Jacky S - Suburban Souls, Book II

I am going over to London tomorrow for a few days and then to Ireland for a change.

Can I do anything for you when in the little village?

With best wishes, in which all join, believe me to remain,

Yours very truly,

ERIC ARVEL.

I answered as follows:

JACKY TO ERIC ARVEL.

Paris. July 14, 1899.

Dear Mr. Arvel,

I am very sorry to hear you have been so ill. I hope you will soon pull round and will profit by your trip.

I ought to be away myself, for fear of fresh rheumatics next winter but all my people have been ill. And so I stick in Paris.

I got the negatives quite safety, and the prints thereof have been a great success wherever shown. For which many thanks.

I am grateful for your offer to be of use to me in London, but I have nothing I can worry you with this journey.

Renewed health, pleasant journey, and a happy return home-that is all the harm I wish you.

Yours faithfully,

JACKY.

I was, rightly or wrongly, so disgusted at his letter, that I hesitated a few hours about answering it, and at last sent him the foregoing, out of common politeness, but I took good care not to mention Adèle or her daughter: his two concubines.

The story of the “violent salivation” seemed diabolically fantastic, if true.

Salivation by inhalation is possible, but rare. I feared to think that the shadow of syphilis was hovering over the villa of Sonis, and that my quondam host had simply been taking mercurial frictions, thus accounting for the malady of years ago.

Anyhow the lips of Lilian, that I once thirsted for, were at the disposal of a salivated man. She was the mistress of her mother's old lover, with rotting gums and fetid breath; sore lips, and ulcerated mouth and tongue.

I prefer not to write more on this subject, and hope that his letter was strictly true.

Although he had only spoken of the British Isles in his letter, I heard afterwards that he was seen in Brussels. I did not verify the statement. I could have written to Mallandyne again, but I resolved to try and forget. I cared very little. I was a subscriber to a newspaper where Arvel contributed articles regularly, and he would date them from different places he used to visit, so that would have been a slight indication of his movements, and the whereabouts of Lilian. My subscription was up, and I did not renew it.

This peculiar mania for writing half the truth to me suddenly and without cause or reason, betrayed a strange hysterical frame of mind in a man of his age, and made me think that most of Lilian's later letters, including the famous one from Lille, were suggested and dictated by him. It was not nice to say: “the bichloride you gave me” I got it at his request.

This poison story made me very angry and as I still continued to send Mr. Arvel his bundles of newspapers, I resolved to tease him a little, as he was trying to do with me, and at the same time to offend him thoroughly.

I amused myself by marking with a red pencil all paragraphs that seemed to have a bearing on illicit connections between fathers and daughters, or brothers and sisters; and cuttings from periodicals, together with any matter that seemed to allude to my amours with Lilian.

I found a number of stories, scandals, police cases and gossip in society papers, which had a special meaning for him and me, but I will only mention a few of the most remarkable ones.

There was a small article in a number of Answers, called: “That Wonderful Number Four,” and I did not fail to frame it with crimson dashes.

In Society, during this month, I marked a few lines about Napoleon the First. (See Appendix K.) I took the paper regularly and Papa had it as soon as I had read it.

July 28, 1899.

Here are a few specimens of what I sent him:

A prospectus of a new work on sexual anomalies, entitled: The Ethnology of the Sixth Sense.

I wrote on the first page in pencil:

“I have a copy of this book, which I can lend you, if you like to say the word.”

The second page gave a table of contents, and following the mention, “Monstrous clitoris,” I added:

“Compare with Dorothée. (Justine.) Conversations in January.

“Compare conversations on the same topic in May.

“Compare Romance of Lust, vol. II, p. 72: Lizzie.”

What could he think of the month of January being mentioned by me? At that time he was away in the South, and the allusion was plain to the fact of Lilian and him being in complicity, by the mention of the two books, one lent to him, and one to her.

I also added two cuttings, one relating to the crime of Bordes, an incestuous murderer, and the other headed: “A Horrible Crime.” (See Appendix L and M.)

ERIC ARVEL TO JACKY.

Sonis-sur-Marne. August 2, 1899.

Dear Jacky,

If you have not anything better to do, will you come down tomorrow Thursday, and have lunch with us? We shall all be delighted to have you. Raoul is here just now, but is going back on Friday.

Hoping to see you and have a good chat with you,

I remain,

Yours very truly,

ERIC ARVEL.

I was greatly surprised at getting the above invitation, after the mercury missive and my selection of insulting paragraphs. What made me smile bitterly was that the invitation arrived Wednesday evening, August 2, and I was to go the next day.

Most of the letters from Sonis were typewritten, and I could nearly always tell whether the father or the girl had used the machine to write to me, as there were slight differences in the writings.

It would be too long to describe how I arrived at the knowledge by comparison, but I was certain that the above had been composed and typed by Lilian and signed by her Papa.

Besides, it was the beginning of the month and she would be under the influence of her “menses.” Immediately before and immediately after the flow, there would be a heightening of actual desire and she would think of me, for such is the effect of menstruation on unbalanced individuals.

The time I saw her, after I searched for her maidenhead in the cab, was May 3, and she is complaining that she is about to be unwell.

She gets me invited again for May 28. I am not sent for again until August 3.

I felt a little pity for her, as I thought of her monthly martyrdom, and I asked myself if she were not perhaps only a miserable victim of the workings of her womb.

When we think of the debased, mercenary whore, who counts upon the weakness of man to feather her nest, we must keep her image distinct from that of the normally healthy woman, with true equilibrium of the reasoning faculties, who has nothing in common with poor-blooded neuropaths hardly responsible for their actions every twenty-eight days, and who pass half their lives seated on a cold custard.

A woman to keep her secrets should never let her male victim know her diaper days.

During the menstrual period of these hysterical women, we find falsehood united to wickedness and craft; cowardly slander; calumnious denunciations; the setting of perfidious snares, and the invention of satanic fables and even robberies, while they cleverly arrange things, so that suspicions shall fall on innocent parties.

My reader has only to run through the dates set down in this book and he will see that all the principal events take place between the twentieth of one month and the eighth of the next; except when there is an irregularity, as when Miss Arvel denied receiving the money I had sent her, and during the fausse couche of January.

No doubt all her life was controlled by her “flowers,” being a hereditarily neurotic subject, and on such a morbid soil, early masturbation and the tantalizing practices peculiar to half-virgins, and women who refuse to have children, would produce neurasthenia with its manifest symptoms.