The policeman glanced casually at my papers and allowed me to pass outside into the street. I had walked about twenty yards when I heard him call me back. Perhaps something in my walk had made him suspicious. I froze momentarily, and then, making up my mind in a flash, I dashed headlong for the nearest corner. I heard his shout and then the noise of his footsteps in pursuit. I turned the corner well ahead of him and found myself in an almost deserted side street. I cursed my luck. I had hoped for a main thoroughfare, for crowds into which I might disappear. I ran on. Fortunately, I was fleet-footed. My thighs flashed under the rough seaman’s trousers. He was still about twenty yards behind when I turned the next corner. He was blowing a whistle now. I darted across the road towards a house which stood in its own grounds, almost running right into a rickshaw which moved swiftly across my path. I tore open the gate, slammed it behind me, and ran to hide in the bushes. I heard the footsteps of my pursuer turn the corner and come to a halt. He walked backwards and forwards in indecision. Cautiously, I crept through the bushes, trembling at every crackling twig, towards the low pagoda-like villa. In this way I circled the house. There was no one on the verandah which gave onto the lawn. I moved quickly across open space and slipped through the open French windows into a lounge furnished with all the splendours of the Orient. Silk damask, jades, ebonies and ivories, rich Chinese rugs, an atmosphere laden with the heavy-sweet smell of incense, which burned in a censer – I had not time to take it all in before I heard the sound of approaching voices speaking some Oriental tongue. I crossed the room in one bound and concealed myself behind some curtains of helio silk.
Chapter Six
We have been camped here for two days. A tall Arab came during the day with another man. He made me stand naked while the other man examined me, pinching my plump buttocks, feeling the posture of my hips, examining my teeth. Evidently I am to be sold.
The idea excites me. Not indifference, not horror, but positively and corruptively almost a feeling of lust. Here is a denial of personality which I have been at such pains to extinguish by my own efforts. Here is a positive and shattering assertion that I am coincident with the pleasure that is to be had between my thighs or at the nipples of my firm breasts. My wildest dreams then become for these men who handle me a matter of fact. Dualism is extinguished, mind obliterated by the refusal of these men to notice its existence. I am annihilated. There remains only this dusky front, the mould of this flank, the tilt of these breasts, the moist softness of this cleft below the strong jut of the mound. They have a life of their own, and in their alluvial silts I lust to submerge myself. And these strange men are my confederates. For the first time in my life, without hypocrisy, without prevarication, I am valued for what I am, woman, the roots of sex and pleasure. I am purged of all poisons, of civilisation.
From my hiding place behind the curtain I saw the two Chinese enter the room and sit cross-legged on cushions on the floor. A moment later a young Chinese girl entered bearing a tray with tea on it. She curtsied and placed it between the men. She was a doll-like, fragile creature dressed in heavily embroidered silk, a tunic, and black silk trousers. She wore boat-shaped little slippers on her naked yellow feet. Having placed the tray in position, she curtsied for a second time and glided silently from the room. The two men talked Chinese. Behind the curtain I leaned back well out of sight.
About a quarter of an hour later, one of the men clapped his hands. The same young Chinese girl entered and removed the tray. Then two fat little men, in dragon-patterned silk robes, came in carrying musical instruments. After bowing politely, they sat well back in one corner and began to play some kind of weird and apparently disordered melody.
One of the two spectators rose then and closed the French windows and over them the heavy damask curtains. In the semidarkness he crossed the room and struck one resounding blow on a brass gong. Then he rejoined the other man in a cross-legged position.
