by John Buchan
Presently she appeared to be satisfied. She said a word to the child, whose feet I could hear cross the room. There was a sound of opening doors – my ears, remember, were free of the bandages and my hearing is acute – and then it seemed to me that the couch on which I lay began slowly to move. I had a moment of alarm and nearly gave away the show by jerking up my head. The couch seemed to travel very smoothly on rails, and I was conscious that I had passed through the folding doors and was now in another room. Then the movement stopped, and I realized that I was in an entirely different atmosphere. I realized, too, that a new figure had come on the scene.
There was no word spoken, but I had the queer inexplicable consciousness of human presences which is independent of sight and hearing. I have said that the atmosphere of the place had changed. There was a scent in the air which anywhere else I would have sworn was due to peat smoke, and mixed with it another intangible savour which I could not put a name to, but which did not seem to belong to London at all, or to any dwelling, but to some wild out-of-doors… And then I was aware of noiseless fingers pressing my temples.
They were not the plump capable hands of Madame Breda. Nay, they were as fine and tenuous as a wandering wind, but behind their airy lightness was a hint of steel, as if they could choke as well as caress. I lay supine, trying to keep my breathing regular, since I was supposed to be asleep, but I felt an odd excitement rising in my heart. And then it quieted, for the fingers seemed to be smoothing it away… A voice was speaking in a tongue of which I knew not a word, not speaking to me, but repeating, as it were, a private incantation. And the touch and voice combined to bring me nearer to losing my wits than even on the night before, nearer than I have ever been in all my days.
The experience was so novel and overpowering that I find it hard to give even a rough impression of it. Let me put it this way. A man at my time of life sees old age not so very far distant, and the nearer he draws to the end of his journey the more ardently he longs for his receding youth. I do not mean that, if some fairy granted him the gift, he would go back to boyhood; few of us would choose such a return; but he clothes all his youth in a happy radiance and aches to recapture the freshness and wonder with which he then looked on life. He treasures, like a mooning girl, stray sounds and scents and corners of landscape, which for a moment push the door ajar… As I lay blindfolded on that couch I felt mysterious hands and voices plucking on my behalf at the barrier of the years and breaking it down. I was escaping into a delectable country, the Country of the Young, and I welcomed the escape. Had I been hypnotized I should beyond doubt have moved like a sheep whithersoever this shepherd willed.
But I was awake, and, though on the very edge of surrender, I managed to struggle above the tides. Perhaps to my waking self the compulsion was too obvious and aroused a faint antagonism. Anyhow I had already begun a conscious resistance when the crooning voice spoke in English.
‘You are Richard Hannay,’ it said. ‘You have been asleep, but I have wakened you. You are happy in the world in which you have wakened?’
My freedom was now complete, for I had begun to laugh, silently, far down at the bottom of my heart. I remembered last night, and the performance in Medina’s house which had all day been growing clearer in my memory. I saw it as farce, and this as farce, and at the coming of humour the spell died. But it was up to me to make some kind of an answer, if I wanted to keep up the hoax, so I did my best to screw out an eerie sleep-walker’s voice.
‘I am happy,’ I said, and my pipe sounded like the twittering of sheeted ghosts.
‘You wish to wake often in this world?’
I signified by a croak that I did.
‘But to wake you must first sleep, and I alone can make you sleep and wake. I exact a price, Richard Hannay. Will you pay my price?’
I was puzzled about the voice. It had not the rich foreign tones of Madame Breda, but it had a very notable accent, which I could not place. At one moment it seemed to have the lilt which you find in Wester Ross, but there were cadences in it which were not Highland. Also, its timbre was curious – very light and thin like a child’s. Was it possible that the queer little girl I had seen was the sibyl? No, I decided; the hands had not been a child’s hands.
‘I will pay any price,’ I said, which seemed to be the answer required of me.
‘Then you are my servant when I summon you. Now, sleep again.’
I had never felt less like being anyone’s servant. The hands fluttered again around my temples, but they had no more effect on me than the buzzing of flies. I had an insane desire to laugh, which I repressed by thinking of the idiotic pointlessness of my recent doings… I felt my couch slide backwards, and heard the folding doors open again and close. Then I felt my bandages being deftly undone, and I lay with the light on my closed eyelids, trying to look like a sleeping warrior on a tomb. Someone was pressing below my left ear and I recognized the old hunter’s method of bringing a man back gently from sleep to consciousness, so I set about the job of making a workmanlike awakening. I hope I succeeded. Anyhow I must have looked dazed enough, for the lamps hurt my eyes after the muffled darkness.
I was back in the first room, with only Madame beside me. She beamed on me with the friendliest eyes, and helped me on with my coat and collar. ‘I have had you under close observation,’ she said, ‘for sleep often reveals where the ragged ends of the nerves lie. I have made certain deductions, which I will report to Dr Newhover… No, there is no fee. Dr Newhover will make arrangements.’ She bade me goodbye in the best professional manner, and I descended the steps into Palmyra Square as if I had been spending a commonplace hour having my back massaged for lumbago.
