The Underside

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘Good morning, Elizabeth. None the worse for the excitements of yesterday?’

  ‘No,’ she answered. ‘No.’

  She sounded thoughtful, a little surprised, as if she had plainly expected to have suffered from all that that extraordinary day had been, and now found that it was rather the other way round.

  ‘I had a word with Sir Charles last night after dinner,’ he said. ‘He suggested October the twentieth as their most convenient day for the wedding. I said that it was entirely suitable to me. But … ’

  He left unmentioned the obstacle that lay between them and which might yet mean that there would be no wedding.

  Elizabeth looked at him directly.

  ‘I told you yesterday,’ she said, ‘that there is no point in pretences between you and me. I love you, Godfrey. Perhaps I always shall. But unless we can go together into what it was that made you run from the prospect of our marrying, go as deep as we find we must, then I do not see that we can marry.’

  He looked at the pattern of the carpet at his feet. Now it had come, the moment. He found himself empty of words as a scoured pail.

  ‘Godfrey, my dear,’ Elizabeth said, her grey eyes bending down on him, ‘believe me, if we can bring this to the light those shadows that have seemed so dark will no longer be there. I promise you that.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. I think they will be banished. I know that they will. I want them banished.’

  Into his mind there came the recollection of the policeman who had found him at the end of the day he had walked so long in dockland, of the rays of that bullseye lantern that had shown him eventually the way that had led directly back to this very room. Yes, a bullseye ray of light, soft but searching, that was what he wanted again now.

  And, hardly knowing anything else was there, he stifled the remembrance of the other feeling with which he had greeted the bullseye: the dislike.

  ‘Then,’ said Elizabeth, standing by the window still, with the street bright in the morning sunshine behind her, ‘you must, quite simply, tell me everything.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You ran away from the responsibilities before you on that day after we had been to Greenwich, just as you had run away after the opera?’

  Godfrey felt as if he was raising his head to look straight into a searing heat.

  ‘It wasn’t simply that,’ he said, wishing there were other words to say.

  ‘Then what was it, my dear?’

  She was looking at him with such evident and willing sympathy that the confession suddenly was almost easy.

  ‘I was not simply running away: I was running towards.’ ‘Towards?’

  ‘Towards the life I led when I was not with you. Towards— I don’t know why—a life of darkness and squalor.’

  ‘But where was this? Where did you go?’

  The surgeon’s scalpel gently lifted another tiny layer of flesh.

  ‘To a place in St Giles. There and elsewhere.’

  ‘St Giles? That’s Seven Dials, isn’t it? I’ve heard a good deal about that from Mr Balneal. But, Godfrey, it’s appalling, filthy, as bad as any of the places we care for. And worse. Far more morally sordid.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it is all you say.’

  Elizabeth said nothing, but after a moment walked over to the table with its piles of solidly statistics-crammed reports and laid her hand on one of them as if she wished to draw strength from all that had been made clear and lucid.

  ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘I suspected that it must be a woman. But that it should have been a woman of that sort, you who in your painting aspire so high.’

  She yet turned and looked at him, forcing her head up.

  Sheer admiration brought it out of him then.

  ‘Elizabeth. No, I must tell it to you all. It was not a woman: it was women, many of them.’

  Her grey gaze did not falter even at this.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I had not foreseen that. My dear, of course I have thought about this. I had asked myself, lying awake, what it was that could have taken you away. I had accepted that there might be a woman, even that there must be a woman. I had known that she could hardly be a person of the kind that you should aspire to. But I had not, even at the worst, imagined this.’

  Godfrey saw, holding his face steady to hers, that crystal tears were swimming in those lustrous eyes.

  ‘No,’ she said, lifting her head a little. ‘No, you have told me what the facts of the case are, and I will accept them. Even these.’

  He took an impulsive step towards her and put out his hands. He wanted to offer her support. The spectacle of her distress affected him to trembling.

  Then he checked himself. She might recoil at his touch. She ought to recoil at his touch.

