Dennis Wheatley - Unholy Crusade

A fortnight after he had sent in the manuscript of his third novel, Mr. Winters asked him to lunch at the Garrick, and there took him to task. Over the coffee he said:

`We are taking After Dusk in Southampton because the success of your first novel will still enable your name on a book to show us a margin of profit. But it's not going to get you anywhere. Now tell me, how much of it is you and how much is Mildred?'

Adam admitted that Mildred had had a considerable hand in it, particularly with the love sequences.

Mr. Winters gave a cynical grin. `I thought as much, and to you as an author your wife is a menace. She is a competent reader and good enough to recognise the big stuff when she sees it; hence her appreciation of your first novel. But her real flair is for light romance: the triangle fiction that goes down well with young girls and frustrated spinsters. Its sales are entirely to the libraries and its authors are almost unknown. But the ones that Mildred picks always show a profit. Not much, but it is bread and butter publishing that helps to keep the firm going. Some writers are naturals at turning out such trash. But you are not, and your new book is neither flesh, fowl nor good red herring. Snap out of it, dear boy. Go home and tell Mildred to put her head in a pudding cloth, then sit down to it and write me a really good book.'

Adam knew inside himself that his publisher was right. When he got home he sugared the pill as well as he could, but gave Mildred an expurgated version of what Mr. Winters had said. The result was a blinding row. She accused him of gross ingratitude and added, he felt without any justification, that his failure to produce really good books was due to his obsession with lust.

They patched up their quarrel, but the rift between them widened. Mildred would let him sleep with her only when he had taken her out to dinner and deliberately filled her up with liquor until she was three parts tight. Meanwhile he set to work on another novel and refused to show her a page of it.

The new book was a sequel to Across the Green Seas. While writing his last two novels, and particularly since the beginning of his association with Mildred, his strange dream parade of life among the Norsemen had occurred only at long intervals; but now that his mind was once more engaged on the subject they again became quite frequent and proved invaluable.

The lofty barn like house on the shores of East Gotland became as real to him as his Chelsea flat. It was one great room, the beams of the roof supported by two rows of tall posts. At one end there was a partition beyond which, through the dark cold winters, were housed the cattle; but only the prize beasts from which they would breed new herds. The rest were slaughtered in the autumn and salted or smoked for the months when it was difficult to procure food. Round the inner sides of the house there were stalls made from wattle. In one, with a stone surround, was the fire that was never allowed to go out. But there was no chimney to the house, only a hole in the roof; and when a high wind was blowing the smoke was beaten back, making one's eyes smart. Another stall had a row of pegs on which to hang their furs, although during the coldest months they never took them off. There were no cupboards, but in one cubicle there was a row of shelves to hold the cooking pots with their crude designs and the drinking horns. In the place of honour, on the top shelf, stood his glass mug; a thick piece with a design of a strange animal men called a leopard miraculously depicted on one side. It was said to have come from a great city far to the southward on the inland sea, named Rome, and had cost him twenty head of cattle. Apart from his great five foot long, double edged sword, which he had christened `the Avenger', the mug was his most precious possession.

So absorbed did he become by this transmission of far memory that he could think of little else; so the book progressed most satisfactorily, but a price had to be paid for that. During the past two years he had formed the practice of writing alternately a chapter of a book, then a short story or a few articles. Now he could not bring himself to break off from his novel, with the result that after three or four months his income began to fall off.

The advance on his last book had not fully covered the furnishing of their flat. Many of the items had been obtained on hire purchase and the installments had to be met. Mildred was still receiving her fees for reading manuscripts, but they were sufficient only to pay for her clothes and help out with the housekeeping. Neither of them had any capital or relatives who they could ask for a loan. Seeing the red light, she both badgered and pleaded with him to put the book aside and get down to more immediately remunerative work. He knew that she was right, but he was now near to hating her and her nagging brought out the obstinate streak in him. With perverse pleasure, he flatly refused.

Then there came a bolt from the blue. Mildred, to her fury, found herself to be pregnant. Adam did his best to console and comfort her, but she laid the blame on him and lashed him with her tongue until any pleasure he might have taken at the thought of becoming a father was destroyed by the knowledge that he was now tied to Mildred more firmly than ever. On top of that he was acutely harassed by the knowledge that having to maintain a child would prove an additional drain on their already strained finances.

His only consolation was that he had finished his book and was well on with revising it. Ten days later he was able to send it in and give his mind to devising plots for short stories. But writing the book had taken so much out of him that his imagination seemed to have dried up. He should, he knew, have had at least a fortnight's complete change and rest, but a holiday was out of the question: they could not possibly afford it. By driving himself mercilessly he succeeded in turning out about two thousand words a day, but he knew the writing to be of indifferent quality and was further depressed, although not surprised, that half the stuff he sent in was turned down.

The six months that followed were an ever increasing nightmare. Mildred had a bad pregnancy and mounting fears of the ordeal she could not escape. Vindictively, she took it out of Adam, abusing him both as the cause of her sickness and about the sad falling off in the standard of his work. For as long as he could each day he now shut himself away from her, doing his writing at a small table in the bathroom, but they had to meet for meals and share their bed at night. In such an atmosphere his work deteriorated further. He found himself incapable of writing stories acceptable to good magazines and even from lesser papers the ratio of rejection slips for his articles steadily increased.

A time came when his bank manager refused him a further overdraft; so, in desperation, he asked Mr. Winters for an advance on his unpublished book. Winters pointed out that After Dusk in Southampton had proved an even worse flop than The Sea and the Siren and that both books had outstanding balances against them; so, with the firm, Adam was already well `in the red'. But he admitted that his reader's reports on the new book Chronicles of Ord were encouraging and, somewhat grudgingly, let him have two hundred pounds.

In overdue hire purchase installments and other liabilities the two hundred pounds melted away overnight. For some time past Adam had been unable to take Mildred out to dinner or a movie, even once a week. They scraped and tried to save by getting rid of their cleaning woman. The additional work thrown upon Mildred made her still more shrewish; although she hardly attempted to cope with it, with the result that the flat became a pig sty. Bills continued to roll in, but only an occasional cheque for a few guineas from an editor, and the bank manager became difficult, insisting that Adam's overdraft must be substantially reduced.