Threatened? Why had he thought of her call as that, he had asked himself. Elizabeth should not be a threat to him. Yet she was. He felt at this moment that she was a threat. He had to acknowledge it.
And it was this that had sent him hurrying back to Blue Cross Street to seek refuge in the world of Lisa. He thought of her rooms now as a world, a world apart existing as it were underneath the regular world, unseen by any but those who had the luck mysteriously to drop into it.
He supposed that he could not inhabit it for ever. Quite simply matters of business would sooner or later intrude and have to be dealt with. To do that he would have to step back into the everyday existence where there were bills that were presented and had to be paid.
But for that evening and all the night that followed he was able to thrust aside this thought. He had found Lisa sitting as she had done the previous day in her blue satin dressing-gown with the calf-close boots and the flesh-toned stockings. And she had smiled at him lazily and had said she was glad to see him and would he order champagne.
Then it was as it had been, though at first they were tender with each other and careful, their love-making as it were no more than an aide-mémoire to what had gone before. But, as the night wore on, they began to plunge fully once again into those regions where life was conducted in an altogether different manner from the world above, where conversation was not the medium of exchange but gestures, finger clutchings, mirror pictures made for each other and of each other in the poised cheval-glass, tongue caresses, pressure of limb on limb, slow slidings and sudden frenzied grabbings.
But before dawn the real world slowly thrust itself in on his mind. This was the day, he thought, when both Elizabeth and Lady Augusta would call at Gillingham Place. To those challenges he had to make some answer.
He got off the bed with heavy reluctance. The boards of the floor when he stepped beyond the carpets struck cold at his bare feet. The fire had died to nothing. He hurried into his clothes which seemed to resist him at every movement, awkward and stale.
Then he woke Lisa.
‘Goodbye, my treasure,’ he said. ‘I must go now. I must get back to my own place.’
‘Will you come again?’ she asked, her voice sleepy and more Irish than it usually was.
‘Yes, I’ll come. No, I don’t know. Oh, yes. Yes. I want to. I must. But I don’t know how soon. Will you be all right?’
And that at last evoked her gurgle of laughter.
‘Wasn’t I right enough for years before I met you?’
‘I know you were. But I want you always to—Oh, I don’t know. Goodbye. I’ve left money.’
He put on his hat and went on tiptoe down the stairs. But Mother Merewether, in her chair as usual, stirred as he unlatched the house door.
‘That’s it, my darlings,’ she muttered. ‘That’s it. Go on. That’s the way.’
It was raining, a steady fall. He hoped to find a night-cab. But there was nothing about. He put his head down, hunched his shoulders and strode bleakly through the pattering drops seeing only the reflections of the last street lamps on the gleaming stones of the pavement.
And it was while trudging along like this that he came upon the coffee-stall.
He had passed the place by, just aware of it as a flimsy cabin of boards and canvas with the small glow of a charcoal fire deep inside. But a few yards further on a chance whiff of coffee made him feel that something hot would banish the chill beginning to invade him from his rain-damped coat and the steady bullying of the wind, all the colder here for coming off the blackly flowing river nearby.
He turned back, entered the wind-strained booth, went up to its short counter and asked for a pennyworth of coffee. Taking the little handleless bowl from the stallkeeper, a red-faced rheumy-eyed individual wrapped—and who should blame him?—in numerous waistcoats and woollen comforters, he took a sip of the weak but at least hot liquid and stood back and looked about him.
On a bench near the end of the counter at which the charcoal fire glowed there were four women sitting close together for warmth and company, their damp clothes steaming a little from such heat as there was within the flimsy open-fronted structure. It was from them, he realised, that there came the dank acidy odour of wetted cotton fustian which fought with the smell of the coffee and sometimes won. And, as clear to recognise as the odour, was the reason the four of them were out so late at night: they were poor whores. One had a long ostrich feather, once dyed red, in her hat. It was broken at the tip but proclaimed its purpose defiantly nonetheless. Another had an old silk shawl, final outcome of heaven knows what a slide down the ranks of the secondhand-clothesmen, but again adding a touch of hard-won gaiety to an appearance otherwise wholly depressing. The third had a battered and sodden artificial flower on her bonnet and the fourth shoes that, though they were cracked and shineless, had a flaunting pair of brass heels.
