Anonymous
A man with a maid,vol.IV
Chapter 1
In the last section of my memoirs, I related in some detail how I at last gained my long-sought revenge on haughty Marion, the sister of my beloved Alice.
Yet to my great delight, this revenge turned out to be an unexpected bounty from the Goddess Venus herself, for not only did Marion succumb to my artful wiles and avow herself truly conquered by demanding virility, but also she brought at our very next meeting her saucy red-haired maid Kay, who she claimed was in dire need of a chastisement for impertinence. And with my aid, the charming Marion entered with full gusto and a wealth of sensual imagination into the fray, thereby providing me not only with a delightful accomplice who, once having been my bitterest enemy, had now become my passionate and secret mistress, but also with another addition to my growing harem of delectable and delightful maids.
When we parted that last time, during which I had managed to reconcile Kay with her ardent mistress, I gave her my word as a gentleman that I would not under any circumstances inform my beloved Alice what well-nigh incredible intimacy I had achieved with this older sister who, though she had not been a virgin thanks to a regrettably one-sided marriage, had once been as prudish and censorious of my bachelor actions as though she had been my own guardian or administratrix. We both agreed that if her yielding to me should come at all to Alice’s knowledge, it should be through Marion’s own person.
Knowing me only by name and by the images and impressions gained from reading my memoirs, you may deem me a profligate and most licentious rogue. With this I have no quarrel, since the passing of the years, the difference in our geographical setting from where these burning deeds of priapic valor originally took place, and finally the impossibility of ever having my inamorata or even myself actually identified, combines in a sense to conceal the most intimate feelings and thoughts and personalities of all the chief characters in my little drama. I do not hold with the vainglorious braggarts who feel that to herald their accomplishments in the boudoir with the fair sex, they needs must trumpet to all the world and sundry the scabrous and shamefully gossiping chronicles of their petty amours. I am neither prig nor puritan-and God be thanked for that-but neither am I a scandal-mongering adventurer who would malign by defamation the very beauties whose sweet generosity granted me such pleasures as few mortal men have tasted.
No, the boaster and the braggart, the Don Juan in the stall who feels it imperative to proclaim his cocksmith’s roisterings under the sheets and out of them to those who would gape and goggle and pry and intrude are, to my fancy, the basest of villains, and if one were to examine at the source their prattlings of tireless bouts of amatory conquest, one would probably find they had more pence in their pockets than honest prick. For the man who has the demon within him to urge him on to blabber all his nocturnal squirmings in the stews is deeply at heart a sadly inferior wretch who must compensate himself for his own actual lack of priapic stamina by substituting tales that would surpass tellings of a veritable Sinbad.
So there, I have said my piece, and done the only moralizing for this volume, for which I crave your honest indulgence. But now let me take up once again the thread of my own delicious affairs at the point which followed the departure of the charming Marion and her exquisitely saucy maidservant Kay.
I had made the resolve to ask Alice for her hand in marriage. Now I will confess that at the outset of my adventures with her I had really no such intention. When one has been a bird on the wing for so long as I, it is difficult at first blush to reconcile oneself to the gilded cage and to the regimen of daily monotony which invariably, alas, seems to follow the most riotously hymenean pursuits. On the day which followed the sweet reconciliation of Marion with her maid, I seriously asked myself if I was not, in making so heroic a sacrifice of my freedom, terminating at one fell swoop all those future bequests which Venus might perhaps have in store for me in my later years.
Would Alice become, once domesticated under my roof as my virtuous bride and the sharer of my fortune, for good or evil as fate might decide, a shrew and termagant, a Xantippe to my Socrates? Or again, even granting that her sweet nature could not possibly foretell any such dwindling away of warm ardor and generous affection, might not the inevitable repetition of our now wedlock-blessed embraces take on a more spiritual and at the same time less passionate tone? Would each of us make the error of taking the other for granted simply because our nuptiality would permit each to enjoy in due and respectful sequence the conjugal rights? These were, I can tell you, serious questions to be considered by a man undertaking on a sudden whim, however noble the pretext and purpose when the vow was originally taken, to sanctify his fleshly lusts and to have them blessed with bell, book and candle under a proper wedding canopy. Mr. and Mrs. Jack-ah, how mundane, how prosaic, how banal! Was not Jack and Alice a sweeter mouthful, and a far more fiery consummation?
But I had in the presence of Marion and Kay announced that I would seek out the dear hand of Alice as my consort, and so I meant to.
And so I did, as you shall see.
Chapter 2
One of the greatest joys in life, when one is perceptive and virile as well, is the spicy uncertainty of day-to-day existence. It is all very well to plan a week ahead to receive one’s tender mistress, to spend the waking hours filling one’s mind with amorous images and planning the most voluptuous dalliance. To be sure, in some ways this anticipation often exceeds the actual joy of realization; yet, for all this I would not gainsay the zestful relish which is occasioned by the unexpected and unforeseen.
Now I was looking forward to the return of my beautiful Alice who, with her maid Fanny, was shortly to return from a visit to an elderly aunt in Nottingham. I had resolved myself at last to give up my bachelorhood, but this was not quite so bleak a prospect as one might have believed. Because now that I had conquered the voluptuous and older Marion, I knew very well that I could entice her to remain my complaisant mistress, and that I could on occasion induce her to let me have a short, delicious hour with her red-haired, temperamental and vivacious maid, Kay. In addition, there was Alice’s own maid, the voluptuous and devoted Fanny, who would be in our household from the very onset of our nuptials, and who, I had good reason to believe, would not find my attentions amiss.
I was as yet too gallant to remind my wife-to-be that there would be times when Nature would put her hors de concours from my priapic sallies, and I knew that my sweet Alice would not be so selfish as to deny me pleasure when she herself could not accord it to me. I must therefore learn with some exactitude if the monthly curse which all women have had to bear since Eve committed her folly of the apple in the garden of Eden fell at different times for my wife-to-be and her charming maid. If they were not at the same time, I could solace myself with delicious Fanny while Alice had the megrims, and then when it was Fanny’s turn to be diffident, Alice would be the more passionate once restored to healthy action. For just prior to and after that accursed span which blights a woman’s capacity for love, she is exceptionally sensitive to all the little attentions with which a lusty man goes about wooing her.
And finally, there was the matter of Connie Blunt, that adorable golden-haired young woman of twenty-two, whose virginity, for all intents and purposes, I had taken in this very Snuggery which had seen the conquest first of Alice and finally and most recently of haughty Marion. I had promised myself that when Connie returned from her fortnight in Italy-which was a week hence-I should question her at some length as to whether she had actually lost her maidenhead to her elderly husband and whether that consummation had been the knell of doom for his faltering heart, or whether again she had clandestinely sacrificed that tender treasure between her succulent young thighs to another man to console her for being brought to bed with a man old enough to be her father.