But, against these trifling scutters, there was all round him and added to at every minute by almost every event of the day, the huge sense of order. Things were being put in their places, massively. Bales, bundles, crates, boxes, casks, chests, each to its allotted place. He saw great barrels of port once trundled rapidly one after the other from the unloading crane on tiny-wheeled trolleys across to the entrance to a great cavernous cellar, there to roll thundering down wooden chutes each to end in its assigned position.
And he was fined, for smoking. He had settled himself on a comfortable bale and had lit a cigar. A man in a frock-coat wearing a round hat, walking by with a bundle of papers in his hand, turned aside to him.
‘Five shilling fine,’ he said, jerking the sheaf of papers towards his cigar.
That and no more.
He fished the coins out of his pocket, handed them over and extinguished the cigar under his heel. The man moved on.
When he got nearly as far as Shadwell and the sky, seen through the tracery of masts and cordage, was beginning to lose its light, he found he had become almost dizzy with the sheer overpoweringness of it all. He turned from the movement and the noise, the swinging casks, the jolting crashes of great bundles of hides and huge baulks of timber, and went into the mean little streets running away from dockland in search of somewhere to take refreshment.
Soon he began to think he had made a mistake. The beerhouses he saw at the street corners were dark and villainous. Among the close-packed houses the light was fading fast and there were few lamps. Suspicious-looking hangdog men and women stood at the open doorways and watched him as he passed. Black pools of water from the rain of the night still stood in the unpaved roadways. Whistles and shouts came from the side turnings, unaccountable and menacing. A raucous burst of noise greeted him from the open flap of a spirit cellar and he caught a glimpse of bearded red-shirted men with little pewter measures in their hands, drunk and quarrelsome.
Ahead of him a mature looking woman, bareheaded and barefoot, came out of one turning and crossed into another. Two or three boys were scampering after her and he heard one of them call out, ‘Have you had it tonight, dear?’ The woman turned to fling a curse and her hair came tumbling down.
Once he caught a whiff of sickly sweetness and looking in through the unshuttered window of the house that it seemed to be coming from, he saw a Lascar with a long-stemmed pipe which he was heating at a candle-end and guessed that this was opium being smoked. And at the next corner, in the pale light of the sole gas-lamp he had yet seen, he came slap upon a fight between two slatternly drabs. The sight repelled him. One had blood sticking streakily to mouth and chin from where it had poured from her nose and the other had an open cut above one eye. Both had torn clothes and both were yelling drunken abuse.
A small crowd had collected, men, shrill-voiced women and children too, relishing the entertainment, and it was not easy to get past. On the other hand he was no longer sure that by going back he could find his way to the docks or the river again.
‘Kick ’er, Sadie.’
‘Get yer nails in, Poll.’
Roars of laughter greeted each blow.
He decided to try to slip through. He would have succeeded too, so engrossed were the onlookers. But at the very moment when there was least room between the soot-blackened wall of the corner house and the back of the man nearest him, a great broad-shouldered coalheaver, a particularly vicious move by one of the two fighters sent the whole rough circle of watchers swaying in his direction.
The coalheaver bumped into him, turned his head, and at the sight of his tall hat broke into a wild grin.
‘’Ere,’ he yelled. ‘Look what we got ’ere. A gent. A real toff gent come to see the fight.’
‘No, no,’ said Godfrey in instant denial, as quickly regretted.
‘No?’ the coalheaver jeered. ‘Don’t like fighting then?’
He turned to the crowd whose attention was wavering between the two women and this new attraction.
‘I tell you wot,’ he shouted. ‘’E don’t like to see ladies a-misbehavin’ o’ theirselves.’
‘Please,’ Godfrey said, coldly as he could. ‘Let me pass.’
‘Let me pass,’ came a voice from the crowd, cruelly mocking his accent.
‘You don’t want ter pass,’ said the coalheaver. ‘I tell you wot you want ter do, me fine gentleman. You want ter be judge o’ this ’ere contest.’
