The Underside

by H. R. F. Keating

  He spent a terrible time there. Away from the once-again-familiar squalor and rankness of St Giles, surrounded instead by every manifestation of the flowering world, he lost all the growing sense of comfort that he had experienced in his first wild rush back to the underside. But he lost none of the desire to plunge. And that plunge, he still unceasingly felt, must be one locked together with the huge-fleshed, dark, infinitely promising Mulatto Mary.

  But around him the tall black silk hats dipped and nodded everywhere, brushed with soft hat-brushes to glossy perfection. And the big crinolines swung and swayed, descending rockingly from carriages while tall footmen waited, making their way sweepingly in and out of the luxury shops, the milliners, the silk mercers, the perfumers, the jewellers. He felt their alienness as if they were so many incomprehensibly gyrating New Zealanders.

  And as he strode along the crowded pavements, peering and staring everywhere for a glimpse of richly bronze flesh, there abruptly before him was Asprey’s, where he had bought Elizabeth half a dozen small pretty gifts to mark the progress of their life together. He shied away from the heavy doorway like a nervous riding-horse confronted by a steam-engine.

  But the thought of Elizabeth did for some moments recall him halfway to his senses. Elizabeth existed. At this moment, no doubt, she would be down at Perkins Rents or at one of the other places she visited, inspecting a newly limewashed stairway, watching over the clearance of some mound of stinking rubbish-impregnated cinders, or down on her knees as he had seen her once teaching a hare-lipped brat to scrub. And at half-past five she would arrive at Red Lion Square, no later, remove her rubber galoshes, change her soiled dress and be ready to take tea in the drawing-room. To take tea and expect him to take it with her. Was it half-past five now?

  He pulled from his pocket the watch he had not thought of consulting since he had glanced at it as he had entered the bookshop that morning. No, it was a long way before half-past five. He stepped into a reading-room and wrote a short meaninglessly excusing note, and still had enough foresight left to find a boy and entrust him with the delivering of it to Red Lion Square with the promise of cake in the kitchen to keep him to his word.

  An arrangement. Trust. But this was only one gesture towards the world of trust and arrangements. Mary. Mulatto Mary. She was his business now. He must and would find her.

  The miserable rasping hours passed as he strode all round the streets of the West End, as far north as Portland Place, as far south as the Strand, chasing will-o’-the-wisp fancy woman after will-o’-the-wisp fancy woman, letting any glimpse of a too flaunting bonnet, a too bright shawl lure him, hurrying paced, away. And when his forays proved fruitless, as they always did, when whatever brazen creature it was he had run after turned and showed a face, garish enough and often promising anything that ingenuity of body could dream of asking, he only cursed that it was not the one dark face that seemed to him the entrance way to full possession of that dark rich world he so much needed.

  He thought that the after-dinner hour, when into the whitely gas-lit streets a new influx of pleasure-seekers made their way, all twisting moustaches and flashing eyeglasses, would bring Mary to flaunt herself in front of them. But, though new figures by the score appeared, prostitutes of all sorts from almost the highest to all but the lowest, elegant silk-bonneted creatures warmly shawled against the night cold, youngsters in thin cotton dresses with hats jauntily decorated with a red feather or a blue, and, lurking in the darker by-ways, the drabs and hangers-on rheumy-faced and huddling in the chill of the wind, he got not a glimpse of anyone who might be his dark Mary. Though he heard more than once wild shrieks of laughter and hurried to where he had thought they came from, never did he see Mary striding out as she had long ago done after him, bawling obscenities and yelling her determination to have him.

  At last he lost heart. For a little he contemplated going back to St Giles, finding the fly-paper man again and begging him to say where Mary was. But he knew that he would get no answer till that king in his territory should deign to bestow one. So at a late hour he crept home to bed. To the bed he shared with Elizabeth, the bed with the clean lawn sheets, the plumped pillows, the sturdy bolster, the washed and fluffed layers of blankets, the comfortable weight of the eiderdown in its sprigged and flowery cover, the subdued glint of brass at foot and head. But he swore to himself that he was no more than a traveller at an inn lying there.

