John Thomas & Lady Jane

Clifford. Therefore the day before she left she went to find
him in the wood.
    The hut was closed. She went
tippy-toe, like Tinker Bell, indoors. She took the hatchet and chopped a piece
of wood on the block. It was good exercise so she went on chopping. There was a
little fireplace in the corner of the hut, she could even make herself a fire.
This amused her. A fire can be very amusing as long as it doesn’t spread.
    Just as her fire was crackling up the
little grate, in came Soames. He couldn’t get in for chopped logs. He was walking
and he looked as if he had been standing in the shower for an hour.
    ‘I’ve been standing in the shower for
an hour,’ he said.
    ‘How wet your knees are!’ she said.
    She laid her hand on his bent knee
and she felt the warmth come through. Yes, knees give off a lot of warmth. A
room full of knees can keep the room heated for twenty-four hours.
    ‘I want to run in the rain!’ she
said, her eyes glowing.
    ‘To get wet?’ he asked ironically.
    ‘With nothing on! I want to feel it!’
she said.
    In an instant she was stripping off
her stockings from her ivory-coloured legs, then her dress and her
underclothes, and he saw her long, pointed, keen animal breasts tipping and
stirring as she moved, while he stood motionless by the little fire. Then naked
and wild, ivory-coloured, she ran out with a wild laugh into the sharp rain.
Wasn’t she beautiful!
    ‘Oh hooray, God save the King,’ she
sang.
    He watched her run with her arms
extended, queer and pale and bright, in the sharp rain, across the open space
and to the trees, her soft waist full and yielding, her haunches bright and wet
with rain, leaping with queer life of their own. It was the first sign of
lunacy and she became more shimmery and indistinct in the rain. Flossie ran
after her, with a sudden, wild little bark, and she turned, holding off the
brown dog with her naked arms.
    He unfastened his boots, and threw
off his clothes in a heap on the floor, and as she was running breathless back
to the hut, he ran out naked, freezing and white. She gave a little shriek, and
fled, Flossie gave a yelp, jumping at him, and he, catching his breath in the
sharp rain, ran barefoot after the naked woman, in a wild game. She could not
run for glancing in wild apprehension over her shoulder, seeing the ruddy face,
and erection almost upon her, she was playing ‘catch me quick and fuck me’, the
white male figure gleaming in pursuit just behind her. The strength to run
seemed to leave her. And suddenly his naked arm went round her soft, naked-wet
middle, and she fell back against him. He laughed an uncanny little laugh, hur,
hur, hur, like a village idiot, which he was rapidly turning into. Feeling the
heap (heap?) of soft, female flesh, that became warm in an instant, his hands
pressed in on her lovely, heavy posteriors as he bounced them up and down.
‘Rule Britannia,’ he sang.
    She, for the moment, she was
unconscious, in the beating overtone and the streaming privacy of the rain. He
glanced at the ground, tipped her over on a grassy place, and there in the
middle of the path, in the pouring rain, went into her, the rain running off
his bum, in a short embrace, keen as a dagger thrust, that was over in a
minute. According to her watch, one minute thirty seconds. All the while the
dog barked as they did it. Soames got up almost instantly, drawing her up by
the hands, they were both blue with cold, and snatching a handful of
forget-me-nots, to wipe the smeared earth off her back, as they went to the
hut. And she too, abstractedly, caught at the campions and the forget-me-nots.
    He shut the door of the hut, and
dried her upon an old sheet which he had put with the blankets on the shelf,
and she rubbed him down, the glistening, healthy white back. Then, still
panting, they slung a blanket over their shoulders, and sat before the fire,
warming the front of their naked bodies, and panting speechless.
    ‘Oh Rose Marie, I love you,’ he sang.
He was in good voice this morning.
    The fuck had taken it out of both of
them. The brown dog shook herself like another sudden shower, and he shouted at
her, ‘Get back you bastard!’
    Turning round to the dog, he had
noticed the torn handful of wet flowers on the bench. He took them up and
looked at them.
    ‘They stop out-doors all weathers,’
he said. This was a brilliant piece of horticultural deduction.
    She sat with her knees open,
receiving the fire-glow on the soft folds of her