Once in the open air I felt abominably tired and very hungry. By good luck I hadn’t gone far when I picked up a taxi and told it to drive to the Club. I looked at my watch and saw that it was later than I thought – close on ten o’clock. I had been several hours in the house, and small wonder I was weary.
I found Sandy wandering restlessly about the hall. ‘Thank God!’ he said when he saw me. ‘Where the devil have you been, Dick? The porter gave me a crazy address in North London. You look as if you wanted a drink.’
‘I feel as if I wanted food,’ I said. ‘I have a lot to tell you, but I must eat first. I’ve had no dinner.’
Sandy sat opposite me while I fed, and forbore to ask questions.
‘What put you in such a bad humour last night?’ I asked.
He looked very solemn. ‘Lord knows. No, that’s not true. I know well enough. I didn’t take to Medina.’
‘Now I wonder why?’
‘I wonder too. But I’m just like a dog: I take a dislike to certain people at first sight, and the queer thing is that my instinct isn’t often wrong.’
‘Well you’re pretty well alone in your opinion. What sets you against him? He is well-mannered, modest, a good sportsman, and you can see he’s as clever as they make.’
‘Maybe. But I’ve got a notion that the man is one vast lie. However, let’s put it that I reserve my opinion. I have various inquiries to make.’
We found the little back smoking-room on the first floor empty, and when I had lit my pipe and got well into an armchair, Sandy drew up another at my elbow. ‘Now, Dick,’ he said.
‘First,’ I said, ‘it may interest you to learn that Medina dabbles in hypnotism.’
‘I knew that,’ he said, ‘from his talk last night.’
‘How on earth –?’
‘Oh, from a casual quotation he used. It’s a longish story, which I’ll tell you later. Go on.’
I began from the break-up of the Thursday Club dinner and told him all I could remember of my hours in Medina’s house. As a story it met with an immense success. Sandy was so interested that he couldn’t sit in his chair, but must get up and stand on the hearthrug before me. I told him that I had wakened up feeling uncommonly ill, with a blank mind except for the address of a doctorman in Wimpole Street, and how during the day recollection had
gradually come back to me. He questioned me like a cross-examining counsel.
‘Bright light – ordinary hypnotic property. Face, which seemed detached – that’s a common enough thing in Indian magic. You say you must have been asleep, but were also in a sense awake and could hear and answer questions, and that you felt a kind of antagonism all the time which kept your will alive. You’re probably about the toughest hypnotic proposition in the world, Dick, and you can thank God for that. Now, what were the questions? A summons to forget your past and begin as a new creature, subject to the authority of a master. You assented, making private reservations of which the hypnotist knew nothing. If you had not kept your head and made those reservations, you would have remembered nothing at all of last night but there would have been a subconscious bond over your will. As it is, you’re perfectly free: only the man who tried to monkey with you doesn’t know that. Therefore you begin by being one up on the game. You know where you are and he doesn’t know where he is.’
‘What do you suppose Medina meant by it? It was infernal impertinence anyhow. But was it Medina? I seem to remember another man in the room before I left.’
‘Describe him.’
‘I’ve only a vague picture – a sad grey-faced fellow.’
‘Well, assume for the present that the experimenter was Medina. There’s such a thing, remember, as spiriting away a man’s recollection of his past, and starting him out as a waif in a new world. I’ve heard in the East of such performances, and of course it means that the memory-less being is at the mercy of the man who has stolen his memory. That is probably not the intention in your case. They wanted only to establish a subconscious control. But it couldn’t be done at once with a fellow of your antecedents, so they organized a process. They suggested to you in your trance a doctor’s name, and the next stage was his business. You woke feeling very seedy and remembering a doctor’s address, and they argued that you would think that you had been advised about the fellow and make a bee-line for him. Remember, they would assume that you had no recollection of anything else from the night’s doings. Now go ahead and tell me about the chirurgeon. Did you go to see him?’
I continued my story, and at the Wimpole Street episode Sandy laughed long and loud.
‘Another point up in the game. You say you think the leech had been advised of your coming and not by you? By the way, he seems to have talked fairly good sense, but I’d as soon set a hippopotamus for nerves as you.’ He wrote down Dr Newhover’s address in his pocket book. ‘Continuez. You then proceeded, I take it, to 4 Palmyra Square.’
At the next stage of my narrative he did not laugh. I dare say I told it better than I have written it down here, for I was fresh from the experience, and I could see that he was a good deal impressed.
‘A Swedish masseuse and an odd-looking little girl. She puts you to sleep, or thinks she has, and then, when your eyes are bandaged, someone else nearly charms the soul out of you. That sounds big magic. I see the general lines of it, but it is big magic, and I didn’t know that it was practised on these shores. Dick, this is getting horribly interesting. You kept wide awake – you are an old buffalo, you know – but you gave the impression of absolute surrender. Good for you – you are now three points ahead in the game.’
‘Well, but what is the game? I’m hopelessly puzzled.’
‘So am I, but we must work on assumptions. Let us suppose Medina is responsible. He may only be trying to find out the extent of his powers, and selects you as the most difficult subject to be found. You may be sure he knows all about your record. He may be only a vain man experimenting.’
