The Underside

by H. R. F. Keating

  And the joy sang.

  Then, in a moment, it seeped totally away.

  What was he doing? He, Godfrey Mann, the painter? The aspirer, the guide?

  Sickened with himself, he turned and broke into a lurching run in the darkness. More than once he blundered into trees.

  And then he fell full-length over a row of low hurdles and sent a flock of sheep galloping and baaing wildly into the night. He lay where he was wiping his hand on the fog-wetted grass till he had torn the tough blades away and was scraping at the earth below, forcing it cleansingly under his fingernails.

  But, though he had tracked his way back home then, he knew that having tasted the rank and gloating waters once more he could now go back to them again as easily as a swimmer slipping into his proper element. His wedding in the snow no longer seemed the crowning of the story: its import surely was as transient as that snow and as insubstantially pretty.

  So he found without surprise next day that his mind was continually assailed by the old underside life. And he both ceased making love with Elizabeth and told her that his night’s walking had disabused him of his notion about a child. A plain lie. Was not a child a true sign of something missing in her for him? The underside richness?

  Outwardly he went on in his customary even-tempered course. A little more than a week, nine days exactly, was to go by from the moment when he had realised that his life might not after all be a high and endlessly level plateau stretching to the end of his allotted span but that he might well have been simply in a pausing place on a journey that would take him at last to depths deeper than any he had yet imagined. But during those days, while he hung like a metal cylinder on a fine thread equally drawn between two strong magnets, there occurred three or four instances when, had things been as they had been before, he and Elizabeth would have joined in light-flashing triumph-crowned love-making. And each time he avoided it.

  It was not difficult. There had been occasions enough in their married life when Elizabeth had said to him that she had her courses or simply that she was very tired or had a headache. And there had been occasions too when he had made his excuses to her. So a murmured apology once, and at another time an unusually quick turning of the back to sleep and at a third failure to understand the meaning of a half-caress had made certain that nothing took place.

  And that was what he wanted. He could not have endured, his mind constantly rearing up with images and remembrances of the underside, to enact with Elizabeth what would seem to be even the faintest parody of events there. And, strongly as he felt this, he also contrived, with a flexibility of mind that gave him wry amusement, to feel exactly the opposite: that it would be betraying Elizabeth and the high pure sweet life he had led with her, and could lead still, to pretend to be loving her with all his being—what were those words in the Marriage Service? ‘With my body I thee worship?’—while his mind was filled with thoughts, and even with explicit visions, of other women in that other world.

  He told himself at that time that if his state of suspension simply continued long enough it was most likely that he would gradually fall back fully into the life that to all appearances he was leading and that then he might well stay there for ever still. Mere habit would do it. And then he would be able once more to cleave whole-heartedly to Elizabeth and to her ideals of, as he had heard her quote from the motto of her medical college in America, ‘clean air, clean water, pure food, temperance and chastity’, to his own particular ideals of art pursued for the illumination of his fellow beings and to the ideal of the great rolling advance of Society itself.

  But the state of suspension did not continue. On the ninth day the cylinder between the magnets swung suddenly and decisively.

  It was very little that tipped the balance, the merest scrap of chance. He was going to spend the day in the Reading Room of the British Museum. He had been for some time in that state of somewhat restless searching about between pictures which he generally seemed to have to suffer. In the summer he had been painting ‘The Nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It had been finished for nearly a month and he had been anxious to settle definitely on another subject with a view to having two pictures to enter in next year’s Academy. The fairy world element of A Midsummer Night’s Dream had turned his mind to the treatment of the supernatural by Goethe, in the witches’ sabbath on the Brocken in Faust. It was a subject he both wanted and did not want to tackle. It had seemed a departure from the emotional field he had found so congenial and successful since he had been married and yet, for what reason he could not say, he felt strongly attracted to it. As part of the process of sorting himself out he had thought of reading other authors’ descriptions of those legendary rites in the Harz Mountains. And so he was on his way to the British Museum.

