The Underside

by H. R. F. Keating

  He would not have far to go, down a short street at the next turning, across a swing bridge near the end of it, past a boatyard he could not mistake and along the lane he would find behind it till he reached his destination. He downed as much as he could of the rest of the sherry and set off.

  He was relieved to encounter no other human beings than one trio of blue-jacketed Norwegian or Swedish sailors, wild drunk, singing unintelligibly and with two of them waving weighty-looking cudgels. Happily just as he came up to them one dropped his glazed hat and while they were searching the muddy surface of the street for it he contrived to walk unnoticed by. He found the bridge, mercifully already swung across its deep mud-filled creek between two docks, and on the far side had little difficulty in seeing the dark mass of the boathouse.

  But hardly had he set foot in the shadow-filled lane just past this when he saw another small group of mist-wrapped figures coming quite quickly towards him. He hesitated but then decided to go forward. The Globe and Pigeons was not far away. Then the leading figure in the advancing group also halted for a moment and an instant or two later the light of a bullseye shone out and he was able to see that he was confronting a policeman, heavy in oilskin cape and tall in crested helmet. He walked forward. Soon he realised that the two men behind the policeman were carrying a shutter between them and that resting on this was a dripping sodden form that must surely be under the covering someone drowned.

  ‘Who’s there?’ the policeman called, gruff and confident.

  And abruptly his feeling of mild welcome at encountering a friendly figure disappeared. The police existed to assist the inhabitants of the civilised world against depredations from below, and he was no longer of the civilised world. The cheerful bullseye light was double-edged. It was as double-edged as the light that had shone on him once in Shadwell on the day he had wandered all about the docks on the first occasion that he had deserted Elizabeth. That softly searching light had sent him back to her. But now he had no intention of going back.

  ‘Good evening, policeman,’ he said, hesitatingly enough.

  ‘Lost your way, sir?’ the policeman answered, responding to the gentlemanly voice and bringing his light tactfully to illuminate the wall just beside him.

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose I have,’ he said. ‘I have been walking and the mist …’

  ‘Yes, sir. I dare say. Well, if you’ll take my advice, sir, you won’t linger in these parts. There’s more than one about here as’d rob you at the mere sound of your voice, sir. So, if you’d care to step along with us, I’ll put you on your way.’

  There was nothing to do but comply with the polite but firm request, furious though he felt at fate having placed such an obstacle in his way. He tramped along beside the policeman at the head of the melancholy little procession. Over the swing-bridge they went and the gleaming black mud below and back in precisely the way he had come.

  At last, to put himself on friendly terms with his protector so as to be able to leave him if opportunity arose, he asked about the sad sight on the shutter behind.

  ‘A girl, sir. We’ve just hooked her from the river. Washed down from Waterloo Bridge as like as not, with the way the tide’s running now.’

  ‘Suicide?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes, sir. We get ’em down here, sir, the unfortnites, three or four a month. More in winter, less in summer.’

  They tramped along in silence for a little in the moonlit mist.

  Godfrey thought of Kitty and of how more than once such a fate as the poor drowned object’s behind them had been predicted for her. It was an end, a sodden cold and watery end, to which not a few of her fellow harlots came, though perhaps not as many as the would-be-goods liked to think. There had been the girl Rosy too back in the St Giles house, established now no doubt these many years in ownership of her comfortable coffeehouse.

  They came to the Stump and Magpie and, seizing the chance, he made a great parade of recognising it and knowing his way back to better parts. With a last ponderous warning about the danger of the neighbourhood, the policeman bade him goodnight.

  He strode rapidly away. And, as soon as he was sure he had well outpaced the little funeral party, he wheeled off down the first turning that presented itself. If he could just double round, he thought, he would easily come up to the Globe and Pigeons without too much loss of time.

  But he had reckoned without the lack of order in the building of the rows of mean little houses all around. No streets here were laid out in neat lines with exact right-angles at the corners. And within five minutes he had lost any sense even of where the river lay, for all that the mists emanating from it were cold and clammy on his face.

