The very sight of Elizabeth now ought to have fired again his original impetus. She looked so much mistress of her small domain, in a grey silk dress that he had seen before, quiet, severely crisp, full-bosomed, its colour enhancing those grey eyes that shone now, he thought, more than ever when she was at last at the beginning of the work she had so long wanted to do. From all this he ought to have seized at once that one simple clear idea that would put both her and all she stood for on to canvas. But he had not.
Hence the platitudes from the newspapers such as the chance reference to Garibaldi that had so disastrously affected Miss Watkyn. He was not even able to produce the right enthusiasm for Elizabeth’s accounts of the work she had already started on.
‘I have one family only at present under my wing, and, though I visit them every day, I still have not really been able to decide how many of them there are, all living in this one small room. So many children appear, and all of them with thick matted hair, and all that hair a playground for the lice—’
Miss Watkyn gave a little shriek. Elizabeth continued un-perturbed.
‘I spend hours with the comb among them and when I think I have really finished the whole family another little creature appears with more hair overhanging its weak eyes and with the same ragged petticoat and ragged frock covering its thin little scab-covered body, and with the same legs black as a negro’s from wading in the same inky kennel.’
‘Don’t you begin to despair?’ Godfrey asked.
She flamed up at once at this.
‘How can you ask? There cannot be any question of despair. It is a matter of driving on and on until the tiny area of cleanliness at last grows and spreads. You must know that.’
She looked at him with reproach. And he remembered how once she had praised him for his persistence. Well, he had persisted too with this elusive idea that had haunted him for months now. No wonder he had at last despaired.
But he had despaired. And it had cut him off from Elizabeth. It was as if she was in this room, in the simple warmth and order of it, and he was outside in the street, in the cutting hail-flecked January wind. He might be separated from her by only a thickness fine as the window-pane. But he was cut off as completely as any wandering crazy old organ-grinder or crutch-hobbling lame beggar who might chance to shamble along respectable Gower Street.
He knew that it needed only one firm push to break the fragile barrier. But it was a push he knew that he was totally unable to make.
So he left after a visit scarcely longer than a formal call, hailed a passing cab at the corner of Bedford Square and went straight to the club. Nor was he entirely displeased when the first person he set eyes on in the smoking-room proved to be Captain Harnett.
Captain Harnett was a man in many ways totally opposed to all that he himself stood for. Where he was serious, even too serious, Harnett was all self-indulgence. He was notorious in the club for the variety and extent of his sensual life, and for his willingness to talk of it. He was a man of about forty, no longer in the Army now that he had inherited. Younger men in the club hung about him and even went to him as a father confessor, especially since he boasted of never having been at all affected by disease however frequently he risked such affliction.
Seeing him now sitting alone in front of a somnolent fire, a long black cigar somewhat fiercely clamped in his mouth, his sharp-profiled mottled-complexioned face sombre in repose, Godfrey had felt a sudden urge to seek for once his company. There would be no confessions. The problem that he was faced with vis-à-vis Elizabeth was not one that Harnett would be even remotely capable of advising upon. It was simply that he felt obscurely that tonight the cynical seeing of the world as no more than a huge sexual market was perhaps the only view that he could bear.
But it seemed he was to get the kind of advice he scorned whether he would or not. Scarcely had he flung himself down in a chair and secured them both brandy-and-soda than Harnett gave him a long appraising look and a quick twisted smile.
‘You look sorry for yourself, my friend.’
‘Why, yes, I feel downcast. I hardly know why. Nothing that a drink won’t cure, I dare say.’
He took a long pull at his glass.
‘Drink has its uses,’ Harnett agreed, ‘though the cure’s apt to last only so long as the medicine’s taken. And a damned nasty taste’s left in the mouth next day.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I’ll tell you what you want, my boy.’
Godfrey could hardly avoid asking what this was, though he suspected all too clearly what sort of an answer he would get.
