I have suffered greatly. I found myself so lonely, so neglected. But all this is quite finished, is it not?
My brother left yesterday by the midnight train. I gave him all your advice and I thank you a thousand times.
Yes, you have guessed rightly. I love him very much. He is so gentle, so good, and then he loves me fondly, too.
If you have dreamt truly when you supposed we were on our wedding trip, how proud and happy I should be; and I am certain that you would regret nothing, for I would make you so happy that the horrible sentence you write to me in your good letter would never enter your mind.
You are sad, fatigued, tired of life, say you? That is because you have no tie to make existence a pleasure. But if you had a good little wife, very loving, full of care for you; a pretty little household-“home”-in all the true sense of the word, your ideas would be quite different. And you have only a word to say to possess all this. Do not suppose that I speak lightly. I have reflected seriously and I am convinced that we should be mutually happy. Do you think it is so very amusing for me to see you only during a few short moments, now and again, and always with a little apprehension? And it will always be the same if we continue like this-but I will no longer.
I kiss you madly as on certain days,
LILIAN.
JACKY TO LILIAN.
Paris, November 16, 1898.
My darling daughter,
I must hold my pen tight today so that it shall not escape and bolt away across the paper to express to you all the sweet joy your delicious letter, which I received yesterday, has given me. I can only see one thing: you love me!
That letter is you: my Lilian, my daughter, my slave, my love, all mine; your heart to excuse me, to console me, and your body a hundred times offered for my pleasure, my lust, my enjoyment… and a little for yours, by the sole fact of the pleasure you bestow. For I often remarked that you found your pleasure in provoking mine. I would ask you: “What do you want now?” And you would answer: “You!”
When you are near me, you feel that movement which opens the sources of pleasure in your inmost being. I am proud to have been the first who produced in you that effect, and you always experience it when I am by your side; when I rub against you; when I look at you. I remember the first time I came to this conclusion; we were in that café where we drank some champagne. You looked at me, your nostrils quivered, you were spending and yet our conversation was commonplace. You were near me and you loved me as you loved me today. I never have understood your love and your passion better.
You talk of “certain days” and of your mad caresses.
Impudent girl! Do you wish to awaken in me all my lust, and excite and provoke all my desires-all the yearning I have for you? You make me remember my imaginations of slavery. I wish to call to you to come to my arms. I wish to command you to run to me, to execute all the voluptuousness of which I dream when my thoughts wander towards you-as it happens too often.
I have still a little virgin paint-brush in a corner of a drawer, wrapped in tissue paper. I would also teach you the bicycle race, when your saddle would be my mouth and face, and the handlebar the head of the bed, or you could turn round and….Will you, say, Lilian, my little incestuous daughter?…
But I stop and read over what I have just written. I ought not write thus to you. I am mad. So much the worse for me…! I send you my incoherent thoughts. Excuse me. I will try to be more cold and reasonable.
My dream, which was delicious, for you gave me your mouth in the railway carriage, and then your thighs and the rest, is impossible to realize for reasons which I will give you some day by word of mouth. It would be too long and useless to tell all here. I must be brutally frank and say that I can give you nothing that you deserve. You have come too late in my life. I am unfortunate-not by your fault, I hasten to say-and if I could have foreseen that our love would have become what it is today, I think I should have fled. Besides, you must remember how long I resisted? Yet I regret nothing, I shall always have the remembrance of the exquisite joys given and taken. But there is no future for us. All you write to me is just and sensible and when you say, “You will not continue like that,” I have only to bow my head. I have nothing to say. You are right.
I ought to have been stronger and not have succumbed, but your eyes were too beautiful; your lips, rosy and moist, too sweet; your passion caused mine to grow. I took you and chanced it. It was so lovely. I say I took you. I do not say I hold you now, and yet you are mine, despite that I love you too religiously to profit by your delicious weakness and make you a woman. That word “religiously” may not match the rest of my letter, but you will understand what I mean-what passes through my brain. And if I am forced to disappear tomorrow from your life, even by your orders, you will always be mine for your whole life, in spite of yourself, free or married, by the sheer strength of the feelings I excite in you. Therefore, fly from me, for I have nothing to offer you but a little sensual pleasure and that is not enough. Leave me alone with my wasted life. It will be better for both of us.
This letter is vague. Will you be able to make head or tail of it? What is the “horrible sentence” of my poor letter? Have I said anything horrible to you… whose soul I martyrize?
Have you never guessed how I always struggled against your fascination? How many times have I regretted a night I refused at Sonis! Do you recollect? I feared to compromise you. Yet had I been more selfish? That lost night!.. What a fool I was!
You told me: “I often go to Paris now.” Is that true, or only to tease me? You often liked to vex me by telling me little things which were not true, to laugh at my amazement afterwards.
Can I see you? Anywhere you like… to talk to you an hour or less, between two trains… if it is true that you often come to Paris, I ask nothing of you. I no longer speak as master. I am a wretch and a coward!
I have nothing of you as a souvenir, not even your photograph. Your letters are not mine, but your property. I want to give them back to you. I have nothing but a little bit of pink ribbon.
J.S.
The foregoing letter I have copied from some rough notes which I happened to keep. I think I wrote more than what is set down here. I alluded to my age and said that marriage was impossible between a man of forty-six and a girl of twenty-two. I also concluded very erotically, asking her to meet me at night in the darkness of the country lanes at Sonis, while her Pa was in London during the remainder of the month.
The general effect of my letter was to show her that I could not possibly carry on our connection any more, as I could see that she wanted something advantageous-money or marriage; and infatuated though I was, it slowly dawned upon me that Miss Arvel did not want Jacky, if Jacky was poor. At the same time, I was careful not to blame her in any way, but heaped reproaches on my own head.
I had no answer. I did not expect she would reply when I wrote. I bore up manfully against the blow for which, however, I was slightly prepared by her silence during the preceding month, and, being so much troubled in every way in Paris, I began to get used to the buffetings of the world. One wound more or less, what does it matter when you are fighting, and getting the worst of every round?
She could only have written in one way and that would have been to say: “I want to see you at once,” and she should have appeared and cried in my arms and proved her love for me in a thousand pretty ways. Luckily for me, she did nothing of the sort. She was not one of the crying kind, being too selfish and hard-hearted. She never wept for me.
I think as far as a man can judge himself, that I really felt an immense love for her of an intensely sensual kind at that moment. I will not tell what thoughts filled my racked brain at this juncture, but had she sought me out, she might have done what she liked with me. But it must have been at once; every day took me farther from her. She did not know her power then, and I may as well say frankly that she never regained it. She did not really care for me, save as stepping-stone to get over part of the torrent of life dry shod.