For a moment he hesitated, and then, falling on his knees, he thrust his bearded face voraciously against my sex.
. . . Once again I have experienced the terrible joy of annihilation, the deliverance of my whole being to the mystery of sensual union, and this time with a male whom I would not recognise in daylight. There is perfection in that. I want nothing more of him. I rejoice again in my separateness, in the vital isolation that makes it possible for a human being to collide, to coalesce, and for a short while to coexist with another. That is the essence of it. I am not like those weak women who want to be owned by a man, body and soul, and who, having submitted to such an indignity, seek in retaliation to hedge him in, to have him belong – what would I do with a man for twenty-four hours in a day, for seven days in a week, and for months, years? That is a kind of slow poison. My life is my own. That is a truism. But in saying it I assert the fact that I am not like those women, devitalized by convention, who will mutilate their own personalities because they will not accept the fact that all great lust is impersonal, a drive in the very mineral part of us whose gleaming ore can only be tarnished by sentiment.
My limbs are at rest. The man is gone, as quietly and obliquely as he came. I do not suppose I will be disturbed at least until dawn. I am anxious to record everything, to break through the shameful shell of civilised expression and to penetrate into the pulsing recesses of my primal being. I want to have what I want to say said before they discover, and perhaps destroy, my record.
We arrived in Charleston about ten o’clock in the morning of my eighteenth birthday on a motorcycle which Snaith had stolen from the local blacksmith. We were tired and dusty after our long ride. We had stopped only once, at a truckdrivers’ rest on the road. There we drank tea. Snaith fingered me under the table but I made him desist because I was anxious to get to Charleston as quickly as possible. I feared that my father might already have discovered our flight.
I had told Snaith that I had stolen fifty pounds. That seemed a fortune to him anyway. I lied because I felt sure he would ask me to hand over the money to him. He did so, almost as soon as we were on the road. I could hardly refuse him, but I congratulated myself on my foresight, for there was another two hundred pounds carefully fastened between my breasts under my chemise. I had no desire to be dependent upon Snaith.
We drew to the kerb in the mainstreet and, parking the motorcycle, we entered a restaurant. We sat upstairs near the window overlooking the street, and from where I sat I could see the motorcycle resting on the kerb. We ate breakfast and discussed our plans. It was Snaith’s opinion that we didn’t need to go any farther. We could be married there. I could write and tell my father and then, if everything went well, we could both return to the village and discuss the future with him. We could do worse, in Snaith’s opinion, than to settle down and inherit my father’s business.
Inwardly, I laughed. I had one purpose in mind. I intended to board a south-bound train that very day. Moreover, I despised the pleading tone in Snaith’s voice. He was a born drudge in spite of his darkly handsome body. The height of his ambition was to exchange his poverty for the profitable little fishing business I would inherit from my father. But he must have been apprehensive about my reaction to his suggestion because at that moment he took my hand across the table.
‘I love you, Helen,’ he said.
My dislike increased. I detested him. But I smiled back at him because I was still, to some extent, at his mercy.
‘Just as you think, Tom,’ I said.
Relief came quickly to his face. He could be comfortable now in his betrayal. He squeezed my hand and helped me to another cup of tea. I glanced out of the window. Down on the street a policeman was bending over the parked motorcycle, peering at the number-plate. Then he took a notebook from his pocket and appeared to be comparing numbers.
As calmly as possible, I said to Snaith: ‘Tom, do you think you would let me have some of the money back? I don’t like to have nothing, and I’d like to buy some clothes for our wedding.’
For a moment he looked suspicious but then his brow cleared and he said: ‘Of course, darling.’
He took out the money importantly and counted out twenty pounds, which he passed across to me.
I watched the policeman look up and down the street. Doubtless he was waiting for our return. I watched him move back out of sight into a doorway. My mind was already made up. I was going to allow Snaith to be arrested. Meanwhile I would make good my own escape. I told Snaith that I was going to visit the toilet and blew a kiss to him as I crossed the floor. Once downstairs, I left the restaurant by the side door. In the sunlight again, it occurred to me that there are some men whose necks are made for the rope.
I breathed a sigh of relief as the train drew out of the station, jerkily, until the carriages were properly disposed in motion behind the engine. I had been very nervous on the platform. Snaith would probably have been arrested, and he might have been spiteful enough to give the police information about me. But soon, with vast stretches of rough countryside rolling off into the distance beyond the window, I fell into a sound sleep in the corner of the carriage.
I woke up to find a young man looking across at me. He was clad in city clothes and was perhaps the most elegant man I had seen in my life. I flushed under his amused gaze. He blinked his eyes in greeting but said nothing. There were two other occupants in the compartment, an old couple, perhaps a retired farmer and his wife. I felt at once that they disapproved of me.
A hundred times during the day I felt the young man’s eyes upon me, seldom on my face, more often on my legs or on my skirt or at the string which gathered the top of my dress in rucks over the smooth rise of my breasts. His attention, the insinuation in his eyes, and the throbbing motion of the train combined to make my flesh, damp from the journey, tingle with excitement against the undersurface of my clothes. Towards evening, I got up and went out into the corridor.
