“Did you see the man’s face?”
“No,” said Elsie, with ashen lips.
“But you know who it was?”
“It was Leslie Morrison.”
The room reeled before her eyes, and she made an ineffectual clutch at a chair.
Through a sort of thick fog she heard the official repeating in a low tone: “It was the man known as Leslie Morrison.”
Then she felt herself fall.
Her mother was with her when she recovered consciousness, and the woman who had attended to her before, and whom Mrs. Palmer now repeatedly and volubly addressed as “Matron.”
Elsie looked round her, but the officials were gone. With a groan she let her head drop backwards again on to the rail of the chair in which she found herself.
“Come along now, don’t give way. You’re better now,” said the matron briskly. “ Don’t let yourself go, Mrs. Williams.”
“Oh, Elsie, Elsie,” wailed Mrs. Palmer, “whatever will become of us? Didn’t I always tell you—”
“Give her an arm, Mrs. Palmer, and I’ll take her on the other side, and we’ll get her into the other room. There’s a nice couch there, and she can lie down a bit.”
They half led, half dragged Elsie away, the matron exhorting her all the time with impersonal, professional brightness to pull herself together.
She was conscious of thankfulness when the woman left her alone with her mother, although leaving the door open behind her.
Mrs. Palmer instantly bent forward and asked with avidity: “What did you say to them, Elsie?”
“Let me alone, Mother, for pity’s sake!”
“How can I let you alone, as you call it, you unnatural girl? What a way to speak to your own mother, on whom you’re bringing sorrow and shame, and may bring worse yet, if you’re not careful! Now you tell me this, Elsie Williams, directly minute: Did you or did you not tell them that you and Horace were on bad terms together?”
“I said we were quite happy together—”
“Stick to that,” said Mrs. Palmer significantly. “Did anyone know — any neighbour or anybody — that you quarrelled? He never made a row, or knocked you about, did he?”
“Only the once,” Elsie said automatically.
She pushed up her sleeve, then shuddered violently as she recalled that she had last made use of that same gesture in the tea-shop with Morrison.
“My goodness, did Horace do that? You must have tried him pretty high, I know. How are you going to account for that bruise, young Elsie?”
“Who’s to know about it?”
“Oh, they’ll find out fast enough! They get to know about everything. Look here, did you say that you’d been pushed against the wall by whoever it was who did in poor Horace?”
Elsie nodded, too much stunned even to wonder how her mother had become possessed of this information.
“Very well, then. Those bruises on your arm are where you fell against that wall. Don’t forget. I shall say you showed them to me, and told me about it.”
“Say what — when?” Elsie asked stupidly. “I suppose all this’ll be over before I’m quite mad, and they’ll let me go home to-day.”
Her mother’s fat face puckered up suddenly, and she began to cry with loud, gulping sobs. “I don’t know!” she wailed. “ I don’t know.”
“But what — what — for Heaven’s sake, Mother, stop that noise, and tell me what they’re going to do. What is it?” almost shrieked Elsie, striving to fight down the panic that threatened to overwhelm her.
“Don’t you understand, you little fool? (God forgive me for speaking like that!) Oh, Elsie, I’m afraid — I’m afraid they’ll — they’ll arrest you — for murder!”
“Don’t use that word!” almost screamed Elsie.
“How can I help it? Murder’s what’s been done, and it lies between you and that fellow Morrison. Elsie, how far have things gone between you and him? But there, I needn’t ask. I know you.” Mrs. Palmer wept convulsively.
She remained with her daughter until late in the afternoon, and twice during that time Elsie was summoned to a further interrogatory. She learnt that Morrison’s knife had been found close to the alley, and that he had been fetched from his office early in the day and taken away by the police.
It was after her mother had gone away, as the dusk was gathering, that Elsie Williams and Leslie Morrison were charged together with the wilful murder of Horace Williams.
“For God’s sake, Mrs. Williams, tell me the whole truth!”
