Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “Make your mind a blank — relax,” said Madame Clara, her tone once more a commanding one.

  Elsie moved uneasily in her chair and fixed her eyes on the crystal. She could only see it faintly, a glassy spot of uncertain outline.

  The seeress bent forward, leaning over the transparent globe. After a moment or two she began to speak, with the same voice and intonation that she had made use of in speaking about Irene.

  “The crystal reflects all things, but Time is an arbitrary division made by man — we do not always see what is past, and what is future.... In your case, there is very little past — how young you are! — and what there is, is all on one plane, the physical. You are magnetic, extraordinarily magnetic. You have known men — you are married, if not by man’s law, then by nature’s law — you will know other men. But you are not awake — your mind is asleep. Nothing is awake but your senses....”

  Elsie’s mouth was dry. She longed to stop the woman but a horrible fascination kept her silent, tensely listening.

  “Now you are bored — satiated. You have repeated the same experience again and again, young as you are, until it means nothing to you. You have no outside interests — and you are ceaselessly craving for a new emotion.”

  Abruptly the sibyl dropped on to a dark note.

  “It will come. I see love here — love that you have never known yet. There will be jealousy, intrigue — letters will pass — beware of the written word Ah!”

  The exclamation was so sudden and so piercing that Elsie uttered a stifled scream. But this time she was not rebuked.

  Madame Clara, all at once, was calling out shrilly in a hard voice, an indescribable blend of horror and excitement in her tone:

  “Oh, God — what is it? Look — look, there in the crystal — what have you done? There’s blood, and worse than blood! Oh, my God, what’s this? It’s all over England — you — they’re talking about you—”

  Irene Tidmarsh screamed wildly, and Elsie realised that she had sprung to her feet. She herself was utterly unable to move, wave after wave of sick terror surging through her as the high, unrecognisable voice of the clairvoyante screeched and ranted, and then broke horribly.

  “It’s blood! My God, get out of here! I won’t see any more — you’re all over blood! ..

  A strange, strangled cry, that Elsie did not recognise as having come from her own lips, broke across the obscurity, the room surged round her, she tried to clutch at the table, and felt herself falling heavily.

  Elsie Williams had fainted.

  She came back to a dazed memory of physical nausea, bewilderment, and resentment, as she felt herself being unskilfully pulled into a sitting position.

  “Let go,” she muttered, “let me go...”

  “She’s coming round! For Heaven’s sake, Elsie ... here, try and get hold of her...”

  She felt herself pulled and propelled to her feet, and even dragged a few steps by inadequate supporters.

  Then she sank down again, invaded by a renewal of deadly sickness, but she was conscious that they had somehow got her outside the dark, scented room, and that the door had been slammed behind her.

  Very slowly her perceptions cleared, and she realised that Irene was gripping her on one side, and the little hunchbacked girl holding a futile hand beneath her elbow on the other.

  With an effort, Elsie raised her head.

  “Look here, old girl, are you better?” said Irene, low and urgently. “I want to get out of here as quickly as possible. D’you think you can get downstairs?”

  Elsie, without clearly knowing why, was conscious that she, too, wanted to get away.

  She pulled herself to her feet, shuddering, and staggered down the stairs, leaning heavily on Irene.

  “What happened?”

  ‘‘ Oh, you just turned queer. Don’t think about it. Look here, we’d better have a taxi, hadn’t we?”

  “Yes. I couldn’t walk a step, that’s certain. Why, my knees are shaking under me.”

  “Go and get a taxi,” Irene commanded the hunchbacked child, who went obediently away.

  Elsie sat down on the lowest stair and wiped her wet, cold face with her handkerchief.

  “What made me go off like that, Ireen? That woman said something beastly, didn’t she?”

  “Oh she’s mad, that’s what she is. She suddenly started ranting, and you got frightened, I suppose — and no wonder. Never mind, you’ll soon be home now.”

  It struck Elsie that Irene was looking at her in a strangely anxious way, and that she was talking almost at random, as though to obliterate the impression of what had passed at the séance.

