Chapter One Hundred and Fifteen
Voot and Sniggly were sharing a cigarette in a small alcove in the duchess’s suite, the duchess herself asleep in the bedroom. Voot’s hand, holding the cigarette, shook from time to time. He couldn’t look Sniggly in the eye, for the shame.
“Cold weather we’re having, eh?” he began.
“Do not worry about it, monsieur,” the footman said by way of solace.
“The weather, you mean?” asked Voot. “You refer to the weather?”
“I refer to the physical act in which you and I just partook, for her highness’s pleasure, monsieur,” Sniggly clarified.
“Oh. That.”
“Please do not feel ashamed.”
“I’d very little dignity to begin with, living here for all these years, managing this place,” Voot admitted, staring at a painting of ecstatic, claret-jacketed huntsman atop unnaturally leaping steeds closing in on a scrawny fox who, as the painter would have it, well deserved its fate. “And now I’m afraid I have none.”
“Well, to look at dignity the way society does, I guess I lost my little crumb long ago,” Sniggly opined. “So I haven’t any more to lose.”
To be specific, their comments were in reference to a deed the duchess had instigated, namely, persuading Voot to fuck the footman while she watched. Voot had initially recoiled, but her highness’s enticement had been so eloquent, her deep well of lechery so contagiously manifest in her eye, that he could have said to have lost sight of his own proclivities in the fever of the moment, rather, he suspected, in the manner of the blood-braying hunters now frozen before him. At the close of the performance, when Sniggly’s innermost ring constricted rhythmically around Voot’s member, causing his sacred secretion to gush deep into the footman’s plebeian orifice, Voot endured an eruption of self-disgust, unhelped by the observation, as evidenced from Sniggly’s drenched, pearlescent hand, that the footman, too, had sacrificed his essential masculine identity for a few spurting moments of physical pleasure.
“I’ve long come to see the course of a man’s life as one intermittent parcelling-out of the mediocre stock of dignity with which he was born,” philosophised the footman.
“Hm. There might be something to that.” Voot passed him the cigarette. “What happens when you’ve none left?”
“You have the likes of me, monsieur—whatever that may be. Monsieur.”
“Please—I think you might call me ‘Erasmus’, after all this.”
“Why ‘Erasmus’?”
“That’s my Christian name.”
“Oh. I understand. Thank you—Erasmus. And I hope you will consent to call me ‘Sniggly’.”
“Very good.”
“Thank you.”
“You were saying?”
“Well, while I’m fairly certain I have no dignity left myself, I couldn’t tell you whether the result is that I’m a thoroughly ruined man, in the eyes of God and society; or whether, because of it, I’ve finally found a kind of peace. In any case, you can’t very well live life, at all, without sacrificing the better balance of your dignity. I mean, even a monk—well, maybe a monk, but even they piss and shit, peek at each other’s cocks, masturbate in the latrines, and so on.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, how did you come into the duchess’s employ?”
Here Sniggly recounted his backstory, which had come flashing back to him, just minutes before, upon the discharge of his semen into his hand (as occasioned by the systematic violation of his anus by Voot’s penis): The son of a righteous preacher who’d been imprisoned for allegedly treasonous sermons, young Sniggly was compelled to enter a workhouse at a tender age. Following years of unrelenting misery, the misery relented, when he was plucked from hell by the duchess, a patroness of the workhouse, who had arrived, on a whim, on an inspection. She took a liking to the dirty, roguish-looking lad who stared up at her without a whit of respect. She taught him his trade as footman; having little but life in the workhouse with which to compare it, he supposed he’d had a bit of luck. In addition to his traditional duties, he found upon the stroke of midnight on the morning he came of age, he was required to submit to ritual sexual humiliation for her highness’s amusement.
“It became rather tedious rather quickly,” he related to Voot. “I am required to satisfy her at certain times, in certain ways, according to a strict timetable posted on the door of the kitchen, for all the servants to see and snicker over.”
“What kind of ways—if I’m not being too inquisitive?”
“The traditional ways, sometimes—on Mondays—then the week sees a steady increase in degradation, from allowing myself to be penetrated by certain implements she enjoys wielding, on Wednesday afternoons, to Saturday night trawls through town for tramps to hire off the street, whom the stable grooms clean up so as to be in a fit state for carnal relations with myself, while her highness watches and is pleasured by a chambermaid. Naturally, we have Sundays off for church and rest. So you see, I’m something of a pioneer in the evolution of mankind: I’ve been shorn of all the trappings of morality and shame, and subsist merely as a shoulder-shrugging automaton, content with his abuse and ever aware it could be worse.”
“Do you take any pleasure in all this?”
“Well. . .” He drew the last fume from the cigarette, stubbed it out, and produced another. Voot lit it for him. Sniggly took a draught, then handed it over. “Well,” he said again, “not really. But then, who ever said we were put here on this Earth to have a good time?”
“Quite right,” Voot nodded.
“Only, I fear her highness has somewhat tired of me, of late. Hence her frenzied search for, you must forgive the term, fresh meat.”
“You mean, me.”
“Yes.” Sniggly smiled. “Buck up, Erasmus,” he advised, clapping him on the back. “You’re a new man, like me, now. We’re the future, you and I. Where others plan the progress of our species to ever greater heights of honour, we see the truth.”