II
Thiswas Elsie’s real life.
Although quite incapable of formulating the thought to herself, she already knew instinctively that only in her relations with some man could she find self-expression.
In the course of the past two years she had gradually discovered that she possessed a power over men that other girls either did not possess at all, or in a very much lesser degree. From the exercise of unconscious magnetism, she had by imperceptible degrees passed to a breathless, intermittent exploitation of her own attractiveness.
She did not know why boys so often wished to kiss her, nor why she was sometimes followed, or spoken to, in the street, by men. At first she had thought that she must be growing prettier, but her personal preference was for dark eyes, a bright colour, and a slim, tall figure, and she honestly did not admire her own appearance. Moreover, her looks varied almost from day to day, and very often she seemed plain. She had never received any instruction in questions of sex, excepting whispered mis-information from girls at school as to the origin of babies. The signs of physical development that had come to her early were either not commented upon except in half-disgusted, half-facetious innuendo from Geraldine, or else dismissed by Mrs. Palmer curtly:
“Nice gurls don’t think about those things. I’m ashamed of you, Elsie. You should try and be nice-minded, as mother’s always told her gurls.”
A sort of garbled knowledge came to her after a time, knowledge that comprised the actual crude facts as tophysical union between men and women, and explained in part certain violent bodily reactions to which she had been prone almost since childhood.
She had not the least idea whether any other girl in the world ever felt as she did, and was inclined to believe herself unnatural and depraved.
This thought hardly ever depressed her. She thought that to remain technically “a good girl” was all that was required of her, and admitted no further responsibility.
Geraldine and she quarrelled incessantly. Geraldine, with her poor physique and constant indispositions, was angrily jealous of Elsie’s superb health and uninterrupted preoccupation with her own affairs. She had only just begun to suspect that Elsie was never without a masculine admirer, and the knowledge, when it became a certainty, would embitter the relations between them still further on Geraldine’s side.
On Elsie’s side there was no bitterness, only contempt and unmalicious hostility. She disliked her elder sister, but was incapable of the mental effort implied by hatred. In the same way, she disliked her mother, almost without knowing that she did so.
Her home had always been ugly, sordid, and abounding in passionless discord. Elsie’s real life, which was just beginning to give her the romance and excitement for which she craved, was lived entirely outside the walls of No. 15, Hillbourne Terrace.
To-night, as she entered the hot, dark, enervating atmosphere of the cinema theatre, she thrilled in response to the contrast with the street outside. When she heard the loud, emphasised rhythm of a waltz coming from the piano beneath the screen, little shivers of joy ran through her.
A girl with a tiny electric torch indicated to them a row of seats, and Elsie pushed her way along until the two empty places at the very end of the row were reached. It added the last drop to her cup of satisfaction that she should have only the wall on one side of her. Human proximity almost always roused her to a vague curiosity and consciousness, that would have interfered with her full enjoyment of the evening.
She settled herself in the soft, comfortable seat, slipping her arms from the sleeves of her coat, and leaning back against it.
Roberts dropped a small box into her lap as he sat down beside her.
“Thanks awfully,” she whispered.
A film was showing, and Elsie became absorbed at once in the presentment of it, although she had no idea of the story. It came to an end very soon, and a Topical Budget was shown. Elsie was less interested, and pulled the string off her box of chocolates.
“Have one?”
“I don’t mind. Thanks.”
“They’re awfully good.” She chewed and sucked blissfully.
“Ooh! Look at that ship! Isn’t it funny?”
“Makes you feel seasick to look at it, doesn’t it?” whispered Roberts, and she giggled ecstatically.
Words appeared on the screen.
“‘Hearts and Crowns,’ featuring Lallie Carmichael.”
“How lovely!” said Elsie.
The story was complicated, and as most of the characters were Russian, Elsie did not always remember whether Sergius was the villain or the lawyer, and if Olga was the name of the “vampire” or of the soubrette. But the beautiful Lallie Carmichael was the heroine, and a clean-shaven American the hero. Elsie watched them almost breathlessly, and after a time it was she herself who was leaning back in the crowded restaurant, in a very low dress, and waving an ostrich-feather fan, torn between passion and loyalty. The American hero assumed no definite personality, other than that which his creator had endowed him. The scenes that she liked best were those between the two lovers, when they were shown alone together, and the American made passionate love to the princess.
At the end of the First Part, the lights went up.
Elsie turned her shining eyes and rumpled curls towards her escort.
“It is good, isn’t it?” he said, with a critical air.