At that moment a tinkle of little bells came to me at the other side of the curtain. It sounded like the little jostling bells one sometimes finds on a pony harness. I widened the slit in the curtain to get a better view of what was passing in the room. A beam of green light from one side of the room picked out the smooth and heavily bedecked body of the young Balinese dancer whose sudden knee movements – for her knees were encrusted with small bells – had caused the tinkling sound which had caused me to look. Every movement of her green-hinged body was oblique, as though her graceful limbs were composed of mechanical jade. She wore a tall, intricately worked head-dress, which appeared to represent in a formalized way some personage in a nest of snakes. The snake-like impression was intensified by the cool angular thrusts of her arms and by the oiled rigidity of her long tapering hands. The cage of her pelvis seemed to be encrusted with jewels which in the strange light appeared to be embedded in the beautiful orbs of her buttocks and, in the centre of the pale green flesh of her soft twitching abdomen a ruby sparkled, a magic navel of fire which reflected the light in all its surfaces, sending needles of colour in all directions. Below the navel, the shadow of her mound was scarcely visible under the thin gold-metallic leaves which seemed to sprout amongst her slow-moving short hairs. Her breasts were entirely naked but tipped each with some jewel which sparkled faintly in the dance. Her neck supported a high collar of silver which lent rigidity to the poise of her head, the head of a statue, kohl-eyed and expressionless as that of an eastern goddess.
Under my startled eyes the strange dance progressed, continued rather, for it did not appear to have either a beginning or an end, being a series of gestures, exotic, sensual, and mechanical at the same time, and not a dance in our western sense. As the girl danced, I realised that her apparent height was deceptive. She was in fact extremely small, like a Chinese woman, and looked tall and stately merely because of the headdress, the exotic harness, and the lighting effects. She looked almost like a child or a doll, and her skin where it was visible had the sheen of pale green porcelain. Her hemispherical breasts were no bigger than apples, and bejewelled as they were, they glowed ambiguously with a fragile duck-egg blue. The faces of the men who sat cross-legged on the cushions were likewise expressionless. I was fascinated by the incense-laden formality of the spectacle.
Suddenly, as inconsequentially as it had begun, the music ceased. The girl stood rigid, without movement, her arms strangely crooked like the handles of an ornate vessel, her kohl-black eyes flickering and occult.
The fat little musicians got up and left the room.
One of the spectators bowed to the other, who returned his bow, and with his hands in the loose silk sleeves of his kimono, he followed the musicians out.
The man who remained said something in Chinese to the dancer. She bowed and sat down on the edge of a divan. Her face was devoid of expression. He crossed the room, did something with the light switches, and the beam changed the direction of its thrust so that the divan and the glimmering trappings of the dancer were flooded in a pool of green. Then he returned and sat down beside her. From my place of concealment I had a direct view of them.
They sat close on the divan, and, as he drew her towards him, the man’s hand caressed the smooth naked slice of thigh which was now exposed to him. Then, with one hand behind her shoulders, he raised her head close to his own and kissed her on the lips. Their movements were slow and suggestive. He was breathing heavily. Suddenly he said something which I couldn’t understand, at the same time relaxing his grip. The young girl slithered out of his grasp and began to remove her exotic trappings. First she removed the headdress, her slender arms pushing it upwards from her short blue-black hair. This had the effect of making her skilfully shaded eyes as large as saucers in which the strange liquids of fear and sensuality fought for control. Then, without a word, she stripped the bejewelled harness from her slim pale yellow body and cast it in a glittering heap on the floor, until she stood stark naked, as palely and supremely beautiful as a lily, her small silky mound like a soft paintbrush, wettened w
ith ink.
