the most part she gives her skill free to the children’s hospitals. But she will not refuse me. As for beginning, I should lose no time for the sake of your own comfort. What about tomorrow morning?’
‘Why not tonight? I ‘have nothing to do,’ and I want to be quit of my headache before bedtime. Why shouldn’t I go on there now?’
‘No reason in the world. But I must make an appointment. Madame is on the telephone. Excuse me a moment.’
He left the room and returned in a few minutes to say that he had made an appointment for seven o’clock. ‘It is an outlandish place to get to, but most taxi-drivers ‘know it. If your man doesn’t, tell him to drive to Gospel Oak, and then any policeman will direct you.’
I had my cheque-book with me, but he didn’t want his fee, saying that he was not done with me. I was to come back in a week and report progress. As I left I had a strong impression of a hand as cold as a snake, pale bulging eyes, and cheek-bones like a caricature of a Scotsman. An odd but rather impressive figure was Dr Newhover. He didn’t look a fool, and if I hadn’t known the uncommon toughness of my constitution I might have been unsettled by his forebodings.
I walked down to Oxford Street and had tea in a tea-shop. As I sat among the chattering typists and shop-boys I kept wondering whether I was not wasting my time and behaving like a jackass. Here was I, as fit as a hunter, consulting specialists and visiting unknown masseuses in North London, and all with no clear purpose. In less than twenty-four hours I had tumbled into a perfectly crazy world, and for a second I had a horrid doubt whether the craziness was not inside my mind. Had something given in my brain last night in Medina’s room, so that now I was what people call ‘wanting’? I went over the sequence of events again, and was reassured by remembering that in it all I had kept my head. I had not got to the stage of making theories; I was still only waiting on developments, and I couldn’t see any other way before me. I must, of course, get hold of Sandy, but first let me see what this massage business meant. It might all be perfectly square; I might have remembered Dr Newhover’s name by a queer trick of memory—heard it, perhaps, from some friend—and that remarkable practitioner might be quite honest. But then I remembered the man’s manner—I was quite clear that he knew something of me, that someone had told him to expect me. Then it occurred to me that I might be doing a rash thing in going, off to an unknown house in a seedy suburb. So I went into a public telephone-booth, rang up the Club, and told the porter that if Colonel Arbuthnot called, I was at 4 Palmyra Square, N.W.—I made him write down the address—and would be back before ten o’clock.
I was rather short of exercise, so I decided to walk, since I had plenty of time. Strangely enough, the road was pretty much that which I had taken on that June day of 1914 when I had been waiting on Bullivant and the Black Stone gentry, and had walked clean out of London to pass the time.
Then, I remembered, I had been thrilling with wild anticipation, but now I was an older and much wiser man, and though I was sufficiently puzzled I could curb my restlessness with philosophy. I went up Portland Place, past the Regent’s Park, till I left the houses of the well-to-do behind me, and got into that belt of mean streets which is the glacis of the northern heights. Various policemen directed me. and I enjoyed the walk as if I had been exploring, for London is always to me an undiscovered country. I passed yards which not so long ago had been patches of market-garden, and terraces, sometime pretentious, and now sinking into slums; for London is like the tropical bush—if you don’t exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of the slums, will break in. The streets were full of clerks and shop-girls waiting for buses, and workmen from the St Pancras and Clerkenwell factories going home. The wind was rising, and in the untidy alleys was stirring up a noisome dust; but as the ground rose it blew cleaner and seemed to bring from Kentish fields and the Channel the tonic freshness of spring. I stopped for a little and watched behind me the plain of lights, which was London, quivering in the dark-blue windy dusk.
It was almost dark when at last, after several false casts, I came into Palmyra Square. It was a square only in name, for one side was filled with a warehouse of sorts, and another straggled away in nests of small brick houses. One side was a terrace of artisans’ dwellings, quite new, each with a tiny bow-window and names like ‘Chatsworth’ and ‘Kitchener Villa.’ The fourth side, facing south, had once had a certain dignity and the builder who had designed the place seventy years ago had thought, no doubt, that he was creating a desirable residential quarter. There the houses stood apart, each in a patch of garden, which may at one time have had lawns and flowers. Now these gardens were mere dusty yards, the refuse of tin cans and bits of paper, and only a blackened elm, an ill-grown privet hedge, and some stunted lilacs told of the more cheerful past. On one house was the brass plate of a doctor, on another that of a teacher of music; several advertised lodgings to let; the steps were untidy, the gates askew on their hinges, and over everything was written the dreary legend of a shabby gentility on the very brink of squalor.
Number 4 was smarter than the others, and its front door had been newly painted a vivid green. I rang the bell, which was an electric one, and the door was opened by a maid who looked sufficiently respectable. When I entered I saw that the house was on a more generous scale than I had thought, and had once, no doubt, been the home of some comfortable citizen. The hall was not the tank-like thing of the small London dwelling, and the room into which I was ushered, though small, was well furnished and had an electric fire in the grate. It seemed to be a kind of business room, for there was a telephone, a big safe, and on the shelves a line of lettered boxes for papers. I began to think that Madame Breda,—whoever she might be, must be running a pretty prosperous show on ordinary business lines.
I was presently led by the maid to a room on the other side of the hall, where I was greeted by a smiling lady. Madame was a plump person in the early forties, with dark hair and a high colour, who spoke English almost without an accent. ‘Dr Newhover has sent you. So? He has told me. Will you please go in there and take off your coat and waistcoat? Your collar, too, please.’
I did as I was bid, and in a little curtained cubicle divested myself of these garments and returned in my shirt-sleeves. The room was a very pleasant one, with folding doors at one end, furnished like an ordinary drawing-room, with flowers in pots and books, and what looked like good eighteenth-century prints. Any suspicion I may have had of the bona fides of the concern received a rude shock. Madame had slipped over her black dress a white linen overall, such as surgeons wear, and she had as her attendant a small thin odd-looking girl, who also wore an-overall, and whose short hair was crowned with a small white cap.
‘This is Gerda,’ Madame said. ‘Gerda helps me. She is very clever.’ She smiled on Gerda, and Gerda smiled back, a limp little contortion of a perfectly expressionless face.
Madame made me lie down on a couch. ‘You have a headache?’
I mendaciously said that I had.
‘That I can soon cure. But there are other troubles? So? These I must explore. But first I will take away the pain.’
I felt her light firm fingers playing about my temples and the bases of my skull and my neck muscles. A very pleasant sensation it was, and I am certain that if I had been suffering from the worst headache in the world it would have been spirited away.
As it was, being in excellent health, I felt soothed and freshened.
‘So,’ she said,’ beaming down on me. ‘You are better? You are so beeg that it is not easy to be well all over at once. Now, I, must look into more difficult things. You are not happy in your nerves—not altogether. Ah! these nerves! We do not quite know what they are, except that they are what you call the devil. You are very wakeful now. Is it not so? Well, I must put you to sleep. That is necessary, if you are willing.’
‘Right-o,’ I answered; but inwardly I said to myself, ‘No,
