He made several passes, during which I kept smiling at him, and shaking my head, as much as to say it was no good.
Then all of a sudden I threw myself into a state of rigidity, a trick I had learnt and practised years previously, and pretended to go off into a cataleptic trance.
The mesmerist was hugely elated. The others present, most of whom knew me, were considerably surprised. Not one of them but believed that he was witnessing a genuine hypnotic phenomenon.
After a while the mesmerist made several passes designed to bring me to. But herein he failed. Again and again he tried. It was no good. The only movement I made was to bite my lip so that it bled, and roll up my eyes horribly, leaving only the whites visible.
The mesmerist began to get badly frightened, and after one or two more vain attempts he ran out of the house to, as he said, fetch a doctor. Meanwhile the others carried me, still rigid, upstairs to bed.
A friend volunteered to stay and watch me, and after a while I came to of my own accord.
“Thank God!” exclaimed my friend, and called out for the others to come up and have a look at me.
“Fine bit of play-acting, wasn’t it?” I said.
But the others would not believe me. They were quite sure in their own minds that I really had been mesmerised, and only when I repeated to them practically the whole of the conversation that had passed between them while I was in my supposed trance, did they realise how completely they had been spoofed.
As for the mesmerist, he never came back to the hotel. Instead of going for a doctor, he had made a bee-line for the railway station, and skipped the town. Evidently he thought it was all up with me.