From London Far Read Free Page A

a pound note on the counter, asked for some unlikely purchase, and was immediately ushered –
    Incontinently, a cold sweat broke out on Meredith’s brow. In horrid trepidation he peered down what was now revealed as a narrow, whitewashed corridor, dimly lit by small electric bulbs. Some twenty feet ahead it made a blank turn and disappeared – to open upon what? Had he not, in his innocence on the low life of the Metropolis, made a wholly embarrassing blunder? Meredith took a couple of paces forward, his mind unwontedly besieged by vivid, detailed and swiftly moving visual fantasies. His ignorance of the seamy side of modern London might be vast, but yet vaster was his knowledge of the seamy side of classical Rome. And this specialized information, for long sterilized and stored up for strictly learned purposes, now rioted before him in images of some vast Neronian lupanar, replete with everything that should satiate the farthest reach and curiosity of lust…
    How would one respond if one were by some black magic actually precipitated upon such surroundings – infinite artistries of the flesh amid a wilderness of marble and gold? The vision and the question hung before Meredith only for a moment and gave way to the drab conviction that he must indeed have broken across the threshold of a subterraneous brothel. And again images stirred in his mind. Memories, thirty years deep, showed him a student hurrying through these streets, and men in shabby Edwardian clothes beckoning meaningfully from doorways, and one man – his features perfectly recalled as they hung etched against gaslight – inviting to a house ‘where the girls danced on the table’. Meredith shivered. At twenty he had perhaps been a little tempted by these girls, but he had no wish to meet their granddaughters. Should he turn round and make for the ladder by which he had come?
    London’s going: Rotterdam’s gone . Who, after all, would think to choose such words as a passport to venery? Meredith’s confidence returned. He thrust his two ounces of tobacco into a pocket, clasped his dispatch-case firmly under an arm, and continued to advance down the corridor.
    The floor was swept; the whitewash had been recently renewed; round the little electric bulbs overhead no cobwebs had been allowed to gather. This was in marked contrast with the dilapidated and rather dirty shop above. It suggested the environs of a hospital, or at least of some institution markedly functional and antiseptic – but whether in this there was matter that should further allay his apprehensions Meredith felt that he was without the data for knowing. He pressed on and in a low, shadowless light turned the corner. And there, very abruptly, he stopped.
    Straight ahead, a lady reclined luxuriously on a divan. She wore a tiara and three strings of pearls; she had no clothes whatever; and she looked at Meredith with a steady and infinite enticement. This was embarrassing; but far more so was Meredith’s instant knowledge that the lady – and the lady thus frankly posed – was familiar to him. He had met her like this before. Meredith, his worst fears thus copiously confirmed, was about to suppose himself an unwitting Jekyll whose Hyde familiarly haunted such places as this when he realized that the low light and his own apprehensions had deceived him. The lady existed only on canvas. In fact, she was the Horton Venus . And she had been painted by Titian just on four hundred years ago.
    Meredith, now on easy and natural terms with what was thus strangely displayed, advanced with simple pleasure for a closer inspection. The Duke of Horton, he recalled, possessed amid his great collection of pictures two which were pre-eminent: Vermeer’s Aquarium , a little miracle of virtuoso edges, of jewelled, mirrored, and refracted light; and this prodigal evocation and transmutation of some great courtesan of Venice, golden-haired, black-eyed, and of ample and resplendent flesh, over the mastering