Venus in India (5 page)

'All right, major. Many thanks. Good-night.'

When it was certain that he was gone, my lady glided on to the verandah and occupied the chair that Searle had sat in.

'What has that brute been telling you about me?' she asked, her voice quivering with passion.

I gave her an exact account of all that had passed between us, and when I told her, though in much softened language, about the way he had spoken of her, she rose to her feet and walked up and down the verandah in a towering rage - like an infuriated tiger.

'The black-livered blackguard!' she exclaimed. 'Oh! truly a nice man to preach continence and virtue! I should like to know who drove his wife to the hills to become the real whore she is! Yes! she is a whore if you like! She asks money from her men! It's five hundred rupees a night to have her, it is! I never yet asked a man for a pice, and I would not take one, or a million, as payment! If I do fuck, I fuck for pleasure, and because I like my lover! But I hate a cad! and if ever there was a cad in this world, it is Major Searle,' and she spat on the floor in token of her disgust for him!

I used all my arts of gentle persuasion to try and calm her down, and at length succeeded. She told me that Searle had never had her with her permission.

I propose, but not just at present, to take you, my patient readers, into my confidence, and tell you what were the adventures of her amorous life, but before doing so I must explain how the abhorred attentions of Major Searle were put a complete end to and how Lizzie Wilson rid herself of a man who had been her plague for some years.

I had hired a native servant as my factotum when I stayed in Lahore en route for my destination at Cherat; a capable man he was, and one who had an eye to business, for whether he was married or not I do not know, but he brought a very fine young native woman with him and, as the reader will hear, her talents were not thrown away at Cherat - although for myself I had far finer game to follow than was afforded by Mrs Soubratie's brown skin and somewhat mellow charms. Though no more than twenty she had gone the way of almost all Indian women and her bosom had begun to flow so that her bubbies, otherwise fine and plump, hung in a despondent manner. Such defects, however, are so common that they are little heeded by the British officers or soldiers, who whet their appetite on the fine, juicy cunt, rather than on other personal graces of the dame who affords them pleasure.

Soubratie, hearing I was going to mess, got out my nice, new, clean, white mess clothes, and himself gorgeously adorned and armed with a lantern, saw me safely across the compound, ankle deep in dust, to the mess of the regiment, there to partake of the generous hospitality of the glorious 130th. Is it any use to describe the ante-room, with its swinging punkahs, chairs, tables and pictures, carpets, books, newspapers, trophies of the chase, etc., etc. Shall I tell how the staff and self-important adjutant welcomed me in a proper and decent style; how the colonel seemed to inspect me; how the other officers, whom I had not yet met, greeted me with a polite 'glad to see you' from their lips, and 'I wonder what the devil kind of a fellow you are' glance from their eyes. Most regiments are alike; when you have seen one you have seen all. The English officer is undoubtedly a fearful 'stick' and of all weary humdrum lives, mess life is the most dreary. Along with the air of ennui and lassitude, however, there is a wicked, devil-may-care current, which forms the pith of an officer's life, and I knew well that when a good dinner had been eaten, a good share of fairly good wine drunk, and cigars and pegs had become the evening fare, I should hear a great deal more than I was likely to at the dinner table, where propriety and stiffness more or less ruled the roost. Accordingly, I was now regaled with old stories of the war, tales of savagery and cowardly cruelty on the part of the Afghans, with an occasional growl at the generals and authorities who, it seemed, must have been incompetent to a degree or far more significant results would have accrued from the valour of the British troops. I knew how to discount all this, and listened with interest, more or less affected, to my new friends' views.

But the 'cloth off the table', brought a subject which is always congenial to the fore. Woman, lovely woman, began to be discussed. My young acquaintance J. C.'s statement as to the complete absence of women from Tommy Atkins' quarters in Afghanistan and the consequent immense demand for cunts on his return to civilisation and comfort was immediately confirmed. In those days (it has been very recently altered) the regulations obliged a certain number of native girls to be especially engaged for the services of each regiment, and these ladies of the camp accompanied their regiment wherever it marched in India, just as much a part and parcel of it as the colonel, adjutant and quartermaster. But Tommy likes variety as well as other people, and in every place where there is a bazaar or shops there are establishments for ladies of pleasure and these latter earn a good many four-anna bits which should by rights find their way into the pockets of the proper regimental whores. The recent influx of troops into Peshawar from Afghanistan had created an enormous demand for cunts, and Nowshera, Attock, even Rawalpindi, Umballa and other places had been denuded of 'polls' who gathered like birds of carrion where the carcass lay. This was a great grievance for the officers of the gallant 130th, who were almost as badly off for women as they had been when they been at Lellabad and at Lundi Kotal, at which latter place a Gurkha soldier who had got a bad case of clap from some native woman was universally spoken of as the 'Lucky Gurkha!' Not because of the clap, bien entendre, but because, though he suffered afterwards, he had managed to secure for himself a pleasure so uncommon, under the circumstances, that it seemed like water a thousand miles distant to a traveller lost in the great Sahara!

