers sped along streets that were rivers of liquid fire, with the traffic incredibly borne on the surface. They stopped for several minutes at a wine shop favorably known to Mayor, whence Tom Grayne emerged with a brown paper parcel. Thence they headed for Kew and the River, where Tom gave intricate directions to the chauffeur, and at last they had to leave the limousine to thread their way on foot, in almost darkness, through pools of slush, beneath dripping eaves. O'Mally didn't seem to mind that his top hat was being ruined, but Mayor was plaintive; he had to be lent a hand along the slippery and rather rotten planking of a wharf. But at the end of the wharf was shelter.
Tom unlocked the door of what looked in the dark like a fish- or net-shed. But when he lighted a couple of oil lamps the place was cosy enough. There was a big stove; he had that going in a minute. There was everything a man of Tom Grayne's disposition needed, and nothing he didn't need. Bunks, cooking-pots, shelves of books, a sink, two tables, a few chairs, two big lockers.
"Umn! No woman, eh," O'Mally remarked.
"Good job, too," said Mayor. "Can you imagine the kind of woman Grayne would select?"
"He would choose an actress," said O'Mally. "Each of them would try to make the other famous and there'd be the usual divorce. Or am I in poor form this evening?"
"Some one died on you?" Mayor asked.
"This place," said Tom, "was rented by a retired sea captain, who fixed it up to suit himself. But some one thought he had money and murdered him. He died on that bunk with his throat cut, and I read about it in the paper—front-page illustration with an X to mark the spot, and so on—three-day mystery. I came to look and found the landlord sure he'd never get another tenant because people are afraid of ghosts. So I rented it cheap."
"And the ghosts?" asked Mayor.
Thö-pa-ga shuddered. Tom was already cooking supper. Coffee was on. A pot of stew was simmering and beginning to smell delicious. Tom laid the table. Mayor opened the paper package.
"I told you Chateau Yquem!"
"I liked the shape of those bottles better. It's Berncasteler Doktor '21. Help yourself."
O'Mally took the corkscrew from its nail on the wall and pulled a cork expertly. He shook down his clinical thermometer and inserted it in the neck of the bottle.
"Good enough," he remarked after a minute. "I am now in no hurry."
"No more patients?" Mayor asked. "Have they all found you out?"
"I am on vacation—first in nearly four years. I catch the eight o'clock boat train for Harwich to-morrow evening. Going to Moscow. A man of whom I'm jealous has cut off a dog's head and kept it alive for three days, during which it eats and reacts to sight and sound. That interests me. Where's a wine glass? These they?" He produced cut glasses from an old sea captain's wine chest. "Are they clean?"
"Boiled."
"What's that delicious smell?" asked Mayor.
"Lobster mulligan. Or do you mean the toasted barley? I eat barley. So, I think, will our friend."
Mayor was pulling off his boots and socks. Thö-pa-ga was doing nothing, saying nothing, seated on one of the bunks with the palms of his hands on the edge, as if he expected to have to jump up at a second's notice.
"May I have that dish-pan nearly full of hot water, and then some mustard," said Mayor. "Unlike O'Mally, I'm important. Serious things might happen if I were to catch a bad cold."
O'Mally filled a wine glass. "Yes," he said, "if you should die, and this mysterious gentleman from Tibet should take it into his head to disappear, they would confiscate the house you have pledged as security." He walked over to the Tibetan. "Drink this."
Thö-pa-ga shook his head.
"Abstainer? Never mind. It's medicine. Drink it"
"What do you suppose is wrong with him?" Tom Grayne asked, stirring the mulligan.
"I know," O'Mally answered. "It requires no thought whatever. Come along, young fellow—you understand English, don't you? Drink this."
The Tibetan hesitated, smiled wistfully and then suddenly obeyed. He swallowed the wine at a gulp. The wind howled under the eaves and he shuddered either at that or at the feel of the wine as it went down. O'Mally nodded.