Whores such as these were no new sight to him. But this was, he thought, the first time he had found himself in close company with creatures quite as wretched as these. On his forays into the East End and others of the poorest quarters he had had them brush hopefully past him but tautened by fear he had always moved hurriedly away. Now, thanks to the lessons he had learnt from Lisa, he was simply at ease with these wretches.
‘It’s a wet night then, dear,’ ventured the one with the brass heels.
‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘a nasty night indeed.’
‘You wouldn’t,’ said the one with the broken red feather, speaking with obvious weariness, ‘be feeling good-natured, would you, sir?’
Godfrey shook his head.
‘Why, no, to be honest, just now I’m not,’ he said ‘But I see you have finished your coffee. Would you allow me to buy you all another cup?’
The whores, who plainly had for long been nursing coffee bowls empty of all but a dribble, eagerly accepted the offer. Thin gloveless hands stretched in a moment across the counter. Then from the far edge of the stall, behind his back, a voice spoke. An old, cracked, hoarse, asthmatic, scarcely female voice.
‘And aren’t a poor old woman to get a cup? Aren’t she as good as them?’
He turned.
Seated on the broken remains of an orange-box was a figure that could be dubbed female only because the clothes it wore tended more to skirt than trousers. From under a shapeless hat that few of either sex could have borne to wear, a face peered, hair-sprouting, gummy-eyed, with skin the colour of much-trodden floorboards.
‘Give her a cup too, sir,’ the first of the whores said. ‘She’s one of us.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said to the stallkeeper a little dazedly. ‘Give her a cup as well.’
He looked at the wrecked creature as with hands like the claws of some large unclean bird she hauled herself to her feet. One of them too? Was it really so? Could it be true that this hideous ruin of humanity plied her body for hire?
The whore with the once-bright silk shawl had evidently read his thoughts.
‘You don’t believe what Nelly told you then?’ she said. ‘But it’s true enough. Old Martha’s still on the walk. Ain’t you, Martha?’
The old woman, hearing her name, turned suddenly to Godfrey and wheezed out a high-pitched laugh.
‘Oh, aye,’ she said. ‘I’m good for it still. Good for it still.’
Her breath, mixture of internal foulness and long-pent gin fumes, assailed his nostrils. Her blear eyes looked up at him with a dreadful dulled sparkle.
‘Oh, there’s chaps as’ll pay old Martha yet,’ she cackled. ‘There’s them as cannot afford more nor to share a crust o’ bread, they wants their rammers housed same as anybody else.’
She laid a claw-hand, creepingly cold to the touch, on Godfrey’s own and leered up at him yet more confidentially.
‘Aye,’ she went on, ‘and there’s fine gentlemen too that have a letch for old Martha. Aye, they do. Don’t they, girls? Don’t they?’
She turned in appeal to the whores on the bench.
Th
e one called Nelly gave a coarse laugh.
‘She’s right though,’ she said. ‘There’s some as likes old Martha better nor us, better nor the fanciest girl in the Hay-market. They likes her dirty old fingers round their pego, that’s what they likes.’
Godfrey’s immediate emotion was sheer disgust. It was not so much succeeded by something else as that simultaneously a quite different feeling also manifested itself. To his astonishment, he found he was feeling for old Martha, and for the other four trollops almost paralleled with her by their ready acceptance of what she had said, a strong current of sympathy.
Abruptly he set down his coffee bowl on the counter while something remained in it still, muttered some form of goodnight and strode out into the steadily falling rain. He felt that he must at once analyse what was in his mind. And savour it.
The thought of Martha, at her age and with all the physical unpleasantnesses that clung to her, indulging in acts of sexual excitement, though it ought to have revolted him and indeed though it did do so, at the same time filled him with a contentment. He was glad such things were.
