II
“Hallo, Elsie!”
“Hallo, Geraldine!”
“You’re quite a stranger, aren’t you? I think it’s about a year since we had the honour of seeing your majesty last.”
“Well, now I have come, aren’t you going to take the trouble to invite me to come in?” asked Elsie good-humouredly.
“There’s a visitor of mine in the drawing-room.”
“Who is it? Aunt Ada?”
“No, not Aunt Ada, Miss Smarty. It’s a friend of mine, I tell you, who I knew at the office during the war.”
“Well, you can introduce me to her, I suppose,” said Elsie carelessly.
She noticed that Geraldine’s hair was not, as it generally was, in curling-pins, and that she was wearing a new dress, of an unbecoming shade of emerald green. Geraldine always went wrong over her clothes, Elsie reflected complacently. She herself wore a new black picture hat, and it was partly from the desire to show herself in it that she had come to her old home.
“Where’s mother?”
“Out.”
“What a mercy!”
Elsie walked into the familiar drawing-room, feeling glad that she no longer lived at Hillbourne Terrace, under her mother’s dominion, and forced to share a bedroom with the fretful Geraldine.
A young man of two- or three-and-twenty was sitting in the drawing-room, and rose to his feet as Elsie and Geraldine came in.
“This is my sister, Mrs. Horace Williams. Elsie, this is my friend, Mr. Morrison,” said Geraldine with pride.
Elsie was immediately conscious of a quickened interest. The young man was of a type that appealed strongly to her; dark and tall, with very brown eyes, and a wistful, ingenuous smile that was the more noticeable because he was clean-shaven.
When they shook hands, she was conscious of the slight, unmistakable thrill of mutual magnetism.
“I thought I was going to find a young lady in here, when Geraldine told me she had a friend!” Elsie exclaimed, laughing.
“Sorry I’m a disappointment,” Mr. Morrison replied, also laughing.
“Oh, I didn’t say that. Only my sister doesn’t have gentlemen friends as a rule,” Elsie declared innocently.
Geraldine’s sallow face flushed. “You don’t know much about it, do you, considering that we never see you nowadays. I’m not one for talking much about my own affairs, either, so far as I’m aware. It’s a misfortune, really, to be as reserved as I am. I often wish I wasn’t!”
It was unprecedented, in Elsie’s experience, to hear Geraldine setting forth a claim, however obliquely, to be considered interesting. Elsie looked at her in astonishment.
“She must be gone on this fellow,” she thought, and without the slightest compunction she immediately put forth all her own powers to attract Morrison’s notice and admiration to herself.
The task proved to be as easy as it was congenial. In a very little while, Elsie and young Morrison were talking and joking together, and it was only an occasional, spasmodic, and quite evidently conscientious effort from Morrison that from time to time caused Geraldine to be included in the conversation.
Morrison told Elsie that he travelled for a big firm of silk merchants in the City, and was very little in London.
“How did you and Geraldine meet, then? I thought you were in the same office as her during the war,” said Elsie sharply.
“Just for six months I was, and then I got this job in the place of a man who’d joined up. I was under age for joining up myself, worse luck,” said the youth.
Then he must be younger than she was herself, Elsie reflected, surprised. She felt oddly touched by the thought.
She looked at Morrison, and found that he was looking at her with admiration evident in his dark eyes.
Elsie allowed her eyes to dwell for a second on his before she broke the momentary silence. “What about tea, Geraldine?”
“All right,” said her sister sulkily. “Where’s the hurry?”
It was already half-past four, but Elsie guessed that Geraldine did not want to go and fetch the tea and leave her alone with Morrison.
“No hurry, I suppose,” she cried gaily, “but I’m a bit tired, that’s all, and I thought I’d like a nice cup of tea. It’s a good long way to come, and the Tube was pretty full.”
“Where did you come from?” Morrison asked eagerly.
She named the suburb. “You must come and look us up one day, Mr. Morrison. My husband is a solicitor, and he’s always at home on Saturdays and Sundays. The rest of the week I’m by myself and ever so lonely,” sighed Elsie.
“I’d love to come. I should—er—like to meet Mr. Williams,” said Morrison solemnly.
“Here’s Mother!” Geraldine announced sharply, as a door banged downstairs.
