Chapter VII: Part II: I (3)

“Do you mean suicide?”

“Yes--a suicide pact.”

She fixed her eyes upon him, anxious to believe that he was startled, and acutely touched, at the lengths to which her love could carry her. The actual idea behind the word--that of suicide--conveyed very little to her. Although she believed herself to be fully in earnest, Elsie never seriously contemplated her own death, nor that of her lover.

She had often thought of Williams’s death as the one possible solution of their problem, but she had actually never really abandoned the secret expectation that a way out would be found for herself and Morrison that would secure their happiness.

She had read of suicide-pacts, and seized upon the idea eagerly as one more peg upon which to hang the proofs of her passion for Morrison, and maintain his love, and his interest in herself, at the level of her own ardour. Although never consciously owning it to herself, Elsie knew that his love was a lesser one than hers.

Leslie Morrison, now, did not make the passionate response for which she had hoped. “Don’t talk like that. Oh, Elsie, it is hard, isn’t it? And you don’t know what it’s like for me to think of that brute making your life miserable. If only there was anything I could do!... I think about it till I see red sometimes. Why doesn’t he die?”

“Because we want him to, I suppose,” said Elsie, suddenly listless. “He’s always talking about his health failing, and things like that, but I don’t see any sign of it myself. Things will never come right for us in this world, Leslie.”

“Elsie, I’ll make him get a separation; I swear I will. It’s the only possible thing. Then at least you’ll be free.”

She noticed that he did not refer to the separation between herself and her husband as to a means of furthering their own love.

“Haven’t your people ever tried to get your freedom for you?”

“Oh, I’ve nobody much, you know! Only mother and Geraldine, and the old aunties. They don’t approve of me either--never did.”

“Poor little girl, they don’t understand you!”

“I don’t care while I’ve got you, Leslie.”

They made love to one another, their voices low, until Morrison reminded Elsie suddenly that it was late.

“You’ll hardly get to the West End by seven now. I’m glad you’re going to enjoy yourself to-night, anyway.”

“I wish we were going together, Les, just you and I. That’s how it ought to be. Are we going to meet to-morrow, dearest?”

“Lunch here, can you? One o’clock. And meanwhile, darling, I’m going to think hard what I can do to make things better for you. He’s got to stop leading you this sort of life, anyway, and it’s up to me to find a way of making him do so. When I think of his knocking you about....”

The blood rushed into his face, and Elsie saw that he had clenched his hand involuntarily. It was balm to her to realise that she still had the power of exciting him to a frenzied anxiety on her account.

“He’s hit me before now, you know,” she said suddenly, hardly realising, and caring not at all, that she was not speaking the truth.

“You never told me. I’ve sometimes wondered....”

“I didn’t mean to say anything about it. I knew it would upset you.... Never mind, darling, I don’t care.”

“But I do. I tell you it’s driving me mad. Oh, what’s the good of talking when one can’t do anything! Look here, darling, I’m not fit to talk to you now--and besides, you’ll be frightfully late. I shall see you to-morrow.”

“One o’clock. Good-night, sweetheart. I wish it was you and me going to this show to-night. Wouldn’t it be heaven!”

“Indeed it would. But things may come right for us even yet, darling--don’t give up hope. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye!” she echoed.

Elsie was late for her appointment with her husband, but he did not complain. He seemed anxious to do everything in his power to conciliate her, and it was characteristic of their relations together that, as her fear of his sarcastic petulance vanished, so her contempt for him increased.

“I got dress-circle places,” said Williams impressively. “I know you like them.”

The piece, a musical comedy, amused her, and she was pleased at various glances that were cast upon her by their neighbours in the theatre. At the back of it all was a warm inward glow that pervaded all her consciousness at the remembrance of Leslie Morrison’s championship of her, his assurance that he would “think out a way.”

Perhaps Leslie would make up his mind to take her away. She had asked him to do so, and he had always refused. Elsie, with an ever-latent fear that Morrison was already beginning to tire of an attachment that to her was the one reality in life, told herself passionately that, with him, she would care nothing for poverty.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” said her husband’s nasal voice.

