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.
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