Mrs. Palmer came in, breathing heavily, her hands full of parcels.
“Elsie! Dear me, thisisa surprise. Good afternoon, Mr. Morrison, how are you? Quite well, thank you, but for Anno Domini, that’s all that’s the matter with me.” She dropped into a chair.
“Where’s tea?”
“I’ll get it up,” said Geraldine.
“Go and give her a hand,” Mrs. Palmer calmly directed young Morrison. “My gurl is out. They’re all the same, nowadays—always out, never in.”
“Inever have any trouble with servants,” Elsie murmured.
She was annoyed that her mother should thus dismiss Morrison, and that he should meekly prepare to obey her.
He opened the door for Geraldine and went out behind her, and Elsie heard her sister talking animatedly as they went downstairs.
“What’s come over Geraldine?” she coldly enquired.
“Why should anything have come over her, as you call it? Geraldine’s a gurl like you are, I’d have you remember, and a very much better one than you’ve ever been, to her widowed mother. You mind your own business, Elsie.”
“That’s a nice way to speak to me, when I haven’t been at home for I don’t know how long.”
“And whose fault has that been?” enquired Mrs. Palmer. “Not but what I’m always pleased to see you, Elsie, as I’ve told you time and time again, and Mr. Williams too—Horace, I should say—if he cares to come. But don’t you go interfering with Geraldine’s friends.”
“Is this fellow a friend of hers?”
“Of course he is. They’ve been going together for some time now.”
“I suppose she’s not engaged?”
“No, she’s not engaged,” Mrs. Palmer reluctantly conceded. “But I’m free to confess that I hope she will be. This Leslie Morrison is a nice fellow, as steady as can be.”
Elsie reflected that Leslie was a lovely name.
“Now, Elsie,” said her mother warningly, “I know what you are, and I give you fair notice that I won’t have any of your goings-on. You’ll remember that you’re a married woman, if you please, and just behave yourself. Any of your old tricks, my lady, and I shall drop the hint to Horace. Him and me knew one another before ever he set eyes on you.”
“All the more reason for not making mischief between us now. He’s jealous enough as it is, making a fuss of anyone so much as looks the same side of the room as I happen to be.”
“I don’t blame him,” said Mrs. Palmer curtly. “You’re a caution, you are, and always have been. I don’t mind telling you that I never was more thankful in my life than to get you safely married. And don’t you go casting sheep’seyes at poor Geraldine’s fellow, for I tell you I won’t have it.”
Elsie laughed scornfully. She was secretly flattered at the alarm that was conveyed by Mrs. Palmer’s reiterated cautions.
“What should I want with a boy like him? He must be six years younger than Geraldine, at the very least.”
“Nothing of the kind. And if he was, it wouldn’t matter. It’s the first time anyone has looked like business, where Geraldine’s concerned, and with you off my hands I can afford to make things a bit easy for her. She’s been a good daughter to me, has Geraldine,” said Mrs. Palmer with a significant emphasis.
“Well, I’m sure I don’t want to stand in her way,” Elsie declared contemptuously.
“Anyone less selfish than you are, Elsie, would offer to help things on a bit. I can’t be for ever asking him here, and he’s not got the money to take her out a great deal. Why don’t you get them to meet at your place?”
“Perhaps I will,” said Elsie slowly.
She was rather silent during tea, mentally reviewing her mother’s suggestion from various angles.
Leslie Morrison definitely attracted her. She asked him how long he was to remain in London.
“Not long, Mrs. Williams. I’m doing Bristol and Gloucestershire next week, and then I’m taking my holiday.”
“Where are you going for that?” Mrs. Palmer enquired.
“I haven’t made up my mind. Anywhere near the sea is good enough for me.”
“My husband and I are thinking of Torquay,” Elsie said. “We’ve been wondering if you’d care to come along, Geraldine. I suppose Mother wants to stew on in London, as per usual.”
“That’s right,” Mrs. Palmer assented complacently. She looked at her younger daughter with approval. It was the first time, actually, that Elsie had ever invited Geraldine to spend a holiday with her.
“Torquay is a first-rate place,” declared Leslie Morrison enthusiastically. “I was there once on business, and I quite made up my mind to return one day.”
