‘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 any 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 realise 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 am. 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 had a cup of tea I felt a little better, and inclined to get up. A cold bath relieved my headache, and I was able to shave and dress. It was while I was shaving that I observed the first thing which made me puzzle about the events of the previous evening. The valet who attended to me had put out the contents of my pockets on the dressing-table my keys, watch, loose silver, notecase, and my pipe and pouch. Now I carry my pipe in a little leather case, and, being very punctilious in my habits, I invariably put it back in the case when it is empty. But the case was not there, though I remembered laying it on the table beside me in Medina’s room, and, moreover, the pipe was still half-full of unsmoked tobacco. I rang for the man, and learned that he had found the pipe in the pocket of my dinner jacket, but no case. He was positive, for he knew my ways and had been surprised to find my pipe so untidily pocketed.
I had a light breakfast in the coffee-room, and as I ate it I kept wondering as to what exactly I had been doing the night before. Odd little details were coming back to me; in particular, a recollection of some great effort which had taken all the strength out of me. Could I have been drugged? Not the Thursday Club madeira. Medina’s whisky-and-soda? The idea was nonsense; in any case a drugged man does not have a clean tongue the next morning.
I interviewed the night porter, for I thought he might have something to tell me.
‘Did you notice what hour I came home last night?’ I asked. ‘It was this morning, Sir Richard,’ the man replied, with the suspicion of a grin. ‘About half-past three, it would be, or twenty minutes to four.’
‘God bless my soul!’ I exclaimed. ‘I had no notion it was so late. I sat up talking with a friend.’
‘You must have been asleep in the car, Sir Richard, for the chauffeur had to wake you, and you were that drowsy I thought I’d better take you upstairs myself. The bedrooms on the top floor is not that easy found.’
‘I didn’t drop a pipe case?’ I asked.
‘No, sir., The man’s discreet face revealed that he thought I had been dining too well but was not inclined to blame me for it.
By luncheon-time I had decided that I was not going to be ill, for there was no longer anything the matter with my body except a certain stiffness in the joints and the ghost of a headache behind my eyes. But my mind was in a precious confusion. I had stayed in Medina’s room till after three, and had not been conscious of anything that happened there after, say, half-past eleven. I had left finally in such a state that I had forgotten my pipe-case, and had arrived at the Club in somebody’s car—probably Medina’s—so sleepy that I had to be escorted upstairs, and had awoke so ill, that I thought I had botulism. What in Heaven’s name had happened?
I fancy that the fact that I had resisted the influence brought to bear on me with my mind, though tongue and limbs had been helpless, enabled me to remember what the wielder of the influence had meant to be forgotten At any rate bits of that strange scene