Tales of Chinatown eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 302 pages of information about Tales of Chinatown.

Tales of Chinatown eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 302 pages of information about Tales of Chinatown.

“No; canaries, linnets—­all sorts.  Isn’t it funny?” The girl laughed in a childish way.  “And now I think Ah Fu will have gone in, so I must say good night.”

But when presently Detective Durham found himself walking back along West India Dock Road, his mind’s eye was set upon the slinking figure of a Chinaman carrying a birdcage.

VI

A HINT OF INCENSE

One Chinaman more or less does not make any very great difference to the authorities responsible for maintaining law and order in Limehouse.  Asiatic settlers are at liberty to follow their national propensities, and to knife one another within reason.  This is wisdom.  Such recreations are allowed, if not encouraged, by all wise rulers of Eastern peoples.

“Found drowned,” too, is a verdict which has covered many a dark mystery of old Thames, but “Found in the river, death having been due to the action of some poison unknown,” is a finding which even in the case of a Chinaman is calculated to stimulate the jaded official mind.

New Scotland Yard had given Durham a roving commission, and had been justified in the fact that the second victim, and this time not a Chinaman, had been found under almost identical conditions.  The link with the establishment of Huang Chow was incomplete, and Durham fully recognized that it was up to him to make it sound and incontestable.

Jim Poland was not the only man in the East End who knew that the dead Chinaman had been in negotiation with Huang Chow.  Kerry knew it, and had passed the information on to Durham.

Some mystery surrounded the life of the old dealer, who was said to be a mandarin of high rank, but his exact association with the deaths first of the Chinaman Pi Lung, and second of Cohen, remained to be proved.  Certain critics have declared the Metropolitan detective service to be obsolete and inefficient.  Kerry, as a potential superintendent, resented these criticisms, and in his protege Durham, perceived a member of the new generation who was likely in time to produce results calculated to remove this stigma.

Durham recognized that a greater responsibility rested upon his shoulders than the actual importance of the case might have indicated; and now, proceeding warily along the deserted streets, he found his brain to be extraordinarily active and his imagination very much alive.

There is a night life in Limehouse, as he had learned, but it is a mole life, a subterranean life, of which no sign appears above ground after a certain hour.  Nevertheless, as he entered the area which harbours those strange, hidden resorts the rumour of which has served to create the glamour of Chinatown, he found himself to be thinking of the great influence said to be wielded by Huang Chow, and wondering if unseen spies watched his movements.

Lala was Oriental, and now, alone in the night, distrust leapt into being within him.  He had been attracted by her and had pitied her.  He told himself now that this was because of her dark beauty and the essentially feminine appeal which she made.  She was perhaps a vampire of the most dangerous sort, one who lured men to strange deaths for some sinister object beyond reach of a Western imagination.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Tales of Chinatown from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.