V
Theyhad another evening together before the storm broke.
Morrison took Elsie to a dance.
He issued his invitation boldly, in the presence of Williams, and to Elsie’s secret astonishment, her husband made no objection to her acceptance.
She wanted terribly to buy a new dress for the dance, but dared not risk a reminder to her husband, for fear he should suddenly forbid her to go. Finally she decided to wear a black dress, covered with black net, and with black net shoulder-straps. It was not new, but she had seldom had any occasion for wearing it, and she had enough money in hand for the housekeeping to enable her to buy a pair of black artificial silk stockings and slim black satin shoes with high heels.
Round her thick, light hair she tied a black velvet band with a spray of forget-me-nots worked in blue silk across it, but instinct told her to leave her full, beautiful throat unadorned by any of the few cheap ornaments that she possessed. Her smooth skin showed a sort of golden glow that merged imperceptibly into the warm pallor of her round arms and the dimpled base of her neck.
Elsie looked for a long while at herself in the glass, rubbed lip-salve into her already scarlet mouth, and, despite the “Japanesey” effect of lids that seemed half-closed, wondered at the brilliant light in her own hazel-grey eyes.
Leslie Morrison came for her, and they left the house together before Williams arrived from the office.
To both of them it was an unforgettable evening.
Elsie, like all women of her type, was a born dancer. Nevertheless, before the evening was half over, they had left the crowded hall for a screened alcove in an upper gallery, where the reiterated refrain of syncopated airs, and the wistful rhythm of valse-times, reached them through the haze of ascending cigarette-smoke.
It was three o’clock when they exchanged a last close, passionate embrace and Elsie, pale, exhausted, with indescribably shining eyes, crept upstairs to her room, undressed, and lay down noiselessly by the side of her husband to relive the evening that she had spent with her lover.
Williams left the house next morning without waking her, but it was that evening that the inevitable crisis came.
The solicitor returned home nearly two hours before his usual time, and found Leslie Morrison just preparing to enter the house.
The two men went in together.
Elsie started violently at the sight of her husband, and then laughed artificially. “Hullo! It’s a case of Oh, what a surprise, isn’t it? You’re back early, Horace.”
“Yes,” said her husband.
“I hope you’re not too tired after last night,” Morrison began.
“Oh no, thanks! It was fine. Horace, I haven’t told you about the dance yet. It’s a shame you weren’t there.”
The moment she said the words, Elsie knew that she had made a mistake.
“Yes,” Williams remarked quietly, “you’d have liked me to be there, wouldn’t you? Well, let me inform you that you aren’t going to any more dances for the present.”
“Whatever do you mean, Horace?”
“Morrison knows what I mean all right, and so do you, you little ——” His low, snarling tone gave the effect of spitting the ugly word at her.
Leslie Morrison sprang to his feet. “Look here, sir——”
The solicitor held up his hand. “That’ll do. It’s not for you to adopt that tone in speaking to me, you know. Please to remember that I’m Elsie’s husband.”
“Look here,” Morrison began again, “I’m perfectly ready to make a clean breast of it. I do love Elsie. Her and me were just pals at first, and then I suppose I didn’t exactly realise where I was drifting. But I’m free to confess that I lost my head one—one evening a little while ago—and I told her I loved her.” He glanced at Elsie, as though for a further cue.
“And of course she told you that she was a pure woman, and a loving wife, and you must never speak like that again?” sneered Horace Williams.
“Elsie, don’t let him speak like that.... Tell him!” urged Morrison.
“I don’t need any telling,” Williams retorted smoothly. “She thinks she’s in love with you, of course.”
“I am in love with Leslie,” said Elsie suddenly. “And if you did the decent thing, Horace, you’d set me free to marry him. You and me have never been happy together. I didn’t ever ought to have married you, but I was a young fool.”
“Understand this, the pair of you,” said the little solicitor clearly and deliberately. “I shall never set you free, as you call it. You’ve married me, and you’ve got to stay with me. As for you,” he turned to Leslie Morrison, “you can leave my house. And understand clearly that I won’t have you inside it again. And if I catch you speaking to my wife again, or meeting her, or having anything whatsoever to do with her, it’ll be the worse for you.”
