neither James nor Clarissa was willing. They were not finished with sex, and I was their instrument. They knelt over me, kissed me all over my body, lapped at me, sucked at me, palpitated their fingers within me so that it wasn't long before I was ready for them again, all three of us sweating, stinking by now from the body secretions, but not caring about the stink, no, wanting it, burying our noses in it, wallowing-these two children have me wallowing in beastliness- God, look at that girl Clarissa, two years younger than her brother, but the hair on her, the black hair between her thighs drives me mad, I curl my fingers in it, I lave it with my mouth, my spittle, her cunt swollen, as big as mine… and there's a moment when the two of them, James and Clarissa, are between my legs, James with his cock in me and Clarissa with her fingers beside her brother's prick… That was the climax. It was not long after that they slipped out of my chambers… I cannot go on in this fashion. My inherent lust now has me a sexual slavey to two children. I have gone through this so many times with my contemporaries, with men and women older than I; with men and women of my years. But now, to have descended to the ultimate depravity of carnal knowledge with children-I've gone too far. I must be punished. If James and Clarissa were not corrupted before I came on the scene, I certainly must have provided the completing strokes. There is no other conclusion to be drawn: I am an animal, I am a beast of the field-and I do not belong with the human species. It is possible I do not belong with any species… The above was the last entry in Angela Cleves' journal. I trust her soul, or whatever substance it is in us that may make us unique, is somewhere at rest, and that it is convinced it once belonged to the “human species.” As for the validity of Cleves' other conclusions, in all fairness I believe that should be left to the reader.
6
Season followed upon season in the normal course of things after the strange disappearance of Angela Cleves, and then there was that first summer upon us when James and I found ourselves suddenly apart. My brother was seventeen-he had matriculated at Oxford and had elected to stay the summer in London, with occasional brief excursions to the Continent. He had rooms near Clement's Inn, from which one could glimpse St. Paul's-I had been up to his rooms just before the annual summer return to Quistern House, and I had thought it all terribly exciting. My elegant brother, the Honorable James Quist-Hagen, quite fitted his rooms, and James had seen to it that they lacked nothing. Of course, in this he had had the assistance of our father, who had settled a handsome yearly stipend on him. I was, naturally enough,, somewhat hurt that James preferred the fleshpots of London and the exotic attractions of the Continent to his sister and Cornwall for the summer, but I quite understood-he was getting on to be rather a man, and the prospect of spending a comparatively sober season with his sister and parents in Quistern House surely went against his developing grain. Had I been a man, I would undoubtedly have behaved precisely like James. Besides-and this surely must have been crucial-since the shocking disappearance of Angela Cleves, James and I had eschewed all manifestations of sex between us. I had no doubt that my brother had been satisfying himself in London, hut I had been forced to be comparatively celibate. At fifteen this celibacy had become most oppressive to a young lady who technically had remained a virgin, and for whom masturbation had become increasingly unattractive. I was, in short, the rumbling volcano ready to explode. But explode with whom? The answer was directly before me, of course-practically under my very nose.
The answer was-Oliver Harwell. This would be Harwell's last year of tutoring me-the following spring he would be finished. And now-now was his last summer with the Quist-Hagens. And he had never looked more attractive. His curly, lustrous grayish-brown hair was echoed in a most virile manner in his short but dense chestnut-colored beard that framed an open, rather squarish face. His gentle eyes were never of a more melting brown. And as for his size-that had always been impressive. Harwell was burly without being gross, barrel-chested without being bearish, big without being gauche-he had always moved with the most masculine grace. He had, of course, as I believe I have implied elsewhere, at all times comported himself with unassailable propriety and had seemed to me, as I think I have remarked, hopeless as a prospective male predator. That one time I had bared my lower limbs to him in the coach-and-four-the reader may recall I had been erotically drawn to him-had turned out to be quite unsatisfactory. So that it might well be asked why I thought there was any possibility that my libidinous needs-and, indeed, the termination of my virginity-might be taken on by Oliver Harwell? Why did I think that the imminent eruption of my sexual volcano could be served by such as Harwell? Why did I believe that that phenomenal bulge of his “basket” at his groin could either be inflated or deflated by Clarissa Quist-Hagen? that the answer to my erotic tension was under my very nose-in Oliver Harwell? What, in short, was I counting on?