“Thanks very much, Elsie,” Geraldine said rather coldly. “It’s a long journey, isn’t it, and I’m a wretched traveller, as you know.”
“Please yourself. Horace wants a thorough change, and we’re sick of Wales. We’ve been there every year ever since we were married.”
“Come, I don’t suppose that makes much of a total, does it?” Morrison gallantly remarked, looking at Elsie.
“More than you’d think for, perhaps. I was caught young—eighteen, if you want to know.”
“Elsie,” said her mother abruptly, “have you been to see your aunties lately?”
She directed the conversation so that no more personalities were possible, until Elsie rose and said good-bye.
“Allow me,” said Morrison, as he helped her to put on her coat.
Elsie fumbled for the sleeve-hole until she felt the guiding pressure of his fingers on her arm.
“Thanks ever so much. Well, good-bye, Mr. Morrison. Let me know if you come up our way any time.”
“I ... I hope you’re going to let me see you to your ’bus,” he said rather awkwardly.
“Really, there’s no need—I couldn’t think of troubling you.”
Elsie took no pains to hide that her protest was a purely conventional one.
“Put on your hat, Geraldine, and go with them. A walk’ll do you good,” urged Mrs. Palmer.
But Geraldine, as she frequently did, had turned sulky. “I’ve got something to do upstairs,” she muttered, and disappeared.
It was exactly like Geraldine, Elsie thought, to cut off her nose just to spite her face. Not that it could have made any difference if she had succeeded in preventing that brief walk taken by Leslie Morrison and Elsie Williams.
Elsie knew, beyond any possibility of mistake, the very first moment at which a spark from her own personality had lit the flame destined to burn more or less fiercely in that of another.
But this time she experienced an odd excitement that held in it something new.
She wondered, rather wistfully, whether this was because it was such a long while since she had had any opportunity of talking to a man other than her husband or one of his elderly married acquaintances. Her conversation with Morrison did no more than skirt the edge of personalities that were implied, rather than spoken. Yet when they parted Elsie knew, and knew that Morrison knew, that each was determined to see the other again. She travelled home in a dream, and hardly heard her husband’s vexed enquiry as to the reason of her lateness.
Williams had always shown a very strong conviction that it was a wife’s duty invariably to be at home in time to welcome her husband’s return from business.
“I’ve been to Hillbourne Terrace.”
“H’m. You’ve made yourself very smart. That hat suits you, Elsie.”
He so seldom paid a compliment that Elsie was astonished, and ran to look at herself in the mirror over the dining-room sideboard.
It was the hat, was it?
Her full face was softly flushed, and her eyes looked bigger and darker than usual. Elsie saw her own closed mouth break into an involuntary smile as she gazed at her reflection. She went up to her room singing softly.
Two days later Leslie Morrison came to see her.
“I hope you won’t think I’m taking a liberty. Knowing your people so well, it seemed quite natural, like, to take advantage of your kind invitation.”
“That’s right,” Elsie encouraged him.
She hardly knew what she was saying, but already their intercourse seemed to be on a plane where conventional interchanges of words were unnecessary.
Although it was only the second time they had met, Morrison told her a great deal about himself, and Elsie listened, with a growing, tremulous tenderness.
He went away before her husband came in, and Elsie underwent a momentary, essentially superficial, reaction.
“I’m getting soppy about that boy—that’s what I’mdoing! Just because he’s got a pair of eyes like—like I don’t know what. Him and Geraldine! It’s too ridiculous. Why, he’s younger even than me.”
She reflected that if Morrison, indeed, had been a year or two older, he would certainly have kissed her by this time. But it was quite evident to her that such an idea had never even crossed his mind. He viewed her with obvious admiration, and with great respect.
The next day Elsie bought a book of poems, about which Morrison had told her. She read some of them, and it seemed to her that she had a new understanding of a form of expression which had never made the least appeal to her before.
“I’m a fool!” Elsie told herself in astonishment, but with an ominous sensation of strange, new emotions, softer than any she had yet known, taking possession of her life. She felt that she would like to give the book to Morrison as a present, but they had made no definite arrangement for meeting again, and she could not bring herself to send it by post. Restlessness possessed her.
It was a relief when one evening her husband began to speak of their summer holiday.
“We can start on Tuesday, like we planned. Cleaver gets back on Monday morning, and the sooner we get to the sea in this weather, the better. It won’t last.”
