Nightmare

Out of the question, of course, to think of parting with Bogey-Bogey … unthinkable. Probably the threat was merely spiteful bluff on Penfold’s part. Though he was quite capable of trying to carry it out. Of course, he couldn’t carry it out. Still … suppose they had to turn out of the flat …

Yes. One could calculate the position of the gramophone almost exactly. The landings of the two flats, of course, corresponded precisely in size and position. The Prossips would have placed the gramophone where it could be most conveniently reached by anyone who had to go to it repeatedly, either from the kitchen or their sitting-room, close to the balusters, two steps down the little stairs from the passage to the hall door. For, of course, they had to lean over the balusters to get at it and would do so where their rail, following the fall of the stairs, first became sufficiently low to place the gramophone within comfortable reach.

He decided upon a knot in the under-surface of the Prossips’ match-boarding. Just there. A line through that knot—say, from the centre of his own landing—ought to pass through the near side of the gramophone. If a hand was restarting the needle, and if a face was bent over it as it did so, the line would just about catch them both—some part of both of them. It would have to be a little oblique, of course—yes, starting from the centre of his own landing—that would be just about right …

Wasn’t there something in the agreement about the landlord being able to take steps to recover possession of the premises if the tenant violated any of the terms of the agreement?

One would be able to time it exactly, too. The footsteps would come hurrying—stop—count one—and then the face would be bent over the record—the bullet would rush up at it out of the record, smash into it, stop its sniggering and grinning.

Perfectly simple. The only difficulty was that the bullet might strike the motor of the gramophone and get deflected, or stopped.

He continued to stand, looking up, calculating absorbedly. One couldn’t possibly do it, of course. The risk would be too great. No one would believe for a moment, knowing of the quarrel with the Prossips, that it had been an accident, though there was, if you came to think of it clearly, no reason why he shouldn’t just happen to examine his old service revolver one day out in the passage of his flat and why it shouldn’t just happen to go off. That sort of thing was always happening …

And, if one could do it safely, of course, it would be so perfectly simple.

Once more the gramophone’s blaring ceased. Once more footsteps hurried to it—stopped. Once more the accursed torment began. Five o’clock? What the devil had he been thinking about—standing there like a fool? Too late to do the floor now.

He began to carry back the things which he had carried out of the kitchen, replacing them exactly in their former positions. Tomorrow or next day they would all have to be carried out again.

6

It is clear that Mr Knayle was right and that Whalley was taking this silly, childish feud with the Prossips altogether too seriously. The curious thing is that Whalley had been living on a sense of humour for the greater part of twenty years.

CHAPTER II

1

IN August, 1918, as he lay in the white, stunning peace of the hospital-ship which was carrying him to England, a matter which for four years had appeared to him of no practical importance whatever began to invest itself with a faint interest. Suppose that rumour at last spoke the truth and that the incredible was to be believed. Suppose that the Boche was finished and that peace was coming some time within the next six months, what was Simon Whalley (Capt., D.S.O.) going to do for the rest of a life which, after all, might continue for a considerable time.

The shrapnel wounds in his head and shoulder were not very serious, he had been told; but it would probably take a year at least to make the shoulder a serviceable one again. It was at all events a possibility that, so far as he was concerned, the War had finished. If it had, what was going to happen him next?

He was then thirty-two years of age. With the exception of some remote Lancashire cousins whom he had never seen and a married sister in the Malay States, he had no living relatives. There no longer existed anywhere in the world for him any place which he could regard as home. He had been called to the Irish Bar a few years before the War, but he had never received a brief—had, even in his student days, regretted that he had committed himself to a legal career—and had now no least intention or desire to resume the old weary, fruitless hauntings of the Dublin Law Library—if there was still such a thing. For that matter he had now no desire to return to Ireland. His parents (his mother had been Irish; his father, retired with a crippled leg and the rank of Major, after Spion Kop, the solitary descendant of an English family which had transferred itself from Lancashire to Co. Meath in the eighteen-fifties) had both died during the War. His brother had been killed in it—a fate which had also overtaken a dismaying number of the contemporaries who had been his more intimate friends both in Meath and in Dublin. Things had changed in Ireland—they were likely, it seemed, to change very greatly. The old days over there were gone—for good. Whatever was going to happen to him, he foresaw, would probably happen to him somewhere else.

Upon his demobilisation he would receive a bounty, he supposed, of two or three hundred pounds. A sum of nearly six thousand pounds stood to his credit in the Bank of Ireland, on deposit. His mother’s few thousands had gone to his sister—his father had died with an overdraft. There was no source from which he could hope to augment his limited capital, save his own abilities. These, upon consideration, appeared so unpromising that, by the time a stretcher carried him on to Dover Pier, he had dismissed all but one of them as quite unreliable.

