There is something enticingly decadent about the pleasures of the luxury yacht and the fashionable seaside resort. As all its admirers know, the seaside must on no account be confused with that vulgar shoreline called the coast. The coast is liable to winter storm and tempest, shipwreck and sharks. But at the seaside it is always summer. The tide ripples calm and warm as quicksilver and the shimmer of heat on the sand is ornamented by toasty-brown girls whose brief bikini pants cling all the closer to their supple curves by virtue of the suntan oil suggestively spread.
Turn for a moment from the beach and spare a glance for the bijou villas along the promenade or the more magnificent private pleasure-domes set further back among the pine trees of St. Jean-de-Luz or Cap d'Antibes. What secret pleasures and perverse lusts find their release in concealed sunlit courtyards or behind the shutters at night? The private yacht and the fashionable villa have always been the two status symbols of the very rich and the very sensual.
Sweet Dreams, a Paris-published novel of the golden age of erotica, meant just what its title said. In the warm sophisticated world of Art Deco and Modernism, pleasures are taken coolly and sometimes perversely. The story is told by an exchange of secret reminiscences between a middle-aged libertine, Bernard, and his intimate friend, Juliette, whom he calls affectionately Julie. She is the mistress of a select finishing-school in Paris, on the leafy Avenue Foch. Julie's taste is for English schoolgirls and her seductive ways with them never fail. They leave her care and are launched on to the marriage-market already well-developed in sexual passion and lovingly grateful to the mistress who has educated them in such matters.
By contrast, Bernard is a man of the world. He is always ready to help a friend in a fix. Which is just as well, because his English friend, Sir Harry, is in a considerable difficulty just then. One of Sir Harry's clients, who owns a fine villa on the Sussex coast, has been summoned back to southern Africa and the rule of Empire. In consequence, he has had to leave his two teenage wards under the care of a young governess. Joanne is not a starched and laced Victorian tyrant but a healthy and warm-blooded young woman of modern tastes. Sir Harry hopes it will work out, but he is uneasy.
Would Bernard consider spending a month at the house, enjoying a holiday and keeping an eye on the group of young women? The handsome brick villa overlooks the sea and is a place of sheer delight in the summer season. There are servants, stables, and horses, not to mention Tania Jenkins who is nineteen years old and an extremely lascivious stable-maid. The spacious house with its fine lawns and channel views will be at Bernard's disposal in the fashionable seaside resort of Fairbourne. Nothing will be required of him but to exercise his influence upon the two sisters and to keep the servants in order. Apart from the groom and the butler, there will be the two pupils, Tania the leather-loving stable-girl, and a few others who are all female.
Bernard is only too willing. Both he and Sir Harry are knowingly hypocritical about the whole thing. Either of them would willingly put the young governess and her two pupils through every jump in the racecourse of sexual excitement. But they pretend otherwise. It is in his account to Julie that Bernard reveals the strange events at Beechy Lodge.
Joanne, the healthy and sensuous heroine of Sweet Dreams is the governess as teacher and seducer. This is absolute reality in the fears and phobias of the age, when most middle-class education of girls began at home. The minds and bodies of adolescents were under the rule of such young women. There were many secretly whispered domestic scandals and sudden departures. It was known for a governess to masturbate or slyly rouse a girl or a boy in her care in order to make the youngster more amenable and docile. This was the means by which May Gray, as the poet later claimed, seduced the ten-year-old Lord Byron and initiated him into the ways of the world.
"When Walter was a little fellow," wrote the diarist of My Secret Life, describing his mother's warning to a cousin, "she had dismissed a filthy creature whom she had detected in abominable practices with one of her children." It was a fear seldom discussed openly but always lurking. Parents of this kind dreaded the immoral governess but did nothing whatever to increase their own participation in the upbringing of the children they had produced. If they did not hand the job over to hired help under their own roof, they packed the child off to a boarding school and saw it every few months. It seemed a choice between seduction by Julie in the Avenue Foch or by Joanne in the bracing ozone of the Sussex coast.
As a final inducement to our fictional hero, Sir Harry mentions that for the first month of Bernard's stay, he will have to look after the two sisters without the aid of Joanne. The day after Bernard's arrival, the young governess will be travelling to the Scottish island on which Sir Harry lives, there to report on the progress of the two girls and to take a short holiday. From the tone of Sir Harry's account, the reader guesses that something very unusual is going to happen to Joanne on that island and that she is most un-likely to be seen at Beechy Lodge again.
To a modern reader it is interesting how the claustrophobia of the family's sexuality led so often to plots involving two sisters or a man and his teenage daughter or even a young woman and her daughter-let alone cousins and nieces. Adolescent sisters like Sally and Jane Fenton run the gamut of lecherous magistrates and reformatory masters, as does a working woman like Pauline Cox and her tomboy daughter Elaine. To undress and command such a pair together gave a thrill of anticipation that was peculiar to the age. So the prospect of having Sharon and Vicky together tickles the fancy of the urbane gentleman, Bernard. In no time at all he regales Julie with the details of his first adventure.
You can easily imagine that I had some misgivings and a few pangs of excitement at the thought of becoming guardian for the summer to two adolescent sisters and their young governess, upon whom I had never set eyes. I knew little more than that they were Sharon, who was sixteen years old, and Victoria who was fourteen. You, my dear friend, have had too much to do with nymphs of sixteen like Judith Terry or little blonde vamps like Linda Jennings at fourteen to be in any ignorance over such things.
A pair of "difficult" sisters at that age can combine together to make life extremely disagreeable for the adult who has charge of them. Or, what is even worse, they may hate one another with great intensity and sour the very air by their jealousy and cat-fighting. What was more, I was for a time to have sole charge of them. Their governess Joanne, an active and well-exercised young Amazon nearer thirty than twenty years old, was to take her vacation at Sir Harry's lodge on the western island of Dungale. He implored me as a friend, on behalf of the colonel and his lady whose wards they were, to guard the girls during Joanne's leave of absence.
I looked forward to my weeks of summer. Before it was over I should take the sisters to join Sir Harry and Joanne at his island retreat. But the first month was to be spent in a fine house that stood on the cliff at Fairbourne, fronting the sea with the downland rising on one side and the long expanse of gardens and promenade running to the pier on the other.
I knew, of course, that the colonial ruler and his lady at Helpmakaar required constant reports and reassurance as to the health and moral progress of their two wards. I hoped to oblige them in this. But whatever the outcome, I should have finished my time as custodian of Sharon and Victoria almost before the first post to the Cape could reach the gallant officer.
To tell you the truth, I was rather intrigued by the regime Miss Joanne had imposed upon the two teenage girls. You know, I am sure, that all governesses are "miss," whether they have been married or not. To be sure I never saw Joanne wear a wedding ring. However, such a buxom and healthy young creature probably warmed a man's bed for him in her student days and perhaps even as a young teacher. Yet there was also something about her which suggested that the preference of this lithe young Amazon was for her own sex.
Beechy Lodge, to give the house its name, stands at the upper end of the esplanade at Fairbourne. One is driven from the station past the pavilioned pier with the sunlit tide sparkling about its iron supports. There is a view of the sand below the shingle where children play and swim-suited girls romp together. Then along the elegant promenade with its sky-blue rails we came to the bandstand in its little cover, where the Coldstreams or the Grenadiers were playing Strauss and Sousa on shining brass. The upper end of the marine drive is steep enough to have cliff walks running down to the shore through yellow broom and pink tamarisk.
Beechy Lodge begins that area of Edwardian villas where all is spacious and expensive, mellow red brick and cream-painted gables. The houses are set well apart, some with little corner towers and others with pretty gothic conservatories and ample lawns kept smooth and trim as green baize.
Well, I met Joanne soon enough. She is not yet thirty years old, rather more than medium height, her figure kept trim by riding and bicycle exercise.
You would, I am sure, approve her looks. An energetic fair-skinned damsel with such clear-cut features and well-set blue eyes, wide cheekbones and demure chin, always attracts attention. Joanne's face has a healthily rounded look, which comes from the wider cheekbones and the narrower chin, as well as her fine condition. That afternoon, she was somewhat 'en deshabile', for her fair tresses that cluster round her head and just overlap her collar had not been put up but were parted on her forehead and worn loose to brush her shoulders. She affects a modern style in such casual details but in the evenings she will put her fair hair up in the most coquettish topknot, just like a little girl going primly to her first dancing-class!
We talked pleasantly of Fairbourne and the weather. The drawing-room at Beechy Lodge is a study in Chinese porcelain and silks, settees in the Egyptian style and inlaid tables. Its windows offer a fine view across the glinting waves to the lightship on the horizon. Joanne explained that Sharon and Victoria were out riding on the downland in company with the stable-girl, Tania Jenkins, as their chaperone. The young governess herself would have gone but she thought it polite to stay and welcome me. She would remain two more days to see me settled in, and then depart for her vacation in the Scottish isles.
My impatience grew to see Sharon and Victoria. Meantime, I looked slyly at the face and figure of my companion. Had I been given a free hand, I could have enjoyed myself greatly with such a trim and appealing young Amazon. It seemed a shame to waste the warm hours of the afternoon. How much better to lead her upstairs, put her over the bed, take down Joanne Taylor's knickers and fondle her to an excruciating release of desire! But it was best to be prudent. I reserved my attention for the two sisters who were to be under my supervision.
It was past four o'clock. The maid had cleared away the tea cups, the remains of the cucumber sandwiches and the little cakes. At last I heard the sound of hooves on the gravel drive, slow and irregular as if horses were being reined in. Joanne excused herself and went out, leaving me to watch from the window. What do you suppose I saw?
Sharon and Victoria were dressed for their outing in white blouses and the skin-smooth fit of jeans which reveal a girl's figure as alluring as ballet-tights. There was no mistaking which of my pupils was which, for Sharon was a softer look at sixteen. Victoria, as yet, appears a tighter and more agile little imp. But the likeness of their looks showed without doubt that they were sisters. Of course Sharon, being the elder, was more to my taste.
Like her younger sister she has a firmness of chin and profile, a clam and self-possessed beauty in the oval of her youthful face. Though Sharon's is the paler complexion and Vicky the sun-kissed child of nature, they have a perfection to make you sigh. Their brown eyes give you an enigmatic and quizzical look, something almost eastern about them like the sly harem odalisque. Yet Sharon's gaze is calm and indifferent, while Victoria's is fierce and intense, her lashes dark as if the little monkey had used Joanne's mascara brush on them!
Sharon's lightly-waved and silky brown hair is worn loose like a veil to frame her face, parted on her forehead and lying in a luxuriant and rounded sweep down her back. Miss Victoria's bold young face is also framed and fringed but in her case the little hoyden looks as if someone had put a basin over her head and trimmed her straight brown hair round an inch or two above her collar. It is certainly young Victoria who appears the tomboy of the pair, while Sharon is already the paler and more languid sensualist.
In personality, they share the same self-possessed and indifferent attitude to the adult world, like sisters who have been brought up in affluence but not cured of wilfulness. Sharon is quiet and self-obsessed, self-loving and secretly indulgent of her own vices. You would recognise her as a brooding, self-absorbed girl with her quiet brown eyes and the heavy silken slant of her brown hair across her forehead. I think Sharon probably makes love to herself a good deal or at least spends languid hours of self-caressing in bed or in the bath. Victoria is a harder little minx, vivacious at times but equally given to spurning affection in a mood of adolescent independence. She will shrug off a kiss or a hug and turn her face silently away.
I watched them dismount and made a private study of their figures. As you would expect, the blouse and jeans showed Victoria to have the taut, unfledged thighs and hips of girl hardly at the threshold of womanhood. What an advantage two more years have given to her elder sister! Sharon is almost a young woman who has not quite shed the last sheen of her adolescent puppy-flesh. As they dismounted, I took a survey of her sixteen-year-old figure in the smooth tautness of her jeans. Sharon's thighs are quite long and firm but not with the slender grace of a nymph. I raised my eyes and studied the firm pale oval of her face and the enigmatical indifference of her brown eyes for so long that she pointedly turned away from me.
This was no great hardship, for her rear view has something to recommend it. The sleek and silken spread of brown hair down her back, long enough to cover her shoulder-blades, has a strongly sensuous appeal. As for her figure, Sharon likes to wear jeans that are smooth and tight-fitting, perhaps enjoying the friction of the seam between her legs as she walks. The light blue jeans-cloth was drawn into little sheaves of wrinkles behind her knees by its tightness. Several more creases gathered across the back of each thigh at the top, from the rear opening of Sharon's legs.
I look forward to the chance of making this moody sixteen-year-old bend over, for the sight would be extremely provoking. At present she has certainly not lost that puppy softness which gathers round a girl's hips and seat at adolescence. There is a full soft swell to the cheeks of Sharon's bottom. I was so pleased that she and her younger sister had honoured my arrival by wearing such tight riding-pants. They stood together, the tight unfledged rounds of Victoria's pretty little buttocks in their tense immaturity and the fatter softer delights of Sharon's bottom-cheeks, which shimmer a little with the impact of jumping down from her horse.
Would you like to have such a pair of exciting pupils at your disposal, my dear Julie?
There was a pause while Joanne gave instructions to the stable-maid. During this, Sharon stood to one side, idle and thoughtful, staring out to sea, away from me. It was Victoria who lay over the fence-rail, swung herself about, turning over and over it, as if used to perform such acrobatics in a gymnasium. The red singlet and the tight blue pants were well-suited to the bending and rounding of her body over the rail. I doubt if Victoria will want to display herself so suggestively when she becomes a self-conscious young lady. As the basin-crop of her brown hair went down over the rail, her straight slim thighs opened alluringly and those pretty little cheeks of Victoria's bottom were drawn apart in a manner that would provide a remarkable view of her if she were naked!
I must tell you one thing, Julie, before I forget. I would not trust that stable-girl as a chaperone for all the tea in China! At nineteen or twenty years old, Tania Jenkins might be a sly pretty creature, but for the common look of her class. She has that bold and smiling air, the lashes of the blue eyes darkened and the eyebrows well pencilled or painted. Her face shows a fine-boned modeling. This young blonde's hair, though softly and casually styled, is allowed to stray here and there in a deliberately coquettish manner. And to see her lithe young thighs in tight leather riding pants, the young vamp lounging slack-hipped as she stood there! She left little to the imagination. You would need little persuasion to put her over the bed and to take down Tania Jenkin's knickers for her. I knew that I should have to keep my eye upon this young slut.
The two sisters were brought in and introduced to me. I cannot say they were discourteous but their replies were of the most minimal kind. They gave an impression of adolescent clannishness. They had built a private world of their own and resented the approach of an adult to that secret place.
I was not reassured on further acquaintance. That evening and the day which followed brought me no closer to them. Miss Joanne was to leave next morning and I anticipated a month of this teenage silence and resentment. But they did not treat Joanne with quite such indifference, which made me all the more certain that my arrival had brought on their grudging and inward-looking manner.
That night I retired to my room. There are three fine bedrooms in a row, with bathrooms attached, looking out upon that same channel view which the drawing-room offered. A verandah runs along outside and would have afforded a pleasant walk or a place to muse from as the moon caught the waves of the dark tide with a glitter of pale phosphorous. I thought it would be agreeable to step out there for half an hour and air my thoughts. It could give no offence to Joanne in the farther room nor to the girls in the room between us. Curtains would be closed by this time and, in any case, I intended only to stand at the rail outside my own window.
In pursuit of this, I tried the handle of the French window and to my surprise found it locked. Now this was curious. I saw no reason for it and, moreover, it was unwise. Suppose a fire or some emergency arose! A fine thing to discover that there was no alternative means of escape by such a route! Well, there was no key and that was that. And yet when one locks a window like this to prevent the present occupant of the room using it, the question is where to put the key so that it may easily be remembered and found. In my experience the answer is generally to lodge it upon some inconspicuous ledge or hiding place within the room itself. I began a quiet search. It was less than five minutes before my fingers felt a promising shape on the groove above the picture-rail not a foot from the main door of the room. Anyone who knew where it was could retrieve it in a couple of seconds. The French window opened softly and easily. And so I was able to take the warm summer air of the early night.
I stood in the fragrance of jasmin and honeysuckle rising from the garden alleys below me. I watched the arm of the lightship beam diminish to a dot, then burst out and swing across the quiescent sea. A distant music came faintly from the pier on the bandstand. From the windows of the other bedrooms diagonals of brightness slanted across the verandah and faded in the shadows of the wide lawns and shrubberies. I had no intention of spying, but where is the harm in peeping in upon two teenage girls who are to be under one's absolute supervision within a few hours in any case? Moreover, the attempt to prevent my walking on the verandah made me think it poetic justice that I should see what they had taken such pains to hide from me!
I meant no more than that but, none the less, I walked solftly until I was level with their window. Sharon and Victoria-the two young wantons!-had not even the grace to close their bedroom curtains. I suppose they thought that, since no one could reach the verandah to peep in at them, there was not a pair of eyes between here and France.
Let me tell you what I saw, without a word of a lie. Between Joanne's bedroom and that in which the two sisters slept, there is the usual master-bathroom that may be entered by a door from either side.
Joanne was standing on the threshold with both doors closed. The fair hair was still pinned up in its topknot, revealing her rounded and firm-featured face whose expression was every bit that of the correct but passionate mistress. She was dressed in a blouse and a pair of thin skin-tight black bicycling pants from waist to heels that had the gloss of sealskin.
She was watching Sharon who stood before her, undressing. The girl had taken off her jeans and was pulling down her knickers. Sharon's panties were the snug-fitting cotton-briefs favoured by most girls of her age. She slipped them off and stood naked before her mistress, a vision of pearl-tinted nudity.
"Lie on the marble surface, Sharon," Joanne was saying imperiously with the twang of the teacher in her voice. "I must sponge you properly, must I not?"
From the tone of her words, it was hard to say whether Joanne or Sharon herself was the instigator of this. Sharon made no protest, though she lowered her face a little as if in submission to higher authority, as she walked across to the marble massage-surface that ran along by the far wall. The singlet-hem ended at her waist, so that her hips and legs were properly bare with no intruding blouse-trail trailing half-way down the pallid and lightly fattened cheeks of Sharon's arse.
It was well worth waiting to see Sharon in this state. The pale firm-set oval of her face and the veil of her sleek brown hair made her like some junior figure of mythology. Her fair-skinned thighs had just a little hint of weight in their voluptuousness. If the pale cheeks of Sharon's bottom are a trifle heavy for a girl of sixteen, this also serves to give her a provokingly voluptuous look from the rear. As she turned with her eyes demurely downcast she did not know that I was watching her and yet, she seemed almost to be directing my gaze to the pale sheen of her young belly and the lightly-haired triangle at her loins, which only half-concealed the path of sexual delight.
Sharon clambered on to the marble surface, showing a splendid rear view as she did so. She lay down quietly and passively on her side with her face towards the wall, perhaps to conceal from the mistress the torment of pleasure reflected in her face. Joanne took a jar of perfumed soap-cream and at the same time leant over the girl. Sharon's veil of brown hair shifted as she turned her face to Joanne. The young woman touched her lips to the girl's mouth and began to kiss her lingeringly and passionately. Sharon squirmed round a little and clasped her arms about Joanne's neck, clinging to her and drinking in the dew of Joanne's kisses.
As soon as Joanne had finished kissing her, Sharon turned on her side with her back to the young woman again, settled down and waited. Joanne dug her fingers deep into the jar of pale soap-cream. She massaged it over Sharon's young belly and into the hair that grew in the triangle of the girl's loins. She took more and spread it in a shining gloss down the adolescent thighs, up their inner surfaces and down their backs. A third time she began, spreading the perfumed cream over the soft pallor of Sharon's bottom-cheeks and then parting them to soap the warm forbidden crack between them. In a moment more, the fair-skinned beauty of Sharon's nakedness shone .wet and sleek from her waist to her knees.
Stooping over the girl, Joanne took a firm hold with one arm, the fingers of which slid between the girl's thighs at the front. Under the pretext of ensuring cleanliness in such intimate areas, the mistress began to masturbate Sharon slyly and soapily with far more skill than a boy of Sharon's own age would ever possess.
I could see Sharon tensing and shifting under the caress, her face was half turned now, showing that her lips were parted and her eyes, though fluttering a little were closed most of the time in a dream of bliss. She made little sounds, almost as if her breath caught in her throat with alarm. Joanne smiled privately to herself. She dipped the forefinger of her other hand in the soap cream and spoke softly and lovingly to the girl.
"Now that fat young bottom, Sharon! Arch it out a little."
Sharon shifted her hips a little and obeyed. While continuing to masturbate her artfully, Joanne inserted the soaped finger gently into Sharon's anus. She skid it in to the knuckle and kept it there. Sharon's arsehold was to be held open upon the finger throughout the masturbation. She was to be taught every sensation to which her young body might thrill.
For quite twenty minutes Joanne continued to tease and tickle and rouse the sex of her pupil. For the last five of these minutes, Sharon twisted her face round, hung about Joanne's neck and tried to suck Joanne's tongue into her own mouth with the frenzy of her kisses. From time to time, I heard her plaintive muffled little cries, "Oh, Jo' ... Oh, Jo' darling! ... Please! ... Oh, please!"
What she was pleading for I did not understand until Joanne's mood suddenly changed. She removed her hand from between Sharon's legs to the accompaniment of the girl's questioning and forlorn little cry. She drew her finger cautiously from Sharon's bottom, wiped the girl over in the most business-like way and dismissed her.
"We shall get you into bad habits, Sharon, if we indulge you too long in such things."
This abrupt interruption of the masturbation, just as Sharon was approaching fulfilment, may seem curious and cruel. In truth it is both, but not without reason. Under the cool pretence of the teacher, Joanne is a lascivious young bitch! She had stopped short-but her object was achieved. Sharon would crawl into bed and make passionate love to herself. Instead of being finished quickly by Joanne there and then, Sharon must squirm and fret and shudder a good part of the night under the caresses of her own fingers. Had she been masturbated by Joanne, the girl might shrug off the moral responsibility. This way, she would become an accomplice in her own seduction and depravity, for her addiction to the pleasure would be partly of her own making. Sharon would never complain to Sir Harry or anyone else of what was done to her every night on the massage table, for she would not want to complain! I have often thought that the moody and self-absorbed attitude which girls like Sharon display to the world is the outward and daily sign of their private passion for self-love and masturbation. In that case, I am compelled to conclude that young Victoria has already begun her own self-indulgence.
And yet nothing had happened in that room that you might not have found in thousands of others all over England. A governess had given her pupil a good soaping when the girl seemed disinclined to do it for herself. She had ensured that Sharon's nooks and crannies were as clean as her curves and slopes. Had I gone to the girls' guardian and complained, I could not have produced a shred of proof that Joanne had acted other than as a loving adult. What else I saw was surely the product of my own inflamed imaginings.
You see, my dear friend? Everything was quite in order at Beechy Lodge that night.
But wait! I had not quite done.
I did not know whether Victoria with her fierce dark eyes and her tightly rounded little buttocks had yet been in Joanne's hands. If not, she soon would be. But stepping back from the bathroom window and coming level with that of the sisters' bedroom, I saw the most delicious sight. There was Victoria with her face hidden and only the plain crop of her brown hair visible. For the little imp was kneeling intently, her eye adjusted to the keyhole of the bathroom door. I wonder if Sharon guesses how many people shared the spectacle of her masturbation that night?
I was greatly looking forward to my weeks of authority over Sharon and Victoria. You would not believe me if I told you otherwise! But for the time being, it was Joanne who held my attention as I watched her through the window. I did not doubt that what she had just done to Sharon must have had a profoundly excitingly effect on the young governess herself.
As the beam of the lightship swung across the glitter of wavelets, the dark shrubbery and moonlit lawn, I drew close and looked. Joanne was standing before the long mirror admiring herself in the pants like shiny black tights and the tunic-blouse. Her figure has that tautly muscled maturity that can make a woman of her age truly appealing. She had unpinned her hair but now she held it up in place with one hand, turning her face this way and that so that she might see herself at her most coquettish. She took her hand away and the fair tresses straggled loose about her head lapping over her collar. Her blue eyes were steady and self-mocking as she faced the glass. The firm beauty of her face seemed inspired by excitement, lips parted a little and nostrils perceptibly flared as if with passion.
But of all things it was the frame of an exercise-bicycle in the bathroom to which she now turned her attention. I almost burst out laughing, Julie, for it seemed so incongruous. Yet Joanne got astride its narrow wedge-shaped saddle and then had to lean right forward, for it is one of those racing-models with low handles. I confess, watching from behind her, that the sight of Joanne Taylor's backside broadly spread and cheeks parted by the saddle is a provoking one. Her lightly muscled legs began to work the pedals in long and easy plunges. Her rear cheeks writhed and rounded and tightened and squirmed upon the saddle. Presently it was impossible to ignore the obvious. With vigour and passion, Joanne was loving that leather wedge of saddle between her legs. How could she not, for it was so placed and so shaped that her least movement set up a friction between it and her most sexually sensitive flesh?
But a bicycle is hardly a cure for love-even among a nation like the English! Presently Joanne's bottom rose a little from the saddle as she tried to settle herself again, a pair of Amazonian bum-cheeks surging and contorting in her shiny black pants. I smiled and vowed to give her something to remember! She was breathing audibly with exertion, the collar length tresses of her fair hair disordered and the parted fringe of it laying askew. One pitied the young woman, for she wanted more than the saddle could provide.
Or so I thought a first. In a moment more, something curious happened, enough to convince me that Joanne had merely been warming herself up for her lover. But who was her lover? I half expected Sir Harry to step out from a cupboard, Julie, and show her his fine old erection. Let me not keep you in suspense, for by now I had a pressure that was bursting to find release in her womb, in her mouth or even to spill its lust over the bare pallor of Joanne's bottom-cheeks.
But at this moment she dismounted, turned out the light, and left the bathroom. Now I saw her through the window of her own boudoir. She took off the blouse and the long shiny pants, dressing herself in the most frivolous and almost absurd night attire for a mature young woman. There was a black gauze-like top whose frilled hem came down just to the small of her back. And there were French panties of the same black material, worn tight and sleek over her loins and the fine firm well of Joanne's backside. I knew without question that she was preparing herself for a visit.
I was engrossed in admiring her resilient young breasts, her firm and proud hips and thighs-and I wondered how the assignation had been planned. To my surprise she came towards the open window, held up a lamp, and moved it to and fro. You would have thought she was signaling to someone out at sea.
As she turned away I looked across the lawn towards the stables and saw a movement. Someone was approaching. I caught a glimpse of blonde hair and just made out that it was Tania! But I had done enough watching for one evening and wished to be a participant in the drama. As Tania came closer I moved into the light. The young tart looked up and saw me. She hesitated and then drew back into the shadows. I remained there, staring down at her. The young bitch knew she was discovered by a third party and slunk away.
Joanne, in the half-lit room, lay down on the bed in her lace top and knickers to await her lady-lover. She had turned over with her back towards me. I could not see her face or her hands but it was plain what she was doing. In the thin black silk of her tight panties, the firmly mature cheeks of Joanne Taylor's bottom were clenching and swelling alternately in a languorous rhythm. Her tautly muscled thighs writhed and whispered together. As she had done for sixteen-year-old Sharon, so she did for herself. Joanne made a bicycle-saddle of her fingers and hand this time-and with greater effect. She laboured with her thighs and squirmed her hips as if trying to ride up a very steep hill. If you were to enjoy a rear view of her in tight pants on a bicycle, leaning forward and driving the pedals with great effort, that was how she looked now. She raised her head once and I saw that the fair tresses were in charming disorder about her face as she laboured breathlessly at her task.
Having warned off Tania, I determined to make the most of Joanne's last night under the same roof as I. She had no idea, of course, that Tania was in retreat. As quietly as I could, I went back through my own room and on to the landing, then along to the other door. A young woman of twenty-five or thirty knows too much about herself to pretend to maiden modesty in such a situation-and is it proved to be with Joanne. As I opened her door gently, she naturally supposed it was Tania. I turned down the light before she looked round. She was lying in the same position but had controlled her thigh squeezing and buttock writhing a little. Like many a young woman who is no longer ashamed of doing it to herself, I think Joanne masturbated regularly on these occasions to get herself in the mood for what was to come. I suppose she is probably still too shy to do it in front of her lover. But there is a certain Scottish island where such reticence will not be tolerated!
Indeed, there was a reserve about her now, for she did not turn over and embrace at once but waited as if to feel what her partner would do. She did not doubt that it must be randy young Tania Jenkins. Who else could it be? I slid on to the bed beside her-or rather behind her. I brushed her fair tresses clear and began to kiss her neck and shoulders. At the same time I reached over and drew away her own motionless hand from between her legs. I felt her ease her thighs apart a little to admit my fingers. She shuddered with pleasure and sighed at the first stroking, for the thin black silk of her knickers just there was already moist with her own dew. As I reached for the elastic waistband, Joanne raised her hips to have her pants taken down properly. I was happy to oblige her in this and also lifted the filmy black top so that I might fondle her breasts. To be sure, the nipples were already hard with anticipation.
The body of a mature young woman is the most reliable evidence of her character. I caressed her lithe and agile thighs, one hand still stroking and tickling her between them. I fondled the firm cheek-swell of Joanne's bare bottom. As my fingers slipped between and touched her anus, the tousled young hypocrite tightened against me. Despite her treatment of Sharon, I think Joanne has never had it done to her there. Fortunately she does not know Sir Harry's motive in inviting her to his domain for several weeks. He will cure Joanne's prudishness over such things! How one would like to witness her initiation....
I decided that I must bring Joanne to the first of several climaxes I had now planned for her that night. My subterfuge would not last for ever. The young governess must be thoroughly compromised. Pressing her over a little more, I rubbed and squeezed, stroked and tickled. Joanne worked her bare hips vigorously. I am sure she would have had her orgasm even had I kept my hand still. I drew the pillow close for her to muffle her cries, so that the two girls in the other room should not hear her. Our young teacher stuffed the corner of the pillow in her mouth and bit upon it. I heard the tiny stifled squeals, so like a little girl of twelve or thirteen rather than a calm beauty of quite twice that age. Joanne came with all the abandon of her healthy young limbs and loins. Then she lay still-and then, at last, turned so that we might fall into each other's arms.
It was at that point that the trick was revealed. She looked at me with eyes so startled under the disordered fringe of her fair hair. She would have sprung from me but I held her fast, put a finger to my lips to hush her, and pointed to the nearby room where Sharon and Victoria would hear any outburst that she made. To put the matter beyond all argument, my fingers were already stroking and rousing her sex all over again. I cannot stress too often that one must pick one's partner with care on these occasions. Even if she is not married, a young woman of such maturity who has been well-exercised on the male staff will not scream with horror at casual masturbation by a comparative stranger, as a nymph of sixteen or seventeen would do.
The look of doubt was scarcely more than a flicker upon Joanne's face. She is an educated young woman and needs no false modesty about her sensual appetites. I stroked clear the fringe of her tousled fair hair and kissed her upon the forehead, to which chaste salute she could not reasonably object. I held her by the chin and kissed her lips, forcing them with my tongue and tasting the moist softness of Joanne's mouth.
She tensed at this-but relaxed again almost at once. I think the young bitch had decided at that moment to surrender herself to enjoyment with a stranger whom she never expected to see again after that night. She could give full rein to her sensual fancies without fear of having to meet the smiling gaze of her lover a day or two later and be reminded of the vulgarity and lewdness of her acts.
"Lie over, Joanne," I murmured coaxingly, "My hand shall slip between the front of your legs and caress you. And my other hand ... You have a firm full backside like a Spartan soldier-girl-haven't you Joanne darling? Ah, you do like to be stroked between its cheeks after all, you little fraud!"
I fondled her as before but this time, in mid-career, I guided her to turn turtle so that we lay head to tail. Joanne was gratefully doing to me all that I did to her. However, it was good to have a close and intimate view of her loins and thighs, her sex and her arse, while my fingers worked upon her.
I suppose she would have pretended shock and modesty, had I permitted it. But it would have been only pretence. She likes herself a good deal, loves to be in tight pants with the saddle between her thighs, and gets up to all sorts of mischief on her own. Sir Harry will be absolutely implacable with her-and I think the young woman may secretly enjoy it. In a week or two she will have ridden the rude male sex more often than a leather saddle. The same intruder will have stretched Joanne's anus wider than she would presently think possible. And the teacher must become a pupil again, of course. One may even expect to see that muddy bruises of a sound caning on the proud fair-skinned swell of Joanne Taylor's bottom-cheeks. The young wench is well able to take it and may perhaps feel pleased with herself at being able to endure such a proof of her womanhood.
All this inspired me to intense stimulation of her sex and her rear cleft, as well as to kiss and fondle the firmly-muscled grace of her thighs. What a shudder and groan as she came a second time! It was hardly midnight but she vowed I had quite exhausted her-and she must be up early in the morning for her journey to Scotland.
I could not grudge her a little sleep but you may be sure I did not volunteer to leave her bed as we lay close together on the silk covers. She fell into a profound and motionless slumber almost at once, breathing steadily and deeply while I feasted my eyes on those little Amazonian legs and arse-cheeks. No doubt, my dear Julie, you have chanced on frisky photographs of bathing beauties or model girls and felt some excitement. Joanne offered more than they for she was a living picture and one was able to inhale the feminine musk of her loins and backside in the warm night.
At length, from somewhere in the town, a distant clock struck two. It was time to coax her to have it again, I thought. Gently I stroked the rear of her bare thighs and the cool smoothness of her bottom-cheeks. Joanne stirred and made a little sleepy sound of protest. I fondled the soft fleece of her sex between her legs and she squirmed tightly on my fingers, glad to be woken, now! She turned, so that our arms slid about each other's nakedness. I murmured lascivious admiration in her ear and teased her about the randy longings I vowed she had muttered in her seep. She giggled at this like a naughty little schoolgirl and I smacked her bottom lightly as if to reprimand her.
Then it was time to be serious. I worked her to a pitch of arousal that permitted no going back. And then I brought her over the crest of desire and down into a shuddering release. I fear the two sisters in the next room would have heard Joanne cry out with the intensity of her orgasm, had she not once again crammed the corner of the pillow into her mouth.
She slept very clamly. I woke her to have it again just before dawn, with the same success. Then I confess, Morpheus laid hold of me. But, just before the servants stirred, it was Joanne who whispered in my ear to wake me. This time I needed to use no persuasion upon her. She was begging me to do it to her just once more before we must part. In the morning light with the disordered tresses about her face and the fringe making her eyes so beseeching, she was desperate for it. This time I saw something I had never witnessed before. Joanne's climax seemed to set off another, and then another. She came, I think, three times in succession, during which I held her writhing nakedness tight for fear she might roll from the bed in her ecstasy. I smothered her shrillness with my own lips upon hers and my tongue in her mouth as gag-Thereafter, I withdrew to my own bed. Before I did so, we vowed our love for one another and promised to write every day. We made plans to meet secretly, if necessary in a hotel somewhere and spend every night together that we could. I woke late the next morning and found that she had already taken her departure for Scotland an hour or two in advance of the time arranged. Alas, the reality of daylight made Joanne reflect with blushes and dismay on what she had done in bed. Rather than have to meet my gaze, she had fled to Sir Harry. Little does she know what awaits for her on that Scottish island with its remote and rugged splendour!
So I was left master of Beechy Lodge and its inhabitants. For a day or two there was that awkwardness one finds between strangers thrown together in such a situation. The behavior of Sharon and Victoria made it all the worse. I could not exactly accuse them of impudence-much better had they been so. What was it then? If I knew that, I might set up as an authority upon the manner of dealing with awkward adolescent girls.
There are times in any household-are there not?-when one feels such tensions and knows that they are the oppressive heat before the storm breaks. There had to be a crisis and a resolution of it before we could live together in harmony. Sharon and Victoria were like two girls overwrought, as Sharon had been after Joanne finished fondling her. They would be impossible companions until their frustrations had been relieved. Sometimes that storm will break in a soft flow of love. Sometimes female adolescence, overwrought as Sharon and Victoria, needs a good weep to relieve its fretting and sulky moods.
One does not deal with girls of fourteen or sixteen as if they are full-grown women. They are neither one thing nor the other-or rather they can sometimes act with womanly wisdom and sometimes with childish temper. Even with a young woman of Joanne's sexual maturity, one has occasionally to treat her as a little girl, in order to put her in her place! How much more was this true of Sharon and Vicky!
So I waited and watched. From the very first I had mistrusted that common young slut Tania Jenkins. I did not altogether like the sound of the afternoon rides under her chaperonage. It took me a day or two before I learnt the route of their equestrian rambles. And then I became a spy once more, in the cause of decorum and decency.
There was a point upon the downland bridleway where the three of them passed through a small wood and did not emerge again until long after the expected time. Well, let us not make a great adventure of it, my dear friend. I had only to walk through there to find something of the sort I had anticipated. Tania was holding two of the horses. Victoria stood by with her own mount, looking thoughtful and disconsolate. A little distance off, screened from the others by thin foilage, Sharon stood in fitful but earnest conversation with a boy of about her own age.
The very thing that the good Colonel Lennox and his lady most feared! I do not think the lad had had his hand in Sharon's knickers yet-but it could only be a question of time, for he would naturally want to fondle her bare arse and the soft warmth between her legs while he kissed her.
As soon as they returned, I began by confronting Tania with her betrayal of trust. She stood before me quite unrepentant, the blue eyes narrowed knowingly and almost smiling, the brows and lashes skillfully darkened, the high-boned prettiness of her face teasing and lascivious. I put a stop to that by informing her that she would present herself to me after dinner that evening in my room and that she could expect to be birched.
I was in some anger with her just then. That evening, at half-past eight, there came a light tap at the door. It was Tania, who had had come quite willingly to receive retribution. She said nothing but stood there in the same lewdly smiling manner stroking back a wisp or two of the blond hair that strayed over her cheek.
I directed her to the table and told her to bend forward over it. She was wearing a short waist-length jacket and a pair of close-fitting trousers in sleek black leather. You know I am no fetishist, Julie, but the sight of the oval nymph-like cheeks of Tania Jenkin's bottom filling out the shiny black leather was powerfully stimulating. What was more, as she bent she looked round at me with the same high-boned cheekiness and began to undo herself. As if wishing to assist in her own punishment, she pushed the leather trousers down until they fell to her ankles and revealed that she was bare underneath. She murmured to me that she had left her panties off deliberately, so that I would find her ready for the birch as soon as I took down her leather trousers. She did not expect that I would allow her to wear her cotton briefs for the discipline and in any case, Tania whispered, she was more excited by the thought of having her bottom bare for it.
Did you ever hear the like, my dear Julie? By now the front of my trousers had grown uncomfortably tight. Tania Jenkins may be an impudent young slut but she was damnably provoking in that posture. As I approached and stood close behind her she still watched me with those sly blue eyes under their darkened lashes. Without a word, she reached back with one hand and drew out my stiffened manhood. She manualised it up and down several times and then at once introduced it between the rear of her graceful thighs. In no time at all I felt myself warmly engulfed in her sex which was already moist, either from natural excitement at her situation or by her own playing with herself.
There was an end of spanking her-which is no doubt what the little minx hoped. Tania bent over the table and closed her legs tight together, holding me prisoner completely. I steadied her by the bare cool flanks of her hips and began to move in and out, and in and out again. There came a dangerous moment when I feared the spout would overflow in her belly, for I had no wish to sire a new generation by her. The girl sensed it easily. She drew me gently from her and laid the length of my stiffness along her arse-valley so that her buttocks pressed it on either side. She lay on her belly over the table and I lay on top of her in this fashion. When the moment came the spouting flood of sperm was safely released between the nymph-like cheeks of Tania Jenkin's bottom, soaking her to an extent that made her gasp with wonder and sigh with gratitude. Much of this was play-acted by her, I do not doubt. And yet I greatly enjoyed her. She lay a moment. Then undeterred she slid to her knees before me, took the limp serpent in her mouth and began to exercise upon it the restoring powers of her lips and tongue.
Morning found her lying naked over the covers of my bed. I marveled at the lewd and eager passions that possessed her. One might make something of Tania, I promise you that! I had now had experience of both parties in the grand lesbian love-affair, Joanne Taylor and Tania Jenkins. It was, you may say, instructive. From Joanne's love-making I deduced Tania's lewdness. And from Tania's amorous ways I learnt much of Joanne's more decorous yearnings. Joanne had liked to keep her knickers on during fondling and caressing-I had cured her of that! Not so Tania who stripped herself eagerly as she bent before me. Joanne was almost ten years the elder, I suppose, and yet forbad certain vulgar intimacies. Tania would reach back and spread herself with her own hands for you to admire her most secret charms.
I resolved privately that I must have both these creatures, the self-possessed young Amazon and the randy stable-maid, in my possession. If necessary I would share them with Sir Harry. Once Joanne and Tania, as well as the two teenage sisters, were safely and securely lodged in his island fastness, we should enjoy a month of the most exhilarating pleasures with the four of them.
But there was a prior engagement, in the matter of Sharon. By consorting with the boy, whoever he was, Sharon was guilty of betraying my trust and Vicky of aiding her. But it was Sharon who must be called to account. .
Next morning, in ominous tones, I informed her that she would not go riding as usual in the afternoon. When the others had gone out, she was to come to my room and learn the price to be paid for her wanton misconduct. She received the news with the indifference of adolescent contempt for her elders, still moody and self-absorbed as ever. For my own part, I could scarcely wait for the hours to pass.
I daresay you hear my very tone of voice as I spoke those words to Sharon, my dear Julie. What a humbug you must think me, for my eyes wandered over the beautiful sweep of her silken brown hair and the firm pale oval of her face, the long taut thighs and the soft weight of Sharon's bottom-cheeks in her smooth tight jeans.
And yet wait before you pass judgment. Wait, at least, until you have heard the sequel.
