The love-affair of Elsie Williams and Leslie Morrison swept on its
course, and in the early days of their madness neither of them paused
for an instant to count its possible cost.
It seemed, indeed, as though Fate were deliberately simplifying their
way.
Horace Williams appeared unable to give his attention to anything
beyond his newly-discovered digestive trouble, and remained
constantly indoors through the hottest and finest of the summer days,
experimenting upon himself with drugs, and studying tables of dietetic
values. He questioned Elsie very little as to her movements, taking it
for granted that she, Morrison, and Geraldine formed a trio.
In point of fact, the youth whom Geraldine had met at the Sunday
evening concert, and whom she spoke of as Percy Belcher, now almost
always made a fourth in the party.
Geraldine monopolised him eagerly, and openly showed her triumph at
feeling that she could now afford to relinquish Leslie Morrison.
Elsie and Morrison went swimming together, and lay on the hot,
crowded sands, and dropped behind the others when they all went for
walks, and sat with locked hands and her cheek against his shoulder
in the stifling, thrilling darkness of the picture theatre, watching
together the representation of a love that was never anything but the
reflection of their own, the eternal triumph of a Man and a Woman, pale
representatives on the screen of Elsie Williams and Leslie Morrison.
The golden fortnight drew to its close, and with the end of the Torquay
holiday, it suddenly seemed to Elsie as though the end of the world
must come.
“What are we to do, Leslie?” she gasped.
“I don’t know, darling,” he said miserably.
“You’re going to be in town for a bit?”
“For a little while. They’re sending me off again, pretty soon--abroad
this time.”
“I can’t live without seeing you sometimes. Oh, Les, how can I go back
to the old life with Horace after _this_?”
“Elsie,” said Morrison very low, “would he divorce you if----?”
“Not a hope. It costs money, and he’s too mean. Besides, he’d never do
it if he thought I wanted it. He’s cruel, is Horace.”
“Not to you?”
“He doesn’t knock me about, if that’s what you mean--he knows I
wouldn’t stand it--but of course he doesn’t care for me, or for anybody
but himself. I was told he gave his first a rotten time--anyway, I
know she used to look wretched enough. You know there was a first Mrs.
Williams?”
“No, I didn’t. Of course, I saw he was much older than you. Oh, Elsie,
whatever made you marry him?”
“Oh, I was a fool and I thought I’d like to be married, and get away
from home. I didn’t know what it was going to be like, that’s certain.
Oh, Les, fancy if I was still Elsie Palmer, and you and me could get
married!” She gave a sob.
“Don’t, sweetheart! I’d have asked for your promise, fast enough, if
you’d been free, but I couldn’t marry any girl till I’m earning a bit
more.”
“Don’t you get a good screw, Leslie?”
“Rotten. But I’m jolly lucky to be in a job at all these days, I
suppose.”
“Lucky!” Elsie echoed the word drearily. “You and I aren’t amongst the
lucky ones, boy. I don’t see how things are ever going to come right
for us, without a miracle happens.”
“He--Williams--may ... he may die.”
“Not he!” said Elsie bitterly. “There’s nothing the matter with him.
All this talk about indigestion is stuff and nonsense--just fads he’s
got into his head. There’s nothing wrong with Horace. And it’s always
the ones who aren’t wanted that live on and on. But how am I going to
bear it, after this wonderful time we’ve been having?” She began to cry.
“Elsie, don’t, darling! I’ll think of a way. There must be some way
out.”
Leslie took her in his arms and she forgot everything else.
On the last evening they all went to the theatre together, and it was
there, for the first time seeming awake to the situation, that Horace
Williams, sitting at the end of the row of stalls, suddenly leaned
across Geraldine and looked long and balefully at his wife.
She felt herself changing colour.
Morrison, however, observed nothing. He talked only to Elsie, looked
only at her during the interval, and whilst the play was in progress
and the lights in the theatre lowered, his hand sought and held hers.
“Elsie, we can’t part like this. How can I see you alone?”
“We can’t--not here. But Horace starts at the office again on
Wednesday, and he’s there all day. Come to the house.”
