Memoirs of Fanny Hill
simpering, with his mouth half open, in stupid rapture, stood and
tractably suffered me to do what I pleased with him. His basket was
dropt out of his hands, which Louisa took care of.
I had now, through more than one rent, discovered and felt his thighs,
the skin of which seemed the smoother and fairer for the coarseness,
and even the dirt of his dress, as the teeth of negroes seem the whiter
for the surrounded black; and poor indeed of habit, poor of
understanding, he was, however, abundantly rich in personal treasures,
such as flesh, firm, plump, and replete with the juices of youth, and
robust well-knit limbs. My fingers too had now got within reach of the
true, the genuine sensitive plant, which, instead of shrinking from the
touch, joys to meet it, and swells and vegetates under it: mine
pleasingly informed me that matters were so ripe for the discovery we
meditated, that they were too mighty for the confinement they were
ready to break. A waistband that I unskewered, and a rag of a shirt
that I removed, and which could not have covered a quarter of it,
revealed the whole of the idiot’s standard of distinction, erect, in
full pride and display: but such a one! it was positively of so
tremendous a size, that prepared as we were to see something
extraordinary, it still, out of measure, surpassed our expectation, and
astonished even me, who had not been used to trade in trifles. In fine,
it might have answered very well the making a skew of; its enormous
head seemed, in hue and size, not unlike a common sheep’s heart; then
you might have trolled dice securely along the broad back of the body
of it; the length of it too was prodigious; then the rich appendage of
the treasure-bag beneath, large in proportion, gathered and crisped up
round in shallow furrows, helped to fill the eye, and complete the
proof of his being a natural, not quite in vain; since it was full
manifest that he inherited, and largely too, the prerogative of majesty
which distinguishes that otherwise most unfortunate condition, and gave
rise to the vulgar saying “That a fool’s bauble is a lady’s
playfellow.” Not wholly without reason: for, generally speaking, it is
in love as it is in war, where the longest weapon carries it. Nature,
in short, had done so much for him in those parts, that she perhaps
held herself acquitted in doing so little for his head.
For my part, who had sincerely no intention to push the joke further
than simply satisfying my curiosity with the sight of it alone, I was
content, in spite of the temptation that stared me in the face, with
having raised a May-pole for another to hang a garland on: for, by this
time, easily reading Louisa’s desires in her wishful eyes, I acted the
commodious part, and made her, who sought no better sport, significant
terms of encouragement to go through stitch with her adventure;
intimating too that I would stay and see fair play: in which, indeed, I
had in view to humour a new born curiosity, to observe what appearances
active nature would put on in a natural, in the course of this her
darling operation.
Louisa, whose appetite was up, and who, like the industrious bee, was,
it seems, not above gathering the sweet of so rare a flower, though she
found it planted on a dunghill, was but too readily disposed to take
the benefit of my cession. Urged then strongly by her own desires, and
emboldened by me, she presently determined to risk a trial of parts
with the idiot, who was by this time nobly inflamed for her purpose, by
all the irritation we had used to put the principles of pleasure
effectually into motion, and to wind up the springs of its organ to
their supreme pitch; and it stood accordingly stiff and straining,
ready to burst with the blood and spirits that swelled it... to a bulk!
No! I shall never forget it.
Louisa then, taking and holding the fine handle that so invitingly
offered itself, led the ductile youth, by that mastertool of his, as
she stept backward towards the bed; which he joyfully gave way to,
under the incitations of instinct, and palpably delivered up to the
goad of desire.
Stopped then by the bed, she took the fall she loved, and leaned to the
most, gently backward upon it, still holding fast what she held, and
taking care to give her clothes a convenient toss up, so that her
thighs duly disclosed, and elevated, laid open all the outward prospect
of the treasury of love: the rose-lipt overture presenting the cockpit
so fair, that it was not in nature even for a natural to miss it. Nor
did he: for Louisa, fully bent on grappling with it, and impatient of
dalliance or delay, directed faithfully the point of the
battering-piece, and bounded up with a rage of so voracious appetite,
to meet and favour the thrust of insertion, that the fierce activity on
both sides effected it with such pain of distention, that Louisa cried
out violently, that she was hurt beyond bearing, that she was killed.