‘In which case,’ I said, ‘I propose to punch his head.’
‘In which case, as you justly observe, you will give yourself the pleasure of punching his head. But suppose that he has got a far deeper purpose, something really dark and damnable. If by his hypnotic power he could make a tool of you, consider what an asset he would have found. A man of your ability and force. I have always said, you remember, that you had a fine natural talent for crime.’
‘I tell you, Sandy, that’s nonsense. It’s impossible that there’s anything wrong – badly wrong – with Medina.’
‘Improbable, but not impossible. We’re taking no chances. And if he were a scoundrel, think what a power he might be with all his talents and charm and popularity.’
Sandy flung himself into a chair and appeared to be meditating. Once or twice he broke silence.
‘I wonder what Dr Newhover meant by talking of a salmon river in Norway. Why not golf at North Berwick?’
And again:
‘You say there was a scent like peat in the room? Peat! You are certain?’
Finally he got up. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘I think I will have a look round the house in Gospel Oak. Gospel Oak, by the way, is a funny name, isn’t it? You say it has electric light. I will visit it as a man from the corporation to see about the meter. Oh, that can easily be managed. Macgillivray will pass the word for me.’
The mention of Macgillivray brought me to attention. ‘Look here,’ I said, ‘I’m simply wasting my time. I got in touch with Medina in order to ask his help, and now I’ve been landed in a set of preposterous experiences which have nothing to do with my job. I must see Macgillivray tomorrow about getting alongside his Shropshire squire. For the present there can be nothing doing with Medina.’
‘Shropshire squire be hanged! You’re an old ass, Dick. For the present there’s everything doing with Medina. You wanted his help. Why? Because he was the next stage in the clue to that nonsensical rhyme. Well, you’ve discovered that there may be odd things about him. You can’t get his help, but you may get something more. You may get the secret itself. Instead of having to burrow into his memory, as you did with Greenslade, you may find it sticking out of his life.’
‘Do you really believe that?’ I asked in some bewilderment.
‘I believe nothing as yet. But it is far the most promising line. He thinks that from what happened last night plus what happened two hours ago you are under his influence, an acolyte, possibly a tool. It may be all quite straight, or it may be most damnably crooked. You have got to find out. You must keep close to him, and foster his illusions, and play up to him for all you’re worth. He is bound to show his hand. You needn’t take any steps on your own account. He’ll give you the lead all right.’
I can’t say I liked the prospect, for I have no love for playacting, but I am bound to admit that Sandy talked sense. I asked him about himself, for I counted on his backing more than I could say.
‘I propose to resume my travels,’ he said. ‘I wish to pursue my studies in the Bibliothèque Nationale of France.’
‘But I thought you were with me in this show.’
‘So I am. I go abroad on your business, as I shall explain to you some day. Also I want to see the man whom we used to call Ram Dass. I believe him to be in Munich at this moment. The day after tomorrow you will read in The Times that Colonel the Master of Clanroyden has gone abroad for an indefinite time on private business.’
‘How long will you be away?’ I groaned.
‘A week perhaps, or a fortnight – or more. And when I come back it may not be as Sandy Arbuthnot.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Some Experiences of a Disciple
I didn’t see Sandy again, for he took the night train for Paris next evening, and I had to go down to Oxford that day to appear as a witness in a running-down case. But I found a note for me at the Club when I got back the following morning. It contained nothing except these words: ‘Coverts drawn blank, no third person in house.’ I had not really hoped for anything from Sandy’s expedition to Palmyra Square, and thought no more about it.
He didn’t return in a week, nor yet in a fortnight, and, realizing that I had only a little more than two months to do my job in, I grew very impatient. But my time was pretty well filled with Medina, as you shall hear.
While I was reading Sandy’s note Turpin turned up, and be
gged me to come for a drive in his new Delage and talk to him. The Marquis de la Tour du Pin was, if possible, more pallid than before, his eyelids heavier, and his gentleness more silken. He drove me miles into the country, away through Windsor Forest, and as we raced at sixty miles an hour he uncovered his soul. He was going mad, it seemed; was, indeed, already mad, and only a slender and doubtless ill-founded confidence in me prevented him shooting himself. He was convinced that Adela Victor was dead, and that no trace of her would ever be found. ‘These policemen of yours – bah!’ he moaned. ‘Only in England can people vanish.’ He concluded, however, that he would stay alive till he had avenged her, for he believed that a good God would some day deliver her murderer into his hands. I was desperately sorry for him, for behind his light gasconading manner there were marks of acute suffering, and indeed in his case I think I should have gone crazy. He asked me for hope, and I gave him it, and told him what I did not believe – that I saw light in the business, and had every confidence that we would restore to him his sweetheart safe and sound. At that he cheered up and wanted to embrace me, thereby jolly nearly sending the Delage into a ditch and us both into eternity. He was burning for something to do, and wanted me to promise that as soon as possible I would inspan him into my team. That made me feel guilty, for I knew I had no team, and nothing you could call a clue; so I talked hastily about Miss Victor, lest he should ask me more.