An English public school had made of him an average public schoolboy, decently educated and decently proficient in games. The University of Dublin had given him an entirely useless Honours Degree in Classics. Apart from his law studies he had received no special training in anything. The world, he had already divined, would shortly be very full of smatterers looking for jobs—and of trained men who would crowd them out of them. There was schoolmastering—but his classics were already half-forgotten and no longer held a spark of interest for him. There were the colonies; but even to the colonies he had no talent or aptitude to offer beyond average health and physique and intelligence, discounted by the fact that he was two years past thirty. But one means of acquiring some more money, reasonably quickly, appeared within his possible reach. He had already written—shortly before the War—a couple of comedies, one successful, one very successful. The most hopeful occupation of his immediate future appeared to be the attempt to write others.

Nearly five years—four of them crowded with the almost entirely physical experiences of the War—now separated him from that brief, completely detached period of his life during which he had been a writer of plays. Looked back to now, it still remained utterly unaccountable, utterly dissociated from the rest of the past—a phenomenon as isolated and self-contained as an attack of measles or a passing interest in chess or wood-engravings. Neither his father’s family nor his mother’s—both had belonged to the small landed gentry class for several generations back—had had any known association with the theatre. His own previous interest in it had always been of the most casual and spasmodic kind, the interest merely of the average theatre-goer who regards it as one means of passing an occasional evening more or less agreeably. Until his twenty-fifth year he had never spoken to any person directly connected with it, never read the text of any play of later date than the eighteenth century, never—with the exception of schoolboy essays—attempted or thought of attempting, literary composition of any sort. The desire to write plays, together with the ability to write them, had both presented themselves to him abruptly at an almost precisely definite moment of a particular night. He could recall the moment quite clearly. He had just then been passing the brightly-lighted entrance of the Shelbourne Hotel and, before he had reached the darkness beyond he had decided that he could write a play and that he would begin to do so before he got into his bed that night.

That had been in the September of 1911. A very popular actress-manager had paid a visit to Dublin with a comedy which had played in London to crowded houses for eighteen months. Whalley had gone with some friends to see her at the Theatre Royal and had been disappointed in the piece, which had appeared to him weak and quite unamusing. It was as he walked towards his rooms in Mount Street, after parting with his friends, that the idea of writing a comedy really worthy of Miss Louie Storm’s talents had suddenly suggested itself to him. Within ten days the project had been carried into execution. Within three months the piece had been accepted and produced in London with brilliant success.

This first improbable adventure as a playwright had made him, for a fortnight or so, something of a celebrity. It had not, however, brought him in much money. The syndicate—three Jews—which was then backing Miss Storm, had quickly discovered his entire inexperience in the matter of dramatic authors’ contracts. The agreeable, clever young man from Ireland, who was so surprised and amused that his play had been accepted, had been without difficulty induced to accept a flat three per cent. The total sum which he had received in royalties from the eleven months’ London run of That Mrs Mallaby had been a little under fifteen hundred pounds. The ease and quickness with which this sum had been earned, however, had consoled him for the too-late acquired knowledge that he had been treated shabbily. He would strike while the iron was hot, write another play, and employ an agent to drive a much better bargain with one of those eager managers who, he had gathered, were only waiting to scramble for his next masterpiece. This prospect was all the more agreeable since his father’s financial affairs had recently fallen into unexpected embarrassment—as far as could be elicited from that charming but impulsive and simple-minded gentleman, through rash investments embarked upon under no more reliable guidance than a desire to obtain fifteen per cent. instead of five. The recent paternal remittances had been grievously reduced from their former generosity. Whalley had bought himself a typewriter, taught himself to use it, given up frequenting the Law Library, and settled down confidently to the composition of his second play.

The writing of the first had been a matter as simple and as effortless as walking or talking. Its plot, ready-made and divided neatly into three acts, had taken him something less than an hour to evolve and had required no subsequent adjustment or alteration whatever. Its characters had been born with its plot in that single hour of travail, clear-cut and definite. Patches of its dialogue, even, had already shaped themselves as he had scribbled down hurriedly a table of the scenes of each act, showing merely the characters on the stage during each. From this very simple scenario he had proceeded at once to the actual writing of the play, the only difficulty of which had been the inability of his pen to keep legible pace with his eager thought. From first to last the whole business had been joyous, absorbed, unhesitating, and care-free—a swift, certain progress to a certain goal. Before sending the manuscript to the typists, he had made a clean, revised copy; but most of the trifling emendations at first inserted in this version had subsequently been repented of and the original word or phrase restored.

