his clothes behind, he shewed to the open air those globular fleshy
eminences that compose the Mount Peasants of Rome, and which now, with
all the narrow vale that intersects them, stood displayed and exposed
to his attack; nor could I without a shudder behold the dispositions he
made for it. First, then, moistening well with spittle his instrument,
obviously to make it glib, he pointed, he introduced it, as I could
plainly discern, not only from its direction and my losing sight of it,
but by the writhing, twisting and soft murmured complaints of the young
sufferer; but at length, the first straits of entrance being pretty
well go through, every thing seemed to move and go pretty currently on,
as on a carpet road, without much rub or resistance; and now, passing
one hand round his minions’ hips, he got hold of his red-topped ivory
toy, that stood perfectly stiff, and shewed, that if he was like his
mother behind, he was like his father before; this he diverted himself
with, whilst, with the other he wantoned with his hair, and leaning
forward over his back, drew his face, from which the boy shook the
loose curls that fell over it, in the posture he stood him in, and
brought him towards his, so as to receive a long breathed kiss; after
which, renewing his driving, and thus continuing to harass his rear,
the height of the fist came on with its usual symptoms, and dismissed
the action.
The criminal scene they acted, I had the patience to see to an end,
purely that I might gather more facts and certainty against them in my
design to do their deserts instant justice; and accordingly, when they
had re-adjusted themselves; and were preparing to go out, burning as I
was with rage and indignation, I jumped down from the chair, in order
to raise the house upon them, but with such an unlucky impetuosity,
that some nail or ruggedness in the floor caught my foot, and flung me
on my face with such violence, that I fell senseless on the ground, and
lay there some time before any one came to my relief: so that they,
alarmed, I suppose, by the noise of my fall, had more than the
necessary time to make a safe retreat. This they effected, as I learnt,
with a precipitation nobody could account for, until, when come to
myself, and composed enough to speak, I acquainted those of the house
with the whole transaction I had been evidence to.
When I came home again, and told Mrs. Cole this adventure, she very
sensibly observed to me, that “there was no doubt of the due vengeance
one time or other overtaking these miscreants, however they might
escape for the present; and that, had I been the temporal instrument of
it, I should have been put to a great deal more trouble and confusion
than I imagined; that, as to the thing itself, the less said of it was
the better; but that though she might be suspected of partiality, from
its being the common cause of womankind, out of whose mouths this
practice tended to take something more than bread, yet she protested
against any mixture of passion, with a declaration extorted from her by
pure regard to truth; which was, that whatever effect this infamous
passion had in other ages and other countries, it seemed a peculiar
blessing on our air and climate, that there was a plaguespot visibly
imprinted on all that are tainted with it, in this nation at least, for
that among numbers of that stamp whom she had known, or at least were
universally under the scandalous suspicion of it, she would not name an
exception hardly to one of them, whose character was not, in all other
respects, the most worthless and despicable that could be; stript of
all the manly virtues of their own sex, and filled up with only the
worst vices and follies of ours; that, in fine, they were scarce less
execrable than ridiculous in their monstrous inconsistence, of loathing
and contemning women, and at the same time apeing all their manners,
airs, lisps, scuttle, and, in general, all their little modes of
affectation, which become them at least better, than they do these
unsexed, male misses.”
But here, washing my hands of them, I re-plunge into the stream of my
history, which I may very properly ingraft a terrible sally of
Louisa’s, since I had some share in it myself, and have besides engaged
myself to relate it, in point of countenance to poor Emily. It will
add, too, one more example to thousands, in confirmation of the maxim,
that women get once out of compass, there are no lengths of
licentiousness, that they are not capable of running.
One morning then, that both Mrs. Cole and Emily were gone out for the
day, and only Louisa and I (not to mention the house-maid) were left in
charge of the house, whilst we were loitering away the time, in looking
through the shop windows, the son of a poor woman, who earned very hard
bread indeed by mending of stockings, in a stall in the neighbourhood,
offered us some nosegays, ranged round a small basket; by selling of
which the poor boy eked out his mother’s maintenance of them both: nor
was he fit for any other way of livelihood, since he was not only a
perfect changeling, or idiot, but stammered so that there was no
understanding even those sounds his half-dozen animals ideas, at most,
prompted him to utter.
