A few months later, Lady J. intimated a coming change in
regime for her young charge. Her training under Colette would continue, her
aunt told the niece, but in addition her training under her aunt and under
Pelham would become more sexually specific - but first, it was time for Jayne
to submit herself to a modest test of the self-control she had learned thus
far.
'Be so kind as to disrobe, my dear' invited Lady J. In
the exquisitely furnished drawing room, Jayne felt vulnerable as she quickly
divested herself of her formal but ultra-feminine, full-skirted dress, her
shoes, silk petticoat, wide-legged silk French knickers and stood before her
aunt in tight-fitting apricot silk waist corset, suspenders and tall, taut stockings.
Lady J admired her niece.
'Completely, if you please my dear' she added - and with
some difficulty (for she was used to having Colette to fasten and unfasten the
tapes of her corset) Jayne complied. When she looked again at her aunt, the
older woman had from somewhere conjured a wicked-looking long rattan cane.
Lady J flexed the yellow rod. 'Now my dear, turn around
and face the wall.' Jayne obeyed, her pale nude body quivering as she turned,
the full, firm breasts jiggling, the rounded buttocks rippling.
'Keep your feet firmly together my dear, clasp your hands
behind your neck and lean well forward from the hips to let your bottom spread.
Jayne posed as bidden, her torso angling forwards.
'Oh, a much more exaggerated pose than that, my dear: you
must be at almost the point of over-balance, so that when the cane strikes it
becomes a real test of your ability to stay still. Lean right forwards - that's
right - but don't let your breasts hang so. Hold your head well back, otherwise
the bosom merely dangles, like a cow's udders - and don't stare at the floor,
my dear. Pull your head and shoulders back, and bow your spine. That's better. It
firms the bosom prettily. Now your breasts thrust forward, as they should.
'Now my dear, relax your buttocks completely.'
Trying as hard as she could to obey her aunt's
instructions to the letter, Jayne put herself in position. With her torso held
at such an acute angle her breasts did indeed tend to hang freely, although
when she pulled her head back to stare straight at the wall the action,
stiffening her shoulders and slightly curving her spine, had the effect of
tautening the twin, firm mounds, thrusting them forward, the thick nipples
pointing slightly outward, away from each other.
The smooth pale mounds of the twin-mooned bottom curved
invitingly, unblemished, the marks from Jayne's last session under Pelham's
strict tuition having faded to invisibility. As her aunt had predicted, the
bent-forward pose caused the lovely bottom to spread and open, widening the valley
between the twin hills, revealing the red fringe that lined either side of the
anal groove and the darker russet tufts that grew so thickly along each plump
sexual labium. Forcing herself to breathe evenly, Jayne relaxed the muscles of
her haunches, allowing the plump buttocks to sit as naturally as the pose
permitted. It would be the first time that Lady J. herself had ever
administered the cane to her niece. Jayne wondered how she would compare with
Pelham. Would she be able to use the switch quite as hard as the strong-armed
groom? She hoped her aunt was not so skilled at using the rod to quite so
painful effect as her tutor - if only to allow her to perform better in the
test. And as the question posed itself, Lady J gave her niece an answer she did
not like to hear.
'Now my dear' warned the aunt, not unkindly 'these are
going to hurt like blazes - so try very hard to keep still.'
There was a brief, silent pause - the mantelpiece clock
ticked loudly - then the air in the quiet room hummed and hissed briefly.
Thwack!
Aaaaah! was the only response from the obedient young
woman.
A few minutes later, six heavily ridged weals traversed
the pinkly-glowing buttocks, their original scarlet already turning purple. Jayne's
eyes were serenely closed, while her face remained passive and calm. She had
stood silent and unmoving as the stripes had been administered, and her aunt
now voiced her approval.
'Excellent, my dear. You have learned well under Pelham's
rod. Now, as I say, I think we can move on.
'It is my intention that you will not surrender your
virginity until we both feel you are ready, my dear - and when that time comes
I have just the person in mind to initiate you in that regard. But before then,
there will be plenty for you to learn. Let us regard the removal of your
maidenhead and the opening of your virgin grove, as the classical Romans called
it, as the final confirmation of your readiness to join the society I shall
place before you. Nonetheless, we need not wait until then for you to learn how
to develop your already advanced sexuality.'
Lady J told Jayne she planned to give the young woman a
sophisticated "grown-up" dinner party, to mark her passage into
adulthood. Among the guests at the latter would be a German professor of
anthropology, a long-standing friend of Lady J., whom Jayne, her aunt assured
her, would find most interesting.
