Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “Times were different then. It was before the war. Living has gone up five hundred per cent, since then, and it’ll be many a long year before it comes down again. Why, Elsie, we couldn’t even live!”

  “I don’t know whether you think I’m living now!” she exclaimed vehemently. “Existing, I call it. And we shall only be young once, Leslie, and it seems so hard to waste it all.”

  He groaned, and they sat silent for a time, their hands locked together beneath the table.

  “Would you be ready to — to end it all?” she asked suddenly. “I mean for us to go out together, right out of life?”‘

  “Do you mean suicide?”

  “Yes — a suicide pact.”

  She fixed her eyes upon him, anxious to believe that he was startled, and acutely touched, at the lengths to which her love could carry her. The actual idea behind the word — that of suicide — conveyed very little to her. Although she believed herself to be fully in earnest, Elsie never seriously contemplated her own death, nor that of her lover.

  She had often thought of Williams’s death as the one possible solution of their problem, but she had actually never really abandoned the secret expectation that a way out would be found for herself and Morrison that would secure their happiness.

  She had read of suicide-pacts, and seized upon the idea eagerly as one more peg upon which to hang the proofs of her passion for Morrison, and maintain his love, and his interest in herself, at the level of her own ardour. Although never consciously owning it to herself, Elsie knew that his love was a lesser one than hers.

  Leslie Morrison, now, did not make the passionate response for which she had hoped. “Don’t talk like that. Oh, Elsie, it is hard, isn’t it? And you don’t know what it’s like for me to think of that brute making your life miserable. If only there was anything I could do! ...

  I think about it till I see red sometimes. Why doesn’t he die?”

  “Because we want him to, I suppose,” said Elsie, suddenly listless. “He’s always talking about his health failing, and things like that, but I don’t see any sign of it myself. Things will never come right for us in this world, Leslie.”

  “Elsie, I’ll make him get a separation; I swear I will. It’s the only possible thing. Then at least you’ll be free.”

  She noticed that he did not refer to the separation between herself and her husband as to a means of furthering their own love.

  “Haven’t your people ever tried to get your freedom for you?”

  “Oh, I’ve nobody much, you know! Only mother and Geraldine, and the old aunties. They don’t approve of me either — never did.”

  “Poor little girl, they don’t understand you!”

  “I don’t care while I’ve got you, Leslie.”

  They made love to one another, their voices low, until Morrison reminded Elsie suddenly that it was late.

  “You’ll hardly get to the West End by seven now. I’m glad you’re going to enjoy yourself to-night, anyway.”

  “I wish we were going together, Les, just you and I. That’s how it ought to be. Are we going to meet tomorrow, dearest?”

  “Lunch here, can you? One o’clock. And meanwhile, darling, I’m going to think hard what I can do to make things better for you. He’s got to stop leading you this sort of life, anyway, and it’s up to me to find a way of making him do so. When I think of his knocking you about ...”

  The blood rushed into his face, and Elsie saw that he had clenched his hand involuntarily. It was balm to her to realise that she still had the power of exciting him to a frenzied anxiety on her account.

  “He’s hit me before now, you know,” she said suddenly, hardly realising, and caring not at all, that she was not speaking the truth.

  “You never told me. I’ve sometimes wondered ...” “ I didn’t mean to say anything about it. I knew it would upset you... Never mind, darling, I don’t care.”

  “But I do. I tell you it’s driving me mad. Oh, what’s the good of talking when one can’t do anything! Look here, darling, I’m not fit to talk to you now — and besides, you’ll be frightfully late. I shall see you to-morrow.”

  “One o’clock. Good-night, sweetheart. I wish it was you and me going to this show to-night. Wouldn’t it be heaven!”

  “Indeed it would. But things may come right for us even yet, darling — don’t give up hope. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye!” she echoed.

  Elsie was late for her appointment with her husband, but he did not complain. He seemed anxious to do everything in his power to conciliate her, and it was characteristic of their relations together that, as her fear of his sarcastic petulance vanished, so her contempt for him increased.

