"Please!" she said, at last sharply pulling at my hand. I grinned at her, keeping my hand firmly in place, kneading her flesh with my fingers. I was slightly amazed at my bruitishness, but I couldn't stop myself.
"I'm afraid you'll find it was false economy not to have got that train," I said, eyes gleaming at her.
Somewhere in my subconscious was a feeling that the whole thing might have been better staged, but my whole body had now worked up into the heat of an alcoholic fighting against deprivation of his liquor. Nothing could have stopped me.
INTRODUCTION by Curtis L. Roche, Ph.D.
Marcus Van Heller's remarkable work, Rape, is an ingeniously wrought study of a sexual psychopath. Within the pages of this fast-paced book the reader will find himself transported along in the sociopathic mind of Londoner Harvey Crawford, a protagonist whose somewhat remarkable narrative explores the innermost reaches of consciousness. Through this consciousness we are able to understand something of the machinations of the mind of a criminal rapist.
When society is better able to understand how the mind of a rapist works, perhaps legislators will be encouraged to enact laws which will provide for the care and rehabilitation of sexual psychopaths, and also to take measures to investigate new and better methods of dealing with the problem with a view to developing preventive programs.
"Harvey Crawford of London, artist, forger, rapist, murderer," is typical of his sort of juvenile mentality in an adult's body. His need for constant sexual relief is not really a seeking for gratification of a normal biological urge, but is, instead, a craving to prove to the world that he is a man, and is to be admired for his manhood. He uses whiskey as a crutch, more or less to excuse his licentious behavior. With a few drinks in him he becomes a sadist and a rapist. Whether this reaction is psychopathic or pathological is of little consequence, because all he can do to satisfy his urge is to violate any woman who rejects him, raping her in a brutal fashion.
Because he has spent most of his adult life in search of sexual gratification, going to any length to get it, the protagonist is fully aware of his inability to remain constant to any woman for long. Driven by feelings of inadequacy, Crawford goes from woman to woman in an effort to alleviate this complex and the increasing anxiety it creates within him. Deeper than that, he is subconsciously aware of a need to find "the lost part of me I needed to be a whole man." Just what this is, he has no idea.
As he reflects back on his life, Crawford realizes that his unconscious mind is beyond his grasp and he cannot understand the symbolism by which it occasionally tries to awaken him to the meaning of his search for fulfillment. He knows only that through his "massive" penis he is able to assert his masculinity.
He does not realize that his search for sexual fulfillment is also a denial of the real motivation which impells him to do what he does; this is the guilt motivation which goads him into seeking conquest after conquest to prove that he is a real man-a fact he unconsciously doubts, but cannot face. He is incapable of facing reality per se. He must live in a fantasy world, preoccupied with sex. Even in his painting he is not given the satisfaction of appreciation, except for the recognition of the sexual character of his work by those who criticize what he does.
The symbolic meaning of the rape scene at the opening of Van Heller's work is made somewhat more apparent as the book ends. We recognize it as the beginning of the end, as if through the crime of raping the college-girl hitchhiker he had picked up, the protagonist seals his own doom and brings to an end the horrible persecution with which his sexuality beset him.
Although the novel's sexual content is brutal and often highly descriptive, it is by no means conducive to prurience. The discerning, sophisticated reader will readily see that Van Heller has something to say and is saying it through the characterization and actions of his protagonist.
We are able to understand something of the fugue state into which the criminal mind enters when an antisocial act is about to commence or when it takes place. At the point when he brutally seizes his victim and strips her, Crawford also denudes her, and himself as well, symbolically. When in this fugue state, he leaves clues about in a helter-skelter fashion which are tantamount to an expression of his wish to be caught and punished. Intellectually he knows he is doing wrong and will be caught eventually and made to pay for his crime; but emotionally and psychologically he does not see himself as a rapist and wrong-doer-he sees himself as a life force, driven and driving through an antisocial society that is hostile and cruel to him. His victim symbolizes that hostile society, and he uses his sex organ as a cudgel with which to flail it as it uses him.
During the act of rape he fancies that his penis becomes larger and more massive, bearing out the truth of the sexual symbolism. He derives pleasure from the sex act not like a normal individual finds satisfaction, but rather as a lust-driven, senseless animal. He is erudite and quite intelligent, but this innate intelligence and personality cannot provide him with the wherewithal to control his sexual behavior. He must rape because he is compelled to do so, because in turn he unconsciously wishes to be punished. Obviously he has become a miscreant because he is insecure in a hostile society-he failed as an artist, so he became a forger; he wasn't punished because of his crimes as a forger, so he did worse things; he raped, and finally murdered. And for this he received the masochistic ultimate ... no further escape.
Instead of remorse, after the rape, Crawford's mind dwells on the voluptuous details for a time; then he becomes aware of the fact that "I had acted extremely foolishly." He is not sorry, nor at any time does he regret having violated the innocent girl. All he can think of is himself.
First he blames the whiskey. Then he admits he has raped a girl, for the first time in his life. Then he begins to think about the penalties of the law he may have to pay. And finally, after thinking about the girl, he considers himself safe, rationalizing that she was the sort who would hate being involved in such an affair, and who "would clean herself up and say nothing about it to anyone. On the other hand, in such an extreme situation she might blurt the whole thing out to the first person who appeared, or, failing that, break down and admit it to someone close, perhaps her mother. Anyway, I doubted whether she'd have noticed the number of the car or much in the way of details to connect me with the rape."
Then Crawford's true character is revealed when he states: "Well, I wasn't going to worry unduly about initiating an attractive girl into the ways of the world. And by the time I had reached my studio in Bloomsbury I had put the whole thing into the back of my mind."
The fact that he fancies himself as having the power of one who initiates an attractive girl into the ways of the world is not mere egoism or idle boasting; it goes deeper than that. Crawford here reveals the clue to it all: The "ways of the world" into which he introduced her are symbolic of the way the world has raped him-or at least the way Crawford sees it. He identifies with the girl in an unconscious way, revealing that he too had been an idealist and a virgin, but the world and its cruelties violated his person.
There is more. Crawford, through his sheer brutality and constant seeking of sexual relief, is in reality proving that he is not effeminate-which he happens to be, at the latent, unconscious level. He must go from woman to woman, occasionally using them brutally, and finally raping one, just to prove that he isn't a homosexual. After all, a man who has so many women, and who rapes a woman ... surely he cannot be construed to be effeminate, can he? Thus Crawford is driven to use his penis to prove his identity as a man.
Later, when he takes pleasure in using his mistress and another woman, we see reflected in the Crawford mentality a quality of disillusionment and frustration. Only when he is witnessing the rape and degradation of his mistress does he realize that he takes pleasure in seeing another man's organ, and in the sexual abuse he witnesses. He is brutally beaten by three men who take revenge on him for taking advantage of a woman who was drunk. He seems to find a painful ecstasy in being kicked and beaten into unconsciousness, and finds that it was all somewhat "infinitesimal." He says, "They'd be sorry if they knew how lightly I'd got off." He means by this that once again he has proved his manhood; he was more a man than they were. It is the little boy boasting loudly, "Naw, he couldn't hurt me one bit!"
Crawford begins to realize the police are looking for him. He has fled London and is in Paris, and though he fears being caught, he goes to Cannes with an American couple who give him a lift. He has an affair with the wife, and after a few days must finally return to Paris, where he is certain he will be caught.
He had another reason for fleeing Paris: He took revenge on the woman and her boy friend who had had him beaten and his girl friend abused. He trussed them both up at gunpoint and then, before her bound lover's eyes, used the woman anally and vaginally. He seemed to derive an erotic satisfaction from showing his organ to the other man and performing sexually before him. Again, Crawford was asserting his manhood, emphasizing it by finally beating the rape victim and then having intercourse with her a few inches from the seething face of the humiliated, helpless lover.
Still another exhibitionistic episode takes place when Crawford has intercourse with a married woman on a beach while an old man, unknown to the woman, hides in the trees and masturbates while watching. Crawford appears to derive a great deal of pleasure from this, again proving that he is more a man than someone else.
Finally, driven by an inexplicable compulsion to return to Paris, where he knows he will be caught, he goes there anyway. He learns that the girl he raped has come to Paris with her father, and they are searching for him in order to bring him to justice.
Despite this knowledge, and after he and his mistress have been safe and snug in their love nest for a few days, Crawford goes out in search of his accusers. Although he is armed, he fully expects to confront them.
Finally, while going from tourist bar to tourist bar on the streets of Paris, he meets the young rape victim and her father. The girl tells her father what happened, and the chase begins.
Even before the chase, Crawford has known all along what the outcome will be. Nevertheless, he does that which any unthinking man must do under the circumstances-he runs. But he runs in such a way that capture will be inevitable.
He grabs the girl at gunpoint and forces a cab driver to flee with them.
At this point the fine characterization the author has drawn begins its involuntary disintegration. We see the mind of Harvey Crawford approaching the breaking point. The fugue state began at the moment of confrontation; no longer was Crawford able to act as a sane man. He behaved in an unpredictable, confused, irrational manner. With the onset of the fugue state, Crawford's intellect clouds over as imminent capture threatens.
Cornered in a barn with the girl, surrounded by the police, who give him until dawn to surrender, still another symbol is triggered. Society is to punish him at dawn, the birth of a new day: The death of men who die before firing squads; the way of the world. Now he is about to be further initiated into the way of the world, and he cannot accept this, nor can he stand the anxiety any longer of waiting. Some vague hope that he can use the girl to bargain for his freedom is still his, yet intellectually he knows this is pointless and futile. All is lost. He wonders how many hours there are until dawn. He puts his automatic to a hole in the barn door and fires wildly, blindly, emptying the gun. This too is symbolic of what he has been trying to achieve with his life. The gun, the phallic symbol, is empty, the bullets spent; all that is left is a hole in the barn door.
Shortly before dawn he returns to the girl. He does not undress her, but magically the girl is nude. Once again he mounts her. Once again "Her legs were splayed and wide open to my need, and this was all that was important." While he is raping her his head begins to throb, and he becomes increasingly more aware of the painful thundering. "I was right inside her, my penis a long probing, searching need. She writhed and twisted, but my hands were quietening her."
Here we find the true motive behind the criminal compulsion of the protagonist. He is not attaining orgasm, but death. He is not comforting her, but quietening (British spelling) her-forever. He has progressed along the road of mental disintegration, seeking first one minor crime after another as a means of psychical gratification; after experiencing these he has progressed to the ultimate-rape, then murder. The thing must end as only it can, and this the inner man craves, while the outer man, in conflict with his unconscious, cannot admit that he yearns for this. Hence, torn apart by such emotions, the psyche of Harvey Crawford finally splits into two distinctly separate spheres: the sane and the insane. This schizoid division was a long time in coming, probably having had its beginnings early in childhood.
Now we recognize the power and intent of the author's premise-in the magnificent portrayal of the workings of the mind of a psychopathic individual, for we see that had the protagonist been given the opportunity at an early age to develop his mind (instead of practicing the Judo he often alludes to, another symbol), he most certainly would not have fallen to the depths to which he fell.
Van Heller has achieved that which he has set out to do. He has shown us the frailties of man. He has shown us madness. He has shown us that pure sexuality in and of itself does not exist, except in the minds of the emotionally ill or the immature, for man needs more than pure carnality in order to rise above sheer animalism. He needs affection, love and understanding, and when he is in need of emotional help or psychiatric aid, there ought to be some way to provide that help-notwithstanding the fact that there ought to be a way of recognizing when an individual needs such help, before it is too late.
It is hoped that the reader will reflect on the moral of the author's story rather than the protagonist's escapades, for the reader who does, will most certainly find that the author had something to say, and said it.
Curtis L. Roche, Ph.D.
My name is Harvey Crawford of London, artist, forger, rapist, murderer. I am also a bit of dipso and maybe if I'd had one whisky fewer that day I wouldn't have had some of these tags after my name. But maybe I would. Because I've spent the major portion of my life looking for sex and going to any lengths to get it. Not that a regular accompaniment of the act to my life has been the object of my search because I've never had any difficulty in finding women all too ready to flop into bed. But, invariably familiarity has eventually bred in me an indifference to and sometimes an actual distaste for the woman of the moment.
An old bachelor friend of mine used to say you could get nothing from a woman that you couldn't get from a prostitute, and that would seem to be the best attitude. For, no matter what the initial delusion of attraction, these things always end in recognition of lust as their aim.
But, impelled by some great feeling of lack, I've gone on looking through woman after woman as if somewhere, in one of them, I'd find the lost part of me I needed to be a whole man.
Unsatisfied, however, I've come to the end of my search and, perhaps in a couple of hours I'll find the peace of mind I've been seeking and come to the end of my search-if only in oblivion.
But to get back to that fateful day on which things might have turned out differently, if only....
It was a hot day. The heat haze on the horizon of the grass-verged country road made a brain-muzzing complement to the quivering heat of the whisky in my body as the car cruised, self-driven, it seemed, at a lazy 45.
Still, blinding yellow fields languishing around my solitary movement, cows drooping and flicking in the warm shade of trees, cyclists sweating and collapsing to the verges. Everything being burned and beaten by the sun.
Unconsciously I was giving way to a drowsy torpor when I became aware of the dash of red animating in the haze ahead. Forcing my eyes into exact focus, I saw growing nearer into my vision the red headscarf of a girl walking on the edge of the road ... into focus the lithe-moving slimness ... white blob becoming white blouse, tight white cotton skirt ... the sun shining transparently through the summer flimsiness revealing neat ridges of briefs underneath, the pertly pressing buttocks, their roundness, protrusion, made clean with the skirt creasing around them as she walked ... the slim, brown legs. I felt the chill spin in my loins and with the whisky inside me would have stopped anyway, but as I drove towards her, the girl changed her rucksack from one shoulder to the other and looking back raised her thumb. A hitchhiker.
My hand was damp on the warmth of the wheel as I swerved the car to an accurate halt beside her. She raised her hand to her eyes, squinting against the sun, and her breasts were full, impudently poised under the silk blouse. I was going anywhere she was going.
I snapped open the door with a warm smile and asked the formal, unnecessary question. For a fraction of a second, almost imperceptible, she surveyed me before her smile of response.
"I want to get to London before it gets dark," she said, in a quiet, well-spoken voice. "If you could take me some of the way I'd be grateful."
"Jump in. You're in luck-I'm going all the way."
With her rucksack safely on the back seat, she relaxed beside me, brushing a drooping black curl from a young, determined face, flushed with a day's tan.
"I'm certainly glad you came along," she said, eyes alight with pleasure at the sudden, comfortable speed after a three-mile-an-hour tramp. "I'd begun to feel a real mad Englishwoman out in the noonday sun."
The very sound of her voice excited me and with the whisky spreading an animal urgency throughout my fibres, I encouraged her to talk, wondering if she could tell I'd been drinking.
From time to time I smiled down at her attractive, slightly haughty face, in which the bright blue eyes seemed sometimes a little brightly nervous. She abounded with the superficial self-confidence of an intelligent, welleducated girl of nineteen or so, whose "according to the best principles" upbringing, had made her a little unsure of the world beyond. She was undoubtedly, I decided, a virgin.
Uncertain of the impression she gave, she felt bound to explain that she didn't make a habit of hitchhiking. It was a wager. The girls at her college had bet her she hadn't the pluck to return from her country home in that way. She normally travelled by car or first class.
"Daddy would be furious if he knew," she explained, "But thanks to you it's going to be easier than I imagined."
I pictured her father for a moment. Stern, military type man. But that only whetted my appetite.
"Weren't you a bit scared about travelling this way alone?" I asked. And, ridiculously unable to help myself, I found my eyes drawn down momentarily to the taut outline of her breast under the thin blouse.
"I was a little," she admitted, with an embarrassed smile, "but so many girls seem to think nothing of it that I decided I was being ridiculous."
I smiled, and as I changed the gears for a hill, the smile half set on my face, for my hand brushed gently against the crook of her knee, the soft, warm skin. The constriction in my loins spread to my face in a warm flush and my hand lingered.
Even then I was unsure. Being sensitive to sexual situations I like to avoid false, or clumsy moves and this was obviously one of those occasions which called for slow persuasion, perhaps, even, mellowing in drink. But the girl sealed her own fate. Murmuring something about cigarettes, she leaned over the back of the seat for her rucksack. It was a long lean and as, kneeling, she stretched over the seatback, I reached my hand under her body to steady her. Accidentally-or did I only imagine it to be accidental?-my hand cupped under her breast. I felt the warmth of contact, the firmness of her flesh through the flimsy blouse and brassiere beneath and turned with one hand on the wheel. With the skirt stretched tighter than ever over the enclosing briefs, I could see the lines of her slender hips, her well-shaped bottom, as if she were naked. More exciting than that. The day's heat seemed to fill my loins and constriction rose from it into my chest.
"All right?" I asked with simulated concern as she slumped back into the seat. I kept my arm around her, fingers lightly touching the firm jut of her underbreast.
"Uh-huh."
She didn't know quite how to deal with this situation, whether to be offended. But she was afraid of being offended without real cause, of appearing ridiculous. She searched in the rucksack as my fingers brushed over her nipple, a sharper jut from the breast, even through the clothing. I didn't care now. I felt a heat of drink and determination, which produced in my face a cynical grin of desire.
"Afraid I don't smoke," I said. "I've neither cigarettes nor matches."
"It doesn't matter." She was slightly flushed and I could feel her heart thumping under my hand.
The whisky had diminished my subtlety of approach, or rather made it from my point of view, unnecessary and I moved my hand firmly over her breast, my hips and loins an inferno of yearning.
"Please!" she said, at last sharply pulling at my hand.
I grinned at her, keeping my hand firmly in place, kneading her flesh with my fingers. I was slightly amazed at my brutishness, but I couldn't stop myself.
"I'm afraid you'll find it was false economy not to have got that train," I said, eyes gleaming at her.
Somewhere in my subconscious was a feeling that the whole thing might have been better staged, but my whole body had now worked up into the heat of an alcoholic fighting against deprivation of his liquor. Nothing could have stopped me.
It must have shown in my eyes, because the girl looked suddenly frightened. Her face was pale as she tore at my hand again.
"Oh, stop. You must stop," she begged. Tears came to her eyes and her throat filled with the noises of desperate exertion as I held her strongly in spite of her struggles.
There was no stopping me now. I could hardly wait to get both arms free, and looked about quickly for a place to pull in the car. With the girl struggling furiously, I saw it and swivelled at speed into a narrow lane through a large copse. A right turn at the end of the copse where the lane petered into a black earth track to farm sheds, and we were careening across a couple of fields in a cloud of dust. I jerked to a halt at the back of the copse, out of sight of the main road and surrounded by high, thick cornfields.
Without a word I wrapped my other arm around her, pinioning her with my judo-tightened muscles and forced back her face with mine. She twisted and writhed, but my mouth closed hard onto her soft lips as I moved the weight of my body half over onto her semi-prostrate form.
As I deftly ripped open the buttons of her blouse, my inside was screwed up in an unvoiced laughter at her helplessness, a laughter that contained the mute force of my cruel longing. The girl, now, was lost to the days of innocence. I had no thought but to uncover her supple woman's body and enter where nobody had yet entered. Give her the pain and, perhaps, the hated pleasure she had never yet felt..
"No. No. Please stop." She was screaming continuously as she fought with a fury which would, perhaps, have upset a weaker man. Her ringers jabbed at my face and tore at my hair as I released her with a hand to encircle the warm flesh of her back and whisk her brassiere undone. I knocked her hand away, without effort, and fiercely kneaded her taut, only slightly yielding breasts. Holding her arms in a vice, I slipped my head down to where the pear-shaped fullnesses of firm flesh writhed and jumped with the frantic contortions of her body. My lips closed over the pink, virgin nipples and brushed the skin which felt as smooth as cellophane. She screamed and her head shot back, her body forming a straining arc as I bit her and automatically I clasped my hands over her tightened buttocks and strained her hips towards mine.
The heat rushed in a spear-like motion to my penis and with a tear at the catch and zip I had snatched off her skirt in a rough, furious movement. Her long, brown legs flailed against me and although her face was hopeless with terror, she seemed to be too exhausted to utter a word or a scream. Her shins grazed the gear lever and deep rose marks appeared on her thighs from compression with the seat.
With blood pounding in my head and echoing in my genitals, I was aware of the flimsy, part transparent briefs creasing on the smooth, full flesh of her hips; the briefs which showed through her skirt when she walked, a sign to lust. They fitted tightly, failing to hide the dark mass of fine hair at the outward jut which joined her legs.
I forced a kiss on her again as I tried to prise down her briefs with one hand. But her violent struggles and my overwhelming lust-now an acute pain at my loins-made such a laborious process unpracticable and I simply tore the flimsy garment away from her. It ripped down the side of her hip and then across her abdomen, revealing her, brown, softly firm and naked to me.
My heart, too, was pounding with the anticipated fulfillment of desire and I moved my hand unsteadily down to the jutting mound of my flies and began to pull the buttons apart. Unconsciously I must have relaxed my grip, for with a movement of sheer desperation, the girl jerked away from me, forcing open the car door and flinging herself into the field almost in a single movement. It was so quick that I was taken completely by surprise and she was out of the car and running along the stubbly edge of the field, close into the copse before I had stumbled from the car after her.
She fled with desperate speed, her body heaving and gasping, racked with sobs. As I charged after her my eyes reveled in the sight of her brown lower body beneath the short flying blouse: the buttocks rotating like ball-bearings in a covering of skin, the skin drawn smoothly and tautly over the flesh leaving hollows in the two mounds as she ran. My skin burned.
I had caught her in a trice, half tackling her so that she fell forward on her face. She writhed over in an instant, trying to ward me off and for a moment I was aware of the virgin about to become woman, the blouse half off her, her nakedness somehow girlish and pure.
Then she was struggling, quite silently, with a new lease of strength and I had my pulsing penis pressed against the flesh of her thighs as I kicked off my trousers. Now was the moment. My penis was a throbbing extremity, filled, it seemed with a long, sharp pain as if it would burst, and I forced her thighs apart with an effort strengthened from an overwhelming fire. She strained back, even put her hands down to my loins in an attempt to prevent the loss of what she would undoubtedly have called her "honour" but the feel of her fingers down there, pushing indiscriminately at whatever part of my genitals presented itself made me lose all control and, in a moment, pushing up, I felt the warmth of tight flesh around the tip of my penis. The girl screamed.
"Oh, no, no, no. Please, Oh please."
She pleaded. Her tear-filled eyes beseeched me and then with a brutal thrust I had sunk into her to her accompanying scream of pain and horror.
A great relief seemed to break over my organ as I felt the contraction of the walls of soft flesh pressing around it. The passage was tight, but easier than I expected, due, no doubt, to my unrestrained initial thrust. I held the girl by her firm upper arms as she sobbed and jerked her body in an effort to escape me and the thick pain I brought. Her legs flailed leaving her vagina eventually wide open from the wide open thighs and I thrust tightly and wonderfully into her. In and in and in, while strangled hoarse sobs and cries were dragged from her throat. I kissed her salt, tear-covered lips as my loins worked and ground into hers, and she turned her head wildly from side to side, still trying to fight me off with her waning strength.
Disregarding her weakened blows, I moved my hands down under her bottom and grasping a warm, tight buttock with each, raised her loins towards me, thrusting with fresh vigor so that groins mingled with her sobs. Sweat broke out on my forehead as I seemed to push farther and farther into her until our bodies met solidly. It seemed that there was no feeling in my body except there at my penis, the whole of me concentrated into a single pulsing, dazzling, devouring sensation in which that irrelevant-seeming rod of stiff flesh was the medium and which grew with each strong thrust and jerk. Her passage clamped sweetly around me, such a natural complement to my male strength and rigidity.
She continued to writhe as I leaned up and kissed the tilted, straining breasts and as I felt the familiar tingling deep down in my body, she began to sob afresh, as if she divined the end was near, her face contorted, rather in mental anguish at the terrible, humiliating, degrading thing which had befallen her than in the pain of physical injury.
My penis began, it seemed, to grow even tauter and more elongated. Somewhere inside the flood was begin ring. My whole body was drenched in sweat and I panted, gasping for breath, thrusting savagely and uncontrollably. I felt the flood sweeping along inner channels to the extreme sweet pain at the extremity of my body. I jerked frantically as the girl screamed and I forced her thighs back against her ribs so that her knees practically touched her breasts and I entered into the very heart of her.
And then-coming ... coming ... rushing inside me ... sweeping to my penis in a great painful surge; my eyes dilated, I gasped, groaned as the wave seemed to tremble at the tip of my organ, hesitate. I cried out and thrust with a great, enormous, slow grinding movement, and inside her there was the explosion of my penis and she cried out too as the hot liquid shot through me like hot, streaming blood and shattered painfully into her.
I went on jerking into her until everything subsided and collapsed and then I fell forward onto her warm body.
Crying quietly and miserably, she pulled away from me and lay face down a couple of feet away in the com, blood drying on her thighs.
We lay for several minutes with the sun striking down on us, prostrate in the dusty bed of corn and then, slowly, I began to pull on my trousers and dust myself down. I was overcome, as usual, with a sort of remorse. Not for what I had done to the girl. That didn't concern me. But for the dead, flat, indifference it left in me. The usual feeling that I had achieved nothing, that it might as well not have happened. Now that the moment was over I felt its complete lack of importance to me except to make me despair that I was exactly as I was before.
I climbed tiredly to my feet and looked down at the slim woman, no longer a virgin, lying on her belly, legs spread-eagled, body shaking with the small, silent dregs of sobs. I felt nothing except a realisation that within minutes I could be roused to the same pitch again and so on ad infinitum. "I'll get your clothes," I said.
She didn't move and I trudged to the car and pulled out her skirt, brassiere and torn briefs, from their tangled disorder on the front seats. I dropped them down beside her and returned again to the car. I climbed in and had a moment's engine trouble. I had intended to back towards the girl and put her in the back seat, but when I looked around she'd disappeared.
I sat still for a moment, slightly stupefied at this unexpected behavior, then I got quickly from the car and went to the edge of the copse. I peered in through the thick foliage, but could see nothing beyond the gloom and splinters of sunlight. There was no sound; the clothes had gone. I called twice, telling the girl there was no point in hiding, that I'd take her to London. The large mass of trees and shrubbery-a three-quarter mile stretch slanting towards the road, squatted stolid and motionless in the sun, a gloomy refuge.
I drove onto the road, seeing no sign of the girl on the way, and speeded off towards London.
Looking back on the incident on the way, although I became freshly aware of the voluptuous details, I also became aware that I had acted extremely foolishly. I ascribed to the aphrodisiac effect of the whisky the fact that I had raped a girl for the first time in my life. I also began to think of the penalties which could be undergone by law for such a grave offence.
I thought about the girl. Was she even now running to a farmhouse, lying in the copse, waiting for the first vehicle to come along? She'd be pretty chary of vehicles in future, I thought. On the whole I considered myself pretty safe. She was obviously the sort of girl who would hate being involved in such an affair, would hate to bring it up again in any circumstances, would perhaps clean herself up and say nothing about it to anyone. On the other hand, in such an extreme situation she might blurt the whole thing out to the first person who appeared, or, failing that break down and admit it to someone close, perhaps her mother. Anyway I doubted whether she'd have noticed the number of the car or much in the way of details to connect me with the rape.
Well, I wasn't going to worry unduly about initiating an attractive girl into the ways of the world. And by the time I had reached my studio in Bloomsbury I had put the whole thing into the back of my mind.
I was helped by the appearance of Loma, who greeted me with an open-mouthed kiss, a hard thrust of her large, sweater-covered breasts and; "Darling, where have you been? I was getting quite frustrated."
I had been living with Lorna for about eight months. As an actress, I rather feared she had more curves than talent, but, like myself, she could boast a private income which made things easier for both of us as we shared a dislike for discomfort.
"I drove out to the club yesterday and stayed," I said. "Didn't I tell you I was going?"
"My sweet, you never tell me anything."
I knew there was no real criticism in the tone. Lorna and I had an excellent respect for the right of the other to indulge in private life. If questions were deflected or unanswered, they were not asked a second time.
At the moment, Lorna, with her long, tight jeans, looked as delicious as she always did when I hadn't seen her for a few days. I bent and kissed her neck and she rubbed her thighs against me as if she couldn't wait to make up for lost time.
In the back of my mind the events of the afternoon shadowed uncertainly and I straightened up.
"I'm hungry," I announced.
Lorna gave me a long, satisfied look, like the cat who knows the mouse can't get away this time.
We ate quietly discussing her problems with odd producers and parts and then I went through from the studio to the bathroom to take a shower.
In the purifying warmth of the water, I wondered uneasily about the hitchhiker, but my thoughts were soon interrupted by the appearance of Lorna in a loosely tied bathrobe.
"I've come to scrub your back," she declared-a frequent method of hers for getting what she wanted.
"O.K." I bent to let her reach and she began to knead the soap into my back with her slim fingers.
"You seem to get hairier every day," she said. "I'll soon feel as if I'm sleeping with a gorilla ... and how did you get these?"
I glanced down at my hip to the small, fresh-looking scratches. A slight flush might have tinged my face at the thought of the lustful battle in the cornfield, but I answered coolly.
"Oh. Probably at the club. Those bloody sharp table edges seem to be all over the place when you've had a couple of whiskies."
I wasn't at all sure how Lorna would take the confession of a rape. Anyway the fewer people who knew, the better.
And she wasn't really very interested in the cuts, although she allowed her fingers to run soothingly along them.
"Let's see if you've any in front," she said, and, as I turned, smiling, she ran her finger tips over my hip until they brushed lightly against my testicles and ended by stroking gently my already half-erect penis.
"No ... there aren't any," she murmured, smiling up into my face with the inviting gleam she could make appear in her eyes at will.
"I think I'd like to have my back scrubbed," she announced, suddenly.
She slipped out of the robe and I treated her body to a look from which familiarity could not completely obliterate admiration.
Lorna had a fleshy, redheaded beauty. Her breasts were large without sagging and swept into a waist whose slimness accentuated them. Her hips were made to receive a man's weight and her thighs were heavy, shapely and altogether voluptuous. As she turned to hang up the bathrobe, her full, white buttocks were cheekily dimpled. She backed under the shower with me and as I soaped her back I felt her buttocks rubbing gently against my loins so that soon my erection was complete and massive. I leaned over her, soaping her breasts, my hands slipping over their bulbous expanses and her hands came behind her back, insinuated themselves between our bodies and began to stroke my penis with a tantalizing, butterfly touch. As I tweaked her nipples, I felt the tingling of nerves beginning in the lower part of my body. The nervous constriction in my chest was always absent when indulging with women with whom I was sexually familiar, but the dull ache of desire in my genitals was in no way diminished. As Lorna twisted to face me I clasped her tightly.
We jogged and rubbed against each other for a few moments before Lorna slid, brushing her lips down my body as she did so, to her knees. Her lips closed suddenly and tightly over the head of my penis and I grabbed her sleek head and pushed it against me, shoving forward with my abdomen. Lorna encircled my hips with her arms, moving her soft lips over my organ, biting it gently, stabbing it with her tongue.
My teeth gritting in a clench of passion, I looked down at her as she crouched beneath me, the shower splashing down on her beautiful white body, stringing her deep auburn hair close around her neck and shoulders, trying to gather and then rushing in torrents down the deep crevices between her breasts and her buttocks. Involuntarily I began to grunt, twining my legs together, wriggling my hips, but Lorna was not going to risk frustration. Her mouth wide, her china-blue eyes half open, she suddenly extricated herself from my flaming loins and rose up to me, pulling my head brutally down to hers.
My hands slipped gently over her smooth, wet back to her buttocks, creased in tautness as she strained against me. Of one accord we moved, still entwined, out of the shower and, soaking wet, stretched out on a casual rug in a corner of the large room.
I rolled heavily onto her cushioning body and her hips extended, her thighs opened wide to receive me. As I thrust my penis, wet from the shower, into her orifice, wet from desire, Lorna bit hard into my shoulder. The sudden sharp pain galvanised me into a furious brutal thrusting and Lorna groaned. She drew her thighs up to her breasts and then spread them out against the thick, soft wool of the rug. I forced myself right into her, my penis seeming heavy and apart from me with its solid, tingling ache. I raised myself slightly, spreading my knees so that they splayed on either side of her hips and Lorna's hand came down under her thighs to brush my testicles as they swung close to her filled vagina. Then, always as if nothing could satisfy her, she grasped my thighs pulling them furiously against her as my thrusting seemed to split her body.
My penis, pulsing with tingling energy, seemed to be the only part of me really alive, filling her with my life and power, as she began to wriggle and groan, "Darling. Oh, darling, darling." She spread her legs even wider, a masochistic position, so that it must have hurt her apart from my great organ splitting up into her very belly. I stabbed and ground brutally, aware, as always of my slight detachment, my consciousness of the whole thing, as if I couldn't enter into it blindly. I always felt this way. But not Lorna. Her eyes were closed, mouth working, head and body straining and writhing.
My penis seemed to grow thicker and heavier, aching as if it were filled with too much blood. I pulled her thighs up, forcing them up against my chest so that she was lying on only part of her back, her rump wriggling free from the rug against my testicles. I thrust my belly hard against her as my penis surged in and out wetly. Thrust, thrust, thrust. My mouth fell open and I began to gasp. This beautiful rounded woman was draining my soul down into my penis. She moaned long and low all the time now, working her hips furiously. Her moan broke up into a series of small, sharp groans and as, with a great straining which jerked my head back, I spurted into her, she convulsed in a long screaming groan, mixed with exclamations of fulfillment.
I sank to the rug and Lorna rolled onto me, kissing me and whispering, "You darling."
We lay heaving for some time, our bodies returning to normal from the furious struggle. Lorna moved off me after some minutes and lay on her stomach beside me, face cradled in her arms. My eyes wandered over the sleek, heavy lines of her body, the long curve of her back, sweeping into sudden protruding curve of buttocks, hollowed at the sides, rounding sharply into downy thighs.
A little nucleus of desire, began, already, to reflame in the pit of my abdomen and I ran my hand down her back, savouring the wet, silky slipperiness. My fingers lingered in the small of her back, traced the tense line of a buttock, and explored the deep crease between the two orbs of flesh as they relaxed again.
The immediate second time was always better, more agonizing. I climbed onto Loma's bottom and she began to quiver beneath me. I slipped my hand under her, stroking and fondling her breasts and kissing her back. Lorna spread her legs slowly, her buttocks forming a broad cushion for my hips.
I slid my hands down from her breasts over the soft, tight flesh covering her ribs, lingered grasping a small handful of rubbery flesh at her navel and then coursed my fingers into the mass of red hair at her leg junction. She wriggled and I pulled her hips up so that she was in a kneeling position. Her head flopped sideways on the rug as I ranged myself kneeling against her .Gently I guided my penis into the openly inviting aperture which presented itself to me fleshily between her thighs. Loma spread her thighs wider and pushed her buttocks back at me as I entered into her to the hilt of my power. I clasped my hands around the front of her thighs where they creased into her hips and holding her fast against me, began a slow rhythmic piston movement as I watched her bottom swaying and pushing against my belly.