The suggestion met a roar of acclamation from the ring of wan excited faces round, and Godfrey found himself almost bodily lifted into the very front of the close circle of torn-shirted, grimy, crop-headed figures that quickly re-formed round the two blood-marked women. The rolled sheets of his sketches slid from under his arm, to be trampled in the mud.
‘All right, ladies,’ shouted the coalheaver. ‘Go to it now. But no foul fighting, mind, the judge’s ’ere.’
Before he had finished one of the women had lashed out at the other. A jagged wound leapt up on her sallow left cheek. Plainly the attacker had taken advantage of the lull to acquire a weapon.
The wounded woman let out a shriek that rang and echoed in the narrow streets round, and then she hurled herself at her attacker, fingers clawing.
‘Go fer ’er belly,’ shouted someone from the ring of avid watchers.
And the hate-filled virago ducked sharply down, grabbed her opponent’s skirt by its muddy and torn hem and jerked it high. Long, stockingless, dirt-splashed legs were revealed in the faint light of the single streetlamp. And a dark bush of pubic hair.
The surrounding mob yelled its delight. And Godfrey, pinioned by the broad coalheaver so that he could not but look on, felt part sickened by the flap of dangling flesh on the attacker’s face, part disgusted by the sight of such degraded femininity, but part heart-thumpingly willing to be there.
And then came a louder shout from somewhere behind in the darkness. A single yelled word.
‘Peelers.’
The crowd in a moment lost its cohesiveness. The coalheaver let Godfrey’s arms drop. Some of the watchers turned and ran, others slipped silently into the shadows. The two fighters gave each other one last glare of hatred and disappeared one one way, the other another.
Godfrey felt himself banged from behind, jostled forwards in the rush. Without thinking, he too took to his heels, running hard along an alley hardly wide enough for two to go abreast and black as pitch except for a narrow streak of violet sky above. He stumbled along, fleeing and knowing that he was fleeing, convinced in his turmoil that he had committed some offence that would not stand examination.
Soon he realised that he was alone. His fellow fugitives had slipped into doorways one by one. He came to a halt and leant against a house wall, panting and feeling sick.
He supposed that in this thick darkness he was as safe as anywhere from the swooping policemen.
He smiled with bitter wryness. Godfrey Mann, afraid now of the police like the veriest common criminal.
And then from the head of the narrow alley there came a gruff call and a moment later the light of a bullseye swung down towards him. It fell far short of where he was leaning against the wall but panic thoughts at once invaded his head. Should he crouch down? Lie flat even on the filthy unpaved ground? Should he run?
He stayed where he was, paralysed. The wavering light of the bullseye, not extraordinarily powerful, even mild, advanced along the alley.
And at last it fell on him. It swung slowly upwards from his boots. When it reached his hat a voice spoke from behind it, respectful in tone but noticeably a little curious.
‘Good evening, sir.’
‘Good evening, policeman,’ Godfrey replied, striving to make his voice easy.
‘We’ve been having a bit of trouble,’ the policeman said, still holding the soft bullseye light on him. ‘You didn’t see anything by chance of a fight between a pair of women, sir?’
‘No. No, there was nothing. I did notice a crowd as I came up. But they ran off
. I have been walking. Walking round among the docks, and I am afraid I lost my way.’
‘Very easily done, sir,’ said the policeman blandly. ‘These ain’t parts for a gentleman to know his way about in.’
‘No. No, I suppose not.’
‘Now if I was to put you right for Shadwell High Street, you could pick up a cab there, sir.’
‘Yes. That would be excellent. Thank you.’
The policeman preceded him back up the alley, a massive figure in tall crested helmet and heavily falling cape. At the top he gave him some directions.
‘Thank you. Most kind. And can I give you a shilling for a glass when you’re off duty?’
‘Thank you, sir. That’s very good of you.’
When he came at last to Shadwell High Street, Godfrey saw with pleasure the bright globes outside a large public house, somewhere promising better things than dangerously poor food and beer to which heaven knows what had been added. He almost ran to the place, suddenly acutely conscious of the sharp menace and hard bareness of the narrow streets behind him.