For a moment he was content to admire her nudity and made no attempt to move towards her. She, meanwhile, stood with lowered glance, a delicate slave awaiting his pleasure. Then he reached forward to put his hands on her hips and drew her small body towards him. A slight reluctance caused a tremor to pass through her silken flesh before, abruptly, it swayed forward in complete subjection towards his lips. He kissed her navel, now devoid of its ruby, almost religiously, his hands cupped over her small tense buttocks, whose substance in the strange light quivered like pale green blancmange. Then his hands, caressing her sides and flanks, seemed to coax his own body off the divan. He was still wearing his kimono, which reached the floor around him like a tent. And so it turned out to be, for, hastelessly, his hands on her temples now, he forced her head and body downwards until she sat crosslegged at his feet, and, raising his kimono at the front, he brought it down over and shrouded her head and shoulders until she had disappeared entirely beneath its folds. They remained in this position for some time, and then gradually he raised her under his cloak so that her nude flesh must have been splashed against his front, while his hands – the kimono between them and her flesh – sought the smooth outline of her buttocks and her little yellow heels dangled just in sight below the hem of his kimono. In this position she rose and fell against him passionately, her toes flexed and sometimes finding the floor to prise herself forwards and upwards again against the unseen genitals of the man.
Soon they fell sideways onto the couch and the man’s powerful lower limbs, naked and glistening in the green light, kicked amongst hers as his buttocks tightened to the orgasm.
They lay still.
A moment later he had divested himself of his kimono and was lying naked beside her. Already, I felt the familiar constriction at my throat, the subterranean tremor in the secrecy of my womb, and, had I not been afraid of his anger, I would have taken off my own clothes and offered myself to his embrace. As it was, I could scarcely restrain myself, for he had begun again to make love to her, only this time in an unfamiliar way. She was lying on her belly in front of him and his hands pulled her buttocks apart, exposing the soft downy crevice and the little amulet of illicit love, round and gathered as a rosebud. At that moment, I could not help comparing him to some horned and mythical creature, a demigod with a nymph, in a temple of initiation. He was kneeling behind her, between her legs. Cautiously, as one might thread a needle, he put his point to her, testing the elasticity of her nether love lips with small, almost doting hip pressures. Suddenly, he seemed to make up his mind, like a skilful surgeon who has decided how to make his incision, and, driving his knees into the softness of the divan, he penetrated her buttocks with the force of a battering ram. The girl cried out in pain but he held her. His forearm was a bar of iron at her straining shoulders. One hand held her by the tuft of hair at the scruff of her neck; the other was under her belly, pressing her rump upwards towards him, and his legs, like powerful creepers, grafted themselves to hers as he pinioned her helplessly to meet his thrust.
At first the girl lay unresisting like a crushed flower under the flat bow of his front, but gradually, as the exploring member moved more easily at her shy ventricle, her softened buttocks mushroomed slowly upwards towards their split to imprison what was within. In a subtle collusion of movement they knelt, the man behind and against the girl who drooped frailly forwards like a broken flower stem so that her glistening hair fell in a blue veil over her eyes. They came to a climax simultaneously, she, spiked deeply, sitting on his knee at the edge of the divan, her small oval hips tilted upwards and her lips, like soft red petals at his mouth, uttered a low moan of pleasure.
Almost immediately, he stood up, pressed a button, and the normal electric lights came into play.
He said something to the girl, who rose slowly to a standing position and raised her slender arms high above her head so that the flesh glimmered whitely under the thin wisp of blue-black hair at her armpits. Her buttocks were tight and her toes were tensed in the thick pile of the carpet. Her breasts and hips looked as though they were moulded of pale yellow porcelain, the former crowned by the buds of delicate violets. He nodded, crossed the floor to where the girl stood rigid in a quivering curve from her heels to her tilted breasts to her fingertips, and, without haste, ran the palm of his hand over the downy contour of her back and buttocks.
He seemed to wish to prolong his orgy indefinitely, to be unwilling to have the beautiful creature go out of his sight. He pinched and patted her with the fingers of a connoisseur. All the time she stood like a statue and I could hear him breathing heavily.
Suddenly, and quite viciously, he slapped her across the face with his open hand, so that she fell again across the divan. I think she must have fainted momentarily. When she came out of her faint she began to cry, low convulsive sobs which caused her little breasts to rise and fall tremulously. He raised her legs onto her stomach, opened her thighs like a bible and lowered his muscly front into the soft and shadowy cleft. The girl, stimulated by the contact, moaned and shuddered with pleasure, a pleasure which seemed all the more desperate and complete for the exaggerated sensitivity of her lacerated flesh. Shortly afterwards it was over. He threw her a pale blue kimono. She put it on, collected the pieces of her dancing costume, and crept from the room in a bowing posture.
