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“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 dickens 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 title 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 courtship. 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!