 CHAPTER IV. I make the acquaintance of a popular man. You may imagine how glad I was to see old Sandy again, for I had not yet set eyes on him since 1916. He had been an intelligence officer with Maud, and then something at Simulah. And after the war had an administrative job in Mesopotamia, or as they call it nowadays, Iraq, he had written to me from all kinds of wareplaces, but he never appeared to be coming home. And what with my marriage and my settling in the country, we seem to be fixed in ruts that were not likely to intersect. I had seen his elder brother's death in the papers, so he was now Master Clan Royden, an heir to the family estates. But I didn't imagine that he would make a scotch lad of him. I never saw a fellow less changed by five years of toil and travel. He was desperately slight and tanned. He had always been that, but the contours of his face were still soft like girls, and his brown eyes were merrier as ever. We stood and stared at each other. Dick, old man, he cried, I'm home for good. Yes, honor bright for months and months, if not years and years. I've got so much to say to you, and I don't know where to begin, but I can't wait now. I'm off to Scotland to see my father. He's my chief concern, where he's getting very frail, but I'll be back in three days. Let's dine together on Tuesday. We were standing at the door of a club, his and mine in a porter, was stowing his baggage into a taxi. Before I could properly realize that it was Sandy, he was waving his hand from the taxi window and disappearing up the street. The sight of him cheered me immensely, and I went on along Paul Mall in good temper. To have Sandy back in England and at call made me feel somehow more substantial, like a commander who knows his reserves are near. When I entered Matt Givory's room, I smiled, and the sight of me woke an unanswered smile on his anxious face. Good man, he said. You look like business. You're to put yourself at my disposal while I give you your bearings. He got out his papers and expounded the whole affair. It was a very queer story, yet the more I looked into it, the thinner my skepticism grew. I am not going to write it all down, or it is not yet time. It would give away certain methods, which have not yet exhausted their usefulness. But before I had gone very far, I took off my hat to these same methods, for they showed amazing patience and ingenuity. It was an odd set of links that made up the chain. There was an importer of Barcelona nuts, the modest officer near Tower Hill. There was a copper company purporting to operate in Spain, who shares were not quoted on the stock exchange, which had a fine office in London Wall, where you could get the best luncheon in the city. There was a respectable, accounted in Glassglau, a French count who was also some kind of Highland lad, and a great supporter of the White Rose League. There was a country gentleman living in Shopsire, who had bought his place after the war, and was a keen writer to Hounds, and a very popular figure in the country. There was a little office not far from Fleet Street, which professed to be the English agency of an American religious magazine. And there was a certain publicist, who was always appealing in the newspapers for help for the distressed populations of Central Europe. I remember his appeals well, for I had myself twice sent him small subscriptions. The way Met Givray had worked out the connection between these gentry filled me with awe. Then he showed me specimens of their work. It was sheer unminigated crime, a sort of selling a bear on a huge scale in the sinking world. The aim of the gang was money, and already they had made scandalous profits. Partly their business was mere, consciousness profiteering, well inside the bounds of the law, such as gambling in falling exchanges, and using every kind of brazen and subtle trick to make their gamble a certainty. Partly it was common fraud of the largest scale. But there were darker sides murder when the victim ran a thought, their schemes, strikes engineered when a wretched industry somewhere or another in the world showed symptoms of reviving shoddy little outburst in shoddy little countries, which increased the tangle. These fellows were the ruckers on the grand scale, merchants of pessimism, giving society another kick downhill whenever it had the chance of finding its balance and then pocketing their profits. Their motive, as I have said, was gain. But that was not the motive of the people they worked through. Their cleverness lay in the fact that they used the fanatics, the moral imbeciles, as McElverry called them, whose key was a wild hatred of something or another, or a raisened belief in inarchy. Behind the smug exploiters lay the whole dreary wastes of half-baked craziness. Mount Giveray gave me examples of how they used these tools. The fellows who had no thought of profit and were ready to sacrifice everything, including their lives for a mad ideal. It was a masterpiece of cold-blooded devilish ingenuity, hideous and yet comic too, for the spectacle of these feverish cranks toiled to create a new heaven and a new earth and thinking themselves a leader of mankind. When they were dancing like puppets at the free will of a few scoundrels engaged in the most ancient pursuits, there was an irony to make the gods laugh. I asked who was their leader. McElveray said he wasn't certain. No one of the gangs seemed to have more authority than the others, and their activities were beautifully specialized, but he agreed that there was probably one mastermind and said grimly that he would know more about that when they were rounded up. The doc will settle that question. How much do they suspect, I ask. Not much. A little, or they would not have taken hostages. But not much, for we have been very careful to make no sign. Only since we have become cognizant of the affair, we have managed very quietly to put a spoke in the wheels of some of their worst enterprises, though I am positive they have no suspicion of it. Also, we have put the break on their propaganda side. They are masters of propaganda, you know, Dick. Have you ever considered what a diabolical weapon that can be? Using all the channels of modern publicity to poison and warp men's minds? It's the most dangerous thing on earth. You can see it cleanly, as I think on the whole we did in the war, but you can use it to establish the most damnable lies. Happily, in the long run, it defeats itself, but only after it has sought the world with mischief. Look at the Irish. They are the cleverest propagandist, extant, and managed to persuade most people that they were brave, generous, humorous, talented, warm-hearted race, cruelly yoked to a dull, mercantile England. When God knows they were exactly the opposite. Matt Giveaway, I may remark, is an Ulster man and has his prejudices. About the gang, I suppose they're all pretty reasonable to an outward view. Highly respectable, he said. I met one of them at dinner the other night at S. He mentioned the name of a member of government. Before Christmas, I was at a cover shoot in Suffolk, and one of the worst had to stand next to me, an uncommonly agreeable fellow. Then we sat down to business. Matt Giveaway's ideas was that I should study the details of the thing and then get alongside some of the people. He thought I might begin with Shopsire Squire. He fancied that I might stumble upon something which would give me a line on the hostages, where he stuck to his absurd notion that I had a special flair which the amateur sometimes possessed and the professional lacked. I agreed that that was the best plan in a range to spend Sunday in his room going over the secret dossiers. I was beginning to get keen about the thing, but Matt Giveaway had a knack for making whatever he handled as an interesting game. I had meant to tell him about my experiments with Glurian Slade, but after what he had shown me, I felt that that story was absurdly thin and unpromising, but as I was leaving I asked him casually if he knew Mr. Dominic Medina. He smiled. Why do you ask? He's scarcely your line of country. I don't know, I've heard a lot about him and I thought I would rather like to meet him. I barely know him, but I must confess that the few times I've met him I was enormously attracted. He's the handsomest being alive. So I'm told, and that's