  But she saw his suddenly imposed hesitation, evidently guessed at once the reason for it. And, with a solemnity that was like an oath-taking, she extended her hand to him.

  He took it in both of his and clasped it hard. They stood in silence. Outside a man was calling ‘Knives to grind, knives to grind.’ In the room the air was still as if it had been transfixed in a painting.

  At last Elizabeth spoke.

  ‘My dearest one, I cannot go on now. I feel the weakness, but I cannot say anything more. Will you—Godfrey, will you let it rest for a little?’

  He released his grasp of her hand. It fell to her side. He saw that she had gone white with exhausting emotion.

  ‘Sit down, my dear. Sit here. Shall I ring for your landlady? Ought you to take something?’

  She let him lead her to a chair and sat in it huddled. But she would not let him do more for her, and he stood watching her while gradually the colour came back to her cheeks. As last she straightened her back and looked up at him.

  ‘Godfrey, it must be soon.’

  ‘Yes. It shall be.’

  ‘Dearest, tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  They had arranged that Elizabeth should come to Gillingham Place. Miss Watkyn could not be encouraged to keep to her bed every day. They had fixed on nine o’clock, because Elizabeth had an appointment to go with a Medical Officer of Health on a tour of inspection.

  Godfrey was waiting to receive her by quarter to nine, having already breakfasted, instructed Billy to make sure the studio was clean and tidy and gone for a stroll along the river while the tidying took place. Now the floor was swept, the chairs banged free of dust and the Venus Verticordia had been taken from its clamps on the easel and hidden away out of sight.

  Elizabeth arrived to the minute.

  ‘It’s Miss ‘ills, sir,’ Billy announced, opening the creaky door of the studio with a flourish.

  Elizabeth looked round as she came in.

  ‘Good boy, Billy,’ she said. ‘You’re keeping it all very well.’

  Billy’s face beneath his tow-mop hair shone with pleasure.

  ‘Can we go out on to the balcony?’ Elizabeth asked when he had gone. ‘I came here in a closed-up fly and I’d like the fresh air.’

  With some difficulty Godfrey got out on to the wide balcony overhanging the river. It had not been used since the autumn and the door to it was jammed with rags against the cold. He stepped on to the wide boards and tentatively jumped up and down.

  ‘It seems safe still,’ he said to Elizabeth. ‘Step out. You were right, it’s very pleasant.’

  It was. A light breeze was blowing from across the river, a little chilly but invigorating. The sun was shining at intervals as banks of white cloud moved across the sky. Out on the wide brown surface of the water boats were moving, briskly or slowly according to their nature, a fussy penny steamer belching smoke, barges swinging majestically as they made their way upstream with the tide.

  They leant on the balcony’s wooden rail and stared down at the swirling water under them.

  ‘There’s more to be said between the two of us,’ Elizabeth began after a few moments.

  ‘I suppose there is,’ Godfrey answered with reluctance. ‘Though
surely now you know almost everything.’

  ‘No, dearest. You told me that you were not running away from your responsibilities in the world but that you were running towards—towards those low women.’

  ‘Yes. I felt that.’

  ‘You wanted them? Those and no other?’

  He felt the strongest unwillingness to plunge his hand once more into the scalding water.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, with an abruptness. ‘I told you. I did feel that. I felt it and that is all there is to be said about it.’

  ‘No, my dearest, we must go deeper. If we leave it at that, it is going to happen again. Is it not?’

  She turned from her contemplation of the swirling river and looked at him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, it could happen again. My dear, I do not want it to. I mean at this moment with all the force that is in me that it should not happen. But I can see no reason why that pull will not one day prove too strong for me still.’

  ‘Godfrey, it will not if we can get to the roots of it. We can pluck it out. We can hold up those dark roots to the light and see them wither.’

  Her eyes poured out that sweeping-all-before-it radiance. He straightened his shoulders.

  ‘Yes, we must try. I see that. I see it.’

  ‘Then, dearest, look at it. What was it that you found in those women? What was it exactly?’

