by John Buchan
The events of the night before were perfectly clear. I recalled every detail of the Thursday Club dinner, Sandy’s brusqueness, my walk back with Medina, my admiration of his great library. I remembered that I had been drowsy there and thought that I had probably bored him. But I was utterly at a loss to account for my wretched condition. It could not have been the dinner; or the wine, for I had not drunk much, and in any case I have a head like cast iron; or the weak whisky-and-soda in Medina’s house. I staggered to my feet and looked at my tongue in the glass. It was all right, so there could be nothing the matter with my digestion.
You are to understand that the account I have just written was pieced together as events came back to me, and that at 10 a.m. the next morning I remembered nothing of it – nothing but the incidents up to my sitting down in Medina’s library, and the name and address of a doctor I had never heard of. I concluded that I must have got some infernal germ, probably botulism, and was in for a bad illness. I wondered dismally what kind of fool I had made of myself before Medina, and still more dismally what was going to happen to me. I decided to wire for Mary when I had seen a doctor, and to get as soon as possible into a nursing home. I had never had an illness in my life, except malaria, and I was as nervous as a cat.
But after I had a cup of tea I felt a little better, and inclined to get up. A cold bath relieved my headache, and I was able to shave and dress. It was while I was shaving that I observed the first thing which made me puzzle about the events of the previous evening. The valet who attended to me had put out the contents of my pockets on the dressing-table – my keys, watch, loose silver, notecase, and my pipe and pouch. Now I carry my pipe in a little leather case, and, being very punctilious in my habits, I invariably put it back in the case when it is empty. But the case was not there, though I remembered laying it on the table beside me in Medina’s room, and, moreover, the pipe was still half-full of unsmoked tobacco. I rang for the man, and learned that he had found the pipe in the pocket of my dinner jacket, but no case. He was positive, for he knew my ways and had been surprised to find my pipe so untidily pocketed.
I had a light breakfast in the coffee-room, and as I ate it I kept wondering as to what exactly I had been doing the night before. Odd little details were coming back to me; in particular, a recollection of some great effort which had taken all the strength out of me. Could I have been drugged? Not the Thursday Club madeira. Medina’s whisky-and-soda? The idea was nonsense; in any case a drugged man does not have a clean tongue the next morning.
I interviewed the night porter, for I thought he might have something to tell me.
‘Did you notice what hour I came home last night?’ I asked.
‘It was this morning, Sir Richard,’ the man replied, with the suspicion of a grin. ‘About half-past three, it would be, or twenty minutes to four.’
‘God bless my soul!’ I exclaimed. ‘I had no notion it was so late. I sat up talking with a friend.’
‘You must have been asleep in the car, Sir Richard, for the chauffeur had to wake you, and you were that drowsy I thought I’d better take you upstairs myself. The bedrooms on the top floor is not that easy found.’
‘I didn’t drop a pipe case?’ I asked.
‘No, sir.’ The man’s discreet face revealed that he thought I had been dining too well but was not inclined to blame me for it.
By luncheon-time I had decided that I was not going to be ill, for there was no longer anything the matter with my body except a certain stiffness in the joints and the ghost of a headache behind my eyes. But my mind was in a precious confusion. I had stayed in Medina’s room till after three, and had not been conscious of anything that happened there after, say, half-past eleven. I had left finally in such a state that I had forgotten my pipe-case, and had arrived at the Club in somebody’s car – probably Medina’s – so sleepy that I had to be escorted upstairs, and had awoke so ill that I thought I had botulism. What in Heaven’s name had happened?
I fancy that the fact that I had resisted the influence brought to bear on me with my mind, though tongue and limbs had been helpless, enabled me to remember what the wielder of the influence had meant to be forgotten. At any rate bits of that strange scene began to come back. I remembered the uncanny brightness – remembered it not with fear but with acute indignation. I vaguely recalled that I had repeated nonsense to somebody’s dictation, but what it was I could not yet remember. The more I thought of it the angrier I grew. Medina must have been responsible, though to connect him with it seemed ridiculous when I thought of what I had seen of him. Had he been making me the subject of some scientific experiment? If so, it was infernal impertinence. Anyhow it had failed – that was a salve to my pride – for I had kept my head through it. The doctor had been right who had compared me with Table Mountain.