"My professional advice would be: return as soon as possible to Tibet." He was watching Thö-pa-ga's eyes. "He will talk presently. He has been wanting to talk all the way from Bow Street. He has been thoroughly frightened, and he is suffering from—"
"Words of one syllable, please!" said Mayor. "I can use twenty-one-syllable Sanskrit words, but mine mean something." Mayor was sloshing his feet in the dish-pan and the steam from the hot mustard-and-water had dimmed his spectacles. He wiped them, to watch Thö-pa-ga.
"He is suffering from being too near sea level," said O'Mally. "If he really is from Tibet, he is used to a minimum altitude of twelve or fourteen thousand feet. It is as if he had taken to deep-sea diving without the proper physique and training. Barometric pressure for prolonged periods, plus a constitutional lack of resistance to micro-organisms that don't exist at high altitudes, produce a mental and physical change. But those are a vicious circle; one produces the other. He will die if he doesn't return to Tibet."
"I would rather die," Thö-pa-ga said suddenly, in good English. The wind howled. They all shuddered.
"Damn our English climate!" Mayor exclaimed. "They say it's worse in Tibet, but I don't believe it!" It wasn't the wind that had made him shudder. He knew that.
Tom Grayne struck the stew-pot with an iron spoon:
"Yesterday's mulligan, warmed up—canned soup added—homemade barley bread baked by a Stornoway fisherman's widow, New Zealand butter, American cheese, celery and white wine. Come and get it."
They drew up chairs to the table. Thö-pa-ga elected to eat mulligan. Tom Grayne munched barley alone.
"Wise enough, if you vary your diet now and then. But it's hell to be wise," said O'Mally. "Are you in training?"
"Yes, for Tibet. The important thing is not to eat too often. Discipline your belly."
"Don't forget the sugar. When do you go to Tibet?"
There was no time to answer. There came a peremptory knock at the door. It sounded authoritative, like a police man's, only there was a suggestion of deliberate rhythm, as if it might be a prearranged signal. A weird howl of wind drove squalling rain against the side of the hut. Beneath, the river sucked and splashed amid wharf-piles. Thö-pa-ga froze motionless.
"Now I understand why I came," O'Mally remarked. He poured wine for Thö-pa-ga. "This is very interesting."
Tom Grayne went to the door and opened a peephole. He could see nothing; it was all dark outside.
"Who's there?" he demanded.
No answer. No sound outside except wind and splash.
"Perhaps your chauffeur?"
"No," said O'Mally, "I sent him home. Can you open the door without cooling the stew?"
Mayor pulled a blanket from the bunk behind him and wrapped it around his knees. Tom Grayne tried to open the door only a few inches, against the wind. A hand seized it—wrenched it suddenly. A man crashed into him, thrusting him backward on his heels. The door slammed. It was Dr. Noropa, in his dripping black waterproof. He turned calmly and bolted the door.
"Give me some more of that excellent stew before he murders us," said Mayor.
O'Mally snorted: "Don't talk nonsense. Grayne can lick him. I can help, if necessary."
Thö-pa-ga neither moved nor seemed to breathe; he stared straight in front of him. He looked guilty of something and ready for death. There was silence for probably sixty seconds. Then, from the midst of a circle of rain from his dripping waterproof, the gaunt Noropa spoke:
"I come to tell you Thö-pa-ga is time-is-come. If you know what is shang-shang, you will let him alone. Thö-pa-ga must go home."
"Well, he should," said O'Mally. "But who are you?"
"I know who you are," Noropa answered. He looked at Mayor. "And I know who you are." Then, at last he met Tom Grayne's eyes. "You, who should know better, having been in Tibet, do you wish a shang-shang sending?"
"Yes. I never saw one. Send the thing by parcel post. Get out of here."
Noropa's death-like face betrayed no emotion. Tom Grayne slid the bolt and Noropa walked out, forcing the door open against the wind with such prodigious strength that he seemed hardly to have to exert himself.