  He tried to produce an answer. But the words necessary were unsayable, even within his own mind.

  He stood in silence, staring out at the lively river scene in front of him, seeing nothing.

  ‘Dearest?’

  He rounded on her.

  ‘You cannot understand,’ he burst out. And then, snatching at the excuse, he added: ‘No woman could understand.’

  ‘You forget what I am. I am a doctor.’

  The rage ebbed from him.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ he said quietly reasoning. ‘I know that you are acquainted with every part of the human body, of the male body, even the most intimate. Yet I cannot believe that you can truly understand how it is necessary for a man to give rein to the urges of his sexual nature. Yes, of course those are supposed not to be let go uncontrolled. Oh yes, the clergymen tell us it is our duty to remain chaste, chaste till we have income enough to marry, to provide a wife with a home and a carriage. A carriage indeed. And in all this time we are expected not to have bodily urges.’

  He felt he was arguing well, that he was putting a good case. Yet was this the case he ought to be putting? Was he not evading the true issue?

  ‘My dearest,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Believe me, I can see that complete chastity for so long as that is perhaps an unreal ideal.’

  ‘Perhaps?’ he answered quickly. ‘I tell you that when men are talking freely amongst themselves, without any cant, it pretty soon becomes quite clear that there is no complete chastity. Why, I don’t believe a single young man of any sort, curate, Roman monk, be he what he may, is ever totally chaste. Oh, they may avoid going to women, but if chastity means altogether refraining from sexual acts then I tell you they don’t achieve it, not one of them.’

  ‘They practise masturbation?’ Elizabeth said.

  Godfrey turned from his contemplation of the brown swift-running water below and looked at her in awe. Was there another woman in London, in the wide world, who could have referred to such a subject with such simplicity and calmness?

  He must fling himself on to this pure searching stream. He must give her his full trust. Let her probe, unfold, go where she would.

  And in the meantime he answered her with a frankness which he hoped equalled her own.

  ‘Yes. That is what I meant. Masturbation. The vice is practised, I truly believe, by every man there is at some time or another.’

  ‘Very well then,’ Elizabeth said, also turning from looking down at the river to face him directly. ‘Why then, if that is the case, did you not content yourself with that? Why instead those terrible forays into the dirt?’

  It was here. The question had been asked. But he could not bring himself even yet to pronounce his answer. A last evasion presented itself to him.

  ‘Why not masturbation,’ he said. ‘Surely you, as a doctor, know the dangers of that? You must be aware of the effects of the vice, the loss of— of—’

  ‘Of semen?’

  ‘Yes. That is the word.’

  He must, he must, entrust himself to this lighthouse beam of a soul.

  ‘Opinions differ as to those dangers,’ Elizabeth went on steadily ‘Did you know that?’

  ‘No. No, I did not,’ he answered, disconcerted.

  ‘Oh, I grant you the majority of medical men will tell you that the human male has only so much semen to expend, that the results of excess and of improper substitutes for sexual intercourse can only be degeneration and may even be death. But I believe that the men who argue thus are blinding themselves. They will not look at the facts. Does the saliva exist in limited quantities only? No, every person who has studied physiology will tell you that enough saliva is manufactured by the body for whatever purposes it is needed while there is sufficient liquid taken in to make it possible. But when it comes to the production of semen they cease to see simple scientific processes at work and throw themselves instead into phantasmagorias of superstition.’

  Godfrey turned away and looked out over the Thames. It was not that his admiration for Elizabeth had been checked by the frankness of her words. Far from it. The way she had cut her path through so much nettle-sour undergrowth had only increased his wonder. But she had cut that path, and now she had reached the heart of the matter.

  ‘But, dearest,’ came the quiet voice, with that individual warmth of American in it. ‘But, dearest, even if you have been under a misapprehension about the results of masturbation, that does not account for what it was that you did. Indeed, if fears for your bodily health kept you from that, how much more so should they have kept you from the very real dangers that come from associating with women who go from man to man indiscriminately?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered, his face turned to the distance. ‘I was aware of those dangers, though by some blessed chance I seem to have escaped them. And, yes, they even acted not as a discouragement to me but as an added attraction.’

