“I am about to prepare you for punishment! Look out!”
So saying, she came near to me with a firm step, holding a martinet in each hand.
Scarcely were the words out of her mouth, when I felt myself enwrapped with a shower of hot blows. The heavy lashing of the two martinets was bestowed upon my flesh with unparalleled velocity, sweeping all over me with their numerous thongs, from shoulders to loins; then thighs to feet, on which I hopped despairingly, first on the right then on the left.
I twisted round and round like a mad dervish, under the rain of the white-hot serpents that stung me with their painful darts on all sides, and the clever whipping creature laid on her blows with mathematical precision, cut following cut with scarcely an interval. Every part of my body was inflamed, with the sole exception of the very spot where I wished to feel the fustigation.
In vain I turned toward the cruel flogging female those hinder parts of mine that palpitated with the desire to be assaulted. She cunningly avoided striking my backside. Both her martinets were plied above and below, so as to cause my suffering to increase. I stamped and howled, in a sudden fit of real rage, trying to place myself in such a way as to receive a stroke of relief on my poor bottom. I never succeeded, and my fury thus grew more frenzied.
All of a sudden, my flagellating lady threw her martinets from her, and left the room without speaking. I felt stupefied, not knowing what to think. The young chambermaid now appeared. Climbing on a chair, she freed my arms.
“Lie down-flat on your face-on that bench,” she told me.
By this I guessed at last that the whipping woman was coming back to quench the feverish thirst that tortured and devoured me. This long interval was infinitely terrible. I could hardly put up with it. While waiting, it seemed as if every inch of my skin was burning with flames even more ardent than when Miss Florence had flogged me with her martinets. The parts she had spared felt swollen, like big balloons. Every pore was open-a thousand tiny mouths seeking for breath.
The pretty minx had concluded her work of tying me down. She made as if about to go. Feeling myself under the spell of insensate desire, I begged the obliging maid to take pity on me and give me a few stout cuts with a whip before leaving the room.
“I'm sorry, sir” she said dryly, “but that's not my business.”
Sketching a stiff curtsey, she flew out of the chamber.
When finally the door did open, I saw the irreproachable mistress of the house again. I thought that the archangel Gabriel had arrived in person, to save me from hell, and take me straight into paradise.
“I'm now going to apply one hundred strokes of the birch, and twenty cuts with my whip,” she said.
Her words fell on my ears like celestial music.
“Look out!”
The first blows, rained down with her usual firmness, cutting and lacerating my buttocks, were a sublime relief. I arched my loins, enjoying the heavenly dew of birching blows that refreshed my body athirst for flagellation. Oh, what a beautiful birch-rod it was! How divinely did it beat me, wounding me with its incandescent points and bounding off again, like a storm of boiling raindrops.
The beautiful flogging woman kept on castigating me, beating time to some unknown measure in her mind; dealing me the fifty blows, the barbarous, beautiful creature took a few moments' well-earned rest. She was impassible and calm; her eyes full of a faraway expression as she appeared to be plunged in some profound reverie of remembrance.
She then drew herself up to her full height, and passed round to the other side of my prostrate body. The regular swishing of the second rod tingled my bottom in its turn, torturing me with its sharp ends. It was terrible and delicious, at one and the same time. Maddening pain, mingled with ineffable sensual joy, made my flesh throb and beat with strange lewd pulsations.
I yelled, and twisted myself about, thousands of incandescent sparks sinking deep into the skin of my stern, while the rod never ceased slashing away at me with its harmonious and inflexible rhythm.
When Miss Florence dropped her second rod, I was on fire. My body was contorted like that of a sufferer of epilepsy. She seized the whip. I heard it hiss through the air and then with a sonorous, slashing sound, it came down dealing terrible cuts on my bruised bum. I writhed under the awful avalanche of blows. Every one of my joints ached. The rigid queen of flagellation, crossing over to the other side of the bench, let me have the remaining ten cuts, dealt with unchanging vigour. The last put an end to all the straining efforts of my tormented body. I lay inert, after one superhuman bounding effort, casing the bench to rock like a boat in a storm.
The moment after, my awe-inspiring mistress of the martinet had disappeared. The young girl came in, and liberated me from my bonds. She begged me not to get up, as she wished to attend to my a little.
Fetching tepid water and a sponge, she wiped away the flow of blood that stood out in ruby beads on my bruised flesh. After that she made me take off the black belt, and bringing a pot of ointment from the dressing room, spread some over my posteriors, covering the greased flesh with a piece of soft cambric.
“As you're a lover of flagellation,” she said, “you ought always to have a pot of this nice cream handy. It heals the skin admirably, quickly effacing all marks of the rod or whip. It's called Cowper's Cucumber Pomade, and is sold in all drugstores.”
While I was putting on my clothes in the dressing-closet, she brought me a glass of very good port. It ran through my veins like liquid fire, bracing me up after the strong succession of shocks I had experienced.
Dinner-hour was now nigh, so I was not long driving to a first-class restaurant, where I invigorated myself completely.
My whole body burnt still with thousands of flames, while delightful reaction threw me into a state of voluptuous beatitude, the well-earned reward of passionate sensualists who dash headlong into the furnace of rods, martinets and whips. This reaction is not sought for nor expected. It is only the happy result of punishment. The votary of the rod, without thinking of the consequences, seeks only at starting to quench the mad thirsting desire that eats up his soul; that imperious craving to feel on his martyred flesh those cutting caresses which bruise and wound.
CHAPTER IX
The passion leading a man to long to be flagellated is a need quite as tyrannical for those engrossed by it as for others who cannot subsist without alcohol, opium or morphine. I was led to note the effect of this besetting idea on myself, for, although still feeling quite sore all over as a result of the terrible castigation to which I has allowed myself to be subjected, my imagination began to stray toward fictive regions where I pictured adventures in which rod or whip played important parts. My flesh cried out again for the beneficent bite of the birch.
A printseller, trading under the rose in most spicy specimens of artistic photography, showed me some very suggestive groupe which contributed to excite my salacity still further.
With astonishing fidelity to nature, these representations of living models showed various scenes of flagellation, where charming, young women abandoned themselves with voluptuous frenzy to the delight of whipping masculine backsides of all conditions and ages.
One series was devoted to the punishment of a youthful pupil by a strict governess. This long suite of postures was reproduced with cinematographic exactness. A boy could be seen undressing; lying down tied to a bench. The birching game began. The authoritative, stern look of the school mistress and the struggles of her pupil writhing under the hail of blows had been dexterously caught by the operator, so that by looking at these photographs it was easy to feel the inward emotion that only such a truthful image can arouse. The punishment could be followed in all its phases; even the progressive effect of the rod on the lad's fleshy buttocks growing darker and darker as they became covered with scratches and weals.