Lorna's lips hung open again and her firm, rounded face was flushed and hot as I thrust faster. She drew her thighs in under her kneeling body, protruding her buttocks and hips a little more so that I clove into her still farther. She gave sudden little explosions of breath-"Oh! Oh! Oooh!" as I rammed hard. My penis was throbbing like a waiting engine again and I gritted my teeth, marveling at sex's capacity. I slid my thumbs between her legs, stretching the lips of her vagina as my pulsing strokes grew rapid. I moved my hands up the broad splayed roundness of her hips and, gripping her waist, leaned heavily forward on her, flattening her breasts to the rug so that her hips automatically reared up, while her face contorted in passion.
I watched in a fury of rushing feeling my penis wetly gliding into her and out again, with the lips of her vagina pulling away from her slightly, clutching at it until the next inward stroke. My head was hot and pounding. The terrible, uncontrollable corkscrew sensation grew in my belly. I began to grunt and groan. Lorna groaning also, almost in delirium, rammed her buttocks harder and harder against me as she drew to her climax. Our bodies smacked against each other in thuds and sucking noises. She spread her thighs still more until her crotch seemed a great open gulf. My head swam on my neck. The liquid heat rushed inside me as I gaspingly cried out. Lorna screamed. The hot fluid trembled an agonizingly long instant and then shattered from my body shooting up into Lorna, who was gasping for her very breath. The sperm burst in continual waves from my organ for what seemed an incredibly long time and then Lorna collapsed and I flopped forward onto her back.
We lay gasping for some time before I rolled off her and stared at the ceiling. Her body still heaving, Lorna put her long, soft arms around me and buried her face in my neck with a purring smile.
The outside room came back to me and I felt slightly cold. I realized, suddenly that the shower was still running and, indifferently, that the water had dried under the sweat of my body.
We slept like logs that night and awakened late so that Lorna had to rush off to rehearsals immediately.
I dressed lazily, cooked myself some eggs and bacon and picked up the morning paper. It was the sight of so many pieces of news in so many shapes and sizes that reminded me of the hitchhiker. I skimmed quickly through the pages, glancing down the columns, taking in every paragraph of news. I didn't know quite what I expected to see, but after reading from front to back I put it down with uneasiness lifted from my mind and settled to a morning's uninterrupted painting.
My painting, my few critiques had said in varying terms, were unusually interesting in the undoubted sexual power of the images, which seemed even to embrace inanimate things. I was never clear how this conclusion was arrived at and it annoyed me that I could not refute it. And today, it seemed, my work took hold of me and manifested itself in savagery of stroke and colour. I found myself simmering on the extra pleasure to be gained from the forbiddenness of rape.
But with the arrival of the evening paper my mental indulgence left me.
It was a small paragraph at the foot of a page, glossed over, doubtless, by a police request that their investigations should not be hindered. Under the simple heading "Assault" it told in about ten lines that an 18-year-old girl had been attacked by a man in a field near Henfield, Sussex. Police, it said, were looking for a man-and there followed a description which would leave none of my friends in doubt as to the attacker's identity.
I stood for some minutes, my mind a numbness refusing to function. Stories told by a reporter friend, had made me only too aware that the police gave away no more information than they felt necessary to help them. It might be that even now they were scenting their way towards me like slow old bloodhounds.
The bitter fruit of my pleasure! How the hell had the girl remembered so exactly. I poured myself a stiff one and sat down. The worst then, had happened. She had blurted the story to a passer-by, her mother, had blurted it to somebody and started off a chain of events which might end in chains for me. Rather, I had started off a chain of events. The whisky had. I thought over the incident, wondering in a sudden mental vacuum if the ecstatic pleasure, the savage power, the fierce defloration of an untouched flower had been worth to me the trouble I was now in. And even then I was sufficiently a realist to see that for me there could be no question.
-I got up and walked from one room to another trying to concentrate. I found it difficult to form any coherent thought but the thought of trial, prison, chains binding me-walls crowding in on me filled me with a horror which only action could to some extent dispel. I went into my bedroom, opened the wardrobe with nervous hands.
I was aware that I had consciously to keep a grip on myself and not panic. I also had to act quickly. Only too many criminals, I knew, were caught because they made no effort to escape until the web of detection was spun around them. I took a set of shirts and ranged them on the bed. I was not going to sit around in the hope that police investigations would fail.
Having packed my suitcase, I felt pleased at my short notice mobility. I sorted out passport, phoned the airport.
In a few hours' time I was on a plane for Brussels. A note left for Lorna about my need for a change of air would come as no surprise. She was used to my whims.
Brussels was not a city that inspired me, nor one in which I felt I could adequately get "lost," but from there I could travel incognito to Paris, without, if I knew the customs authorities, even getting my passport stamped. Once in Paris I could steer clear of the police, I was sure. I knew the city well, spoke near perfect French and could keep out of the way indefinitely.
I slumped back in my comfortable seat with reflections of the future mingling with thoughts of my neighbour.
I liked the smooth speed of air travel and I like the too-brief journeys. There was the homosexual dilettante on his way to Paris to escape the restrictions of the English law, who had sounded me ... the well-read widow on her way to spend a long dreamed of holiday in Italy, who had provided me with a fortnight of sexual bliss ... but my present companion was something really special.
She was sitting on the window side and from my gangway seat I was able to study her at close range on the pretext of looking at the gloomy shapes of cloud through the window. I judged her to be Scandinavian with her blonde, pale, chiselled beauty. Her profile was strong and straight and her deep blue eyes had a profound, thoughtful look as she glanced inwards at the reading, eating, sleeping, thinking passengers in the warm brightly-lit plane. I could have leaned and kissed the clean, delicate skin framed tautly over her cheek, with an inclination of my head, so close were we sitting, and her sleek, blonde hair, which I itched to run my fingers through, exuded a faint perfume which mads my nostrils tingle.
I could look down on the rounded mound of her sweat-covered breasts, cleaving slightly at the open top Of her suit and, letting my imagination vault, I was hard put to stop myself from reaching out and touching them.
Outwardly unconcerned, I awaited my moment with eagerness. It came inevitably and, as she fumbled for a light, I snapped my lighter to her cigarette. Her deep eyes thanked me as she pursed her finely-drawn lips over my hand.
"Will you have a cigarette?" she asked, courteously, noticing I wasn't smoking.
"I don't smoke myself, thanks," I replied, "but I find a lighter such an excellent opening for one who likes to chat on journeys that I always carry it for other people."
She laughed. "And who reaps the benefit?"
"Nobody loses," I answered with a smile.
She smiled back. "I take the bait."
That was a fair beginning and we whiled away a pleasant hour in which I became more and more impressed with her poise and apparent maturity. As I listened to her warm voice, tinged very slightly with accent, I did nothing to hide the light which shows in the eyes of every man who's not afraid to let a woman see that she interests him-as a woman. She responded agreeably, but with some reserve-as, indeed, was fitting.
She was Danish, it appeared, and was on her way to do a little business in Brussels before going on to Paris. We exchanged interested twinkles over the coincidence.
She was interested in art and we discussed painters and their problems at some length.
"Can you imitate well?" she suddenly asked me.
I mentioned that at an exhibition in Kensington my work had been --likened to various painters but, and I smiled, had been accorded a sexual power which was unique.
"Imitation is not the aim of my work any more than it is almost any painter's. Why do you ask?"
"If you are good, I might have a job for you."
"Working with you would give me great pleasure," I said.
She would tell me no more and we began to arrange to meet in Paris in a few days' time when it occurred to me that I might easily risk a day or two in Brussels. In fact I began to forget the reason for my flight.
On Olsa's recommendation-we were soon on good terms-I took a room at the hotel where she usually stayed not far from the Palais de Justice and the clot of big tourist restaurants which appear at first to be on the sea front, so broad is the avenue they overlook. It appeared that I should have her all to myself at least for the evening and, I hoped, for the night. After settling into rooms at opposite ends of a short, discreetly carpet-padded corridor, we went out to dine.
I found myself more fascinated by this woman than I had been affected by the female sex for some time. She had a quiet gaiety, an intelligent mind, which, while ready to listen sympathetically, was equally ready to question a poor argument. She was, above all, the very essence of quiet, superior sex-appeal. I had been able to take a good, full look at her as we left the plane and had imagined her tall, slender firmness in bed with mounting excitement. Her breasts were large and high poised under the well cut suit, her long hips slim and supple-looking. Ascending the hotel stairs, I had been unable to drag my eyes from the sinuous firmness of her calves and the promise above.
I ordered the best wine for our meal and steered the conversation onto the work she might have for me. She was more talkative, but still unwilling to go into details. The work, she said, would be for a friend of hers and there could be a lot of money in it. Something in the way she emphasized the word "could" prompted me to ask if the work was legal.
"You must see my friend," she said, in a tone of finality. "Let's not discuss it further now."
"I'm not so interested in the money," I said, "but I might demand some other compensation for working for you."
I looked into her eyes with a slight smile. She considered me for a moment with a countering smile which was half indifferent, half provocative.
"I'm afraid you'd be wasting your time in that case."
"It's not what I'd consider a waste of time," I said, purposely misconstruing her words.
"You'd better stick to the money. You'd acquire that more easily."
It takes more than words to rebuff me and I saw that we drank well, mixing at a night club later.
Climbing the stairs back at the hotel, I slipped my arm around her until I could feel the tight bulge of her breast. She didn't demur and at the top of the stairs I kissed her. She allowed herself to be kissed, making no response at all and I released her, outwardly amused, inwardly irritated.
"Thank you," she said, with amusement, "for a pleasant evening."
"Enchante," I said. "But the night, as they say, is very young. How about a drink?"
"You have drink in your room?"
"Certainly," I answered, "but I'll bring it to yours if you prefer."
"No. I think you'd better leave it in your room-and that I had better go to mine." And she had whisked away leaving me time only to stare after her with a smile that hid my disappointment. It seemed she meant it.
In my room, however, I mixed a couple of drinks, waited for 15 minutes and walked quickly along to Olsa's room. My discreet knock was answered by a low, "Who's there?"
"I've brought the nightcap you were too polite to admit you wanted," I whispered.
"Now please," her voice whispered back. "I meant what I said, really, you're not very courteous."
"Look, I'm only being friendly. I'll promise to be out in ten minutes-and you'd better let me in because I can hear someone coming." My tone was determined.
There was a whispered expression of annoyance and in a second or two the door opened. I stepped quickly inside, walked straight to a table and placed the drinks on it. When I turned, Olsa had closed the door and was looking at me with a mixture of annoyance and amusement.
"Your determination is really rather intriguing," she said.
"And well worth it," I retorted, regarding her appraisingly.
She was swathed in a silk dressing gown which she had obviously donned hurriedly when I disturbed her preparation for a bath. Insecurely tied, it swelled out voluminously over her breast, outlining them with clear, silken strokes. A deep cleft down the front of the gown exposed the inner rising of smooth, white flesh.
"You must go in a few minutes," she said, sitting in an armchair opposite me. We drank quietly, watching each other. Her crossed legs as she sipped revealed a beautifully shaped calf and an inch or two of buttery-looking thigh, where the gown had fallen back. I was overcome by the realisation of her single precarious covering.
"Why this effort at puritanism?" I asked, suddenly.
"Upbringing," she answered, with a cheekily defiant smile, "and the fact that I'm in love with someone."
I felt a pang of annoyance, not so much at her words, but the conclusions she drew from them.
"I have no doubt," I said, "that your beloved enjoys himself while you're away. Surely you wouldn't find the same thing impossible."
She shrugged. "Some women are like me. There's no point in arguing."
I rose, crossed to her chair and sat on the arm.
"It's always worth arguing about these things," I said.
"Perhaps from your point of view," she said, and stood up.
I stood up swiftly beside her and put my arms around her firmly.
"All right. We won't argue," I said.
I kissed her, pressing her body against me, my hand slithering over the silk, down her back, stroking her buttocks, feeling my desire rising against her.
"That, I'm afraid, is not permitted," she said, cool and unruffled. She pulled away from me.
"Oh, please," I said, fiercely, catching at the gown. It pulled apart above the waist cord and I had a glimpse of one of the finest breasts I've seen, soaring magnificently from her body. I caught her again, and my hand seemed to tremble as it enclosed the jut of solid-feeling flesh. She pulled away again towards a small casual table and I saw, with growing heat, the gown twisting in a crushing embrace about her long slim buttocks. I moved quickly after her. This was really a prize too good to lose.
Before I reached her, she turned suddenly to face me, a handbag dropped to the floor and I stopped in astonishment.
"I thought that would surprise you," she said, quietly, levelling a small automatic at my navel.
"What the hell's the idea," I said, incredulously.
"Nothing," she replied. "Except to keep off the pawing hands of those who won't take no for an answer."
She smiled. "It's all right, I'm not going to shoot you. I know this method is a little drastic, but it's very practical and saves no end of trouble. Now if you'll just return to your room, I'll look forward to seeing you at breakfast with no hard feelings. Thank you for the drink."
"All right, my sweet," I said, composure recovered. "I congratulate you on a somewhat novel method of keeping the wolf from the body. But I warn you I shan't give up trying."
She smiled again. "Good night."
I returned to my room a little amazed, wondering about a number of things. I began to feel I was going to get more than I bargained for in mixing with this woman. But I went to sleep picturing her breast, momentarily revealed to me. She was a cool beauty. And I was determined to have her.
Beyond regarding each other on the following day with knowledgeable amusement, neither of us mentioned the incident of the night before.
We chatted about everything under the sun as we sped in a black Packard towards the Franco-Belgian border. At the flimsy red barriers, bored customs men at either end of the short stretch of no-man's land didn't even bother to open my passport.
"They're very lax, nowadays, unless they're looking for suspicious people," Olsa said.
Idly I wondered how the rape enquiries were proceeding in England. I didn't doubt my ability to escape notice even if I became a "suspicious person."
In no time we had passed Le Bourget airport and were speeding into the cluttered, nondescript, marketstrewn outskirts of Paris. Olsa dropped me on the Left bank near St. Germain-des-Pres. She arranged to meet me at a restaurant in four days time and drove off in the direction of Neuilly where she said she lived.
Sitting on the crowded terrace of a well-known cafe that evening, watching the colourful conglomeration of nationalities crossing the warm blare of light bursting into the roadway, I felt very glad to be back in Paris once more. Paris I had found, more than any other city was a vast clearing house for unexpected happenings.
I must, I decided, try to get an apartment, even a top-floor maid's room. Somewhere, where the police would be less likely to make checks as they occasionally did on hotels.
It was while I was toying with this problem that the girl pushed her way through the tables and sat beside me, asking in French if I would care to see her paintings. I replied that I should be delighted. It had always been one of my pleasures to see the work of young artists who make their way from cafe to cafe trying to sell their work to tourists in order to live and go on painting. I always hoped I might make a discovery.
The girl, who spread a folder of paintings and sketches in front of me, was dark and wistful looking. She had small soulful features and enormous dark eyes, which sparkled from time to time in the light. Her tight blue jeans creased across her hips and her black jumper clasped her well-rounded bosom with a tight fondness. Her fingers as she turned the paintings one by one were long and slim, made for caressing. I invited her to have a drink and we were soon steeped in a discussion of her work. She showed considerable talent and I bought two of the paintings for something more than' they were worth and asked if she had any more work I could see.
We had been chatting for an hour and the girl, obviously flattered at my interest, said she had more at her brother's studio, where she was living while he was in the south.
On the way to the studio, I asked her frankly how she'd been managing to sell and she admitted, as frankly, very badly. I suggested she was not overeating either and she said with a rueful smile, that artists never did.
So, excusing myself as a fellow artist on better times, I insisted on calling at a charcuterie on the Boulevard St. Michel, which I knew stayed open late, a breadshop and a wineshop. Laden with bacon, tinned vegetables, bread and a few bottles of good wine, we arrived eventually, with some merriment, at the studio.
It proved to be an enormous room with a little kitchen, simply, but cleverly furnished to give an effect of luxurious eccentricity. While Monique-a perfect name for her dark, velvet looks, I had thought, busied herself with cooking in the kitchen, I sat on a bed which I noted was broad enough for three and studied her paintings.
Soon we were enjoying a meal washed down with strong, red wine and I was learning about Monique. She was 20, had been painting since she was a small child and always occupied her brother's studio while he was away rather than live with her parents at Bordeaux.
"I like to get away from them for a time," she told me. "They're so strait-laced. And they can't understand my preoccupation with what they regard as non-productive work."
I held her hand for a moment on the table. "That's very intelligent of you," I said. "No parental eye to ruin your happiness."
She smiled at me warmly and I could see that she was attracted to me and that her fundamental shyness was wearing thin from the wine. The meal over, we discussed her paintings in detail, continuing to drink steadily.
"I think I've had a little too much wine," Monique said, eventually, looking at me with a hazy little smile. "Do you mind if we stop this critical analysis for a while."
I didn't mind a bit and soon we were dancing quietly to a programme of soft radio music. We danced cheek to cheek and I stroked her long, black hair. It was obvious she was filled with the glamorous carelessness of the wine. When I kissed her she pressed herself hard against me.
We sank onto the bed and I slipped my hands under her jumper, unfastening her brassiere as I kissed her. Her eyes held mine as I caressed her breasts one after the other. The spark had flamed inside her and she kissed me, pulling down to her, breathing heavily.
"Have you had men in here before?" I asked.
"I've only ever been with a man once before and that was when I was 17," she admitted, softly.
"Did you go to bed with him?" She looked so young and trusting, that it occurred to me, that I was, perhaps to be the first.
"Twice," she replied. "And then he was killed in a car crash."
"You poor dear," I murmured.
Gently, I unbuttoned her jeans and slipped them down her slim legs. She lay with her eyes closed, lips apart, dressed only in transparent white briefs with a frilly edge.
Her breasts were not large, but looked full against her slim ribs and waist-slim and taut from her obligatory diet; her thighs were sinuous and strong, made for the convulsive union.
I slipped my hand up under the narrow join of her briefs and caressed the moist lips of her vagina. With a little moan she allowed her legs to fall apart and, pulling my head down to her, slipped her tongue between my lips. "Oh, it's been so long," she whispered. "Please." I undressed quickly, my only difficulty being the slipping of my pants over my pulsing erection. I pulled off the briefs and she raised her hips to help me do it. I stroked the hair of her mound, exploring the crease, again, with my fingers. Monique, eyes still closed, spread her legs, tightening her muscles and I moved gently between her thighs.
"Now, now," she whispered, face puckered into the pain of waiting.
I lowered my face onto hers, while with one hand I guided my penis to the moist slit between her legs, that most intimate of her belongings, now opened and offered unconditionally to me.
As her tongue searched my mouth I thrust into her, and the jerk and exclamation she made reminded me that her virgin days were not very far behind. "Be gentle at first," she begged.
And I moved gently and warmly into her, my penis throbbing the more as I saw her face, mouth opening and gasping, forehead creased with passion. All the years of remembering and longing coming out in an increasing abandonment of a woman who forgets her self, except for the enormous filling of her body down there with an unbearable pleasure.
I, too, was soaring under the effects of the wine and I slipped my hands under her soft, small bottom caressing the other opening of her body as she twisted and gasped. Gradually she opened her legs wider and wider and drew up her thighs so that with an extra little grin that brought forth an elongated moan from her I filled her body up to the hilt. I pulled my thighs close against the inside of hers, skewering my rigid rod of stiff sensitive flesh into her close-fitting channel.
Thrills of the unbelievable intimacy I was enjoying with a stranger hammered staccato in my stomach, my abdomen, my genitals as I thrust and ground, stabbed, rode into the sweet opening, the very core of her being.
Monique gave, I think, the most abandoned response I have known, writhing her whole warm body from side to side, twisting and wriggling her hips in a continuous almost rotating, movement, clasping my face with the long painter's fingers, spreading her thighs and tightening her legs in a scissors around my waist so that her feet pointed towards the ceiling, moaning and gasping all the time: "Oh, my God, oh, my God, I love you, I love you, oh, don't stop, oh, oh uuuugh!"
Her organ seemed to grow and grow until I was lost in it, grinding, a numbness all over me, then only feeling the nucleus of growing intensity somewhere in the red depths between her stretched-apart legs.
Monique, her head rocking, followed my example, reaching round my buttocks, jabbing her fingers into the sensitive flesh of my anus, gasping and groaning so much that I thought I was hurting her, but: "Oh, darling, go on, go on!" She could hardly mouth the words.
The nucleus was growing to a great tube of pain, growing to a twisting, clasped tautness until my penis seemed like an enormous balloon inside her, trying to push through to my fingers as they stabbed into her bottom and she shrieked, grasping my testicles.
Mounting, mounting, mounting as she was gasping, gasping, gasping and suddenly in a dizzy, head-roaring dazzlement the balloon burst and my creation swept in long waves, rushing into her moist widely receptive body, hurtling up in thrust after gasped-out thrust until a half oblivion of decline with caresses and passion dissolving into hot breath, her supple body so much plasticine.
I didn't stay the night, feeling disinclined with the afterward limpidity, wanting the fresh air as I did, and sleep to follow. But the next day I moved into the studio from my hotel.
I was aware that Monique in her loneliness liked to cling to the emotional sop I provided, but I considered the shield of a private studio worth the inconvenience. Police wouldn't visit the studio and were un-likely to bother me even if my passport overran its tourist limits.
Perhaps I may seem to have been fortunate in my meetings up to this point with women and the willingness I found, but that could be a thought only in an unadventurous mind. For any man of means and breeding, ten women are waiting for an illicit adventure, a fairy-tale romance, a grown-up affaire, a hoped for husband. He needs only the drive. He should have no occasion, sexually, on which he could look back and say: if only I had realized; if only I had taken the chance. Personally I would never insult a woman by leaving her frustrated.
Anyway, I found my time occupied extremely pleasantly, while I awaited my meeting with Olsa. During the day we ate and painted; during the night we made long-drawn, firm-bodied, abandoned love, exploring one position after another, Monique with the insatiable appetite of a young woman who has had only a memory of love for so long.
The sun was showing deep, short shadows as I watched from my pavement seat on the narrow street, Olsa's car glide into the curb. The rays gleamed and quivered in a sheen on the bonnet and with a cognac or two coursing through my veins, I was reminded of a similar day, similar feelings in a golden Sussex field not long before.
The spin of desire, coiled and whirled in my loins as Olsa's long, slim legs swung out of the car, mockingly revealing the cool white of thigh above the cobwebby stocking-top and the gloom of concealment higher up under her skirt.
We shook hands and I held her long cool fingers for a moment.
"I'm pleased to have an aim return to my life," I said.
She smiled and replied bluntly: "Still trying to seduce me?"
We had another cognac and then she drove me off towards Neuilly to meet "the man who might have work for you."
Now that my obvious desire for her had become an open joke between us, I had no compunction in making advances to Olsa and it occurred to me suddenly that I could gain some pleasure from her lovely form at the very moment without her being able to do much about it. I slipped an arm around her slim shoulders as she drove.
"Better be careful," she warned. "Paris traffic is far from safe."
In answer, I impudently insinuated my hand between the folds of her open jacket and began to stroke her thrusting, sweater-clad breasts.
"How can you be such a fool-we'll crash," she cried.
"Not if you attend to your driving," I laughed.
Gently I rubbed and fondled the tight bursting melons of flesh and the large-pointed nipples which I could feel voluptuously hard through the tightly stretched wool of the jumper.
"You're really quite ridiculous," Olsa snapped, not knowing whether to be angry or amused.
"You can't blame me for seizing an opportunity when your hands are full of something other than an automatic," I retorted.
She laughed and relaxed at that, presumably deciding that she could permit such a minor liberty, had, in fact, little choice. I continued my fondling of the glorious mounds until near the end of the journey.
It seemed to me that Olsa was melting towards me, but for the moment I contented myself with the upper part of her body. I don't trust women drivers at the best of times and was inclined to think-like most short-sighted men-that I valued my life more than sexual pleasure.
We eventually drew up, with Olsa's beautiful face looking a little flushed, in a smart side street in Neuilly and at the touch of a button were let into a first floor apartment as luxuriously decorated as any I had ever seen.
Light peach colour was the motif with carpets and rugs of flame and red. The furniture was of an extremely simple and effective contemporary design and every modern comfort and convenience seemed to have been installed. I thought it an excellent and comfortable place in which to enjoy the having of Olsa. But not for the moment.
For as we passed from one tasteful room to another, a slim, dark-suited man with the lightly darkened face of a high caste Indian, rose lithely to his feet and came towards me smiling.
"Mr. Crawford-I'm very pleased to meet you," he said in beautiful, brittle English. "My name is Douglas Jaswant."
We shook hands and I bowed slightly while Olsa watched us with an inscrutable face. It occurred to me suddenly that this was the man she professed herself in love with and I looked at her sharply. As if she guessed my thought, her eyes seemed to twinkle and I half expected her to protrude a neat little tongue at me from her lovely lips.
"I'm afraid on my instruction that Olsa was not very explicit," Jaswant went on. "If you'd care to sit down and have a drink, I'd like to tell you a little more about our proposition.
Settled with our drinks we looked at each other attentively.
"Since Olsa mentioned you a few days ago," Jaswant began, "I have taken the trouble of looking into your work. May I first of all express my admiration ... "
About an hour later after the Indian had sounded my views on morals, ethics, the making of easy money, the willingness to take risks, I began to get an inkling of what the game was. Deciding at last that I was "safe," he came right out with it.
"Mr. Crawford, we have a business, a very lucrative business. We sell modern masterpieces to rich clients, whose artistic judgment is not all that it might be, but, who, I might add, trust ours implicitly. Needless to say these masterpieces are masterpieces only of imitation."
I pursed my lips and he went on.
"Painters willing to perform the delicate and, to a minor extent, risky operation of out-Picassoing Picasso are, of course, not easy to find. Our last operator died a month ago of tuberculosis and our business has been declining ... "
"What are you offering?" I cut in-and he smiled.
"A man of quick decision is what we want, Mr. Crawford. Olga was right about you."
An hour later I had instructions to the last detail, a number of Picasso originals and a generous advance.
For the next few days I worked in leisurely but steady fashion, telling Monique that a friend wanted the copies as presents for his relatives. After initial difficulties I managed to produce more or less exact copies and Jaswant, whom I would contact at another apartment off the Boulevard Malesherbes, expressed himself well pleased.
I found a certain satisfaction in the work, did not neglect my own entirely, and completely forgot the reason for my hurried flight to the continent.
I needed no self-deception to realize that Monique adored me. It was there in her brown eyes, in her words, in her desperate, all-giving lovemaking. But I never had any difficulty in carrying on with my new work or visiting Jaswant as she was intelligent enough and trusting enough not to ask too many questions about my frequent outings.
When I had been in Paris about a month, Jaswant announced his intention of flying to America. He had been negotiating, he said, and had certain sales for many thousands of dollars. I was not surprised to hear this, being well aware that he liked to sell as far from his environment as possible and picked his clients very carefully.
I had seen Olsa, of course, on a number of innocuous occasions, mainly with Jaswant. It was obvious she was in love with him and probable that he was, reluctantly, with her, although he treated her like a classy whore-doubtless part of his fascination for her. They did not, it appeared, live together and I fancied that Jaswant preferred to be able to withdraw to his apartment near Malesherbes from time to time.
My desire for Olsa continued to grow and I think she derived some satisfaction from this. It helped to compensate in a small way, for the indifference of the Indian.
Jaswant left by plane from Orly Airport late one night and from then on Olsa and I had frequent coffees and lunches together although she continued to evade my more serious advances.
When, a week or so later, we had news of Jaswant's impending return, I began to get desperate. I could no longer look at Olsa, her aloof, taut-skinned beauty without feeling my loins in a whirl, my penis stirring in a warmth of longing. I just had to have her to avoid a feeling of failure, that something wonderful that I desired was lost to me forever.
The night before Jaswant was due back, I made some excuses to Monique and met Olsa for dinner. Under her cool surface, I sensed a nervous excitement at the thought of her lover's return and I took advantage of this careless flush to ply her with wine and later brandy. We both drank quite a lot, Olsa more than I, and I had, myself, to take the wheel as we drove back to her apartment. Olsa was so flushed and high-spirited that she did not question my coming in with her and, as I switched on a table lamp, the warm peach of the walls and the flame of the rugs reflected in the half-light on her radiant features, her warm, laughing eyes.
"I feel wonderfully whoozy," she laughed, kicking off her shoes and flinging off her coat before skinking unsteadily into a deep armchair.
"Let's have a final for a good night's sleep," I suggested, pouring out two tumblers half full of whisky.
"Oh, that would be too much," she laughed, a tipsy break in her voice. "I shouldn't be able to stand."
"Nonsense!" I put down the glass in front of her and swigged mine.
"All right," she said, with a grin. She picked up the glass and drained it, seeming unaware of the considerable contents. "One more can't hurt."
One more probably made all the difference.
Olsa rose unsteadily to her feet.
"I'd better make some coffee." she said indistinctly.
I looked at her in the warm peach glow, her long black silk dress hugging her body. The skin tight material out-lined her breasts as they seemed to try to break through to the air. It fitted under them, stretched tautly over her ribs, nipped into her waist and then swept out again tightly around her long, slender hips. As she moved her long svelte body away from me towards the kitchen, her dress wrinkled around her bottom, tightly fondling it, seeming to offer a buttock with each step she took forward. My face felt feverish. Tonight I must have her.
"Mind you don't mess up that beautiful dress," I said.
"Oh, yes." She tried to gather her thought for a moment. "Better take it off" she said. "Better change it."
She bumped into a table and I rose and stepped quickly across the room to her
"Steady," I warned, catching her, with my arm around her waist.
"I'm all right," she murmured, looking at me with a faraway smile in her eyes.
"You're not. You're going to fall over at any moment," I said, briskly. "I'll help you."
We moved towards the bedroom door, feet muffled in the thick carpet, and my hand slid down onto her smooth, firm hip and rested lightly against her rump.
Olsa didn't seem to notice, and I kept my hand there as she walked, feeling her flesh move under the silk, feeling the separateness of her buttocks, as first one and then the other slid and pushed against my hand as she stepped slowly and carefully forward. My penis was just a painful sensation pushing against my trousers and as we reached the door of the bedroom, I reached around Olsa to open the door. For a moment she sagged back against me and the mound at my loins was crushed against the crease of her buttocks. I held her waist with one hand and pushed gently against her as I opened the door. She didn't seem to notice and we passed into the bedroom.
I was hot all over and, once in the room, I began to unzip her dress down the side.
"It's all right, I can manage," she said.
"I can manage," she repeated as I ignored her, but then she stood, helplessly, eyes closed, while I pulled the dress over her head.
"Get my slacks," she said. "Slacks ... there in the ... in the wardrobe."
I maintained a firm, busy, matter-of-fact voice as I said: "Well you can't put it on over your slip. Have to take that off."
I lifted up the slip and Olsa seemed hardly aware of what I was doing. "Christ, you're drunk," I thought. "How bloody lucky."
When I pulled off the slip my head all but swam with the unbearable sight of her beautiful breasts tightly enclosed in a brief, black brassiere and her hips, buttocks half revealed, swathed in thin black briefs below which her stockings showed off a pair of strong, graceful legs which would have shone in any chorus.
"Better sit down a moment," I suggested. "Yes. All right," she breathed through half open lips. "In the wardrobe...." She lay back on the bed, eyes closed, superbly ready for the taking, for quenching of my loins. I was afraid for a moment that she might pass out and, as I prefer a little animation, for or against, I slipped quickly out of my clothes. My penis shot stiffly through the aperture in my pants and Olsa's eyes opened vaguely.
"In the wardrobe...." she said. And stared at me. She half rose and her legs spread, slightly, revealing flesh and a wisp of hair under the thin strip of silk hiding her vital citadel which I was all set to take by storm. Her eyes fastened on my rugged erection.
"No, no!" she cried. "How dare you think you can...." Her voice faded into a cough ... "Oh my head. Leave me alone."
I whipped off my pants and the remainder of my clothes and stretched nakedly on the bed beside her, my penis throbbing erectly across her round thighs.
When I kissed her, she tried weakly to push me away, but I caught hold of her blonde, sleek hair and crushed my mouth on her soft, well-defined lips, smelling the fresh smell of her tight smooth skin mingling with the pervading aroma of the whisky. My hand ranked over the tightly-drawn skin of her ribs and rose abruptly over her flimsily-covered breasts, fondling, fondling the soaring mounds hardly hidden from me at all.
"Oh, no, no, no. Let me go. Please let me go." Olsa murmured, trying vainly to push my hands away.
Her thigh stirred against the tautness of my painful desire and I pulled off the little, black brassiere exposing her beautiful, firm ovals of flesh crowned poutingly by her large redly-waiting nipples. I kissed her neck, running my lips down over her smooth, warm, white shoulders, swept to her breasts, pressing my mouth against the vast firm whiteness, their sensitive summits. Olsa, aroused in spite of herself, from the wine, the caresses, now clasped my head, now tried to push it away.
I felt more emotionally moved than I could remember before. This superb woman with whom I felt so in tune lying half-helplessly, all but nude before me, fighting herself, fighting me for some unnatural reason which only she herself knew. I wanted for the first time in my life, to feel completely at one with a woman.
Gently I drew down her briefs, so gently she hardly realized what was happening. Tightly sucked from her hips, slipping more easily over her long thighs falling away to her feet and to the floor.
She lay panting slightly but cool-looking, contained within herself something from all the beautiful women who had ever been painted and something unique.
"Olsa, Olsa. You wonderful creature. My God." I moved my lips down her body, smoothing them over her hips, her flat little tummy, her thighs. Her legs fell apart and I buried my face at their curving junction. This, the secret part of her. The part that would appear mountainously inaccessible to most men seeing her clothed, superbly beautiful and poised, climbing down from a plane, getting into a car, walking down the Champs Elysees. My tongue flicked out to bury itself in the soft, moist recess. She groaned and drew abruptly away, wriggling her long warm hips up and out of reach.
"No, no, no, no." She opened her eyes and they implored, but I could allow no sentimentality to frustrate such a wonderful experience. My hand brushed up her calf, stroking the slenderly-muscled firmness of them, on over the slim inside smoothness of her knees, up the thigh and suddenly off the texture of her stocking to the buttery flesh of her bare thigh. I drew my fingertips over it, reveling in its yielding texture while my lips sank into the haughtily tilted breasts.
My penis throbbed and, unable to stop myself, I pulled Olsa's long, cool fingers down to enclose its heat. At the touch of her hand entwining and gently squeezing it, it seemed to breathe life of its own, jerking at the touch, raging like an electric drill. I moved my chest over onto her breasts, feeling the velvety roundnesses imprinting a soft pattern on my flesh, stroking her unhollowed shoulders.
