Sax Rohmer
THE YELLOW CLAW
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Inhaltsverzeichnis
Titel
THE LADY OF THE CIVET FURS
MIDNIGHT AND MR. KING
INSPECTOR DUNBAR TAKES CHARGE
A WINDOW IS OPENED
DOCTORS DIFFER
AT SCOTLAND YARD
THE MAN IN THE LIMOUSINE
CABMAN TWO
THE MAN IN BLACK
THE GREAT UNDERSTANDING
PRESENTING M. GASTON MAX
MR. GIANAPOLIS
THE DRAFT ON PARIS
EAST 18642
CAVE OF THE GOLDEN DRAGON
HO-PIN'S CATACOMBS
KAN-SUH CONCESSIONS
THE WORLD ABOVE
THE LIVING DEAD
ABRAHAM LEVINSKY BUTTS IN
THE STUDIO IN SOHO
M. MAX MOUNTS CAGLIOSTRO'S STAIRCASE
RAID IN THE RUE ST. CLAUDE
OPIUM
FATE'S SHUTTLECOCK
“OUR LADY OF THE POPPIES”
GROVE OF A MILLION APES
THE OPIUM AGENT
M. MAX OF LONDON AND M. MAX OF PARIS
MAHARA
MUSK AND ROSES
BLUE BLINDS
LOGIC VS. INTUITION
M. MAX REPORTS PROGRESS
TRACKER TRACKED
IN DUNBAR'S ROOM
THE WHISTLE
THE SECRET TRAPS
THE LABYRINTH
DAWN AT THE NORE
WESTMINSTER--MIDNIGHT
Impressum neobooks
The Yellow Claw
Author: Sax Rohmer
Henry Leroux wrote busily on. The light of the table-lamp, softened and
enriched by its mosaic shade, gave an appearance of added opulence to
the already handsome appointments of the room. The little table-clock
ticked merrily from half-past eleven to a quarter to twelve.
Into the cozy, bookish atmosphere of the novelist's study penetrated the
muffled chime of Big Ben; it chimed the three-quarters. But, with his
mind centered upon his work, Leroux wrote on ceaselessly.
An odd figure of a man was this popular novelist, with patchy and
untidy hair which lessened the otherwise striking contour of his brow.
A neglected and unpicturesque figure, in a baggy, neutral-colored
dressing-gown; a figure more fitted to a garret than to this spacious,
luxurious workroom, with the soft light playing upon rank after rank
of rare and costly editions, deepening the tones in the Persian carpet,
making red morocco more red, purifying the vellum and regilding the
gold of the choice bindings, caressing lovingly the busts and statuettes
surmounting the book-shelves, and twinkling upon the scantily-covered
crown of Henry Leroux. The door bell rang.
Leroux, heedless of external matters, pursued his work. But the door
bell rang again and continued to ring.
“Soames! Soames!” Leroux raised his voice irascibly, continuing to write
the while. “Where the devil are you! Can't you hear the door bell?”
Soames did not reveal himself; and to the ringing of the bell was added
the unmistakable rattling of a letter-box.
“Soames!” Leroux put down his pen and stood up. “Damn it! he's out! I
have no memory!”
He retied the girdle of his dressing-gown, which had become unfastened,
and opened the study door. Opposite, across the entrance lobby, was
the outer door; and in the light from the lobby lamp he perceived two
laughing eyes peering in under the upraised flap of the letter-box. The
ringing ceased.
“Are you VERY angry with me for interrupting you?” cried a girl's voice.
“My dear Miss Cumberly!” said Leroux without irritation; “on the
contrary--er--I am delighted to see you--or rather to hear you. There is
nobody at home, you know.”...
“I DO know,” replied the girl firmly, “and I know something else, also.
Father assures me that you simply STARVE yourself when Mrs. Leroux is
away! So I have brought down an omelette!”
“Omelette!” muttered Leroux, advancing toward the door; “you
have--er--brought an omelette! I understand--yes; you have brought an
omelette? Er--that is very good of you.”
He hesitated when about to open the outer door, raising his hands to his
dishevelled hair and unshaven chin. The flap of the letter-box dropped;
and the girl outside could be heard stifling her laughter.
“You must think me--er--very rude,” began Leroux; “I mean--not to open
the door. But”...
“I quite understand,” concluded the voice of the unseen one. “You are a
most untidy object! And I shall tell Mira DIRECTLY she returns that she
has no right to leave you alone like this! Now I am going to hurry back
upstairs; so you may appear safely. Don't let the omelette get cold.
Good night!”
“No, certainly I shall not!” cried Leroux. “So good of you--I--er--do
like omelette.... Good night!”
Calmly he returned to his writing-table, where, in the pursuit of the
elusive character whose exploits he was chronicling and who had brought
him fame and wealth, he forgot in the same moment Helen Cumberly and the
omelette.
