Chapter XXIX: The Green Baize Door

There is a drug in the hellish pharmacopœia of China, to prevent the further manufacture of which tender-hearted people should go on their knees and pray the allied powers may some day wipe the Chinese off the face of the earth.

The taking of it means death, very slow death. The burning of it--for it is primarily a gum and, made into pastilles with sawdust, has a smell that is half pleasant--is not a good thing for the person who sits in the smoke of it. After half an hour of that vapor it is impossible to move either hand or foot, to wink though a candle singes the eyelashes. But there is no insensibility in that paralysis, which is where the wickedness of the stuff comes in. Hearing, seeing, feeling the tortures of the damned into the bargain, the person stupefied can neither move nor cry out; even tears are stopped in them. The only trouble with the stuff, from a Chinese point of view, is that to use it twice in twenty-four hours spells death to the victim. And it is not always safe to have a dead body on your hands.

Thus every step of the way down-stairs was clear to Magdalen Clyde as her head hung down lifeless over Ah Lee’s arm. For she knew it was Ah Lee, though he was dressed in a woman’s black gown; she felt the hateful nails of his long fingers as he clutched her. What was the matter with her that she could not scream? Her heart felt as if it would burst in the dreadful effort; a cold pain shot, lightning-swift, through her limbs; and her thoughts--if she could think, how was it she could do no more?

It was all so simple. Ah Lee was taking her away. They were going down-stairs, turning not to the street, but to the green baize door.

What for? There was no way out there. The tailor would find her there in the morning; the man who carried her was a fool. It seemed hardly to matter that she could not, for some dreadful constriction somewhere, either move or scream. The cold air of the little dark room struck fresh on her face.

Ah Lee--she saw his face as he lighted a match, and could have shrieked with horror at something that surmounted his fishy eyes and smooth forehead--laid her down on the table like a parcel.

“He’s going to leave me here!” she thought. “What for?”

She felt as if she wrenched her bones out of their sockets as she tried to see what he was doing behind her; yet all the while she knew she had not so much as moved her little finger. That cold torture swept through her again, and she could not even grind her teeth on it. For a moment that alone, and it was quite enough, took all her attention. When it passed she knew that whatever Ah Lee was he was not the fool she thought.

“The ventilator!” She saw the beautiful case of it all like a flash, just as she saw before her the source of that draft she had been too stupid to find. In one corner of the room was a square iron patch, cut out into patterns; a bit of filigree, not a grating. As Ah Lee lighted a match over it the rush of air from it put out the flickering thing.

“The table was over it when I was here,” she thought with deadly recollection. “That was why I didn’t find it,” and the sweat of fear was damp on her hands. The Chinaman was going to put her in the cellar, and----

“That horrible smell up-stairs!” She could put it together now with dreadful clearness. “It made me like this. I can’t speak or move; I’ll be dead in the cellar--no one ever goes there.”

From where he had laid her on her side she saw, with the eyes she could not shut, Ah Lee rise softly from his knees; business-like and impassive, as if he had been handling the potatoes at Ardmore Castle.

He picked her up--living, breathing Magdalen Clyde, who could neither move nor cry--and carried her to the corner of the floor where there was no fancy iron cover now but only a square opening. In the black darkness she felt the edges of it as he----

God! God in heaven! Her feet were down that hole to her knees; his hands were round her waist; were under her arms! She was sliding like a log down to the unknown horror below. The filth of an unused cellar, the----She heard the scurrying of the horde of London rats as her head got below the level of the floor, while her feet still touched on nothing. Why did he not let her drop and be done?

For his grip was in her armpits still, and as she hung she felt his feet in their woman’s skirt pass her face. He was leaning down with her half in and half out of the opening.

Her feet touched something, stone cold, solid.

Ah Lee, still clutching her with one hand--she had not thought a piece of smug yellow flesh could be so strong--was lowering himself with the other.

As she thought it the man made the quick drop of a gymnast, and with a trick of the arm eased her softly to the floor where he stood beside her.

Exactly as a bird watches a snake she watched him; she even wondered, through the cold fear that was on her, how he had come to get her instead of Dolly. It was Dolly he had meant to leave to the rats in this place--able neither to scream nor move.

