"I have made my plans here also. I shall have to pay a price so enormous that I'm afraid it will stagger you, Sir Thomas, but it's the only way in which I can get hold of the right stuff. For what it is intrinsically worth, about sixty pounds sterling, your east-end dealer will pay four-hundred pounds, and make a big profit on it. I shall have to pay nearly a thousand and I shall want double that money—two thousand pounds."
He stared at me in anxiety.
"My dear Rolston," I said, "cheer up. My income is over twenty thousand a year, and in normal times I don't spend a third of it. Buy all the filth you want, and Heaven send that it does the trick!"
"In two days," he said, "the 'Golden Swan' will house two cases of the best 'red bricks' obtainable on the market anywhere, for it's as much by the superior quality of what I shall supply, as well as the fact of being able to supply it, that I depend. Of course, you'll get nearly all the money back."
"Confound it, no, that's going too far. We'll send all the abominable profits to the Richmond Hospital anonymously."
We talked until the fire was out and the gray wintry dawn began to steal in through the dirty windows of the bar beyond, and when all our plans were laid with meticulous care I went to bed but not to sleep, assailed by a thousand doubts and fears.
... In a week or two the upstairs room began to be frequented by silent-footed yellow men, who came and went unobtrusively. Whenever any of them chanced to meet me I was greeted with a profound obeisance which was rather disconcerting at first, but my conversation was limited to a mere greeting or farewell. Most of these men spoke pigeon English, but I had little or nothing to say to them of set purpose. It had been arranged between Rolston and myself that I was to be represented as a good-natured fool, who mattered very little in any way.
For his part, the pretended Ah Sing was up and down the stairs a dozen times every evening. He was never once suspected, his influence and importance in the lives of these aliens grew every day. But it was a long business, a long and weary business, in which at first hardly any progress towards our aim could be discerned.
"It's no use being discouraged, Sir Thomas," Rolston would say, "we're getting on famously."
"And the opium?"—somehow I wasn't very keen on discussing that aspect of the question.