"We must stop," Olsa whispered suddenly, but as if she were now an accomplice. She made a brave effort to pull herself together.
"You darling," I murmured. "It's too late now." I swung over onto her and she closed her legs quickly, trying, still, to push me away. My rigid organ penetrated between her tightly pressed thighs, squeezing between the milky, firm flesh which was forced to yield sufficiently to receive me. Overcome at the pressure, I raised myself gently and then sank hard between her thighs, feeling my skin pulled painfully but wonderfully back at every downthrust.
"Open your legs, darling," I ordered, more gently than the fierce relentlessness of my passion warranted. In answer Olsa tried weakly to slide from under me. She succeeded only in making her defenses more precarious and I insinuated my hips forcefully between her thighs splayed on either side of me. I kissed her again, a-tingle from my knees to my belly, my body pressed hard onto hers while I rubbed my hips against hers, savouring the delicious agony before I would sink my rod into the sweet hole which wriggled in an attempt at evasion. The hole, if I may use the vulgar expression, which men have desired from time's beginnings, which is in fact, woman's only consistent source of power. And here was this beautiful woman, shorn of pretences and social trappings, back to a primitive equality, about to be dominated savagely, crushed with me in a close intimacy, made to receive my stiff flesh into her most intimate being.
"Don't, don't. I feel ill." Olsa made a last appeal which choked in her throat as I stabbed the thick tip and a couple of massive inches of penis moistly into her.
I could hardly believe after the difficulty I'd had with her, her distance, that this, at last, was it. She was mine. My mind was numbed in a dazzlement of passion. Kissing her fiercely all over her finely-chiselled, sensitive face now-creased in the sweet pain of passion, I sank into her again and again. Her firm jaw thrust out in strain as my penis gouged her passage in quick, fierce, brutal thrusts. With every tight in-stab, her passage contracted around me, making me gasp with an almost unendurable sensation.
Olsa, too, was gasping and made no further effort to dislodge me. It was as if I had mastered a fine mare in the rodeo-and a fine performance she now gave. She slid her hands down to my waist and drew my hips at her with every thrust I made as if she wanted to swallow between her legs the whole of my burning, pistoning loins.
Her buttocks were in strained and hard when my palms moved under them, straining them up against me. Her thighs drew outward allowing even deeper penetration and her fine mouth opened, trembling lightly as if she were trying to pronounce words which were lost in her abandonment.
Deep, deep, deep, my loins sucked in a passionate quicksand. I felt her stockinged thighs clasp my hips, the rough texture of her stockinged calves glided over my back, ankles, locking together, her whole body straining up to me, through me, to her very toes.
Feeling the old, familiar tightness in my penis, a growing density, lost within her, I slowed to grinding pushes. I watched her face, nostrils flared slightly, mouth open in a gentle panting and I was aware that this act more than any other I had experienced was, for me, a union. Immensely greater than with so many women whose bodies I had used for masturbation.
"Olsa, Olsa ... Olsa," I repeated and her head swayed slightly, eyes half opening in a sweet longing. Words seemed to fail her as her arms clasped me pulling me into her, herself up and around me.
My hands gripped and stroked her as I rose and fell on her cushioning body. Her skin seemed to clothe her like a light silk glove, tight over the bones and the various firm mounds of flesh which covered them. I leaned the top half of my body up from her, wriggling my hips into her, feeling there was yet more of her to own if I could only force myself in to the limit.
Olsa began to groan, squirming caught hold of my buttocks, forcing me at her pelvis between thighs which were now spread-eagled at right angles to her hips. She clasped her legs around my waist again, a continuous low moaning coming from her panting mouth. She reached down, fondling my testicles, reaching right under me, exploring the rim of my anus as it swung towards her and receded.
Sweeping into her I felt my penis alive, hotter, more sweetly painful, its animal power making me grind and swivel my hips, wanting to make her feel to an extent she would never forget.
Drawing to the hot, liquid, rushing climax, I breathed:
"Now, now?" wanting her to share in this final, convulsive belonging.
"Yes, yes, now!" she breathed, fiercely, desperately, in response, animal noises choking in her throat.
In, in and with another stroke it would be ... Aaaaaaaaah ... Long drawn moans were sucked from our throats as we met in the sexual explosion, my living matter received with each of my convulsive thrusts into her soft, straining, yearning, wriggling, now subsiding belly.
I lay on her panting, dazed and breathless, kissing her firm, velvety neck while she lay, mouth open, eyes closed, face flushed, the deed, which for so long she had avoided, done. After a while we were quiet and still. We had both sobered up as an aftermath of the extreme sensation. When I kissed her breasts in a mute gratitude, she opened her eyes and looked at me with an unexpectedly cold expression.
"I suppose you're pleased with yourself," she said. She spoke quietly and her eyes were very cold. "You got me drunk. You got me drunk so that you could take advantage of me."
I got up and walked to the bathroom. I couldn't take this quite seriously.
"Don't spoil it," I said, over my shoulder. "You know you wanted it as much as I did."
Her cold eyes followed me. "I didn't want it." Her voice was chill and menacing as a snake. "I don't make love in sheer animal passion."
"Huh. You're telling me." I grinned. The self-deception of the woman. I felt suddenly satisfied, smug, unguarded and I stretched languidly in the warm shower letting the water soothe my cooling, satisfied pores.
After the warm, then cold, and then a brisk rub down which brought a reddish glow to my brown skin.
I strolled back into the bedroom, clothed in a fresh towel and Olsa, fully clothed, was sitting quietly on the bed, the same automatic in her hand, pointing as before, at my navel.
"What's this," I grinned. "Think you're in a film?"
"Better take it seriously." The hatred in her tone was unmistakable. I stopped, looking at her, the grin still on my face concealing my astonishment. Could this be the same woman, who, a matter of minutes ago had been filled by me, gasping ... Yes, now now-the same woman who had twined her long thighs tightly around me as I took her.
"Oh for Christ's sake," I said in a friendly brusqueness, moving towards her.
Her hand clenched whitely around the small gun.
"Come any nearer and there won't be anything of you left to do that to another woman," she snapped.
"But Olsa-this is a very unreasonable way of . receiving your enjoyment." I adopted a conciliatory tone.
"Yes," she said bitterly. "Enjoyment in a drunken stupor. I hardly knew what was happening and now you're going to pay for what you've done."
"Come off it. We were both in the same state and we both thoroughly enjoyed a delightful experience." I was beginning to feel annoyed at her ridiculous attitude.
In answer she backed towards a chest of drawers, eyes fixed, slightly bloodshot, on mine. With one hand behind her she scraped open the drawer and reached inside. When she withdrew her long, slim hand, it clasped the cruel-looking leather of a riding crop.
"Turn around and put your hands over your head," she ordered, coming slowly and cautiously towards me.
"Look here. Don't be so bloody melodramatic," I said.
"Christ, what the hell have you lost?"
"My self-respect," she snapped back. "I make love only when I want to, not like a hog. Now put your hands above your head unless you want me to take a few snicks out of your body."
She was controlled and somehow inexorable. I realized the madness of taking risks with her in this mood. She was just as likely to shoot me and think later. I raised my hands, turning so that I only half faced her.
"What's the idea?" I demanded.
"You'll see," she snapped and a second later the crop lashed across my back in a stinging weal.
The suddenness of her movement was her undoing. I reacted without thinking, a purely automatic reflex at the unexpectedness of the blow. Although she was holding the automatic firmly, Olsa was ever so slightly off balance from the blow she had made and undoubtedly was not expecting me to be so rash as to retaliate. But I hurled myself backwards in a furious movement which carried a sudden hatred from the blow with it. I caught her wrist with one hand, pushed at her face with the other. She was swung around with the push, jerked off her balance towards me by the pull on her wrist. As she fell to he floor I went down with her, twisting the gun from her grasp, lashing at her face with the flat of my hand. She struggled for a moment, tearing her finger down my side so that the flesh curled off and the blood spurted in sudden red spots. Furious at the pain and her stupidity, T. forced her over onto her stomach, seizing the riding crop which had fallen beside us in the struggle. She screamed as I twisted her arm between her shoulder blades, but the breath was knocked out of her as my knee sank into the small of her back.
"Right, my haughty beauty, we'll see who's stronger." I gritted.
I brought the crop down across her buttocks as they squirmed visibly beneath the tight dress and she cried out, trying furiously and vainly to jerk away.
"Your own medicine," I said, between clenched teeth and ripping her dress up, I laid the crop across her bare buttocks, so that bright, thin welts broke their slim round smoothness.
When I got up she lay where I'd left her, broken and sobbing. I pocketed the automatic, dressed calmly and left.
Walking back towards St. Germain-des-Pres I reflected that this might be the end of my work for Jaswant-if Olsa told him anything of what had happened. She seemed so full of rage that I thought it likely she'd tell him I'd tried to assault her or some such story. It seemed un-likely she would want me to escape scot-free from the beating I had given her beautiful buttocks, or for that matter, the use I had made of her sex.
I was astonished at the turn of events. I would hardly have believed such hypocrisy, hatred and ferocity could be contained in such a poised and noble-looking soul. What an astonishing change from abandon to puritanism! Olsa was a woman I found very difficult to understand, but, I noticed, my desire for her had evaporated considerably from my conquest. Or rather from the combined effects of conquest and stupid aftermath. Her behavior had lowered her in my estimation.
Jaswant, I imagined, would not remain indifferent if she told him I had beaten her up after having advances repelled, or some similar story. I felt he could be a very jealous man and a powerful enemy. It would almost certainly mean the end of my vicarious masterpieces.
I glanced across the flood of traffic around the Arc de Triomphe, to the blue, wind-swept flames of the Unknown Warrior's grave. I had, I thought in passing, no desire to join him. Jaswant didn't know where to get in touch with me, although he knew some of my usual haunts. The best thing, I decided, would be for me to telephone him in a few days.
by the time I'd emerged from the shadowed sobriety of the respectable end of Boulevard St. Germain into the warm splash of noise and colour of the St. Germain-des-Pres restaurants, I was going over in my mind the joys of Olsa's body. Any consequence would be worth the exquisite pleasure of being inside her, watching at the same time the contortions of her fine face. I was well-pleased with another body rifled. I popped into a cafe for a couple of cognacs to prepare myself for fresh pleasures with Monique.
The next day I stayed in recuperating while Monique, charming and attentive, made little sorties to buy food. We passed a quiet and pleasant day, which I decided, would be the order of things until I knew whether I could expect more work and money from Jaswant. In the meantime I had quite a large portion of my advance remaining to see me through some months if I didn't give way to extravagance.
Only in fleeting moments did I remember my reason for being in Paris. I had accustomed myself to looking forward to a long stay with plenty of money and pleasant company.
The following day Monique and I took a stroll in the evening warmth. We wandered hand in hand for a while studying the lighted shop windows-evening is late in Paris-and then made what, looking back, I can see was an unfortunate mistake. We went to one of the big St. Germain-des-Pres cafes, a regular haunt of mine and landmark into the bargain.
After an hour or so reading newspapers and sipping coffee we decided to take a walk along the Seine. We wandered down one of those narrow, little streets where the high buildings are like tired, old men, swaying crookedly in all directions and emerged on the sudden, sleepy splendour of the river. There on the cobbled quayside which, with the river itself, makes a deep rift in the city, quiet and calm, while the traffic bustles above, we sat and gazed in contentment at the reflected pools of streetlamps in the dark water.
But our contentment was short-lived. From the shadowy figures which strolled by, silent or murmuring, from time to time, three shapes detached themselves and came towards us. I watched them approaching, while Monique continued to gaze at the river, and thought they would pass. But behind us, where we sat on the narrow stone parapet which drops down to the water, they stopped and one said: "Get up Mr. Crawford, and the little girl friend with you."
In the darkness, I saw the ominous bulges in their thrusting overcoat pockets.
"Don't be ridiculous," I snapped, recovering from my astonishment. "Who the hell are you anyway?"
"We're friends of a former friend of yours and if we have any trouble you'll see the river from a little closer."
My mind was racing. "All right," I said. "But you don't want the girl if you're from Jaswant."
"We can make good use of the girl," one of them leered. "Get up!"
We stood up and walked with them up the slope to the street where we were bundled quickly into a large car. It must all have appeared as casual as a film.
The car shot forward and, from my front seat, I turned to see that I was closely covered by one of the men, while the other two had Monique, sitting quietly terrified, across their knees.
The man behind me, who appeared to be older than the others, could easily have passed in other society as a ruggedly good-looking self-made man with a heart of gold. I was soon to learn different.
The driver, a nondescript little man, who paid attention to nothing but the road, might have been any taxi-driver. But the other two, the two whose eyes were roaming feverishly over Monique, were youngish, tough-looking fellows, who probably went wild after fine records in the Resistance from the sheer lack of excitement in civilian, peacetime jobs and were now capable of any unsqueamish villainy. It was to the eldest, behind me, that I spoke.
"What's the idea?" I asked. "You're going to get into serious trouble for this."
"No, Mr. Crawford. You're the one who's in trouble," he answered quietly.
"Just what are you trying to do, anyway," I demanded, "and why?"
"Never mind why," he snapped back. "We're acting on orders and we don't ask why but you'll soon see what's going to happen."
"Very considerate of you to bring such a nice little girl along for us," sneered one of the younger men and I heard Monique squeal.
I twisted around and saw that Monique had been pulled down between the two men, both of whom were mauling their hands over her.
"Leave her alone...." I was cut short as I started to reach towards them by the muzzle of an automatic, flourished momentarily in my face.
"Better let the boys have their fun," said the older man.
I sank back into my seat while Monique, too frightened to make a further sound, was kissed savagely by one of the toughs.
"Let's have a little more response," he leered.
"What a nice pair of bumpers she has," gloated the other. "Let's have a look at them raw."
"Sure. Get your clothes off kid," snarled the first.
Monique shrank into the deep upholstery of the car looking at the men in horror.
"She's shy," drawled one of them. "Here, let me give you a hand, baby."
Genuinely fond of Monique, I stared in helpless fury as the two toughs manhandled her clothes from her body. Monique, terrified, made little attempt to resist, but began to cry quietly.
The toughs treated her clothes with scant respect. After her jumper and jeans had been pulled from her, her brassiere was ripped from her tender breasts which shot into view like young fruit suddenly uncovered in a basket.
"Not bad-not bad," one of the men said, his mouth drawn up at a corner in a cynical grin. "I'm going to enjoy getting astride you, baby."
Monique, her eyes closed as if to shut out the nightmare, continued to cry as rough hands mauled her tender bosom. Their appetites whetted, the toughs began to get excited, like hounds fighting over the fox. Monique's briefs were ripped away and lost in the sprawling feet on the car floor.
"Stand up. baby," the first tough murmured. "Let's have a look at you."
The voice of the leader behind me cut in.
"Better pack it in for the moment boys, we don't want anyone to get curious."
"Come off it Pierre. You getting too old...."
"I said pack it in!"
The words were a fierce snap. A command from a man who was used to being obeyed without question. The two toughs subsided and contented themselves with treating Monique's supple, uncovered body to lustful glances as she sat quietly and miserably between them, tears wet on her cheeks.
My stomach bunched in a knot of furious nerve ends. I looked away out of the window and it seemed we were racing away from Paris along one of the broad roads which leads to the south. Nobody spoke, the driver a radiator of unnoticing indifference. We passed rapidly through the darkening suburbs, dwindling from tall, old apartment houses and the old twinkle of a late cafe to gathering gloom of wasteland and stretches of farming country.
A few kilometres further and we turned off the main road along a narrow lane bordered on one side by a high hedge fringing acres of black fields, cut off from the road by a few strands of wire. We turned off again, racing quite alone in the shadow of woods on either side, chopped off abruptly at the roadside by barbed wire and grass verges.
"Here it is," ordered the leader after some minutes, and the car slowed in the darkness and pulled up onto the verge.
"Get out." He kept his gun trained on me as I climbed out of the car. The other two men followed, guns drawn, pulling Monique, naked to the warm air, with them.
The road was quiet, carrying an extra gloom from the trees on either side. There was a smell of leaf mould and the grass on the verge was already dampening with dew.
"Stay here-and the usual," the leader said to the driver and prodded me along the verge.
We came in a few steps to a place I should not have noticed in the dark, where the wire, rusted and curled into broken strands, trailed in the moist grass. A torch flashed on revealing an overgrown track through the foliage.
"Through there."
Once in the wood and swallowed by it, more torches flashed on.
"This baby's got a beautiful ass." The voice of the first tough carried loudly through the still air and I could picture him walking behind Monique, playing his torch on her buttocks as they swayed sinuously and unprotected in front of him.
"Keep your voice down," snapped the leader.
And the voice came back, but much quieter, "I'm having a bigger job keeping my prick down." A light slap followed.
"Nice soft flesh, too." came the voice.
A few seconds later we came to an earthy clearing where, unaccountably, old pieces of rusted iron were strewn, and glowed russet in the torchlight.
"Sit down, Crawford," the leader said. "Make yourself at home for the entertainment."
As I looked around and hesitated, he snarled: "Sit down, I said!"
I sat down on the rough, dampish earth, my hands brushing soft, damp leaves and the angular edges of stones.
The leader ranged himself standing behind me so that I could not see him, only sense his rugged presence as the torchlight surrounded me and cut across the clearing where Monique was standing, cold in spite of the warm air and frightened, her bare, firm body cringing from the light.
"We didn't get any orders about procedure," said the leader. "You'd better toss a coin."
The two toughs fumbled in their pockets, unable to take their eyes from Monique, whose horror-struck, brown eyes pleaded from one to the other-no doubt only increasing their desires.
"I am glad you had a girl with you, Crawford." came the leader's voice from behind me. "It was expected you would have and it makes more fun for the boys."
There were murmurs of anticipation from the two toughs as a coin flicked in the torchlight and landed lightly on the earth. The first of the men leaned over it and then smiled with pleasure.
He walked towards Monique who stood mutely where she had been left.
"Baby you're lucky," he said. "You're going to have the biggest prick you've ever had-but not where you expect it."
So saying he unzipped his flies and pulled out an erection which might well have made his words no idle boast. Monique's eyes went down to it, fascinated as by a snake and she cringed away from him. The tough reached out at her roughly and jerked her down on her knees in front of him. He glared over at me where I sat furious and yet with a strange sadistic thrill.
"I always react better to an audience," he snarled and then forced Monique's head down to his loins.
Monique made little whimpering sounds in her throat and tried to pull her head away from the thick rod of flesh and the rounded redness thrusting towards her, but the tough caught her head with one hand while with the other he thrust his penis against her mouth. The lips splayed open against the thrust and in a second, the great organ was partly swallowed up in Monique's mouth. She looked quite dazed and her eyes closed as the tough began to twist about, forcing his penis in and out of her mouth, grazing it between her teeth. He crushed her head against his trousers, pushing it with both hands until almost the whole of his organ disappeared and Monique gave a strangled cough. I thought she might be sick.
The tough's face was flushed and contorted in the cold light of the torches, which played yellow against the still leaves of the nearby trees, adding a small loneliness to the circle of light and light verging into gloom in which we were.
Suddenly, catching hold of Monique's hair, he yanked her to her feet.
"Now baby," he said through clenched teeth.
He whipped a piece of thin cord from his pocket and laced it quickly around her wrists as tears began afresh to slide over her dark cheeks. Moving her to a tree, he bent her over and tied her hands to one ankle, ninning a hand, trembling, over her legs as he did so. With a rough gesture, he forced her against the tree, bottom thrusting, bare and helpless, up and out towards his penis. He moved up behind her, an intensity of desire on his face.
"Open your legs baby," he ordered, forcing them wide, "and maybe you'll have a new experience."
So saying, he spread her proffered buttocks with his hand, gazing for a moment at the firm little anus nestling between them and then he ranged his organ against it. On second thoughts he reached down and stuffed a handkerchief between her teeth-an action which brought guffaws of approval from his cronies.
"Safety first," drawled the leader.
The tough's penis prodded between Monique's buttocks for a moment, while she stiffened and tried to sway her bottom away from him and then, pushing hard and pulling her legs wide he entered slightly. We could see the tip of his penis sucked in as he gave a grunt of pleasure and Monique jerked sharply.
Overcome, the tough caught her waist with both hands and drove hard at her split, breaking right through immediately from the force of his merciless thrust.
Monique, I think, would have collapsed had his body not been bolstering her from behind and the tree in front. Even through the handkerchief came a muffled scream of pain.
The tough, his teeth clenched, showed no quarter. He thrust into Monique's bottom again and again, deeper and deeper until, with a final grind, he forced her to contain him up to the hilt.
"Nobody's ever been here before," he panted, "Look what you missed Crawford."
He pulled Monique's buttocks wider still so that, even from a distance, I could see the growing, enlarging aperture as he withdrew for each separate stab. Gradually he moved his body into her so that his whole weight was resting on her, against her buttocks-all the weight of his big body behind his raping of her backside. His movements began to grow more full of fury, thrusts grew shorter and swifter so that he hardly withdrew an inch before skewering into her rectum again.
He began to gasp, his face contorted. Monique, eyes closed, drooped limply seeming almost unconscious. She was practically standing on her head, it seemed only her bottom, and the backs of her thighs presented to us.
The tough's mouth opened in a great O and his gasps filled the still clearing, hollowly as he leaned his torso and his legs away from her, thrusting forward only with his hips for greater pressure. Swiftly in and in and further in with a growing tension until suddenly his body stiffened, went rigid and a long gasp was pulled out into the night air as he thrust convulsively at her anus, his sperm shooting into the aperture and up into her body. He seemed to contain in himself a reservoir and Monique endured thrust after brutal thrust of his convulsion before he sank slowly over her body gasping.
The leader's voice cut through the sound of his henchman's fading passion.
"Enjoying the entertainment, Crawford? I'm sure the girl friend is."
"You swine. You'll pay for this," I snapped.
"Save your breath." The voice contained a grin. "It's the interval now."
The tough had regained his composure, thrust his deflated organ out of sight, and was helping his friend to untie Monique.
She leaned against the tree, eyes closed in a state of complete and helpless subjection while the second tough kissed her savagely, pressing her hard against the rough bark.
The first of the two took up his position, gun at the ready, on the far side of the clearing, torch playing on the two bodies, one clothed, one naked, pressing together before him.
The tears had dried on Monique's face by now and as the second tough put her on the ground she appeared hardly to know what was happening.
He stood feasting his eyes on her nude curves for a moment and then pulling out his penis flopped down onto her face. His penis, in turn, rammed through her lips and her face was lost in his loins, her black hair flowing out on either side of him as the tough jerked up and down. Monique's head was forced roughly into the earth with each downward flop of his hips and when I began to doubt if she could breathe he suddenly slithered down her body until his rampant penis rested against her mound. Fiercely he pulled up her legs against her breasts so that she was doubled over almost as she had been in the standing position, but face upwards this time. And then he rammed himself into her vagina, burying himself in her passage with his first brutish movement.
Monique gasped-the first sign of life she had shown for some time-and as he swept into her with an animal fervour she began to cry again, so that dumb fury mounted in me. Her whole body being stripped, prostrated, raped and torn asunder by ruffians. What a horrible experience, I thought, for one so sweet and tender. And then-strangely in those circumstances-I remembered the sun on the Sussex fields and I realized with a dulling shock that I was no better than these men. No man, I realized then, could escape. Any who criticized another's conduct with women was, and knew himself to be, a hypocrite in some degree or another, knew himself to be creating an artificial attitude-an artificial emotion even-which would break down on the opportunity.
Hopeless with my realisation, I watched the tough's penis, hard and thick, draw back from Monique and then rush in again like some fierce charging and recharging bull.
And then from a pocket he drew a shortish, thick, hard-rubber truncheon and reaching under her in his passion, pushed it at Monique's anus. The aperture, already raped and loosened, resisted this thicker violation for a moment, but then the tip of the truncheon submerged to an accompanying moan of pain and horror which the tough stifled with his mouth, crushing his lips on Monique's.
As he jerked into her, so he thrust the truncheon until it was almost all swallowed in her backside and the pain must have been intolerable.
Monique's face was screwed up in continuous agony as astride her the tough began to writhe convulsively uttering oaths and obscenities in a mixture of moans until he culminated in a long, furious thrust which contorted his face like Monique's and released him of his bursting load.
As he lay panting, hot on Monique's prostrate, spread-eagled body, his crony's voice stridently called. "Get off her you dope. I'm ready to have a go in the bitch again."
The leader's voice cut from behind me.
"No boy. Mr. Crawford's had enough of the spectacle. Now it's his turn."
The second tough climbed off Monique, adjusting his dress. She lay motionless as both men came towards me.
"Right boys," came the voice from behind me and the two toughs drew out truncheons, one fresh from the secret part of Monique. They came towards me, smiling cruelly and realizing the hopelessness of my position and unwilling to help them by passivity, I swung around and lunged at the leader. He was farther from me than I'd thought. A torch light blinded me and a truncheon struck me a dazing blow across the side of my head. I lurched back, turning wildly towards the other two, my fist cracked hard against somebody's flesh and then heavy, numbing blows were raining down on my head and face. I seemed to be surrounded in an aura of revealing, jumping, hazy light; beyond that, gloom and the blows.
With streaks of pain stinging the heavy ache, I felt myself sinking. Somewhere there was a scream, a muffled noise. Blows seemed to be coming from all around me. My head was dizzy and I had the impression I was lying down although I couldn't remember falling. I felt what might have been a boot in my groin-and all dissolved in darkness....
I was walking from a room to somewhere ... in a palace ... the rooms were vast and tiled ... marble and gold, sumptuous, cushions ... ceiling was lost far above in the mist ... and I was a king and had a hundred wives ... for some reason I was hurrying and I came into a room which was filled with people ... people lying around the room in pairs on cushions and they were my wives ... and when I looked I saw they all had their short tunics pulled above their waists and a hundred different, muscular men were raping them, gorging into their bare and intimate channels ... or was it agreed union? ... were my wives making love to the men, surrendering, bucking joyfully under them? ... I rushed from couple to couple, they ignoring me, and cut off the men's heads ... and as they fell they were my heads ... my faces looking at me in horror ... they were all me and then the wives came towards me, offering themselves, crying....
I came to in the dawn chill of the now pale, indifferent wood and Monique was sitting with me crying. As I stared at her, she bent forward over me and kissed me gently saying something I didn't really take in. I felt dazed and just lay for some time looking up at the sky which was grey with a yellow light from the blue and yellow lines of the coming day making it gleam.
And then I realized that I couldn't see properly out of my eyes and that my face was puffed. I started to raise my hands towards my face and a dozen sharp pains shot through me so that I groaned and stayed where I was.
Then I began to make out the different aches and pains-in my groin, on my arms, my back and my face which must have been very tender. My head was aching and I found it difficult to think of what I was doing there. And then, as the pains became more conscious and sharp, the oddments of the scene began to bring everything back to me-the rusted iron, the scraped, trampled clearing, a little blood, I noticed on the wet, morning earth, the big tree. Yes, the big tree, I twisted my head, painfully and Monique's eyes, red-rimmed, were there and her hands were stroking my hair, her arms clasping me and she was fully clothed.
"Monique, Monique." The sight of her poor, sweet face, the red tear-filled eyes, in which I read now only tears and concern for me, filled me with a slow, consuming anger.
"I'll get the bastards for this," I swore. "The bastards. The bloody bastards."
Monique clasped me, her body trembling slightly, fresh tears starting to her eyes.
"Oh, darling, no! Oh please, no!" she exclaimed, starting to cry. "They didn't hurt me! Really they didn't hurt me!"
She collapsed against me, crying almost hysterically and, in spite of the pain, I dragged myself into a sitting position and held her close, soothing her. The whole thing must have been a nightmare to the poor girl. I could hardly believe now, the injustice of her being dragged into what was solely my affair.
Monique soon recovered bravely and began to soothe my face gently, tears still streaming down hers, with a handkerchief.
"Oh, my love, you're in a terrible state." She shook her head, biting her lips at the sight of me and I supposed I must have been a pretty bloody mess from the colour of her handkerchief. But when I moved again, it occurred to me that I had suffered nothing serious. Everything seemed to be in working order.
I put my hand carefully to my face, tenderly feeling the swollen skin. Nose felt all right, jaw, eyes merely blackened, I imagined-yes, nothing serious. I rubbed my tongue gently round my dry mouth, over my dry, swollen lips. Even my teeth were intact.
Carefully I climbed to my feet as the sky began to lighten all over and the sun to rise. Gingerly I moved my arms about, loosened my shoulders, stretched. Doubtless I had a big bruise in my groin and others in countless places but a few days rest would put me right, I reckoned. I drew Monique towards me, holding her, placing my swollen face against hers and she clung to me, quietly now, and desperately.
"Did you see what happened?" I asked, hesitantly, after a while.
"Yes," Monique answered, after a silence. "They left you and they brought my clothes back for me."
"Did they touch you again?"
"No," she answered. "One of them hit me when I tried to stop them kicking you, but then they thought they heard the driver whistling them and they went off."
We stood quietly for a moment, re-living the night's events and then Monique whispered: "Are you badly hurt anywhere?"
I released her, moving about again for a minute, letting the circulation flow in my chilled limbs. The injuries, now, seemed infinitesimal compared with what I might have suffered-only bruises and a few small cuts and bumps.
"No. They'd be sorry if they knew how lightly I'd got off," I replied.
"Your face is terrible," Monique said, beginning to recover herself, becoming practically concerned for her mate.
"We'd better do something."
I took her hand and we moved along a little track, across which sunlight was now glancing, towards the road. Except for birdsongs the place was as quiet as the night before. The road was very narrow and I doubted whether it carried much traffic even at a reasonable hour.
"We'll have to walk a bit-how do you feel?" I asked.
"I'm all right if you are. Which way do we go?" So we set off walking.
It took us quite some time to reach the other, bigger lane and my shoulders were aching from the blows and having to keep them upright by the time we found ourselves walking towards the road south from Paris. Here we were in luck. Tootling along behind us, bright and early in the morning came a country laundry van. I raised my thumb and soon we were speeding towards the main road, being plied with questions by a voluble little Frenchman.
The little, square-faced man was completely unable to contain his curiosity as to what we were doing on that lonely road, at that time in the morning and in such a state.
We told him the truth to a considerable extent-that I had been beaten up by roughs while out with my girl friend. We left it at that. The little man was furious. Incredible! Insufferable! What Frenchmen could have done this thing and left us lying in the woods all night. We had to assure him we were going to the police about it and it was with difficulty that we restrained him from stopping at a station on the road so that he could add his indignation to our story. He went well out of his way to drive us nearly home and left us with a thousand handshakes, condolences and assurances that this sort of thing was not frequent. He drove off at an unwisely furious speed. Doubtless his family waxed indignant with him over the lunch table.
Back in the friendly comfort of the studio we each had a bath, did what we could for our bruises and went to bed. Much later we got up, had a meal and went to bed again. The following day we felt much better.
My anger against the toughs had to some extent dissipated. Now, it was directed completely at Jaswant and Olsa. Particularly against Olsa. There must have been something sexual in my anger against her for causing us the bother. A man one could always meet on equal terms. One could hate him squarely, fight him squarely. But a woman. I felt a woman was hitting below the belt in hitting at all. There was something altogether unjust about a woman, with her sexual lack of physical strength, having a man beaten up. Something in which hate could simmer.
I resolved to pay her a little visit and by the evening I had decided on the best way to get my revenge on both Jaswant and Olsa. It was a possibility I knew, that they had already cleared out of the city, afraid that I would expose them. On the other hand they might think I would be in a hospital for a few days and be taking their time.
Late in the evening I told Monique I was going out for a breath of air. She looked at me anxiously and wanted to come too, but I told her I wanted to be alone to think for a while and she eventually gave way.
"Please be careful, darling," she murmured as she unexpectedly kissed me.
I went out into another warm Paris night, Olsa's automatic in my pocket.
At speed, I strode through the warm tourist-filled night, seeing nothing, my mind bent on what I intended to do. The trees, the restaurants, the conglomeration of voices, all so many half-seen, half-heard shadows, slipped away from me, and with the Arc de Triomphe looming gloomily and distantly behind me, I was soon moving quietly through the sober, silent streets of Neuilly.
There was no answer when I rang the bell of Olsa's apartment and I walked back through the foyer, crossed the road and established myself in the dark shadows of a courtyard on the opposite side of the road.
During the half hour I waited, leaning quietly on the wall, only three or four people passed along the street, an occasional light flashed on in the opposite apartments, a voice carried down from the rooms overlooking the courtyard behind me-no noise of the city; all quiet in this still backwater.
Until, surprising me, catching at my stomach with its sudden approach after the long wait, Olsa's car swept into the street and pulled up in front of her apartment. As I'd hoped, Jaswant was with her, hand in pocket, staring up and down the street as he got out of the car. He looked as if he was expecting me at some time. Olsa, beautiful and unsmiling, pressed the button and looked around anxiously for the Indian as the foyer door swung open.
"You first," she said quietly.
With a last look at the street, Jaswant swirled past her and led the way up the stairs. And as they passed out of sight, I was across the road in a few little strides.
I pressed the button and was in the door with a quick movement as it swung automatically open. Olsa turned on the stairs, looking at me with a stupefied expression, above her, Jaswant reached for his pocket. A motion of my extended automatic stopped his movement half way, however, and they both stared in a mixture of fear and surprise as I advanced slowly up the carpeted stairs toward them.
"Nice to see you again," I said as I passed a hand over Olsa's body, searching for any weapons she might have, enjoying the firm, roundness of her flesh as I did so. As I took a gun from Jaswant's pocket, he said:
"Sorry we can't return the sentiment with sincerity, Crawford."
He had recovered his sangfroid in quick time.
"You appear to have had some trouble with your face," he continued, mocking and cynical. I looked at him for a moment, anger simmering slowly in my chest
"The boot's on the other foot, now," I replied quietly.
I took the key from Olsa and ushered them into the apartment, watching them carefully.
"The boot. Ah, yes," Jaswant continued suavely.
"Significant that you should use such an expression. Well swung, I imagine that they have an unfortunate effect on a handsome face."
The man's calm arrogance surprised me a little. It was unwise of him to bait me in such a manner. I thought he would have had more sense.
At gun point they removed their coats, Olsa beautiful and provocative, in her tight clothes and then the reason for Jaswant's poise became apparent.
"I don't know what little fate you've prepared for us, Crawford," he said, "But before you commit any indiscretion, such as your last attempt on Olsa's virtue, I'd better warn you that we hold a card or two."
I started at him, without a word, curiosity chasing hatred around my brain.
"It seems," he continued smoothly, "that you make a habit of forcing your unwanted attentions on the gentle sex. Whilst you have, to some extent my sympathy in these matters, there are limits beyond which a gentleman such as yourself should not go."