‘A different woman, my lad. There’s not a lot in this world that a change of quim won’t mend. Take my word for it.’
Godfrey forced himself to smile.
‘I’ve no doubt you’re right.’
‘Then—’
Captain Harnett rose to his feet.
‘Then shall we be off, my dear fellow? The lupanars of the town await.’
‘I’m sorry, no,’ Godfrey said.
He had in a moment thought of all Harnett was promising: the Haymarket, with even on this cold night plenty of female company willing to share a bed often for no more than a guinea, the poses plastiques with women straining their imaginations to present themselves in lewd and yet lewder ways, the flash houses where nothing that the sexual urge in man contrived was a matter for shame. He had thought of his own one night of licence. And he had without hesitation decided against. It was not, he found, because of his objection to the supposed rule that any man must be willing to show himself a stallion at a moment’s notice. It was rather that he felt that Harnett’s view was altogether too simple, that it did not answer the question it seemed so easily to ask.
But Harnett was not disconcerted by his refusal. Equably he proposed that they should dine together at the club instead. And, as the evening progressed, Godfrey had to admit to himself that Harnett was good company. Though by the end of the evening he had created in Godfrey’s mind a vision, fundamentally terrible, of the happy-go-lucky pursuit of erotic pleasure—none the less reckless even though Harnett had apparently always escaped the penalty of disease—the telling of its incidents had been often extremely amusing.
At about eleven Harnett repeated his invitation to a joint pleasure raid on the resources of the capital and Godfrey again declined.
‘As you like, my dear fellow, though I must say I think you’re a bit of a fool.’
They took their hats from the servant who had helped them into their greatcoats. Outside it was clear and moonlit, though the wind that had blown all the day was if anything even sharper. They looked about for a cab for Godfrey.
‘Hah, look there,’ Harnett exclaimed suddenly, pointing with his silver-headed cane to the distant street corner and the halo of frosty light from the gaslamp there.
‘A hansom?’
‘No, my dear fellow, better than that. A whore. And, if I mistake not, a creature I know, a girl of infinite resource. Can’t I persuade you to change your mind?’
‘No, I think not. Not even for the infinite—’
At that instant he recognised in his turn the distant beguiling figure in the gaslight.
It was Lisa. Surely it was her, though he had not set eyes on her since that night six months before. He found that a coursing excitement had sprung up in him at the sight of her. Or was it really her?
Would he accept Harnett’s offer after all? There would be no difficulty.
And evidently Harnett, with his extraordinary quickness to perceive sexual subtleties, had sensed something of what had passed through his mind.
‘Come, my dear chap, I’ll leave her to you. She’ll extend your experience, I promise you.’
‘No. No, I thank you.’
Godfrey was able to speak the words firmly, and found that he had meant them firmly. Let his position with Elizabeth be what it might, he would not go back to that world to escape from which he had invoked Elizabeth’s spirit.
Ch
apter Seven
Captain Harnett had promptly declared, without evident ill-will, that if Godfrey were ‘not interested in the strumpet, then I’m damned if I don’t have her myself’. And he had gone resolutely striding away down the street in the direction of the girl who was, or who might not be, Lisa. Godfrey had turned in the other direction towards a night cab stand, plunging his thoughts into the idea of Elizabeth as if he were holding his shrinking flesh to a cauterising iron.
There was a single empty four-wheeler at the stand, its horse occasionally stamping its feet in the cold and champing at its feed-bag. Godfrey went up to the vehicle and tapped smartly at the closed sash.
‘’Ullo,’ a sleep-thick voice answered from within. ‘Is it a job?’
The dark figure of the cabbie, shrouded in a heavy old coat, his round hat jammed on his head even in slumber, began to rise up on the far side of the glass. And at that precise moment there clanged forth into Godfrey’s mind with the majestic unexpectedness of the sun breaking goldenly through an unending sullen cloud curtain the idea of just how he would paint Elizabeth.
