CHAPTER III

DR. OPPENSHAW

Just as rabbit-burrows on the Arizona plain give shelter to a mixed tenantry, a rabbit, an owl, and a snake often occupying the same hole, so the Harley Street houses are, as a rule, divided up between dentists, oculists, surgeons, and physicians, so that under the same roof you can, if you are so minded, have your teeth extracted, your lungs percussed, your eyes put right, and your surgical ailment seen to, each on a different floor. Number 110A, Harley Street, however, contained only one occupant--Dr. Otto Oppenshaw. Dr. Oppenshaw had no need of a sharer in his rent burdens; a neurologist in the most nerve-ridden city of Europe, he was making an income of some twenty-five thousand a year.

People were turned away from his door as from a theatre where a wildly successful play is running. The main craving of fashionable neurotics, a craving beyond, though often inspired by the craving for, the opium alkaloids and cocaine, was to see Oppenshaw. Yet he was not much to see: a little bald man like a turnip, with the manners of a butcher, and gold-rimmed spectacles.

Dukes inspired with the desire to see Oppenshaw had to wait their turn often behind tradesmen, yet he was at Simon Pettigrew's command. Simon was his sometime lawyer. It was half-past twelve, or maybe a bit more, when the taxi drew up at 110A and the lawyer, after a sharp legal discussion over tuppence with the driver, mounted the steps and pressed the bell.

The door was at once opened by a pale-faced man in black, who conducted the visitor to the waiting-room, where a single patient was seated reading a last year's volume of _Punch_ and not seeming to realise the jokes.

This person was called out presently, and then came Simon's turn.

Oppenshaw got up from his desk and came forward to meet him.

"I'm sorry to bother you," said Simon, when they had exchanged greetings. "It's a difficult matter I have come to consult you about, and an important one, else I would not have cut into your time like this."

"State your case," said the other jovially, retaking his seat and pointing out a chair.

"That's the devil of it," replied Simon; "it's a case that lies out of the jurisdiction of common sense and common knowledge. Look at me. Do I look as though I were a dreamer or creature of fancies?"

"You certainly don't," said Oppenshaw frankly.

"Yet what I have to tell you disgusts me--will disgust you."

"I'm used to that, I'm used to that," said the other. "Nothing you can say will alarm, disgust, or leave me incredulous."

"Well, here it is," said the patient, plunging into the matter as a man into cold water. "A year ago--a year and four weeks, for it was on the third of May--I went down to my office one morning and transacted my business as usual. At twelve o'clock I--er--had occasion to open my safe, a safe of which I alone possess the key. On the top of a deed-box in that safe I found a brown-paper parcel tied with red tape. I was astonished, for I had put no parcel in."

"You might have forgotten," said Oppenshaw.

"I never forget," replied Simon.

"Go on," said Oppenshaw.

"I opened the parcel. It contained bank-notes to the amount of ten thousand pounds."

"H'm--h'm."

"Ten thousand pounds. I could not believe my eyes. I sent for my chief clerk, Brownlow. He could not believe his eyes, and I fear he even doubted the statement of the whole case. Now listen. I determined to go to my bank, Cumber's, and make enquiries as to my balance, ridden by the seemingly absurd idea that I myself had drawn this amount and forgotten the fact. I may say at once this was the truth, I _had_ drawn it, unknown to myself. Well, that was the third of May, and when and where do you think I found myself next?"

"Go on," said Oppenshaw.

"In Paris on the third of June."

"Ah--ah."

"Everything between those dates was a blank."

"Your case is not absolutely common," said Oppenshaw. "Rare, but not without precedent--read the papers. Why, only yesterday a woman was found on a seat at Brighton. She had left London a week ago; the interval was to her a complete blank, yet she had travelled about and lived like an ordinary mortal in possession of her ordinary senses."

"Wait a bit," said Simon. "I was not found on a seat in Paris. I found myself in a gorgeously-furnished sitting-room of the Bristol Hotel, and I was dressed in clothes that might have suited a young man--a fool of twenty, and I very soon found that I had been acting--acting like a fool. Of the ten thousand only five thousand remained."

"Five thousand in a month," said Oppenshaw. "Well, you paid the price of your temporary youth. Tell me," said he, "and be quite frank. What were you like when you were young? I mean in mind and conduct?"

Simon moved wearily.

"I was a fool for a while," said he. "Then I suddenly checked myself and became sensible."

Oppenshaw rapped twice with his fingers on his desk as if in triumph over his own perception.

"That clears matters," said he. "You were undoubtedly suffering from Lethmann's disease."

"Good Lord!" said Simon. "What's that?"

"It's a form of aberration--most interesting. You have heard of double personalities, of which a great deal of nonsense has been written? Well, Lethmann's disease is just this: a man, say, of twenty, suddenly checked in the course of his youth, becomes practically another person. You, for instance, became, or fancied you became, another person; you suddenly 'checked yourself and became sensible,' as you put it, but you did not destroy that old foolish self. Nothing is destructible in mind as long as the brain-tissue is normal; you put it in prison, and after the lapse of many years, owing, perhaps, to some slight declension in brain power, it broke out, dominated you, and lived again. Youth must be served.

"It would have been perhaps better for you to have let your youth run its course and expend itself normally. You have paid the price of your own will-power. I am very much interested in this. Tell me as faithfully as you can what you did in Paris, or at least what you gathered that you