“Rather. Topping!”

For a minute or two she listened to the comedian on the stage, and was genuinely amused by his facial contortions and wilful mispronunciations of polysyllabic words.

“He’s so silly, you can’t help laughing at him,” Elsie declared, wiping her eyes.

Then she drifted back again into the dream wherein she and Leslie Morrison figured as sole protagonists, with complete and unexplained elimination of Horace Williams.

“Look who’s here, Elsie!”

She started violently, convinced against all reason that she would see Morrison.

“Isn’t that your aunties?”

“So it is,” said Elsie without enthusiasm.

Aunt Ada and Aunt Gertie were making violent signs to her, and in the interval Horace, still evidently bent upon doing everything possible to please her, insisted upon going to speak to them, and suggested supper after the play.

“He is going it,” Elsie reflected dispassionately, not in the least touched, but a good deal amazed at the lavishness of Horace’s amends.

She was in reality very much bored by the company of the two aunts in the little restaurant to which they eventually went.

“Why don’t you go and see your poor mother, Elsie?”

“I do see her, Aunt Gertie.”

“Not very often, dear.”

“As often as I’ve time for,” said Elsie curtly.

“Geraldine’s not looking well,” Aunt Ada began next.

“What happened to that young fellow she was supposed to be going with last year?”

Horace Williams called abruptly for his bill. “It’s after twelve, and I’ve got to be at work to-morrow, if you ladies haven’t. All good things must come to an end, you know.”

“It’s been most pleasant, I’m sure,” said Aunt Gertie.

And when Horace had gone to pay the account at the cash-desk, she added sentimentally to Elsie:

“It’s a real pleasure to have seen you and him together--and so happy.”

“Thanks,” said Elsie sarcastically. “We’re as happy as the day is long, of course.”

“So you ought to be,” said Aunt Ada very sharply.

They exchanged good-byes outside the restaurant, and Elsie and her husband went by Tube to their own station.

The long suburban road was almost deserted when they came out into it.

“We’ll go by the Grove, of course,” said Elsie, indicating the narrow alleyway that eventually merged into their own street, with a high blank wall upon one side of it and the backs of a rather sordid row of houses upon the other.

A few leafless plane-trees showed above the top of the wall, and an occasional tall lamp slightly relieved the gloom of the long, paved passage-way.

Their footsteps on the stones were clearly audible in the unusual stillness that belonged both to the deserted locality and to the small hours of the morning.

“Who’s that?” said Horace so suddenly that Elsie jumped.

Footsteps were hurrying behind them, and they both turned. With a strange sense of foreknowledge, Elsie saw Leslie Morrison.

The two men stopped dead as they came face to face with one another. Elsie shrank back against the high yellow brick wall, her eyes fixed upon Morrison’s ravaged face.

“I couldn’t rest for thinking of it all. I know what happened to-day, Williams,” he said in a high, strained voice. “It can’t go on. You’re making Elsie’s life hell. Give her her freedom.”

“Damn you! Who are you to interfere between man and wife?” said Williams, low and fiercely. “I know what you want, both of you, but you won’t have it. Elsie’s my wife, and I shan’t let her go.”

“You’ve got to.”

Horace Williams, looking full at the youth, who was shaking from head to foot with excitement, gave his low, malevolent laugh.

Almost at the same instant Elsie heard her own voice screaming, “Don’t ... don’t...!” and saw the flash of a knife as Morrison raised his arm and struck again and again.

Williams spun round as though to run, and his eyes, oddly surprised-looking, glared, straight and unseeing, at Elsie.

Leslie Morrison stabbed at him again in the back.

“What have you done?” sobbed Elsie to Morrison. “Oh, go!”

She saw Morrison dash away up the passage, and at the same moment Horace Williams took a few steps forward.

“Keep up--I’ll help you!” gasped Elsie.

She thrust her arm beneath his elbow, dimly astonished and relieved to find that he was walking, when he suddenly lurched heavily against her, the upper part of his body sagging forward. Then he fell heavily and lay motionless, blood trickling from his mouth.

