of overflowing sentiment, which this entrancing quiet and this voluptuous scene of love and passion had inspired me with, I quite forgot where I was, and whom I was caressing. I kissed Lizzie rapturously and I murmured in a voice which must have quivered with deep emotion, ‘Oh! my darling! my own, own, darling.’
Lizzie started. She disengaged my hands and, standing up, she exclaimed in a voice which sounded strange to me, so different was it from her ordinary tone, ‘Charlie! Charlie! Don’t speak to me like that! Don’t! there’s a good fellow!’
‘Oh! Lizzie! what have I done?’ I said in alarm.
‘Oh! you must not speak to me like that! You know you don’t love me, Charlie dear. You don’t love me like you do your wife, and if you did it would only make me unhappy. Oh! Charlie! the one thing which would take away the only pleasure I have in life, would be to know that some man really and truly loved me. I could not leave my husband and live with him, and I must have a man as often as I can. You don’t understand. When a woman has led the life I have she can’t steady down unless some illness puts an end to all feeling of desire in her. She must go on as she is till death, or at least till decay of all her bodily powers. Confess now, it was not Lizzie Wilson you were speaking to but your wife!’
‘Well, Lizzie, dearest!’ I said, quite thunderstruck with her vehemence and her outcry against love, ‘I won’t tell you a lie. I did for the moment forget where I was. It was this way — but sit down darling — and I will tell you truly.’ She did so, and still standing over her, and again possessing myself of the sweet charms between her thighs, to which she admitted me full rights as a true friend but not as an earnest and passionate lover, I told her about the scene of which I have given my readers a faint notion, as regards the delicious commingling of the adoration of the heart and the worship of the senses.
When I had finished Lizzie heaved a prodigious sigh and said: ‘Charlie! Take my advice and don’t be too long sending home for that true wife of yours! She will keep you from harm out here, and it is not right, it would be a cruel shame to condemn her to pass the life of a nun whilst you are amusing yourself in India, fucking to your heart’s content women who do not deserve such delight. For, mark my words, you are not the kind of man to go without women, nor will you find a station where there are not women, pretty and fine, who will not leave you alone — they will be as eager to have you as you will be to have them. Yes! believe me, if ever a man was formed to strike a woman’s fancy it is you. Send for your wife, for otherwise some mischief will be brewed, and you may be made to repent that you left her at home.’
These words, spoken with great earnestness, struck me very forcibly. It seemed also so like Satan rebuking sin that I could hardly help feeling amused. After a pause of a second or two, during which I gently stroked the sweet cunt under my hand, I said: ‘All right, Lizzie! I believe you are quite right! I will send for my wife as soon as you advise, but come in, there’s a darling, and let us enjoy the fleeting hour. It seems like ages since I last had my prick in this sweetest, softest, juiciest little cunt of yours!’
To this she replied, ‘Searle has been here tonight.’
My goodness! All my blood ran cold. I felt now as if my Louie, in answer to my prayer to come to bed, so that I might enjoy her loveliness, told me, ‘Too late, my dear, So and So has just been fucking me and I’m not inclined for any more!’
‘Searle!’ I exclaimed, snatching my hand away from under her clothes. ‘Searle! Oh! Lizzie! and did you let him have you?’
‘I did not say that he had me, Charlie, so you need not get into a fit of jealousy, you silly boy! No! If there is one man in the world to whom I would forever say no, it is Searle; but he was here all the same.’
I breathed. Somehow Lizzie had grown dear to me, she had been so nice, such a splendid fuck, and so tender towards me in spite of her disclaimer of love.
‘What did he want, Lizzie?’
‘What you say you do now, Charlie! But oh! we had such a row! I declare it has given me quite a headache! Oh! Searle! you … cursed beast!’
‘And what did he do or say Lizzie! Tell me!’
‘Well, you had hardly got across the road before Searle, who had apparently been watching for you to go, sneaked on to the verandah around the corner, and asked if I had got his note. Now I had received a note from him which I had kept to myself, and which I had not shown you, dear, for I did not want to make you jealous; a fine production it is, too, and a very useful one for me, I can tell you. I think he must have been either drunk or mad when he wrote it, for he could not have written a more damning piece of evidence against himself if he had tried to do it in his sober senses. Oh! Mrs Searle would give a cartful of her rupees to have it, for she could then get the divorce she longs for. Plenty of good fellows are ready to marry her if she could get divorced, and I know she has often said she would be glad to give up her present life; but Searle knows this, and his only revenge against her is to behave so prudently as not to give her any chance. If ever he has a woman it is so on the sly that no one knows it. Well, he has written down in black and white that he has had me — and since Mrs Searle left him, too. Let’s light a candle and I’ll show you the letter!’
Full of curiosity and rather astonished to find how the truth comes out, for I had certainly understood Lizzie to say that Searle had never had her, nor ever should have her by her permission, I went for my candle and lit it. Lizzie then took the precious letter out of her pocket and gave it to me to read.
It commenced with prayers and entreaties to let him come and have her whilst I was at mess. It said that he knew well that I did nothing all day and night but fuck her, that by this time she must be tired of me and at least that a little of her accustomed change of diet would be agreeable. From prayers, it went to using threats. Her husband’s regiment was at Peshawar, now with a newly appointed colonel who was death on adultery and fornication, and he had given out that the first time he found any of it going on amongst the married women of his regiment, he would set the penal laws on the subject in force and that he (Searle) had plenty of evidence which would put me (Devereaux) into prison and send her out of the country branded as an unchaste woman, a whore and an adulteress, and that unless she admitted him to her embraces he would help the colonel to make good his word. Then came more prayers and more earnest entreaties — then offers of a thousand rupees (twice what his own wife charged) — jewellery, anything, if she would but consent, and then in a postscript, he boasted that he had already fucked her, at Agra, on an occasion when, stunned by a fall from an overthrown gharry, she had been carried into his bungalow, and seeing who she was, and determined not to lose the precious opportunity, he had raped her in her unconscious state, and enjoyed the ‘wealth of her voluptuous cunt’ — he actually used these last words.
‘The intense blackguard,’ I exclaimed, moved to great wrath by the reading of this precious epistle.
‘You may say so, Charlie! But now hear what the brute did. At first he asked had I got his letter. I said yes. Then he asked me in a wheedling tone would I consent and let him have me. I said not for all the thousand rupees in India, that he was too loathsome a brute for me to touch with the end of a barge-pole, let alone take in my arms. Then he began to threaten me with our new colonel, saying that I could not get away from here now unless he, Searle, gave me an order for a gharry, that everything like a cart with wheels was engaged for the next ten days, and that long before that time was over the regiment would be on the march from Peshawar to Muttra, and that the colonel, finding me here instead of at Muttra, where he had ordered me to go, would be furious, and he, Searle, would take the opportunity then of telling him why I stopped at Nowshera, namely, to have three separate officers who stayed here, two on their way down country, and one on his way to join his battalion at Cherat, and he would tell who these officers
