The Underside Read online

  The Underside

  H. R. F. KEATING

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter One

  Godfrey Mann made a bet with himself as the hansom approached the tall brilliantly lit house in Brook Street. Midnight. If any one of the many marriageable girls to whom Lady Augusta would introduce him had by midnight said one thing that was fairly to be described as worthwhile, then he would stay on dutifully going through quadrille and waltz, cotillon and galop.

  But if—a quiver of excitement caught him feather-light at the throat—if by midnight there had been only insipidities about the heat or, worse, hectic stupidities about the Season, then it would be such excuses as would come easily from a licensed eccentric like an artist and a stroll back home with a cigar through the Haymarket.

  No more than that, he promised himself. No more than dip his wings swallow-like in the black water.

  The hansom joined the tail of the line of carriages outside the house. Godfrey reached up and paid the driver and then, stepping out, made his way along towards the awning that stretched across the pavement and the broad lane of carpet under it leading to the wide open door. Light streamed out, clear and golden. Faintly from inside came the sound of music, elegant and bouncily rhythmic. His nostrils caught a hint of the scent from the big tubs of freely blossoming gardenias he could obliquely see in the marble-floored entrance hall.

  Looking ahead, he failed to notice until he brushed against it a small form down beside the railings just outside the swathe of radiance from the open door. It was a gutter child, one of three or four crouching in the shadows, eyes wide fixed on the olympian comings and goings.

  ‘Gi’ us a ha’penny, sir,’ came at once the piping request.

  Godfrey dug in his pocket, found a coin and tossed it to the child, boy or girl it was hard to tell from the shapeless and tattered garment it wore.

  He went up into the house. And on the stairs, standing in the slow-moving line of guests waiting to greet Lady Augusta and Sir Charles, he found that all his prognostications—and hopes—about what sort of talk he would hear were being fulfilled to the letter. The two girls just ahead of him, ignoring their solidly fat chaperone flicking steadily at herself with a broad lace fan, were exhaustively discussing the subject of ices. The ices at the dance they had been at earlier in the week had been the most wonderful they had ever eaten, the very newest thing, the peak of the confectioner’s art. Would they, or would they not, find them again when they got to the tea-room?

  Well, there were two who were not going to lose him his wager.

  Nor would any of the three somewhat older girls who had now arrived with their mother on the stairs immediately below him. He had a feeling he knew who the mother was. A Mrs General MacSomething. No doubt any of her daughters would be considered a respectable match for a young man of twenty-four with an income of his own, even if he did choose to spend his time painting pictures. And no doubt, for all their giggling and nudging over the tall cavalry officer with that extraordinary bush of moustache just at the turn of the stairway above them, they would when it came to it fall quietly in with the wishes of Mrs General MacWhatever and secure themselves a solid footing on the social ladder. Unless any of them were, as was equally possible, to run off in a sweet-toothed swirl of romantic love with some such blackguard as that cavalryman.

  Across the turn of the stairway another fragment of conversation came to his ears. A desiccated-looking woman in totally unbecoming eau-de-Nil, who had been a connection of his mother’s, a Lady Emmeline Otway, was talking to a plump companion in canary-yellow silk trimmed with black velvet.

  ‘Yes, Lady Augusta always chooses them to match. Such taste. Always so right.’

  Godfrey glanced round, wondering what Lady Augusta, whom he was half-inclined to respect but of whose taste he had no particularly high opinion, chose always with such care. Was it the chandeliers that swung above, loaded as could be with sparkling faceted slips of glass? No, there was not even a pair of them. The carpets? What he remembered of the carpets here was thickness and richness of colour but no especial art in the matching.

  Lady Emmeline, when her father had died, so the family story went, had gone through his library separating male from female authors. Of what would she approve? Matching Brussels lace trouserlettes for the legs of the pianos? No, Lady Augusta was never that sort of fool.

  ‘My dear,’ the woman in the canary-yellow was saying now, ‘I have tried with my own two. But when I got the calves to agree the heights were always wrong. So I got two of a height and made the spindly one wear padding. But he complained that a street boy stuck a pin in him because he looked false and gave notice.’

  Lady Emmeline could be heard to hiss shock at the risqué turn the conversation had taken. But her plump acquaintance prattled happily on.

  ‘And Lady Augusta has six—my dear, I’ve counted—six footmen all alike as statues’.

  Godfrey sighed. The two girls in front of him had progressed from comparing the merits of ices to comparing the merits of bands. At Lady Melchester’s the band had kept abominably bad time. What was the use of music if it were not in perfect time?

  Tonight. In the Haymarket. The passing of the doxies. Their hard feckless faces, painted doors promising to open at a touch and lead swiftly down.

  No, whatever happened, he would slip away before midnight. Only to see that world of theirs.

  And then he was bowing over Lady Augusta’s plump, wrinkled, much ringed hand.

  ‘Well, Godfrey, so we are to be honoured tonight?’

  ‘Your wish is my command,’ Godfrey answered, wondering as he often had in the past just how much of the sarcastic there was in Lady Augusta.

