I found Sandy wandering restlessly about the hall. “Thank God!” he said when he saw me. “Where the devil have you been, Dick? The porter gave me a crazy address in North London. You look as if you wanted a drink.”
“I feel as if I wanted food,” I said. “I have a lot to tell you, but I must eat first. I’ve had no dinner.”
Sandy sat opposite me while I fed, and forbore to ask questions.
“What put you in such a bad humour last night?” I asked.
He looked very solemn. “Lord knows. No, that’s not true, I know well enough. I didn’t take to Medina.”
“Now I wonder why?”
“I wonder too. But I’m just like a dog: I take a dislike to certain people at first sight, and the queer thing is that my instinct isn’t often wrong.”
“Well, you’re pretty well alone in your opinion. What sets you against him? He is well-mannered, modest, a good sportsman, and you can see he’s as clever as they make.”
“Maybe. But I’ve got a notion that the man is one vast lie. However, let’s put it that I reserve my opinion. I have various inquiries to make.”
We found the little back smoking-room on the first floor empty, and when I had lit my pipe and got well into an armchair, Sandy drew up another at my elbow. “Now, Dick,” he said.
“First,” I said, “it may interest you to learn that Medina dabbles in hypnotism.”
“I knew that,” he said, “from his talk last night.”
“How on earth—?”
“Oh, from a casual quotation he used. It’s a longish story, which I’ll tell you later. Go on.”
I began from the breakup of the Thursday Club dinner and told him all I could remember of my hours in Medina’s house. As a story it met with an immense success. Sandy was so interested that he couldn’t sit in his chair, but must get up and stand on the hearthrug before me. I told him that I had wakened up feeling uncommonly ill, with a blank mind except for the address of a doctorman in Wimpole Street, and how during the day recollection had gradually come back to me. He questioned me like a cross-examining counsel.
“Bright light—ordinary hypnotic property. Face, which seemed detached—that’s a common enough thing in Indian magic. You say you must have been asleep, but were also in a sense awake and could hear and answer questions, and that you felt a kind of antagonism all the time which kept your will alive. You’re probably about the toughest hypnotic proposition in the world, Dick, and you can thank God for that. Now, what were the questions? A summons to forget your past and begin as a new creature, subject to the authority of a master. You assented, making private reservations of which the hypnotist knew nothing. If you had not kept your head and made those reservations, you would have remembered nothing at all of last night, but there would have been a subconscious bond over your will. As it is, you’re perfectly free: only the man who tried to monkey with you doesn’t know that. Therefore you begin by being one up on the game. You know where you are and he doesn’t know where he is.”
“What do you suppose Medina meant by it? It was infernal impertinence anyhow. But was it Medina? I seem to remember another man in the room before I left.”
“Describe him.”
“I’ve only a vague picture—a sad grey-faced fellow.”
“Well, assume for the present that the experimenter was Medina. There’s such a thing, remember, as spiriting away a man’s recollection of his past, and starting him out as a waif in a new world. I’ve heard in the East of such performances, and of course it means that the memory-less being is at the mercy of the man who has stolen his memory. That is probably not the intention in your case. They wanted only to establish a subconscious control. But it couldn’t be done at once with a fellow of your antecedents, so they organised a process. They suggested to you in your trance a doctor’s name, and the next stage was his business. You woke feeling very seedy and remembering a doctor’s address, and they argued that you would think that you had been advised about the fellow and make a 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 chirurgeon. Did you go to see him?”
I continued my story, and at the Wimpole Street episode Sandy laughed long and loud.
“Another point up in the game. You say you think the leech had been advised of your coming and not by you? By the way, he seems to have talked fairly good sense, but I’d as soon set a hippopotamus for nerves as you.” He wrote down Dr. Newhover’s address in his pocket book. “Continuez. You then proceeded, I take it, to 4 Palmyra Square.”
At the next stage in my narrative he did not laugh. I dare say I told it better than I have written it down here, for I was fresh from the experience, and I could see that he was a good deal impressed.
“A Swedish masseuse and an odd-looking little girl. She puts you to sleep, or thinks she has, and then, when your eyes are bandaged, someone else nearly charms the soul out of you. That sounds big magic. I see the general lines of it, but it is big magic, and I didn’t know that it was practised on these shores. Dick, this is getting horribly interesting. You kept wide awake—you are an old buffalo, you know—but you gave the impression of absolute surrender. Good for you—you are now three points ahead in the game.”
“Well, but what is the game?