The professor arrived during the early afternoon of the
day of the dinner party, was shown to his room by Mrs Pelham and joined Lady J.
and her niece in the spacious sitting room of the big house. Over tea the
conversation naturally turned to the subject of Jayne's coming birthday, and
the significance of birthdays in general as milestones in life. Although (or so
Jayne presumed) the professor knew nothing of the special conditions which
surrounded Jayne's life with her aunt and the Pelhams, the fact that he was an
anthropologist quickly led to wide ranging reflection upon such occasions and
soon he was expounding upon initiation rites of primitive tribes, and the concept
of the ordeal as a rite of passage.
As the professor talked, his tales becoming ever more
frank, Jayne's tummyflies began to flutter and stir. Perhaps hoping to shock,
with this frankness, the Professor (Gudeweir was his name) spoke quite openly of
painful ordeals undertaken or imposed upon young men and even young women as
what he called 'rites of passage'. His tongue loosened, perhaps, by the liberal
quantities of sherry with which Lady J. Plied him, his talk was soon
concentrating upon female rites of passage.
'Imagine, my dear,' he had said to Jayne by way of
illustration, ' having to stand stock still while a heavy roll of straw thickly
crawling with angry stinging ants is pressed against your bare front, even
touching against your breasts - and you must not move or cry out while it is
held there, the ants fiercely stinging and biting. That is a test applied to
young women in many parts of South America - and not just in jungles or in
primitive places. Even in cities, among the descendants of South American
natives, such ceremonies still exist. While in many tribes in Africa, it is
part of the initiation rites that the young women must lie on the ground, on
their backs, their breasts and bellies and even their sexual organs smeared
with the juice of a highly stinging plant and endure being sprinkled with a
particularly virulent and aggressive species of soldier ant, to demonstrate
their fortitude for child birth.
'If you had lived in ancient Sparta, for instance, and
once you became of marriageable age, each month you would have competed quite
naked in organised games, including running races and wrestling matches, with
the young men of your village there to watch, until one had chosen you as a
bride.
'And if you had been - even until very recently - brought
up with the Dyaks of Borneo, you would as soon as you reached puberty been
taken regularly to an old woman to have your body covered in tattoos - each
area covered in turn, according to tabu - the ancient law - and ritual. Your
shoulders, then your back - all using simply a sharp-pointed thorn mounted on
the end of a stick and tapped repeatedly incessantly with a second stick, used
as a hammer. The tattoo pattern would first have been painted on with coloured
vegetable dye, and the tattooing would go on until the entire pattern had been
pricked into the skin. After the shoulders and back, then the breasts and then
the torso and abdomen. And once a husband for you had come forward and your
marriage date set - your pubic hair scrapped off with a sharpened cowrie shell,
and your pubic mound and finally your labia majora, you sex lips - I hope I do
not offend with my frankness - themselves tattooed. And of course, at your
wedding, your virginity taken first by the chief and then you would be taken
sexually by every married man in the village, your head resting on a wooden
pillow, beginning with the oldest and ending with the youngest.'
If Professor Gudeweir had sought to alarm or shock Jayne,
or goad her into calling a halt to his increasingly frank and sexually explicit
tales, he signally failed. Privately, the young woman was recalling how reading
stories of such things even as a young girl aroused her pubescent sexuality
even though, then, she did not fully understand why. She would play games,
imagining herself undergoing such ordeals - and it was these games, she
inwardly admitted, which were what brought her her first recognised experiences
of sexual arousal.
After tea, Jayne prepared for dinner with the first
stirring of an outrageous plan forming in her head. As she thought it over, she
began to steel herself, to dare herself to go through with it. By the time she
was ready to meet her aunt's chosen guests, she had made up her mind. She would
do it.
Over dinner Jayne deliberately raised the afternoon's
topic of conversation again. Obliquely at first, then more openly, she brought
the professor on to what was obviously a favourite subject. As the evening
progressed and the port began to relax the inhibitions of those around the
table (all carefully chosen by Lady J - Jayne's self-imposed task was not quite
as difficult as she imagined) the conversation became more detailed, more
explicit, as he once again, but to his wider audience, luridly described
examples of cruel initiation practices in the primitive tribes and bygone
cultures he had studied. The talk again ranged wide, from the tests endured by
Spartan youth to the ordeals undergone in the rain forests of Borneo, not to
mention the rigours of a Prussian upbringing even for aristocratic young ladies
of the Austro-Hungarian empire. When the professor talked of cold showers and
vigorous exercise, Jayne smiled inwardly, occasionally catching the also
smiling eye of her aunt. When the professor talked of stoic fortitude under the
needle-pointed bone and hammer of the primitive tattooist, or of submission to
ritual defloration in ancient religions, the trembling initiate required before
the assembled elders of the cult to impale herself on the unyielding erect
phallus of a stone idol, Jayne's pulse quickened and her tongue occasionally
flicked across her pearl-white teeth to moisten her quivering lips.