Elsie looked dumbly at Mr. Cleaver, too sick with fright to speak.
“Do you understand that you’re in the most frightful danger?”
A sound that just amounted to an interrogation forced its way between her dry lips.
“You know what the sentence is for anyone found guilty of wilful murder?”
Elsie screamed and shrank.
Cleaver bent forward, deep dents coming and going at the corners of his nostrils, his white face working with earnestness. She could see the sweat shining upon his forehead.
“Try and understand. You will be committed for trial for the murder of your husband.”
“But Leslie Morrison ...”
“He’s in the same boat. His one idea, it seems, is to shield you — to pay the whole of the penalty himself.”
“It was him who — who ...” Elsie’s voice trailed away. # .
“I know. But who inspired him to do it, Mrs. Williams? I tell you that nothing but absolute frankness can give you a chance.”
“Shall I be in the witness-box?”
A bewildered idea that she could still make use of her charm to serve her present cause made Elsie ask the question.
“You will be in the dock,” said Cleaver grimly. “Understand that everything — your life itself — depends upon your being absolutely straightforward with me. Don’t conceal anything — don’t attempt to. I tell you, it’s your one hope.”
Elsie stared and stared at Mr. Cleaver. “I never meant Leslie to do it!” she cried suddenly and wildly.
“But you knew he was going to?”
“No, no, no!”
“Mrs. Williams, tell me the truth. You and Morrison were madly in love with one another, and had been for over a year?”
She nodded..
“You knew that your husband would never, in any circumstances, set you free?”
“Yes. We asked him, begged him to. He — he was very cruel, Mr. Cleaver.”
“You and Morrison would not face open scandal by going away together?”
“It wasn’t that.”
“What was it, then?”
She hesitated, twisting her handkerchief round and round in her fingers.
The solicitor moistened his lips with his tongue. “Your only hope, your one and only hope in this world, Mrs. Williams, is to speak the truth. I’m powerless to help you if you won’t be open. Don’t be afraid that everything you say now will come out in the police-court; it won’t necessarily be so at all — far from it. But I can judge of nothing unless I know every single thing.”
“I’ll tell you,” said Elsie, white to the lips.
“Why would you and Morrison not have gone away together? Were you afraid?”
“We had no money.”
“I see. Morrison’s pay was very small, and you had nothing but what your husband gave you?”
“Yes.”
“Whereas if you were a widow, you had reason to suppose that Williams would leave you comfortably provided for?” “ Yes.”
“Did it not occur to you, then, that his death would be a very’ convenient solution of the whole problem?”
“Oh yes! How could I help thinking that?”
“You not only thought it, Mrs. Williams, you said it, and you wrote it.”
“I never” The denial sprang from her quite instinctively.
Mr. Cleaver put up his hand authoritatively. “Wait! Do you remember a conversation with a friend of yours, Miss Irene Tidmarsh, on
the eighteenth of last October, when you made use of the words, ‘ I wish to the Lord that Horace would do the decent thing or go West, and let me have a chance of happiness ‘?”
Elsie was terrified at the precision with which her very words were quoted and the occasion known. “ I can’t remember,” she gasped.
“Mrs. Williams, you must speak the truth. Remember that a great deal is known already, and banish any idea of false shame from your mind. This is a question of life and death to you: neither more nor less. If I know the truth from you, I can advise you as to the line you must take under cross-examination. Remember that it will be a terrible ordeal for you, and it’s essential that you should be properly prepared for it. And weight will be attached, without a doubt, to that conversation of yours with Miss Tidmarsh.”
“But how will they know about it?” she sobbed, forgetting her previous denial.
“Miss Tidmarsh will be called as a witness against you,” said Mr. Cleaver gravely. “We’ve got to account for those words of yours somehow, and what is more serious still — if anything could be more serious — we’ve got to keep out of sight, if we can, those damning letters of yours.”