The door slammed. Then suddenly Thö-pa-ga gulped wine and shook off silence. He seemed unconscious of O'Mally's professional critical gaze. His left hand rested on the table, but he seemed not even aware that O'Mally's fingers touched his wrist. He spoke, if to any one at all, to Mayor:
"You, who are kind to a stranger, you don't know. Me they will not kill. Because me they need for purposes. But you they will make away with by magical means. That is to say, if you befriend me. It is therefore not seemly for me to have friends, because I get them into trouble."
"Oh, come now, come," said Mayor. "The police at Bow Street showed me your record. You're an Oxford graduate. You surely don't believe in magic."
"You mean, you don't," said O'Mally. "Early environment, early associations, ill health, worry, nostalgia, and persecution—don't overlook that—readily produce receptivity to hypnotic suggestion. Those are words of one syllable, more or less. They're all in the dictionary. Have you caught cold?"
"No," said Mayor.
"That was magic. Before you were put into knickerbockers, your mother or your maiden aunt or your nurse told you a hot mustard foot-bath would prevent colds in the head. It won't, of course. But it did, didn't it? Don't interrupt him—go on talking, Thö-pa-ga. Who are you? Why are you in London?"
"I am of a sub-sept of the Josays Sept of the Kyungpo. It is a secret sub-sept, and my father, who was a nobleman, was Keeper of the Thunder Dragon Gate, of which you have never heard."
"Oh, yes, indeed we've heard of it," said Mayor. "Tom Grayne knows as well as you or I do, it's a figure of speech. It means a state of consciousness, through which the Arhants* have to pass on the Road to Enlightenment. It is referred to in the New Testament as the Eye of a Needle."
[ *Arhant, arhat (Sanskrit: enlightened one) —a Bhuddist who has realized certain high stages of attainment. The implications of the term vary based on the respective schools and traditions. ]
"That," said Thö-pa-ga, "is what you may have read in books, or what you have deduced. But what I know is other wise, and so I warn you. When my father had died and my mother was made to go into a nunnery, I wished never to become the Keeper of the Thunder Dragon Gate, although they said I had inherited my father's spirit and his duty also. There was an Englishman who came to Lhasa, a very kind man who represented the Indian Government. I ran away and asked that Englishman to give me work to do. He begged my freedom from the Dalai Lama. There was money. It was simple. I was sent to Oxford for an education, and I have it. But before I reached Oxford, he who had done me that great kindness was already dead—they said, of poison. And at Oxford there began to be a very soon beginning of a shang-shang sending not at all a mystery to me."
The blinded window-pane above the back of Mayor's head smashed suddenly—three distinct crashes of splintering glass. The wine bottle broke into a dozen pieces. The mulligan stew-pot fell off the stove to the floor. O'Mally stared at his top hat, on a nail on the wall. There was a hole through it.
"This is London, England," O'Mally remarked. "Or am I dreaming?"
Tom Grayne took a flash-light from the locker, leaned his weight against the wind-blown door and walked out.
"They will not kill me," said Thö-pa-ga, "because they need me for a purpose. But they will kill you—each of you and every one."
"Who are 'they'?" asked Mayor.
O'Mally reached for his top hat. "Exactly! Who are they? Does a shang-shang spit a soft-nose Webley bullet? Go on—don't interrupt him, Mayor—tell us. I wish now I weren't going to Russia."
CHAPTER 3. "Say it, then, behind his back, to Ambleby!"
A POLICE whistle—three shrill blasts. In rain and darkness there is no other sound like that. O'Mally straightened his tie. The whistle shrilled again. Tom Grayne wrenched the door open and came in, dripping.
"Cops!" he said abruptly.
He had hardly said it when the door thundered to a man's fist. He uncovered the peephole—peered through.
"Yes, it's the Law. Shall I let 'em in?"
