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We were heading now for that strange settlement off the West India Dock Road, which, bounded by Limehouse Causeway and Pennyfields, and narrowly confined within four streets, composes an unique Chinatown, a miniature of that at Liverpool, and of the greater one in San Francisco. Inspired with an idea which promised hopefully, I raised the speaking tube.
But certainly I must seek the fresh air." Going up the steps and out through the door above which the blue lantern burned, we came to the street, turned to the left, to the left again, and soon were threading that maze of narrow ways which complicates the map of Pennyfields. I felt somewhat recovered.
He lighted his pipe, and looking about him in a sort of vaguely aggressive way: "Last night," he resumed, "after I was chucked out of the Dock Gates, I made up my mind to go and smoke a pipe with old Ma Lorenzo. Round I goes to Pennyfields, and she don't seem glad to see me. There's nobody there only me. Not like the old days when you 'ad to book your seat in advance." He laughed gruffly.
"Neither of 'em!" cried the fireman, some evidence of animation appearing in his face; "I been at Kwen Lung's." "In Pennyfields?" "That's 'im, the old bloke with the big joss. I allers goes to see Ma Lorenzo when I'm in Port o' London. I've seen 'er for the last time, mates." He banged a big and dirty hand upon the table.
From Thessaly's flat they set out upon many a strange excursion, one night visiting a private gaming-house whose patrons figured in the pages of Debrett, and, perhaps on the following evening, Thessaly's car would take them to a point in the West India Dock Road, from whence, roughly attired, they would plunge into the Asiatic underworld which lies hidden beneath the names of Three Colt Street and Pennyfields.
"I want you to run down to Pennyfields with me." "Some development in the Kwen Lung business?" "Hardly a development, but I'm not satisfied, Knox. I hate to be beaten." Twenty minutes later I was sitting in Harley's study, watching him restlessly promenading up and down before the fire. "The police searched Kwen Lung's place from foundation to tiles," he said. "I was there myself.
"Not a stray cat," said Dunbar with emphasis, "can approach Limehouse Causeway or Pennyfields, or any of the environs of the place, to-morrow night after ten o'clock, without the fact being reported to me!
He even goes so far as to say that he has heard as a sort of legend of the existence of a very large Carmelite monastery, accommodating over two hundred brothers, which stood somewhere adjoining the Thames within the area now covered by Limehouse Causeway and Pennyfields.
Before the door of a house in Pennyfields which closely resembled that which we had left in Wade Street, in that it was flatly uninteresting, dirty and commonplace, we paused. There was no sign of life about the place and no lights showed at any of the windows, which appeared as dim cavities eyeless sockets in the gray face of the building, as dawn proclaimed the birth of a new day.
How I opened the street door I know not, but even as I stepped out into the squalid alleys of Pennyfields the cloaked figure was beside me. A hand was laid upon my shoulder. "Listen!" commanded a deep voice. Clearly, with an eerie sweetness, an evil, hellish beauty indescribable, the wailing of a Stradivarius violin crept to my ears from the room above.
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