The boys and servants in the neighbourhood had given him the nick-name
of good-natured Dick, from the soft simpleton’s doing every thing he
was bid at the first word, and from his naturally having no turn to
mischief; then, by the way, he was perfectly well made, stout,
clean-limbed, tall of his age, as strong as a horse, and, withal,
pretty featured; so that he was not, absolutely, such a figure to be
snuffled at neither, if your nicety could, in favour of such
essentials, have dispensed with a face unwashed, hair tangled for want
of combing, and so ragged a plight, that he might have disputed points
of shew with any heathen philosopher of them all.
This boy we had often seen, and bought his flowers, out of pure
compassion, and nothing more; but just at this time as he stood
presenting us his basket, a sudden whim, a start of wayward fancy,
seized Louisa; and, without consulting me, she calls him in, and
beginning to examine his nosegays, culls out two, one for herself,
another for me, and pulling out half a crown, very currently gives it
him to change, as if she had really expected he could have changed it:
but the boy, scratching his head, made his signs explain his inability
in place of words, which he could not, with all his struggles,
articulate.
Louisa, at this, says: “Well, my lad, come up stairs with me, and I
will give you your due,” winking at the same time to me, and beckoning
me to accompany her, which I did, securing first the street-door, that
by this means, together with the shop, became wholly the care of the
faithful house-maid.
As we went up, Louisa whispered me “that she had conceived a strange
longing to be satisfied, whether the general rule held good with regard
to this changeling, and how far nature had made him amends, in her best
bodily gifts, for her denial of the sublimer intellectual ones; begin,
at the same time, my assistance in procuring her this satisfaction.” A
want of complaisance was never my vice, and I was so far from opposing
this extravagant frolic, that now, bit with the same maggot, and my
curiosity conspiring with hers, I entered plump into it, on my own
account.
Consequently, soon as we came into Louisa’s bed-chamber, whilst she was
amusing him with picking out his nosegays, I undertook the lead, and
began the attack. As it was not then very material to keep much
measures with a mere natural, I made presently free with him, though at
my first motion of meddling, his surprise and confusion made him
receive my advances but awkwardly: nay, insomuch that he bashfully
shied, and shied back a little; till encouraging him with my eyes,
plucking him playfully by the hair, sleeking his cheeks, and forwarding
my point by a number of little wantonnesses, I soon turned him
familiar, and gave nature her sweetest alarm: so that aroused, and
beginning to feel himself, we could, amidst all the innocent laugh and
grin I had provoked him into, perceive the fire lighting in his eyes,
and, diffusing over his cheeks, blend its glow with that of his
blushes. The emotion in short of animal pleasure glared distinctly in
the simpleton’s countenance; yet struck with the novelty of the scene,
he did not know which way to look or move; but tame, passive,
simpering, with his mouth half open, in stupid rapture, stood and
tractably suffered me to do what I pleased with him. His basket was
dropt out of his hands, which Louisa took care of.
