'I was only a boy then, my dear girl,' he began, 'and by God I loved the girls, bless' em. I believe I was the only English officer in the war invited to get into a really swagger harem-and this chap, Ramuz Pasha, was so grateful that he wouldn't take no for an answer.
'We went into a luxuriously-got-up set of rooms, with about thirty women, some mere children, lying about reading, sewing or smoking, or playing with the little tots children who pottered about the marble floors.
'Well, the pasha bet Sous Lieutenant D'Alberique at myself?100 English that we wouldn't account for the lot them between us.
'My Gad, my dear, we did, and I won another?25 off D' Alberique as a side bet. I was seven ahead. Oh, it was lovely. Those warm, smooth Eastern beauties, their breath smelling of strange spices, their lazy, languorous lust, and the delicate vice of their actions. Lord, they did know how to fuck. “When Ramus told' em I had saved his life they nearly ate me. I never faltered. Between each fuck I jumped into the great bath in the middle of the big room. The water was warmed exactly right, perfumed, and strengthened with some pick-me-up mixture. The slaves brought us coffee, liqueurs, sweets and cigarettes, and it was one triumphant carnival of vice. If there had been any more I could have gone on.
'D'Alberique and I lay back on couches, and looked at our assembled victims-lovely, lustful-eyed Circassians, Greeks, Roumanians, Herzegovinians and Turks-there were even two English girls. And after that, my dear, when I went back to the hotel I found an English society lady on her way out to the front to see her husband, and what a night I had with her. Yet, when I looked out of the window in the morning over the sparkling waters of the Bosporus I felt like a lion.'
Maudie was interested.
'Were you ever wounded, general?' she asked.
'Only once, madame, and rather badly. I have the scar still.
'Oh, do show me.'
'It's in rather an awkward place.'
'“What odds; do I mind your seeing me naked? Come on. I'm sure it wasn't behind.'
'Madame!'
The old soldier quickly took down his trousers, and there, just below his balls, was a long vicious looking scar. Above it his balls were swollen, and his cock stiff as an iron rod.
'How dreadful,' said Maudie, 'and supposing it had been a little higher, why you might have lost this,' and she fingered his cock.
That did it. The general read assent in her eyes and almost rent his clothes oft:
He was a fine naked figure, upright as a dart, muscular and clear of skin, and he gripped Maudie in an embrace which she certainly did not expect from a man of seventy odd.
Their bodies writhed in unison as Maudie gently put the general's cock into her greedy little cunt. It was big and the entrance was difficult at first, and painful, but the pain was the pain which you and I, readers of both sexes, know to be the perfect poetry of pain.
'Oh! oh! general,' Maudie gasped.
'My dear girl,' said the old soldier, 'in one part of South Africa where I was quartered, the maidens were sewn up damme, just before they were married, and if the mar couldn't get in, he was considered no man.'
The struggle was over, the pass passed, and the general was right in, his grey hairs pressed against Maudie's clean shaved mount of Venus.
Maudie took it as a 'dream fuck', possibly the very best form of fuck there is. With tightly closed eyes she imagined the old man who held her in his impassioned embrace whose finger strokes made her back boil with pleasure, and whose prick seemed to be drawing every atom of strength out of her, as a young soldier of early Victorian days fucking his tearful girl on the eve of his departure for the Crimea. She imagined him, bearded, begrimed, and half-frozen in the trenches. She could see him carrying the wounded Turk to safety under the fire of the Russian guns. She thought of the harem episode, thought too of the honours of the Mutiny. Of the triumphal return and of the pinning of the VC on his breast by the Queen herself. Kabul, Burma, Egypt, Majuba-they all rushed like cinematograph pictures across her brain.
In fact she fucked herself through fifty odd years of history and, as the rumble of the returning car warned them, they woke out of their lust dream and spent in unison.
'Dress quick, you old darling,' whispered Maudie. 'Tubby mustn't know.'
He was into his clothes with the speed of a practised old campaigner, and met Tubby at the end of the passage with Madame Rade.
'Rippin' drive,' said the fat young man, 'took Madame Rade's kid too-she's going to arrange about sports now, see you later.'
Maudie had sponged herself, but was still naked when the two came into her room. She made Tubby be lady's maid massage her a little, find her clothes, and put her into them. Then she gave him her keys, and asked for all her jewels.
It was a large order, for Maudie had not made love for peanuts all her young life.
Tray after tray Tubby lifted out of the great jewel chest. Every variety of precious stone glinted there, and Maudie got on all she could, bar the tiaras. Somehow her unexpected act of lust with the veteran servant of Mars, and the cloud visions of the gorgeous and gory scenes she had pictured, made her want to show off, to be extravagantly overdressed. She would be Ninon de l'Enclos-in ultramodern clothes.
The result was very dazzling, and as Tubby secured the last hook, and stood back to look, he gasped.
So did Madame Rade.
'Cherie,' she said, 'you look like a modiste's and jeweller's window combined, turned into a rainbow.'
Maudie did not answer. She was in the thralls of the full sensual rapture of jewels. As she looked in the glass at her fingers, her arms, her breasts, her waist, her throat, she read stories of love and lust, of battle and murder, of every unrestrained crime committed for the sake of a woman's kiss.
“With a click of her tongue she rang down the curtain on her dreams. 'Now,' she said, 'for the great handicap race for Toinette. I think I have got it right. It's a hundred yards.
'Charlie, of course, is scratch. Phil I've given five yards, he's a bit of an athlete, and the poet has long enough legs and I think eight is fair mark. Tuberino mio, you get fifteen, and old General Fitzhugh must have thirty-five. He'll hardly last. Now, there's old Rosenberg, an immensely wealthy stockbroker, whose coming down tonight. He takes fifteen, also, and Sandy McPhail, the Paisley-shawl merchant, is a ten-yard man. He'll be here tomorrow.'
Tubby rather grudgingly assented. He had set his heart on winning the race. He coveted little Toinette, and he meant to prove his manhood by taking her maidenhead properly.
'It's going to be?250 apiece,' Maudie added-'you may as well whack up now, Tubby.'
Tubby wrote a cheque. 'But,' he said, 'Charlie may not-'
'That's all right,' Maudie interrupted. 'I owe him a bit for a job he's going to do for me. That'll be?1,750 in all.'
Madame Rade heaved a happy sigh;?1,750-for that she didn't care who broke that little wisp of skin which guarded Toinette's womb.
Tubby went, and she stayed with Maudie to smoke and chat.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Charlie, strolling from his room, came upon MIle Rade standing at the door of a bedroom a few yards down the corridor.
He had scarcely even spoken to the fascinating French girl before the motor ride, but he had noted her delicate petite airs and graces.
' Tantahas gone to Miss Maudie,' she volunteered. 'Everybody's gone out; I'm supposed to stay here learning lessons. I feel so lonely.'
Charlie suggested that he might keep her company.
'Oh, do,' she answered, 'come in here. It's a bedroom, but it doesn't matter.'
Charlie was nothing loth: she was as pretty as a little bit of Dresden china-and he longed for a kiss, just a tiny playful toying with her lips.