In response to O'Mally's nod he leaned his weight against the door. A policeman's flash-light—foot—knee—shoulder—face beneath an oilcloth-covered helmet—an official voice:
"What's going on in here? There's a broken window—"
"Come in—for God's sake, come in and let's shut the door!"
Two policemen entered, oilskinned, bulky, suspicious, cautious because they had no warrant.
"Anybody hurt? A fight? Any firearms in here?"
O'Mally answered: "No."
"May I have your names, please—and addresses."
O'Mally produced his card. He showed the flap of his wallet, then his new passport.
"Thank you, Sir 'Grace. And these others?"
"Dr. Mayor of the British Museum and the Home Office. Mr. Tom Grayne, American. Mr. Thö-pa-ga, from Tibet."
"Ah! How long has he been in here?"
O'Mally gave a telegraphically terse synopsis of what had happened. He described Noropa.
The policeman produced his note-book. "I was asked in—"
Tom interrupted him: "Yes, I invited you in. Take a seat at the table; you'll write easier."
He poured them coffee. One policeman stood, sipping noisily. He didn't like American coffee, but he was polite about it. The other sat, reading aloud what he wrote:
"Nine-eighteen P.M. A man was seen and heard to fire three shots with a revolver in the direction of this shed—occupied by—broken window—broken wine bottle, upset cook-pot—"
"And a top hat ruined," said O'Mally.
"—hole in a top hat. Does any of you gentlemen know how it happened, or why? Bearing in mind, please, that any thing you say may be taken down and used in evidence against you."
Tom Grayne told the whole story. The policeman wrote down the details of Tom's passport.
"And now what next?" O'Mally asked. "You were tipped off by Bow Street to follow Noropa, and he followed my car. Am I right, constable?"
"I'm sure I don't know, sir. I'm what is known as acting on information received. I've no warrant, but I could get one. I heard three shots, saw one of them, and flashed my light on a tall man in a hooded black waterproof. I saw him throw his revolver into the river. There were other witnesses besides me. I believe it would be best for all concerned if his here Mister Thö-pa-ga (two dots, you said, over the 0) would come with me to the police station—I mean, if he'd come willing—and be locked up for the night, where he'd be safe and warm and comfortable, and we could make enquiries in the morning."
Thö-pa-ga reached for his overcoat.
"Damn!" remarked O'Mally. "We were just getting his story. Professor Mayor went bail for him. Ask the Professor."
Mayor glanced at Thö-pa-ga. The Tibetan nodded; he had already buttoned his overcoat up to his ears.
"I don't understand my legal position," said Mayor. "You must do as you see fit, constable."
"He seems willing to come with me, sir."
"I'll go with the policeman and Thö-pa-ga," said Tom Grayne. "There's plenty more wine. You two make yourselves at home until I come back."
Mayor nodded.
"Very well," said O'Mally. "Are they pursuing Noropa?"
"Begging your pardon, sir," the constable answered, "the man wasn't identified. He slipped away into the shadows, but I daresay he won't go far before they catch him. If it should happen his name's Noropa he'd have more than a bit to explain. There's a watch being kept on this place; you'll be safe here until daylight. Or I could phone for your car, Sir 'Orace."
"No thanks."
"As you say, sir."
It was a long way to the police station. Tom Grayne trudged through the storm in silence beside Thö-pa-ga, who kept stride with the policeman. There was no sense in trying to talk to Thö-pa-ga, who seemed more gloomy than ever—an unusual state of mind for a Tibetan; Tibetans usually laugh at anything. Tom felt baffled. He had already begun to count on this accidental meeting as just the very stroke of luck he had been hoping for for months. Thö-pa-ga might—anything is possible—might help him to reenter Tibet. If not, he might have connections in Tibet who would honor an introduction. No plan yet, of course, but a strong hunch. Busted hunches are more disappointing than broken promises: one expects results from a hunch. This was the wrong kind of result.