  Elsie herself could not remember clearly, but there was a lurking horror at the back of her mind..

  “What did she say?” she persisted feebly.

  “Here’s the taxi!” cried Irene, in intense relief. “Here, get in, Elsie. Thank you,” she added to the child. “Don’t wait, I’ll tell the man where to go.”

  She gave the driver Elsie’s address after the little girl had entered the house again, and then climbed in beside her friend, drawing a long breath.

  “Thank the Lord! We got away pretty quickly, didn’t we? Well, it’s the last time I’ll meddle with anything of that kind, I swear. I say, Elsie, had we better stop at a chemist’s and get you something?”

  “Yes — no. I don’t care. Ireen, I want to know what that woman said. It was something awful about me, wasn’t it?”

  “She had a — kind of fit, I think. I don’t believe she knew what she was saying — she just screamed out a pack of nonsense. And you gave a yell, and went down like a log. I can tell you, you’ve pretty nearly scared the life out of me, young Elsie.”

  Irene was indeed oddly white-faced and jerky. Her manner was as unnatural as was her sudden volubility.

  Elsie, still feeling weak and giddy, leant her head back and closed her eyes. She felt quite unable to make the effort of remembering what had happened at the clairvoyante’s house, and was moreover instinctively aware that the recollection, when it did come, would bring dismay and terror.

  She and Irene Tidmarsh did not exchange a word until the taxi stopped.

  “Here we are. You’d better pay him, Elsie. I’ll take the Tube from the corner, and get home in half an hour.”

  “Aren’t you coming in with me?” said Elsie, surprised.

  “I don’t think I will. I’d rather get straight home.”

  “Oh, do!” urged Elsie, half crying. She felt very much shaken. “I’m all alone; Horace won’t be back till seven, and this has upset me properly. Besides, I know I shall remember what it was that awful woman said in a minute, and I’m frightened. You must come in, Ireen.”

  “I can’t,” repeated Irene, inexorably. “I ... really, I’d rather not, Elsie.”

  The door opened, and Irene turned rapidly and walked away down the street.

  Elsie tottered into the house.

  “I’m ill,” she said abruptly to the servant. “I fainted while I was out, and I feel like nothing on earth now. I shall go to bed.”

  “Yes, ‘m. Shall I go for a doctor, ‘m?” said the girl zealously.

  “No,” said Elsie sharply. “I don’t want a doctor. Telephone to Mr. Williams at the office, Emma, and ask him to come home early. Say I’m ill.”

  “Yes, ‘m.”

  Elsie dragged herself upstairs and took off some of her clothes. She was shivering violently, and presently pulled her blue cotton kimono round her and slipped into bed. She lay there with closed eyes, shuddering from time to time, until Emma brought up a cup of strong tea. Elsie drank it avidly, lay down again and felt revived. Presently she dozed.

  The opening of the door roused her. It was nearly dark, but she knew that it must be her husband, who never knocked before entering their joint bedroom.

  “What’s all this, Elsie?”

  “I felt rotten,” she said wearily. “Turn on the light, Horace.”

  He did so, and advanced towards the be
d. His face wore an expression of concern, and he walked on tiptoe.

  “I fainted while I was out with Ireen,” Elsie explained, “and I was simply ages coming to. We came back in a cab, and I must say Ireen’s awfully selfish. She wouldn’t come in with me, though she must have seen I wasn’t fit to be left — just turned and walked off. I’m done with her, after this.”

  “Where had you been?” enquired Williams quickly. “Oh, just out.”

  “Where to?”

  “I suppose you’ll call me a fool, if I say it was to see one of those clairvoyante women, someone Ireen had heard of. It was all Ireen’s doing — she persuaded me to go.”

  “Very silly of you both,” said the little solicitor coldly. “Did this person upset you?”

  “Yes. She had a sort of fit, I think, and called out a whole lot of nonsense, only I can’t remember what it was.’’ Elsie moved uneasily.

  “Where does she live?”

