Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden

sufferer, albeit a shade less eager, had not percep- tibly slackened. The surgeon’s hair, greyed in the first week, was now falling out in handfuls. The stench of so many unburied corpses was becoming intolerable. My erstwhile well-hung cods sagged wearily against the lower portion of the Imperial slit : and only the loyal assistance of the maids of honour in supporting and swinging my body kept me at all to my duty. Fuck me ! Hoarsely whis- pered the gin-smelling potato-trap of the still randy sovereign. I screwed up my almost deliquescing tickle-toby to the pitch of another jumble-giblets, but it was with no hopeful outlook. Frankly, to myself — and the surgeons read my gloomy thought — I was compelled to look facts in the face, and admit that a very few hours now would see me sink a corpse at the very breach in which so many brave men had fallen fighting. For I was determined not to withdraw, even if the lady herself had been willing to let me off. This she was not. Her greasy and rotund arms held me to her bulging belly, the bloated and ill-smelling butter- bags flopping down with fat, their black nipples inflamed with lust and alcohol. Her bristly scut scraped my boyish abdomen ; her spunk-besmeared grummet stuck ever closer to my ever wearier rubigo. So I made the best of a bloody bad job, and gave her a spirit-indeed-is-willing-but-the flesh-is-weak prick-scouring as if the last trump were going to sound in a minute, and I were afraid to be “ caught with my work half done on Judge- ment Day,” as Browning says. So I leather-stretched wearily on. During all this time the Empress had kept up her strength by copious libations of whisky, (which stood in casks at a great height above her head, and trickled down in tubes into her royal mouth, on the same principles as saline injections). But I suppose the violence of her paroxysms or the me- [38]