The Blue-Eyed Manchu by Achmed Abdullah

Book Details

In The Blue-Eyed Manchu (1917), a Secret Agent, haunted by a prior encounter with an Afghan warlord, is charged with going to China, finding the One Man who is stirring up troubles across Asia, and killing him. To do so, he must outwit and dodge the killers sent by the cult of Doorgha, black-faced Hindu goddess of destruction, intent on turning him into a human sacrifice.

The Blue-Eyed Manchu is a novel of twenty chapters.

In the 1910s, Achmed Abdullah (1881-1945) emigrated to the United States and eventually became a writer and playwright, and later on, a Hollywood screenwriter. Abdullah’s work appeared in various US magazines, including Argosy, All-Story Magazine, Munsey’s Magazine and Blue Book. He earned an Academy Award nomination for collaborating on the screenplay to the 1935 film The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.

The Blue-Eyed Manchu contains 1 illustration.

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1. Abdullah-BlueEyedManchu.epub

Excerpt: The Blue-Eyed Manchu

Chapter I

“Even from beyond the grave I shall kill you!”

NICE, cheerful sort of prophecy, isn’t it? It made me shudder at nights, when the wind was shrilling in the tree-tops and all the little downy screech-owls were giving their evening concert.

But I did not take my fears very seriously, though the memory of the prophecy never quite left me.

I had really nothing tangible to worry over ever since I had returned from Europe a few weeks earlier, and had made my home, including a garden, obligate chicken coop, and garage, on the Jersey side where the street car conductors are still polite and where I could get a good view over the Palisades.

Rest—that’s what I needed—and I divided my time between my chickens and some tattered copies of “Le Vicomte de Bragelonne” and “Aucassin et Nicolette”; and for awhile at least I was childishly, ridiculously happy. What if the little hamlet where I lived was grey and drab and prosaic? It was the very medicine for me. It spelled forgetting—forgetting what had gone before—what had wound up with the cheerful message quoted above.

Nothing remained to remind me of the whole eighteen months—those months pregnant with excitement, adventure, and forebodings—but Cajetano Maria Mascasenhas, the Goanese half-caste. I had taken him to America with me. In the past the man had risked his life for me. He had stuck by me through thick and thin. So now I gave him asylum and bread. It was the least I could do.

And he repaid me with a doglike devotion which was a little embarrassing to me and which at times brought a lump into my throat.

And then, overnight it seemed to me, a subtle change crept into the manners and the behavior of the Goanese.

He took to staring at me for long seconds in a frightfully embarrassing, appealing manner, like some dumb animal; his whole soul self-involved, enigmatic, encircled by superstitious, sybilline speculations.

At other times, chiefly when he imagined himself unobserved, his lips would straighten into a thin, sneering line; a purple-black, opalescent light would come into his deep-brown eyes; his whole attitude, his carriage, the poise of his head, the very gestures of his frail, high-veined hands would give me a sudden impression of arrogance and defiance; yes, and of hatred.

I could never nail him. For never did he speak an arrogant word; never did he do anything which he should not have done. But there was something about him which I did not understand; and which, therefore, I did not like.

But then I am a prosaic, matter-of-fact sort of a chap. And so I decided to banish this impression from my conscious memory as something altogether incredible, altogether ridiculous.

So matters drifted along for several sleepy weeks.

Finally one night—and I shall never cease to remember the drab, gray, inarticulate horror of it—a strange thing happened.

I was reading Williams’ Grammar, rubbing up my Chinese a bit, when Mascasenhas came into the library with some letters. He stepped directly in front of me, bowing in his usual feline manner. I took the letters. He straightened up, and as he did so it seemed to me that there was a faint smudge of scarlet on his forehead.

It was very strange. I can’t quite express it with the written word. But the smudge was faint, very faint, very evasive; and yet it was starkly vivid.

I spoke instinctively, without thinking:

“What’s that scarlet mark on your forehead, Mascasenhas?”

The Goanese looked at me. He shivered like a tree cut away from its supporting roots. His olive skin turned a dull dead white.

“A scarlet mark, Mr. Vandewater?” His words broke and splintered. “Surely—not a scarlet mark —surely not—”

His voice snapped off in mid air. He stepped in front of a large Louis-Seize mirror which is the pride of my library and looked at himself in a searching, intent manner.

Then he turned to me again. His face had regained its natural color. His voice was low and steady.

“No, master. You are mistaken. There is no scarlet mark.”

I looked at him again. And he was right. There was no mark on his forehead. Not even the faintest trace. And yet, two minutes ago I could have sworn that—

No, no, no! It must have been my wretched imagination, perhaps an optic illusion, which had been fooling me. For I could have sworn on a stack of Bibles ten feet high that a scarlet mark had been on the man’s forehead; a scarlet mark which, in its hazy outlines, resembled the dread caste-mark of Doorgha, the black-faced Hindu goddess of destruction.

I tried to steady my nerves. I poured myself a stiff measure of bourbon. But the impression refused to budge.

My nerves twitched and ached. Peace had flown out of the window, and my little suburban home had lost its charm—had lost the clean scent of its sheltered security.”

Excerpt From: Achmed Abdullah. “The Blue-Eyed Manchu.”