“What letters?” screamed Elsie, a new and unbearable horror clutching at her.
“The letters, Mrs. Williams, that you have repeatedly written to Leslie Morrison during the past months.”
“They’re burnt, they’re burnt!” shrieked Elsie. “He swore he’d burn them!”
“I wish to God he had, but he never did, Mrs. Williams. Those letters may form the bulk of the evidence against you. You repeat in them, again and again, that Williams ill-treated you, made you miserable, and that you wish he was dead. In one of them occurs the words: ‘ He’s ill now, and taking sleeping draughts. One little mistake in pouring out the mixture, Leslie, and you and I might be free! I’d do more than that for our love’s sake, darling.’ Do you understand the awful weight that those expressions and many, many similar ones would carry with a jury, Mrs. Williams? We’ve got to put some construction on them other than the obvious one, if we can’t get a ruling that they’re inadmissible as evidence, which is what we shall try for. I want to make it very, very clear to you. Everything depends on your co-operation. Are you fit to listen to me?”
Elsie was sobbing and writhing.
“Have you any letters whatever from Morrison?” pursued the relentless voice of the solicitor.
“No.”
“What have you done with them?”
“I burnt them all.”
He looked at her as though doubting her words. “Very few women burn their love-letters, Mrs. Williams.”
“I was afraid to keep them.”
“For fear of your husband seeing them?”
She hesitated. “Partly.”
In Elsie’s mind was a piercing recollection of the haunting fear that had obsessed her ever since the scene at the house of Madame Clara, the medium.
“Beware of the written word....”
But she would not give that reason for having destroyed Morrison’s letters to the solicitor. The strange, undying remnant of vanity that finds a lurking-place upon the most apparently trivial and unlikely ground held her back from the truth.
Elsie Williams realised that Mr. Cleaver was in grimmest earnest when he told her that only the absolute truth could possibly save her; she was prepared to tell him the truth in spite of her deadly terror and shame, but she could not bring herself to say that the reason why she had destroyed the letters of Leslie Morrison was because she could never forget the words spoken by the clairvoyante whom she had visited.
“I burnt the letters because I had nowhere to keep them, and I was afraid they might be found,” she repeated, her young face grey and ravaged.
It was the only particular in which she lied to Mr. Cleaver, and she did so with blind and irrational persistence.
After the hours that he spent with her, Elsie, physically exhausted, and psychically strung to a pitch of tension that she had never known in her life before, was left alone in her cell, face to face with her own soul.
At first, fragmentary recollections of the past forty-eight hours obsessed her. She went over and over her conversations with the police officials, her own replies to Mr. Cleaver, her mother’s hysterical ejaculations. Then she thought of Leslie Morrison, who had backed up her statements to the police, and who, when both were arrested together, had only asked through white lips: “Why her? She was not aware of my movements.”
But since her own half-unconscious betrayal of him, Elsie’s feeling for Morrison had undergone an extraordinary revulsion.
It had all turned out so utterly unlike anything that they had ever planned. It still seemed to Elsie that catastrophe had fallen, a bolt from the blue, into the midst of their lives without warning. She still felt that none of it could be true, that she must wake as from a hideous dream.
When had she had a hideous dream — something about Horace — something like this?
Dim associations of horror and bewilderment awoke slowly within her, and brought to her the remembrance of her visit with Irene Tidmarsh to the woman who had called herself “clairvoyante.” She had talked in a deep, rather artificial voice about love and intrigue; she had bade Elsie beware of the written word. And then all of a sudden the atmosphere had altered, Madame Clara’s voice itself had altered, horribly, and she had screamed out terrifying words and phrases. “Blood, and worse than blood ... you’re all over blood! O, my God, what’s this? It’s all over England — you — they’re talking about you.”
Elsie understood. In a flash of searing, anguished intuition she understood what would happen.
With the appalling rapidity of a vision, there came to her the realisation of all that would come to pass in the near future.
