The Sleuth of St. James Street | Page 2

and in any
quantity - by the carload. Imagine it; sheet ruby, sheet emerald, all the
beauty and luster of jewels in the windows of the corner drugstore!
And there is another thing that I want you to think about. Think about
the immense destruction of value - not to us, so greatly, for our stocks
of precious stones are not large; but the thing meant, practically, wiping
out all the assembled wealth of Asia except the actual earth and its
structures.
The destruction of value was incredible.
Put the thing some other way and consider it. 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 Rodman was after was a
practical fact. He had it on the way. Giovanni and Lord Bayless
Truxley were convinced that the man would work out the formula.
They tried, over their signatures, to prepare the world for it.
The whole of Asia was appalled. The rajahs of the native states in India
prepared a memorial and sent it to the British Government.
The thing came out after the mysterious, incredible tragedy. I should
not have written that final sentence. I want you to think, just now, about

the great hulk of a man that sat in his big chair beyond me at the
window.
It was like Rodman to turn up with an outlandish human creature
attending him hand and foot. How the thing came about reads like a lie;
it reads like a lie; the wildest lie that anybody ever put forward to
explain a big yellow Oriental following one about.
But it was no lie. You could not think up a lie to equal the actual things
that happened to Rodman. Take the way he died!....
The thing began in India. Rodman had gone there to consult with the
Marchese Giovanni concerning some molecular theory that was
involved in his formulas. Giovanni was digging up a buried temple on
the northern border of the Punjab. One night, in the explorer's tent, near
the excavations, this inscrutable creature walked in on Rodman. No one
knew how he got into the tent or where he came from.
Giovanni told about it. The tent-flap simply opened, and the big
Oriental appeared. He had something under his arm rolled up in a
prayer-carpet. He gave no attention to Giovanni, but he salaamed like a
coolie to the little American.
"Master," he said, "you were hard to find. I have looked over the world
for you."
And he squatted down on the dirty floor by Rodman's camp stool.
Now, that's precisely the truth. I suppose any ordinary person would
have started no end of fuss. But not Rodman, and not, I think, Giovanni.
There's the attitude 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 Rodman.
The two men spent the remainder of the night looking at the present
that the creature brought Rodman in his prayer-carpet. They wanted to
know where the Oriental got it, and that's how his story came out.

He was something - searcher, seems our nearest English word to it - in
the great Shan Monastery on the southeastern plateau of the Gobi. He
was looking for Rodman because he had the light - here was another
word that the two men could find no term in any modern language to
translate; a little flame, was the literal meaning.
The present was from the treasure-room of the monastery; the very
carpet around it, Giovanni said, was worth twenty thousand lire. There
was another thing that came out in the talk that Giovanni afterward
recalled. Rodman was to accept the present and the man who brought it
to him. The Oriental would protect him, in every way, in every
direction, from things visible and invisible. He made quite a speech
about it. But, there was one thing from which he could not protect him.
The Oriental used a lot of his ancient words to explain, and he did not
get it very clear. He seemed to mean that the creative Forces of the
spirit would not tolerate a division of worship with the creative forces
of the body - the celibate notion in the monastic idea.
Giovanni thought Rodman did not understand it; he thought he himself
understood it better. The monk was pledging Rodman to a high virtue,