The Underside

by H. R. F. Keating

  And then he plunged forward to join in. In a moment he had found or forced a sort of place for himself in the dance. A masked girl in the guise of a haymaker, with simply a straw hat on her head secured with a large green handkerchief and a mock smock of cheap muslin over her dress, seized him by both hands, bounced with him for a series of steps, smiled at him with total frankness, leapt and hopped at him.

  ‘You ain’t got much of a fancy-dress,’ she shouted.

  ‘I was in too great a hurry to meet you,’ Godfrey shouted back.

  ‘Then you’ll have to catch me.’

  And the dance took her whirling away.

  But other girls presented themselves. And danced and parted.

  ‘You’re a gentleman,’ declared one, when Godfrey gasped out a few words to her in the swing of a wild galop. ‘I allus fancied a gentleman.’

  ‘Then you shall have one. But what are you, you pretty little shepherdess?’

  ‘Lor, sir, I’m an envelope-folder.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  Under her mask, swinging and swaying in the dance, she looked at him with a bold defiance.

  ‘You know what they say about us envelope-folders?’

  ‘Nothing bad, I’m sure.’

  She laughed, loudly as a donkey.

  ‘Oh, yes, but they does. That’s the whole on it. They pays us ninepence a day and they says what they likes about us.’

  Godfrey, breathing and panting as he danced, persisted in his gentleman-style gallantry.

  ‘I’m sure whatever they say’s undeserved.’

  ‘No, t’ain’t. You ninny.’

  And with one look of thwarted contempt she broke from his grasp and ran spinning across the wide ballroom.

  Godfrey was left standing, feeling a fool, and, he supposed, looking one, stock still at the edge of the whirling round of prancing blundering figures. He walked away.

  Yes, the girl was right. What was he doing turning neat little politenesses here? For all the eagerness with which he had plunged into this fray, he was not of it.

  For a moment he contemplated leaving. He pulled out his watch. It was still not very long after midnight. A fast hansom through the empty streets now and he might perhaps get to Brook Street before they retired. Some excuses. Any. And then he could be having that tête-à-tête with Elizabeth that was to have been the crown of this day.

  But no. No, if he did not take all of this here into him now, then he would have it as a rebuke within him as long as he lived.

  He swung round and confronted the dance again. It was a wild mad polka now. What about one of those sailors? Those boy-girls? Had he not avoided them when he was on the floor before? Had he not feared a little that much freedom?

  He would not any more. One of the sailors. Now. Or that girl over there in the uniform of a Volunteer? When he had first glimpsed her tall cock-feather-plumed hat across the other side of the big hall he had thought that she was really a Volunteer. And then she had danced by not very far off and, because she had had her back to him, he had seen that, slim though she was, she was no man. But there was something in her assumed man-like swagger, in that close-fitting blue jacket and those tight buff pantaloons, a sharp gaiety, that from right across the far side of the room called to him.

  Yes, the Volunteer.

  And damned be any fellow who was dancing with her now.

  He started out across the floor, realised that in the mass of hopping swaying dancers he would never reach her, backed away and made a path for himself through the watchers standing round the walls, all the while keeping his eye on the tall plumed military hat as it bounced and leapt to the polka steps.

  The Volunteer.

  And then—Then, as she swung round in the arms of her partner and he saw her face clearly for the first time, he knew that, mask or no mask, she was Lisa.

  There could be no doubt of it, although her features had been visible to him for only a second or two in the swing of the dance. There was that blade-sharp nose of old with the hooked bend in it, the crookedy mouth and, falling oddly from the tall Volunteer’s cap, the dark straight and unabundant hair. It was Lisa.

  Now he threw himself through the jostling buffeting dancers to come to her. He saw as he got nearer that the man she was dancing with, a dark fellow with a grinning wide-jawed dog mask, was wearing under his hired smock the fluffy yellow flannel jacket of a carpenter. Well, the like of him would scarcely be able to afford the pleasure of Lisa.

  He came up behind him, reached out and tapped him in a friendly way on the shoulder as he swung clumsily along with Lisa in his arms.

