On the morning of the following day — Wednesday, the twenty-third of August — Mr. Philip Courtney walked out of The Plough Hotel into the sunshine of Regent Street.
Philip Courtney was at peace with all the world.
It was eleven o'clock. He had eaten a late breakfast, smoked the first, most satisfying pipe of the day, and glanced leisurely through the papers. He had nothing on his mind until evening, and an easy job then.
Cheltenham struck him as being as pleasant a town as any in England. He liked its white-painted, geranium-bed dignity; its spacious, shady streets; its suggestion of Bath without the latter town's cramped and dingy lanes. He would go for a stroll before lunch.
And so he was hesitating on the sunny pavement when a voice spoke behind him.
"Phil Courtney! You old horse!"
Courtney turned.
"Frank Sharpless!" he said.
The sight of a khaki uniform was not, in that year nineteen thirty-eight, bo frequent in Cheltenham as it is today. Frank Sharpless, a captain in a Sapper regiment, gleamed with all his buttons.
"You old horse!" he repeated. "What are you doing here? On a job?" "Yes. And you?"
"Leave. I'm visiting my father; he lives here." Sharpless gestured hospitably towards the hotel. "Come in and have one?"
"With pleasure."
In the American Bar upstairs, at a table by the window with pint tankards between them, they regarded each other with real pleasure.
"Phil," said Sharpless, "I'm going to Staff College."
Courtney considered this. "That's good, I suppose?"
"Good?" echoed the other, with hollow incredulity. "It's the biggest damn honor you can get, I'd have you know! I go there next year. Six months, and then anything can happen. I'll probably wind up as a colonel, one day. Can you imagine me as a colonel?" He peered round to look at the three pips on his shoulder-strap, as though trying to envisage what it would look like.
In person Frank Sharpless was a rangy, dark-haired, good-looking fellow, with a real good humor which made him liked everywhere. Also, he had a first-rate mathematical brain. But he did not seem very adept at concealing his feelings. Though he was full of beans this morning, yet he clearly had something on his mind, worrying him.
"Many congratulations," said Courtney, "and all the luck in the world. Cheer-ho."
"Cheer-ho.".
"Your father's pleased, I imagine?"
"Oh, pleased as Punch! — Look here, Phil." After taking a deep pull at the tankard, Sharpless set it down abruptly. But he appeared to change his mind again, and edged away from what he had been thinking about. "Still ghosting, are you?"
When it is stated that Philip Courtney was a ghost, and a real king-specter among ghosts, this means merely that he was a ghost-writer.
He wrote, in short, those autobiographies and reminiscences of well-known persons, eminent, famous, or merely notorious, which the well-known people signed. Phil Courtney was also a conscientious craftsman who really enjoyed his work.
He was a stickler for realism. He tried to make the autobiography of a celebrated harlot sound as though it had actually been written by the celebrated harlot, if she had. been endowed with a little — just a very little — more culture and imagination. He tried to make the reminiscences of a sporting peer sound as though they had actually been written by the sporting peer, if he had been endowed with a little — just a very little-more brains. And this pleased everybody.
To him these books were completely satisfying. They represented so many characters he had created, so many personalities of which he was a part, with the advantage over fiction that these characters were real. You could find them in the telephone book or, if sufficiently exasperated by their temperament, kick them in the pants.
Up to this day Phil Courtney, despite minor squalls on the part of his sitters, had been a happy man. "Still ghosting," he admitted. "Who is it this time?"
"Quite a bigwig, they tell me. Fellow from the War Office, by the way."
"Oh? What's his name?"
"Merrivale. Sir Henry Merrivale."
Frank Sharpless, who had again lifted the tankard to his lips, slowly set h down untasted.
"You," he said slowly, like one anxious to define the terms carefully, "you are going to write the reminiscences of Sir Henry Merrivale?"
"Yes. He told the publisher he hadn't time to write 'em himself, but he didn't mind dictating it. Of course that's what a lot of them say, and as a rule it doesn't mean much. I shall have to edit it—"
"Edit it?" roared Sharpless. "You'll have to burn it."
"Meaning what? They tell me he was a big shot during the War, and that he's been mixed up in any number of well-known murder cases."
"And no shadow of doom," said Sharpless, eyeing Courtney with real curiosity in his good-looking, rather fine-drawn face, "no shadow of doom darkens your fair day. No warning voice whispers in your ear: 'Get out of here, and stay out while you've still got your reason.' Well, it won't be long now."
"Here! Oi! What is all this?"
"Look here, old boy," said Sharpless, drawing a deep breath and putting his finger-tips on the edge of the table, "I don't want to discourage you. So I will only say this. You are not going to write the reminiscences of Sir Henry Merrivale. You think you are; but you're not."
