The French Lieutenant's Woman (43 page)

Such scenes as that
which followed have probably changed less in the course of history
than those of any other human activity; what was done before Charles
that night was done in the same way before Heliogabalus--and no doubt
before Agamemnon as well; and is done today in countless Soho dives.
What particularly pleases me about the unchangingness of this ancient
and time-honored form of entertainment is that it allows one to
borrow from someone else's imagination. I was nosing recently round
the best kind of secondhand bookseller's--a careless one. Set quietly
under "Medicine," between an Introduction to Hepatology and
a Diseases of the Bronchial System, was the even duller title The
History of the Human Heart. It is in fact the very far from dull
history of a lively human penis. It was originally published in 1749,
the same year as Cleland's masterpiece in the genre, Fanny Hill. The
author lacks his skill, but he will do.

The first House they
entered was a noted Bagnio, where they met with a Covey of Town
Partridges, which Camillo liked better than all he had ever drawn a
Net over in the Country, and amongst them Miss M., the famous Posture
Girl, whose Presence put our Company of Ramblers upon the Crochet of
shewing their new Associate a Scene, of which he had never so much as
dreamed before.

They were showed a large
Room, Wine was brought in, the Drawer dismissed, and after a Bumper
the Ladies were ordered to prepare. They immediately stripped stark
naked, and mounted themselves on the middle of the Table. Camillo was
greatly surprised at this Apparatus, and not less puzzled in guessing
for what Purpose the Girls had posted themselves on that Eminence.
They were clean limbed, fresh complec- tioned, and had Skins as white
as the driven Snow, which was heightened by the jet-black Color of
their Hair. They had very good Faces, and the natural Blush which
glowed on their Cheeks rendered them in Camillo's Mind, finished
Beauties, and fit to rival Venus herself. From viewing their Faces,
he bashfully cast his Eyes on the Altar of
Love,
which he had never had so fair a View of as this present Time... The
Parts of the celebrated Posture Girl had something about them which
attracted his Attention more than any things he had either felt or
seen. The Throne of Love was thickly covered with jet-black Hair, at
least a quarter of a Yard long, which she artfully spread asunder, to
display the Entrance into the Magic Grotto. The uncommon Figure of
this bushy spot afforded a very odd sort of Amusement to Camillo,
which was more heightened by the Rest of the Ceremony which these
Wantons went through. They each filled a Glass of Wine, and laying
themselves in an extended Posture placed their Glasses on the Mount
of Venus, every Man in the Company drinking off the Bumper, as it
stood on that tempting Protuberance, while the Wenches were not
wanting in their lascivious Motions to heighten the Diversion. Then
they went thro' the several Postures and Tricks made use of to raise
debilitated Lust when cloyed with natural Enjoyment, and afterwards
obliged poor Camillo to shoot the Bridge, and pass under the warm
Cataracts, which discomposed him more than if he had been overset in
a Gravesend Wherry. However, tho' it raised the Laugh of the whole
Company, he bore this Frolick with a good deal of patience, as he was
told it was necessary for all new Members to be thus initiated into
the Mysteries of their Society. Camillo began now to be disgusted at
the prodigious Impudence of the Women; he found in himself no more of
that uneasy Emotion he felt at their first setting out, and was
desirous of the Company's dismissing them; but his Companions would
not part with them, till they had gone through with the whole of
their Exercise; the Nymphs, who raised a fresh Contribution on every
new Discovery of their impudent Inventions, required no Entreaties to
gratify the young Rakes, but proceeded, without the least Sense of
Shame, to shew them how far Human Nature could debase itself.