  It so happened that just as the short walk from Red Lion Square took him past a small bookseller’s shop a sudden heavy shower of rain came on. He had no umbrella and decided to take shelter, and there among the volumes he idly turned over was the translation of Juvenal in Bohn’s Classical Library. Straightaway his eye fell on the words ‘She then took her stand with naked breasts and gilded nipples’. It was, he saw, the poet’s description in the ‘Satire on Women’ of the misdeeds of the Empress Messalina.

  And in an instant he connected her, as if a long leaping electric spark had zig-zagged across the gap of centuries, with Lisa. There was no precise reason why. In all his sexual dealings with Lisa she had never painted her nipples, though she might have done. But the words of the old Roman satirist, as translated with exact and plodding faithfulness by of all people an English clergyman some seventeen hundred years later, made him see instantaneously what there was of Lisa in the young lust-dominated empress, what there was of Messalina in the nineteenth-century harlot.

  He put down the book, closing it carefully, left the shop and turned unhesitatingly in the opposite direction from the Museum.

  He must immerse himself once more in Messalina’s, in Lisa’s world.

  He strode along the broad pavements of this solemnly respectable area, washed scouredly clean by the shower, heading unfalteringly for the filth, the broken cobbles, the slimy lanes of St Giles. It ought to have been, he knew, to wherever Lisa herself might be. But Lisa was no longer in the world he sought. She had been removed from it. Of this he felt totally sure. It had truly been her he had seen at the Derby, and the man beside her, Joey, had beyond doubt been married to her. How that could have come about he could not conceive. Why she had deserted the world of which she had seemed the writhing and thrusting embodiment he could not think. She had taught him its ways. She had first enunciated for him its credo. But she had left it, had for some unguessable reason or none moved up into the world of laws.

  She was lost to him, removed from the world he wanted now burningly to re-enter. But she had left him an inheritance. She had left him—he saw it ice-clearly in a moment—Mulatto Mary. Mulatto Mary, different as could be in physical characteristics from Lisa herself, thin-bodied, white-skinned, angular, yet nevertheless her heir. She was indeed, he saw now, an heiress richer than her benefactor. She held for him a deeper promise than Lisa had done, for all that he and she had contrived together, for all that Lisa had instructed him in.

  For a moment a turbulent stream of vehicles in the road he had to cross halted him. Then he flung himself into the heaving tussling hoof-resounding press, the carriages and the carts, the cabs and the groaning waggons, the placarded buses and the dashing hansoms temporarily foiled by the hurly-burly, and plunged across.

  St Giles lay ahead. And he did not doubt that there Mulatto Mary would be, though all but three years had passed since he had seen her there and unaccountably declined the carelessly prodigal offers she had made to him.

  And then he was there, in St Giles again, its narrow crowded streets close about him with the amazingly familiar reek of its close-packed denizens. The sharp smell of fustian clothing wetted by the rain, the strong odour of
unwashed sweaty bodies, the intermittent sharp tang from gin-wrecked breath. He walked as if in a dream, sure beyond doubt that the object of his quest would be where he expected, a child’s treasure laid for safe-keeping in some nook among the thickened roots of an ancient tree.

  Unhesitatingly he picked out his way, pushing through the streets of lean and hungry shops, finding the yet narrower lanes, stepping over the mounds of decaying rubbish, kicking aside the snarling belly-to-ground dogs and scarcely doing more to avoid the crawling proliferating mass of puppy humans. Yet these last checked him a little. Babies, infants, snotty-faced and dirty-legged, would he soon be rid of their taunt?

  Then at last came the familiar end-blocked alley. The drably grey clothes hanging to dry across it from house to house might have been the very same patched and ragged garments he had seen three years before. The litter of cabbage-leaves on the puddles of its unpaved surface might have been there untouched since he had taken Kitty somewhere among them. Here was the very place indeed that had risen up to him more than once in dreams in his clean-sheeted plump-pillowed marital bed.

