“Oh, yes,” said Elsie.
That night as she was going to bed, she critically examined her own underwear. Her chemise and drawers were coarse, she wore no stays, and the garters that held up her transparent lisle-thread stockings were plain bands of grimy white elastic. Her short petticoat was white, with a torn flounce, and only the camisole, which showed beneath her transparent blouses, was trimmed with imitation Valenciennes lace and threaded with papery blue ribbons.
“What you doing, Elsie?” grumbled Geraldine from her bed. “Get into bed, do; I want to go to sleep.”
“Have you seen those things they sell in sets, Geraldine, in some of the High Street shops? Sort of silk combinations and a princess petticoat and nightgown, all to match like?”
“I’ve seen them advertised at sale times, in the illustrateds, and beastly indecent they are, too. Why, you can see right through that stuff they’re made of.”
Elsie became very thoughtful.
Her sister’s words had brought before her mind’s eye an involuntary picture that both startled and repelled her.
“Anyway, the prices are something wicked. What’s up, young Elsie?”
“Nothing. I heard something to-day that set me wondering, that’s all.”
“What?”
“Oh, some girl that wanted a pink silk rig-out, that’s all.”
“You must have some queer friends. No decent girl would wear those things — only tarts do, unless it’s fine ladies that aren’t any better than they should be, from what the Society papers say.”
Geraldine, in her curling-pins and her thick nightgown, looked rigidly virtuous. “Get into bed, do.”
“It’s too hot,” sighed Elsie.
The room was like a furnace, but neither of them would have dreamed of opening the window after dark.
Elsie tossed and turned about for a long while, unable to sleep. She visualised herself in new clothes, in evening dress, which she had never worn, and she thought of the excitement of staying in a big hotel where there would very likely be a band in the evenings and, of course, late dinner every night.
If only it had been anyone but Mr. Williams! But then, he was the only rich man she knew.
“It’s a shame,” thought Elsie, “that I shouldn’t have opportunities of meeting other men like him, only different. I wish I’d gone in for manicure — I’d have met all sorts then.”
For a moment she wondered whether her friendship with Williams might not lead to his introducing her to his wealthy friends, but she was shrewd enough to perceive that his first preoccupation would be to keep their connection secret, and that he was of far too cautious a temperament to risk her meeting with men younger and more attractive than himself.
Her last waking thought was of the silk set of underclothes, cool and lovely and transparent against her skin.
The following morning Mr. Williams behaved exactly as usual, and made no reference whatever to his suggestion of a holiday. Elsie, rather anxious and affronted, took advantage of a late call from a client to leave the office at six o’clock exactly, without returning into her employer’s room to announce her departure as she usually did.
On her way to the crowded Tube station she was followed and accosted by a strange man. This adventure had become a common one to Elsie, but a certain recklessness pervaded her that evening, and when he urged her to come and sit in the park, under the cool of the trees, she went with him. He was a man of thirty-five or so, with a miserable, haunted, disease-ravaged face, and he began almost at once to pour out to her a long story of his wife’s treachery, of which he had just made the discovery.
“I’ve never looked at another girl,” he kept on saying. “I’ve never spoken to one the way I’ve spoken to you to-night. But you remind me of her, in a way, and I knew you’d be all right, and sorry for a poor devil who’s been fooled.”
Elsie hardly listened to him, but she let him put his arm round her waist, and as his caresses became more violent and eager, she again felt that instinctive conviction that it was to such an end that she had been created. These physical contacts only, brought her to the fullness of self-expression. At last she realised that her companion was muttering a request that he might go home with her.
“What do you take me for?” Elsie asked furiously. “I’m a respectable girl, I am.”
He became maudlin and begged her to forgive him, and she sank back again into his embrace, appeased at once.
At last, when the park gates were closing, she roused herself and insisted that if he wanted to go on talking to her they must go somewhere and have supper.
The man seemed too dazed and wretched to understand her, but when Elsie, rendered prudent by certain previous experiences, asked whether he had any money, he drew out a handful of loose silver.
“That’s all right, then.” she said, relieved, and took him to a cheap and very popular restaurant.
Elsie drank cocoa and ate sweet cakes, and her escort, leaning heavily on the marble-topped table, continued his low, maundering recitation of self-pity.
She had very little idea of what he was talking about.
She liked the restaurant and enjoyed her cakes, and the occasional contact between herself and the unknown man satisfied her for the time being.
When they left the restaurant, Elsie directed him to the omnibus that would take her nearest to her own suburb, and they climbed to the top of it, and sat in close proximity on the narrow seat all through the long drive.
It was with real difficulty that she tore herself away in the end, physically roused to a pitch that rapidly amounted to torment. She was frightened and disgusted by her own sensations, but much less so than she had been in the days of her technical innocence, before she had known Doctor Woolley. She decided that she would go to Brighton with Mr. Williams.
And she would buy the silk underclothes — pink silk — and a real evening dress, cut low, that should reveal her shoulders and the full contour of her bust, and perhaps he would give her enough money for a string of imitation pearl beads as well.
“After all, he can afford to be generous,” Elsie thought complacently. “An old man like him! I expect I’m a fool to look at him, really.”
