Anonymous - Caroline

“WHAT a cad you are, Simpson!” responded Edwin and was said to have blushed fearfully.

“The devil of it, though, she has a lovely one. Champagne-I say, what a jolly good idea!”

Edwin's Mama was not so drowsy as they thought, where hangs the tale, though for myself, I thought her opportune. It chanced that a valet of the house bore the same name as Edwin's friend and she-supposing the two were the same (for she had seemingly but blinked at them for a fraction of a moment in her bleary state)-heard their murmurs on the stairs and called after them for Simpson to attend upon her rapidly.

“I will do it, Mama,” called Edwin, only to be admonished through the door and told that it was not his place- the which he took, of course, in quite a different sense to what she had intended.

“I say, your dear Mama must have taken a shine to me, what?” uttered Simpson who plainly had a letch on him to view that magnificent posterior once again. Hence despite the most embarrassed protests from Edwin 'twas he who bore the bottle and the chalice-so to speak-upstairs again while Edwin fiddled in the drawing room. These sounds and movements being observed, the maid in question listened from a cubbyhole and heard the selfsame moans of pleasure as emanated from above as Edwin did who fretfully strode back and forth. The bed squeaked. Slaps and smacks were heard-slobbery kisses, little grunts and groans. The lady was being injected once again, and no doubt held the bottle in her hand while Simpson gallantly took saddle in between her thighs.

A half hour passed and then he reappeared.

“Edwin, I say, I must begone,” he uttered hastily and made his exit, murmuring all the things one does on making such departures. Have we not all found it wise to do so now and then?

Edwin, 'twas said, remained a-pacing and then decided to go up. In turn, I was about to say, but I would not slander the dear chap who was all to bits and pieces at the happening. The maid-sensible girl-removed her shoes and followed him, hid in a linen cupboard near the room where a voluptuous act had just ensued.

“Pray, Mama, have you been assaulted?” Edwin asked.

“I? I am constantly under assault, my pet. Have you been here long? Where have you been?”

“That beast Simpson, I shall fight him for this!”

“Simpson? The valet was not here. Some stranger, dear. They are all strange, the strangers, are they not? Come, comfort me. How I am put upon!”

“Dearest Mama, where is your nightgown, where your clothes?”

“I do not know, I do not know. No, do not pull the curtains, for the light shines in my eyes too strongly. Help me up.” She hiccuped, Edwin bleated, then a silence fell. A sucking sound ensued.

“I think she had it in her mouth, sir, that I do,” the maid said.

“She kisses soundfully-so I am told,” said I. The silly girl should have ventured out and peeped. How rarely such things happen when one wants a full, precise report!

“Well, I don't know, sir. Anyway, there was mumblings, and she give a silly laugh or two, said 'Oh, you naughty boy,' and things like that.”

“Things like that?” I was beginning to regret the departure of my sovereign from my hand to hers. She clutched it tightly; almost purposefully, I'd say.

“Yes, sir. I think he had a feel. She said, “No, don't. Help me to put my drawers on, Edwin-fetch them from the drawer. Oh!'

She gave a gasp and then I heard her smack him and she laughed. Said he were sorry, that he did, and then I heard him move about. He said, 'Oh, let me.'-'No,' she says, 'not yet.' There was more suckings-kisses if you like-and then she told him to go down. I peeped and looked. His cock was up all right. I saw it in his trousers, sticking up.”

“Well, then, they didn't do it, Alice.”

“No, sir. But he has a feel of her and she of him. Bertha, she's heard them at it several times. Tells him to keep his pecker up, she does, keep it in reserve for her. She teases him to madness, the poor boy.”

“She made it up, you fool, all for a sovereign,” Caroline opined.

“Perhaps,” I said. I believed the first half-not the second part. It was not in Lucy's character at all. One goes on instinct in these things.

Besides-she would have cried and cried… And Alice had not mentioned that.

Frequently in the past weeks while I have been at my scribblings, my emendations, crossings-out, addings and subtractings of words and phrases that I thought more felicitous than others, I have been reminded by Caroline that on no account must I omit that tale of Miss Miriam Crampton-Hythe. I had not intended to, of course. My notes had not yet reached that point, but on sufferance, as it were, I tell it now.

The lady was thirty-eight, and I confess that of late I have had as much a penchant for maiden ladies of well-matured curves as I have for the sloe-eyed, winsome girls who are still brought occasionally to the divine sacrifice upon a couch downstairs or in our bed.

The truth of it is that we have acquired quite a reputation in modulating the ways of these delicious things. I shall be chided at saying that and asked why I do not put it more plainly.

“More plainly is not how I wish to put it,” I retort. I have even yet to catch the touch of things; I say this with due modesty. There is positively no describing of the transition of the hand from a stockinged thigh to the frilled leg of the drawers above. Others, I find (for I have occasionally haunted the bookshops in Holywell Street, in London), do not bother with such things. They merely say, “I fucked the girl,” or “felt her tits.” The effort is enormous, I confess, to emulate, in such congregated letters as form words, the sensations of the flesh, the bouncing of warm titties underneath one's chest, the sometimes fretful wrigglings of the legs, the clutchings of one's shoulders that ensue, the pantings from pursed lips.

“Let us tickle up her bottom,” Caroline or Adelaide will often say to me on viewing a new prospect. Such invariably are around eighteen or so, and ripe for it. I am ever amazed at the hoards of words, of dancing images, that crowd into my mind when I hear such. What a perfect delight it is to uncover the pale bottom of a squealing girl! The enchantment is ever new, whatever one may think of it in terms of dull morality.

I stray again, you see, am like a man who one day would eat chocolate cake and another day prefers an orange sponge, creamfilled. A hedonist-yes, I confess it, but will stray no more and will come to Miriam.

In the Spring prior to our meeting her, Miriam apparently had cause to dismiss her two servants and took on another pair-a general house-man in his early thirties, and a maid of younger aspect. I do not doubt that the pair were skilled at reading character in their employers. Miriam appeared to them a figure of considerable loneliness, and isolated in a lonely house. Truth to tell-and as I later read the matter-there was an element of self-flagellation in the lady. In the new parlance of our time, it is lately called “masochism,” though I do not take happily to the word and find it foreign.

Whatever may have been the cause of Miriam's strange submissions, a telling element-as she described-was the apparent devotion that Carrie, the maid, accorded her almost from her first evening there. Even the houseman, Charlie, gazed upon her with a seeming awed devotion- and this in utter counterpoint, I say, to the general indolence and remoteness of the pair she had dismissed, so she reported.

Being thus flattered and cosseted, the pair seemed more to her as cousins rather than mere servants. Hot chocolate was brought to her the moment she awoke, even though she had not ordered it. Her pillows were plumped up; she was made comfortable. Toast that was always warm and well-buttered was presented to her lips.