In the course of the vey liberal education, if not exactly wasted, then at any rate in the common estimation thrown away upon him, Lord Snatch had put himself upon footings of some intimacy with both restoration comedy and the Gothic novel, and was in consequence partial to the modelling of his own conduct upon that of an archetype common to both genres, namely the brutish husband, in which guise he derived a considerable satisfaction from the vey banality itself of the provocations which he lavished upon Lady Snatch, relishing alike the contumely which ever must hatch in Her Ladyship’s breast, preparatory to being poured over himself in the form of the coarsest and most larvally Ohio-inflected execrations, a hot and malodorous sensation savoured by His Lordship much after the fashion of a freshly bemerded hog, such being the spirit in which he, gratifyingly, now found himself as he mounted the cancerous and creaking escalier, upon which like unto a cascade frozen in time there yet tarried in their slumbers, much as they had these thirty-six hours since the dalliances initially described, diverse knaves, lotophages, cut-purses, wan and furtive self-pleasurers, sunken-eyed connoisseurs of the visual arts, predators and Rohypnol men, thugs, craque-fumeurs, registered gents, aficionados of the catalogues of Mothercare, spicists and smaque addiqutes and more craque fumeurs, and numberless chaps who, each taking his turn in sequence after Mr Francis MacMahon - the inverter, which is to say perverter, of the motto “First come first served” - presumably enjoyed second, third, fourth etc etc dibs upon a wicket which must in its later hours have become so sticky as to be downright unplayable, and the air about His Lordship suffused with manmusk odour and odour cloacae that is a tad paradoxically the divine afflatus of each man his own while yet inimical and offensive to the alien nostril, there came His Lordship upon, cringing and abased like a beaten dog, approaching supplicant-wise and open-palmed from a dark doorway one of many, St Just who was the Telemachus of the piece, and His Lordship, being just then in the middle of one of those De Quincey moments of his, found himself delivered over wholesale to the inevitable rumination concerning the question as to how such an ineffectual milquetoast and all round squib should have had the effrontery to chose as a nom de guerre the label of such a notorious revolutionary terrorist instead of something more befitting to his station - His Lordship having road-tested various possibilities including “Dick” and “Boy” and “Igor”, although as we know only “Ganymede” seemed to have any sticking power - the helot, the … vassal, the … Pound Shop Lenin meanwhile wringing his damp little paws and venting a sequence of passive-aggressive niceties as his lord affecting not to heed him swept past him on that slimy landing and continued his laborious ascent, and as he drew nigh unto the salon wherein My Lady had disported and eke did disport herself yet with diverse bucks and fops of the seedier wards of the polity, uxoriously took counsel with his inward eudaimon - a sadly bedraggled and attenuated creature, none too respectable - as to what salutations he might bestow upon My Lady, purposing to stimulate in the bosom of that redoubtable matron a crystal fountain of that acrid pique the astringency of which he so savoured - did I mention this? - and having undertaken the condign period of reflection and deliberation found his life force gravid with the prognosis that the parole juste was as like as not to be that acme of sublime banality, that alpha and omega and destroying Shiva of curdling vacuity, brought to its purulent fruition in a confected two-cylinder midwestern whine, to whit: —
Lord Snatch, Francis MacMahon, St Just
Being by the diligence of others, to whom for their noble benison the authors hereby place on the record their respectful thanks, furnished with, regarding the events under present consideration, fulsome accounts of the particulars from across the perspectival spectrum, together with an attendance list the veracity of which has been established by means of exhaustive cross-checking with all and only the most reputable and reliable sources of record, the authors choose not to exacerbate the enervation of a no doubt already jaded readership with further needless and aggravating iterations of the salient facts of a well-known history, yet considering nonetheless that the augmentation of the record by the addition of two or three new perspectives, of the protagonists by common consensus the most central to the events in question, the more excessively egregious vulgarities whereof have been filtered out by a species of algorythmical Lord Chamberlain, and the residue being quo hoc modo rendered palatable to even the most refined and squeamish aesthete or maiden aunt, may yet prove of lasting value to future scholarship, in which spirit the authors now find themselves moved to report that, upon being favoured with the ejaculation [sic] aforementioned of her lord and, if the reader might upon this solitary occasion be prevailed upon to