I had got thus far in my reflections, when I recollected that which put a different complexion on the business. Suddenly I remembered the circumstances in which I had made Medina’s acquaintance. From him Tom Greenslade had heard the three facts which fitted in with the jingle which was the key to the mystery that I was sworn to unravel. Hitherto I had never thought of this dazzling figure except as an ally. Was it possible that he might be an enemy? The turn-about was too violent for my mind to achieve it in one movement. I swore to myself that Medina was straight, that it was sheer mania to believe that a gentleman and a sportsman could ever come within hailing distance of the hideous underworld which Macgillivray had revealed to me… But Sandy had not quite taken to him. I thanked my stars that anyhow I had said nothing to him about my job. I did not really believe that there was any doubt about him, but I realized that I must walk very carefully.
And then another idea came to me. Hypnotism had been tried on me, and it had failed. But those who tried it must believe from my behaviour that it had succeeded. If so, somehow and somewhere they would act on that belief. It was my business to encourage it. I was sure enough of myself to think that, now I was forewarned, no further hypnotic experiments could seriously affect me. But let them show their game, let me pretend to be helpless wax in their hands. Who ‘they’ were I had still to find out.
I had a great desire to get hold of Sandy and talk it over, but though I rang up several of his lairs I could not find him. Then I decided to see Dr Newhover, for I was certain that that name had come to me out of the medley of last night. So I telephoned and made an appointment with him for that afternoon, and four o’clock saw me starting out to walk to Wimpole Street.
CHAPTER SIX
The House in Gospel Oak
It was a dry March afternoon, with one of those fantastic winds which seem to change their direction hourly, and contrive to be in a man’s face at every street corner. The dust was swirling in the gutters, and the scent of hyacinth and narcissus from the flower-shops was mingled with that bleak sandy smell which is London’s foretaste of spring. As I crossed Oxford Street I remember thinking what an odd pointless business I had drifted into. I saw nothing for it but to continue drifting and see what happened. I was on my way to visit a doctor of whom I knew nothing, about some ailment which I was not conscious of possessing. I didn’t even trouble to make a plan, being content to let chance have the guiding of me.
The house was one of those solid dreary erections which have usually the names of half a dozen doctors on their front doors. But in this case there was only one – Dr M. Newhover. The parlourmaid took me into the usual drab waiting-room furnished with Royal Academy engravings, fumed oak, and an assortment of belated picture-papers, and almost at once she returned and ushered me into the consulting-room. This again was of the most ordinary kind – glazed bookcases, wash-hand basin in a corner, roll-top desk, a table with a medical journal or two and some leather cases. And Dr Newhover at first sight seemed nothing out of the common. He was a youngish man, with high cheekbones, a high forehead, and a quantity of blond hair brushed straight back from it. He wore a pince-nez, and when he removed it showed pale prominent blue eyes. From
his look I should have said that his father had called himself Neuhofer.
He greeted me with a manner which seemed to me to be at once patronizing and dictatorial. I wondered if he was some tremendous swell in his profession, of whom I ought to have heard. ‘Well, Mr Hannay, what can I do for you?’ he said. I noticed that he called me ‘Mr’, thought I had given ‘Sir Richard’ both on the telephone and to the parlourmaid. It occurred to me that someone had already been speaking of me to him, and that he had got the name wrong in his memory.
I thought I had better expound the alarming symptoms with which I had awakened that morning.
‘I don’t know what’s gone wrong with me,’ I said. ‘I’ve a pain behind my eyeballs, and my whole head seems muddled up. I feel drowsy and slack, and I’ve got a weakness in my legs and back like a man who has just had flu.’
