Jacky S - Suburban Souls, Book II

EXAGGERATED AMPLITUDE OF THE VAGINA.

“In certain women, the vagina may acquire a considerable amplitude. If it is congenital, and the woman is salacious, and indulges beyond measure in the pleasure of love with men who have a large member, her vagina may become a veritable gulf, in which a penis of ordinary dimensions finds itself quite lost. There is no remedy for this deformity, except to endeavor to palliate it with tonics and astringents within the limits of possibility.” (P. 311.)

“…If a woman has a small one, she makes no difficulty in showing it, and displaying the neatness of her receptacle. But if she has a large one, she never permits it to be seen, for fear of revealing her disgrace.” (P. 313.)

It will be noticed that mention is made in this last letter of Mr. Arvel to the well-known romance of Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders.

Papa was always alluding to this book, which had evidently made a deep impression on him. It will be remembered that the heroine unwittingly marries her brother. So whichever way we turn with the master of the Villa Lilian, the incubus of incest must always seemingly oppress us.

There was now a desire to see me again at Sonis. The lessons of typewriting were a pretext, and there was the hint of his departure to London, showing that the coast was clear for me in his absence.

ERIC ARVEL TO JACKY.

Sonis-sur-Marne. November 21, 1899.

My dear Jacky,

I am returning your three volumes, which I have read with much interest and I tender you my very best thanks for the loan of them.

The “indigo” one reads like a true story, as it might fall from the lips of a woman who had given herself up to circumstances, and set perhaps the correct value of a “jewel,” which is simply a marketable commodity, appraised by the vanity of man, held up to him as a temptation to commit all kinds of follies, in the hopes of obtaining a primary from a source, which has, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, been tapped in a moment of curiosity by the demi-vierge, who wanted to go one better, having learned from friends of her own sex, that there is still a resource in the sonde of the angel purveyor.

The interesting young lady who relates her adventures, bears out my theory that the “Sixth Sense” does exist, not as the outcome of Love or Affection, but as that of lust, played on and developed by the art and wiles of woman, the past mistress in converting vain man to the worship of Priapus, whose altar reposes on a solid foundation of rosserie.

When some ten or fifteen years have passed over your head, and your shoulders get bowed with age, and your whitened hair cries out: “Ichabod!” to show that some of the glory of your house has departed, you will find that Youth looks on you with smiling eyes, and that the tempting morsels are offered you, with the hope that they will be as the Dead Sea fruit to you, and with the determination to give you nothing better than the husks which have fallen from the trough of the swine.

Go on the boulevards and see the vieux marcheur, who can but limp, and watch the play around him, as he stops at the shop of the modiste or the jeweler, and then exclaim with Hamlet: “To what base uses may we return!”

There are a few exceptions to the general rule, and the endeavor of the woman seems to be to compromise actually or morally the weak, vain mind of man.

The husband of “Mademoiselle Giraud” would marry, and the comedy she played to disarm the man who thought he was on the point of possessing the woman he had yearned for, has been copied over and over again. The woman often throws herself into the arms of a man, decided that he shall, even with a show of a complete abandonment of herself; enjoy no more than the petites privautés, into which she has been initiated by her comrades.

You see I am drifting into the zone of platonic friendships, and getting by experience to know how to discount that mendacious exclamation: Je t'aime, which seems to warm the cockles of our hearts. All is vanity. It is given to some of us to learn that woman is capable of pure devotion, and that at times she can abandon herself to a kindred soul, but as a rule, woman is the author of such a book of follies in a man, that as Bulwer said: “all the tears of angels could not blot them out.”

Some of these days I must try and write my life, with all the follies I have committed “writ large,” but perhaps before the idea is carried out, I may have gone over to the other side, and buried a long record in the silent grave, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.

Yours very truly,

ERIC ARVEL.

P.S. -Many thanks for the budget of papers, which have just been brought down to me and will accompany me to London to read on the way.

My address will be Potteton's Family Hotel, Trafalgar Square, W.C., for the next three weeks, so that if you want anything from London, you will know where a letter will find me.

At last, Papa began to show a little temper. He preached me a sermon to let me see what a silly man I was, and how badly the “half-virgin" had treated me.

I suppose the couple was annoyed at my indifference to their timid overtures, and the marked passages in the Ethnology, to which book Papa took care not to allude, must have shown them sufficiently that I did not wish to renew with Lilian.

His position was a strange one between Lilian and me, her old lover, with whom he corresponded, never mentioning her name, and I never asked after her. And now he suddenly breaks out m the foregoing letter, to my great delight.

A few days afterwards I replied evasively. I was resolved not to say anything that would compromise me in any way, or enable him or her to have the least idea what my real feelings were.

As I read this over, correcting the proofs, I cannot help thinking from the outburst in the foregoing letter and the allusions to female vice and treachery in the following ones that Lilian had gone away. The month of November was always a fatal one for her. It is not possible that a man could so write if the wretched girl was at his elbow, as in former days.

Not that the quarrels of such people mean anything. They may hurl the vilest insults at each other, and even come to blows, but like dogs, it does not prevent them licking each other afterwards.

Even had Lilian departed, whenever she met Papa again she would be at his disposal, if he so willed it, until death should part them.

But in the meanwhile she had exhausted his two purses and was no longer at Sonis.

The unbreakable chain that united Lilian and Eric was no heartfelt attachment. It was a double heavy yoke of dissimulated interests. Their Liaison was a commercial partnership.

JACKY TO ERIC ARVEL.

Paris. November 29, 1899.

My dear Mr. Arvel,

I received the books and was glad to see you liked them. I too fancied that Dolly Morton sounded as if half true, perhaps in part told to a man who knew how to listen. I did not like to say so, for fear of being wrong.

I sent you to London three newspapers that ought to have gone in the last bundle, and would have been too stale if kept three weeks longer. I shall collect your papers and not send any until three weeks, counting from the twenty-first.

I did not flatter you when I said that you had greater experience than I with the fair sex. Your letter of the twenty-first. proves it beyond a doubt, and what is more strange, you seem to have the power of reading my thoughts to a certain extent. I have not your knowledge. I am all theories, and that is not much good, I know. It would take me a long time to explain all I mean and to answer your clever and deep-thinking letter properly. In September and before, I could write; now I cannot.

So you must forgive me if I do not reply to you as you deserve. I will try later on if I can, but I shall never be able to discriminate and reckon things up as wonderfully as you do.