Jacky S - Suburban Souls, Book II

Your idea about a woman writing her own double life is a very good one. But as there exist no really truthful autobiographies or confessions written by men, how can you expect women to have less vanity and more veracity than we have? Nevertheless, women are always confessing, if you only take the trouble to listen to them. They are so cunning and clever-not intelligent, for malice and craftiness do not betoken intelligence-that they continually overreach themselves, and if you coolly think over all a woman has said and written to you, you ought to get very near the truth. A man who can't do that, is of no use with women. But all are not daughters of Judas. There do exist loving, tender, truthful women. Sensible people know how rare they are. Their lives would be uninteresting, so we could only get revelations from wicked creatures.

A man need not take much trouble to “hold a woman by her senses,” or otherwise. Be natural, straightforward, and patient, and if she loves you, she will hold you herself. But she must feel something with you which she feels with no other. She must prefer you.

I have a pet theory, although in these matters there are no hard and fast rules to be laid down. It is this: a man may love many times in his life; a woman loves but once. If you could get at a woman's heart, you would only find one name deeply engraved upon it, even though she may have had countless lovers. Some women meet that one man at the outset of their career, others later, and many never.

Some have come across the one man they could have loved and have kept their secret. They have never been “had” by him and he never knows how he was loved. If you have fallen across that genuine, disinterested tenderness during your life, you are all right. If not, you have never known the real love of a woman.

I am most happy to hear you have been enjoying good health and been taking pleasant journeys.

Since June we have left off subscribing to The Stock Exchange Review, so I do not see your articles, which I suppose you still contribute and send from the different continental towns you visit?

All my family, you will be pleased to hear, are very well indeed, “as it leaves me at present.”

Yours faithfully,

JACKY.

P.S. -I didn't have Nemesis Hunt last week.

There was a slight retard. Not surprising when we think of what she gets up to-and down, to, as well.

It's a far cry indeed from Mord Emly to my sweetheart Fanny Hunt.

The Double Life got into Mr. Arvel's hands on the seventeenth of September. On the eighteenth, he wrote the letter saying he would send me back the books “tomorrow.”

It is a stout volume of 446 pages! He and Lilian were reading it together, no doubt, and he wanted to lead me to believe that he could get through it in two days! In point of fact, he sent it to me back a week afterwards, on the twenty-fourth, after he had received my answer to his letter. When he wrote on the eighteenth, prompted by Lilian, they had not got to page 417, where I talked about the daughter hoodwinking men by pretending to be a virgin, whose Papa teases her with his infamous love, while she gets money out of her lovers for her dress and the house and is masturbated by her own brother, etc.

All this, however, is only to lead up to this concluding and amusing result:

The book came back entirely cut open for reading, with but one exception: one page of the preface-the one containing the lament over the daughter's death-of which I had lent the proof to the girl only, in May, was not cut. This was a damning oversight.

October 8, 1899.

During the whole of the month of August and the best part of September, my faithful mistress had been in the country and had not been well at all.

She returned about the twenty-second of September, and went to bed.

It was her last struggle. The doctors gave me no hope, and this morning she is gone from me, after suffering such agony that to stand by the bedside of a loved one, and see her hellishly racked fighting for life, as each essential organ gave way, would make an atheist of the most fervent believer and he would ask himself as I did: Is this the work of the Almighty? Is God a cruel Chinese mandarin or a torturing Torquemada?

In repose at last, on a bright Sunday morning. How beautiful she looked! During her illness I could not recognize her as the handsome, strong lass who had footed it merrily with me over peak, crag, and glacier but a few short years before in Switzerland.

Many a time she would fatigue our guide and he would drag himself slowly from the valley, while I, in despair, would lie down panting by the side of the steep path and looking up, admire my devoted companion's perfect frame, profiled against the clear sky, as alpenstock in hand, she stood triumphantly perched on some projecting rock.

And now she is gone. After death, the pristine beauty came back to the loving face, as if the mocking devils who had torn at her poor heart for years with the red-hot pincers of disease, had relented, and pleased to have finished their horrible task at last, satiated with her sufferings, had allowed her to look her best to show us poor mortals what fragile, feeble shadows we are.

And so she sleeps. Her big blue eyes will never more brighten at my footfall. I shall never see their laughing light again.

I kissed her still-warm cheek passionately and lengthily. I could have kept my lips to her face for an hour, but my tears fell upon her and that I did not like.

I am sorry I did not send for a photographer. I thought of that too late.

And so she sleeps. For the first time in my life I have seen a cherished being die and gazed at my love after death.

Up to now, I think I must have feared the end of all things. At present, the skeleton may come with his scythe, because I saw on the peaceful features of the white figure on the bed, who had been my girlish sweetheart, my wife without the priests, my devoted woman who lived for me alone, that she was at rest, and I really grasp the fact that death is the only true release.

And so she sleeps.

My fair Lilian is dead. She knew of naught but her love for me. The black Lilian lives, and she hates me by now. She will never forgive me for having seen through her tricks and wiles, aided in her natural cunning by the artificial villany of her salacious step-father, and her selfish mother.

The fathers are generally responsible in these cases, but when the mothers are weak, and sacrifice their daughters to keep the man at home and get all his money for the house, we must pity the young lass whose flower of virginity is torn from her by those who should be its most vigilant sentinels.

Corruptio optimi pessima, the corruption of the best is the worst-is not only true for the victim, but also for the seducer. Women who have been debauched in their teens, or earlier, under ordinary circumstances, often rise again. But those who have been led astray by their fathers, who have known a villainous priest, as it sometimes happens, never succeed in getting out of the mire. As criminals of olden days were marked with a branding iron, it would seem as if the defiling culprit seared his youthful living plaything with an indelible mark of shame.

At the same time, the unnatural parent, who may have shown an honest face up till then, acquires in his features an expression of savage hatred. He becomes quarrelsome and morose, and like Mr. Arvel, his soul torn by his unholy passions, knowing that the slightest whisper may render him a thing to be scorned by friends and neighbors, he hurries to snarl at everybody, as if preparing an everlasting defense of his conduct; as if he found an excuse for himself in vilifying his wife and speaking with scorn of the daughter-prostitute, whose caresses he would go and humbly beg for a moment after he had traduced her.