She meant that her attraction for men was sufficiently potent to ensure her ability to cast her spell wherever she chose, but common sense reminded her that the number of men within her immediate sphere was limited. Even men who followed her, or addressed her casually in the street, were mostly of the bank-clerk type, and of her own actual acquaintance scarcely one reached the level of the professional class to which Williams belonged.
At Hillbourne Terrace, Elsie found the front door locked, and realised that it must be late. She understood what had happened. Mrs. Palmer, angry at her daughter’s tardiness, had probably decided to give her a fright, and was waiting in her dressing-gown, angry and tired, for Elsie to try the side-door.
“I just won’t, then,” muttered Elsie angrily. “I’ll jolly well go to Ireen.”
She had seen a light in the house opposite as she came up the street, and it would not be the first time that she had called on Irene Tidmarsh for hospitality.
Her friend opened the door in person, and Elsie explained her position, giving, however, no specific reason for her lateness.
“Come in,” said Irene indifferently. “You can sleep with me if you want to. I often thank God I’ve no mother.” The two girls went up to Irene’s large, untidy bedroom in the front of the house, and began to undress, and Elsie was unable to resist the topic of the pink silk underclothes that obsessed her imagination.
“Geraldine says only tarts wear them.”
“What does she know about it?” Irene enquired. “Ladies of title wear them — that Lady Dorothy Anvers, that’s always being photographed, she goes in for black silk nightgowns — black, if you please!”
“I’d rather have pink, a great deal. I think black’d be hideous.”
“Depends on one’s skin, I suppose,” said th
e sallow Irene thoughtfully. “Who wants to give you a silk nightie, young Elsie?”
Elsie deliberated. She was not usually communicative about her own affairs, but the notice of her employer had gratified her vanity, and she very much desired to boast of it to someone. Irene, at least, would be safe, and she sometimes offered shrewd pieces of advice that were not the outcome of experience, of which, by comparison with Elsie herself, she had little, but of a natural acumen.
Elsie, when the gas had been turned out, and the two girls were lying in Irene’s bed, after extracting giggling oaths of secrecy, recounted to Irene the whole story of her adventure with Mr. Williams. She represented herself as still entirely undecided as to the sincerity of his assurance that their relationship was to be purely friendly.
“Rats!” was Irene’s unvarnished comment. “It isn’t very likely the old fool would have told you to get silk nighties and things unless he meant to see them himself. But I wouldn’t do it, Elsie. It’s too risky.”
“Why, who’s to find out? It isn’t as if his wife was alive,” said Elsie, with a recollection of the household in Mortimer Crescent.
“I don’t mean that at all. But it’s a beastly risk for you. He’s your boss, after all. Suppose he gives you the sack, once this week-end business is over? Men are like that — they get sick of a girl directly they’ve had their fun, and then they don’t want to be for ever reminded of it.” “It’s quite as likely he’d be for ever pestering me to go with him again,” Elsie declared, not at all desirous of supposing that her attractions could be provocative of such speedy satiety. “And even if he did sack me, there are plenty of other jobs going.”
“You young fool! Don’t you see what I mean? Suppose he landed you with a baby?”
“Oh! “ Elsie was startled.
Like a great many other girls of her class and upbringing, although she possessed a wide and garbled knowledge of sex, she was singularly unable to trace the links between cause and effect. “A baby,” in this connection, was to her nothing but an isolated catastrophe, that she had never particularly connected with the physical relations between a man and a girl.
“It couldn’t, Ireen.”
“Why not? Of course it could happen. A girl I know got caught, only luckily she had some sense, and went to one of these doctors that can stop it for you”
“Can they?”
“Some can,” said the well-informed Irene. “But mind you, it’s an expensive business, and a jolly dangerous one. Why, the doctor can be had up for doing it, I believe. So don’t you go and get yourself into any mess of that sort, now.”
“I should think not,” murmured Elsie.
“How old did you say this fellow, this Williams, was?”
“I don’t know. About forty or forty-five, or something like that. He was years older than his wife, and she wasn’t a chicken.”
“And she’s dead, is she?”
“Of course she is. I told you all about that ages ago.”
“ I know. Look here, Elsie, I’ve an idea. Why don’t you marry this fellow?”
“Ireen Tidmarsh, are you dotty or what?”
“I’m giving you jolly good advice, and you’ll be a young fool if you don’t take it. He’s rich, and you’d have a splendid position, and after a year or two you’d probably find yourself free to go your own way. He wouldn’t live for ever, either.”
“Don’t,” said Elsie.
“Well, it’s true. You can bet he’s on the look-out for a second wife already — widowers of that age always are.”
“ He wouldn’t think of marrying me.”
“Only because he can get what he wants without,” said Irene curtly. “You show him he can’t, and set him thinking a bit. If he’s half as keen on you as you say he is, anyway, the idea’s bound to cross his mind.”
Elsie was rather bewildered, and disposed to be incredulous. She was incapable of having formulated so practical an idea for herself, and it held for her a sense of unreality. “Anyhow, I couldn’t marry an old man like that. I don’t even like him.”