2
STROLLING ON THE PROM
The seaside in Sweet Dreams is a sensualist's delight. To most men and women, it is a haven for the seasonal frivolities of the esplanade, the men in their striped blazers and straw hats, the women in summer frocks of a butterfly elegance. At all times, in novels of the gilded age of love and lust, it must be a place of sunshine and warm breezes, with its ornamental bandstands and piers, those oriental pleasure-palaces jutting into the glittering tide of spindly iron legs. The only vessels to be seen are little steamers-known for obvious reasons as "shilling sickers"-which take their passengers on cruises for a few hours or even across the English Channel to Boulogne for lunch.
Most of all it is a place for encounters and romance. It offers promenades and shrubberies, warm sands by day and coloured lights after dark. There are peep-show machines called "What the Butler Saw," which suggest that most butlers spend their time at keyholes, watching the girls of the house taking their clothes off and bathing. There are paper hats with mottoes like "Kiss me Quick" or "All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor." As novels like Villa Rif insist, the seaside begins in the first warm days of May and ends with the storms of September. In the dark gales of winter, it ceases to exist.
Outside the gaily-painted little kiosks that sell toffee-apples and pink candy-and even copies of La Vie Parisienne-there are racks of cartoon postcards. In the sexual caricatures, women with enormous bottoms and red noses exchange pop-eyed innuendo with men encumbered by potbellies and heads bald as boiled eggs. Knickers and chamberpots, honeymoon predicaments and children's innocence make up the stock-in-trade. A little boy, red-faced, clutches the front of his pants. "I only tried to blow his whistle," says the little girl wistfully. A uniformed policeman surprises a young couple behind a bush. "Excuse me, miss," says the law, "is this person molesting you?"
"Ooooh!" she says, "Yes, thank you, officer!" Two newly weds stand close, up to their waists in the sea. "The further you go in," she murmurs knowingly to him, "the nicer it feels." The lords of misrule preside over the morals of this summer saturnalia.
Respectable people who wouldn't be caught dead with such humour in their hands at any other time of year buy these locker-room jokes and post them to their friends. Because, of course, this is the seaside and everyone is on vacation. And anyway-it's only once a year.
At the funfair on the pier, skirts fly high as the carousels spin, bare thighs and panties are offered to the world, in suggestive abandon by modest girls who might die of shame at revealing themselves like this in the streets of their home towns or on the subway.
Romance and sexual adventure hang heavy in the warm salt air of the resort. This is the place for the less innocent to meet a lover for a week-long affair or to find a partner for life. In the bijou villas behind tall laurel hedges, the rich hide their mistresses away and come down for a relaxing-or bracing-weekend after a hard stint at the bank or the stock exchange.
The underground novels of Paris and Amsterdam seize on the swinging marinescape. But for all that, the seaside is in some ways a recent and exciting institution. Not since King Canute and his disagreement with the tide had the world's rulers spent much time on the beach. It was King George III who noticed it first and decided to take the air at Weymouth on the south coast of England. His son-Prince Regent and George IV-had an oriental pavalion built as his private palace at Brighton. Victoria herself preferred the Isle of Wight and an occasional trip to the fashionable French resort of Biarritz. To this day, Biarritz commemorates the Anglo-American discovery of the seaside with the Hotel Windsor, the Avenue Edward VII, the Hotels Washington and Florida. Nice responded with the Promenade des Anglais and the Quai des Etats-Unis. Back on the Isle of Wight, Prince Albert designed an Italianate palace for his royal bride, on the coast at Osborne.
Long before Palm Beach and Malibu, America had caught the craze. The boardwalk of Atlantic City and the sands of Coney Island testified to that. With the ending of World War I, the seaside became very big business indeed. Between 1920 and 1925 the population of Miami shot up by 150% as homebuyers tried to make the vacation magic last all year round. A building lot in the city rose from S800 to $150,000 in the same five years. Why live in Ohio or Michigan when you could retire to unspoilt Biscayne Bay?
The seaside was healthy. So many people were cured by its breezes that "Doctor Brighton" became an institution by 1800. As late as 1935, King George V was ordered by his physician to take a trip to Bognor. But the town, however healthy, was tedious. The order was repeated. "Oh, bugger Bognor!" said the King-and died.
To working-class men and women, the summer resorts were a fairyland of sexual promise. "Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside," they sang in John Glover-Kind's music-hall song, "Oh, I do like to be beside the sea." So the new excursion trains of the railroads brought them by thousands. "Brighton and back for three-and-six" was the boast of London's south coast company by the 1860s-about twenty-five cents. These new "trippers" liked, as the song said, "to stroll along the prom, prom, prom ... where the brass bands play tiddledee-om-pom-pom...."
The underground fiction, published in France beyond the reach of British and U.S. censorship, made the most of this erotic vacation paradise. Of course the writers drew a highly coloured picture. But the object shown in the picture existed also in reality.
Modern readers of mainstream Victoriana, for example, have been brought up to believe that while you might see girls in their swimsuits on the sands, they would still be quite well covered up. No naked thighs squirmed seductively in the warm sun and not a single bare bottom twinkled over the waves. It was unheard of for a girl to dress or undress on the beach, we were told. She disappeared into a bathing-rnachine and came out almost as fully covered as when she went in.
Here is something closer to the truth from the diary of the Reverend Francis Kilvert recording a visit to Weston-super-Mare in September 1872.
Many people were openly stripping on the sands a little further on and running down into the sea, and I would have done the same but I had brought down no towels of my own.
Next day, Kilvert came prepared with towels.
There was a delicious feeling of freedom in stripping in the open air and running down naked to the sea, where the waves were curling white with foam and the red morning sunshine glowing upon the naked limbs of the bathers.
Nor was this happening miles from civilisation but on a beach in the middle of a thriving seaside resort. Small wonder that ladies and gentleman alike regarded a camera and a telescope or a pair of field-glasses as part of their holiday equipment. And so in the winter dark-room of the amateur photographer the warm summer days were revived as glass-plate negatives yielded fine prints of unsuspecting beauties caught in every posture of energetic nudity. For all the talk of inhibitions, their erotic preferences were not much different to our own. There were girls who got a thrill from being exhibitionists and men who liked to be photographic peeping toms.
To the readers of erotic fiction there was a special appeal in the select resort villas of the summer coast which the wealthy had built and maintained solely for pleasure. "When the summer was over, memories of Florville dwelt in the minds of the lovers like the phrases of a song." So opens The Days at Florville, echoing the kind of fascination that Proust showed for his fictional Balbec, based on Cabourg in Normandy. And like Proust's Alber-tine, the fair-skinned young women of such novels are always ready for some intense lesbian loving in their seaside luxury. Here is a disillusioned young wife after ten years of her husband's attention, fretful and pining in the Villa Rif.
Though she was in her thirties and, perhaps, more than twice his age, the lad was excited by what he saw of Trish. She had had ample exercise in the marriage-bed but now there was a look about her that suggested she was quite ready to make love in some more perverse manner. Her black slightly curled hair had been razor trimmed boyishly short, leaving her nape bare. There was a prim prettiness about her features, lips lightly parted with an expectant air, eyes long-lashed and wide. Trish was costumed in a pair of close-fitting blue-gray pants and a very short blue jacket. Seen from behind as she walked, there was a slight heaviness and self-assured swagger to her rear cheeks that amused and excited the lad as he watched her.
It was evident from the dossier that Trish was permitted to have affairs with the other young women at the Villa Rif and, indeed, to make love to them. But this was only to be done in the presence of the men who possessed her. It had been decided that she would superintend the seduction of Catherine Bond, the pretty schoolgirl, in order that Cathy should be properly roused and instructed by a mature young woman. Trish, the razor-cropped and sexually experienced woman, and Catherine, the fringed and pretty schoolgirl, were to writhe and kiss and masturbate naked upon the large table in the saloon. The men and their chosen guests wold draw up their chairs after dinner and watch.
But there were several photographs, in addition to the main sequence that suggested Trish had paid the penalty for her secret and loving visit to Lesley.
Trish was shown in that same tiled room with two men and the sullen Persian mistress Karima. There was Trish with her boyishly trimmed crop of black curls lowered, hiding her face, teeth tight on her lip, as Karima fondled her between the rear of her thighs. There was Karima smiling, Trish with her mouth stretched wide in protest, eyes filled with panic. The man kneeling behind her was enjoying Trish's rear tightness on his erection and the thrill of being deep between the voluptuously sleek pallor of Trish's bottom-cheeks. There was the same man a moment later, presenting his stiffness to the young woman's lips, while .her face was suffused with tension and rebellion. In the next picture twenty or thirty thin raised curlicues of the whiplash had marked the full rounded pallor of Trish's bottom. Her face showed the drawing in at the cheeks during the energetic suction of the penis that she had received in her mouth after all. Behind her, Karima was smiling, trailing the whip through her fingers, waiting impatiently to teach Trish a further lesson in obedience.
In the lamplit courtyard of the Villa Rif, within earshot of a warm and tranquil tide breaking on summer sand, younger girls like Catherine Bond or the red-haired sixteen-year-old Angie and her fellow-pupil, the olive-skinned French girl Nathalie, undergo their varied forms of sexual apprenticeship from the men who have brought them there. In the more sedate atmosphere of Beechy Lodge, in Dreams of a Summer Day, the thirty-year-old governess Joanne, the two teenage sisters who are her pupils-Sharon and Victoria-and even the lascivious young servant Tania Jenkins all succumb to the enervating debauchery of the seaside house. Fortunately, the hero of the novel is on hand to relieve their frustrations.
Sexual adventure of this sort by the summer sea took several forms. Often it was an amorous intrigue in the fashionable resorts like Brighton, England, or Charleston, South Carolina. But sometimes it was a wild romantic passion acted out on a remote stretch of coast where men and women could be as savage and extreme in their ecstasy as they chose. Joseph Peladan in La Vertu Supreme (1900) set the pattern for this, when he described the desire of Sir Arthur Glocester for a beautiful governess, Nannah. Nothing would do but he must take her off to a lonely farmhouse on the wildest coast of the Cotetin peninsula in Normandy. They are like conspirators, she as determined as he to explore her body through every means of pleasure and ordeal in this terrifying but exhilarating place. The untamed beauty of the summer coast makes a stimulating contrast to the softer loveliness of the girl herself. The stir of the wind and the booming surf muffle cries of ecstasy and protest alike. A similar fate lies in store for the young governess Joanne, though in her case the marinescape is that of a remote Scottish island from which escape will prove impossible. Like Trish and her young pupil Catherine, Joanne is the subject of a passion that is demanding to the point of tyranny.
The truly rich had no need to stop when they reached the sea. There were steam-yachts for leisurely cruises, where willing girls might be taken still further from prying eyes. And by 1920 there were even smart little aeroplanes, enabling the well-heeled romantic to pop over to Le Touquet for a French weekend with his favourite girl. To the owner of an elegant Victorian steam-yacht-a whole fleet of which appears in the underground novels-money was no object. As J. P. Morgan once remarked, the man who has to ask how much it costs to run a yacht obviously can't afford it. These floating harems of sexual indulgence were the toys of the lucky few. Summers were spent drifting, rather than sailing, to Cannes and the Riviera, to Alicante and Egypt, Naples and the Adriatic.
It was a life of relaxation and elegance, rich in erotic possibilities. The underground novels made the most of them. A good many readers would happily have changed places with one narrator in Pearls of the Orient who finds that the "cabin-boy" assigned to attend to his every need is a well-built girl of nineteen. With nowhere to run to, she must be the plaything of his passion throughout the entire voyage. Or there is the almost preposterous banquet on board the ship Brandon in Birch in the Boudoir, when even the supports of the table and the candleholders are all provided by the kneeling and lying bodies of naked girls. Even the platter on which the succulent food is presented proves to be the bare flesh of Jackie, a promiscuous young blonde, whose young friends Mandy and Kim are the candleholders. Perhaps such antics exaggerated the actual events on luxury steam-yachts but the bedroom intrigues on ocean liners bound for India were certainly a fact of life. Captain De Vane's night of fierce passion with the Arabian beauty Nabyla in Nights of the Rajah was not as exceptional as the promotional literature for prudery suggested.
Extravagance in the novels is more easily forgiven because the reality of life on a luxury yacht was extravagant itself. In one of the stories in Pearls of the Orient, the guest of honour finds the bed in his state-room to be one of exceptional comforts. After an excellent dinner and an entertaining evening, he lies down on the most comfortable silken sheets and pillows. The pillows are luxuriously soft and rather nicely warmed. Snoozing happily, he draws the silken pillow-covering away a little and finds his face resting on bare female flesh. His host, a wealthy saddler, has marched a couple of his shop-girls on board. These are window-dressers in the saddler's store and in no position to argue with their master. Stretched out naked on their bellies, side by side as bolsters across the top of the hero's bed, they provide a pair of delicious and stimulating pillows. In no time at all, his lips and fingers are drowsily busy with the Maggie the blonde and dark-haired Noreen. He rises very late next morning, having had his breakfast brought in at ten o'clock. "The trim strength of Noreen's young thighs, the love-nest between the back of them, the firm broadened swell of Mag's bottom-cheeks, all received their tribute of languorous kissing and amorous smacking."
The French, no less than the British in the 1920s and 1930s, produced a good few novels like Orgies a bord d'un Yacht whose title needs no translating. But in the matter of sex on the high seas it was Britannia who ruled the waves and Maggie or her kind who provided the pillows in the luxury cabins. Not surprising, perhaps, when we remember how many sailors' women had traditionally gone to sea with the warships of the Royal Navy and, in some cases, actually loaded the guns for their menfolk to fire during battle. Earlier still, in the 18th century, Mary Read "The Pirate Wench" had hoisted the skull and crossbones to show that there was no department of seamanship where a woman could not command.
As the private steam-yachts passed into history, the erotic exhilaration of an ocean voyage still lingered in the saloons of the great liners between two world wars. Though the splendid leviathans of the Blue Ribband have also passed into history, the same urges survive in a rather curious form. Take the case of the supersonic spanking, for example.
On 11 February 1977, the London Daily Telegraph reported this curious story which might stand as a warning to all who cruise or cross the lazy sunlit waters of the world's oceans. A National Airlines flight was bound from London to Miami. There were two air hostesses on board but the airline's slogan, "Take me, I'm yours!" was intended to apply to the flight and not the cabin staff. Each time that the first young lady came within range of a certain passenger, she alleged, he slapped her hard on he bottom.
It happened four times, she said, once so hard that she almost fell over. "I told him each time, 'Cut that out!' " she added.
The second hostess said that the passenger slapped her backside twice and that after a third slap she complained to the pilot. "But shortly afterwards I felt another whack on my behind. This was no way to run an airline. At Miami Airport the FBI, no less, waited to arrest the boisterous traveller. His name was Bumguard, but this produced not the least smile on the face of law enforcement.
What is the technical name for the offence of bottom-slapping a pair of uniformed young ladies in a pressurised cabin high above the clouds? The legal brains went through the federal laws and found the one that included this capricious felony. They charged Mr. Bumguard with air piracy. The maximum sentence was twenty years, which works out at two and a half years for each slap on a young lady's rump. Even the most unsmiling feminist might think it a little excessive.
Perhaps, after all, it was this passenger's misfortune to have been born a century too late. Out on the briny, rather than flying above the clouds, the participants in the drama might have seen the events in better proportion. But the authorities are sensitive about those who fool around on airplanes. By contrast, in fact as well as fiction, it seems that the gentleman at sea on his yacht or at home in his villa could get away with pretty nearly everything. And in erotic fiction, at least, pretty nearly everything was exactly what he wanted.
3
NATHALIE ON THE BEACH
The girls who present themselves, desirable and almost naked on the beaches of erotic fiction, are a cross-section. Some are good and some are bad, though all are alluring in one way or another. Nathalie, a French girl getting her first taste of the English seaside, is a delicious mixture of one who is both innocent at sixteen and yet excited by many things that she only half understands.
A stroll along the fictional promenade would show other girls of her age who are not in the least innocent. There is Elke Maline, raised in Linz and lesbianised at her school in Vienna. She is high on stimulants of some kind and squirming in the arms of a boy before the shocked eyes of the strolling holidaymakers. Her cheeks are flushed. Lying on the shingle, she alternately writhes against the boy who holds her and then screams abuse him. Then she lies limp as, with his hand thrust inside her pants, he caresses her between the legs. From time to time Elke breaks away from this heavy petting. She bows the bell-shape of her collar-length brown hair and covers her pertly pretty high-boned face with her hands. Then that "sullen heart-shaped face, the hazel eyes and fringe" are revealed again. "She lay inert on her side, facing the boy who had his arms about her and with her back to the promenade. The strollers gazed at the tight and softly-filled seat of her faded jeans as it swelled and tensed in her excitement. At sixteen years old, Elke Maline's bottom-cheeks had a slight fatness and width to them which was as yet crudely seductive, though it might grow too heavy in a few years more. When the boy who was lying with her slid his hands inside her jeans, Elke's feet twined together with excitement. She drew her knees up a little." The photographs taken of her at this moment by enthusiastic amateur cameramen display "the soft ripe cheeks of Elke Maline's bottom, squirming and tensing together as the boy masturbated her gently."
Elke Maline's masturbation on the public beach creates the randy and greedy beach-girl, of whom there were a good many in fact and fiction. She gets the only reward that erotic story-telling knows, for she is falling about as if tipsy and screaming her abuse so loudly that from time to time one of the two boys has to put his hand over her mouth. Deserted later on by her companions, she is made love to by passing strangers. Indeed, Elke Maline's backside is also well acquainted with male passion and the birch by the time that her seaside adventure is over.
At the mid-point of the moral scale of the seaside, are heroines like cheeky little Sally Fenton with her fair cherub curls and high-boned prettiness. In Elke Maline's case, the reader feels that the Austrian ball-breaker deserves all she gets. But when Sally Fenton in her skimpy swimwear comes under the surveillance of a tight-lipped moralist, our sympathy is on her side. "She was an active and slimly graceful youngster. She stood in the shallows and practiced her diving most elegantly. From a standing position, she would dive forward and down in a kind of aquatic somersault. When her head and shoulders disappeared, the taut sleek-cheeked seat of Sally Fenton's swimming-briefs would break the surface, streaming wet like the pelt of a pretty young seal." The lips of the moralist are resolutely pursed at this "provoking display of the tightly and wetly clad cheeks of Sally Fenton's fourteen-year-old bottom."
However provocative and saucy, she is a good-natured girl. When Elke undergoes her sexual retribution, there is a sense of rough justice that makes it comic. But Sally's fate at the hands of the disciplinarians who take charge of her and her elder sister Jane has a distinct chill. "What a sight she was, naked and fastened on all fours over the block. He had fetched the birch with its three quivering willow-switches bound at the handle. The rounded cut of her fair halo of curls was twisted aside. Sally, the cheekiness gone from her pretty face, looked back at us in great apprehension. Her slim finely-boned young back and the slender straightness of her agile thighs had been dusted with the gold of the sun. It was only her hips and the trim little rounds of Sally Fenton's bottom-cheeks which retained their fair-skinned hue."
High-spirited innocence, chastised for "insolence" or "provocation," was common enough. So was the downfall of an apprentice-whore like Elke Maline. On the yachts of erotic fiction, there are cabin-girls who enjoy everything a man wants. Pearls of the Orient has a tousled fair-skinned brunette, a mature youog Amazon called Mandy, obliged to be cabin-girl to Mr. Bowler. Skin-tight boots come up to her knees. A short singlet ends at her waist. On the cruise, her sturdy hips, thighs and backside must always be bare. Mandy lies willingly on top of him, impaling herself on his erection, thighs squirming and buttocks clenching. Then she lies on her belly over the bed. The young wench joins in the fun, her firm-featured face grinning at him over her shoulder as he impales Mandy's backside. Then she rides him again, bringing them both to orgasm. A groom spurs her on, "thrashing the bare slatternly cheeks of Mandy Worth's bottom very hard with a spanking-strap." The result is far from Nathalie's innocence. Mandy tenses her buttocks desperately under the strap, and releases herself ecstatically on the penis, smarting and climaxing together. The tanning continues after she has come. Mr. Bowler constantly fondles and pats her next day, delighted to find "the sturdy pale cheeks of Mandy's bottom still sore but her cunt fulfilled and yearning only for more." He adds that a sturdy mature young wench of a vulgar kind like Mandy is well able to take more. That night he lies on his back, penis erect. The smiling groom shows Mandy a pony-whip. Unhesitatingly, the eager young Amazon mounts, lies forward, and offers herself. "The strapping broadened double-cheeked swell of Mandy's backside made an exciting full-bottomed invitation to the groom's whip-her eagerly-paid price of joy between her legs. Even a strong young woman like Mandy screamed at the spurring of pain and pleasure. The groom's fun with Mandy's full-cheeked arse-target rivaled Mr. Bowler's!"
More rare, and more refreshing, was the portrayal of innocent desire in the person of a rather reserved and well brought-up girl like Nathalie. By the time her story is told in Villa Rif, she has tasted love in almost every way. But her essential innocence is not compromised. For all her later experiences in the sensual atmosphere of the Villa Rif, there is nothing to compare with that first unspoilt afternoon of summer on the Sussex coast. Unaware that the eyes of her elders are watching her, sixteen-year-old Nathalie slips away to a quiet part of the beach and her first encounter with a boy of her own age.
It was after dinner on the second evening at the commandant's villa. The four men had withdrawn with their cigars and armagnac to the central courtyard, where not a breeze stirred the ornamental palms. From the dry garden all about the walls there rose an electric rasping of cicadas. On such an evening, the sea had fallen still and the tide was no more than a whisper of wavelets on warm sand.
The commandant had started a discussion on the subject of innocence in women.
"It is a quality which some men see in the entire sex and others find nowhere," he said, lowering himself with a smile into the steamer-chair. "I think one cannot find it in a mature young woman, for she has too much knowledge of her own desires and their necessary fulfilment. I cannot find it either in very young girls. A sniggering fourteen-year-old is perhaps not mature enough to be innocent."
"Nor should you confuse innocence with virtue," said Armand, standing in the shadow of the lamplit palm and piercing his cigar. "A young woman rebels from a sense of virtue. Jenny with her long dark hair and flashing blue eyes was such a creature. There was but one solution for a troublesome young whore of her sort-a place where her submission was required absolutely. I fear a good deal of whip-leather has been applied to the bare cheeks of Jenny Woodward's bottom by her Arab taskmasters."
The commandant held up his hand. At that moment one of the younger girls, Nathalie, came from the doorway with the tray of glasses and bottles. She was quite a tall girl of sixteen with the smooth olive tan that one associates easily with southern France. There was a certain open and fine-browed nobility in her young face, a straight Grecian line to her features. The dark hair was brushed back from her face, held by a pair of clips, so that it gathered to her collar. If a slight frown or a sudden intensity clouded her dark eyes, it was not resentment nor rebellion that provoked such glances. They were a measure of the seriousness with which Nathalie regarded her life.
She was casually dressed, as were all the girls of her age who served the men at the Villa Rif. In Nathalie's case, her costume was of the briefest, a short green singlet that ended at her waist and the tight slinkiness of bathing briefs that were dark blue with several diagonal white stripes. Apart from her canvas shoes she wore nothing else.
As the girl filled the glasses and then carried them to the individual table set beside each chair, the men had leisure to admire her young figure. The bare olive-tan legs had a maidenly trimness that was long and curving. Her hips and backside in the tight sheen of the bathing-briefs seemed no less lithe with just a hint of that fuller voluptuousness that characterises olive-skinned maidenhood.
They watched her frankly and intimately, having no need to conceal their admiration from a girl who belonged to them. Nathalie showed no resentment, nor even self-consciousness, beyond keeping her eyes turned demurely from those of the men who surveyed her. She filled each glass in turn and then stood obediently before the commandant, as if waiting to see what would be required of her next.
"You may go, for the moment, Nathalie," he said with a smile, "I propose to tell our guests a little of your history. Wait in the library. I daresay you will be required later on. Read a little more of La Fontaine while you wait."
They watched her walk away with the long and easy strides of her bare tan legs. The commandant smiled again.
"In Nathalie you see the nearest I have known to innocence in a woman. It will not last, of course. If she does not lose it herself, there are men and women who will take it from her, perhaps within the next few hours. But to understand what she is, you must know her story. And that is the story of how I first met her last year, while I was still in England."
The commandant told his story in these terms. He had been staying at a resort on the Sussex coast, twenty miles or so from the grander parades and squares of Brighton. One afternoon, coming from a stroll on the pier, he had seen Nathalie and another girl, a prim looking blonde, walking casually from the beach towards the hotels and the boarding houses.
Nathalie had been dressed then as she was now, for that was the purpose of his story. Intrigued by the light olive tan of her young thighs and the supple resilience of her adolescent hips and buttocks-but most of all by the open nobility of her face and dark eyes-the commandant had followed her. He was determined to see who she was and where she went. Her name was easily discovered, for she had a canvas bag, held by a strap over one shoulder and with the words "Nathalie's rucksack" written upon it. By patient following of her to the seaside road, he determined her lodging and the fact that she was unaccompanied by her nearest family. It seemed that she had been sent to learn the English language in hopes of finding employment as a maid or domestic.
Having so much influence, the commandant was able to let it be known that he sought such a servant-girl of fifteen or sixteen. By means that it was hardly necessary to elaborate, he became the employer and the possessor of Nathalie. Yet the commandant was too subtle a man to launch himself at once upon this well-built and shapely maiden. It was his habit-his policy-to observe a girl well before he came to deal with her. And so it was with Nathalie.
But there was no doubt in his mind that a girl who leaves her own country will behave with greater freedom and even lasciviousness in another, where she is not known and where she may suffer none of the reproach that would attend her in her home town. In addition, there was the free and easy atmosphere of the seaside. It was impossible to imagine Nathalie walking through the streets of a great city in singlet and bathing briefs-as she did in this resort-town. That she was innocent, the commandant never doubted. Yet, at her age, the commandant expected a certain collision between innocence and curiosity.
How that might come about, he could not say. That Nathalie's warmer Mediterranean tan would prove irresistible to the pale Anglo-Saxon was never in doubt. The commandant observed that the English can never resist exploring the olive-skinned beauty of fifteen or sixteen in the Latin girls who come their way. And so he revealed to his listeners the story of Nathalie on the beach.
There are those, he maintained, who despise and deplore voyeurism. Yet how is life to be learned apart from observation? He watched Nathalie closely for a week or two-and saw nothing. His reward came a full fortnight after he had first taken her into his keeping.
It was a warm afternoon of July, a day that showed the summer at it's most agreeable. The tide was slack, its waves breaking as a distant glitter of warm light. From Hastings westwards, the long beaches lay open and quiet, despite the holiday folk who clustered along them. The downland was peaceful and sunny above the town, the sheep grazing among the bushes of yellow gorse.
Where the promenade ends the white cliffs begin, the pebble beach is less frequented, even at low tide when the shelves of rocks and their mysterious pools are accessible. It was to this agreeable expanse that Nathalie made her way. She wore the green singlet, the canvas shoes with their rubber soles, and the bathing costume whose tight and shiny briefs were the same dark blue with diagonal white striping that the commandant had first seen.
She had not the least reason to suppose that her mentor and two of his friends followed her to that place. What their motive might be, it was hard to say. Probably they had no more sinister intention than to see Nathalie in her breast-halter and briefs-or perhaps naked altogether. What possible harm could there be in that, especially if the girl herself never even knew that she was being spied upon? To see her adolescent olive-tan nudity would be a pleasure for her admirers and would rob Nathalie herself of nothing whatsoever. Not even her modesty would be impugned by it.
So the commandant and his two friends had kept company, following a little behind her. This was easily done for the Sussex beaches are divided by wooden groins tall enough to conceal whoever moves beyond them. The girl thought herself far enough from civilisation when she set down the canvas bag that was labelled "Nathalie's rucksack" and stretched herself out on the pebbles to bask in the sun.
The sun was high in a vault of pale azure. Far off the waves of the channel glittered and broke in sighs on the damp sand of the lower beach. Nathalie drew a book from her rucksack and prepared to improve her acquaintance with the English language. She did not even bother to remove the green singlet.
Our three voyeurs must surely have felt that theirs was to be a tedious vigil. But then the air was disturbed by a profound sigh.
It did not come from Nathalie. She looked up from her reading, quite as surprised as the three men who were watching her from behind the groin. There was a pause. Heat and silence prevailed over the glittering water and shimmering cliffs. The sigh came again, fainter but unmistakable.
As quietly as she could, Nathalie got to her feet and began to move cautiously to the further groin. She trod with care, as if anxious not even to rattle a pebble as she walked. The voyeurs watched her as she stood at the far groin, her arms folded on top of it, chin resting on them, staring at what she had discovered.
Those who watched her listened for another sigh, but there was only silence. Nathalie slipped off her singlet, the smooth olive tan of her back broken only by the thin strap of her breast-halter. She put down the singlet and gently began to climb over the wooden groin, lowering herself soundlessly on the other side.
The situation was intriguing enough to force a pursuit by her admirers. What was it that lay just beyond their view? Skilled in these matters, they walked round the sandy stretch of beach and came silently up to the wooden partition over which the girl had just climbed. Being a series of horizontal wooden beams, the groin allowed them ample space to spy through it and see what Nathalie was doing. She stood no more than fifteen feet from them, looking at the object of curiosity which lay before her.
The three men smiled, seeing that the "object" was Master Charlie.
The county of Sussex is well-supplied with those schools where the future leaders of the nation are educated. They are expensive and exclusive. And, so far as the young gentlemen are concerned, the only female shadow ever to fall upon the hallowed walls is either that of an elderly servant or a member of their own family paying a visit.
Master Charlie was a lad of Nathalie's own age, but how different in other respects. He was a patrician and she a commoner. He was fair and blond with rosy cheeks, she a beauty of Provence or some territory of its kind. He was a boy and she a girl, to be sure, but he was an adventurous young fellow who had broken bounds that afternoon to lie in solitude upon the beach and give himself to the sun.
It seemed that Master Charlie had also slipped into a beer-house at lunchtime, for he lay on his back with eyes closed and lips parted lightly, in a profound slumber. This would not have mattered much had he not already undressed himself ready for a bathe. He was not naked, of course. The future leaders of the nation do not lie naked on the public beach. But he was dressed in no more than a long thin jersey which hugged him from the shoulders down to the top of his legs.
Such garments will never stay in their place upon a sleeper. It was not the least surprising that the hem of the jersey had worked itself up so that it hardly came down lower than the young fellow's waist. Nathalie stood there, her dark eyes wondering. Though he was so fair skinned, Master Charlie offered her the first sight of a penis and its appendages belonging to a boy of her own age.
She would not have been human had it not intrigued her. But Master Charlie was sound asleep and she did not suppose for a moment that anyone else could see her. Had a man presented his penis to Nathalie in the public street, the girl would have averted her eyes in disdain or disapproval and walked past him. The world would applaud her action. But this was different.
The exhibition that Master Charlie offered was entirely innocent. He had not believed that his jersey would reveal such a sight or, indeed, that anyone would pass that way to see it. And was not Nathalie innocent too? She had not the least intention to spy upon him. But seeing him like that, she must have wondered at first whether he was all right. Perhaps he lay injured or dead. Her anxiety was soon set aside. Master Charlie was sleeping, sighing a little in the depth of his dreams. That was all.
It was clear, even to Nathalie, that nothing short of an earthquake would wake the young drunkard in the next half hour. He was entirely at her disposal. She looked about her, seeing not a person in either direction for a mile or more, the dark curls brushing the bare olive tan of her shoulders as she turned her head this way and that. The commandant and his friends smiled. The girl turned away from them and stooped over Master Charlie. It was not his face but his loins at which she now peered.
The sleeping penis was relaxed and coiled a little, the young pendulum weights hanging from it in repose. There was a mixture of tenderness and excitement in the girl's firm open face, an unease in her dark eyes, as Nathalie examined the young manhood from twelve or eighteen inches.
As she did so, the voyeurs examined her. In her present position she offered the firm bare curves of her olive-skinned legs, the swell of the muscular curves, the little hollows and creases behind the knees the trimly adolescent but still very feminine upward branching of her bare thighs. She was a healthy and well-exercised girl with all the natural passions and hungers proper to such a constitution. Because she was bending over, her hips had that fuller and more seductive swell which the posture endows a woman with at all ages from infancy to maturity. The seat of the dark blue bathing briefs was drawn tight. The cheeks of Nathalie's bottom at fifteen or sixteen had a lithe and taut muscularity but there was already just a hint of the fuller voluptuous swell which young women of her race acquire in a decade more.
Her admirers were now her adorers, the commandant added. They desired Nathalie for what she offered them and, equally, they desired her to give herself to the lad who lay there sleeping.
She did neither of these things. Instead, she went down gently on her knees, quietly enough not to disturb the sleeping victim. She bowed her head over his loins, gazing this way and that at the penis. Glancing up once to assure herself that Master Charlie still slept soundly, she fastened the clips of her hair more tightly to prevent the dark curls falling forward and tickling his thighs or belly. Then she bowed her face and with the lightest touch of her fingers raised the sleepy penis on their tips.
The genial monster made not the least response. Nathalie turned it a little, this way and that, upon her finger-tips. She drew the foreskin back from the knob and examined the size of that roundness. She looked closely at the vent with an expression on her face that suggested she was thinking how one day she would have such a piston inside her and that an impregnating flood must escape from that nozzle with which nature had endowed the unconscious Charlie.
It would have been easier to disturb the seven sleepers of Ephesus at that moment than Master Charlie. All the same, Nathalie's fingers suddenly froze in stillness. She had felt the penis begin to stiffen and harden a little, whether its owner was waking or sleeping. Indeed, Charlie shifted and then settled back into an agreeable stupor.
Nathalie watched his face closely as if to satisfy herself that there was no danger yet of wakening the young carouser. Supporting the youthful penis by the fingers of one hand, she began to lift and examine his balls with the other. The firm line of her young mouth and nose, the nobility of the brow from which the dark curls were clipped back, suggested some healer of the sick rather than a girl on the verge of a sexual adventure.
The three friends who watched her were gratified to see how much was instinctive in Nathalie herself. It was thought from her character or demeanour that she could never have had her hand in a boy's pants before nor, for that matter, have read of such things from a frisky book. Yet without the least instruction, Nathalie's nature prompted her to massage the stiffening penis in her fingers with a gentle rhythm until it stood bolt upright, hard and veined as if carved from pale marble.
Then it seemed that she had reached a point of incomprehension-or perhaps indecision. What was she to do next? Many things were to happen to Nathalie in the next year or so. But on that summer afternoon, she was by no means a young slut who cared nothing for the loss of her virginity. Having brought Master Charlie to this parlous state, what was she to do next?
He, poor young fellow, had no say in the matter. He had not stirred since that momentary shifting in his sleep. Strong drink, exhaustion, and a healthy constitution enabled him to ignore even the calls of lust as he dreamed his dreams. Nathalie sat on her heels and brought her face closer so that her eyes were examining the penis shaft from no more than six or eight inches. She was uncertain and hesitant. Ideas and hints of what she might do passed through her mind, one supposes, but she seemed to lack the final resolve to do them.
How strongly the onlookers willed her to take the last step! Nathalie's first concession was to kiss the knob of the penis lightly and briefly. It was not even a proper kiss, rather a merest touch of the lips. She drew back at once and paused. But the monster had done her no harm. Nathalie kissed again, more slowly and for a longer period of time. She considered it closely again and this time lifted his balls in her fingers and kissed them once or twice.
Like all beginners in dangerous pastimes, her courage grew quickly as she found that the harm imagined was not as quick to follow as she had thought. Her inexperience made her a charming subject for observation but, as the commandant insisted, it was her innocence that gave her the greater appeal. In this he was careful not to confuse innocence with prudishness, finding in the latter no attraction at all.
Nathalie pillowed her head level with the pale serpent and studied it from the distance of a mere hand's length. Her fingers stroked it and turned it. She investigated the fold of skin half-concealing the knob and stared wonderingly as the swelling of that knob caused the head of the monster to emerge again. Nathalie watched with growing amazement as it stiffened and hardened along all its length, presently standing upright in defiance of every law of gravity. Now it was hard as a sculpted model, veins and contours raised, though of a warmer substance than any carving.
Nathalie shook her dark ringlets into place and settled down within kissing distance of this object of curiousity. A warm-blooded olive-skinned girl of her sort, however innocent, needed no further tuition in these matters. She kissed the hard-head lightly and repeatedly, while her nimble young fingers played with the balls. Then, at last, she did what the onlookers had been willing her to. Rounding her lips over the swollen knob she cautiously took two or three inches into her mouth and teased the sensitive phallus with her loving tongue. Charlie groaned a little in his sleep and then seemed to sink deeper into repose.
Nathalie sucked the penis lightly and cautiously. Had she imagined that Charlie or any other person could see her, she would never have done such a thing. But secure, as she thought, in her privacy the experiment was one she could not resist. The three men who watched her secretly were delighted to see that Nathalie tasted the penis properly at last. They greatly hoped that a spurt or two of amorous gruel would escape into her mouth before she could draw clear. But, as yet, that did not occur. She took her mouth away after a little, pillowed her head again and gazed affectionately at the lad's stiffness. Her fingers could no quite leave it alone and she could not restrain herself from touching it with light kisses where it was still wet from her mouth.
This could not last indefinitely. Even strong drink would not make Charlie insensible to all these attentions for much longer. He stirred more energetically and emitted a long sigh, like a swimmer rising to the surface from a long dive.
Nathalie was suddenly aware of her predicament. There was nowhere to hide and no means by which she could explain her appearance so close to a boy in this state. With great presence of mind, she gathered up her rucksack and tiptoed beyond a nearby shelf of rock. Finding a patch of warm sand, she lay down and pretended to be asleep. It would seem as if she had chosen this place for her afternoon's sunbathing without being aware that anyone else was near her.
No sooner had she done this than Charlie was observed to open one eye and look about him. He stared at the fine state of his erection and shook his head in astonishment. For one who had been in such a profound slumber, he recovered himself with great agility. And, as if led by the infallible sense of Eros, he looked directly towards the shelf of rock, in the shelter of which Nathalie lay concealed.
Did Nathalie, in her turn, feign sleep to escape detection? Or did she secretly hope that Master Charlie would now become the prince who woke his sleeping beauty? At sixteen years old, it was doubtful if she herself could have decided upon the confusion in her mind. But Charlie stood up, stretched, and took a step towards the fateful shelf of rock. He saw this olive-skinned girl-student lying there and smiled to himself. Nathalie was not naked, to be sure, but the briefs and breast-halter of her swimwear left the whole of her trim and lightly-muscled legs bare, as well as her back, her shoulders and her belly.
Even if Charlie had enjoyed a girl of his own kind, it was un-likely that he had ever shared the pleasures of love with an olive-skinned and dark-haired girl of Nathalie's sort. He tiptoed towards her and knelt down close by. Nathalie dared not open her eyes, for she would at once accuse herself of having put Master Charlie in that state of erection which he found upon waking. For better or worse, she must pretend that her sleep was inviolable.
But this conferred upon her an inestimable advantage. She was not obliged to offer any show of reluctance or resistance to his advances, unless she truly wished to. No moral blame could attach to such a girl for what was done to her while she was unconscious. There were smiles upon the faces of the watchers as the little comedy of innocence unfolded upon the warm beach.
Nathalie was lying on her side, hands folded under her dark curls as a pillow, one knee drawn up a little to give a further erotic swell to her young haunches. Charlie stared down at her, open-mouthed. He was like a little boy with a new puppy, not quite knowing to begin petting it. He said something quietly to the girl but she did not respond. Then he stooped and kissed her gently on the face and the neck. Nathalie shivered perceptibly with anticipation but did not dare to open her eyes.
Unable to believe his good fortune, a sleeping beauty entirely at his disposal, Charlie stretched himself out beside her. He touched his lips to hers and kissed her. Nathalie still feigned sleep but instinctively she pouted her lips to his, returning the caress of his mouth. He plucked the back-string of her breast-halter so that the top half of her bathing costume came loose. He helped Nathalie's young tits out of the tight cloth in which they nestled and he grinned at the sight of them. He kissed her nipples until they stood hard as purple berries. He teased them with his tongue and fingers. Then his face slid down and he trilled his tongue in her belly-button.
It was only natural, the commandant said, that the boy should want to take Nathalie's briefs down and examine her intimately. He lifted her hips gently and slid the shiny blue briefs with their diagonal white striping until they came down clear of her loins. It was an easy matter then to draw them down her long olive-tanned thighs and off over her feet.
His kisses began on her trimly muscled calves and travelled up the graceful slimness of Nathalie's thighs. All this time the watchers were trying to get a good view of her on both sides. The satin-smooth elasticity of her young belly led down to a fine triangle of dark hair. Her thighs were not yet parted but, at the rear, the Latin-tan cheeks of Nathalie's bottom were trimly and demurely rounded.
Master Charlie kissed her along the smooth length of her elegant thighs and then upon their inner surfaces. Nathalie's upper leg was straight but the lower one was bent up at the knee. This enabled Charlie to glimpse her cunt from the rear, though it was concealed at the front by the drawing up of one leg. That being the case, he lay down behind her, his eyes and mouth level with the parting of Nathalie's thighs.
He slipped his fingers between her legs and coaxed back the folds of intimate flesh with their secret feminine slit. He masturbated Nathalie slowly and skillfully in the warm afternoon. It was impossible to imagine that such a warm-blooded suntanned girl had not done this furtively for herself by her age. Yet this was surely the first time she had had it done for her by a boy. You may be sure that had such a thing been suggested by her boyfriend, Nathalie would have coloured up and refused. But now she had the convenient excuse of being asleep and not knowing that it was being performed upon her. Yet the slight tensings of her thighs and contractions of her buttocks would have betrayed her to a more experienced lover than Charlie.
The commandant insisted, however, that her innocence was not compromised in the least. It is a curious morality, he observed, that turns a blind eye to Nathalie masturbating herself-when she alone receives the pleasure-but shrieks aloud with anger when it is done to her by a boy so that the pair of them may enjoy the girl's excitement. And this was true. Nathalie's arousal, a gleam of wetness on the folds of her vaginal flesh, added to the boy's own pleasure. He fingered her over and tickled and teased until she could hardly control her shudders of anticipation.