the only thing that puts me off. It wouldn't if you saw him. He's not in the least the ordinary matinee idol. He's the only fellow I ever heard of who was adored by women and also liked by men. He's a first-class sportsman and said to be the best shot in England after his majesty. He's a common man in politics too, and a most finished speaker. I once heard him, and though I take very little stock in oratory, he almost had me on my feet. He has knocked a bit about the world, and he is also a very good poet, though that wouldn't interest you. I don't know why you say that, I protested. I'm getting rather good at poetry. Oh, I know Scott and Malkalay in Tennyson, but that's not Medina's line. He is a deity of legions and a hearty innovator. Jolly good too. The man's a fine classical scholar. Well, I hope to meet him soon, and I'll let you know my impression. I had posted my letter to Medina and closed Greenslade's introduction on my way from the station, and next morning I found a very subtle reply from him at my club. Greenslade had talked of our common interest in big game shooting, and he professed to know all about me, and be anxious to make my acquaintance. He was out of town unfortunately for the weekend, he said, but suggested that I should lunch with him on Monday. He named a club a small select old-fashioned one of which most of the members were hunting squires. I looked forward to meeting him with a quite inexplicable interest, and on Sunday, when I was worrying through the papers in Malkalay's room, I had him in the back of my mind. I had made a picture of something between an oida, guardsman, and the Apollo Belvedere, and rigged it out in this far's clothes. But when I gave my name to the porter at the club door, and a young man who was warming his hands at the hall fire in forward to me, I had to wipe that picture clean off my mind. He was about my own height, just under six feet, and at the first sight rather slightly built, but a hefty enough fellow to eyes which knew to where to look for the points of men's strengths. Still he appeared slim, and therefore young, and you could see from the way he stood and walked that he was as light on his feet as a rope dancer. There was a horrible word in the newspapers, well groomed, applied to men by lady journalists, which always makes me think of a glossy horse on which a stable boy has been busy with the brush and curry comb. I had thought of him as well groomed, but there was nothing glossy about his appearance. He wore a rather old well cut brown tweed suit with a soft shirt and collar and a russet tie that matched his complexion. His get up was exactly that of a country squire who would come up to town for a day at Tattersall. I find it difficult to describe my first impression of his face, for my memory is all overlaid with other impressions acquired when I looked at it in very different circumstances. But my chief feeling, I remember, was that it was singularly pleasant. It was very English, and yet not quite English. The coloring was a little warmer than sun or weather would give, and there was a kind of silken graciousness about it not uncommonly found in our countrymen. It was beautifully cut, every feature regular, and yet there was a touch of ruggedness that saved it from conventionality. I was puzzled about this till I saw that it came from two things, the hair and the eyes. The hair was almost a dark brown brushed in a wave above the forehead so that the face with its strong fine chin made an almost perfect square, but the eyes were the thing. They were a startling blue, not the pale blue, which is common enough and belongs to our Norse ancestry, but a deep dark blue, the color of a sapphire. Indeed, if you think a sapphire with the brilliance of a diamond, you get a pretty fair notion of those eyes. They would have made a plain-headed woman lovely in a man's face, which had not a touch of the feminine. They were startling. Startling, I stick to that word, but also entrancing. He greeted me as if he had been living for this hour, and also with a touch of deference due to a stranger. This is delightful, Sir Richard. It was very good of you to come. We've got a table to ourselves by the fire. I hope you're hungry. I've had a devilish cold journey this morning, and I want my luncheon. I was hungry enough, and I never ate a butter meal. He gave me burgundy on account of the bite in the weather, and afterwards I had a glass of the Bristol cream for which his club was famous, but he drank water himself. There were four other people in the room, all of whom he appeared to call by their Christian names, and these lantern-jawed-hunter fellows seemed to cheer up at the sight of him, but they didn't come and stand beside him and talk, which is apt to happen with your popular man. There was that about Medina, which was, at once, friendly and aloof, the air of simple but tremendous distinction. I remember we began by talking about rifles. I had done a good deal of chakar in my time, and I could see that this man had a wide experience and had the love of the thing in his bones. He never bragged, but by dropping little remarks showed what a swell he was. We talked of a new 240 bore, which had remarkable stopping power, and I said that I had never used it on anything more formidable than a scotch stag. It would have been a godsend to me in the old days on the Ongui where I had to lug about a 500 express that broke my back. He grinned ruefully. The old days, he said, we've all had them, and we're all sick to get them back. Sometimes I'm tempted to kick over the traces and be off to the wilds again. I'm too young to settle down and you, Sir Richard, must feel the same. Do you ever regret that the beastly old war is over? I can't say I do. I'm a middle-aged man now, and soon I'll be stiff in the joints. I've settled down in the Cotswolds, and though I hope to get a lot of support before I die, I'm not looking for any more wars. I'm positively almighty meant for me to farm. He laughed. I wish I knew what he meant me for. It looks like some sort of politician. Oh, you, I said. You're the fellow with 20 talents. I've only one. I'm jolly well going to bury it in the soil. I kept wondering how much help I would get out of him. I liked him enormously, but somehow I didn't yet see his cleverness. He was just an ordinary good fellow of my own totem, just another as Tom Greenslade. It was a dark day and the firelight silhouetted his profile, and as I stole glances at it, I was struck by the shape of his head, the way he brushed his hair in front and back made it look square. But I saw that it was really round, the roundest head I've ever seen except in the calf ear. He was evidently conscious of it and didn't like it, so took some pains to conceal it. All through luncheon I watched him covertly, and I could see that he was also taking stock of me. Very friendly these blue eyes were, but very shrewd. He suddenly looked me straight in the face. You won't vegetate, he said. You needn't deceive yourself. You haven't got that kind of mouth for a rustic. What is it to be? Politics, business, travel? You're well off? Yes, for my simple taste I'm rather rich, but I haven't the ambition of a maggot. No, you haven't. He looked at me steadily. If you don't mind my saying it, you have too little vanity. Oh, I'm quick at detecting vanity. And anyhow, it's a thing that defies concealment. But I imagine, indeed I know, that you can work like a beaver and that your loyalty is not the kind that cracks. You won't be able to help yourself, Sir Richard. You'll be caught up in some machine. Look at me, I swore two years ago never to have a groove. And I'm in a deep point already. England is made up of grooves and the only plan is to select a good one. I suppose yours is politics, I said. I suppose it is a dingy game as it's played at present, but there are possibilities. There is a mighty Tory revival in sight and it will want leading. The newly enfranchised classes, especially the women, will bring it about. The suffragists didn't know what a tremendous force of conservationism they were releasing when they won the vote for their sex. I should like to talk to you about these things someday. In the smoking room we got back to sport and he told me the story of how he met green Slade in Central Asia. I was beginning to realize that the man's