At this the girl lifted big inscrutable eyes to her and stood at gaze, a most exquisite picture: the breasts just beginning to be marked, the hips a little fuller than a boy's, the feet and hands smaller-a perfect Tanagra statuette in whitest flesh with a roseate glow on the inside of arms and thighs, while the Mount of Venus was just shadowed with down. She stood there waiting, an entrancing maiden figure. I felt my mouth parching, the pulses in my temples beating. What did it mean? Did Jeanne intend-?
The next moment Jeanne lifted the child out of the bath, and covering her with the towel said, "Dry yourself and come down, dear. We're all going to dine soon."
When we were downstairs she asked, "Well, are you going with us to Algiers?"
"Suppose I wanted Lisette?" I asked boldly.
Jeanne shrugged her shoulders. "There are sure to be several Lisettes in your life," she said seriously, "but only one Jeanne, I hope," and she set her eyes on mine.
"You are a wonder," I rejoined, "a marvel!"
Nothing more was said then, but when Lisette came down in her nightie and dressing-gown, Jeanne encouraged her to sit on my knees after dinner, and I seem still to feel the warm imprint of her lithe body on my legs.
When I went back to the Meurice that night I knew I'd have to fight the greatest temptation of my life. Could I fight it?
It was Shakespeare's word that saved me, I verily believe. I could not be "the bellows and the fan to cool a harlot's lust." Yet the temptation was tremendous, for really Jeanne was a most interesting companion and an adorable mistress. I wanted to know why she had selected me. "How does one know why this man pleases you intimately," she asked, "whereas another repels you? You please me physically, interest me mentally, and I know you're hardworking and kind. I think we could have an almost ideal existence, and I'm tired of Paris and lonely, without an object or purpose in life."
"And Lisette?" I asked.
"Oh! the Lisettes are for later," she smiled. "Before she's grown up you'll have found an Arab beauty with even lovelier limbs. It's the artist in you leads you to stray, the attraction of plastic beauty on you. I noticed that at the very beginning, but I can't make my breasts small and round. If I could I would, you may be sure, but I know I can give you more pleasure than any other woman, and so I feel sure you will always come back to me."
It was true, but could I work with Jeanne: that was the doubt. Already I felt more tired than I had been for years. That night I studied my face in the glass and saw that my features had sharpened, and I had lost my healthy color. I was getting grey and worn, and if a month had this result, what would a year effect or ten years? I could not shut my eyes to the truth. I should be played out. I would have one more gaudy, great night; I'd kiss Lisette, too, and feel if she responded, and then for the train to Calais and my work again in London.
And this I did. I gave a big lunch to people of importance in the theatre and in journalism and invited Jeanne and referred everything to her and drew her out, throning her, and afterwards returned to her house to dinner. While she was changing and titivating, I took Lisette in my arms and kissed her with hot lips again and again while feeling her budding breasts, till she put her arms round my neck and kissed me just as warmly; and then I ventured to touch her little half-fledged sex and caress it, till it opened and grew moist and she nestled up to me and whispered: "Oh! how you excite me!"
"Have you ever done it to yourself?" I asked. She nodded with bright dancing eyes. "Often, but I prefer you to touch me." For the first time I heard the truth from a girl and her courage charmed me. I could not help laying her on the sofa, and turning up her clothes: how lovely her limbs were, and how perfect her sex. She was really exquisite, and I took an almost insane pleasure in studying her beauties, and parting the lips of her sex kisses: in a 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.