few moments she was all trembling and gasping. She put her hand on my head to stop me.
When I lifted her up, she kissed me. 'You dear,' she said with a strange earnestness, 'I want you always. You'll stay with us, won't you?' I kissed her for her sweetness.
When Jeanne came out of the cabinet, we all went into the dining-room, and afterwards Lisette went up to her room after kissing me, and I went to bed with Jeanne, who let me excite her for half an hour; and then mounting me milked me with such artistry that in two minutes she brought me to spasms of sensation, such as I had never experienced before with any other woman.
Jeanne was the most perfect mistress I had met up to that tune, and in sheer power of giving pleasure hardly to be surpassed by any of western race.
An unforgettable evening, one of the few evenings in my life when I reached both the intensest pang of pleasure with the even higher aesthetic delight of toying with beautiful limbs and awakening new desires in a lovely body and frank honest spirit.
Next day I left Jeanne a letter, thanking her and explaining as well as I could the desire in me to complete my work, and enclosing five thousand francs for her and Lisette, all I could spare. Then I took the train and was in my home in Kensington Gore before nightfall. I had won, but that was about all I could say, and I wasn't proud of myself. For months the temptation was in my flesh, more poignant than at first, till suddenly I heard from the comic actor of the Palais Royale, Monsieur Galipaux, I believe, that Jeanne had left Paris and gone to live in Algiers. 'We all miss her,' he added.
Since then I've neither seen nor heard of her or Lisette, but she taught me what astonishing quality as lovers some French women possess.
Often since when I've met mad, unreasoning jealousy, the memory of Jeanne has recurred to me. She taught me that a woman can love and delight in giving the most extreme pleasure, and yet be without jealousy of the aesthetic, lighter loves of man. The faithfulness of heart and soul and the spiritual companionship is everything to such a few, rare women.
CHAPTER XXIV
I have decided at one jump to pass over more than a quarter of a century, leaving my maturity to be described later, and so come at once to old age, for there are things to be said that I wish to transcribe with the exact fidelity of a diary.
I had often heard of sixty-three as being 'the grand climacteric' of a man's life, but what that really meant I had no idea till I had well passed that age.
Alphonse Daudet has written somewhere that every man of forty has tried at some time or another to have a woman and failed (fit faux coup). He even went so far as to assert that the man who denied this, was boasting, or rather lying.
I can honestly say that I had no such experience up to sixty. I had become long before, as I shall tell, a mediocre performer in the lists of love, but had never been shamed by failure. Like the proverbial Scot, I had no lack of vigor, but I too 'was nae sae frequent' as I had been. Desire seemed nearly as keen in me at sixty as at forty, but more and more, as I shall relate, it ramped in me at sight of the nudities of girlhood.
I remember one summer afternoon in New York, it seems to me just when short dresses began to come in. A girl of fourteen or fifteen, as I came into the room, hastily sat up on a sofa, while pulling down her dress that had rucked up well above her knees. She was exquisitely made, beautiful limbs in black silk showing a margin of thighs shining like alabaster. I can still feel how my mouth parched at the sight of her bare thighs and how difficult it was for me to speak of ordinary things as if unconcerned. She was still half asleep and I hope I got complete control of my voice before she had smoothed down the bobbed unruly hair that set off her flaming cheeks and angry confused glances.
Time and again in the street I turned to fix in my memory some young girl's legs, trying to trace the subtle hesitating line of budding hips, seeing all the while the gracious triangle in front outlined by soft down of hair just revealing the full lips of the fica. Even at forty, earlier still, indeed, as I have related, I had come to love small breasts like half-ripe apples and was put off by every appearance of ripe maturity in a woman. But I found from time to time that this woman or that whom I cared for could give me as keen a thrill as any girl of them all, perhaps indeed keener and more prolonged, the pleasure depending chiefly upon mutual passion. But I'm speaking now of desire and not of the delights of passion, and desire became rampant in me only at the sight of slight half-fledged girlhood.
One experience of my manhood may be told here and will go far to make all the unconscious or semi- conscious lusts manifest. While living in Roehampton and editing the Saturday Review, I used to ride nearly every day in Richmond Park. One morning I noticed something move in the high bracken, and riding to the spot, found a keeper kneeling beside a young doe.
'What's the matter?' I asked.
'Matter enough,' he replied, holding up the two hind legs of the little creature, showing me that they were both broken.
'Here she is, Sir,' he went on. 'As pretty as a picture, ain't she? Just over a year or so old, the poor little bitch, and she come in heat this autumn and she must go and pick out the biggest and oldest stag in the park and rub her little bottom against him-Didn't you, you poor little bitch! — and of course he mounted her, Sir; and her two little sticks of legs snapped under his weight and I found her lying broken without ever having had any pleasure; and now I've got to put her out of her pain, Sir; and she's so smooth and pretty! Ain't ye?' And he rubbed his hand caressingly along her silky fur.
'Must you kill her?' I asked, 'I'd pay to have her legs set.'
'No, no,' he replied, 'it would take too much time and trouble and there's many of them. Poor little bitch must die,' and as he stroked her fine head gently, the doe looked up at him with her big eyes drowned in tears.
'Do you really lose many in that way?' I asked.
'Not so many, Sir,' he replied. 'If she had got over this season, she'd have been strong enough next year to have borne the biggest. It was just her bad luck,' he said, 'to have been born in the troop of the oldest and heaviest stag in the park.'
'Has age anything to do with the attraction?' I asked.
'Surely it has,' replied the keepers. 'The old stag is always after these little ones, and young does are always willing. I guess it's animal nature,' he added, as if regretfully.
'Animal nature,' I said to myself as I rode away, 'and human nature as well, I fear,' with heavy apprehension or presentiment compressing my heart.
Now to my experience. In the early summer of 1920, having passed my sixtyfifth birthday, I was intent on finishing a book of Portraits before making a long deferred visit to Chicago. Before leaving New York, a girl called on me to know if I could employ her. I had no need of her, yet she was pretty, provocative, even, but for the first time in my life, I was not moved.
As her slight, graceful figure disappeared, suddenly I realized the wretchedness of my condition in an overwhelming, suffocating wave of bitterness. So this was the end; desire was there but not the driving power.
There were ways, I knew, of whipping desire to the standing point, but I didn't care for them. The end of my life had come. God, what a catastrophe! What irremediable, shameful defeat! Then for the first time I began to envy the lot of a woman; after all, she could give herself to the end, on her death bed if she wished, whereas a man went about looking like a man, feeling like a man, but powerless, impotent, disgraced in the very pride and purpose of his manhood.
And then the thought of my work struck me. No new stories had come to me lately: the shaping spirit of imagination had left me with the virile power.
Better death than such barrenness of outlook, such a dreadful monotonous desert. Suddenly some lines came
