The Underside Read online

  Godfrey, having made his bow, turned and looked down the length of the tea-room at the ornate clock standing on the far mantelpiece. He could just make it out as reading twenty minutes past twelve.

  ‘Sir Charles,’ he said, ‘I am going to excuse myself, early though it is. A painter depends on the light and I should be at my easel in good time tomorrow. So good-night and thank you.’

  Chapter Two

  With steps that he could not prevent getting faster at every stride, Godfrey walked through Hanover Square and into Regent Street. There he pulled his cigar-case from his pocket. But at once he thrust it away again without opening it. This was not the contemplative stroll he had falsely promised himself.

  Faster and faster he hurried past the blankly shuttered shops of what was so often described as ‘the most fashionable street in the world’. The delicate and costly objects in the fancy watchmaker’s would have been so many pebbles to him now had everything behind its shutters been showered on him at once. Past luxurious haberdashers and hosiers, past the ‘Fancy Stationer’ and the ‘Fancy Staymaker’. Past the new photographers’ shops, past the music shops, the shawl shops, the French glove shops. Past perfumery and point-lace, past milliners, jewellers and confectioners. And then at last he was in Regent Circus and in a minute had turned into the Haymarket.

  Its garish length lay open before him. Under the strong gas lights the pavements were, even at this hour, as crowded as midday. Men, almost all smoking, their tall black hats rakishly set catching the light, strolled back and forth, giving off even at a distance an air of swaggering excitement. And the women —Paphians from first to last, he thought—were in their different ways as brazen. In flashing satins and silks, with faces white-washed or painted, the most obtrusive of them flaunted their way through the very thick of the throng. At the mouths of the side-streets others, less gaudy, lurked, dimly seen shapes in light-coloured gowns, pale-faced, often bonnetless or with a few bright and broken artificial flowers in their hats. And, at a yet lower level, dodging in and out of the strollers there were the young ones, creatures whom Godfrey succeeded in not letting his thoughts dwell on, girls of twelve and thirteen, generally dressed in horribly inappropriate cast-offs far too big for them, begging half the time, half the time importuning.

  Occasional loud laughter floated up and talk noisy as if the speaker were in a dense-packed gin-palace. Drawn to it all, Godfrey plunged in, subduing his pace to the easy stroll of those around him. He felt excitement running up and down arms and legs. But, he told himself, there would be no more than that. The curious joy that came over him merely to bathe in this atmosphere was, he said to himself, all that he wanted. And besides, an artist had a duty not to spend his powers in dissipation.

  Added to which, he admitted with a wry smile, he was a little afraid. Afraid not only of disease, but of any commerce at all, even of conversation, with these beings from, as it were, another world, a Hades with customs quite different from those of this earth.

  At his smile a voice spoke close beside him in the mingled brilliance and dark shadow of the harshly gaslit street. ‘You look good-natured, dear. D’you want to come with me then?’ Without turning to look, he shook his head in brief negative. A little to his relief, the woman—she had sounded as if she were forty at least—paid him no further attention.

  But he continued to move slowly through the crowd, drinking in the scene almost like a horse watering, breathing deeply, letting its essence invade him. He glimpsed through the open doors of the Grand Turkish Divan men lolling on sofas with the silk-brilliant women leaning intimately over them. His ears caught a pearl-thread of laughter. He went through the peristyle of the theatre where the press was even thicker and where the harlots’ soft signalling kissing-sounds seemed to float in the air everywhere like butterflies.

  Turning to stroll back up, he saw ahead of him an ancient shapeless bent-backed creature, tattered and greasy rags dropping from her, hopping and hobbling along beside a tall girl in a cream-coloured cotton gown with a wide straw hat whom he had noticed earlier. Cacklingly the crone was demanding money and the girl was attempting to walk away. At this moment a tall man with an eye-glass, apparently attracted, veered across the pavement. The old woman at once scrambled her way round so that she was progressing backwards in front of the young whore and between her and her prospective catch. In an instant the girl’s hand dipped into her pocket and Godfrey caught the tiny silver flash of a coin passing. The old gin-sodden creature backed quickly away and the whore exchanged a few words with the tall man who turned and walked beside her.