reputation was justified, where there was a curious mastery about his talk, careless power as if everything came easily to him and was just taken in his stride. I had meant to open up the business, which had made me seek his acquaintance but I did not feel the atmosphere right for it. I did not know him well enough yet and I felt that if I once started on those ridiculous three facts, which were all I had, I must make a clean breast of the whole thing and take him fully into my confidence. I thought the time was scarcely ripe for that, especially as we would meet again. Are you any chance free on Thursday? He asked as we parted. I would like to take you to Dine at the Thursday Club. You're sure to know some of the fellows and it's a pleasant way of spending an evening. That's capital, eight o'clock on Thursday, short coat and black tie. As I walked away I made up my mind that I had found the right kind of man to help me. I liked him and the more I thought of him the more the impression deepened of a big reservoir of power behind his easy grace. I was completely fascinated and the proof of it was that I went off to the nearest booksellers and bought his two slim volumes of poems. I cared far more about poetry than Malky the Ray imagined. Mary had done a lot to educate me but I hadn't been very fortunate in my experiments with the new people but I understood Medina's verses well enough. They were very simple with a delicious subtle tune in them and they were desperately sad. Again and again came the note of regret and transience and disillusioned fortitude. As I read them that evening I wondered how a man who had apparently such zest for life and got so much out of the world should be so lonely at heart. It might be a pose but there was nothing of the conventional despair of the callow poet. This was the work of one as wise as Ulysses and as far wandering. I didn't see how he would want to write anything but the truth. A pose is a consequence of vanity and I was pretty clear that Medina was not vain. Next morning I found his cadence still running in my head and I could not keep my thoughts off him. He fascinated me as a man fascinated by a pretty woman. I was glad to think he had taken a liking for me for he had done far more than Green Slade's casual introduction demanded. He had made a plan for us to meet again and he had spoken not as an acquaintance but as a friend. Very soon I decided that I would get Matt Gilray's permission to take him wholly into our confidence. It was no good keeping a man like that at arm's length and asking him to self-puzzles presented as meaninglessly as an acrostic in the newspaper. He must be told all or nothing and I was certain that if he were told all he would be a very tower of strength to me. The more I thought of him the more I was convinced of his exceptional brains. I lunched with Mr. Julius Victor in Carl Tenhouse, Terrace. He was carrying on an ordinary life and when he greeted me he never referred to the business which had linked us together or rather he only said one word. I knew I could count on you, he said. I think I told you that my daughter was engaged to be married this spring while her fiancé has come from France and will be staying for an indefinite time with me. He can probably do nothing to assist you but he is here at your call if you want him. He is the Marquis de la Tour du Pin. I didn't quite catch the name and it was a bigish party. We sat down luncheon before I realized who the desolated lover was. It was my ancient friend Turpin who had been a liaison officer with my old division. I had known that he was some kind of grandi but as everybody went by nicknames I had become used to think of him as Turpin, a version of his title invented I think by Archie Roiland's. There he was sitting opposite me, a very handsome pallid young man dressed with that excessive correctness found only among Frenchmen who get their clothes in England. He had been a tremendous swashbuckler when he was with the division unbridled in speech volcanic in action but always with a sad gentleness in his air he raised his heavy little eyes and looked at me and then with a word of apology to his host marched around the table and embraced me. I felt every kind of a fool but I was mighty glad all the same to see Turpin. He had been a good pal of mine and the fact that he had been going to marry Miss Victor seemed to bring my new job in line with other parts of my life but I had no further speech with him for I had conversational women on both sides of me and in the few minutes while the men were left alone at table I fell into talk with an elderly man on my right who proved to be a member of the cabinet. I found that out by a lucky accident for I was lamentably ill-informed about the government of our country. I asked him about Medina and he brightened up at once. Can you place him? He asked I can't I'd like to classify my fellow men but he is a new specimen he is as exotic as the young Disraeli and as English as the late Duke of Defengier. The point is he has a policy something he wants to achieve and he has the power of attracting a party to him. If he has these two things there is no doubt about his future honestly I'm not quite certain. He has very great talents and I believe if he wanted he would be in the front rank as a public speaker. He has the ear of the house too though he doesn't often address it but I'm never sure how much he cares about the whole business and England you know demands wholeheartedness in her public men. She will follow blindly the second rate if he is an earnest and reject the first rate if he is not. I said something about Medina's view of a great Tory revival based upon the women. My neighbor grinned I dare say he's right and I dare say he could whistle women anyway he pleased. It's extraordinary the charm he has for them that handsome face of his and that melodious voice would enslave anything female from a charwoman to a Cambridge intellectual. Half his power of course comes from the fact they have no charm for him. He is as a luth as Sir Gallagher from any interest in the sex. Did you ever hear his name coupled with the young women's? He goes everywhere and they would give their heads for him and all the while he is as insensitive as a nice eaten boy whose only thought is getting into the 11. You know him? I told him very slightly. Same with me. I've only a nodding acquaintance but one can't help feeling the man everywhere and being acutely interested. It's lucky he's a sound fellow. If you were a rogue he could play the devil with our easygoing society. That night Sandy and I dined together. He had come back from Scotland in good spirits for his father's health was improving and when Sandy was in good spirits it was like being on the downs in a southwest wind. We had so much to tell each other that we let our food grow cold. He had to hear all about Mary and Peter John and what I knew of Blanchiron and a dozen other old comrades. I had to get a sketch, the merest of sketch, of his doings since the Armitus in the East. Sandy for some reason was at the moment disinclined to speak of his past but he was as ready as an undergraduate to talk of his future. He meant to stay at home now for a long spell at any rate and the question was how he should fill up his time. Country life's no good he said. I must find a profession or I'll get into trouble. I suggested politics and he rather liked the notion. I might be bored in Parliament, he reflected, but I should love the rough and tumble of an election. I only took part in one and I discovered surprising gifts as a demagogue and made a speech in our little town which is still talked about. The chief row was about Irish home rule and I thought I'd better have a whack at the Pope. Has it ever struck you Dick that the ecclesiastical language has in most sinister resound? I knew some of the words though not their meaning but I knew that my audience would be just as ignorant. So I had a magnificent paration. Will you men of kill clavours? I ask endure to see such a chassable setup in your marketplace? Will you have your daughters sold into simony? Will you have celibacy practiced in the public streets? Gad, I had them all on their feet bellowing. Never! He also rather fancy business. He had a notion of taking up civil aviation and running a special service for transporting