  ‘Excuse me, my friend,’ he said in his ear, ‘but I’d dearly like to enlist alongside your soldier friend.’

  But the dog-masked carpenter did not yield her.

  ‘Ay, and I like her myself,’ he flung out.

  ‘I’m glad you do,’ Godfrey said, half-running to keep up with the pair of them in the swirl of the polka. ‘But I want her, my good friend.’

  He was beginning to feel silly. If this fellow simply stayed as he was, it would mean a tussle or abandoning Lisa. And, for all the free-and-easy way in which the dancing was conducted, he had seen no fighting anywhere and suspected that it was quickly pounced upon.

  Should he offer money? Probably not. The fellow had spoken with a decidedly independent air.

  ‘Lisa, Lisa,’ he tried calling across the carpenter’s broad shoulder. Lisa did then look at him from under the peak of her tall cap, the thin black strip of her mask considering him.

  ‘Lisa, do you recognise me?’ he called breathlessly, tearing off his own mask.

  For several bouncing steps of the dance she did not reply. He ran along behind the broad-shouldered carpenter and peered at her anxiously. At last she answered.

  ‘Why, yes. You’re the gentleman I found in the gutter one night last summer.’

  ‘I am. I am. Oh, Lisa, stop. I must speak with you.’

  Would she respond to his plea?

  Suddenly she plucked the carpenter’s broad red hands off her waist.

  ‘Joey,’ she said to him, ‘be a good chap. Dance with some other girl.’

  ‘And you the smartest of them all,’ the carpenter answered, trying to put his hands back.

  But when she gave him a smile and removed the hands once more he bounced good-humouredly away under his grinning dog-mask and in a moment had secured himself a pretty flower-girl and was whirling onwards.

  ‘Joey?’ Godfrey said to Lisa, as she stepped aside from the polka swirl and stood facing him. ‘Joey? So you know his name then under the mask?’

  ‘Sure, I do. Joey comes here with me whenever I’m not busy with a flat and he’s got the mint-sauce for the entrance fee.’

  ‘Which I suppose is not so often? If he’s the carpenter I took him for?’

  ‘Oh, he works regular. He doesn’t do so badly. But you? How are you for all this time?’

  ‘I’m well. Well.’

  ‘And have you never been down the Haymarket of a night that I haven’t seen you?’

  He thought of why it was that he had not.

  ‘No. No, I’ve not been that way. I’ve … But, no matter, I’ve found you again now.’

  ‘You wanted me?’

  ‘From the moment I realised who it was under that Volunteer’s—No. No, I’ve wanted you ever since I parted from you that night.’

  Lisa laughed.

  ‘Then why didn’t you come looking for me? I’m there always. And ready always.’

  She had set herself up in rooms of her own in Blue Cross Street just south of Leicester Square since the previous summer, having, as she said to Godfrey, ‘had a piece or two of luck.’ They were a sitting-room and a bedroom separated by a pair of folding doors and furnished rather more handsomely than the room he remembered off Coventry Street. The house appeared to belong to a huge old fat woman called by everybody Mother Merewether who spent all her days and nights, so far as Godfrey could make out, in a sprawling armchair i
n the room next to the front door, drinking continually from a bottle of cheap fiery sherry from which she would treat the girls who rented rooms from her when she felt well disposed towards them.

  No sooner had Lisa shut the door than they were back at once to their old footing. She would not lie naked on top of the bed as they had done the time before because the fire in the sitting-room had died almost to extinction in her absence. But this did not seem at all to matter and within minutes he was experiencing again those mind-annihilating sensations of old. Then everything was blotted out, who he was, what he meant to do with his life, all hopes, all fears, the events of the day past, Elizabeth, everything. And instead there were the huge moving forms, the tidal waves of colour, a primeval life. A night without time.

  It was in fact as late as ten next morning when he re-entered the world again. Then Lisa sent out for breakfast from a nearby restaurateur’s. When it was eaten, Godfrey looked at her, sitting there in chemise only at the table which the chambermaid had placed in front of the now relit and brightly burning fire.