Once the subject of love and women was started rolling the tongues of those who had been most reticent during dinner were set wagging, and I found a most entertaining host in the fat, pudgy, double-chinned major, who seemed to take a fancy to me. He proposed that we should adjourn outside where the band of the regiment was performing some operatic airs and lively dance music, and there we sat, in those voluptuous Madras long armchairs, enjoying whatever coolness there was in the air, the sounds of the suggestive music and the brilliancy of the myriad bright stars which glittered overhead, literally like diamonds in the sky.

'Searle, our brigade major, said he would come later this evening,' said the major, 'but I rather think he won't.'

'Why?' I asked.

'Because he is cunt-struck with a very pretty little woman in the dak bungalow.'

This I guessed was a shot to me.

'Indeed! Well! I hope he will succeed and get his greens! Poor chap!'

'Oh! Do you! Well! We were all saying that it was a dammed shame, because we had made up our minds that you were surely in her good graces yourself, and we thought it mean of Searle to try and cut in whilst you were out! ha! ha! ha!'

'Oh!' I said quietly, 'but I am a married man, major, and have just left my wife, and do not go in for that sort of thing! So, as far as I am concerned, Major Searle is welcome to the lady if he can persuade her to grant him her favours.'

'Well! But Searle is a married man himself, Devereaux!'

'Oh! I dare say! I don't mean to imply that a married man is impervious to the charms of other women because he is married. I am not straitlaced, and I dare say should be quite as liable as anybody else to have a woman who was not my wife, but you know I have not been married long enough to be tired of my wife, and I have not been long enough away from her to feel any inclination to commit adultery yet!'

'Well! Searle is married - but he's a brute! Yet I somehow pity the poor devil too! I don't know how it is, but he and his wife, a devilish fine woman, a perfect Venus in her way, don't get on altogether well; in fact she has left him!'

'Oh! my! do you say so?'

'Yes! Now mind you, Devereaux, you must not give me as your authority, but I can tell you that he treated that poor woman like hell, half killing her with a blow from the side of his hairbrush; devilish nearly smashed her skull, you know, and after that she left him, and went and set up on her own account at Ramsket.'

I am sure my dear readers are amused at my assuming the air of a thoroughly moral young husband still contented with the breasts of his spouse, as Solomon, I think it is, tells us we ought to be, but of course I was not going to amuse my new friend, or indeed any others, with tales which somehow spread so wonderfully quickly, and in rapidly widening circles, until they reach the ears of those we would least wish to hear them. Really and truly, my heart and conscious pricked me when this conversation brought to mind my beloved little Louie, and I thought of her in her lovely bed, perhaps weeping in sad silence as she prayed for the safety, welfare and quick return home of one whom she loved so dearly, who made her joyous by day and gave her rapturous fun at night, her husband, and the darling father of her angel baby girl. But alas! the spirit is willing and the flesh weak, as I have remarked before, and the weakness of the flesh exceeds the strength of the spirit all too often.

But the conversation was bearing directly on a subject which was becoming interesting to me since I had seen Searle and heard Lizzie's indignant remark that his wife was a regular whore, whose price for her charms was, however, uncommonly high. I did not mind what my fat major said about Searle's designs on Lizzie that evening, because Lizzie would have to have been a most unaccountably stupid deceiver if she had merely expressed abhorrence of him to blind me! No, I felt certain the abhorrence was real and true, and I had no fear that I should find that she had afforded him a retreat, either hospitable or the reverse, in her sweet cunt when I got home to her again.

'How do you mean "set up on her own account", major?' said I.

'Oh! hum! well! look here, bend your head a little nearer to me! I don't want to talk too loudly! Well! she is - that is, any fellow almost, who cares to give her a cool five hundred rupees, can have her.'