Elsie, utterly distraught, and her knees shaking under her, felt her screams strangled in her throat. A distant figure showed at the near end of the alley, and she flew, rather than ran, towards the stranger, calling out in a high, sobbing voice for a doctor--for help.

The woman, elderly and respectable-looking, asked what had happened.

“I don’t know,” said Elsie. A blind horror was upon her, but instinct warned her to make no definite statement of any kind.

A nightmare confusion followed. The alleyway, from being a silent and deserted spot, became clamorous with footsteps and voices. Elsie dimly heard a tall man in evening clothes saying that he was a doctor, and saw him kneel beside the blood-spattered form huddled upon the pavement. It was he, and a stalwart policeman, who finally lifted that which had been Horace Williams on to a hand-ambulance and took it away.

Another man in police uniform took Elsie’s arm, giving her the support that alone enabled her to move, and helped her to a taxi.

She almost fell into it, weeping hysterically, and he took his place beside her as a matter of course. In the sick, convulsed terror that shook her, his stolid presence was an actual relief. She thought that he was taking her home until he gently explained that she was coming with him to the police-station.

“We want to get this cleared up, you know, and you can help us by telling us just what happened.”

A new and more dreadful fear came over her. If Horace was dead someone would be accused of having killed him. They might suspect her.... Elsie felt as though she were going mad with the horror of it all.

She began hysterically to scream and cry.

VII

It was still early in the day when Elsie’s mother came to her at the police-station. Her fat face was white, stained and mottled with tears.

“It seems too bad to be true,” she kept on repeating again and again. “That’s what I said when I heard about poor Horace: too bad to be true. And you in this dreadful place, Elsie, and such a state as you’re in--and no wonder. The whole thing seems too bad to be true.”

“Have they--found anything? Shall I be able to go home soon?” asked Elsie.

“I don’t know, dearie. They’ve got to find out who killed poor Horace, you know. Elsie, you’ve always been a sensible girl. You must tell them all you know, however dreadful to you it is to speak of such things. Or I’ll tell them for you, if you’d rather just have it out with mother. Didn’t you see anyone?”

“Someone flew past, and as I turned to speak to Horace, I saw the blood coming out of his mouth.”

“Who was it flew past?” said Mrs. Palmer.

“I don’t know. It all happened in a flash, like,” said Elsie.

“You and Horace were happy together, weren’t you?”

“Yes, always,” said Elsie stolidly. She had made up her mind not to say anything else.

“You didn’t quarrel?”

“No, never.”

“You’ll tell them that, won’t you, dearie? The police, I mean.”

“It’s nothing to do with them,” said Elsie childishly.

“Now don’t talk that way. That’s silly. You don’t seem to realise, my lady, the sort of mess you’re in.”

Mrs. Palmer’s voice rose to stridency as she let her fear and her temper get the mastery of her attempt at caution.

“My God, Elsie, can’t you see what it means? They may try you for murder. Murder--the same as the horrid common people in the newspapers. Who’s to know what happened--you and Horace in that empty street at one o’clock in the morning, and he gets done in, and whatever you may say--and mind you, I’ll back you up in it-they’ll get hold of the fact that you and poor Horace didn’t hit it off together.”

“We were quite happy together.”

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Palmer approvingly. “You stick to that.”

Then she began to cry. “To think it should have come to this! I that have always held my head high--I don’t know what your aunts will say! It’ll be an awful shock for them.”

Elsie hardly heard what her mother was saying. Waves of physical nausea kept on passing over her, and she was conscious of nothing but thankfulness when an elderly woman in uniform came to her with a cup of tea, and suggested that she should lie down and get some sleep.

Elsie followed her, scarcely replying to Mrs. Palmer’s voluble farewell and assurances of her own speedy return.

She could not afterwards have told where it was that she was taken, but a small, narrow bed awaited her, and she flung herself on to it and fell almost at once into the trance-like sleep of utter bodily and mental exhaustion.

The same uniformed woman was waiting for her when she woke, after several hours, and the sight of her brought back in a sick rush the horrors of the morning.

“Oh, I must go home!” cried Elsie.