“It might. September can be a ripping month sometimes,” said Elsie dreamily.
“That’s your experience, is it? Well, it’s not mine. I only hope we shan’t have a rainy spell as we did last year, and sit in an everlasting sitting-room without so much as a book to look at.”
Elsie shuddered at the recollection. She and Horace had quarrelled incessantly throughout their last holiday.
“Is your sister coming with us?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’ll be better than nobody. She’ll be somebody for you to go with to those picture-houses that you’re so fond of. But it’s a pity that girl hasn’t got a sensible husband. We might get a decent game of bridge, then.”
“It’s a pity you haven’t got any men friends,” Elsie retorted. “I never knew anybody like you for that.”
Williams did not answer, but he turned upon his wife a look, peculiar to himself, that always vaguely frightened her. It held not only utter contempt, but something of quiet, unspecified menace.
She hastily spoke again. “Geraldine’s got a—a young fellow that she thinks is going with her now. A boy called Morrison.”
“Is he coming to Torquay?”
It was Horace Williams’ own matter-of-course tone in making the suggestion that suddenly filled Elsie with a frantic determination to see it carried out.
“Yes, most likely he is. So you’ll get your bridge, I daresay, and there’ll be somebody to take us to the pictures of an evening.”
As Elsie said the words, her heart seemed to herself suddenly to leap against her side, as though in anticipation of a joy almost too great to be borne.
She lay awake most of that night, revolving schemes by which Leslie Morrison could be brought to Torquay without letting Williams know that it was Elsie who had originated the idea.
Although formerly she had been as much flattered as irritated by her husband’s suspicious jealousy, it seemed to Elsie now to be of the utmost importance that he should not look upon Morrison in any other light than that of Geraldine’s friend. She wondered if she could induce Geraldine herself to suggest that Morrison should come to Torquay, but decided that it was unlikely. Finally, after a great deal of deliberation, Elsie next day wrote a note to the young man:
“Dear Mr. Morrison,“If not otherwise engaged, we shall be pleased if you will come to tea on Saturday afternoon. It will be the last time for some weeks we shall be at home, as we go to Torquay on the Tuesday. My sister, Miss Palmer, is coming with us. Why not join the party, as you say you would like to visit Torquay again?!!!“Yours sincerely,“E. Williams.”
“Dear Mr. Morrison,
“If not otherwise engaged, we shall be pleased if you will come to tea on Saturday afternoon. It will be the last time for some weeks we shall be at home, as we go to Torquay on the Tuesday. My sister, Miss Palmer, is coming with us. Why not join the party, as you say you would like to visit Torquay again?!!!
“Yours sincerely,“E. Williams.”
Elsie thought about this note incessantly after it was written and posted, and awaited the reply with proportionate excitement.
It came by return of post:
“My Dear Mrs. Williams,“Very many thanks indeed for your most kind invitation to tea. Unfortunately I am not able to avail myself of it, as am already engaged to go to Hillbourne Terrace. The suggestion about me going to Torquay is simply great—that is, if you really meant it! I intend talking it over with your sister when we meet on Saturday.“Believe me, with kind regards,“Yours very sincerely,“Leslie M. Morrison.”
“My Dear Mrs. Williams,
“Very many thanks indeed for your most kind invitation to tea. Unfortunately I am not able to avail myself of it, as am already engaged to go to Hillbourne Terrace. The suggestion about me going to Torquay is simply great—that is, if you really meant it! I intend talking it over with your sister when we meet on Saturday.
“Believe me, with kind regards,
“Yours very sincerely,“Leslie M. Morrison.”
Elsie came downstairs earlier than usual in order to conceal her letter before Williams should ask to see it, as he invariably did with his wife’s correspondence.
She put it in her pocket, and kept it there all day. On Saturday she wanted very much to go to Hillbourne Terrace, but Williams was at home, and on such occasions he never expected his wife to go out except with him. They spent the afternoon drearily enough, Williams reading the newspaper, and Elsie pretending to sew, and in reality wholly occupied with speculations as to how Geraldine would receive Leslie Morrison’s suggestion.
She felt pretty certain that Mrs. Palmer, at all events, would be in favour of it. “If only he has the sense to make it sound as if it came from him, and not from me!” thought Elsie.
