Chapter 12
The Hotel Majestic in Cannes occupied a commanding position along the beach-front. Its wide public verandahs spilled out a kaleidoscope of gay, umbrella-awned tables over a close-cropped lawn. To the right sprawled the gently-swaying masts of the yachting colony. To the left swept the probing finger of Cap d'Anubes, far into the incredibly blue Mediterranean. And forward, ahead, lay the shimmering expanse of sea itself.
That evening they were all assembled on the balcony of the baroness's top-floor suite.
Three Americans had joined the party-Capt. Jackson Willoughby, veteran Air France pilot, and two air hostesses, Rhoda Langtry and a tall, sultry Negress, Thespie Jones.
"They work for different airlines," said the baroness, introducing the two girls. "It's obvious why. But they both come from the same state-Arkansas. They grew up in towns not more than fifty miles apart. And only here, in Europe, can their friendship grow and prosper."
"It's sure hell, this black-white thing," growled Theophilus. For once there was the fervour of deep feeling in his words.
The others made no comment.
"And then," said the baroness, "there's Capt. Jackson Willoughby, here." All turned.
Jackson Willoughby would have been recognised as an American anywhere. He was as American as a dollar bill, a packet of Luckies, a Coca-Cola bottle, or canned Pabst.
They saw a man in his mid-forties, with the clear blue eyes of the aviator, with the unshakeable willpower of the pilot who has to so often deny himself the luxuries of women, of tobacco, of liquor so that he may be hard and fit to fly. Around the corners of his eyes played the cross-feet of a sense of humour that was quick to shine out. In his handshake reposed the steel of the airline commander. His suit, and his manner of wearing it, bespoke the cosmopolitanism of a man many years from home, yet to whom home was wherever he happened to be.
"Hi, folks," he grinned. "Glad to be aboard."
Each wondered what was to be the speciality of the newcomers.
And, as if divining their thoughts, the baroness splashed soda from a syphon into her glass, raised it, and whiplashed her reply to their unspoken question right back at them.
"Thespie and Rhoda here, are about as advanced as any of us," she said. "You see-they don't fuck apart. They fuck together. Whoever takes on the one has to take on the other, simultaneously. Or, if two tackle one of them, both must tackle the other one, too, at the same time."
"At the same time?" queried Istvan.
"At the same time," echoed Thespic, softly.
All probed in imagination-and all derived some impression, even if only the most fleeting, of what the baroness was getting at.
"That's right," said the baroness. "I don't think either of these two has ever had a screwing alone. That right, Rhoda? Thespie?"
"Not in a hell of a long time, Baroness," said Rhoda. "Got no use for it, that way. Can't seem to come, by ourselves."
"And Captain Willoughby?" asked Felicity, a shade of insolence in her tone.
"Captain Willoughby, you'll find, is perhaps the greatest libertine in the world today," said the baroness, suddenly calm. Felicity had the latent power always to annoy her.
Greater than you, you old bag? thought Felicity, still insolently. Something disturbed her, deep insidebut she was still too polite to show it.
"Captain Willoughby's been everywhere in the world. There's nothing he hasn't learned-from the East, from the Eskimos, from the Arabs, from the Watusi-or even from us,-here in Europe," said the baroness.
"Hashish?" murmured Felicity.
"Hashish," said the captain, quickly, "is fine-provided you, and not the hashish, stays the boss."
He eyed the impudent actress imperturbably. So this, he thought, is the luscious Felicity Velda. Wonder how those tits'd turn out, once you got her to bed? Spare rubbers, perhaps?
As if divining his thoughts, the actress smoothed down her frock and brought her hands up suddenly, constricting the upper hemispheres of her breasts so violently that they threatened to overflow the very confines of her gown.
"Which is exactly what I wanted to know," said the captain, cryptically.
Carotti mentally chalked up the score. One-love, in favour of the pilot. A smile flickered over the photographer's face.
The baroness returned to her subject.
"Listen," she said. "There's nothing any of us thinks we can do, or can invent-that he can't out-do, or outinvent. Just don't say I didn't warn you-or that I didn't invite you to try."
"Some build-up, Lillian," said the captain affably.
At which the doors of the baroness's bedroom opened, and two more people entered-Thys van Grondwijk and his wife, Alouetta.