  And next day he took breakfast opposite Elizabeth, domestic and comfortable as any husband in London, amid the smell of well-cooked haddock and fine buttered eggs, of fresh toast and of tea rising up from the pretty china pot and with The Times stiff and crackling in front of him. But he took care to provide a reason for an absence lasting at least till a late hour that night. And then he set out on the hunt once more.

  All he could think of, however, was to go to St Giles again. It was there that he had known Mulatto Mary. It was there that he must find her.

  But he searched in vain. He spent a whole weary storm-tossed morning prowling through the increasingly familiar streets, among the costers and coster-girls, the criminals and the beggars and all the miscellany of the rookery’s inhabitants from stay-lace sellers to chair-menders. He marched time and again past the stalls festooned with cheap clothing and kept by long-locked Jews—‘Capth and thlipperth, capth and thlip-perth. Pritheth you won’t thee beaten. Capth and thlipperth’—past tawdry Brummagem jewellery stalls, their wares seldom priced above a penny or two, past the rag-and-bottle shops, past the secondhand boot and shoe translators with their leaning rows of patched Wellingtons and Bluchers.

  The striking of twelve noon from the church clocks above sent him hastening, much too early, to the Seven Dials itself, to intercept again the fly-paper man, the key to his search, if he should be returning from Piccadilly or wherever in the opulent West End he had been selling his curious wares.

  One o’clock struck, and still the beggar-king had not appeared. For a quarter of an hour more he strode up and down the people-thronged pavements where the seven streets met. He was just about to turn into a pastrycook’s somewhat cleaner than the generality to buy an Abernethy biscuit or a bun and eke out the time a little when, in the far distance bobbing and weaving over the massed bonnets and hats, the beavers, the billycocks, the wideawakes, the battered fifth-hand and sixth-hand stovepipes, the caps of every sort and description, he saw it, standing out just as he had expected, the high wound-round mass of sticky papers.

  He swung away from the door of the pastrycook’s with its piles of buns and biscuits and its tall churns of milk, and he hurried, heedless of the dung and mud thick in the roadway, to meet the greasy-coated figure of the old man.

  ‘Good afternoon to you. I am lucky to have come upon you again.’

  This time he did not fail to take the tone of client to patron.

  The fly-paper man looked at him in silence. But it was plain that he knew him.

  ‘I wonder,’ Godfrey said after a little, ‘if you would do me the favour of taking a glass? It’s a cold day.’

  ‘The Grapes,’ the old man rasped out tersely.

  And, by no means accompanying Godfrey but rather striding ahead of him careless whether he followed or not, the greasy-coated monarch made his way across to the big open-doored gin-palace he had named. Inside, among the sharp-faced velveteen-coated throng, many with a snuffling bulldog at their heels, the old man allowed Godfrey to order hot brandy-and-water. And he sipped a good one-third of his glass before he condescended to speak.

  ‘I mind yer now,’ he said at last. ‘I brought yer back once from up West fer me Kitty, me Kitty what I ain’t see for more’n a year.’

  ‘You did,’ Godfrey answered.

  And then feeling the abasement and even feeling a pleasure in it, he made an addition to his brief acknowledgement.

  ‘You brought me to her, and I was grateful to you for it. Most grateful indeed.’

  ‘An’ it’s Mary now, Mulatter Mary.’

  ‘
Yes. Yes, it is. I want her. I must have her. You know where she’s to be found? I’ll pay you, of course. I’ll pay you well. For the information. It’s your due. I’ll pay.’

  The old man looked at him in silence. His hat, with its extraordinary covering of fly-dotted sticky papers, was on his head still, sitting low on the lank hair. His two begrimed eyes had an air of plain contempt.

  ‘You’d pay me five sovereign?’ he asked. ‘Five golden oners?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Godfrey, defying his mocking incredulity. ‘I’d pay that and gladly.’