Jaswant paused for effect, reveling in his supercilious eloquence as I began to see what had happened.
"There is, behind you, on the table, a newspaper which we've been keeping in case you should be so unwise as to return," he went on. "If you care to pick it up, turn to page three and look at the bottom of the page, you may see something which will interest you."
Carefully, keeping my eyes on the two of them, I eased back to the table, put it between myself and them and turned the pages of a London evening newspaper. I found the spot and lifted it to my eyes, so that I could see the slightest movement while reading. Quite small, at the bottom of the page, was a little continuation of investigations into the rape of an 18-year-old girl in Sussex. It came as only a slight shock to see that the police would like to see 34-year-old painter, Harvey Crawford, who, they thought, might be able to assist them in their investigations. The careful politeness of the Law had a menacing, irrevocable echo. Here was the raper, it proclaimed to the world.
"So, Mr. Crawford," Jaswant said, as I put the paper back on the table. "I should not advise you to do anything but go away from here and keep out of the way for quite some time-unless of course you would like the police to have some inkling of your whereabouts."
I stepped quickly across the room and hit the Indian full in his sneering face. He staggered and cannoned against a wall, slipping to the floor as Olsa uttered a little, stifled cry.
"Stay where you are, Olsa. I have other plans for you," I snapped.
Jaswant sat against the wall, holding his face glaring at me with blazing black eyes.
"Get up!"
He rose to his feet slowly and I pulled a piece of cord from my pocket.
"Now, Olsa," I said. "Take this cord and tie the boy friend's wrists behind his back and make a good job of it or it'll be the worse for both of you."
Olsa took the cord and, with me directing her closely, tied Jaswant's hands. After she'd finished I tested the knots carefully, forced Jaswant to lie on the floor, had her tie his ankles in similar fashion and hobble him to the leg of a sideboard. He lay there, awkwardly on his side, staring at us with mute fury in his eyes.
I turned my attention to Olsa.
"Right, you sweet creature. Take off your clothes," I ordered.
Olsa hesitated and Jaswant's voice was a demon in the room.
"You swine, Crawford. You touch her and you'll regret it, I swear."
"Olsa has obviously not told the whole truth," I replied.
"She has already been well and truly touched by me and thoroughly she enjoyed it at the time."
The Indian stared, his eyes two beads of intensity, at Olsa, who shook her head in denial.
"Oh, she'll deny it," I laughed. "She's a very clever young woman."
I motioned her with the automatic, and she began, with a last appealing look at Jaswant, to strip.
"Anyway," I told him. "I really don't think you can , use unpleasant expressions about me after your little remembrance of a day or so ago."
Jaswant said nothing. He had only horrified eyes for Olsa as her charms became once more revealed to me. I had thought he was a jealous type at heart. Olsa, down to her briefs and brassiere, was slim and elegant as an advertisement for somebody's stockings. She rolled her stockings gently off her firm, shapely legs and peeled off her brassiere. As her large breasts came smoothly into view, I realized that my desire was obvious at my loins and as she slithered her hips from the briefs and let them fall to her ankles before stepping slenderly out of them, I wondered if the buttons would hold me intact.
"Right. You can walk around the room a bit for the joy of myself and your boy friend." I told her.
Olsa's blue eyes were a little bit nervous as she complied. Jaswant's eyes followed her supple movements as she walked, hating me seeing her. I began a running commentary on her body, the tensions, the sinuous ripplings, so that Jaswant cried out: "I'll kill you for this Crawford."
I grinned and continued. Olsa's breasts, naturally high, trembled as she walked, smooth, shaped jellies of flesh, her long legs swung freely and her slender buttocks quivered, hollowing and rounding, hollowing and rounding.
"Olsa is a beauty," I told him. "I really enjoyed having her very much last time and I'm going to enjoy even more a little experimentation this time."
"You wouldn't dare touch me," Olsa snapped, eyes flashing.
"Why should I have changed?" I asked her. "All right, you can come here now."
Producing another piece of the cord I had brought with me, I deftly tied her wrists in front of her, chancing a struggle.
"If you do make a fuss," I told her, "I'll take it out of the boy friend."
That must have been a real deterrent because she meekly allowed me to caress her body. Jaswant glared, his lips trembling, as I fondled her breasts, her nipples, curves.
My body was raked with desire and a revengeful anger as I forced Olsa to her knees on the thick rug.
"This," I said to Jaswant, "is what your roughnecks did to the girl I was with at the time they carried out your orders. They tell me it's an eastern custom. Perhaps you know a bit about it already."
So saying I undid my fly and exposed my penis, long and throbbing to the view of both.
"Crawford. I warn you if you touch the girl I'll have you smashed to a pulp." Jaswant spat the words, almost wept them.
"Save your breath for the spectacle," I snapped back.
I pushed Olsa off her balance so that she fell forward on her elbows.
"You can't! You wouldn't dare!" She began to cry slightly at the thought, presumably, of the humiliation of being used before her lover's eyes. I sank down on my knees behind her, holding her firmly as she tried to roll over onto her side. My penis was one long prickle of sensation as I jabbed it against the join of her buttocks. I pulled the cheeks of her bottom apart and prodded my organ against her neat little anus. She writhed away from me and I pulled her back, opening it slightly as it came back towards me. I screwed the tip of my penis into the aperture with an effort and Olsa screamed and tried to kick back at me, jerking away.
"One of your toughs told me I'd missed something," I gasped at Jaswant. "It seems to me we're all missing it."
From his prone position, the Indian could only mutter furious oaths and threats, his eyes bulging in horror and fury at the sight of his mistress about to be buggered.
I ranged myself again against the virgin slit, pushing strongly in short jabs with my whole bodyweight behind them. The reddish-brown skin stretched and yielded as Olsa groaned and struggled vainly. With a thrust I penetrated, the weight of my push carrying my throbbing organ a couple of inches straight into the soft channel as Olsa screamed, seeming to be fighting for her breath. "Oh! Oh! Ooooooh!" Like the tough, I showed no mercy.
The channel was tight, stretching closely around my penis, clamping it, holding and crushing the sensitive skin, rubbing with an exquisite pain as I forced myself in and out.
Olsa continued to groan and wriggle. But her groans fell on ears which accepted them as a prick to desire, her wriggles stretched bottom, pushing her channel unintentionally back onto the stiff rod violating her virgin end.
I clasped her hips, rotating mine, pushing into her from slight angles, pulling her back onto me until with a last insinuation I had lost my penis completely in her back passage and my hips met her buttocks with a smack.
I glanced, panting, to where Jaswant lay. He was straining at the cord which tied him, eyes transfixed on the point where my penis disappeared into the tight hole of Olsa's behind. The cord was tough. I knew it would only cut more painfully into his wrists as he struggled.
I turned back to Olsa, pulling her thighs apart so that I could insert my fingers into her vagina-a little more humiliation. I ran my hands over the fleshy mound, lightly hair-covered at the join of her legs, moving my fingers up over the rubbery flesh of her abdomen, following the thin, silky path of a line of hair which pointed towards her little navel, disappearing into a soft down. I passed over the whirl of her navel with my hands up to the taut line of her ribs, let my hands flow outwards over the heights of her breasts, stroking the tissues of the skin, the sudden jut of the large nipples as I worked into her with a growing tightness in my stomach.
"Open your legs, Olsa," I gasped. "Spread them farther: farther!" This was designed especially for Jaswant's benefit and I heard him grunting and heaving on the floor.
Leaning heavily on her, I pushed Olsa's body down to the rug. The strain on her elbows was too much and they fell away so that she flopped forward straight on her face, haunches flailing high in the air, joined to me by the tube of thick, pulsing flesh which seemed to become more and more conscious of itself. Olsa gasped with each thrust, becoming less tight in each thrust that I made. With my knees I edged her knees wider apart, pulling her bottom back onto my flesh-sword, grunting fiercely each time I rapiered into my soft target. Her anus seemed to be enlarging at its outer extremity and I thrust in deeper, forcing her buttocks apart, leaning more heavily yet, to find the deeper narrowness tearing at my flesh.
"Oh, stop! Stop! Stop!" Olsa had had all she could take. Her behind must have been aching intolerably, but I gave no respite as Jaswant cried out: "For God's sake, Crawford, leave her alone! Leave her you swine!"
With my fingers, my face contorted, I pulled her buttocks from each other, stretching, increasing the diameter of the aperture as Olsa began to sob.
"This is what your toughs did," I gasped, feeling the power rising liquidly inside me as her passage contracted around the whole length of my organ. "Howhow do you find ... it?"
Olsa groaned, trying to push her legs flat along the rug. But I forced her thighs under with mine, exposing her still more as my penis seemed to enlarge with a hundred sensual armies waiting, growing restless in my loins, waiting for the sign until with a great rushing they came thundering along the well-known paths as my mouth opened in a great contortion. My head jerked back and Olsa screamed afresh with my convulsive stabbing of her bowels. And with a roaring in my head, my whole being sucked down to spill from my penis, the great weight shot from me, shattering into Olsa's backside like charge after charge of buckshot.
I collapsed over her kneeling body, biting her neck and my penis deflated inside her. I left it, deflated, warmly resting in her passage while my gasp-wracked body began to calm. Then I withdrew from her and she fell over on her side holding her legs tightly together, gasping, tears wet on her cheeks. On the floor, Jaswant was silent, only his heavy breathing to be heard. I felt, without looking at him, that he was sick at heart, his vanity flattened, his "own" woman humiliated....
For some time I lay on the rug, watching the two of them, having retrieved my automatic from the floor where I had put it well out of their reach. Nobody spoke. Olsa, eyes closed, cheeks wet, body flopped in exhaustion; Jaswant, eyes fixed on me, with a look of hatred, almost disbelief, occasionally glancing towards Olsa's heaped nudity with a look of possessive horror.
After a while I got up, re-arranged myself and poured myself a drink. I sat back in an armchair, automatic resting handily on the arm and let the fierce, hot, liquid course through my veins, warming me, bringing me back to myself from lassitude. I poured another, munched a couple of biscuits from a bowl on a table and swigged the drink.
I looked at Olsa's lush curves, the slim tapering of her body from shoulders to waist as she lay, the broader sweep of her hips and the tapering again to her slim ankles.
"Always as well to let passion reassert itself unforced," I said to the room at large as I crumbled another biscuit. "Let the desire come naturally."
Jaswant's eyes flickered towards me and held mine for a moment with the intensity of-so I imagined-a witch doctor's.
"That," he said hoarsely, "does not apply to the woman."
"Don't you believe it," I answered, cheerily. "Olsa's a hypocrite. She enjoys this like hell really. You should have seen her performance the night before you came back. I thought I wouldn't be able to satisfy her. But, of course, being a hypocrite, little Olsa has second thoughts and makes trouble."
Olsa stirred and raised herself, tears of rage in her eyes.
"You filthy liar," she cried. "If Douglas doesn't kill you, I shall."
A streak of annoyance shot through me. The effrontery of the tone after ordering such a cold-blooded beating up for me and violating of Monique!
I stepped over to Olsa, turned her over and slapped her hard across her recently raped buttocks.
"Don't give me any of your twisted hypocrisy," I snapped.
From where he lay, Jaswant tried to spit at me and Olsa lashed out with her feet, catching me a crack on the shin with her heel.
The slight, bruised pain brought back to me the pain of the bruises sustained in the wood clearing, the truncheons, the kicks, Monique's face as she was thrust brutally to the ground. I walked quickly around the room, jerking open drawers and cupboards until I found what I wanted. I strode back to Olsa, yanked her to her feet and flung her face downwards over the arm of an armchair. I held her in the small of the back with one hand, while I swished in trial the riding crop I'd taken from a drawer. I looked down at Olsa, kicking vainly, buttocks raised over the arm, torso declining on one side, legs on the other.
"You have a bottom so delightful it just calls for punishment of one kind or another," I told her, through gritted teeth.
Close on my words the riding crop whacked down across her rump, sinking into the soft flesh. Olsa shrieked and wriggled furiously and vainly. I covered her buttocks with thin pink weals, lashing down each stroke with all my strength, watching her buttocks flop loosely relaxed and then tighten furiously to meet each stroke.
"Oh, please, Harvey! I can't bear it!"
She had used my christian name in an effort to move me, regardless even of Jaswant, cursing on the floor.
I brought the crop down a couple more times into the firm flesh of her thighs and then flung it from me. Overcome with a sort of sadistic passion I turned Olsa over. Her face was white, her mouth hung open exhaustedly. I gave her face a couple of sharp slaps and her red-rimmed eyes pleaded with me.
From my trousers, I produced, once more, my rampant penis and with her head hanging down on to the seat of the chair, her thighs drooping from the arm on the other side, I thrust it into her vagina. Olsa uttered a long-drawn "Aaaaaah!" But, I imagined she preferred to be skewered in the normal way to either of her previous fates. I pressed my thighs against hers, forcing her legs into practically a standing position on the floor, while her head flopped like a puppet upside down on the seat of the chair. I forced her legs apart and looked down at where the lips of flesh cleaved open revealing the wet pinkness of her opening. I turned my head to Jaswant, to whom the cleft was well-displayed. "It's a fine specimen," I sneered, before ramming in again before the movement of his very eyes.
Jaswant struggled madly with his bonds, calling me all the names under the English and Indian suns. Olsa simply groaned. Her bound hands flopped behind her head onto the seat of the chair. She had given up the struggle.
Her smooth hips were lifted to me, the highest part of her, offered as if she were pushing them up at me and I glutted up into her belly in resounding jerks which must have seemed to her as if they would split her body in two.
My penis thundering once more, I caught her thighs, her knees and pulled them up around me, wrapping them around my waist. Entering into her to the hilt, I swung her off the chair, her long hair grazing the carpet and carried her to within a foot of Jaswant There I dropped her on the floor and fell on her, forcing her legs back almost over her head a few inches from the Indian's horror-glazed eyes. In that position-our two organs, mine dominating, filling, hers yielding, containing, within inches of his eyes-we made the orgasm. My sperm, shooting up into Olsa's belly, her juices-excited, doubtless by her whipping-descending in a flood on my rod, following it as it dripped from her vagina.
Pouring myself another drink, I sank comfortably into the chair which had just proved so useful. Olsa lay exhausted, her white body heaving. Jaswant lay regarding her with a mixture of pain and anger, as if the whole thing were partly her fault. It occurred to me that he might suddenly have decided there was some truth in my suggestion of her cooperation in our previous liaison.
Physically I felt tired, mentally, satisfied. I thought Jaswant had suffered enough. I doubted whether he'd ever feel the same about Olsa-whatever he felt about her before.
I pocketed both automatics, stood up smiling and addressed myself to the two bodies on the floor.
"Well, I'm off now," I said. "Thanks very much for having me and I hope not to see you again. I have no doubt there are plenty of knives in the kitchen so when Olsa has recovered from her pleasure, she can doubtless manage to set you both loose. In her state, you should have fun, Jaswant."
I walked to the door and the Indian shouted: "I'll get even with you for this Crawford. Your life won't be worth living. I'll see that you're afraid to go out alone." A hysteria at his frustrating helplessness seemed to seize him.
"Wherever you are you won't be safe," he cried. "There'll always be me or the police. You'd be better off with the police. You swine!"
Swiftly I stepped over to him, raised my shoe and kicked him, hard, but not too maliciously up the behind.
"Tell that to the marines."
I shut the door behind me, leaving Jaswant mouthing oaths and threats, Olsa lying in a silent huddle. Whatever their feelings toward each other after the night's events, I would certainly be a friend to neither.
Briskly I strode back to St. Germain-des-Pres, keeping to side streets just in case Olsa was a bit quicker getting into the consoling arms of her boy friend than I expected her to be.
I popped into a little tabac for a hot coffee to wash the whisky down and realized once again I'd got to do something in a hurry.
It was very probable, I knew, that Jaswant would contact the police, most likely anonymously, at the first opportunity, informing them that I was in Paris, living somewhere in the St. Germain-des-Pres area. Even if he had some fear of reprisals from me regarding his "business" it was probable that he'd take the chance. He and Olsa could always disappear quickly, or, failing that were in a much stronger position to bluff and deny. Anyway was it likely that I should go to the police on any matter?
On the whole, although I was satisfied at having gained some revenge-and very satisfying revenge at that-I was only too aware that they held the whip hand.
Jaswant would give the police an opportunity of finding me first and would probably employ his toughs at the same time. At least, I now knew what they looked like-unless, of course, he had an entourage of such cut-throats.
My immediate problem was to decide where to go. I still had quite a lot of money, but I thought it would be unwise to attempt to fly or sail to any far distance place. I might be caught on the boat without any possibility of escape. Certainly, I should be too obvious a target.
Walking the remainder of the distance to the studio, I decided my best course was to travel-perhaps hitchhike-down to Marseille or some south coast town, where I should be well away from the field of search operations and might, if followed, be able to get a small boat to take me, unobtrusively to the coast of Africa.
Not until I was on the point of entering the apartment did Monique occur to me. She was going to be pretty upset, I supposed, but I didn't fancy taking a woman with me: too costly, too much of a nuisance in emergencies, too many complications altogether. My line was fairly obvious and I went into the apartment looking stern and a little worried.
"What's the matter. Harvey? Where have you been?"
Monique was anxious at the first sight of my face. It was clear she'd been waiting in a fidget of worry for my return.
I came straight to the point.
"Listen darling. I'm afraid I'll have to go away for a week or two," I said, drawing her to me.
She caught her breath and was silent for a moment, seeming unable to speak. When she did, she leaned away from me, her eyes filled with tears, staring anxiously into mine as if she were trying to read my thoughts.
"Harvey, Harvey! What's happened?" she begged.
"Nothing too serious," I replied, calmly. "I've just settled our account and I think I'd better disappear unless you want me to be fished from the Seine some morning."
She buried her head in my chest, holding me very tight.
"Have you ... have you...?"
"No, I haven't killed or maimed anybody," I said. "I've just given a thorough going-over to those who were responsible for our little outing."
"You ... you're not hurt?" She drew back to look at me.
I laughed, touched by her concern.
"Not a scratch." I said. "Put me on level terms and I'm not so bad."
I had already told Monique that the horror she'd been through was the result of an old enmity between myself and a man I'd exposed who'd been living on the "immoral earnings of women." She asked no further questions about my vengeance.
During the next hour we drank coffee and packed my few belongings, having decided I'd better leave early in the morning. Monique was very brave about it after I'd promised to return in a few weeks' time. I even began to think I might keep my word in this respect. Monique had been very charming to me.
When all was ready we went to bed and risked dawn exhaustion in a last sensitive twining of bodies, made all the more acute by the imminent parting.
We were up, however, soon after the sun in the morning and Monique, face tight, came with me to the Metro. She wanted to come with me to the outskirts of the city from which I intended to take a bus until I was far enough away from the built-up area to hitchhike with hopes of success. But this I prevented. There was no sense in prolonging her misery and once I'd gone she'd feel better, I knew, and settle down to a little routine of activity to await my return.
I left her at the entrance to the underground Metro, where a handful of bedraggled clochards were beginning to stir from the newspapers and sacks which had been their beds for the night. Neither of us liked train partings. Films, books and life itself had made such a tearing away too classic for it to be taken calmly-at least by Monique-and we kissed hard and quickly on the verge of humanity's dreg-ends stirring on the steps and then, with Monique's broken "Au r'voir cheri" I had passed through the swing doors out of her sight.
With my travelling bag swinging lightly beside me, I was soon leaving Paris in my wake, striding, after a short bus ride, along one of the main roads to the south. I remembered the times when, as a student, I had hitch-hiked to all sorts of places for the fun of it. I felt a little embarrassed at the wads of 10,000 franc notes which packed my wallet, the fact that I could easily have travelled first class. My slight feeling of hypocrisy was heightened by my first two lifts: the first by an old farmer, whose dilapidated old vehicle was packed, for some reason, with bags of cement and bits and pieces of equally dilapidated farm implements; the second by a young couple who were profusely apologetic, when they discovered I was English, because they couldn't take me very far as they were turning off a little way along the road.
But the third lift, which arrived at a more respectable time for people on vacation to be stirring, was a different proposition. The great, grey car with its bright red tourist plate came sleeking along the road at such speed that I raised my thumb with little thought of success. The speed didn't slacken and I caught a glimpse of a little plumpish figure crowned by a shielding homburg staring indifferently ahead from behind the wheel, a woman's slim brown face, glancing out at me from beside him.
Some twenty yards farther on the car began to slow until it pulled to a rubbery standstill on the hot, sticky road and waited in lordly style for me to approach.
I ran the few score yards to the car and bent to look inside. A woman's brown, attractive face smiled up at me through the open window. Behind her, in a shadow, a fleshy, uninterested face loomed, staring vaguely in my direction.
"We're going to Cannes. Any help?" the woman asked.
"Too good to be true," I laughed. "I'm going just there."
The woman's slim, brown arm reached over and flicked open the door of the back for me, and I climbed in onto a seat big enough to accommodate at least three, lightly strewn at the moment with books, magazines and a couple of casual bags.
"Shift those things up to the end," the woman said. "There's nothing breakable."
The car swept into movement again and by the time I had settled myself the point of embarkation was lost in the dusty distance. The woman turned, wriggling round in her seat so that she could sit half facing me. "We like to have someone for company. A long drive can become very monotonous when you're by yourself."
I found her very slightly American accent, her soft tone most attractive. One could imagine it purring warmly in one's ear. Her tanned face bespoke long sojourns in warm places, its firm, oval cut a force of character. Somewhere in her hazel eyes, I could feel a flicker of invitation, a subtly suggested readiness to flirt. Not surprising, really. I imagined she must be some 10 or 15 years younger than her husband somewhere around the right side of 35. One brown hand moved a fair, straying curl into place as she looked at me, and I hoped I would be able to break some of the monotony for her.
"When do you hope to reach Cannes?" I asked.
"Oh, some time in the evening," she replied airily as if it didn't interest her in the slightest. "Did you want to get there by some particular time?"
"I've got all the time in the world," I answered, smiling at her. "But you'll have to go at a pretty powerful speed to make such good time-although I can well imagine it's not beyond the possibilities of a car like this."
"Given a good road she'll leave everything behind her." It was as if, encouraged by their favourite subject, the words had materialised, brusquely, from the back of the man's head. He hadn't moved and it was difficult, after the sound had faded, to realise that he'd spoken.
Recovering from a slight surprise, I made haste to reply: "I can believe that. I must say I didn't think you'd be able to stop after you'd overtaken me on the road."
"Fine brakes. Pull you up dead in no time. Remarkable acceleration, too."
The voice was unexpectedly thin, the accent much more pronounced than the woman's, and after each reluctant sentence a lack of interest in any reply could be sensed. Nonetheless I replied in warm, interested tones.
"Do you know Cannes?" the woman asked politely. "This will be my first visit," I told her. "Then we must tell you the best places to eat and drink," she said. "I know the town like the palm of my hand."
I wondered if I was mistaken about the invitation in her voice. It was certainly a suggestion only a very attentive listener would notice.
"That would be very kind of you," I replied.
"I used to do a lot of hitch-hiking when I was at college," the woman went on. "It's really the most interesting way of travelling. I think if I weren't so lazy and self-indulgent, I'd still do it."
It was clear that she'd taken me at my fairly prosperous looking face value and was searching-very politely-for an explanation of my mode of travel. I rose to the bait.
"I completely agree with you," I said. "As a matter-of-fact, I'm a writer and I find this a most useful way of meeting and studying people-particularly in a foreign country. Although I have to fight against the qualities you mentioned, too."
She smiled at me in a twinkling recognition of my suggestion of mutual sympathies.
"Well, well," she said. "I'm sure Henry and I could provide you with some material." She laughed with an air of good-natured tolerance in the driver's direction and he grunted.
"What's your name?" she asked me, suddenly. "I might have read something you've written."
I hesitated a split second. I had intended to lie about my name just in case they read English newspapers. But I decided with the unlikelihood of that and the possibility of their seeing my passport, plus a certain feeling that I might see more of them than I'd bargained for, that it would be more practicable to tell the truth.
"Harvey Crawford," I answered. The woman pondered. I sat silent in amused anticipation.
"Do you write for Colliers at all?" she asked. "Sometimes-but it's a very competitive market."
"Yes. I think I've seen your name in the magazine
-but I can't remember what it was you were writing about."
"I've written a few short stories for them and some articles on art," I replied, warming to my tale. "But I haven't done much lately as I've been working on my first novel."
"How interesting. And do you paint as well, then?" she asked.
"Better than I write, I think," I answered.
"I've always wanted to have my portrait painted," she murmured, as if more to herself than to me.
"I'd be delighted to repay your kindness to me if you're staying long enough in Cannes," I said.
"Oh, no" she laughed. "I was only musing. How rude that must have sounded."
"Not at all. I'd be flattered to be allowed to paint you. I'm quite serious."
"That's really very nice of you. We'll see," she replied.
We talked for a long time about art and writing in which she had a certain "cultural" knowledge and she eventually introduced herself and her husband. Her name was Gene Gaynor. Her husband said nothing.
After the woman had solicitously asked if I'd care to eat yet, we pulled up at a large roadside restaurant for a meal. We had made great progress under the concentrated guidance of Mr. Gaynor and were clearly going to reach our destination in good time.
Out of the car, I was able to take better stock of my companions and it was a pleasant stocktaking regarding Gene Gaynor. She wore a sleeveless blouse, exposing her slim brown arms, a scarf at her neck. Her legs were covered by fawn coloured slacks which fitted neatly over her small round buttocks, her slim hips. Her breasts, too, as far as I could judge, were small, but well-shaped, and she held herself with a carefree poise. I passed out a bag to her from the back seat and in taking it she brushed her fingers against mine. I looked up quickly and her eyes were smiling at me.
We followed Henry Gaynor into the restaurant. He was not very tall-no more so than his wife-and his thickset figure was running to fat. His face, which might once have been manly handsome, was not flabby and not very distinguished. He could have passed for his wife's sugar daddy.
During the meal I tried to give the conversation to Henry Gaynor for a while. I felt I was beginning to establish a sympathy with his wife, but I was a little put out by the man's silence.
Eventually he relaxed a little after a good bottle of wine and talked about the way the car stood up to the most rigorous treatment and had been over most of the world with him. He was obviously a rich man, but it was difficult to say what his wealth was founded on. He was one of those men who is described as "in business." He had read a few books, his favourite author being Jerome K. Jerome-"always good for a laugh"-and his specialty was golf. Then, as if he had said too much, he relapsed into silence, concentrating on his food and his wine.
Over our coffee, Henry excused himself to go to the toilet. Gene Gaynor looked at me as if to say 'alone at last' and reaching over the table, smoothed her fingers over my eyebrow.
"You've the remains of a nasty bruise there," she said, pursing her lips in sympathy. "And down here." She brushed her hand over my cheek. "Did you get in a fight?" Her cool fingers rested on my cheek for a second or two while her eyes smiled gently at me.
"Yes. I got involved in a brawl in Les Halles," I answered. "One of those affairs where you have no time to prove your neutrality, when it's every man for himself."
"You poor dear. Those bruises really need some attention." Her solicitousness, little marks of affection, were coming more and more in the open.
"You're very charming," I answered.
She smiled contentedly at me and Henry returned and flopped into his seat.
A little while later Henry paid the bill.
"Really. Please be our guest. We've been so glad to meet you," Gene Gaynor said-and I couldn't gracefully refuse.
I opened the car door for her and for a moment as she climbed in, she placed her hand on my arm as if to steady herself. Her fingers squeezed into my flesh although she didn't look at me. I thought, on the whole, she was inclined to be a little too rash.
We chatted pleasantly while the countryside, the towns, the villages sped by. Even Henry joined in a little more as the day wore on. I realized that perhaps he was a litle shy, a little embarrassed at his wife's unconcealed attitude towards him-an attitude of tolerant amusement was perhaps the most accurate way of describing it. Embarrassed, perhaps, at what appeared to be his defenselessness against it.
We stopped for a drink on the last lap of the journey-insisted on paying this time-and it was then that Gene Gaynor suggested we might all care to go for a swim the following morning. I said I would like to very much. Henry said he had promised to play golf.
"Oh, you and your interminable golf," Gene Gaynor simulated a pout. "Surely you can put that off until later."
"Well, I said I'd telephone George as soon as we arrived, but I suppose I could leave immediately after a swim and have lunch at the club." Henry had done the unexpected.
I explained that I, too, had arranged to see a friend on my arrival-I was afraid Gene Gaynor was about to suggest I should stay at their hotel and, although by no means poor at the moment, with my uncertain future I had no wish to be over-extravagant. So they put me down in the centre of the town and I arranged to meet them the following day in a cafe.
After taking a room at a small, comfortable hotel, I studied French and English papers, but could find no later news about myself.
The following day I arrived at our rendezvous early so that I could watch them approach. Gene swung lithely out of the car dressed in a yellow sweater and a full, gaily coloured skirt under which her legs moved freely. I rose and shook hands with them both and after a coffee and a little bright chatter we set off for a less densely populated stretch of the beach-an impossibility to find.
Settled at last we followed the custom of stripping on the beach. I had bought a pair of trunks and a towel, which, like the others I wore under my clothes. Clothes piled beside us, we lay back for a while in the hot sun, soaking it into our skins, watching the bathers and sleepers gathered in little family clots, strewn in pairs, single sometimes, with newspapers over their faces, drinking lemonades, beers, eating bananas.
The bruises on my body were disappearing under the brown of my tan and beside Henry I must have cut a fair figure. Thick and hairy, he had at one time been muscular in an ungraceful way. Now his muscles were being inundated with layers of loose flesh which rounds of golf were not sufficient exercise to dispel.
But I noticed Henry only in passing for I was unable to restrain myself from studying Gene, a fact which she noticed, catching my eye upon her from time to time. She had one of those figures which, half-hidden under clothes, suddenly blossom into much more provocative dimensions when revealed. More provocative proportions rather. For the slimness of the waist is suddenly revealed and the slim beauty of the legs, the firm small roundness of the buttocks-hidden, in their smallness, under clothes,-the firm pointed protrusion of the breasts, which again appear as only medium mounds under the disguise of swathing clothes. Gene Gaynor was like a piece of willow, a woman without awkward angles, seeming, as some women do, to have been whittled out of one slim, smooth, strong piece of spongy wood. I was enchanted.
She, catching the admiration in my eyes, seemed to tense her body, to turn, showing it off, imperceptibly while a gleam of sex charged her eyes as she smiled at me.
Henry lay, oblivious to our growing recognition, eyes closed, fat chest heaving whitely in the sun.
"I'm going in now," Gene announced after a while. "You coming, Henry?"
Henry grunted and said he would later. He preferred a snooze.
"Are you coming?" She looked at me, raising her eyebrows, slightly.
"Certainly," I answered.
The next moment, she was racing with quick little strides over the soft sand, nearly tumbling, feet pushing for a firm foothold bringing out the sturdy little muscles in her calves and thighs. I raced after her, drawing quickly level over the firmer sand of the shore. We plunged together into the foam-flecked blue, the warm but cool-feeling water. For some distance we swam out together, free-style. She was quite a powerful swimmer and I had a job to keep up. Soon we were lost from the shore, cut off by dozens of bathers, whose heads and bodies and rubber rafts ebbed and flowed in a fluid wall. She relaxed at last and paddled, recovering her breath from the exertion.
"Isn't it wonderful?" she shouted across the few feet of water which separated us.
"I think," I called back, "that I'm going to enjoy my stay here much more for having met you."
"I'll do my best to help." She had paddled closer and for a moment our hands touched. Impossible to say whose grip tightened first, but the underwater pressure swept up together with the pull of our hands and she was there alongside me in the water, face and shoulders beautifully bronzed against the white of her bathing cap and costume, hazel eyes melting in a soft caress, lips slightly parted. There, upright in the water I kissed her and she responded fiercely. We sank, together below the surface, broke and came to the surface again, eyes laughing at the pleasure of a new discovery.
We swam and floated a little more and then made our way back through the jostling bodies to the shore.
Henry appeared to be asleep when we sank, wet, but already drying, in the sand beside him. Gene sprinkled sand on his reddening stomach, letting it fall from higher and higher altitudes until he awoke with a start.
"Go and have a swim." she told him. "You need some exercise or you'll never get round the course."
Henry slapped her playfully-the first sign of life he'd shown towards her since I'd met them-and waddled off to splash eventually into the clear sea and paddle his way from the shore.
"I think I'll get dressed while there aren't too many people looking," Gene murmured, "It'll be hopeless trying to get a bathing hut. I never bother."
"Yes, go ahead," I said with a slight inflection which made her flash a quick sexy smile at me.
"You're not to stare," she said.
"I'll try not to," I answered, continuing to look at her.
I lay still, watching her through eyes half closed against the glare of the sun as she dried herself rapidly in the exposed places of her body. Sitting, half covered by her towel she slipped her shoulder straps off and pulled the sweater over her shoulders. Of course, she wouldn't be wearing any underclothes as she'd arrived with her costume already on. I watched her appraisingly as she slipped the damp costume clingingly from her torso and had a glimpse, which she seemed in no hurry to prevent, of the whiter rounds of her breasts before the sweater slid over them. She would need no brassiere anyway to keep those firm little breasts haughtily poised. She inserted the end of the towel under her sweater, dabbing and massaging the damp flesh into dryness and then, wrapping the towel round her waist so that it formed a skirt with a split from waist to knee down the side facing me, she wriggled out of the costume altogether. The thin strip of flesh, laid bare to me down the whole length of her leg, revealed the shadowed beginnings of the slight concaves of her buttocks as she tensed a leg to dry it with an end of the towel.
"I hope, Harvey, you don't object to my deshabille," she said, quietly.
I had noticed the invitation in the use of my Christian name.
"As a matter-of-fact I find you most charming that way," I replied. "Although not, perhaps quite sufficiently deshabille."
She laughed at my bold acceptance of the cue.
"Well, this is hardly the place," she said.
"I await the right one with eagerness," I retorted.
She slipped her skirt over the towel, buttoning it up the side, her lips apart in a light smile and then whisked the towel away from under the covering, reaching under the skirt again to dab dry her legs and intimate places.
For my part I felt it more fitting to the circumstances to await Henry's return before I started a striptease act. While we waited for him to reappear, Gene drew faces which were immediately obliterated by silvery falls, in the sand at her feet.
"Henry spends a lot of time playing golf while we're here," she said. "He always leaves me to my own devices to a considerable extent."
"I got the impression his opinion wouldn't have worried you much anyway," I suggested.
"Well, I don't like to be too flagrant in my abuses," she answered." Henry has a lot of money and I believe he thinks I wouldn't be completely unfaithful to him."
"Which of course is his little dream," I said.
She smiled at me with a deep smile that was as if she had opened her arms to me.