The baroness made the introductions.
"Some of you know the van Grondwijks already. Those who don't-well, here they are. Thys. Alouetta. More money than the Rothschilds. More love of good living than Escoffier. Been here, there-everywheresince we last met."
"But happiest of all to be with you, Lillian^-and your people," said Thys, genially.
The Van Grondwijks were a white counterpart of the Kandis. Their physiques were akin. Their readiness to laugh was akin. They were as alike bodily as they were in personality.
"We were talking about specialties," said Hildegarde, once the two Hollanders had been given a drink. "What's theirs, Baroness?"
"Yes," said Felicity. "You've been pretty generous in your build-ups. I never heard you give me one, though. How do they rate, these two?"
"You'll find them right up your alley, Felicity!" the baroness flashed back.
Felicity raised her eyebrows questioningly.
"The whip-isn't that what you've always been wanting?" asked the baroness.
"Ah, yes!" sighed Felicity, en captured.
"Then meet the master-the masters-of all time, since Dc Sade himself! Thys, Alouetta, meet Felicity Velda!"
Thys van Grondwijk looked at the beautiful Italian girl with a new interest.
"Not the Felicity Velda?" he inquired.
Regally, slowly, Felicity rose to her full height. By a mere forward roll of her shoulders she suddenly seemed to expand her breasts by a good four inches. The satin of her gown moulded itself to their glorious contours, disappearing inwards at the cleavage between them.
"The Felicity," she stated, simply.
"Aha," commented Alouetta van Grondwijck, cryptically.
That was all there was to it. But there was a subtle undercurrent of violence in the words.
Cannes sweltered, white and raw, bleached by the sun. The breeze-what there was of it-was from the land. Is was hot, foetid, oppressive
Along the esplanade sauntered the tourists, stripped to the bare minimum of bikini or swim-trunks, their bodies brown or reddened beneath enormous-brimmed straw hats. They sprawled, shirts unbuttoned to the waist, sipping iced drinks beneath the garish brightness of multi-coloured parasols.
It was too hot to talk. It was too hot to loll abed. There were but two alternatives-the cool of the water, or the shade of the cafe parasols; perhaps, alternately, a little of each. Though it was morning, everyone limply awaited the benison of evening, when the breeze would change and sweep in, cool and welcome, over the sea.
Slowly the day dragged to an end.
The baroness's party, now nineteen in all, took dinner in the spacious restaurant. They sat, not as one party, but in more intimate groups of threes and fours. Evening cocktails and a swim had freshened them all considerably.
After dinner, they retired to the large lounge in the baroness's suite. On either side of this elegant salon were the two bedrooms of the suite.
As they sat, idly chatting, Capt. Jackson Willoughby voiced their collective thoughts with a simple request.
"You gonna throw any light, yet, Baroness?" he asked, easily and naturally.
"Light?" queried the baroness. "Light? On what?"
"On what's in store for us-that's all," said the captain.
"Oil-I see," said the baroness. "Our plans? I wonder, now? There's that element of surprise, you see. I planned to make some use of that, you know."
"And why not?" boomed Berenice, merrily. "Things go on happening like they have been-and I couldn't care less where I am-tomorrow, next week. Or next month, for that matter."
The baroness scanned the faces of those about her. There were a few who had the fatalism, the acceptance of "let-things-happen" that was the forte of the Kandis. They were the contented, the complaisant ones.
There were others, however, who had been betraying an inward uneasiness-brought on, she knew, by the events of the past few days. This uneasiness was neither fear, nor nervousness, nor apprehension. It was, rather, a conglomerate of all three emotions.
Such were Reggie and Leslie, Elaine and Hildegarde, and Heine Gorlitz-if that man's iron control could be said ever to betray any inner emotion whatever. Then there was the conflict between Dino Carotti and Felicity Velda. In that latter relationship, the baroness was thinking, there lurked the beginnings, perhaps, of a crack-up. And why not, then? The two had been living together now for the better part of two years. And that, God knows, was at least a year longer than she had expected it to last, even when the attachment was formed. Felicity was too haughty, too intensely selfish.