The table-clock ticked merrily on;
SCRATCH--SCRATCH--SPLUTTER--SCRATCH--went Henry Leroux's pen; for this
up-to-date litterateur, essayist by inclination, creator of “Martin
Zeda, Criminal Scientist” by popular clamor, was yet old-fashioned
enough, and sufficient of an enthusiast, to pen his work, while lesser
men dictated.
So, amidst that classic company, smiling or frowning upon him from the
oaken shelves, where Petronius Arbiter, exquisite, rubbed shoulders
with Balzac, plebeian; where Omar Khayyam leaned confidentially toward
Philostratus; where Mark Twain, standing squarely beside Thomas Carlyle,
glared across the room at George Meredith, Henry Leroux pursued the
amazing career of “Martin Zeda.”
It wanted but five minutes to the hour of midnight, when again the door
bell clamored in the silence.
Leroux wrote steadily on. The bell continued to ring, and, furthermore,
the ringer could be heard beating upon the outer door.
“Soames!” cried Leroux irritably, “Soames! Why the hell don't you go to
the door!”
Leroux stood up, dashing his pen upon the table.
“I shall have to sack that damned man!” he cried; “he takes too many
liberties--stopping out until this hour of the night!”
He pulled open the study door, crossed the hallway, and opened the door
beyond.
In, out of the darkness--for the stair lights had been
extinguished--staggered a woman; a woman whose pale face exhibited,
despite the ravages of sorrow or illness, signs of quite unusual beauty.
Her eyes were wide opened, and terror-stricken, the pupils contracted
almost to vanishing point. She wore a magnificent cloak of civet fur
wrapped tightly about her, and, as Leroux opened the door, she tottered
past him into the lobby, glancing back over her shoulder.
With his upraised hands plunged pathetically into the mop of his hair,
Leroux turned and stared at the intruder. She groped as if a darkness
had descended, clutched at the sides of the study doorway, and then,
unsteadily, entered--and sank down upon the big chesterfield in utter
exhaustion.
Leroux, rubbing his chin, perplexedly, walked in after her. He
scarcely had his foot upon the study carpet, ere the woman started up,
tremulously, and shot out from the enveloping furs a bare arm and a
pointing, quivering finger.
“Close the door!” she cried hoarsely--“close the door!... He has...
followed me!”...
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
shadow on the center of the Persian carpet.
Coincident with her sobbing cry--NINE! boomed Big Ben; TEN!...
Two hands--with outstretched, crooked, clutching fingers--leapt from the
darkness into the light of the moonbeam.
“God! Oh, God!” came a frenzied, rasping shriek--“MR. KING!”
Straight at the bare throat leapt the yellow hands; a gurgling cry
rose--fell--and died away.
Gently, noiselessly, the lady of the civet fur sank upon the carpet by
the table; as she fell, a dim black figure bent over her. The tearing
of paper told of the note being snatched from her frozen grip; but never
for a moment did the face or the form of her assailant encroach upon the
moonbeam.
Batlike, this second and terrible visitant avoided the light.
The deed had occupied so brief a time that but one note of the great
bell had accompanied it.
TWELVE! rang out the final stroke from the clock-tower. A low, eerie
whistle, minor, rising in three irregular notes and falling in weird,
unusual cadence to silence again, came from somewhere outside the room.
Then darkness--stillness--with the moon a witness of one more ghastly
crime.
Presently, confused and intermingled voices from above proclaimed the
return of Leroux with the doctor. They were talking in an excited
key, the voice of Leroux, especially, sounding almost hysterical. They
created such a disturbance that they attracted the attention of Mr. John
Exel, M. P., occupant of the flat below, who at that very moment had
returned from the House and was about to insert the key in the lock of
his door. He looked up the stairway, but, all being in darkness, was
unable to detect anything. Therefore he called out:--
“Is that you, Leroux? Is anything the matter?”
“Matter, Exel!” cried Leroux; “there's a devil of a business! For
mercy's sake, come up!”
His curiosity greatly excited, Mr. Exel mounted the stairs, entering
the lobby of Leroux's flat immediately behind the owner and Dr.
Cumberly--who, like Leroux, was arrayed in a dressing-gown; for he had
been in bed when summoned by his friend.
“You are all in the dark, here,” muttered Dr. Cumberly, fumbling for the
switch.
“Some one has turned the light out!” whispered Leroux, nervously; “I
left it on.”
Dr. Cumberly pressed the switch, turning up the lobby light as Exel
entered from the landing. Then Leroux, entering the study first of the
three, switched on the light there, also.
One glance he threw about the room, then started back like a man
physically stricken.
