But Sophy knew better and when the last night came, she surpassed herself. It was warm and we went early to bed: “it’s my night!” she said: “you just let me show you, you dear! I don’t want you to go after any whitish girl in those Islands till you get to China and you won’t go with those yellow, slit-eyed girls—that’s why I love you so, because you keep yourself for those you like:—but you’re naughty to like so many—ma man!” and she kissed me with passion: she let me have her almost without response, but after the first orgasm she gripped my sex and milked me, and afterwards mounting me made me thrill again and again till I was speechless and like children we fell asleep in each other’s arms, weeping for the parting on the morrow.
I said “Good-bye!” at the hotel and went on board the steamer by myself: my eyes set on the Golden Gate into the great Pacific and the hopes and hazards of the new life. At length I was to see the world: what would I find in it? I had no idea then that I should find little or much in exact measure to what I brought and it is now the saddest part of these Confessions that on this first trip round the world, I was so untutored, so thoughtless that I got practically nothing out of my long journeying.
Like Odysseus I saw many cities of men; but scenes seldom enrich the spirit: yet one or two places made a distinct impression on me, young and hard though I was: Sidney Bay and Heights, Hong Kong, too; but above all, the old Chinese gate leading into the Chinese City of Shanghai so close to the European town and so astonishingly different. Kioto, too, imprinted itself on my memory and the Japanese men and girls that ran naked out of their hot baths in order to see whether I was really white all over.
But I learned nothing worth recalling till I came to Table Bay and saw the long line of Table Mountain four thousand feet above me, a cliff cutting the sky with an incomparable effect of dignity and grandeur. I stayed in Cape Town a month or so, and by good luck I got to know Jan Hofmeyr there who taught me what good fellows the Boers really were and how highly the English Premier Gladstone was esteemed for giving freedom to them after Majuba: “we look on him with reverence” said my friend, Hofmeyr, “as the embodied conscience of England”; but alas! England could not stomach Majuba and had to spend blood and treasure later to demonstrate the manhood of the Boers to the world. But thank God, England then gave freedom and self-government again to South Africa and so atoned for her shameful “Concentration Camps.” Thanks to Jan Hofmeyr I got to know and esteem the South African Boer even on this first short acquaintance.
When I went round the world for the second time twenty years later, I tried to find the Hofmeyrs of every country and so learned all manner of things worthful and strange that I shall tell of, I hope, at the end of my next volume. For the only short cut to knowledge is through intercourse with wise and gifted men.
Now I must confess something of my first six months of madness and pleasure in Paris and then speak of England again and Thomas Carlyle and his incomparable influence upon me and so lead you, gentle render, to my later prentice years in Germany and Greece.
There in Athens I learned new sex-secrets which may perchance interest even the Philistines though they can be learned in Paris as well, and will be set forth simply in the second volume of these “Confessions”, which will tell the whole “art of love” as understood in Europe and perhaps contain my second voyage round the world and the further instruction in the great art which I received from the Adepts of the East—unimaginable refinements, for they have studied the body as deeply as the soul.
EUROPE AND THE CARLYLES.