  Godfrey followed them as if drawn by a fine unbreakable thread. And it was all too possible, he thought, that the life-full straight-backed swaying girl ahead would come in the end to practise the same act of petty blackmail that she had just been victim of. Then the harlot as she turned into Panton Street put back her head and laughed aloud at something her companion had said to her. And there was in that pealing sound, Godfrey could not but register, only joy.

  He stood at the corner watching them, and, as he had expected, before long they went in at the door of an accommodation house. He turned away and once more floated with the idling darting-eyed crowd, drifting eventually into one of the cafés in Coventry Street to take a cup of coffee. In the foyer there was a small shining mahogany counter with displayed on shelves behind it knick-knacks of various sorts evidently designed as trifling gifts. A big-bosomed woman in a black silk dress with harsh high-piled golden hair was there to serve.

  ‘Lovely night, dearie,’ she said to him.

  ‘Yes. Yes, it is. A fine night.’

  ‘But hot. Lord, ain’t it hot? Enough to put a girl all in a sweat only sitting here.’

  She laughed. And into Godfrey’s mind came a picture of her body, big-breasted, wide-hipped, milkily white, and covered in a light sheen of sweat.

  ‘It is hot,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ the vendeuse returned, ‘there’s only one thing to do, they say, when you’re as hot as this.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  Godfrey began to think of a retreat.

  ‘To get hotter, dear. Get yourself some nice little creature and forget whether it’s hot or cold, rain or shine. That’s what they say.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I suppose it is.’

  The vendeuse laughed again, richly and coarsely. Godfrey smiled.

  ‘I’ll tell you what you want to do, dearie. You want to buy one of these trifles here. Make a lovely present for a girl, they do. Why, you’ll only have to step out into the street and they’ll be round you like bees round a honey-pot. Nice looking chap like you.’

  For a moment, an absurd moment, Godfrey thought of buying something—one of those glove-cases—and making it a present. To Elizabeth Hills.

  ‘No, No, thank you. Good evening.’

  He stepped quickly out into the night again and made his way wanderingly on past coffee-shops with their plain little notices saying ‘Beds To Be Had Within’, past wine-vaults, past oyster-rooms bright with scarlet lobsters and crabs on their stone slabs, with pickled salmon on beds of green fennel, with yellow finnan haddocks, with the tubs of oysters on their walls and their busy flannel-aproned assistants. Eventually he turned into the little dark lanes north of Coventry Street.

  Somewhere here at one moment in the quietness something just down a narrow unlit way—half a faintly moving figure, half a sound—arrested his attention. He stopped and peered into the dark, and then discovered it was two doxies, one standing keeping watch, the other squatting to urinate. He hurried away. Yet the glimpsed tableau, hard though he tried to thrust it from his mind, refused to leave him, dwelling there like a soft persistent ghost.

  Indeed, when outside a discreetly-lit house in Tichbourne Street opposite the darkened shape of Kahn’s Anatomy Museum a lurking individual in a very skimpy frock-coat with a stovepipe hat broken at the brim murmured to him as he passed, ‘The poses plastiques inside, sir, you’re very welcome to step in’, he al
most did so, if only to dispel with cruder flavours the lingering ghost-taste. But he was too quick with himself. He jerked out his habitual ‘No. No thank you’ and turned sharply back towards the lights of Coventry Street.

  And it was there that the mulatto woman made a set against him.

  She was a tall well-built creature, in her thirties as well as he could judge thinking of it afterwards, and she wore a somewhat tattered but gaudily bright dress of crimson satin with neither mantle nor bonnet. She had come up as he had re-entered Coventry Street, and, as she had seemed quite indisposed to alter her course, walking straight towards him with her big eyes rolling whitely in her thick-lipped bronze face, he had at almost the last moment stepped sharply aside himself.

  It was this abrupt movement that seemed to draw her particular attention to him.

  ‘What you wanna step away from me fo’?’ she demanded in a loud free tone.

  Godfrey ignored it. But the mulatto swung back and presented herself directly in front of him.

