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 travelled 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 marvellous wine, and I noticed with pain Medina’s abstinence.
‘You really are missing a lot, you know,’ Burminster boomed in his jolly voice, and for a second all the company looked Medina’s way.
He smiled and lifted his glass of water.
‘Sit vini abstemius qui hermeneuma tentat aut hominum petit dominatum,’ he said.
Nightingale translated. ‘Meaning that you must be pussy-foot 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 latter 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 defence 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 Karakoram way?’ He was addressing Medina. ‘No? Well, the next time you meet a man in the Guides ask him about them, for they’re a 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 Falstaff 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 “hominum dominatum”.’
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 neighbours 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, cannoning at the doorway into Burminster, to whom he did not apologize. That nobleman rubbed his shoulder ruefully. ‘Old Sandy hasn’t got used to his corn yet,’ he laughed. ‘Looks as if the madeira 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 whom he greatly admires behave rather badly. I was considering what had ailed Sandy when Medina raised the subject.
‘A wonderful fellow, Arbuthnot,’ he said. ‘I have wanted to meet him for 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 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 extreme opposite of the world of half-lights and perils in which I had sometimes journeyed. I thought of them as I thought of Fosse 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 in tent and slum? I suddenly had a picture of a plump face all screwed up with fright muffled beneath the bed-clothes.
I had imagined that Medina lived in chambers or a flat, but we stopped before a substantial house in Hill Street.
‘You’re 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’ve a lot of stuff, books and pictures and things, and I like it around 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 workshop as well as library.
A servant entered, unsummoned, and put a tray of drinks on a side table. He was dressed like an ordinary butler, but I guessed 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 armchair, and held the syphon while I mixed myself a very weak whisky-and-soda. Then he sat opposite me across the hearthrug 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 whisky-and-soda, and was just adding a little more soda-water from the syphon 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 twelve 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; remembered them hazily, like a drunkard’s dream.
The head seemed to swim in the centre of pale converging lines. These must have been the book-shelves, which in that part of the room were full of works bound in old vellum. My eyes were held by two violet pin-points of light which were so bright that they hurt me. I tried to shift my gaze, but I could only do that by screwing 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 bogey. 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.
‘Hannay,’ it said. ‘You are Richard Hannay?’
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 and 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 over-mastering aura. I thought – if at that moment you could call any process of my mind thought – that if I could only link it on to 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 Hannay,’ said the voice. ‘Repeat, “I am Richard Hannay”.’
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 Hannay 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 commonplaceness 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 Hannay, 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 a 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 glibly as a parrot, but all the while I knew I lied. Something deep down in me was insisting that I was Sir Richard Hannay, K.C.B., who had commanded a division in France, and was the squire of Fosse 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 docilely. I was no longer in the least scared. Someone or something was trying to play monkey-tricks with my mind, but I was 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 sederunt 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 grey 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 kerb and sleep…
*
I woke about ten 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 backed 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 Wimpole 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 remembered that I had been drowsy there and thought that I had probably bored him. But I was utterly at a loss to account for my wretched condition. It could not have been the dinner; or the wine, for I had not drunk much, and in any case I have a head like cast iron; or the weak whisky-and-soda in Medina’s house. I staggered to my feet and looked at my tongue in the glass. It was all right, so there could be nothing the matter with my digestion.
You are to understand that the account I have just written was pieced together as events came back to me, and that at 10 a.m. the next morning I remembered nothing of it – nothing but the incidents up to my sitting down in Medina’s library, and the name and address of a doctor I had never heard of. I concluded that I must have got some infernal germ, probably botulism, and was in for a bad illness. I wondered dismally what kind of fool I had made of myself before Medina, and still more dismally what was going to happen to me. I decided to wire for Mary when I had seen a doctor, and to get as soon as possible into a nursing home. I had never had an illness in my life, except malaria, and I was as nervous as a cat.
But after I had a cup of tea I felt a little better, and inclined to get up. A cold bath relieved my headache, and I was able to shave and dress. It was while I was shaving that I observed the first thing which made me puzzle about the events of the previous evening. The valet who attended to me had put out the contents of my pockets on the dressing-table – my keys, watch, loose silver, notecase, and my pipe
and pouch. Now I carry my pipe in a little leather case, and, being very punctilious in my habits, I invariably put it back in the case when it is empty. But the case was not there, though I remembered laying it on the table beside me in Medina’s room, and, moreover, the pipe was still half-full of unsmoked tobacco. I rang for the man, and learned that he had found the pipe in the pocket of my dinner jacket, but no case. He was positive, for he knew my ways and had been surprised to find my pipe so untidily pocketed.
I had a light breakfast in the coffee-room, and as I ate it I kept wondering as to what exactly I had been doing the night before. Odd little details were coming back to me; in particular, a recollection of some great effort which had taken all the strength out of me. Could I have been drugged? Not the Thursday Club madeira. Medina’s whisky-and-soda? The idea was nonsense; in any case a drugged man does not have a clean tongue the next morning.
I interviewed the night porter, for I thought he might have something to tell me.
‘Did you notice what hour I came home last night?’ I asked.
‘It was this morning, Sir Richard,’ the man replied, with the suspicion of a grin. ‘About half-past three, it would be, or twenty minutes to four.’
‘God bless my soul!’ I exclaimed. ‘I had no notion it was so late. I sat up talking with a friend.’
‘You must have been asleep in the car, Sir Richard, for the chauffeur had to wake you, and you were that drowsy I thought I’d better take you upstairs myself. The bedrooms on the top floor is not that easy found.’
‘I didn’t drop a pipe case?’ I asked.
‘No, sir.’ The man’s discreet face revealed that he thought I had been dining too well but was not inclined to blame me for it.