  “Why?”

  “She ought to be prosecuted for obtaining money under false pretences. I suppose you gave her money?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “You’d better give me her name and address and I’ll see that she is properly dealt with.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  Horace Williams shrugged his shoulders. “Well, you’d better get up and come down to supper, hadn’t you? There’s no reason for lying in bed if you’re not ill.”

  “All right,” Elsie agreed sullenly.

  Her husband never shouted at her or threatened her, but she was afraid of him, and of a certain sinister dryness that characterised his manner when he was displeased.

  The dryness was there now.

  Elsie spent the evening downstairs. Her husband read the newspaper, and she turned over the pages of a fashion magazine listlessly. Her thoughts, unwillingly enough, returned again and again to the scene in the clairvoyante’s room, but still she could not remember the actual words screamed out by Madame Clara before she had lost consciousness. But she remembered quite well other words, that had preceded them.

  “You are magnetic ... extraordinarily magnetic... You are not awake — your mind is asleep... Now, you are bored, satiated. You are ceaselessly craving for a new emotion....”

  Elsie reflected how true this was.

  She glanced distastefully at her elderly husband.

  The bald patch glistened on the top of his head, and he was breathing heavily as he read his newspaper.

  He had always been rather distasteful to her physically, and although the continuous, degradingly inevitable proximity of married life in a small suburban villa had hardened her into indifference, Elsie was still averse from the more intimate aspects of marriage with him.

  She wished that she could fall in love, remembering that Madame Clara had said: “I see love here — love that you have never known yet.”

  “That’s bunkum,” thought Elsie. “I’ve been in love heaps of times — I was in love with that doctor fellow, Woolley. It doesn’t last, that’s all.”

  She hardly ever met any men nowadays, as she resentfully reminded herself.

  The husbands of her married friends were at work all day, and if she occasionally met them at their wives ‘eard-parties, they did not interest her very greatly. Most of the wives distrusted the husbands and gave them no opportunity for flirtation with other women. And Horace Williams himself was a jealous man, always suspicious, and never allowed his young wife to go anywhere with any man but himself.

  Elsie had been for a long while in inward revolt against the dullness of her life. She remembered with longing the old days of her girlhood, when every walk had been the prelude to adventure, and the casual kisses of unknown, or scarcely known, men had roused her to rapture.

  Nowadays, she knew very well that she would be less easily satisfied. The apathy that had been creeping over her ever since her marriage had to a certain extent lessened the force of the animal magnetism by which she had been able to lure the senses of almost every man she met, and for the first time she was beginning to have doubts of her own attractiveness.

  Elsie gave a sigh that was almost a groan.

  Williams neither stirred nor raised his eyes.

  “I think I’ll retire to my little downy,” Elsie murmured, drearily facetious.

  “It’s only a quarter past nine.”

  “Oh, well, we lead such a deliriously exciting life that I’d better get some rest, hadn’t I?” she said ironically. “Just to make up for all the late nights we have.”

  At last her husband put down the paper and looked coldly at her through his pincenez. “What is it you want, Elsie? I work hard all day at the office, and you have plenty of time and money for amusing yourself in the day time — and a strange use you seem to make of them, judging by to-day’s performance. What more do you want?”

  “I don’t know. We might go to the pictures sometimes, or to a play. I hate not having anything to do.”

  “That’s the complaint of every woman who hasn’t got children.”

  “I can’t help it,” said Elsie angrily.

  He said nothing, but continued to fix his eyes upon her, with his most disagreeable expression.

  “Good-night, Horace.”

  “I shall come up to bed before you’re asleep,” he said meaningly.

  She went out of the room.

  The thought crossed her mind, as it had often done before, that she had made a frightful mistake in marrying Horace Williams.

  “I was only eighteen,” she thought, “I ought to have waited. Perhaps he’ll die.”

  As she undressed, Elsie idly imagined a drama of which she herself would, of course, be the heroine.