It was the thought of what Elizabeth had done for him just a few moments earlier that gave it to him, complete and entire except for one irritating lacuna in his factual knowledge.
And that, he realised, might be remedied at once. He swung away from the cab and actually ran along the street back towards the club, hearing faintly in the moonlight the cabbie’s curses of bleak rage. Inside the club, he brushed aside the servant who wanted to take his coat and bounded up the stairs two at a time, hat still on his head, to the library.
At this hour that room, never much used in this establishment, was deserted except for a solitary elderly member soundly dozing under a single wall gaslight in front of a dully dying fire.
Godfrey paused at the door for a moment. Surely he had seen at some time Lemprière’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology somewhere on the shelves. But where? He thought hard and then decided he knew. He hurried over. But in the dim light he could not read a single title. He strode across to the writing-table, seized a sheet of paper, folded it into a spill and went to light it at the gas.
The dozing old member stirred. ‘Waiter,’ he mumbled. ‘Potash-water.’ And then he fell asleep again.
Godfrey carefully carried his flaming spill back to the shelves where he had thought that the worthy Channel Island clergyman’s compilation might be. And in the last flicker of his improvised torch he saw it. He hurried with it back to the light.
Venus, Venus. Ah, here she was. Venus also surnamed Cytheraea. No. Venus Exopolis, so named because her statue was without the city of Athens. Venus Phallommeda named from her affection for the phallus. Good heavens, no. And, ah, yes, here.
Venus Verticordia, named thus because she could turn the hearts of men to cultivate chastity.
And was this not Elizabeth? Was this not what she had done for him, turned him from vice. Was this not an extension of her battle to bring light into dark places, this bringing of purity to all that was foul? She should be Venus Verticordia. She was Venus Verticordia. And now he could paint her.
Even the weather entered into his scheme of things in the joyous rush of the days and weeks that followed. There came a spell of a fortnight and more when day after day the sky was clear. If ever there was good light in winter, it was now. And Godfrey made the very fullest use of it.
There had been first that marvellous next morning when he had gone to see Elizabeth, locating with difficulty some tumbledown houses called Perkins Rents in a rookery crouching under the very shadow of Westminster Abbey, coming suddenly from grey tranquillity into close-packed airlessness and seeing Elizabeth teaching a tattered hare-lipped girl of ten or so to use a scrubbing brush. For a little he had stood and watched her in the entrance of the court, with his coat-tails held up round his waist to prevent them dipping into a broken basket of stinking herrings which a man crouching in the slight shelter of the entrance archway was trying feebly to sell. At last he had felt he could fairly interrupt the scrubbing lesson and he had approached.
And then, pacing with care beside her up and down the cramped space of that icy-puddled unpaved court, he had explained just how it was that at last he wanted to paint her. And she had at once been infected with his enthusiasm and had agreed. She had even abandoned her intention of attending a meeting that afternoon so that she could pose for the preliminary study.
That had gone well, too. She had evoked such an excess of clumsy admiration from young Billy as he had shown her up to the studio that he had wondered whether he would ever get a coherent word out of him again. And in the studio she had turned this way and that to the light, had moved her head up and down, had put her arms here and there with wonderful patience. She had even draped a sheet over her dress for him to get some idea of how the draperies would fall, and far from complaining she had been eager to do any more he thought necessary. At the end of two hours he had sketched the whole outline of the picture on to the large sheet of brown paper that he always used at this stage. Already he could see the finished work as he hoped it would be, an intense vision if vague of detail and, he was convinced, bound to be as far superior to the Torquato Tasso as that had been to any of his earlier trial pieces.
In the weeks that followed he lived oblivious of anything but the work. And this not because he had much less time than he would have liked before the Academy but because of the passion that filled him. When each afternoon the light began to fail and he had to send home the professional model he used at this stage he would continue to stand in front of his easel staring at the chalk-marked brown paper until the very shapes on it disappeared in the gloom. And eating or sitting or taking himself bemusedly off to bed he did nothing but ponder the vision that hung like a bright cloud in the centre of his mind.