  The voice of the world of calculations, of nicely balanced accounts and bills paid on the due date, recorded within him that this price, though quite excessive in this neighbourhood as payment for all that a woman could do for a lust-torn man, was not great by comparison with sums often paid out elsewhere for services as nebulous as getting the information he sought. He had written cheques himself for twice the amount on occasion towards charities that interested him really very little. He had paid as much for the difference between a suit of evening clothes in the fullest fashion and one a shade or a season less so.

  ‘Put it there,’ said the old man. ‘Put it there. On the table. Your gold.’

  He was being challenged, challenged like a schoolboy unwisely claiming to know his verses.

  He reached at once for his gold-purse and from it, one by one in quick succession, he tumbled five new-minted sovereigns clinking on to the table top.

  The old man’s dirt-engrained paw closed over them like the darting talons of a bird of prey.

  ‘Keep the like o’ that well under the shades ’ereabouts, mister,’ he said rebukingly.

  ‘Very well.’

  For some moments Godfrey did not dare to ask for the information his gold had bought. But at length, in face of the fly-paper man’s continuing silence, he forced himself to speak.

  ‘And where, please, will I find Mary?’

  For a moment or two longer the fly-paper man still kept silent. But before Godfrey could repeat his question he unexpectedly put one of his own.

  ‘Yer’d do anything to come to ’er, wouldn’t yer? Anything?’

  His mind making the discovery, deducing it from the carelessness with which the five sovereigns had been paid out, could be plainly heard in his voice. But Godfrey answered with the simple truth.

  ‘Yes, I’d do anything.’

  He saw the begrimed eyes looking at him with continuing contempt and speculation.

  ‘I’ll tell yer what,’ the old man said at last.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I ’ad what yer might call a proposition made ter me not so long ago. A proposition of a gentleman.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Godfrey was acutely aware that the other Godfrey he used to be would at this moment be coldly asking that the bargain be fulfilled, not grovellingly listening to the roundabout talk of the man who should be honouring it, and even urging him to continue.

  ‘Yes?’ he said again.

  ‘Yeh. Proposition by a gentleman. Concerning what you might call a lady. A lady. Or a woman. Or a bleeding whore. What you like.’

  ‘Mary? Was it about Mary?’ Godfrey asked.

  ‘Nah. Not at all. Not at all.’

  And the fly-paper man tapped his empty glass sharply on the table between them.

  Godfrey called for two more of the same. And when they had been brought he asked anxiously again, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Nah, none o’ yer dark whores in the question ’ere,’ the fly-paper man said ruminatively. ‘One white as can be got’s what’s wanted ’ere.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘White as can be got, ter lie in the filth.’

  ‘In the filth? I’m not sure I understand you.’

  ‘Nah? Then yer’d better. Yer’d better, if yer wants me ‘elp to yer Mulatter Mary.’

  There was plain contempt now, totally undisguised. And Godfrey accepted it.

  ‘What is it that you want then?’

  ‘I’ll tell yer what I wants. And I’ll tell yer what my gentleman wants, as’ll pay good money for it. He wants ter see a whore a-lying in the filth somewhere, on a dust-heap like, or all among the scourings an’ mess they puts out o’ their ‘ouses. An’ ‘e wants ter see ’er with a man naked as ‘e was born. An’ the two on ‘em at it there. That’s what ‘e wants. A white-skinned whore and a white-skinned man. A man such as the like o’ you, my gentleman.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  He knew before the cold figure of the fly-paper man had got half way through laying out his proposition not only what it was the old man was going to say but that he was going to accept the monstrous offer.

  ‘Very well,’ he said curtly. ‘Name your time, name your place. Only let it not be long.’

  ‘Oh, it’ll not be long,’ the fly-paper man answered, with a leer that showed more of the revengeful beggar than the monarch. ‘My gentleman as wants it, ’e’s in jest as much on a hurry as what you are. Gi’ me till I gets a message to ’im, confidencheral message to ’is club, an’ time fer ’im to say as ’e can come. It won’t be no longer nor that.’

  ‘And the girl?’ Godfrey asked.

  ‘Them I can get by the score,’ said the fly-paper man.