“It means an age without seeing you. Elsie, can I write to you?”
“Yes ... no....” She was startled. “Oh, Les, darling, I’d love your
letters!... But he’d see them. Wait a minute.”
She thought rapidly.
“Address them to the post-office--I’ll call there. He doesn’t know or
care what I do all day, so long as I’m always there in the evenings
when he gets back.”
But Elsie was to find herself mistaken. Her husband, after their return
to the suburban villa, displayed a very unmistakable interest in her
movements during the hours of his absence at work.
He obliged her to give him an account of her day, and took to ringing
her up on the telephone for no acknowledged reason, and always at a
different hour.
At first, Elsie cared little. She and Leslie Morrison met daily, and
on one occasion spent the afternoon in the country together. Elsie
recklessly telephoned to her own house at seven o’clock that evening,
and said that she was with Irene Tidmarsh, and should not come home
that night.
“You must,” said the hollow voice at the other end of the line.
“I can’t. Her father’s awfully ill, and she’s afraid of being left.”
“When shall you be home?”
“To-morrow.”
“I’ll come and fetch you.”
“All right,” said Elsie boldly. “What time?”
There was no answer. Williams had rung off.
Elsie knew, beyond the possibility of mistake, that her husband
suspected her; but in the intense excitement that possessed her she was
conscious of nothing so much as of relief that a crisis should be at
hand.
She spent the night with Leslie Morrison at a tiny hotel in Essex.
Early next morning they travelled back to London, parting at Liverpool
Street station.
“Let me know what happens directly you can, darling,” urged the man.
“I’ll telephone. Anyway, come round as soon as you can get away. _He_
won’t be in before seven.”
“Good-bye, Elsie darling. I’ll never, never forget....”
He left her, joining a hurrying throng of other young men wearing soft
hats and carrying little brown bags, nearly all of them hastening
towards the City.
Elsie proceeded by train and tram to the house of Irene’s father.
Her friend opened the door to her. “Hullo! I thought I should see you.
That hubby of yours is on the warpath.”
“What’s happened?”
“Oh, nothing, thanks to me! Come in, Elsie. Have you had breakfast?”
“I’ve had some tea; I don’t want anything else. Tell me about Horace.”
“Well, Horace, as you call him, saw fit to come round here at eleven
o’clock p.m. last night, and got me out of my virtuous downy by ringing
at the front door bell till I thought the house was on fire. He said
he’d ‘come for’ his wife, if you please!”
“I know. I told him I was going to spend the night at your place,” said
Elsie calmly. “I suppose you didn’t happen to tumble to it, Ireen?”
“I’ve not known you all these years for nothing, old girl,” said Irene,
grinning. “What do you take me for? I told him you were in bed and
asleep, and had been for hours.”
“You’re a real sport, Ireen! How did he take it?”
Irene pursed up her lips and shook her head. “He asked me to tell you
to ring him up first thing this morning. If you ask me, you’re in for
trouble. And p’r’aps now you’ll be so kind as to tell me what it all
means, and why on earth you couldn’t have given me fair warning before
saying you were here. It’s lucky for you I didn’t give the whole show
away on the spot.”
Elsie, habitually ready to discuss any of her love-affairs with Irene,
had told her nothing about Leslie Morrison. But she saw now that a
degree of frankness was inevitable.
Irene listened, sitting on the kitchen table, her shrewd, cynical gaze
fixed upon Elsie. “You’re for it, all right,” she observed dryly. “I
thought directly I saw you after you’d got back from Torquay that there
was something up. But I somehow didn’t think you’d go off the deep end
like that, Elsie. Why, you’re dotty about him!”
“Yes,” said Elsie, “I am.”
“And what do you suppose is going to happen?”
Elsie groaned. “I wish to the Lord that Horace would do the decent
thing, or go West--and let me have a chance of happiness.”
“He won’t,” said Irene. “Well, whatever you do, don’t make a fool of
yourself and run off with this fellow. It simply isn’t worth it, when
he hasn’t got a penny, and not very often when he has.”
“If I thought Horace would divorce me it’d be different,” Elsie said.