“Cumberly!” he gasped, “Cumberly”--and he pointed to the furry heap by
the writing-table.
“You said she lay on the chesterfield,” muttered Cumberly.
“I left her there.”...
Dr. Cumberly crossed the room and dropped upon his knees. He turned the
white face toward the light, gently parted the civet fur, and pressed
his ear to the silken covering of the breast. He started slightly and
looked into the glazing eyes.
Replacing the fur which he had disarranged, the physician stood up and
fixed a keen gaze upon the face of Henry Leroux. The latter swallowed
noisily, moistening his parched lips.
“Is she”... he muttered; “is she”...
“God's mercy, Leroux!” whispered Mr. Exel--“what does this mean?”
“The woman is dead,” said Dr. Cumberly.
In common with all medical men, Dr. Cumberly was a physiognomist; he was
a great physician and a proportionately great physiognomist. Therefore,
when he looked into Henry Leroux's eyes, he saw there, and recognized,
horror and consternation. With no further evidence than that furnished
by his own powers of perception, he knew that the mystery of this
woman's death was as inexplicable to Henry Leroux as it was inexplicable
to himself.
He was a masterful man, with the gray eyes of a diplomat, and he knew
Leroux as did few men. He laid both hands upon the novelist's shoulders.
“Brace up, old chap!” he said; “you will want all your wits about you.”
“I left her,” began Leroux, hesitatingly--“I left”...
“We know all about where you left her, Leroux,” interrupted Cumberly;
“but what we want to get at is this: what occurred between the time you
left her, and the time of our return?”
Exel, who had walked across to the table, and with a horror-stricken
face was gingerly examining the victim, now exclaimed:--
“Why! Leroux! she is--she is... UNDRESSED!”
Leroux clutched at his dishevelled hair with both hands.
“My dear Exel!” he cried--“my dear, good man! Why do you use that tone?
You say 'she is undressed!' as though I were responsible for the poor
soul's condition!”
“On the contrary, Leroux!” retorted Exel, standing very upright, and
staring through his monocle; “on the contrary, YOU misconstrue ME! I did
not intend to imply--to insinuate--”
“My dear Exel!” broke in Dr. Cumberly--“Leroux is perfectly well aware
that you intended nothing unkindly. But the poor chap, quite naturally,
is distraught at the moment. You MUST understand that, man!”
“I understand; and I am sorry,” said Exel, casting a sidelong glance
at the body. “Of course, it is a delicate subject. No doubt Leroux can
explain.”...
“Damn your explanation!” shrieked Leroux hysterically. “I CANNOT
explain! If I could explain, I”...
“Leroux!” said Cumberly, placing his arm paternally about the shaking
man--“you are such a nervous subject. DO make an effort, old fellow.
Pull yourself together. Exel does not know the circumstances--”
“I am curious to learn them,” said the M. P. icily.
Leroux was about to launch some angry retort, but Cumberly forced him
into the chesterfield, and crossing to a bureau, poured out a stiff
peg of brandy from a decanter which stood there. Leroux sank upon the
chesterfield, rubbing his fingers up and down his palms with a
curious nervous movement and glancing at the dead woman, and at Exel,
alternately, in a mechanical, regular fashion, pathetic to behold.
Mr. Exel, tapping his boot with the head of his inverted cane, was
staring fixedly at the doctor.
“Here you are, Leroux,” said Cumberly; “drink this up, and let us
arrange our facts in decent order before we--”
“Phone for the police?” concluded Exel, his gaze upon the last speaker.
Leroux drank the brandy at a gulp and put down the glass upon a little
persian coffee table with a hand which he had somehow contrived to
steady.
“You are keen on the official forms, Exel?” he said, with a wry smile.
“Please accept my apology for my recent--er--outburst, but picture this
thing happening in your place!”
“I cannot,” declared Exel, bluntly.
“You lack imagination,” said Cumberly. “Take a whisky and soda, and help
me to search the flat.”
“Search the flat!”
The physician raised a forefinger, forensically.
“Since you, Exel, if not actually in the building, must certainly have
been within sight of the street entrance at the moment of the crime, and
since Leroux and I descended the stair and met you on the landing, it is
reasonable to suppose that the assassin can only be in one place: HERE!”
“HERE!” cried Exel and Leroux, together.
“Did you see anyone leave the lower hall as you entered?”
“No one; emphatically, there was no one there!”
“Then I am right.”
“Good God!” whispered Exel, glancing about him, with a new, and keen
apprehensiveness.
“Take your drink,” concluded Cumberly, “and join me in my search.”
“Thanks,” replied Exel, nervously proffering a cigar-case; “but I won't
drink.”
“As you wish,” said the doctor, who thus, in his masterful way, acted
the host; “and I won't smoke. But do you light up.”