Further conversation was cut short by the arrival of Henry, stalking unsteadily through the sand. He plomped down beside us saying that he thought he had time to have lunch in town if he popped round and saw George before hand.
"Don't put yourself out, dear. I have Mr. Crawford to keep me company."
There was a suggestion of hurt sarcasm in her voice which I thought rather clever and which Henry obviously took literally.
"No. Oh no, of course not," he muttered quickly. "I can do that easily. Are you sure, dear, that you don't mind me being away during the afternoon?"
"Oh, I'll cope," she answered airily.
Henry and I dressed as discreetly as we could and we must have contrasted considerably. He with his gone-to-seed flabbiness, fast becoming a stocky rotundity; I with the slim muscular remnants of earlier athletic days and the tuning-even against a certain amount of dissipation-which later judo training had provided. I noticed Gene's deep hazel eyes roaming over us and could sense that these were her thoughts.
Once dressed we headed for the car and then Gene suggested that Henry should leave us and visit George to save time.
"It's in the opposite direction to the hotel," she said.
"I feel like a walk and perhaps Mr. Crawford would be good enough to see me back to the hotel."
"All right, dear," and Henry was away, threading painfully in the huge car through the multi-sized, multi-coloured blizzard of traffic.
Walking back the few hundred yards to the hotel, Gene linked her arm with mine and turned her body in towards me slightly. With an uneasy stirring in me, I could feel the firm, warm flesh of her breast pressing against my biceps, her hip, naked under the thin skirt, rubbing against mine.
"Are you taking me out this afternoon?" she asked, with the contented anticipation of one who knows the answer already.
"What does Henry think you do?" I asked.
"Oh, he thinks I swim, walk on the sands, ride, eat, drink, go to the cinema. But he wouldn't mind me going out with you, anyway. Henry's like that. He knows he has no choice really and he'd sooner keep me than restrict me in these little things and risk losing me. Not, as I said, that he really thinks I'd be unfaithful to him."
"You have it all your own way, in fact," I said with a grin.
"Uh-huh." She pressed against me with a little movement of affection-or desire.
We reached the hotel in a few minutes and she disengaged her arm.
"Won't you come up and have a drink?" she asked. "A little aperitif before lunch?"
It rather amused me to find myself in the position of the sought-after, I who had so often played the role of the seeker, and I began to feel very pleasantly disposed and rather affectionate towards this woman I'd known for such a short time, in addition to sensing the thrill of union tingling my skin.
"That would be nice," I said. And she stood, half-poised on a forward step, lips apart in a silent laugh of sheer animal excitement for a second or two before she preceded me, limbs swinging gracefully under their slight shield of clothing through the foyer.
Once in the room, which boasted an adjoining bathroom, I noticed, she turned towards me, placing her hand gently on my chest, running it over the tight muscles of my torso through the silk shirt which I wore. Just as if this were a performance which we had rehearsed and moved into quite naturally, I drew her to me, slipping my hand over the smooth flesh of her back, feeling it taut and strong under the moving tissue of sweater.
Her face, tilted back, was close to mine and the laugh had gone. In its place was an open-lipped desire. Her breasts, which I could feel, distinctly and in outline, thrust into my chest, heaving slightly, her hazel eyes, with their beautiful whites, imperceptibly blue-tinged, seemed hardly to see me, to be turned in on themselves in a deep desire, lids half closed, heavily.
I kissed her and a shock seemed to run through her body, clamping her electrically against me. Her hands slipped from my chest up over my shoulders, lacing round my neck and crushing my face hard down on hers. I could feel her strained breasts pressing still more firmly against me.
"Henry will be here any moment," I whispered, brushing my lips over her face as she held me in a grip whose physical force suggested desperation.
"No he won't." The words breathed out separately with difficulty. "He has to go to the other side of the town."
I had not really been expecting this madness.
"Surely," I whispered again. "You don't want to risk him finding us! We must wait until this afternoon."
"No, no, please," she whispered fiercely. "I can't wait until then. He'll be another 15 minutes. We have time."
Christ! I nearly laughed. What a woman! "If you're sure," I said softly.
She made no answer, her hands merely roaming over my back, clasping me around the hips and straining me towards her as she thrust her lower body into me. My penis had risen in a mountainous hump and, feeling this through the flimsy covering of her skirt she raised herself on tiptoe, forcing the junction of her legs against the mound.
I needed no further encouragement and pushed her cold-bloodedly across the room onto the bed. I didn't particularly want to be discovered by her husband in a compromising situation and, in spite of her feelings in the matter, I was certain our time was limited.
She fell back onto the bed, still holding me and I fell forward on her belly. Leaning slightly sideways I reached down between us and unbuttoned my fly. My penis was hot and alive almost with excitement, even to my hand as I pulled it forth. With a quick movement, I drew her skirt up to the top of her thighs, exposing them, firm and brown as I had seen them in her bathing suit, but somehow so much more secret and intimate now.
We had no time for preliminaries and I did not caress her, didn't even notice the features of her body or pull the skirt higher than necessary to slip my penis under it and up.
As I reached the point of entry she abruptly drew up her thighs and I entered her with the effect of a double shock and she gasped, her breasts straining from the bed, embedding their firm points in my chest.
It was the first time, I could remember that I had had a woman so nearly completely covered with clothes. Only her legs were bare, her skirt draping down around her hips and flanks, making the intercourse a more secret, exciting thing, adding a furtive lack of complete knowledge to it, which coursed a shot of extra power, like a sudden sharp injection, through my organ, twisting my loins, reaching its chill hand up through my belly to my chest, where my heart palpitated under the wonder and intimacy of the sensation.
With the lips of her sex, moistly brushing my trousers at the point where my penis shot stiffly from them like some stripped fruit, I wriggled farther and farther into the depths of her passage.
She, obviously a woman who needed sex to a great extent, and gave her body as its instrument once the fire in her was kindled, clasped my hips with her knees, pressing her thighs against my trousered body as if trying to hold me there in a vice, while she rotated her hips in little semicircular movements.
Her eyes were half open still, with the lids, paler than her brown skin, half lowered. Her eyes, I felt, did not really see me, but were concentrated in seeing nothing but the inner rage of her sensation. Her brown fingers dug into my shoulders, my back, to the accompaniment of an agonized gasp every time I entered her with a strong, hard stroke.
The thought of Henry's imminent arrival added a further boiling intensity to my passion, creating and holding in my chest a nervous thrill, as if a bladder were enlarging to bursting point inside me.
I heard a footstep on the stairs outside and half stopped.
"Henry?" I hissed, in a rush of uncertainly.
But Gene pulled me back into her, writhing her hips.
"Oh, don't stop, don't stop!" she whispered furiously. "I don't care, I don't care."
The door was locked on the inside and I continued with a furious rapidity of movement, trying to force the explosion so that I could hide away if necessary before Henry was let in. But so loud were Gene's involuntary, undisguished moans that I had no doubt her husband would hear us from the other side of the door. But there was nothing to be done and I could feel myself mounting to the great pressure against which I could do nothing.
To my relief-almost subconscious and comparatively unimportant though it was-I heard the footsteps pass and continue down the corridor and I was able to turn my whole mind back to the squeezing, bloodsucking fury which grasped and drew on my penis, enlarging it, bloating it, making it feel three times its size as my stomach, my abdomen, swirled in a liquid excitement, Gene, legs drawn back against her body, so that the skirt had fallen back to her waist and her buttocks were partly exposed as well as the intimate sensual regions where my organ buffetted and tortured her, began to bite into my neck with quick little paingiving stabs of her sharp teeth, stifling her moans and strangled throat noises in the flesh of my shoulder.
Her body jack-knifed and convulsed, jack-knifed again and a moment later, the sucking of the juices of my body down through the tube of throbbing flesh, which joined me to her, exploded in a rushing waterfall which cascaded into her inundated channel. I cried out, gripping her so tightly that she squealed and then I flopped flat onto her and lay, cheek against hers, drained of breath and feeling.
When our heaving bodies had subsided and the noises of the world outside swam more clearly into our consciousness, we rearranged ourselves quickly, Gene, brushing-in a charming gesture-the surrounds of my flies.
"You'd better go now quickly darling," she said, smiling at me as if we had been lovers for months, "and I'll see you at the same cafe this afternoon between 3 and 3:30. Maybe I'll let you into a secret then."
I raised a quizzical eyebrow. "You don't mean to say you have secrets from me already?"
She laughed, kissed me gently, moistly on the lips and bustled me softly from the room.
Walking from the hotel, I passed Henry's car coming back from the trip which had given his wife time to be unfaithful to him on his own bed. The vehicle swept majestically by and Henry-thinking of his golf, or of his wife, perhaps-didn't notice me.
After lunch I remembered to buy some painting materials just in case Gene reminded me of my offer to paint her. Although now I could see that the main point of her conversation had been to provide us with an opportunity to make love, I laughed to myself as I remembered, too, that my first thought had been that it would provide us with a good opening. It had not occurred to me at the time that she'd be quite so actively inviting-so demanding, in fact. She was certainly the sort of woman who'd take chances and think afterwards-and without any regrets.
Vaguely I wondered what her secret could be. Probably something quite fatuous: that it was the first time she'd been unfaithful to Henry? Hardly, I thought. I settled myself early in our cafe to await the answer and a more luxurious indulgence in the forbidden pleasures of adultery.
When Gene arrived, it was in a well-cut white cotton dress which set off to advantage the brown, soft texture of her skin and the round, willowy curves of her body. She sank into a chair beside me and twined her fingers in mine.
"Mine's a long lemonade," she said, Everything happened very naturally with Gene, no awkwardness, no strain; we seemed to flow into each other. I decided she was a very pleasant person to be on intimate terms with-and all so quickly.
"Everything all right?" I asked.
"Yes. He had no idea," she answered. "He got back soon after you left. You must have seen him."
"In the distance," I replied. "But weren't you a little afraid he'd find us?"
She smiled at me.
"You can bluff your way through anything if you're clever," she said. "And what do we get out of life that's worth having except excitement in one form or another? I couldn't live without it."
"That makes two of us," I grinned. "I knew we were well suited," , She squeezed my hand and brushed my cheek with her mouth.
"I'm glad you think that," she murmured.
"What would you like to do this afternoon?" I asked after we'd made a fair start on fresh drinks, "Or, rather, where would you like to go to do it?"
She looked at me, thinking about something and didn't answer for some time.
"I told you I might let you into a secret," she said at last. "But I don't know if I should."
"You and Henry aren't married," I prompted, clucking my tongue in disapproval.
"Oh no, nothing so terribly immoral as that," she laughed "This is a question of forbidden pleasure."
"A subject which never fails to fascinate me."
For a moment I wondered if she was a call girl. Such things did happen to highly-sexed women in spite of-or even because of-secure and elevated positions.
"I know of a club," she suddenly admitted, "where all sorts of pleasurable activities go on. But perhaps sex en masse doesn't interest you."
"I find any variation on existing experience worthwhile," I replied.
"Well I'm not sure that I want to share you," she said with a pretty little pout, eyes twinkling.
"You hold the cards," I answered. "I'm quite content with things as they are, but I do like to see these interesting sidelights on the activities of my fellow men-and women.
"Well we could go there. It would be a very nice place for the two of us, anyway. The intercourse doesn't have to be communal." She mused a little and finally said: "Well, let's go for a little drive and I'll see.
"You mean to say you've got the car?"
She laughed in a triumphant little tinkle, "Certainly. I always get my own way. Henry's gone to the links in George's car."
A block or two away we climbed into the car where she'd parked it out of the sun. I was surprised and amused by the woman's most uncommon outlook. Knowing me as a lover for the first time, she was already risking my being attracted to others in what sounded like a most peculiar set up. But that was typical of her inability to prevent herself from embarking on courses of action. The results of which were very much open to question. There was an ease about her, a confidence, as if she felt sure of her ability to get her own way over a period if not at once. And it became more and more apparent that sex was her main idea of excitement-as, in fact, it is for most of us-and that she wasn't prepared to limit her excitement.
All around us in Cannes, as we drove through the crowded streets, holidaymakers, tourists, short and long-time visitors to the sun thronged and jostled. On the beaches they stretched in silent sun-worship, the hue of their skins betraying the length of their stay.
Outside Cannes again on a broad road whose direction I did not immediately recognise, cars thronged in and out of the town, bringing in score after score, hundred after hundred to fill the beaches over again, taking the burned bodies out again to recuperate in the country distances.
Gene drove well and at speed and, watching her brown, warm face, her slim hands on the wheel, I began to want her, to want her in a long, luxurious, unhurried orgasm. The morning's intimate moment had had too much emphasis on the moment. I now felt a desire to know thoroughly her slim, small-boned body. As if she divined my thoughts she leaned over, suddenly, and kissed me, dangerously, without relaxing the car's speed one kilometre. I liked her for that.
"How did you find this place?" I asked her, against the smooth purr of the engine.
"You don't think Henry introduced me to it, do you?" she asked archly.
"Tell me," I said. "I'm interested."
"I met an English ex-Army officer and his wife when I was here about three times ago," Gene told me. "The colonel didn't know anything about it. But his wife, who found him a little unimaginative, had known the owner some years before and had become a member. She introduced me."
"And what did you do then?" I asked.
"Had a very pleasant time," she answered.
I pictured her under the heavy weight of various male members, being crushed under their fiery bodies, limbs atwine.
"The bitch," I thought, with a grin.
We turned off the main road onto a narrower lane, turned into a drive and were soon approaching a large house, standing majestically on a slight incline, surrounded by shrubberies. "This is it," Gene announced.
"Very impressive," I said. "How do you know anyone will be there."
"It's always pretty crowded-not in the sense of the beach of course-there's a hell of a lot of people like the same thing you know."
I grinned and remained silent as we drew up outside the stone steps leading up to an entrance hall. Gene tooted her horn and then pulled round to one side of the building where several cars were parked in a gravel yard.
by the time we'd walked back to the front of the house-mansion would be a more descriptive term-a tall man with a goatee, immaculately dressed in very English-looking sporting clothes, was standing in the portal.
He came down the steps to meet us, a broad smile relaxing his rigid-looking features.
"Hello, my dear," he called in English, with a very little accent, to Gene. "I was expecting you a week or two ago."
They shook hands and he kissed her on both cheeks.
"Yes, I meant to tell you we'd be later this year."
"And how is your husband?"
Gene turned to me with a grin.
"Louis has never met Henry, but he always asks after him so solicitously."
"I thought perhaps my identity had been mistaken," I ventured.
"Oh no, Monsieur." Louis shook his head with a smile. "I am told that Henry is a fat man with looks of no distinction."
"You flatter me and my battle scars," I said.
We shook hands as Gene introduced us.
So this cultured looking fellow was Louis de Chauvreland, rich owner of the mansion and president of the club. His was the inspiration of this sexual paradise whose delights I hoped to taste.
We followed him into the great hallway of the building up the broad main staircase with its plush carpet. There was, it appeared, no fee to be paid for club membership. In fact membership was a rather rashly informal affair, an introduction from an established member sufficing. The aims were very simply to give a little pleasure to individuals who were loathe to go through the conversations, the feints, parries and occasional withdrawals of the less honest world without. Louis de Chauvreland derived his pleasure from the variety of experience which was presented to him by simple introduction and by witnessing the pleasure of his guests. He was a very rich man.
Pressing a button which opened the door to the main hall confronting us, de Chauvreland said: "You have come at a quiet moment. We were just awaiting a little entertainment."
Pushing through heavy velvet curtains we stepped into a room from the Arabian Nights, my breath was caught.
The hall was large, heavily carpeted and rugged; walls of cool mosaic and drapings; enormous, beautiful vases were poised on pedestals which protruded in a pattern of intervals around the walls, and parts of the floor which appeared to be structurally raised, in fact, revealed themselves to be enormous humps of rugs and cushions. In the corners tables of oak and bronze were merged with the drapings and on a framework a huge, glinting, bronze gong hung. Glinting because, although from the shadows of the ceiling a string of myriad-pieced chandeliers glinted also, the hall was lit by a hundred or more huge candles, sprouting in clamped clusters from various altitudes on the walls. The light was dull in spite of the numbers and somehow mysterious, its mystery accentuated by the macabre effect of shaded lights, hidden by wall curtains, which flung small pools of light to the floor, light which oozed from under the drawn-up drapings, to creep strongly and then more weakly fading into the dusk of the candles along the cushioned fastness of the floor.
In the magnificent opulence of the setting, it was with a slight start that I became aware of the shaded figures, reclining in small groups, or in couples in the shaded places. Figures, all properly dressed, I noticed, who were drinking wine, spirits, coffee, looking at one another, lips moving in quiet conversation.
As we advanced soundlessly into the room, I was startled again with the realisation that what I had taken to be the solid walls, dipped deeply in many almost unseen places to deep alcoves, some half or nearly hidden-others completely I was to learn-by drapings and pillars.
While I was still learning the geography, accustoming my eyes to the deep shadow of half concealed spots, sensing fresh movements, in the ravines of cushions at the sinister extremities, our host had motioned us to be seated at one side of the great mosaic of light and shadow, and momentarily disappeared.
Gene, whom I had momentarily forgotten, slipped her hand into mine, lacing our fingers.
"Like it?" Her eyes, too glinted in the bronze reflections and it seemed, for a moment as if I had been lured into an infidel land-which was, of course, quite true in the moral sense. Not that I set myself up as the epitome of the moral world.
"It's all very strange." I answered. "And what sort of perfume is this?"
My nostrils had begun to twitch at a faint scent which seemed only then to have started lacing sensual tentacles around me.
"A little extra aphrodisiac," Gene said. "Funny, nobody notices it as they first come in."
"Our host is the picture of elegance," I went on. "I suppose you've seen him at closer quarters?" Gene laughed, squeezing my hand. "As a matter-of-fact, I haven't," she replied. "Louis has a tendency to abnormality. He likes watching other people, reading erotic literature and indulging occasionally in homosexuality. He gets more pleasure that way, it seems."
At that point our host returned, carrying, himself, a little tray with coffee in delicately patterned china. Behind him followed a young man, well made but as delicate looking as the china. He rather gave point to Gene's explanation. He in turn carried a tray on which were several glasses and an assortment of decanters containing spirits and liqueurs.
Our host placed the coffee beside us and had us helped to the drink of our choice.
"The entertainment is ready," he announced. "I hope you like your first visit, Mr. Crawford."
Sipping the excellent coffee and feeling the atmosphere of the room prickling my skin like a caressing hand, I could make out the shadowy groups of figures in the dark extremities. They all seemed to be facing inwards, waiting, Suddenly from opposite walls, two powerful yellow spotlights blazed on, converging at a level spot in the center of the hall, making a pool of light at their meeting, illuminating yellowly the faces of those seated near. I could see there were several beautiful women lying in the huddled groups, their faces nonetheless lovely from the macabre hue of the lights.
"Louis always does things on a grand scale," Gene whispered in my ear.
As her whisper died, the huge gong at one end of the room was struck. Its reverberation filled the hall with a great mellow chime, which seemed to be a living force, as if a band of armed brigands had sprung silently into the room. And as the sound faded, I became aware of a fluttering movement on the edge of the darkness and as I stared the movement became a body, a beautiful, lithe, sensuous body of a woman who must have been Indian, writhing in a dance which mingled a disdainful aristocracy with an overwhelming impression of potential savagery and abandon. She swayed sensuously, indistinctly on the outskirts of the light and then as a crash of pulsing music, played on strange instruments and reminiscent of the Polovtsian Dances pealed out from somewhere, she plunged, full-bloodedly into the light.
There was a slight murmur of appreciation as the woman's features became so suddenly clear. She was dressed in a transparent blouse which covered her body from just above her breasts to her ribs and a baggy pair of trousers of the same chiffon-like material, loose and caught in at her ankles. Covering her breasts and her hips, over these unprotecting garments, were long frills of a heavier silver material, which flapped and glinted as she moved. Thus her shoulders, arms midriff and feet were bare and her legs almost to the top of the thighs were clearly visible through the chiffon, Her face was aristocratic with a slight Mongolian flattening of the features-very slight; her body glinted brown and muscular as it swayed to the music, large dimples shadowed and unshadowed in the bare section of her hips just above her buttocks. Her breasts, modestly obscured by the silver, thrust out their covering material in a quivering ridge and, following her fine rounded legs up to the level of the silver frill, I could trace the graceful sway of her buttocks underneath the material, Immediately I wondered if she was there for the having. I felt like some mogul, watching one of his many concubines perform before having her perform in a different and more private manner.
I could not see where the music was coming from, but it was obviously not recorded and I could only presume that somewhere in the outer darkness, de Chauvreland had some authentic little band of eastern musicians-members of the club, perhaps.
The dancer, whose disdainful expression was in sharp contrast to the plunging savagery of her movements, raised her hands above her head, her arms swaying like approaching snakes and began to rotate her hips in a circular motion, at first slowly and then with a growing ferocity, while her head swayed from side to side on her neck. Then, with two quick gestures, she had unclipped the silver frills covering the more intimate portions of her finely-made body and she was spinning and rotating in virtual nudity before us. She began to shake her body so that it shivered in quick movements from her toes to her shoulders and her breasts which were large, with large brown nipples, quivered and tremored. She danced in a square, as if to show off all angles of her body to each side of the room. Her buttocks, solid oval tubes, dimpled and tautened, spread and swayed at her movement.
I felt hot from the perfume, the warmth of the place, the liqueurs and the oriental beauty of the woman before me. My sexual power had risen and was surging against its confining clothing.
As the dancer swayed towards us, her body was brown and lightly muscular, her eyes inscrutable. On the edge of the light, in front of our little group, with the music growing in crescendo, she bent back from the hips, balancing on her spread-apart legs as, shaking her shoulders, she bent right back until her head almost touched the floor behind her. Her breasts, upraised and flattened slightly with the stretching, seemed to be offered to us, the lower part of her body, spread and thrust forward, thick folds of flesh clearly visible between her legs through the diaphanous wisp of material, seemed to be offered too. I could hardly keep my place.
And then the body, tremoring, arms stretched on either side, breasts quivering, as if with emotion, raised itself, sweeping up to the vertical, inscrutable almond eyes holding us, lips slightly parted.
With the music descending, fading away, the dancer, too, withdrew her gracefully beautiful body, gradually to the outer limits of the light until her movement was a flutter and then nothing-lost in the darkness.
There was no clapping-apparently such applause was not expected. A hush seemed to have quelled even the quiet conversation of before, I was aware of an electric feeling in the atmosphere. De Chauvreland turned towards me, motioning a boy to refill our glasses.
"How did you find our dancer?" he asked. "Superb," I enthused. "Is she a member or just entertainment?" My host smiled.
"She is much in demand," he said, anticipating two or three questions ahead. "But today, to celebrate your joining us, you may have priority."
I cast a sidewards glance at Gene.
"Go ahead," she said. "You'll like me all the better after you've tried an inferior brand."
De Chauvreland grinned, non-committally.
"You will have to wait until the end of the show," he said. "Perhaps by then you'll have changed your mind."
"There was something about her sphinx-like expression that fascinated me," I admitted. "Where did you find her?"
"She is Mongolian by birth," de Chauvreland answered, "but her mother was Indian and she was trained as a dancer in the religious temples. It was her choice to be a dancer, although her parents were rich and she had no need to do anything. I met her, here while she was on holiday. She has an appetite which dancing alone will not satisfy."
Somewhere a different music had begun, starting like the beating of tomtoms.
"Where do you get your music from?" I asked.
"The music does not come on a commercial basis," de Chauvreland, said, smiling. "A club such as this gathers its members from far and wide and we lack no talent and almost no nationalities."
The music had grown to a savage rolling of sound. We could have been in the heart of Africa at some tribal festival. And it was with the savagery of Africa that the "act" began. A huge negro sprang into the light, dragging with him a negress, whose refined features told of a European influence. The movement was abrupt and savage, but done with a fine balletic feeling and rhythm. It was obvious to me that these, too, were trained dancers.
The woman mimed a look of terror and collapsed where she was flung by the man.
Their bodies, dressed only in red sashes wrapped around their hips and loosely carried between their legs with a similar sash round the breasts of the woman, gleamed in supple sinews in the light, which flicked suddenly to green. The man's was coal black, the woman's much lighter, but still darker than brown. She was slim and quite beautiful even from a European standpoint.
As she cringed in feigned terror, the music beat out an inexorable and sinister repetition of drums and some wooden instruments which I could not place.
The negro circled the woman, boasting his power, writhing his hips, waving his arms from side to side, stamping his feet. Then, towering over her, he drew her, as if by some magic electric power, to her feet, so that, reluctantly, she joined in a gently swaying dance with him. Each faced the other and he seemed to be weaving a spell over her as they shook their shoulders in time, together stretched their bodies, turned, whirled and rotated their hips.
Gradually, the negro's movements became more full of power and so, it seemed, the woman's movements reflected the power in growing abandon, while her face, with its half-European features, contorted in the pain of helplessness.
A gleam of satisfied power filled the face of the negro as, with a jerk, he whipped away the sash covering the woman's breasts. She clutched her hands to her bosom in her uninterrupted dance, holding them there for a moment, before they, as if magnetised and straining against the magnetism, were drawn away from her body, revealing her great, well-poised breasts, soaring, twin orbs of chocolate flesh towards her tormentor.
The negro circled her, towering into and over her with a witch-doctor's rhythm of power and possession as her arms fluttered towards him in a warding off movement, only to recede again as if invisibly repelled. The man's red-wrapped hips began to revolve faster as the music grew in a sinister sexuality, faster, too. Following his movements the woman's broader, red-clothed hips, also rotated and flexed with growing abandon, while her breasts writhed and jumped and her face revealed the terror of her helplessness against his power.
Moving in towards her, the negro caught at the sash around the woman's hips and slowly, as she spun, twisted it from her smooth body, twirling her like a top so that she went on spinning on the edge of the circle of light, which flicked to red.
The negro raised both hands above him in a sinister gesture of triumph, his broad lips, gleaming eyes, opening and piercing at his prize. Swaying his hips again and beckoning her towards him in a devilish gesture, the man moved towards her while the woman, mouth open, eyes filled with fear, rotated towards him, hips swivelling, naked and gleaming. With a gesture he had her turn and followed her, hips working as she swayed, buttocks large and brownly hollowed, tensing and untensing before his eyes.
While her smooth, gleaming back was thus towards him, the negro pulled away his covering and there was an involuntary gasp from Gene and some of the other women as his erection shot into view. God! It was enormous. I doubted if any woman could take it. But women have an amazing capacity.
At a motion from his finger tips, his captive, rotated round to see his strong black, primeval body. Her fear-crazed eyes, fastened on the massive stiff penis and her body seemed to shrink back without actually doing so. Her head swayed from side to side as if begging, imploring, trying to escape, but vainly unable to do so. Electric cords bound their bodies together.
And as a diabolical smile of evil crossed his face, the woman came hip-jerking in towards him. A few inches from him, she stopped and they faced each other for several seconds, writhing, while I guarantee everyone in that room was in a sweat of desire and anticipation.
Within inches of him as she was, the negress seemed absolutely dominated by the massive power of the man and, stretching his hand above her head, he stared into her face as the music took on a threatening, stormy rhythm; and, her mouth moving as if uttering prayers, the woman began to sink, inch by inch, fighting against some dread power, to her knees and then to her side on the floor at his feet. Her hips were jerking backwards and forwards in thunderous movements to the music as the negro sank, in a spiral it seemed, strangely, to the floor by her side so that they were again facing each other a few inches apart, writhing their bodies at each other in sensual movements on the floor.
The woman's head still was straining as if mentally she were trying to escape but could do nothing against the physical power the negro exercised over her body.
Slowly, painfully, she moved over onto her back, while the women in the audience groaned. Her face was contorted with horror and fear, her legs now wide apart giving a fine view of her open vagina, her hips rotating, buttocks brushing the floor in a light swishing.
The negro, whose erection must have been as thick as most men's wrists and, it seemed, as long as their forearms, writhed himself to his knees, an evil grin radiating from his features and moved in front of the woman's open thighs, looking at his victim, looking at her involuntary sacrifice.
On his knees, swaying, he towered before her. She seemed to try to rise, failed, and in helpless abandon finally thrust her hips, her abdomen, her mound with its wide open offering, up to him.
The negro writhed down to her, his enormous penis, thrusting an inch from her Vagina. Her head fell back in terror and the lights flicked one after the other the colours of the rainbow and the drums played a great beat as he tore into her agonised belly.
Involuntarily the women in the audience groaned again and the men stared in mixtures of desire, horror and triumph. The negress seemed to have accepted the huge rod better than most people could have believed, Her body simply flexed, her head flopped this way and that.
The music tom-tommed faster and more furiously and somehow the movements of the two bodies still seemed to be part of a dance, each containing a savage power, each being carried away finally by the natural evolution of the sexual act.
The woman's hips still rotated, buttocks still brushing the floor and the man's narrow hips, thrust up and down, his small buttocks tightening into little melons and relaxing again each time he burst his organ farther into her flesh.
The woman's strong thighs clasped his slim hips, her legs wide, clamping him on alternate beats of the drums. Her long brown arms encircled his broad athletic back; her breasts seemed to hold him away from her by their great size. We had a perfect view.
The light had changed to orange, which seemed to give a purplish hue to their skins as the negress drew up her thighs, her calves, clasping her naked feet around the muscular legs of her master. We could see that his enormous penis was almost completely sucked in. It seemed that it must be penetrating right through her body.
Another drum joined the others as with a thrust he embedded the whole of his massive strength into his victim's channel and she writhed in convulsions. Yet another and another joined as the two bodies rode together to an abandoned climax.
Women among the audience were moving uneasily as the climax drew dear; some, I noticed-including Gene-had their hands on the knees of the men they were with and their knuckles showed white. The men seemed to have eyes for nothing but the spectacle of the savage, primitive lovemaking being performed on the cushions before all eyes.
The negro's mouth had opened, his hips were pistoning like a young bull's and, despite the woman's thrusts in the opposite direction, each stroke he made thrust her several inches along the floor away from him. Her lips were wide, tongue flicking along their dry lengths. They had both begun to make low noises, like some jungle animals, in their throats.
I marveled at the size of the woman's aperture to contain such an enormous organ as her mate's. My penis, thrusting against my clothing as if it would burst through at any moment was, I knew, nothing compared with such a giant.
And then as the drums beat an ear-splitting tattoo, the negro gave a roar. Muscles were bunched on his great muscular body. He was a splendid savage and the woman, whose body he was racking mercilessly, was no less fine in appearance in the abandon of the final throes. The roar was the cue for a wail from the woman, both of which cries broke off into strangled bursts of breath as the negro shattered his load into the open body of the woman and she opened to the extremity to receive it.
The drums began to decrease in fervour, dwindling down while the two black bodies coiled in momentary exhaustion and then recovery.
Miraculously, there seemed to have been no break in the balletic movement. It was as if the whole thing had finished as it had begun-as part of a carefully designed, erotic act.
The drums has faded to a very quiet beating and into the foreground came some sort of pipe which wailed an unearthly dirge over the scene.
His organ deflated, but still large, the negro withdrew from the woman's body and snaked to his feet, drawing her up after him by some mental power. Their hips snaked and swayed again in a gentle motion of recovering strength, The man's face was a picture of satisfaction and satiation, the woman's of intense shame and misery.
When finally, with a mocking laugh, he made a motion which seemed to release her from his power, she ran, buttocks cringing sinsuously, the outer sign of the shame she carried in her loins, from the circle of light, Her seducer, eyes alight with laughter, circled and snaked in a pleasure of ecstasy, reveling in his power, and beating a staccato path of triumph with his bare feet, to the clack-clack time of a half-oriental-half-spanish rhythm, then he, too, disappeared into the darkness.
The audience sat spell-bound, caught in a choking desire. I caught glimpses of movements. Couples, I realized, were gliding off into the curtained alcoves, their loins bursting with more than they could contain.
Gene's eyes were upon me, but I turned to de Chauvreland.
"My god, that was magnificent." I said.
He smiled with pleasure at the success of his act.
"Yes," he said suavely. "That's a new one. Nobody had seen that before. These two are members of a company of dancers. It's amazing to me the way they find such energy to see it through to the end. But these Africans are amazing."
My host leaned over to me, speaking softly close to my ear.
"By the way, if you wish to disappear now do not think you will offend my hospitality. Such is the nature of my hospitality. You can see it is usual."
"The spectacle is too magnificent for an immediate retreat," I grinned. "It's having a disastrous effect upon my system, but if there's more to come I must see it."
De Chauvreland was obviously very pleased at my spontaneous praise for his ingenuity in presenting entertainment. He put his hand on my shoulder and I remembered the warning of his sexual aberration.
"I'm glad you're enjoying it," he said. "Sometimes I wonder if I'm maintaining the standard. It's not always easy. There's one more item, partly amateur if we have a brave spirit left in the audience."
Music, softer and more menacing than before, began somewhere in the wings and, superbly athletic, the negro of the previous act stalked back into the light. His body, as I've said, was strongly muscled, his shoulders broad, body and legs long, hips so slim that the size of his penis seemed out of proportion to them. He was smiling and graceful, his loose-limbed body as feline and potentially powerful as a panther, his great middle limb hung limp and thick against his powerful thighs, behind it, his testicles, too, were large. There was an absence of hair.
Beside, me, Louis de Chauvreland swung easily to his feet and strolled into the light, ranging himself beside the negro, as tall, but much narrower, a thin, cultivated twig beside the powerful, savage branch.
He turned in a slow circle peering through the mist of perfumed light into the deeper gloom.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he announced, after a moment. "You saw and I think were impressed by the last item and I now have a proposition to make to the ladies amongst you. For those who would like to try their capacity and reach heights they've probably never attained before-the heights of love which knows no civilised inhibitions, shows no quarter, I offer this magnificent specimen of humanity, here. But, ladies, before you come to try your power, which you must do at this spot before us, I warn you that once started, you must be prepared to accept the rigours of complete submission. If anyone, after taking the challenge, tries to back out she will be forced to continue."
So saying, he returned to his seat beside me and watched for the offer.
There was a hesitation of perhaps two minutes. If anyone was coming, she was half afraid, waiting, half hoping perhaps that someone else would take up the challenge first.
The negro stood in the pool of light, penis still limp, smiling and waiting. There was something impudent about his attitude and I sensed that most of the women in the dark hall were white.
I wondered, secretly, about Gene, but dared not even glance in her direction in case she thought it was a sign of encouragement. I didn't want my future enjoyment rendered less exciting because this savage had enlarged her.
Anyway, any concern I might have had about her was dispeled by a slow movement from the opposite side of the room. Walking slowly out from the shadow came a tall, pale and lovely girl. Dressed in a long black dress, which sheathed her body, clasped at her neck with an amber clasp, she walked slowly as if in a trance. I had the impression that she was half afraid, but could not resist such an opportunity for a fantastic experience, that she was willing, like so many, to risk all for a moment.