There must have been good stuff in Magdalen Clyde; she thanked God that Ah Lee had not got Dolly, even as she saw him put up his arms and lift himself half out of the open hole.

She would have shut her eyes if she could, not to see him go in the light of the match he held in his teeth. But she could only watch him till the match light died. He reached out for something, and then the dark hid him.

“He’s going,” she thought slowly. “And the rats will come.” She had always had a deadly, foolish terror of rats. She prayed God she might not die that death, but some other.

Something dropped lightly beside her; over her head was a sound of iron settling into its socket. In the deadly silence of the place a hand felt for her, very soft and slow.

He had not gone. He had put the grating of the manhole into its place.

“He’s going to kill me!” thought the girl; and was glad, because of those scurrying rats.

Well, but for Dolly left alone, what was death? Yesterday there had been Lovell, to-day there was only some burned-out ashes and a lie. It was not for Buff Ogilvie and his Judas kisses that she would fain stay in the world, though perhaps the thought of them added another pang to the going out of it. The awful terror of death that catches the heart and turns it over came on her. She was brave as women go, but a man might have winced at the slow touch of those fingers that had murder in them. They crept like loathsome worms from her wrist to her throat.

For a moment the Chinaman felt the stagnant pulse there. He grunted to himself, and as Magdalen Clyde waited for the blow that would end her--and perhaps it may be not written against her as cowardice that she prayed he might not bungle at the job--he stood erect and turned away. She heard him stepping across the cellar, and she knew now whose step that was which had waked her on a night now centuries past.

A little creak of wood sounded loud, but before she could wonder at it the man was at her side again. He threw her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and as he did it she saw where the cold draft came from that aired the tailor’s room. Just a common wooden hatchway, wide open, the starlit oblong of it bright as day in the black cellar.

Ah Lee grunted again as he shoved his corpselike burden up and through; climbed out himself with beautiful lightness and with business-like attention to details, lowered the lid of the cellar hatch to the proper angle and fitted in the iron bars that no one had looked at for months.

“We’re in the court between our house and Madame Duplessis’,” Magdalen thought swiftly, for that was where the cellar hatch must open. Flat on her back, on cold, greasy stones, she could not be sure, since all she could see was a star in a straight line over her. She could not move her eyeballs any more than if she and they had been cut out of white marble. But she could think and touch hell by it. Lovell, the blind French woman, and Stratharden’s Chinaman made a dreadful sum in her head. If Ah Lee took her to Lovell, who was Ogilvie, the horror of it would kill her.

For a long five minutes it seemed as if he could not make up his mind what to do. He stared about him with lack-luster eyes, and was at last sure the court was empty. The only way out of it was through the passages of Hare’s Rents, and at this hour they would be deserted.

Ah Lee chose one of them, haphazard; pulled down a veil from his lady-like hat, and did not look so unlike the broken-down women with a pretense of decency who crawl along the pavements of the slums.

He picked up his burden very differently this time and was careful to stagger under it, as a woman might do who makes shift to carry another who is drunk or ill. Anywhere else some one would have stared curiously at the queer sight; Hare’s Rents was callous; also, it was out or in bed. But even Ah Lee hid against his arm the dreadful face and staring eyes of the girl he carried as he neared the open doorway that led through the Rents to the lane. Some child might shriek at the look of those eyes.

The horrible sweetness of the drug he carried hung about his woman’s mantle and half stifled Magdalen Clyde. She felt him come to a sudden pause and did not know that one word--that she could not speak--would have saved her.

For they were in the passage where an ugly gas-jet burned dim; and there, between Ah Lee and the street, sprung from Heaven knew where, stood a woman. She was oddly dressed, almost like a nun; and as she stood she stared.

The Chinaman opened his lips to speak, and with a quick change in his face shut them again. Those bright-brown eyes that glared so widely were blind!

Noiseless as a drift of wind he passed and was gone into the street beyond. Aunt Manette breathed softly through her nose, moistened her lips with a delicate, tasting movement.

“What an abominable odor!” said she to herself curiously. “But of course----”

Magdalen’s head, of its own weight, fell back from the Chinaman’s arm; her desperate, immovable eyes saw the French woman Lovell had sent to her turn away smiling.