  ‘What fo’ you do that?’ she demanded again. ‘You ‘fraid of a woman like me? You don’t wanna have it ‘cept with a girl white as snow, is it?’

  Godfrey thought afterwards that things might have been different if he had attempted some jocular answer. But instead he tried to dodge past the burly creature. And this she was not having. She put out both her large bronze hands and gripped him by the elbows.

  ‘Let me go,’ he said with sudden heat.

  ‘I ain’t gonna let you go, darlin’. You’re gonna come along wi’ me. You’re gonna have me if it’s the las’ blessed thing you do.’

  With a sharp tug Godfrey freed himself, and, without consideration of dignity, lunged round and ran. It was not easy however to make any fast progress through the sauntering night crowd. And the big mulatto woman seemed able to run every bit as fast as he, making wild grabs from time to time at his coat-tails and yelling after him a stream of abusive and obscene epithets.

  Once, when a pair of drooping-mustachioed passers-by playfully attempted to detain his pursuer, he did begin to draw away. But at that moment his hat, which had been gradually slipping forward down his sweaty forehead, tipped right off. He stooped to retrieve it and the mulatto broke free of the two playful gentlemen and with a great cry of ‘I’ll get you between my legs yet, you bugger’—a cry which turned heads for yards all round—she lunged forward once more.

  This is ridiculous, Godfrey thought, dodging and slipping his way through the crowd.

  He determined to put a quick end to the farce. There was a turning on his left and he decided to take it and, where the press of people would be less, really make good speed.

  And it seemed that his plan was going to succeed. The narrow street he had dodged into was entirely empty, though dark. He took a great gulp of warm night air and began to stride out as he had not done since running races at school.

  Behind him, already more distant, he heard a shriek of frustrated rage from the mulatto. He pounded onwards. And then he put a foot on some slimy thing on the dark cobbles and crashed heavily to the ground, leaving himself hopelessly winded and shocked almost to fainting.

  How long he would have lain there he did not know, nor whether the mulatto would have come up and claimed her prey at last. But in half a minute or less he heard a soft voice, with a noticeable Irish accent to it, saying something about was he badly hurt. And then he felt hands taking his head and raising it up a little.

  ‘No, no,’ he managed to reply. ‘I do not think I am much hurt.’

  ‘Ah, but you came a terrible cropper,’ the Irish girl said. ‘I was after having a piddle just further along and I saw it plain.’

  By now he was on his knees, feeling the squelchy rubbish in the gutter soaking into his trousers. He looked up at the girl, the Irish doxy to judge from her coarse speech. In the dark he could see little beyond a dress of some light-coloured stuff, dark straight hair beneath a pale bonnet and a white blur of a face.

  He pushed himself to his feet, took a deep breath and felt somewhat better.

  ‘Thank you’, he said. ‘It was most kind.’

  The girl stooped quickly, picked up his hat from where it had rolled away, brushed it against the arm of her dress and held it out to him.

  ‘You’re a gent,’ she said. ‘D’you want to be kind to a girl?’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Godfrey said, in his still confused state mistaking her meaning and pulling out his gold-purse.

  ‘No, dear, put that away,’ the girl said in her soft Irish voice. ‘You can keep it till after.’

  ‘But—But—’

  ‘You come along with me. We’ll go to a nice house. I’ll give you a good time.’

  Godfrey found himself enmeshed suddenly in a web of cold reluctance. He felt in a turmoil still from his encounter with the mulatto. He had as a fixed principle a determination not to risk disease in this way. He had all his unexamined fears of any actual contact with the denizens of the dark world, for all that it fascinated him. And yet that fascination was powerful.

  ‘Come on now,’ the soft voice cajoled. ‘Are you timid?’

  ‘No, no. It’s not that.’

  ‘Sure, it isn’t. But what is it then? We could have a nice bit of supper. You could send out.’

  Godfrey, condemning himself as weak, seized on this. After all, he reflected, he had wanted refreshment when he had entered the café and had been deterred by the importunities of the vendeuse. He had had only an ice at Lady Augusta’s. After such a shaking he ought to take something reviving. And then afterwards he could give the girl some money and bid her goodnight. There need be no hard feelings. A man was entitled to do as he pleased.

