Nightmare

On one of these morning promenades he had for the first time an experience which was subsequently to become familiar to him—a sudden sick dizziness, accompanied by a sensation that every drop of blood in his body had turned to lead. His legs sagged under him. He came to a stop struggling with an onset of violent depression, bodily and mental. These curious disturbances, however, passed away almost instantly. He attributed them to a too hearty breakfast and the coldness of the December morning, continued his walk, and had forgotten all about them before he reached the hospital.

A week or so later he had another attack of the same kind after his bath. Altering his diagnosis, he cut down his smoking for some days. There were more important things to think about than little attacks of dizziness and shivers. His long-delayed demobilisation had been rushed through and he was a free man once more. And Mr Loxton, relenting of his inhospitality, had invited Elsa and her husband to become his guests until their departure to Surrey.

Mr Loxton had weighed a good deal on Whalley’s mind lately. He was a squarely-built, brusque man of sixty-two, a prominent figure in the public life of Dunpool, one of the leaders of its commercial plutocracy, and still the active senior partner of the most important firm of iron-founders in the west of England. He lived in an imposing house in the outskirts of Rockwood, entertained lavishly, got up at six o’clock every morning, neither smoked nor drank anything stronger than water, and never spoke without stating a fact or asking someone else to state one. He was childless; after her father’s death Elsa had lived with him, managed his house for him, and been regarded by him, generally, as a daughter. One did not desire Mr Loxton’s death; but some time, probably within the next fifteen years, he would die. The reasonable supposition was that he would leave some considerable portion of his money to his two nieces. The thought that his own unsatisfactoriness as a nephew-in-law should have endangered Elsa’s personal prospects had worried Whalley seriously since their return to Rockwood.

Mr Loxton, however, was geniality itself during the short visit. After dinner on Christmas Day he held up a glass of water and abandoned the ‘Whalley’ to which ‘Captain Whalley’ had already been softened.

‘Well, Simon, my boy, here’s to those plays of yours. Don’t forget that I’m to have a box whenever you have a first night.’

And on the last day of December, just before they started for Surrey, he handed Elsa a cheque for five hundred pounds.

‘I expect you’ll want a car of some sort, young woman. If that isn’t enough let me know. If it’s too much, spend what’s over on a perambulator.’

Elsa’s sister, Mrs Canynge, remained, however, cold. Her husband—he was, Whalley discovered, the managing director of the firm of Loxton & Ferrier, Ltd.—took the trouble to display a marked incivility. Elsa’s personal friends, however, were all charming to him. Amongst them was a cheery, pleasant little man of thirty-seven or so, named Knayle, of whom he was to see more later on, and who, he learned, had known Elsa all her life. Mr Knayle, whom she called ‘Harvey’, addressed her as ‘Elsa’—apparently as a matter of course—and was much interested to learn that her husband had written That Mrs Mallaby and The Vanity Bag, both of which he remembered having seen and greatly enjoyed. He invited them to tea at his flat and proved the most entertaining and sympathetic of hosts.

3

They arrived at the cottage at Puttiford in the dusk of a frosty afternoon. It was a veritable homecoming. The red curtains of the little latticed windows were all lighted up. Silhouetted in the porch stood the maternal woman from the village who was to ‘do for’ them. They went into the cosy little sitting-room, and found a crackling fire of pine logs and a sumptuous tea awaiting them. Hand in hand, like two happy children, they stood looking about them silently until Mrs Hidgson had finally withdrawn, then, attracted by the hooting of an owl just outside one of the windows, drew aside its curtain. Whalley’s best efforts, however, failed to open the window, and he drew the curtain across again with a puckered frown. During tea he was a little abstracted and, half-way through the meal, rose to make another trial of the window, equally unsuccessful.

‘Always the way with these picturesque old houses,’ he said, returning to her. ‘The windows won’t open—or, if they open, they won’t shut. I wonder if there are any tools in the place. We must get that window right straight away.’