Yet Master Charlie's instincts warned him that he should not allow Nathalie to reach her conclusion yet. He had by no means finished his exploration of her. He drew his hand away and Nathalie lay suddenly very still, as if in dismay at being brought to such a height of expectation and then abandoned there. The boy, lying behind her, studied the rear aspect of her sixteen-year-old cunt closely. Then he touched his lips to it, savouring Nathalie as she had tasted him. He pouted and tongue-tickled, while Nathalie pressed back a vibrant groan of desire by stifling her mouth against her hand.
Charlie paused and fondled her cunt a little more. Then he examined it carefully as it rested wetly upon his fingers. He moved closer and began a survey of the firm trimly-rounded olive-skinned cheeks of Nathalie's bottom and the darker humid cleavage between them. Perhaps he knew that in the Mediterranean culture from which she came, the female bottom is not regarded with Anglo-Saxon disdain. Whatever the reason, he began to kiss the smoothness of the tan-skinned bum-cheeks. Nathalie tensed a little for this was a compliment that had never been paid to her before and one which perhaps she had never imagined possible. But Master Charlie would permit no evasion and his lips made a full exploration of her rear hemispheres.
Gently he parted the olive-skinned bottom- cheeks and examined Nathalie's anus, studying its flinching tightness with an intimacy permitted to few bridegrooms in the honeymoon bed. He stroked Nathalie's bottom-crack lightly and there was no doubt that she liked the sensation, while seeming to feel that she ought not to. He drew her closer, making Nathalie stick her young arse out a little more towards him. He kissed her where his fingers had just tickled. His fingertip touched Nathalie's arsehole. Despite her pretence at sleep, she drew herself in quickly and protectively. But Master Charlie's finger was not to be deterred by this.
The three men who watched this pantomime of innocence wondered how far the lad would permit himself to go. How far, indeed, would Nathalie make him free of her sixteen-year-old body? In her physical development, she ought not to be spared anything. She was able to accommodate the penis between her legs, in her mouth, and even in her young bottom. But whatever might be possible, prudence suggested that certain things were not as yet desirable.
Master Charlie was content to lie there a moment longer and then gently to insert his stiffened penis between the rear of her legs, so that it was comfortingly held between the surfaces of her thighs by their pressure. This arrangement had much to be said for it. He was able to enjoy an exciting masturbation by being rubbed and squeezed between the satiny-soft surfaces. Nathalie received the excitement of having her slit stimulated by the friction of the penis along it. And all this might be done without two innocent young people bringing a third into the world in circumstances decidedly inauspicious.
In this manner, Charlie made love to her by a method that must be one of the oldest substitutes known to mankind. His hardened rod of flesh thrust in and out, Nathalie almost doing a sitting jig upon it in her own enthusiasm. He grunted and bucked against her with such energy that one might almost have thought he was trying to inflict some injury upon the girl. But the infliction was the sweetest assault that Nathalie had ever known.
It could not be said, the commandant maintained, that Charlie made a woman of the olive-skinned girl that afternoon. He did not take her virginity, for in the southern world from which she came such a thing would have dishonoured her. Had he exerted all his strength he might have buggered Nathalie and avoided the consequences by this method. But he did only those things to her which the girl herself desired.
Towards the conclusion, he was so stiff that the penis stood bolt upright rather than protruding out. It was more convenient then for Charlie to place it along Nathalie's bottom-crack, her sleek olive-skinned buttocks pressing it on either side. At the same time, she was free to squeeze her thighs upon her vaginal flesh and rub herself against him.
Charlie gritted his teeth, gasped, and began to come. The penis knob enclosed in the humid warmth of the girl, between the firm olive-skinned smoothness of Nathalie's bottom-cheeks began to squirt and spurt. He kept moving briskly, his youthful vigour so pronounced that the warm jets of sperm kept coming for a considerable time. Indeed, it was supposed that a healthy young fellow like he must have had two or three orgasms at that moment, one merging with the other. Nathalie was astonished and lay quite still to feel what was happening to her.
When it was over, Charlie drew away, sheepish at what he had done and yet smiling with great satisfaction. He looked to see the result. Between the cheeks of Nathalie's backside the blobs and trickles of passion-juice were thick and copious as the orgasm of a young Hercules. Had such a flood escaped into the girl's womb she would infallibly have produced a brat nine months later. As it was, Charlie knelt over her, slipped his fingers between her legs at the rear and began to frig her in t he-most business-like manner. Presently there was a gasp and a shivering moan, a quivering of her thighs and flanks, as Nathalie attained the crest of her desire. For the first time she had done so in the presence of a lover.
Consider the situation, the commandant added. Charlie had drenched Nathalie's arse with his sperm. Nathalie had come off in the presence of the boy. When the pleasure and excitement was over, however, each of the participants grew self-conscious and fearful. The pretence at sleep was revealed as a pretence by now. Yet both still maintained it. However shyly, they could not bear to be acquainted. Master Charlie got up and walked softly away to the place where he had been lying. He stretched himself out and grinned with every justification at the state in which he had left Nathalie. And yet, as the commandant pointed out, Nathalie had suffered no worse than a wet bottom as the price paid for a very valuable lesson in the art of love and the psychology of mankind. That being the case, there was no need to pity her.
Best of all, she had surely preserved her innocence.
No one who listened to him doubted the truth of that assertion. It would be a hard and inflexible moralist who would condemn either the girl or Master Charlie for the little game into which Cupid and the laws of nature had driven them. Little boys, as the rhyme says, are eager to know what little girls are made of. The curiosity of little girls is no less keen. There on a sunlit beach just beyond the lighthouse, these two had put the matter to the test.
Charlie was still smiling to himself as he lay on the sand to which he had returned. Nathalie would in time appreciate the use of the lovelesson she had just had. But because she was innocent, she was for the moment shy and even shame-faced. Cautiously, because of the state in which Charlie had left her, she pulled up the pants of her swim-suit. She hooked the breast-halter back into place. And then she got up and walked very quietly away in the opposite direction. Charlie sat up and grinned again as he watched her go.
The three men who had followed the little drama agreed that Nathalie's character had been vindicated utterly. To be innocent is neither to be prudish, they said, nor to be indifferent to moral scruples. It is a fine balance that is preserved all too briefly at such a stage of a girl's life.
This provoked a discussion in the lamplit courtyard of the villa when the story was told. Someone raised the possibility that all girls are innocent at one time or another. The commandant shook his head. He was convinced, he said, that the red-haired girl, Angie, was essentially innocent despite her humble origins and vulgar manner. Yet the youngest girl at the villa, Cathy Bond, with her dark page-boy crop and figure, her pretty face with its round high-boned cheeks, was already a sexually-knowing little bitch.
This was agreed. Three nights before, the tensed bare cheeks of Cathy Bond's bottom had been soundly thrashed with a cane by the negress Merle for her perverse and smiling misconduct. What was it, then, that made the different between Nathalie, Angie, and Catherine? There was much discussion of this but it was the commandant himself who suggested a method by which the matter might be tested through observation.
Three of the oblong marble tables were set out side by side in the lamplit courtyard that night. Each of the three girls must lie upon one of them. The same experiments would be performed on each and her reactions would be noted. By such means the three moral characters might be put to the test and compared.
Catherine Bond's pretty, firmly rounded young face was framed by the straight brown hair trimmed at her collar and cut in a level fringe across her forehead. Though Cathy Bond was the youngest, it was also supposed that she might prove to be the most randy. She was a given a moment to wriggle out of her blouse and skirt. At last, she was wearing only the tight cotton briefs of her schoolgirl knickers. The commandant ordered her first of all to replenish the glasses of the guests and light their fresh cigars. After the cheeky little tart had done this, she was told to clamber on to the first of the marble tables. Angie was called in, and then Nathalie herself.
Each of the three tables was soon occupied by a girl who was quite naked. The commandant stood up to begin his demonstration and the guests stretched back in their chairs to enjoy the entertaining sequel.
4
EVELINE
High society in London-and low society too, for that matter-had one great advantage over the beau monde of Paris and Berlin. The seaside at Brighton or Margate, Hastings or Folkestone, was only about sixty miles from Hyde Park and Mayfair. There were, of course, far-off watering places in Devon or Wales but the pleasures of the ocean were no more than two hours' journey. For the Parisian, they lay far off at Menton or Monte Carlo to the south, Biarritz to the west, or the fashionable resorts of Deauville and Cabourg on the Normandy coast. The Berliners were even worse placed, having only the cold Baltic at hand. For them the sea was far off at Venice or Genoa and most of them stopped short at inland spa towns like Baden-Baden.
The rich and the elegant, of whom our heroine Eveline was undoubtedly one, organised their summers in a civilised and agreeable manner. First of all there was the London Season and the presenting of debutantes at court. The season began in May and ended early in August. The debutantes, girls of eighteen who were to have a "season" of dances or parties culminating in a presentation to the king or queen, were launched on to the upper-class marriage market by their parents. They met the right sort of young men, carefully chosen to attend the balls and evening parties in Mayfair, and with luck they found a husband. On the night of a "coming out" ball, the grand house in Park Lane or Portman Square would be transformed, the wrought-iron verandah a mass of exotic blooms under candy-striped awning.
The great events of the London season included the race meeting at Royal Ascot, to which the royal family could drive down the grassy approach from Windsor Castle, and the July regatta on the Thames at Henley. As the oars cut the placid water or the horses thundered past, there was a gentle accompaniment of champagne corks popping and picnic hampers being opened for lunch. The best people did not, of course, open the bottles and hampers themselves. They brought their servants to do that and to hand round the smoked salmon or the pate.
And then in August the season ended. The lucky girls like Eveline announced their engagements in the Times and the Morning Post. Their less fortunate sisters sighed and hoped that they had not, after so much trouble, been left on the shelf. For better or worse, the season was over. There were two reasons for this. The first was the approach of the "Glorious Twelfth" of August when an unfortunate bird called the grouse came into season. All over the grouse moors of England's nobility the guns opened up like an anti-aircraft barrage. In their thousands of birds fell shattered and gory from the sky. But the more important reason was that the parliamentary session ended in August and the House of Lords rose for the summer recess. Traditionally this lasted until January, so as not to interfere with the pursuits of hunting, shooting, and fishing in the autumn months.
Like Eveline, the girls turned their thoughts to the sea, for it was not lady-like to join the men in a general massacre of wildlife. As we shall see in a moment, the resorts of the Sussex coast between Brighton and Hastings were a favourite choice. They were sedate and genteel, not quite as vulgar as places like Margate were becoming. But on the other hand the girls night find themselves rather short of men of their own class, who were banging away on the grouse moors, making war not love. There was a tendency for greedy female eyes to stray and sometimes to come to rest on lovers rather lower in the social hierarchy.
These were only seaside romances and would be purely temporary. All the same, the memoirs of Eveline published in 1904 show us how such a thing could come about. She has had her party and a formal proposal of marriage from Lord Endover. Now comes the time when she is packed off to Eastbourne at the foot of the Sussex downs for a few weeks of sea air. Restive and amorous, this free-wheeling young society beauty begins to cast her eye round for some means of whiling away the summer. One must be discreet, of course, How about a trip in a boat with a muscular young fellow at the oars, well-hung and willing?
A rowing boat may not be as convenient as a yacht. But there are all sorts of things that a girl can get up to once she and her companion are out of range of those tiresome telescopes that glint and twinkle along the promenade. Eveline was old enough to have been the grandmother of Elke or Claudia but we meet her when she is in her teens and when the very same beach and warm sea sparkled for her as they were to do for her descendants in the erotic fiction of the future. So we join our Paris-educated beauty, who knows all the facts of life, describing herself in the title of her memoirs as one who got away with it.
"My brother Percy has arrived at Liverpool. He will be in London tomorrow. He comes down to Eastbourne the next day. Papa returns to town to meet him. Lady L--is no rose for the journey. Mrs.
Lockett and John are left in town. Johnson has been sent down with Goorkha and another. We have secured excellent stables. Our apartments at the hotel are sumptuous and most convenient."
The above is the substance of the letter I sent to Lady Lessleton.
Sir Edward and I breakfasted together. The morning was lovely in its spring freshness. The sea was as smooth as glass.
The announcement of Sir Edward's elevation to the Perrage was gazetted in the morning paper. I was the first to kiss my congratulations. After the meal, the manager of the hotel waited on him also with the usual obsequious good wishes. It was intended kindly nevertheless. The afternoon post brought the following paragraph in Society Peeps:
"We announce with peculiar pleasure that a marriage has been arranged and will shortly be solemnized between the Right Honourable the Earl of Endover and the Honourable Eveline L--, only daughter of the newly created Baron L--of Muddipour, still better known as Sir Edward L--, Bart. We rejoice that the noble Earl, who has so long withstood the blandishments of very many eligible ladies, has at length secured as his prize the beautiful and accomplished belle of this-her first season. Everybody will remember how, by her ideal beauty, no less than by her charming style, and her modest and frank deportment, Miss L--took the town by surprise and our hearts by storm. Many will recall with pleasure Miss L--'s exquisite piano performances when she so kindly assisted at the concerts lately given in aid of the funds of the Lying-in Hospital; the Hospital for the Special Treatment of Corns and Bunions; and the Asylum for the Victims of Misplaced Confidence. The Earl's seats are the splendid pile so well known as Normanstoke Towers, in Sussex; and "Chitterlings," a beautiful property in Cumberland, which has hitherto formed part of the jointure of the Countesses of Endover."
When I had recovered from the perusal of this, I said to myself:
"The Dragon has had a finger in that pie. I wish at this moment-he had another-but no matter!"
The main fact was correct, however. Lord End-over had wrung a consent from me before we left town. He was overjoyed and very kind. I only felt ill at ease and uncomfortable. Sir Edward tried his best to console me.
"You will have your freedom-a first-class and leading position in both counties. 'Chitterlings' will be settled on you a part of your jointure. It is a lovely spot. I remember it well. The views of the lake are magnificent. It has been admirably kept up. Eveline, my darling, you ought to be a happy woman."
"Let us forget it now, dear papa. Here at least we are out of the hurly-burly."
We agreed in our arrangements for the day. I was to ride with him in the morning. We would walk up the downs in the afternoon. Sippett was in attendance on Lady L--as usual. He went to town next day to meet Percy and on business. I was left alone. Lady L--made no scruple of her dislike to me. After breakfast I wandered along the Parade. I watched the sea and the boats. One old boatman interested me.
"Go for a row, miss? Beautiful mornin', miss. Sea like ile. Launch her down in half a jiffy, miss. Pull alongside and see the bathin'."
The loveliness of the day tempted me.
"Which is your boat, my friend?"
"That's she, miss. Yon white one, with the red streak."
"She looks a safe craft. Does she rock about much?"
"Lor' bless your sweet soul! No, miss! Why look at her grand flat bottom, and her fine run aft! She can travel too. She's got legs on her! You should have seen her at the regatta. Better have an hour's row, miss."
I got into the boat. The Locket, David Jones of Eastbourne, was painted on the board against which I leaned. It was a nice big boat with good cushions in clean white covers. The old man pushed off and jumped in.
"You'll go past the machines, miss, o' coorse?"
"Anywhere you like, Mr. David Jones. I have confidence in you. It is quite warm on the water."
"Yes, miss. These are the ladies' machines. The gents' is further hup. We shall have to pass the ladies just, but it won't take long."
"Where are you going then, Mr. Jones?"
"Why, o' coorse-past the gents. All the ladies goes past in my boat. 'Tis what they likes best-as is nat'ral. That's what they takes the row for."
The old fellow grinned. He screwed up his face into a comical expression. He actually winked.
The boat did travel well, as the poor old fellow said. It only took ten minutes to pass the line of gaudily arrayed, tall, angular female figures, of squalling children and shouting girls bobbing about knee-deep with their "flat bottoms and fine runs aft" presented seawards.
"What a number of people on the beach, Mr. Jones!"
"Yes, miss. They alius comes there to look at the ladies."
"I don't see very much to admire, but then perhaps it's because I'm a woman."
"Jus' so, miss. You wait a bit. It's all right, I knows what the ladies like."
Presently we passed the first of the men's bathing machines. Old Jones had pulled in closer.
"There we are, miss! Fine 'uns too among 'em today!"
I laughed-the idea was so crudely expressed. The fact was so evident that this was only an ordinary exercise on the part of the girls that I shook off the awkward feeling of restraint which troubled me. I looked boldly enough now. The men stood upon the machines with the doors open. They seemed to be employed principally in sawing their backs in a painful manner with bath towels. They were absolutely naked, their figures entirely and unblushing exposed. Indeed when they saw me pass along with the old fellow they took special pains to exhibit themselves, their privates wagging proudly about in front.
"That's a fine 'un; ain't he, miss?"
I gazed in the direction in which the old man nodded his head as the boat glided by. I thought he seemed to row slower as we passed. It was a tall man-white, handsome, well-developed-a patch of dark hair on his belly-a huge instrument of pleasure dangling between his thighs.
I held my breath. I noted the man well. I also observed the number of the machine-it was 33.
"Ah, he's a fine man, he is, miss, but he ain't half as fine a made man as what my son is. He's a sailor, miss, aboard of a big four-masted ship, he is, and comin' home tomorrow. He's been round the Horn to Valparaiso and he's been took very bad along of the Horn and the weather. He's been paid off today, and he's comin' own here to see his old dad again. I 'spects him by the first train. He's been ten months away, but he's bound straight here, for he's a good lad and nothing wouldn't stop him in London."
"Dear me, Mr. Jones, you quite interest me. And you think he would not stay to spend any of his money among the pleasures of London? He must be quite a model young man. I'm sure you must be proud of him."
"I am that, miss. Not that he's much of a muddle either-he's fond of his old father, but he's fond of a pretty gal too. He'll be here tomorrow, then you can tell me if I'm right or not. Lor', miss, you should just see him pull these oars about. He used to make The Locket fly, he did! I fear I won't keep him here long. Not that he wouldn't go to sea again, but he'll get rid of his money among the gals here. They'll all be after him like they was afore."
"What a sad thing, Mr. Jones. Don't you give him good advice?"
"So I used to do, miss. But Lor' luv yer, what's the good; lions wouldn't hold him, miss, he's that hot when he gets ashore. I got the missionary to reason with him, but it wasn't no good. He went about just the same again. No, miss, wild helephants couldn't hold him."
"I think, perhaps, if you removed him from such temptations; if you kept him to your boat-letting business now, under your own eye, you know, Mr. Jones, don't you think that might tame him down a bit?"
"P'raps it might, miss, if he'd anyone to read and talk serious to him, but I don't know no one; and he's that quick and impatient-"
"You make me feel very much for your poor son, Mr. Jones. I shall come round in the morning, and if he's there then I should be pleased to talk to him on his duty to his parents."
"I've been a widderer these twenty year come Michaelmas, so there's only me to look after the lad. He's more fit to look after me now. There's one thing I likes about him. He don't drink."
I had one of my headaches next morning. I have not always the remedy for them at hand. On this occasion I had left it in London. I thought the air along the sea front might do me good. After breakfast I strolled along the Parade to the far corner where Mr. Jones-who, by the by, was not a Welshman but a native of Sussex-had his boat.
"Good morning, Mr. Jones. I see you are an advocate of cleanliness. Your Locket looks splendid, after the scrubbing you are giving her."
A fine, tall, young fellow, fair and freckled, with his short curly hair shading his broad forehead, wielded a mop which belaboured the bottom and sides of the upturned skiff. His legs were bare to the knees. He stood like an old Northern Viking, a splendid specimen of the Anglo-Saxon race. The heavy bucket might have contained only waste paper from the manner in which he shifted it about, charged to the brim with sea water. He almost dropped it, however, as he turned and saw me. His mouth opened. He stood stupidly staring at me from behind his old father. I recognized the youth at once.
"Good mornin', miss. I don't know nothin' about no advocates, miss, but my son Bill is just a givin' her a rub round as we was a thinkin', the mornin' being so fine, I might see a young lady down for a row."
He had a twinkle in his eye which conveyed a silent hope that the liberal fee he had received the previous day might be repeated.
"So this is your son, is it, Mr. Jones? He must be of great service to you now you have got him."
"Oh, yes, miss-he's a main stronger nor me. You should see him capsize that there butt all alone by hisself. Why a rhinersorous couldn't do it!"
The old boatman was brimming over with pride-satisfaction at recovering his long-absent son betrayed itself in every feature.
"You must be very glad to see your father again."
"Yes, so I am, miss, and to find him so well and hearty. You see, miss, he's getting on now. It ain't as I'm so awful strong-it's that my old dad is a gettin' a bit shaky in his timbers, miss."
There was something charming in the kindly smile, and the rough, yet tender, manner of the blunt young sailor towards the old man which made me look him over attentively. He was certainly a superbly built young fellow. His bare arms and legs were furnished with a muscular development which is rare in these days of effeminacy. A vigorous, healthy life upon the ocean had served to enhance all his natural advantages. He was a man to my mind. My headache increased-I wanted him badly to cure it.
Between them, they turned the boat over again. It was a good substantial skiff. I had been used to boating with Percy as a child. I knew something about rowing. I used to astonish the girls at the pensionnat near Paris when we all went in a formal party down the Seine from Suresnes. It suited me now to pretend ignorance.
"I hope you will stop with your dad, and-and be a good boy. He tells me you are too fond of-of pleasure."
My manner was demure. I flashed him one of my glances. He seemed struck. There is-they say-a Freemasonry in love. I say there is more. There is a magnetism in love which is conveyed from mind to mind-from brain to brain-from heart to heart, if you will-but there is a power, subtle and irresistible, which speaks more powerfully than words. "I love you, I want you." Such was the influence which flashed between us now.
"We sailors don't get too much pleasuring, miss-but I've been ten months at sea, shut up in an old box of a ship all the time, four hours out and four hours in-and that's about the size of it. My dad ain't the man to deny me a fair run ashore now I'm home again. I know how to take care of the rhino all the same, but I mean to stay some time with him now and I shan't trouble about shipping again yet awhile."
There was a half serious, half comical air about the young fellow which showed he only partly believed in me. His keen blue eye followed me. He was noting me well from head to foot. He was distinctly struck with my appearance. Admiration was plainly, visibly written in his look. I read him like a book. I was a revelation to the young sailor. No doubt his appetite was sharp after ten long months at sea. I inwardly rejoiced. Meanwhile the boat was ready, the cushions in their places.
"If you've a mind for a row, miss, my son Bill will go with you and pull you about in the butt anywhere you likes."
I got into the boat. They launched her down. Bill swung himself in over the bow. He backed her out from the smooth beach. Then he sat himself down facing me and began to row steadily away from the shore.
"I really don't know if I ought to trust myself all alone with such a gay young man as your dad describes you, Mr. William, but after all he does not give you a bad character, though he does say you are somewhat-somewhat-what shall I say?"
"Oh, I know, he's a larky old customer, is my dad, and he thinks I'm not much steadier than he was when he was a young 'un. Which course shall we steer, miss-go along the Pevensey shore, or keep on out of the Bay a bit?"
"Let us get into deep water and right away from the sound of the noisy people ashore. How fast you row!"
He was pulling as if for a wager. We were already half a mile away, heading straight out to sea. He slacked a little as I spoke. All this time his gaze never left my person or my face. He was trying to sum me up. Speculating, probably, as to what sort of bedfellow I should make. He was very good-looking certainly. As he bent forward to his paddles, his loose shirt disclosed his broad chest covered with a fine sandy down. I felt impatient as I sat on the broad seat with a back to it. I faced him all the time. I sat cross-legged, my right knee over the left. As Bill pulled away at the paddles, my leg was jerked backwards and forwards. I took care he should have a good view of my feet and my stocking as well. I soon fascinated him. The black silk seemed a new sensation. He commenced to row still more unevenly. My leg moved in cadence. He could see at times up to my knee as the light breeze assisted his design. He was evidently getting excited. A strong lascivious expression extended itself over his features.
"So you have been shut up ten months on board ship, Bill? That must have been trying to a fine young man like you?"
I could not beat about the bush. I wanted him. I meant to indulge my inclination-to have him. It was no time to waste in mere sentiment-in childish trifling.
"I guess it was, miss. Never saw a petticoat for over four months. We were not allowed ashore at Valparaiso, only in the daytime. It's a queer hole for British seamen, miss; nothing but rows and robbery."
"Poor fellow! But of course you have a sweetheart here?"
"Not I, miss. I only came home last night, or rather early this morning. I couldn't stop in London with the poor old dad here and he so old and feeble-like, so I jumped into the first train I could."
"You are a good fellow, Bill. I like you very much. What a long way we are from the shore now! I can't see the pier any more."
"We're over two miles from Eastbourne now. See that light-ship there-that's the Royal Sovereign shoal."
"How lovely it seems-how calm the sea is! We need not go any further out. You might not be able to get back, Bill."
"I only wish I couldn't!"
"Why so, Bill?"
"Because I haven't had the chance to see a face like yours in all my life, miss! There-now it's out!"
"Oh, Bill! You don't mean that? Come and sit here and tell me all about it."
I made room for him beside me on the broad seat with the backboard. The words "David Jones" were quite obliterated by our figures. Bill took up a rope and began undoing the end into four separate cords. Then he got the other end of the same rope, and served it the same. I watched him. Then he put two ends together, the four cords of each end interlacing.
"Why Bill! What do you call that?"
"That's what we sailors call making a splice, miss-when it's done."
"Do you ever think of being spliced yourself, Bill?"
"Sometimes, but sailors ought never to be properly spliced up, miss. There ought to be a slippery hitch somewhere. They're awfully true when spliced, but the gals ain't. They can't stand the long absences."
"Can you make a slippery hitch, Bill?"
He laughed. We both laughed. I looked into his eyes. He returned my gaze. I put my hand on his thigh. He slipped his left arm round my waist. He had dropped the rope now. We sat quiet a moment. The only sound we could hear was the low gurgling of the placid sea under the boat's bows and sides, as she lay idly rolling on the gentle swell.
"We are quite alone here, Bill-not a boat anywhere."
He had white canvas trousers on, turned up to his knees. My hand stole along until it was suddenly arrested by something hard and solid between his legs which lay along the inside of his left thigh. I lifted my face up close to his. Instantly he kissed me on the mouth.
"Oh, Bill! Oh, you bad boy!"
He seized me tightly in his arms. He covered me with kisses. He pressed my bosom with his great sailor hand. I closed my eyes and suffered all.
"Make me a slippery hitch, Bill dear!"
He pressed me again tighter than ever. My fingers pressed his limb. It seemed tremendously thick and stiff.
"Ten months! Only think, Bill, how bad you must feel!"
His hand was already on my leg. As I spoke it moved further up. I opened my legs and let it pass. Meanwhile I deliberately unbuttoned his canvas flap.
"I want to look at it, Bill!"
"So you shall, my dear. It's a whopper!"
A moment later, a huge naked limb stiffly erect and throbbing with eagerness for enjoyment was in my grasp. His hand had already taken possession of the centre of my desires. His fingers maddened me. Without more ado, I pulled the big member into the warm daylight. It was a beauty! White and red, with a large soft top and hard sides-very long and awfully stiff. We rolled about together in this position as the boat answered to the undulations of the sea. It could not last so, however, and so it came to pass that I slipped, cushion and all, off the seat. Bill and I found ourselves on the floor-boards of the skiff with the cushion under us. I still retained my hold of his limb. He reached out and secured another cushion which he placed under my loins. Then he tilted me back. He pulled up my clothes. I am afraid I helped him. He took one look at my exposed legs-at my white belly. I saw for a second his big truncheon menacing me within a few inches of my thighs. Then he threw himself upon me. I was quite as eager as he was. I helped him to his pleasure. The lewd business was about to begin-the curtain was up-the actor and the actress were on the stage.
"Oh! Oh! Bill-you hurt! Oh! Oh! You're right into me! You're too big! You're-Oh!-Oh!-Oh! My goodness, Bill!"
Nothing stopped him. The young fellow had had a long fast. I was getting the full benefit of his abstention. He pushed his great tool into me to his balls. He never spoke, but he set his teeth together. He worked up and down, thrusting at me like a battering ram. In less time than it takes to relate he sank on my chest. I felt a sudden gush of hot seed. I knew that his pleasure had reached the climax. He lay discharging, until a flood of thick sperm deluged my interior. My own pleasure was supreme. He gave me no rest. Instead of withdrawing, he recommenced. A few thrusts, aided by the natural elasticity of my vagina, restored him to all his virility. He commenced another course. Oh, the impatient fellow! How he worked me!
"Oh! Bill, dear Bill! Go slowly-do it gently, Bill! Oh, oh! You'll know the bottom of the boat out! Oh, my goodness! Oh!"
"Boat be damned!" was the polite rejoinder.
At last he got up. He adjusted his clothes. He wiped his smoking member. I raised myself on my cushions. I dipped my handkerchief into the cool sea-water and sopped up all I could of the tremendous overflow I had received. I made the best toilette possible under the circumstances.
"We can sail back easy. The wind is almost dead fair. Then we can sit together. Do you feel jolly now, my dear love?"
There was something that touched me beyond simple lust in this young fellow. There was an innate tenderness towards "his gal," to which they say sailors are particularly prone, just as one makes a pet of a dog.
I have heard of sailors at Portsmouth newly discharged from their ships and envious of married men who had found a ready-made progeny on their return, seeking to emulate them by hiring babies to carry up and down the Yard. I can quite believe it.
Bill set to work. In two minutes the mast was stepped; in two more the sail was hoisted and set, and the sheet, as he called it, hauled aft. The skiff sailed along merrily-too quickly I thought, as I sat on the cushioned floor of the boat with my head on the thigh of the young sailor who held the tiller. My restless fingers would not remain quiet. They sought their playfellow. Bill opened his flap. I pulled out his stiffening limb.
"Oh, Bill! What a big one! Do you feel any better now?"
"Why, yes, my lovely dear one, of course I do, and I'm damned grateful to you for the chance, miss. But I wish-that I do-we were not going to part so soon. I should like to have you all night."
"Oh, Bill! A pretty thing you'd make of me by morning!"
His limb rose again under the skillful touches of my nimble fingers. As I sat, my face was just on a level with his erect weapon. He held the tiller in one hand; with the other he caressed my neck and bosom. I bent forward. I examined minutely his splendid limb from end to end. I put my hand under and felt his testicles. I tickled him lusciously. I put the tip of the broad nut to my lips. I kissed it. I opened them-it entered. I sucked it. I rolled my hot tongue round the red head.
"Oh! Oh! Little lass! You are driving me mad, don't ye know! Stop a moment. Here, come stern on. I'll arrange all in the twinkling of a handspike. Now sit down between my legs. So! Oh, my God!"
He pulled me backwards. He had already raised my clothes. My buttocks were exposed to his salacious view. I settled myself down upon his thighs. I felt his thing pressing in between my pliant globes. The big knob was jammed between them. I put down my right hand. I placed his weapon between the moist lips of my little slip. I pressed down.
"Oh! Damn my eyes and limbs! My bowsprit's run you aboard, missy! It's right into you up to the gammoning! Oh, isn't it lovely?"
He seized me round the hips. He pushed home. With my left hand, I tickled his testicles. His big limb stretched me tremendously. I enjoyed it all the same. I shared his transports. I was mad with lust. I jogged up and down. My spasms came all too soon. I ceased moving. I could only moan now. Bill took up the movements. He pushed with fury.
"Oh, Bill! You'll upset the boat!"
"Upset the soup, you mean? There it goes! Enough for all hands!"
Truly the vigour of this active young sailor was tremendous. He had been ten months, remember, without copulation. His excitement, doubtless his enjoyment, was proportionate to the length of his abstinence. I was really glad when the boat's keel touched land.
"The Honourable Mr. Percy is in the drawing-room, miss."
"Arrived already, Ferguson? I had no idea the time had gone so fast. Oh, I am so glad! Say I'm coming immediately."
I found him so changed. The big boy of fifteen had expanded into a fine young man. He was handsome too. A speaking likeness of his father. My thoughts went back to the old days. Was he changed in character also? Hardly so, I thought. Did his mind revert to the time when we were last together? If so-what did he think of it all now?
"How you are altered, Eveline! I should have known you anywhere-but how you have grown! How you have developed! You are the most beautiful of girls! By Heaven, you take me by surprise! What a figure! I never saw so perfect a face in my life."
We stood together in the light of the window. He was indeed altered. No doubt he found me also very different from the little girl he had parted from so long ago. I seemed to astonish and attract him. He had lots to tell me of his foreign service-his friends and his comrades. We passed a quiet evening together. Papa had returned with Percy from London.
5
MAIDENHEAD STORIES
While England's bourgeoisie were disporting themselves in this manner, their American cousins found their own paths to summer dalliance. But there was an important difference. Like The Seven Year Itch, the plot was more likely to revolve round the married woman asserting her sexual independence at the beach. Even at the height of summer, London temperatures were rarely unbearable. New York, in an age before air-conditioning, was like Naples or Calcutta. Of course, the breadwinner must remain behind in the steamy jungle of Manhattan. But his wife and his children could be packed off to the cooler breezes of New England or, at least, somewhere beyond the big city. Names like Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard were murmured as symbols of social cachet.
And what did the little woman do when she found herself alone and unchaperoned near the Atlantic rollers for the summer months? Perhaps she closed her eyes, crossed her legs and thought of husband and duty. Sometimes she did not. The effect of ozone on domestic morals was quite as powerful in the new world as in the old.
"Vic's Story," from the 1897 Maidenhead Stories deals with just such a situation. Though the setting and characters are American, the book was first published for the Erotika Biblion Society of New York in Paris, and it was limited to two hundred and fifty numbered copies. Examples of this original edition are now almost unknown outside the great libraries like the Bibliotheque Nationale and the British Museum.
The book was described as the American Decameron, its action taking place at the final dinner of the Beta Theta Phi, a secret society at Smith College. "All the dishes had been served, the waiters sent away, clouds of cigar smoke filled the room, champagne corks popped with the regularity of minute guns, frisky stories were told and the songs grew more and more suggestive." It is discovered that one member of the society, Frank Eaton, is still a virgin and the dinner guests resolve to remedy this. Two girls are fetched from Josie Mason's cat-house, Ida and Vic. They are to perform their lascivious magic on Frank Eaton. They and every other person present must tell a seductive story of personal experience to spur him on. One of the girls, Vic, recalls the pleasures of her seaside vacation, while her husband remained in New York.
Vic is described as a large, luxurious blonde some twenty-two years of age with beautiful golden hair flowing over her plump shoulders and dimpled arms. Her features are very regular and a languid light plays in her half-closed azure eyes. Though her breasts are not so firm as Ida's, they are classically voluptuous. What a downy couch, the narrator tells us, they would make for one tired conqueror in the battle of love! Her full lips seem to oppress her with their might, while her majestic thighs are dreams of luxury. The satiny texture of her skin has a lovely rose tint; a very light golden down, short as velvet and as soft, surrounds but does not shelter the entrance to a crimson hall where pleasure dwells. She has a habit of lazily stretching out one shapely leg and drawing it up again that nearly drives one wild with the view of the vanishing beauties thus described.
This buxom blonde sounds like nothing so much as one of those gorgeous nymphs whose painted forms adorned the ceilings of Europe's royal palaces in the 18th century. But that would be misleading, because she is a real live flesh and blood creature living in the banquet years of the East Coast before World War I.
When almost all the others have told their stories and poor Frank Eaton's fate is nearly decided, Ida's turn comes. She is reluctant and protests a little. Then she relents and begins to tell the story of her days of freedom at Nagaskel Beach. Appropriately for such a girl, she calls her revelation "The Fun of the Thing." When it is over, the president of the society concludes wisely that "women are only seduced by men who have cither been seduced by women or who have found women willing to aid their timid first advances." The age of the bashful virgin was over and that of the modern young woman had begun. But, then, any lad who spent an afternoon in the hands of Elke Maline could have told him that.
"Well, I'll skip the first year of my married life, which was stupid enough. Though my old fool of a husband had lots of money, he hadn't any position in society, so I spent my time tediously enough. But that's neither here nor there. I'll tell you how I found out the fun of the thing. In the summer, I went down to Nagaskel Beach and put up at the smallest hotel, leaving my old fool of a husband in New York with his stupid speculations. I had a room whose windows opened on the piazza that overlooked the sea. It communicated with the adjoining room by a door which, of course, was locked and bolted on each side. Time hung heavily on my hands. I was bashful then and didn't make acquaintances easily. I spent much time in my room, reading novels and looking out at the sea.
"Several mornings in succession, I noticed peculiar sounds from the next room-hurried whispers, broken ejaculations, smacking like that of the lips, snaps of laughter and finally an odd cracking sound, which roused my curiosity to the highest degree. Who occupied the room and what was the source of the strange sounds? There must be two people in there and one of them, I felt certain, was a woman from the smothered laugh I occasionally heard, and, by the way, that laugh had the most peculiar effect on me. Whenever I heard it, it sent the most delicious shivers racing up and down my back, which were, if anything, increased by the odd cracking noise that invariably accompanied the laughter. Finally I could stand it no longer. My curiosity gave me no rest until I found out a way to gratify it. Over the door was a glass transom, covered on my side with a curtain, or rather, by a piece of green paper tacked onto a frame. Near one end, at the top, it had been torn away a little. As quickly as possible one morning, I pushed the bed in front of the door, placed a chair on the bed and climbed on the chair. I could easily see over the torn paper through the transom and all over the room. As I had carefully closed the shutters in my own room, there was little risk of being seen by anyone, at least so I thought. In the room was a young man, exceedingly handsome, whom I had noticed frequently at the dining table and had longed to be acquainted with. He was dressed in his undershirt and trousers, with a pair of loose slippers on his bare feet. When I noticed that he was in such a state of undress, my modesty was so greatly shocked that I blushed red hot and was on the verge of climbing down, but his muscular arms and magnificent chest, which the light undershirt left exposed, were so fascinating and so different from my shriveled-up old man that I found it impossible to take my gaze away from the beauties.
"The young man was busy with a watercolor sketch of some sea and clouds, which were visible from one of his windows. I noticed that the window opening on the porch was closed and the curtains tightly drawn. As I was admiring this manly beauty, the door of the room opened and one of the chambermaids entered-an extremely handsome girl. The artist, for so I shall call him, hearing her enter and lock the door, rose up and, running to her, clasped her in his arms and with a loving, clinging kiss he said: 'Why, how long you have been this morning, Katie!' Katie put her finger on his lips and pointed to my door, as if to say: she is there yet and whispered sweetly in his ear, which I couldn't hear. His only reply was to give her another of those clinging kisses, which she seemed to return with interest, and the sight of which made me feel exceedingly warm and uncomfortable. Then his hand, which had been about her neck, descended to the front of her dress and, quickly unbuttoning this, he laid bare a really well-formed bosom. This he proceeded to caress and kiss in the most exciting manner, all the time pushing Katie onto the bed, upon which she fell at last with that smothered laugh, which again sent its delicious shivers over me. For a time, he lay beside her, leaving her waist entirely unbuttoned and seeming to get great pleasure from her breasts, stiffening the little rosebuds on top and every now and then burying his face between them and making her laugh.
"By this time, I felt very warm. Then I saw one of Katie's hands steal softly down the front of his trousers, unbuttoning as it went, until finally it snapped out from its nest the finest chanticleer that ever crossed by night or morning. I had never seen anything like that before, my husband's old limp, wrinkled thing being so repulsive that I always avoided the sight of it. But this bird was so tall, so smooth, so white, so noble with its fiery red comb and dark bushy tail, that I held my breath from sheer amazement. But what amazed me still more was that Katie, far from showing any disgust of that enormous thing, caressed it lovingly and, bending over, even impressed a kiss upon its ruby topknot. Was it possible that a woman could like that thing? To be sure, it wasn't really hideous like the nasty little thing I was acquainted with, but I couldn't understand how she could appear to be really fond of it. However, I did not have much time for studying this problem, as a sudden change occurred in the horrid tableau which occupied all my attention. With a couple of kicks, the artist had disengaged himself from his slippers and trousers, exhibiting a magnificent pair of well developed legs, whose beauty were really dazzling and at the same time, he had pulled up Katie's dress as high as possible, also displaying another pair of superb legs and a magnificent you-know-what surrounded by curly, sort hair! In another instant, his finger was in at the cleft and Katie, instead of repelling him, spread her thighs a little apart to allow him better entrance, still retaining her grasp of his chanticleer. The girl seemed, from the expression on her face, to actually like the business-was it possible that a woman could enjoy anything in connection with that place?
"And yet for her there seemed to be considerable fun in the thing-for my part, though, I was still amazed at her apparent enjoyment. I felt the most uncomfortable hot and pricking sensation you-know-where and seeing the artist apparently making things so pleasant for Katie with his finger, almost unconsciously I ran my hand under my petticoats and soon found a little eminence inside the cave opening, which responded to my touch by sending the most delicious thrill through me, all over.
"For a moment the pleasure so overcame me that I could scarcely stand. It was all I could do to hold my position. I had even somewhat forgotten the picture before me, when another of those smothered laughs brought back my truant attention in time to see the artist on his knees between Katie's thighs, just about to put his majestic bird into her thickly shadowed nest. The bird was so large that I wondered that it even would make its way through the narrow opening, but from my position I had a most excellent point of view. I could see it making its way slowly but surely with short and well-timed strokes, which Katie aided by well-managed pushes of her superb posterior, until at last it disappeared entirely from my view. I had followed it with breathless interest, fully expecting the young girl to split open at any minute or at least to cry out with pain, but her elasticity seemed fully equal to the strain put upon it and instead of crying, she had upon her pretty face a look of supreme ecstasy. She lifted her shapely legs and clasped them over his posterior, while with her sturdy arms she drew his face down upon hers and covered it with kisses, while both put themselves into a slow but rhythmical motion, during which I could just catch maddening glimpses of the white bird of paradise, flushing in and out of Katie's dusky grotto. All doubts that I formerly had as to the pleasure of the performance vanished at the sight of the writhing ecstasy, which grew more and more in unbounded lustfulness as the temperature of the two bodies grew higher on account of the friction, while my body was fairly consumed by radiated heat from the passionate picture before me. It was a bewildering medley of rumpled skirts, pink flesh, blue stockings, dark hair, passionate kisses and fervid embracing with both arms and legs. For a moment they rolled over on one side and Katie, closing her eyes, clasped him so tightly she nearly choked him, and then seemed to faint away, setting her teeth and looking quite pale. I heard her gasp, quite forgetting her former caution as she came to herself.
