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 sounds 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."
"Shu
t 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.
Three
"If everyone is ready," suggested Dr. Richard Rich, "shall we begin the experiment?"
It was nearly nine o'clock. The long, spacious back drawing room was lighted only by a bridge lamp, with a white parchment shade, beside the sofa.
Arthur Fane had always been punctilious about the ceremony of dressing for dinner. But tonight, as a concession to the heat, he had so far unbent as to wear a soft shirt with his dinner jacket. So did the other men with the exception of Frank Sharpless, whose black-and-scarlet mess jacket fitted tightly round the usual stiff shirt and black tie. Vicky Fane wore dark violet, with full skirt and sleeves. Ann Browning was in white. All stood out vividly, even in shadow, against the cream-painted walk.
The windows at the narrow end of the room were open. But their curtains had been partly drawn, so that only the last shreds of daylight entered when Richard Rich took up a position with his back to the red-brick fireplace.
Dr. Rich was a short, stocky, comfortable-looking man in an untidy dinner jacket. He had thrust his hands into the pockets of it. He was bald except for an unexpected brush of hair, black streaked with gray, which began half way down the back of his skull and curled out over his collar. It formed the only vaguely theatrical touch to an otherwise stout, ordinary personality. His round face was slightly flushed with the heat, or with the brandy he had taken after dinner. He was smiling.
"And when we do begin," he continued, softly over a note of heavy brass. "I think Captain Sharpless will understand why I couldn't proceed last night."
Sharpless waved this aside.
"All right. But what is this experiment, exactly?"
"That's what I want to know," agreed Arthur Fane rather sharply. "What are you going to do?"
Dr. Rich smiled in a maddeningly cryptic way.
"With your permission," he said, "I first of all propose to place one of you under hypnosis."
"You're not going to place me under hypnosis," said Arthur, "and get me to make a fool of myself in public. Besides, I don't hold with this. It's — it's morbid."
"You would be a bad hypnotic subject anyway," smiled Dr. Rich. "No. With her permission, the person I propose to use for the experiment is Mrs. Fane."
For some reason, this created a minor sensation.
Vicky was sitting bolt upright in a slender chair not far from the fireplace, her hands folded in her lap. She turned her head round, surprised.
"Me?" she asked. "But why? I mean, why me?"
"First, Mrs. Fane, because you're the best hypnotic subject here. The second reason — well, you'll understand the second reason when we have finished."
"But I should have thought…"
Vicky did not complete die sentence. What she evidently meant, to judge by the direction of her glance, was that she thought the best subject would be Miss Ann Browning.
Ann Browning was sitting in shadow, in one of the white easy chairs. She bent forward absorbedly, in deep and eager interest. Though about the same age as Vicky, she seemed to have little of th
e letter's brisk practicality. She was smaller than Vicky, and more slender. Her hair, gold where the light struck it, was bound round her head. Her skin, against the white gown, had merely a clear glow as opposed to Vicky's faint tan.
Dr. Rich's shrewd little eyes interpreted that glance, and answered it.
"You would be wrong, Mrs. Fane," he said.
"Wrong?"
"I suppose you share most people's view that the easiest hypnotic subject is a sensitive or highly strung person? That, as any doctor will tell you, is the exact reverse of true."
Arthur Fane sat up.
"Do you call me a sensitive or highly strung person?" he asked incredulously.
"No, Mr. Fane. You are just dogged. You would fight the influence. I doubt whether anybody could hypnotize you."
"By George, you're right there," breathed Arthur. He was flattered and pleased; and, as usual when pleased, his rare, pleasant smile lit up the dark face. He took two puffs at a dead cigar. "But why has it got to be any of us? Why can't we have one of the maids in, and experiment on her?"
"Arthur, they'd talk!" said Vicky warningly.
Her husband saw the justice of this, and subsided. But he did not seem pleased. He kept darting glances, rather hungry glances, in the direction of Ann Browning. Vicky saw these looks too.
"Well, Mrs. Fane?" prompted Rich.
Vicky laughed a little. "I don't mind being the victim, exactly. But it's as Arthur says. I don't want to make a fool of myself in public. This — this is the business where your subconscious mind is supposed to be released, isn't it?"
"Only in a sense. You will be under the control of my will, and must obey my orders."
"Yes, that's what I mean," returned Vicky, rather hastily. "I mean, I shouldn't want to be made to quack like a duck, or go up and kiss somebody, or anything like that."
Throughout the foregoing, Uncle Hubert Fane, who was smoking one of Arthur's best cigars with relish, had several times looked very thoughtful. A watcher might even have said that he seemed apprehensive. Once, at the mention of the subconscious mind, he cleared his throat as though to intervene.
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