  He strode on nevertheless, unable to slacken his pace little though he knew in what direction he was heading. He wanted to encounter a passer-by now, no matter how dangerous looking, as strongly as half an hour earlier he had hoped to avoid them. But the little muddy chancily moonlit streets were totally empty.

  Then at last, turning cautiously down a narrow sloping way, he glimpsed the river, black and mist-wreathed, and the sloping mudbanks of the strand and paused to look about him, a little uncertain now whether he needed to go upstream or down to get to his destination.

  And as he stood there a puff of cuttingly cold wind dispersed the mist all round him. It revealed the spars and cordage of a pair of ships lying out in mid-stream and the backs of the low houses behind him supported over the river mud by water-smoothed and slimy piles. And it revealed too, not two yards from him, an old upended pushcart propped in the shelter of a low stone causeway and in it, clear to be seen, a boy lying asleep.

  He was huddling round a battered black canister as if clasping it for warmth, which, since he had only a short jacket and a pair of ragged trousers ending at the calf for protection, must have been very necessary. Taking a step nearer, Godfrey saw that the canister must be the boy’s working equipment, a small brazier from which he would sell something. Perhaps it had some vestiges of heat in it still. He leant forward and saw inside a short length of something whitish. Some eel. It was a hot-eel boy.

  He was pathetically thin, the bare legs under the ragged trousers fine as a bird’s with the feet curled round much like a bird’s and black almost to the ankle with mud, as if they were slippered. His face in the moonlight was white as candlegrease.

  Standing looking down at him, so miserable even in sleep, made so wretched by the conditions of his life, Godfrey remembered abruptly the boy that he and Elizabeth had seen asleep on top of a barge on the soft spring night they had gone down to Greenwich together, well before they were married. That boy had seemed a gift to them from a world of fairy-like unreality. He remembered that they had stood in silence plainly with the same thoughts passing through their minds at the sight of him, lying there so tranquilly cradled on the broad stream. It was a far distance from that lad to this one.

  Suddenly he experienced a rush of determination to do something for this world-bruised scrap of humanity. He would do good by stealth. He would leave a coin for the lad to find when he woke. It could not be much. He had little enough on him. But small though it might be such a gift would be wealth to a wretch like this. It would easily enable him amply to restock his supply of eel to sell next day. It might even set him on the path to commercial success, so little must lie in these poverty-stricken parts between utter destitution and a modest competence. Indeed, this one small financial fillip might be all that was needed to set the lad on a steadily climbing path. With a tiny unexpected capital—a sixpence would even be enough— he would be placed in quite a different position from the hand-to-mouth existence he must lead every day. He could even grow and prosper. Why, he might end his days a wealthy man. Stranger things had happened.

  He hunted in his pockets and found indeed a sixpence. And, conscious suddenly of behaving very much out of his present character in setting the poor sleeping wretch on even an imagined path to prosperity and dignity, he bent forward and placed the coin on th
e bottom of the lad’s canister beside the congealed fragment of unsold eel.

  Yet he walked away smiling a little to himself at his unexpected fairy godfatherhood. At his sixpenny largesse.

  And the notion brought to mind a child he had not thought of at all during the transaction, the mud-daubed imp—was it boy or girl?—who had gained another sixpence at Greenwich on that same night. The one who had forced her head into the ooze and had afterwards confronted the silk-hatted spectators on the lighted balconies with that disturbing mixture of proud contempt and pure joy in the act she had performed. She had earned her money. And she had made sure she got it, too, forcing herself across the mud to pick it up when the flung coin had fallen short. And only then giving vent to her moment of curious triumph.

  Suddenly his feet brought him to a halt. The sixpence he had just bestowed, had that too not fallen a little short of its objective? Simply placed in that canister next to the fragment of unbought eel, was it not quite likely to be stolen while the boy was still asleep? After all, he had succeeded in putting it there without at all disturbing the lad. And the moon was shining full on it.