Morrison took a sudden step forward, his hands clenched, and Elsie screamed, but Horace Williams stood his ground.
“I’m well within my rights, and you know it,” he declared. “I could horsewhip you, in fact, and if you were fool enough to bring a case for assault it’d go against you.Clear out!That’s my last word to you.”
“Will you let Elsie have a divorce?”
“No, I won’t.”
“Will you let her have a legal separation, then? You’ve her own word for it that she’s not happy with you. I’m not thinking of myself, but you can’t have the cruelty to keep her tied to you when she’s miserable. Let her have her freedom.”
For all answer, Williams pointed to the door. The expression of his face had not altered by a hair’s-breadth.
Morrison turned to Elsie, white and tense. “Elsie, you hear what he says. What d’you want me to do?”
Elsie had lost her nerve. She began to cry hysterically. Instead of answering Morrison’s appeal, she turned to her husband.
“Why can’t you let us just be pals, Leslie and me?” she sobbed. “You bring your horrid, mean jealousy into everything. I s’pose you don’t grudge me having a friend of my own age, do you?”
Leslie Morrison instantly and loyally followed her lead. “If Elsie is kind enough to let me be her friend, and—and take her out every now and then, and that sort of thing, I’m willing to forget what’s just passed, and simply ask you as man to man if you’ve any objection to us being, as she says, just pals,” he said steadily enough.
“I have every objection. You young fool, Elsie has just said in so many words that she’s in love with you. Did you mean that, Elsie, or did you not?”
Elsie sobbed more and more violently, and her voice rose to an incoherent screech. “How do I know what I mean or don’t mean, when you make a row like this? But I’ll tell you this much, anyway, it’s true what he said; I’m wretched with you, and if you were half a man, you’d set me free.”
“There, that’s enough,” said Williams. “Going round and round in a circle won’t help any of us, and you ought to know by this time, Elsie, that I always mean what I say. You’ll please to remember what you were when I married you—a little fool of a typist, without a penny, whose mother kept a boarding-house and was only too glad of the money I gave her. It doesn’t take a genius to say what would have happened to you if you hadn’t found a man fool enough to marry you, either.”
“Stop that!” Morrison shouted.
The solicitor blinked at him quietly. “I’ve twice told you to get out of my house,” he observed. “Don’t make me say it a third time. It’ll be the worse, if you do—for Elsie.”
“Are you threatening her, you—you brute, you?”
“I object to your friendship with my wife. That’s all—and enough too. Now go.”
“Oh yes, go!” said Elsie suddenly, breaking into renewed sobs and tears. “I can’t stand this. You’d better go, Leslie boy, really you had. I shall do myself in, that’s all.”
“Don’t talk like that——” the youth began frantically, but Williams opened the door, and stood silently pointing to it.
There was something strangely inexorable in his little, trivial figure and sinister, passionless expression.
“Elsie,” said Morrison brokenly, “if ever you want me, send for me. I’ll come!”
He went out of the room, and they heard him go down the stairs and let himself out at the front door.
“That’s the end of that,” said Williams in a quiet, satisfied voice. “Stop that howling, Elsie. You didn’t really suppose that I didn’t know what was going on?”
She sobbed and would not answer.
There was a long silence, and at last Elsie, face downwards on the sofa, began to feel frightened and curious. She bore it as long as she could, and then looked up.
Her husband was gazing out of the window, in which a potted aspidistra stood upon a wicker stand between soiled white curtains.
At the slight movement that she made he turned his head. “Elsie, tell me. Did you really mean what you said, that you’re in love with that boy?”
To her incredulous surprise, his voice had become hoarse and almost maudlin.
“You only said it to make me angry, didn’t you?”
In a flash Elsie saw the wisdom of allowing him at least to pretend to such a belief. “Perhaps I did,” she said slowly. “Anyway, it’s true enough that we aren’t particularly happy together, and never have been. And I meant what I said about a separation, right enough, Horace.”
“You won’t get one,” said Williams, and his voice had become vicious-sounding once more. “And rememberwhat I’ve said—that fellow is never to set foot in here again, and you and he are not to meet in future.”