But why? Why, he asked himself. And he could find no answer. Plainly, he would not have thought as he had done unless he had been coming straight from Lisa, her influence strong upon him. But Lisa was by no stretch of imagination really like old Martha. She might not be the ideal of beauty, with her somewhat thin frame, her unabundant hair, her crookedy mouth, but she was undoubtedly sexually attractive. And she was clean too, a thing which had reconciled him to the milieu she represented. Still, the clean and attractive Lisa had made him free in a mysterious way of a world of which the disgusting Martha and her four attendant drabs were citizens.
It was a fact. A curious inexplicable fact, but a fact. Then what of Elizabeth and all she stood for? How did that fit into this scheme of things? Elizabeth seemed as remote from it as the moon above, hidden behind the sullen mantle of dark cloud. Would the cloud part for him? Would he get back to her? He felt for the dark world too strongly now. For all its squalor and horrors it too was comforting, every bit as comforting in a strange way as the neat and cosy firelit rooms in Gower Street, and far stronger. It was a stream swirling powerfully as the nearby Thames, black and glossy, full of half-concealed eddies as the tide ran down.
He was skirting the sleeping shapes of the houses of the Temple now, their forms just emerging with the first slow lightening of day, the day in which both Elizabeth and Lady Augusta would pay him visits. And abruptly he found the thought of seeing either of them more than he could endure. If he saw them, he would have to make elaborate excuses for his absence. To Lady Augusta he would have to invent some reason for his failure to ask Elizabeth to marry him. His tale of a feverish cold was hardly going to be sufficient for that. Whatever he said would have to be something that admitted the possibility of the marriage. It would put him squarely back in the world of marriages and alliances.
And he did not want to go back to that world. He wanted still to stay in Lisa’s.
Yet that as any sort of permanence was unthinkable. Men had married women of the streets, and had generally been pushed out of Society for doing so. Well, Society was not something that meant life and death to him. But what did mean life and death was his painting. That had been the be-all and end-all of his existence up to now. And, though there might seem to be nothing to stop him painting with Lisa as his wife, he had no doubt that the two things were incompatible. He did not want Lisa as a wife. He did not want her even as a regular home-keeping mistress. He wanted her in her world. And that world and the world of his art were simply pole-far apart. His art was aspiring while Lisa’s world—What was Lisa’s world? Was it sinking? Was it grovelling?
If it was he should not want it. But he did. It was strong and he wanted it.
He had come to a halt in the middle of a stretch of deserted pavement, empty as yet of even the earliest movers-about, the lamplighter on his extinguishing round, the postmen, the newsboys, the first scouts of that giant army that was London. Now he swung off into the dawn streets in a sudden burst of fierce walking. Going anywhere, nowhere. But not back home.
Chapter Ten
His feet sent him down to the river and onwards along its course. And bit by bit his eyes began to take in the early morning sights, a baked-potato man out to provide breakfasts for those who had left home before fires were lit, the just open doors of a public house with a barmaid looking at the world with evident sourness, a sweep tramping along with his round-headed brushes over his shoulder.
And there was the river too, slate-grey in the morning light now that the steady patter of the rain had at last come to a stop and a constant flurry of small happenings. A string of barges was already moving slowly up against the seaward-flowing tide. Brown-sailed fishing smacks were putting into the steps at Billingsgate, their decks glinting with their silver catches. A tall-funneled Citizen penny steamer, its paddle-wheels churning, was making her way across from the pier on the far side by London Bridge, a knot of huddled passengers on her deck. He stopped and looked.
But to halt had been fatal. Only brisk walking prevented contradictory thoughts entering his head.
