Nightmare. Lynn Brock

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.