'What!' said I in well-affected incredulous tones, 'you want to persuade me that an officer's wife, a lady like Mrs Searle must be, has actually done such a monstrous, not to say such an idiotic thing, as not only to leave her husband, a thing I cannot understand, but to set up as a whore, and in such a place as Ramsket? Surely, major, you are mistaken! Remember! we are told to believe nothing we hear and only half of what we see!'

'I know! I know!' said he, still as calmly as if he were Moses laying down the law, 'but look here, Devereaux, you won't tell me I am a liar if I say the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and that my proof of what I say is that I, Jack Stone, have had Mrs Searle, and paid for my game! Yes, sir! Rupees five hundred did Jack Stone pay Mrs Searle for a night in Mrs Searle's bed.'

'Goodness, and you have actually -'

'I have actually fucked her, sir! and fucked her well! and a damned fine poke she is too, I can tell you, and well worth the five hundred she asks for the fun. Such a damned fine poke is she that Jack Stone, who is not a rich man but must lay up for a rainy day, has put three times five hundred rupees away in the bank of Simla, and means to lodge them some day soon in the bank of Ramsket, of which the banker and sole proprietress is Mrs Searle, the bank itself being her goloptious cunt, between her goloptious thighs. Did you mark that, young man!'

'And does Searle know this?' I asked, still incredulous.

'What? that I have had his wife?'

'No, not that you in particular have had her, but that she is had by other men, and for money paid down on the nail.'

'Know it! of course he does! It's her way of paying him off for his brutal conduct to her, to drive him nuts by writing and telling him how nicely she is dragging his name through the mud.'

'Then why does he not divorce her?' I cried indignantly, for I felt that it was monstrous for a wife, no matter what her grievance might be, to behave in such an outrageous manner.

'Ah! - but sink your voice a little lower, Devereaux, not that all this is not perfectly well known by our fellows, but about the divorce. Well, you see, if what I have heard is true, a divorce is the last thing Searle can get, or would care to ask for, no matter how much he might wish it could be managed.

'Certain little things would come out at the trial, and he might find himself not only minus a wife whom he hates, but also minus his liberty and what remains of his honour, and I don't think anyone would care to become a convict, even to rid himself of his wife!'

'What little things?' asked I, quite bitten with curiosity.

'Oh! Searle was a long time in Persia before he married, and he got the Persian taste for boys! Sodomy, you know!' And the modest major sank his voice to a whisper. 'Sodomy! he tried to get Mrs Searle to acquire a taste for it herself, but she, like a proper woman, indignantly refused to comply. It might have stopped there, but one night Searle, full of zeal and brandy, actually ravished his poor wife's - hem - hem - hem, well! - bum! and from that day she hated him - quite naturally, I think! Then, of course, she gave him the nag, nag, rough side of her tongue, until he nearly killed her, as I told you, in his passion. Then she went and set up at Ramsket.'

'But,' said I, horrified to hear such a disgusting story, so loathsome on either side, 'how is it she can demand such enormous sums for what I expect equally good returns can be got almost anywhere in India!'

'Oh! but you don't know. First of all, Mrs Searle is in society - she is, I suppose, the most beautiful woman in India, if not in all Asia!'

'In society!'

'Yes! bless you! you don't understand. Now come! You, who have seen the world at home! Have you not heard how Mrs So and So is suspected of poking, and yet you have met her every night at the best houses? Have you not seen common or fast women, who dare to do what your own wife or sister dare not, and nobody says more than that they are fast? Do you suppose you know what women actually do poke, and those who only get the credit for it? It is just the same with Mrs Searle. She lives in a pretty little bungalow, some three miles deep in the hills of Ramsket; she calls it Honeysuckle Lodge, but the funny fellows call it Cunnie Fuckle Lodge. Ha! ha! ha! and she has named the hill it is on Mount Venus; she stays there all the hot weather; in the cold weather she goes to Lucknow or Meerut or Agra or Benares or wherever she likes. No fellow has her without an introduction. The Viceroy is damned spoony on her, and that is sufficient to keep the fashionable people quiet. People suspect, people know, but people pretend to think it impossible that the quiet lady, living in a little bungalow, away from all the world, minding her garden and her flowers, is anything but a poor, persecuted wife whose husband is a brute!'