pilgrims from all over the Muslim world to Mecca. He reckoned that the present average cost to the pilgrim at not less than 30 euros and believed that he could do it for an average of 15 euros and show a handsome prophet Blanchiron he thought might be interested in the scheme and put up some of the capital. But later in a corner of the upstairs smoking room Sandy was serious enough when I began to tell him the job I was on for I didn't need Matt Guevara's permission to make a confident of him. He listened in silence while I gave him the main lines of the business that I had gathered from Matt Guevara's papers and he made no comment when I came to the story of the three hostages. But when I explained my disinclination to stir out of my country rut he began to laugh. It's a queer thing how people like us get a sudden passion for coziness. I feel it myself coming over me. What stirred you up in the end? The little boy? Then very lamely I shyly began on the rhymes in Greenslides memory that interested him acutely. Just the sort of sensible nonsensical notion you would have, go on I'm thrilled. But when I came to Medina he exclaimed sharply you've met him? Yesterday at luncheon. You haven't told him anything? No but I'm going to. Sandy had been deep in an armchair with his legs over the side but now he got up and stood with his arms on a mantle piece looking into the fire. I'm going to take him into my full confidence I said when I've spoken to Matt Guevarae. Matt Guevarae will no doubt agree. And you have you ever met him? Never but of course I've heard of him indeed I don't mind telling you that one of my chief reasons for coming home was a wish to see Medina. You'll like him tremendously. I've never met such a man. So everyone says. He turned his face and I could see that I had fallen into that portentous gravity which was one of Sandy's moods and the compliment to his ordinary insufficiency. When are you going to see him again? I'm dining with him the day after tomorrow at a thing called the Thursday Club. Oh he belongs to that does he? So do I. I think I'll give myself the pleasure of dining also. I asked about the club and he told me that it had been started after the war by some of the people who had queer jobs and wanted to keep together. It was a very small only 20 members. There were Colette, one of the queue boat, VCs and Pew of the Indian Secret Service and the Duke of Berminister and Sir Arthur Warcliffe and several soldiers all more or less well known. They elected me in 1919 said Sandy but of course I've never been to a dinner. I say Dick, Medina must have a pretty strong pull here to be a member of the Thursday. Though it says as it shouldn't. It's a show most people would give their right hand to be in. He sat down again and appeared to reflect with his chin on his hand. You are under the spell I suppose. He said, utterly. I'll tell you how he strikes me. Your ordinary very clever man is apt to be a bit bloodless and priggish while your ordinary sportsman and good fellow is inclined to be a bit narrow. Medina seems to me to combine all the virtues and none of the faults of both kinds. Anybody can see he's a sportsman and you only to ask the swells to discover how high they put his brains. He sounds rather too good to be true. I seem to detect a touch of acidity in his voice. Dick, he said, looking very serious. I want you to promise to go slow in this business. I mean about telling Medina. Why? I ask, have you anything against him? No, he said. I haven't anything against him. But he's a little incredible and I would like to know more about him. I had a friend who knew him. I have no right to say this and haven't any evidence. But I have a sort of feeling that Medina didn't do him any good. What was his name? I ask. And was told Levator. And when I inquired what had become of him, Sandy didn't know. He had lost sight of him for two years. At that I laughed heartily, for I could see what was the matter. Sandy was jealous of this man who was putting a spell on everybody. He wanted his old friends to himself. When I taxed him with it, he grinned and didn't deny it. End of chapter four. Chapter five of The Three Hostages. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Sydney M. The Three Hostages by John Buchan. Chapter five The Thursday Club. We met in a room on the second floor of a little restaurant in Mervin Street. A pleasant room, paneled in white, with big fires burning at each end. The club had its own cook and butler, and I swear a better dinner was never produced in London, starting with preposterously early plover's eggs and finishing with fruit from Berminster's houses. There were a dozen present, including myself, and of these, besides my host, I knew only Berminster and Sandy. Colotte was there, and Pew, and a wise and little man who had just returned from bird hunting at the mouth of the McKenzie. There was Palliser Yeats, the banker, who didn't look 30, and fully loved the Arabian traveler who was really 30 and looked 50. I was especially interested in Nightingale, a slim peering fellow with double glasses, who had gone back to Greek manuscripts and his Cambridge Fellowship after captaining a Bedouin tribe. Lythan was there too, the attorney general who had been a private in the guards at the start of the war, and had finished up a G.S.O.I., a toughly built man with a pale face and very keen quizzical eyes. I should think there must have been more varied and solid brains in that dozen than you would find in an average parliament. Sandy was the last to arrive, and was greeted with a roar of joy. Everybody seemed to want to wring his hand and beat him on the back. He knew them all except Medina, and I was curious to see their meeting. Berminster did the introducing, and Sandy for a moment looked shy. I've been looking forward to this for years, Medina said, and Sandy, after one glance at him, grinned sheepishly and stammered something polite. Berminster was chairman for the evening, a plump, jolly little man who had been a pal of Archie Roy Lance in the Air Force. The talk to begin with was nothing out of the common. It started with horses and the spring handicaps, and then got on to spring salmon fishing, for one man had been on the Helmsdale, another on the Naver, and two on the Tay. The fashion of the club was to have the conversation general, and there was very little talking in groups. I was next to Medina, between him and the Duke, and Sandy was on the other end of the oval table. He had not much to say, and more than once I caught his eyes watching Medina. Then, by and by, as was bound to happen, reminiscence began. Collot made me laugh with a story of how the Admiralty had a notion that sea lions might be useful to detect submarines. A number were collected and trained to swim after submarines, to which fish were attached as bait, the idea being that they would come to associate the smell of submarines with food and go after a stranger. The thing shipwrecked on the artistic temperament. The beasts all came from the music halls and had names like Flossy and Sissy, so they couldn't be got to realize that there was a war on, and were always going ashore without leave. That story started the ball rolling, and by the time we had reached the port, the talk was like what you used to find in the smoking room of an East African coastal steamer, only a million times better. Everybody present had done and seen amazing things, and moreover, they had the brains and knowledge to orientate their experiences. It was no question of a string of yarns, but rather of the best kind of give and take conversation, when a man would buttress an argument by an apt recollection. I especially admired Medina. He talked little, but he made others talk, and his keen interest seemed to wake the best in everybody. I noticed that as at our luncheon, three days before, he drank only water. We talked, I remember, about the people who had gone missing, and whether any were likely still to turn up. Sandy told us about three British officers, who had been in prison in Turkestan since the summer of 18, and had only just started home. He had met one of them at Merseye, and thought there might be others tucked away in those parts. Then someone spoke of how it was possible to drop off the globe for a bit, and miss all that was happening. I said I had met an old prospector