‘You are not wakeful,’ I heard her 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 cross the room. There was a 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 realised that I was in an entirely different atmosphere. I realised, 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 savour 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 my temples.
They were not the plump capable hands of Madame Breda. 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 rising 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 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 push 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 hypnotised I should beyond doubt have moved like a sheep whithersoever this 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 Hannay,’ it said. ‘You have been asleep, but I have wakened you. You are happy in the world in which you have wakened?’
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 clearer in my memory. I saw it as farce, and this as farce, and at the coming of humour 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 sleep-walker’s voice.
‘I am happy,’ I said, and my pipe sounded like the twittering of sheeted ghosts.
‘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 Hannay. Will you pay my price?’
I was puzzled about the voice. It had not the rich foreign tones of Madame Breda, but it had a very notable accent, which I could not place. At one moment it seemed to have the lilt which you find in Wester Ross, but there were cadences in it which were not Highland. Also, its timbre was curious—very light and thin like a child’s. Was it possible that the queer little girl I had seen was the sibyl? 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 anyone’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 recognised the old hunter’s method of bringing a man back gently from sleep to consciousness, so I set about the job of making a workmanlike 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 and collar. ‘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 lumbago.
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 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