The man, seemingly abstracted now, put on his own kimono, lit a long and tapering cigarette, and clapped his hands. The servant who appeared silently opened the curtains, flooding the room with daylight.
I was not able to leave my hiding place until evening. I was not afraid of my unknowing host’s sexual passion. On the contrary, if my position in Singapore had not been so insecure I would willingly have given myself to him. But at that moment I was in need of a protector and not a lover, although I had no doubt that one man would insist on fulfilling both functions.
As soon as the room was deserted I had my first opportunity since leaving the ship to look at myself in the mirror. Straightway, I removed the cap and ruffled my blonde hair. It had a windswept appearance which, although I was unaware of it, was quite fashionable among Eastern women of that time. For myself, unconscious as yet of all fashions – in Australia clothes are worn to hide one’s shame and not to render the female body more provocative – I was quite pleased with its appearance. But my clothes were impossible. Already I had conceived a plan. If I could find some suitable clothes I would not be afraid to be found ‘in possession’ of the room when the owner returned.
By a stroke of good fortune the matter was soon settled. I found an intricately worked kimono of brocaded yellow silk in a cabinet. Hastily, I divested myself of my seaman’s attire, glanced at the luscious maturity of my creamy flesh, and slipped into the cool yellow silk. Then, rolling the clothes I had taken off into a bundle, I went through the French windows and threw it into the centre of a clump of bushes. The moment I had done so it occurred to me that I had forgotten about the young seaman’s papers. They had been in one of the pockets. And now, since the undergrowth was so dense, they were irrevocably lost to me. But I had little time for the luxuries of conscience. Without delay I returned to the room and made myself comfortable on one of the divans.
About an hour later, a servant entered bearing a tray of refreshments. He had laid it down on a table before he became aware of my presence. His face remained impassive when he saw me. He hesitated for a moment and then, as though nothing was out of order, he left the room with small quick steps. I heard excited conversation at the other side of the door, high-pitched staccato Chinese voices. I got up from the divan and helped myself to a drink. I had decided that I might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, although I was tolerably certain that my host, obviously a man of culture, would be more imaginative than that in his treatment of me.
I moved over to a chair by the window to drink what I had poured myself, and I had no sooner installed myself there than the door opened and this prince of sensualists came graciously across
the room towards me.
He stood a few yards off, bowed, and said in faultless English:
‘You wished to see me, madam?’
‘I need your help, sir,’ I said.
‘It will be my pleasure,’ he replied at once. ‘But first, my dear lady, hadn’t you better explain to me how you come to be in my house, unknown to me, and wearing, if I am not mistaken, a garment which belongs to me?’
‘I came in by the window,’ I said. ‘And as I had no clothes I put this on.’
‘I see,’ he said ironically, but never for a moment losing his affable tone. ‘Like a goddess you arrived naked at my window, entered, and clothed yourself. Now all is explained.’
‘I could hardly have presented myself to you without clothes,’ I said with intended finality.
‘Assuredly not,’ he agreed most politely. ‘A poor mortal such as I could not expect . . . ah, if it were only possible! But then, like my great master, Confucius, I am cursed by a restless and enquiring spirit. A fair goddess, in my house, in my robe . . .’
‘If you wish to have it back,’ I said with hauteur, and I began to take it off.
‘Please, dear lady!’ he said, raising a hand in protest. ‘It is yours. You are more than welcome to everything that is in my house. Forgive my enquiring spirit! In some circumstances it is not the least of my virtues.’
I smiled at him.
‘A moment,’ he said, gesturing for me to sit down. He clapped his hands. A servant appeared and my host gave an order in Chinese.
Helen And Desire Page 7