in Barbotin in 1920, who had come down from Portuguese territory, and when I asked him what he had been doing in the war, he said, What war? Pew said a fellow had just turned up in Hong Kong, who had been a captive of Chinese pirates for eight years, and had never heard a word of our four-year struggle, till he said something about the Kaiser to the skipper of the boat that picked him up. Then Sandy, as the newcomer, wanted news about Europe. I remember that Leithun gave him his views on the malaise that France was suffering from, and that palacer Yeats, who looked exactly like a rugby three-quarterback, enlightened him, and incidentally myself, on the matter of German reparations. Sandy was furious about the muddle in the Near East, and the mishandling of Turkey. His view was that we were doing our best to hammer a much-divided orient into a hostile unanimity. Lord, he cried, how I loathe our new manners in foreign policy. The old English way was to regard all foreigners as slightly childish and rather idiotic, and ourselves as the only grown-ups in a kindergarten world. That meant that we had a cool, detached view, and did even hand it unsympathetic justice. But now we have got into the nursery ourselves, and are bare fighting on the floor. We take violent sides and make pets, and of course, if you are to fail something or other, you have got to be foamed something else. It is all wrong. We are becoming balkanized. We would have drifted into politics if Pugh had not asked him his opinion of Gandhi. That led him into an exposition of the meaning of the fanatic, a subject on which he was well qualified to speak, for he had consorted with most varieties. He is always in the technical sense mad, that is, his mind is tilted from its balance, and since we live by balance, he is a wrecker, a crowbar in the machinery. His power comes from the appeal he makes to the imperfectly balanced, and as these are never the majority, his appeal is limited. But there is one kind of fanatic whose strength comes from balance, from a lunatic balance. You cannot say that there is any one thing abnormal about him, for he is all abnormal. He is as balanced as you or me, but so to speak, in a fourth dimensional world. That kind of man has no logical gaps in his creed. Within his insane postulates, he is brilliantly sane. Take Lenin, for instance. That is the kind of fanatic I am afraid of. Lyvan asked how such a man got his influence. You say that there is no crazy spot in him which appeals to a crazy spot in other people. He appeals to the normal, said Sandy solemnly, to the perfectly sane. He offers reason, not visions. In any case, his visions are reasonable. In ordinary times he will not be heard, because as I say, his world is not our world. But let there come a time of great suffering or discontent, when the mind of the ordinary man is in desperation, and the rational fanatic will come by his own. When he appeals to the sane, and the sane respond, revolutions begin. Pew nodded his head as if he agreed. Your fanatic, of course, must be a man of genius. Of course. And genius of that kind is happily rare. When it exists, its possessor is the modern wizard. The old necromancer fiddled away with cabalistic signs and crude chemicals and got nowhere. The true wizard is the man who works by spirit, on spirit. We are only beginning to realize the strange crannies of the human soul. The real magician, if he turned up today, wouldn't bother about drugs and dopes. He would dabble in far more deadly methods. The compulsion of a fiery nature over the limp things that men call their minds. He turned to Pew. You remember the man we used to call Ram Dass in the war? I never knew his right name. Rather, said Pew, the fellow who worked for us in San Francisco. He used to get big sums from the agitators and pay them into the British Exchequer, less as commission of ten percent. Toad, fellow! Burminster exclaimed approvingly. Well, Ram Dass used to discourse to me on this subject. He was as wise as a serpent and as loyal as a dog, and he saw a lot of things coming that we are just beginning to realize. He said that the great offenses of the future would be psychological, and he thought the governments should get busy about it and prepare their defense. What a jolly sight it would be, all of the high officials sitting down to little primers. But there was a sense in what he said. He considered that the most deadly weapon in the world was the power of mass persuasion, and he wanted to meet it at the source, by getting at the mass persuader. His view was that every spellbinder had got something like Samson's hair, which was the key of his strength, and that if this were tampered with, he could be made innocuous. He would have had us make pets of the prophets and invite them to government house. You remember the winter of 1917 when the Bolsheviks were making trouble in Afghanistan and their stuff was filtering through into India? Well, Ram Dass claimed the credit of stopping that game by his psychological dodges. He looked across suddenly at Medina. You know the frontier. Did you ever come across the guru that lived at the foot of the Shansi Pass as you go over to Kaikand? Medina shook his head. I never traveled that way. Why? Sandy seemed disappointed. Ram Dass used to speak of him. I hoped you might have met him. The club Madeira was being passed round, and there was a little silence while we sipped it. It was certainly a marvelous wine, and I noticed with pain Medina's abstinence. You really are missing a lot, you know, for Minster boomed in his jolly voice, and for a second all the company looked Medina's way. He smiled and lifted his glass of water. He said, Nightingale translated, meaning that you must be a pussyfoot if you would be a big man. There was a chorus of protests, and Medina again lifted his glass. I'm only joking. I haven't a scrap of policy or principle in the matter. I don't happen to like the stuff, that's all. I fancy that the only two scholars among us were Nightingale and Sandy. I looked at the ladder and was surprised by the change in his face. It had awakened to the most eager interest. His eyes, which had been staring at Medina, suddenly met mine, and I read in them not only interest, but disquiet. Burminster was delivering a spirited defense of Bacchus, and the rest joined in, but Sandy took the other side. There's a good deal in that Latin tag, he said. There are places in the world where total abstinence is reckoned a privilege. Did you ever come across the Ulai tribe up the Karakorum Way? He was addressing Medina. No? Well, the next time you meet a man in the guides, ask him about them, for they are curiosity. They're Mohammedan, and so should by rights be abstainers, but they're a drunken set of sweeps, and the most priest-ridden community on earth. Drinking is not only a habit among them, it's an obligation, and their weekly tamasha would make foul staff take the pledge. But their priests, they're a kind of theocracy, are strict teetotal. It is their privilege and the secret of their power. When one of them has to be degraded, he is filled compulsorily, full of wine. That's your, how does the thing go? Your hominom dominatus? From that moment I found the evening go less pleasantly. Medina was as genial as ever, but something seemed to have affected Sandy's temper, and he became positively grumpy. Now and then he contradicted a man too sharply for good manners, but for the most part he was silent, smoking his pipe and answering his neighbors in monosyllables. About eleven, I began to feel it was time to leave, and Medina was of the same opinion. He asked me to walk with him, and I gladly accepted, for I did not feel inclined to go to bed. As I was putting on my coat, Sandy came up. Come to the club, Dick, he said. I want to talk to you. His manner was so peremptory that I opened my eyes. Sorry, I said. I've promised to walk home with Medina. Oh damn Medina, he said. Do as I ask or you'll be sorry for it. I wasn't feeling very pleased with Sandy, especially as Medina was near enough to hear what he said, so I told him rather coldly that I didn't intend to go back on my arrangement. He turned and marched out. Canoning at the doorway into Berminster, to whom he did not apologize. That nobleman rubbed his shoulder roofily. Old Sandy hasn't got used to his corn yet. He