  So, agreeing simply to meet the old man where they were at nine o’clock that night, he left and found that he could return, cool as you please, to Red Lion Square. It was, he thought, as if he could take the whole of the transaction he had just been part of and place it in a block of ice, to be lowered into an ice-pit this chilly winter weather and there left till rank summer came again for it to be hauled out, broken in an instant into fragments and before long to melt entirely.

  He spent the hours away from St Giles exactly as he would have spent them had he not been near the place since before his marriage and had no intention of entering the Grapes at Seven Dials on the stroke of nine that night. He sat in his studio and sketched a little, with no picture on hand having no more serious work to do. He took tea with Elizabeth when she came in. And he listened attentively to a story she had to tell of a woman in a house where a properly trapped drain had just been installed coming up to her and saying, ‘Them drains is nothing more nor a feather in your cap, madam.’ He had laughed, too, with genuine mild amusement.

  Elizabeth had worked at her desk in the back-room library afterwards and he had sat by the fire and read a novel, the novel he had been reading for some days past, that he had begun attracted by its serious dealing with a high theme. He had read with interest and pleasure. Then they had dined. The meal had been, as usual, excellent, somewhat plain in style but prepared to bring out the best in the food in the way Elizabeth had long ago encouraged their cook to do.

  As soon as Elizabeth had come in he had offhandedly mentioned that he would have to go out after dinner—‘a fellow at the club has promised to introduce me to a German acquaintance, a collector’—and so as soon as they had finished he got up, went round to Elizabeth, put a hand on her shoulder and stooped as though he were kissing her cheek. Then he went out into the hall, took his coat and a pair of gloves from the box, settled his broad wideawake on his head, told the maid, Jane, that he might be late and would take a latch-key so that no one need wait up for him and left.

  But the moment he felt the cold air of the night on his face he broke into a walk that was nearer a run in his eagerness to be at his destination.

  He arrived a few minutes before nine, but the fly-paper man was before him. He was on a bench at a table not far from the lead-covered bar. Further along the same bench there was a woman, sitting very upright and not looking at the old lanky-haired man but nevertheless clearly there with him. The partner in the rites about to be performed.

  It was at once obvious why the fly-paper man had chosen her.

  She was not particularly young nor startlingly voluptuous. But her fullish face was pale as a rich lily and she had about her, instantly to be seen, an odd air of remote distinction. Her black silk dress decorated only b
y a few crushed-looking scarlet bows marked her clearly by its evident shininess and its worn seams as one of the poor, but the unexpected distinction remained. And it would contrast boldly indeed with sordid surroundings and the more sordid threshing of working limbs.

  Did he feel any uprising of sexual excitement at the sight of her? He recorded that he did not. Yet he did not doubt that when the time came he would do what had been asked of him. He must. In that black-clothed creamy-skinned withdrawn figure lay his path to Mulatto Mary.

  He offered the fly-paper man hot brandy-and-water again.

  ‘Yes,’ said that bleary-eyed monarch. ‘Brandy-and-water.’

  ‘And will you take the same?’ he asked the woman.

  And her eyes, hitherto subdued and distant, blazed with sudden sharp light.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ she said.

  ‘She won’t,’ barked the fly-paper man in almost the same breath.

  He stepped half a pace back in surprise at the vehemence of the old man’s pronouncement. His murmured remonstrance at the impoliteness came from the self that had so lately left the house in Red Lion Square.

  ‘Yer don’t know ’er then?’ the fly-paper man said.

  ‘No, I have not hitherto had the honour of the lady’s acquaintance.’

  He regretted at once the deliberate cool hauteur of his tone. He must not again arouse the dislike of this king in his territory.

  But for once the monarch was prepared to overlook lèse-majesté.

  ‘Then yer can ’ave the honour o’ the acquaintance o’ Lushy Lou,’ he said, in grotesque parody of the remark that had been made to him.

  ‘Lushy Lou?’

  ‘Yes,’ came the cool and unexpected voice of the woman who was being so callously talked about. ‘Lushy Lou they call me. Louisa was the name my parents gave me, and Lushy describes the condition I aim to achieve just as often as I get the money to do so.’

  The words were pronounced in an accent which would not have disgraced any drawing-room in Belgravia.