At the police station, what with sending out a messenger to find a cigarette slot-machine, and then telling the long tale all over again for the benefit of the sergeant on night duty, nearly two hours went by. There was no sense in making a mystery for the police; the obvious thing to do was to keep them friendly.
So it was after midnight before Tom Grayne returned to the storm-swept hut where he had left his guests. He found O'Mally stoking the stove and arguing with Mayor.
"That is why," Mayor was saying, "I need your influence."
"At the Foreign Office? I have none—none whatever," O'Mally answered. "I'm consulted now and then by the Home Office, just as you are, in special cases. At the Foreign Office I'm an absolute nonentity."
"How about the India Office?"
"Worse and worse! An Indian Rajah, who got himself into political trouble, was one of my patients. I'm supposed to have advised him how to prove he didn't poison his aunt."
"Give him wine, Grayne! Make him drink it. O'Mally, I am not your patient, so you needn't lie to me. I happen to know you're on the Foreign Office list. That's why I invited you here. I repeat: if I should go to the Foreign Office, with a Home Office introduction, and tell that graciously insolent Sphinx Ambleby that Tom Grayne ought to go to Tibet, I should be courteously informed that no one is allowed to enter Tibet. Even as it is, Grayne is on the black book for having entered Tibet and remained there without permission. If you were asked what you think of him, what would you say?"
"I wouldn't tell him or you that," O'Mally answered.
"Say it, then, behind his back, to Ambleby." Mayor sipped wine. O'Mally clipped the end of a big cigar, with a platinum clipper—a personal gift from a crowned head. Mayor continued: "You are Ambleby's physician. He's a credit to you. Hundreds of people have wished him dead a thousand times over, but you've kept him alive. Oh, yes, I heard all about his being poisoned by a spy, and how you invented an antidote."
"I didn't."
"It was kept out of the papers, if that's what you mean. And I know, without being able to prove it, that you're off to Russia on a medical errand of your own, but with a secret errand, too, for Mr. Foreign-Office-Secret-Service Ambleby, who has a high opinion of your gift for bluff innocence and discreet observation."
"You are guessing," said O'Mally. "You are talking non sense."
"If," said Mayor, "you should go to Ambleby, and tell him what I have just now told you; and tell him your real opinion of Tom Grayne, Ambleby would regard that as a very proper introduction. I tell you, he hasn't another man to send to Tibet; there simply isn't one available who has Tom Grayne's knowledge of the country, Tom's physique and Tom's ability to take care of himself. And I repeat: this case isn't simple. It isn't merely a Tibetan feud; nor is it just another psychopathic case for you to pause and analyze on your way to a peerage. It's—"
He hesitated. O'Mally grinned.
"Go on, man! Are you weakening? Say it!"
"I have said it already three times."
"Grayne know what you think it is?"
"Yes. He and I together deciphered a Japanese document that baffled me until Tom broke the code. If it were known Tom had seen it, I should never be trusted again. It was one of those documents that governments always denounce as forgeries when secret service agents find them in a dead man's wallet."
O'Mally looked sharply at Grayne: "What do you think it is?"
"I agree with Mayor."
"You agree with him because you wish to go to Tibet?"
"No, Sir Horace. I intend to return to Tibet with or with out a Foreign Office permit. You may say so, if you want to."
O'Mally liked that. He uncorked another bottle of wine. He filled a glass for Grayne, who had hitherto not tasted it.
"Here's luck to you! So you agree with Mayor? Splendid! You believe, then, that this is a cog in the wheels of a Japanese scheme to get control of China?"
"Sure as you're alive," said Tom Grayne.
"I'm alive, my boy. I'm alive and interested."
"Then do your plain duty!" said Mayor. He was getting short-tempered. He laughed at himself. Then he yawned. "Strong wine—not used to it." Suddenly he clutched the table.
The wind was howling, but it wasn't wind that shook the door. O'Mally dropped his monocle—caught it in mid-air—pretended he did it on purpose. Grayne picked up a heavy broomstick.