But it was too late: the storm was up, and force was on her to give way
to it; for now the man-machine, strongly worked upon by the sensual
passion, felt so manfully his advantages and superiority, felt withal
the sting of pleasure so intolerable, that maddening with it, his joys
began to assume a character of furiousness, which made me tremble for
the too tender Louisa. He seemed, at this juncture, greater than
himself; his countenance, before so void of meaning, or expression, now
grew big with the importance of the act he was upon. In short, it was
not now that he was to be played the fool with. But, what is pleasant
enough, I myself was awed into a sort of respect for him, by the comely
terrors his motions dressed him in: his eyes shooting sparks of fire;
his face glowing with ardours that gave another life to it; his teeth
churning; his whole frame agitated with a raging ungovernable
impetuosity: all sensibly betraying the formidable fierceness with
which the genial instinct acted upon him. Butting then and goring all
before him, and mad and wild like an ower-driven steer, he ploughs up
the tender furrow all insensible to Louisa’s complaints; nothing can
stop, nothing can keep out a fury like his: with which, having once got
its head in, its blind rage soon made way for the rest, piercing,
rending, and breaking open all obstruction. The torn, split, wounded
girl cries, struggles, invokes me to her rescue, and endeavours to get
from under the young savage, or shake him off, but alas! in vain: her
breath, might as soon have strength to have quelled his rough assault,
or put him out of his course. And indeed, all her efforts and struggles
were managed with such disorder, that they served rather to entangle,
and fold her the faster in the twine of his boisterous arms; so that
she was tied to the stake, and obliged to fight the match out, if she
died for it. For his part, instinct-ridden as he was, the expressions
of his animal passion, partaking something of ferocity, were rather
worrying than kisses, intermixed with ravenous love-bites on her cheeks
and necks, the prints of which did not wear out for some days after.
Poor Louisa, however, bore up at length better than could have been
expected: and though she suffered, and greatly too, yet, ever true to
the good old cause, she suffered with pleasure and enjoyed her pain.
And soon now, by dint of an enraged enforcement, the brute-machine,
driven like a whirlwind, made all smoke again, and wedging its way up,
to the utmost extremity, left her, in point of penetration, nothing to
fear or to desire: and now,
“Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth,”
(Shakespeare.)
Louisa lay, pleased to the heart, pleased to her utmost capacity of
being so, with every fibre in those parts, stretched almost to
breaking, on a rack of joy, whilst the instrument of all this
over-fullness searched her senses with its sweet excess, till the
pleasure gained upon her so, its point stung her so home, that catching
at length the rage from her furious driver and sharing the riot of his
wild rapture, she went wholly out of her mind into that favourite part
of her body, the whole intenseness of which was so fervously filled,
and employed: there alone she existed, all lost in those delirious
transports, those extasies of the senses, which her winking eyes, the
brightened vermilion of her lips and cheeks, and sighs of pleasure
deeply fetched, so pathetically expressed. In short, she was now as
mere a machine as much wrought on, and had her motions as little at her
own command, as the natural himself, who, thus broke in upon her, made
her feel with a vengeance his tempestuous mettle he battered with;
their active loins quivered again with the violence of their conflict,
till the surge of pleasure, foaming and raging to a height, drew down
the pearly shower that was, to allay this hurricane. The purely
sensitive idiot then first shed those tears of joy that attend its last
moments, not without an agony of delight, and even almost a roar of
rapture, as the gush escaped him; so sensibly too for Louisa, that she
kept him faithful company, going off, in consent, with the old
symptoms: a delicious delirium, a tremendous convulsive shudder, and
the critical dying: Oh! And now, on his getting off she lay
pleasure-drenched, and regorging its essential sweets; but quite spent,
and gasping for breath, without other sensation of life than in those
exquisite vibrations that trembled still on the strings of delight;
which had been too intensively touched, and which nature had so
ravishingly stirred with, for the senses to be quickly at peace from.
As for the changeling, whose curious engine had been thus successfully
played off, his shift of countenance and gesture had even something
droll, or rather tragi-comic in it: there was now an air of sad
repining foolishness, superadded to his natural one of no meaning and
idiotism, as he stood with his label of manhood, now lank, unstiffened,
becalmed, and flapping against his thighs, down which it reached half
way, terrible even in its fall, whilst under the dejection of spirit
and flesh, which naturally followed his eyes, by turns, cast down
towards his struck standard, or piteously lifted to Louisa, seemed to
require at her hands what he had so sensibly parted from to her, and
now ruefully missed. But the vigour of nature, soon returning,
dissipated the blast of faintness which the common law of enjoyment had
subjected him to; and now his basket re-became his main concern, which
I looked for, and brought him, whilst Louisa restored his dress to its
usual condition, and afterwards pleased him perhaps more by taking all
his flowers off his hands, and paying him, at his rate, for them, than
if she had embarrassed him by a present, that he would have been
puzzled to account for, and might have put others on tracing the
motives of.
Whether she ever returned to the attack I know not, and, to say truth,
I believe not. She had had her freak out, and had pretty plentifully
drowned her curiosity in a glut of pleasure, which, as it happened, had
no other consequence than that the lad, who retained only a confused
memory of the transaction, would, when he saw her, forget her in favour
of the next woman, tempted, on the report of his parts, to take him in.
Louisa herself did not long outstay this adventure at Mrs. Cole’s (to
whom, by the bye, we took care not to boast of our exploit, till all
fear of consequences were clearly over): for an occasion presenting
itself of proving her passion for a young fellow, at the expense of her
discretion, proceeding all in character, she packed up her toilet, at
half a day’s warning, and went with him abroad, since which I entirely
lost sight of her, and it never fell in my way to hear what became of
her.