Jacky S - Suburban Souls, Book II

Here Lilian grips her lips with her hand and hides her mouth; her elbows resting on the table.

Mamma continues: “She is not going to take any fresh customers, but gradually drop the old ones. I want her to shut up at once, but she wishes to wait until September, when the season here is over. She will become her Papa's secretary (I kick Lilian under the table), he will give her a salary (a kick), and teach her the business (a kick); so that she will become a lady journalist (a kick); and remain comfortably at home with her Papa!” (Kick, kick, kick!) I agree heartily with Mamma. “Certainly, she cannot do better than always remain with her Papa!”

Lilian holds her lips tight and does not move. Papa returns and says that she does not help him. She retorts that the other day she prepared a lot of newspaper cuttings. Papa says:

“You were to have worked a day with me, but you never turned up.”

She takes some medicine, which I opine is for cramps of the stomach, a well-known symptom of poor-blooded hysteria, and the dogs come in.

One bitch licks my ears. Lilian pretends to be disgusted. Mamma not being present, I say that ear-licking is nice and that lovers lick each other's ears.

“When you are married, you will be glad to lick your husband's ears!”

“Horrible!” she exclaims. Papa smokes in silence.

Mamma returns and the talk turns on theatres. Lilian tells Mamma to go to bed. Lilian has a pleasant, cool way of saying curtly:

“Go to bed, Mamma!”

Her replaceable parent refuses. Lilian talks of the plays she saw in Brussels.

“You went to a theatre every night?”

“Not every night,” answers Papa, “as she was ill part of the time. She caught cold during a drive in the Bois de la Cambre, and went to bed early.7 I wanted to go out and leave her. She would not allow me to do so.”

“No, certainly not!” protests Lilian. “Pa wanted to see the Carnival. I wasn't going to let him gad about alone.”

Mamma laughs and looks at me with sparkling, aggressive eyes.

“She only let me go from her side once the whole time we were there, and that was for ten minutes,” said Papa.

And he then held down his head and looked quite silly and delighted. And so did Lilian. They were really, without exaggeration, like a newly-married couple talking of their honeymoon. Mamma beamed on the guilty pair, and glared defiance at me, with glittering glance, as if to show me that she was on guard, to defend the happiness of Papa and Lilian against a wicked stranger. Poor foolish mother! She too, was trying to torture Jacky.

“How about taking the dogs out?” asks Papa.

“Lilian! Why don't you go out with Mr. Arvel and Mr. S.?” says Mamma.

“I don't like three people walking together,” retorts her daughter.

This was a hint for me, but I refused to take it.

Lilian thanks me for some of my own make of eau de Cologne that I have brought her. She is going to be rubbed with it, as I have advised her. She says that Mamma does not know how to “friction” her. Ma declares that she is a bad nurse. Lilian replied freely before her mother that Pa alone knows how to rub her properly. Papa says he will come and wake her up early as usual, and rub her with eau de Cologne. Lilian answers that she will not be woke by him any more, and forbids him to come into her room in the morning. So Mamma goes to bed, looking at me with a triumphant air, and Papa and I go out together, leaving Lilian alone. There is no more strolling for me alone with her. They are punishing me.

We walk and I talk. Again Papa recurs to Trixie. He asks what has become of her. I reply that she had a slight illness. That I lost sight of her, and during the Easter holidays I saw her husband in deep mourning with the children.

If a husband walks out in black at Easter with his little family and no mother, it is a sure sign that their Mamma is dead. I often caught sight of him since, but always in mourning, and never with Trixie. He cannot get over the fact of her having procured women for me. I explain to him that a woman who really adores a man will do almost anything, and suffer a martyrdom; or go through the most disgusting vicissitudes, enduring what seems sometimes beyond human strength. (He ought not to be surprised, for has not Adèle given him her daughter?) I quote wife-beaters, and how they refuse to charge their husbands. It is all love.

“Lust, you mean!” he adds, with a snarl of deep scorn. He is a man who despises women, and hates them because he cannot do without them in the kitchen and in bed.

We speak of jealousy. I tell him that Trixie was always ready to go with any man or woman I told her. Jealousy is a ridiculous feeling. He declares that he is jealous and that he could not care for a woman if he thought she had anybody else. He could not enjoy a partie carrée. This interesting talk takes up so much time that when we return, I have missed a train. There is none now until 12:20. He will sit with me another hour.

Lilian is alone, reading one of my magazines. Papa leaves us.

“Well what do you think of me?” I say. “You did not imagine I was so clever with women? I should like to have your frank opinion of Jacky.”

“I think you are not clever. You are very bad. I could never have supposed you would have had such horrible thoughts of me.”

I laugh disdainfully.

She then says, slowly and sadly, with a sigh:

“I am very wicked sometimes.”

This is the nearest approach to remorse or regret that I have ever heard from her.

I do not reply, and a moment later, Papa returns, and she shortly afterwards touches his cheek with her lips, chastely, and he salutes her on both cheeks as on the occasion of my last visit, and she bids us both “good night.” After this kissing comedy, she says “Good night,” softly and kindly to me specially, and gives me her hand. She is sad. Still she does not go at once, but hovers round Papa and strokes him gently on the head with her book. At last, she goes, gliding away gravely, bidding me good night for the third time, gently and warmly, as if regretfully. I rise respectfully from my chair, touched in spite of myself by the misery of her tone, and return her good night as she goes by, and she begs me to be seated and not derange myself.

Thus she passes out of my life. I have heard her speak to me for the last time and her last words were: “I am very wicked sometimes!”

Could a novel-writer find a better exit for his heroine than that?

Papa and I are once more alone together. Still more bawdy chat. I say that I had a demi-vierge all the year before and that I respected her virginity. Did I do wrong or not? Am I not a fool?

“No,” says Pa, “you acted properly.”

“But she went afterwards and gave herself up to somebody else.”

“You can't help that. You did your duty.”

He would like to meet a woman with an elongated clitoris. I talk to him of hermaphroditism. I am getting tired and sleepy. I remember that in January, Lilian was greatly struck by that character in Justine, called Dorothée, who possessed a penis-like clitoris. Miss Arvel frequently mentioned it. The idea tickled her fancy. And now Papa talks of the same anomaly! How they must have enjoyed my bawdy books together!

Again he says that girls nowadays prefer being “messed about” to honest coition.

“Ah! They tell you that to please you,” I reply, “when you don't have connection with them nicely; or when they don't like you; or when you can't.”

He pauses and reflects, and I think that masturbation and prolonged and unnatural caresses, when practiced before the age of puberty, or shortly afterwards, at the dawn of woman's sexual career, lead to an aversion for normal coition in later life. In such cases, some abnormal stimulus trains the sensual desires to respond to an appeal which has nothing to do with the fascination normally excited by the opposite sex. Anything will therefore serve to produce the orgasm: man, woman, or child; an obscene book, or their own finger, without counting purely mechanical means. There is no warmth or tenderness: one man being as good as another to them. Indeed, once their venereal sluices opened and shut, the presence of the male, or the active agent, becomes more wearisome than otherwise, and they evince no desire to return in kind. The organs are quickly excited and as quickly dormant again. The private parts, thus so early brought into use, and subjected to such sudden strain, revolt against the repeated unnatural shocks, and becoming flaccid, lose their tone. All is soft, stretched, and open, and lovers are bewildered to find a young face on the body of a woman whose soft flesh seems to be dropping from the bone, while they go away wondering how such a darling little chit should carry between her thighs the yawning gulf of an older mother of a family.