laughed. Looks as if the Medina had touched up his liver. It was a fine, still-march night with a good moon, and as we walked along Piccadilly, I was feeling cheerful. The good dinner I had eaten and the good wine I had drunk played their part in this mood, and there was also the satisfaction of having dined with good fellows and having been admitted into pretty select company. I felt my liking for Medina enormously increase, and I had the unworthy sense of superiority which a man gets from seeing an old friend, who he greatly admires, behave rather badly. I was considering what had ailed Sandy when Medina raised the subject. A wonderful fellow Arbuth bought, he said, I've wanted to meet him for several years, and he is certainly up to my expectations, but he has been quite long enough abroad. A mind as keen as his, if it doesn't have the company of its equals, is in danger of getting viewy. What he said tonight was amazingly interesting, but I've thought it a little fantastic. I agreed, but the hint of criticism was enough to revive my loyalty. All the same, there's usually something in his most extravagant theories. I've seen him right when all the sober knowledgeable people were wrong. That I can well believe, he said. You know him well? Pretty well, we've been in some queer places together. The memory of those queer places came back to me as we walked across Berkeley Square. The west end of London at night always affected me with a sense of the immense solidity of our civilization. These great houses, lit and shuttered and secure, seemed the exact opposite of the world of half lights and perils in which I had sometimes journeyed. I thought of them as I thought of Foss Manor, as sanctuaries of peace, but tonight I felt differently towards them. I wondered what was going on at the back of those heavy doors. Might not terror and mystery lurk behind that barricade as well as intent and slum? I suddenly had a picture of a plump face all screwed up with fright, muffled beneath the bedclothes. I had imagined that Medina lived in chambers or a flat, but we stopped before a substantial house in Hill Street. You coming in? The night's young and there's time for a pipe. I had no wish to go to bed, so I followed him as he opened the front door with a latch key. He switched on a light which lit the first landing of the staircase, but left the hall in dusk. It seemed to be a fine place full of cabinets, the gilding of which flickered dimly. We ascended thickly carpeted stairs, and on the landing he switched off the first light and switched on another which lit a further flight. I had the sensation of mounting to a great height in a queer shadowy world. This is a big house for a bachelor, I observed. I have a lot of stuff, books and pictures and things, and I like it round me. He opened a door and ushered me into an enormous room which must have occupied the whole space on that floor. It was oblong with deep bays at each end, and it was lined from floor to ceiling with books. Books too were piled on the tables and sprawled on a big flat couch which was drawn up before the fire. It wasn't an ordinary gentleman's library provided by the bookseller at so much a yard, it was the working collection of a scholar, and the books had that used look which makes them the finest tapestry for a room. The place was lit with lights on small tables and on a big desk under a reading lamp were masses of papers and various volumes with paper slips in them. It was a workshop as well as a library. A servant entered unsummoned and put a tray of drinks on a side table. He was dressed like an ordinary butler, but I guess that he had not spent much of his life in service. The heavy jowl, the small eyes, the hair cut straight round the nape of the neck, the swollen muscles about the shoulder and upper arm told me the profession he had once followed. The man had been in the ring and not so very long ago. I wondered at Medina's choice, for a pug is not the kind of servant I would choose myself. Nothing more Odell, said Medina. You can go to bed, I will let Sir Richard out. He placed me in a long arm chair and held the siphon while I mixed myself a very weak whiskey and soda. Then he sat opposite me across the hearth rug in a tall old-fashioned chair which he pulled forward from his writing table. The servant in leaving had turned out all the lights except one at his right hand, which vividly lit up his face, and which, since the fire had burned low, made the only bright patch in the room. I stretched my legs comfortably and puffed at my pipe, wondering how I would have the energy to get up and go home. The long dim shelves where creamy vellum and Morocco ran out of the dusk into darkness had an odd effect on me. I was visited again by the fancies which had occupied me coming through Berkeley Square. I was inside one of those massive sheltered houses and, lo and behold, it was as mysterious as the aisles of a forest. Books, books, old books, full of forgotten knowledge. I was certain that if I had the scholarship to search the grave rows, I would find out wonderful things. I was thirsty so I drank off my whiskey and soda, and was just adding a little more soda water from the siphon at my elbow when I looked towards Medina. There was that in his appearance which made me move my glass so that a thin stream of liquid fell on my sleeve. The patch was still damp next morning. His face brilliantly lit up by the lamp seemed to be also lit from within. It was not his eyes or any one feature that enthralled me, for I did not notice any details. Only the odd lighting seemed to detach his head from its environment so that it hung in the air like a planet in the sky, full of intense brilliance and power. It is not very easy to write down what happened. For 12 hours afterwards, I remembered nothing. Only that I had been very sleepy and must have been poor company and had soon got up to go. But that was not the real story. It was what the man had willed that I should remember. And because my own will was not really mastered, I remembered other things in spite of him. Remember them hazily like a drunkard's dream. The head seemed to swim in the center of pale converging lines. These must have been the bookshelves which in that part of the room were full of works bound in old vellum. My eyes were held by two violet pinpoints of light which were so bright that they hurt me. I tried to shift my gaze but I could only do that by screwing around my head towards the dying fire. The movement demanded a great effort for every muscle in my body seemed drugged with lethargy. As soon as I looked away from the light I regained some possession of my wits. I felt that I must be in for some sickness and had a moment of bad fright. It seemed to be my business to keep my eyes on the shadows in the hearth. For where darkness was there I found some comfort. I was as afraid of the light before me as a child of a buggy. I thought that if I said something I should feel better but I didn't seem to have the energy to get a word out. Curiously enough I felt no fear of Medina. He didn't seem to be in the business. It was that disembodied light that scared me. Then I heard a voice speaking but still I didn't think of Medina. Hane, it said. You are Richard Hane. Against my will I slewed my eyes round and there hung that intolerable light burning into my eyeballs and my soul. I found my voice now for it seemed to be screwed out of me and I said yes like an automaton. I felt my wits in my sense slipping away under that glare but my main discomfort was physical. The flaming control of the floating brightness not face or eyes but a dreadful overmastering aura. I thought if at that moment you could call any process of my mind thought that if I could only link it onto some material thing I should find relief. With a desperate effort I seemed to make out the line of a man's shoulder and the back of a chair. Let me repeat that I never thought of Medina for he had been wiped clean out of my world. You are Richard Hane, said the voice. Repeat I am Richard Hane. The words came out of my mouth involuntarily. I was concentrating all my wits on the comforting outline of the chair back which was beginning to be less hazy. The voice spoke again but till this moment you have been nothing. There was no Richard Hane before. Now when I bid you you begin your life. You