  He turned, walked back, extracted the coin from the canister and began to slide it, carefully as he could, into one of the clenched and dirty fists.

  But he had reckoned without the attributes of any boy brought up on the banks of the Thames. In an instant the lad woke, leapt up still hugging his canister and crouched on the boards at the foot of the pushcart, ready at a flick to spring away and be lost in the night.

  Godfrey seized on the first thought that came into his head to reassure the lad.

  ‘The Globe and Pigeons?’ he said rapidly. ‘I am seeking it and have lost my way. I woke you to ask your help.’

  The pale-faced crouching boy looked at him with suspicion still.

  ‘Globe an’ Pigeons,’ he said huskily. ‘ ’S jus’ round the corner.’

  ‘Ah, thank you,’ Godfrey said, adding, since he was still holding his magic coin, ‘perhaps you could tell me something else and earn a sixpence.’

  ‘A sprat?’

  The eyes in the pale face widened in astonishment at such luck.

  ‘Tell me,’ Godfrey said, ‘do you known of a woman they call Mulatto Mary?’

  ‘That blower?’ the boy answered, becoming noticeably more cocky from the nature of the inquiry. ‘I knows ’er like I knows the back o’ me ’and.’

  ‘You do, do you? So you could tell me if it’s likely she’s to be found in the Globe and Pigeons just now?’

  ‘Nah,’ said the boy scornfully.

  Then, seeing the rush of disappointment sweeping his mysterious questioner’s face and fearing perhaps for his ‘sprat’, he quickly added more information.

  ‘She was there all right. This mornin’. Born jus’ round ’ere she was, an’ she comes back ter the Pigeons jus’ like she was a blessed pigeon ’erself.’

  He paused to blow on his cold hands. And then looked up at Godfrey with a yet more knowing air.

  ‘An’ I could tell yer where she is now,’ he said. ‘Straight I could.’

  ‘Where is she then?’

  ‘Fer another sprat I could tell yer.’

  Godfrey smiled.

  ‘You shall have one,’ he said. ‘But true telling, mind.’

  ‘True as the tide,’ the boy swore.

  And Godfrey, apprehending what an inexorable part the tide must play in the affairs of a riverside urchin, felt strongly inclined to believe that what he was about to hear would be the truth so far as his young informant knew it.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Up over St Giles, she is,’ the boy said. ‘I never been that way, mind. But I knows on it, and I knows true. There’s a place there with an old fly-paper cove and—’

  The expression of fury on Godfrey’s face brought him to a halt.

  ‘You knows on ’im, the fly-paper cove?’ he asked.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then that’s where yer’ll find Mulatter Mary. Called back by ’im she was, jus’ today. An’ back she went.’

  Godfrey gave the boy the two sixpences. He would have liked to have given him more, only he was not at all sure whether he had enough first for Mary and, as important, to get him back to St Giles as fast as a cab would take him. And he dared not risk delay.

  Sitting at last in a cab—an old four-wheeler, smelling appallingly from the sodden straw on its floor, was all he had been able to find—Godfrey went over in his mind for the twentieth time just what must have happened. The fly-paper man, the St Giles king among the other monarchs of that lawless land, must have been fully prepared to honour his agreement and had sent across to Rotherhithe for Mary, to have her ready for when he himself had completed his side of the bargain. She had been so near. But his own impulsive gift to Lushy Lou, that piece of left-over charitableness from the world of charities and calculations, must have turned the old man against him. There had been, now that he came to think of it, something hesitant and even shifty in the old man’s manner when he had been giving directions for Rotherhithe. Plainly the king had decided then to manifest his displeasure and had sent him off on his fool’s errand.

  But having no need of Mary now in St Giles and perhaps fearing that he himself, thwarted down among the river mists and mean houses, might come angrily back, would not the old man send her away somewhere?

  So there was no time to lose.

