"From the point of view of a criminal," I said to myself, "this staircase offers unique advantages. For the committal of a crime, here, surely, is a vantage ground which is ideal and ready-made to hand. A stranger, ascending the staircase, as I am, in the dark, could be knocked on the head with impunity, and nobody be the wiser. Under cover of night, the body could be dropped out of the window, conveyed across that fever-breeding piece of waste land, and hoisted over yonder fence into the river. In an hour a corpse would be borne miles away from the scene of the crime, leaving never so much as a trace behind to tell how, and by whose hand, it came there."
The thought was not reassuring; and when, the next instant, I arrived at the topmost landing, and, on opening a door and entering the den, saw two evil-looking rascals hurry out to cut off my retreat by the staircase, while two others got between me and the door, as already described, I began to realise that the hospitality which seemed likely to be pressed upon me would not be of the nature of an invitation to stay to tea.
Just at this moment I was aware of a dull noise in the distance. There was a slight but ever-increasing vibration in the boards beneath me, a gathering rumble and roll as of approaching thunder, and with a hoarsely discordant shriek, an ear-splitting babel-tumult and roar, which seemed to shake the house to its foundations, an express train hurtled by, almost outside the very windows.
Under the present condition of electric communication, and with no apparatus, the sending of a telephonic message for help to the police office would have been scarcely less impossible of accomplishment than making known my present danger to anyone on board the train; yet so unreasoning are we in the causes which arouse or allay our nervousness, that the consciousness of my near presence to the railway did more to bolster up my courage than all my philosophy. "With the trains and their living freights so near at hand, I don't feel altogether cut off from the outside world," I said to myself; and as the two men in the corner were still whispering together, I plucked up heart to take stock of my surroundings.
The den was lit by a single paraffin lamp, to the unassisted industry of which I was at first inclined to ascribe the vile atmosphere of the place.
"That light we see is burning in my hall.
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world,"
says Portia. The light which I saw burning in the den did not shed its beams very far; but in the matter of shedding smells in a world, nice or naughty, I judged its capacity at a low estimate as forty horse-power! An ordinary motor-car, in its most perfumed moments, leaves trailing clouds of glory and cherry blossom in its wake compared to that lamp's distribution of oily odours on the atmosphere.
Add to this the insufferable and sickening stench of opium—a stench which I can only compare to a choice blending of onions and bad tobacco—and the reader will not wonder when I say that my stomach signalled for full speed astern, by retching rebelliously under my breast-bone.
Greasy as was the atmosphere, the dirty yellow distempering of the walls was in places even greasier. The chief articles of furniture were two raised mattresses, the bare wall behind them being literally coated with dirt and grease, rubbed from the chaste persons and fastidious clothes of many smokers. Above these mattresses a crudely coloured and revolting representation of the Crucifixion was incontinently fastened, and upon the mattresses lay the Chinamen of whom I have already spoken.
Of the two men still whispering in the corner, the leader was of singular appearance. In figure he was dumpy and comfortably rounded, which was, I suppose, the reason of the nickname, "The Dumpling," which I afterwards heard applied to him. His neck was so short, and his huge head was set so closely upon his high shoulders, and thrust forward so prominently, as almost to suggest the hunchback. But if the figure was grotesque, the clean-shaven face was striking and powerful. It was absolutely grey in hue, like the face of a dead or dying man; but so far from being spare and haggard, as one would have expected from so unhealthy and colourless a complexion, the face, like the neck, was full, and the features of the fleshly aquiline type. The forehead was high and intellectual, but the eyes were his most singular feature. Accustomed as I am, as the phrase goes, "to read character," this man utterly baffled me, for the eyes of two totally different men looked out from the same head. On the occasion of which I am speaking his eyes, when they rested upon me, seemed the incarnation of all that is cunning, cruel, treacherous. Yet in the eyes of this same man, as I came to know him thereafter, I have seen the most singular and gentle melancholy.