De Chauvreland, who had taken it upon himself to keep me informed, leaned over to me with a little gasp of triumph.
"She's resisted everybody since she's been coming here" he whispered. "Something about her boy friend being killed in the war, She said she found some relief watching others, but didn't fancy any relationship herself. I knew she'd break down sooner or later."
"She's lovely," I whispered back, a twinge of regret in my voice, "It's like throwing her into a volcano for sacrifice."
"Let us not be squeamish," de Chauvreland replied, a sharp note in his voice, "This is the moment she's secretly longed for, a moment of degradation and sublimation together. She can't help herself."
"What does she, a white woman, find so fascinating in such savagery?" I whispered. "Savagery, my dear fellow."
"Who is she?" I asked, as the girl, shapely, but so slim she looked likely to snap if the negro touched her, moved slowly towards him, "She's Swedish," he answered. "Many of these Scandinavians are the same. They have no negroes in their part of the world. The black power and strangeness fascinate them."
I relapsed into silence, watching, as the girl, afraid, half embarrassed, but magnetised-almost the real-life sequel of the act-walked towards the negro, proud and smiling, his penis half erect and moving visibly at the sight of his anticipated partner in the vivid act of the union of black and white at their genitals.
"I almost forgot," de Chauvreland leaned towards me conspiratorially. "He's an artistic fellow, but there's still a lot of his country in him. This will be his first white woman."
This, I must say, gave an edge to the affair, which sent a queer feeling in the pit of my stomach. By background and environment I was so composed that I couldn't help feeling a slight horror at the union of these two. But it was a horror which contained some sort of sadistic pleasure, making my organ tingle.
The negro, moving silently on the balls of his naked feet had reached towards the girl and drawn her skillfully into his arms, where she hung limply as he crushed her to him-an obscene picture, the naked brawny savage, crushing this black-clothed, pale-face morsel of woman flesh offering against his throbbing body.
Somewhere in the darkness, a man, whose feelings had reached a greater pitch of the unfitness of the scene than mine, found his voice in a choking cry.
"No, no. She can't. No. Stop her. Stop!"
There was a momentary buzz of voices, figures moved shadowily towards the man's voice and there was silence again. The girl and the negro had not given any sign of having noticed the interruption.
Watching avidly, I saw her hands, moving shyly, it seemed, slowly over the rippling muscles of his bent-over back, fluttering then in cool, fluid movements, white, pure and slim over the black, the jet black skin, down to his buttocks, feeling them, stroking the iron, tensed firmness. Her hand explored, seeming to be dragged away from her body, away from the control of her mind, round the front of her body so that he moved sideways from her slightly, still holding her. His penis was as huge, as incredibly huge and fleshily thick as we had seen it before, stretching out and away from him like a great boom.
And her long, slim, virginal looking fingers, which looked as if they should only have caressed a harp, were running timidly and then more boldly, the length of his great rod of hot flesh. She seemed to be feeling its massiveness, marveling at it, and then grasped it at its base, in her hand. Her long, white hand seemed very small at the base of that great ebony shaft. It would have taken four hands or more to have held it.
Slowly, wonderingly, she moved her hand up the shaft towards its great flattened cudgel of a tip, her finger and thumb failing to meet around it. And at the end, at the outlet for his passion, she lingered, tracing long fingernails over the sensitive skin of the great knob.
I strained forward, my body aflame with a shameful fire. I was repelled and yet fascinated. One part of me could have leapt to the rescue of this beautiful princess lost to civilisation; the other urged them on with all my will, feeling that my own liquid was likely to spill without so much as a finger urging it on.
And then I realized that she was trembling. Was it fear? A sudden realisation of what was inevitably to happen? A fear that she couldn't take it? Or was it sheer passion at the sex and ascendancy of this man, so black, huge and unknown to her? Or a mixture of both?
The negro crushed his great lips on her small mouth and her hand began to work at his huge arm of flesh, pulling it slowly and then faster forward and back, sliding the skin on it, kneading it.
Rotating his hips while she masturbated him, turning his thighs out and pushing forward with his hips, the negro began to unzip her dress. She helped him pull it over her head, releasing him for a moment and then resuming with her long, relentless fingers.
Her frilly underwear was black, her flesh white as milk against the black of his. He pushed her back a moment, looking at her, a gleam in his eyes which proclaimed clearly that he was about to have, to dominate, to lie between the legs of a beautiful white woman and lay her body waste. And then he jerked her at him again, his penis standing so high, that it ran up between them, lying vertically against her belly.
His hands, rapid as a practiced European lover's unfastened her brassiere, drawing it away and letting it drop to the floor. They caught the elastic top of her brief knickers and pushed them down, down, over the slim, white hips, the long white thighs, so that they, in turn, dropped to the floor. The woman kicked off her sandals and stepped out of the flimsy garment.
She was so slim. I felt she must be a mannequin. She was elegance in its perfection: tall, small high breasts, long curved body, slim waist, long slim legs from her long curved hips, long slim buttocks, the skin sharply white against her potential possessor's, smooth, firm and lovely. I had difficulty keeping my seat. But that was an illusion. For in spite of the pain at my loins, I was held in the grip of a clamping excitement.
Her mouth hung open, beautiful eyes heavy-lidded as she pressed her face against the negro's neck. He was running his black, huge hands over her,-great black spiders closing over her, her buttocks, turning her, holding her breasts as she sagged back against him, turning her back again, lowering her to the floor. Heavy breathing was clear in the room, panting through the darkness. The room was in a fever heat, The moment had almost come when the woman of the white world surrendered the pulsing treasure between her legs to the great throbbing, rifling rod of the other race.
Great pants of breath were choking from the negro even now and the woman's face was creased in an unyielding passion.
She sank back to the cushioned floor, her long body elegant even at this hot, sexual moment, and the negro lowered himself heavily onto her. His great upper body swamped her slimness; his tapering thin hips were contained in the slim, but greater breadth of hers; his penis lay, still, along her naked belly and her hand came down between them and fondled it.
They remained, panting together, lying pressed in a crush of passion, only their hips moving very slightly, but intensely, waiting on this moment as if daring one half of the world to come and try to drag its own half back to itself.
And then, as the audience tensed-I could feel it, strangely powerful-the woman wriggled her slim legs apart under him and his small hips fell through her thighs.
The negro's eyes gleamed in a great wide gleam which shone in his face and the woman's flesh was trembling, trying not to shrink involuntarily from the test.
She slowly, reluctantly almost, drew up her thighs and under them, between their bodies, I could make out the gulf-how small it seemed!-the flesh bordered gulf into which he was about to plunge. "
The negro drew back his hips, pulling his huge, black rod down from her, lowering it level with her opening. In that moment, she reached down, to guide it or hold it off-it was impossible to say-and that cool touch galvanised the great, black body into action, shot his hips at the junction of her thighs, piercing his enormous flesh into the gulf with force.
The woman's mouth fell open, her teeth caught at her lip and she uttered a low scream. There were other screams from the darkness and sweat was hot on my forehead. Gene had screamed and, for a moment, hid her face in my shoulder, but only for a moment.
Once begun, the negro was ferocious. He had white flesh at his command and he was the master. But she could take little of him at a time and then only in obvious desireful pain.
We watched, mouths dry, his rod, its great diameter expanded even more than before, working its way into her, decreasing the length of it that we could see joining his hips to her crevice. He was unable to thrust straight in more than a few inches and we watched, trousers tight, as he worked it slowly and strongly from this angle and that, bursting farther in the tiniest measures. Her split spread farther and farther to receive him while she writhed her hips-in an effort to get away from the pain, it seemed at times.
As the negro's passion mounted and choking cries came, like the cries of an ape, from his stomach, through his chest and up through his throat, contorting his thick lips, the woman began to cry out. Tears came involuntarily from her eyes and she tried to pull away from his weight.
"No! You must stop! You're hurting me! You'll kill me!" she moaned. Her face was frightened and contorted with pain as the negro bore down on her more heavily still, filling her body, centimetre by centimetre, unyielding.
"Oh! Oh! Oh! Stop! Oh, please! Stop him!"
Her eyes rolled to the yellow impassioned faces on the edge of the darkened crowd, while the negro forced her back, crushing his lips on hers, moving wetly and thickly into her stretching, enlarging, painful passage.
There was a movement in the crowd. Two men moved towards the writhing couple, eyes wide with horror as if they, fiends for sex, had nonetheless had too much.
But as they reached for the negro, oblivious to their presence, mounted on this white body, several men in some sort of oriental uniform sprang at them, dragging them back from the light in a quick, brief struggle.
The woman, prostrate, crushed in her slimness, almost through the floor, began to struggle hard, crying, weeping.
"I can't! I can't! Get him off! Get him off!" she squealed, pleading, begging. Nobody moved after that.
The negro's tree of a penis had almost disappeared in the woman now and was shagging in slowly and thickly, splitting into what must have been a very sore channel. A little blood appeared suddenly on the woman's thigh.
I started at it, uncertain. And then the woman was screaming, clawing at the negro's back, drawing blood from his black skin in broken weals.
At this, one of the uniformed men sprang into the little illuminated arena and pulled off her arms, pinning them above her head, but the negro thrust him away with a violent movement and pinned the arms to the girl's sides himself.
He had forced back her legs against her breasts and his penis, with a final grind was lost in her.
She was weeping with the pain of it and I wondered if he would do her some injury. It was difficult to understand where all that length had gone. But he was lost in his own sweeping, elemental passion and now jerked violently and yet more violently in to her. I doubted whether he was aware of the woman's weeping.
A little more blood trickled down her thigh and she seemed to be suffocating as his great flesh came into view for a moment and then pulsed into her white body like a great bird of prey, dilating, distending the pinker fringe of colour between her widespread legs.
His hands had moved up to her shoulders and great red marks glowed in her white flesh as his grip tightened and relaxed over her. He leaned his torso up from her so that the whole of his body from shoulders to knees formed a right angle with his penis and then he reached under her, holding her slim white bottom, drawing her hips up off the floor as he thrust.
The woman was looped almost double, only her pelvis and her buttocks pushed towards her black tormenter. She seemed to be in a semi coma, aware, doubtless, of nothing but the thick pain down there at her loins, where an enormous monster was moving into deeper territory than had ever been explored before.
The negro's breath was hurling into the air in great choking gasps, his muscular lions working furiously, little buttocks clamping together in rapid muscular tensions, relaxing again as he withdrew.
Faster, faster, and his eyes gleamed viciously in passion and triumph. A white woman there down at his hips, helpless, her body being raped mercilessly by him. By him, a member of the black race, but more powerful than her own kind, able to make her scream, able to fill her with a great, wide pain she'd never known before. His face was savage and cruel and his orran swept ruggedly and with greater ease as her channel grew, into the core of her. Until with her moaning in delirium, his head thrust back, straining away from his jabbing hips and his mouth opened in a great animal cry as his primeval sperm swept into the white slim body of civilisation-in and in, up and up into her body in a great wave and another and another until his jerks grew slower and dwindled, flipped like the tail of a dying snake and came to a standstill. He fell forward, crushing the pathetic, raped body. The girl was unconscious.
The half-hidden audience was silent for some time. I found that I heard some ridiculous woman weeping quietly and then several people in European dresswomen amongst them-came forward, without rancour, and lifted the negro to his feet. He stared at them with a look of proud, savage defiance, flecks of blood on his limp penis, cast one look at the spread-eagled body, motionless on the floor, and left with a quiet tread.
The men picked up the Swedish girl and faded into the gloom. De Chauvreland turned to me. "A tough finale?" he asked. "A little too tough, perhaps," I said. "Perhaps. But she knew the rules. I'm sure it's the strongest thing anyone here has ever seen."
"Do you think the girl will be all right?" I asked. "Her? Oh, certainly. She'll recover quickly enough. She'll have an aching belly for a day or so, but nothing serious, I think. With that type of woman, half the pain comes from the shock of doing what they thought they never could again." Turning to Gene, I saw there were tears in her eyes. "I think that went a little too far, Louis," she complained quietly. "You should have given that poor girl a chance to pull out of it."
"My dear sweet." He reached across me and held her shoulder affectionately. "If I'd done that there would have been nothing to see. You saw how soon she changed her mind. But I'm sorry you found it so terrible. Have a drink." He poured the three of us strong whiskies. "You know, it's surprising how a woman will be satisfied with nothing else after that. I daresay, in spite of the way she feels now, that girl will be seeking him out in a day or two. She'll never want to look at another white man."
"Well give me a white man any day," Gene smiled at me as she said it and I felt it was incumbent on me to fulfill her implication, I had not forgotten the disdainful Mongolian dancer, but I was inclined to think that a bird in the hand was the best bet-and Gene was still to some extent a mysterious stranger to me.
"Look here," de Chauvreland suggested suddenly, "if you'd like to stay here overnight and have a look around the place, please do so. I should be pleased to have you here. But should you have other plans, please don't hesitate to say so. Anyway, I'll see you back here in a little while and you can tell me."
His remarks had been addressed exclusively to me. I suppose he could not expect Gene to have an unannounced night away from her husband in any case, but before I had time to answer, he had waved in a nonchalant motion and left us.
I looked at Gene.
"Why not," she said. "I can come up again tomorrow when Henry's away at golf again. Why not enjoy yourself while the opportunities are there?"
"You're very charming," I said. "But can de Chauvreland be trusted not to be embarrassing? I remember what you said and I have no such tendencies!"
"Louis?" She laughed. "Oh, he's all right. He only likes young boys with tender behinds."
"Well than. Perhaps I will," I decided.
"But first...." Gene's eyes contained an intense feeling as she placed her hands on my lapels.
I kissed the vermilion lips and her slim tongue, like a smooth little lizard, darted through my lips, flicking into my mouth, reaching around inside, as if it were a small penis trying to fill to big an aperture, lost but determined and tingling in the cavity.
"Harvey," she whispered. "All that sex has done something to my inside. Quickly, or I shall go mad."
Pressing hips together we crossed the circle of light, still burning, hollow and wan, an unwanted ghost in the huge-now empty-room. We stepped across the droplets of blood which dappled the churned up coverlets on the floor and entered the far gloom.
From the alcoves, muffled by the heavy drapings, came diverse sounds of passion, beginning, growing cresting, spending, spent, a muffled story of our lives.
Gene pulled aside the curtains of several of these little nests before we found one unoccupied. They were filled with couples in various stages of undress, some as yet in the preliminary overtures, others in the throes of intercourse, yet others lying exhausted and prostrate. Nobody minded as we peered in even if they noticed, which was rare. And my blood began to grow hot from the various portions, nude and semi-nude which I glimpsed of beautiful floor-felled women.
Into our own haven we sank as the curtain swung back behind us and I studied for a very brief moment what was a replica of the main hall; dimly lit, perfumed, voluptuously, sumptuously draped-and each equipped with a bidet. I smiled to myself at such convenience.
But Gene was already stripping from her clothes and I was still in my underwear by the time she was tiptoeing, rounded and supple, with twin mounds of white in the tan at her breasts, towards me. The small triangle of white at her loins fascinated me in its surround of golden brown. The contrast in shade seemed to make it a sacred place, seldom uncovered. I grinned to myself at this travesty of the truth and gently stroked the golden hair of it with my fingers as Gene rubbed against me.
Her hands trembled as, unable to wait for my loins, she pulled my pants away from my hips, grasping my penis as it jabbed into view. Her fingers sent a flood of emotion to my loins, opening the gate for the pent-up feelings of the afternoon and I pushed my hand between her thighs, which closed fleshily against it, rubbing on it, and inserted my fingers into the long wet crack between the folds, reaching, crooking up as she exploded little gasps of emotion. My fingers found the ring of skin and entered up, breaking into the smooth, soft world within. Gene swayed her head in a painful ecstasy, rubbing my organ, brushing her fingertips lightly, trembling over my testicles.
Whispering pleadings to hurry and fill her, she pulled me down on her soft flesh to the floor, spread her legs and, grasping my penis, pulled it into her vagina. With a thrust which buried me in her, I closed my lips over hers and she thrust out her tongue and left it swooning in my mouth as I had her.
Our act was wonderful and painfully prolonged, and after it we slept for some time together in the warmth on the soft bed of cushions and covers.
Later we dressed and went back into the main hall. Tables had been laid and a meal and drink were being served, buffet fashion; to a number of visitors who had recovered from their exertions.
We joined them and de Chauvreland came towards us.
"I trust you found everything to your convenience," he said, "Please help yourself to anything you fancy."
As we munched the delicacies with which we were surrounded, I took fresh stock, discreetly, of the hall.
The chandeliers were sparkling now in a full blaze of light which, although doing little to remove the bizarre, oriental appearance and atmosphere of the room, revealed to better advantage the most motley collection of individuals I'd ever seen in one place. Nearly every nationality appeared to be represented with many national costumes evident. Some were dressed in an eastern costume-borrowed from the host, I later discovered-which belied their European appearance, but, doubtless, reflected their sexual outlook; others were in the height of elegance and fashion-many of the women in long evening dresses of superb quality; others again were the picture of bohemianism and yet others, like Gene and myself, were casually dressed in summer and sporting wear. It was obvious here that clothes did not necessarily make the man, nor assure his membership.
As I glanced amongst the women, I marveled at the choice of beauty in all its national forms and all assembled for the enjoyment of the body and emotions. Presumably most of the women could be had by any male member-although I found that such broad participation was not obligatory.
De Chauvreland slid from one group to another, introducing people who wanted to be introduced, chat ting, joking in a number of languages.
"I must be going shortly," Gene said at last. "I'm afraid Henry will soon be back from his golf and in anticipation of future absences, I don't want to impose too much on his gullibility." She smiled and leaned heavily against me and I accepted the cue in a willing bondship.
"Will you come up here, tomorrow, or shall I meet you somewhere?" I asked. Gene's eyes purred, reflecting a satisfaction which made me wonder for a moment if she'd feared she'd seen the last of me.
"I'll come up here and then we shan't have to fix a time," she replied. "I expect the bird will escape her cage in the afternoon.
I saw Gene to her car, where she left me with a twinkle.
"You won't fall for her, will you, darling?" I kissed her, she smiled and sped off down the long drive.
Returned to a sandwich, I noticed de Chauvreland eyeing me from the centre of a group he was entertaining with some droll story. I was already much impressed with his solicitude as a host, and in a few minutes this impression was sealed in my memory.
Through the crowd he came, holding the arm of the Mongolian dancer, stylishly dressed now in a tancoloured velvet western suit.
De Chauvreland's eyes smiled as I failed to hide my look of pleasure, and he introduced us with some finesse, making my admiration of her dancing the apparent reason for our introduction. He stayed with us for a while, taking part in the conversation and then drifted off.
The girl spoke perfect English and conversed very intelligently, displaying a wide knowledge of all sorts of subjects. But her soft, oriental acceptance of her womanhood contained a gentle femininity more marked than in even the less aggressive of her western sisters. She had been trained to be an accompaniment to man, albeit a suitably inspiring one, not to set herself up against him.
Her beauty, slightly removed from our western civilisation, gave her that atmosphere of an unknown world, which, as in every other form, was quick to kindle my interest.
The velvet suit, flowing over her reed-like body, gave her a slight feline strangeness, a much less pronounced similarity with the strangeness of a negress wearing high heels, It added, somehow, to her potentiality.
Her eyes, as they held mine deeply and inscrutably while we talked, were only slightly almond-shaped, enough to give her the impression of great and passionate forces, held precariously at bay. Her features, at close quarters, were much more Indian than Mongolian, with an almost imperceptible flaring of the nostrils and high, smooth cheekbones, We talked at length about dancing in its various forms. I was particularly interested in Indian dancing which had fascinated me since the arrival in western towns of Indian companies and we were soon steeped in an animated discussion which brought us imperceptibly closer. I expressed anew great admiration for her dancing, asking the significance of various movements, which had, doubtless, escaped the eyes of many present, but which sheer training had forced her to include, even though they were unnecessary to the erotic spell she'd been intended to weave.
"I do hope we shall see you dance again," I said. "I would regard it as a tragedy to be so near to such a fine dancer and see her dance only once."
Whether she regarded the compliment seriously or not-and there was no reason why she shouldn't-she took the cue.
"If you like I will dance for you tonight," she promised.
Her eyes revealed that this was how it was to be done.
"For me alone?" I asked, touching her hand gently with mine. "For you alone," she smiled, We wandered out into the grounds after that and out in the hot sun, with the secluded greenery of trees and shaded walks around us. I was impatient to make love to her. But I gave no voice to my feelings. This, I felt would have been a breach of etiquette, of the evolution of an affair which could be conducted in a sequence of comfort The girl remained charming and gentle, betraying no indication of the intimacy in which we would find ourselves later that night.
In some of the narrow paths in these wonderful grounds of de Chauvreland's-virtually a forest-I walked behind her, feeling the heat of the blood in my face as I watched the sun soaking into the tan of her costume as it out-lined her trim body. I derived hot satisfaction from the sight of the small length of her calves which protruded below the fringe of the skirt. And as she half turned, occasionally to look back, she caught, invariably, my eyes on the thrust of her large breasts, large even under the concealing folds of the cloth.
Could I ever have a surplus of women, I wondered? Could I, even in the throes of a new passion, a fresh shower for my emotions, narrow my thoughts to a single track? As well ask me to ignore an offered peach although I had just tasted the sweetest melon. It was no question of a mechanical appetite for an act-that could become a bore-rather than an avidity for an emotional injection, which reached its culmination in the act. My appetite for women was enormous. Each woman, each body was a fresh excitement-and I could never have enough excitement, in any form.
As we stopped to look at some plant-twined trellis work, I reached my arms around the girl, from my position behind her and kissed her neck. She inclined her head, offering the total expanse of her firm, brown throat, and turned towards me, slowly, almond lids lowered over almond eyes. Pulling my head down, she kissed me, swaying into me as if a wind had swept her body in against mine. The kiss was the burning of snow between us and it needed but a momentary decision on either side and we would have lain there on the spot, loving, hot and burning in our clothes in the sun. But in me there wavered the thought that this should wait, that it should grow until the evening and the evening's comfort. And my wavering found an echoing tremor in the girl, who breathed my thoughts into words.
"It will be better later."
We walked back to the mansion, arms linked, and I thanked the Creator for the variety of women.
During the evening, de Chauvreland showed me over his huge mansion, The variety of taste displayed was quite remarkable. One room would be furnished in the most modem style, the next in, say Louis XV style and another in oriental opulence.
"It's a hobby of mine," he explained. "I like so many things, styles among them, that I couldn't possibly limit myself to a single one."
The most astonishing room I found was what appeared to be a fully equipped doctor's surgery.
"It is for the occasional accident. It makes things much easier," he answered my unspoken question. "By making abortion available and safe-I have a specialist friend-we thus remove the only argument of the 'moral' world to which we attach any importance: the purely practical one of the unwanted child." I was in complete agreement with the man and although what he went on to say seemed elementary, I let him continue. After all, he wasn't to know that I was completely a man after his own heart.
"We have here a sort of nomadic community," he said, "In which sex is stripped of the humbug with which so many try to surround it; where it is treated as a very normal and pleasurable part of existence like eating or induling in sport or having intellectual intercourse. After all what is it? You have a woman with looked at soberly-a rather uninteresting cavity in her body and man with a rather comic, one might almost say disgraceful from the artistic point of view, morsel of flesh protruding in a peculiar spot. When these two items are brought together you have a very pleasurable sensation. What could be simpler than that if you cut out the child? But, of course, man with his jealousy-the most pernicious of our qualities-and his insistence on an emotional sop for which he has no possible proof, but whose do's and don't's he accepts unquestioningly, has created a great aura of tabou and secrecy and in some cases disgust around this simple act. This is a very sacred thing, he says-motherhood and possession. While he ignores motherhood with contraception and, frequently, everybody else's right to possession. And anyway neither men nor women should be reduced to the level of inanimate goods which can be possessed without feeling.
"And so we have this little society to which people who think this way can come and, I assure you, they are not forced to think it beyond a certain minimum degree. Nobody is forced to be completely promiscuous. If it fails to give them pleasure, then obviously as we accept pleasure as the criterion there is no point in their being unduly promiscuous.
"But of course, the jealousy and possession just as the horror of the freedom with which sex can be regarded, springs only from environment and upbringing. Why, my dear fellow,"-he broke into a splutter of laughter-"there was a time when I thought I could never respect an unmarried woman who was not a virgin, Ruined something between us, I thought. But with usage and becoming accustomed to the world, after a few initial shocks, this attitude died, as it does with any reasonable person. It dies here in people all the time until they no longer have the same cramped, jealous emotions, which caused them nothing but worry and pain. Of course, unfortunately not all husbands and wives think the same way; so many wives and some husbands-have to creep here alone for their pleasure to avoid hurting the other's feelings."
He appeared to come to the end of his sermon and as we continued to stare for a moment at the shining, antiseptic surgery, I felt bound to add something to show my agreement, "I can understand your feeling about virgins," I said. "In spite of their points lost on lack of savoir faire, they add something to one's pleasure from the very knowledge that one is giving them a completely new and-in the main-pleasurable experience, forcing them to submit themselves to actions they hardly guessed at. But what most people don't realise is that this is a purely selfish attitude aimed at one's own greater pleasure and, more important, that this extra pleasure dies when the woman is, inevitably, no longer a virgin-or the man for that matter. Then it makes no difference."
"I can see you have found yourself a home," de Chauvreland smiled. "However, for the sake of the first time, we can try to bring you a virgin during your stay."
"I'm not complaining," I grinned.
We wandered back to the main hall after our tour to find a small number of members chatting. They were staying the night, I was told. Among them was my dancer-if I may be forgiven for using the possessive term for the sake of clarity.
We drank, I was introduced to some more members, some of whom I noted for future enjoyment, and then couples began to drift away to the alcoves, or to other rooms if their tastes were more committed to the western idea of comfortable surroundings.
De Chauvreland himself started to leave with another Frenchman and an English girl, bidding us goodnight.
"Everything has been arranged for you," he said to me.
As the three of them, the couple preceding their host, disappeared from the hall, the dancer whispered to me.
"They have agreed to let him watch them."
"Probably," she replied. "Although most of the rooms have peepholes, anyway. There's not much point in demanding privacy."
We drained our glasses and she put her hand on my hip.
"Shall we go now?"
I put my arm around her slim shoulders, a nervous excitement mounting inside me, and we left the room to its few late occupiers.
We went up heavily carpeted stairs to a floor above, along a long corridor with rooms-which I had seen during the afternoon tour-opening off on either side. At the end of the corridor we entered a large room, warm and cushioned in the eastern style with walls completely made of huge mirrors. Small ante-rooms opened off the main at each side, their doors being cleverly hinged mirrors.
"Sit and wait a moment," the dancer smiled. "I must dress."
She walked through one of the mirror doors while I made myself comfortable on the cushions to one side of the room.
Within a few seconds the eastern music of the afternoon was filling the room, wailing out from one of the ante-rooms. Its opening notes were followed by a sudden switching out of the light in the room which quite startled me. But immediately a fresh mist of red light flooded the mirrored chamber, flung from fluorescent tubes which I had failed to see at the junction of walls and ceiling. The light was bright, drawing clear blood-tinged reflections so that the room looked multiplied over again and I was no longer sure just how large it was.
As the weird orchestration filled out, the mirror door swung quietly open and like a slim oriental fairy, she was in the room, gliding, coppery in the red glow, reflected in flashing, bloodened images five times over. The door was closed quietly behind her.
I leaned forward, stomach tightening as she swayed sinuously before me, dressed in the same costume that she'd worn during the public performance of the afternoon. She danced close in front of me, face unemotional in the classic aristocracy of the sphinx, seeming to reach tall and high over my seated body. Her arms moved with the grace of blown reeds and the menacing power of cobras. Her whole body was a cobra, with the face of a sphinx, swaying, glittering red and silver and copper. She was five cobras. There again behind herself, a slim satellite, again on either side, sinuous bodyguards and there again strangely inverted in the mirrored ceiling an unearthly spirit.
She twirled away from me, gliding swiftly round the walls, plunging into the centre again and tremoring two feet from my face. Then, as before, she reached down to her hips in a movement which was part of the dance and her silver trappings glittered and tinkled to the floor. Her hands smoothed the thin reddened chiffon over the sinews of her copper hips and then rose, pressing her body in offering, to the tinsel of her breasts. Another quiet tinkle like an unexpected triangle in the orchestra and she was dancing in gossamer-clung nudity.
The large breasts, with their large blotches of darker brown nipples, swung full and firm under the slim glove of chiffon, her hips, with only the lightest down of hair rounded sinuously into the long, graceful muscles of her thighs, muscles which like her calves tensed and relaxed, grew marked and merged into the smooth firmness of her flesh again as she moved and pirouetted on her toes.
As she danced, I had a view of her shimmering back as well in the mirror behind her, could see the whole of her supple body with its desire-flushing tensions.
In front of me she rotated her hips, gliding them in a circular motion leaning like a falling sapling, righting herself again, falling to the other side. Slowly she turned so that in profile I watched the superb outline of her breasts quivering and jogging quietly in a fleshy voluptuousness, her buttocks tightening, hollowing and relaxing rounding again. She turned her back towards me, swishing her hips from side to side in a contrasting angular motion, arms floating from her sides. Her back was slim and strong, her buttocks strong too, oval and brown and tensing like tautened tissue, relaxing to firm roundness brushing against each other as she strained them inwards. Her long, swaying thighs tapered into slim knees and below her knees her brown legs rounded out again to supple calves before dwindling again to slim, strong ankles under the thin veil.
My eyes were staring taking in every inch of her body which seemed to be flickering like a golden flame, a liquid movement. My face was burning, body hot all over. At my loins I was hottest of all, with a prickling, confining sensation.
I began to unlace my shoes, pull off my socks and my outer clothing, eyes still on the woman. She wafted away from me and then flowed back again, dark eyes gleaming in the glow. For a moment her eyes lowered and then the sphinx expression lifted, a slight smile flitted across her small and beautiful features. A smile of welcome and anticipation.
Dancing still, she stepped out of her moccasins, unclipped the white blouse and trousers and let them float to the floor behind her.
I stripped off my underclothes, body trembling with excitement, feeling the thrill of freedom coursing through my fibres. And then I sat nude, watching her a little longer, my penis thrusting out like the arm of a tripod into the misty red atmosphere.
The girl quivered closer, body shaking, starting from her shoulders, growing like an expanding ripple until it had embraced her breasts, her abdomen, her thighsher whole slim, lovely body trembling in a fragile shimmer. Her slim lips were parted, her eyes filled now with a deep unsmiling look of desire as she reached the climax of her dance. Swaying a few inches from my eyes she snaked back from her hips, bending back so that her head swept the floor behind her. Her body elongated as in a distorting mirror. From the ceiling her navel poised over her in a long reflection; behind her, her head peered at her in a crazy inverted curiosity; on either side were replicas of herself, prostrated offered sinuously in abandon.
My eyes travelled up her calves, her thrust out thighs lingering on the smooth, copper insides of them, travelling up to the light hair and the folds of flesh between her legs. My eyes glued there, fascinated, while the lips seemed to open slightly in a moist desire. I crawled to her as her hips began to rotate in that position, I thrust my face at the cleft between her opened, slightly swaying thighs and buried my tongue into it. With an explosion of breath she swayed her pelvis from me without changing her position, and then she swung it back again, crushing it onto my mouth, rotating it against my lips.
Kissing her still, I sank onto my back under her, pulling her down on me. The music continued its plaintive suggestiveness as she slipped down on my body, sitting upright on me, raised herself over my thick, vertical penis and then plunged onto it with a great sigh.
I felt her tight around me and strained my buttocks in together, forcing up, concentrating the sensation there at my genitals as she rose and sank on my rod. Her hands caressed my chest, my sides, my belly and then reached behind her round bottom and stroked my testicles.
Wriggling and thrusting in a pool of sensation, I raised my hands and caught the orbs of her breasts, mashing them with my fingers, pressing my hands down the slim muscular sides of her torso, stroking her thighs as they pressed on either side of me so that her slant eyes spread slightly in pleasure.
Holding her breasts as I might a trumpet, I brought the protruding points down to my lips and kissed them, biting into them in a sudden fierce ecstasy. She squealed and struggled her upper body away from me, perching astride me still. Flitting a smile between the little delicate gasps which joined the breath from her flared nostrils, she swung round on my penis so that her back was towards my face and continued, her plunging onto my organ in that position. Thus I had a perfect view of her oval, straining buttocks as they rose and fell. They rose, tightly pressed in embrace and fell, spreading as her organ enclosed mine. And as they spread I had a delicious view of her tight little anus, dark and corrugated in the brown flesh, surrounded by a light down.
As she sank her intimate area down on my abdomen, I traced her buttocks with my hands, holding them, feeling them, reveling in the sensation at my loins and the sensation, pliable and smooth, at my fingers. Opening them as she descended I pushed my index finger at the little back cleft and she wriggled her bottom in delight. As we continued, my penis heavy and clamped inside her belly, I gently insinuated my finger into her bottom, feeling the tight rim give way and then enclose my finger tightly as if to prevent it escaping. I thrust gently with my finger and she began to choke slightly in her throat.
She twisted round again, dragging my finger from her rump in the process and her almond eyes were doting over me in a deep, helpless desire.
"Oh, smother me," she breathed. "Come on top of me I want to be crushed under you."
In mounting excitement which gave a rapidity to my movements I sat up, pushing her over, revolving on to her as she drew her legs up and out and her hips cushioned mine as I crushed onto her.
As my penis dug deep into her wet channel, I kissed her, kissed her long Mongolian eyes, nose, lips and she dug her nails into my neck and slipped her tongue into my mouth, swaying it there long and slim like a dancer, an imitation of herself.
The noises in her throat whispered and choked in desire and she swung her legs up around my waist, feet pointing to, reaching for the ceiling and then sweeping with a dancer's incredible suppleness beyond the vertical back so that they touched my head and I was lifted on her hips, balancing on them as I sank farther into her body than I would have believed possible. Her head swayed in ecstasy and I caught the reflection of its movement in the mirror. I became suddenly aware of our duplicate and our reduplicate ... five of us twined and plunging about the room, hot and red in the misty light, panting, mouths working.
Glancing to one side, I could see the reflection of us, her doubled over, me thrusting rigidly into the intimate splayed junction of her legs, withdrawing slightly, my rigidity glowing in the reflection and plunging again out of sight.
Groaning, her oriental inscrutability lost, replaced by the agonised pain of ecstasy, she brought her feet down from my head and spread them to either side at right angles to me-practically a 'splits.' Stabbing into her with my prickling, enlarging branch of flesh, I twisted my hips, rotating them, while she rolled her body from side to side in the exhilaration of having her body thickly filled, her vagina laid, her passage plundered.
As I felt my penis growing, its particles seeming to move and jostle against each other, heating and tingling like a furious changing of electrons and protons, I whispered to her that the climax was nearing.