Inside, the bars were by contrast all that he wanted. Light from a dozen big gas-pendants reflected in as many ornately-framed mirrors hissed and flared banishing every shadow. Bottles, glasses and pewter pots shone sparklingly. White-aproned pot-boys bustled to and fro. There were good fires and everywhere laughter and busy talk. On the walls rotund casks, interspersed with hanging nets of bright lemons, gleamed and glinted. Tobacco smoke swirled in the air, its cheerful fragrance mingling with the soft peachy smell of beer and the sharper smell of humankind, sweaty and strong, but nonetheless warm and even welcoming. From above, on the first floor, came the sound of a small band tootling and fiddling and the regular thump-thump of dancing.
He ordered himself hot port negus and a dish of steaming sausages with mashed potatoes and sat down gratefully, lending half an ear to the busy talk all round him.
There were plenty of women in the company, every one of them gay, to judge by their flaunting dresses of violet, scarlet and bright blue, the many pairs of red morocco boots to be seen and the bare heads with shining oiled hair. Some were sitting on the knees of men at the tables and others were walking about here and there, plainly waiting to be picked up. Much of the conversation he heard was thick with open references to the final object of the encounters between man and woman.
Just behind him, standing where he could observe them in one of the big mirrors, there was a solid-looking man of thirty-five or so dressed in a grey frock-coat buttoned to the chin—he unhesitatingly put him down as a professional burglar—and a whore in violet, busy consuming a saucerful of peas with a leaden spoon. The tang of the vinegar they were soaked in came clearly to his nostrils as did the couple’s talk to his ears.
‘Sophy James,’ the burglar exclaimed loudly. ‘Know her? Why, I knew her well afore she married that bloke, the gentleman’s son.’
‘Him as gave ’er the baby?’
The burglar pulled the short clay pipe from his mouth and laughed in genuine pleasure.
‘That babe was mine, that was,’ he said. ‘Sophy was carrying it afore ever she went a-servanting there.’
‘And the young son married ’er all the same?’
‘He did. Fell in love with ’er soon as ever she stepped inside the door and she had ’im in her bed that very night. So the boy was born in wedlock. And you know where he is now, that young shaver o’ mine?’
‘No. Go on.’
‘I met Sophy in the street not a month past, and she told me. She don’t forget an old friend. That boy that’s mine, if ever son were father’s, is getting hisself this minute the best o’ college eddications.’
Godfrey ate, listened, marvelled, felt warmed.
Presently he realised that a girl who had just come in, a pretty young thing in a green dress with a Paisley shawl on her shoulders, was looking at him with particular interest. He wondered suddenly whether he should beckon her over. For less than a guinea in these parts he could have all he wanted from her and she was fresh and healthy-looking as a country-girl. Should he let his eyes meet hers? It would be all that was necessary. Then buy her something to drink and in a little go off with her?
It was placed there in front of him. And he felt that this country-green creature would be perhaps the middle path between the dark world of Lisa and the world of Elizabeth, shining and aspiring. He did not want to choose between them now. Should he take this way out?
Then he saw that in thinking about the girl he had unwittingly been staring at her and she was threading her way through the noisily talking and laughing drinkers towards him.
She arrived and leant forward across the table.
‘Are you going to buy me something then?’ she asked in an accent that confirmed his guess at her country origins.
‘By all means. What would you like?’
‘A quartern of Old Tom’d suit very well.’
So, his country lass liked gin. Yet, he admitted as he paid his fivepence and received the order, the drink had clearly not diminished the freshness of the creature’s complexion nor the happy brightness of her eyes.
‘Well, what’s your name, my dear?’ he asked.
‘It’s Betsy,’ she replied with the same air of simple candour with which she had asked him for a drink.
