Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  And it did in fact possess religious grandeur, even to the way the priestly directors fattened their own stomachs. From time to time the sirens of the air-raid signals would announce the hour for this perverted religion to celebrate its black mass. Then the office would begin to stir. There was no radio in the room, so we had no way of knowing what was happening. Someone, speaking in a broad country accent, would say: "Wonder what's up?" About this time a young girl from the reception desk in the superintendent's office would come with some such report as: "Several formations of enemy planes sighted." Before long the strident voices of loud-speakers would order the girl students and the grade-school children to take shelter. Persons in charge of rescue work would walk about distributing red tags bearing the legend "Bleeding stopped: hour minute ." In case someone was wounded, one of these tags was to be filled in and hung about his neck, showing the time at which a tourniquet had been applied. About ten minutes after the sirens had sounded the loud-speakers would announce: "All employees take shelter." Grasping files of important papers in their arms, the office workers would hurry to deposit them in the underground vault where essential records were stored. Then they would rush outdoors and join the swarm of laborers running across the square, all wearing air-raid helmets or padded hoods. The crowd would be streaming toward the main gate. Outside the gate there was a desolate, bare, yellow field. Some seven or eight hundred meters beyond it, numerous shelters had been excavated in a pine grove on a gentle slope. Heading for these shelters, two separate streams of the silent, impatient, blind mob would rush through the dust—rushing toward what at any rate was not Death, no matter if it was only a small cave of easily collapsible red earth, at any rate it was not Death.I went home on my occasional off days, and there one night at eleven o'clock I received my draft notice. It was a telegram ordering me to report to a certain unit on February the fifteenth. At my father's suggestion, I had taken my physical examination, not at Tokyo, but at the headquarters of the regiment located near the place where my family maintained its legal residence, in H Prefecture of the Osaka-Kyoto region. My father's theory was that my weak physique would attract more attention in a rural area than in the city, where such weakness was no rarity, and that as a result I would probably not be drafted. As a matter of fact, I had provided the examining officials with cause for an outbreak of laughter when I could not lift—not even as far as my chest—the bale of rice that the farm boys were easily lifting above their heads ten times.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  But I can see today that we feel all the freer and lighter for having cast off the tinsel of ‘civilization.’ On board the same steamer with us were some relatives and acquaintances. These and other deck passengers I frequently met, because, the boat belonging to my client friends, I was free to move about anywhere and every where I liked. Since the steamer was making straight for Natal, without calling at intermediate ports, our voyage was of only eighteen days. But as though to warn us of the coming real storm on land, a terrible gale overtook us, whilst we were only four days from Natal. December is a summer month of monsoon in the Southern hemisphere, and gales, great and small, are, therefore, quite common in the Southern sea at that season. The gale in which we were caught was so violent and prolonged that the passengers became alarmed. It was a solemn scene. All became one in face of the common danger. They forgot their differences and began to think of the one and only God- Musalmans, Hindus, Christians and all. Some took various vows. The captain also joined the passengers in their prayers. He assured them that, though the storm was not without danger, he had had experience of many worse ones, and explained to them that a well-built ship could stand almost any weather. But they were inconsolable. Every minute were heard sounds and crashes which foreboded breaches and leaks. The ship rocked and rolled to such an extent that it seemed as though she would capsize at any moment. It was out of the question for anyone to remain on deck. ‘His will be done’ was the only cry on every lip. So far as I can recollect, we must have been in this plight for about twenty-four hours. At last the sky cleared, the sun made his appearance, and the captain said that the storm had blown over. People’s faces beamed with gladness, and with the disappearance of danger disappeared also the name of God from their lips, Eating and drinking, singing and merry- making again became the order of the day. The fear of death was gone, and the momentary mood of earnest prayer gave place to maya[1] . There were of course the usual namaz[2] and he prayers, yet they had none of the solemnity of that dread hour. But the storm had made me one with the passengers. I had little fear of the storm, for I had had experience of similar ones. I am a good sailor and do not get sea-sick. So I could fearlessly move amongst the passengers, bringing them comfort and good cheer, and conveying to them hourly reports of the captain. The friendship I thus formed stood me, as we shall see, in very good stead. The ship cast anchor in the port of Durban on the 18th or 19th of December. The Naderi also reached the same day.