  ‘Yes, yes. Good. I’ll come.’

  ‘There’s a good house only a step round the corner.’

  Bemused, and yet with a feeling of holy daring, Godfrey followed his rescuer. In two minutes he found himself standing beside her as she knocked on the door of a modest-looking house.

  A stoutish neat enough woman opened to them.

  ‘Ah, it’s you Lisa,’ she said as the light from the hallway spread across the narrow pavement.

  ‘You’ve a room free?’ asked the girl called Lisa.

  ‘Yes, yes. The second floor front.’

  She turned to Godfrey.

  ‘It’s a good room, sir,’ she said. ‘You’ll find everything to your liking.’

  She lowered her voice.

  ‘It’s thirty shillings.’

  ‘Yes, yes. That’s all right.’

  Godfrey followed Lisa up a carpeted staircase with the plump landlady bringing up the rear. He wondered whether, had she not been behind him, he would not have turned and run out into the street again. On the second floor Lisa opened a door and went ahead of him into the room.

  He entered and looked about. There was a Turkey carpet, and long curtains at the windows. A decent armchair stood near the empty fireplace, in which someone had placed a paper decoration. Two other chairs stood against a wall on either side of a three-legged table covered with a dark-green cloth. In a corner there was a wash-stand with a towel laid neatly across the jug on it. The wide brass bedstead was covered with a white lacework counterpane.

  Godfrey turned quickly to the landlady.

  ‘Would it be possible to get some supper?’ he said.

  ‘Anything you like, sir. Anything you like. I can send out for anything.’

  Seeing Godfrey hesitate, she stepped in rapidly.

  ‘Champagne, sir, of course. And to go with it, how about a nice lobster?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Godfrey said. ‘That will be excellent.’

  Then he recollected himself and turned, with a little embarrassment, to the girl, Lisa.

  ‘That is—That is, my dear, if it suits you?’

  ‘I like lobster fine,’ she answered.

  And then the landlady withdrew, closing the door with care behind her. Godfrey stood and looked more closely at his companion under the light of the ga
s-chandelier. She was, as he had already seen, dark-haired and pale of face. But he saw now that, while by no means coarse, she was really not at all pretty. Not only was her complexion too wan, but her nose, sharp as a blade, had a pronounced hooked bend to it, as if at some past time it might have been broken. The mouth too was small and crookedy. Indeed, she would have been downright ugly if it had not been for her expression that, in the quick yet not hasty flicker here and there of the eyes and the poised-to-dart mobility of the crooked mouth, conveyed a vivacity and even intelligence more than ordinary.

  If he was looking at her, she was equally regarding him.

  ‘Why, your coat is all messed, and your trousers too,’ she said. ‘Here, I’ll brush them.’

  And immediately she dropped to her knees and began to flick with taut-stretched fingers at the filth on the trousers. Her treatment was effective too.

  ‘But you’re getting it all over your hands,’ Godfrey said.

  ‘Ah, isn’t it dirt only? Where’s the harm in that? I’ve touched enough of it in my time.’

  In a few moments more she had finished, and Godfrey, glancing down at his knees, saw that the trousers were in an almost tolerable state.

  ‘Thank you, thank you, it’s very good of you,’ he said stammeringly.

  ‘Take off your coat now,’ Lisa replied.

  After a fractional hesitation Godfrey did so. For a moment he wondered what he would do when they brought in the supper. And then he thought, with a smile at his own naivety, that this was no place for scruples of that sort.

  He began to feel more at ease, and watched Lisa happily as she tackled the stains and smears on his coat in the same quick manner as she had dealt with the trousers.

  ‘How is it that you come to be what you are?’ he asked, almost without realising that he had spoken.

  ‘A whore?’

  The quick eyes looked at him with, he thought, a flick of scorn for his circumlocution.

  ‘Yes. That.’

  ‘And why wouldn’t I be? Doesn’t it keep me well enough? Better than if I was a servant girl.’