remember nothing. You have no past. I remember nothing said my voice but as I spoke I knew I lied and that knowledge was my salvation. I have been told more than once by doctors who dabbled in the business that I was the most hopeless subject for hypnotism that they ever struck. One of them once said that I was about as unsympathetic as Table Mountain. I must suppose that the intractable bedrock of common-placeness in me now met the something which was striving to master me and repelled it. I felt abominably helpless. My voice was not my own. My eyes were tortured and aching but I had recovered my mind. I seemed to be repeating a lesson at someone's dictation. I said I was Richard Hane who had just come from South Africa on his first visit to England. I knew no one in London and had no friends. Had I heard of Colonel Arbuthnot I had not or the Thursday Club I had not or the war yes but I had been in Angola most of the time and had never fought. I had money yes a fair amount which was in such and such a bank and such and such investments. I went on repeating the stuff as Ghibli as a parrot but all the while I knew I lied. Something deep down in me was insisting that I was Sir Richard Hane KCB who had commanded a division in France and was the squire of Foss Manor the husband of Mary and the father of Peter John. Then the voice seemed to give orders. I was to do this and that and I repeated them dossily. I was no longer in the least scared. Someone or something was trying to play monkey tricks with my mind but I was the master of that though my voice seemed to belong to an alien gramophone and my limbs were stupidly weak. I wanted above all things to be allowed to sleep. I think I must have slept for a little for my last recollection of that queer siderent is that the unbearable light had gone and the ordinary lamps of the room were switched on. Medina was standing by the dead fire and another man beside him a slim man with a bent back and a lean gray face. The second man was only there for a moment but he looked at me closely and I thought Medina spoke to him and laughed. Then I was being helped by Medina into my coat and conducted downstairs. There were two bright lights in the street which made me want to lie down on the curb and sleep. I woke about 10 o'clock next morning in my bedroom at the club feeling like nothing on earth. I had a bad headache my eyes seemed to be back with white fire and my legs were full of weak pains as if I had influenza. It took me several minutes to realize where I was and when I wondered what had brought me to such a state I could remember nothing. Only a preposterous litany ran in my brain the name Dr. Newhover and an address in Wimple Street. I concluded glumly that that for a man in my condition was a useful recollection but where I had got it I hadn't an idea. 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 remember 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 headlight cast iron or the weak whiskey 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 gotten some infernal germ, probably botulism and wasn't 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 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, note case, 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 remember 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 untitly 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 Madiera. Medina's whiskey 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 would be this warning 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 lunch and 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 thereafter 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 someone'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 solve 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 turnabout was too violent for my mind to achieve in one moment. I swore to myself that Medina was straight and 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 on me must believe for my behavior 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 still had to find out. I had a great desire to get hold of Sandy and talk it over but though I rung up several of his layers 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 Wimple Street. End of Chapter 5 The Thursday Club Recording by Sydney M Chapter 6 Of The Three Hostages by John Buckin This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by K. L. Zelke. The House in Gospel Oak. It was a dry march afternoon with one of those fantastic winds which seemed to change the direction hourly and contrived 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 an 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. Newhofer. The parlor made 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 basins in a corner, roll-top desk, a table with a medical journal or two, and some leather cases. And Dr. Newhofer, at first sight, seemed nothing out of the common. He was a youngish man, with high cheekbones, a high forehead, and a quantity of blonde hair brushed straight back from it. He wore a prince's neds, and when he removed it showed pale, prominent blue eyes. From his look I should have said that his father had called himself Newhofer. 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. Haney, what can I do for you? he said. I noticed that he called me Mr., though I had given Sir Richard, both on the telephone and to the Parliament. 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 going wrong with me, I said. I have 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 catacize 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 whole condition. Then he went through a 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 made me get up—took off the tortoise shell spectacles he had been wearing, and resumed his princess, 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. Haney, but neurosis is so mysterious a disease, and it's 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 centers of the neck and head. That may be induced by the accidents, concussions 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 and 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 Mary LeBorn Road. He took off his glasses and smiled. Then he wrote something on a slip of paper and handed it to me. I read, Madam Breida, 4 Palmyra Square, N. W. Right, I said. Much obliged to you. I hope Madam Breida 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's 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 checkbook 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 cheek-booms 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 own 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 shop-boys, 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 matter. 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 Arbuth not called, I was at Fourpell Myra 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 Boulevant and the Blackstone 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, passed 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 glaces 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, sometimes 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 shopgirls waiting for buses, and workmen from St. Packers and Clerkenwell factories going home. The wind 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 the Kentish Fields and the Channel the tonic freshness of spring. I stopped for little, and watched behind me the plane of lights, which was London, quivering in the dark blue windy dusk. Footnote. See the thirty-nine steps. It was almost dark when at last, after several false cast, 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 nest of small brick houses. One side was a terrace of artisan's dwellings, quite new, each with a tiny bow window, and names like Chatsworth and Kirchner Village. 