  ‘But I hear that you yourself have been honoured by the Queen,’ she went on. ‘Your picture in the Academy bought. It cannot often happen that an artist begins so happily.’

  ‘I was indeed honoured.’ Godfrey replied.

  ‘And well recompensed, I hope.’

  ‘Her Majesty gave six hundred pounds for it,’ Godfrey said.

  ‘Six hundred pounds? Then we can no longer think of you as a mere amateur.’

  ‘I had hoped that you would not. Painting is my whole life.’

  ‘That we certainly knew. It has kept you out of Society so much. This must be the first entertainment you have come to here in the year you have been back from your travels.’

  ‘I am afraid it is.’

  ‘Well, now that we have you I shall make you earn your keep on the dance floor.’

  ‘I shall be only too delighted,’ Godfrey said, bowing his departure.

  But Lady Augusta laid a plump shiny-skinned hand on his arm.

  ‘No, before you go,’ she said. ‘There is one girl that I shall insist that you dance with.’

  Godfrey steeled himself. Why should there be here one girl who could be singled out for him to dance with? Who, i
f he knew anything of Lady Augusta, would be someone he could talk with, someone she had seen even as a suitable match for him?

  ‘I shall, of course, be happy to dance with any lady you introduce me to,’ he said.

  ‘She is a niece of mine, or rather of my husband’s,’ Lady Augusta explained.

  ‘I did not know you had a niece. Is she very young?’

  ‘No. She must be much your own age.’

  Godfrey felt a new interior qualm.

  ‘But she has been in America,’ Lady Augusta went on. ‘And indeed she has done there things quite as extraordinary as anything in that extraordinary country.’

  Godfrey raised an eyebrow in mild acknowledgement of the extraordinariness of America. He felt the onset of a sharp depression.

  ‘Yes,’ Lady Augusta added. ‘Or I might have said she has done things as extraordinary as the things you yourself have done.’

  ‘Lady Augusta.’

  He pretended to a tone of shocked reproof.

  ‘Well, I will tell you,’ his hostess said. ‘She has become a doctor.’

  ‘A doctor? A woman? But—’

  ‘Yes, you may well express bewilderment. But in America all things are possible. Or so they tell me. And Elizabeth has qualified as a doctor.’

  ‘I shall be most interested to meet her,’ Godfrey said, and realised that he had meant it.

  ‘You shall.’

  Again he bowed farewell and the solid stream on the staircase was able to move forward once more.

  He went, as Lady Augusta had wanted him to, into the ballroom and had little difficulty in finding partners since any large entertainment of Lady Augusta’s could not but include numbers of family friends of his. And, as he had foreseen, not one of them had anything worthwhile to say. They varied from the youngest, who were almost entirely speechless, to the oldest, who talked without stop and said nothing. But they were all of them of the same mould: the iron-edged mould of Society that decreed what they should think and what they should think of themselves at each stage upwards in the path it laid out for them.

  But they troubled him less than they might have done. He had Lady Augusta’s newly-risen niece to think about. And she was matter for thought indeed. A young woman of much his own age and yet—unheard of—a doctor. Or, to be accurate, not quite unheard of. There was, surely, that Mrs Garrett Anderson, who had slipped through some loophole in the law to qualify as a medical practitioner. But all the same for a woman to seek to adopt that profession …

  But was he allowing prejudice to hobble him? Perhaps he had been.

  He smiled at his proneness to fall into the trap that he had in his own person so often been the victim of.

  ‘A penny for that thought, Mr Mann,’ said his partner of the moment, one of the older ones who had been prevented from chattering ceaselessly only because they had been dancing a more than usually strenuous waltz.

  ‘Forgive me,’ Godfrey said. ‘I was thinking of another young lady.’

  ‘That I shall find hard to forgive, unless I am to learn her name.’

  ‘Ah, but I don’t wholly know it.’

  ‘Worse and worse. You have glimpsed her riding in the Park and have been irretrievably smitten?’

  ‘No, I have never seen her. And I never go to the Park.’

  ‘Yes, I know of your bearishness, you horrid creature, and, if it were not that I am so intrigued by this mysterious fair one, you would hear more from me on that.’

  ‘She may not even be fair,’ Godfrey said. ‘In fact, I rather suspect she cannot be.’

  ‘But who is this? You are to tell me at once.’

  ‘I will. She is a niece of Sir Charles’s and—’

  ‘Ah, you need say no more. I know well whom you mean. Miss Elizabeth Hills. Or am I to say—but it sounds so altogether ridiculous—Dr Elizabeth Hills? Or Miss Doctor?’

  ‘Whatever title she is to have, you have found the lady.’

  ‘She was easy enough to find. All the gentlemen can talk of no one else since she came to London.’

  ‘And you? You know her?’

  ‘I have seen her. And I will have to admit that you do her an injustice in supposing her not fair.’

  ‘Indeed?’

  ‘But I can happily report that she does speak with a distinct Yankee intonation.’