"Sh-h-h!" said Mayor.
They all listened. One lamp flickered out, short of oil. The river sucked the wharf-piles. The wind howled. The shed creaked. The door thudded again, three times, as if some one kicked it.
"You're an en-n-t-tertaining host!" said Mayor. His teeth chattered.
Grayne went to the peephole, saw nothing and suddenly opened the door. The other lamp blew out. It was pitch dark, and a gale in the room.
"Duck!" yelled O'Mally. He up-ended the table, crashing everything to the floor. He and Mayor crouched behind the table. The door slammed. The stove belched smoke. Grayne had hold of some one. They were struggling, crashing among upset chairs and broken dishes.
"Hold him!" O'Mally shouted. "I'm coming!"
But he tripped over a table-leg and before he was up the door opened and slammed. A sudden blinding electric torch—darkness again.
"All right, sir, all right, I have him! Has he hurt you?"
"Police?" asked Mayor's voice. "Sure you've got him?"
"Yes, sir, he's out o' mischief for the present. Get up, you! Stand over there!"
The policeman held his flash-light steady until O'Mally relighted the lamp.
"Lucky I saw him! Sure you're not hurt, sir?"
Noropa, handcuffed, with his hands behind him, stood glaring with his back to the wall. One of Noropa's eyes was closing up; he was bending a bit forward, as if hit in the wind. Tom Grayne's coat was torn and there was blood on his lip. O'Mally took a stride toward Tom:
"Hurt?"
"No."
O'Mally examined the prisoner. The policeman stared at the mess on the floor.
"Did he do all this?"
"No, he didn't," said O'Mally.
"Thought he couldn't have. I was close on his heels. How did all this 'appen?"
O'Mally laughed testily. "It was a part of my arrangements for going to Russia! I didn't wish to be shot. You say you followed him here?"
"Yes, sir. The constable on watch at the end of the alley saw him first, but I was on my way here with a message, so I killed two birds with one stone, as you might say. All I saw him do was kick the door. Maybe when they search him at the station—"
"What's the message?"
"Oh, yes. I took the liberty a while ago of phoning for your auto. Sir 'Grace. It's 'ere already, at the street corner, two 'undred yards away. We had to phone Scotland Yard about all this. They phoned back ten minutes later to say there's a gentleman from the Foreign Office—"
"Didn't I say so?" Mayor interrupted.
"He said, sir, you'd know his name without his giving it, and he'd be very much obliged if, on your way home, you'd drop in and see him."
"At his office?"
"No, at his rooms."
"Told you so," Mayor repeated.
Tom was staring at Noropa. "You're no Tibetan! You're not Chinese, either! Are you?"
Noropa said nothing. He glared with one eye; the other was already swollen shut.
"They may need my hat for evidence," remarked O'Mally. "Lend me one of yours, Grayne—yes, that cap will do nicely, thanks. Are you coming, Mayor? I can drop you at your house on my way to—"
"Victoria Street, Westminster!" said Mayor. "Yes, I know where you're going."
The policeman led his prisoner outside. O'Mally waited until the door had slammed shut behind them.
"Just one moment. You, Mayor. And you, Grayne. If either of you should mention my name, in connection with this night's work, or for any other reason, at the Foreign Office, it would be breach of confidence, an unfriendly gesture and a damned serious indiscretion. Have I made myself clear? Very well. Thank you, Grayne, for supper and entertainment. Both were excellent. Good night. See you again some day, I hope."
"Good night, Tom," said Mayor. "How early can you be at my house in the morning?"
"Much too early for you. I'll be waiting for you down stairs."
Mayor winked twice behind his gold-rimmed spectacles. He jerked his respectable gray head toward O'Mally's back. Grayne let them out.
He had cleaned the place and was asleep on a bunk within ten minutes.
CHAPTER 4. "If you can do it!"