“Isn’t it good? Have another sweet?”
“Well, thanks, I don’t mind. Are you enjoying yourself, kiddie?”
“Awfully. I like pictures.”
“What about me? Don’t you like me a little bit too, Elsie, for bringing you?” His voice had become low and husky.
Still under the emotional influence of the story, the music, and the relaxation produced by bodily warmth and comfort, she looked at him, and saw, not the common, rather negligible features of sandy-haired Mr. Roberts, but the bold, handsome American hero of the film.
“Of course I like you,” she said softly.
“You won’t forget me when I’ve gone?”
“No.”
“You will, Elsie! You’ll let some other fellow take you to the pictures, and you won’t give me another thought.”
“Of course I shall, you silly! I shall always remember you—you’ve been awfully sweet to me.”
“Will you write to me?”
“We’ll see about that.”
“Promise.”
“Promises are like pie-crusts, made to be broken.”
“Yours wouldn’t be. I bet anything if you promised a chap something, you’d stick to it. Now wouldn’t you?”
“I daresay I should,” she murmured, flattered. “Mother says I’ve always been a terrible one for keeping to what I’ve once said. It’s the way I am, you know.”
No fleeting suspicion crossed her mind that this was anything but a true description of herself.
“Elsie, do you know what I should like to do?”
“What, Mr. Roberts?”
“Call me Norman. I should like to make a hell of a lot of money and come back and marry you.”
“You shouldn’t use those words.”
“I’m in earnest, Elsie.”
“You’re making very free with my name, aren’t you?”
“You don’t mind.”
“No,” she whispered.
“You’re a little darling.”
The lights went out again, and his hand fumbled forhers in the darkness. Warm and unresisting it lay in his, and presently returned pressure for pressure.
The story on the screen began to threaten tragedy, and Elsie’s body became tense with anxiety. She pressed her shoulder hard against that of Roberts.
He, too, leant towards her, and presently slipped one arm round her waist. Instantly her senses were awake, and although she continued to gaze at the screen, she was in reality blissfully preoccupied only with his embrace, and the sensations it aroused in her.
Intensely desirous that he should not move away, she relaxed her figure more and more, letting her head rest at last against his shoulder. She began to wonder whether he would kiss her, and to feel that she wanted him to do so. As though she had communicated the thought to him, the man beside her in the obscurity put his disengaged hand under her chin and tilted her face to his.
She did not resist, and he kissed her, first on her soft cheek and then on her mouth.
Elsie had been kissed before, roughly and teasingly by boys, and once or twice, furtively, by an elderly lodger of Mrs. Palmer’s, whose breath had smelt of whisky.
But the kisses of this young commercial traveller were of an entirely different quality to these, and the pleasure that she took in them was new and startling to herself.
“Elsie, d’you love me?” he whispered. “I love you. I think you’re the sweetest little girl in the whole world.”
Elsie liked the words vaguely, but she did not really want him to talk, she wanted him to go on kissing her.
“Say—‘I love you, Norman.’”
“I won’t.”
“You must. Why won’t you?”
“It’s so soppy.”
“Elsie!”
She felt that the magnetic current between them had been disturbed, and made an instinctive, nestling movement against him.
He kissed her again, two or three times.
Reluctantly, Elsie forced herself to the realisation that the film must soon come to an end, and the lights reappear.She looked at the screen again, and when the lovers, in magnified presentment, exchanged a long embrace, responsive vibrations shook her, and she felt all the elation of conscious and recent initiation.
The lights suddenly flashed out, a moment sooner than she expected them, and she flung herself across into her own seat, pressing the backs of her hands against her flushed, burning cheeks and dazzled eyes.
She knew that Norman Roberts was looking at her, but she would not turn her head and meet his eyes, partly from shyness, and partly from coquetry.
“Isn’t this the end?” she said, knowing that it was not, but speaking in order to relieve her sense of embarrassment.
“No, it isn’t over till half-past ten; there’s another forty minutes yet.” He consulted his wrist-watch elaborately. “I expect they’ll have a comic to finish up with.”
Elsie sensed constraint in him, too, and in sudden alarm turned and faced him. As their eyes met, both of them smiled and flushed, and Roberts slipped his arm under hers and possessed himself of her hand again.
“Did you like that?” he whispered, bending towards her.
“The picture?”
“You know I don’t mean that.”
She laughed and then nodded.
“Elsie, tell me something truly. Has any other fellow ever kissed you?”
