They were on the opposite side of the street from the theater, and Branch, glancing across, noted persons idling by the entrance to the playhouse. Some were Chinese; others Americans.
Time moved slowly here in Chinatown, in this spot of the Orient dropped from its native soil.
Joseph Darley stopped at a door that lay diagonally across the street from the Mukden Theater. It formed an unpretentious entrance between two shops.
The committeeman led the way into this entrance. They passed through a plain, lighted hall. They reached a small elevator at the end of the passage.
Darley opened the door, and the men ascended in the lift. It was an automatic elevator that moved in a solid shaft.
They reached a spot that Cleve Branch estimated as two stories above the street. The elevator stopped. They made their exit into a small anteroom. The atmosphere was altogether Oriental now. This silent spot seemed miles away from the street below. For here, with the elevator behind them, both men sensed the exotic setting of China itself.
Darley — a man who was a traveler — remarked upon it as he drew a tasseled cord which hung from the door at the other side of the anteroom.
“You are in China, now, Branch,” he said. “You will meet a man whose mind dwells in China. Not content with keeping aloof from the realities about him, he desires to spread the customs and traditions of his native land.”
THE door opened as Darley ceased speaking. A crouching servant, garbed in Chinese robes, stepped back that the visitors might enter. Cleve Branch eyed the man suspiciously.
A casual observer might have mistaken the man’s stooped position for a bow. Cleve realized that it was the Chinaman’s natural posture.