"Yes, yes," she breathed. "For me too."
I reached under her holding her buttocks, squeezing them in a grip which seemed to add to her growing abandon, pulling them apart in a furious, overwhelming ecstasy of sensuality which contained some cruelty. I held her loins pulling her at my penis as if her hips were the stem of a rubber stamp, her right-angled legs, the stamp itself, entering into her directly and deeply.
She clasped my shoulders, gasping, and tightened her grip on them with a long unrelaxing squeeze. I cannoned my organ into her depths, felt it tingling like an electric drill, faster and faster.
Her grip was hurting my shoulders and her eyes were blind, unseeing in their passion.
"Yes, yes, yes!" the words blurted out quickly and breathlessly. She had difficulty in pronouncing them at all and they drained away into a long, screaming gasp which continued as tensed my buttocks and ground with slow concentrated pushes into her suddenly soaking channel. As I touched new depths from the last moment opening of her cavity, my whole penis seemed to become the throbbing electric drill, pulsing, burning itself even and then, as if I were urinating with difficulty, the liquid gathered in the flesh, agonisingly held for a moment and then burst through, seeming to open me with wide wounds as it spat into her and into her again.
We subsided, working down gently and her almond eyes were loving and grateful, her hands smoothing and tender on my back. I moved off her and her slim hand reached down and fondled my deflated penis for a while, her eyes smiling at me. She nestled in, close to me and there was something about her oriental distance even in the most giving and intimate acts that I still found in her an excitement as if she were yet to be plumbed.
We must have slept for some time, cozy and warm in the wealth of rugs and cushions.
When I awoke some time later, the music had stopped, but the light was still red and passionate. The girl had rolled over from me and her back presented to me as she lay on her side. I studied it in admiration. There was no superfluous flesh-that superfluous flesh which I found the first thing to suffocate me in a woman. Her body was supple as a willow, buttocks smooth and glowing coppery in the light.
I stroked her buttocks gently, tracing, the sinuous hollows and my sexual power began to move at my loins-a sensation first and then a solidifying, a slight lifting, thickening, elongation and then my penis was rising to full, rugged power.
I moved softly closer to her, lying along her back, feeling her warm, living flesh radiating along the length of mine.
She stirred and awakened and feeling me there, reached behind her, running her hand over my hip, stretching to reach my buttock and pull me close to her. I kissed the smooth brown skin of her high cheeks and her slant eyes smiled at me as she twisted her face back to kiss me fully.
My penis was hard and straining at her bottom and I inserted it between the smooth, bulbous orbs, rubbing it in the crease of her buttocks. She wriggled her behind back against me and I prodded against her anus, having difficulty in finding it and then in entering.
Yielding willingly to my desire, she drew her thighs up in front of her slightly, stretching her buttocks, protruding the intimate junction of them, helping to guide me. Her hand crept round and caught my rod, massaging it for a moment, pinching the knob and then directing it at her posterior opening. For a minute or so, I jogged gently against the tight resistance. If she had been used in this way before, it could have been but rarely-insufficient to loosen her.
Her face twisted round to me.
"I don't want to hurt you," I breathed.
"Oh, no. Go on, please go on. I want you to fill me there."
So saying, she turned her face sideways again and arched her whole body at me, so that her thighs were drawn up in front of her and her upper body from her hips was also inclined forward, protruding her buttocks to me even more, stretching them. She helped by pushing her bottom back at my organ and gradually I felt the elastic give of the rim. The flesh yielded, but for a moment I did not enter and then the flesh snapped back and oozed over my organ, and I could feel the sudden painful clasping of her tight ring. She groaned but bravely pushed her bottom back at me again and I sank another slow inch into her back passage. The channel became a little easier, but was tight enough around my flesh to fill me with an unendurable thrill at the tip of my rod. Unable to be gentle any longer, I grasped her with one arm under her and round her breasts, the other over her, tightly holding her hips. Without more ado I plunged the remainder of penis into her behind. As it surged into her like an undamned river she cried out and tried to struggle away, crying that I'd hurt her. But with the bursting heat at my penis I ignored her cries and plunged into her again and again, scraping tightly into the depths of her tight, soft channel.
After the first strokes, which screwed her face up in pain, she found the pain a pleasant, ecstatic one and as the thrusting surged more easily she wriggled her bottom about on the end of my sex and pushed back in a splitting movement.
I began to screw her faster and as the sensation grew I rolled over onto her and she turned onto her face, spreading her legs widely so that where I joined her at her anus there was a growing liaison.
With memories of Olsa glimmering in my mind, I pulled her up onto her knees, which she voluntarily spread wide. I pushed her face straight down onto the floor and her buttocks reared up at me as I entered the small, intimate hole in a tubular possession.
Her face was an oriental mask of passion as it flopped sideways, her concaved back, swayed slimly and her round bottom rotated on the end of me.
I glanced behind us in the mirrored wall and saw a maze of thighs, linked like some strange sculpture, twisting and vibrating, my buttocks tensing as I jerked forward for each thrust. At the mirror to our side we looked like a dog and a bitch, animalistic in our position; I could watch my rod sucking out of her and then pushing stiffly in again.
I began to thrust furiously, pushing with all my weight and several times she was forced an inch or two across the floor. My rod was lost in the dark brown depths which contained it tightly up to my hairy abdomen.
The dancer began to groan and pant as if she were about to have an orgasm-as I later found she did in fact-and I leaned back my head, mouth wide, concentrating all my power in the growing heat of my hips, skewering them, swivelling them, thrusting them, ramming them, giving them a sensual life of their own.
As I barraged into her buttocks my whole loins were a whirl of sensation and it seemed that the flood started from much greater depths than was usual. I felt as I panted over her behind that my blood, my living tissue, was being ripped from my inside and sucked down through my body into the bloating tube which crushed into her now soft and easier passage. Her buttocks were spread by her position and my hands into an incredibly stretched posture as the thick fluid gushed from me into her and my body was wracked with groans and tremors. As she received the flood into her behind, she cried out in a great gasping "Oh" after "Oh" As soon as I calmed to stillness, lying along her back, she twisted from under me and clasped me with her slimly muscular arms, holding my head against her palpitating breasts.
We repeated the more usual act twice more during the night and finally slept soundly until well into the morning without being disturbed.
Awake and dressed, we moved from the lighted windowless room to the sunlight of the corridor and the main hall below.
In the hall, which was flooded with daylight, thrown through from the windows of the alcoves, themselves now exposed to the hall, a large crowd had gathered.
The omniscient host came towards us.
"Ah, good," he said. "We are just preparing for lunch and afterwards there is some more entertainment in store for us. I trust you had a good night."
"Never had a more enjoyable," I assured him. The almond eyes of my partner flickered in agreement like a Siamese cat's.
The whole company moved to the great oak-tabled dining room on the ground floor where a number of waiters served the finest meal I'd tasted in France. Truly de Chauvreland catered for every appetite.
After lunch we went back to the main hall to sip our coffee and talk. It was in the moving from room to room that my dancer disappeared.
"I told you she has an appetite," de Chauvreland smiled.
I grinned and looked around at the lovely faces and figures, radiating in the room an uncomplicated contentment, which sprang from the knowledge of an everlasting source to dispel frustration. But before I could start working on a fresh relationship, the heavy curtains were being pulled across the alcove openings sinking the hall into a deep gloom. This was the afternoon's entertainment.
There were movements in the gloom before the double spot-light flashed onto a wall and revealed a naked young man tied by hands and ankles to a pillar. De Chauvreland certainly had an eye for theatrical effect.
The very fact of being there, naked before the eyes of so many women had raised the young fellow's organ to a state of half erection, revealed mercilessly by the bright yellow light.
"He is a virgin," the whisper breathed from mouth to mouth in the room.
As the murmur brought smiles of amusement to the faces of many, faintly visible in parts of the room, a new murmur grew, mysteriously from the same source as on previous occasions-the light strumming of an electric guitar. The rich sound strummed louder and louder and then, naked as the man, four slim-shaped women writhed into the light.
I marveled at de Chauvreland's source of dancers, but as I watched I realized that these were only good amateurs. One didn't need to be professional to succeed in such an erotic situation.
The women, their breasts and buttocks different shapes and sizes, quivering and creasing, danced suggestively around the young man, moving close to him, while his penis rose until it pointed to the ceiling. His eyes watched the surrounding nymphs in a fever of half frightened desire.
One after the other as they revolved around him, they reached out stroking his organ, sending shudders through his body as each in turn, pulled it, caressed it, pinched it. They danced away to surge back again, falling each on her knees before his fastened body, taking the stiff flesh gently in her mouth, clasping it a moment between her lips and drifting away once more.
The young man's agitation was desperate and I almost began to feel sorry for him, so unable to give vent to his feelings.
Circling him, swaying and shaking, the women moved relentlessly in again, bending before him, catching his organ between their breasts, shrugging their shoulders together so that their fine fleshy melons formed a deep rift in which they rolled the throbbing rod.
Twining slim, soft arms around him, they moistly kissed him in turn, rubbing against him with the soft flesh of their mounds. The young man began to pant and strain at his bonds as they turned, moving past him in a row, brushing his pulsation with their buttocks, lingering a moment, letting it rest between their jiggling buttocks, looking like fat, shining cheeses.
As they dispersed, spinning out again to feast his eyes, another woman, in skin-tight satin, which exposed her breasts to the nipples and split up the front to her leg junction, glided amongst them. In her hand she carried a small whip-a cat o'nine tails made of silk; a plaything purely for erotic enjoyment.
She in turn danced before him, the skin-clinging satin voluptuously outlining her figure, falling back from her thighs in front, revealing them, glossy and trembling in long ripples.
The young man's eyes were with passion. He'd forgotten the audience. Here, undoubtedly, were the figments of his imagination come to life by courtesy of Louis de Chauvreland. But their unassailable distance had become a pain in his genitals and he almost wept as his body heaved under the choking effort of his breath.
Eyes gleaming mischievously at her virgin prize, the satin clad woman swayed in towards him, wielding the whip. She brought it down on his rampant penis with soft, tickling blows, increasing the power gradually until he was jerking in a fury, the silk lashing in tentacles of passionate caress around his uninitiated flesh.
"Oh my god! Oh my god!" His plaintive words were just audible as his body writhed, hips straining outwards, legs tensing rigid in ridges of young muscle.
The women twirled and flaunted their bodies in unison before him, touching him, drawing their ringers over his tender parts, as the soft, stinging curls of whip sensually tongued his rigidity.
Swivelling her hips, the wielder of the whip lashed it across his chest, his knees, his belly, his thighs, working back again to his genitals and the poor fellow arched himself outwards with a cry, eyes glazed an the nude, bulging figures as he grew set in that intense tautened attitude and his penis turned deep crimson and then almost a fiery purple.
His hips began to thrust forward in rapid movements as if he were having intercourse with some invisible siren, his organ piercing upwards through the thin air until suddenly, with a hoarse cry he finished in a straining forward-thrust position and his sperm shot whitely and furiously at the women in front of him, inundating the hips of one as she twirled in abandon. The long arc of his spending passion fell and fell in company with his moans until only a white trace on the cushioned floor and his thighs remained. His body sagged forward in exhaustion and a tear coursed down his cheek at the emotion of the experience.
The women began to untie him and then led him away.
"Don't worry, ladies and gentlemen," de Chauvreland announced with a grin. "Our young friend will be given time to recover and then reap a full reward at the loss of his unenviable virgnity." There was a trickle of laughter, and several people, expressing a wish to see the true initiation, got up and left at the invitation of their host.
It was during the lull in entertainment that Gene slipped quietly into the gloom at my side and greeted me with a long French kiss.
"You haven't deserted me I hope," she said, with a pretty little pout.
"On the contrary, I had all night to consider your eminent superiority," I flattered, tongue undisguisedly in cheek.
"You unfaithful hound," she grinned. "Oh, by the way, someone was asking for you at the hotel today."
The unexpected words fell like strong fingers on the back of my neck. Everything else blanched from my mind and for some seconds I stared at her, unable to speak.
Gene looked at me queerly and I recovered myself.
"Someone you didn't want to see?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said. "What was this person like, male, female?"
"Oh, very male," she replied. "Rather handsome in a rugged, middle-aged way-and very well dressed. I thought it might be a friend of yours and I told him you weren't staying there, but that you were in Cannes and that I'd be seeing you and would let you know he'd be back if he wanted very much to see you. He said that he did want very much to see you, but that he'd prefer it to be a surprise so perhaps I wouldn't mention I'd seen him. There, now I've told you and he asked me not to."
I sat looking at her dumbly. So they'd found me already. How the hell? I was almost sure it was Jaswant's henchman from the description. I felt a prickle of uneasiness-if I was taken unawares this time I'd had it.
"Listen, Gene, this is rather serious," I said quietly.
"Oh, dear. What have I done," she breathed, catching my hand.
"It's all right. You weren't to know," I said. "But you see these fading scars,"-I indicated my face-"Well this gentleman has arrived to finish where he and his cronies failed last time."
"Oh, Harvey!" There was real concern and horror in her voice as her fingers tightened involuntarily on mine.
"Never mind," I went on. "There's no point in your worrying. The chief thing is that I must get out of here and quickly."
"Yes, yes. I'll drive you somewhere. You must get out of Cannes or they'll find you in no time." Her words tumbled over one another. She had forgotten her own enjoyment of our relationship. This concern was all for me.
"Let's get out of here," I said quickly. "It's very likely they've followed you."
"Oh my god!"
Quietly and quickly we made our apologies to our host, who expressed his sadness that we had to leave so early and exhorted us to visit him again shortly. Beyond that he asked no question. Doubtless he was well used to sudden intrigues and he had plenty of other things to occupy him.
Just inside the entrance to the mansion we stopped.
"Look," I whispered sharply. I'm going out of the back door and I'll cut through the grounds. You drive onto the road and I'll meet you round the first bend. They won't touch you, especially if I'm not with you and, of course, they may not have followed you anyway. If you see any sign of anyone loitering drive straight on to Cannes and I'll get in touch with you somehow. If I'm not waiting for you, do the same thing. Give me fifteen minutes."
"For God's sake be careful, Harvey."
"Don't worry," I tapped my inside pocket with a smile and walked away through the house.
Once in the grounds at the back where I had recently spent a much more pleasant hour dawdling with my partner of the night before, I slipped into the shrubbery of the flower beds, brushing my way quickly and quietly through their shelter. I drew out the gun just in case and the hot silence of the place sent a spasm of iciness through me. There could be so little in my living or dying in the next fifteen minutes.
I walked quickly through the shrubbery, brushing through the dusty leaves of bushes and small trees, with light swishing sounds. My senses were an intensity of reception for the slightest sound or movement. I reached the woods which were the thickening culmination of an acre or two of grounds, without trouble and paused there, listening to my own breathing in the green stillness of shadow and dappled sunlight. I looked back towards the mansion, cold and deserted looking-such an incongruous mask-and not a thing was moving. No movement at its walls; in the arbours and pergolas-nothing.
I moved into the wood a little farther and began to walk parallel with the house and the main road beyond. Cursing every time I cracked a twig, crunching noisily where the moss and leaf mould became dry earth, I followed the wood round in an arc to the side of the house and beyond it, parallel now with the drive. I saw nothing and where the drive ran into the bend of the lane to the main road I scaled a seven-foot stone wall and dropped lightly to the h-edged-off field on the other side. Keeping close in to the hedge I crossed the field to the stretch of the road to Cannes. And suddenly I froze.
Faintly through the thickness of the hedge bordering the main highway I could make out the vague glinting shape of a car. I dropped on my stomach and crawled with painful slowness towards the hedge at this point.
Quiet voices reached me over its thick, dusty green comfort. I felt a passing sense of the melodramatic-like some Cheyney character. But the nerve-wracking reality killed in me any sense of bravado.
The voices murmured, assumed an identity, became shades of tone, developed into words as I slithered close.
"Wonder what the hell this place is, anyway? Think Crawford's got some country cousin?" The voice was undeniably that of one of the toughs of my acquaintance.
"Probably nothing to do with Crawford. The dame only said she'd be seeing him, didn't say when."
Yes, they were here in force and it looked very much as if caution was no particular object. They were out to get me, quickly, quietly ana be away before the hue and cry.
I lay rooted to the spot, having come so close I was afraid, now, to move away in case they heard me.
There was a few minutes silence, during which my breathing, stifle it though I tried, sounded terribly loud to me.
"For Christ's sake how long we going to have to hang around here?"
"If Crawford's there and the woman tells him, they'll be out sharp." It was the voice of the leader, that "rather handsome in a rugged, middle-aged way" man. "If she doesn't tell him and they stay, we'll wait until he comes out."
"Suppose he's not there at all. I think we'd better go in and see."
"We'll wait until gets dark."
Silence again, slow and intense.
"There it is! He's not with her."
For a moment I missed the significance of the muttered exclamation, but then I heard a car in the distance, towards the mansion and realized they must have a lookout somewhere near the wall of the grounds where he could see the drive and along the lane to the main road.
"So what now?" The young man's voice was harsh and annoyed.
The leader's decision was quick and determined.
"We'll go in and see. He may be hiding out here. We can always pick up the woman again back at her hotel."
I held my breath as the sound of the car grew louder. There was a movement on the other side of the hedge, a scuffling and the slamming of car doors. They had climbed back into their car. No doubt as Gene slowed at the corner and sleeked past, they'd be carefully studying a road map.
The car approached, geared down, purred past in a vague glinting form beyond my cover, turned into the road, geared up and roared away.
I lay still, face close to the fresh-smelling grass.
Doors opened and slammed again and the voices were there once more.
"Crawford certainly gets hold of some classy dames. I thought his face wouldn't have been worth looking at now."
There was a short mirthless laugh and then some snapped orders.
"We'll hop over the wall and scatter through the grounds. Short of accidents we'll meet at the back and move in. Jacques, you'd better stay with the car-and be ready. We'll be in a hurry."
There was a quick movement of soft footsteps along the grass verges of the lane, dwindling to a hardly heard scuffling until it became just a sound in the ears and the men had gone.
I raised my head gently, peering through the close pattern of leaves, twigs and space. I could see the legs of a man-almost certainly the driver-standing motionless, waiting. Very gently I raised myself, got to my feet, quickly, with soft, nervous footsteps; I slipped along the hedge to a gate, opening onto the main road. I, in turn, had made a quick decision. I had no intention of returning to the mansion after the confusion the toughs would have spread. I grinned to myself. Some confusion, I thought, if they allowed their natural inclinations to run riot.
Softly, with my heart in my mouth, I squeezed through the wooden rails of the gate onto the grass verge at the roadside. Crouching low and tensed with a consuming nervous energy. I crept along the hedge to the angle of its unction. The car, long and powerful, stretched like a lurking animal along the verge and out of sight, around the junction was the driver. The road, little frequented by traffic, was deserted as I drew level with the back of the car, eased along in its shadow and inched with a quiet desperation to the thick, rough corner where the hedge so slightly partitioned me from him.
Bending low, body strained back, I peered through the rough, leafy edge of branches. The man had his back towards me and was gazing, hands in pockets towards the mansion grounds. Obviously he expected any excitement to come from that direction.
For a moment or two I hesitated, mentally fumbling on the likelihood of him turning. And while I hesitated I felt my chances slipping away in that inevitability by which we are left only the smallest portion of time successfully to make a gamble. I stepped forward quickly and firmly, drawing my gun from my pocket in the same movement. The man sensed rather than heard me and his body twitched in the instinctive tautening of a turn. Raised like a gentleman in matters of violence, I had frequently regretted my inhibited slowness to strike the first blow. This time a lot depended on speed and the twitch died in a relaxed slump as I smashed my butt on his turning skull.
The blow struck, I pulled the body feverishly into the base of the hedge, where it lay partly covered by the lower twigs and branches. I glanced along the lane. There was no sign of any of the others. With the morbid feeling that these men would materialize from nowhere if I turned my back on them, I retreated to the main road. There, I made a dive for the car, started it, turned it, cursing my clumsy slowness, and then, with a roar of acceleration, I was streaming back along the road to Cannes.
I had no immediate plan. My one aim was to get away from that spot as quickly as possible. The more distance I put between myself and these hired killers, the safer I should feel. It would be some time, I thought, before they could convince themselves that I was not hidden away in the mansion and even after that the return to Cannes by foot and bus would be a laborious process.
For a moment I had had the uneasy feeling that wherever I hid myself I should be dogged by these men and that thought made me suddenly wonder how they'd found me such a short time after my leaving Paris.
Monique! For some time with the car racing in an exhilarating surge of power, my mind wrestled with this new complication. I was very fond of Monique. The thought of her being hurt was not a pleasant one. But I could think of no other way by which they could have traced me to Cannes. True that even she hadn't known exactly where in the south I was going-nor had I for that matter-but a good guess and possibly a quick check at the main hotels en route might have led them to my hiding place.
It was the nagging thought that I owed a little to Monique for the trouble she'd endured that tipped the balance in favour of a course of action which, I hoped, would be sufficiently unexpected to ensure my immediate safety. I would return to Paris.
by the time I had abandoned the car in a Cannes side street I had quiet decided that would be the best ting to do.
In a smooth rapidity I settled at my hotel and made my way to Gene's hotel.
Before I had quiet reached the steps, I saw her pushing her way through the crowds from the opposite side of the road. She ran to me, eyes wide and anxious. She had been waiting for me to come.
"Oh, Harvey, you don't know what I've been through. I thought you might have been killed or something."
"Not quite-and I shan't be if I keep moving," I grinned, "Their transport facilities have been rather dislocated."
But Gene was in no laughing mood as she leaned towards me, hand on my arm regardless of curious eyes from the hotel foyer.
"What are you going to do? I saw them and they looked dangerous. Is it safe to come into the hotel or should we find a cafe?" Her words followed the fluttering incoherence of her thoughts and I held her shoulder tightly.
"Look, Gene," I said. "I've a little grace, I don't know how long, and in that time I've got to get well on the way to somewhere where they won't find me I don't know how the hell they got onto me from Paris, so it won't be easy."
"The car's round the corner. Let's go quickly."
We jostled through the holiday crowds, Gene leading me by the hand to the parked car. Soon we were streaking through the city towards a northern route.
"I've decided to go to Geneva," I told her as we blared aside strolling, jaywalking visitors, fumed impatiently at the lights. "I have friends in Switzerland and I'll be safe there for a time."
Gene was silent for awhile, weaving, tight-lipped, through the traffic.
"I didn't believe you when you said it was a cafe fight," she said after a while. "But, Harvey-how bad is it?"
Foul deeds will rise, I thought with a mental chuckle.
"It's very bad," I answered. "It's my life that's at stake."
We drove out onto the smooth, tree -lined north road in a long, forboding silence. Gene seemed a little shocked.
"There was no point in telling you-so I made up the cafe fight." I put my hand on her thigh, tenderly and she smiled at me quickly with pain behind the smile.
She looked back, fixedly on the road ahead, unable to maintain the smile.
"Oh Harvey. Don't ... don't think I'm ridiculously sentimental ... and I know I shall probably never see you again after today ... but I should hate anything to happen to you. A tear forced itself down her eyelashes and dripped miserably onto her cheek. I tightened my grip on her thigh. Any woman would have felt the same about someone she'd just found and was forced to lose. She knew as well as I did that it wouldn't last a day-well, perhaps a day-but her sadness got across to me and I felt inclined to indulge in the safely temporary emotion.
"We can see each other again," I said quietly.
"You know perfectly well we won't." She even grinned sadly at my absurdity, but inside her, I knew, was the hope that as I'd said the words, it could be true.
"Why not? You'll be around for some time yet-and I'll be going back to Paris in a few weeks if I'm still able to."
"Darling. So much can happen between now and then."
"But I intend to go back to Paris."
"Harvey?"
There was a note of anguish in the tone and I looked at her sharply. "What is it?"
"I'd like you to make love to me just once more-the last time."
As I looked at her, I felt the momentary twinge of a doting husband looking at his dear little wife whom he loves very much. Gene must have fallen for me rather a lot.
by now we were well clear of Cannes with a long stretch of dusty, hot road between us and what had probably not yet even developed into our pursuit. Anyway the pursuit, once started, would almost undoubtedly take the wrong direction-unless, of course, they gave up and headed back for Paris.
"All right," I said, pressing my fingers gently into the flesh of her thigh. "But we'll have to be careful in case we're taken unawares."
"We'll be careful." she whispered.
We drove on for a few more kilometers and at the first lane, Gene turned off, without looking at me and pulled up as soon as we were out of sight of the main road.
I moved to take her in my arms, but she restrained me, her hand tenderly pressing at my chest.
"No, not here," she said, a hint of pleading in her voice. "I don't want it to be cramped and difficult."
She opened the car door and stepped out into the dusty little lane looking back at me as if, for a moment, she was afraid I wouldn't follow her. As I stepped out after her, her hazel eyes softened and a semblance of a smile quivered around her full lips.
We pushed our way through a gap in the hedge on one side of the lane and clambered down the unexpectedly steep drop of a field to a flat stream bank where the grass was long and lush. On our side of the stream the field, humped with a few odd cows, stretched away to another distant hedge; on the other a thick little wood of willows dwindled down to the stream's edge.
"It couldn't have been a more lovely little spot." Gene's eyes flashed a brave, rueful little smile as she spoke and I felt momentarily embarrassed by the initial formality of the affair.
Gene sank to the grass slowly and began to take off her clothes. She was determined that our bodies should be in full, naked contact and, sensing that, I began to strip without demurring.
The sun, closing down on our nudity, sent a prickly heat under my skin after the initial thrill at the sudden exposure of my loins to the comparative coolness of the air away from the trapping heaviness of clothes. My penis rose as if in a sudden sun worship, reveling in the rays.
Gene, patches at her loins and breasts showing pale and unprotected in the surrounding darkness of her tanned skin, caught her arms around my legs as I stood for a moment breathing in the sun, and hugged them to her breasts.
I looked down at her, at the deep rift between her fine little breasts and her head tipped back and she gazed up at me. Her eyes dwelt on the jutting underside of my penis and its large suspended accompaniment. She ran her hand up my thighs, between my legs, until her fingers dug gently into my pelvis, and then she slid her hand forward, drawing my testicles out from my body, holding them, as if gently weighing, in her hand. Climbing up onto her knees, so that as I looked down I could see the slender mounds of buttocks, the mesh of hair down through the valley of her breasts, she kissed my testicles, running her lips lovingly over them. Suddenly, as if she had been fighting against it she seized my sun-warmed penis with both hands and closed her lips over it, sucking it in gentle contractions of her soft mouth.
It was as I looked up and beyond her towards the tops of the trees on the other bank of the stream, concentrating on the pulsing contraction which sent a throbbing undulation in constant motion through my loins, that I saw the man. He had obviously been fishing. I could see the rod perched and deserted further along the opposite bank. He himself, old and white-bearded with peaked cap and dilapidated clothes, was half hidden by the trees only about fifteen feet from us on the other bank. I gave no indication that I'd seen him and he, obviously, in the blindness that old people so often have, thought he couldn't be seen. He must have seen us arrive, I supposed, and had now moved along for a better view and a thrill of a type he probably hadn't enjoyed for many a year. Gene's body-her buttocks were towards him-must have looked the picture of slim, lovely elegance to a man so advanced in years and I decided not to spoil his pleasure. It even added to mine-a little thrill of delight at our observed licentiousness. He seemed like some Old Father Time come to witness our fading moment together in a kindly extension.
My penis, by now, was beginning to feel full and heavy and I sank down to my knees facing Gene and bit her breasts. She fell back, lying flat on the grass, sideways to the old man and her thighs flopped open. She pulled my hand down between her legs and I fondled her for some time, running my fingertips up the insides of her thighs, around her vagina and eventually inside it, holding off while she became more and more excited.
Wriggling her hips hotly, she caught hold of my penis again.
"Put it in, now, Harvey," she whispered.
She stretched her thighs wider as I moved over between them. I lowered myself onto her soft belly, sank, cushioned onto her body, feeling the points of her nipples, like little hard buttons, pressing into my chest. Her arms clasped me hard on her, her lips moving, pressing like live things on mine. Her legs twined in mine, rubbed against them as she moved her soft belly under me so that I could feel the flesh brushing against mine.
My penis was a rigid, hurting core, longing for moist, enclosing relief and, when it reached the point where I could stand its isolation no longer, I sank it into her, up between her legs, gliding through the soft portals. The relief swept through my whole body and gently and smoothly I worked into the depth of her in that wonderful squeezing sensation, until my testicles were brushing against her buttocks, below the no longer visible crevice where I'd entered and there was nothing between us except a pressing expanse of pelvis-no gap to be bridged.
Undulating my hips into her, I moved my face over hers, letting it sink down to one side of her, biting her ear. She, her face looking over my shoulder, ran her tongue furiously over my neck. I turned my face sidewards in a quick movement as if in passion and was able to see the old man. He had moved out from the sheltering trees a little, his trousers were undone-he was masturbating. You dirty old bugger, I thought with an inward grin.
Gene was quite unaware of the third party to our passion and was writhing in the throes of a desperate last intimacy. I could sense that she wanted me to crush her, to possess her utterly, hurt her even. As I held her thighs and pushed them out in an arc from her body. I wished I had the dimensions of the black race.
The realization that this was perhaps the last time of intimacy with someone I'd come to feel for with some affection added a certain sensation to my enjoyment also-gave it a new edge as if we were making love for the first time.
Gene, working her hips desperately, screwing herself down onto my thick stem, began to pant with a quick even heaviness of breathing and I increased the strength of my thrusts, snorting heavily, too, through my nostrils.
As, quicker than usual, the climax began to approach for both of us in a rushing fever which convulsed our limbs and cleared our lungs out into the sunlight, I heard sudden low gasps from the other side of the stream and allowed my head to rock in that direction as I twisted. The old man-with an organ unblemished by his age-was on the brink of explosion. As he shot furiously onto the grass in front of him he stifled a groan which-although he presumably thought it inaudible-would have been easily heard by Gene had she not been so abandoned to the passion which was drawing to its inevitable close.
I turned my attention fully back to her, raising myself up from her body, raising it, with my hands cupping her buttocks, up after me. I felt the draining pull staccato in my stomach, developing from its source into a great rapid and then shooting down to explode in her channel, bespattering her soft inside as it burst from my organ.
Gene, face working like a mad woman's called my name in quick passion-filled gasps as she too was drained of her vitality.
I lay on her, breathing heavily, allowing my penis to rest limply inside her. She held me, eyes closed, body raked with agitation. After a while, I rolled my heaviness off her and lay on the grass. The old man had moved back into the trees and was watching.
Gene left her thighs wide open, hips thrust forward as if offering herself to the sun, giving him an inviting view of the prize ready for the taking.
"When will you be back in Paris," Gene asked heavily without looking at me.
"We'll say three weeks time. That's sure to be safe," I replied without hesitation.
She made a quick calculation.
"That'll be the 17th-are you sure you'll be there? But, of course, how can you be sure." Her voice was resigned, deadened, unhappy.
"Darling, short of accidents I'll be there. I want to be there. I want to see you again."
"Do you?" She rolled over onto her side-presenting the old man with another delicious view of her slim back-and looked at me.
"Of course," I smiled. "You're the most delightful companion I've ever had."
She smiled in turn at that.
"What a silly thing to say-you can't possibly remember. It's very sweet though."
We lay in silence for a while and she traced her fingers over my chest. The sun was still hot although sinking and I felt my body regathering the energy I'd spent, growing strong and powerful and full of life again in its soft bed of grass. Gene's hand on my chest was a cool, foreign pressure reminding me of the unusual freedom my body was enjoying. I felt my penis stir on my thighs, slowly thickening with a return of the tingling pleasure it could contain.
Gene sensed it, too. Perhaps there was a new lease of strength growing in her. She let her fingers drift down from my chest to my belly, exploring my navel, advancing gently over my abdomen, combing through the hair until again they gently stroked the instrument of her enjoyment. Under her impudent fingers, which began to knead it more forcibly as it grew, it stretched out to the sun, reaching and reaching for it in a new passion.
"Harvey," Gene whispered. "I want to feel that you've possessed me completely before you go out of my life; to feel there's no part of me you haven't had. That way you can hurt me, make me feel completely given to you. Do you understand?"
I nodded and she added: "That will be something unique for me, between only you and me. But I can feel that it is something I want, that will give me to you."
I kissed her. Her words-who would have thought it to be intact-had begun to inflame my loins. Over in the wood the old man was still watching. I doubted if he'd have the strength for a second time.
"Be gentle," Gene whispered-and rolled over onto her face, clenching her hands, opening her legs.
I slithered rigidly onto her backside, pressing on her gently with my hips, indulging in the firm, smooth texture of her little buttocks against my hips. Then I knelt up between her thighs and my feelings were of passion and cruelty as I looked at her slim, small-waisted body prone in front of me, arms stretched tensely waiting over her head.
Her buttocks tensed rigidly as my hands ran over them, separating them slightly at their join, but after the automatic tautening, she relaxed the round mounds and as they softened, I moved them apart easily revealing the little virginal anus, which I should have expected to have been ravished on countless occasions. I kept the flesh of the buttocks apart with my thumb and forefinger, spreading the cringing anus slightly, revealing it fully as a target, and with my other hand, guided my throbbing rod down to the unopened aperture.
The closed mouth reacted with virginal reluctance, resisting the urgent knob. I persisted gently, allowing the buttocks to fall back against the stiff flesh so that their insides rubbed it into a peak of desire as it wormed gently up and down.
For a minute or two this continued, with Gene, hands clenched into fists, spreading her legs a little more. And suddenly I felt the merest tip enter, felt it suddenly nipped in a surrounding tightness of flesh and Gene's fists clenched and contracted until the knuckles were drained of colour.
Gently, penetrating no farther, I swivelled on this bridgehead, consolidating it, stretching the lips of the new source of love. And then, very gradually, and in small advances, I moved into the dark, untouched channel. As with a quick downward pressure I burst full in with the tip of my organ, Gene groaned and wriggled in an effort not to jerk away.
I consolidated again, a thousand needles pricking in my genitals, teeth clenched and then I rammed home, searing through the passage in a bulldozing thrust that widened and extended in a painful experience for both of us-painful but wonderful Gene cried out and her body arched into the ground-a movement which simply contained my organ more firmly in the contracting passage. Without more ado, I pushed her body down into the ground again, brooking no further resistance and sawed furiously in and out of the narrow, clinging tunnel while her groan echoed over the stream to the old man, who, I later noticed, was still standing in the trees an ardent witness of this glorious exhibition.
I held Gene firmly by the backs of her slim upper arms as I barraged into her bottom, and my legs forced her legs apart so that she could not escape in face of the pain.
And as I burst thickly, ruggedly into her, the ease of the operation improved until I was entering and withdrawing slightly with a rubbery facility, crushing and flattening her little buttocks under my hips with each in thrust.