And immediately after tea, before he unpacked, he hunted down an aged screwdriver, repaired its haft, and eased the jammed sash. From her chair before the fire Elsa watched him with amusement and some surprise. Afterwards, however, they spent an evening of rapturous contentment.

Elsa revealed herself as the most capable of cooks and managers. Mrs Higson proved the most efficient of ‘doers for’. The little house was kept as neat and bright as a new pin. Its equipment—including gas-supply and indoor sanitation—was entirely satisfactory. The local tradespeople were obliging. The Guildford shops were but half an hour away by bus. London could be reached in an hour and a half. Puttiford’s delightful common and golf-links began at the front door. All the loveliness of Surrey lay around them. They bought a small car, joined the golf-club, made friends with the score or so of agreeable people who were their neighbours, and ran up to town every week for a theatre or a concert. Everything, in fine, connected with their cottage was delightful except that, after a couple of months, Whalley discovered that he couldn’t write plays in it.

On the morning of the second day after their arrival he shut himself up in the tiny room between the kitchen and the sitting-room which he had arranged as his own special sanctum. Its one little window faced north, however; the sun never came into it; it was rather damp, and it had no fireplace. The oil stove smelt and he put it out, chilled down, became oppressed by the smallness and darkness of the room and the busy clatter of the kitchen next door. He adjourned to the sitting-room; but a clothes-horse draped with airing-sheets had been drawn across its fire. After half an hour of disjointed musings, he went out and inspected the garden, which, he decided, would want a lot of tidying-up. Then he remembered that his foot had caught in the bedroom carpet when he had entered it on the preceding night. Failing to find either tacks or hammer, he went off to the village to procure them. On his way he met the genial secretary of the golf-club and was easily persuaded to return to the cottage, collect his clubs, and play a very pleasant eighteen holes.

In the afternoon Elsa and he went for a long walk, returning just in time for tea. After tea he remembered the tacks and the hammer and hurried off to the village. The bedroom carpet, he discovered, required tacking down all round. To do this it was necessary to move most of the furniture. Descending to the sitting-room he found Elsa in the firelight. They sat there until it was time to change for the meal which they had decided to call supper. Afterwards he retreated again to his sanctum and for nearly an hour sat there, endeavouring to entice his thoughts away from their endless retracings of the past four months. They refused, however, to submit to any control—jumped to and fro, from his first walk with Elsa to their walk that afternoon—to the car they would have to get—to Mr Loxton and the unlikelihood of his living beyond seventy-five—to his own father’s death at sixty-eight—back to Elsa. Some day—incredible, desolating horror—one of them would die and leave the other. Every moment that he lived must be lived for her—with her. She was alone now—in there in the sitting-room. He had left her alone for a whole hour. But he must leave her alone—sometimes. It was impossible to think except of her when he was with her. And yet … that hour had gone from them. Yes—there was a deuce of a lot to be done in that garden. But the garden mustn’t be allowed to interfere with the things that really had to be done. Nor golf. It had been a very jolly game that morning—that iron of his at the seventeenth had been rather a beauty. Pleasant chap, the secretary. He had said that his wife would call. He mustn’t forget to tell Elsa.

He went back to the sitting-room and kissed Elsa passionately. They were drowsy after their long walk and went off to bed before ten.

The days slid away. The weeks began to slide away. There was always something to be done—something that had been done to think about. Sometimes for a week on end the one thing that must be thought about—that must be done—disappeared completely from view. Then, as they returned from a walk or a drive or a mild bridge-party, an abstracted silence would fall on him, and he would quicken his pace, or speed up the car. Arrived at the cottage he would hurry into the little sanctum, light the oil-stove and a pipe, and seat himself with Elsa’s pen and a writing-block. Mrs Higson’s curiosity was aroused by the elaborate designs drawn on the crumpled sheets which she found in the sanctum’s waste-paper basket. She had believed that the master was a literary gentleman, but formed now the conclusion that he was an artiss or something.