"Why not? If you mean the old boy's temperamental," smiled Courtney, with the confidence of one whose tact has handled a popular actress and a Russian Grand Duke, "I think I can promise that—"
''Rash youth!" said Sharpless, shaking his head and fixing his companion with a moody eye. "Cripes! Was there ever such rashness?" He frowned. "I didn't know the old boy was down here, though. Where's he staying?"
From his pocket Courtney fished out pipe, pouch, and address book. He lit the pipe and leafed through the book.
"Here we are. 'Care of Major Adams, 6 Fitzherbert Avenue, Old Bath Road, Leckhampton, Cheltenham.' I'm told he first went to Gloucester, to see the Chief Constable about some criminal business, and then came on here for a rest."
He paused, caught by the expression on Sharpless's face. It was the same expression he had seen there a few minutes ago. Sharpless ran a hand through his dark, wiry hair. Then he clenched his fist, and seemed to meditate hammering it on the table. Instead, after looking round to make sure that the sunlit room was empty except for the barman, he leaned across the table and lowered his voice to a whisper.
"Look here, Phil."
"Yes?"
"That address. Reminds me of some friends of mine. The Fanes. They live close to there." "Well?"
"Phil, I've gone and fallen for a married woman." There was a silence.
"No! — strike me blind!" said Sharpless, lifting his right hand as though to take an oath, and drawing back a little. "I mean it. It's serious. It's the real thing."
His voice was still a fierce whisper. Horizontal wrinkles furrowed his forehead.
"But that would…" Courtney began. "Staff College," he added warningly.
"Yes! It'd play the devil! Don't I know it? But I can't help it, and that's all there is about h!"
"Who is she?"
"Victoria Fane, her name is. Vicky. They live in Fitzherbert Avenue too. Big, white, square house, set back from the road; you can't miss it as you go by. She's got a swine of a husband who swindles people under the guise of a solicitor. God, Phil, she's wonderful. I won't want to bore you with all this…"
"You're not boring me. You know that. Go on."
Sharpless drew a deep breath. "I was out there to dinner last night. I'm going again tonight."
"Dinner on two successive nights?"
"Well, there's an excuse. Last night, you see, there were six of us to dinner. Vicky, and this swine Fane— I know I oughtn't to talk about my host like that, but he is a swine and that's all there is to it — and Fane's uncle, and a wishy-washy gal named Ann Browning, and a doctor, and myself. This doctor is one of the kind (what do you call 'em?) who tells you when you've got complexes."
"Psychiatrist?"
"That's it! Psychiatrist. Rich, his name is! Dr. Rich. Well, this Dr. Rich, who's a genial old buffer like John Bull and looks as though he'd got no nonsense about him, started talking about his work. In the course of it he said that he very often used hypnotism."
"Used what?"
"Hypnotism," explained Sharpless, making mesmeric passes in the air by way of illustration. "Yes?"
"Now, that interested me. I've always thought it was a good deal of a fake. That's to say: I've seen 'em on the stage, where they fetch somebody up out of the audience and make him quack like a duck. But there always seemed to me something very, very phoney about it."
"There's nothing phoney about it, Frank."
"No. That's what Rich told me, and they all backed him up. I'm afraid I got a bit argumentative. I said I didn't maintain it couldn't be done; I said all I maintained was that I should like to see it done where there was no possibility of a fake.
"I said, furthermore, 'Suppose you could put a person under hypnotic influence like that, so that he or she was absolutely controlled by your will, would that person do anything you ordered?' I was thinking of the dangers of it, you see. I said, 'For instance, could you get a girl to do thus-and-so?' "
Sharpless paused.
He brooded, rubbing the aide of his jaw, but with a subdued twinkle in his eye nevertheless. He had a charm of naivete which enabled him to get away with even worse social bombshells than this.
"It wasn't a very tactful question, I admit," he said.
"Under the circumstances," said Courtney, "perhaps not. Well?"
"Well, Dr. Rich got very grave. He said, yes, you could, if the girl were already inclined that way; and that it was one of the dangers of hypnotism in the hands of unprincipled persons. I saw I'd rather dropped a brick, so I tried to cover it up by saying that what I meant was: could you get her to commit a crime? I said: 'If a victim is really under the will of a hypnotist, wouldn't there be the devil to pay if you told her to commit robbery or murder?' "
Courtney drew at his pipe. "And what did Dr. Rich have to say to that?"
"He explained it. The explanation sound s reasonable, I'm bound to admit."
"What is it?"
"That under hypnotism you will only do what you're capable of doing in waking moments. Like this! Suppose Vicky Fane walks into this room now. We hypnotize her, and then say, 'Now walk up to the bar and have a big drink of whiskey.' Vicky doesn't drink much, but she does indulge occasionally. So she'd go and do it like a soldier. You follow that?"