  “I got dress-circle places,” said Williams impressively. “I know you like them.”

  The piece, a musical comedy, amused her, and she was pleased at various glances that were cast upon her by their neighbours in the theatre. At the back of it all was a warm inward glow that pervaded all her consciousness at the remembrance of Leslie Morrison’s championship of her, his assurance that he would “think out a way.”

  Perhaps Leslie would make up his mind to take her away. She had asked him to do so, and he had always refused. Elsie, with an ever-latent fear that Morrison was already beginning to tire of an attachment that to her was the one reality in life, told herself passionately that, with him, she would care nothing for poverty.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” said her husband’s nasal voice.

  “Rather. Topping!”

  For a minute or two she listened to the comedian on the stage, and was genuinely amused by his facial contortions and wilful mispronunciations of polysyllabic words.

  “He’s so silly, you can’t help laughing at him,” Elsie declared, wiping her eyes.

  Then she drifted back again into the dream wherein she and Leslie Morrison figured as sole protagonists, with complete and unexplained elimination of Horace Williams.

  “Look who’s here, Elsie!”

  She started violently, convinced against all reason that she would see Morrison.

  “Isn’t that your aunties?”

  “So it is,” said Elsie without enthusiasm.

  Aunt Ada and Aunt Gertie were making violent signs to her, and in the interval Horace, still evidently bent upon doing everything possible to please her, insisted upon going to speak to them, and suggested supper after the play.

  “He is going it,” Elsie reflected dispassionately, not in the least touched, but a good deal amazed at the lavishness of Horace’s amends.

  She was in reality very much bored by the company of the two aunts in the little restaurant to which they eventually went.

  “Why don’t you go and see your poor mother, Elsie?”

  “I do see her, Aunt Gertie.”

  “Not very often, dear.”

  “As often as I’ve time for,” said Elsie curtly.

  “Geraldine’s not looking well,” Aunt Ada began next.

  “What happened to that young fellow she was supposed to be going with last year?”

  Horace Williams called abruptly for his bill. “It’s after twelve, and I’ve got to be at work to-morrow, if you ladies haven’t. All good things must come to an end, you know.”

  “It’s been most pleasant, I’m sure,” said Aunt Gertie. And when Horace had gone to pay the account at the cash-desk, she added sentimentally to Elsie:

  “It’s a real pleasure to have seen you and him together — and so happy.”

  “Thanks,” said Elsie sarcastically. “We’re as happy as the day is long, of course.”

  “So you ought to be,” said Aunt Ada very sharply. They exchanged good-byes outside the restaurant, and Elsie and her husband went by Tube to their own station.

  The long suburban road was almost deserted when they came out into it.

  “We’ll go by the Grove, of course,” said Elsie, indicating the narrow alleyway that eventually merged into their own street, with a high blank wall upon one sid
e of it and the backs of a rather sordid row of houses upon the other.

  A few leafless plane-trees showed’ above the top of the wall, and an occasional tall lamp slightly relieved the gloom of the long, paved passage-way.

  Their footsteps on the stones were clearly audible in the unusual stillness that belonged both to the deserted locality and to the small hours of the morning.

  “Who’s that?” said Horace so suddenly that Elsie jumped.

  Footsteps were hurrying behind them, and they both turned. With a strange sense of foreknowledge, Elsie saw Leslie Morrison.

  The two men stopped dead as they came face to face with one another. Elsie shrank back against the high yellow brick wall, her eyes fixed upon Morrison’s ravaged face.

  “I couldn’t rest for thinking of it all. I know what happened to-day, Williams,” he said in a high, strained voice. “It can’t go on. You’re making Elsie’s life hell. Give her her freedom.”

  “Damn you! Who are you to interfere between man and wife?” said Williams, low and fiercely. “I know what you want, both of you, but you won’t have it. Elsie’s my wife, and I shan’t let her go.”