No other tangible result was produced by these spurts of industry which gradually became more and more widely spaced. Whalley, of course, explained to Elsa humorously what happened to him when he shut himself up in his lair.

‘I sit down and think that I have got to think of an idea for a play. I immediately stop thinking about anything for a bit. Then I begin to think about you. I draw curlimacews until I think again that I have got to think about an idea for a play. Then I think that it is utterly impossible to think of an idea for a play. The darned thing must come of its own accord. One has nothing to start from—one hasn’t the faintest idea where one wants to go. I draw a lot more curlimacews. Then I think that I have got to think of an idea for a play—that I must start earning some money straight away, and that, whether it is impossible or not, I must think of an idea for a play before I leave that room. I immediately stop thinking about anything. Then I begin to think about you and draw curlimacews until I think again that I have got to think of an idea for a play. It goes on like that until you open the door and tell me that it’s teatime. It’s exactly like trying to make a blind mule drink out of a bucket that isn’t there. There’s no use worrying about it. The darn thing must come of its own accord … Oh, I wanted to oil the lock of the garage.’

Returning from a call one afternoon towards the end of February, Elsa found him standing in the garden regarding the cottage with a curious frowning intentness. A drizzling rain was falling. She reproached him for standing in it without a raincoat.

‘The little shanty got on my nerves suddenly,’ he explained, rather shamefacedly. ‘I felt I had to get outside. It’s such a little box of a place. The ceilings are so low. I’ve felt all along, somehow … stifled … cramped …’

Her voice trembled a little.

‘But I thought you were quite happy here, dear.’

‘Happy? Yes, yes, dear, absolutely happy—you know that, don’t you. It isn’t that. But … It’s so difficult to explain—so perfectly idiotic. It’s all right so long as I am with you, but when I’m alone … That little den of mine gives me the horrors now. When I go into it, all I want to do is to get out of it again as quickly as possible … Oh, there’s that washer for the scullery tap. I shall have time to fix that before tea.’

He abandoned the sanctum altogether. Spring came and was gone. Summer came. Surrey was a garden of drowsy enchantment. The cheery, decorative young people at Myrtle Cottage had made themselves very popular. They played a lot of golf and tennis—had nearly always some engagement for their afternoons. They worked in the garden. Whalley had always some small job to do about the house. Elsa’s eyes lost the watchfulness that had grown in them for a little while following that incident in February. He appeared absolutely happy. Nothing else really mattered.

At the beginning of September, however, his interest in the links and the garden declined noticeably. ‘We’ve got to get out of this place, Elsa,’ he said abruptly as they drank their early tea one morning. ‘Puttiford, I mean, for a bit, anyhow. It’s no use to us. It’s a backwater—a blind alley for us. These people who live here in those houses in among the trees—well, they’re very nice and kind, and so forth—but, you know, they’re dead. Stuffed. Nothing ever happens to them. Nothing could ever happen to them. They’re determined that nothing will ever happen to them. That’s why they live at Puttiford. We’ve got to get away from them … get round … see people who are alive and do things. Anyhow, for a bit.’

They left the cottage in Mrs Higson’s care and took the car up one side of England to Scotland, and down again along the other side, travelling by short stages, and staying at a number of alarmingly expensive hotels. If the people whom they encountered along the way were not dramatically inspiring, most of them were at all events alive and amusing. The two months’ holiday was a gratifying success and had a gratifying sequel. Within a month from their return to Puttiford, Whalley wrote a play.

True—it was not a comedy, but a historical play—and a historical play whose theme and characters had been used before by many other dramatists. Nor had any original idea been born to Elsa’s fountain-pen. Whalley had merely been strongly impressed by that tragic little room at Holyrood and had decided to write a play about Mary, Queen of Scots. However, it was a play, and, he thought, quite a good one. Elsa considered it perfectly wonderful. They celebrated its departure to Whalley’s old agent by a weekend at Brighton.

