Thongs

He did not answer.

'You think there is?'

'We could disappear,' he said in a dull voice. 'We could, Gertrude. We could go somewhere where they would never find us.'

I laid my hand on his, causing his hand to lie heavily on my belly.

'Do you really think so, Harry? Do people like us not need the Order? Is that not why we belong to it?'

'I don't,' he said obstinately. 'Of course, I'm not a member of the Hierarchy. I'm simply a permanent civil servant!'

'Would you make me happy, Harry?'

'Yes, Gertrude. I think I would!'

'And if I wanted one day to be flogged to death?'

He was deathly pale.

'Could you not learn ordinary love, Gertrude? I mean, not ordinary! But a man and woman love.'

'You mean ordinary love, Harry,' I said gently.

He smiled hopelessly.

'Yes. That's what I mean.'

'No, Harry, I'm afraid not. Don't think I don't want you just now. But afterwards. What then?'

'But the Order is not against our making love, Gertrude! And afterwards — so what? Afterwards, when we feel like it, we make love again. What else?'

'It sounds monotonous, Harry. I couldn't bear for it to become monotonous.'

'But life's like that, Gertrude! What do you want? You can't burn with passion all the time. You would soon burn yourself out. Like phosphorous.'

'Perhaps that's the answer,' I said quietly.

'What do you mean?'

'To raise passion to such a level that life becomes extinct within it.'

'But that's suicide, Gertrude!'

'I've been thinking, Harry.'

'What about?'

'About the Virgin Death. Do you know anything about that?'

'Of course. She symbolizes the infinite lust for Pain, to the point of death.'

'Did she exist?'

'Oh, lots of people have died under flagellation,' he said evasively. 'We had a stockbroker ourselves who went out with a heart attack during a flogging.'

'Yes, but it's not the same, Harry. This woman mounted the cross to die. She knew she was going to die. She demanded it. Did she exist?'

'I suppose from the official standpoint she did. But we're living in the twentieth century, Gertrude. It's a relative age. People don't have the same lust for the infinite, or if they do, they're mad. What's the point? Men like to be flogged or to flog. But to the point of death, that's another thing.'

'But that's just the point, Harry. You know the point at which one screams out of control, the point at which one is simply a helpless victim of the thongs? That is dying, Harry, when one no longer has the power of will. You are suspended in Pain; you no longer wish for it to go on or to stop. You become Pain. If someone were to drive a knife into your heart at that moment, you wouldn't feel it; it would be like turning off the light, that's all. Normally, when you don't die, you come back through Pain to yourself, and it is you who is painful, your own aching flesh. And there's nothing in that; it's simply painful. The triumph is in the rising beyond the painful into Pain. Once that leap out of the self has been made, it is an anticlimax to go back. That's like ordinary lust which goes on and on. You come to the climax and then everything is shattered. You are yourself again, alone, just as you were before. And it goes on and on and on. Until we feel like it again, you said a moment ago. But that's monotonous, Harry. And it's the same with flagellation. Only with flagellation there's no excuse. It's sheer cowardice to come back. Only that person is admirable, only that person is truly religious, who has the courage not to come back. What for, after all? To do it all over again?'

'All right,' Harry said in a tired voice, 'so you choose to die because you find life monotonous, because it goes on and on with the same rising and falling, the same thrills which are provoked and which come to an end. But that is what living is, Gertrude, and I don't see why one should expect it to be anything else. For me the courageous thing to do is to come to terms with what you call monotony, that's to say, with reality, to accept it, and intelligently to alter it to one's best advantage. Your way out is sheer Nihilism, and there's a strong core of Nihilism in all the religions. You call life meaningless, and you think you assert your freedom in rejecting it. But your act of suicide is just as meaningless as any other. And the application of the words meaningful or purpose to life in the abstract is itself meaningless. All meanings and purposes are men's meanings and purposes; men choose them, often courageously, and then living is easier. But it is the living that counts. Death is nothing; it is simply the point at which there is no more possibility. It may or may not be courageous to court death, but for me, it's insane.'

'Oh Harry!' I said, turning once again on to my belly, 'if only I could accept the tepid thing you call living! I want to give myself to you. Believe me! I do!'

'Do so then! Why this eternal search for a meaning! Take life as it comes! Accept the thrills. Don't question their meaning. They have no more meaning than a rose's redness. In terms of what, for God's sake, do you want to justify a fuck?'

I laughed, sat up, and kissed him gently on the lips. His arms encircled my naked body at once and pulled me to him. If he had taken me there and then on the rug, I don't think I would have resisted and everything, my own life and his, would have been very different. But as he laid me gently back on the rug and freed his prick from his trousers, he made the mistake of asking my permission. 'Please, Gertrude!' he said.

Something within me snapped. Why did he have to ask my permission if he was so sure of his ideas? Why did he not ram it home to the hilt in the budding lips of my cunt? I turned over quickly on to my belly. 'Take me there if you wish,' I said coldly, presenting my anus.

And he did. Poor weak Harry did as he was told! How easy it would have been for him to raise me and ram it into my cunt from behind! But no! He laid his knob respectfully on my anus, and a moment later, with a little sigh of pain, I felt the thick shaft sink in between my buttocks.

He tried to hurt me then, consciously. He was taking his revenge upon me. Poor Harry! Had he forgotten that pain was my element? That I lived in it as a fish in water or as a salamander in a flame?

When he came he collapsed, hiding his face in the back of my neck. I lay with my head turned towards the fire, staring at the dying embers.

— 5-

In the middle of the night someone was knocking on the door of my bedroom.

Was it Harry? Had he come to plead again?

'Go away!' I said. 'I want to sleep!' I heard voices.

Then Harry's voice said: 'Please open up, Gertrude. It's urgent. Someone is here to see you.'

I yawned. I was angry with Harry. He had almost convinced me and then he had given the lie to his own words by being afraid to act.

'Can it not wait until morning?'

'It can't, Gertrude.'

I put on a black dressing gown, brushed my hair and applied lipstick heavily at the dressing-table, and then, in a leisurely way, I opened the door.

Harry stood there and behind him, slightly in shadow, another man.

'You may go, Mr. Prentice,' the man's voice said. His voice had a foreign intonation.

It was not until Harry had gone downstairs that the man stepped forward out of shadow.