Their last Exploit
inflamed these Sons of Debauchery so far that they proposed, as a
Conclusion of the Scene, that each Man should chuse his Posture, and
go through what they had only seen imitated before. But this was a
Step the Nymphs would not comply with, it being the Maxim of these
Damsels, never to admit of the Embraces of the Men, for fear of
spoiling their Trade. This very much surprised Camillo, who from
their former Behavior, persuaded himself there could not be invented
any Species of Wickedness with which they would not comply for the
Sake of Money; and though before this Refusal, their abandoned
Obscenity had quite stifled all thoughts of lying with them, yet now
his Desires were as strong as if they had been modest Virgins, and he
had seen nothing of their Wantonness; so that he became as earnest to
oblige them to comply as any Man in the Company.

This gives the general
idea of what went on at Ma Terpsichore's, though it omits a
particular of difference: the girls of 1867, not so squeamish as
those of 1749, were willingly auctioned off in a final tableau.

However, Charles was not
there to make a bid. The less obscene preambles he had quite enjoyed.
He put on his much-traveled face, he had seen better things in Paris
(or so he whispered to Sir Tom), he played the blase young know-all.
But as the clothes fell, so did his drunkenness; he glanced at the
lecherously parted mouths of the shadowed men beside him, he heard
Sir Tom already indicating his pick to the bishop's son. The white
bodies embraced, contorted, mimicked; but it seemed to Charles that
there was a despair behind the fixed suggestive smiles of the
performers. One was a child who could only just have reached puberty;
and there seemed in her assumption of demure innocence something
genuinely virginal, still agonized, not fully hardened by her
profession.

Yet as he was revolted,
so was he sexually irritated. He loathed the public circumstance of
this exhibition; but he was enough of an animal to be privately
disturbed and excited. Some time before the end he rose and quietly
left the room, as if it were to relieve himself. In the anteroom
outside the little danseuse who had served the champagne sat by a
table with the gentlemen's cloaks and canes. An artificial smile
creased her painted face as she rose. Charles stared a moment at her
elaborately disordered ringlets, her bare arms and almost bare bosom.
He seemed about to speak, but then changed his mind and brusquely
gestured for his things. He threw a half sovereign on the table
beside the girl and blundered out. In the street at the alley's end
he found several expectant cabs waiting. He took the first, shouted
up (such was the cautious Victorian convention) the name of a
Kensington street near to the one where he lived, and then threw
himself into the seat. He did not feel nobly decent; but as if he had
swallowed an insult or funked a duel. His father had lived a life in
which such evenings were a commonplace; that he could not stomach
them proved he was unnatural.
Where
now was the traveled man of the world? Shrunk into a miserable
coward. And Ernestina, his engagement vows? But to recall them was to
be a prisoner waking from a dream that he was free and trying to
stand, only to be jerked down by his chains back into the black
reality of his cell.

The hansom threaded its
way slowly down a narrow street. It was crowded with other hansoms
and carriages, for this was still very much in the area of sin. Under
each light, in every doorway, stood prostitutes. From the darkness
Charles watched them. He felt himself boiling, intolerable. If there
had been a sharp spike in front of him he would, echoing Sarah before
the thorn tree, have run his hand through it, so strong was his
feeling for maceration, punishment, some action that would lance his
bile. A quieter street. And they passed a gaslight under which stood
a solitary girl. Perhaps because of the flagrant frequency of the
women in the street they had left she seemed forlorn, too
inexperienced to venture closer. Yet her profession was unmistakable.
She wore a dingy pink cotton dress with imitation roses at the
breast; a white shawl round her shoulders. A black hat in the new
style, small and masculine, perched over a large netted chignon of
auburn hair. She stared at the passing hansom; and something about
the shade of the hair, the alert dark-shadowed eyes, the vaguely
wistful stance, made Charles crane forward and keep her in view
through the oval side-window as the hansom passed. He had an
intolerable moment, then he seized his stick and knocked hard with it
on the roof above him. The driver stopped at once. There were hurried
footsteps; and then the face appeared, slightly below him, beside the
open front of the hansom.

She was not really like
Sarah. He saw the hair was too red to be natural; and there was a
commonness about her, an artificial boldness in her steady eyes and
red-lipped smile; too red, like a gash of blood. But just a
tinge--something in the firm eyebrows, perhaps, or the mouth.