'The cult I am currently studying' the professor was
saying 'is particularly interesting. Its initiation rituals apparently form a
perfect bridge between those of the more primitive tribes, which are primarily
painful ordeals with little or usually no overt eroticism, and those of
sophisticated groups throughout the ages where eroticism - or sometimes merely
sexual licence - is the prime intention. I say apparently, because the cult in
question existed over two thousand years ago and has, like the civilisation in
which it flourished, disappeared almost, but not quite, without trace. We have
been left with only the smallest fragments of the jigsaw. In this case, just
one - incomplete - text of a ritual. And in all the other rituals I have
studied I can find no modern or even historical equivalent. It is fascination,
tantalising - and frustrating.'
The guests, including Jayne, listened with interest,
prompting the German to continue.
'I read of the cult in Summerian writings in a language
so long dead that many of the texts have been indecipherable. However, there is
a professor at Cambridge who is quite brilliant - together we have been able to
translate- or perhaps reconstruct would be better - much that has remained
secret for millennia. In the cult I describe there were - as is so usually the
case - different initiation rituals for women and men.
'The female ritual involved the complete unifibrillaic
removal of the anterior and ventral tomentum: or in layman's language the
plucking, one hair at a time, of the young woman's entire growth of pubic and
anal hair.'
'My oh my,' remarked one of the older woman guests with a
laugh 'that would surely have brought tears to the eyes' and a chuckle of
laughter rippled round the table.
'That's the point,' sighed the professor, 'one doesn't
know. The text is at once both highly specific and infuriatingly vague. For
example,' he went on, so enthused with the academic interest of his subject
matter that he could have been discussing the fascination of splitting the atom
rather than an evidently bizarre ancient sexual ritual, 'the precise mechanics
of the ritual are spelled out - but little about its reputed effect upon the subject.
While there is in the ritual a complete and absolute taboo on any sexual
contact or stimulation of the young woman during the ceremony, it appears she
would nonetheless reach a considerable sexual high while enduring the rite. It
is an example of what is sometimes called "altered state", well
documented in other forms of painful ritual or ceremony. The famous Sundance
ritual of the Apache is perhaps one of the best-known examples, having featured
so graphically in the film A Man Called Horse. Having transcended the
discomfort of having her hairs slowly pulled out one at a time, the initiate
became transported to a plane of sexual ecstasy - or so the text indicates. The
difficulty is, one does not know whether to take the text as literal truth,
erotic fantasy - or some halfway house.'
Professor Gudeweir paused, and the woman who had spoken
earlier continued:
'But surely there are other, parallel, sources?'
'No' said the professor without hesitation. 'Of course
there are other rituals involving depilation - but none quite so painstaking'
he chuckled mischievously 'no pun intended, indeed - quite so painstaking or
laborious as this - in any society I have studied either modern or, as in this
case, so archaic that only a few fragments of writings about it remain to us.'
'Perhaps someone should try it, some day,' said the woman
with a chuckle. 'It sounds quite fascinating - although I'm not sure I would
want to volunteer,' and she chuckled again.
Professor Gudeweir laughed, and gave a little shrug:
'I'm afraid that is exactly it,' he said, 'everyone finds
it fascinating, but no one wants to try it. You know - I have repeatedly asked
among my research students if there is among them, or if they know of, any
young woman who would be prepared to submit to the rite, in a properly
controlled scientific experiment of course, to allow me to test the veracity of
the text.
'Sadly, I have never found a volunteer. So much for the
inquiring mind of the modern young. One or two have indicated an interest - but
when they learn the full extent of the trial - according to the text the ritual
can take over two hours - they quail at the prospect. As I was saying earlier:
no fortitude. Our soft, modern European way of life has robbed our young people
of their hardihood.'
Professor Gudeweir's expansive gaze swept the table and
its seated guests with a smile, and then another little shrug:
'I am sorry - I have monopolised the conversation. Please
forgive me...'
Another guest took up the conversational torch and the
talk flowed on. At the far end of the table, a bright-eyed Jayne listened but
with half an ear, trying to contain the excitement of an idea growing in her
brain, her mind elsewhere.