Jacky S - Suburban Souls, Book I

With humility, I lie at your feet, you can walk on me. And I shall still say: “Thank you!” I kiss the darling feet that stamp upon me, and also your dear hands that hurt me.

I kiss your whole body, my respected master. Oh! If I could always be frightened of you, as I was the other day beneath the gaze of your cruel eyes.

I want to be frightened of you always; you must be wicked and cruel; your only joy must be to make me suffer without ceasing.

You must make me come myself as you order me on my knees, to receive a flogging, if you so desire it.

I am your thing, your bitch, your submissive slave.

LOUISE.

You must do what you told me on my next visit to Paris: put me on my knees before you, my eyes turned to yours; the vase beneath my chin, and splash my face, my lips, my cheeks, with your hot urine, amusing yourself all the time by hurting me, and always exacting a tender and submissive look in my eyes.

It is so difficult for me to support your gaze when it is hard and cruel, as it was last night beneath the glare of the electricity.

I wish to see your small hand gently prick my flesh with your scarf pin; and revel in your awful joy as you see my blood, and then force me to pour vinegar upon the wound.

You will allow me, will you not, master, to suffer through you, and for you?

Pardon me for having tried to escape from your influence. I come back to you, more tender, more humble, more submissive than before. Do to me whatever you please.

You will see, master, all my efforts to satisfy you, so that your joy may be complete so that you may permit me to kiss your hand. The traces of your hands are still on my flesh, my arm is still black and blue.

Pardon me my bad writing. Next time, I will strive to make my writing more legible, but to-day I am too nervous, I hunger too much for you.

If you wish it, if it will please you that I read the books you told me about, I will do so with joy. But I should wish that all you do be for your desire and your caprice, and not to be agreeable to me.

The only reward of a slave is that her loved and respected master should find her worthy to suffer for him and for his pleasure.

I will try also not to think of myself when I talk to you. I will only think of making your pleasure slow and perfect.

I will try and support pain with a tender and submissive look, and my face shall show pleasure whatever I feel, so as to please you, and not have the hard and sulky expression for which you so rightly whipped my bottom the other day.

You should be still more exacting; very severe, very cruel, to form me for your taste, and make me sweetly tender, docile, and obedient, punishing me each time I give way to my lust; and driving it out of my frame by dint of suffering.

Let me only think of you; only dream of you; let me only look at you; let my eyes, like those of a fawning, loving cur, never leave your eyes; let them never look elsewhere; nothing should make them turn away from you, when I am in your dear presence.

I am very sensitive about the hair. You must order me to let it down, and then comb it out, pulling it roughly until the tears come in my eyes, and if I weep, punish me for my silly sensibility. You will do that, will you not? I wish to suffer for you, my desired master.

Have you not dreamt worse sufferings than these?

If so, will you kindly tell me of them, so that I may think of the suffering in reserve for me, and get my mind used to fresh divine torture.

Do not forget your little riding-whip. Shall I bring one myself?

If I had my own way, this letter would never be done, but it would end by wearying you. I finish here regretfully. To write to you is a great joy for me.

I place my head beneath your feet, which I feel on my face, crushing my cheeks with your boot heels. I feel your hand twisting and tearing my flesh; then you pinch me. I feel your hand smartly slapping both cheeks, while I am on my knees, my arms strapped tightly behind me. I feel the stinging hush of your whip cutting into my flesh at long intervals, so as to make your pleasure last longer, and tears roll down my cheeks, in spite of all my efforts, as, to punish me for loving you too much, you tear off the hair that hides my sex. Each time I must say to you: “Thank you, master!” If I forget, your dear hand shall slap my face as hard as it can strike, and always my eyes are fixed on yours: softly, tenderly, and submissively. I am your enduring obedient slave,

LOUISE.

This new passion did not prevent me nursing my poor Lily at home, and working at my chemical inventions, while I took as much exercise as I could in the open air. I seemed to get younger and gayer, as I would leave my bed as early as possible, and stride merrily along, drunk with the lightness of the pure morning air, my good old Smike careering joyfully round me.

Good health means gaiety, and my greatest trouble was the beggarly lightness of my banking account, now that my poor invalid seemed a trifle better.

Now and again, I thought of the Lily of Sonis, and I felt that there was something very strange in her conduct.

I had said in my last letter to her that I would try to elucidate the mystery, and having, as I expected, no answer, I began to ask myself what steps I ought to take to unravel the puzzle. All my old powers of reasoning, that I thought I had left for ever in my bed of pain, came gradually back to me, and I saw that Mademoiselle Arvel had no real tenderness for me.

I had never read her letters over again, although I had often said to myself that I would do so. I had them all, as I have given them here, dated, and tied up in a bundle.

One afternoon, my new mistress, Louise, failed to keep an appointment, and having a moment to myself, I got the packet of Lilian's letters out of a drawer of my desk, and read them all carefully through, one by one.

Then I began to vaguely sketch in my mind all the little criticisms that I have spread over these pages, and I found the explanation of many things she had said to me and which I had let pass at the time.

When she told me that rigmarole story about the fifty francs supposed to have come from Madame Muller, and how she wrote to her Mamma in Normandy, that she had got some money, and had paid a bill with it, without showing any papers to her vigilant parent, I had smelt a rat. But I was so stupid in my blind passion, that my suspicions did not take a proper shape, until I reflected upon the letter of the twenty-sixth of April, wherein she said that she had written to me on her return to Paris from the South, and that the letter had been probably mislaid.

I jumped to the conclusion that when she denied having received the unregistered missive, containing the fifty-franc note, she was telling a deliberate lie.

When she came to lunch with Lord Fontarcy and myself in Paris, she expected more than she got. She evidently hoped for some present from my friend. When I sent the money, torn from me by a threat, she was disgusted at the smallness of the sum, and never acknowledged it, nor wrote to me from London.

Then, when I dropped her a line five weeks afterwards, which was weak on my part, she got me invited to Sonis, and to excuse her fault, she worked the missing letter dodge again.

Two missing letters in ten months! She lied.

When I first made love to her and offered her caresses without danger of pregnancy, she answered that she would want “something else,” i.e., money.

After our first meeting in November 1897, when she left me at the railway station, I noticed her uneasy look. She was thinking of the five pounds she said she had lost in London, and was no doubt saying to herself: “Is he not going to give me something?”

Laugh at me, kind reader, if it so please you, but at that time I should not have dared to have offered her money.