I had turned to her and had found to my astonishment an extraordinary mistress, passionate at once and devoted, who apparently had mastered the whole art of love. This girl not only gave herself with complete abandon, but sought at the same time to excite her lover to the utmost and to give him every possible thrill. She spoke English, too, far better than her mother, and I soon came to the conclusion that her whole sexual nature had been abnormally developed by her mother's practices.
When I offered her money, she did not wish to take it, but wanted to know my hotel and the number of my room and whether she might come there the next day and at what hour. Of course, I fixed a time and was at the door waiting for her.
I think it is worth mentioning the strange manner in which she felt it necessary to express her devotion to me. She allowed me to undress her. But from there on she would allow me to do nothing. She removed my clothes, made me sit on an armchair and then sat down between my knees. With unutterable grace and tenderness she encouraged my passion to rise, stroking me with her fingers over all the surfaces of my groin, until I was standing mightily. I tried to raise her, but she made me desist, bent over, took me between her soft little lips and sent a hundred little darts of sensuality coursing through my sex. Gradually, I realized her purpose. She wished to accept my sperm in her mouth to prove the depth of her passion for me. As soon as that thought occurred to me, I relaxed in the chair. First, however, she straddled the chair and my thighs and lowered herself onto my enraged manhood. It disappeared entirely into her tight canal and the tingling that so quickly brought me to the heights of passion began almost at once. Then she raised herself without proceeding further in that fashion. She didn't hesitate to take my shaft from her pussy and bring it to her lips, all slicked up and dripping as it was. She sucked the head gently, admiring the angry red color of the velvety skin that deepened to purple before her eyes. Then she licked along the ridge that ran beneath the lance to the balls, alternating long, wet lashes with short, flicking strokes. I raised my hips under this exquisite torment and in response, she plunged her head down and swallowed me whole. Her head began to piston up and down as she fucked me with her mouth and throat. I felt myself utterly lose control and allowed the growth of the flood in my member which, a moment later, shuddered to its foundations as the slick flow of my passion thrust upwards into her doting mouth. When she felt it arrive, she swallowed voraciously, her eyes flickering with tenderness and her cool palms supporting between my thighs and urging the last drop of my vital fluid to flow upwards to her mouth. Only then did she rise and kiss me on the lips, almost as a religious neophyte will kiss the image of his god, and I took her on my knee and again we slowly excited one another towards love.
All the months I was in Peking I used to see her nearly every day. It was she who convinced me that passion and devotion, hard as they are to find there, are not unknown in China. She was the very soul of love.
Strange to say, she wanted a child, but there I could not agree. “If you had a child,” I said, “I should be tied to Peking always and I must eventually go away.”
“Then you don't love me,” was her reply.
“Oh yes I do,” I answered.
But I felt always that she had the best of the argument.
One day she told me that her mother, discovering what we were about, had asked for money. Naturally, I gave with both hands. No price within my power would have been too high for the pure and real devotion which she had for me. She was an adorable mistress.
One evening she wanted to know if I would like her better if she took all the hairs off her pussy as many women did. I said no, that I liked her better as she was, but she went on earnestly: “I have the salve and I shall use it if you say so. You know, there is nothing I would not do to keep your lovenothing!” I kissed her tenderly. If ever I was tempted to give up my life in which the wanderlust played so great a part, I was tempted then. The girl's love was infinite. I felt suddenly almost basely materialistic in the face of such passion. What more could a man desire? But then, we must face reality. My life's work was elsewhere. This affair, almost saintly as it was, could represent to a man like me no more than a pleasurable interlude. The problems of the world recalled me, like the voice which called Moses to his task. I faced up to the real, as all really dedicated men have in the past. It was high time to shake myself out of my lethargy and give more purpose, more depth and meaning, to my intellectual life. But parting from her was the hardest task I had in all my travels. When I finally left, I did so with a heavy heart.
Fortunately, I found an old banker who gave her from me a yearly pension. Three years afterwards she married an American and I had a letter from her in due course declaring that she was very happy and about to have a child.
Before going on to Japan, I stayed for a couple of months with an English friend and his wife in Hong Kong, but the residence there made little or no impression on me. They told me I should find nothing worthwhile in Japan, but in that they were not soothsayers. Still, for the time being, they gave me rest and change and I was in need of both.
I write all of these things quite frankly because I believe that Puritanism is not only dead, but deserved to die, and I feel sure that bodily pleasures of all sorts will be more and more sought after in the future.
CHAPTER VI
Looking back over my life, I realize with dismay that there are many people and places of which I have not had the opportunity to speak. In this volume therefore there was from the beginning a kind of dual purpose. In the first place, I wished to continue the true story of my life and loves and, in the second, to make up for the unfortunate omissions in the earlier volumes I'd written. Thus, formally speaking, this last, and in a sense, most final of my expressions, will doubtless lack the purposeful continuity of the earlier. In a summing up, that is only to be expected. I make no apologies for it. I should be untrue to my purpose were I to do otherwise than I am doing. For the truth is that I am not satisfied with what I have written; I might have done it better. I am obsessed by the desire to make each chapter of this volume memorable by some new thought.
The greatest omission as I see it has been amongst some of the great names with whom I was off and on acquainted throughout my colorful life. Without hesitation, therefore, and despising a mechanical chronology, I move now into the consideration of some of the men who have inspired me and whom, not seldom, I have numbered among my friends.
I was more interested in Meredith than in any other man of my time. I thought him one of the greatest of men, worthy to stand with Shakespeare and Wordsworth. He was one of the handsomest of men, just above middle height, slight and strong of figure with a superb head and face, the head all outlined in graying hair, but excellently shaped and the face noblestraight nose, incomparable blue eyes, now laughing, now pathetic, excellent mouth and chinin sum a very good-looking man, sane and strong. When Grant Allen sent him one of my earliest stories, “Montes the Matador,” he praised it as better than the “Carmen” of Merimee because, he explained, I had given even the bulls individuality. He ended his praise with the words: “If there is any hand in England that can do better, I don't know it.” As I have said somewhere, I regarded that judgment as my knighting. No contempt touched me afterwards; Meredith to me already stood among the greatest.
Born in 1828, he brought out his first book of Poems in 1851 and I think he was always more of a poet than a prose writer. But good as his best poetry iseven “Love in the Valley” has stanzas I can never forget and Modern Loves with the entrancing “Margaret's Bridal Eve” is greater still; yet neither in poetry nor in prose has Meredith reached the highest or given his full measure.