Two things. The first was that I had turned heads sharply when I had visited my brother in his flat near Clement's Inn- but I had already established in my mirror that I had reached the first showing of my beauty. Aside from my mother, my milky skin had no equal. No emeralds could compare with the depth of green my eyes had. No stygian night could offer the purest, glossiest black with which my ebon tresses glowed. As for my breasts, they were large, saucy and with dark areolae; their exceptionally protrusive nipples, because the shape of the breasts tended toward the oblique, were pointed on the bias. My waist was easily spannable by a modest male hand, and my hips were a sudden bloom that tapered off into succulent thigh, muscular but shapely calf, the slimmest ankles and the most delicate feet. I was never at a loss for virile attention from the eligible males at the several balls my mother and father had now taken me to, but none of the raffish young blades I met on these occasions struck my fancy-but they did, by their foci, corroborate the manifestations of my beauty, and my beauty, therefore, must be bound to have an effect on Oliver Harwell. The second thing I counted on that would move Harwell to provide the ultimate embrace was my propinquity to my tutor without the intrusion of James. (I must at this point explain to the reader that my brother had never constituted an “intrusion” as far as I was concerned, but that he might well have been for Harwell; we would, in any case, soon see. The reader must also understand that I much rather would have had my brother James present in Cornwall than anyone else, Harwell not excepted. James and I had gone through our childhood together, and for this there was no substitute. I both loved and respected James, and envied him his total abandonment to living with such flair that still my heart, so many years later, now, aches for him as it never ached for my mother and father or, indeed, anyone else, with the possible exception of Hugh Kinsteares, a kind of shy counterpart of my handsome brother; but more of Kinsteares at a later date…eh?) Yes, I believed my nearness to Harwell, without anyone else in the conservatory where he instructed me, would in not too long a time precipitate him toward me. I would be able to do things to Harwell I had never conceived of doing when James was there-mainly out of deference to my oldest brother who was my docent everywhere…
So I thought. But time passed, and Harwell made not the slightest overture. I was becoming quite disgusted. Quistern House had a score of summer guests, with and without titles. Some of the men seemed quite prepossessing, and my mother, sweet lady, would bid me be forward. “It's very curious,” she said, “I've never known you to be shy.” I shrugged and held my tongue. My mother went on. “Several of the men have made quite proper inquiries about you, Clarissa. The Earl of Merlin-Chase, for example. And he has wondered why you have broken off conversations with him quite abruptly. Is there some pressing reason for your forwardness, Clarissa?” Yes, Harwell, Oliver Harwell, I said silently. “I can't imagine what it might be,” I told my mother earnestly.
“Really?” she said. She regarded me momentarily with a frigid eye. “I shall have to speak to your father about your social backwardness, Clarissa. After all, you are fifteen, and it's time we seriously contemplated your marital prospects.” “Yes, Mother.”
At which she regally swept from the room. But, unwittingly, she had given me an idea. Is there some pressing reason… The less-than-casual observer by this stage must of course have the question on his mind as to the true nature of my desire for Oliver Harwell. What made my need so sharp for him? I had become obsessed with him. More properly-as he examined me at length on the “dark” side of Shakespeare-I had become aware of my obsession with Oliver Harwell's size. He was, surely, the largest and most massive man I had ever encountered-but he was both majestic and gentle. His enormous hands could have choked the life out of me in a matter of moments. And when I pictured the dimensions of his genital equipment, I very nearly swooned… The probable size of them… Their filling power… They would-or, rather, a single element of them would-penetrate my velvety fossa beyond my wildest imaginings.
And I could play with them, depending of course on Harwell's sustaining power… I envisaged what must be, I thought, this Brobdingnagian center piece; and beneath it the great spheres of the spermatic function-they should be able to spurt practically endlessly… My face blushed furiously. I flung back the light bedcovers and explored myself-I was sleeping au naturel. I pincered one of my nipples and then descended directly to the pit that had an