He pressed on down streets where already shopmen were taking down the shutters, ready to catch a little early trade when the huge march of the countless clerks from all the many suburbs of the life-sucking metropolis began. Soon he found himself among the docks, already busy as noonday. There were men at work in hundreds here, dock-labourers, seamen, waterside-labourers, ballast-heavers, lightermen. There were the sailors, English, Chinese, Negroes, Malays, white-turbaned Lascars, red-shirted Americans, big raw-faced fair-haired Swedes. Scraps of talk and snatches of song in every tongue there was floated on the air to be drowned by the squealing roar of cranes rattling chain through pulleys, by the thumping of barrel and bale as they struck the stones of the quays, by the groaning of carts slowly starting into motion, by the restless clop of waiting drayhorses’ heavy hooves, by the crack of carters’ whips, by the clatter on the cobbles of wheelbarrows by the score, by shouts and oaths.
To make his way along at all it was necessary to keep a sharp eye out and there was plenty to distract his mind. The hum and roar of mighty business blotted out everything. Even the sight of flaring-clothed women, sleepily emerging to visit the shops, the chandlers, the tally-shops with their garments to be bought by instalments, the slop-shops, the tobacco shops, the coffee-shops and the eating-houses, did not send his thoughts back to Lisa and the bedraggled whores of the night past. There was too much going on. Bustle banged him out of it.
Up on the unloading and loading ships sailors marched round capstans, bent over the spokes, hoarsely singing as they winched the cargoes up, ‘Oh, Mexico was covered in snow, the grub was bad and the pay was low’. Others swarmed up and down the intricate rigging of masts, splicing and mending, calling to each other, sending long ropes swittering down to the ground, all like so many jabbering darting monkeys. Yet others stood in boats or swung from cradles over ships’ sides, scraping with sharp shrieks of metal on encrusted copper-sheathing or busy with big paintbrushes, making the air reek. Everywhere there was activity, noisy, vigorous, purposeful.
At some point he realised that he was extremely hungry. A whiff of salty oysters from the open door of a shop, the ground in front of it littered with the broken shells, suddenly sent his gastric juices flowing and he hunted quickly round for a public house looking less brutally rough than the generality. He found one before long and ate a plate of cold beef and drank a pint of Barclay Perkins Entire in the company of men who looked like the mates of unloading ships.
When he came out into the bustle again he knew he had left it too late to go home and be found in bed or sitting wanly in an armchair when Elizabeth or Lady Augusta called. Too late. They would simply have to accept that he had gone off the rails.
The die was cast. Yet it had not fallen for the odd numbers either, for Lisa’s world. He found before long that his art was making irre
sistible demands on him. There were so many sights that he had seen and longed to transfer to paper. He went into a chandler’s and bought some rough sheets and a carpenter’s pencil.
And for the rest of the afternoon he wandered on, past the provisions warehouses, the hides warehouses, the tea warehouses, the tallow warehouses, the deep-mouthed wine cellars, busying himself in catching in pencil the myriad activities of this great entrance-way to the huge city. There was a vessel new in with silks and condiments from Java, her spicy smell overcoming the prevailing odour of soft rich tar and tangy metallic river-water, her Lascars lithe in the rigging. There was a clipper newly arrived from Australia with gold in her cargo and a platoon of soldiers there to guard it. Their scarlet made a wonderful splash of stiff formality among the loose flowing clothes of the sailors and the labourers. There was a three-master unloading ice from Norway, the great dull crystal blocks swinging down from her derricks into the waiting carts to be taken to the ice-pits to await the summer. The sight reminded him by contrast of seeing an orange-clipper from the Azores lying near the Custom House and unloading her golden sun-fruit into lighters for the stores of Botolph Lane. The two seemed to be the extremes of what the biggest capital of the world demanded in prodigious tribute.
Or there were the side activities of the great port that provided magnetic scenes for his pencil, the barefoot boys in old sailors’ jackets playing leap-frog over the bollards, an old woman slipping like a grey shadow with a battered basket on her arm searching for anything dropped or broken off in all the bangings and swingings of the great unloading process. And then there were the parrots. He must have seen more than a score of them in the course of the afternoon, flaming dashes of colour on the shoulders of bare-armed tattooed sailors, squawking harshly amid all the excitement.
The Underside Page 10