Nightmare - Lynn Brock

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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

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