His only other activity was to visit Elizabeth, though it would be long before he would need her again for the picture. But he felt now on a sure footing in Gower Street and he knew that in every moment he spent there he was absorbing his inspiration into his system.
They were back in their relations where they had been before she had left to go down to Wiltshire. There could be no question of that. Even the enthusiasm of Miss Watkyn over the proposed work—she had demanded to know all about it, and Godfrey despite his instinct never to discuss an unpainted picture had had to make some concessions to her fervid interest—could not hamper the way the two of them grew, meeting by meeting, closer together.
The days went spinningly by. Each one was marked for him by a minute or two of extra light to work by. And each week was marked by a distinct progress in the task on the easel. The figure drawn from the model being finished, the background progressing stage by stage, the moving on from chalk to oil colours, the transfer painstakingly of the work on paper to the carefully squared-off canvas.
And how secure he felt. For the first time he tolerated the presence in the studio of a model without the least qualm. When he had been working on the Torquato Tasso and various girls had at various times been there for long periods, though he had never stepped beyond the most formal politeness with them, he had always experienced an intense disturbance, a fear not only of the effects of their possible promiscuity but, more, of the world he suspected some of them at least inhabited, the world that both attracted and repelled. But now, armoured in Elizabeth’s radiance, the particular girl he employed, a statuesque but vain and incredibly talkative creature, might for all the effect she had on him have been a plaster cast.
Even when one day, despite his wearied requests for less chatter, she had told him with the utmost relish that she had been to a party ‘with ever such a lot of artists—just like you—well, with quite a dozen’ where the entire company had taken off all their clothes still he had been able to regard her completely in the light of some talking doll, irritating but unconnected in any way with the reality of life.
And soon he came to spend each evening with Elizabeth, leaving Gillingham Place when
the light went and staying in the comfort, warmth and orderliness of Gower Street until it was time to go back to bed. Often they would sit hardly talking at all. Miss Watkyn would, with frequent deep sighs, read to herself from some volume of verse, Elizabeth would have on her reading-stand a fat Blue Book and he himself would sit idling over the newspaper and taking long looks at his muse when he thought he was unobserved.
It was on one such quiet evening, shortly after they had heard that Sir Charles and Lady Augusta were back in Brook Street for the spring, that he was able to register that his relations with Elizabeth had taken a marked step forward. It was a registration made on the acutely sensitive barometer of Miss Watkyn’s feelings. And it blew up like a sudden squall too, one that set the indicator swinging in a moment from ‘Set Fair’ to ‘Stormy’.
All that precipitated it was a quiet remark from Elizabeth.
‘I had no idea that Blue Books and Statistical Tables grew quite so prolifically,’ she said, as she laid down a thick unbound volume she had just finished. ‘When I leave here I shall have to have a room with library shelves.’
Godfrey might not even have noticed the implications had Miss Watkyn not started out of her chair as if a spectre had appeared greenish and dripping in the middle of the neatly warm room.
‘Leave?’ she exclaimed. ‘Leave here? Leave me? No, no. You cannot.’
And she had fallen heavily back in her chair.
Naturally there had been a certain amount of to-do. Smelling-salts, always by Miss Watkyn’s side, had had to be applied, a gushing fit of tears had had to be ignored by Godfrey and treated with a touch of sharpness by Elizabeth and finally Miss Watkyn had had to be assisted up to her darkened room.
Then, while he waited for Elizabeth to return—and Miss Watkyn of course kept her a considerable time—he began thinking about what had caused all the furore. And he saw quickly enough that Miss Watkyn had been right, in a way, to display such feeling. Because what Elizabeth had been doing was to imply that in some within-sight future she would be in her own home. Or rather in a home shared with a husband. She had been seeing herself as married to him and had un-consciously referred to their future state.
The Underside Page 7