The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu quotes

I do not know when the blow will fall, how it will fall, nor from whence, but I know that my first duty is to warn him. Let us walk down to the corner of the common and get a taxi.”

How strangely does the adventurous intrude upon the humdrum; for, when it intrudes at all, more often than not its intrusion is sudden and unlooked for.

Today, we may seek for romance and fail to find it: unsought, it lies in wait for us at most prosaic corners of life’s highway.

How strangely does the adventurous intrude upon the humdrum; for, when it intrudes at all, more often than not its intrusion is sudden and unlooked for.

Today, we may seek for romance and fail to find it: unsought, it lies in wait for us at most prosaic corners of life’s highway.

The drive that night, though it divided the drably commonplace from the wildly bizarre—though it was the bridge between the ordinary and the outré—has left no impression upon my mind. Into the heart of a weird mystery the cab bore me;

The man bowed and led the way, so that shortly we found ourselves in a small, paved courtyard. It was a perfect summer’s night, and the deep blue vault above was jeweled with myriads of starry points.

How impossible it seemed to reconcile that vast, eternal calm with the hideous passions and fiendish agencies which that night had loosed a soul upon the infinite.

“Up yonder are the study windows, sir. Over that wall on your left is the back lane from which the cry came, and beyond is Regent’s Park.”

“She is one of the finest weapons in the enemy’s armory, Petrie.

But a woman is a two-edged sword, and treacherous.

To our great good fortune, she has formed a sudden predilection, characteristically Oriental, for yourself. Oh, you may scoff, but it is evident. She was employed to get this letter placed in my hands. Give it to me.”

He is an adept in all the arts and sciences which a great university could teach him. He also is an adept in certain obscure arts and sciences which no university of today can teach.

He has the brains of any three men of genius. Petrie, he is a mental giant.

”

… him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government—which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence.

Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.

”

It is with some shame that I confess how her charm enveloped me like a magic cloud. Unfamiliar with the complex Oriental temperament, I had laughed at Nayland Smith when he had spoken of this girl’s infatuation.

“Love in the East,” he had said, “is like the conjurer’s mango-tree; it is born, grows and flowers at the touch of a hand.”

Now, in those pleading eyes I read confirmation of his words. Her clothes or her hair exhaled a faint perfume. Like all Fu-Manchu’s servants, she was perfectly chosen for her peculiar duties. Her beauty was wholly intoxicating.

He is the greatest genius which the powers of evil have put on earth for centuries. He has the backing of a political group whose wealth is enormous, and his mission in Europe is to pave the way! Do you follow me?

He is the advance-agent of a movement so epoch-making that not one Britisher, and not one American, in fifty thousand has ever dreamed of it.

”

Far over on the Surrey shore a blue light—vaporous, mysterious—flicked translucent tongues against the night’s curtain. It was a weird, elusive flame, leaping, wavering, magically changing from blue to a yellowed violet, rising, falling.

“Only a gasworks,” came Smith’s voice, and I knew that he, too, had been watching those elfin fires. “But it always reminds me of a Mexican teocalli, and the altar of sacrifice.”

The simile was apt, but gruesome. I thought of Dr. Fu-Manchu and the severed fingers, and could not repress a shudder.

Of his face, as it looked out at me over the dirty table, I despair of writing convincingly.

It was that of an archangel of evil, and it was wholly dominated by the most uncanny eyes that ever reflected a human soul, for they were narrow and long, very slightly oblique, and of a brilliant green.

But their unique horror lay in a certain filminess (it made me think of the membrana nictitans in a bird) which, obscuring them as I threw wide the door, seemed to lift as I actually passed the threshold, revealing the eyes in all their brilliant …

“You scoff, sir, and so do others.

We take the proffered right hand of friendship nor inquire if the hidden left holds a knife!

The peace of the world is at stake, Mr. Eltham. Unknowingly, you tamper with tremendous issues.”

Furthermore, I have an idea that his arrangements are of such a character that they must go forward. He might turn aside, of course, to assassinate me, if opportunity arose! But we know, from experience, that he permits nothing to interfere with his schemes.”

There are few states, I suppose, which exact so severe a toll from one’s nervous system as the anticipation of calamity.

All anticipation is keener, be it of joy or pain, than the reality whereof it is a mental forecast;

but that inactive waiting at Redmoat, for the blow which we knew full well to be pending exceeded in its nerve taxation, anything I hitherto had experienced.

I felt as one bound upon an Aztec altar, with the priest’s obsidian knife raised above my breast!

Secret and malign forces throbbed about us; forces against which we had no armor. Dreadful as it was, I count it a mercy that the climax was reached so quickly. And it came suddenly enough;

And it came suddenly enough; for there in that quiet Norfolk home we found ourselves at hand grips with one of the mysterious horrors which characterized the operations of Dr. Fu-Manchu. It was upon us before we realized it.

There is no incidental music to the dramas of real life.

As we sat on the little terrace in the creeping twilight, I remember thinking how the peace of the scene gave the lie to my fears that we bordered upon tragic things. Then Caesar, who had been a docile patient all day, began howling again;

As I came away, a van drove up from the docks and a couple of fellows delivered a sarcophagus as big as a boat. It is unique, according to Sir Lionel, and will go to the British Museum after he has examined it.

The man crams six months’ work into six weeks; then he is off again.

”

We cannot know everyone who has read the riddle of China. I never see a report of someone found drowned, of an apparent suicide, of a sudden, though seemingly natural death, without wondering.

I tell you, Fu-Manchu is omnipresent; his tentacles embrace everything.

I said that Sir Lionel must bear a charmed life. The fact that we are alive is a miracle.”