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 refuge of tin cans and bits of paper, and only a blackened elm, an ill-grown pivot-edge, and some stunted lilocks, 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 four 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. I was presently led by the maid to a room on the other side of the hall, where I was greeted by a smiling lady. Madame was a plump person in her early forties, with dark hair and a high colour, who spoke English almost without an accent. Dr. Newhover has sent you. So, he has told me, will you please go in there and take off your coat and waistcoat? Your collar, too, please. I did as I was bid, and in a little curtain cubicle divested myself of these garments and returned in my shirt-sleeves. The room was a very pleasant one, with folding doors at one end, furnished like an ordinary drawing-room, with flowers in pots and books, and what looked like good eighteenth-century prints. Any suspicion I may have had of the bona-fides of the concern received a rude shock. Madame had slipped over her black dress, a white linen overall, such as surgeons wear, and she had as her attendant a small, thin, odd-looking girl, who also wore an overall, and whose short hair was crowned with a small white cap. This is Gerda, Madame said. Gerda helps me. She is very clever. She smiled on Gerda, and Gerda smiled back a limp little contortion of a perfectly expressionless face. Madame made me lie down on a couch. You have a headache! I mendecisiously said that I had. That I could soon cure. But there are other troubles. So. These I must explore. But first I will take away the pain. I felt her late fingers, playing about my temples and the base of my skull and my neck muscles. A very pleasant sensation it was, and I am certain that if I had been suffering from the worst headache in the world it would have been spirited away. As it was, being in excellent health, I felt soothed and refreshed. So, she said, beaming down on me. You are better. You are so big that it is not easy to be well all over at once. Now I must look into more difficult things. You are not happy in your nerves. Not altogether. Ah, these nerves. We do not quite know what they are. Except that they are, what you call, the devil. You are very wakeful now. Is it not so? Well, I must put you to sleep. That is necessary, if you are willing. Right, oh! I answered. But inwardly I said to myself, no, my woman. I bet you don't. I was curious to see if, now that I was forewarned, I could resist any hypnotic business as I believed I could. I imagined that she would try to master me with her eyes, which were certainly remarkable orbs. But her procedure was the very opposite. For the small girl brought some things on a tray, and I saw that they were bandages. First of all, with a fine Cambryk handkerchief, she swabbed my eyes, and then tied above it another of some heavy opaque material. They were loosely bound, so that I scarcely felt them, but I was left in the thickest darkness. I noticed that she took special pains, so to adjust them that they should not cover my ears. You are not wakeful, I heard a voice say. I think you are sleepy. You will sleep now. I felt her fingers stray over my face, and the sensation was different. For whereas when she had treated my headache, they had set up a delicious cool tingling of the skin. Now they seemed to induce wave upon wave of an equally pleasant languor. She pressed my forehead, and my senses seemed to be focused there, and to be lulled by that pressure. All the while she was cooing to me, in a voice which was like the drowsy swell of the sea. If I had wanted to go to sleep, I could have dropped off easily. But, as I didn't want to, I had no difficulty in resisting the gentle coercion. That, I fancy, is my position about hypnotism. I am no kind of use under compulsion, and for the thing to affect me, it has to have the backing of my own will. Anyhow, I could appreciate the pleasantness of it, and yet disregard it. But it was my business to be a good subject, so I pretended to drift away into slumber. I made my breath come slowly and softly, and let my body relax into impassivity. Presently she appeared to be satisfied. She said a word to the child, whose feet I could hear across the room. There was the 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 saver 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 on my temples. They were not the plump, capable hands of Madame Brita. 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 rise it 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 the 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 pushed 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 with or so ever the 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 Haney, it said. You have been asleep, but I have awakened you. You are happy in the world in which you have awakened? 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 clear in my memory. I saw it as farce, and this as farce, and at the coming of humor 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 sleepwalker's voice. I am happy, I said, and my pipe sounded like the twittering of sheeted ghost. 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 Haney. Will you pay my price? I was puzzled about the voice. It had not the rich foreign tones of Madame Brita, but it had a very notable accent, which I could not place. At one moment it seemed to have the lit which you find in Western Ross. But there were cadences in it, which were not Highland. Also its timber was curious, very light and thin, like a child's. Was it possible that the queer little girl I had seen was the symbol? 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 any one'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 said about the job of making a workman like 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 in color. 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 good-bye 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 Lombego. 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 forebowed to ask questions. What put you in such a bad humor 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 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. Oh, 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 meant with an immense success. Sandy was so interested that he couldn't sit in his chair, but must get up and stand on the hearth rug before me. I told him that I had wakened up feeling uncommonly ill, with a blank mind, except for the address of a doctor man in Wimpole Street, and how during the day recollection had gradually come back to me. He questioned me like a cross-examining council. Bright light. Ordinary hypnotic poetry. 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? I 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 impertence, anyhow. But was it Medina? I seem to remember another man in the room before I left. Describe him. I only a vague picture. A sad, gray-faced fellow. We'll 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 wave in a new world. I've heard in the east of such performances, and, of course, it means that the memoryless 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 would make a beeline 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 surgeon. 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. You then proceeded, I take it, to Fort Palmyra Square. At the next stage of my narrative, he did not laugh. I daresay 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 sweetest 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 practice 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 of 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 have a fine natural talent for crime. I tell you, Sandy, that's nonsense. It's impossible that there is 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. Newhofer met, by talking of a salmon river in Norway. Why not golf at North Berwick? And again, you say there was a scent like Pete in the room. Pete, are you 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. How that can easily be managed. McGillivray will pass a word for me. The mention of McGillivray 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 McGillivray tomorrow about getting alongside his Shropshire Squire. For the present there is 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 ask and 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 damnedably crooked. You have got to find out. You must keep close to him and foster his illusions, and play up to him for all your 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 like the prospect, for I have no love of play acting, but I am bound to admit that Sandy talks sense. I ask him about himself, for I count it 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 Clanroydon, 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 are both not.