4

The ice was broken. Before the time came to leave their little cottage two more plays had been written—one a rather gloomy War drama, the other a four-period comedy with a first act set in the ’sixties.

The parting from Myrtle Cottage was, at the last moment, a severe wrench. Some encouraging news from the agent, however, consoled them. His New York office had succeeded in interesting a well-known manager in the comedy. After some weeks in rooms in Guildford, they found a tiny flat in Chelsea to let furnished for three months, and installed themselves there. Whalley wrote another comedy, but soon found London distracting. They returned to Surrey in the spring and spent the remainder of that year at a very comfortable little inn at Albury. Another comedy was written there.

For another year they moved on from one small hotel to another, then settled, successively, in a furnished bungalow near Gillingham, lodgings at Bournemouth, and a boarding-house at Folkestone. Nine plays of various sorts had now been sent off to the agent. From time to time he wrote regretting his failure to place any of them. The New York manager had paid a thousand dollars for an option, but had then faded out. Serious encroachments had been made upon Whalley’s six thousand pounds. Those curious spasmodic attacks of dizziness and depressed exhaustion to which he had now grown accustomed, became more frequent and of longer duration. He began to lose appetite and weight and to suffer a good deal from sleeplessness and a chronic soreness of his tongue which robbed smoking of all pleasure. Two doctors failed to alleviate this trouble, which remained with him for the next seven years.

In the spring of 1922—they were living in rooms at Guildford then—he became definitely anxious, and decided to write a novel. Working at feverish speed, he succeeded, without difficulty of any sort, in carrying out this project within the space of three months. The English publishers who accepted the book paid a hundred pounds in advance royalties and its ‘fresh and delicate humour’ received an unhoped-for number of kindly notices from the press. It fared still more fortunately, for a first novel, in America, where the sales amounted to nearly 5,000 copies. Altogether it brought to Whalley royalties amounting to about £400.

He put aside those golden visions which he had seen so clearly on that September afternoon on which Elsa and he had watched the deer in the park at Ducey Court. £400 a year was not to be sneezed at. His sales would increase as his name became known. In a few years he might hope to be earning a steady £700 or £800 a year. And one could write two novels a year—easily.

He wrote a second—a third—in all, nine. They were all alike. His agent assured him that his publishers and his public expected them to be so. They all achieved the same limited success. Between the years 1922 and 1927, they furnished him with an average income of £550.

In the summer of 1927—they were back at Puttiford, staying at the inn—he had a severe attack of neuritis, brought on, he then believed, by over-violent tennis and subsequent carelessness in sitting under an open window. Three weeks of agonising pain and sleepless nights left behind a sudden swift wasting of the muscles of his shoulders and his arms, and for a couple of months he was unable to brush his hair or put on his clothes without great difficulty and fatigue. Radiant heat and ionisation proved ineffectual. Gradually, however, if very slowly, he recovered a restricted use of his arms, though his shoulder muscles remained wasted. The Guildford doctor who attended him affixed the label: ‘peripheral neuritis’ to the attack, was interested in his tongue trouble, and a little vague in his acceptance of the tennis-and-draught theory. Finally he advised a nerve specialist.

Whalley went up to London and paid five guineas to a nerve specialist who told him that there was nothing whatever wrong, organically, but that rest and change were necessary. The book for the following spring had been begun and Whalley was unwilling to move until it was at all events well on towards completion. They remained on at Puttiford. One day, while he was writing in the hotel garden, he became aware of a point of sharp pain at the tip of his right thumb. Next day the tips of the fingers of both hands were numb. In a week the numbness had spread to his feet, which felt as if jagged sprigs were stretched along their soles, inside the skin. He had grown so used to partial disablement now that these new symptoms did not perturb him greatly. But he decided that it was time to look for some air more bracing than that of Surrey, and they set off, rather hurriedly, for the little inn on the Quantocks, at which they had engaged rooms by wire.

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