He greeted me with a manner which seemed to me to be at once patronising and dictatorial. I wondered if he was some tremendous swell in his profession, of whom I ought to have heard. “Well, Mr. Hannay, what can I do for you?” he said. I noticed that he called me “Mr.,” though I had given “Sir Richard” both on the telephone and to the parlourmaid. It occurred to me that someone had already been speaking of me to him, and that he had got the name wrong in his memory.
I thought I had better expound the alarming symptoms with which I had awakened that morning.
“I don’t know what’s gone wrong with me,” I said. “I’ve a pain behind my eyeballs, and my whole head seems muddled up. I feel drowsy and slack, and I’ve got a weakness in my legs and back like a man who has just had ’flu.”
He made me sit down and proceeded to catechise me about my health. I said it had been good enough, but I mentioned my old malaria and several concussions, and I pretended to be pretty nervous about my condition. Then he went through the whole bag of tricks—sounding me with a stethoscope, testing my blood pressure, and hitting me hard below the knee to see if I reacted. I had to play up to my part, but upon my soul I came near reacting too vigorously to some of his questions and boxing his ears. Always he kept up that odd, intimate, domineering, rather offensive manner.
He made me lie down on a couch while he fingered the muscles of my neck and shoulder and seemed to be shampooing my head with his long chilly hands. I was by this time feeling rather extra well, but I managed to invent little tendernesses here and there and a lot of alarming mental aberrations. I wondered if he were not getting suspicious, for he asked abruptly: “Have you had these symptoms long?” so I thought it better to return to the truth, and told him “only since this morning.”
At last he bade me get up, took off the tortoiseshell spectacles he had been wearing and resumed his pince-nez, and while I was buttoning my collar seemed to be sunk in reflection. He made me sit in the patient’s chair, and stood up and looked down on me with a magisterial air that made me want to laugh.
“You are suffering,” he said, “from a somewhat abnormal form of a common enough complaint. Just as the effects of a concussion are often manifest only some days after the blow, so the results of nervous strain may take a long time to develop. I have no doubt that in spite of your good health you have during recent years been working your mind and body at an undue pressure, and now this morning quite suddenly you reap the fruits. I don’t want to frighten you, Mr. Hannay, but neurosis is so mysterious a disease in its working that we must take it seriously, especially at its first manifestations. There are one or two points in your case which I am not happy about. There is, for example, a certain congestion—or what seems to me a congestion—in the nerve centres of the neck and head. That may be induced by the accidents—concussion and the like—which you have told me of, or it may not. The true cure must, of course, take time, and rest and change of scene are obligatory. You are fond of sport? A fisherman?”
I told him I was.
“Well, a little later I may prescribe a salmon river in Norway. The remoteness of the life from ordinary existence and the contemplation of swift running water have had wonderful results with some of my patients. But Norway is not possible till May, and in the meantime I am going to order you specific treatment. Yes. I mean massage, but by no means ordinary massage. That science is still in its infancy, and its practitioners are only fumbling at the doorway. But now and then we find a person, man or woman, with a kind of extra sense for disentangling and smoothing out muscular and nervous abnormalities. I am going to send you to such an one. The address may surprise you, but you are man of the world enough to know that medical skill is not confined to the area between Oxford Street and the Marylebone Road.” He took off his glasses, and smiled.
Then he wrote something on a slip of paper and handed it to me. I read “Madame Breda, 4 Palmyra Square, N.W.”
“Right!” I said. “Much obliged to you. I hope Madame Breda will cure this infernal headache. When can I see her?”
“I can promise you she will cure the headache. She is a Swedish lady who has lived in London since the War, and is so much an enthusiast in her art that she will only now and then take a private patient. For the most part she gives her skill free to the children’s hospitals. But she will not refuse me. As for beginning, I should lose no time for the sake of your own comfort. What about tomorrow morning?”
“Why not tonight? I have nothing to do, and I want to be quit of my headache
