Between her and the sweet liberty of the rain-washed air a door crashed like the crack of doom.
XXII
THE SEVEN BRASS HINGES
Into a space perhaps four feet in width from wall to wall and seven deep from the front door to the foot of a cramped flight of crazy wooden stairs, some ten people were crowded, Sofia and the maid Chou Nu in a knot of excited men.
In the saffron glow of an ill-trimmed paraffin lamp smoking in a wall bracket, desperate faces, yellow and brown and white, consulted one another with rolling eyeballs and strange tongues clamorous. Sofia heard the broken rustling of heavy respirations; she saw uncouth gesticulations carve the shadows; her nostrils were revolted by effluvia of unclean bodies, garments saturate with opium smoke and curious cookery, breaths sour with alcohol.
Two were busy at the door, under the direction of Prince Victor, setting stout bars into iron sockets. When they had finished, Victor elbowed them out of his way and thrust back the slide of a narrow horizontal peephole, through which he reconnoitred.
The tall, thin body stiffened as he looked, and without turning he flung an open hand behind him and snapped a demand in Chinese. Somebody slipped a revolver into his palm. Levelling it he sent a volley crashing through the peephole. Yells responded, and in the hush that fell upon the final shot a noise of fugitive feet scraping and stumbling on cobbles. A bullet struck the door a sounding thump and all but penetrated, raising a bump on the inner face of its thick oaken panels; and Victor shut the slide and turned back.
Subservient silence saluted him. He spoke in Chinese, issuing (Sofia gathered) instructions for the defense of the house. One by one the men designated dropped out of the group about her. Three shuffled off into a room adjoining the hallway. Two others ran briskly up the stairs. A sixth Victor directed to stand by the barred door. His chauffeur and another Chinaman he told off for his personal attendance.
The maid Chou Nu was left to shift for herself, and while Sofia could see her she did not shift a finger from her pose of terror, flattened to the wall. When Sofia came back that way, the girl had vanished, however. Nor was she seen again alive.
Her arms held fast, Sofia was partly led and partly dragged down the hall, Victor herding the group on past the staircase and into a bare room at the back of the house, where a solitary lamp burning on a deal table discovered for all other furnishing broken chairs, coils of tarred rope, a rack of ponderous oars and boat-hooks, a display of shapeless oilskins and sou’westers on pegs. The windows were boarded up from sills to lintels, the air was close and dank with the stale flavour of foul tidal waters.
Here Victor took charge of Sofia, the chauffeur holding the lamp to light the other Chinaman at his labours with a trap-door in the floor, a slab of woodwork so massive that, when its iron bolts had been drawn, it needed every whit of the man’s strength to lift and throw it back upon its hinges; and its crashing fall made all the timbers quake and groan.