  “You’ve got to.”

  Horace Williams, looking full at the youth, who was shaking from head to foot with excitement, gave his low, malevolent laugh.

  Almost at the same instant Elsie heard her own voice screaming, “Don’t ... don’t ...!” and saw the flash of a knife as Morrison raised his arm and struck again and again.

  Williams spun round as though to run, and his eyes, oddly surprised-looking, glared, straight and unseeing, at Elsie.

  Leslie Morrison stabbed at him again in the back.

  “What have you done?” sobbed Elsie to Morrison. “Oh, go!”

  She saw Morrison dash away up the passage, and at the same moment Horace Williams took a few steps forward.

  “Keep up — I’ll help you!” gasped Elsie.

  She thrust her arm beneath his elbow, dimly astonished and relieved to find that he was walking, when he suddenly lurched heavily against her, the upper part of his body sagging forward. Then he fell heavily and lay motionless, blood trickling from his mouth.

  Elsie, utterly distraught, and her knees shaking under her, felt her screams strangled in her throat. A distant figure showed at the near end of the alley, and she flew, rather than ran, towards the stranger, calling out in a high, sobbing voice for a doctor — for help.

  The woman, elderly and respectable-looking, asked what had happened.

  “I don’t know,” said Elsie. A blind horror was upon her, but instinct warned her to make no definite statement of any kind.

  A nightmare confusion followed. The alleyway, from being a silent and deserted spot, became clamorous with footsteps and voices. Elsie dimly heard a tall man in evening clothes saying that he was a doctor, and saw him kneel beside the blood-spattered form huddled upon the pavement. It was he, and a stalwart policeman, who finally lifted that which had been Horace Williams on to a hand- ambulance and took it away.

  Another man in police uniform took Elsie’s arm, giving her the support that alone enabled her to move, and helped her to a taxi.

  She almost fell into it, weeping hysterically, and he took his place beside her as a matter of course. In the sick, convulsed terror that shook her, his stolid presence was an actual relief. She thought that he was taking her home until he gently explained that she was coming with him to the police-station.

  “We want to get this cleared up, you know, and you can help us by telling us just what happened.”

  A new and more dreadful fear came over her. If Horace was dead someone would be accused of having killed him. They might suspect her... Elsie felt as though she were going mad with the horror of it all. She began hysterically to scream and cry.

  VII

  It was still early in the day when Elsie’s mother came to her at the police-station. Her fat face was white, stained and mottled with tears.

  “It seems too bad to be true,” she kept on repeating again and again. “That’s what I said when I heard about poor Horace: too bad to be true. And you in this dreadful place, Elsie, and such a state as you’re in — and no wonder. The whole thing seems too bad to be true.”

  “Have they — found anything? Shall I be able to go home soon?” asked Elsie.

  “I don’t know, dearie. They’ve got to find out who killed poor Horace, you know. Elsie, you’ve always been a sensible girl. You must tell them all you know, however dreadful to you it is to speak of such things. Or I’ll tell them for you, if you’d rather just have it out with mother. Didn’t you see anyone?”

  “Someone flew past, and as I turned to speak to Horace, I saw the blood coming out of his mouth.”

  “Who was it flew past?” said Mrs. Palmer.

  “I don’t know. It all happened in a flash, like,” said Elsie.

  “You and Horace were happy together, weren’t you?” “Yes, always,” said Elsie stolidly. She had made up her mind not to say anything else.

  “You didn’t quarrel?”

  “No, never.”

  “You’ll tell them that, won’t you, dearie? The police, I mean.”

  “It’s nothing to do with them,” said Elsie childishly.

  “Now don’t talk that way. That’s silly. You don’t seem to realise, my lady, the sort of mess you’re in.”

  Mrs. Palmer’s voice rose to stridency as she let her fear and her temper get the mastery of her attempt at caution.