"'You haven't gone, have you, Will?'
"'Oh, no, I have held on,' replied Will, the artist.
"'Then give it to me again; kill me if you can Will."
"'All right,' he answered, rolling on his back and pulling her on the top of him, while the motion was renewed. She being seated astride of him, he held her erect, his hands just beneath her breasts and she placing her hands at his shoulders. This position presented a most perfect view of his superb ornithological specimen. As Katie rose and fell at its point, nearly its whole grand length was fully revealed for an instant before it was plunged in again. For every motion on the bed, one went on under my clothes. I saw Katie's face grow redder and redder; her breath came shorter and shorter.
"'Oh, get on top of me, Will,' she gasped sudi-bly.
"They rolled back into the first position and the motions became more and more furious, till at last a spasm seemed to seize both of them, their embrace grew rigid, their lips closed on each other and they lay motionless, save for a sudden throbbing about the middle.
"There was no denying it; what I had just witnessed was a scene of extreme pleasure. I had learned at last that the fun of the thing depended entirely upon whom you are having fun with. I found myself growing faint, a strange, sick feeling, yet not unpleasant, awakened all my members. Oh, if I could have that superb Will in my arms and his superb William in my sanctuary! I almost felt like calling out to him to come in to me, but my modesty and virtue held me back. I felt sure I would fall as I climbed down and stretched out on the bed. I tried to be as quick as possible, but I was so weak that I slipped just as I was getting down. I closed my eyes for a moment, tried to reproduce the picture I had just seen, pulled up my clothes and, with my fingers manipulated myself so well that soon I too was swimming in a seas of ecstasy like nothing I had ever imagined before-so intense was the delight that I fairly lost consciousness in a storm of lustful sighs. When I opened my eyes, I looked up and it seemed that at the torn place in the paper over the door an eye was looking down at me.
"Remembering my exposed position, I quickly pushed down my skirts and straightened out my clothes, but when I glanced beneath my eyelashes at the transom, the eyes were gone. I listened carefully; no sound from the room. I climbed the chair again and looked in; Katie was gone, but the artist laid on the bed, his beautiful William limp and sad, hung over one leg, while he, with his hand clasped behind his head, looked out at the clouds.
"Give me some champagne, boys, I'm dry."
"So are all of us. Your story is so hot, Vic, it will take considerable fluid to keep us from sizzling up. But you go on with your tale."
"Well, I'll skip several days, during which nothing lascivious happened. I watched the next room, but Katie and Will did not repeat any of their amorous games. In fact, the artist managed to be out of his room at the time when the servant came in to arrange it. During this time, however, Will and I had become acquainted. How, it doesn't matter, for you all know it was an easy thing, since I was anxious to know more of a man who could give such a pleasure to a woman. For several days our acquaintance grew. We walked together, he began to teach me how to swim, and I must say, I felt great delight in the touch of his hands on my lightly-clothed body and he had a way of being quite touching without being presuming. In fact, a flirtation had pretty well been established between us, innocent so far, for I was too modest and shy and inexperienced then to carry it further (you needn't laugh boys, it was true then), and I suppose he wasn't quite sure of me and was looking about for the best way of completing his conquest. Of course, associating with him made my temperature rise higher and higher. I had several times to relieve myself with my fingers and yet I never thought of letting him in my room to cool my ardor with his sprinkler. I had the notion that I ought to remain virtuous-though why I couldn't quite say.
"At last, one night I found it impossible to sleep, and so, slipping on a light wrapper over my nightgown, I sat down by the window opening on the porch and threw open the shutters so as to get the cool breeze from the sea. As I looked out, I saw a figure leaning against the railing smoking. The noise of my shutters attracted his attention and he turned. It was Will, the artist, in his shirt and slippers. Seeing that it was I, he said good evening and asked if he might come over and talk to me, if I would excuse his costume. Trembling with mingled fear and delight, I consented and, resting himself on my window sill, he opened a most interesting conversation, destined to become interesting in the highest degree, for in the midst of our chatter we heard steps. Someone had come out into the piazza and was walking down to our end. Quick as thought, Will and I slipped into my room and pulled in the shutters just as the newcomer passed the window and, seating himself on a chair at the end of the porch in front of Will's room, lighted a cigar and began to smoke.
"'What did you come in here for?' I asked in a whisper. The whole thing had surprised me so that I was quite overcome.
"'There wasn't anything else to do,' he whispered, coolly settling himself on a stool at my feet.
" Why, what do you mean, why didn't you go into your own room?'
"'Don't you know that man would have seen me leave your window and just think you might have been seriously compromised?'
"I shivered at the thought, for I assure you I still had some modesty left then. 'Well, then you must hurry out of my room by my door,' I said, rising. 'Thank you for your consideration, coming into my bedroom."
"'But I can't get into my room. My door is locked and the key is on the inside and what a sight I would make, locked out in my shirt sleeves at this time of night. Please excuse me and endure my company until that idiot goes away."
"I recognized the force of his remarks and allowed him to remain. No sooner had I given him this permission than he seized my hand and covered it with kisses.
"'What do you mean,' I whispered, trying to withdraw my hand.
"'I mean that I am dying of love for you. I am burning up. You do love me, don't you dearest?' For some time I didn't know what to say!; his vehemence overpowered me. I tried to repel him, but while he still held my hand he slid an arm around my waist and drew me closely to him.
"'Oh, love me, love me," he continued.
"Finally I found my tongue. 'If you don't let me loose, I'll call for help, you unprincipled man."
"'No you won't, my dearest, you won't call people to see a man in your room."
"I shivered all over at the very thought. 'But,' he continued, 'you will love me. I am burning up for love of you.' After that, nothing was said-on my part for fear of attracting the attention of the smoker outside on the porch, on his part because his lips were occupied otherwise. His kisses ascended from my hand up my arm, my neck, chin and to my lips, leaving a chain of fire behind them and throwing me in a state of nervous exultation which was more thrilling than anything I had ever experienced. By the time he had reached my lips (I had ceased struggling for fear of making a noise, of course), and after two or three of these soul-thrilling kisses, I returned one of them. That settled my case. Releasing my hand, his hand, with the rapidity of lightning, slid under my wrapper and nightgown, and before I was fully aware of what he was doing (for his fiery lips were raising my spirits to the boiling point), his finger was in at the cleft and rested upon that little devil where unassuaged desires are the vein of our sex.
"No sooner was it touched than it responded, and most delicious thrills radiated out all over my body-far superior to anything my own finger had been able to produce. At first, I tried to squeeze out his finger by pressing my legs tightly together, but he held his ground and soon the fiery darts which went through my frame weakened me so much that I not only relaxed my muscles but actually spread my thighs further apart, giving him a better opportunity to play his nefarious occupation.
"I assure you that I scarcely knew what I was doing, so overcome was I by the contradictory feelings of desire and modesty, virtue and passion. His kisses on my lips became so entrancing that I finally put both arms about his neck and hugged him tightly, giving him back kiss for kiss. Suddenly realizing my position, in a passion of virtue, I pushed his lips away from mine, but before I could shove him off he had opened my wrapper, exposed my bosom and fastened his blazing lips upon the tip of my right breast, while one of his hands tickled the tip of the other. Oh, how the little things stiffened under his touch and what a delicious sensation of weakness passed over my whole body! Half fainting, I abandoned myself, relaxing all my muscles. He saw his opportunity and didn't let it slip. Seizing me about the waist, he lifted me quickly and bore me to the bed, throwing himself upon me. Once more his lips drew the breath from me, substituting for it the flames of passion which enfolded me in an ever intense blaze. I felt that one of his hands was drawing up my garments, but I was so far gone in my delirium that I didn't think of stopping him; in fact, I must say that now I wanted him to go on, for the vision of Katie's bliss had rearisen in my mind and I too wanted to try the fatal experiment. I then felt something hard and hot strike against my thigh. I knew it was his William and in an agony of expectation awaited its entry into its gate of what is either heaven or hell, as the case may be.
"At last I felt it rubbing against the sides and then touching the little devil or angel of the gate-sending a spasm through me that nearly made me faint. Reaching down, the artist gently rubbed it up and down till the opening was moist and I nearly was out of my senses. Then, slightly depressing it, he brought it to the secret opening and it began to penetrate slowly but surely. Oh, how luxuriously it sank into the hot, moist loving flesh which so tenderly and caressingly closed around it in a clinging embrace, while from its blazing head living flames darted out all over my writhing body. At the same time, Will darted his tongue between my lips, touching my tongue with an electric spark. I felt that at last I was to become fully acquainted with the fun of the thing, which was so intense that it hurt. Slowly, voluptuously, back and forth moved the sublime dispenser of love in my blazing body and unconsciously I too began to set myself into action, aiding him and greatly increasing my own enjoyment. It seemed as though my whole existence was centered in two fiery focuses, one at my lips, the other at my middle. He clasped me underneath my posterior, raising me to meet his thrusts. In a moment I caught on and performed my part excellently.
"How it happened I don't know, but I remember my legs somehow or other got clasped over his back. I think I wanted to get as much out of him as possible and my inspiration showed me the true way. Faster and faster became our movements, deeper and longer our kisses and hotter and more thrilling the flame that was consuming me. I floated in a sea of voluptuousness, thrilled with the pleasure that darted over me in ecstatic spasms, I felt myself inundated by a burning liquid, something seemed to give way and I lost my consciousness. When I came to, I felt Will's arm about me, his hot breath on my cheeks and his hand at the gate to heaven. And now I had lost my real virginity, my senses were fully awakened, I knew the fun of the thing and as a natural result, here I am."
"Oh, Vic, don't stop, tell us the rest of it, yours is the best story yet."
"There isn't any rest to it; Will and I continued our performances for the fun of the thing the rest of the summer. At last we were caught and my husband got a divorce. I didn't contest it-I was only too glad to get rid of the old impotent fool and took a good sum of money to keep quiet. Will undertook to manage my fortune and lost it all. By this time I had learned the business and adopted it as a profession."
"And you are surpassed by none and only equaled by Ida."
"Hurrah for Vic! The queen of the town."
"Hurrah for both daisies!"
"Hush, boys," said Vic. "We have another story yet, the president's!"
"Yes, give us your story!"
"No, hold it back!"
"Go ahead!"
"See if you can beat Vic's story."
6
HAZARDS TO NAVIGATION
Pleasure afloat has been an attraction to the rich and sexually ambitious for a very long time. Whatever it was that used to happen to girls on Errol Flynn's yacht would have seemed pretty tame stuff to the Emperor Tiberius and his successors. Suetonius, the Roman historian, describes the excesses of Nero who floated down the Tiber to Ostia on his pleasure-galley or cruised across the Bay of Naples. The advantages of a galley or a yacht were obvious. Sexual extravagance could be enjoyed out of sight and hearing of land. There could be no escape for the objects of Nero's lust, whether men or women. The warm sunlit waters made an agreeable and relaxing setting. And it seemed as if an entirely different moral code prevailed.
In times closer to our own, yachting got into its stride with the return to England of Charles II in 1660 from his exile in Holland. The very word yacht was a corruption of the Dutch jacht. The king and his royal brother, the Duke of York laters James II, took a keen interest and became proficient helmsmen. The idea of a pleasure yacht, as distinct from a racing craft or a naval ship reserved for royal use, soon caught on.
By the Victorian period and the age of steam, some of the most graceful craft ever built were of the pleasure-yacht kind. Their epitome was the new Royal Yacht, appropriately named the Victoria and Albert which was the floating palace of successive monarchs until after World War II. With the fine and ornate hull of an old-fashioned clipper, it sailed the seas during the 1920s and 1930s, the golden age of erotica's heroines, like a ghost from half a century before.
During the season at Monte Carlo or Alicante, the trim white vessels with their buff funnels rode at anchor, row upon row. Almost as many of them belonged to J. P. Morgan and the American tycoons as to European nobility. For most people, even the prosperous middle-class, the nearest they got to one of these floating dreamboats was a view from the promenade or the harbour through a telescope or binoculars. All the same, the fantasies that were conjured up seemed extravagant enough for an emperor himself. By day the fairy ships cruised the warm blue ocean, the sleekly oiled flesh of beautiful girls tanning gently in the sun. At night, across the water, came the throb of dance-music, the white evening dresses catching the light, sighs and murmurs lost upon the waves.
It would have been amazing if the novelists of love and lust had not chosen to set some of their stories in a setting as promising a this. French classics like Orgies on Board a Yacht in the series "Etudes Passionelles" date from the years before World War II. Others, Life on Board a Yacht, Pleasure-Bound Afloat, and their kind, are of the same period or earlier. Nor did the novelists forget those long voyages to India and back by the last rulers of the British Empire. The famous P & O liners, following the route through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, offered opportunities for amorous dalliance that almost rivaled the possibilities of a private yacht. Fantasy touched reality at a good many points in these stories. Captain DeVane's nights of passion on the Red Sea with the hot-blooded young Arabian beauty, Nabyla Justo, described in Nights of the Rajah, had its real-life counterpart in the affair with Winnie recounted by Frank Harris in My Life and Loves. Colonel Sullivan's bedroom acrobatics with the lynx-eyed Miss Jolly in the warm Caribbean was a caper not unknown in reality.
Some of the novels took the pleasure cruise as their main subject. Others used it merely as a scenario. In some cases the girls were as eager to get on board and enjoy the fun as the men who lured them there. At other times, the young ladies had been abducted by unscrupulous old lechers, against their will. When that happened, the object was as a rule to enjoy the entire menu of sexual pleasures with the female captives in a place where resistance was in vain and from which the sounds of protest would never be heard. For these girls it was strictly a one-way trip, at the end of which they could be sold to an Arabian sheikh or harem dealer. There was no risk, after that, of complaints being made or scandal caused.
In reality, most of the girls who embarked on these aptly-named pleasure cruises did so willingly-and in many cases eagerly. But that would not do for the writers of erotic melodrama. What their readers wanted was not a girl who was greeted with, "Welcome aboard. Have a nice trip," but rather the struggling numphy who shuddered at the fateful words, "At last, m' proud beauty! I have you in m' power!" Such tales have the unmistakable stamp of the age of Art Deco and Jazz. The great days of romance were over. Erotic fiction and the Hollywood of Valentino catered for much the same sinister sado-masochistic thrill. In reality, most girls had not the least wish to be abducted by glamorous villains or luxurious steam-yachts. As a fantasy, however, it might be worth a daydream or two.
After the war, Grimaudin d'Echara published a series of novels whose sexual antics were, to say the least, unusual. Fleshly Paradise and Orgies on Board a Yacht were the most famous of these. The voyage of the Carmen-Sylva in the latter novel is a mixture of the Marquis de Sade, custard-pie, and aristocratic sex-japes. The dim-witted Berneval is tied up in one of the last orgies and made to witness the antics of his wife Marthe with her girlfriend Cecile. The two women enter naked, but for their black silk stockings and high-heeled boots, each with a dog on a lead. Unknown to Berneval, Cecile Coquerel has seduced his young wife by subtle masturbation and Marthe is deeply in love with her. To his indignation, they perform in front of him. The Cecile orders Marthe to suck him off, a service that Marthe has never performed for him in the whole of their married life. The ecstasy is too much for poor Berneval. At the moment of orgasm, he has a seizure, dies, and is buried with full Italian military honours.
The perverse young beauty, Cecile, soon requires more extravagant ways of amusing herself. One of these is to pony-ride her other girl-friend Charlotte. In their private cabin, Charlotte gets down naked on all fours with driving-reins made of cord in her mouth. Cecile, dressed only in gloves, silk stockings and her high-heeled boots, gets astride her back, "martyrising" Charlotte's bare flanks with spurs of sharpened jade on the surface of the boots. Cecile rubs herself on the other girl's bare back to the point of orgasm, feeling the sweat of exertion on Charlotte's nudity. In the end, they collapse together on the cabin floor, the "jockey-girl" Cecile trembling with release, Charlotte beaten and exhausted.
By the time that the Carmen-Sylva pauses at Naples, there is a corpse or two to be accounted for, and some very strange behavior between the ladies on board. But European aristocracy takes the crisis in its cool elegant stride and the ship sails on.
The English version of such events in Pearls of the Orient is restrained by contrast. There are some pretty odd antics on the good ship Brandon, but no one actually dies as a result of them. Apart from the captain and a discreet crew, the four guests are tended by half a dozen girls as cabin-staff. Their host provides these from the most attractive girls whom he chooses to display the goods in the window of his store. At that time the girl in the window was regarded as fair game for the eye of every appreciative gentleman. The window-dresser was a symbol of the female exhibitionist and probably trying to entice every many who passes by. And so she did. The second Mrs. Benjamin Disraeli, after all, had started life as a humble under-dresser in a hat-shop window. Like the milliner or the dancing-girl, this display-conscious shop-girl makes her appearance in several of the stories.
In this case the team of female comforters is led by a young blonde of twenty-three, whom we glimpse at her chores even before the erotic Odyssey beings.
She was firm-figured, hut a lack of length in her thighs gave Maggie a slightly stocky or coltish appearance. The plain length of her lank blond hair was worn straight to her shoulders and fringed in the manner of a little girl. However, there was a hardness in the pale oval of her face, the cruder features and blue eyes. The master of the Brandon had been all the more inspired by the combination of a working-girl's vulgarity and a little girl's innocence in her appearance. So Maggie in her sleeveless blouse of red and her jeans-trousers of yacht white was his first choice. Many a man slowed his pace, waiting for Maggie to bend to her task so that the tightening of the white jeans and the parting of her buttocks would show him the broadened shape of her arse and her soft young sex moulded between her legs by the tightened denim.
Lucky the guest who has Maggie for his cabin-girl. Despite the hardness and crudity in her face at times, there is a gentle lilt to her voice and all the vitality of youth in her physical passions. The first prerequisite of a sea-going orgy is that every guest must be provided with at least one girl like her in constant cabin-attendance.
The good ship Brandon has more than that. Its owner is able to supply half a dozen girls from his very own store. It is against company policy to have cabin-boys on the yacht, so half the girls wear the boys' uniforms and half the girls appear as girls. The high-spot of the voyage to Biarritz and St. Jean-de-Luz is the nuptial feast and honeymoon night of Sian and Annie, a pair of alluring young vamps who are required to become lovers as Charlotte and Cecile had been.
Fortunately on a vessel of this kind the girls come in two distinct sexes, though both Sian and Annie are distinctly feminine. Annie is a saucy little blonde of nineteen with a rounded face, quizzical eyes, and her chignon tied by a black velvet bow. She is issued with the regulation uniform, a blouse, a pair of panties and a very short skirt. Sian is no less feminine, "having the right to wear a wedding-ring and having enjoyed the marital penis nightly in the simple back-street bedroom. Indeed, Sian's crowning glory is a set of red tresses, adorned at the side by a tortoise-shell comb, which cluster down to overlap her collar. She has a sensuality in her wide mouth and blue eyes. But there is a shortage of boys to match the girls. Sian's uniform is a blouse and tie, worn with white satin page-pants that encase her skin-tight from waist to just above the knees. The biologists and the sociologists might not agree, but that makes Sian an honorary boy for the rest of the voyage. As the master of the yacht points out, Sian has enjoyed the advantage of receiving "many a helping of penis" and will therefore have a better idea of how to act like a boy towards Annie.
And, of course, the captain has the authority to marry a couple at sea. Annie with the "trim little swagger of her hips and the sly heavily-lidded look of her blue eyes," makes an interesting bride. But Sian the redhead with the rather vacant sensual look breathes feminine desire in her page-boy outfit. The two girls are nervous and unwilling at first, not least because their honeymoon bedroom can be viewed through spy holes from the four cabins of the guests. There is no means of turning the light out and the warmth of southern Biscay at night makes sheets unnecessary. The two girls perform on the silk of the bed in view of their admirers.
All the same, there is some bashfulness on the first night. The two girls have known one another for a year or two but, sexually, they are still strangers. It is necessary for two experts to start the newly-weds off as they lie naked on the bed, "manualising" them until the rest follows naturally. Little blond Annie is heard to cry out with the pleasure of what Sian does to her during the first night. And Sian, remembering what it was that her own boy-friends or bridegroom did to her, becomes a most proficient lover.
The narrator remarks that the nightly performance, spied on by the guests, goes the way of so many arranged marriages. It begins with reluctance but the end of the six-week cruise, blond Annie and redheaded Sian are in love with one another. The gentle pleasures of lesbianism outweigh the rough assaults of the male member. Not surprising, perhaps, since one of the guests employs Sian very literally as a cabin-boy and obliges her to surrender her behind to him.
The construction of the pleasure yacht is important, when the pleasure is sex. So the windows of the guest cabins look into the bridal suite. But each of the guests has one of the other girls to assist in the enjoyment of the spectacle. Maggie, Jacqueline, Kim, and Susan do their duty. As our hero draws his chair up to the window to watch Sian and Annie, he is attended by Maggie herself. Annie's knickers are just coming down and the little blonde is turning her mouth for Sian's kisses as the long warm night begins. The Brandon cuts a long and gentle swell somewhere off St. Jean-de-Luz or San Sebastian.
In the cabin, Maggie has not yet removed her working clothes, clad in a tight black sweater and even tighter blue jeans. She is on all fours, the lank blond hair spilling about her face as she sucks the penis of her middle-aged master, aiding his pleasure in seeing what Sian and Annie are doing. The mirrored cabin also reflects for him the sight of Maggie on all fours. The tightening of the jeans-cloth on her hips and thighs in such a posture, shows the swell of her sex between the rear of her legs and the firm spread of Maggie's bottom. It is the view which entranced passers by when she polished the floor behind the plate-glass of the window, except that now it is transferred complete to the cabin on the Brandon.
Girls like Sian and Annie, Noreen and Maggie, appear in more than one book of such series. There is a joking reference to Maggie in the novel Pleasure Bound. At some later stage, her pants are taken down and she is given an enema with a syringe whose bulb is the size of a pair of bagpipes. Maggie "buggered by a pair of bagpipes" amuses the voyagers of the other book. The result of such a quantity of soap solution pumped up the young window-dresser's behind has them chuckling and grinning expectantly.
It is not just the events of the voyage but the atmosphere of indolence and existing for pleasure that gives such appeal to the sex-life of the yacht. The most ordinary postures and gestures acquire a new significance in the suggestive and menacing world of the orgy afloat. The guests rise late next morning after a hard night with Maggie and the other girls. There is a leisurely breakfast and a day spent in deck-chairs, watching the sparkling water as the waitress-service wiggles past. And then it is time to dress for dinner. And after diner, it will be Jacqueline, or Kim, or Lizzie, or all of them, performing on the table for the amusement of the diners.
No one could accuse such books of socialist realism. As the orgy gets going in the saloon, is there anyone on the bridge? Was that an iceberg that just went past the porthole? Or is there a crew of jack-tars that is never seen, like the phantom crew of Pornotopia's own Flying Dutchman?
Traditionally, there have always been two extremes of erotic writing. There are realistic and, indeed, authentic descriptions which make a diary like My Secret Life or even a novel like Suburban Souls such a forceful narrative. At the other end of the scale there exist the brightly-lit realms of sexual fairyland. They existed in Rabelais and the Marquis de Sade, as well as in surreal eroticism. But for the fanciful novelist there was surely no better setting than the pleasure yacht for the creation of his very own world. It was not surprising that a good many of the girls were on their way to the silken bondage of an Arabian Nights harem. After all, it was almost the only fantasy erotic enough to improve upon the good ship Brandon and the rest of the curious fleet.
But it was not only Maggie and her kind who were picked out of shop windows by lecherous admirers, like dolls to play with. Elsewhere, the worthy Colonel Sullivan set eyes upon a darker and more exciting conquest, whom he called "The Odalisque."
7
THE ODALISQUE
The hazards of pleasure lay everywhere as soon as the sexual adventurer put to sea. The amount of passion poured out during the long voyages of the Victorian rulers of India would populate a small city. It was believed that little girls often masturbated by rocking themselves to and fro. What else was a crossing of the ocean but a constant rocking to and fro by the great ships between the wars? Even those who travelled on business or affairs of state were not exempt from the erotic effects of life at sea. Woman and her Master finds Grace Marjori-banks on her way to the Sudanese war and harem captivity. Nights of the Rajah depicts Captain DeVane on board a P & O liner in the Red Sea, having wild nightly orgies with the Arabian beauty Nabyla Justo, who is definitely the property of another man. But all the passionate ladies and gentlemen in such adventures were founders of empire and public servants going about their duties.
On the far side of the Atlantic there was shipping of another kind, well-appointed passenger vessels sailing between ports like Charleston and the tropical paradises of the Caribbean. The system of fancy girls and slavery may have been under threat in the Old South but slave-girls could legally be held in islands like Cuba long after that. Indeed, the whiteslave trade continued to flourish there under the protection of criminal bosses until the mid-twentieth century.
For this extract, we join Colonel Sullivan, outward bound from Charleston's East Dock for the port of Havana-or "Havanah," as he still calls it in his aristocratic and old-fashioned way. He is off to Cuba on business, but pleasure soon overtakes him. The gallant officer is on the verge of a sexual adventure to which he is introduced by the knowing and almond-eyed Miss Jolly. Small wonder that he calls her his "odalisque." She is everything that an eager little harem idol should be. Like Maggie and Noreen in Pearls of the Orient-and like the second Mrs. Benjamin Disraeli in real life-this "randy young wiggler" has been spied at work in a shop window by an amorous passerby and picked up in no time at all.
Colonel Sullivan's adventure is soon to make him the protector of half a dozen girls in an agreeable hacienda where every comfort is provided. But it begins in the most ordinary way with a dull businessman setting off on a routine journey to finalise a deal for a sugar concession. Like so many of his kind, he has seen and coveted the girl of his dreams without the least hope of ever possessing her. But, of course, the first aim of a self-respecting erotic novel is to make such dreams come true.
The manner by which he wins his "odalisque" is unusual. It is her master's cruelty which drives her into a stranger's arms. On this occasion, the vindic-tiveness of Mr. Lane is an object of criticism rather than an example to be followed. Colonel Sullivan wins his girls by sexual kindness rather than sadistic indulgence.
In fiction of this type, however, there is another element that is almost as important as the erotic. Even when the story's origins are in our own time, its erotic capers are intensified by a pervading sense of leisure and comfort. Everyone drinks the best champagne, eats the finest food, and the men smoke the most fragrant cigars. The servants are invariably discreet, loyal, and do as they are told. In Colonel Sullivan's adventure there are no feelings of jet-lag, no security checks, and no brass-voiced hostesses hurrying the passengers along. The great liners like the Atalanta are floating palaces-or at least floating mansions. Gentlemen live like gentlemen, enjoying a decent and civilised level of comfort. They may not behave much like gentlemen in bed but that, of course, is all part of the service.
The modern traveller, seeing the ocean only as a glassy wrinkled floor thousands of feet below, will get there faster. But most of us might prefer a comfortable bed in a luxury cabin on the upper deck with randy young Miss Jolly scratching at the door like a she-cat on heat, begging to be allowed to slip between the sheets and show what she can do.
I had always thought of her as the Odalisque, though it would be hard to say which blood ran predominantly in her veins. Was it a mixture of southern French and a dash of Greek or Egyptian? Could there be a little heat of Celtic temper and even a look of a shop-girl Cleopatra? The truth is that Miss Jolly was an appealing warm-skinned apparition of all these things. She is the type of warm-blooded little bitch produced by the mingling population of any port or dockland but rarely with such provoking warmth and the beauty of tight-lidded almond eyes as in her case.
I first saw her on an autumn evening just as it was getting dark. She was then employed in setting out the goods for her master's shop, displaying them to the passing world with the aid of another girl who was much fairer skinned and dark haired. I was not able to inquire of Mr. Lane, her master, how the young odalisque came to be working among fashion and elegance, advertising her beauty to the world. I suppose she was about eighteen or nineteen at the time I speak of and I knew her then-and still do-as Miss Jolly. I do not think it was her real name. A randy little wriggler of her sort working close to such style and beauty soon fancies that she has an entitlement to stage-title. But as Miss Jolly she always appears.
I saw her first entirely by accident. It was under the stone arcading by the old port. On that October day, late in the afternoon, I was strolling there, in a cream linen suit and with a dress cane. I paused to admire a display of elegant silks and paisley behind the glass, not seeing at first that the girl and a companion were working there within a few feet of me. Then I looked up and noticed her.
If I can describe her to you, you must begin by imagining a girl who is not more than average height with a neat trim figure that promises hot-blooded and knowing lasciviousness. Her satiny skin has the rich gold or tawny shade that one associates with Greece, or Egypt, or Provence. Her face consists of a long sloping brow, a sharp young nose, a prim mouth and a demurely receding chin. One thinks of a slave-maiden of the Nile perhaps or a sun-kissed temple houri. And there is something about Miss Jolly and her kind that makes one want to possess them as slaves. I believe it is the hint in the slant of the eyes and the sharp young profile of the havoc they might cause unless put under a man's absolute rule.
But it was her provoking little body that roused me first. Her dark hair when I first saw her was in an elegant coiffure, worn in a shape like a beehive on the top of her head, so that one was able to enjoy the delicate whorls of her ears with their little pearl ear-rings at the lobes and the slim elegance of Miss Jolly's golden-skinned neck. By the time my adventure with her took place, the young tart had adopted the plainer and more proletarian style of a short crop of tighter curls, hardly touching her collar at the back and just coming over her brow at the front. I think she was self-conscious at being closely inspected for she would walk with a bustling little swagger, her chin tucked down primly and the tight-lidded ellipse of her eyes lowered to avoid the smiling gaze of the gentlemen-fanciers who passed her in the street.
She had the dark enigmatic eyes of Eurasia, giving her the look of a cunning and eager little she-cat, on heat for the male. But this was misleading, for she would turn a cold and prim disdain on some of those who admired her at her work.
What interested me most was the way in which she dressed to make the best of her charms. The eye-lashes were carefully darkened and the rather heavy lids painted with a little white cosmetic, for Miss Jolly painted quite flagrantly even at eighteen or nineteen. She wore a thin woollen singlet fitting close on her slim straight back and her narrow waist, showing her breasts to be as trim and firm as the rest of her. Best of all, for such a girl, she eschewed long skirts, whose trailing hems would bring disaster among the carefully laid out display. Instead she had clad the lower part of her figure in snug-fitting pants of blue jean.
By now, you may imagine, I was more interested in the girl than in the display to which she was attending. It was past five o'clock on that October afternoon. She and her companion had finished their work and were engaged in brushing the felt carpet on which it stood. This was done by each girl in turn sitting on her heels and working the little handbrush hard in tight circles to raise the nap. From time to time, as they laboured with such energy, it was necessary to stretch forward and go on all fours.
How ordinary this will seem to anyone who has not watched Miss Jolly at her toils and not become totally infatuated with her! Let me explain.
I stood there and watched as she sat on her heels with her face bowed to her work, scouring the felt with hard little circle motions. I smiled at the way she jutted her haunches back and naturally I stood where I might get the best view. Presently, in order to reach further, she went on all fours and offered a sight that almost took my breath away.
Sometimes there is randiness in the very shape of a girl's body, and so it was with her. As I stood behind her I saw that Miss Jolly's trim thighs branched quite widely upwards from the knees. Her hips were lithe and neat enough but I must add that Miss jolly s bottom-cheeks appeared the most perfectly rounded I have ever seen. They were not large or fat but deliciously and smoothly rounded. The sharper upward and outward branching of her legs also caused her buttocks to be deeply and suggestively parted in her present posture. It was more than suggestive, for the south central seam of the jeans-seat was drawn tight and deep between her buttocks, as if to show how lewdly nature made the girl show herself in this posture. Miss Jolly's bottom-cheek was more widely and deeply revealed as she brushed up the felt on all fours than I have ever seen in a girl of her age.
The slope of her warm-skinned brow and sharp young nose was lowered in concentration and in the energy of her work. The display of her intimate charms which she offered suited me very well. It matched my own mood. I desired Miss Jolly greatly and could think of any number of things I would like to do with her. But I had no intention whatever of entering upon a great romance with the girl. A randy young piece of Miss Jolly's kind will do for an hour's amusement but she is not of the type to whom one vows a life-long attachment. Yet it was pleasant and amusing to see the way she arched her back downwards and provoked the onlooker by a fuller and more lewdly opened spread of her bum-cheeks.
I will only say that she glanced up and saw how I was standing over her, not a foot away beyond the glass, and that I was taking a survey of the rear view she presented. I believe she also sensed a stirring of manhood under the tight pants of my cream suiting. It was the bold movement of tightly-clad and stiffening penis that caught Miss Jolly's attention at once. If you would know her, you must understand that all her primness and evasion, her demure and enigmatic manner is mere bluff. Backstreet beauties of her kind are well-versed in the shape and functions of the penis by the time they are thirteen or fourteen. Turning to the dark-haired girl who was with her, Miss Jolly bared her little teeth in some private giggling.
All this might have been nothing. What could possibly come of it? But I watched them finish their work, kneeling and brushing in turn, Miss Jolly first and then her plumper companion with pale skin and dark hair. At last they stood together, heads close in murmured conversation. They seemed to agree upon a plan of some kind. With her back to me, Miss Jolly bent over with her hands on her knees, looking round to see if I would admire this view of her with as much enthusiasm. Indeed I did. At the same time, I made out the lips of the fair-skinned and dark-haired girl, who said quickly, "He's watching you again." Then they seemed to call an older woman, a manageress of some kind, to witness that they had an admirer.
Now this incident was in itself so trivial that I should not have dreamt of preserving it, had it not been for the sequel. I thought of Miss Jolly from time to time and I resolved upon the fate in store for her, if ever it should be in my power to arrange such a thing. I did not suppose that power would ever be mine, nor had I leisure to investigate the matter.
It was almost six months later, in the following spring, that I was to sail from Charleston East Dock to Havanah aboard the steamer Atalanta. Those who remember this fine old vessel will not need to be reminded of the luxury and elegance that accompanied her voyages. The oak-paneled saloon, the white linen and silver upon the tables, would have done credit to many a stately mansion of the Tidewater country of the Delta. I had taken one of the first-class cabins on the upper deck, for I was going to Cuba to see about the purchase of a concession in the sugar trade.
Let us have no hypocrisy, however. I was not unaware that in the old days a man might hold ten or twenty pretty girls as his slave-maidens upon a private Cuban estate. Slavery was more deep-rooted there and the Cuban courts were apt to turn a blind eye to the whims of wealthy foreigners. I was soon to see for myself that even certain white-skinned girls had gone to meet a strange fate in certain provinces of that accommodating island.
Now this was no business of mine and nothing was further from my thoughts as, in the thicker light of sunset, the Atalanta weighed anchor and slipped out from the Cooper River into the broad waters of Charleston Harbour. We passed the islands, Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie, so pregnant with historical associations. It was April and the weather already humid or sultry, as it often is by then in Carolina. The blossom had fallen and the long summer had begun. I was cooling myself in the first draughts of the ocean when I noticed a man who was a stranger to me.
He was standing by the ship's rail with a golden-skinned girl of somewhat oriental beauty. I can only say that Mr. Lane, as he was later known to me, seemed the last man on earth to attract a young and fiery creature. He was middle-aged and rather gross, perspiring somewhat in his pale linen suit. The girl stood rather strangely beside him. She wore a coat loose upon her shoulders, her arms not in its sleeves. Presently she moved, her hands being clasped at her loins, and the coat slipped from her. It fell to the deck, from which her companion hastily picked it up and looked about him. It seemed absurd at first, but there was an awkwardness in her posture and lack of movement, a stiffness and constraint. I could have sworn that her hands or wrists were somehow tied, perhaps strapped together. Then, as she turned her face full towards me, I saw the flash of feline temper in her almond eyes. I knew at once the slope of the brow and the sharp young nose, the weaker mouth and chin. She was Miss Jolly.
Her story was suggested at once. Miss Jolly had a master who was taking her to Cuba where the "underground trade" in such girls still flourished. Whether she was to be part of his harem there, or whether he proposed to sell her at one of the private Havanah auctions, I could not say. I supposed, if indeed her wrists were pinioned, that she was being taken against her will. It is not always the case. I have known several girls who have gone willingly, prepared to pay for a life of indolent luxury by nights of sexual surrender. If it were necessary, however, the well-bribed stewards would see to it that Miss Jolly remained a prisoner in the cabin, allowed exercise only under her master's supervision.
And what of my distant encounter with Miss Jolly on the deck that evening?
I would deceive you if I pretended that my heart leapt with excitement or anything of the kind. Miss Jolly was a randy young piece and, though I might envy Mr. Lane such a slave-girl, it was nothing to me if he took her to Cuba and sold her into sexual bondage. If you had seen Miss Jolly walking with the tight lascivious little swagger of her hips, or sitting on her heels and jutting out her arse at the passers-by, or staring with the knowing enigmatic look of her almond eyes, you would know that she certainly deserved some such fate.
So please do not mistake me for Sir Galahad to the rescue. Mr. Lane was the owner of the fashion-store and the girl. Miss Jolly the young window-dresser, shop-girl, counter-jumper, was his to dispose of as he wished. He had nothing to fear from me. Nor indeed would the master of the ship interfere in his affairs. The girl was being carried to Cuba with the consent of the vessel's owners. In the list of passengers, next to Mr. Lane's name, there appeared that of "Miss C. Jolly."
All the same, I could not help noticing that Mr. Lane was not at dinner that evening in the paneled saloon. He had chosen to dine alone in his cabin, attended by the lynx-eyed little odalisque.
The cabins on the upper deck, above the wash of the paddles and forward of the smoke from the funnel, were arranged in a sheltered row. Outside was the deck-wall with the rail beyond it. It was only when I returned after dinner that I realized what Mr. Lane's domestic arrangements were. It was possible, you see, for a family and servants to occupy two or three cabins together. Private doors communicated between them. But there were bolts on either side of these doors so that each cabin might be used in complete privacy when strangers travelled in them. Such a door could be opened only by the consent of the parties on both sides.
Mr. Lane had taken two cabins. That immediately next to mine was occupied by Miss Jolly herself. He was in the further one. And he alone had the key which would permit Miss Jolly a stroll on the deck. I believe also that he had had the bolt removed on her side of their common door. She was not permitted to close herself in.
I was alone in my cabin, removing my tie, when I heard a muffled curse from beyond the partition door. It was Mr. Lane, calling Miss Jolly a sly little bitch and a thieving young whore. I had opened my porthole a little to catch the cooler air off the Savannah coast and so had they, which made the sound carry clearer. But in the darkness the two glass circles acted like mirrors, as they will on trains. Angled to each other, they reflected for me a partial view of what was going on in the next cabin!
Miss Jolly was lying on the bed, naked but for a short white singlet and a coquettish little pair of black boots with tall heels, fitting skin tight and shiny to just below her knees. She lay on her belly over the pillows and the slim coppery tan of her thighs was parted a little to admit the rousing and caressing fingers of Mr. Lane. Did he masturbate Miss Jolly to excite her or to excite himself? Both I suspect. He pulled the hem of her singlet higher yet, so that her trimly rounded golden-tanned hips were properly bare. She was curved forward from the waist and the smoothly swelling rounds of Miss Jolly's bottom had a paler coppery tan compared with the darker gold of her trim-waisti! back.
The young tart was looking back over her shoulder as he roused her, her firm golden-tanned thighs squeezing and squirming on his fingers. This lasted for some while, as the beat of the paddles and the ship's engines carried distantly from below.
But it was all in vain. Despite his desire and his fretting, Mr. Lane was quite unable to stiffen his resolve sufficiently to do justice to this girl of nineteen or twenty. Once he lodged himself briefly between her legs only to lose his place and to eject a brief spasm of sperm on the back of her warm golden thighs, the rest falling in a few squirts upon the paler copper smoothness of Miss Jolly's bottom-cheeks. Such feeble dribbles in such a manner were an insult to her lynx-eyed beauty and seemed almost designed to make her feel degraded rather than fulfilled. But worse was to come.
He cursed her for a conniving young whore, for all the world as if Miss Jolly herself had cast some spell upon him to prevent his performing the rites of love. I saw him turn aside and snatch up a spanking-strap, favoured among men who are masters of such girls. It consisted of a broad thin strap, about eighteen inches long and two inches wide, split at its end into several tails. The advantage of this implement is that it may be used without respite. Though Miss Jolly would smart dreadfully from it, the strap would never leave a mark beyond a temporary and fiery blushing of her coppery-toned buttocks.
Mr. Lane wielded the strap with vicious skill. A hundred times, it seemed, he brought it down with an explosive smack across the perfectly rounded cheeks of Miss Jolly's bottom. He gave the almond-eyed girl a tanning that would have been the envy of the public hangman. He was in a most tremendous rage and it was necessary at one point to tie her wrists to the bedrail. Apart from the single restraint, she was free to roll and writhe as much as she wished.
Between the strokes of the strap, Miss Jolly's buttocks tightened with desperate fright, but the next one caught her long before she could contain the smart of the last. I have stood in the public whipping-house of Charleston, near the slave market in Chalmers Street. I have seen dark-skinned girls like Monnelia tail-whipped and those with a paler Asian beauty like Helen Wong. I have seen private sessions where olive-skinned Italian tomboys like Antonia Beri and Patrizia Luisi have had their bare bottoms smartened by the lash. But I had never seen anything to match the vindictive sadism of Mr. Lane towards Miss Jolly. It was not mere lechery and enjoyment but the release of his fury and frustration.
You may be sure her rather short crop of slight upward-brushed curls was twisted round. The reflection was clear enough for me to see the slim bare neck and the pearl studs in her neat ears. Indeed, the profile of the long sloping brow and sharp young nose was admirably shown. But the prim young mouth was open in a wild cry and the tight-lidded almond eyes were brimming over.