The woman took very little notice of her words, but she conducted her to a lavatory and helped her to make her toilette.

Cold water and the effects of sleep combined slightly to steady the wretched Elsie. “I should like to go home at once, please,” she said, in a voice that she tried in vain to render firm.

“Yes. Well, I daresay your mother will take you away as soon as you’ve answered a few questions,” said the woman indifferently and quietly. “They want you downstairs first for a few minutes now.”

“Is Mother there?”

“She’s in the waiting-room. You’ll be able to see her afterwards.”

“_Afterwards?_”

Elsie’s agonised perceptions fastened upon that one word. She sought with frantic and irrational intensity to pierce the veiled threat that she felt it to convey.

A man whom she knew to be a police-inspector appeared at an open door, and the uniformed woman went away.

“Now, Mrs. Williams, I’m afraid we must trouble you for a short statement,” said the man pleasantly. “Will you follow me, if you please?”

He moved forward, and Elsie saw into the room that he had just left.

Leslie Morrison was within it.

As their eyes met, it seemed to Elsie that the last shreds of self-control deserted her, and she screamed on a high and hideous note words that came incoherently and frenziedly from some power outside herself.

“Leslie, Leslie! Oh, God, what shall I do? Why did you do it? I didn’t ever mean you to do it.... I must tell the truth....”

The inspector swung sharply round and gripped her by the arm. “Do you realise what you’re saying? It is my duty to caution you that anything you say now may be used in evidence against you.”

Elsie burst into hysterical sobs and tears.

The man pushed her gently into another room where another official and a young man in plain clothes sat at a table with papers and pens in front of them.

The interrogatory that followed was conducted with grave suavity by the senior official, but Elsie was conscious only of a horror of committing herself.

She said again and again that she and her husband had always been happy together.

It was a faint relief when at last they came to actual questions of fact, and she could reply with direct statements to the enquiries as to her movements on the previous evening.

(O God, was it only last night that she and Horace had gone to the theatre--only _this morning_ that they had started to walk home from the Tube station?)

“Mrs. Williams, I want you to tell me in your own words exactly what happened in the alleyway just before your husband was struck.”

Elsie realised with despair that she must say something.

She was not imaginative, but almost without her own knowledge she had evolved a sort of account by which, it seemed to her, confusedly, that she might safeguard herself.

“We were walking along,” she said in a trembling, almost inaudible voice, “and there wasn’t anybody in sight, and suddenly someone rushed up from behind and pushed me away from my husband. I was sort of dazed for a moment--I think I must have been pushed against the wall--and when I recovered I saw Horace--my husband--struggling with a man. Then the man ran away.”

“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 this 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 be 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.

_Dawlish_, 1923.

THE BOND OF UNION

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.

The impression that inwardly she is projecting really does reflect itself on to the minds of most people, I believe.

It is only slightly distorted, even in my own version of it, which runs something like this:

=“_The girlish figure dominated the room. Animal magnetism vibrated in every gesture_”= ... and so on--only leaving out the brilliancy of the eyes and the deepness of the voice, both of them rather cheap accessories to a pose that really is quite strong enough without them--to the end:

=“_She held them all, by sheer will-to-dominate._”=

Pamela, being a brilliant talker, prefers always to talk personalities.

Two nights ago, sitting on that cushioned rail that runs round the fireplace, she recounted an adventure.

“... Only it’s the spiritual adventure that I’m telling all of you. Because you’ll understand. The other part was all obvious, the danger and all that. You’ve probably seen it in the papers.”

She was right. It had been lavishly paragraphed, with photograph inset. Her _flair_ for publicity is unerring.

“Darlings, how I loathe the Press--if I could only tell you! But the other part of the affair was so utterly wonderful, that it’s swamped everything else. It was like a revelation.

“You know how essentially super-civilised I am? A man once wrote a poem about my being like a piece of jade--hard, and brilliant, and polished, and yet with the unfathomable subtlety and agelessness of the East. My civilisation is partly temperamental, I suppose, and of course to a certain extent the result of elaborate education--and then hereditary as well. Look at Anthony. Could anyone have a more utterly civilised parent, I ask you? Elma is less poised, of course, but mercifully for me I’ve managed to inherit my mother’s physique and my father’s mentality. Like a sensitised plate, isn’t it? It does mean isolation of soul, and those terrible nerve-storms of mine, but in my heart of hearts I know it’s worth it.