"Then 1*11 leave things just as they are," she said. "With this proviso-that if anybody feels he or she can't take the suspense any longer, please feel free to come and talk to me about it. This I can promise, thoughthere's plenty of fun ahead of us. That I can assure you.
"I'm all for that, Baroness," said Willoughby. "Your kind of fun is what I can take lots of. Sorry I spoke."
"Don't give it another thought," smiled the baroness.
The small talk resumed, this time with a more vivacious ring to it. Ice clinked in tall Tom Collinses. The party seemed to settle down once more.
Then Istvan spoke.
A look of genuine puzzlement wrinkled his brow as he asked the baroness: "Mind if I put a question, Madame?" About Rhoda and Thespie?
"Go right ahead."
"You were telling us," Istvan recalled, "that anybody who has one of them has to have the other one as well, simultaneously?"
"That's right," smiled the baroness. "Isn't it, girls?"
"Too true, it's right," said Thespie definitely. "We get it anyway else, we just can't come-that's all there is to it!"
"We]l, that part I can understand," said Istvan, gravely.
"What bothers me is the other bit. That if two tackle one, both have to tackle the other as well. I'm sorrysorry if I'm being dumb about this, but I just don't get it."
"Damn good point, that," interjected Dr. Shane McGarrity. "I'll tell you something. I've been wondering, myself, about just that very thing."
"And so've I," confessed Heine Gorlitz.
"You mean-you don't understand?" asked the baroness, surprised.
"I certainly don't," said Dr. McGarrity.
"But it's perfectly clear to me," said the baroness. She looked at the two girls. "Can't you explain it, Rhoda?" she asked.
Rhoda shot a quick and mischievous look at Thespie. The negress caught her meaning at once.
"Rather show you, than talk about it," said Rhoda gaily. "That is-if nobody objects. I don't. And Thespie won't. What say?"
A thrill gripped them, immediately. It was the old but each-time-new excitement aroused by exhibitionistic sex. It was a feeling with its roots deep in the fear of convention, of shocking somebody or another-perhaps even the fear of being discovered in an act that had been thought intimate and private.
"So? Who do we get to work with?" asked Thespie brazenly.
Her eye fell full on Istvan. But Istvan, whose question had prompted this sudden turn, bowed out gracefully.
A quick thrill of adoration racked Althea at Istvan's gesture of withdrawal. She stole her hand into his.
Thespie caught the significance of Istvan's refusal.
"No takers?" she taunted. "So-well pick two, then. Hows about you, skipper-for one?"
"Can't frighten me," the captain sang out, cheerfully.
"And what about Dr. McGarrity?" asked Rhoda.
"The poor, tired, almost-clapped Doctor McGarrity," echoed the doctor. He stood up, however, and crossed over to stand beside the aviator. "If you only know what we've been through in the past few days. However -Dr. McGarrity it is. You bought it, kids-you drive it, then!"
"Right!" said Rhoda, alert now, and businesslike. "Now, Istvan-the part you don't seem to understand is that business about if two tackle the one of us, both have to tackle the other one as well? That it?"
"That's it," said Istvan.
"Fine," said Rhoda. "So we strip, now? Good. Then choose your weapons, you two-Thespie or me. And don't be gallant-whoever you choose is going to get not one bit more than the other one. You'll see!"
Swiftly, the four disrobed. Dr. McGarrity presented a forlorn sight as he stood, penis a-droop, and something in his self-pitying observance of his own condition led to an outburst of merriment from among those who watched.
"Change places, Mac?" catcalled Cariotti, whose own penis was already throbbing to erection at the mass striptease.
"Not on your life!" said the doctor. "It'll work-just give it time!"
And it did, too, as the smooth, chocolate-skinned negress knelt at it and flicked her now-naked titties horizontally over its drooping head. Her body was superbly moulded and her tits, shapely globes of incomparable beauty, felt actually warmer than the rest of her bodyheat as they caressed the tip of the doctor's tool now beginning to swell.
Stripped at last, Rhoda alio came into the fray. She came at the doctor from behind, her glorious body alive with lascivious, lewd intent-ready, already, for penetration.