The satin-smooth orient-gold cheeks of Miss Jolly's bottom jumped and quivered under the sharp impacts of the spanking-strap. Urgently, she twisted this way and that. But the result was merely to impart an agonising taste of the strap across the bare flanks of her hips, across the front of her thighs and, once, across her flat warm-skinned belly. Helplessly, she turned on to her face again, hips and bottom-cheeks surging, thighs and loins toiling, for all the world like a swimmer in a strong tide. In doing so, she inadvertently opened herself to her chastiser, thighs splayed and buttocks stretched apart by her thrusting. At this, the strap was more wickedly aimed so that its agonising tails curled into the warm cleft of Miss Jolly's bottom-crack. There was a moment of frozen torment. And then Miss Jolly screamed at last.
She was far removed now from the quizzical and giggling odalisque working in the window of Mr. Lane's emporium. It was clear to me that the name of "Miss C. Jolly" would never appear on any passenger list of a ship returning to Charleston. This was to be a one-way journey to the province of Estremadura where, as I was to learn, Mr. Lane traded such girls. He was the owner of the emporium, to be sure, but he had what they call this "sideline" which brought him a handsome additional income. Miss Jolly would be "broken in" there if necessary. I late viewed the soundproof rooms, equipped with straps and gags. His pleasure would be to torture Miss Jolly if his young window-dresser could afford his satisfaction in no other way. You see what melodramatic visions the man and his present conduct inspired in one's mind?
Such was to be her fate. I would not have wished it upon her, for it seemed to me a waste of a seductive little tart who could be put to better purposes. But there was no means to prevent it just then. The strapping in the next room began again, for he had not nearly finished with her yet. I watched her slim thighs tighten frantically together. The coppery cheeks of Miss Jolly's backside contorted and squirmed under the searing smackkiss of leather. Though it was a strap and not a whip, he tanned her for a very long time. It was certainly more than anything I had ever seen in Chalmers Street.
At last, Mr. Lane finished and threw down the strap. He left the girl to bewail the dreadfully smarting state of her backside and thighs. She could not get to the deck, for he held the key to that door. She might enter his adjoining cabin, if she chose, and if she was randy for another taste of leather. Even if see were to unbolt the door communicating with my cabin, she could not open it, for it was also bolted on my side.
I was later going to bed that night than I had intended. The strapping had begun before nine and lasted until after ten, giving me much to think about. But sea air and a hearty appetite had done its work. I soon fell fast asleep.
I woke, perhaps an hour later. It was dark but I was alarmed to hear a sound like the movement of rats on board ship. These carriers of disease to seafaring folk are enough to rouse the deepest sleeper. I sat up and then realized that the sound was coming from the door between the two cabins. Yet it was kind of scratching that a rodent-or rather a cat-might make. I got up, walked across and listened. I cannot tell you why, other than instinct, I next drew back the bold on my side of the door. I tried the handle and found that it opened. Miss Jolly was half kneeling and half lying against the doorpost on the other side.
She has that high sing-song voice which turns the word "Yes," for example, into a prolonged "Ya-a-a-s." In these tones, she whimpered softly for comfort and consolation. I raised her to her feet and led her into my own domain, closing the door and bolting it as a matter of prudence. I lit the lamp beside the bed and saw that she was still naked apart from her short white singlet and tight black knee-boots.
I sat down on the edge of the bed while Miss Jolly stood before me. I made her turn and smiled to see that her rear cheeks still blushed a little from the strap. She flinched slightly when I touched them.
"Kneel down," I said, pushing on her shoulders as she faced me again, "I believe you like something in your mouth first, do you not?"
She knelt without demur, took my stiffness in her hand, kissed its knob and then slid her warm young mouth over it. From the moment I first saw her at her shopwork I knew, by instinct, that the little bitch was greedy for such things. One cannot always tell this from a girl's appearance, such a thing would be absurd. But in this case her appearance had combined with her attitude and manner to show the world what she was. No doubt she had been well-trained. By the time she was twelve or thirteen, in the back streets where Mr. Lane housed his wage-slaves, boys of her own age would have made Miss Jolly taste a regular helping of cock. The lads in charge of her then had trained the young minx excellently. Miss Jolly sucked the penis with many a tongue tickle round the knob and the vent. I would have been happy to flood her tongue with my passion and watch her swallow the gruel. But after a first impulsive squirt, she drew her mouth away and looked up at me with her enigmatical young lynx-eyes. I allowed her to lie upon her back on the bed and receive the resolve of manhood between her slim gold-dusted thighs.
Miss Jolly clung to me as I rode her loins in this manner. She was like a drowning Venus who clutches the swimmer that rescues her. At the same time she fastened her little teeth in my flesh with the extravagance of her lust and tried to score me with her nails. Caring nothing for the consequences, I poured out my tribute in the narrow passage of her loins, while she thrust her firm little belly up to receive it deeper, all the strength of her trim young figure pressing against me.
We lay in a state of exhaustion, not even speaking to one another at that time. I cannot tell how long it was, an hour perhaps more, when I made her turn over on her belly. I needed her again, as much as she had needed me when Mr. Lane had roused her and then been unable to satisfy her. I made her turn her dark upward-brushed curls on the pillow, however, so that I should be able to enjoy watching the long slope of her profile and the randiness of her tight-lidded almond eyes while I was busy behind her. I think she liked to be made to keep her face to her master in this way. Miss Jolly is one of those girls who are more excited the more extreme the demands made upon them by their lovers.
Parting the coppery satin of her buttocks, I gazed at Miss Jolly's anus. I think she may have been a virgin in that part but she showed no fear nor shrinking. I chose the wet soap and smeared this upon her tight rear entrance. There was certainty in her slant eyes but neither resistance nor refusal. The natural readiness of Miss Jolly is hard to exaggerate and she was as keen to try this experiment as I. So the knob touched the tight rear button and there was a moment's ordeal for her. At last I felt her give and was at once held in an exquisite tightness. To feel the squeezing of Miss Jolly's arsehole upon one's erection was a delirious thrill. The expressions of her face would tell you that she is both fire and ice. So she felt, as her smooth copper-tan bottom-cheeks curved up into my own hairy loins. The swell of Miss Jolly's backside was cool and smooth to the casual touch but the blood was passionately warm under that surface. I tailed her thoroughly, releasing my seed as deeply as possible, and I fear she may have been rather tender for a few hours. We lay like that, she under me, for the tightness of Miss Jolly's rear hole was able to retain me long after I had finished. Indeed, I dozed a little and woke again to find myself still in the close hold of Miss Jolly's bum-hole.
She went back reluctantly to her own bed a little later. I was honest with her, at least, and whispered to her in one of her randy moments that I had been greatly intrigued by hearing her get the strap and that I hoped she would be tanned again before the voyage was over. The words were spoken half as a joke. I had no idea of the dramatic consequences that would attend them.
Next day I neither heard nor saw her. Mr. Lane appeared briefly on one or two occasions but we exchanged no conversation beyond passing the time of day. I could not help wondering, however, whether I was to receive another visit from Miss Jolly that night. It was impossible for me to return the compliment or even receive her once more, unless she unbolted the door on her side. A night of furtive passion on board the Atalanta required the consent of both parties.
Such was the situation when I went down to the saloon for dinner, just about half-past seven. There was no sign of Mr. Lane, for he had again ordered dinner to be sent to his cabin. It was still light and, according to the captain, the line of land upon the horizon was the last of the Florida Keys. We should dock in Havanah before noon on the following day.
This news made me wonder all the more whether I should receive a visit that night. If not, my entire acquaintance with Miss Jolly would have been seeing her at her shopwork and then topping and tailing her the previous night. When I went back to my cabin, everything was silent. I felt sure they were not next door to me. Was it possible, perhaps, that Mr. Lane had taken the young tart into his own quarters to do something or other to her there? I had not the least idea.
The night was not truly stormy but there was rather more of a swell and splashing against this ship's side. Still I heard nothing from my neighbours. It seemed best to go to bed and forget about Miss Jolly. I though I heard sounds from somewhere, perhaps the further cabin, but no one came scratching at my door.
I really thought that was the end of the matter-and I regretted it. Miss Jolly was such a randy little piece that I felt she must have been born with such a character. I imagine she had showed the evidence of it while still a very little girl. At that time, I expect, it was misunderstood and punished as mere childish naughtiness, which seems to me a cruelty in its way. I thought to myself that I would have liked one more go at her. However, that now lay out of the question.
I had not gone to sleep when I heard a door open and close very softly. And then another opened and closed, nearer at hand. The scratching on the panel began.
I was there in a flash, guiding her in, finding her naked still apart from singlet and boots. She walked before me to the bed with that tight and lascivious little swagger of her hips. And how I stared in astonishment! The trim coppery globes of Miss Jolly's behind were vindictively marked by the stripes and curls of whipcord. Indeed, a knotted whip had been used and plum-coloured blobs showed where the knots had caught her.
How could this be? It was a whipping that would have been the envy of any overseer. Yet there had not been a sound. However stoical she might pretend to be, Miss Jolly would have screamed herself hoarse during such an ordeal. Neither I nor anyone else had heard her cry out. She told me the answer. It had been done in Mr. Lane's cabin while we were at dinner. But, in any case, she had been fastened over the stool and made to wear a gag. Her mouth had been so tightly wadded with damp cotton that nothing but a wild mewing escaped her.
For the first time I began seriously to wonder how I might release her from her slavery. I did not then know that the pert little blonde Jane Truman had already suffered much worse than this at Mr. Lane's hands in his Cuban retreat. But Miss Jolly appeared to have resigned herself to her fate. She asked only that we should repeat the performance of the night before while there was still time. Next morning she must go with Mr. Lane.
I admired her resolve but doubted her wisdom. On the other hand, if her loyalty to her master went so deep, there was little I could do. One cannot free a slave who pines to be in bondage. However, I was able to grant her immediate request. Indeed, I was in such a mood that I thought it safe for Miss Jolly to suck until the penis flooded her mouth and her throat with its outpourings. In no time at all, my brain so heated with desire, I was ready, to do duty between her thighs. A little pause and some refreshment followed. Then I turned her over. She had brought some oil for the lubrication. So presently I took my place and, last of all, pumped out my remaining passion into Miss Jolly's delectable backside. After the dark drama of her whipping she was like a prisoner released into an outer world of excitement. She took the penis, in her backside and elsewhere, with eagerness and response. She thrusted to impale herself more vigorously and deeply without the least apparent fear of what the consequences to her body might be. I have known girls of all kinds whose eagerness is an objectlesson in self-indulgence. But I have never known one to equal Miss Jolly as she was that night.
That ought to have been the end of the story. But I was surprised to wake next morning, when it was fully light, and find my almond-eyed odalisque still in bed with me. I roused her at once. I pointed out that it was late. I insisted that she must return to her own bed before she was missed by Mr. Lane. She looked sulky and unconcerned, pleading only for another consolation between her thighs. She whispered that Mr. Lane had been unable to endure the stuffiness of his cabin and that he had gone out to sleep in a chair on the deck, where the air was fresher. He might not be back yet. We had time for a little more fun. But I had no intention of being so foolhardy. The fellow might every easily be back by now. Though I had, very nearly, to push her through the door and bolt it, I returned Miss Jolly to the place she should be.
Then I truly thought the adventure was over. But it was not. Mr. Lane had not come back to his cabin. He still had not come back when the steward brought his breakfast. By ten o'clock he was nowhere to be found and the ship was searched. There was no sign of him, though a chair upon the deck suggested that he had indeed slept there in search of cooler air.
The matter grew more serious. The rail of the ship was examined and one of the lower ribbands near the stern was found to be splintered in two. On the rough edge was a thread of blue that matched Mr. Lane's dressing-gown. We passed the old fortress and entered the harbour of Havanah with horror in our wake. How it had happened, no one knew. Mr. Lane had drunk generously the night before. He was also accustomed to take a sleeping draught when on such journeys. Was his head so muddled that he blundered against a piece of rotted wood, slipped and went into the sea? Had he missed his way in the dark or lost his footing against a piece of unsound timber? Or had he been drugged by an overdose of his sleeping potion and helped over the rail?
This last question was one asked only by myself. And I asked it only of myself. I could not help recalling the assurance with which Miss Jolly insisted that her master would not be back yet from sleeping on the deck. How could she know that? I could think of only one answer. Why was she so confident that she would not be whipped again for disobedience? It was surely because she knew that the whip-hand and everything attached to it had already been gnawed to the bone by the sharks and the lesser fry.
In such circumstances, there are always those ready to tell a man what his duty is. I conceived then, as I do now, that it was my duty to keep my mouth shut. I cannot tell you precisely how Mr. Lane fell from the deck. I assure you that he did. The poor fellow's boot was found caught on a trailing rope just above the water. It must have come free of his foot as he went down. For the rest of the story, you must ask the sharks.
Was it Miss Jolly's rebellion at the savage whipping that evening which drove her to such a deed? Was it that she feared he would torture her in some way upon his remote hacienda? Or had she been planning her escape from such a master for a long time, finding the means only during the voyage of the Atalanta from Charleston to Havanah?
I had no answer to such questions, but I intended to obtain it. It was an easy matter to suggest to the captain that I should take Miss Jolly under my protection and see her to her destination. She was in no position to refuse, for I hinted very broadly the tale I might tell if I wished. That being the case, she soon found that she had now exchanged one master for the other. I flatter myself, however, that the second is more to her taste.
To be sure, I was kinder to her than Mr. Lane had ever been. I demanded my rewards in bed and took them, which he had never been able to do. It was a relatively simple matter to negotiate with his heirs and take the girl off their hands. They inquired if, perhaps, my interest in Cuban sugar would persuade me to purchase the property in Estremadura, for which they had no use at all. And so I did. The hacienda and the harem it contains are under my protection to this day. You will not find the name of "Miss C. Jolly" on the passenger list of any ship returning to Charleston. But you will find her here, naked between the singlet hem at her waist and the tops of the boots just below her knees. Just at this moment, she is bending over with her back to me and turning the ellipse of her tight-lidded almond eyes to see if I am watching her. It is the same posture of self-advertisement that she performed that October afternoon in Mr. Lane's window to see if I would watch her then. Miss Jolly need have no fear. As she bends before me now, I could not take my eyes from her to spare a glance for Aphrodite herself. To be sure the randy young odalisque is my slave, but we are both in our turn slaves to the passion that unites us.
8
PLEASURE BOUND
Despite its title, this Paris-published novel which dates from the end of the Edwardian period is not a tale of gags and halters, slip-knots and restraining belts. It is one of a series written, allegedly, by "Nemesis Hunt" and it comes from the last volume, subtitled Pleasure Bound Afloat.
All the ingredients of a sea-going orgy are here. There is a private yacht like a floating Ritz and food and wine to match. This must be one of the few chapters in erotic fiction where a menu card and wine list are printed for the reader to sample. We also have the girls, provided by obliging pirates.
The description of the banquet is almost purely decorative, though there is petting under the table. Hony reaches orgasm while eating asparagus. There are no bouts of copulation but much suggestion and atmosphere, as the New Decameron sails south through the night. We hear news of the scandal of the day and there are fetishisms which Krafft-Ebing had identified or created, according to one's point of view.
There is some real bondage for poor Lord Reginald who is put in irons, and a kinky young lady calied Maudie flaunts her beauty in front of him dressed only in her jewelry, high-heeled shoes, and little cupids painted on the bare skin either side of her navel. For good measure there is a joke about Maggie, the harem-bound blond window-dresser, getting an enema with "a pair of bagpipes."
In a few years fetishistic adornments of erotic fiction were to be more pronounced. The Select Bilbiotheque of Don Brennus Alera produced forty volumes whose heroines in high heels and tight waist-belts often cultivated the new "boyish" look. They clinked in ornamental chains or pulled in vain against their straps, or squirmed under the whip or received the contents of a squirt in their backsides or their bellies. The French police rarely confiscated the books, wrote Armand Coppens in Memoirs of an Erotic Bookseller, because there were few literal descriptions of the usual sex act.
This was true of that wave of underground fiction. In Belle Sauvage, a softly-fleshed and fair-skinned girl, a saucer-eyed soubrette of eighteen with dark hair combed back sleek and plain to show her face, is presented to us. We are invited to admire the black high-heels and a gloss of black stockings sheathing her slightly plump adolescent thighs. Her knickers are thin black silk, quite tight on her hips and ending with a frill across her behind. It almost seems that Louise Neville's panties are more significant than what they contain.
A good many of the newer novels were more obsessed by the erotic tableau than by their characters. A diary like My Secret Life, a novel like Suburban Souls or even a sexcapade like Eveline had presented a realistic background against which extraordinary men and women lived out their sexual lives. In the new fiction, of which the Select Bibliotheque was a prime example, ordinary men and the girls of their choice performed against extraordinary and even bizarre backdrops. High heels and black silk stockings, erotic panties andingenious corsets were an important theme in their own right. The Select heroines appeared in bondage gear of every kind, from few simple straps to a complete pony-girl harness.
The new sexology had certainly given inspiration as well as explanation to the creators of these fantasies. Novels like the Select Bibliotheque's Under the Yoke or White Women Slaves, or even Miss Jolly and Belle Sauvage, may be set in the period of the American Civil War but their sexual kinks seem straight out of the 1920s.
Pleasure Bound marks the parting of the ways, in this respect. All the new fashions are mentioned and laughed at. But while some of the guests are laughing, the glint in the eyes of others suggest that it won't be long before they start trying a few experiments with the female crew, to see if such high-jinks are as much fun as they sound.
* * *
Southward Bound on the "New Decameron"
The Grand Salon of the New Decameron was a spacious place, occupying the full breadth of the ship, and brilliantly lit by clusters of electric light.
The walls were adorned by pictures of great beauty and evident value, and one's feet sank noiselessly into the heavy carpet.
Covers were laid for about fifty, and the assembled pirates, each dressed in the evening dress uniform affected by the "young man," were grouped expectantly round the walls.
The "young man" stood at the door to welcome his guests, who had been summoned by the steward pirates, and the elderly stewardess, who, with four pretty girls, obviously ladies, constituted all the female personnel of the pirate craft. Lady Tittle sighed when she though of the hell of a time those four women must have at the hands and-well, well-of these bonny young pirates.
She, followed by Mr. Silverwood and Miss Jepps, was the first to arrive.
Herr Kunst was flanked by the Sisters Lovett, very demure, if very decollete, in virgin white. They were very pretty girls, and there looked liked being competition among the pirates.
Lord Reggie Cameron entered delicately, like Agag, closely followed by Mr. Moss Hell, who surveyed the luxurious entourage with oily satisfaction.
Mr. Hannibal McGregor had, for some inexplicable reason, arrayed himself in the full war paint of old Gaul, and swung his kilts just in front of Mr. Neale, the actor, who was flanked by the flappers. Hony and Carrie, whose admiration he was attempting to excite with, obviously, very little success.
The "young man" shook hands in a most gallant manner with each, and presented them, en masse, to his comrades. Others of the pirates conducted them to their places at the centre table, at the head of which the "young man" took his place.
The "young man" made a short speech. After welcoming them to the New Decameron, he expressed a wish that they would be comfortable. He briefly explained himself and his companions.
"Compelled to sever our connection with society, owing to some of its ridiculous laws, we have had to earn our living somehow, and we have done fairly well. True, we are pirates-thieves, if you like-but there are worse on the Stock Exchange." Lord Reggie sighed, and Mr. Moss Hell and Kerr Kunst looked uncomfortable. "There are also thieves in society-since the introduction of bridge," he continued-"but while these thieves are unrecognized, we are open. We thieve in the broad light of day, and we are generally careful not to thieve from those who can't afford to lose.
"Your presence on this ship was an inspiration of one of my men. Frankly, we were getting bored. We want livening up. Liven us up, and you shall be repaid with a pleasant cruise; some possibly very exciting adventures; a sojourn in our little lotus land of an island in the Pacific; all creature comforts, and, in curse of time, we hope you will leave perfectly satisfied."
The captives' faces took an interested expression. Though so far no viands had made their appearance, the appointments of the table held out great hopes. The snowy napery bore much valuable silver plate and the profusion of glasses suggested much liquor.
"And now," said the "young man,"
"to supper."
The menu cards were of ivory-coloured paper, surmounted with the traditional skull and cross-bones.
Sole au vin blanc. Saumon sauce Mouton Rothschild, 1875 Hollandaise.
Riz de Veau aux epinards.
Veuve Clicquot, 1899. Poulet a I'lndien.
Heidsieck, dry Monopole, 1898. Selle d'agneau.
Petit pois. Pommes nouvelles
Asperges, Beurre fondu.
Omelette Surprise. Cognac, 1845. Coup, Roi de Mer.
Grande Marnier, Cordon Rouge. Cafe Ture.
Punch Decameron.
"You will observe," said the "young man,"
"that you will neither die of hunger or thirst."
The menu was indeed a surprise. Lord Reggie, who had cultivated his appetite all over the world, realized that he was in for a good thing. He smacked his lips in anticipation.
"Archie," he began, languidly.
The "young man" banged his hand on the table.
"Lord Reginald," he exclaimed, "whether you know who I am, or whether you do not, remember that here I am 'Captain,' and nothing else. If I catch you calling me anything else, I'll clap you in irons, at once."
"I'm so sorry, Archie-"
"Prendergast."
"Yes, Captain."
"Have this gentleman put in irons at once, and release him to-morrow morning for breakfast."
"Oh, Archie, I didn't mean-"
"Release him for lunch."
"Oh-"
"Young man," said Lady Tittle, "you'll be missing to-morrow's dinner if you aren't careful."
The man called Prendergast, a rotund personage of an extremely genial cast of countenance, punished a large cocktail severely, wiped his mouth leisurely, rose serenely, and approached the now terrified Lord Reggie.
"Archie," exclaimed the alarmed young nobleman, "I didn't mean-"
"Lord Reginald," said the "young man,"
"you've asked for it: I shall not see you till the day after tomorrow. Prendergast, don't waste time."
The unfortunate young peer was led away, vainly protesting, and his exit sent swift inspiration to Lady Tittle. "Archie," of course-it was the young Duke of St. Eden.
Archibald Hamilton Blackmore, tenth Duke of St. Eden and possessor of a half dozen more titles to boot, had disappeared from his own world under mysterious circumstances. His reckless extravagances had startled most of the capitals of Europe, and when the scandal about his aunt became more than whispered, he had to go. May-fair forgot, if it didn't forgive, and Lord Herbert Blackmore, his brother and heir, a dissolute young blackguard who had the charm of manner, without the brains, of the duke, reigned at Eden Place in his stead.
This, argued the astute Lady Tittle, was obviously what had happened. Always a dare-devil, the young duke had realized on his immense colliery and London estate possessions and become a very up-to-date pirate. It was very, very interesting, and it was Hony's chance of a lifetime. The child looked deliciously fascinating and Lady Tittle saw a very sporting chance of good-bye to musty old Clouds Court, and the dowager house at Eden Place as a very much more attractive residence. She determined to keep her own counsel. No one but herself and Lord Reggie was likely to recognise the duke. Of course this piracy business could not last, but the young duke was clever enough to avoid detection, and within a year-well, what with her own tact and Hony's beauty, the latter ought to be a duchess.
Dinner was served. A procession of pirates wearing white aprons attended on the wants of their comrades and guests. A distinguished-looking man, indubitably French, headed the waiters. "The Marquis de X--," said the "young man," presenting him, "our chef, a cordon bleu, if ever there was one. He had the misfortune to kill rather too many of his wife's lovers; hence his presence among us. He is a really first-class cook, and though we have not the facilities of the Ritz, we manage to do ourselves very nicely."
"Ah, madams and misters," exclaimed the Frenchman, visibly agitated, "I am desolated; I am on the summit of desolation. Though so beautiful a dinner I have prepared, these brigands prefer their piracy, and I, though I keep him as hot as I can, I am delayed four hours; it is effrayante. "
Still, the dinner, or supper, was very good.
Conversation was sparkling and bright; rather risky at times, possibly, for the Sisters Lovett didn't spare the liquors, and Lady Tittle just doted on the Veuve Clicquot. She had just finished, for the third time, her story of the late Empress of--and the black groom, when one of those very sudden, and very awkward, silences fell over the assembly.
It was broken by a loud and startling detonation, followed by a clicking noise like the falling of small pieces of broken glass.
Herr Kunst sprang to his feet, while all eyes turned on him. It was obvious that he had farted. Lady Tittle thought that he was about to leave the room; but no. The agitated German fell upon his knees on the floor and grabbed frantically about the carpet. The astonished company noted the glitter of diamonds. Herr Knust-over-enjoying his dinner-had let a really remarkable fart, and bang had gone the diamonds from their snug retreat, thence, per his trousers, to the floor.
It was impossible not to laugh, and even the ladies joined in the general mirth, meanwhile helping Herr Kunst to recover his treasures.
"Don't you worry, mein Herr," said the "young man," reassuringly. "I gave my word that no valuables should be seized, and however many thousands pounds worth you may have on yourer-person, you can rest assured that they will be perfectly safe. Possibly my safe may prove a more secure resting place than any portion of your anatomy."
The "young man" had been on the Rand, and knew a bit about hiding places. He had guessed at once what had happened.
The stewards assisted Herr Kunst to recover his treasures and, with a sigh of relief, he replaced them in his pocket, exhibiting no shame for his exhibition of artillery.
The dinner did not occupy much time. The various courses were very quickly and deftly served by white-aproned pirates. Lady Tittle thoroughly enjoyed herself and drank far too much Veuve Clicquot-led on by the pressing of the bosun, who was heading the waiters. Hony and her flapper friend were overwhelmed by the delicate attentions of the exquisite young ecumeus de mer, and the Sisters Lovett got frankly drunk. What conversation there was became markedly lascivious, and Carrie Francks had to ward off a marauding hand from each side before the omelette. Hony gave herself to being surreptitiously felt, and spent copiously, from the asparagus onwards.
A blue-chinned, sinister-looking pirate sat next to Lady Tittle and, with his second cognac, became flippant. Lady Tittle had recognized him at once as a well-known acting manager, whose wife had fucked him into society, but who had had to leave the circle of the blest because of a little adventure galant with twopenny worth of tramping trollop off Pont Street.
His long, sinuous hand wandered on to Lady Tittle's knee. She snapped, "Please remember, Mr. Forest, that this is a tablecloth, not a sheet!"
There was a rustle of sh! sh! The "young man" intervened.
"No names! please no names. Lady Tittle, remember that we are all incognito here."
The dear old lady, remembering the fate of Lord Reggie, forebore, and put paid to her third cognac.
A delicately-veiled glance from the "young man" conveyed to her ladyship that it was time for her to gather up her flock.
A smile to Miss Jepps and a sumptuously frou-frouy uprisal from that young lady gathered the womenfolk together.
"I will show you to the music-room, my lady," murmured one of the smart stewardesses.
The ladies left.
The pirates and their male guests, left alone, gathered closer together. The "young man," leaning his elbow on the table, delicately balanced his glass of "Punch Decameron," a delicious iced punch, made according to a recipe known only to one of the pirates, who had stolen it from Blan-chards just before the knowledge reached him that a warrant was out for his arrest.
"Gentlemen," he said, "just one toast to our better acquaintance, and then I think we will go to the library."
They drank the toast of the three consonants-L.F.F., "Luck, fuck and a fiver"-with no heeltaps, and the "young man" led the way to the library.
The library on the New Decameron would have delighted the most exquisite amateur of the arts. It was a large, lofty chamber, extending, like the saloon, the entire breadth of the ship. The New Decameron, being turbine-driven and carrying no bulky cargo, had, save her coal lockers, which were also comparatively small, owing to the fact that she carried in addition to her ordinary coal a large quantity of compressed fuel, very large accommodation for staterooms.
Panelled entirely in very highly polished old Spanish mahogany and lit by beautifully designed clusters of electric lights, the room presented an appearance of great comfort. The thick pile of the carpet seemed to caress the feet, and there was an indescribable odour of some strange scent, which seemed to blend deliciously with the cigars and opium-tainted cigarettes provided by the "young man." On a Sheraton buffet, fitted with silver fiddles, stood a goodly regiment of bottles and glasses. As the captives and those of the pirates who had followed the "young man," and who were obviously the most important members of the ship's extraordinary company, settled themselves on the luxurious settees, a door behind the buffet opened and one of the pretty waitresses entered.
She was changed. The pirates took no notice but their captives gasped. She was stark naked, save for red morocco slippers with high, black, silk-covered French heels. Mr. Silverwood's hands instinctively groped in his trouser's pocket.
The girl was very beautiful. Medium in height, she had a skin like porcelain and her figure was absolutely correctly proportioned. Her dark, chestnut hair fell in luxuriant waves over her forehead and was gathered behind into a heavy knot, caught with a golden clasp. It seemed to kiss her pretty back with a silken caress. She was clean-shaven, both on her Mount of Venus and under her arms, so that, but for her jewelry, her slippers, a gold-mounted monocle which she wore in her left eye and some fantastic painted decorations on her beautiful body, she might have been a marble statue of a somewhat up-to-date Venus. Her nails were very carefully manicured, and her fingers were heavily beringed. She wore diamonds and rubies only on her hands, but round her neck was a collar of pearls, black and white, with a blue enamel buckle bearing an inscription in small brilliant points. It was almost similar to the famous collar given to the actress Nemesis Hunt by H.S.H. the Prince of Marsgorovia.
Clasping her waist was a very thin gold belt, from each side of which depended a fragile gold chain which, meeting just above the delicious roundeur of her hair-bereft mountain of love, carried an open-work gold box shaped like a heart, which, from the odour which exuded, evidently contained some rare Eastern perfume. It was surmounted by a tiny amethyst dove carrying in its beak an olive leaf of green jade.
On her stomach, on either side of her rosy-tinted navel, were painted twin cupids, their lips extended in the shape of a kiss. As the soft flesh heaved and fell, the pouting mouths seemed to be actually kissing that delightful little dimple of a navel. It was a pretty fancy.
Her eyes were very blue and clear, her mouth full and ripe, and her winning smile showed glistening teeth. For earrings, she had ivory cupids with turquoise eyes and wings of almost transparent pearl.
As she came right into the middle of the room, Hannibal McGregor spent voluminously into his kilts. Moss Hell made a rapid calculation of his bank balance and wondered if the "young man" would cash a cheque. Mr. Silverwood determined to remain a pirate for life.
With an easy, lissom walk she approached the "young man."
"Mr. Prendergast has sent me, sir, to say that the gentleman you had put in irons seems to be going mad. He certainly seems very odd."
"Did you go and see him dressed like that?"
"Yes."
"No wonder the poor devil seems odd. Well, I'll both increase and decrease his punishment. Give him a large glass of champagne, put a good dose of our island aphrodisiac in it, and an opium cigarette, and go and sit and talk to him for half an hour-he's chained up, I suppose?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then we'll let him out. Just get so near to him that he can't touch you. He's a nice boy, I daresay you may have met him, before youer-abandoned society."
The ravishing vision disappeared through the door amidst unmistakable groans of disappointment from the captives.
"Oh, we have others," said the "young man," flippantly.
The faces brightened. The "young man" laughed. "Well," he said, "I suppose this needs some explanation. That young lady is really of good birth, in fact she is a titled tart, but she had to leave society: her code of signaling at bridge was more ingenuous than ingenious. Her partner came too-he is there," nodding at one of the pirates who was busy with the spirit decanters.
"My God! it's Lord-" said Mr. Silverwood.
"Quiet, man, quiet," snapped the "young man."
"Remember where Lord Reggie is."
Mr. Silverwood reflected that if there was going to be any naked female janitor business, things might be worse, but then, he mightn't be given one, and he held his tongue.
"Please understand," the "young man" insisted, "that there are to be no names mentioned. Remember that there are worse punishments than putting in irons. One of our Russian members escaped from Siberia in an open boat, and he knows a bit. He isn't as handsome as he was."
Herr Kunst shivered.
"Well, we are a community of pirates, all of whom have outraged society.
"We have a delightful island home, which by some mistake is uncharted, and we make our money this way. The idea was originated by myself. Do you remember the theft of the Reisenheimer art collection?"
"Vat!" screamed Herr Kunst, "den you it is dat der Venus of Titian haf, dat I to der collection lent, mein Gott! ain't it?"
"Correct. You shall have the opportunity of seeing it once more. Perhaps you would like to buy it back?"
"Ah veil," said Herr Kunst, "it mit much completenesses insured vos, mit mein freund, Isaacs, you know Isaacs; he vould so beautiful a pirate make; Isaacs he vos in his so great shop ven I call. I see der glass balls for der fire out-putting.
"'Isaacs," I say, 'vot on earth vos in dose?'
"'I don't know vot vos in dem,' he say, 'but der vos paraffin in dem now."
"He vos a great man Isaacs, a great man. Ven der fire came all der peoples on holiday avay vos, but his mother-in-law up stairs resting vos, vile Isaacs vos see dat der vos enough paraffin. She vos burn, poor ting. Isaacs vos in her vill for tree million. He vos in der canned meat business now. His elder briider vos found der firm, but ven von day he and Isaacs vos inspect der vats, all alone, he vos overbalance and fall in. Isaacs has all der business now. It vos a coincidence, ain't it?"
The "young man" laughed.
"To continue," he said, "this yacht, or whatever you like to call it, was built to the order of Lord X, one of us. It was completed a few weeks before his creditors became aware of the hopeless extent of his obligations, nor had his father's cheque for 20,000, which he had forged, yet come back to the old duke, so he took the yacht out on a trial trip, picked us up at various places, and here we are."
"Mein, dat vos clever," observed Herr Kunst. "Isaacs vould haf liked dat. After der death of his briider he vos extravagant, und mit a prostitution voman go. Tree hours he vos bargain mit her, und den vos gif her von dollar, less ten per cent discount for cash in advance, and she vos gif him der red carbuncles on his Thomas John, und he vos gif dem to his vife, and she vos gif dem to the church pastor, und Isaacs vos laugh like hell, ain't it."
"Ah, I perceive you are a raconteur, mein Herr," said the "young man."
"Well, we can do with you. As I was about to explain, when you interrupted, story-telling is quite part of our programme-hence the name of the New Decameron-with all due apologies to Boccaccio-and I trust all of you will be able to oblige. You see, by the charming apparition you just now witnessed, that our manners are free-very free."
"Hae ye heard this ane?" interposed Hannibal McGregor, "'tis just Scotch, but it's gey humorous."
"Lead on, McDuff," said the "young man," and Hannibal, swallowing nearly a tumbler full of neat Lagavulin whisky (no charge for advt.) did lead on.
"Maggie McPherson lived at Paisley," he began, "and she suffered sair with the piles. So that her mother took her to Glasgow to see the great doctor. After he had examined the lassie, he turned to Mrs. McPherson, and said, Madam, I am of the opinion that it will be necessary for your daughter Maggie to have an enema introduced into her anus."
"'And what,' said Mrs. McPherson, 'is this anus that you're talkin' aboot, and this enema?'
"'The anus, Mrs. McPherson, is the arse-hole of your daughter Maggie, and the enema is the instrument I have here' (producing an ordinary syringe with a bulb in the middle).
"'Maggie come awa'. I didna bring ye tae Glesca tae be buggered by a bagpipe.' "
There was general laughter, and down went the remainder of the whisky.
"Are we not going to see any more of theer-ladies?" hazarded Mr. Silverwood.
"Not dressed like the first," answered the "young man"; "our rule is only one at a time decorated like that, but wait till you come to our little island 'set in a summer sea.' The native women are very, very beautiful. Floradora isn't in it; in fact I may mention that I have upwards of 25 wives and mistresses myself."
"Shakes!" ejaculated Mr. Silverwood: "you must be a regular Solomon."
"I flatter myself I do my duty," responded the "young man," modestly.
"Hooch aye," sighed Hannibal McGregor, "ye remind me of a bit joke ma wife just crack it ainst. It has aye been ma habit to read to the guid wife fra' the Guide Book on the Sawbath, an' I was reading hoo the gran' king had 700 wives and 350 concubines, and I said, "t'would be a gran' thing to be King Solomon."
"'Och awa wi' ye!' said the auld bitch-'a pretty Solomon ye'd ha bin, wi' yer ainst a fortnight.' "
Once again the whisky was deplenished.
Mr. Billy Neale, the matinee idol, clipped into the conversation.
"Once more, touching Solomon," he said, "that reminds me of another yarn. They were talking in some theatrical public house also of the happiness of Solomon, in that he had so many wives, ander 'help two ends to meet."
"'And wot did he want all those for?' queried the very, very low comedian.
"'You see, Solomon was a very strong man, and he needed much amatory comfort,'
"'Gam: you tell me he needed over a thousand bits o'skirt. Why, I knows a little girl called Rosey, Peckham Rye way, 'ood fuck 'is 'ed orf in a week.' "
There was a momentary pause, while Mr. Neale complacently patted his neatly-creased trousers, and a little boy came into the room. He was about fifteen, and quite out of the common good-looking, plump, but alert, his uncovered head showed a wealth of crisp, curly hair. In fact he was of the type of "pretty boy" who is so often unduly popular at public schools.
"Mr. Prendergast's compliments, sir," he said to the "young man,"
"and he says that he thinks that the gentleman in irons has had about enough. He's beginning to foam at the mouth."
"Well, well, tell Mr. Prendergast to send him to us. Keep the irons on, though."
In less than two minutes the captive was shown in.
He trembled, and the irons clattered as Mr. Prendergast led him by the elbow. His hair was disheveled and his eyes glittered wildly.
Behind him walked the maddening female apparition, still naked and quite unashamed, who had so upset the pirates before.
Mr. Silverwood nearly had a fit.
After an interval of a few seconds the boy followed.
"Well, Lord Reginald," said the "young man," genially, "we have released you, but your punishment is not quite completed yet. Do you like your lady jailor?"
"Yeser-damn her-" faltered the young nobleman. The marked protuberance in his trousers showed that he had appreciated her beauty very much indeed.
The lady, whom the "young man" informally introduced for the first time as Maudie, sat down, with her infernally bewitching grace, on one of the divans. Her beautiful naked flesh sank luxuriously into the soft cushions.
Mr. Silverwood rose and left the room abruptly, the tense twitchings of his high-boned cheeks betraying his extreme physical excitement.
He found the upper deck, and wandered aimless aft. The New Decameron was shooting into the Gulf Stream with the Southern Cross right above her fore-mast, and the turbines purred a soft tune, suggestive of the lump of naked loveliness below and what might be happening.
Suddenly he encountered Miss Jepps. The faint glitter of the stars lit up her face a little and she looked very alluring. She was wearing a heavy seal-skin coat and sitting in a very tired attitude on one of the deck seats.
Mr. Silverwood saw the chance of once more working off the extreme erotic excitement which possessed him. He dropped on to the seat by her side and kissed her roughly and passionately. A sharp slap on the face was his only reward.
"Get away, you sod; I've had fourteen of them already. What is going to happen to me on this ship?"
The poor man murmured something about money.
"Money," answered Miss Jepps, savagely, "money, you can write your cheque-book silly before you get my thighs to open. I never want to feel a man's breath on my lips again in my life. Give me a cigarette and sit on the other end, the very other end of the seat."
Mr. Silverwood obeyed, and as he obliged the worn-out lady with a match, little Hony wandered aimlessly by and climbed to the bridge.
The "young man," in response to a message from the bridge, left the smoke-room and made his way on deck. Herr Kunst silently followed. In the shadow of one of the life boats he touched the former on the shoulder.
"May I some business talk?" he said.
"Of course."
"It is dat you make much moneys, ain't it?" he queried.
"Very fair, very fair."
"I know der ships vat der diamonds carries," said Herr Kunst. "Der vos der Rheingold, private owned, she vould not be to the Canaries arrived yet."
"Ah, good," said the "young man."
"Mr.-Mr.-"
"Herr Kunst mein name it is. It vos an awkward name, but it vos mein only von I haf, ain't it?" The "young man" smiled.
"It is just dis," Herr Kunst hurried to explain in a guttural whisper. "Dere is dat of der most God-damnedest shits, Solly Joelstein, who schvindle me in Jo'burg, who was vuck mein most beautiful vife, und seduction mein kleine daughter. Dat lump of vat you call 'im, turd, ain't it?"-Herr Kunst grew very excited-"he vos in his yacht der tousands and tousands of illicit diamonds carry to England. He vos pick up anuder yacht and transfer der stones. Ve meet 'im. I know ver vireless code, an' ve take all ze stones and shoot de Goddam-vuck-bugger bloody into der sea in for der sharks his balls to off bite, ain't it?"
"Certainly, certainly," said the "young man."
"An for me 25 per cent, ain't it?"
"Well-yes. I'll tell the electrician to inform you we pick up any code message he doesn't under ;tand. Now I must go to the bridge."
9
LIFE ON BOARD A YACHT
"This is the New Caledonia, " says Osgood Fielding III in Some Like it Hot, "The Old Caledonia went down during a wild party off Cape Hatteras." Though the vessel in Life on Board a Yacht may not have lifebelts with the name Titanic on them, it certainly seems likely to go the same way as the Old Caledonia. By the time we get to the end of the rumbustious goings-on, the only wonder is tat the ship stayed afloat so long.
Pleasure Bound is an introduction to what the French used to call "Le High Life" at sea. In the following chapter, the title says it all. "The Gentlemen Enjoy Themselves." In other words, the rumpus begins. But it is a carefully staged rumpus, for there are two classes of women on board. First there are the great courtesans. Esther Hazy is a joke on the name of Austro-Hungarian royalty. Liane de Vibrecoeur and Cleo Montauciel sound suspiciously like the grandes horizontales, Liane de Pougy and Cleo de Merode. They were the darlings of poets and royalty alike. At sixteen, Liane had been shot twice by her older and jealous husband. Fortunately neither bullet was fatal, they both hit her in the bottom. She divorced him and, as the wits said, never looked back.
It is the other girls on the yacht who pay for their trip the hard way, Renee Giovanina and their kind. Indeed, they are in such danger of losing out on the sexual goodies that passionate Giovanina comes scratching at the narrator's cabin door, begging like a she-cat on heat.