  He hurried along its length, the whiffs of stale urine stronger with every step. Then he was at the familiar doorway of the narrow-fronted house at the end, its worn-down step almost miraculously recalling to his mind its exact hollowed-out shape and grittily grey colour.

  Without an instant’s pause for consideration, he pushed at the time-blackened door. It swung open, as it always had. And there was the dark flight of steps that led to the big basement kitchen.

  He felt his way down, unable to hurry because of the darkness but unworried with his quest so nearly over. And the low-ceilinged kitchen was just as he had remembered it, with the same sharp smell of bacon frizzling at the same sullen coke fire, with the big battered table just as it had been and round it half a dozen slouching figures who were probably not at all the people he had met three years before but who, tattered and dark-faced, might well be.

  He looked across without hesitation towards the corner where Mulatto Mary had been accustomed to sit. Even in the gloom he would catch the white glint of the eyes in that broad bronze face, the whiter glint of her teeth as she grinned.

  And she was not there. No one was there.

  ‘Mary,’ he blurted out to the dim figures looking warily up at him. ‘Mulatto Mary, the woman they called Mulatto Mary, where is she?’

  ‘Yer wanting Mulatto Mary?’ a woman’s voice responded from the far end of the big table.

  Standing just inside the room and peering through the smoky gloom, he thought he recognised the speaker. Surely she was one of the whores he had known, the one with the billhook of a face? As his eyes grew moment by moment more accustomed to the half-darkness he recognised more of her broken and battered features.

  ‘It’s Jessie, isn’t it?’ he asked.

  ‘Yer know me then?’

  ‘I used to come here often, some three years ago.’

  ‘Yeh. Got yer now. Kitty. You were one o’ Kitty’s.’

  ‘Yes, I was one of Kitty’s. But it’s Mary I’m looking for now, Mulatto Mary.’

  ‘She’s ’ere sometimes,’ Jessie conceded. ‘On and off. But I ain’t seen ’er fer weeks now.’

  He felt immensely chagrined. She ought to be here: he had wanted her here. But the puppet-master does not always act at the behest of the puppets.

  ‘But do you know where she might be?’ he said. ‘Where she might be at all?’

  For a little he thought the billhook-faced whore was going to make no reply. But eventually she spoke again.

  ‘The fly-paper man,’ she said. ‘He’d know where she is. Runs ’er, ‘e does. When she lets anyone run ’er, that is.’

  ‘The fly-paper man. I remember him. He brought me here first. But is he to be found here still?’

  ‘Aye,’ replied Jessie morosely. ‘’E’s round about right enough. Lives ’ere still, ’e do. But ain’t yer seen ’im up West?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t think so.’

  But had he? Had he, in a cab, hurrying somewhere, glimpsed that curious figure with the tower of broad sticky papers wound round his tall hat? Had he seen him for a few seconds, and had the man made no impact on his mind? It was possible. In cab or carriage he had belonged totally to the world of cabs, carriages, appointments and purposefulness. That figure from the other world which he had thought had fallen away from him entirely might well have made no impression at all.

  ‘Yeh,’ said Jessie. ‘Try the fly-paper man, if yer must ‘ave Mary. Though if it’s no more nor a roll on a floor yer looking fer, I’ll take a quid off of yer quick as any.’

  He wondered whether he ought not to accept the offer. Would it not be a sign of what world he was in? But the thought of Mulatto Mary, of her wide and deep bosom, of her spreading generous hips, her broad bronze features, at once drove out the thought. It was her he wanted. She whom he had refused before: she it must be now.

  ‘The old man?’ he said. ‘When could I see him? Do you know?’

  ‘Why, ‘e’s ’ere often enough dinner time,’ Jessie said, unconcerned at not having her offer taken up. ‘Yer’d not ‘ave ter wait above an hour, may be less. Or, like as not, yer’d meet ’im by the way now.’

  ‘Then I’ll go,’ Godfrey said.