Her breasts were as statuesque, each in their way, as those of any woman in the room. They were subject to one flaw, however; one was larger than the other, a defect common to thousands of otherwise superbly-sculpted women. But even the lesser of her two tits was full, rounded, voluptuous. Dr. McGarrity felt the warm body of the white girl pressed against his back, and reached behind him to clasp her buttocks, already working, so that he might draw her hairy mons veneris right into the twin globes of his arse.
The captain was ready, penis throbbing over his contracting scrotum as he moved, gently, the better to observe the magic being wrought by the negress on the doctor. Without touch of hand, using only the lobbing bouncing of her bosoms, Thespie had brought the reluctant cock of the doctor into as rigid and raging a weapon as he had ever displayed for action. The captain marvelled.
"Looks like it's gonna be you, Thespie," he sang out. "Any girl can do all that to a sleeping prick, and that's the girl who can have me!"
"No objection?" asked the doctor, proud again of his awakened manhood.
"None at all," said Thespie, randy already herself, "Whatever I get, Rhoda gets, too. That's the way the matzo crumbles, man!"
"Show us, then," said the doctor.
"Right," said Thespie. "So it's me you want? That it? I lie down-so." Flaunting her black nudity, she crossed to a divan.
"Now you come into me," she said to the doctor.
"That's right-right in the cunt, man!" She shuddered in delight as her vagina swallowed up the length of Dr. McGarrity's tool. She wriggled, involuntarily, upon the heft of it.
"Now," she said. "Come on, Rhoda. You lie there. Now, doc-you suck her, or fingerfuck her, see? Have her any way you can think of. She'll come at you any way you want her. All you have to do is to satisfy yourself, satisfy me, and satisfy her-all at the same time. You understand?"
Dr. McGarrity smiled, benignly. This he was going to enjoy.
Then he went limp with surprise as the negress, suddenly and without any warning, wriggled free from beneath him and escaped, just at the instant he had hoped she would open up to him. In his mouth was already the warmth and the softness and the taste of the lush cunt he had hoped to tongue.
"Now-supposing both of you want me," went on Thespie, her breasts rising and falling magnificently as she spoke. "Say one in the mickey, and one in my mouth, hey? O.K. That still leaves you each a head, each a pair of hands-so you slam a tongue, or a fistful of fingers, into Rhoda. You follow?"
She thrust herself quickly against the body of Dr. McGarrity.
"Or suppose you get up my arse, and you, skipper, want it in my cunt? You're still free, both of you, to deal with Rhoda, see?
"Or else we can try it even another way. We all lie round in a square, and each one sucks the other off. I take you, Doc You take Rhoda. Rhoda takes the skipper. The skipper takes me. That one clear?"
"That's the way we'll do it, then," said the doctor. "That last way."
As they took up their positions, then, the foursome became oblivious to the presence of the others. Each in the grip of desire, they lay hastily, greedily, in the positions each felt instinctively must be adopted. Their caresses had degenerated, now, into a rough tearing at one another. Voraciously, mouth sought for prick, mouth slavered at wet, distended, engorged cunt. And, as tongues slid upon clitoris, as licking spit-wet lips clamped down upon toolheads, the four of them shuddered in unison. Soon there was the panting urgency of mouthbreathing, the lascivious swish of tongue slashing along gaping cunt, and each was away...
The sight of the four bodies interlocked in fuck, and the visibility of each fornicator's action, swept the audience into a fever of desire. They craned forward, greedily jostling each other for vantage points around the four corners of the sexual square.
Berenice shouted encouragement to the quartette coupled in lustful copulation, naked and sweating openly before them.
"Get into it, fellers!" she called. "Go after what you want. The more you get, the more you're going to want to give! Don't you forget that, now!"
"That's telling them!" grinned Theophilus. He patted his enormous wife affectionately over her pantieless buttocks.
"I've heard about that philosophy of yours, Theophilus," called out Alouetta.
"Only thinking worth a damn, in sex," he declared, majestically. "You want to try it, perhaps, with me?"
"I've wanted you ever since I've beard about you," she laughed, unashamedly.
"So long as I get Thys, why-have him, by all means," said Berenice, generously.
People separated into watching groups as the fresh foursome began to undress. The-homosexuals and the lesbians remained, watching avidly the four-square oral fornication being enacted before them.