It can convey no faint conception of her. With her pure, fair skin, eyes like the velvet darkness of the East, and red lips so tremulously near to mine, she was the most seductively lovely creature I ever had looked upon.

In that electric moment my heart went out in sympathy to every man who had bartered honor, country, all for a woman’s kiss.

“I will see that you are placed under proper protection,” I said firmly, but my voice was not quite my own. “It is quite absurd to talk of slavery here in England. You are a free agent, or you could not be here now. Dr.

“He evidently made more than was necessary to dispatch Sir Lionel Barton,” he said; “and contemptuously—you note the attitude, Petrie?—contemptuously devoted the surplus to me. His contempt is justified.

I am a child striving to cope with a mental giant.

It is by no wit of mine that Dr. Fu-Manchu scores a double failure.”

They possessed a viridescence which hitherto I had supposed possible only in the eye of the cat—and the film intermittently clouded their brightness—but I can speak of them no more.

I had never supposed, prior to meeting Dr. Fu-Manchu, that so intense a force of malignancy could radiate⁠—from any human being.

He spoke. His English was perfect, though at times his words were oddly chosen; his delivery alternately was guttural and sibilant.

“You have presumed,” continued Fu-Manchu, “to meddle with a world-change.

Poor spiders⁠—caught in the wheels of the inevitable!

You have linked my name with the futility of the Young China Movement—the name of Fu-Manchu! Mr. Smith, you are an incompetent meddler—I despise you! Dr. Petrie, you are a fool—I am sorry for you!”

It struck the half-hour, leaving the stillness complete. In that room, high above the activity which yet prevailed below, high above the supping crowds in the hotel, high above the starving crowds on the Embankment, a curious chill of isolation swept about me.

Again I realized how, in the very heart of the great metropolis, a man may be as far from aid as in the heart of a desert.

I was glad that I was not alone in that room—marked with the death-mark of Fu-Manchu; and I am certain that Graham Guthrie welcomed his unexpected company.

Even had I not known that an attempt was to be made that night, I should have realized it, as, strung to high tension, I waited in the darkness.

Some invisible herald went ahead of the dreadful Chinaman, proclaiming his coming to every nerve in one’s body.

It was like a breath of astral incense, announcing the presence of the priests of death.

Above all, perhaps, I wondered if this would prove to be the hiding-place of the beautiful slave girl who was such a potent factor in the Doctor’s plans, but a two-edged sword which yet we hoped to turn upon Fu-Manchu.

Even in the hands of a master, a woman’s beauty is a dangerous weapon.

A cry rang out behind me. I turned quickly. And a singular sight met my gaze.

“Of what are you speaking?” I questioned. “You speak of slave-raids, of the desert. Where did these things take place? Of what country are you?”

“Does it matter?” she questioned in turn. “Of what country am I? A slave has no country, no name.”

“You may call me Karamanèh,” she said. “As Karamanèh I was sold to Dr. Fu-Manchu, and my brother also he purchased. We were cheap at the price he paid.” She laughed shortly, wildly.

Then, for the first time, Smith’s hand trembled. But his glance never wavered from the malignant, emotionless countenance of Dr. Fu-Manchu. He clenched his teeth hard, so that the muscles stood out prominently upon his jaw.

I suppose that silence which followed my awful discovery prevailed but a few seconds. To me those seconds were each a lingering death.

There, below, in that groaning hulk, I knew more of icy terror than any of our meetings with the murder-group had brought to me before; and through my brain throbbed a thought: the girl had betrayed us!

This also I did.

And never have I experienced a similar sense of revulsion from any human being. I shuddered, as though I had touched a venomous reptile.

Smith threw down his revolver.

Smith threw down his revolver.

“I curse myself for an honorable fool,” he said. “No one could dispute my right to shoot you dead where you stand.”

Knowing him as I did, I could tell from the suppressed passion in Smith’s voice that only by his unhesitating acceptance of my friend’s word, and implicit faith in his keeping it, had Dr. Fu-Manchu escaped just retribution at that moment.

Inspector Weymouth stood with us, a badly puzzled man. Then occurred the extraordinary incident which to this day remains inexplicable, for, clearly heard by all three of us, a guttural voice said:

“Another victory for China, Mr. Nayland Smith!”

I turned as though I had been stung. Smith turned also. My eyes passed from face to face of the group about us. None was familiar. No one apparently had moved away.

Transfixed with astonishment, I stood looking down upon him.

The wonders of the Arabian Nights were wonders no longer, for here, in East-End London, was a true magician’s palace, lacking not its beautiful slave, lacking not its enchanted prince!

“It is Aziz, my brother,” said Karamanèh.

Southery spoke in a weak voice.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “it seems I am raised from the dead.”

It was the weirdest moment of the night wherein we heard that newly buried man speak from the mold of his tomb.

“They die like flies!” screamed Fu-Manchu, with a sudden febrile excitement; and I felt assured of something I had long suspected: that that magnificent, perverted brain was the brain of a homicidal maniac—though Smith would never accept the theory.

“It is my flytrap!” shrieked the Chinaman. “And I am the god of destruction!”

Many there are, I doubt not, who will regard the Eastern girl with horror. I ask their forgiveness in that I regarded her quite differently.

No man having seen her could have condemned her unheard.

Many, having looked into her lovely eyes, had they found there what I found, must have forgiven her almost any crime.

The soul of Karamanèh was a closed book to my shortsighted Western eyes. But the body of Karamanèh was exquisite; her beauty of a kind that was a key to the most extravagant rhapsodies of Eastern poets.

Her eyes held a challenge wholly Oriental in its appeal; her lips, even in repose, were a taunt.

And, herein, East is West and West is East.