“Whoever you marry, young Elsie, you won’t stick to him,” said Irene cynically. “And if you ask me, the quicker you get a husband the better.”
“That’s what mother says.”
“She wasn’t born yesterday. Well, do as you like, of course, but it’s the chance of a lifetime. I’m sure of that. Just hold out for a month — tell him you couldn’t think of going anywhere with him — and see if he doesn’t suggest your becoming the second Mrs. Williams.”
“You’re mad, Ireen,” said Elsie, entirely without conviction.
She was in reality very much impressed both by Irene’s worldly wisdom and by the sudden realisation it had brought to her of the possibilities latent in Mr. Williams’ admiration.
She disliked having to work, and she knew that marriage was her only escape from work. To be married very young would be a triumph, and she thought with malicious satisfaction of how much she would enjoy asking Aunt Gertie and Aunt Ada to visit her in her own house.
“Well, good-night,” said Irene’s voice in her ear. “I’m going to sleep. If you want to get over to your place early in the morning, don’t wake me, that’s all.”
“All right.”
Elsie turned over, gave a fleeting thought to the memory of the man she had met that evening, and fell asleep almost at once.
The next morning, after huddling on her clothes, and washing her face very hastily just before putting on her hat over her unbrushed hair, Elsie crossed the street and went home.
Mrs. Palmer was on the doorstep.
She was very angry.
“How dare you stay out all night like that, you good-for- nothing little slut? I haven’t closed my eyes for wondering what’d happened to you. Where have you been?”
“At Ireen’s.”
Why didn’t you tell me you were going there?”
“I never thought of it, till I got here and found the door locked.”
“It wasn’t locked till nearly eleven o’clock, miss, and you could have come in by the side door, as you very well knew. And what were you doing out till eleven o’clock, I should like to know?”
“Nothing,” said Elsie, beginning to cry.
Her mother promptly boxed her ears. “Elsie Palmer, you’re nothing but a liar, and you’ll break your widowed mother’s heart and bring her to disgrace before you’re done. However you’ve managed to grow up what you are, so particular as I’ve been with the two of you, is more than I can understand. Tell me this directly minute, who you were with last night?”
Elsie maintained a sullen silence, dodging as her mother aimed another heavy blow at her.
“I declare you’ll make me lose my temper with you!” said Mrs. Palmer violently. “Answer me this instant.”
“I went to the cinema.”
“Who took you?”
“That fellow in the office — that Leary boy.”
“Why couldn’t you come in last night and say where you’d been, then? The fact is, Elsie, you’re telling me a pack of lies, and I know it perfectly well. You can’t take your mother in, let me tell you, whatever you may think, I’m sure I don’t know what to do with you. I sometimes think you’d better go and live with your aunties; you’d find Aunt Gertie strict enough, I can tell you.”
Elsie knew this to be true, and was fiercely resolved never to put it to the test.
“What you want is a thorough good whipping,” said Mrs. Palmer, already absent-minded and preoccupied with preparations for breakfast. “Put that kettle on, Elsie, and be quick about it. And I give you fair warning that the very next time I have to speak to you like this — (see if that’s the girl at the door — it ought to be, by this time) — the very next time, I’ll make you remember it in a way you won’t enjoy, my lady.”
Mrs. Palmer’s active display of wrath was over, and Elsie knew that she had nothing to do but to keep out of her mother’s way for the next few days.
She helped to
get the breakfast ready in silence. She was too much used to similar scenes to feel very much upset by this one; nevertheless it influenced her in favour of acting upon Irene Tidmarsh’s advice.
She knew very well that it would not be as easy to hoodwink Mrs. Palmer over a week-end spent out of London as she had pretended to Mr. Williams. Elsie was still afraid of her mother, and believed that she might quite well carry out her threat of sending her daughter to live with the two aunts.
Her chief pang was at relinquishing the thought of the pink silk underclothes, but she endeavoured to persuade herself that they might still be hers, when she should be on the point of marrying Mr Williams. After all, it would be more satisfactory to own them on those terms than to be obliged to put them away after two days into hiding, in some place — and Elsie wondered ruefully what place — where they should not be spied out by Geraldine.
She went to the office as usual and was a good deal disconcerted when Fred Leary announced that “the Old Man “ had telephoned to say that he was called away on business, and should not be back for two days.
Elsie, rather afraid that her own determination might weaken, decided to write to him, sending the letter to his home address.
Her unformed, back-sipping hand, covered one side of a sheet of notepaper that she bought in the luncheon hour.
“Dear Mr. Williams,
“One line to tell you that I have thought over your very kind suggestion about a holiday, but do not feel that I can say yes to same. Dear Mr. Williams, it is very kind of you, but I cannot feel it would be right of me to do as you ask, and so I must say no, hoping you will not be vexed with me. I do want to be a good girl. So no more, from
“Your little friend,
“Elsie.”
VIII
It took Elsie exactly three months to bring Mr. Williams to the point predicted by Irene Tidmarsh.
During that time she was quiet, and rather timid, scrupulously exact in saying “sir” and very careful never to be heard laughing or chattering with Fred Leary.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 263