“Only people are so ghastly. My friends have to rescue me.... You remember what it was like, Torry, the night that woman assaulted me at the Embassy, and talked, and talked, and talked. O Christ! it was all about food, or flannel, or babies--something too utterly indecent, I know. I sat there, helpless, martyred--and darling Torry came and rescued me. I shall never forget it, Torry, you sweet, never.

“Now this is what happened the other day. (Why do you allow me to be discursive, dear people?) You know my car was held up by Sinn Feiners? I, who adore everything lawless! But it was simply for being Anthony’s daughter, of course. They hate him so.

“You know how I drive for miles and miles, entirely alone, just so as to feel the air in my face, and my hands--rather small, really, by comparison--controlling that great swift machine. Well, I’d got to such a lonely place that it was like finding God--when suddenly these men appeared.

“I wasn’t a bit frightened--I never am frightened--but it was horrible, all the same. And I kept thinking of the people who’d be so sorry if I were killed, and wondering who’d be the sorriest, and who’d remember longest.”

=(_She looked round the room, her dark brows raised in an expression part whimsical, part pathetic._)=

“All this isn’t the adventure, you know, though they took my jewels, and tied me up to a bench on a sort of heath place. They tied me here, and here.”

She held out a slim ankle, and extended both wrists.

“Dear hearts, don’t, don’t touch me! I’m so dreadfully on edge to-night. Nothing to do with the adventure, though. That was altogether beautiful.

“You see there was another woman on the bench, to whom they’d done exactly the same thing--only she’d been walking, not driving. They left us together, and said they’d come back later and shoot us. Terrorism, of course, but it would be such an ugly way of going out, wouldn’t it?

“She and I looked at one another, tied to either end of that bench, and in some way that I simply can’t describe, our spirits leapt together. She, it turned out afterwards, recognised me at once--that’s the worst of being too weak to refuse sittings when one’s pestered by every photographer in London--but I hadn’t the least idea who she was, and don’t care. Bright red hair, quite distinguished-looking, and altogether rather lovely in a pallid, blanc-de-Ninon way, though no actual physical charm. But I felt it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been a _déclassée_. By the way, what is a _déclassée_?

“This still isn’t the adventure--besides, you know this part already, all of you--but some of those ruffians came back again, and untied us, and said we could find our own way home. They’d taken my car, needless to say. I gave them one of my looks--the sort that means I’m really, really angry, like when someone kisses me in a clumsy way, or spills something on my frock--and the men melted, literally melted, away. Then she and I began to walk, and this is really when the part that matters started to happen.

“Having come through this shattering episode, and found ourselves unshot, and alive, it was almost like two disembodied spirits communing together. We got into the realities straight away. It was far more wonderful than if one of us had been a man, because then sex must have come into it, but as it was, each of us laid her whole soul perfectly bare, in the way one can never do to a man, if he loves one, for fear it should kill his love, or if he doesn’t love one, for fear it should make him think he does.

“But as it was, each of us was perfectly fearless, and in a way perfectly shameless. It was partly violent emotional reaction. You see, we’d both thought we were facing death.

“She told me that she was utterly miserable. Her husband was a brute, and her lover had let her down. He’d fallen in love with a girl, a sort of pure-eyed-baby person, and had just told this woman--who’d been giving him everything, of course, for years--that he wanted to _se ranger_ and get married.

“She was nearly out of her mind, that woman. You see, she wasn’t young, and then some skin treatment she’d been having hadn’t succeeded, and was helping to break her up. She told me about that, too. Oh, there was nothing she didn’t say, but she simply didn’t care, we were so utterly intimate for that fleeting moment. Nobody else in the world knew, she told me. She’d always tried to avoid scandal, and no one had ever really known about her _liaison_ with this man. (Women _are_ clever about love.)

