Charles Devereaux - Venus in India

But the ‘cloth off the table’, brought a subject which is always congenial to the fore. Woman, lovely woman, began to be discussed. My young acquaintance J.C.’s statement as to the complete absence of women from Tommy Atkins’ quarters in Afghanistan and the consequent immense demand for cunts on his return to civilisation and comfort was immediately confirmed. In those days (it has been very recently altered) the regulations obliged a certain number of native girls to be especially engaged for the services of each regiment, and these ladies of the camp accompanied their regiment wherever it marched in India, just as much a part and parcel of it as the colonel, adjutant and quartermaster. But Tommy likes variety as well as other people, and in every place where there is a bazaar or shops there are establishments for ladies of pleasure and these latter earn a good many four-anna bits which should by rights find their way into the pockets of the proper regimental whores. The recent influx of troops into Peshawar from Afghanistan had created an enormous demand for cunts, and Nowshera, Attock, even Rawalpindi, Umballa and other places had been denuded of ‘polls’ who gathered like birds of carrion where the carcass lay. This was a great grievance for the officers of the gallant 130th, who were almost as badly off for women as they had been when they had been at Lellabad and at Lundi Kotal, at which latter place a Gurkha soldier who had got a bad case of clap from some native woman was universally spoken of as the ‘Lucky Gurkha!’ Not because of the clap, bien entendre , but because, though he suffered afterwards, he had managed to secure for himself a pleasure so uncommon, under the circumstances, that it seemed like water a thousand miles distant to a traveller lost in the great Sahara!

Once the subject of love and women was started rolling the tongues of those who had been most reticent during dinner were set wagging, and I found a most entertaining host in the fat, pudgy, double-chinned major, who seemed to take a fancy to me. He proposed that we should adjourn outside where the band of the regiment was performing some operatic airs and lively dance music, and there we sat, in those voluptuous Madras long armchairs, enjoying whatever coolness there was in the air, the sounds of the suggestive music and the brilliancy of the myriad bright stars which glittered overhead, literally like ‘diamonds in the sky’.

‘Searle, our brigade major, said he would come later this evening,’ said the major, ‘but I rather think he won’t.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because he is cunt-struck with a very pretty little woman in the dak bungalow.’

This I guessed was a shot to me.

‘Indeed! Well! I hope he will succeed and get his greens! Poor chap!’

‘Oh! Do you! Well! We were all saying that it was a dammed shame, because we had made up our minds that you were surely in her good graces yourself, and we thought it mean of Searle to try and cut in whilst you were out! ha! ha! ha!’

‘Oh!’ I said quietly, ‘but I am a married man, major, and have just left my wife, and do not go in for that sort of thing! So, as far as I am concerned, Major Searle is welcome to the lady if he can persuade her to grant him her favours.’

‘Well! But Searle is a married man himself, Devereaux!’

‘Oh! I dare say! I don’t mean to imply that a married man is impervious to the charms of other women because he is married. I am not straitlaced, and I dare say should be quite as liable as anybody else to have a woman who was not my wife, but you know I have not been married long enough to be tired of my wife, and I have not been long enough away from her to feel any inclination to commit adultery yet!’

‘Well! Searle is married — but he’s a brute! Yet I somehow pity the poor devil too! I don’t know how it is, but he and his wife, a devilish fine woman, a perfect Venus in her way, don’t get on altogether well; in fact she has left him!’

‘Oh! my! do you say so?’

‘Yes! Now mind you, Devereaux, you must not give me as your authority, but I can tell you that he treated that poor woman like hell, half killing her with a blow from the side of his hairbrush; devilish nearly smashed her skull, you know, and after that she left him, and went and set up on her own account at Ramsket.’

I am sure my dear readers are amused at my assuming the air of a thoroughly moral young husband still contented with the breasts of his spouse, as Solomon, I think it is, tells us we ought to be, but of course I was not going to amuse my new friend, or indeed any others, with tales which somehow spread so wonderfully quickly, and in rapidly widening circles, until they reach the ears of those we would least wish to hear them. Really and truly, my heart and conscience pricked me when this conversation brought to mind my beloved little Louie, and I thought of her in her lovely bed, perhaps weeping in sad silence as she prayed for the safety, welfare and quick return home of one whom she loved so dearly, who made her joyous by day and gave her rapturous fun at night, her husband, and the darling father of her angel baby girl. But alas! the spirit is willing and the flesh weak, as I have remarked before, and the weakness of the flesh exceeds the strength of the spirit all too often.

But the conversation was bearing directly on a subject which was becoming interesting to me since I had seen Searle and heard Lizzie’s indignant remark that his wife was a regular whore, whose price for her charms was, however, uncommonly high. I did not mind what my fat major said about Searle’s designs on Lizzie that evening, because Lizzie would have to have been a most unaccountably stupid deceiver if she had merely expressed abhorrence of him to blind me! No, I felt certain the abhorrence was real and true, and I had no fear that I should find that she had afforded him a retreat, either hospitable or the reverse, in her sweet cunt when I got home to her again.

‘How do you mean “set up on her own account,” major?’ said I.

‘Oh! hum! well! look here, bend your head a little nearer to me! I don’t want to talk too loudly! Well! she is — that is, any fellow almost, who cares to give her a cool five hundred rupees, can have her.’

‘What!’ said I in well-affected incredulous tones, ‘you want to persuade me that an officer’s wife, a lady like Mrs Searle must be, has actually done such a monstrous, not to say such an idiotic thing, as not only to leave her husband, a thing I cannot understand, but to set up as a whore, and in such a place as Ramsket? Surely, major, you are mistaken! Remember! we are told to believe nothing we hear and only half of what we see!’

‘I know! I know!’ said he, still as calmly as if he were Moses laying down the law, ‘but look here, Devereaux, you won’t tell me I am a liar if I say the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and that my proof of what I say is that I, Jack Stone, have had Mrs Searle, and paid for my game! Yes, sir! Rupees five hundred did Jack Stone pay Mrs Searle for a night in Mrs Searle’s bed.’

‘Goodness, and you have actually –’

‘I have actually fucked her, sir! and fucked her well! and a damned fine poke she is too, I can tell you, and well worth the five hundred she asks for the fun. Such a damned fine poke is she that Jack Stone, who is not a rich man but must lay up for a rainy day, has put three times five hundred rupees away in the bank of Simla, and means to lodge them some day soon in the bank of Ramsket, of which the banker and sole proprietress is Mrs Searle, the bank itself being her goloptious cunt, between her goloptious thighs. Did you mark that, young man!’

‘And does Searle know this?’ I asked, still incredulous.

‘What? that I have had his wife?’