Her first impulse was to lie glibly. Then her natural, instinctive understanding of the game on which they were engaged, made her laugh teasingly.
“That’s telling, Mr. Inquisitive.”
“That means they have. I must say, Elsie, that considering you’re only sixteen, I don’t call that very nice.”
Elsie snatched away her hand. “I get quite enough of that sort of thing at home, thank you, Mr. Norman Roberts,Esquire. There’s no call for you to interfere in my concerns, that I’m aware of.”
His instant alarm gratified her, although she continued to look offended, and to sit very upright in her chair.
“Don’t be angry, Elsie. I didn’t mean to offend you, honour bright. Make it up!”
The pianist began some rattling dance-music and the lights went out again.
Elsie immediately relaxed her pose, feeling her heart beat more quickly in mingled doubt and anticipation.
The doubt was resolved almost within the instant. Roberts pulled her towards him, bringing her face close to his, and whispered:
“Kiss and be friends!”
All the while that the last film was showing, Elsie lay almost in his arms, seeing nothing at all, conscious only of feeling alive as she had never felt alive before.
Even when it was all over and they rose to go, that sense of awakened vitality throbbed within her, and made her unaware of fatigue.
“Follow me,” said Roberts authoritatively, and took his place in front of her in the gangway. There he waited, meekly and like everybody else, until the people in front should have moved. But to Elsie there was masculinity in the shelter of his narrow, drooping shoulders, as he stood before her in his crumpled light overcoat, every now and then shifting from one foot to the other.
She followed him step by step, pulling her hair into place under the tam-o’-shanter, and settling it at its customary rakish angle.
It was no longer raining, and a watery moon showed through a haze.
They dawdled as soon as they were out of the crowd, with linked arms and clasped hands.
“Swear you’ll write to me, Elsie.”
“All right.”
“Lordy, to think of all we might have done together these three months I’ve been here, and I’ve never had more than a word with you here and there!”
“I was at school all the time, till last week.”
“You aren’t going back to school again?”
“No, that’s over, praise be! I’m supposed to be taking up typing and shorthand, some time, though there’s plenty for two of us to do at home,Ishould have said.”
The faint reverberations of a church clock striking came to them.
“Goodness, that’s never eleven o’clock striking! Well, you will get me into a row and no mistake!”
She began to run, but stopped under a lamp just before No. 15 was in sight.
He had kept pace with her high-heeled, uneven steps easily, and stopped beside her.
“Say good-night to me properly, then.”
“How, properly? Good-night, Mr. Roberts, and thank you ever so much. Oh, andbonne voyageto-morrow, in case I don’t see you. Will that do?”
“No, it won’t. I want a kiss.”
“You don’t want much, do you?” she began half-heartedly, and looking up and down the street as she spoke.
It was empty but for themselves.
Roberts caught hold of her and kissed her with violence. Unresisting, Elsie put back her head and closed her eyes.
“Kiss me—youshallkiss me,” he gasped.
At the sense of constriction that came upon her with the tightened grasp of his arms, Elsie gave a fluttering, strangled scream and began to struggle.
“Let me go! You’re hurting me!”
He loosened his hold so abruptly that she nearly fell down.
She began to hurry towards home, moving with the ugly, jerking gait peculiar to women who walk from the knees.
“Shall I see you to-morrow before I go?” His voice sounded oddly humble and crestfallen.
“I’ll come to the drawing-room for a minute—no one’s ever there in the mornings.”
“What time, Elsie? I ought to be off at nine.”
“Oh, before that some time, I expect. I say, you’ve got your key, haven’t you?”
A sharp misgiving assailed her as he began to fumble in his pockets.
“Yes, all right.” He put it into the lock.
Elsie, relieved, stood on tiptoe and put her arms round his neck. “Good-night, you dear,” she whispered. “Now don’t begin again. Open the door and go in first, and ifthe coast isn’t clear, just cough, and I’ll wait a bit. I’ll see you to-morrow.”
When he signed to her that the house was quiet, and that she could safely enter, Elsie slipped past him like a shadow while he felt about for matches, and flew upstairs. Her mother slept in the back bedroom on the third floor, and Elsie saw that her door was shut and that no streak of light showed under it. Satisfied, she went up the next flight of stairs to the bedroom.
Geraldine, of course, was bound to know of her escapade, but Geraldine would either believe, or pretend to believe, that Elsie had been with Irene Tidmarsh, and the two Palmer girls always combined with one another against the sentimentalised tyranny that Mrs. Palmer called “a mother’s rights.”
