“Hallo, Elsie!”
“Hallo, Ireen. Look here, I can’t stay. I only want to ask you if you’ll swear we’ve been to the pictures together to-night, if anyone ever asks. Quick! Be a sport, and promise.”
“What’s up?” Irene asked wearily.
“Oh, only my fun. I don’t particularly want mother to know about me going out to-night, that’s all. If I can say I was with you if I’m asked, it’ll be all right, only you’ll have to back me up if she doesn’t believe me.”
“Oh, all right, I don’t care. You’re a caution, Elsie Palmer — you and your made-up tales. Don’t see much difference between them and downright lies, sometimes.”
“Well, what am I to do? I can’t ever go anywhere, or have any amusement, without mother and Geraldine wanting to know all about it, and if I’ve been behaving myself, and ‘cetera and ‘cetera.”
“Who is it this time, Elsie?”
“Only this fellow who’s leaving to-morrow, the one that’s been P.G. with us such a time, you know.”
“Oh, Roberts?”
“‘M. Well, so long, dear. Thanks awfully and all that. Ta-ta. Don’t forget.”
“Ta-ta,” repeated Irene. “You’ll have to tell me all about it on Sunday, mind.”
“Awright.”
Elsie turned and hurried homeward again, shrugging her shoulders up to her ears as the wind whistled shrilly down the street.
It was September, and cold.
When she was indoors again, she pulled off her tam-o’-shanter and stuffed it once more into the pocket of her serge skirt. Then she went upstairs to the room at the top of the house that she shared with Geraldine.
“I wish you’d knock.”
“Whatever for? It’s my room as much as yours, isn’t it?” Elsie said without acrimony.
“Have you been washing up all this time?”
“Nellie went off early.”
“The slut! Whatever for? Did you tell mother?”
“No. It wouldn’t be a bit of good. She won’t say anything to Nellie just now, whatever she does, with these new people just coming in.”
“Oh, my head!” groaned Geraldine, not attending. She lay on her bed, her white blouse crumpled, and a machine-made knitted coat, of shrimp-pink wool, drawn untidily over her shoulders. Her black Oxford shoes lay on the mat between the two beds, and her black stockings showed long darns and a hole in either heel.
Elsie began to arrange her hair before the looking-glass in a painted deal frame that stood on the deal chest-of- drawers. Presently she pulled a little paper bag from one of the drawers and began to suck sweets.
“No good offering you any, I suppose?”
“Don’t talk of such a thing. Elsie, I can’t come down to supper to-night. Do be a dear and bring me up a cup of tea — nice and strong. I’ve got a sort of craving for hot tea when I’m like this, really I have.”
“You don’t want much, do you, asking me to carry tea up four flights of stairs? I’ll see what I can do.” Elsie began to hum, in a small, rather tuneful little voice. She let her skirt fall round her feet as she sang and pulled off her blouse, revealing beautifully modelled breasts and shoulders. Her arms were a little too short, but the line from breastbone to knee was unusually good, the legs plump and shapely, with slender ankles and the instep well arched. She wore serge knickerbockers and a flimsy under-bodice of yellow cotton voile over a thick cotton chemise.
“Are you going out again?” asked Geraldine in a vexed, feeble voice.
“I may go round and sit with Irene for a bit, after supper. I think she wants to go to the pictures, or something.”
“How’s Mr. Tidmarsh?”
“Going to die, I should think, by all accounts,” glibly replied Elsie, although as a matter of fact she had forgotten to make any enquiry for Irene’s father, who had for months past been dying from some obscure and painful internal growth.
“Why doesn’t he go to a hospital?”
“Don’t ask me. Ireen’s always begging him to, but he won’t.”
“Old people are awfully selfish, I think,” said Geraldine thoughtfully.
“Yes, aren’t they? Look, I’m going to put this collar on my Sunday serge. That ought to smarten it up a bit.”‘
She pinned the cheap lace round the low-cut V at the neck of an old navy-blue dress, and fastened it with a blue-stoned brooch in the shape of a circle. Her throat rose up, fresh and warm and youthful, from the new adornment.
“Isn’t it time I put my hair up, don’t you think?”
“No. You’re only a kid. I didn’t put mine up till I was eighteen. Mother wouldn’t let me.”
Elsie dragged a thick grey pilot cloth coat from behind the curtain of faded red rep that hung across a row of pegs and constituted the sisters’ wardrobe, caught up the black tam-o’-shanter again and ran downstairs.
All the time that she was laying the table in the diningroom, which was next to the kitchen on the ground floor, Elsie hummed to herself.
The table-cloth was stained in several places, and she arranged the Britannia-metal forks and spoons, the coarse, heavy plates and the red glass water-jug so as to cover the spots as much as possible. In the middle of the table stood a thick fluted green glass with paper chrysanthemums in it.
Elsie added the cruet, two half-loaves of bread on a wooden platter with “Bread” carved upon it in raised letters, and put a small red glass beside each plate. Finally she quickly pleated half a dozen coloured squares of Japanese paper, and stuck one into each glass.