This happy experience had not repeated itself. It had taken him six months to find an idea for his second play and, even then, the idea had for a long time refused to reduce itself to three acts. The writing and re-writing of the piece had, with intervals of loathing abandonment, taken another five months, in the course of which the dialogue, the characters, and even the plot itself had undergone countless revisions and remodellings and repolishings. A well-known agent had, it was true, placed the play almost immediately with another leading lady backed by Israelitish money, upon quite satisfactory terms. But a further seven months had elapsed before The Vanity Bag had been produced. It had had a mildly successful run of six months or so and had produced for its author royalties amounting to eight thousand pounds.

With this reward, Whalley had told himself he had every sensible reason to be satisfied. Eight thousand pounds had fallen into his hands just at a moment when they were urgently needed. He had by this time emerged from a rather prolonged phase of vague disillusionment and self-distrust, spent several months abroad, returned then to the ordinary habits and interests of his life, resumed his vigils in the Law Library, lowered his golf handicap, and recovered his normal cheerful and untroubling outlook. Humdrum and, so far, unencouraging as Law had appeared to him, it had seemed on chastened consideration to offer a more secure future than playwriting. Briefs would come—he had now money enough to live on until they did. If he wrote another play or other plays in his spare time, well and good. But playwriting would remain strictly a side-line—the possibly profitable amusement of an amateur. The business of his life must be the profession to which he had been trained.

And so, as abruptly as it had begun, his career as a dramatist had ended. He had never made any subsequent attempt to write anything—never felt the least impulse or desire to do so, though his father’s means had now become seriously straitened and it had been necessary to lend him twelve hundred pounds, with little prospect of the loan’s repayment. Occasionally the sight of his typewriter’s dusty cover, stowed away in a corner of his sitting-room, had caused him a smile of amused reminiscence. When, from time to time, his agent had written as to the likelihood of another play, he had sometimes experienced a momentary pang of regret for opportunities neglected. His reply, however, had always been that he had been frightfully busy lately.

Then the War had happened. He had received a commission in October, 1914, and had gone into the trenches for the first time in February, 1915, near Fleurbaix. Subsequently he had been wounded three times—twice severely—gassed, and blown into the air by a mine, had suffered from trench-foot, lice, a particularly loathsome kind of itch, cold, wet, occasional attacks of blind fear, and, towards the end, an intolerable fatigue and boredom. As the hospital-train rolled smoothly up through Kent, he told himself that, for him, at all events, the War had been a damned silly, tiresome business and that he was damned glad to be out of it—if he was out of it. The best of it had been the marvellous cheerful patience of the men. The worst of it had been that of all the countless jobs that had fallen to him to do, there had been no chance or possibility of doing a single one properly and thoroughly. He had inherited from his mother a punctilious conscientiousness which had always insisted upon the exact performance of detail, and the eternal, unescapable scamping and shirking and botching which he had seen going on around him for the past four years had irritated him profoundly. That, despite himself, he too should always have been compelled to scamp and shirk and botch, had been in the end an exasperation. Yes. He was damned glad to be done with it all.

However, parts of it had been interesting. He had met some wonderful human beings, and, without undue complacency, he could feel satisfied that he had done his bit as well as the next chap. He knew that he had been a smart, smart-looking, efficient and reliable officer, satisfactorily plucky, popular with the men, if a little suspect of his fellow T.G.’s on account of his passion for thoroughness, his lack of interest in whisky and smut, and his capacity, on occasion, for mordant retort. If he had not felt the part, he had contrived to play it not too badly. He supposed that, some time, it would give him some satisfaction to look back to that.

He made an effort to turn his thoughts again towards the future, but there was only a past from which he had escaped. What had he been thinking about? Oh yes—those two old plays he had written … donkey’s years ago. Awful tripe—especially the second one—as well as he remembered. Plays … after that …

His memory suddenly recalled vividly a very large packing-case which he had seen just before the Christmas of 1911 in a corner of a room at Miss Storm’s theatre. The room had been the office of Miss Storm’s official reader, a bored, sardonic young man who had raised the lid of the packing-case and exhibited its contents with a grin. It had been filled to overflowing with tattered typescripts—hundreds of them—churned, it had seemed to Whalley, deliberately, into hopeless confusion. ‘The Great Unactable’, the sardonic young man had explained, and had torn a page from someone’s Act II to light a cigarette with at the fire.

The kind, considerable purr of the train was delicious. Whalley shut his eyes upon that chilling memory and went asleep.

2

After a fortnight in London he was transferred to Ducey Court, the residence of a large estate a little distance outside Rockwood, converted temporarily into a hospital for officers. A few minutes after he had been deposited in one of the cots of a small upstairs ward, the door of the room re-opened and a slim girl in V.A.D.’s uniform appeared, bearing a laden tea-tray. While one hand had reclosed the door behind her, her long steady eyes took stock of the new arrival gravely and then smiled. In that moment, they were both ever afterwards agreed, they both fell in love.

