obstacle to our wild career, at any rate we pretty soon had the floor to our own selves. I heard several complimentary remarks as we whirled by, and once I caught Restall's eye full, it bespoke admiration, and by the motion of his lips as he turned to speak to the man by his side, I had an inkling that he was informing the man of the fact that I was a member of his company, and that he, Restall, intended to sleep with me, he could have had me then and there if he had chosen to come and ask, and provide a place.
The music stopped suddenly, and my partner and I sank exhausted on to the nearest seat. As he fanned me, he whispered: “This is an uncomfortable sitting out place. I know one much better-shall we go?” and I only nodded my answer.
“This is the place I mean,” he said, when we paused before a curtained door, situated near the stage. He drew the curtain aside, and next minute I found myself in a cozy little room, and heard behind me the unmistakable sound of a key being turned in the lock.
The room was furnished mainly with a large sofa, the sort that has the ends made to flop down, and a number of theatrical photographs. I thought it was some sort of private sitting room, had I known more I should have guessed at once that it was a dressing room. The photographs of the celebrities were mostly women, and all signed.
As there was no other place to sit on I flopped on the sofa at once, and a moment later my partner was at my side, his arm tight around my waist, and his lips on my cheek.
I suppose it was the fact of my clerical descent that made me leap to my feet with a little noise of disapproval when I felt his fingers tickle the bare flesh above my petticoats or was it the fear that some one might come in — at any rate he took it for the latter, for he hastened to assure me that the door was locked.
“But,” I replied, still rather coy, “suppose any one should want to come in and sit out in this room, too?”
“That they're not likely to do,” he said, with a delicious smile, “for you see this is my dressing room.”
Then I recognized him, he was the tenor of the Harmonic company, the man I had so much admired that night we all went to the theatre-that fatal night before George Reynold's ill advised attempt on my virginity in Sir Thomas Lathmere's house-but the absence of the small pointed beard he affected on the stage altered him, for the better I think.
“I saw you in a box a little time ago,” he said. “You looked like a little dream, but you were with society people. How do you come to be here, and brought by Restall?”
I didn't care that evening; I was carried away by surroundings, and the man seemed so nice, so I told him a good deal of the story — always mind you, my readers, suppressing the fact that George Reynolds had actually pierced my little bird's nest-as Walker Bird is in the habit of calling those inner temples of Venus in which he from time to time inserts his chubby little prick, and his embrace was so comforting, and I suppose I wanted it so much, that I made not the slightest demure when once more he placed his hand beneath my clothes, slid up my silk stockings and eventually laid it on my Mons Veneris.
He slid quietly to the ground, pulled me gently forward till my little bottom just balanced on the edge of the sofa, all the time lifting up my clothes with his other hand, and then pressed himself against me.
“Half a mo-” interrupted Gladys-she gets shockingly suburban when she's excited- “Do you mean to tell me, you little simpleton that you actually let the man fuck you with your new ball dress on?”
And I had to confess to Gladys that in my innocence I actually did do such a silly thing.
“The man ought to have known better- and a well known actor, you say. Actors I've fucked have been most considerate about my clothes, but go on and get the fucking.”
First fucks with different new men are, I suppose, all more or less the same; unless, of course, the man is some old beast, or ugly, or with a dirty beast you are only doing it for money. With a man you want to fuck, the excitement is so great, and you begin to come so soon, that you really haven't any time to notice whether he does it artistically or not; its seldom, indeed, that you even distinguish any great difference in the size of his penis from the man you had last. At any rate my friend, I did not even know his name, got into me till I could feel his balls hang against my bottom, and spent very quickly. He kept it right in me and fucked me again slowly and deliciously, and I can tell you I was in a bit of funk of having been put in the family way when at last the sense of joy had passed, and I stood up. He was sitting opposite me in a chair, his penis perfectly limp.
“Well, I suppose we'd better be getting back,” he said, after I had arranged my dress as well as I could, “people'll be looking for you.”
I thought at first that he was callous; sufficiently pleased to have had a new girl, and wanted to be rid of me. I was angry-but when I suggested leaving him, he would have nothing of it. He took me into one of the first tier boxes, where we sat and watched the other dancers.
Willie Moorfield knew his way about London, and I spent quite an amusing evening while listening to his running comments on the celebrities present.
Miss Marion Storm, the successful comic opera prima donna of two continents, floated by on the arm of a very nice young man, who looked as near to being made up as any young man I had ever seen before. He was, so said Moorfield, a young gentleman who liked being an actor, and with whom audiences put up because it was general knowledge that he had only four or five consumptive and syphilitic cousins between himself and an Earl's coronet. He loved notoriety, and was at the present moment paving assiduous court to Marion of the nut brown hair, tip-tilted nose, and generally fascinating and devil may care expression, because he knew that a lot of other men in London wanted her; that, in fact, she was the fashion.
“They say he really means to marry her- or rather she's quite determined that he shan't get out of it,” said Moorfield, “I only hope they won't both fall in love with the same man.” Which rather amazing statement left me with the idea that the Honorable Mr. George Danvers, Clarendon, Hope, Travis, Gwyn Iumthait was by way of real inclination-a sod.
“Don't you think you're getting rather vulgar, Blanche?” this from Gladys.
“You mean in my words? Well, I don't agree with you, and anyway, a sod is a much nicer term than bugger, which old Doctor Johnson so delightfully describes in his dictionary as “a term of endearment, common among sailors.”
But I mustn't waste time, Moorfield went on to tell me that Miss Storm had ruined almost as many men as Belero, and was equally proud of the fact. Married originally to a comedian, far, at that time, above her own station, both socially and professionally, she had thrown him over without the slightest compunction when fortune began to smile on her, and a man with a bit of money came her way.
The man with the bit of money took a theatre for her; procured a play for her, and made her in the twinkling of an eye one of the greatest stars of the burlesque stage in England. Her salary went up, she became the rage, but the man with the money lot it over the venture. “It was only the other day,” said Moorfield, “that she met him at Ostend, as she was leaving the boat. He was broke to the world, and the opportunity of the custom house business gave him the chance to ask her if she could lend him a tenner or so. She put half a crown on the douane counter, and turned her back. And that night, too, she slept with an actor who hadn't a sou to his name, and who, more than likely as not, borrowed a cool hundred from her.”
“She has money, and she is an artist to the heels of her little shoes,” continued Moorfield. “But she has the lust of money, and whoever the man may be, provided he can give her any more, she will fuck him for it. She will marry that ennobled descendant of a complacent Stuart prostitute and despite the twenty thousand a year he can give her, she will go on acting, because she likes it, loves it for itself, and like the fame and applause it brings her, and she will go on fucking, because she likes that too, and because, however much money she has, she glories in earning more by her cunt.”
“I gather,” says Gladys, “that you and your new friend had become pretty intimate-to judge from you language.”
Well, gentle readers, we had. A sort of affinity seemed to have sprung up between us- and we glided into using dirty words just as if they had been the ordinary common talk of polite conversation.
Little Annabel Cupid was the next goal of his spiteful tongue: he hadn't much to say of her save that she only slept with Jews, and that she wasn't able to suck the man off because she feared that the enamel on her face would crack.
Of Madame Sydney, the operatic star, he told me that she had an absolute passion for loose life, but that she feared so much to find herself enceinte, that she would only play the sucking game with her lovers, or allow them to make an entrance up her stage door.
“The dirt road, as the Americans call it,” interrupts the conscientious one.
