"- has always acknowledged, in its God-given wisdom, man's lower nature. The confessional is ever open for the discharge of the shameful ordures of humanity. But men must not wallow, they must be led, nay forced, to identification with their higher selves. Or, if you wish that in political terms, repressive government and occasional carnivals. Will you become our censor, in the service of a repression that is itself in the service of God's plan for the humanity he made in his own image and likeness?"
"Give me time to think of it. Time to come to terms with my own unworthiness."
EIGHT
"So, Severn, she said 'Voulez-vous profiter de ma caresse, monsieur?' and I, nothing loth, sneered up at the liveried tiger who sneered down, passing beneath him on my quick passage to the other door of her coach, and I was in there breathing the richness of her perfume, which was roses and violets and Eastern spices, Severn, and we galloped through the dirty streets not to the Villa Borghese but to the palazzo to which her husband the prince has banished her, Severn. He has banished her because she is too ready to summon any pretty man to her bed. Well, now it was I who was summoned and I was nothing loth. How shall I describe to you that long night caressing her long nakedness, holding in my arms the princess of love who is the sister of him who was like to be emperor of all the world? No prodigal outpouring of poesy's most opulent treasure could convey one whit of the ecstasies spent freely and as freely renewed.
"The bed itself, Severn, was in form of a gold trireme and the coverlet was of silk containing the down of innumerable eiderducks and cygnets. The sheets too were of silk that gave off crackles of electricity when we crawled thereon naked towards each other from opposed angles. She instructed me in all of the modes of physical possession out of her deep learning. Marry, I cannot remember the names of them all, but there was certes the pavonian touch, the Ledan straddle too, the chthonian ditch, the I think it was termed Ceutan flight and eke the Madrilenan interuberal. When, sweating and briefly weary of our sport, she rang for refreshment, the wine we drank we drank from heavy bronze cups with dove-feet, and there was fruit with, though this must seem impossible, dawn dew upon it though midnight had scarce struck. All this I tell you is true, Severn, in poetic truth it is all true.
"Guilt? Why should guilt touch me with its scaly wing? I have been faithful to the limit, have I not? Would it be just for me to be denied what his lordship takes with such aristocratic carelessness daily, nightly, matutinally, postmeridianly, serally? She should have yielded when I asked, Severn, but I well remember the afternoon when, her mother gone out visiting, we stood looking at each other's feet, unwilling to engage each other's eyes, our breasts heaving, and she said somewhat to the effect that this was the fate imposed upon us by a social order that chains neither the milord nor the stinking swinking I would say artisan but reserves its bondage for all who wear clean shirts and pressed muslin and chat with the rector after matins but have nothing in goldsmith's notes. Ah, the risk and the scandal. But I, Severn, have had a whole manhood of fleshly longing crammed into a boy's years, and Alma Venus or Queen Mab or l'ultima principessa could give in no wise to my fancy what she she she denied to my body.
"Then thousand curses and stinging blights light on it all and on her too who turned her desirable back on the prospect of a paradise pardieu for herself as much as for me, poor dogsbody, Severn. I wanted her so much, stripped of her demure muslin and her warm body snaking or lamiating in my warm arms, hers and hers only and to the inferno with Alma Venus. God or whoever's up there rain down stinking ordures on her who withheld so through fear of Mr Snigg and Mistress Sniff and the Reverend Snoggsbody and invoked an unjust propriety to leave me quenching my fire with cold water and tired lettuce leaves. Radishes and onions and eke turnips and potatoes are, e'en uncompanioned with gross bloody beef or fat lusty pork, promoters enow of lawless lechery. And Burton laughed, I swear his laugh broke an instant from the frontispiece woodcut of his wry costive countenance.
"Well, he was in the right of it, e'en so your worship. And all the poets dead and gone laughed too and laugh still. This afternoon I had a long colloquy with mad Will, who speaketh good Florentine I may say, though he was helped out on a word here and there by Master Florio, ever banging at his open dictionary as at the King's Bible. But in fair English he told me, the sounds sweetly Italianate, and after a while he laughed but little, that there is nothing after this, neither fire nor ice, for he has wandered like a ghost and longed to lap blood. There is nothing, saith he, like the red din of an aching tooth as it engageth good hot meat, nor the nutmeg and cinnamon in mulled ale thudding on the arch of the palate, nor the dove-soft touch of a young love's ripening breast.
"Of that I could endite well, Severn. Had I but had time and sense I could have writ a great long poem on the sweetness of the breasts of the enchantresses of history, from Helen to Alma Venus here in Rome who has had her right breast modelled in marble by Maestro Canova or some such rogue. And of the aching sweetness of the soft swell outwards from the waist to the buttocks, and the faint sweet down on the skin. Away with your bloodless Jesus, I say.
"Well, no, not so truly, since he had blood enough in him and fire enough and his whipping arm was strong. It is that the enemy of the world has filched and perverted him, the enemy that rules now, Severn, and you would wish to know who he is and behold I will tell thee. He is all against life, meaning the thud of the heart in venery, the savour of claret, the clamorous morsels of spring in the nest you by chance uncover, hawthorn and goldenrod, good witty lechery in the company of men, the green waving tree, tough-boled, of the body. It is not enough for him to suck blood only at once to spew it forth, he must also poison the very wells of blood. His name may be Wells for all we know, or Flibbertigibbet or Cacasona, it matters not. He is cacodemon of decay, and it is not the decay of the grass-dropped apple in autumn. For the apple dies in sweetness but I do not.
"I do not, Severn, I do not not not. Nor do I proceed to the consummation with speed enow. You see, I do not curse the brevity of this my allotment, for your three score and ten superstition puts silly value on the straight line of the geometers, which has length but not thickness. I have had thickness enough, God knows, and now I am hawking up the thickness – blood less and less, a rank porridge more and more. I regret only that I was denied the one sweetness Lord Byron would have crushed carelessly between his fine teeth, like a horse grinding a sugar lump. He would have taken her if he could and then confounded the memory of her caresses with a myriad others, not even remembering her name – Fanny something, but there have been so many Fanny somethings. So my craving was not inordinate, Severn, and it was denied.
"I reserve a special curse for Society, which has as ultimate head of its Executive the Life Hater. Ah, how Society feels itself threatened by the human senses! Even the chomp and honey drip of language, made of sense and bound to sense as it is, must be squeezed dry by Society. And yet I, disregarded small poet, am one of the sustainers of Society and, in a sense, must die for it. When will it be, Severn, the end? I curse you again and I curse Clark for withholding the drowsy quietus. Curse you and your fucking nasty perverted gentle Jesus whining about the sanctity of life. Curse every follicle, each footsole's grimy whorl, each inbreath and eke each outbreath, muddy Severn, torturer. I will haunt your grey age, enemy."