forebear not too grudgingly the usage of idiom whilom it descends into cliché, master, Her Ladyship, being as yet pinioned underneath the person of Eurymachus the smooth and deceitful son of Polybus, who, having bided with utmost patience as numberless of his fellows before him let fall their seed upon what must by now have been a most thoroughly inseminated furrow, was in no manner disposed to forebear the spilling of his own seed upon that same pasture, Her Ladyship, shall we let it be known, favoured the convocation with a shrug of the shoulders and a species of grunt, this interpreted by Eurymachus the smooth and deceitful son of Polybus as an exhortation to redouble his efforts, wherefore he called upon Timothy the twink of Peter Astley and Adrian the twink of Rogers Boyes, whichever of the twain chanced to be in possession of the bottle of amyl nitrate transported thither for the use and delectation of Her Ladyship’s fops, straightway to administer unto him the vapours thereof, that he might bring to a satisfactory climax, that is to say engender a form of paroxysm on the part of himself and, if she so list, Her Ladyship also, the proceedings in question serving, as we now submit, as the explanans as to that phenomenon explanandum, namely why Her Ladyship did not at once offer salutations for the safe return of her lord and, if the reader could be prevailed upon to overlook upon one single further occasion so admittedly egregious a solecism, master, accompanied with, ideally, a burnt offering - although perhaps there were in that époque no goats to be had in the purlieus of Cheltenham Road, withal in the present case it occurs to speculate regarding the reasons for the lack of brigandage of St Werbuggers Farm to such a purpose - the renewed diligence, between Her Ladyship’s legs, of Eurymachus the smooth and deceitful son of Polybus pursuant upon Her Ladyship’s eructation being for the reasons given the singly striking aspect of the scene which greeted His Lordship as the door to that chamber swung, yowling like postcoital cats, open, prompting Her Ladyship to greet her lord and, if the reader might be prevailed upon to overlook yet again the acknowledged ghastliness, whereof the authors now undertake to affix their seals to a solemn and binding oath not to do it again, ever, master, with a phrase whose felicitous brevity stands as admonishment to this age of prolixity, namely —
Eurymachus
The faucet of Her Ladyship’s objurgations being once op’d, His Lordship, being, not unreasonably one would think, in expectation of the delectable prospect of taking the waters in a veritable Tunbridge Wells or Harrogate or Baden Baden of contumely, licked accordingly those vey craqued lips of his, and chuckled as provokingly as he dared, and leant against the jamb of the door, thereby purposing to signify that Her Ladyship might fling such parcels of dung and morsels of execration as she pleased, for it was all one to him, and moreover the sulphur had ever been the veyest thing for the carbuncles which oppressed him so grievously, himself being always and unfailingly the foremost in acknowledging the recurrence of this indisposition as ineluctably the corollary of his wanton appetite for that lotophagic hobbyhorse of his, upon which, although no doubt in some wise a thing in itself to be regretted, His Lordship, in making the best of the hand which life had dealt him, was steadfast in putting a positive construction, in which connection he cited oft the literary emanations of Mr Thos. De Quincey and Mr Wm. Burroughs as, withal perhaps but epiphenomenally, instances of lotophagia for all that it was everywhere maligned being notwithstanding a practice not lacking in benefits, albeit, admittedly, of a somewhat intangibly cultural nature, to humankind, whereas such a display of insouciance upon His Lordship’s part would serve, serendipitously as he anticipated, only to move his life’s companion to bestow upon him further torrents of that midwestern inanition which was and ever had been his life’s joy, contrariwise Her Ladyship, affecting to ignore the caperings of her lord and - nostra maxima culpa! - master, merely wriggled in such a manner as to signify that, inasmuch as the buck or fop presently disporting himself upon her person might in his current dispositions constitute something of a burden, the buck or fop presently disporting himself upon her person might if he pleased so rearrange his dispositions as to afford Her Ladyship some easement conducive to both their happinesses, and being engaged in the said fornication, afforded His Lordship vey little mind, whereupon His Lordship, in whom the sprezzatura which, like all of his kind - sc. the intersection of the lotophagical and the aristocratical, a brace of exemplars being My Lord of Bristol (deceased) and My Lord of Marlborough - he wore as an exoskeletal carapace, precluded all possibility of his exhibiting the marks of disgruntlement at his cuckolding, merely redoubled the nonchalance which he so cunningly affected, commencing a whistle which, despite doing vey ugly violence to pitch and melody, was nonetheless recognisable