I had now, through more than one rent, discovered and felt his thighs,
the skin of which seemed the smoother and fairer for the coarseness,
and even the dirt of his dress, as the teeth of negroes seem the whiter
for the surrounded black; and poor indeed of habit, poor of
understanding, he was, however, abundantly rich in personal treasures,
such as flesh, firm, plump, and replete with the juices of youth, and
robust well-knit limbs. My fingers too had now got within reach of the
true, the genuine sensitive plant, which, instead of shrinking from the
touch, joys to meet it, and swells and vegetates under it: mine
pleasingly informed me that matters were so ripe for the discovery we
meditated, that they were too mighty for the confinement they were
ready to break. A waistband that I unskewered, and a rag of a shirt
that I removed, and which could not have covered a quarter of it,
revealed the whole of the idiot’s standard of distinction, erect, in
full pride and display: but such a one! it was positively of so
tremendous a size, that prepared as we were to see something
extraordinary, it still, out of measure, surpassed our expectation, and
astonished even me, who had not been used to trade in trifles. In fine,
it might have answered very well the making a skew of; its enormous
head seemed, in hue and size, not unlike a common sheep’s heart; then
you might have trolled dice securely along the broad back of the body
of it; the length of it too was prodigious; then the rich appendage of
the treasure-bag beneath, large in proportion, gathered and crisped up
round in shallow furrows, helped to fill the eye, and complete the
proof of his being a natural, not quite in vain; since it was full
manifest that he inherited, and largely too, the prerogative of majesty
which distinguishes that otherwise most unfortunate condition, and gave
rise to the vulgar saying “That a fool’s bauble is a lady’s
playfellow.” Not wholly without reason: for, generally speaking, it is
in love as it is in war, where the longest weapon carries it. Nature,
in short, had done so much for him in those parts, that she perhaps
held herself acquitted in doing so little for his head.
For my part, who had sincerely no intention to push the joke further
than simply satisfying my curiosity with the sight of it alone, I was
content, in spite of the temptation that stared me in the face, with
having raised a May-pole for another to hang a garland on: for, by this
time, easily reading Louisa’s desires in her wishful eyes, I acted the
commodious part, and made her, who sought no better sport, significant
terms of encouragement to go through stitch with her adventure;
intimating too that I would stay and see fair play: in which, indeed, I
had in view to humour a new born curiosity, to observe what appearances
active nature would put on in a natural, in the course of this her
darling operation.
Louisa, whose appetite was up, and who, like the industrious bee, was,
it seems, not above gathering the sweet of so rare a flower, though she
found it planted on a dunghill, was but too readily disposed to take
the benefit of my cession. Urged then strongly by her own desires, and
emboldened by me, she presently determined to risk a trial of parts
with the idiot, who was by this time nobly inflamed for her purpose, by
all the irritation we had used to put the principles of pleasure
effectually into motion, and to wind up the springs of its organ to
their supreme pitch; and it stood accordingly stiff and straining,
ready to burst with the blood and spirits that swelled it... to a bulk!
No! I shall never forget it.
Louisa then, taking and holding the fine handle that so invitingly
offered itself, led the ductile youth, by that mastertool of his, as
she stept backward towards the bed; which he joyfully gave way to,
under the incitations of instinct, and palpably delivered up to the
goad of desire.
Stopped then by the bed, she took the fall she loved, and leaned to the
most, gently backward upon it, still holding fast what she held, and
taking care to give her clothes a convenient toss up, so that her
thighs duly disclosed, and elevated, laid open all the outward prospect
of the treasury of love: the rose-lipt overture presenting the cockpit
so fair, that it was not in nature even for a natural to miss it. Nor
did he: for Louisa, fully bent on grappling with it, and impatient of
dalliance or delay, directed faithfully the point of the
battering-piece, and bounded up with a rage of so voracious appetite,
to meet and favour the thrust of insertion, that the fierce activity on
both sides effected it with such pain of distention, that Louisa cried
out violently, that she was hurt beyond bearing, that she was killed.