When they get Renee into the saloon, the real ladies as much as the gentlemen are greatly excited and looking forward to what they are about to do to her. If she hopes for feminine sympathy, she is about to find out that her own sex can be quite as eager and heartless as the male in a situation of this sort.
* * *
When I left my pretty Renee, having conducted her to her cabin, in a state of mind which required composure and rest, I had not the courage to go and see Giovanina who I knew was waiting for me.
I returned to my cabin and was about to enjoy well-earned repose, when I heard somebody scratching at the door. Without apprehending anything, and in rather a bad humour at being disturbed, I found myself, to my conversation, face to face with my lovely Italian mistress, who appeared like an avenging goddess.
The little roguish damsel not seeing me come to her as usual had been waiting for me in vain.
So she enacted a terrible scene of loving jealousy of which I should never have supposed her capable. She had been listening at the door!
I sought to pacify her, but could only succeed by employing the supreme argument, and by given her what she was longing for: the possession of myself. Fearing to lose me, she wanted to gain me back again, and the sly puss set about it so cleverly, with so much skill; so endearingly, I may say, that she made me forget Renee, writhing in my arms, under the caressing performation of my deflowering member. Greedy Giovanina soon rendered it impossible for me to do any more.
I was forced to quit the arms of my ardent companion in obedience to an imperious summons from the Court, who sent to require my services. It was the date fixed for the grand soiree that had been announced.
I was pretty well occupied all day long superintending the preparation.
I pass over the minor details. It only remains now for me to relate the most astounding and impressive adventure that ever occurred to me in my life.
The evening of the ball, the saloon was brilliantly lighted, and magnificently decorated with artificial flowers. The entire company was assembled; the gentlemen in evening dress and the ladies in magnificent brand-new toilettes, of which I will try to briefly give a faint idea.
Liane de Vibrecoeur wore a splendid ball-dress of black moire, garnished with white-ribbons from top to toe, even to her low dancing shoes and silk stockings. Her queenly head was surmounted by a splendid aigrette of ostrich feathers and diamonds. Her bodice was a mere pretence-so low cut was it; and her closely-fit-ting skirts moulded her tempting thighs and posteriors.
Stella Carina, in a mauve frock, was very elegant and seductive. Cleo Montauciel looked lasciviously lovely and tempting, her beautiful bare arms encircled by thin gold bangles. Blanche de Noirmont and Esther Hazy were dressed alike, in sisterly fashion, robed in elegant princesse costumes of black velvet, with long trains, their sole ornaments being a cream-coloured velvet ribbon fastened with a diamond clasp round each of their white, full necks; their feet being fitted in black satin shoes, and their legs encased in black silk openwork stockings.
Renee Danglars and Micheline Darcourt had chosen-the former, pale blue; the latter, pink. Their outrageously decollete, vapoury ball-dresses were of cloudy chiffon muslin trimmed with ribbons and lace. The two young fairies were intensely alluring.
But charming Odette established another record. Sure of her beauty, she realized a positive marvel of skill by appearing in a dress so refined in every respect that it did not admit the possibility of the least of her charms remaining unappreciated. She had displayed such science in the arrangement of her costume that she might have turned the heads of all the men, even had she been less pretty. She was irresistibly tempting from head to foot, and from the moment of her entrance was surrounded by the gloating rakes.
There was plenty of dancing, and it seemed as if all was likely to pass off in a proper manner, within the bounds of an evening party of good society. Suddenly, at a sign from Lord Reginald, the dancers stopped, and the music ceased.
When everybody was gathered round their host, the latter raised his voice.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he announced, "I am obliged to bring to your notice a grave complaint which has been made against a person who I will not mention for the moment. As it is a matter which must be settled once for all, and would otherwise tend to disturb the previous perfect harmony existing among us, I propose that complainant and defendant be heard contradictorily, upon which we shall be able in full knowledge of the case to decide what punishment is to be inflicted on the delinquent. We will therefore constitute a tribunal, which I reserve myself the right of presiding as judge, and I invite Count Popolsky and three other gentlemen to assist me members of the court."
As may well be supposed, this speech was not without causing great astonishment. No one knew what the case was about and the guests mutely interrogated each other with enquiring glances. But all doubts were soon set at rest, when it was found that Captain Bullock was the plaintiff, and little Renee Danglars, the alleged culprit.
The Captain bluntly exposed his grievances, complaining briefly of the scornful conduct of the pretty girl who had repeatedly repulsed his advances. This he took to be an insult. Such an awful affront called for satisfaction, his feelings having thus been deeply wounded, and his manly dignity turned into ridicule.
Renee, who had become the cynosure of all eyes, sat bolt upright alone in a corner of the saloon. She hardly knew whether to take this matter seriously, or in a comic vein. Ought she to laugh or to cry? When asked what she had to say in her defense, she advanced smiling to the middle of the room and replied to the questions put to her by Lord Seacombe who, with impertubable serenity, played the part of the president of a law-court. His examination did not last long.
"Mademoiselle," began Judge Seacombe, "you have just heard Captain Bullock's complaint. What foundation is there for his approaches? Have you really, as he affirms, repelled his gallant advances, and if so, why?"
"My answer is simple enough," replied Renee still smiling. "It is true that I rejected the Captain's amorous offers. That I admit, unreservedly. As for my motives, gentlemen, your eyes must show them to you. Just look at that old buffer's frontispiece! Did you ever see a more ugly mug? No, there, frankly-do you really think that I could lie down with such an old beast? Do you fancy honestly for one single moment that a dismal conjunction of that kind could cause me any pleasure?"
"Pleasure or no, mademoiselle, that is not the question. It is not the duty of the court to enter into details of your unreasoning likes and dislikes. You could not expect the Captain to be the only one on board to be thrust out in the cold when all the rest of us are having plenty of-ahem!-poking. When you agreed to come with us, you knew well enough that it was not to gaze at the stars, but that our intention was to amuse ourselves, madly-to satiety. Now, it appears to me, that on the night of our fancy dress ball, you were not quite so coy, and I cannot admit that you should now play the prude with our good friend Captain Bullock. We are on this earth to enjoy ourselves; to revel in love's delights, and women are made for love. You are intelligent, my dear, and quite willing to profit by all the advantages of your present situation. You are quite ready to amuse yourself on this pleasure trip; to laugh and sing; put on pretty dresses, and wear jewels-our frank gifts. But when in return, you are asked for a mere bagatelle; just the trifle of a few minutes of fleshly abandonment, you refuse."
A certain feeling of uneasiness began to take possession of Renee, who saw that the reproaches addressed to her were seriously meant. Therefore she added:
"But I never refused. All I say is that I will not have connection with the Captain. No matter with whom, rather than with him with you, if you like?"
"You ought to have arranged matters better when we all started together. You were assigned by lot to the Captain. His complaint is justified, and you must submit. The order of the court-and my fellow judges concur-is that you beg Captain Bullock's pardon, and surrender yourself to his desires-to all his desires! Do you understand, mademoiselle?"
"Never!" exclaimed Renee, stepping resolutely forward. "I shall never belong to that man!"
"Is that your last word?" asked Lord Reginald.
"Yes, Lord Seacombe-my very last word!" replied Renee, in a savage tone seating herself next to Micheline.
"Very good, mademoiselle", rejoined his lordship. "The case has been heard, the judges will not deliberate on their verdict."
The "court" retired into the smoking-room for about twenty minutes, during which time, the company chatted and laughed.
Odette, speaking to Renee, whom Micheline had already endeavoured to render submissive, said to her:
"Why don't you give in, you stupid! Get into bed with Bullock! Go on and let him have you! What harm can it do you! Do you suppose that his tool is not so good a one as anyone else's? I've no patience with such a stubborn child! If you only knew! It's always the same after the first time a girl's been poked!"
"Fiddlesticks!" said Renee, casting a furtive glance at me. "You may say so, but I don't think it can be the same with every man! After all, if you must know my ideas on the subject, the old fellow-sickens and disgusts me-there!"
"Well, my girl," replied Odette, "I don't wish you any harm, but you'll see what'll happen. The Captain has taken a fancy to you. He'll have you at no matter what cost, and I greatly fear that you will be obliged to give him your maidenhead by force! A scene of rape! That will be rare fun!"
"I should like to see it, indeed!" exclaimed Renee, with fire in her eye, and clenching two baby fists.
At this moment, the gentlemen-judges returned to the saloon, after having, it was said, examined the grave affair in all its bearings, and I must admit that nobody had the least idea of what was now about to occur.
In clear and ringing accents, Lord Reginald at once communicated the decision of the "tribunal":
"We have unanimously recognized that Mademoiselle Renee's conduct deserved exemplary punishment and it shall be inflicted, even if at the last moment she should consent to what was demanded of her: This is therefore what we have decided by common consent. That Mademoiselle Renee, having behaved like a naughty and capricious child, shall be treated like a whimsical little girl who refuses to obey her elders. She shall have her bottom well whipped and each member of the company here assembled shall give her three strokes with a birch on her naked backside. That will teach her to be capricious!"
Renee could not believe her ears; she was petrified, stunned. At this juncture, Captain Bul-luck, taking advantage of the opportunity offered to him, advanced towards her, and seizing her suddenly in his vigorous grasp, prevented her from using her arms in defense.
During this, Lord Seacombe had left the saloon, returning almost immediately with his valet. Tom, a big, strong negro. He must have been no novice at the flogging game, for he seemed at once to realise what was required of him. Seeing Renee struggling like the very devil in the arms of Captain Bullock, from whose clutch the frightened girl was trying to escape.
Tom simply asked:
"Is that her?"
Lord Reginald made an affirmative sign.
Tom at once advanced towards Renee and placing himself before her, he seized hold of her slender wrists and then said to he Captain:
"Let go, sah!
Bullock stretched his hands apart, and Tom, by a surprise movement, having passed Renee's arms over his shoulders, lifted her up on his back where she remained suspended. In vain she kicked and struggled. The black servant held tight.
One of the gentlemen seized her left ankle; another clutched the right, and she was thus reduced to immobility on the broad back of her tormentor.
Lord Reginald then came forward, lifted up Renee's skirts and petticoat and threw them over her head.
Her rich and elegant underclothing thus exposed to view, the sight of her hidden charms was eminently soul-stirring. It was of a nature of trouble the senses and raise voluptuous ideas among the spectators.
It was still worse when Lord Seacombe, speaking to the Captain, said:
"It is now your turn! You have been insulted, so you must begin by undressing the prisoner!"
The Captain did not wait to be told twice. He drew near Renee, and passing his right hand in the slit of her drawers, he gently slapped her buttocks. Then for a moment his rough ringers disappeared between her thighs. Renee howled and endeavoured though uselessly to resist. She was held as in a vice and all her efforts served but to make the male guests laugh.
With skill and dexterity such as I should never have supposed Captain Bullock to possess, he undid the young girl's drawers, letting them fall down to her heels. Two splendid posterior globes were exposed to view. It was enough to send a tremor of lust through the most indifferent man.
I do not know where they came from, but there suddenly appeared a dozen birch rods coquettishly tired up with differently coloured ribbons.
The Captain was the first to begin.
Weighing his strength, with a well calculated stroke, he aimed the initial blow at Renee's lovely hemispheres.
The young girl gave a violent plunge and uttered a shrieking cry of agony which pained me to the heart, and I could read in the eyes of the other women an immense feeling of pity.
A second and a third blow applied with still greater vigour produced two opposite effects. Whilst unfortunate Renee was writhing with her whole body trembling with pain and shame, and shaken by internal sobs, it seemed to me that the witnesses of the flogging tragedy were gradually being overwhelmed by peculiar excitement, betraying itself in their staring eyes, and in the tremor of their lips. They appeared to feel a certain strange and hiterto unknown sensuous enjoyment which I confess was also gaining me.
After Captain Bullock, it was the turn of Lord Reginald. He approached and probably finding the exposed surface too limited for his purpose, threw up the poor victim's entire chemise right over her head.
Then with a certain degree of deliberate calmness and without any haste, he applied his three strokes, which had that same effect as those given by the Captain, with this difference, however, that they drew more doleful complaints and still more painful cries from the unhappy martyr.
I cannot say what whim or caprice seized his brain, but the fact is that after his allotted share of the birching task. Lord Seacombe called to me.
"Come now," he said, laughing, "you can't expect to get out of this! You must take your part in the whipping of rebellions Renee. Give us a sample of Parisian skill!"
I advanced mechanically, and took the birch that was handed me. I went close to Renee. I could not bring myself to strike her. At the sight of her lovely body, and of her satin skin, already streaked with long ruby, blistered lines, beneath which young, ardent, healthy blood was boiling, I could not restrain myself, but stooping down, instead of beating the bruised flesh with the awful instrument of torture. I imprinted a long and passionate kiss on the part which had been most sorely hurt. My lips were loth to leave Renee's burning, quivering, voluptuous flesh.
My pitying proceeding was looked upon as a stroke of Gallic humour and gallant attention, causing a murmur of applause to salute my retreat. But no one except Renee could understand the meaning of my caress or grasp its real meaning.
The poor child-alas!-had not reached the end of her fearful ordeal. Count Popolsky now took the birch in hand and with a kind of frenzied rage, began to strike in his turn.
Renee gave a cry of intense agony followed immediately by a savage howl.
At the same moment, the negro let go his victim, who fell on the floor. With one bound, she was again on her feet and took refuse in a corner of the saloon where she baricaded herself behind a sofa, like a hunted animal tracked by a pack of hounds. All the women were seized with profound emotion.
After the first moment of surprise, the gentlemen had hastened to gather round dusky Tom, whose neck was bleeding profusely. With a violent bite of her teeth, Renee had torn a piece of sable flesh from Tom's nape. The pain caused him to loose his hold, and he yelled, swore, and jumped about like a demon.
Lord Reginald, in a fury, shared by all his friends on seeing the entertainment brought to so sudden a termination, made a sign to his guests, who all at once surrounded the poor lassie with whom they engaged a furious tussle. Naturally, she was not strong enough to resist their combined attack and was obliged to succumb. Foaming with rage, writhing in the grip of her captors, who now held her down on the floor, she was stripped of her clothing, bit by bit.
This proceeding took some little time. At each fragment of flesh revealed, the men's ardour redoubled and soon amounted to blind, bestial rage. At last, having had everything torn from her with the exception of her chemise, she contrived by a supreme effort to free her quivering body, and got on her feet for a moment. Seized again, the last veil was ripped from her white frame and she now appeared to the gaze of all stark naked and blushing, in all the bloom of her sculptural charms.
It was enough to damn a saint. In the middle of the saloon stood a column supporting the ceiling. This pillar was garnished with red velvet and half fainting, the young girl was bound to it. A blue scarf was wound round her neck, while her hands and ankles were fastened to the column by a silken cord of the same colour which had formed part of her costume.
And now commenced a most sickening scene.
All the spectators, armed with birches, began to thrash the young girl most unmercifully. She gave vent to dismal, heartrending groans.
At last, when they could continue no longer, Lord Reginald, gave a signal and Renee was released. She fell down at full length on the carpet, exhausted by pain and anguish; her dilated eyes conveying an expression of undefinable terror.
Captain Bullock, like a stallion in heat, his gaze being fixed and glassy as of a man demented, in a paroxysm of lust, had rapidly torn open his trousers and thrown himself upon his prey.
She had not the slightest strength left and offered the merest shadow of resistance.
She merely made a few convulsive starts when the Captain, clawing at the poor, bruised body, upon which could be seen drops of blood crimsoning his brutal fingers, clasped her in a bear-like hug, and possessed her-roughly, vilely, fully. The poor child gave one pitiful moan and then fainted, while on his part, the grunting brute, like a drunken man, satiated his beastly fornicating lust, beneath the excited gaze of the spectators who, breathless and in a state impossible to describe, followed every phase of this dramatic episode.
Renee, half dead, was enveloped in a dressing-gown and carried to her cabin, where she was left to the care of a lady's maid who thought the whole affair was quite natural. The serving-maid merely shrugged her shoulders when she saw the wounds inflicted on the unfortunate young woman's bottom.
10
BELLE SAUVAGE
Perhaps there was no more sophisticated High Society than that which spent its seasons in classic cities by tropic seas. But this time it was the New World which provided the setting for the secret erotic adventure. Before the Civil War the great and splendid marine villas of the Old South looked out upon a warm glittering ocean in cities like Savannah. Or they lined the famous East Battery and White Point Gardens at Charleston. The diaries and letters of such society matrons as Mary Boykin Chesnut preserve something of the atmosphere of those long steamy summers.
It was natural that with the coming of the heat those who could do so left the sweltering plains of the plantation houses and moved to their splendid classical mansions where the piazzas, as they called their covered balconies and verandahs, were cooled a little by the sea breezes. Here a man or woman might live almost entirely for pleasure until the worst of the sultry months were over.
The flowery avenues and the fine white houses of Charleston with their ornamental balustrades represented for most people the height of southern luxury. The city was less cosmopolitan than New Orleans but far more refined and exclusive. The best of European craftsmanship, the finest wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux, were unloaded at the nearby East Dock, where the bales of cotton and sacks of rice waited shipment in the other direction to the warehouses of London and Hamburg.
As a setting for erotic fiction, the sophisticated waterside life of the Charleston season was rich in potential. A wealthy plantation owner might keep a white mistress or a dusky harem in one of these houses and visit as he chose. There was also a brothel-quarter round Tradd Street, near the East Dock. He might hold parties for his male cronies in a bachelor residence and turn the dinner-table merriment into an orgy that would make a rumpus-room seem like a Trappist monastery.
Such goings-on fill the pages of novels like Dolly Morton, whose subject is the sexual slavery of dark-skinned girls-and even some of their white sisters. As the famous actress Fanny Kemble noted in her journal, such girls were the absolute sexual property of their master. He might buy as many as he wished, at the auction houses of Richmond or New Orleans, and do whatever he pleased with them. These fancy-girls, as they were called, fetched the highest prices. The story of one such girl is told in the fictional form of Miss Jolly. Sold at the famous rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel, Miss Jolly is a young exhibit at a sale-room when she first catches the eye of Colonel Ashbee who is passing that way and swiftly snaps her up. A bargain at any price.
Belle Sauvage is a sequej, or at least a complement, to the earlier book. But it has a twist which is far removed from the image of the slave-girl as a pathetic submissive. Its dark-skinned beauties may be compelled to obey the orders of their master but they have minds and spirits of their own. In fiction, at least, they are quite capable of getting the better of the tyrant who believes that he has bought them outright. One particular "Belle Sauvage" is summoned to act as a sexually provocative waitress at a dinner where Colonel Ashbee entertains his friend Colonel Johnson. His aim is to show how he can put her through her paces and, indeed, command her as he chooses.
But all the time, this "daughter of African beauty and southern sun" is plotting a revenge that will make him the laughing-stock of the Charleston season and ruin his sexual reputation for ever. Of course, he may take his vengeance upon her in turn and the "proud dusky Venus" risks being punished in the public whipping-house. But that would probably happen to her anyway, sooner or later, when her master fell into a bad mood. What the fashionable world will hear and remember is the strange humiliation of the colonel himself. Like Elke Maline, Monnelia the slave-girl is one of nature's ball-breakers. Even her master is not immune from that. Such a thing might have been impossible in the great plantation house. Here, in the saturnalia of a Charleston season, it is a different story.
* * *
The night of Colonel Ashbee's dinner in the fine house overlooking White Point Gardens marked the opening of the spring season. The live oaks of the public promenades, with their veils of Spanish moss, were already in leaf. The tall pillared houses, their elegant verandahs shaded by magnolia in full bloom, had become the retreat of fashion and sophistication. In a little while the heat of the tidewater plantations would prove insupportable to the ladies of those country estates and the world would move to the ocean. But even here in Charleston, the waves of the evening tide seemed to lie enfeebled and panting on the shore of White Point and the East Battery by the time that the sultry day was done.
The expanse of White Point Gardens, where the canopied carriages rolled along the wide and shady gravel drives was the grand parade of the old colonial quarter. Inland from this park, down narrower and more winding vistas, azalea and bougainvillea blossomed crimson and purple over private walls along King Street and Church Street. Here stood those handsome brick dwellings with their white pediments and porticoes, built a century before to house the lawyers and physicians, the land agents and shippers, all those who grew rich upon the backs of the great plantation lords.
Colonel Ashbee was the possessor of a more stately waterside mansion whose open piazzas caught every light Atlantic breeze in the stifling months of July and August. The cream-painted elegance of his villa suggested the home of a Spanish grandee or a colonial governor. Behind tall railings and palmetto trees, an open and shaded verandah ran the full length of the building on every floor. The colonel was not a great deal richer than his plantation rivals. Yet the Grecian pillars of his loggias seemed more graceful and the ornamental balustrading more airy. Colonel Ashbee was a man of leisure, able to make his fortune and still have time for the handsomely bound volumes of his Corinthian columned library. He was the first gentleman of White Point Gardens. The richly ordered house with honey-coloured Chippendale and deeply polished Sheraton was proof of it. Other men talked of cash crops and cotton yields: the colonel would run you up a piece of Cicero or a few lines of Ovid.
Like all his neighbours, Colonel Ashbee boasted an ornamental garden behind the house on the Charleston waterfront, separating it by a good distance from two out-buildings of plain brick. One of these contained his horses and the olive-green pilentum in which he took his carriage exercise. In the other he kept his chosen slave-girls. You may be sure that he did not bring his field-slaves to Charleston for the season. Of what use would they be? Those who served him here were dark-skinned beauties of graceful figure and seductive glance. He had bought them at fancy-girl auctions for a price that few other owners could afford.
There was nothing in which the colonel took as great a pride as in his fancy-girls and their ability to please a gentleman.
After the cares of the plantation house at Chelsea Landing, the warm days of the Charleston season passed for Colonel Ashbee in agreeable idleness. Every morning when the sun glittered like shivered glass on the burnished sea, he would retire to his steamer-chair in the shade of the piazza and study the financial news in the day's papers. His investments were widespread. The news from the markets and the exchanges of Wall Street or London rarely brought a frown to his face and often evoked a smile of satisfaction.
As the tide deepened to bottle-green in the long afternoon of the southern day, he would take a drive in his swan's-neck carriage, perhaps along the banks of the Ashley River or else beyond the harbour to the open sea. Here the surf boomed on tropic sands and the wind rattled the palmetto fronds, for all the world as if it might have been a desert island on the equator.
When evening came there would be an agreeable dinner, at home or elsewhere, with the finest society of White Point Gardens or the East Battery. The latest virtuoso of the keyboard would send the arpeggios of Chopin skimming into the warm night or a young daughter of fashionable birth who fancies she had a talent for opera would warble a little Rossini or Gounod.
But sometimes, as the sun sank golden beyond the Cooper River and the mangroves, turning the quiet sea to Prussian blue, the colonel dined at home with his cronies and their women. These were not occasions that the world heard about. Much went on behind the door of his elegant white-and-gold dining-room that was not fit for the ears of polite society. Such pleasures required attendance of his most beautiful fancy-girls. It was the custom that his guests should stay the night in the cool and airy bedrooms of the upper floor. His companions in pleasure must not be seen driving away at two or three in the morning. After such excitements, breakfast was served late the next day. It was often noon before the last guests emerged to join the others in the shade of the piazza which looked across the live oaks of the gardens to the glittering calm of Charleston Harbour.
There was a lively but amiable rivalry between Colonel Ashbee and his neighbour in the tidewater country, Colonel Johnson. Each teased the other with not knowing how to manage the beautiful female slaves who gave pleasure to their master. Colonel Ashbee had acquired a delicious pair of girls, a half-caste, Helen Wong, whose slave ancestry lay in the Pacific trade and Miss Jolly, a randy little almond-eyed odalisque. As so often, where there are many such girls and only one man to employ them, jealousy was fierce and frequent. In the end, these two hot-blooded she-devils flew at one another. Each of their bodies was Colonel Ashbee's property and the damage inflicted was an offence against him. In his anger he arranged that both of them should receive public correction in the whipping-house next door to the Chalmers Street slave-market. Colonel Johnson twitted his friend over this, saying that he should never approve such a thing. To confess publicly that the girls were beyond his control and to display their bare bottoms under the lash for every idle apprentice or slatternly housewife to see was more than he could sanction.
Colonel Ashbee was not ill-provided in the matter of feminine company. Apart from his fancy-girls, he was the possessor of a fine young fair-skinned mistress, twenty-six years old, who was known a "Lady Susan" for her proud bearing and disdain. To be sure there was something of a spoilt and sullen look about her, caused perhaps by her rather shallow chin and prim mouth. She had a self-confidence in the tilt of her clear young features and narrowed blue eyes, softened by just a hint of pretty freckling and by the tresses of light brown hair brushed back and trimmed to lie upon her collar.
As she strode to the stables for riding exercise, she stiffened the negro manhood of strapping bucks and little boys alike. Her shapely legs were encased from foot to knee in tight polished riding-boots of light tan. The thin blue cotton of her riding-jeans was smooth and taut on the graceful feminine bow of her thighs in their proud young maturity. At the rear, the tight-strained cotton seat showed the self-assured swell of Susan Webb's bottom-cheeks. Far from concealing her charms, she taunted and goaded the black onlookers. The tightness of the jeans-seat showed them the slight suggestive ridge, arching high over each firm swell of her buttocks, the scandalously brief outline of Sue Webb's knickers.
It was the opinion in the slave-cabins that Colonel Ashbee's young woman "juiced herself with excitement by the friction of tight pants-and by the thrill of flaunting her young figure before the blacks, knowing that every negro penis must be helplessly stiffened by the sight and that any attempt upon her would be visited with castration or the gallows. What was the pleasure she received in showing them the beauties they must never touch?
A negro lad of thirteen or fourteen was always ready to cup his hands as a stirrup for the young woman to mount her horse. His reward came as she stepped up and curved forward, the firm maturity of her behind swelling fuller in the tight blue denims. The lad enjoyed a long moment when the proud dwell of Sue Webb's bottom-cheeks was thrust almost into his face. The shape of her underpants was clearly ridged through the thin cloth and between her legs the soft flesh of her sex was invitingly moulded by the cloth. Much youthful seed had been spilt by the negro stable-boys in homage to the view she presented on these occasions.
It would not be said, then, that Colonel Ashbee or, indeed, Colonel Johnson suffered from a lack of such beauties. However, a pleasant custom had grown up between the two friends. From time to time they would dine together, in great privacy. Each provided a girl for the other, as a man might invite his favoured acquaintance to share a bottle of exceptionally fine wine. It was necessary to show the greatest discretion in this matter and the locations of theseingenious dinner parties were chosen with care. By the first week of May the weather had grown so sultry that Colonel Ashbee could think of nothing more pleasant than to put out into the harbour on Colonel Johnson's yacht, whose saloon and elegant furnishings were a miniature of his own domestic luxury. The two men and their two chosen girls would be alone, safely at anchor, in the calm waters off Fort Moultrie. The crew would go ashore in the painter and leave the amorous adventurers to their private pleasures. Their banquet would be laid out and prepared.
Each man kept a surprise for the other. It was known only that Colonel Ashbee proposed to bring a favourite slave-girl for Johnson, tempting him with an elegant and shapely black Venus. Johnson had in keeping for his friend a saucy white-skinned soubrette, acquired from an introducing-house. When they sat down to dine, it was the dark-skinned slave beauty who appeared first as their waitress.
Monnelia was an exquisitely-formed slave-maiden, a creature of natural poise and lithe figure. She seemed the daughter of African grace or Caribbean elegance tempered by the southern genius of Lousianna or Mississippi. She was just nineteen years old and had the seductive loveliness of a heathen warrior-princess. When she was brought on to the auction dais in New Orleans, they had made her pose naked to show the deep bronze smoothness of her body. The long lines of her dark-skinned thighs and legs had a satiny gloss as the strong lights were directed upon her. Her thighs were trim and her hips rounded, her shoulders sleek and her breasts carried high. Her warm-toned face was animated by eyes that seemed wide and soft. Her nose and chin were perfectly formed in their African beauty. There was nothing gross or coarse in her looks, she might have been a model of refinement and elegance. But she promised sexual pleasure to the man who would master her and her lips had a desirable fullness. Her short hair was brushed up from her face, the better to expose her delicate ears with their thin gold rings. At the back its cropped length was tailed and ribboned to leave her neck and shoulders quite bare.
As was always the case, the food at Colonel Johnson's dinner was of the most succulent. Cold Spanish soup was followed by pate and then by saumon fume. There was cool chablis and sweet sauterne. The finest poultry and the most subtle Venetian ices were washed down by wines of every region.
The valets had made Monnelia strip down to a single garment and a pair of shoes. Her warm brown body was covered only by a brief corselet of thin white silk. Her legs and thighs, her arms and shoulders, even the upper half of her back, were completely bare apart from the two shoulder-straps that helped to hold the corselet in place. How easily the shape of her spruce young breasts was seen through the thin silk! The nipples were erect, a tribute to her natural animal vitality. The satiny-bronze of the firm globes bobbed a little in their youthful elasticity as she walked. The hem of the white silk corselet was cut above her dusky hips on either side. At the front it narrowed between her legs, just covering the little bush of dark hair that crowned her sex. At the rear, the seat was deliberately cut too small to cover completely the sleek ebony smoothness of Monnelia's bottom-cheeks. Her long African-tan thighs were slim and willowy in their supple grace. Best of all, the valets had made her wear smart white shoes with tall heels, so that the rounding of her hips and arse, the sinuous squirming of her thighs, were seductively exaggerated as she walked-whether or not she wished it.
Johnson was amused at the way in which Ashbee had chosen to curb the disdain of this beautiful nineteen-year-old negress. He was frankly admiring of her supple figure, the self-possessed beauty of a tribal princess in her face, the primitive warrior-girl appearance of her upward brushed hair and its ribboned coiffure at her nape. Her brief-cut waitress-costume not only made Monnelia expose her beautiful legs and hips, and her seductive dark-tanned bum-cheeks, but was designed to make her feel she was doing so.
When the meal was over, Johnson watched her approach with the silver tray of decanter and glasses. In the prim movement of her haunches there was a natural sophistication. Her long and elegant legs moved with controlled ease. She set down the tray. Then she turned to fetch the silver cigar-box.
When she turned to walk away, he had a view of the proud young negress-skinned swell of Monnelia's arse-cheeks and the supple curves of her bare thighs. Where the white silk of the corselet emerged between the rear of her legs, its seat was cut to arch up high and tight so that the dark oval smoothness of Monnelia's bottom-cheeks was suggestively half naked. She did not suffer a big-buttocked and heavy-thighed look which mars some of her type. A native grace of shape and movement made Monnelia's backside worth studying. Its cheeks were tanned as silken ebony as her other surfaces. Colonel Johnson, admiring her elegant and youthfully trim hind curves, thought that the dusky gloss of this cheek-skin suggested Monnelia wet-bottomed from sitting in coffee-coloured sludge.
Colonel Ashbee showed his mastery of the girl by the service he made her perform in this state. Still with her back towards him, it was necessary for the elegant young slave-girl to bend right over to find the cigar-box. The satin-smooth and African-brown cheeks of Monnelia's behind swelled out temptingly as the search for the cigar-box detained her in this lasciviously inviting pose. The swell of her hips as she bent over also strained the thin white silk of the corselet seat into the slave-girl's rear cleavage, so that her warm-toned buttocks were quite bare and temptingly offered. She was obliged to hear the men's laughter from behind her and the suggestions of what they would like to see done to her. Then she turned with the silver cigar-box and came back towards them, bare legs moving with maidenly restraint and her eyes downcast to avoid meeting the smiling gaze of Colonel Johnson.
While their swarthy glamour-girl stood before them with the box, eyes demurely lowered, they agreed that Monnelia thought too much of herself for a mere slave-girl. She must be cured of this pride by a reminder of the more vulgar aspects of her femininity, which even a daughter of African beauty possesses.
Johnson kept her standing by his chair as he smoked his cigar. He ran his hands up and down the sleek dark velveteen gloss of her thighs, which were level with his eyes as he lounged back in his chair. Bowing his head, he kissed her just above the knees and then allowed his lips to browse upwards on her dark satin flesh. Monnelia, looking modestly away from him and with her fine brown eyes still lowered, straddled a little in obedience to his orders. He kissed the inner surfaces of her willowy negress thighs. His lips feasted on this warm wilken texture as high up between her legs as he could go, his tongue touching the faint mineral taste of her there. His fingers meanwhile felt her sex through the thin silk of the corselet, fondling her and stroking, stroking and fondling, until Monnelia released her pent-up breath in a gasp and her body shivered.
The colonel turned her to the table and made her bend forward across it. Smiling at the sight she presented, he tugged the seat-hem of the corselet higher so that the material was gathered in Monnelia's arse-crack and her fine African-satin buttocks were more properly bare. He fondled her elegant young backside, caressing the slight flesh-creases under the shapely swell and softness of Monnelia's bottom-cheeks. He began to kiss the bare native tan of those cool and dusky rear globes, which caused the girl to hide her face by leaning her forehead on her folded arms. He insinuated a finger under the twist of silk and explored her bum-cleft. He felt her flinch as his fingertip touched Monnelia's arsehole. Gratified by this, he stroked and tickled her there for a long time to make her accept what she would instinctively have rejected. Gradually her hips and her shapely dark-skinned legs in the high-heeled white shoes relaxed.
Even the dignity of a maiden-warrior like this could be overcome by caresses. The natural sensitivity of Monnelia's anus had begun to welcome the finger's teasing and tickling. Through the thin silk he fondled her young breasts with his other hand. The slave-girl could not conceal her natural and instinctive excitement. It amused Johnson that while Monnelia's arsehold tightened against the caressing finger, her dark nipples grew hard as berries at the excitation of that sensitive place and the thought that he was prepared to be so perverse with her.
He made her perform little tasks, picking up crumbs or reaching for dishes. In each posture she was required to bend. Each time that she did so, he inflicted a vigorous smack on the bare ebony ovals of Monnelia's bottom, hard enough to make the very air sing. To spank an African-tan beauty, so tall and maidenly, was a considerable stimulus to a man of his age.
During these attentions which Johnson paid to Monnelia, Colonel Ashbee had prudently withdrawn to an adjoining stateroom to be waited upon by the treasure chosen for him. What a contrast she was to the jungle Venus being spanked in the saloon.
Ashbee smiled and turned his attention to the white girl before him. Louise was the type who easily passed into the total possession of such a man as Johnson. Ashbee thought to himself that the young bitch was not quite tall enough to be a glamour princess but she had an impudent quality that made him want to enjoy her. The short cut of her dark hair was drawn back tightly, straight and slick to show her ears and neck, trimmed off at her nape. She had used mascara to darken her lashes, emphasising the round saucer-eyed cheekiness of her sexual flirtation. At eighteen her face still had the rounded quality of adolescence, a pert young nose and a firm chin. She was dressed as if to excite her bridegroom in a honeymoon hotel. Though the sleek pale softness of teenage flesh gave a slight plumpness to her shape, she was deliciously served up.
Her legs were sheathed to mid-thigh in translucent stockings of black silk. There was a succulent stretch of bare white skin above the stocking-tops before the lace hem of her short black knickers. She wore a matching bodice and a pair of shoes with high heels to simulate a little of the height she lacked. Colonel Ashbee was pleased to see that she was a filly who had not yet been broken in. In the intervals of flirting, when she thought he was not looking, Louise's young face showed her to be tense and a little ill at ease.
He was content to have her standing by his chair and to run his hands over her legs in their sleek black stockings. Louise Neville flinched a little as he began to caress the soft bare skin above her stocking-tops! Then he commanded her to pose before him in postures of calculated impudence. She squirmed her hips nicely and angled her legs as she imagined a girl would do when offering herself for sale. When he made her turn her back and bend over, the tension was evident again in the way she held herself. The face she presented as she stooped had lost its soubrette sauciness and was uneasily self-conscious once more. Ashbee preferred this to a girl who was insolently sure of herself. Though she still wore the tight knickers of thin black silk, her bending posture added a slight fatness to the vulgar swell of Louise's bottom-cheeks. In this posture Colonel Ashbee found her suggestively exciting. He liked to make her look as if she were asking for certain bedroom perversities to be inflicted. The slight unease and apprehension in her young face warmed his enthusiasm.
He summoned her to kneel before his chair and unbutton him. From the slight hesitation, he guessed that Louise had probably mouthed some lucky boy on whom she had a crush. But to be commanded to suck the fleshy truncheon by a man almost three times her own age caused her a natural dismay. She drew his manhood out, kissed the tightly swollen knob uncertainly several times and hesitated again. It required a peremptory instruction before she opened her mouth and began to behave properly. Louise gave him several minutes of undiluted bliss with her lips and tongue. He wondered if she had done it before for a boyfriend, or whether a natural feminine instinct guided her in the soft and moist caresses. He was content, for the moment, to stop her when he felt crisis draw near and then make her start again when it subsided. In this manner she held the root of his erection with one hand to prevent it going too far into her throat. Then, while she looked saucer-eyed under her dark lashes at what she was doing, Louise Neville sucked the penis and trilled her tongue about its knob for the next half hour.
By then Ashbee and Johnson had separately decided that the time was ripe for each to take his girl to bed and do to her as she deserved. Therefore, Ashbee sent Louise to the saloon to carry his compliments to Johnson and propose a final midnight toast. It was unthinkable for Ashbee to burst in upon his friend. Yet there was a charm and excitement to have Louise enter and find Monnelia also kneeling with a gentleman's fleshy poker stiff in her mouth. Johnson required proof of submission and humility from this proud slave-girl with the dark African gloss of her breasts and hips, her thighs and bum-cheeks. He had made her pose on all fours, not sitting on her heels, so that he might admire in the mirrors the swelling negress tan of Monnelia's bare buttocks. The light shone on the velvety ebony sleekness of her nude haunches as she drew him from her mouth, tickled the vent with her tongue, and then drew him in her mouth again. He made her continue for a little, finding a pleasure in making Monnelia humble herself while Louise watched.
Then the time came for the midnight toast. Each man carefully buttoned himself and they met in the saloon to drink a glass, sitting at the littered banquet table. Louise and Monnelia stood by, a pair of obedient waitresses. The men, in excellent spirits and greatly looking forward to the night ahead, drank damnation to the Yankee prudes and then put down their empty tumblers.
They had eaten well and, by this time, had drunk a good deal. To be sure the wine and the armagnac had been of the finest but there had been a great quantity of it. Colonel Ashbee felt a sudden contentment. Had Louise not been waiting for him, he would have fallen asleep in his comfortable dining-chair at that very moment. His eyelids seemed without support, closing with a will of their own. It was an agreeable sleepiness but, not having done his duty in bed with Louise, it was confoundedly inconvenient. Had it not been for the reputation of his manhood, he thought, he could almost have dismissed the young whore for that night.
He lowered his eyelids, thinking he would feel better if they rested like this for a moment. Then he opened them, only to feel them sink again as if it were the greatest and most sensual pleasure in the world to sit there with his eyes shut. He was just alert enough to notice in that brief glimpse that Louise and Monnelia were no longer looking at their lovers but at one another. Like Sisyphus with his impossible stone, he raised the lids again but could not keep them so for the world. A vision of Colonel Johnson opposite him, squinting in a singular manner, puzzled Colonel Ashbee's weary brain.
Hut he vowed to be master, of himself. To be sure, he had not even fallen into a doze. He was walking down a long passageway, at the end of which was his stateroom with the most comfortable bed in all the tidewater lands. Louise Neville was walking ahead of him, glancing back from time to time with impudent, dark-lashed, saucer-eyes. In her tight knickers of black silk and her tall-heeled shoes, she was flirting her shimmering young bottom at him as she walked. ... The soft adolescent cheeks of Louise Neville's backside were writhing and rolling in the tight black silk of her panties, to get him in the mood to ride her hard and long....
And so he would! By thunder, he would give the young bitch a rogering to remember . ... His passion should flood Louise's tongue and fill her throat. ... He would turn her on her back and guide his shaft between her parted thighs ... He would make her lie on her side with her back to him ... The way her dark hair was combed back tight and slick from her brow exposed her ears and neck....He would feast his lips there as his hands fondled her soft young buttocks and his finger oiled her ... He smiled at the image of her round-eyed dismay, the tight dark dimple of Louise Neville's anus was soon stretched alarmingly round the swollen penis engulfed in her backside ... To be sure, he would make her take a real spending that way ... In to the hilt, his knob deep enough inside her to cause her to panic. ... A squirting of his passion deep in her tripes, putting her into a parlous state. ... There was nothing he would not do to this teaser of eighteen....
Colonel Ashbee's mouth fell open. As if from long practice, his dreaming head slid sideways and pillowed itself on the upholstered wing of his tapestried chair. A sharp sound came from his throat, making him stir without waking. And then his slow and steady breathing measured the minutes and hours of night.
It was Johnson who woke first. The sun was entering through open curtains with an amber radiance. To either side the two young waitresses stood obedient to any command. Looking at them, it seemed as if they must have remained at their posts the whole night through. He imagined he heard a soft, hurried movement somewhere outside but that was impossible. They were alone.
The colonel's first thought was of vexation for the pleasure he had missed. His second was that he felt marvelously refreshed. Was it possible he had indulged some lechery with Monnelia during the night and been in such a state that it escaped his memory? He did not think so, but he could not be sure.
The sound of his movements woke Colonel Ashbee, through whose mind passed much the same sequence of thoughts. But now it was too late, for already there were footsteps on the deck. The crew and servants had returned from their shore-leave and the day's routine was beginning. Colonel Johnson's white footman, Hargreaves, tapped at the door gently and entered with great deference. He inquired whether the gentlemen and their ladies were ready to take breakfast yet. The good fellow showed not the least dismay at Monnelia in her brief white corselet or Louise in black silk knickers and stockings. He had served his master too long for such a thing to upset his balance.
The two friends who had planned such a night of pleasure ate their breakfast in silence. As yet neither said anything to the other of what had happened. Each hinted that he had, during the night, had fun with the girl of his choice-though neither could remember doing so.