The following morning Elsie went to the High Street post-office and found there the letter that she had expected.
“My Own Darling Girlie,“What is to be done? I can’t tell you, darling, what a hound I felt to leave you all alone with that jealous brute yesterday and yet the awful thing is that he has the right to you and I have none. Oh, Elsie life is hard isn’t it darling? I wish I could take you away but that cannot be and it is you that have to bear the brunt of it all except that I am in hell knowing what you are going through all the time. Perhaps that is not an expression I ought to use to you but you must excuse it for I hardly know what I am writing.“One of our chaps has gone sick, and they are sending me to the North instead of him which means we can’t meet again as I go off to-morrow. But write to me darling and tell me what it is best to do now. Would it simplify things if we were to be just friends and no more?“Cheer up, Elsie perhaps some day things may come right for us—who knows? He may die; doesn’t he always say there is something wrong with him?“A thousand kisses for you, dearie. I have your sweet photo with me and love to look at it and re-read your wonderful letters. Write and tell me everything, and what you think we had better do. Shall we be able to meet when I come back at the end of the month?“No more at present, from“Your own true lover, Leslie,“Boy.”
“My Own Darling Girlie,
“What is to be done? I can’t tell you, darling, what a hound I felt to leave you all alone with that jealous brute yesterday and yet the awful thing is that he has the right to you and I have none. Oh, Elsie life is hard isn’t it darling? I wish I could take you away but that cannot be and it is you that have to bear the brunt of it all except that I am in hell knowing what you are going through all the time. Perhaps that is not an expression I ought to use to you but you must excuse it for I hardly know what I am writing.
“One of our chaps has gone sick, and they are sending me to the North instead of him which means we can’t meet again as I go off to-morrow. But write to me darling and tell me what it is best to do now. Would it simplify things if we were to be just friends and no more?
“Cheer up, Elsie perhaps some day things may come right for us—who knows? He may die; doesn’t he always say there is something wrong with him?
“A thousand kisses for you, dearie. I have your sweet photo with me and love to look at it and re-read your wonderful letters. Write and tell me everything, and what you think we had better do. Shall we be able to meet when I come back at the end of the month?
“No more at present, from
“Your own true lover, Leslie,“Boy.”
To Elsie, Leslie Morrison’s love-letters were wonderful.
She read and re-read this one, but when she had answered it, she burnt it.
Certain words of the clairvoyante, whom she had once visited with Irene Tidmarsh, she had never been able to forget, and of late they had haunted her anew.
“Beware of the written word....”
Elsie burnt all Morrison’s letters to her, and asked him to burn all those that she wrote him.
Gradually these letters that passed between them grew to be the most important factor in her life.
Elsie, who had detested writing, now desired nothing so much as to pour out her soul on paper, and the limitations that she found imposed upon her through lack of education and the power to express herself made her angry.
Again and again she asked Morrison in her letters to take her away, and after a time his steadfast refusals bred in her mind the first unbearable suspicion that her passion was the greater of the two. Her letters became wilder and wilder.
Sometimes she threatened suicide, or gave hysterical and entirely imaginary descriptions of scenes with her husband; sometimes she expressed a reckless desire for Horace’s death, or asked if she could “give him something” unspecified. These phrases, to a large extent, were meaningless, but Elsie frantically hoped by them to impress upon Morrison the extent of her love for him.
When he got back from the North of England they met surreptitiously.
A certain café in a small street not far from Elsie’s home became their rendezvous. Sometimes Morrison was able to get there in the middle of the day, but generally he came at about five o’clock, and they had tea together. Very occasionally they met early in the afternoon and went out together.
Each meeting was entirely inconclusive, save in exciting Elsie almost to frenzy and reducing young Morrison to further depths of despondency.
The months dragged on. Morrison was often away, and then he and Elsie wrote to one another daily. She was entirely obsessed with the thought of her lover, and hardly ever saw Irene Tidmarsh, or went to Hillbourne Terrace. And all the while, Horace Williams said nothing.
He and his wife did not quarrel; indeed, they hardly spoke to one another, but the atmosphere between them, day by day, was becoming more heavily charged with mutual hatred and apprehension.