She was not listening to Irene at all. “Though even then, I don’t know
what we would live on. Leslie hasn’t anything except his salary, and
that’s tiny, and I’m sure I couldn’t earn a penny if I tried. Mother
wouldn’t help me, either, if I did a thing like that.”
“No more would anybody else. And surely to goodness, Elsie, you’d never
be such a fool. Think what it would mean to be disgraced, and have a
scandal.”
“I wouldn’t mind that with him.”
Irene groaned. “You are far gone! Well, the worse it is while it lasts,
the sooner it’s over. You’ll see sense again one of these days, I
suppose. Meanwhile, you’d better ’phone that husband of yours.”
Elsie’s conversation with Williams over the telephone was brief. She
agreed to come home at midday, and neither made any reference to the
visit of Williams at eleven o’clock on the previous night.
Elsie anticipated a scene with her husband, and felt indifferent to the
prospect. She had not enough imagination to work herself up in advance,
and, moreover, her faculties were entirely occupied with the blissful
expectation of seeing Morrison again that afternoon.
He came some hours after she had arrived home.
Elsie had done some shopping in the morning. With her husband’s money
she had bought a gold-nibbed fountain-pen for Leslie, and had paid for
copies of a photograph of herself.
She had scarcely ever in her life before given anyone a present, and
Leslie Morrison’s ardent thanks, and rapture over the photograph,
caused her the most acute pleasure.
“Darling, it’s lovely, and it’s just you! I shall always carry it about
with me, done up with your dear letters.”
“Don’t keep my letters, Leslie,” said Elsie suddenly.
“Why ever not?”
A sudden recollection had come to her ... “_Beware of the written
word...._”
The medium to whom Irene had once taken her had said that. She had also
said other things; had told Elsie that love would come to her....
Perhaps she really knew....
“I’d rather you didn’t, really,” she said feebly. “Suppose--suppose
Horace ever got hold of them----”
“How could he? Besides, Elsie darling, he’s got to know about us some
time. I wish you’d let me tell him now. I can’t go on like this; it’s
a low-down game coming to a man’s house without his knowledge and--and
making love to his wife.”
“His wife!” said Elsie angrily. “Don’t call me that. I may be his wife
in law, but it’s you that I really belong to.”
“Well, let me have it out with him then,” said Morrison earnestly. “We
don’t know, after all. He may be ready to do the decent thing, and set
you free.”
“I don’t care if you do. I’m pretty sure he guesses.... Horace has
always been jealous, though he’s never had any cause before.”
“He didn’t say anything at Torquay?”
“No, it’s since we got back. He asked me once if you were engaged to
Geraldine, and I said no. And he asked if you meant to come and see
us here, and I told him most likely you would. He didn’t say anything
much, but he hates a man coming near the place, really.”
“I’d far rather have it out with him,” young Morrison repeated. His
face was resolute, and he stood his ground when Elsie, starting
violently, exclaimed:
“I believe that’s Horace now! I can hear his key in the door. He’s
never in at this hour as a rule--the skunk, he’s come to spy on me!”
“Darling, it’s all right!” said Morrison.
He put the photograph away in his breast-pocket with hands that
trembled slightly. Both fixed their eyes on the door as it opened upon
the figure of the little elderly solicitor. His face wore a no more
sardonic expression than was habitual with him, and Elsie could not
deduce from it whether or not he was surprised to see Leslie Morrison.
Neither man made any movement towards shaking hands, but they
greeted one another conventionally, and talked a little, as though
indifferently, of the holiday at Torquay.
Leslie asked whether Mr. Williams was any better in health, and the
solicitor replied coldly:
“No, I am no better. I daresay my case would be a very interesting one,
from the point of view of a doctor. But I am not one to give up, and I
have no doubt that a great many people do not realise there is anything
the matter with me.”
He turned his eyes upon Elsie for a moment as he spoke.
At the same instant, the inevitable thought that had flashed through
her mind at his words caused Elsie to cast a lightning glance towards
Leslie Morrison.
It was that glance that her husband intercepted.
V
They had 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 remember what 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.”
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.