That day they were tiresome masters to their slaves and poor company for their companions. Colonel Ashbee had Helen Wong whipped for a trivial oversight. His white-skinned mistress, Lady Susan, felt the sharpness of his tongue once or twice. Later he apologised for this and took her to bed for an hour or two. He ordered Monnelia to be locked in a room to await his decision. But he felt there was little he could do to assuage his frustration. If he had Monnelia's dusky-cheeked bottom pony-whipped and the reason were known, the whole of Charleston society would soon hear a rumour to his discredit. He and Johnson had chosen two delicious female creatures for a night of pleasure-and then had been unable to do anything to them. Fashionable company in such a city as Charleston loves the whisper of cruel innuendo, even when its own masters' reputations are to be torn in shreds by such tattle. Colonel Ashbee guessed the nature of the scandal that might be murmured against him. There would be whispers of impuissance and smiles of a most knowing kind. He shuddered at the thought and resolved, for the moment, to do nothing.
He continued to suspect that he was the victim of a plot. But he had not the least idea what it was or who had contrived it. His disadvantage was that he knew nothing of Louise, as Johnson knew nothing of Monnelia.
It was a week later when he received enlightenment. To his fine house in White Point Gardens there came a small carefully sealed package, in blue paper. It was delivered through the anonymity of the postal service. When opened, it proved to contain half-a-dozen photographs, printed full-plate. They were not the work of a great artist of the camera, but they showed the saloon of the yacht by the early light of day through its glass skylight and portholes.
Colonel Ashbee looked at the first and his heart was fired by anger and incomprehension. It showed him and Colonel Johnson asleep in their chairs. On the banquet table, amid the litter of crockery and scraps of food, wine decanters and glasses still half full, lay Louise and Monnelia.
The two girls were as nearly naked as made no difference. The sole garment remaining was that pair of Louise's knickers in thin black silk which still dangled from one of her ankles. Black and white beauty sprawled in a most ungainly attitude, Louise with her head thrown back, biting her lip lightly with the intensity of her pleasure.
Monnelia had one arm round Louise's fair-skinned waist to curb her writhing of pleasure a little. Her other hand was busy between those soft young thighs of purest pallor that relaxed and opened innocently to her expert caress. The negress with the warm-skinned nudity of her smooth shoulders and back, her graceful young thighs and regal bearing, was conditioning Louise to pleasures with a woman that the victim would soon be unable to renounce. In any city as cosmopolitan in its tastes, there were fair-skinned girls of her own age who would enjoy giving Louise lessons in the art of lesbian love. Ashbee thought of Jane Truman and Tania Nicoll, even the two sixteen-year-old twins at the Tradd Street house, Jenny and Jacqui, whom birching had failed to cure of their vices.
He looked at the photograph again. The naked waitresses had gorged themselves on the remains of the banquet. There was a smear of fruit sorbet on Louise's lip and a splash of wine on her breast. It was the latter blemish, just by the nipple, that Monnelia was licking off with her expert tongue. Her head was bowed to this task and she showed the camera only the short ribboned tress of her upward-brushed crop at the rear.
Colonel Ashbee saw nothing of the self-consciousness or apprehension in Louise's face now that she had shown when she was at the command of a man. She was bold and insistent in her love-making with the supple and passionate young negress. There was a hard and demanding quality about her. Monnelia too had lost her demure and reticent air, the soft brown eyes now illuminated by desire and beseeching. As Louise faced the hidden camera lens, so the other girl presented the rear view of her dark-tanned skin. Louise was tense with the surge of pleasure swelling till it must burst in her loins, while the ebony Venus was opening herself in the warm and yearning expansion of desire. Those elegant African-smooth ovals of Monnelia's bottom-cheeks were arched backwards towards the concealed photographers, as if inviting the camera to explore her more intimately. Even in anger, Ashbee felt a satisfaction that the slave-girl should have shown herself in a manner she would have shunned if she knew she was being watched. Monnelia's dusky-cheeked arse, swelled seductively. Its tawny moons were lightly parted, seeming innocently to invite the smack of a man's hand, the fierce caress of the overseer's whip, the hectic assault of sodomy. She, at least, was his slave and must answer to him.
It was evident that the two girls had been making love together on the table for much of the night. The second picture showed, by the look of relaxation and fulfilment on the face of the fair-skinned partner, that Louise had climaxed in the expert fingers of the native girl. They were both in a gender and affectionate mood now, playing with one another's bodies as little girls play with toys or dolls. Even for the most demure teenage girl there exists a fascination at the prospect of exploring every hole and corner of another young beauty, tickling a sensitive spot or intruding a playful finger.
Monnelia had used a blackened wick or a fragment of charcoal. With this she had made a flower of Louise's belly button, drawing petals on the pale skin round the charming whorl of flesh. Each breast had been patterned round the nipple. Bold-faced now, Louise Neville was slyly smiling, looking back to the mirrors to see the handiwork on her own bottom. Its soft pale cheeks were signed with Monnelia's name, as the artist of this design.
Louise had also enjoyed some amusement with her companion, finding one of those brightly-feathered dusters whose rounded handle of three or four inches is the thickness of a thumb. By oiling the handle with butter, she had inserted it firmly up Monnelia's behind to give the black warrior-princess a fine peacock tail, sprouting from between her rear cheeks. There was another photograph, taken as the dark-skinned beauty paraded on the table, moving her willowly African thighs, admiring herself in the mirrors. Monnelia's arse-bouquet of feathers was an adornment she evidently enjoyed and which excited her to look at.
The next of the pictures showed that the playfulness had been only an interlude in their passion. Now the two lesbian lovers lay head to tail, each having her eyes and lips level with the loins and backside of the other. The charcoal was smudged and indistinct upon Louise's pale softness. Much of it had now been transferred with some wetness to Monnelia's lips! And still the peacock-tail of feathers sprouted from between the smooth African-satin of Monnelia's bottom-cheeks. There was no doubt from the photograph that the two girls were having fun with each other. They sucked one another's sensitive nipple-buds and clitoris, and trilled their tongues in places of excruciating responsiveness. They did all this with an eagerness they had never shown to Ashbee or Colonel Johnson. Louise was running her tongue nimbly in the dark-haired slit between Monnelia's thighs. At the same time, Monnelia had made Louise present herself in an upward squat. The tongue of the dark-skinned Aphrodite ran everywhere along the cleavage from the base of Louise's spine to the guardian clitoris at the portal of her sex. The seduction was cunning and remorseless, the tribal beauty playing on the sensitive slit and not even hesitating to insinuate her tongue-tip in Louise's tight posterior dimple. The saucer-eyed soubrette must have come to her climax with such cries of release that nothing short of drugged stupor could account for the two men being deaf to her.
In the final picture all passion had been spent. It was not long before the two men stirred from their sleep. Louise and Monnelia lay among the guttered candles and the debris of the banquet, still naked in their gentle embrace. If they were not asleep themselves, they were certainly lying with eyes closed in dreamy recollection of the love-making they had just shared. The light shone full on the African-tan gloss of Monnelia's bare thighs and hips. Inspired by the joy of release she had shared with Louise, her dusky skin displayed a living sheen that only the excitement of gentle but cunning kisses can awaken.
The two girls had not drawn apart but now lay more gently together than in the fierce passion of their earlier embraces. Louise Neville's dark lashes were closed over her blue saucer-eyes. The light caught the sleek short crop of her brown hair ad her face had a child-like solemnity as she dozed. Monnelia's thigh was crooked lightly and possessively across the softer pallor of Louise's hip, as if to remind her prey how easily the act of sexual conquest might be repeated upon her. The footman who had entered then had smiled at the sight of the dark-skinned girl's back, the upward brushed hair and its short ribboned coiffure at her nape. The African-satin ovals of Monnelia's bottom-cheeks were arched backwards towards him with innocent vulgarity as she slept. He could see the warrior-maiden's dark-haired sex between her open legs. The resilient ovals of her ebony-cheeked backside swelled seductively and its twin mounds were drawn apart by the way she was sprawling, so that Monnelia's anus was shown. Seeing this, the footman had smiled at the thoughts that crossed his mind.
There was ample evidence of the gasping and threshing frenzy with which Louise had undergone her first lesbian seduction. One of her soft pale breasts was stained by wine, for she had rolled on to her belly where a glass of claret had been upset. A blob of grey candle-wax had fallen on one coffee-dark oval of Monnelia's backside, almost in her anus-crack. The sting of it had been nothing to her as she laboured on top of the other girl. It seemed that Louise had writhed against the butterdish in her ecstasy, for a smear of it gleamed on one fair-skinned thigh. Convulsed by the action of Monnelia's fingers or tongue between her legs, she had also sat back in the dish of dead cigar butts. A powdering of the grey ash now smudged a bare and softly pale cheek of Louise Neville's bottom as she displayed it unwittingly to the camera.
Ashbee threw down the photographs, which served to remind him only of the pleasures stolen from him. Then he saw that the package contained something small and wrapped in soft paper. He opened it and found a dark bottle with an apothecary's label. "Flowers of Laudanum." He and Johnson had been drugged by two young bitches who had the temerity to prefer their own illicit pleasures to those for which nature had formed them.
The colonel was rarely perplexed, but he was so now. That the photographs were the work of an amateur, he had no doubt. But such a man would not come aboard the yacht uninvited. How, then? In what company had the fellow been? He asked the man Hargreaves, but Hargreaves could tell him nothing. And yet, a day or two earlier in the very place where an interior window looked into the saloon, the footman had picked up a discarded handkerchief embroidered with a name. Hargreaves had tucked it quickly in his pocket so that it should not be seen.
Colonel Ashbee was determined to see justice done. He showed Colonel Johnson the photographs. Johnson was equally vindictive but advised against making an exhibition of Monnelia at the whipping-house. Such a display would lead to gossip. Gossip would hint at folly on the part of two men who prided themselves on being beyond folly. If the truth were even guessed at, mirth would be general all about them.
It was impossible that Ashbee should not hear- or suppose-that one of his young mistresses had been the cause of his humiliation that night. He said nothing, but looked everywhere on the sly for the owner of an empty bottle of Flowers of Laudanum. There was no doubt in his mind, thinking back, that a soporific dose had been added to the final glass of armagnac after dinner. But who had done it?
At last the colonel thought he knew the answer. A careful question to the chemist in Broad Street revealed that Flowers of Laudanum had been bought there by his proud and fair-skinned mistress "Lady Susan." And so Colonel Ashbee thought he understood. He watched her that afternoon as she walked away to the stables for her horse. Colonel Ashbee considered the young woman's prim mouth, the narrowed blue eyes, the collar length brown hair, the skin-fit of her tan riding-boots, the firm proud swell of Sue Webb's bottom-cheeks in the tight jeans-seat rounding and swaying with her self-assured strides as she walked.
The colonel knew he was right. Sue was fiercely jealous. She could not bear the thought of him in the arms of cheeky young Louise Neville-and so she had taken steps to prevent it. The discovery of such jealous devotion filled him with pride and longing for her. Now he understood why she had avoided his bed since then. It was surely pique at being neglected for another girl of a lower class. Colonel Ashbee endured the enforced celibacy with ill-concealed impatience and growing excitement as the prospect of their passionate reconciliation. He must have Susan or no other at the moment. The triumph of inspiring such desire in a young woman of twenty-six-half the colonel's age-made him strut and smile like a game-cock.
As for Monnelia, he rewarded her complicity by putting her at the disposal of Captain Prince. The captain was the colonel's guest that month and liked to slip out of his room at night for an hour or two of pleasure in the bed of a dark-skinned girl.
But Captain Prince was an elderly gentleman, unable to do full justice to the African-velvet beauty of Monnelia. He stretched out adoringly as she lay on her side with her back to him, requiring Monnelia to be naked but for the white shoes with high heels. Then he instructed the graceful young negress to arch her dark satiny-tan backside out until she felt it touch his features, so that she was almost sitting on his face. He assured her that this gesture, which others might find impudent, would not offend him in the least, even though the elegant ebony ovals of her smooth buttocks parted and she revealed her most intimate rear anatomy to him. For an hour or two, Monnelia's arse and the posterior opening of her thighs was the object of his browsing, kissing and tongue-tickling. It was doubtful if any master revolted her as greatly as this old gentleman with his lubricity. The dusky tribal beauty would much have preferred a possessor who demanded the fierce and vigorous passion to which she knew how to respond. Too irresolute to penetrate to the inner sanctum, Captain Prince drew himself up at last and released the thin volleys of his tribute in warm runs upon the sleek dark swell of Monnelia's bottom-cheeks and the rear of her thighs. Then he made his departure, leaving her to lie like this until the morning with her young desires unappeased.
But the old gentleman was cunningly perceptive. He was conscious of shuddering moans and sighs of joy that proceeded from Monnelia's bed when he was in the next room with Helen Wong. One night his hand contacted a fold of hemmed cotton among her sheets. He secreted it and took it with him. From the tiny mark of the name it proved to be a pair of Susan Webb's knickers discarded in Monnelia's sheets during the threshing and writhing of passion.
Next night in the fine house, the young white woman's bed was unslept in. Next morning, it was Sue's handkerchief that the maid found in the folds of Monnelia's greatly disordered sheets. The slave-woman who attended her at the bath observed a dozen raised red passion-bites, fresh that morning, on the pale flesh. All had been inflicted between Susan's waist and her knees. The woman smiled and whispered something to her overseer.
No one could say how long it was before the truth dawned upon Colonel Ashbee. It was not adoration of him but of his graceful and willowy slave-maiden that had driven Susan to such measures with the Flowers of Laudanum. That the colonel should possess himself of Louise was nothing to Miss Webb. That Monnelia should be sullied by the rival loving of Colonel Johnson was more than Sue could bear. And so she had taken steps to prevent it that night on the yacht. Whether the footman Hargreaves was a party to placing the drugged armagnac before the two libertines, no one could say. That he was the photographer of the tender lesbian embraces was generally believed. Whether some friend sent copies of the photographs to Colonel Ashbee as a warning-or some enemy to gloat over him-was a question on which Charleston society held two opinions.
To be sure, the colonel had friends who would like to see him revenged upon Monnelia and even Lady Susan. And he had the deadliest enemies, two girls of nineteen and twenty whom he had wronged. The two white-skinned girls, Tania Nicoll and Jane Truman, had been whipped on his orders for endeavouring to steal away certain of his female slaves. Whatever the cause, in the idle months of the season, tongues began to wag and the photographs were spoken of even by those who had not had the good fortune to see them. How the secret became a rumour that ran from Meeting Street to the East Battery, none could say. Yet the remainder of that Charleston summer was the most uncomfortable time that the colonel ever passed in his fine mansion fronting White Point Gardens.
11
VILLA RIF
Erotic fiction conjures up a world of dreams. Some are the sunlit idylls of Nathalie on the beach or the two-sister fantasies of Beechy Lodge, above the sunlit waters of the channel. But at the other extreme of the subconscious world lie nightmare and erotic melodrama. In sleep, at least, the sexually unthinkable is to be thought. Darker desires and phobias are purged. The Villa Rif is a waking dream of this kind, a study in sexual gothic. Its people are a shade too preposterous for reality and its sardonic conclusion goes almost over the top. Men and women do not behave quite as vindictively as this in reality. The escape into the fantasy of the proud but persecuted beauty, the sadist's natural partner, offers them the means to let off psychic steam. Where better to contemplate this than the Villa Rif as the early dusk of autumn closes upon the summer dream?
The novel is an evocation of an idyllic summer resort, somewhere on the coast of south-west France, in the years before Hitler's war. Sophisticated men and women descend on the town for the season, which lasts from May until September. Of all the luxurious villas among the pine trees, five minutes away from the boom of the Biscay surf, none is more intriguing than the Villa Rif.
To this house come three men and the six young women who are to serve their pleasures. The mistress of the girls is a stony-eyed negress called Merle, who is said to show that a girl has far more to fear from a woman's cruelty than from any man. Once there, Catherine, Angie, Trish, and the others know that there can be no going back. The passions of the Villa Rif are always fierce and sometimes perverse, on occasion they are cruel in pursuing the pleasure of the masters to extreme limits. Once the gates close on the ornamental gardens, the occupants are sealed off from the world. Most of the girls are there willingly. But abduction and compulsion are optional extras.
Even in a smart and sophisticated resort, such a menage causes gossip at the sunlit cafe tables along the fashionable Promenade d'Espagne, where the rollers burst on the wide sands and the tricolor flags stand out stiffly in the ocean breeze. Is it true that a young woman has made her sexual submission in front of her own daughter? Have the pair of them disappeared into absolute sexual slavery? But during the months of the summer, the gossips speculate in vain.
Occasionally, as in Belle Sauvage, the camera has a part to play in the main action-and never more so than in the story of the Villa Rif. Its last secret is revealed by some overlooked photographs. When the season is over and the villa closed, a boy who lives nearby is walking through its overgrown garden. He hears a loose shutter banging, enters the deserted house and finds strange clues as to the obedience imposed on a young woman that summer. Chief among the clues is a set of photographic prints which chronicle her experience during a summer night. Unusually in an erotic novel, the silent evidence of the photographs is allowed to evoke and suggest, to hint and inspire the imagination, rather than to be blatant and literal. By this means, much is implied that might be impossible to describe with candid realism.
Despite the obsessive and sadistic training of a young wife for her duties, it is hard to deny that the whole thing is a very black joke-either at the heroine's expense or that of the boy in the story. He views the photos and has a fantasy of being present when Lesley gives birth to her daughter, "an elfin image of herself." The boy is almost a descendant of Monsieur de Bandole, in the Marquis de Sade's final version of Justine. Bandole announces one day that he has made a medical and scientific breakthrough. He has discovered a way of making childbirth and labour more difficult.
The boy in Villa Rif hardly qualifies for a Nobel Prize in Sadean Medicine. But his fantasy is a little more understandable, since his notion of a young woman in labour is based on neither knowledge nor experience.
The toil of honeymoon passion, and the young wife's labour of expelling from her body an elfin version of herself, were suggested by the assured swell of her backside's pearly sleekness. The boy had a brief fantasy. She sprawled naked on her belly over the pillows, gasping and squirming in labour as she gave this elfin daughter to the world. The pale swell of Lesley Hollingsworth's bottom-cheeks shone sleek with sweat and the crack between them ran wet with it. Her belly-labour and bottom-writhing were prolonged. They had tied her wrists to the bedposts. Lesley's plain short cut of fair hair twisted this way and that, her teeth set on her lower lip in anguish. The smiling onlookers teased and encouraged her. The boy used a tailed spanking-strap, imparting a stinging smack across her wet rear cheeks from time to time to drive her on.
In other words, we are in the middle of a surrealist send-up, like the medical shadow-plays which show alarm-clocks or hammers being removed from the patient's intentines. Anatomical impossibility does not invalidate the boy's fantasy in the dreamworld of the Villa Rif. Seaside dreamworld and erotic nightmare have their own psychic realities.
Villa Rif suggests that sexual melodrama since Sade lives on this edge of sardonic humour. Bandole's disciple in fantasy makes labour more uncomfortable if not more difficult. In the novel's reality, when the chastised Lesley swoons, the gaoler revives her by tickling her bottom. But no one reads erotica as a first-aid guide. The villa has bizarre rules and Lesley, despite age and status, is constantly compared to a little girl-a bewildered modern Alice in a disciplinary Wonderland. There are cushions and lubricant in the punishment room in case her chastiser should feel randy. There is a whip in the boudoir and bathroom. The bedroom is equipped for her punishment or anatomical functions, in case a visitor should fancy some such kink.
The dark sexual drama takes a step back from reality. Do the photographs portray real events or merely a staged tableau? Is the boy who discovers them a participant in a sinister secret or the victim of a practical joke? Like all true horror, this story has a possibility of the comic. When he receives an appeal from the young woman, threatened with death by her tyrant, is it genuine or an elaborate jape by his friends? In fiction the customer is always right. The tyrant dispatches Lesley Hollings-worth if the reader wishes him to. If not, the idea is a black joke. Catherine Bond becomes a schoolgirl slave if the market requires-and lives in total innocence if it does not. In fantasy, at least, power over the girls at the end of the story is the reader's own. The frantic smuggled message from the captive young woman is received. Should we call the FBI-or smile to ourselves and toss the paper in the fire?
With the passing of the equinox that divided summer from autumn, the season faltered and died. A cold sea gathered and broke in pale green surges on cloudy mornings. At night, where the wavelets had hissed and whispered on the warm sands of August, the dark stillness was broken by the crack and rush of the incoming tide against the harbour walls. A lighthouse beam circled the troubled waters of the bay. By the end of October the first rain storms swept the outlying Rue Fief de l'Abesse with its single-storeyed cottages. The water dripped from the blinds and shuttered windows of the Bazar de I'Ocean with its peeling stucco and walls painted in tall blue lettering for Souvenirs and Maillots de Bain.
The tenants of the secluded villas beyond the tennis-courts and the lighthouse had long returned to the shoplit evenings of the Avenue Victor Hugo or the Rue de la Paix. The girl-children who had romped carelessly in wet swimsuits on the public beach were no more. Like emergent winter butterflies, they were now the perfumed and bare-shouldered young ladies who sat attentive to Rossini or Massenet in the footlight glow of the Opera stalls.
By the Feast of Toussaint the afternoon sun was low in the ocean sky. The window-models of the smart perfume boutiques and the couturier looked out upon the fashionable boulevards behind the casino. But the broad avenues already rustled with fallen leaves of the plane trees and chestnuts. Old men and women walked slowly in the sea-mist of the promenades. The Villa Rif itself had long been abandoned and shuttered by its summer tenants. Even the concierge had withdrawn to her cottage. The blue and gold of July's morning glory flowers had withered on the terrace wall and the sign that threatened the intruder with a chien mechant was overrun by bramble and briar.
It was on an afternoon of wind and rain in the late autumn that a boy of fourteen, a nephew of the taciturn concierge, entered the grounds of the villa by the garden gate. He was a youth of solitary habits but intriguing desires and dreams. In the dank afternoon, he had chosen a short cut across the bed of fallen pine needles to the grey and windswept prospect of the cliffs, a volume of the Chants de Maldoror in his pocket. There was no one to challenge him as he followed the path beside the house. Already the first storms had brought down frail branches, brittle as old men's bones, and forced the catch of a wooden shutter. The boy heard the intermittent banging of hinged wood against a stucco wall.
It was not his intention to do more than secure the shutter. But he could best do this from inside. He must climb in, close the shutter and window, then let himself out through the door which would close automatically on its lock. So he climbed easily through the space of the open window and dropped down into the first room. The fine proportions of the interior had a spectral air in the dim and clouded half-light which filtered through the slats of the shutters. There was space and emptiness, for the furniture had been removed and the floors were uncarpeted. The boy closed the shutter and the window behind him. Then he made his way through the unnatural twilight of the abandoned rooms.
Across the head of the stairs lay a shaft of grey cloud-light. He went up and found that it came from the open door of the washroom, the only room in the villa whose barred windows made shutters unnecessary. Its floors were paved with marble and its walls were white-tiled. As one would expect, there was a handbasin and a toilet-pedestal. Yet it was far too large a room to serve only for the purposes these indicated. There was ample space at the centre of its floor for the heavy divan of black buttoned leather. Two round leather bolsters similarly padded lay across it. The divan was a curiosity, for it was the only item of furniture left in the Villa Rif by its summer visitors. More curious still were the stout restraining straps riveted at intervals to its mahogany frame.
It seemed that in the haste of their departure the guests had forgotten to repair the disorder of this tiled suite. On the sofa lay a young woman's panties. They were tight-fitting stretch-briefs in black elasticated cotton. The boy's interest quickened as he picked them up. A slim leather switch cane and an open jar of lubricant were on the floor nearby. He noticed that the varnished wood of the sofa bore sheaves of tiny scratches, as if from the nails of strapped hands in the frenzy of pleasure's climax or the moment when torment grew unendurable. A soft cloth and the roll of paper removed from its place lay on the sofa. A pulse of excitement and curiosity beat harder in the boy's throat as he tried to conjecture what had been done to the young woman in this room. On the handbasin ledge lay a soft pliable gag-strap, upon which it was just possible to see the impress of her teeth clenched in desperation. A pencil-shaped glass-squirt and the liquid-soap dispenser from the handbasin had been left on a stool nearby.
The boy examined the stretch-cotton of the black briefs eagerly. He had glimpsed enough of girls of his own age to know that these were not the knickers of a schoolgirl or a teenage nymph. He had seen such plainer panties as this on the washing-line of many a mature young Venus, well-used to the rituals of the marriage-bed and even the labour of giving an infant or two to the world. This pleased him, for he imagined that far more extreme demands would be made on such a sexually experienced young woman than would be possible with an adolescent tomboy or a bride of eighteen.
He tucked the black briefs in his pocket as a souvenir of the interesting scene, went back down the stairs and made his way through the rest of the half-lit rooms. Exploring one of these, he stood before a grand stone fireplace carved with serpents and gryphons. In the grate he made out a large bundle of papers. One or two were a little charred, as if the departing tenants had put a match to them and left, without waiting to see them burn. Perhaps it was carelessness in arranging them that had saved them from destruction. Or perhaps a sudden chimney draught had extinguished the blaze rather than nurturing it. The boy picked the bundle out of the grate and examined it.
First and most curious, there was a sound recording, sealed in a large envelop, perhaps so that it might not be discovered by the servant deputed to burn the papers. There was also a short dossier describing the young woman Lesley, her name and age, her bourgeois education and upbringing, her marriage and infidelities. Intriguingly, she had concealed her promiscuity a few months earlier by finding fulfilment in the arms of another woman. Soft feminine caresses woke cunning ecsta-cies in her body and lingering cries of desire.
At the top of the first bundle there were several photographs lying loose that showed her while she was still at liberty before her desertion. They had been taken surreptitiously, no doubt by those who planned her abduction, while she was tidying a garden. They showed her as having a high-crowned pudding-basin crop and fringe of straight fair hair, no doubt to make her more boyish for her female admirers. Yet any man would find a challenge in the firm pale features, the dismissive blue eyes and the sulky weight of her mouth and chin. Nor would he ignore the long trim legs, taut young hips, and the firming out of her bottom-cheeks in fulfilment of youth at the approach of her thirtieth year. But still the arrogant blue eyes looked a little away from the lens and the fair-skinned facial beauty under the parted fringe was marred by that sullen air of a spoilt and peevish little girl.
Several views showed her standing in an appealingly thoughtful mood with a young child, gazing at some object in the distance. In some pictures she stood alone, head bowed in contemplation of a garden task to be performed. Others were suggestive views from behind as she bent tightly to the flower-bed. In bending over so fully, her posture drew skin-taut the thin cotton trousers of the black coolie-suit. Her legs were tensed astride and knees braced forward as she bent in the effort of garden-labour. The camera caught every detail of this pose. It showed the mature firmness of her thighs and hips, the broadened swell of Lesley's bottom-cheeks. The part of her buttocks, the inward slopes of her bottom-crack, even her vaginal flesh were clearly shaped by the thin black cloth, drawn skin-smooth on her hips and her backside.
The dossier assured the boy that the young woman had undergone a night-long session by the wish of hermentors. Looking at the photographs of her in the garden, the thought of what had happened excited him greatly. Anticipation rather than unease provoked him as he collected up the packages and made his way from the Villa Rif. Returning home, he locked the door of his room to guard against intrusion. Then he read through the dossier more carefully. The boy found it exciting to know so much about the young woman whose fate he was to witness in the photographs. Her conduct as schoolgirl and student, wife and lover, had been detailed. Her moral delinquencies and defects of character were listed. Next he began to examine the pile of photographs.
There appeared to be fifty or sixty full-plate photographs of her, taken throughout a mid-summer night in the Villa Rif. There was a clock on the wall whose hands stood at half-past ten in the first of the night's photographs and after three in the morning when the session ended. Most of the shots had been necessarily but skillfully taken with the magnesium brilliance of flash in the white-tiled room. Some were full-length studies of her and others were intriguing close-ups.
Among the other full-plate prints, some close-ups would have done credit to the portrait studio and others to a demonstration of female anatomy. A dozen of them showed her looking into the camera so that the entire picture was filled by views of her firm fair-skinned face and boy-cut hair. Several of these had been taken early on. They showed the wilfulness and self-possession in her features, the spoilt child who had grown up to be an ungracious young woman, believing in her own right to choose pleasures and partners as she wished. There was a dismissive coldness in the eyes under her long parted fringe and a self-centred indifference in her sullen mouth. She was a young woman who demanded her right to behave as she liked. She would give herself where she chose and refuse herself as she decided.
The full facial portraits that followed showed an intriguing change. There was dismay and indignation in the blue eyes. Then came outrage and wildness. Thereafter the eyes brimmed over with tears and the mouth widened in a wild cry. The portraits of Lesley tearful and self-pitying or screaming and frantic were unique of their kind and might have been an object of curiosity to men who study human behavior in all its moods.
Other full-plate close-ups would have brought joy to the learned anatomist. Her abductors had made the young woman lie naked on her back and draw her knees up to her breasts. Then the camera had photographed her splayed thighs closely from below. Lesley's vaginal flesh and the soft fleece of its hair were displayed almost at life-size in some of the full-plates. Her sex had never been shown so fully before and the outrage to her dignity must have provoked the most vehement protest and grudging obedience.
In the first photographs it was the cunt of a young wife in repose. The camera had caught her from underneath as she lay in a horizontal squat, her naked thighs and hips swelling with the strain, her warm sex revealed fully. Later there were shots that caught the gleam of wetness engendered by her excitement. Well-used to such rituals in the marriage-bed and elsewhere, she responded readily to teasing fingers, despite her gasps and denials. The dossier noted that Lesley masturbated regularly during her adult life, in the belief that her body was hers to do with as she chose. In this case, the fingers that roused her were not her own-nor had it been done for her pleasure. They had brought her just far enough for the purpose of the camera-studies, then left her to twist and gasp and gnaw her lips in frustration.
A dozen full-plate photographs were camera studies taken when she had been made to turn over on her belly across the bolsters. Lesley's bare backside was the subject of interest, its pale cheeks swelling firmly to fill the picture, raised and broadened by the leather bolster over which she lay. Some photographs were angled to show the broad curve of its fullest outward cheek-swell. Others offered the fatter bottom-flesh low down on the cheeks. Several showed the more private inward slopes where her rear cheeks curved together.
The boy studied these close-ups of the young woman's behind with great care. The tightening and tensing of her buttocks, their shifting and fattened swelling and clenching were excitingly suggested by the prints. There was a proud pallor, an erotic firming out that showed him what she was. Lesley's was the firm moon-cheeked backside of an erotically mature young Venus who had done her duty in the marriage bed, and now asserted her rights to take her pleasure as she pleased. In three close-ups her captors had made her bend over very tightly indeed so that he saw the change to a yellowed-ivory skin-tone on the inward slopes between her bum-cheeks. In two of the pictures, as another note in the dossier added, the tight dark vortex of Lesley Hollingsworth's anus was the focus of the composition. The boy looked closely at the anatomy of her rear hole, seeing this view of a grown woman for the first time. Perhaps no one but a randy old medical examiner had ever before enjoyed such a leisurely and prying view of her rear anatomy.
Despite so much amorous exercise, the labours of pregnancy and the firming out of her hind-cheeks in consequence, he was intrigued to see how small and tight Lesley Hollingsworth's arsehole still appeared. The photograph emphasised the enforced stretching apart of the warm inward buttock-slopes that normally concealed it, making her anus seem all the more shrinking and vulnerable. Lesley seemed conscious of it too, by the way she was tensing her bottom in one photograph and trying to contract the little hole still harder. But even by doing this she acknowledged the thoughts that must occupy a man who had her at his disposal in such a posture. The boy smiled and knew that the rear view she offered in the photograph would certainly give such a master exciting ideas on the subject of the tight little buttonhole.
Making sure that no one was close by and that he would not be interrupted, the boy began to go through the photographs systematically, following the sequence of events. In the first pictures, it was clear that the young woman was unaware of the camera, which added to the curiosity of spying on her in her private moments. The accompanying recording was incomplete but there were snatches of conversation, matching certain photographs on whose backs several of the words had been scribbed in pencil!
The first photograph, taken a few minutes before
10:30 that night in the tiled suite, showed Lesley already on the black leather of the divan. She was naked but for a leather collar at her neck, a tight belt round her bare waist, leather anklets and wrist-cuffs, and a strap tightened round the midpoint of each thigh. From the way she was lying, it seemed that her wrists had already been fastened together in front of her. A light chain clipped to the leather cuffs ran slack to its fastenings at the head of the divan. She was free to assume any posture but, at the same time, she was securely tethered to the leather couch on which she lay.
The boy admired the view she offered. She was more exciting in her black straps than she would have been in simple pale nudity. She had bowed her high-crowned crop of fair hair as she lay on her side, so that her face was partly hidden. But her breasts were shown, firmly developed globes befitting a woman of nearly thirty, with rosy nipples naturally erect. The pale sleek curve of her back was clear of strapping above her waist. The boy admired the trimness of her thighs, which appeared well exercised. The young woman's hands were folded over the light hair of her loins, either in modesty or self-comfort. The history of her body was seen in the marginal broadening of her hips, the slight firming out of the full-moon pallor of Lesley Hollingsworth's bottom-cheeks. From the rear, the effect of the tightened waist-strap was to emphasize the firm swell of her backside and to draw attention to this part of her. It was clear that she had not long undressed. A slight flesh-print left by the elastic edge of her snug-fitting black cotton briefs arched high over each pale cheek of her proud young arse form the rear opening of her legs.
It seemed un-likely that the session in the photographs had taken place on her last night at the Villa Rif, though there had been such a session then to judge from the disorder of the tiled room. But similar provision and precaution was shown in the photograph. On the table by the divan there was a slim leather switch and a vaseline jar, a snakeskin lash with rounded handle and short tail. There was also a glass pencil-shape and the glass globe of liquid soap from the basin, an intriguing full-sized erection made of black rubber and the rolled paper removed from its holder. Even the most ordinary attentions were not to be spared her.
Though the session might often have been repeated, this appeared to be her initiation.
The clock had moved on five minutes in the next picture, but now the captive was not alone. Her companion was another young woman of similar age or a little older with a trim and experienced look, a wedding-ring on her finger. She was identified in pencil as "Trish." Patricia, who preferred to be known by the diminutive Trish, was standing almost naked before Lesley, wearing only the tight cotton briefs that seemed proper to the age of feminine wisdom. She had a tall and firmly developed figure of the same pallor. In some respects she was a good contrast, for her hair was dark and worn in a crop of close curls or ringlets. Her features were neater and prettier than Lesley's with a hint of freckling. There was a quick and nervous air about Trish. Her long-lashed eyes seemed apprehensive. Her lips were a bud of anticipation and she had touched her finger to them in a warning of silence. Trish had chosen a boyish appearance to excite her husband or to play the boy with other women. She had gender lesbian looks and there was no doubt that she and Lesley were already lovers.
The next picture, following almost at once, was a charming study of Trish taking her knickers off. It had been timed at the most precarious moment when she was balanced on one leg, the elasticated briefs loose round her shins. Steadying herself with one hand on the divan, bending and half turning, she had crooked her other leg out and behind her and was in the process of pulling her foot clear of the white cotton web of her elasticated briefs.
It was two or three minutes later. Trish had stretched herself out on the leather divan beside Lesley, more naked now than the Venus in the black strapping. With practice learnt from the years of her husband's passion for her, Trish had turned on her side to face Lesley and was making love to the other young woman in a slow and dreamy fashion. From the angles of Trish's cropped dark curls and Lesley's plainer crop, it was clear that they were drinking each other's kisses. Their tongues wrestled softly in one another's mouths, as if trying to share the tastes that ran there.
The way in which Lesley's wrists were strapped in front of her made it difficult for her to respond in other ways. But Trish was masturbating her as only an experienced young wife knew how. It suited Lesley's self-indulgent and sulky disposition that she alone received the ultimate pleasure. She was lying on her side facing Trish, her upper leg lifted a little to allow free play to the graceful young woman with the dark ringlets. The hidden camera was now behind Lesley, level with her thighs. Trish's fingers were to be seen playing and squeezing, tickling and stroking the lightly haired folds of vaginal flesh between the trim pale thighs. The first glistening trace of Lesley's excitement rewarded Trish's loving fingers.
A facial portrait of Lesley was taken at about the same time. The long parted fringe of fair hair had fallen aslant a little. The eyes were closed, the lashes fine on the cheeks. The mouth was lightly parted as if with irregular breathing and shivering sighs. This portrait of Lesley while being masturbated by an experienced young woman was followed by another in which her teeth fretted at her lower lip and she seemed to groan with desperation and shudder in anticipation. It was a face that betrayed a delicious mingling of torment and delight. Trish was leaning over her with an expression of anxiety. Her eyes mingled love with a perverse concern that Lesley should suffer a keen and nerve-shrilling ecstasy in her crisis.
The hands of the clock showed next that it was just after eleven. The teasing arousal continued, as it had done for nearly half an hour. Lesley's excitement shone high up on the sleek pallor of her thighs' inner surfaces. The firm mounds of her bare buttocks were tightened and contracted together with energy as she rode Trish's hand like a love-saddle.
In the following picture, the brightly-lit white-tiled room with its handbasin and pedestal seat had hardly changed. The clock hands stood at quarter past eleven. But now Trish was caught in the act of rising hastily from the black leather divan with a look of unease. Lesley had twisted her face and was looking back with an expression in which resentment, alarm, and self-pity were all mingled. The boy had no doubt that these two young women were in danger of being caught at their love-making like a pair of naughty children and they behaved accordingly. He smiled at their predicament, seeing that Trish had snatched up her white cotton briefs in one hand and was poised to hurry from the room.
Trish did not appear in the other photographs of Lesley. There was a single one of her on her own. She was in a room that looked like a cellar and was bending tightly forward over a wooden trestle, fastened to it by anklets and wrist-straps. She wore a waist-length singlet and her briefs which had been pulled down in an untidy tangle round her knees. Someone evidently called to her as the photograph was taken. Trish had turned the razor-trimmed boy-cut of her dark curls and was looking round, the prim and pretty features a study in dismay, her eyes startled and her lips parted in breathless apprehension. Trish had wanted to act the boy with Lesley and so they had treated her like a boy here. The firm sleek pallor of Trish's bottom-cheeks had been seductively fattened by-bending her over the trestle and fastening her. As he studied the photo, the lad wondered if Trish's husband would have been secretly excited to see her in this predicament. He liked the idea of that and hoped Trish would taste the pony-lash which lay like a black snake on the nearby table.
The other young woman's penalty was more complex. In the next photograph, it was five minutes or so later. Lesley was alone on the black divan, the high crown of her fair hair lowered, as if watching her own strapped hands. The boy stared at the photograph, excited and scarcely able to believe what the young woman was doing to herself in her frustration. But there was no doubt of it. The concealed cameraman had caught her beautifully at a most private moment. Taken from the rear, as she watched her own hands, the picture showed the firm pearly-smooth cheeks of Lesley Hollingsworth's bottom tensing and slackening in a slow languorous rhythm. Her trim thighs were squirming together in a whisper of bare skin.
A full-plate close-up of the rear parting of her legs showed beyond doubt that she was playing with her own femininity, its lips, its secret places and its clitoris. She had drawn one leg up a little, clear of the other. The boy could see in the photograph how her fingers were travelling to and fro between her thighs, over the excited wetness of the sensitive light-haired folds, rubbing firmly then stroking lightly, squeezing and fondling. The photograph had the same voyeur's sense of amusement and excitement as the one taken secretly of her bending over to her garden weeding, her buttocks swelling to their largest size in the vulgar pose of comic femininity.
When the next picture was taken, she had been alone for ten minutes. A mirror showed that with eyes closed her mouth was open wide. She caught her breath unevenly in wordless exclamations and gasps. But the rear of this mature young Venus with her perversely plain crop caused the boy's first sense of erection. The photograph had once again caught the laboured writhing and ecstatic tightening of her buttocks. It suggested cunningly the vulgar rounding and lewd tremors, the fattened swelling out and inward clenching of Lesley Hollingsworth's bottom-cheeks in the labour of her self-fulfilment. The boy was excited to see her doing it and yet hoped keenly that she would be caught and disciplined for the act.
It was not clear that she had managed to bring herself to a conclusion. Probably not, for it was only a few minutes later. The first of the men was with her now. He was standing in front of her smiling and unbuttoned, showing her the erection which stood out stiff and urgent. Once again the camera had superbly caught her expression. The cold contempt in the blue eyes was matched by the forlorn look of an overgrown waif with her pudding-basin cut and fringe. The man was holding the stiffness immediately under her eyes, as if to show her what she was about to get.
The clock hands showed that it was just half-past eleven. He was lying on the divan behind her as she lay on her side, as if to make a minute inspection. But he was lying further down so that his face was level with her hips, her arse and the rear opening of her legs, no more than twelve inches from her. The area of his interest seemed to lie between the black strap round her waist and the two straps round the middle of each thigh. He had allowed Lesley to keep her folded hands pressed between her thighs under the pretext of shielding herself there. By this subterfuge, she might continue to gratify herself by furtive pressing and touching. But the man was no barbarian, knowing that a woman of her age, so used to coming on the stiffness of husband or lover, or on the fingers of a bored young wife, would want to finish her self-indulgence. Provided that it did not impede him, he seemed to have no objection.
His kisses, beginning in the hollows at the backs of her knees, had travelled up until he was nuzzling the rear of her long taut thighs close to their tops. In the photographs which followed, his kisses grew more general, his lips browsing over her thighs and bare neck, her breasts and shoulders. Between her legs he tasted the mineral tang of her arousal. Nor did he hesitate to nuzzle the proud pallor of the cheeks of Lesley's backside, which had once squirmed humidly on honeymoon sheets and contorted urgingly in the pangs of labour.
Her sex in its excited state came next. He had made her curve forward from the waist and draw one leg up. Now he was taking her roused cunt in his hand like a fledging bird, and was kissing its moist lips and slit deliciously with a skill that must have driven her frantic. There was a second photograph of this, the movement of the clock showing that she had endured more than ten minutes of such exquisite torment and that the man had brought her to her shuddering climax by such light pouting lip-touches and tongue-tickles.