She knew already that the police-court trial was the almost certain preliminary to her committal and Morrison’s for trial at the Old Bailey. They would he tried for murder.
She and the man who had been her lover would stand in the dock together as prisoners; lawyers would fight out questions concerning their past relations; people would give evidence against them — evidence in their favour; Elsie would in all probability hear her own letters to Leslie Morrison read aloud in court...
It would be a sensational trial, such as she had often followed with avidity in the newspapers.
“It’s all over England — they’re talking about you...”
But why ... why? ...
Elsie Williams’ instant of vision fled from her as suddenly as it had come, and left her agonisedly and wildly rebellious, bewildered at the vortex of terror and shame and misery into which it seemed to her that she had suddenly, without volition of her own, been flung.
She could not trace the imperceptibly-graduated stages that had brought her to the pass where catastrophe became inevitable. To her, it seemed that she had swiftly been hurled from security into deadly peril by some agency as irresistible as it was malignant.
Every now and then realisation came to her, when certain frightful words sprang into frightful meaning, as they had never done before.
“Murder...”
“Conspiracy ... and incitement to murder....”
“Principal in the second degree....” The police officials had made use of that expression — so had Mr. Cleaver.
Elsie’s mother had fetched Mr. Cleaver, and had wildly repeated, in front of Elsie and the lawyer, that she would grudge no expense, not if it cost her her last penny.
“And the aunties will help, Elsie, they’ve been ever so good — anything we can get together, says your Aunt Gertie, and her face the colour of the tablecloth. Mr. Cleaver here will tell us the best man, if it — if it comes to — to ...”
“You could scarcely do better than Sir Cambourne Trevor, Mrs. Palmer, but his fee, I ought to warn you, is a thousand guineas.”
“A thousand guineas!” Elsie and Mrs. Palmer had screamed together.
And Mr. Cleaver, gaunt and haggard and
grey-faced, had made answer: “It’s her life that will be at stake.”
From time to time, Elsie understood. She knew, at those moments, what it all meant. There would be no more concealments, everything would be dragged out into a publicity that could only bring with it dishonour and shameful notoriety, and hatred, and execration.
And she would have to live through it — to suffer through an ordeal of vast, incredible magnitude, of which the climax — she knew it in a prescience that mercifully could not endure — would come in the ghastly dawn of a prison-yard, beneath the shadow of the scaffold...
Inexorable results would be suffered by herself, and she would never know how it was that these things had become inevitable — had happened.
THE END
Dowlish, 1923.
BOOK II. SEVEN SHORT STORIES
THE BOND OF UNION
(To A. P. D.)
A wide, cushioned seat runs round three sides of the deep fireplace in Torry Delorian’s library for the admitted reason that Lady Pamela March likes to face the room when she is talking.
The room, of course, means the audience. Personally, I consider that she could safely — I mean, without spoiling her picture of herself — make use of the very word itself. It is so obviously the only one that applies, when she sits there, smoking one cigarette after another, and we sit there, smoking one cigarette after another, all listening to Pamela, playing up to Pamela, and all more or less sexually attracted by Pamela.
The subconscious mind of Pamela projects on these occasions, I think, something of this kind:
“The girlish figure dominated the room. Magnetism vibrated in every gesture of the slim hands, every glance from the brilliant eyes, every modulation of the rather deep voice. She held them all, by sheer force of personality. The peacock-blue folds of her dress, with its girdle of barbaric, coloured stones ...”
The bit about the dress, of course, varies. Sometimes the folds may be saffron-yellow, and the girdle opalescent, or there is no girdle at all; and anyhow, in those particulars, the same effect is never repeated twice. But I imagine that, like all women, she makes a point to herself of the accoutrements, not realising that the audience — almost altogether composed of men — attribute the entire effect to the sheer, smooth slope of her shoulders, the alluring curves of her mouth, the rich swell of her breasts beneath semi-transparencies.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 272