as a charmingly mangled ‘O soave fanciulla’ from La Bohème, this inevitably standing to Her Ladyship in the relation of egregiously maculated margarita ante porcos, although one or two of the knaves and fops combling the salon were heard to exchange observations regarding how serendipitously Her Ladyship’s coupling syncopated with his Lordship’s rendition of the Puccini crowd-pleaser, vulgarities which His Lordship with sublime delicacy suffered to pass beneath his notice, indeed condescending so complaisantly as to evince a thoroughgoing gratification that his life’s companion should have found the wherewithal to entertain herself during his unavoidable absence on business, speaking of which, feeling it incumbent upon himself discreetly to ascertain the, so-to-speak, remuneratory ball-park in which Her Ladyship had been operating whilst entertaining the gentlemen callers whose musk so delightfully perfumed the space, inasmuch as he himself and, as he suspected, she also was conscious of the nigh approach of that state of epsloot clucking dinjerley, to which purpose, albeit mindful of the susceptibility of Her Ladyship to choleric paroxysm, he in his customary tone of emollience inquired of her whether —
Dinjerley
E’en so refined an address found vey little favour with Her Ladyship, who straightaway and by dint of some shoving and one or two slaps divested herself of the malodorous fop who had these ten minutes past been cantering up and down the sparsely forested valley between her hips, before selecting two more of his kind, and then with increased vigour renewed her debauch in the form of an unedifyingly athletic penetrazione doppe, which moment the Cheltenham Road Telemachus viz. St Just, chose to insinuate himself into the doorway beside and somewhat underneath His Lordship - and rightly so, demmit! - plucking most impertinently His Lordship’s sleeve, whereupon that etiolated and yet residually noble sapling of the House of Snatch rounded upon the Perkin Warbeck of Lower Kingsdown, and seizing him by the collar demanded to know what the divil he thought he meant by makin’ so bold with the person of a Peer of the Realm, to which unimpeachably reasonable inquiry that base helot responded with a demeaningly servile display of Uriah-Heapish writhing and passive-aggressive animadversion to his own capacity for the absorption of inculpation in inverse proportion to his desert thereof, this obfuscation being the carapace or shell of the nugget, that is to say the issue at this point of the dialectical slough in which we presently and in despite of our best intentions find ourselves seemingly inextricably immersed, namely that like St Just, regarding himself somewhat as like fuckin’ like steward, had fuckin’ like strove to act as like fuckin’ like whistleblower with regard to Her Ladyship’s like wantonness with like the like financial fuckin’ proprieties in the free exchange of goods ’n’ … er … services, this apologia rousing on the part of His Lordship only a profound disdain, and I think that all of us there present felt ourselves diminished by the spectacle, inasmuch as there were audible, over the squelchings and suckings and gaseous pops and liquefactions dominating the soundscape of that chamber, the oral tokens of disgust at the self-abasement of the fellow, notwithstanding which His Lordship did not deign to join himself with the general tendency to heap execration upon the servile chump much though the oik deserved it, but rather condescended to bestow upon the gathering the outward tokens, in the form of an episode - a petit mal might perhaps be the mot juste - of picturesque shuddering, which represented to that gathering the refining, purifying and, to the gratification and edification of all present, the ultimately successful inner struggle of obliged noblesse to master itself, this performance prefatory to His Lordship’s droll observation that it is all very well makin’ free with a chep’s spousal chattel, but a chep might possibly have the expectation of some kind of financial testimonial as naturally arising out of and proceeding from the affront, for in the other case it seemed to him that adverse consequences - the disintegration of the social order and the breakdown of the common values that bind servant to master - must surely flow from such wanton neglect of the law of fair exchange, sanctified as the latter was by the verdigris of heritage and precedent, his declamation being acknowledged by all present as a sublimely magisterial, almost Aurelian, justification of the noble practice of gentlemen who suffer other gentlemen to lie with their wives, saving the pair of silverbacks who had been executing upon Her Ladyship the aforementioned d.p. and who, upon being displaced - or, not to put too fine a point on the matter - usurped by a pair of howler monkeys, inveighed against their ruined orgasms, petitioning His Lordship that they might be afforded compensatory relief at the hands of other doxies of His Lordship’s acquaintance, to which His Lordship vouchsafed the succinct reply, —
Squattocrat Heights
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