Her cool smooth bottom-moons were being kissed again. Her face was lowered as if in dismay and only her long parted fringe was visible. Like a randy bumble-bee he pouted everywhere. These photographs even showed his lips moulding a shameless kiss to Lesley Hollingsworth's anus. There was a tension in the line of her bare flank that showed she would have closed the way to him, had he not kept her rear cheeks firmly pressed apart. Her attempted refusal ensured that this attention was more prolonged. The photographs and the clock-hands indicated that his kisses teased the young woman's tight and flinching rear hole for ten minutes more. It was a perverse and mocking tribute, not paid to her even during honeymoon passion or the more recent courtship of her lovers.
At a few minutes past midnight, the kissing between her buttocks was finished. Lesley had been turned bottom-upwards over the leather bolsters, her arms now drawn out at full stretch and her wrists fastened by their straps to the head of the divan. She had twisted her high-crowned boyish crop and was looking at him over her shoulder with the sullen reproach and woeful self-pity by which a schoolgirl of ten or twelve tries to melt the heart of the teacher about to punish her. In this picture, the man's hand was holding an open jar of vaseline so that its rim just touched her bare thigh, high up at the back.
Another close-up of her backside followed. The swell of her buttocks had been raised high and broadened by the leather bolsters packed under her loins. The cheeks of her backside were pulled part by her posture. But Lesley Hollingsworth's arsehole was now obscured by an opaque and thumb-sized blob of vaseline.
There was a second close-up from behind. Lesley's bottom-crack was now properly lubricated and her buttocks drawn a little harder apart as she was pulled more tightly forward over the leather roll of the bolster. It showed that her firm fair-skinned thighs had been secured and that the black strap round her bare waist was now holding her. And there was another picture in this group, angled to show Lesley looking back self-pitying over her shoulder at her ravisher. It was the woeful little-girl look that reproached him on behalf of her behind. She seemed to remind him indignantly that hers was a woman's bottom, a bottom shaped for the dignity of the bridal bed, a bottom whose fuller firmness was evidence of carrying and bearing. What he now proposed would outrage her feminine privilege in every respect.
The boy looked from the suggestive manner in which Lesley was made to show her backside to one of the first photographs, taken of the young woman tidying the garden when she had no idea that the camera was trained upon her. It was intriguing to think that her bare backside in its present state was that of the young woman who looked with such cool disdain and self-possession from the blue eyes under the long parted fringe. The gaze was so sullen and dismissive, sulky and resentful then-but so reproachful and self-pitying now.
At the same time, the first snatch of recorded conversation paralleled the photograph. There was a peevish and half-audible protest from Lesley, answered by Merle, the stony-eyed young negress. Merle had not appeared in the photographs and this was the first indication that she had entered the room with the man.
"Don't be foolish, Lesley! It's because you're so tight there that your admirer wants you in that way. A young woman of your kind, who guards her own rights and pleasures so jealously, usually has a bottom that is virgin or very nearly so. Now you must surrender that virginity."
There was another scarcely audible protest, still peevish and self-justifying, again answered by Merle.
"In that case, Lesley, we must teach you that you are formed in that area for a man's pleasure as well as your own needs. His pleasure is your first duty now. See to it that you make the next half-hour enjoyable for him."
"No!" It was a wail of dismay and outrage.
"Lie still, Lesley," said Merle more gently, "Let me sit and stroke your hair for a moment. You like that, I think, when Trish does it to soothe you. Now, you must listen to me and be sensible. There are men who want you in this way because you are too easy between your legs. That easiness is your own fault. And there are men who want you this way because it excites them when a mature and experienced young woman of your age cuts her hair to make herself look more like a boy. Are you so frightened of a man's erection? You like the feel of it inside you, don't you, Lesley? Your promiscuous affairs are proof of that. In your behind the excitement may not be so intense, but the feel of him there will still excite you if you make up your mind to respond properly."
There was another sulky murmur on behalf of her feminine dignity.
"Then forget marriage and children tonight, Lesley. Forget even your femininity. You like to be a boy with other women. Imagine yourself a boy for the rest of the night, bottom-upwards over the gaoler's sofa. I can promise you that a young woman of your age pretending to be a delinquent lad for a man's pleasure is something truly exciting for him. Play your part. Let this be something done to you before a sadistic prison-farm thrashing. You're no longer a nymph of eighteen or twenty. As the years pass you must try harder to appeal to men by offering more perverse excitements than a teenage girl would have the courage for. Now, Lesley, pretend that you offer your bottom reluctantly but lasciviously to him while you wait to be thrashed."
There was a pause. The sofa springs moved as Merle stood up and the man added his weight instead. There were more frantic protests from Lesley, a cry of alarm and then a diminishing wail of enforced acceptance.
"She's tight!" the man said with a breathless laugh. The sofa springs were compressed and eased in a steady rhythm. Presently there was another cry of alarm, slighter this time, and a few self-consciously mumbled words.
"You need a man who's not afraid to create havoc in your behind, Lesley," said Merle with a laugh at the young woman's timidity, "A flutter of panic in your belly because he goes deeply in your backside? Or is the coming and going of his manhood stirring up some rather unlady-like sensations in your behind? Ah, yes! I think that's it, isn't it, Lesley?"
There was no more for several minutes, though the rhythm of the springs grew more rapid, paused for a moment and then began again. Lesley had been having it for about twenty minutes with sulky and reproachful little sounds when she began entreating the man to withdraw at the last moment, not to let loose the storm of his warm lust in her entrails.
"Don't be foolish, Lesley!" Merle replied on his behalf. "You have had quite enough experience of the pleasures and labours of the bed to learn something about your own anatomy. A woman with a firm young backside like yours can easily accommodate a man's sperm. In any case, when the moment comes and he's deep inside, you'll have no choice! You'll take as much as he pumps into you, whether you can or not."
There was a further sullen and self-pitying protest, once again answered by Merle with amusement.
"How little you know about your new lover, Lesley! His pleasure is increased by knowing that when he leaves you, you'll still be carrying the slippery warmth of his passion-juice inside you and feeling it there. Naturally he wants to give it to you as deeply as possible and to have your bottom tighten on him with alarm when you feel how much of it is coming. Have you never experienced amorous tyranny in a man before? Have the men in your life never treated you like that? No wonder you preferred another woman as your lover!"
The man who now stretched Lesley's rear tightness and subdued and quietened her. He watched his bone-hard erection engulfed between her bum-cheeks. The sleek pallor of Lesley Hollingsworth's bottom-cheeks was now presented to him fully and complaintly over the leather bolster. She offered the pearly moons of her buttocks passive and still like an obedient girl-child submitting to adult inspection. Lesley was too apprehensive to do otherwise, despite her reluctance and resentment. With her arse impaled by the lover, she was fearful of the ruin or havoc that wriggling or resistance might bring upon her. His fingers stroked her smooth rear cheeks gently as he paused, admiring the young wife's stretched backside, making Lesley wait in uneasy anticipation.
The rhythm of the springs began again. At last the man gasped out, as he went in almost to the hilt, warning Lesley that she would soon feel him flood her behind. Her face was bowed and only the high crown of her straight and plain-cropped fair hair was at his disposal to kiss. He went deeper still and her slight instinctive tightening of alarm precipitated his orgasm. Faintly, there was a muffled constricted squirting, suggesting that the tightness of her behind upon his stiffened muzzle had increased the force of his ejaculation. He released spurt after spurt of his passion deep in Lesley Hollingsworth's bottom where the thickness of warm gruel fell upon hot infertile soil. The young woman caught her breath. It was, no doubt, the fright of being flooded in such a place for the first time. The boy guessed that it was also because the pulsing of the slippery spawn in her behind went on for so long, creating a sense of turmoil in the young wife's entrails.
The lover murmured and panted, kissing her bare neck and shoulders, assuring her how great was the enjoyment her behind had given him. He described how the tightness of her arsehole was a thrilling stimulant and how the release of his squirting in the soft warm depths of her backside had excited him greatly. Teasingly, he asked Lesley if she had enjoyed feeling the long and repeated jets of sperm released deep in her bottom. It was hard to hear her muffled words but a peevish, self-pitying tone of denial was unmistakable.
The next photograph had been taken a moment later. There were no more which displayed Lesley undergoing her lover's assault. This close-up showed the young woman's hind cheeks as she cautiously expelled the deflated intruder from her bottom with gentle squeezings or contractions. A second wider view showed that as she did this her head was pillowed on one side, the long parted fringe of her plain crop shaken into place and the clear fair-skinned features still suggesting a fractious little girl but no in a more chastened mood.
In the following picture, the listless knob lolled across one of her swelling bare buttocks. The close-up showed a shining trail of a last mucus dribblet of male passion strung wetly across the moon pallor of that rear cheek. But the knob had also been daringly and indecorously deep in the young wife's backside. As the serpent withdrew limply it also left a lewdly suggestive tan smudge across one proud pale cheek-swell of Lesley Hollingsworth's bottom. This self-possessed young woman was thus obliged to present herself to the gaoler for chastisement like a rude and careless little girl-but also a little girl who had just provoked a libation of male sperm by her perverse and precocious tempting. Faced by this evidence of Lesley's wanton disposition and the suggestive blemishes on one cheek of her seat, the gaoler would not hesitate to whip her-and whip again-with quite exceptional severity.
In the next camera study, it was half an hour after midnight by the clock. Lesley sprawled on her belly over the bolster, arms again drawn out at full stretch, wrists fastened to the end of the divan. The round padded bolsters of black leather still raised and broadened the full double-cheeked palor of her backside. There was tension and fretfulness in the strain of her bare thighs and hips, the use of her bottom by the man having been prolonged for a considerable time. Lesley's posterior would be teased and plagued by the lingering sensations of intrusion long after she had squeezed out the flaccid serpent from her arse. The cold thought of the whip would also inspire a flutter of panic in the young woman's belly, so that she squirmed in fearful anticipation over the bolsters and gave vent to little gasps of dismay.
Merle was still with her, not in the photograph but on the recording. The tension and restiveness of Lesley's body was echoed by a shifting of buttoned leather under the urgent pressure of her knees. There was an indistinct and self-conscious request from the young woman. The wrist-straps made it impossible for her to move from the divan without the leave she now sought.
"No, Lesley," said her black mistress, "You'll wait until your chastiser has finished with you."
"But I c-can't!" It was such a sulky little-girl protest to come from an emancipated young woman.
"That's your problem, Lesley," Merle said quietly, dismissing the subject.
"But I must!"
"You're not a child, Lesley Hollingsworth," Merle said coldly, "Lie over the bolsters properly. Even if there were time before the gaoler's arrival, I should not permit you to reject your lover's tribute so peremptorily. A young woman of your age should have enough feminine dignity to curb her little-girl urges. Since you whine like a little girl, I'll teach you a lesson that I given fourteen-year-olds like Catherine Bond. You shall learn self-restraint."
Lesley's vain dissent was the shrillest sound on the recording so far. The sofa springs gave as Merle sat beside her. There was a rattle of the pencil-shaped glass squirt in the bottle of green liquid-soap and the puff of squeezed rubber drawing the thick perfumed solution into the bulb.
"A teasing of this sort will intensify your discipline, Lesley. Presently, you'll want to argue much harder for the leave refused you. In future you'll join Cathy Bond and the youngsters. Even with kids of your own, Lesley, you're not too grand to lie bottom-upwards over the stool in a class of little girls."
The sofa-leather sounded to the frantic squirming of Lesley's bare belly and thighs. There was the sharp and fat-sounding impact of a hard bottom-smack on bare swelling flesh. A second and third smack followed, the young woman's gasp testifying to the sting of them.
"Keep your behind still, Lesley!" said Merle quickly.
There was another resounding cheek-smack, and then yet another.
The recording echoed Lesley's panting resistance and cries of dismay, her sudden gasp at the depth of the squirt's cold intrusion in her arse. Merle spoke softly and teasingly, prolonging the wait to make her victim wriggle. Then there was the strenuous breath of squeezed rubber, a rhythmic squirting muffled by the depth of the rear insertion. A slippery whisper indicated the withdrawal of the slim glass probe. Lesley repeated her earlier entreaty, self-consciously but with more insistence. Again she was denied.
"Please! ... Before he comes!" It was still the little girl's woeful protest against her teacher's refusal.
"You'll wait till you've been dealt with, Lesley! We don't permit such schoolgirl excuses to delay or interrupt your discipline."
"No! I can't!" Bare thighs and belly smooth urgently on padded leather.
"Fortunately," said Merle, "a man whose profession requires him to deal with female delinquents is well used to little dramas of that sort."
The boy looked quickly and keenly at the accompanying close-up of Lesley's moon-pale buttocks and the backs of her upper thighs. She had not been able to calm herself after the reprimand. From the rear, her upper thighs were pressed hard and tense together. The pallor of her bottom-cheeks had been urgently tensed so that the crack between them was compressed to a thin tight line. There was also a facial portrait, showing the sullen resentment of a girl-pupil who hopes her mournful look will alter her teacher's resolve. The boy was excited by the knowledge that Merle's resolve would not be altered.
Beyond the divan, the tiled room was visible. Across the seat of the porcelain pedestal lay a slim pony-switch, a yard long. Its handle was as thick as a thumb, the leather tapering to a finely quivering pencil-point tip.
Her gaoler or chastiser was with her now. He was a more shadowy figure than the lover who had enjoyed her an hour or so before. Lesley's face was turned with reproach and apprehension in her blue eyes under the parted little-boy fringe. The sight she offered keenly excited this disciplinarian.
The next photograph showed the pudding-basin crop of her fair hair bowed, as if in desolation at the man's further refusal of her request. The area of the rear view that seduced him was conveniently framed by the shiny black leather of the waist-strap and the strap round the middle of each thigh. He sat on the edge of the divan to admire the taut lines of her young thighs, the erotic maturity of her behind, the slight firm filling out of its pearly cheeks as a tribute to her age and the bedroom duties of an adult woman's life.
The camera showed her truly frantic now, as he perched on the side of the divan and examined the area of his interest. He leant over her, his face no more than twelve inches distant. Her wrists and waist were fastened but her legs were free as she lay on her belly over the bolsters. In her alarm and the growing unease inflicted by Merle, she tensed and squirmed in a manner more seductive than she could have realized. The pale mounds of her behind rounded and contorted before him. As she struggled to contain herself, Lesley's bottom-cheeks contracted and swelled rhythmically, touching and parting lightly with a whisper and glistening of unwiped soap from the slim glass squirt. The gaoler looked more closely at the parting of Lesley's rear cheeks and thighs, breathing the human and intimate feminine scents from these warm body-cleavages mingled with cheap perfume of soap.
The man was tantalised by writhing peeps of light-haired vaginal flesh between the rear of her legs and glimpses of her anus which she tightened in panic. Her squirming over the bolsters was bound to stimulate him, for it suggested Lesley Hol-lingsworth bottom-upwards in a labour of sexual passion. The gaoler was not alone in his zeal. The young wife's sullen look and her perversely plain crop of fair hair showed her character. Seeing the slim pony-switch close by, most men and quite a few women would now very much have wanted to bring Lesley Hollingsworth to obedience by using whip-leather across the seductively rounding and squirming cheeks of her proud bare backside.
As one would expect, the disdainful young woman was looking sidelong over her shoulder at the man who made the preparations for her discipline. A last coldness of self-possessed arrogance still lingered in her blue eyes and the perverse plainness of her little-boy crop. The thought of what lay in store for her did not quite dispel a slight sullen hardness of her mouth and chin.
The man stood up and fetched the switch. The springs of the divan shifted as the young wife began to tense at the touch of the lather whip measuring lightly across her bare backside. The slim wand cut the air with a sharp swish and landed with an ear-stunning smack across the bare pale cheeks of Lesley Hollingsworth's bottom. There was a second's pause. Then she gasped at the naked intensity of the swelling anguish. "Lie still, Lesley!" the man said calmly. The searing smack of the pony-switch was repeated across her bare rear cheeks, and repeated again. She gave a wild protesting cry.
The boy listened to see if it would be six strokes, but it was more. He waited for twelve, but that was not even a beginning. The young woman's cries grew more intense and desperate. In the next photo, he saw that after several stokes across the crowns of her bare buttocks, the supple switch caught Lesley very low down across the pale cheeks of her bottom with a vicious impact. The photos and recording conveyed the deliberately repeated smacks of leather low across the softer and fatter swell of her bottom-cheeks just above her thighs. The sounds of her frenzy grew. But the gaoler continued to aim low down across her backside. A moment later, Lesley Hollingsworth screamed. The boy's heart jumped with shocked excitement. In the photo the toilet wall-clock stood at half-past one in the morning.
Under the parted fringe Lesley's brimming eyes implored her chastiser. Her mouth had the woebegone downward line of a penitent child. The disciplinarian had thrashed her soundly with the switch, leaving countless deeply-coloured weals across the pale erotic maturity of Lesley's bare bottom, as well as several given deliberately across the backs of her thighs. The trailing whip was to be next. But first she was to get another taste of the switch, a dozen times aslant her rear cheeks and a dozen times very low down across them.
It was almost two in the morning. Did she think it was over? Perhaps she was ready to do anything for a brief respite. To the boy's delight, the man had unbuttoned and presented himself to the young woman's mouth. Still secured by her wrists and waist, she had shaken her fringe clear and twisted her basin-crop of fair hair aside. The photograph would have amused those who had endured her moody arrogance. Under force of circumstances, Lesley was sucking her chastiser's manhood, as if drawing off the venom from him might sap his zeal for punishing her. She had admitted doing this for a man only once before, in a sudden frenzy of honeymoon passion! The wall-clock in these photos showed that he occupied her in this way for almost twenty minutes. He came over her tongue, requiring her to consume the tribute and begin again at once. But this did not save her from the short tail of the lash.
The photographs already showed that Lesley's bare backside had been soundly whipped a second time. From her urgent but rather peevish appeals on the recording she had yet to understand the man who dealt with her. The full-moon cheeks of her bottom were tapestried by the art of the whip and smarting untouchably. The sight of this might have moved some men to leniency. But for the gaoler, the state of the young women's behind stimulated his vindictive zeal. No one would reproach him and Lesley would never be free to tell tales. He discarded the rod and drew the short tail of a snakeskin pony-lash through his fingers. The smarting imprints of the switch across the bare buttocks of this wanton young wife made her supremely responsive. But the state of Lesley's buttocks merely served to put some cruel ideas into her gaoler's mind.
In preparation for the lash, Lesley was now secured kneeling very tightly forward over the scroll at the end of the sofa. Her arms were fastened at full stretch to the base of its frame. Her full pale buttocks were pulled hard apart by this posture, showing the yellowed-ivory smoothness of Lesley's bottom-crack where its slopes curved in towards her anus. The boy smiled, wishing she had been positioned before him like this to receive judgment for her wilful and promiscuous conduct. In his fantasy, the young judge considered this view of her while deciding upon her sentence. He considered how long her detention should be and what judicial disciplines he would order. As the thoughts of this occupied him, he slowly unbuttoned himself.
Then he listened intently to the recording, as the pony-lash was used. Between the nerve-tightening thrill of her outbursts, he heard her give vent to storms of shrillness, rising and falling in the arpeggios of punishment. At first the intensity of her frenzy shocked him. But then he grew more and more intrigued by what they were doing to her. He knew that little girls shrieked without restraint when they were birched. But there was an intense fascination in hearing Lesley Hollingsworth scream, for he had never imagined such sounds coming from a sullen and self-possessed young woman of her age and type. To hear this boyishly-cropped but erotically mature young Venus frantic as an hysterical schoolgirl was profoundly exhilarating. The lad sought manual relief as he listened to her and studied the photos of her.
He particularly admired the portraits of her face in which the blue eyes under the parted fringe overflowed so piteously and the mouth formed a woebegone howl. Then there were others in which the eyes were wild and the mouth distended in a heart-stopping shrillness.
The gaoler curbed the young woman's arrogance with the pony-lash and its short tail of braided leather. He cracked the sinuous thong across the bare pale moons of her buttocks in a curling cut. The whip curved and clung agonisingly to the first swell, curled in between the bare cheeks of Lesley's bottom, and flicked round the far flank of her backside. Her wilful, sulky young face under its little-boy fringe, was twisted round to her chastiser. Her blue eyes, brimming over, matched her frantic shrillness on the recording. Her strapped hands were clenched into fists, every muscle in her thighs and hips seemed contracted by the anguish. She had jammed one knee into the back of the other, as if to contain the smart. Her toes curled with the searching intensity of the whip.
The recording caught the small sounds of her desperation, the breathless squirming in the pauses as she awaited more discipline. The sofa springs echoed the strapped writhing of her mature young thighs and hips. The lad heard the young wife's bare belly slithering in her own perscription against the smooth leather in the sweltering southern night. Once or twice, in the anguish of a whipstroke she could not contain-or the panic of anticipation before the next-the punished adulteress lost her self-restraint, as her chastiser intended. The recording caught each sharp abrupt burst of feminine rudeness urgently emitted from Lesley Hollingsworth's bottom. The boy's heart beat faster at the though that they had brought her to this extremity.
As he studied the photos, the adolescent voyeur timed the events by the wall-clock of the white-tiled suite. The young woman's ordeal at the hands of her gaoler, beginning almost an hour after midnight, concluded just after three o'clock in the morning, when summer dawn was close. Beyond the barred windows, it was possible to see a hint of misty light over the grey early sea.
Presently, her shrill protests confirmed that the gaoler had caught Lesley between her rear cheeks. As daybreak outshone the harsh brilliance of electric light on white toilet tiles, he was pitiless with her. Though the restraint of the straps enforced her posture, the manner in which her firmly swelling buttocks were pulled hard apart was extremely suggestive. The disciplinarian was intimately severe between them, making Lesley take one crack-shot after another, aiming repeatedly at the tightened rear bullseye. The boy did not blame him for yielding to this temptation and, indeed, envied him. To the boy's satisfaction each pistol-shot smack of these intimately searching whipstrokes made Lesley Hollingsworth scream at the thrilling peak of her range.
The boy was enthralled by the ringing vibrance of Lesley Hollingsworth's screams. Later photos also revealed how the curl of the whip across her bottom-cheeks caused a punctuation line of raised droplets to trickle down and gather in the crease dividing her buttocks and thighs. The close-ups showed the increase in the trickles, sometimes smudged by the next smack of the leather across the young wife's bottom-cheeks. To see the pale assured swell of Lesley's backside marked so often and adorned with so many little dribblets was profoundly stimulating. Loops and curlicues of the lash embossed the raised weals printed by the slim switch. At last, with uncharacteristic gentleness, the gaoler unfastened her. He raised her carefully to her feet.
There was one more detail, deeply thrilling to the boy, as proof of how far such a man would take young wantons of Lesley's kind. Her head dropped on the man's shoulders as he raised her. Her arms fell limp at either side. As if in tribute of submission to what had been done to her, Lesley Hollingsworth swooned like a ravished virgin bride in her chastiser's arms.
Merle applied a sal volatile bottle to the young wife's nostrils, while the gaoler coaxed her back to her senses over the divan. He turned her over on her belly and bent one of her knees up gently so that she showed her sex fully. To reassure and restore her, he fondled and stroked her cunt. As she stirred, his other fingers began to tickle Lesley Hollingsworth's arsehole knowingly while he revived her. Several photos showed this sentimental swoon on the divan. Lesley's high-crowned and fair-cropped head still dropped but her spread arse and thighs were raised to her admirer's face as she sprawled like a dreamer on her belly over the buttoned leather. Her chastiser smiled for the first time as he fondled her warm cunt and coaxed her rear hole with his fingertip. It was not long before there was a sign of movement.
"You wanton young whore, Lesley Hollingsworth," he said kissing her ear, "Are we to have such a drama every time you get a smacked bottom? I can promise you more than this in a week or two. You shall learn to behave with greater fortitude before I finish with you. Ah, you begin to stir. Enough soothing of your cunt, then. But a little more tickling of your backside to rouse you."
As her eyes fluttered uncertainly open, she instinctively tightened her behind against the finger, as if to check herself. But he smiled at her and continued the tickling. He spoke gently, telling her that he too would take his reward in her rear portal. Unlike its neighbour, it had lost no tightness by over-use or by giving an infant to the world. First, with gentle cunning, Merle caressed and roused her, as Lesley climaxed in soft cries and shudders.
The chastiser's erection was stouter than her earlier lover's. In preparation, she lay on her belly over the cushions. He took the fine erect phallus of black rubber. She was to wear it a while to ease and stretch the way for him. There were several close-ups of the young wife's behind during this. They showed Lesley Hollingsworth's anus stretched tight to its limit round the protruding sausage-shape of black india rubber. The boy studied the photos with great care, needing manual relief. His pulse quickened. He knew how greatly he would like to master Lesley with a rubber muzzle in this way.
The chastiser made her wait like this for ten or fifteen minutes. Merle then warned Lesley to yield to the man that reward which the female deliquent must traditionally surrender to the gaoler who has just tanned her. Then the man knelt astride Lesley's whip-embroidered bottom and took that reward.
Several other pictures were taken at ten in the morning, on a later day in the white-tiled suite. The sky was bright with reflected brilliance of sea and summer. Lesley had no doubt been brought there for her routine morning use of the tiled room. But once her briefs were off, the demands of hermentors took precedence. She was again on the black leather divan, lying on her side with her back to the door, naked but for her short waist-length singlet. There was a stranger standing by, unsmiling and intent as he watched. His presence suggested the scene of a slave-wife displayed for sale.
Karima, the surly young Persian woman, leant over her. Karima had been manualising Lesley for several minutes when the photograph was taken. The print showed, from the rear, the soft folds of Lesley's vaginal flesh shining wet. Moisture also dewed the inner surfaces of her thighs and the rear parting of her legs. As usual Lesley was receiving caresses rather than giving them. Her eyes under the parted fringe were languorously closed and her lips had parted in the more laboured breath of excitement. The stroking of her vaginal cleft and the tickling of her clitoris had entranced her utterly. She had abandoned herself to the bliss of Karima's expert fingers.
The next photograph had been taken at the peak of Lesley's climax. It was the most intriguing. Lesley had lifted her upper leg to allow Karima to finish vigorously. This revealed how deftly the other woman was masturbating her. Lesley's bottom was thrust out, its cheeks drawn apart. Her backside and the rear of her thighs were still marked lightly by the prints of her recent whipping, the raised weals clearly visible. Her anus was again stretched by the protruding black sausage of rubber phallus, inserted by the wish of her Persian mistress as Lesley released her passion, quivering on Karima's fingers.
But Lesley's face was turned over her shoulder to the doorway, to which an elfin schoolgirl had been brought. The moment was precisely chosen. The boy saw in the reproachful sullenness of the little girl's face the same fair-skinned looks as in the plainly-cropped young woman writhing on the divan. There was no doubt that the sulky little elf was Lesley's own. But Lesley had reached a point from which she could not draw back. She had started to come. The gaze that she directed back towards the girl combined desire and dismay, delicious languor, imploring, and self-love. The youngster watched calmly and unprompted. Her survey of Lesley took in the raised whip-prints on the bare bottom, the sheen of sexual excitement on the thighs, a vaseline smear between the young woman's buttocks. In the unused china pot on the divan lay the squirt, tissue roll, perfume-spray, and a coiled lash of knotted cord. The china rim was close enough to touch the rear of Lesley's bare thigh lightly. The impassive little nymph watched from the doorway. Distantly came the muted thunder of ocean breakers and the shouts of children on the beach.
Karima, the sullen-faced Persian mistress, was bringing the young wife to her climax expertly but impersonally. Lesley continued looking over her shoulder, unable to draw her eyes from the cause of her dismay. In the anguished and exquisite moment, she helplessly showed her youngster the release of her orgasm, reflected in the passion-racked tensings of her face.
The sulky little elf stood watching, while Lesley was obliged to perform every suggestive ritual that could be devised for her on the divan. Merle murmured to the stranger, explaining the rules imposed on this white slave.
If Lesley took down her black stretch-briefs for the most menial purpose, she must first yield to pleasure or discipline if hermentors wished. If she took her briefs off for pleasure or punishment, she must also perform her lewdest function or display, if the command was given. To deny her a pretext for refusal, access to the tiled room was prevented on days before Lesley Hollingsworth's knickers were taken down over the bedroom stool or pillows of a master or mistress-or when she was to lie over a whipping trestle.
As a slave-wife, she was taught that when her loins and belly, thighs and backside were bare, anything might be demanded of her, whether in bedroom or punishment vault, or tiled washroom. When Lesley was whipped, the vaseline, rubber phallus and other aids to passion were available to her chastiser. So were china pot and liquid soap, roll and squirt. When she served the simplest bedroom passion of men or women, a whip lay close. The white china pot, the rolled tissue and squirt were at hand. In the tiled room, where the china pot and roll were proper, a cane and whip, vaseline and rubber phallus were always displayed. As the boyishly-cropped young wife shed her skirt and pushed down her briefs in the tiled closet, she had frequently been detained. The pearly cheek-swell of Lesley Hollingsworth's bottom was soundly thrashed all morning with a bamboo cane before she was left to herself. Sometimes it was intended that she should contain herself during this tanning and sometimes not.
The boy spent an hour or two with the photos. He studied the sullen young face, the moody mouth and chin, dismissive blue eyes, the long parted fringe of her cropped hair. He chose a close-up, the pallor of Lesley's bottom-cheeks swelling firmly over the leather bolster. Their erotic maturity was a tribute to the carrying of her elfin girl in her belly some years earlier. The toil of honeymoon passion, and the young wife's labour of expelling from her body an elfin version of herself, were suggested by the assured swell of her backside's pearly sleekness. The boy had a brief fantasy. She sprawled naked on her belly over the pillows, gasping and squirming in labour as she gave this elfin daughter to the world. The pale swell of Lesley Hollingsworth's bottom-cheeks shone sleek with sweat and the crack between them ran wet with it. Her belly-labour and bottom-writhing were prolonged. They had tied her wrists to the bedposts. Lesley's plain short cut of fair hair twisted this way and that, her teeth set on her lower lip in anguish. The smiling onlookers teased and encouraged her. The boy used a tailed spanking-strap, imparting a stinging smack across her wet rear cheeks from time to time to drive her on.
Then, in fantasy, he was again a judge who examined her bending, her skirt and pants removed, to receive sentence for the wantonness. He murmured and fondled. "An easily-roused cunt ... and a bottom like yours, Lesley. ... A strict regime of the prison-farm, I think. ... Turn your bare bottom-cheeks fully towards me, Lesley Hollingsworth ... Five years, I think. ... The judicial lash upon those bare buttocks once a month. ... Your kids shall watch you get it. ... You like having a girl-friend Lesley? We'll soon find you one there. ... You shall bend before me this afternoon ... something to comfort you between your thighs ... Fondling between your legs....
Squeezing ... stroking ... You like it, don't you Lesley? ... Now the strap across your bottom, Lesley Hollingsworth...."
At last he roused himself from the foolish but passionate phrases of his reverie, and noticed for the first time a scrap of paper among the prints. It had been written by the young woman-an appeal for rescue, smuggled into the pile of photos. She and Trish and her elfin girl were in the harem of their purchaser. She bewailed her fate as a slave of this tyrant. Lesley was now in the prime of erotic maturity, but she would not remain so. The man promised her, in a year or two, a final night. Being her last, he would be able to subject her loins, belly and backside to extreme, intimate severities quite beyond remedy. After such havoc there could be no going back. He would want to draw the cord judicially tight round Lesley Hollingsworth's throat.
Panic-stricken, she demanded rescue in her note and promised to write the place of her captivity on the back of the paper. The boy hesitated and did not turn the paper over. Such writing might be no more than a game or a joke. It mattered little. He knew how often and with what fascination he would brood on the photos and recording. Yet if the other side of the paper was read, he might sooner or later respond to her smuggled pleading. He put the paper down and looked again at her lesbian embraces with Trish, the images of Lesley's mouthed frenzy under the whip, the close-ups of her bottom and thighs.
Light faded from the gathering ocean rollers that burst in spray and thunder on November's empty beaches. The boulevards were wet and deserted, and lamps shining by four o'clock. It was dark before his decision was made. He guessed it was what most men and women would secretly like to do in Lesley's case.
He took the paper on which her appeal had been written. Without turning it over to read her instructions, he walked across to the fireplace, dropped it on the hot coals and watched it darken and flake into ash.
12
AFTERWORD
In the end, the themes of erotic fantasy and the seaside of summer dreams coincide to an extent that is more than fortuitous. Neither belongs to a place or a season. Both of them, in one way or another, represent a state of mind. The settings of the beach, the villa, the luxury yacht and the island seraglio compete for the attention of the summer dreamers and erotic fantasists alike.
A novel like Sweet Dreams is study of rival pleasures. In one part, Juliette supervises her exclusive school in Paris. In the other, Bernard has charge of two teenage sisters and a stable-mind in a seaside villa. Juliette certainly has a good time. Broad green prospects of the Bois de Boulogne open before her. She had Linda Jennings the sensuous little blonde, Valerie Bishop the pretty gamine, Sandra Williams the eager tomboy, Judith Terry the willowy numph. But, despite her impressive cast-list, it is Bernard who carries the day. Quite simply, the seaside is the place for summer and fantasy. Not even the Avenue Foch can rival it.
The beach encounters of erotic fiction throw up good girls like Nathalie and bad girls like Elke, saucy little girls like Sally Fenton and thoughtful grown-up girls like Jane Truman. The grand villas, behind tall hedges and carefully bolted gates, are filled with the languid sprawling bodies of Tania and Louise or Angie and Trish. Their life is arranged in such a way that they have nothing to do all summer but lounge there and wait for their man to take notice of them. As a male daydream, it seems hard to improve upon.
Erotic innocence and sexual gothic alike thrive in this atmosphere. Nathalie can strip down to a revealing bikini, play with a boy's penis, and still be innocent. Sally Fenton, though marched off to corrective training, is a cheeky and refreshing child of nature. Eveline, though high-spirited and ready for anything, is an amiable and straightforward girl in her seaside romp.
There are villains and mischief-makers of both sexes. Without them there would be a good deal of idyll and no drama. Louise Neville and the dark-skinned beauty Monnelia make fools of their masters. But even this is done in a spirit of sea-going saturnalia. Merle superintends a remarkable ordeal for the fair-skinned Lesley. But even its sexual horrors are hard to take seriously-if they ever took place. The seaside is a place for black humour. In this case it takes the form of an authoritarian joke at the expense of a pretentious young woman, or a trick played upon an eager boy by a couple of friends who leave staged photos and a well-rehearsed recording for him to find in an unoccupied villa.
The most coveted possessions of the seaside culture remain the villa and the yacht. A fleet of pleasure-craft put to sea in erotic fiction. The cabin-staff would be hard to fault.
For the discerning voyager, there is Susan Webb or Catherine Bond, Cathy being the schoolgirl novice and Sue the proud young beauty a dozen years her senior. Both wear the uniform illustrated in the Select Bibliotheque's Under the Yoke Series. Tight silk blouses end at a smart waist-belt. Then there is nudity from the waist to the tops of the skin-tight high-heeled boots that come up almost to the knees. The full range of erotic possibilities is available. To instruct the younger girl in the ways of love by gentle and intimate caresses or to explore the fledgling womanhood of Cathy Bond's backside. To have Susan spread-thighed and eager for the soothing balm between her thighs, or else to have her bending over for a variety of purposes suggested by "the proud pallor of Sue Webb's bottom-cheeks at twenty-six years old." Any guest with those two attendants in his cabin is likely to sleep late and appear on deck rarely.
Among the other sailings, there is the yacht offering Sian and Annie, as a boy-girl and girl-girl. For a more exotic crew, one might try the hint of demure oriental beauty in Helen Wong or the satiny sheen of Monnelia's "African tan" nudity. Sian and Annie have the advantage of falling in love with one another and being more than eager to perform naked on the saloon table after dinner. And when the weary guest on this vessel retires to his cabin, he finds his head resting on that unusual pillow provided by Maggie and Noreen. Though referred to variously as sluts and trollops, they give excellent value for money to the traveller, lying face-down as human bolsters across the top of the bed.
As our hero says, drawing back the pillow-covering and finding a pair of robust young bottoms and thighs with a rear view of vagina, sleep is difficult. There is Maggie, the slightly stocky twenty-one-year-old with bold features but the long curtains of blond hair like a child-and Noreen with the firm insolence of her fair-skinned face, the lank hair dark and fringed in her case. Mag's cunt is constantly within kissing range, he tells us, and his fingers can hardly leave Noreen's backside alone. The fiddling and the kissing, not to mention more business-like attentions, are so constant that the two girls are in a very roused condition by morning. The luckless gentleman has to begin all over again after breakfast.
Erotic fantasy comes in many styles. There is sunlit innocence for Nathalie and shipboard randiness for Louise Neville or Sue Webb. There is captive beauty helpless in the hands of sexual pirates. There are villas of languid pleasure for Jenny Woodward or Judith Terry, and villas of stern discipline for Catherine Bond or Tania Jenkins. And there are island seraglios, where a life of sensuous luxury or a sinister fate behind closed doors is equally probable for the fleshly cargo shipped from the United States or Europe.
Not that this disqualifies them from the world of summer dreams. Most seaside fantasies are benign and idyllic, but a visit to the Punch and Judy show on the sands shows children wide-eyed with delight at a macabre and traditional entertainment. Mr. Punch clubs the baby and beats his wife as a matter of routine, though in her case it is days of constant mild concussion rather than whip-marks on the buttocks that result. There is a policeman who is battered to death and the executioner accidentally gets hanged. But there has never been a more popular entertainment among children of the past two centuries than the seaside puncinello.
The conventions of Brennus Alera's Select Bibliotheque in the 1920s require that one or two, heroines should come to a macabre end in island bondage and this is the case in Barbaric Fetes. But this was not a convention confined to erotic literature. The great perfumed sensation of the day was James Elroy Flecker's Hassan, recommended to schoolchildren for its poetic beauty. In Flecker's pleasure-palace, the heroine must choose between submission to her master or a night of passion with her lover followed by torment and execution. She chooses the latter and afterwards leaves the stage, towing a cart laden with bonds and whips, braziers and other implements. Some of Alera's wilder accounts owe much to this Broadway and West End hit.
Naturally, the heroine of Hassan does not perform oral sex, except possibly for her boy-friend. The crime of Noreen in the male paradise of a shoreline seraglio is to close the teeth upon an unwelcome intruder in her mouth. Maggie, being present when it happens, is bound to share her destiny.
Perhaps the sinister puppet-show in its waterside booth has more in common with the style of the Villa Rif or Pearls of the Orient than literature would care to admit. Maggie and Noreen end in the style of grand guignol-coincidentally the French term for Punch and Judy on a human scale. They are borne off-stage on a harem cart, like the losers at the end of Hamlet.
Maggie and Noreen shared their fate at the Khan's hands in a distant pavilion. Afterwards the grooms hoisted the pair on their bellies over the cart, bare from waist to heels. On one side hung curtains of pale gold hair, from the other a lank dark collar-length and fringe. The men and quite a few women pressed close for a peep at the Khan's skill. Maggie, the bold-faced young blonde, and Noreen, the strapping young trollop, lay face-down, heads drooping.
The occasion had allowed preliminaries, say the narrator, eager to assure us that Noreen's crime (abetted by Maggie) was the worst slave-girl outrage of all time. There were "smiles and satisfaction that the two window-dressers had had their impudent young bottoms whipped while awaiting their finale." In their present posture, "it was their insolent young backsides that bid the onlookers farewell. Even those who demurred at extreme measures now smiled at the sight Noreen and Maggie presented."
The unmistakable tone of Punch and Judy is evident in such seaside thrills of the macabre.
The master was defied by the young brunette Amazon. That evening, Mandy would follow the present pair. This strapping wench, a mature young woman with firm full-cheeked bottom, thighs and hips, would feel the Khan's severity. Mandy's sombre drama in the remote pavilion, would unfold leisurely, its final curtain skillfully delayed. New whips had been woven by Mandy's admirers. A jilted lover's ring with marking-disc sparkled in the brazier coals. Long-nozzled bellows lay suggestively between the brazier and the trestle, over which the bare robust cheeks of Mandy Worth's bottom and her thighs would be displayed. Her shrillness, masked by music, would be distant and suggestive as perfume. Even the demurrers could not resist stealing a final peep at Mandy over the cart next morning, her legs and backside bare, offering a mute tableau of retribution.
AH the same, the Khan's achievements with Noreen and Maggie, even with Mandy thrown in, are modest by comparison with the narrative of Life on a Yacht, which polishes off almost everyone. Even this island seraglio in the sun with its cobalt blue sea and warm sand does not escape the general rule. The fate of such girls is no more than the afternoon session of Punch and Judy. The characters all come bouncing back next day-unless of course Maggie and Noreen, by some un-likely possibility, proved to be real. But guignol never is.
For the most part the summer fantasies are of Nathalie's innocence or the adolescent yearnings of Sharon and Victoria. Sharon, fretful and troubled at first by the undressing hands of hr guardian, soon accommodates herself to his desires. Victoria, "the little imp," stands cheering on the sidelines. Tania Jenkins, the lascivious blond stable-maid, waits impatiently for her turn with the only man in their lives. Summer at Beechy Lodge is a procession of seaside days and restless nights. Joanne, the young governess, meantime discovers that Sir Harry has always had a taste for a buxom Amazon beauty of her kind.
But in the end, the most coveted fantasy appears to be that of the luxury yacht, the ultimate Dream-boat with an invisible crew and a half-a-dozen pretty girls to attend each pampered gentleman. That perhaps is as it should be. Whatever the stories or the characters, the erotica of the summer seaside and the pleasure boats matches the title of the first selection. Sweet Dreams. For every tongue-in-cheek sexual melodrama of Maggie or Noreen, there are a dozen warm and sighing heroines with the innocence of Nathalie or the adolescent longings of Sharon. In this world of sexual pantomine there are certainly demon kings and witches. But the captain of the Dreamboat has a
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Archive Note: At this point, in mid-sentence, the pocketbook ended. There were several blank pages following the interrupted sentence, but there was no printing on those pages.