She had felt confident of receiving another letter from Morrison before starting for Torquay, but to her dismay there was no word, either from him or from Geraldine, and on the eve of departure she still did not know whether or not her scheme had succeeded. For the first time, she heartily wished that there had been a telephone in her mother’s house.
On the morning of their journey the weather changed andbecame suddenly sultry. The train was crowded and unbearably hot.
Geraldine was to meet them at the station, and the fact that she arrived late made Horace Williams angry, in his own unpleasant, silent way. There was only one empty seat in the railway carriage, which Elsie at once took, and Williams and Geraldine were forced to stand in the corridor, already strewn with hand baggage and full of heated, perspiring people.
The train ran from London to Taunton without a stop, and at the end of two hours Williams forced his way into the carriage and spoke quietly to his wife.
“Here, Elsie, give me your place for a little while. One of my boots is hurting, and I can’t stand any longer. Go and take your turn for a bit.”
Elsie joined Geraldine in the corridor without demur. There were certain tones in Horace Williams’ voice that she had learnt to obey. Geraldine, her face pallid and shiny with heat, her tight blue cloth dress looking as though it constricted even her narrow chest and shoulders, was sitting in an uncomfortable, crouching position on a roll of rugs.
Both she and Elsie had removed their hats, and while Elsie’s hair dropped naturally into soft, flattened curls and rings, Geraldine’s clung damply in straight, short wisps to her neck and forehead, and she constantly raised her hand to push away, quite ineffectually, a straggling end that immediately fell down again.
“Hell, I call this,” she remarked shortly, as Elsie, stumbling over bags and packages and the feet of other passengers, reached her side and propped herself up against the side of the swaying train.
“You’re a nice one to take on a holiday, I must say,” Elsie retorted, but without acrimony. She felt that nothing would really matter if she could once get the assurance that she craved.
“Horace is in a foul temper. He never can stand the hot weather. I’m sure I hope it’ll be cooler at the sea than what it is here. Have you brought a new bathing costume, Geraldine?”
“M’m. A blue one, with a decent skirt—not one of those horrible skin-tight things you see in the picture papers. Improper, I call them.”
“You couldn’t be improper if you tried,” said Elsie cryptically. “Besides, there’ll be nobody to go in the water with you except me. Horace never bathes—makes him turn green, or something.”
She eyed her sister carefully as she spoke. Something in the wariness of Geraldine’s return glance gave her a rising hope.
“I’m sure I wish we were going to have someone we knew there. Horace would be much easier to keep in a decent temper if he had another man to go with sometimes.”
Then Geraldine spoke. “That boy Leslie Morrison said something about coming down one day this week, and spending part of his holiday at Torquay. He was awfully keen I should go and stay with his mother, near Bristol, too.”
“Was he? Well, you could do that later,” said Elsie. She was nearly breathless with triumph, but strove to make her voice sound matter-of-fact. “But I hope to goodness he will come to Torquay. It’ll make all the difference to Horace.”
Geraldine sneered. “I daresay you think it’ll make all the difference to you, too. It’s anything in trousers with you, old girl, whether the fellow belongs to another girl or not. But I’m not afraid of anything of that sort while Horace is about. He knows how to keep you in order, as Mother said.”
“I’ll thank you, and Mother too, to keep your opinion of me till it’s asked for.” Elsie, however, spoke mechanically.
She had immediately become obsessed by visions of herself and Morrison, walking, swimming, sitting beside one another on the sands, or in the intimate closeness and darkness of the picture palace....
“I’ll just tell you this, young Elsie. Leslie Morrison isn’t the sort of fellow you’ve been used to—not like Johnnie Osborne, and that truck. And as for carrying on with a married woman—why, he’d be ashamed to think of such a thing.”
Elsie smiled, and said nothing. She hardly heard what her sister was saying.
A hand laid upon her shoulder made her jump violently.
“Are you in the moon, Elsie? I’ve been making signs to you for ten minutes, I should think. It’s more than time we had our sandwiches,” said Horace Williams querulously.
“Oh, all right.”
By tugging and pulling at piled-up packages, they succeeded in getting hold of the basket in which Elsie had packed ham sandwiches, seed-cake, and bananas.
The train sped onwards....