IT was like any other door in the long, dim, draughty corridor, except that a man in blue uniform stood outside and asked Tom Grayne's business. The Foreign Office is like all the rest of Whitehall; comfort hadn't been invented when they built it. On the other hand, tradition was already ancient; it grows older, but it never dies, in that kind of building. The muscular, military-looking man in blue tapped on the door as if a lady were asleep within, opened the door cautiously, tiptoed in, murmured, and came out smiling. A neatly dressed Japanese gentleman walked along the corridor from behind Tom Grayne and turned the corner at the far end.
"Go right in, sir. Mr. Ambleby expects you."
Tom Grayne circumnavigated a beautiful old Spanish leather screen, so arranged that whoever stepped into the room presented his face to the desk in profile in the light from a high window. There was a coal fire, in a hideously dignified Georgian fireplace. Over the fireplace was a three-quarter length mirror—new glass in an antique frame; it very clearly reflected whoever entered the room, but it did not reveal the desk to him who entered.
Against a background of books, in the dimness behind a big, antique desk, sat Arthur Tremaine Ambleby. An astonishing man, because he was so different from what one expected. He stood up as Tom Grayne entered and without a word, but with a very gracious gesture, offered him the chair beside the desk. That placed Tom in the light from the window.
Ambleby looked like a poet, or perhaps an editor of a very learned review. He looked capable of having written Locksley Hall, or he might have translated Homer into English elegiacs. Gray hair. Wise eyes. A clean-shaven, courteous, civilized face. A dark leather bow tie. A leather waistcoat. An immaculately tailored jacket of a color that couldn't be guessed exactly against the background of books in the dimness. A man of perhaps sixty, who looked fifty and conveyed, without the slightest trace of self-importance, the impression of knowing all the secrets in the world and thoroughly enjoying them.
"Professor Mayor told me to come and see you," said Tom.
Ambleby nodded. There was nothing on his desk. No notes. No papers. Nothing that suggested that the room might be the exact center of an invisible spider-web of secrets that reached all over the world, into men's minds, hopes, ambitions, histories, forgetting nothing, overlooking not much. There were no files in the room. There was not even a door leading into another room where files perhaps might be.
"Yes," said Ambleby. "I spoke with Professor Mayor at three o'clock this morning and we discussed you. You have helped him, I believe, to decipher some curious documents in Tibetan and—er—and other languages."
Tom Grayne kept silence. He liked this man, right off the bat. He was just the kind of man he did like. Knew his stuff. Nobody's fool. But Tom was thoroughly on guard against him; he anticipated one of those simple, utterly in nocent traps that are much harder not to fall into than the complicated sort. It appeared:
"You have an acquaintance in Harley Street?"
"No."
"Wasn't he with you last night?"
"Man who wears a monocle and spats? Oh, yes, I've met him. That's all. He doesn't know me. I don't know him."
"You have visited Tibet?"
"Yes. I intend to return."
"And you use an American passport?"
"Yes."
"How do you propose to do it? You understand that the terms of a treaty between the Tibetan and Indian Governments preclude our supplying you with anything in the nature of a permit?"
"Yes."
"We couldn't even give you unofficial recognition. Quite the contrary."
"Yes, I understand that."
"How then do you propose to enter Tibet?"
"That, sir, is my secret. Short of locking me up or shooting me, I'm fairly confident that nobody can prevent my getting in."
"I know how you got in, as you call it, last time."
"Yes, but I'm not an animal. I don't try the same trick twice running."
"What do you propose to do in Tibet?"
"Study the country. It's my subject."
"Some very interesting books have been written about Tibet," said Ambleby. "Which particular field will your book cover?"
Tom avoided that trap also. "I don't write books. The British Museum is crowded with information about Tibet that needs checking. Anything I learn for a fact I'll report to Mayor. He can do as he likes with it."
"Does he supply you with funds?"
"No, I have enough money of my own. I don't need much, the way I travel."
"You know a Tibetan named Thö-pa-ga?"