  “My God, Elsie, can’t you see what it means? They may try you for murder. Murder — the same as the horrid common people in the newspapers. Who’s to know what happened — you and Horace in that empty street at one o’clock in the morning, and he gets done in, and whatever you may say — and mind you, I’ll back you up in it — they’ll get hold of the fact that you and poor Horace didn’t hit it off together.”

  “We were quite happy together.”

  “That’s right,” said Mrs. Palmer approvingly. “You stick to that.”

  Then she began to cry. “To think it should have come to this! I that have always held my head high — I don’t know what your aunts will say! It’ll be an awful shock for them.”

  Elsie hardly heard what her mother was saying. Waves of physical nausea kept on passing over her, and she was conscious of nothing but thankfulness when an elderly woman in uniform came to her with a cup of tea, and suggested that she should lie down and get some sleep.

  Elsie followed her, scarcely replying to Mrs. Palmer’s voluble farewell and assurances of her own speedy return.

  She could not afterwards have told where it was that she was taken, but a small, narrow bed awaited her, and she flung herself on to it and fell almost at once into the trance-like sleep of utter bodily and mental exhaustion.

  The same uniformed woman was waiting for her when she woke, after several hours, and the sight of her brought back in a sick rush the horrors of the morning.

  “Oh, I must go home!” cried Elsie.

  The woman took very little notice of her words, but she conducted her to a lavatory and helped her to make her toilette.

  Cold water and the-effects of sleep combined slightly to steady the wretched Elsie. “I should like to go home at once, please,” she said, in a voice that she tried in vain to render firm.

  “Yes. Well, I daresay your mother will take you away as soon as you’ve answered a few questions,” said the woman indifferently and quietly. “They want you downstairs first for a few minutes now.”

  “Is Mother there?”

  “She’s in the waiting-room. You’ll be able to see her afterwards.”

  “Afterwards?”

  Elsie’s agonised perceptions fastened upon that one word. She sought with frantic and irrational intensity to pierce the veiled threat that she felt it to convey.

  A man whom she knew to be a police-inspector appeared at an open door, and the uniformed woman went away.

  “Now, Mrs. Williams, I’m afraid we must troub
le you for a short statement,” said the man pleasantly. “Will you follow me, if you please?”

  He moved forward, and Elsie saw into the room that he had just left.

  Leslie Morrison was within it.

  As their eyes met, it seemed to Elsie that the last shreds of self-control deserted her, and she screamed on a high and hideous note words that came incoherently and frenziedly from some power outside herself.

  “Leslie, Leslie! Oh, God, what shall I do? Why did you do it? I didn’t ever mean you to do it... I must tell the truth...”

  The inspector swung sharply round and gripped her by the arm. “Do you realise what you’re saying? It is my duty to caution you that anything you say now may be used in evidence against you.”

  Elsie burst into hysterical sobs and tears.

  The man pushed her gently into another room where another official and a young man in plain clothes sat at a table with papers and pens in front of them.

  The interrogatory that followed was conducted with grave suavity by the senior official, but Elsie was conscious only of a horror of committing herself.

  She said again and again that she and her husband had always been happy together.

  It was a faint relief when at last they came to actual questions of fact, and she could reply with direct statements to the enquiries as to her movements on the previous evening.

  (O God, was it only last night that she and Horace had gone to the theatre — only this morning that they had started to walk home from the Tube station?)

  “Mrs. Williams, I want you to tell me in your own words exactly what happened in the alleyway just before your husband was struck.”

  Elsie realised with despair that she must say something.

  She was not imaginative, but almost without her own knowledge she had evolved a sort of account by which, it seemed to her, confusedly, that she might safeguard herself.

  “We were walking along,” she said in a trembling, almost inaudible voice, “and there wasn’t anybody in sight, and suddenly someone rushed up from behind and pushed me away from my husband. I was sort of dazed for a moment — I think I must have been pushed against the wall — and when I recovered I saw Horace — my husband — struggling with a man. Then the man ran away.”