  He stopped. Had he not nearly said it now? Was not that it?

  Elizabeth was silent, as if she sensed that there needed no extra pressure from her now.

  Out in the river, a police cutter, its oars flashing in perfect time, made its way swiftly up towards Waterloo Bridge. A suicide? The thought passed across the surface of Godfrey’s mind.

  Then, almost somnambulistically, he spoke again.

  ‘That is it, Elizabeth. That is what I have to tell you. That the very lowness of it all, the very evil, the dark itself, exercised the fascination for me. It is the underside. It is the underside that calls.’

  He was holding the thick wooden rail of the balcony in front of him as if he would crush it like spun sugar in his grip.

  ‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Yes, now it is there. Now it is out. We have seen it, my dearest one. We have seen it clearly. Now it can die.’

  Godfrey turned to her, slowly and wearily.

  ‘It will die?’ he asked, as if the question hardly mattered.

  ‘Yes,’ Elizabeth answered, all light, all confidence. ‘Yes, it will die. It is dying now, with every minute in the air. And, my darling, now nothing stands between us. Nothing ever shall.’

  So, Godfrey thought like a shipwrecked sailor picking up articles likely to be of everyday use as he stood on the strand after the great storm, so Elizabeth and I are to be married on October the twentieth next. It will be, unless Lady Augusta’s arrangements go astray, at St George’s Church, Hanover Square. The Bishop of Stanmore will officiate.

  Elizabeth had declared to him that no obstacle any longer existed. The great surgical operation had been conducted and the patient was still alive. It was over. From now on the whole tenor of his life would be quite d
ifferent. It would be. It must be. The light had brought its brightness to the innermost depths and all now must be well.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Snow. How extraordinary that snow should choose to fall as early as October the twentieth. Almost unheard of, but there it was, a deep fall after a week of colder and colder weather. There must be three inches or more of it, Godfrey thought, stepping with care out of the jobbing-stables victoria as it arrived in front of St George’s Church just around the corner from Hanover Square.

  The pavements outside the church and the steps up to the heavy portico had been well swept. But large flakes were still descending and he had to cross to the shelter as quickly as he could. Yet, once there, he could not deny himself the pleasure of standing and watching the crystal-white fluff as it swooped and danced downwards in the cold air.

  It was beautiful, wonderfully beautiful, pure and out of this world. Yes, perhaps after all snow on the wedding day was to be welcomed. It was a benediction. Nature was bestowing her most intricate and lovely gift.

  And it had transformed the whole swarming city. All the mire and the beastliness had vanished. In the space of the hours of darkness they had been blotted out under this extraordinary carpet of soft and infinitely pure whiteness. All the roar and the rush had been stilled. As he had driven up from Blackfriars there had not been a single carriage or cab, waggon or omnibus to be seen. Everywhere there had been a profound and magical silence, broken only by the shouts of the occasional party of boys snow-balling, their cries made crystal pure by the stillness of the air. There had been only these and the foot passengers with business too important to wait, heavily great-coated trudging figures.

  It was almost as if, he thought, laughing at himself for it, as if the whole great rush and whirl of London had come to a pause, a moment of awe, because of the ceremony that was about to take place at its heart. As if all the city’s millions had halted in wonder at the solemnity and the marvel of the joining of himself and Elizabeth.

  And for this moment of moments had not the whole scene been transformed? The daily mud-spattered surfaces of the streets with their dirt and their dung had been replaced by the infinite purity of the snow. The houses, that yesterday had been ordinary structures and tomorrow would be so again, were for this morning fairy palaces, each lintel and cornice with its line of pure white, every roof no longer grimy with soot but clothed in this heaven-sent mantle. The trees that an autumn’s fogs had left sodden and drooping-leaved were suddenly again things of unparalleled beauty, each branch and twig bearing in the stillness its delicate burden of crystal whiteness.