I moved along towards the end of the carriage to the little hallway which gave on to the toilet and stood looking out of the window at the dusk which was spreading to the pale orange horizon. A few moments later, I turned to find him standing beside me.
‘It’s a tiring journey,’ he said in a pleasant voice.
I nodded.
‘Trains are always boring,’ he said.
I agreed.
‘Do you smoke?’ He offered me a cigarette from a slim cigarette case.
I took one although I had never smoked before. He lit it for me and laughed when I began to cough immediately.
‘I thought I’d like to try one,’ I apologised through my coughing.
‘Good for you!’ he said. ‘You must try everything.’
At that moment, the train, which had slowed down, lurched into speed again, and the young man, knocked off his balance, came against me heavily. In his effort to steady himself, one of his hands gripped my arm, while the other, clutching lower down, closed on the upper part of my skirt, rending the material. Thus, suddenly, before both our eyes the velvety skin of my thigh was visible, pale and thickly fleshed in the gloom of the corridor. His apology was cut short by the sight of my face, turned up towards him now, my lips wet, expectant, and slightly apart, my glance boldly sensual. I was holding him close against me by his lapel. Without a word, he glanced quickly along the corridor and ushered me gently into the toilet.
For some minutes we pressed against one another with our straining bodies, our lips stuck together and his right hand kneading at the exposed flesh of my thigh; then, moving his hands downwards, he raised them again somewhere behind my knees under the skirt, upwards over the firm bulge of my buttocks, until, with one hand on either side, he clamped me close where his sex was. With the whole weight of my body balanced on the palms of his hands, I thrust my tongue deeply into his mouth, at the same time raising my legs round his waist, and then, in this position, he carried me across to the toilet seat, where he sat down, disclosing his sex with a deft movement, and lowered my
rigid torso until I felt my cleft split by the blunt power of his erection. Such was the intensity of my desire, so heavy was the abandoned suspension of my legs, that he penetrated at once to the very pit of me. In that position, my long fair hair hanging untidily over my tightly shut eyes, I rocked deliriously with all the force of my lower torso. What had begun to exist as a dull throb of hunger in the hotbed of my flanks now concentrated to an abscess of stabbing pleasure in the utter profundity of my diaphragm and burst, shooting a delicious corrosion through every fissure of my flesh. Simultaneously, my nerves registered the final ecstatic vibrations of the strong shaft which transfixed me. My trembling thighs were wet with the lather of our fleshly collision, and between the smooth young globes of my tilting buttocks my glistening short hairs, still interwoven with his, seeped with a liquid like the viscous fluid of flowers. Under the wringing-wet shift his skilful fingers were tracing delicate patterns on my back, and the satisfied heap of my belly rose and fell against him for want of breath.
A moment later, he gently tilted my chin upwards and looked into my face.
‘What’s your name?’ His grey eyes were amused but gentle at the same time.
‘Helen.’
‘Do you often do this?’
‘I did it for the first time yesterday, with a man I mean.’
He raised his eyebrows in surprise.
‘Where do you come from?’
I shook my head without answering.
‘Alright,’ he said. ‘It’s none of my business. Where are you going?’
‘To Sydney first.’
‘I’m going there too,’ he said.
I smiled at him, drew his head towards me, and kissed him sensually on the lips. But he drew away.
‘Not like that,’ he said. ‘Stand up, Helen, and take off your skirt.’
As I was wearing a dress I had to uncover the upper part of my torso as well. As I did so, the packet with my money fell out.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s mine.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ he said casually. ‘Now, put it down beside your dress and come here.’
I did not hesitate to obey. I was not wearing knickers. The upper part of my body was clad in a short shift of snow-white linen. It came down only as far as my navel. The soft burnished underside of my belly was thus naked except for the two elastic thongs of my garterbelt, which ran downwards to the fleshy part of my thighs, framing the gleaming hairs of my sex and joining the glove-tight neatness of my dull dark stockings, which caused the flesh to bulge slightly where it issued from them. I went towards him slowly.
When I reached the edge of the toilet on which he was sitting, he halted me. He sat for a moment, gazing at the warm contours of my mound. Then he stood up.
‘Stand up there, Helen,’ he said.
Again I obeyed him. I realised with pleasure what he was about to do. Level now with my centre, the smooth inclined place of my thighs sweeping downwards to his lips, it was as though some kind of erosion were taking place in my tired limbs. I quivered like a reed. A sliding within me mounted to breaking point as I clutched close, until the electricity mounted again to my nipples and the seed flowed in my womb like sand shifting in the tide.
At the peak of my pleasure, I moaned softly, uttering needless demands, the whispered words escaping hoarsely from between my lips until that final fractured moment when the orgiastic tensions snapped with the elasticity of a wet lip somewhere in the most secret part of me.
And there was more, with the sound of the rails underneath and emptiness in the corridor, before I rose to kiss him for the last time, but the train was slowing down to enter a station.