Sitting talking to her, all his first impressions were confirmed. Betsy was really unspoilt and transparently straightforward in the half-damaged world all around. He supposed that she was not unique. Certainly in her story, which bit by bit he learnt, she made no pretensions to being out of the ordinary. She came from Essex, she said, where her father was a farm labourer. One day a young lad not much older than herself had persuaded her to make love for the first time in the corner of a field.
‘I was liking it fine,’ she said, ‘a-lying under him there, till who should come round the corner of the hedge but my Dad, and in his hand his scythe. Afore I knew what was happening he had the blade of it into my Robert’s rump, and he was leaping up and hollering away down the field like the bull was arter him.’
She leant back and laughed aloud at the recollection.
‘But my Dad wouldn’t have me in the house arter,’ she said at last, wiping away the tears of mirth. ‘So up I come to Lunnon.’
‘And you’ve been gay here ever since?’ Godfrey asked.
‘Why, yes. What else is there for me to do?’
‘And how long has this been?’
‘I hardly knows. Three year, may be four. It was haymaking when Robert and I was in that field, I do know that.’
Godfrey talked on. He felt that Betsy brought all the freshness of the hayfields of her early days into the garish busy atmosphere. And, as she chattered back in answer to his questions about her life both in the country and in the magnet-metropolis, he found that the decision which he had been unable to take as dawn had broken had now, in the recesses of his mind, taken itself.
He stood up.
‘Well, my dear,’ he said, ‘I’m, going to leave you now. But please don’t think it’s because I don’t like you. Here, let me give you a sovereign to show I do.’
Betsy took the gold, rang it on the table in front of her with naive shrewdness, pocketed it quickly and looked up at him.
‘But why won’t you come wi’ me, seeing as how you’ve paid?’ she asked.
‘I have an appointment. That’s all.’
‘What ‘pointment’s that then as you’ll give me a shiner to go to?’
‘It’s with a lady. The lady I hope quite soon to marry.’
Chapter Eleven
Out in Shadwell High Street Godfrey was lucky enough to espy an empty cab trotting quietly westwards. He ran after it shouting and eventually attracted the driver’s attention.
‘Where to, sir?’ the man said when Godfrey came up.
And he found himself momentarily nonplussed. He looked at his watch, thinking himself lucky not to have lost that as well as his sketches in the mean streets.
He gave the address and climbed in.
Sitting in the dark interior of the swinging, swaying vehicle, he tried to bring some order into his thoughts. Yes, he was going to Gower Street now, and he was happy to be doing so. His determination to see Elizabeth, to establish himself once more as a dweller in her world, was firm. But just why had he taken it? Or—so mysterious events seemed—had it taken him? It almost appeared so. Listening across that public-house table to pretty Betsy’s tale, being warmed by her simple view of the predicaments of her life, he had found that his mind was made up.
He thought now that the process must have, in fact, begun long before he met Betsy or even entered the warm and brilliantly lit atmosphere of the public house. It had become clear to him that, after all, the world of Lisa, that cocoon of time wrapped in the sheets of a bed, was not the only world. The world of Elizabeth, which for two days and more had seemed to be gradually paling away to mere outlines, had, as he had listened to Betsy, swiftly taken on substance again. The colours had been filled in.
He realised suddenly, just as they went out of Cheapside into Holborn, that curiously Betsy for all that she was simply and no more than a street-walker, was in fact of Elizabeth’s party. She lived in the world of payments and receipts, for all that what she trafficked in was her own rosy favours. And Elizabeth, though the notion of prostitution was abominable to her, and though she had an income and did not have to ask herself each day where food and lodging were to come from, applied her income to the necessities of the world, received and paid her bills. How curious it was. Yet the two of them were alike, figures of determination and energy, striving forwards.
Determination and energy. It had been, surely, the extraordinary display of purposefulness that the whole of dockland exhibited that had begun his cure, that massive putting into order of the varied world’s commodities. Yet was he cured? Had he been ill? And had the right draught administered at the right time cured him? The world of Lisa, though its colours were now fading fast for him, did not seem all the same a sickness.
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