  ‘May I stay here?’ he asked simply and suddenly.

  Lisa smiled across at him, that crooked-mouth smile that ought to have been only cynical but which had in it always a lacing of warmth.

  ‘Why shouldn’t you stay?’ she said. ‘These days I don’t have anybody till the evening generally and you’re welcome to be here. And you can stay on in the evening and all night too, only you must pay me.’

  ‘I will. I will.’

  So he spent the day there, lounging in shirt and trousers, with Lisa, who had gone out for a little to visit some shops, sitting beside him still in her silk stockings and boots but with only a blue satin dressing-gown otherwise. They sprawled on the big red sofa drawn up to the fire and smoked, looked at the newspapers, played a game or two of cribbage and chatted lazily about the pleasures of London, the music-halls that Lisa had loved ever since as hardly more than a child she had started going to the penny gaffs, the day of the Boat Race which had always been a holiday for her, a chance to mingle with huge excited crowds, to cheer for any reason or none, and Derby Day, a treat yet in store for her she said and another of London’s rare carnivals.

  They made love on the big sofa too and then sent out for luncheon, devilled kidneys and potatoes maître d’hôtel and a bottle of claret. This was an incursion of the outside world, however, that did for some minutes remind Godfrey of what it was that he was doing. But it lasted only long enough for the writing of two hasty sick-bed scrawls to Lady Augusta and Elizabeth. And then, since the fire had been banked high all day and the whole set of rooms was now pleasantly warm, at Lisa’s suggestion they abandoned the sofa for the wider territory of the bed. And now she pulled away all the covers and before she took off her blue satin dressing-gown she dragged from the corner a tall cheval-glass and positioned it with care at just the best angle to show them, as they would lie on the wide stretch of the linen sheet, white and inviting if not unsoiled, their two selves. And soon in the poised glass it was moving limbs, tense breasts, thrusting buttocks and such a surplus of delight that Godfrey thought more than once that he was on the point of thundering into unconsciousness.

  In the evening they went to dine at the Café de l’Europe. Its clientèle of well-dressed handsome women of the town and their admirers Godfrey found wonderfully sympathetic, an extension out into the world of the private rule-banished existence he had led for almost twenty-four hours. But he chose a compartment well to the back of the big restaurant.

  They ate lobster and drank champagne, as they had done at their first supper together in much more constrained circumstances.

  And then, hurrying a little at the prospect of being secure once more in the little universe of those two rooms, he took her back. And, paying only the scantiest attention to Mother Merewether’s greeting, they ran together up the stairs with the fat old creature’s hoarse voice floating up after them, ‘That’s the way, that’s the way, can’t wait to fetch each other, can’t wait.’ And then there came again the procession of dim-moving forces, the territory of the instincts, meeting, blending, expanding.

  And sleep.

  And waking. Godfrey to find Lisa tickling the rim of his ear with the pointed nail of one finger.

  The gas-burner was still on and he lay there on the wide soft bed, happy to be no more than just conscious of what was there waiting from him, half an hour away, perhaps an hour, slowly to be reached. Then Lisa began to whisper to him.

  She whispered obscenities. It was the first time she had done so with him. It was the first time, indeed, that he had heard any woman talk bawdy. It was the first time, to tell the truth, that he had at all heard some of the things she said.

  And it seemed to mark the opening out of a new land to him, a land which his maps had not even marked. A place rich with stored delights to be tapped from strange growths. It was a new world and the thought that he had suddenly landed on its shores was to him power and glory.

  With a sense of shriven daring he ventured a contribution of his own. And his heart thumped when Lisa gave a warm snicker of laughter. He had found a new possibility of arousal, and like a stallion made free of broad untouched pastures he roamed and he romped there.

  Once he saw that dawn had broken and the tall brown rectangles of the window blinds had light behind them. Otherwise the night was all a long tumultuous road, sometimes rich coloured, sometimes dark in sleep. And at the end there was a late waking and foolishly he attempted to set off once again, despite detecting a faint aching in the genital area, for the regions of elemental delight.