  But the cab was a wretched vehicle. The driver, despite all entreaties and later threats, sat sulkily determined to go no faster than he wanted, and he plainly wanted to go damnably slowly. And the horse, which Godfrey frequently standing up and thrusting his head out of the window became well acquainted with, was a fearful bony animal that looked as if the cold night chill had long ago invaded it to the marrow. Nor was there money to spare to offer the only inducement that might have had some effect.

  He sat and fretted.

  He had eventually found the ancient contraption near the eastern end of Tooley Street and it had seemed to take as long as would be reasonable for the whole journey just to traverse the length of that long and dismal thoroughfare. Then at last they came to London Bridge, mercifully at this late hour as empty of traffic as at morning and evening it was thronged with vehicles of every sort, jostling, cutting and thrusting, with its pavements equally crowded, two slow-moving masses of foot passengers, clerks and porters, old men and boys, the well-dressed and the ragged, all sucked towards or spewed out of the vast enterprise of the City. But now there was only a single red letter-van dashing southwards at a great rate, doubtless heading for the railway station, its lively horses’ hooves striking sparks from the cobbles. He gave it a glance of furious envy. But at last they entered the deserted streets beyond to go lugubriously by the great banks and proud commercial houses. Then they crept at interminable length along under the shadow of St Paul’s, slowing even to descend Ludgate Hill, where often he had seen dashing stockbrokers taking the slope up at a spanking trot on their late morning way to their offices, delighting to show off the paces of their latest stable acquisitions. Then they clopped along Fleet Street as if they were setting the pace for a funeral procession, and crawled through Covent Garden, before long to be enlivened by the arrival of carts bringing produce from the country and doubtless lumbering along faster than this miserable rate of progress. And then Long Acre, and a long acre indeed they made of it, till Godfrey, breaking down at last, ordered a halt, leapt down and took to his own swift-striding legs.

  There were still a good many people about. St Giles went to bed either very early or very late. But the idling harlots and predatory men were not so thick on the pavements as earlier, and it was possible to make unimpeded progress. He strode through, evoking only now and again a loud Irish curse.

  And then he was within only a few yards of that narrow blocked-off alley. And then he was at its entrance.

  There, abruptly, he came to a full halt. A knot of people, mostly women, had gathered in the lantern-lit doorway of
the first house into the alley. They were laughing and loudly talking and all looking at a solitary incongruously silk-hatted figure standing addressing them, a large white note-taking pad held before him.

  It was, of all people, Arthur Balneal.

  For a full half-minute Godfrey stood where he was, staring at this altogether unexpected sight. Had the Celebrated Investigator chanced at that moment to turn round he would have seen the husband of his valued lady colleague on the Committee of the Society for the Promotion of Sanitary Visiting Among the London Poor as a person plainly at home in the midst of this notorious area. But Arthur Balneal was too busy making entries on his large white pad of paper with a large well-trimmed pencil.

  An unexpected sight, he had at first thought. But reflection made him see that this apparition was in fact quite easily accounted for. Balneal was an investigator. The homes of the squalid London poor were his chosen field. What more likely than that he should bend his formidable attentions on St Giles?

  His next instinct when he had fully seized on Balneal’s presence was to retreat. But at once he saw that he could not. If he crept away it might be at the very time the fly-paper man came out of the house at the far end of the alley with Mulatto Mary.

  No, he must stay where he was. Or, no again, he must do more than that. He did not know of any other way out of the alley, but it was a byword that St Giles was honeycombed with secret passages and tunnellings constructed over the years to defeat the rare raids of police parties. There could well be some tunnel, from behind perhaps an old bin that stood in the dark kitchen of the far house, leading into the cellar of a house in the next row. The fly-paper man could even at this instant be urging Mary’s ample form on her hands and knees along some such escape way.

  Balneal was peering through his large spectacles at one of the harlots on the doorstep of the first house, her arms folded arrogantly in front of the low-cut bosom of her garish dress. She was answering some question, it seemed. And from the look of vexation on Balneal’s pale countenance she was not answering in the prescribed form.