  ‘Which, as she comes from America, is not altogether surprising.’

  ‘I see you are to be one of the gentlemen that defend her.’

  Well, Godfrey reflected, it would seem that he was to be. The more he thought about what she had done, and the more such prattles as his present partner talked against her, the more he began to see that she might be quite a remarkable person. The blood, the bile, the bowels, all that was in the human body: to understand them and to know what to do for some at least of their ills. Yes, remarkable.

  Happily the waltz came to an end before he had had more openly to espouse the cause of Miss or Dr Hills. He bowed to the prattler and slipped his watch from his waistcoat pocket. Already half-past eleven. Was he going to reach his midnight appointment with himself without having met the girl who was bound to settle the wager in favour of remaining till dawn in the world of politeness? And did he, in fact, now really want that to be the way of it?

  ‘Ah, Godfrey, there you are. I was beginning to think you had been ungracious enough to leave already.’

  It was Lady Augusta. Godfrey turned.

  And at once he knew that the girl at Lady Augusta’s side must be the American doctor. She was certainly to be granted the description ‘fair’, he conceded. She was of medium height with a generous womanly figure, wearing a somewhat plain dress in a grey watered silk with a little white lace on the full bodice that seemed particularly to suit her. But it was not this that made her someone bound to attract attention. It was not even, he thought, particularly the fullish regularly featured face in its frame of smooth dark hair. It was her eyes. They were large and grey and they shone with a light that was not the sparkle of excitement but a steady pouring-out of luminosity that seemed to bathe everything they looked at in a radiance at once calming and softly penetrating.

  She made you feel she saw you, completely and steadily. And the effect was exhilarating.

  Lady Augusta introduced him.

  ‘And you are to dance,’ she said. ‘You are both altogether too serious, too set on high things. We have a duty to amuse ourselves as well, let me tell you.’

  So they danced. And, as the dance was a cotillon, there was no opportunity at first to talk. But as soon as the music ceased Godfrey suggested an ice and they went down to the tea-room. The ices—were these that latest thing in the art, Godfrey wondered—took more than a little getting in the crush, but eventually he and this wonder from America were seated on each side of a little table by a pair of open french windows looking out at the dark garden of the big house.

  ‘So you come to us from across the Atlantic?’ Godfrey said.

  She smiled, the luminous grey eyes darkening with a flicker of amusement.

  ‘You mean to say “So you are a doctor?”, I think.’

  ‘I—I hesitated to broach the subject. To be altogether frank, I am not sure of my feelings on it.’

  ‘Then you are a singularly unusual person.’

  Godfrey felt himself suppressing a blush.

  ‘You do me too much credit,’ he said hastily. ‘I will confess that when I talked of you to my partner in the waltz not long ago she placed me at once in the camp of your committed defenders.’

  ‘But you are not one of them?’

  ‘It is that I must really take time to consider just what it is you have done,’ Godfrey replied.

  ‘Then it’s as I thought. You are unusual. Most people, you know, condemn me out of hand. And even those who champion me, I sometimes think do so from motives that are little credit to them.’

  Godfrey felt yet more at a loss in front of this directness.

  ‘In one thing at least you have certainly been
calumniated in my hearing,’ he said, by way of temporising. ‘You have not very much of the American in your voice.’

  ‘That’s scarcely surprising. My parents went there only just before I was born. They spoke the English of England.’

  ‘And they are cousins of Sir Charles?’

  ‘They were. My mother died some four years ago, and my father, who was older, last January.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear it. But was it—was it perhaps your mother’s early death that gave you the idea of studying medicine?’

  ‘That is perceptive of you, Mr Mann. Yes, it was. My poor mother. She suffered much, and, I believe, did not seek treatment as soon as she ought to have done because of an altogether irrational dislike, or fear, of medical examination, particularly at the hands of a man.’

  ‘I begin to make up my mind on the vexed question of the propriety of Miss Hills’ vocation,’ Godfrey said.

  And then he had the greatest of difficulty in not smiling once more at his own thoughts, because the clock at the far end of the long tea-room began at that moment to strike midnight.

  For perhaps a quarter of an hour more they continued to talk, with Elizabeth sketching out for him the course of her career which had begun at a medical college for women then recently founded in New York.

  Did she mean to practise medicine here? he asked. No, that was impossible. Foreign qualifiers had been specifically excluded from practising in Britain by an Act of 1858. Yet she intended to stay. She had no family in America, and Sir Charles and Lady Augusta were being very kind ‘for all that they cannot bring themselves even to think about my studies, much less approve of them’.

  So she would regard them only as having been a beneficial education? She bridled quickly at this, a little bright colour showing itself on her full face. No, she had not gone through all that she had—and it had not been easy, and it had not always been pleasant—for it to be let to go to waste ‘like the Latin that a gentleman must have learnt, once’.

  Then Sir Charles came up, slight of figure, with scanty hair well brushed across his head, always smiling. It appeared that Elizabeth, at the orders no doubt of Lady Augusta, was to be introduced to other young men. And was to dance with them.