“And then I told her every single thing about myself--things that I’d never dream of breathing in this room, nor you of believing, most likely. Foul, filthy, hateful things about myself.... I know now why Catholics go to confession. It releases so much.

“Darlings, words can’t ever describe what it was like. I shall never forget it, as long as I live, and neither will she.

“We parted, of course, but we both knew that there was a link between us that nothing could ever break, even though we never met again. It was too utterly perfect and complete as it was.”

There was a silence, and then someone said, suitably: “Wonderful Pamela!”

She smiled vaguely, shook her head, and then tragically clasped both hands to her breast. “Please, a cocktail. I’m so tired. Oh, and what’s the time? I’m dining with a man at eight, and he’s thrown over a most important engagement to take me, and he’d be quite capable of getting angry if I failed him. Sweet, no! Not a quarter past nine! Oh, please, someone, a car, and take me to the little tiny, tiny French restaurant in Wardour Street.”

Lady Pamela waved away the cocktail, spilling it, prayed for another one and drank it, and then wafted away on the wings of little distressed exclamations and futile, effective gestures of farewell.

That was two nights ago.

This morning I was in Bond Street, and I saw Pamela March in her father’s car, held up by a block in the traffic.

On the other side of the narrow street another car with a solitary woman in it passed slowly. I recognised the woman instantly from Pamela’s description, for she had bright red hair, was quite distinguished-looking, and altogether rather lovely in a pallid, blanc-de-Ninon way, and radiated a marked degree of physical charm.

The eyes of the two women who had been as disembodied spirits communing together met in a long look.

And the expression in each pair of eyes was momentarily identical, and it was with the same effect of immutable determination that each simultaneously administered and received the cut direct.

_They knew...._

LOST IN TRANSMISSION

LOST IN TRANSMISSION

I

The Lambes were very rich.

This was all the nicer for Mrs. Lambe, because once upon a time, not so very long ago, when she was still Maude Gunning, she had been poor. From the time she was eighteen to the time she was thirty, she had taught music at the girls’ school in Carlorossa Road. She had gone to and from her work four days a week all through term time by tram. Fortunately, the tram took her almost from door to door. She was a bad walker, owing to corns.

During the school holidays Maude had always tried to find private pupils, and as she and her father and mother were well known in the big manufacturing town and its suburbs, and her successes at the L.R.C.M. examinations were a subject of local pride, she had generally succeeded.

And it was odd to think, as Mrs. Lambe quite often did think, that most of the large, comfortable, expensive houses to which she had gone--with a very keen appreciation, on autumn and winter afternoons, of the big fire blazing in the pupil’s schoolroom or dining-room, as the case might be--to think that these houses, for the most part, were less large, comfortable, and expensive than the one of which she was now the mistress.

Edgar Lambe, when he first met Miss Maude Gunning at a tea-party, was already a wealthy man, although not as rich as the demand for houses that sprang up during the war afterwards made him.

At the party, Maude played the piano, and played it very well. Mr. Lambe, who was naturally musical, asked to be introduced to her. He had never married, although he was forty years old, and he had recently made up his mind to look for a wife. Maude attracted him, although she was neither pretty nor very young.

Three months after their first meeting they were married.

Mr. Lambe bought the largest corner house in Victoria Avenue.

It was, of course, wholly detached from its neighbours. There was a carriage-sweep in the front, and a long, wide garden at the back, and a high wall all round. There was a tennis-court, two greenhouses, and a vegetable garden beyond the flower-garden.

The inside of Melrose was even more magnificent than the outside, and far more interesting to Mrs. Lambe, who was not very fond of being out-of-doors, having had a great deal too much of it in her tram-journeying days. But she had many ideas as to comfort and elegance indoors, and Edgar was generous with money, and had a standard of his own--and one that secretly rather scared her--as to the way in which a house should be “run.”

This standard of Edgar’s was principally applied to lighting, heating, food and service. The house was fitted with electric light, of course, and Edgar had had a separate boiler put in for the three bathrooms, so that it was his favourite boast that if anyone wanted a bath in the middle of the night, the water would still come out of the tap almost boiling. There were radiators in all the rooms except the kitchen, offices and servants’ bedrooms, and hot pipes in the linen-cupboard.

