Part 22 (1/2)

With that I let him go. The colloquy had not only done me no service, but had positively emboldened him--or so I seemed to perceive as the weeks went on--in his efforts to cast off his old slough and become a travesty of me, as he had been a travesty of my uncle. I am willing to believe that they caused him pain. A crust of habit so inveterate as his cannot be rent without throes, to the severity of which his facial contortions bore witness whenever he attempted a witticism. Warned by them, I would sometimes admonish him--

”Mirth without vulgarity, Trewlove!”

”Yessir,” he would answer, and add with a sigh, ”it's the best sort, sir-- _ad_-mittedly.”

But if painful to him, this metamorphosis was torture to my nerves.

I should explain that, flushed with the success of _Larks in Aspic_, I had cheerfully engaged myself to provide the Duke of Cornwall's with a play to succeed it. At the moment of signing the contract my bosom's lord had sat lightly on its throne, for I felt my head to be humming with ideas. But affluence, or the air of the Cromwell Road, seemed uncongenial to the Muse.

Three months had slipped away. I had not written a line. My ideas, which had seemed on the point of precipitation, surrendering to some centrifugal eddy, slipped one by one beyond grasp. I suppose every writer of experience knows these vacant terrifying intervals; but they were strange to me then, and I had not learnt the virtue of waiting. I grew flurried, and saw myself doomed to be the writer of one play.

In this infirmity the daily presence of Trewlove became intolerable.

There arrived an evening when I found myself toying with the knives at dinner, and wondering where precisely lay the level of his fifth rib at the back of my chair.

I dropped the weapon and pushed forward my gla.s.s to be refilled.

”Trewlove,” said I, ”you shall pack for me to-morrow, and send off the servants on board wages. I need a holiday. I--I trust this will not be inconvenient to you?”

”I thank you, sir; not in the least.” He coughed, and I bent my head, some instinct forewarning me.

”I shall be away for three months at least,” I put in quickly.

(Five minutes before I had not dreamed of leaving home.)

But the stroke was not to be averted. For months it had been preparing.

”As for inconvenience, sir--if I may remind you--the course of Trewlove never did--”

”For three months at least,” I repeated, rapping sharply on the table.

Next day I crossed the Channel and found myself at Ambleteuse.

II.

I chose Ambleteuse because it was there that I had written the greater part of _Larks in Aspic_. I went again to my old quarters at Madame Peyron's. As before, I eschewed company, excursions, all forms of violent exercise. I bathed, ate, drank, slept, rambled along the sands, or lay on my back and stared at the sky, smoking and inviting my soul. In short, I reproduced all the old conditions. But in vain! At Ambleteuse, no less than in London, the Muse either retreated before my advances, or, when I sat still and waited, kept her distance, declining to be coaxed.

Matters were really growing serious. Three weeks had drifted by with not a line and scarcely an idea to show for them; and the morning's post had brought me a letter from Cozens, of the Duke of Cornwall's, begging for (at least) a scenario of the new piece. My play (he said) would easily last this season out; but he must reopen in the autumn with a new one, and--in short, weren't we beginning to run some risk?

I groaned, crushed the letter into my pocket, and by an effort of will put the tormenting question from me until after my morning bath. But now the time was come to face it. I began weakly by asking myself why the d.i.c.kens I--with enough for my needs--had bound myself to write this thing within a given time, at the risk of turning out inferior work.

For that matter, why should I write a comedy at all if I didn't want to?

These were reasonable questions, and yet they missed the point.

The point was that I had given my promise to Cozens, and that Cozens depended on it. Useless to ask now why I had given it! At the time I could have promised cheerfully to write him three plays within as many months.

So full my head was then, and so empty now! A grotesque and dreadful suspicion took me. While Trewlove tortured himself to my model, was I, by painful degrees, exchanging brains with him? I laughed; but I was unhinged. I had been smoking too many cigarettes during these three weeks, and the vampire thought continued to flit obscenely between me and the pure seascape. I saw myself the inheritor of Trewlove's cast-off personality, his inelegancies of movement, his religious opinions, his bagginess at the knees, his mournful, pensile whiskers--

This would never do! I must concentrate my mind on the play.

Let me see--The t.i.tle can wait. Two married couples have just been examined at Dunmow, and awarded the 'historic' flitch for conjugal happiness. Call them A and Mrs. A, B and Mrs. B. On returning to the hotel with their trophies, it is discovered that B and Mrs. A are old flames, while each finds a mistaken reason to suspect that A and Mrs. B have also met years before, and at least dallied with courts.h.i.+p. Thus while their spouses alternately rage with suspicion and invent devices to conceal their own defaults, A and Mrs. B sit innocently nursing their illusions and their symbolical flitches. The situation holds plenty of comedy, and the main motive begins to explain itself. Now then for anagnorisis, comic peripeteia, division into acts, and the rest of the wallet!

I smoked another two cigarettes and flung away a third in despair.

Useless! The plaguey thing refused to take shape. I sprang up and paced the sands, dogged by an invisible Cozens piping thin reproaches above the hum of the breakers.