With this artless cliché they were compelled, ultimately, to rest content, though, naturally, they made afterwards the usual attempts to define exactly what had really happened to them in that miraculous instant. At all events, whatever had happened, they both knew beyond all thought of doubt, had been waiting from the beginning to happen and would go on happening until the end. This decided, in a little over a week—with a total actual acquaintance of less than twenty-four hours—they resolved to marry one another, and did so—Whalley’s shoulder having made unexpected progress—in the week following the Armistice.

Elsa Barnard was then twenty-five. As regarding family ties, her isolation was almost as complete as Whalley’s own. Her mother had died during her childhood. Her father—of Barshire family and, like Whalley’s, a soldier—had rejoined his old battalion at the outbreak of the War and been killed in the third week of it. Two brothers and no less than seven cousins had been swept away in the following four years. A married sister and a widowed and childless uncle—her mother’s elder brother—in whose house and charge she had lived since her father’s death, were her only living relatives.

Whalley was duly introduced to them, received with cold politeness, and, after some cross-examination, given to understand that they both washed their hands of Elsa’s unwisdom in marrying an individual of whom she knew nothing save that he had a disabled shoulder, no occupation, no friends in England, and no prospects save a hope that he might write plays. They both attended the quiet little wedding, however, and Mr Loxton, the uncle, gave the bride away, having previously presented her with a cheque for a hundred pounds.

The Whalleys spent their short honeymoon at a little Surrey inn under the lee of the Hog’s Back. Towards its close they discovered, just outside Puttiford, the adjoining village, a tiny seventeenth-century cottage whose tenant, desiring to spend the following year abroad, agreed to let it to them, furnished, for twelve months, beginning from the following January. This impetuous arrangement completed, they returned to Rockwood—Whalley to Ducey Court for further treatment pending his demobilisation, and Elsa—no offer of hospitality having been made either by her uncle or her sister—to the house of some friends. As she no longer attended the hospital and as his hours of escape from it were still strictly limited, they saw, for nearly a month, very little of one another. During that period of intolerable separations he found ample time to realise what he had done—and what he had to do. The first realisation amazed him; the second transformed his amazement to stupefaction.

Into the paradise in which Elsa and he had strayed for the past two months the serpent £ s. d. had been permitted to make but one brief intrusion. On the afternoon on which they had become engaged, as they returned slowly towards the hospital along one of the drives of the park, they had halted to watch the deer drifting in the September sunshine.

‘It doesn’t seem of any real importance, somehow,’ Elsa had said. ‘But I suppose we shall have to eat and wear clothes and live in some sort of a house. I’ve been taking it for granted that you have some money, Simon. I have none, you know—just fifty pounds a year my mother left me. Poor pater died without a red.’

He had laughed and said, with perfect confidence and tranquillity, as his arm had drawn her slenderness closer to him, ‘I have a fountain pen and about six thousand pounds to buy ink with. We ought to be able to write quite a lot of plays before all that ink is used up, you know. If you really feel that we shall want to eat, one winner ought to supply us with a square meal a day for ten years or so. Naturally, we will write the winner first. Don’t tell me that you’ve begun to repent already, Elsa. I’ve used the fountain pen, you see. They’ll never take it back at the shop.’

There had been no further discussion of ways and means. In those few airy words of his he had disposed of all the stupendous difficulties of their future. It was amazing. Not once during the past two months had he caught a glimpse of the chill, dangerous actualities that lay in wait outside his warm, tender, sunlit dream. He had lived spellbound by all the marvellous, lovely, gracious things that were Elsa—her eyes, her hair, her smile, her voice, her way of holding her fork, her skill in shaving him—ten thousand lovelinesses. In the bright aura of courage and confidence that surrounded her he had basked—content, self-complacent, blind to everything beyond. All things had seemed possible, easy, certain. Amazing, for, all his life, he had always foreseen difficulties. Amazing.

Well, the music had to be faced. No more airy talk of writing plays—some time or other. He must throw off the spell—shut himself out from it, tear his mind out of its lazy happiness and start it out on the cheerless, lonely quest for an idea. Now—at once.

He found a deserted, dark little room beyond the operating-theatre, filled with stacked cane-bottomed chairs, and, escaping from the cheerful clamour of the wards, retired there in the mornings as soon as the masseuse had finished with his shoulder. Sometimes he sat there for three hours on end, staring at the dusty chairs, and smoking cigarette after cigarette. Nothing came of these seances, however. His mind appeared capable of two functions only—spasmodic reminiscence of detached experiences during his War service, and impatient eagerness to be with Elsa again. After ten days of this fruitless discipline, he abandoned it and spent his mornings wandering about the park. He had never been able to think constructively, however, out-of-doors or when moving about. Having decided that there was no hope of settling down to work until he had a quiet, comfortable room to work in, he became rather irritably impatient for his demobilisation, which, for some unknown reason, had been postponed.