“Later,” muttered Exel; “later. Let us search, first.”
Leroux stood up; Cumberly forced him back.
“Stay where you are, Leroux; it is elementary strategy to operate from a
fixed base. This study shall be the base. Ready, Exel?”
Exel nodded, and the search commenced. Leroux sat rigidly upon the
settee, his hands resting upon his knees, watching and listening. Save
for the merry ticking of the table-clock, and the movements of the
searchers from room to room, nothing disturbed the silence. From the
table, and that which lay near to it, he kept his gaze obstinately
averted.
Five or six minutes passed in this fashion, Leroux expecting each to
bring a sudden outcry. He was disappointed. The searchers returned, Exel
noticeably holding himself aloof and Cumberly very stern.
Exel, a cigar between his teeth, walked to the writing-table, carefully
circling around the dreadful obstacle which lay in his path, to help
himself to a match. As he stooped to do so, he perceived that in the
closed right hand of the dead woman was a torn scrap of paper.
“Leroux! Cumberly!” he exclaimed; “come here!”
He pointed with the match as Cumberly hurriedly crossed to his side.
Leroux, inert, remained where he sat, but watched with haggard eyes. Dr.
Cumberly bent down and sought to detach the paper from the grip of the
poor cold fingers, without tearing it. Finally he contrived to release
the fragment, and, perceiving it to bear some written words, he spread
it out beneath the lamp, on the table, and eagerly scanned it, lowering
his massive gray head close to the writing.
He inhaled, sibilantly.
“Do you see, Exel?” he jerked--for Exel was bending over his shoulder.
“I do--but I don't understand.”
“What is it?” came hollowly from Leroux.
“It is the bottom part of an unfinished note,” said Cumberly, slowly.
“It is written shakily in a woman's hand, and it reads:--'Your wife'”...
Leroux sprang to his feet and crossed the room in three strides.
“Wife!” he muttered. His voice seemed to be choked in his throat; “my
wife! It says something about my wife?”
“It says,” resumed the doctor, quietly, “'your wife.' Then there's a
piece torn out, and the two words 'Mr. King.' No stop follows, and the
line is evidently incomplete.”
“My wife!” mumbled Leroux, staring unseeingly at the fragment of paper.
“MY WIFE! MR. KING! Oh! God! I shall go mad!”
“Sit down!” snapped Dr. Cumberly, turning to him; “damn it, Leroux, you
are worse than a woman!”
In a manner almost childlike, the novelist obeyed the will of the
stronger man, throwing himself into an armchair, and burying his face in
his hands.
“My wife!” he kept muttering--“my wife!”...
Exel and the doctor stood staring at one another; when suddenly, from
outside the flat, came a metallic clattering, followed by a little
suppressed cry. Helen Cumberly, in daintiest deshabille, appeared in
the lobby, carrying, in one hand, a chafing-dish, and, in the other,
the lid. As she advanced toward the study, from whence she had heard her
father's voice:--
“Why, Mr. Leroux!” she cried, “I shall CERTAINLY report you to Mira,
now! You have not even touched the omelette!”
“Good God! Cumberly! stop her!” muttered Exel, uneasily. “The door was
not latched!”...
But it was too late. Even as the physician turned to intercept his
daughter, she crossed the threshold of the study. She stopped short
at perceiving Exel; then, with a woman's unerring intuition, divined a
tragedy, and, in the instant of divination, sought for, and found, the
hub of the tragic wheel.
One swift glance she cast at the fur-clad form, prostrate.
The chafing-dish fell from her hand, and the omelette rolled, a
grotesque mass, upon the carpet. She swayed, dizzily, raising one hand
to her brow, but had recovered herself even as Leroux sprang forward to
support her.
“All right, Leroux!” cried Cumberly; “I will take her upstairs again.
Wait for me, Exel.”
Exel nodded, lighted his cigar, and sat down in a chair, remote from the
writing-table.
“Mira--my wife!” muttered Leroux, standing, looking after Dr. Cumberly
and his daughter as they crossed the lobby. “She will report to--my
wife.”...
In the outer doorway, Helen Cumberly looked back over her shoulder,
and her glance met that of Leroux. Hers was a healing glance and a
strengthening glance; it braced him up as nothing else could have done.
He turned to Exel.
“For Heaven's sake, Exel!” he said, evenly, “give me your advice--give
me your help; I am going to 'phone for the police.”
Exel looked up with an odd expression.
“I am entirely at your service, Leroux,” he said. “I can quite
understand how this ghastly affair has shaken you up.”
“It was so sudden,” said the other, plaintively. “It is incredible
that so much emotion can be crowded into so short a period of a man's
life.”...
Big Ben chimed the quarter after midnight. Leroux, eyes averted, walked
to the writing-table, and took up the telephone.