Geraldine was lying in bed, reading a paper novelette by the light of a candle stuck into an empty medicine bottle that stood on a chair beside her. She looked sallower than ever now that she had undressed and put on a white flannelette nightgown with a frill high at the neck and another one at each wrist.
Her lank hair was rolled up into steel waving-pins. It was one of Geraldine’s grievances that she should be obliged to go to bed in curlers every night, while Elsie’s light curls lay loose and ruffled on her pillow. Sometimes, when they were on friendly terms, she and Elsie would speculate together as to how the difficulty could be overcome when Geraldine married, and could no longer go to bed and wake up “looking a sight.”
She rolled over as Elsie cautiously opened the door. “You’ve come at last, have you? How did you get in?”
“Mr. Roberts let me in. He knew I’d be late to-night,” said Elsie calmly, beginning to pull off her clothes.
“You’ve got a nerve, I must say. Mother thinks you were in bed ages ago. She came up after supper and said you were in the kitchen. She was in the drawing-room nearly all the evening, doing the polite to the Williamses.”
“Did she find out that supper hadn’t been cleared away?”
“I suppose she didn’t, or she’d have been up here after you. You’re in luck, young Elsie.”
“I shall have to go down and do it first thing to-morrow before she’s down,” said Elsie, yawning.
“Where have you been?”
“Pictures.”
“With Ireen?”
“’M.”
“I shall ask her what they were like, next time I see her,” said Geraldine significantly.
Elsie pulled the ribbon off her hair without untying it, shuffled her clothes off on to the floor from beneath a nightgown that was the counterpart of her sister’s, and dabbed at her face with a sponge dipped in cold water. She carefully parted her hair on the other side for the night, and brushed it vigorously for some moments to promote growth, but the worn bristles of her wooden-backed brush were grey with dust and thick with ancient “combings.”
At the bedside Elsie knelt down for a few seconds with her face hidden in her hands, as she had always done, muttered an unthinking formula, and got into bed.
“You’re very sociable, I must say,” Geraldine exclaimed. “Out half the night, and not a word to say when you do come up!”
“I thought you had a headache.”
“A lot you care about my headache.”
“I’m going to put the light out now.”
“All right.”
They had always shared a bedroom and never exchanged formal good-nights.
In the dark, a tremendous weariness suddenly came over Elsie. She felt thankful to be in her warm, narrow bed, and blissfully relived the evening’s experience.
She found that she could thrill profoundly to the memory of those ardent moments, and even the bodily lassitude that overwhelmed her held a certain luxuriousness.
Dimly, and without any conscious analysis, she felt that for the first time in her sixteen years of life she had glimpsed a reason why she should exist. It was forthisthat she had been made.
No thought of the future preoccupied her for a moment. She did not even regret that Norman Roberts should be going away next day.
“I must get up in good time to-morrow, and get a word with him in the drawing-room before he’s off,” was her last waking thought.
But she was sleeping profoundly, her head under the bedclothes, when Mrs. Palmer’s customary bang at the door sounded next morning soon after six o’clock.
“Wake up, girls.”
“Awright!” Geraldine shouted back sleepily. If one or other of them did not call out in reply, Mrs. Palmer would come into the room in her grey dressing-gown and vigorously shake the bed-posts of either bed.
They could hear her heelless slippers flapping away again, and Elsie reluctantly roused herself.
“I simply must clear that supper-table before mother goes down,” she thought. Still half asleep, and yawning without restraint, she put on her thick coat over her nightgown, and ran downstairs with bare feet.
The broken remains of supper, even to Elsie’s indifferent eyes, looked horrible in the grim morning light.
She huddled everything out on a tray, pushed it out of sight in the back kitchen, and ran upstairs again, her teeth chattering with cold.
The still warm, tumbled bed was irresistible, and tearing off her coat, Elsie buried herself in it once more.
She slept through Geraldine’s sketchy, scrambled toilet and muttered abuse of her sister’s laziness, and did not stir even when her senior, as the most unpleasant thing she could do, opened her window, which had been closed all night, and let in the damp, raw, foggy morning air.
Elsie did not stir again until the door was flung open and Geraldine pulled the bedclothes off her roughly, and said angrily:
“Get up, you lazy little brute! I had to wash all the beastly things you left over last night, and mother and I had to do the breakfasts, and see that young Roberts off and everything.”
“Has Roberts gone?”
“Yes, of course he has. It’s past nine, you lazy pig, you——”
“Oh,” said Elsie indifferently, stretching herself.