He made me sit down and proceeded to catechize me about my health. I said it had been good enough, but I mentioned my old malaria and several concussions, and I pretended to be pretty nervous about my condition. Then he went through the whole bag of tricks – sounding me with a stethoscope, testing my blood pressure, and hitting me hard below the knee to see if I reacted. I had to play up to my part, but upon my soul I came near reacting too vigorously to some of his questions and boxing his ears. Always he kept up that odd, intimate, domineering, rather offensive manner.
He made me lie down on a couch while he fingered the muscles of my neck and shoulder and seemed to be shampooing my head with his long chilly hands. I was by this time feeling rather extra well, but I managed to invent little tendernesses here and there and a lot of alarming mental aberrations. I wondered if he were not getting suspicious, for he asked abruptly: ‘Have you had these symptoms long?’ so I thought it better to return to the truth, and told him ‘only since this morning’.
At last he bade me get up, took off the tortoise-shell spectacles he had been wearing and resumed his pince-nez, and while I was buttoning my collar seemed to be sunk in reflection. He made me sit in the patient’s chair, and stood up and looked down on me with a magisterial air that made me want to laugh.
‘You are suffering,’ he said, ‘from a somewhat abnormal form of a common enough complaint. Just as the effects of a concussion are often manifest only some days after the blow, so the results of nervous strain may take a long time to develop. I have no doubt that in spite of your good health you have during recent years been working your mind and body at an undue pressure and now this morning quite suddenly you reap the fruits. I don’t want to frighten you, Mr Hannay, but neurosis is so mysterious a disease in its working that we must take it seriously, especially at its first manifestations. There are one or two points in your case which I am not happy about. There is, for example, a certain congestion – or what seems to me a congestion – in the nerve centres of the neck and head. That may be induced by the accidents – concussion and the like – which you have told me of, or it may not. The true cure must, of course, take time, and rest and change of scene are obligatory. You are fond of sport? A fisherman?’
I told him I was.
‘Well, a little later I may prescribe a salmon river in Norway. The remoteness of the life from ordinary existence and the contemplation of swift running water have had wonderful results with some of my patients. But Norway is not possible till May, and in the meantime I am going to order you specific treatment. Yes, I mean massage, but by no means ordinary massage. That science is still in its infancy, and its practitioners are only fumbling at the doorway. But now and then we find a person, man or woman, with a kind of extra sense for disentangling and smoothing out muscular and nervous abnormalities. I am going to send you to such an one. The address may surprise you, but you are man of the world enough to know that medical skill is not confined to the area between Oxford Street and the Marylebone Road.’ He took off his glasses, and smiled.
Then he wrote something on a slip of paper and handed it to me. I read ‘Madame Breda, 4 Palmyra Square, N.W.’
‘Right!’ I said. ‘Much obliged to you. I hope Madame Breda will cure this infernal headache. When can I see her?’
‘I can promise you she will cure the headache. She is a Swedish lady who has lived in London since the War, and is so much an enthusiast in her art that she will only now and then take a private patient. For the most part she gives her skill free to the children’s hospitals. But she will not refuse me. As for beginning, I should lose no time for the sake of your own comfort. What about tomorrow morning?’
‘Why not tonight? I have nothing to do, and I want to be quit of my headache before bedtime. Why shouldn’t I go on there now?’
‘No reason in the world. but I must make an appointment. Madame is on the telephone. Excuse me a moment.’
He left the room and returned in a few minutes to say that he had made an appointment for seven o’clock. ‘It is an outlandish place to get to, but most taxi-drivers know it. If your man doesn’t, tell him to drive to Gospel Oak, and then any policeman will direct you.’
I had my cheque-book with me, but he didn’t want his fee, saying that he was not done with me. I was to come back in a week and report progress. As I left I had a strong impression of a hand as cold as a snake, pale bulging eyes, and cheekbones like a caricature of a Scotsman. An odd but rather impressive figure was Dr Newhover. He didn’t look a fool, and if I hadn’t known the uncommon toughness of my constitution I might have been unsettled by his forebodings.