“Mother!” she called.
“What?” said Mrs. Palmer from the kitchen.
“It’s ready laid.”
“What are you in such a hurry for? Miss M. and Mr. Williams haven’t turned up yet.”
“Mr. Roberts wants his supper early, I know.”
“You’ve no business to know, then. Well, put the ham on the table and the cold sweets, and he can go in when he pleases. This is Liberty Hall, as I call it.”
Elsie carried in the ham, placing the dish on the table beside the carving-knife and fork that were raised upon a “rest “ of electro plate. The glass dishes containing a flabby pink decoction of cornflour, and the apple tart, with several slices of pastry gone from the crust, she laid at the other end of the table.
“Supper’s in, Mr. Roberts,” she cried through the open door of the drawing-room, but this time she did not go in, and flew back to the kitchen before; Mr. Roberts appeared. “Geraldine’s asking for tea, mother.”
“There’s a kettle on. She can come and fetch it.”
“I’ll take it up,” Elsie volunteered.
“You’re very obliging, all of a sudden. I’m sure I only wish you and your sister were more like sisters, the way Aunt Ada and Aunt Gertie and Mother were. There wasn’t any of this bickering between us girls that I hear between you and Geraldine.”
“You’ve made up for it later, then,” said Elsie pertly. “The aunts never come here but they find fault with things, and Aunt Ada cries, and I’m sure you and Aunt Gertie go at it hammer and tongs.”
“Don’t you dare to speak to me like that, Elsie Palmer,” said her mother abstractedly. (“ Give me a spoon, there’s a good gurl.”) “What you gurls are coming to, talking so to your own mother, is more than I can say. What’s at the bottom of all this talk about carrying tea to Geraldine? What are you going to do about your own supper?”
“Have it in here. I don’t want much, anyway. I’m not hungry. Tea and bread and jam’ll do.”
“Please yourself,” said Mrs. Palmer.
She was a large, shapeless woman, slatternly and without method, chronically aggrieved because she was a widow with two daughters, obliged to support herself and them by receiving boarders, whom she always spoke of as guests.
“Where are these what-you-may-call-’ems — these Williamses — coming from?” Elsie asked, while she was jerking tea from the bottom of a cocoa-tin into a broken earthenware tea-pot.
“Ask me no
questions and I’ll tell you no lies,” said her mother.
She had no slightest reason to conceal the little she knew of the new people who were coming, but it was her habit to reply more or less in this fashion, semi-snubbing, semi-facetious, whenever either of her daughters asked a question.
“I’m sure I don’t want to know,” said Elsie, also from habit.
She made the tea, poured out two cups-full and took one upstairs. As she had expected, the alarm clock on the wash-stand showed it to be eight o’clock.
Almost directly afterwards, she heard the front door slam.
No. 15 was a narrow, high house, with very steep stairs, but Elsie was used to them, although she grumbled at the number of times she went up and down them, and she and Geraldine and Mrs. Palmer all kept numerous articles of toilet and clothing in the kitchen, so as to save journeys backwards and forwards.
She now went down once more, and sitting at a corner of the newspaper-covered kitchen table, drank tea and ate bread-and-jam deliberately.
“That’s the bell!”
Mrs. Palmer hoisted herself out of her chair, from which she had been reading the headlines of an illustrated daily paper, commenting on them half aloud with: “Fancy! ... Whatever is the world coming to, is what I say...”
“That’ll be the Williamses, and about time too. You’ll have to give me a hand upstairs with the boxes afterwards, Elsie, but I’ll give ’em supper first.”
She went out into the hall, and Elsie heard the sounds of arrival, and her mother’s voice saying: “Good evening, you’ve brought us some wet weather, I’m afraid... You mustn’t mind me joking, Mrs. Williams, it’s my way... Liberty Hall, you’ll find this...”
Elsie ran to the back kitchen, donned the pilot-cloth coat and the tam-o’-shanter, and slipped out through the side door into the wet drizzle of a cold autumn evening.
“Ooh!” She turned up the collar of the coat, and pushed her gloveless hands deep into her pockets as she hummed along the pavement. It shone wet and dark, giving blurred reflections of the lamps overhead. Every now and then a tram jerked and clanged its way along the broad suburban road.
Only a few shops were lit along the road. Most of the buildings on either side were houses that displayed a brass sign-plate on the door, or a card with “Apartments “ in one of the windows. Right at the end of the street, a blur of bluish light streamed out from the Palatial Picture House.
“I thought you weren’t coming,” said young Roberts, reproachfully. “It’s long after eight.” He wore a light overcoat and he, also, had turned up his collar as a protection against the rain.
“I had to help mother, of course. And if you want to know, I ought to be there now.” She laughed up at him provocatively.
“Come on in,” he said, pulling her hand through his arm.
II
This was 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 misinformation 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 to physical 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, Hillboume 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.”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 256