  Then he found that he could not, that Lisa only half wanted to and that ashy bitterness also lay on the road.

  Abruptly he sat up, slid down off the bed and, without even stopping to wash himself, put on his clothes. His temples were starting slowly to pound with the beginnings of a headache, the dull painful feeling in his sexual organs seemed to be spreading up into his stomach and all along his spine. He felt ready to lash out in temper at the least triggering-off.

  He took pleasure in counting out the sovereigns, ten of them for the two nights, a high rate, and piling them above the dead grate in the sitting-room. As he did so he felt Lisa’s eyes on him, through the opened double-doors, from where she continued to lie on the sheet-ruckled, sheet-fouled bed.

  ‘Well, goodbye,’ he said tersely.

  ‘You’ve had too much of it,’ she commented equably. ‘But don’t take it to heart. Everybody needs a rest some time. Come back tonight. I won’t go out.’

  ‘Please don’t stay in for my sake,’ he answered. ‘You have your living to earn. Go out.’

  Lisa gave a little giggle at this, not very full of life, as if she too was pretty much satiated. But it was a giggle nevertheless, and with a trickle of malice in it.

  ‘Oh dear me,’ she said. ‘I don’t go out as if I was a copying-clerk only who’d lose his situation if he wasn’t at his desk on the stroke of seven each day. I’ll be here if you want me again.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ Godfrey said.

  And on that cold note he left.

  Chapter Nine

  But he did go back. And early in the evening of that same day too. It had been a miserable intervening period. He had reached home longing only for a bath in water as hot as his slummocky Billy could be badgered into getting. And the boy had said that the fire in the kitchen range had gone out and had been cursed more sharply than he ever had been before, had in consequence snivelled so much and laid the new fire so badly that it too had gone out and there had been in the end a wait of two full hours before any sort of heated water had been ready. And during that time what else had there been to do but sit, in the crumpled clothes in which he had set out for the Opera two days before, and stare at the heavy easel that dominated the studio with the nude figure of his model painted on it in the warm monochrome he used while his studies for the draperies that were to cover her lay scattered round on their brown-paper sheets.

 
He had not been able to see, sitting gloomily there, how the whole picture would ever be ready for the Academy. And, suppress the thought how he might, he had not been other than grimly aware that the picture was merely a symbol for Elizabeth herself. Sooner or later he would have to think of her, properly to think, not fob off her possible attentions with hurried lying notes.

  His headache by then was steady and fierce. His throat felt dry and sore. The pain down below too had been from time to time sharply insistent.

  Had he caught something? Was this the first sign? Why did he not know what there was to be known about such things? Should he go round to the club and see if Captain Harnett were there, the authority to consult?

  He had shrunk from the idea.

  And yet he had felt that he must know. He had resolved to make discreet inquiries for the right sort of medical man. After all, he had said to himself sombrely, it is more than likely that Lisa is diseased, a common whore.

  Rancorous thoughts had sculled about in his mind, to cease only when at last Billy came cautiously up the stairs with his first can of hot water. Not that that had been all that hot.

  And his lukewarm soap-scummed bath had made him think of Elizabeth again. Of how he had resolved on an occasion very like the present one to further his acquaintance with her with the object of avoiding for ever that dark other world. On that occasion he had scrubbed at himself fiercely in cold water. Now all that he could bear was the big sodden sponge and this tepid heat.

  He had managed to sleep a little after that and an afternoon spent sitting by the fire had revived him somewhat, if only to the point of making him nervously determined to do nothing that he could not help. He would not find out whether he was infected. He would not offer anything other than the barest fabricated excuses to Elizabeth and Lady Augusta.

  But he had left out of account what those two determined people might have to say. And within a single hour he had received notes from both of them. Lady Augusta’s, sent by messenger, said blandly that she trusted he was recovering from his sudden cold and that if she did not hear from him or see him at Brook Street she would call next day. Elizabeth, writing in the morning and putting her letter in the post, said much the same thing but added that all that a cold needed was the vigorous application of mustard-plasters. She too concluded by threatening to call next day.