‘I hope you’re hungry,’ he said. ‘Capital fellow the landlord! He knows what a man’s appetite is. I ordered eggs, kidneys, sausages, and cold ham, and he seemed to expect it.. Yes. These are my headquarters for the present, though Advanced G.H.Q. is elsewhere. By the by, Dick, just for an extra precaution, my name’s Thomson—Alexander Thomson—and I’m a dramatic critic taking a belated Easter holiday.’
The breakfast was as good as Sandy had promised, and what with the rim in the fresh air and the sight of him opposite me I began to feel light-hearted.
‘I got your letters,’ I said, ‘but, I say, your knowledge of Derby winners is pretty rocky. I thought that was the kind of information no gentleman was without.’
‘I’m the exception. Did you act on them?’
‘I told Medina I had broken with you for good and never wanted to see your face again. But why did you make such a point of it?’
‘Simply because I wanted to be rid of his attentions, and I reckoned that if he thought we had quarrelled and that I had gone off for good, he might let me alone. You see he has been trying hard to murder me.’
‘Good Lord!’ I exclaimed. ‘When?’
‘Four times,’ said Sandy calmly, counting on his fingers. ‘Once before I left London. Oh, I can tell you I had an exciting departure. Three times in Paris, the last time only four days ago. I fancy he’s off my trail now, for he really thinks I sailed from Marseilles the day before yesterday.’
‘But why on earth?’
Well, I made some ill-advised remarks at the Thursday Club dinner. He believes that I’m the only man alive who might uncover him, and he won’t sleep peacefully till he knows that I am out of Europe and is convinced that I suspect nothing. I sent you those letters because I wanted to be let alone, seeing I had a lot to do, and nothing wastes time like dodging assassins. But my chief reason was to protect you. You mayn’t know it, Dick, but you’ve been walking for three weeks on the edge of a precipice with one foot nearly over. You’ve been in the most hideous danger, and I was never more relieved in my life than when I saw your solemn old face this morning. You were only safe when he regarded our friendship as broken and me out of the way and you his blind and devoted slave.’
‘I’m that all right,’ I said. ‘There’s been nothing like it since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’
‘Good. That’s the great thing, for it gives us a post in the enemy’s citadel. But we’re only at the beginning of a tremendous fight and there’s no saying how it will go. Have you sized up Medina?’
‘Only a little bit. Have you?’
‘I’m on the road. He’s the most complex thing I’ve ever struck. But now we’ve got to pool our knowledge. Shall I start?’
‘Yes. Begin at the Thursday dinner. What started you off then? I could see that something he said intrigued you.’
‘I must begin before that. You see, I’d heard a good deal about Medina up and down the world and couldn’t for the life of me place him Everybody swore by him, but I had always a queer feeling about the man. I told you about Lavater. Well, I had nothing to go upon there except the notion that his influence upon my friend had been bad. So I began making inquiries, and, as you know, I’ve more facilities than most people for finding things out. I was curious to know what he had been doing during the War. The ordinary story was that he had been for the first two years pretty well lost in Central Asia, where he had gone on a scientific expedition, and that after that he had been with the Russians, and had finished up by doing great work with Denikin. I went into that story and discovered that he had been in Central Asia all right, but had never been near any fighting front and had never been within a thousand miles of Denikin. That’s what I meant when I told you that I believed the man was one vast lie.’
‘He made everybody believe it.’
‘That’s the point. He made the whole world believe what he wanted. Therefore he must be something quite out of the common—a propagandist of genius. That was my first conclusion. But how did he work? He must have a wonderful organisation, but he must have something more—the kind of personality which can diffuse itself like an atmosphere and which, like an electric current, is not weakened by distance. He must also have unique hypnotic powers. I had made a study of that in the East and had discovered how little we know here about the compulsion of spirit by spirit. That, I have always believed, is today, and ever has been, the true magic. You remember I said something about that at the Thursday dinner?’
I nodded. ‘I suppose you did it to try him?’
‘Yes It wasn’t very wise, for I might easily have frightened him. But I was luckier than I deserved, and I drew from him a tremendous confession.’
‘The Latin quotation?’
‘The Latin quotation—Sit vini abstemius qui hermeneuma tentat aut hominum petit dominatum. I nearly had a fit when I heard it. Listen, Dick, I’ve always had a craze for recondite subjects, and when I was at Oxford I wasted my time on them when I should have been working for my schools. I only got a third in Greats, but I acquired a lot of unusual information. One of my subjects was Michael Scott. Yes—the wizard, only he wasn’t a wizard, but a very patient and original thinker. He was a Borderer like me, and I started out to write a life of him. I kept up the study, and when I was at the Paris Embassy I spent my leisure tracking him through the libraries of Europe. Most of his works were published in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and mighty dull they are, but there are some still in manuscript, and I had always the hope of discovering more, for I was positive that the real Michael Scott was something far bigger than the translator and commentator whom we know. I believed that he taught the mad Emperor Ferdinand some queer things, and that the centre of his teaching was just how one human soul could control another. Well, as it turned out, I was right. I found some leaves of manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, which I was certain were to be attributed to Michael. One of his best-known works, you remember, is the Physionomia, but that is only a version of Aristotle. This, too, was part of a Physionomia, and a very different thing from the other, for it purported to give the essence of the Secreta Secretorum—it would take too long to explain about that—and the teaching of the Therapeutae, with Michael’s own comments. It is a manual of the arts of spiritual control—oh, amazingly up-to-date, I assure you, and a long way ahead of our foolish psychoanalysts. Well, that quotation of Medina’s comes from that fragment—the rare word “hermeneuma” caught my attention as soon as he uttered it. That proved that Medina was a student of Michael Scott, and showed me what was the bent of his mind.’
‘Well, he gave himself away then, and you didn’t.’
‘Oh yes, I did. You remember I asked him if he knew the guru who lived at the foot of the Shansi pass as you go over to Kaikand? That was a bad blunder, and it is on account of that question that he has been trying to remove me from the earth. For it was from that guru that he learned most of his art.’
‘Was the guru’s name Kharama?’ I asked.
Sandy stared as if he had seen a ghost.
‘Now how on earth do you know that?’
‘Simply because I spent an hour with him and Medina a few nights ago.’
‘The devil you did! Kharama in London! Lord, Dick, this is an awesome business. Quick, tell me every single thing that passed.’ I told him as well as I remembered, and he seemed to forget his alarm and to be well satisfied. ‘This is tremendously important. You see the point of Medina’s talk? He wants to rivet his control over those three unfortunate devils, and to do that he is advised to assert it in some environment similar to that of their past lives. That gives us a chance to get on their track. And the control can only be released by him who first imposed it! I happened to know that, but I was not sure that Medina