Nightmare

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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.