It took Mrs. Lambe a little while to assimilate Edgar’s views as to meals. She quite understood that these must be served punctually, and that the plates must be hot--really hot--and that there must always be a relay of fresh toast towards the end of breakfast; and of course late dinner every night except Sunday, when it was cold supper. But she did find it a little bit difficult, just at first, to realise that Edgar disapproved strongly of twice-cooked meat. At her own home there had been a weekly joint, which was hot on Sunday, cold on Monday, hashed on Tuesday, and cottage-pie’d on Wednesday--and sometimes, if it had been a larger joint than usual, curried on Thursday and turned into rissoles on Friday.

At Melrose, after one, or at the most two, appearances in the dining-room, the beef disappeared into the kitchen and was finished there, while a new joint, or a pair of fowls, took its place on the upstairs _menu_.

The amount of “butcher’s meat” that came into the house amazed and disconcerted its mistress, until she found that her servants took it as a matter of course, and that her husband continually praised her to his friends as a good manager, and that the monthly bills--which at first had appalled her--by no means exceeded the sum which he had himself suggested that he should allow her for the housekeeping.

By the time that Mrs. Lambe had a nursery, with two little girls in it, and a nurse, and a nursery-maid to wait upon them, she took it quite as a matter of course that there should be yet a third list of items to consider in the ordering of meals--weekly chickens, and special dairy produce, and a regular supply of white fish, for the nursery. This question of food for the household was, of course, immensely important, and she gave a great deal of conscientious thought to it, thankful when the cook suggested a new variety of sweet for the dinner-parties to which Edgar so much enjoyed inviting his business friends and their families.

On these occasions he himself selected the wines with the utmost care, and instructed the two parlour-maids minutely and repeatedly in the proper formula to be employed with each course.

Mrs. Lambe was always relieved that this great responsibility did not in any way rest upon her. A mistake, she felt, would be altogether _too_ terrible.

The parlour-maid and the waitress who always came in for the evening when the Lambes entertained, never made mistakes.

Mrs. Lambe was very “good” with servants, and never had any difficulty in finding and keeping thoroughly satisfactory domestics. The little girls’ nurse, who received far higher wages than any of them except the cook, was the only one with whom there was sometimes a little trouble.

She occasionally hinted that Ena and Evelyn were rather spoiled, and inclined to come up to the nursery disposed to be fretful and out of sorts after too much notice in the drawing-room, and far too many expensive chocolates from the pink and blue and gilt boxes that were always being given to them.

Mr. Lambe was a lavish and indulgent father. He thought his fair-haired, pretty little daughters wonderful, and took the greatest delight in associating “Dad’s” return from the office with new toys or “surprises” of sweetmeats.

Mrs. Lambe never had the heart to disappoint him by suggesting that his munificence was making the little girls rather critical and capricious, even at six and four years old. Edgar only roared with appreciative laughter when they told him, seriously and rather crossly, that they always wanted the chocolates to come from Blakiston’s--which was the best, and by far the most expensive, confectioner’s in the city. They did not care for any other kind.

Edgar repeated this story to a great many of his friends, who were as much amused as he was himself at such an instance of early discrimination.

Mrs. Lambe was amused herself, and could not help thinking that Ena and Evelyn were smart and original children.

They were also very pretty; rather pallid, sharp-featured little things, always beautifully dressed, exactly alike. Neither she nor Edgar regretted in the very least that neither of them had been a boy.

Every night Maude Lambe, who had been brought up to be thoroughly religious, knelt at the side of her enormous bed, with its opulent pink satin duvet, and humbly thanked God for all that He had given her--Edgar and the children, and Edgar’s wealth and kindness, and her beautiful, comfortable home.

There was only one fly in the ointment--Aunt Tessie.

Edgar had told her all about Aunt Tessie before they were married. He had explained that she would live with him always, in spite of the undeniable fact that she was Not like Other People, and that he would never allow her to be sent away to an institution, whatever the other Lambe relations might say.