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?' "