But the others sensed that a new contest, a more mighty and even more impressive one, was about to commence. They fell back, leaving the rest of the floor to Berenice and Alouetta, to Thys and Theophilus.
Alouetta was first to peel down to the buff. The wealth of white flesh she presented to the assembled gaze was almost past human comprehension. Great tits like inverted basins jutted and ballooned from her mighty torso, their nipples hard and half as long as the teats upon the udders of one of her native Friesland cows. Her rotund belly divided at the V of her vast, sparselyhaired sex into thighs sturdy as twin tree-trunks.
Almost her exact counterpart except for the blackness of her African skin where all of Alouetta was gleaming white was Berenice. She was greater than Amazonian but was superb, carved ebony in the excellence of tit, of thigh, of belly and buttock. She was all sex... black sex.
Toward the two women advanced the two naked men, slowly and deliberately, like a pair of gross, big-bellied Japanese judo combatants. The black man bore down upon the white woman. The black woman spread open her colossal thighs, and prepared to receive the onslaught of the white giant.
Not a man in the room then but whose juices were oozing from his upright phallus. Not a woman but whose cunt was a palpitating oven of passionate heat.
Heine, breathing strangely and deeply, reached for
Anaka-Lee. She came, entranced as if under the influence of some hypnotic drug, into his muscular arms.
"Strip!" he commanded, harshly.
Entirely possessed, the Polynesian reached for the hem of her satiny gown, shucking it over her head. With the tossing aside of her single garment, she stood revealed in all her nudity.
Heine was not much more tardy in his disrobing. Together the pair fell to the floor beside the first foursome who, joined in their sexual square, were beginning to moan in the transports of their approaching communal orgasm.
Heine's possession of Anaka-Lee unleashed their emotions.
Istvan leaped to the baroness, who had contrived to jerk one great mammary from out of her corsage. He was already nude. He bore the baroness to the floor without giving her time to disrobe, sliding her skirts up above her waist as she collapsed, whining and weak, beneath him.
"Ah-hoh!" she cried, jerking spasmodically. "Now! Now, this moment! Puck me! Plunge it into me-ah, for Christ's sweet sake! I'm afire! I want you-soo-o-o much. Oooh-h! Give it to me, whoever you are!"
Althea, equally randy, had stripped to the skin. She squatted athwart the eager, slavering tongue of the baroness. Seeing her, Istvan arched his back, boring down with his genitals deep into the baroness's quim, and arching up to make way for bis beloved to be sucked by the woman he was fucking. The baroness squirmed and shivered in her rut, striving to contain all that Istvan was screwing into her; striving, in her turn, to give equal satisfaction to the sweet-smelling, squelching, seductive cunt she was sucking and tongueing.
Most of them in the room were now coupled, or preparing for it. Four had achieved orgasm by now. They lav, spent and oblivious. The others were still seeking relief. Jackson Willoughby was with Felicity. Dr. McGarrity, spent and roused again, was rolling round the floor, copulated gloriously into a surprisingly active and receptive Hildegarde. Somebody had dimmed the main lights, leaving only the diffused illumination of sidelamps.
In their search for relief, only two people, Elaine and Leslie, had been left out. Unheeded by any, these two now found each other. They stepped, together, daintily over the mass of writhing flesh upon the floor. Together, on tiptoe, they passed, wraithlike, through the door of one of the adjoining bedrooms.
There, in privacy now, the homosexual laid the slim girl upon the bed. Naked, as was she, he bent towards her. Blindly she reached for that slim man-body that was so nearly a counterpart of her own. She drew him toward her, and Leslie, shuddering, presented the heft of his manhood at her sex.
Shivering, she activated the shy, unaccustomed muscles that opened her vagina. Jets of lubricating fluid were released as Leslie made his entrance. Feeling himself plunging deliriously down some dune of sort, warm, allembracing beach sand, he collapsed upon the slender body of that beloved girl, who now tasted the sublime difference between dildo and the sinewy warmth of male actuality. Tiny, feminine cries bubbled and spilled from her as she relaxed beneath him, all delicious inexperience, yet as ardent and afire as was he to learn.
And they were suddenly one, the homosexual and the lesbian.
They clove to each other, and in their cleaving, and in the agonising ecstasy of their simultaneous orgasm, they knew that they had found one another.