I walked down to Oxford Street and had tea in a tea-shop. As I sat among the chattering typists and shopboys I kept wondering whether I was not wasting my time and behaving like a jackass. Here was I, as fit as a hunter, consulting specialists and visiting unknown masseuses in North London, and all with no clear purpose. In less than twenty-four hours I had tumbled into a perfectly crazy world, and for a second I had a horrid doubt whether the craziness was not inside my mind. Had something given in my brain last night in Medina’s room, so that now I was what people call ‘wanting’? I went over the sequence of events again, and was reassured by remembering that in it all I had kept my head. I had not got to the stage of making theories; I was still only waiting on developments, and I couldn’t see any other way before me. I must, of course, get hold of Sandy, but first let me see what this massage business meant. It might all be perfectly square; I might have remembered Dr Newhover’s name by a queer trick of memory – heard it, perhaps, from some friend – and that remarkable practitioner might be quite honest. But then I remembered the man’s manner – I was quite clear that he knew something of me, that someone had told him to expect me. Then it occurred to me that I might be doing a rash thing in going off to an unknown house in a seedy suburb. So I went into a public telephone-booth, rang up the Club, and told the porter that if Colonel Arbuthnot called, I was at 4 Palmyra Square, N.W. – I made him write down the address – and would be back before ten o’clock.
I was rather short of exercise, so I decided to walk, since I had plenty of time. Strangely enough, the road was pretty much that which I had taken on that June day of 1914 when I had been waiting on Bullivant and the Black Stone gentry, and had walked clean out of London to pass the time.* Then, I remembered, I had been thrilling with wild anticipation, but now I was an older and much wiser man, and though I was sufficiently puzzled I could curb my restlessness with philosophy. I went up Portland Place, past the Regent’s Park, till I left the houses of the well-to-do behind me, and got into that belt of mean streets which is the glacis of the northern heights. Various policemen directed me, and I enjoyed the walk as if I had been exploring, for London is always to me an undiscovered country. I passed yards which not so long ago had been patches of market-garden, and terraces, sometime pretentious, and now sinking into slums; for London is like the tropical bush – if you don’t exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of the slums, will break in. The streets were full of clerks and shop-girls waiting for buses, and workmen from the St Pancras and Clerkenwell factories going home. The w
ind was rising, and in the untidy alleys was stirring up a noisome dust; but as the ground rose it blew cleaner and seemed to bring from Kentish fields and the Channel the tonic freshness of spring. I stopped for a little and watched behind me the plain of lights, which was London, quivering in the dark-blue windy dusk.
It was almost dark when at last, after several false casts, I came into Palmyra Square. It was a square only in name, for one side was filled with a warehouse of sorts, and another straggled away in nests of small brick houses. One side was a terrace of artisans’ dwellings, quite new, each with a tiny bow-window and names like ‘Chatsworth’ and ‘Kitchener Villa’. The fourth side, facing south, had once had a certain dignity and the builder who had designed the place seventy years ago had thought, no doubt, that he was creating a desirable residential quarter. There the houses stood apart, each in a patch of garden, which may at one time have had lawns and flowers. Now these gardens were mere dusty yards, the refuse of tin cans and bits of paper, and only a blackened elm, an ill-grown privet hedge, and some stunted lilacs told of the more cheerful past. On one house was the brass plate of a doctor, on another that of a teacher of music; several advertised lodgings to let; the steps were untidy, the gates askew on their hinges, and over everything was written the dreary legend of a shabby gentility on the very brink of squalor.
Number 4 was smarter than the others, and its front door had been newly painted a vivid green. I rang the bell, which was an electric one, and the door was opened by a maid who looked sufficiently respectable. When I entered I saw that the house was on a more generous scale than I had thought, and had once, no doubt, been the home of some comfortable citizen. The hall was not the tank-like thing of the small London dwelling, and the room into which I was ushered, though small, was well furnished and had an electric fire in the grate. It seemed to be a kind of business room, for there was a telephone, a big safe, and on the shelves a line of lettered boxes for papers. I began to think that Madame Breda, whoever she might be, must be running a pretty prosperous show on ordinary business lines.