"You have a room?"

"Yes, sir."

"Tell him where to
go."

She disappeared from his
sight a moment and said something to the driver behind. Then she
stepped up, making the hansom rock, and got in beside him, filling
the narrow space with cheap perfume. He felt the light cloth of her
sleeve and skirt brush him, but they did not touch. The hansom moved
on. There was a silence for a hundred yards or more.

"Is it for all
night, sir?"

"Yes."

"I asks 'cause I
adds the price of the fare back if it ain't."

He nodded, and stared
into the darkness ahead of him. They passed another clopping hundred
yards in silence. He felt her relax a little, the smallest pressure
against his arm.

"Terrible cold for
the time of year."

"Yes." He
glanced at her. "You must notice such things."

"I don't do no work
when it snows. Some does. But I don't."

More silence. This time
Charles spoke.

"You have been
long... ?"

"Since I was
eighteen, sir. Two years come May."

"Ah."

He stole another look at
her during the next silence. A horrid mathematics gnawed at Charles's
mind: three hundred and sixty-five, say three hundred "working,"
multiply by two ... it was six hundred to one that she did not have
some disease. Was there some delicate way he could ask? There was
not. He glanced at her again in an advantageous moment of outside
light. Her complexion seemed unblemished. But he was a fool; as
regards syphilis he knew he would have been ten times safer at a
luxury establishment like the one he had left. To pick up a mere
Cockney streetwalker ... but his fate was sealed. He wished it so.
They were heading north, towards the Tottenham Court Road.

"Do you wish me to
pay you now?"

"I ain't
partickler, sir. Just as you fancy."

"Very well. How
much?"

She hesitated. Then:
"Normal, sir?"

He flashed a look at
her; nodded.

"All night I usual
charges ..." and her tiny hesitation was pathetically dishonest,
"... a sovereign."

He felt inside his frock
coat and passed her the coin.

"Thank you, sir."
She put it discreetly away in her reticule. And then she managed an
oblique answer to his secret fear. "I only go with gentlemen,
sir. You don't need no worries like that."

In his turn he said,
"Thank you."
 

40

To the lips,
ah, of others,
Those
lips have been prest,
And
others, ere I was,
Were
clasped to that breast . . .
--
Matthew
Arnold, "Parting" (1853)

The hansom drew up at a
house in a narrow side street east of the Tottenham Court Road.
Stepping quickly out of the vehicle, the girl went straight up some
steps to a door and let herself in. The hansom driver was an old, old
man, so long encased in his many-caped driving coat and his
deep-banded top hat that it was hard to imagine they had not grown
onto his body. Setting his whip in the stand beside his seat and
taking his cutty out of his mouth, he held his grimed hand down,
cupped, for the money. Meanwhile he stared straight ahead to the end
of the dark street, as if he could not bear to set eyes on Charles
again. Charles was glad not to be looked at; and yet felt quite as
unspeakable as this ancient cab driver seemed determined to make him
feel. He had a moment of doubt. He could spring back in, for the girl
had disappeared ... but then a black obstinacy made him pay.

Charles found the
prostitute waiting in a poorly lit hallway, her back to him. She did
not look round, but moved up the stairs as soon as she heard him
close the door. There was a smell of cooking, obscure voices from the
back of the house.

They went up two stale
flights of stairs. She opened a door and held it for him to pass
through; and when he had done so, slid a bolt across. Then she went
and turned up the gaslights over the fire. She poked that to life and
put some more coal on it. Charles looked round. Everything in the
room except the bed was shabby, but spotlessly clean. The bed was of
iron and brass, the latter so well polished it seemed like gold. In
the corner facing it there was a screen behind which he glimpsed a
washstand. A few cheap ornaments, some cheap prints on the walls. The
frayed moreen curtains were drawn. Nothing in the room suggested the
luxurious purpose for which it was used.