But it was too late: the storm was up, and force was on her to give way
to it; for now the man-machine, strongly worked upon by the sensual
passion, felt so manfully his advantages and superiority, felt withal
the sting of pleasure so intolerable, that maddening with it, his joys
began to assume a character of furiousness, which made me tremble for
the too tender Louisa. He seemed, at this juncture, greater than
himself; his countenance, before so void of meaning, or expression, now
grew big with the importance of the act he was upon. In short, it was
not now that he was to be played the fool with. But, what is pleasant
enough, I myself was awed into a sort of respect for him, by the comely
terrors his motions dressed him in: his eyes shooting sparks of fire;
his face glowing with ardours that gave another life to it; his teeth
churning; his whole frame agitated with a raging ungovernable
impetuosity: all sensibly betraying the formidable fierceness with
which the genial instinct acted upon him. Butting then and goring all
before him, and mad and wild like an ower-driven steer, he ploughs up
the tender furrow all insensible to Louisa’s complaints; nothing can
stop, nothing can keep out a fury like his: with which, having once got
its head in, its blind rage soon made way for the rest, piercing,
rending, and breaking open all obstruction. The torn, split, wounded
girl cries, struggles, invokes me to her rescue, and endeavours to get
from under the young savage, or shake him off, but alas! in vain: her
breath, might as soon have strength to have quelled his rough assault,
or put him out of his course. And indeed, all her efforts and struggles
were managed with such disorder, that they served rather to entangle,
and fold her the faster in the twine of his boisterous arms; so that
she was tied to the stake, and obliged to fight the match out, if she
died for it. For his part, instinct-ridden as he was, the expressions
of his animal passion, partaking something of ferocity, were rather
worrying than kisses, intermixed with ravenous love-bites on her cheeks
and necks, the prints of which did not wear out for some days after.
Poor Louisa, however, bore up at length better than could have been
expected: and though she suffered, and greatly too, yet, ever true to
the good old cause, she suffered with pleasure and enjoyed her pain.
And soon now, by dint of an enraged enforcement, the brute-machine,
driven like a whirlwind, made all smoke again, and wedging its way up,
to the utmost extremity, left her, in point of penetration, nothing to
fear or to desire: and now,
“Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth,”
(Shakespeare.)
Louisa lay, pleased to the heart, pleased to her utmost capacity of
being so, with every fibre in those parts, stretched almost to
breaking, on a rack of joy, whilst the instrument of all this
over-fullness searched her senses with its sweet excess, till the
pleasure gained upon her so, its point stung her so home, that catching
at length the rage from her furious driver and sharing the riot of his
wild rapture, she went wholly out of her mind into that favourite part
of her body, the whole intenseness of which was so fervously filled,
and employed: there alone she existed, all lost in those delirious
transports, those extasies of the senses, which her winking eyes, the
brightened vermilion of her lips and cheeks, and sighs of pleasure
deeply fetched, so pathetically expressed. In short, she was now as
mere a machine as much wrought on, and had her motions as little at her
own command, as the natural himself, who, thus broke in upon her, made
her feel with a vengeance his tempestuous mettle he battered with;
their active loins quivered again with the violence of their conflict,
till the surge of pleasure, foaming and raging to a height, drew down
the pearly shower that was, to allay this hurricane. The purely
sensitive idiot then first shed those tears of joy that attend its last
moments, not without an agony of delight, and even almost a roar of
rapture, as the gush escaped him; so sensibly too for Louisa, that she
kept him faithful company, going off, in consent, with the old
symptoms: a delicious delirium, a tremendous convulsive shudder, and
the critical dying: Oh! And now, on his getting off she lay
pleasure-drenched, and regorging its essential sweets; but quite spent,
and gasping for breath, without other sensation of life than in those
exquisite vibrations that trembled still on the strings of delight;
which had been too intensively touched, and which nature had so
ravishingly stirred with, for the senses to be quickly at peace from.
As for the changeling, whose curious engine had been thus successfully
played off, his shift of countenance and gesture had even something
droll, or rather tragi-comic in it: there was now an air of sad
repining foolishness, superadded to his natural one of no meaning and
idiotism, as he stood with his label of manhood, now lank, unstiffened,
becalmed, and flapping against his thighs, down which it reached half
way, terrible even in its fall, whilst under the dejection of spirit
and flesh, which naturally followed his eyes, by turns, cast down
towards his struck standard, or piteously lifted to Louisa, seemed to
require at her hands what he had so sensibly parted from to her, and
now ruefully missed. But the vigour of nature, soon returning,
dissipated the blast of faintness which the common law of enjoyment had
subjected him to; and now his basket re-became his main concern, which
I looked for, and brought him, whilst Louisa restored his dress to its
usual condition, and afterwards pleased him perhaps more by taking all
his flowers off his hands, and paying him, at his rate, for them, than
if she had embarrassed him by a present, that he would have been
puzzled to account for, and might have put others on tracing the
motives of.