"Yes."
"But suppose you got a real, honest, fanatical teetotaler; a Band-of-Hoper; somebody like Lady Astor, for instance. After hypnotizing her—"
"Beautiful thought."
"Shut up. After hypnotizing her, you plank down half a tumbler of whiskey and say, 'All right, polish that off.' But she wouldn't. She couldn't. She might be in agony, because the hypnotist's will is law. She might even pick up the glass. But she wouldn't. If she did, it would mean there was something wrong with her teetotaler's principles.
"Finally, Dr. Rich said he regretted he hadn't got certain things there that night, or he would show me an interesting experiment which he thought I should find conclusive. That made me suspicious again, and I asked why he couldn't do the experiment now. He said it required certain properties.
"Whereupon Fane's uncle — decent old chap — suggested that we should meet again for dinner the next night, the same lot of us, and Dr. Rich could show us the experiment. Fane, the blister, didn't like this a bit. But I gather that Uncle Hubert is the wealthy relative whom Fane wants to keep on the good side of, so he managed to cough up an invitation. So it's dinner there again tonight."
Again Sharpless paused, uneasily.
"What sort of experiment, Frank?"
"I don't know," admitted Sharpless. His voice was heavy with worry. "Look here, Phil. Would you say that I was what-d'ye-callit? Thingummybob? Psychic?"
Courtney laughed outright.
"All right. Laugh. Your own doom will soon be on you anyhow. But I tell you—" Sharpless brought his fist slowly down on the table—"I tell you there's something funny going on in that house. Under the surface."
Courtney was direct. "You mean you think the lady's husband suspects your intentions?"
Sharpless hesitated, so Courtney prodded again.
"How far has the affair gone?"
"It hasn't gone anywhere yet. Hang it, I haven't even got any reason to suppose she cares two pins for me!" Sharpless brooded."And yet I do know, too. It was last week. At a damn concert in the Promenade. They were playing Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes … if you laugh I'll murder you!"
Courtney showed no disposition to laugh. After surveying him narrowly* with defiant embarrassment, Sharpless stared hard at the contents of his tankard and spoke in a muttering voice.
"She doesn't love the swine Fane. That I do know. Not that they don't put up a good front! This Dr. Rich may be hot stuff as a psychologist, but he can't see psychology when it's under his nose. I rode part of the way home with him on the bus last night. And he kept saying what an ideal couple the Fanes were, and how pleasant it was to see such things in this age of divorce, until I could have landed him one."
"H'm."
"But when I say there's something funny going on there, I don't mean that, exactly. I mean something else that's queer. And I'm not looking forward to tonight. I wish you could come along."
"I'd like to. But I've got a nine o'clock appointment with Sir Henry Merrivale."
Sharpless moved his shoulders.
"Well?" he said. "You've heard about it now. What's your advice?"
"My advice is: be careful."
"It's all very well to sit there and say that, Phil. But I can't be careful."
"Well, what do you want? Divorce?"
"A divorce, even if Fane consented," said Sharpless, "would mean good-by to the Staff College. But I'm beginning to think-"
"You're beginning to think: never mind the Staff College. To hell with the Staff College. You don't want to go to the place anyway. Is that it?"
"No, not that, exactly. Something like it, though. And, in any case, don't sit there puffing your pipe and looking like the Wise Man of the East. This is serious. I want advice; not sarcasm. Can't you rally round and offer a helpful suggestion?"
Courtney stirred with discomfort. Though he was only half a dozen years older than Sharpless's twenty-seven, he felt at once far older and yet less experienced.
"Look here, Frank. I can't solve your problem for you, and neither can anybody else. It's something you've got to work out for yourself."
"Oh, Lord!"
"It's true. If you love this girl, and she loves you, and you can see a way out without too much scandal, I should say go ahead. Have the girl and the Staff College too. Only for the love of Mike make sure you know what you're doing."
Sharpless did not reply.
His shoulders hunched up, and his gaze strayed out of the window down into the street. His eyes, ordinarily gray, were now almost black; the brows pinched together above them.
'That's that, then." He turned round from the window, like a man coming to a decision, and spoke in a different voice. "The governor'll want to see you. What about coming along home with me for lunch?"
"Glad to. But if-"
"No. Let's forget it." Sharpless drained his tankard and got up. "But I wish tonight were over. Cripes, how I wish tonight were over!"
It might have been instinct; it was certainly prophecy. Imperceptibly, a design had now been completed. The arrow was fitted, nock to the string; the bow was drawn to the full arc of its power. You could now only wait for the thud as the shaft went home.