As I slipped the dress back over my warm satisfied flesh, the true immensity of the adventure before me filled me with an ungovernable joy of living.
Chapter Three
We must have come far during the day. But I saw very little except movement of the sand dunes in the strong sunlight. It was almost white. And, occasionally, a few palm trees.
They placed me in a kind of tent on top of one of the camels. Evidently they fear I might be seen by someone in a passing caravan. But the cloth flapped about in the air and I could see the swaying train of camels ahead, and sometimes a man on foot in a white burnous, or two or three of them, black-faced, sometimes turbanned, and occasionally a man would glance up at me. Each time I tried to see in him my lover of the night before. But I could never be certain.
Strangely enough, I feel almost no desire to escape now. I am caught up in my own history, which moves on hidden springs which I cannot pretend to understand. I suspect that I have abandoned myself so utterly that, were a chance of escape to offer itself, I would ignore it. I want the future that is in store for me. The discomfort of the day’s journey is more than compensated for by the acute sense of anticipation which seems to hang at my thighs at this moment. It is nearly dark outside the tent. Not much noise in the camp. I will continue my account, but I shall have to be careful, for I may be visited at any moment.
I suppose what occurred now was inevitable. The nameless young stranger of the train – we agreed that we wanted to know nothing more of one another than we knew already – deserted me after a few days in Sydney, during which time he initiated me into some of the most subtle of erotic pleasures. He left the lodging house, where we stayed together as man and wife, taking most of the money with him. He left me only ten pounds and an unsigned note which read:
Dear Helen,
You are a most wonderful creature and will go far. Meanwhile, with little compunction, I have taken your money. A girl like you has no need of it anyway, not, I’m afraid, that your need, had it existed, would have made any difference to my own very real requirements.
Adieu.
The theft was a blow. Stranded in Sydney almost without money, I was forced to give up temporarily the idea of my flight from Australia. I found it difficult to blame the young man, although I would willingly have seen him hanged to have my money back.
My inexperience, together with my desire to be near oceangoing ships, took me down to the docks in whose precincts all the flotsam and jetsam of the big seaport gathered. There, in one of the dockside cinemas, I allowed myself to be picked up by a man whose hand glided under my skirt during the performance. He was a sailor, and he took me to a cheap hotel in the neighbourhood. In the squalor of his bed, I surrendered to him all the delights of my young female limbs. He took me brutally, his massive body sprawled on top of my sensitive flesh, mouthing obscenities at the moment at which his lust parted from him. Afterwards, he called me a whore and a low bitch, doubtless because his lack of education caused him to be conscience-stricken by the intensity of his own pleasure. It was an experience which I would not have missed but which, in its unimaginative haste, palled very quickly.
He had promised to get me a passage to Singapore on one of the ships. In Singapore, he insinuated, a healthy young girl like myself could find lucrative work. I would earn enough money to travel farther west in comfort. It was only after he had deserted me for two days and two nights, leaving me utterly penniless, that I realised he had no intention of returning.
I had some difficulty in leaving the lodging house because my sailor had left without paying the bill. The landlord, a heavy man of nearly sixty, threatened to send for the police. He relented, but only after I had allowed him to take his pleasure of me in the cellar where the beer barrels were kept. He took me there to be out of the way of his wife, and, as it was a stone floor, he threw a few potato sacks down to protect my naked thighs. Afterwards, he drew two glasses of beer, toasted my health, and gave me a few shillings for my pocket. As I left, he patted my shoulder in a paternal way and told me to look after myself.
Free again, with all my possessions in one small case, I wandered through the narrow streets near the docks. I was held by the loading cranes which rose above the rooftops and by the foghorns of the ships which would soon sail for forei
gn countries. I had no idea of what I should do. I was beginning to realise the danger of letting myself be taken too easily. I had not eaten for two days and was farther off than ever from that soft narcotic climate in which I felt my whole being would flourish. Thus I repelled the advances of the various sailors who tried to pick me up on the streets, and finally I entered a quiet café, sat far away from the door, and ordered something to eat.
I had been sitting there alone for over half an hour, wondering what I was going to do for a place to sleep, when a young man entered. He was obviously a halfcaste, but he was very expensively dressed in a white silk shirt and a well-cut blue suit. He sat down first at a table close to me, and then, when I did not seem to notice him, he came and sat down beside me.
‘Are you alone?’ he said.
I nodded.
He smiled at me. ‘You look unhappy,’ he said. ‘Have you anywhere to go?’ His eyes were on the small case beside me.
I shook my head.
‘Tired?’
‘Yes.’
‘You can sleep at my place for the night,’ he said. ‘We can discuss the future tomorrow.’
Without waiting for a reply, he lifted my case, paid the bill, and walked outside to his parked car. I had never seen one like it before. It was a new Jaguar. I followed mechanically. I was tired and desperate, and he looked more interesting than any of the sailors who hung around the streets, one of whom I would eventually have had to accept as a lover merely to get a bed.
Helen And Desire Page 3