  He proffered Jessie a shilling and found it snatched from his hand under the mute sharp gazes of the other inhabitants of the cellar kitchen.

  Then he made his way back to the meeting place of the Seven Dials, certain that if the fly-paper man was coming from the West End he could intercept him there. He stood leaning against a street post waiting, watching the busy life all round, the people going in and out of the seven big gin-palaces already doing a brisk trade, the sharp-faced thieves, the play-acting beggars, the song patterers, the bird-fanciers with their singing charges in cages by their sides.

  But he did not have long to wait. Suddenly, on the far side of a knot of boys and youths gathered round a raucous song-sheet seller bawling out a ballad about ‘The Jack Tars of Old England’, he saw that sticky fly-paper decorated hat.

  In half a minute he was confronting the old long-locked long-bearded man, the hat with its swathes of fly-stuck papers nodding over him.

  ‘Good morning. I believe you might tell me where I can find a person going by the name of Mulatto Mary.’

  He had spoken stiffly enough, seeing the old man much as he might see any of the hundred and one other menials who touched on the pattern of his daily life, the cabbies, the club servants, the clerks perched on their stools in outer offices, the match-sellers, the shoeblacks, the crossing-sweepers. But he received an answer he did not expect.

  There was no cadging assumption of the utmost willingness to oblige. Instead the gaunt-faced grimy-eyed old man looked him slowly up and down and said not a word.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It was not until he had fully absorbed the look of stony indifference which was all the answer the fly-paper man returned to his lofty inquiry for the whereabouts of Mulatto Mary that he recalled what he should have remembered before, that curious gathering-up of authority which had come to the old man the last time they had entered the no-man’s-land of St Giles together three years before. Out in the world of cabs and carriages this fellow in his long flapping grease-thick old coat might be of no more account than the meanest cringing beggar: in this other world he was a figure of power.

  ‘I—I was told you might be able to help me,’ he stammered at last in face of the old man’s silence. ‘If you could I’d be grateful, most grateful.’

  ‘You’ve taken a letch fer Mulatter Mary.’

  It was not a question. It was a statement. For a moment he resented it. But the running desire that occupied every corner of his mind at once swept over and obliterated these last traces of the old regime.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I want her. Can you tell me where I can find her? Please.’

  He was begging.

  The old man looked at him from
glaring deep-sunken eyes.

  ‘They say,’ he pronounced at last, ‘there’s a nobleman what took ’er up. Nobleman wiv a fancy c’lection o’ beauties, black, white and yeller. Kep’ a place up over St John’s Wood. They say.’

  ‘There? She is there?’

  ‘Yer’d be a fool ter b’lieve all yer hears,’ the fly-paper man replied after a little.

  Godfrey submitted his will to this piece of enigmatic contempt.

  ‘Then where is she to be found?’ he asked. ‘Where, please?’

  ‘Yer’d better come an’ ask me that in a day or two,’ the fly-paper man answered. ‘I can’t be looking arter the likes o’ you whenever yer chooses ter ask. Come in a day or two.’

  The king in his territory was not to be put to trouble. The old man stalked away, his hat with its toppling swathe of broad sticky papers visible above the surrounding heads for minutes afterwards.

  Godfrey stood there, feeling emotions and counter-emotions swirl and plunge within him. Mary, he had to have her. Should he run after that insolent fellow, shake the truth out of him? Was she really in an establishment up in St John’s Wood? He had heard such places existed. Should he find a cab, hurry over there, search about, ask questions, offer a huge sum for her release to him? Or was what the old man had said no less than the truth? ‘You’d be a fool to believe all you hear.’ Then where was Mary? Was she, despite the billhook Jessie’s denial, actually still at the old house? No. Surely it was more likely that she would be somewhere round the Haymarket. Or parading in the Burlington Arcade? Well, no, not there. She was not of the silks and satins class of the Paphians who walked there. But it had been near the Haymarket that he had first encountered her, and had run away from her. It was there he would look.