After some minutes, by which time the unaccustomed tearing and pressure was pulsing my penis in a fierce rage, Gene shifted under me, pushing her bottom, came back with me on the end of my stem and she pulled her knees in under her so that she could better thrust and work the small junction against my genitals. With such an invitation I caught her hips and, pulling her back at me, thrust forward into her at the same time, burying the last of my vibrating penis into her slim back channel. She jerked forward again with the unexpected possession of more than she'd bargained for, but I pulled her back immediately and undulated small strokes into the softening passage.
Inside me I could feel the pulsation like a throbbing wound and my teeth clenched, my breath hissing through them and down my nostrils.
Gene, pinioned by my front at her rump, began to push back with abandon, taking it better and better. Her firm, little buttocks, distorted outwards in her all-giving position, wriggled sharply and with growing fury against my hips until at last she was rearing and thrusting her behind like an exotic dancer deep in the pulsating rhythm of a rumba.
She reached back behind her with hands flopping forward on her face as she did so, and grasped my thighs with her fingers, pulling me at her completely conquered treasure.
Screwing into her with a thick sensation as if a giant hand were tightly squeezing my organ, I felt the storm gather in my loins and rush in a mountainous fury along the coils to the outer protrusion, breaking at last in a great sensational burst into the opened gulf of her backside, shooting from my extremity in machine-gun-like explosions, penetrating deeply where such a penetraton had never before been known.
We lay quietly for some time, Gene not moving as if she wanted to contain in her bottom the load that had been unleashed there and was afraid to move in case she lost my matter, which for her signified our special, private intimacy.
Over in the trees, when I remembered to look, the old man was fiddling with himself in some vague unsure way, but I couldn't see very clearly what he was up to.
The sun was very low on the horizon now and as its heat began to fade on our skin, we dressed and walked back up the slope, through the hedge to the car.
With the fields preparing to sink into darkness, growing a paler golden red after the bright day, we sped along the road to the north, where Gene was to leave me at the first railway station that presented itself.
"I feel a little better now," she said, smoothing her skirt over her thighs with one hand as she drove. "You'll feel even better tomorrow," I said.
"I mean mentally," she retorted with a ghost of a smile.
"Both physically and mentally, you'll feel better," I assured her.
"And how will you feel?" she asked.
"Apart from my immediate worries, I shall be looking forward to getting back to Paris and seeing you there," I answered.
She caught my hand in pretense at a little business-like shake.
"I doubt if that will ever happen," she said. "But I hope it will."
Her pessimism, I thought, was becoming a little obsessional. She had no reason to doubt the possibility of a later meeting. Still less had she known I was going to Paris when I left her and not Geneva as she now thought. She must really have cared for me quite a lot for such premonitions to have weighed so heavily. But what did this represent? Something desirable unconquered. She'd be in love again in a week.
"Sure Henry won't be worried about you?" I asked.
"Oh, he'll be well occupied until much later. Anyway for two pins I wouldn't bother to go back to him."
In silence we reached the next big town and drove to the station. Waiting there for my train I thought that Gene was rather an attractive woman. If it had gone on much longer, I might even have fallen for her. She had a maturity-except for her lapse in falling in love with me so easily and obviously-which was a quality I liked in women. It occurred to me that if I met her in Paris-and I had every intention at that moment of meeting her-I might even take her to live with me. However, I'd see later....
Waiting in those last moments before parting, she suddenly pulled a slip of paper from her pocket, borrowed a pen from me and scribbled her New York address. She gave me the slip.
"Just in case we shouldn't meet in Paris. If ever you're my way...." She broke off and looked away from me up the line, peering into the dusk for the lights of the train.
"I'm not giving you mine," I said bluffly, "because nothing's going to stop us meeting in Paris."
She turned back to me smiling suddenly as if something in my voice had convinced her.
"Give me your diary," I added.
In it I marked the number 110, 6E.
"When you reach Paris in a few weeks time," I said, "Go to this number post office in the sixth arrondissement as I've marked. There, poste restante, you'll find a note from me, telling you where I can be found. If there should be nothing it means you've arrived first, in which case, leave me a note and I'll pick it up as soon as I arrive."
Gene took the diary and pressed it in her hands.
"O.K." she said huskily.
Dimly forming in the dusk, the train steamed slowly in like a long sniffing dog, until in a slow groan of boredom, it halted as if a leash had been tautened by an irritated owner.
I climbed onto the step, circled Gene's slim waist with my arm and kissed her warmly. She swayed against me, crashing her lips on mine in a kiss which contained all the desperation of a final parting.
I stepped inside the train, calling down: "See you shortly-don't worry."
Gene said nothing, just looked up at me from the platform, staying there, watching as the train drew away in a series of jostles. I leaned out and waved as the platform seats, the waiting room, staff doors, a flower bed, slid by and receded. Gene half raised her hand, staring still and with a final flourish I withdrew into the compartment. I was a little tired of these under-surface emotional partings.
I settled down to sleep until I reached Geneva. There I would take off for Paris immediately.
It was a pity I had had to lie to Gene about my destination, but I thought it wiser that nobody left in my wake should know where I'd gone. It was, after all, probable that my pursuers would question her. I was well aware they might force her to tell where I'd gone. When I reached Paris I should have to lie low in case Jaswant had told the police I was there. But the police, I felt, would be a lesser enemy than the band of cut-throats after my blood. I felt in Paris a little less obvious than I should have in most other European cities.
Gluey-eyed from several uncomfortable attempts at sleep and nagging worries that I couldn't completely dispel, I arrived in Paris the following day, apprehensive and as wary-eyed as if I were in a be-denizenned jungle.
I took a taxi to within a couple of streets of Monique's apartment-studio and walked carefully to a small cafe a few doors down from its entrance on the opposite side of the road. I went in, ordered a coffee and a sandwich at the bar and watched that street through the open doors. I wasn't too sure what I expected to see, but I felt unwilling to declare myself yet I felt that somehow, by waiting in the quiet little bar-where only two old men were drinking at a table and patron was busily polishing glasses-I should discover how the land lay.
A second coffee followed the first and for perhaps half an hour I stood at the chromium painted bar, gazing in affected idleness at the thin flow of people and vehicles in the street. Once, as two policemen strolled past, I turned my back to the doors and studied the price tariff above the multi-coloured bottles stocked behind the bar. They passed on and after a few moments I paid and left.
Adjusting my wallet at the door, I watched the law wheel slowly and nonchalantly round a far corner and then I hurried without a sideways glance, but with the prickly horror of a dozen eyes upon me, to the courtyard leading to the studio.
A short silence followed my knock and then Monique's voice called out: "Who's there?"
"It's Harvey," I called back. "Harvey!"
A bolt was withdrawn, the door flung open and Monique had slipped into my arms with a little cry of joy. I found the ease with which a reunion followed a parting rather entertaining.
Tears matted the eyelashes of her shining eyes as she drew back to look at me.
"Oh, darling. I didn't expect you to be back."
And then the unexpectedness penetrated the joy misting her mind and a sudden shaft of apprehension withered the laugh in her eyes.
"What's happened? Are you all right?" She ran her hands down my arms, my body as if she expected to find some wound.
I ushered her gently into the studio and closed the door, re-bolting it.
"I'm fine," I said. "But how about you."
"Why ... why did you come back so soon? Did they find you?"
Her voice was a whisper and she glanced beyond me to the door as if behind it, a dozen men were waiting with guns drawn while I was allowed my last goodbye.
"Almost-but not quite. And that's why I'm back." I grinned cheerily to reassure her.
A reluctant smile intruded on her face and she held me close smiling quietly through the brink of tears.
"Oh, I'm so glad you're back," she murmured. "I was terrified, Harvey."
And then the story came out in a series of breathless sentences.
The leader of the toughs had picked her up one night as she was going home after shopping. He had forced her into a car and asked her where I was. She had refused to tell him and he had driven her out of Paris and then burnt her with a cigarette end on the arms and the thighs-she showed me the marks-until she broke down and told him I'd gone to the south coast. He'd tried to make her confess that she knew exactly where I'd gone, but as she didn't his efforts had gone unrewarded. Afterwards he had driven her back to Paris and put her out near a metro station, arms and legs smarting from the shriveled wounds. He had warned her not to give me any warning if she knew where I was and said that he'd see her again sometime just in case they hadn't caught up with me in the meantime.
"He seemed in a hurry to be off," Monique concluded. "I suppose he wanted to drive south immediately." She reached up and put her soft lips to my neck.
"Please, darling, forgive me for telling them which way you'd gone. I tried not to."
"You dear, sweet thing. You should have told him immediately. It's not your concern to shield me." I stroked her hair and tipped her head back so that I could see her face clearly. "We must get you away from here," I said "or your life will be tyrannized by these men."
"No. It's all right now you're back." Her young, brown eyes gave her welfare completely to me. Wryly I pictured myself as a protector of young maids. Sir Galahad of the left bank.
"Well they lost no time in finding me, but I think I've given them the slip now," I told her. "They'll probably cover half the continent before they think of coming back to Paris."
Monique was warming to the realisation of my return.
"We'll be all right," she said with a little laugh. "We can buy in food for a month and not go out. They don't know where I live-at least I don't think they do."
"Has there been any other excitement?" I asked, wondering how I could bring up the subject of police activity in the district.
"No-except that I came straight home after you'd left and painted a beautiful picture in the depths of despair."
As Monique searched for her masterpiece, I decided to rely on my own observation for news of the probings of the law. Obviously they weren't too close or Monique would surely have been interviewed, or at least have noticed a preponderance of policemen in the area-or would she?
That night, at least, I pushed thoughts of my lack of security into the background. We ate and drank with the relish of the half starved; we danced as if civilization were a dream we had almost forgotten and at last we made love as if we had been awaiting the moment for years through an intolerable pain of celibacy.
Late in the following morning, Monique went out like a happy, new housewife into the sunlit, busy streets to do some shopping-enough for a week if not for a month.
"Buy me some English papers while you're out," I said as she was going, "and some French ones. We'll have to have a little relaxation to occupy our confinement."
"You mean we can't spend the whole time in bed?" she laughed-and skipped out like a frisky lamb.
In one of the papers she brought back I found what I'd wanted to find-but not exactly.
In a jazzy English newspaper which probably thought it was doing its duty to somebody by "making known the facts" I found a short item which constituted a continuation of news on the Sussex attack. They still wanted to see me-in fact a warrant had been issued. But what was most shocking was that I was believed to be in or near Paris and that the father of the girl, Colonel Bateson-I might have guessed-was coming with his daughter to Paris to try, by his own efforts, to find me. The item, in fact, began with the ringing words: "This sort of beast should be stamped out of society-and if the police can't do it I will." The colonel, it seemed, was a little impatient of the wondrous workings of the law.
The name of the girl was published too-Lydia Bateson.
Sunk in an armchair behind the shielding folds of the paper while Monique happily cooked a meal, I pondered this new discovery. It seemed strange that I should know her name now, but that at the time she should have been just a casual incognito. Lydia. I could have felt her name in my head. It would have been Lydia I was raping in a field, not just an attractive unknown girl. It seemed as if the person I had raped and the person I now knew was Lydia Bateson were two different individuals. It was some time before these trivial considerations could be coaxed from my mind. At least, I thought, the paper had done its duty to me, giving me fair warning to beware of an irate colonel out to avenge his daughter's honour.
In a day or so he intended to leave England, the item said. That meant he might be on his way, or even in Paris, already. For a moment I felt a wave of weak despair flow into me as if the personal fury of a father would be so much more effective than the machinery of the law. But I fought down this emotional aberration. He might never have been to Paris in his life and anyway what hope had he of finding me in such a city? I stuffed the newspaper away under a cushion. In the French papers, interest in Harvey Crawford must have been dying-there was no mention of me.
That night I found myself wavering between leaving Paris again and staying put. Rationally, I told myself, it would be much more sensible to get away-but something urged me to stay. I couldn't remember the girl's face, couldn't picture it in any detail.
In the few following days I stayed in the studio, whiling away my time with Monique. A growing sense of insecurity gathered inside me. I felt as if a coil of rope circling the whole of Paris was gradually being pulled tighter until it would find me at its center unable to escape from the noose.
The thought of Jaswant and his toughs had faded into my subconscious. I no longer regarded them as a threat. The threat;-and I told myself how ridiculous it was-seemed to me to come from the colonel and his daughter. There was between myself and them a very personal contact. They were hating me passionately with none of the impartiality of a gang of toughs or the police. The whole purpose of their lives was, for the moment, directed against me. And the girl carried in her head a picture of me which was with her, doubtless, day and night. She was unable to escape me and I was unable to escape her.
As the days followed the same routine pattern I became restless. I couldn't sit still for any length of time and spent long periods gazing from the window which was my only escape to the outside world. The studio no longer seemed a shelter but a prison in which I was being cramped until my persecutors came for me.
Monique, sensing my impatience and frustration, doted attention on me, preparing the most delicious meals, loving with abandon-but I had lost my appetite for everything. All I wanted was movement and freedom.
For hours we wouldn't speak, Monique having given up the struggle to take my mind from whatever it was that was cutting me off from her. Little things began to irritate me and a great sore of nerves built up inside me until, sitting tensely behind the shield of unseen newspapers I had to fight down impulses to shout and stamp at the blank indifferent walls.
One morning my frayed strands of control snapped.
"I'm going out," I said.
"Harvey. Please don't risk it. They may be waiting for you."
"Oh for God's sake! I'm going out."
"Oh, please. I'll go out and get anything you want. Let me go, please."
Monique's eyes had filled with tears as she implored me. But her noble insistence only creased my revulsion for my enforced confinement.
In a flare of furious temper I crashed my fist on a table.
"I'm going out I tell you. I bloody well am going out. Can't you see I'm going crazy being cooped up here."
Monique's protests whimpered into silence at my outburst and her eyes were wide with fright as they followed me to the door. On the threshold I turned.
"Bolt the door again after me. I'll be back in an hour or two."
Out in the narrow street, breathing the sudden animation of a different air I felt a surge of rejuvenating freedom. I couldn't even bother much with caution. It was like crawling from a dark cupboard and escaping a creeping claustrophobia.
My eyes reveled in the brisk movement of people and vehicles as if for some days I had been blind, and I strode with a light step.
I wasn't sure where I was going. In fact I was hardly thinking at all. Nobody approached me, no vehicle slowed alongside, nobody gave me a second glance and suddenly it seemed that I had come through a nightmare and awakened to harmless reality again.
On the Boulevard St. Germain I took a seat in the back row of a cafe terrace and sipped a beer. I sat watching the people passing; envying in a remote way their smiling faces bespeaking happy, uncomplicated lives. I thought of the past few months, of the colonel, of Lydia. I thought myself back into a dull, apprehensive depression. For three hours and five weak French beers I sat moodily on that terrace-and then I began to walk again.
I was consumed with a vague feeling of urgency, of needed accomplishment. At times it occurred to me that I should not parade myself too obviously and then I would strike off into narrow, undistinguished streets, watching everything that moved.
But the big tourist centers drew me and I had to struggle with the impulse to walk slow and staring past the well-known cafes. It became almost a physical effort to keep to the lesser visited areas.
Here and there, as I grew tired, I would slip into a small cafe and have a drink or a sandwich in company with chattering Frenchmen who after an initial glance disregarded me completely....
More and more my mind began to center on Colonel Bateson and Lydia. They were the only names in my head. I tried to picture Lydia's face, but it was a vague undefined outline; the features were without form. Every time I felt I had them, the picture just failed to become whole and blurred away into other faces.
I toured the outskirts of the central area of Paris until my eyes became tired with the fixed intensity of watching and my legs felt heavy and strained. As the dusk flattened on the city and the lights glowed out I resignedly caught a metro to Odeon and walked wearily back to the apartment.
Monique greeted me with tears and I was tired enough to submit willingly to her fussing around me.
But that first little sortie had dispeled my fears of the police or Jaswant's toughs and the following day I insisted on going out again. Monique implored me to stay in, but I was more reasonable then I had been the day before and managed to reassure her.
"I just can't stand being shut in," I told her, "and if I didn't go out I'd be likely to break a window or something. I promise I'll be careful, but I'm sure they're looking for me in Switzerland or somewhere miles away in any case."
"All right, darling. But I shan't be happy until you come back."
I kissed her and went out into the warm afternoon.
This time I walked more boldly through the heart of St. Germain-des-Pres and on towards the Champ- Elysees. I scrutinized the face of everyone who passed near me.
It wasn't until I settled on a crowded terrace on the Champs-Elysees that I realized consciously that I'd been looking expressly for Lydia and her father. Had I passed Jaswant I probably shouldn't have recognized him.
I tried again to build a picture of her face and, failing, imagined her body as it had writhed from me those months ago. But even her body seemed to lack reality-a picture of cardboard.
I left the cafe aware that I was acting a little unwisely and began walking again briskly.
For a long time I walked blindly, seeing nothing but faces, faces, at which I peered with a strange, mixed feeling of hope and misgiving. With dusk glooming down again I found myself at one of the northern Portes a cluttered, busy, working class exit from Paris.
And it was there that I saw them.
I knew immediately. I didn't have to see the details of her face. I didn't even notice what she was wearing. I saw them clearly on the opposite side of the street revealed half by the fading light, half by the early glow of street lamps.
For a moment I was nonplussed. I stood transfixed and stared across at them with a sudden chill of horror at our proximity and then I turned abruptly, a prickling at the back of my neck, and stared into a shop window.
They were walking steadily, but not fast and, as I half turned to watch them go, I realized with a start that they were looking specifically for me, scouring the districts, looking for me as they turned every corner just as I had been searching for them. A peculiar panic overwhelmed me as I watched them dwindling in the lights and the curbside trees, cut off completely from time to time by strollers.
I checked myself in the middle of an impulse to walk quickly, without a backward glance, in the opposite direction, to take a metro, better still a taxi and get to the other side of the city, get home to Monique, safely shielded by the four walls I'd hated. But stronger and counteracting was the frightening impulse to follow them, get them in sight again, see where they were going, have a good look at them, hear their voices if possible, find out what they were going to do. With a hot feeling in my chest, as if I were about to stalk a tiger, I paced quickly after them.
For a moment I thought I'd lost them, but as a rabble of slouching Algerians made off down a side street, I saw them in the space that was left, the colonel big and hunched looking straight ahead, the girl, slim in a skirt and blouse the way I remembered her, darting quick glances into the lighted doorways of cafes.
Drawn on against my better judgment I crossed to their pavement and began to overhaul them. I had no idea in my head. I just wanted to get close to them and, automatically as I walked I put my band in the pocket of my coat and felt there the automatic which I carried with me everywhere.
I chuckled grimly at my advantage. Here they were searching Paris for me, perhaps almost on the point of giving up-and here I was about fifty yards behind, getting closer and staring straight at their backs.
It was the girl who mainly focused my attention. So this was Lydia. Studying her slim back, the tautness of the skirt over the buttocks, the well-shaped legs, the realness of her flooded back to me. This was Lydia the girl I'd picked up and raped, whose face I couldn't remember. And now months later, here she was some hundreds of miles from the spot with not a thought in her head but to find me-and here I was no more now than a dangerous thirty yards behind.
My heart warmed to the risk I was taking and I stayed at that distance, keeping a few people between us all the time, waiting for something to happen, sure that it would.
Occasionally the girl glanced round and then I would align myself with someone between us or walk purposefully into a doorway as if I lived there.
As I was beginning to wonder if, perhaps, I should force myself away before something disastrous happened, they turned, suddenly, into a cafe.
I waited in a doorway for a minute or two and then crossed the road quickly. I moved up in the shadow of the trees until I was opposite the cafe, keeping my eyes firmly fixed on it all the time. A great oblong of light glared through the glass door, dimly yellowing the pavement and the trees. Through the door I could make out a number of men drinking at the bar. The long window of the cafe was covered with lace curtain. I couldn't see anything through it.
For some minutes I waited uncertainly and then, my heart thumping, I dodged through the traffic. On the edge of the opposite pavement I hesitated again, my body a bundle of nervous energy, preparing me for instant flight. Making a quick decision I stepped quickly up to the door to peer in. As I reached it, it opened and I was face to face with the colonel.
The sudden shock paralyzed me. I was completely deprived of the power of movement and it flashed through my mind that this was a moment of climax in my personal history.
In the second or two that followed, the colonel stepped aside and his daughter walked out looking straight into my eyes.
With the suddenness of the meeting she looked away with an involuntary movement, like a shudder, and walked quickly on up the street. Her father stared at her, then at me and had caught her in a moment. She said something to him and the two of them had turned toward me.
I suppose I could have run for it and had whistles blowing, crowds chasing me. But I hardly thought of it. My hand clenched over the automatic in my pocket and I stayed where I was, staring at them.
We faced each other for some seconds, like duellists unwilling to make the first move, and then the colonel came heavily towards me.
I had recovered my calm; a dynamic calm, potential and ready to break into furious activity. My eyes glared into the colonel's as he came towards me and instead of letting fly at me, as I felt had been his first impulse, he stopped, confronting me and demanded in biting tones: "Your name Crawford?"
"No," I said. "Sorry."
He stared at me, pulled short by my nonchalance, but unbelieving, and then he whirled on the girl, who had come quietly up to us regarding me with horrified eyes as if a little piece of the past had come right back to her.
"Sure?" he snapped.
The girl nodded.
As he turned back to me I took out the automatic quietly and caught the girl by the arm.
"Keep away and keep quiet," I said pointing the gun at the colonel. "Your daughter's coming with me as a surety for my protection. You'll see her if you don't make a sound."
I had reckoned without the rash wrath of a father.
With a military roar, the colonel lunged at me, murder in his eyes. My fist, weighted with the little automatic, caught him on the side of the jaw and he crashed onto his side as the girl screamed.
I grasped her, digging the automatic into her back. Passers-by turned, stopped, stared, slow to become involved. Men peered through the glass door of the cafe and then came out into the street. A crowd began to gather around us reluctant and menacing at the same time.
"Move!" I snapped at the girl, "or I'll shoot you and your old man."
Sections of the crowd swayed towards us as we moved towards the road and I swept the automatic in an arc, snapping threats. The ranks broke; there was a hum of conversation and somebody called for the police.
A hundred yards down the road a taxi was parked. "Run!" I snapped, pushing the girl towards the vehicle.
The crowd moved slowly after us cutting us off from the colonel lying dazed on the ground; there was more shouting.
As I ripped open the door and bundled the girl into the back seat behind the bewildered driver, I heard the colonel shouting in English. I looked back quickly and saw blue police uniforms pushing through the crowd. I fired a shot over the jostling, following mass and it disintegrated into dim figures pushing and clawing hysterically for safety. I barked an order at the driver, threatening him with the gun as I slumped in beside the girl and the taxi shot forward. A stone crashed onto the bodywork and then we were round a corner.
"Here we are together again in a car," I said with a grin, quietly astonished at my own calmness.
"You must be mad," she gasped.
"Perhaps I am."
I snapped orders at the driver and, peering through the back window, could see another taxi careening through the traffic. There was no mistaking its objective. I was sure it contained the colonel.
Somewhere from another direction I heard the mad hee-hawing siren of a police van.
With my gun at his neck, the chauffeur did wonders with the car, weaving in and out of traffic, racing through narrow streets, doubling back and eventually heading out towards Le Bourget Airport and Belgium beyond.
For a moment I thought we'd made it, but on a long, straight stretch of road, the colonel's taxi came pounding. Behind it, at some distance, the siren followed, blaring out into the darkness.
Grimly hostile, my driver put his foot down on my command and we left the city's outskirts at breakneck speed.
"It's very nice to see you again," I said without taking my eyes from the back window. The colonel's taxi was losing ground. "I'd become quite obsessed with you."
"You won't get away with it. All the police in Paris want you."
I wondered with a grin how many times she'd read a similar remark in a thriller. Did she read thrillers? "Do you read thrillers?"
She cringed away, keeping to the extreme end of the seat.
"Well you're in one now-and your father's fading out of the picture."
In what seemed no time at all we had passed Le Bourget and were racing through country. We had lost the colonel's taxi, but the police siren was more insistent and I could see its distant lights drawing slowly closer. v
"Get a move on!" I snapped at the driver.
We appeared to be passing through grazing land. I could see dim shapes in the fields on either side. I glanced back. The lights of the police van were brighter, a little nearer. I leaned over towards the driver.
"Slow right down round the next bend, but don't stop," I said, "and then keep going after we've jumped or I'll shoot up the car."
There was no answer and I jabbed him with the gun.
"All right. I heard you," he growled.
"My dear, sweet, Lydia," I said, lingering over the name, "when the car slows we're jumping out. You're going first and I'll be so close behind I'll be able to catch you if you try to run. If you want to stay in one piece I shouldn't try."
We waited, tensely. There were low hedges on either side of the road. I looked back again. Yes, the van was gaining. To jump was the only hope.
I could make out the curve in the road.
"Slow right down and then accelerate after we've jumped," I snapped again. "And make sure you do."
I opened the door on the girl's side and held it ajar.
The taxi swayed round the bend, the following lights disappeared, I pushed the girl, leapt out after her, slammed the door and pushed her at the hedge in a single movement. The driver accelerated. His skin came first.
In the seconds that followed I manhandled the girl over the low hedge, dropped on her, holding her down, hand over her mouth as the police van streaked round the bend and swept on.
I yanked the girl to her feet and began to run with her across the dark expanse. Dim shapes rustled around us, cows raising their heads to stare.
"We can go faster than this," I snapped, pulling the automatic from my pocket. I goaded the girl to a faster pace, running half behind her, holding an arm.
Back on the road further along from our point of entry into the field, stationary lights twinkled; others flickered along the hedge and voices carried to us over the three hundred yards or so we had crossed. The colonel's bass roared out, "Lydia, Lydia! Where are you! Don't worry my love we're coming!"
"Not a murmur!" I hissed at the girl.
We ran on as the lights spread out in the field behind us, flickering in a widening semi-circle. We half clambered, half fell over a wooden gate and raced on close in to another hedge parallel with the road. Some of the torches were flickering closer, their, beams reaching the other side of the hedge along which we were stumbling. The girl was gasping for breath and my ribs ached. I could have got along faster on my own, but I was unwilling to let the girl go while she might still be of use as a shield, while the pursuit was still so close. The lights were flickering in our field now and suddenly there was a cry in French.
"Along here! Here by the hedge! Cut them off-the other side of the field!"
Through my painful breathing I cursed. They had heard us panting, running on the harder earth. The night was very still; sounds carried-our sounds and the sounds now seeming to stretch all around us. A voice cried out ordering the dousing of half the torches so that we couldn't locate the pursuit.
A wild, furious panic surged inside me. I was on the point of abandoning the girl and trying to escape with the little extra speed of singleness. I had a sudden picture of my hemmed in position. I'd never really imagined myself trapped, hunted down. I'd had great faith in my ability to get out of this. I fought down my panic and then I saw the great shape of the barn looming up ahead and more to the center of the field. The only hope-a rest. I dragged the girl towards it, forcing an extra spurt of effort. We reached its high, wooden wall with the torches sweeping in towards us and the sound of panting around us from dark places. I jerked the girl, who was in a state of near collapse around the walls, searching frantically for the door. They were on the far side, swung inwards, open; great wooden doors half the height of the barn. I hurled the girl in and she collapsed on some straw. It seemed that my hands couldn't keep up with my mind as I swung the doors shut one after the other and, feeling frantically in the darkness, found the enormous wooden bar the giant staples, grated the bar into the slots.
I sagged in momentary relief against the door, panting, feeling my heart pumping painfully, hearing the echoing sounds of distress from the girl behind me.
There was the sound of heavy breathing almost immediately outside the barn, a pushing and crashing against the door, a shout of: "Careful; he's armed."
The door didn't yield a fraction and I remained against it, recovering, only six inches from my pursuers.
A confused sound of voices and the tramping feet of fresh arrivals grew outside. They knew we were there. There was nowhere else.
Gun in fist I moved quietly away from the door in the gloom. I could see the blurred outline of the girl, still panting on the straw, as I walked gingerly around the walls. There was no other entrance. Our end was clear for some dozen feet and beyond that straw in various layers reached back for another twenty or thirty.
A voice called to me from outside as if from another world-a police inspector.
"You're trapped Crawford; you might as well come out."
I crept back to the door, feeling along it with my hands. A couple of feet from the floor to one side I found what I was seeking-a little niche in the wood where a knot had worn out. I put the muzzle of the gun close up to the hole and fired a shot into the field beyond.
There were muttered oaths, sounds of a quick dispersal outside-and then quiet.
I heard the voice of the colonel then, just arriving.
"What's happened? Where are they? My girl all right?"
There were muffled replies and then the voice again, desperate and verging on the hysterical.
"Lydia, Lydia darling! Let me get at the door! Let me go!"
There was the sound of a scuffle. The colonel was having to be restrained from risking a bullet.
I knelt down beside the girl, exhausted still from flight.
"You keep quiet," I whispered tersely. "Not a word if anyone shouts."
I moved back to the door, listening. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't think beyond the moment.
The inspector's voice came again-from a greater distance.
"If you come out now Crawford, you have rape in England and a few lesser charges here against you. If you continue to oppose us your eventual position will be much worse."
I gathered my breath.
"Don't forget I've got the girl," I shouted back. "If anything happens to her the blood will be on your head."
Silence followed, while I strained listening.
"Crawford, you haven't a hope. In an hour you'll be surrounded by a hundred police. We'll gas you out if necessary."
I put the automatic to the hole and squeezed the trigger twice. There was silence.
I went back to the girl and squatted a yard or two from her in the straw. She was quiet, terrified probably, unable to speak.
Could I use her to bargain with. My mind searched wildly. They couldn't shoot their way in for fear of harming her. But I couldn't get out. Even if I waited until daylight and took her out as hostage for my safe getaway, I stood little chance. A hundred men! They could be on the roof, behind the hedges. Sharpshooters could pick me off with ease. If we stayed put we'd be starved or tear gassed-in spite of what the colonel might say.
For a long time I stared dully at the motionless shape of the girl, unable to concentrate, my head vacant with despair. Outside there was no sound. Reinforcements were on the way.
An hour or more passed. I couldn't see my watch.
Sharply, startling me a heavy voice penetrated into the barn-a different voice, more authoritative.
"Crawford, we'll give you until dawn to come out with the girl unharmed. Then we're coming in. You know what you stand to gain or lose."
Then the colonel's voice shouting wildly, not very reassuringly:
"Don't worry darling. It'll be all right."
I put my hand to-my head. My hand was cold and my head ached the way it did when I worried about a painting. I saw the girl, dimly, looking unmoving in my direction and I sank to the floor resting my back against the door, balancing the gun loosely towards her.
Dawn. How many hours to dawn? What to do? I started blankly towards the girl, feeling the empty stillness of the barn, my mind a vacuum, unable to think, only able to sit there stupidly, hopelessly. From time to time an odd thought would pass-bits of 'Hamlet', the ace of clubs, a Utrillo, all merged and insistent, crowding the present from my mind. Time ticked by and the girl was asleep in spite of everything and I was thinking that I mustn't sleep. And then I was at school and I had committed some crime and was to come before the head to be severely punished. Everybody said I would be expelled, everybody was looking at me, some with stem pity, others with malice and disgust, all with unbending superiority. I waited and waited to see the head and the waiting was unbearable.
I awoke with a start and my head was heavy with burden. It was some seconds before I placed everything and then I got quickly to my feet. The girl was asleep and light was filtering through cracks and holes all over the bam. My body ached, my mouth was thick, eyes tired and heavy, hair stiff and dry.
Dully I bent to the peephole by the door. Outside I could see nothing but the green field, fresh dewy blades of grass, a section of hedge-and the promise of a lovely day. I felt sick and unbelieving.
The girl stirred and awakened, uncomprehendingly at first and then the slow recognition and fear spread across her face.
I looked at her face, seeing it for the first time since Sussex and it was the face of a woman, firm, shadowed a little with the responsibility of life. I had made her a woman-one of those strong shelters which are strong because of our eventual need for shelters. I had forgotten her body, but now it was there in its supple strength. I needed her in that moment. I needed the relief, the temporary shelter.
As the voice cried out: "Are you coming out Crawford We'll give you five minutes," I blazed away through the hole until the automatic clicked and then I dropped it in the dirt and turned to the girl.
I went towards her and she didn't say a word. She just looked at me with her eyes wide and staring as if she were dumb. I fell down onto her, devouring her mouth with mine, relieved in the warm humanity of her. My hands moved over her body and she began to struggle. I thought dully, 'Not again' and held her with an arm across her neck.
I reached down and took out my penis and looked at it stretching like a reaching arm.
Her body was nude and beautiful to look at and I could think only of her.
In the background I heard a murmur of something outside and movement-but this was what mattered, a life and a life together, brushing together for an all excluding moment, but only for a moment because life is a single, lonely thing. All through my body an electrical current was running. I was incomplete and I needed completion. And the girl was struggling uselessly and she cried out as I moved onto her, so I put my hands on her throat to quieten her. And with my hands there my electrical current had made a circuit with her. I was right inside her, my penis a long probing, searching need. She writhed and twisted, but my hands were quietening her.
My eyes were stinging and I couldn't see well as I felt the warmth of her thighs against me even through my clothes.
My penis was cleaving with rapid motion up and up into the soft, moist channel, from between her legs up into her belly. Her legs were splayed and wide open to my need and this was all that was important.
I heard the thunderous battering which was like a dark force in my head. My eyes were misting as I looked at her face in my passion. Her eyes were closed and she was still. Everything seemed strange and unreal and there was water running down my face and stinging in my nostrils. But there at my loins was the real source and ending of things, there was life and the sensation grew tighter and tighter and tighter. I was existing only there in an unbearable peak of intensity.
A thundering there, a painful thundering; and in my head, too and I couldn't see anything but it didn't matter. Nothing mattered; everything paled to nothing and this great bursting and bursting and bursting and suddenly flooding was everything. It was a long moment of life and then it was over and life was over and it was supremely unimportant and life was supremely unimportant and the running in my eyes hurt terribly and they were pulling me off her and I knew that she was dead.
They tried the usual paraphernalia-the temporarily insane lark-but there was nothing very temporary about my "insanity." To tell the truth I couldn't get very interested. Life seemed pretty pointless. Just these moments and then a dull reaction until the next. Complete importance and then complete unimportance, but there was a motivation all the time.
I don't care. I've had my fill. But all the same I hope there's something better. No damn fool moralizing. Better still, complete oblivion.
This room is small, restricting. Worst by far then Monique's, but it doesn't worry me any longer. Everything's been very quiet. Somewhere I can hear a tap dripping-there is always a tap dripping, some little insistent sound-and sometimes through the ventilator I heard a bird. I think I hear a bird.
I can hear something. Listening to the bird I can hear something beyond. Yes, I hear it. I hear the sound of footsteps....