Whether she ever returned to the attack I know not, and, to say truth,
I believe not. She had had her freak out, and had pretty plentifully
drowned her curiosity in a glut of pleasure, which, as it happened, had
no other consequence than that the lad, who retained only a confused
memory of the transaction, would, when he saw her, forget her in favour
of the next woman, tempted, on the report of his parts, to take him in.
Louisa herself did not long outstay this adventure at Mrs. Cole’s (to
whom, by the bye, we took care not to boast of our exploit, till all
fear of consequences were clearly over): for an occasion presenting
itself of proving her passion for a young fellow, at the expense of her
discretion, proceeding all in character, she packed up her toilet, at
half a day’s warning, and went with him abroad, since which I entirely
lost sight of her, and it never fell in my way to hear what became of
her.
But a few days after she had left us, two very occasion, not to wrong
our training at Mrs. Cole’s, especially favourites, and free of her
academy, easily obtained her consent for Emily’s and my acceptance of a
party of pleasure, at a little but agreeable house, belonging to one of
them situated not far up the river Thames, on the Surrey side.
Every thing being settled, and it being a fine summer day, but rather
of the warmest, we set out after dinner, and got to our rendezvous
about four in the afternoon; where, landing at the foot of a neat,
joyous pavilion, Emily and I were handed into it by our esquires, and
there drank tea with a cheerfulness and gaiety, that the beauty of the
prospect, the serenity of the weather, and the tender politeness of our
sprightly gallants, naturally led us into.
After tea, and taking a turn in the garden, my particular, who was the
master of the house, and had in no sense schemed this party of pleasure
for a dry one, proposed to us, with that frankness which his
familiarity at Mrs. Cole’s entitled him to, as the weather was
excessively hot, to bathe together, under a commodious shelter that he
had prepared expressly for that purpose, in a creek of the river, with
which a side-door of the pavilion immediately communicated, and where
we might be sure of having our diversion out, safe from interruption,
and with the utmost privacy.
Emily, who never refused anything, and I, who ever delighted in
bathing, and had no exception to the person who proposed it, or to
those pleasure it was easy to guess it implied, took care, on this
occasion, not to wrong our training at Mrs. Cole’s, and agreed to it
with as good a grace as we could. Upon which, without loss of time, we
returned instantly to the pavilion, one door of which opened into a
tent, pitched before it, that with its marquise, formed a pleasing
defense again the sun, or the weather, and was besides as private as we
could wish. The lining of it, embossed cloth, represented a wild forest
foliage, from the top, down to the sides, which, in the same stuff,
were figured with fluted pilasters, with their spaces between filled
with flower vases, the whole having a pay effect croon the eye,
wherever you turned it.
Then it reached sufficiently into the water, yet contained convenient
benches round it, on the dry ground, either to keep our clothes, or...,
or..., in short for more uses than resting upon. There was a side-table
too, loaded with sweetmeats, jellies, and other eatables, and bottles
of wine and cordials, by way of occasional relief from any rawness, or
chill of the water, or from any faintness from whatever cause; and in
fact, my gallant, who understood _chère entiêre_ perfectly, and who,
for taste (even if you would not approve this specimen of it) might
have been comptroller of pleasures to a Roman emperor, had left no
requisite towards convenience or luxury unprovided.
As soon as we had looked round this inviting spot, and every
preliminary of privacy was duly settled, strip was the word: when the
young gentlemen soon dispatched the undressing each his partner and
reduced us to the naked confession of all those secrets of person which
dress generally hides, and which the discovery of was, naturally
speaking, not to our disadvantage. Our hands, indeed, mechanically
carried towards the most interesting part of us, screened, at first,
all from the tufted cliff downwards, till we took them away at their
desire, and employed them in doing them the same office, of helping off
with their clothes; in the process of which, there passed all the
little wantonnesses and frolics that you may easily imagine.