Melville Davisson Post

“ Maine read the secret message in his emotionless drawl:
“'The American is destroyed and his accursed work is destroyed with him. Send the news to Bangkok and west to Burma. The treasures of India are saved.'”
I cried out in astonishment.
“An assassin! The creature was an assassin!”
Sir Henry's drawl lengthened.
“It's Lal Gupta,” he said, “the cleverest Oriental in the whole of Asia. The jewel traders sent him to watch Hudson, and to kill him if he was ever able to get his formulas worked out. They must have paid him an incredible sum.” ”

“ We were being content with crude imitation colors in our commercial glass, when we could quite as easily have the actual structure and the actual luster of the jewel in it. We were painfully hunting over the earth, and its bowels, for a few crystals and prettily colored stones which we hoarded and treasured, when in a manufacturing laboratory we could easily produce them, more perfect than nature, and in unlimited quantity.
Now, if you want to understand what I am hinting here about Hudson, you must think about this thing as a scientific possibility and not as a fantastic notion. ”

“ I suppose there is no longer any doubt about the fact that Hudson was one of those gigantic human intelligences who sometimes appear in the world, and by their immense conceptions dwarf all human knowledge—a sort of mental monster that we feel nature has no right to produce. ”

“ Not even this big, yellow, servile creature who took exclusive care of him in the house was allowed to enter, except under Hudson's eye. What he saw in the final scenes of the tragedy, he saw looking in through a crack under the door. The earlier things he noticed when he put logs on the fire at dark.
Time is hardly a measure for the activities of the mind. These reflections winged by in a scarcely perceptible interval of it. They have taken me some time to write out here, but they crowded past while the big Oriental was speaking—in the pause between his words. ”

“ He did not move. The steady light threw half of his face into shadow. But in the other half every feature stood out sharply as in a delicate etching. It had that refined sharpness and distinction which immense moments of stress stamp on the human face. He did not move, and there was no sound.
“I have said, Excellency, that my angle of vision along the crevice of the doorsill was sharply cut midway of this now enlarged fireplace. From the direction and lift of the Master's face, he was watching something above this line and directly over the pedestal of the andiron. ”

“ Again Sir Henry regarded me with his ironical smile.
“Perhaps,” he drawled, “there is some explanation in the report in your pocket, to the Monastic Head. It's only a theory, you know.”
He smiled, showing his white, even teeth.
We went into the superintendent's room, and sat down by a smoldering fire of coals in the grate. I handed Maine the roll of vellum. It was in one of the Shan dialects. He read it aloud. With the addition of certain formal expressions, it contained precisely the Oriental's testimony before the court, and no more. ”

“ And he squatted down on the dirty floor by Hudson's camp-stool.
Now, that's precisely the truth. I suppose any ordinary person would have started no end of fuss. But not Hudson, and not, I think, Giovanni. There's the altitude that we can't understand in a genius—did you ever know a man with an inventive mind who doubted a miracle? A thing like that did not seem unreasonable to Hudson.
The two men spent the remainder of the night looking at the present that the creature brought Hudson in his prayer-carpet. They wanted to know where the Oriental got it, and that's how his story came out. ”

“ Suppose we should suddenly discover that pure gold could be produced by treating common yellow clay with sulphuric acid, or that some genius should set up a machine on the border of the Sahara that received sand at one end and turned out sacked wheat at the other! What, then, would our hoarded gold be worth, or the wheat-lands of Australia, Canada or our Northwest?
The illustrations are fantastic. But the thing Hudson was after was a practical fact. He had it on the way. Giovanni and Lord Bayless Trusley were convinced that the man would work out the formulas. ”

“ Yet it seemed impossible—at least, it seemed impossible for me—to consider this great vital hulk of a man as a monk of one of the oldest religious orders in the world. Every common, academic conception of such a monk he distinctly negatived. ”

“ I watched, also, flattening my face against the sill, for the thing to appear.
“And it did appear.
“A naked foot became slowly visible, as though some one were descending with extreme care from the elevation of the andiron to the great marble hearth, under this strange enlargement, now some distance below.”
THE big Oriental paused, and down at me.
“I knew then, Excellency, that the Master was lost! The creative energies of the Spirit suffer no division of worship; those of the body must be wholly denied. ”

“ The big Oriental paused and made a gesture outward with his fingers, as of one dismissing an absurdity.
“No living human being could have been concealed in that room. There is only the bare floor, the Master's table and the fireplace. ”