  Horace would be at the office, as usual, and a telephone message would come through to say that he was ill — very ill indeed — he was dead. Everyone would admire the young widow in her black, with her string of pearl beads... Horace would leave her quite a lot of money. Elsie knew that he was rich, although he had never told her his income. She would stay on in the villa, but people would come and see her — she would go out and enjoy herself — enjoy life, once more...

  Elsie sighed again as she got into bed.

  Bored and exhausted, she fell asleep almost at once, to dream vividly.

  In her dream, she stood outside a closed door, knowing that something unspeakably horrid lay beyond it. Terror paralysed her. At last she pushed at the door, but it would not yield more than an inch or two. Something was behind it. She looked down and saw a dark stain spreading round her feet, oozing from beneath the resistant door.

  Screaming and sweating, Elsie woke up, and as she did so the remembrance came back to her in full of everything that the clairvoyante had said that morning.

  II

  “Hallo, Elsie!”

  “Hallo, Geraldine!”

  “You’re quite a stranger, aren’t you? I think it’s about a year since we had the honour of seeing your majesty last.”

  “Well, now I have come, aren’t you going to take the trouble to invite me to come in?” asked Elsie good- humouredly.

  “There’s a visitor of mine in the drawing-room.”

  “Who is it? Aunt Ada?”

  “No, not Aunt Ada, Miss Smarty. It’s a friend of mine, I tell you, who I knew at the office during the war.”

  “Well, you can introduce me to her, I suppose,” said Elsie carelessly.

  She noticed that Geraldine’s hair was not, as it generally was, in curling-pins, and that she was wearing a new dress, of an unbecoming shade of emerald green. Geraldine always went wrong over her clothes, Elsie reflected complacently. She herself wore a new black picture hat, and it was partly from the desire to show herself in it that she had come to her old home.

  “Where’s mother?”

  “Out.”

  “What a mercy!”

  Elsie walked into the familiar drawing-room, feeling glad that she no longer lived at Hillbourne Terrace, under her mother’s dominion, and forced to share a bedroom with t
he fretful Geraldine.

  A young man of two- or three-and-twenty was sitting in the drawing-room, and rose to his feet as Elsie and Geraldine came in.

  “This is my sister, Mrs. Horace Williams. Elsie, this is my friend, Mr. Morrison,” said Geraldine with pride.

  Elsie was immediately conscious of a quickened interest. The young man was of a type that appealed strongly to her; dark and tall, with very brown eyes, and a wistful, ingenuous smile that was the more noticeable because he was clean-shaven.

  When they shook hands, she was conscious of the slight, unmistakable thrill of mutual magnetism.

  “I thought I was going to find a young lady in here, when Geraldine told me she had a friend!” Elsie exclaimed, laughing.

  “Sorry I’m a disappointment,” Mr. Morrison replied, also laughing.

  “Oh, I didn’t say that. Only my sister doesn’t have gentlemen friends as a rule,” Elsie declared innocently.

  Geraldine’s sallow face flushed. “You don’t know much about it, do you, considering that we never see you nowadays. I’m not one for talking much about my own affairs, either, so far as I’m aware. It’s a misfortune, really, to be as reserved as I am. I often wish I wasn’t!”

  It was unprecedented, in Elsie’s experience, to hear Geraldine setting forth a claim, however obliquely, to be considered interesting. Elsie looked at her in astonishment.

  “She must be gone on this fellow,” she thought, and without the slightest compunction she immediately put forth all her own powers to attract Morrison’s notice and admiration to herself.

  The task proved to be as easy as it was congenial. In a very little while, Elsie and young Morrison were talking and joking together, and it was only an occasional, spasmodic, and quite evidently conscientious effort from Morrison that from time to time caused Geraldine to be included in the conversation.

  Morrison told Elsie that he travelled for a big firm of silk merchants in the City, and was very little in London.

  “How did you and Geraldine meet, then? I thought you were in the same office as her during the war,” said Elsie sharply.

  “Just for six months I was, and then I got this job in the place of a man who’d joined up. I was under age for joining up myself, worse luck,” said the youth.