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Roxanne had never screamed so hard in her whole life. It rang and echoed in her ears, like the roar that follows an explosion of a battery of cannon. “No?” Chris said, pretending mild surprise. The whip was back on her belt. “No? Then make me an offer I can’t refuse.” Roxanne began to shake her head so hard that saliva flew from her lips and hit the arms of the cross. She was incapable of speech or thought. “Pull it together, babe,” Chris threatened her. Roxanne heard the muted laughter of the pack. Her silence, her inability to piece one word to another, shamed her and drove her further into panic. She finally fell back on the ineffectual offer of a desperate bottom. “Anything but that,” she whispered. “Do anything to me but that.” Then she hung her head, insofar as her rigid bonds permitted even that gesture, and absorbed the silence that greeted her as just punishment for her lack of originality, her lack of fire, her admission of failure and fear. She despised herself utterly—first of all because her offer was a bluff. She had not meant it. It was completely insincere. Chris could (she was sure) come up with a dozen other things she would hate and fear just as much. There was also the inescapable fact that she was in a bondage too complete, too carefully constructed, to allow escape. Therefore, the pack—or Chris, as their delegate—could literally do anything they wished to her. Any mercy they showed her was a gift. She had no position to bargain from. Chris knew this, and had decoyed her into a game that only Chris could win. Either the sentence would be carried out anyway—thus demonstrating Roxanne’s lack of power and complete helplessness—or another, more terrible one would be enforced in its place. Finally, Roxanne knew that the ropes and clips were there only to save her face, to give her an illusion of dignity that would make her more pliant beneath the pack’s will. Should any of them choose to do so, she could be loosed from all physical restraints, and still she would not be able to move from the spot without permission. But Chris appeared to have taken her seriously. Chris seemed to think that she did, indeed, have something left of sufficient value to buy herself a little time. Joyous Day walked over to Chris and offered her “a funny cigarette, mon.” They contemplated their victim together, turning over her offer, finding something in it that terrified Roxanne. “Since you don’t want me to whip you on top of the clips, I’ll whip you without them,” Chris said. “Joy, take them off.”

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "I can only say one thing in answer: I must see you personally, here at Wragby, before I can do anything. You promised faithfully to come back to Wragby, and I hold you to the promise. I don't believe anything nor understand anything until I see you personally, here under normal circumstances. I needn't tell you that nobody here suspects anything, so your return would be quite normal. Then if you feel, after we have talked things over, that you still remain in the same mind, no doubt we can come to terms." Connie showed this letter to Mellors. "He wants to begin his revenge on you," said he, handing the letter back. Connie was silent. She was somewhat surprised to find that she was afraid of Clifford. She was afraid to go near him. She was afraid of him as if he were evil and dangerous. "What shall I do?" she said. "Nothing, if you don't want to do anything." She replied, trying to put Clifford off. He answered: "If you don't come back to Wragby now, I shall consider that you are coming back one day, and act accordingly. I shall just go on the same and wait for you here, if I wait for fifty years." She was frightened. This was bullying of an insidious sort. She had no doubt he meant what he said. He would not divorce her, and the child would be his, unless she could find some means of establishing its illegitimacy. After a time of worry and harassment, she decided to go to Wragby. Hilda would go with her. She wrote this to Clifford. He replied: "I shall not welcome your sister, but I shall not deny her the door. I have no doubt she has connived at your desertion of your duties and responsibilities, so do not expect me to show pleasure in seeing her." They went to Wragby. Clifford was away when they arrived. Mrs. Bolton received them. "Oh, your Ladyship, it isn't the happy homecoming we hoped for, is it!" she said. "Isn't it!" said Connie. So this woman knew! How much did the rest of the servants know or suspect? She entered the house which now she hated with every fiber in her body. The great, rambling mass of a place seemed evil to her, just a menace over her. She was no longer its mistress, she was its victim. "I can't stay long here," she whispered to Hilda, terrified. And she suffered going into her own bedroom, re-entering into possession as if nothing had happened. She hated every minute inside the Wragby walls. They did not meet Clifford till they went down to dinner. He was dressed, and with a black tie: rather reserved, and very much the superior gentleman. He behaved perfectly politely during the meal, and kept a polite sort of conversation going: but it seemed all touched with insanity.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  When he was let down again, the judge asked him once more if that were true which the folk avouched against him, and Martellino, seeing that it availed him not to deny, answered, 'My lord, I am ready to confess the truth to you; but first make each who accuseth me say when and where I cut his purse, and I will tell you what I did and what not.' Quoth the judge, 'I will well,' and calling some of his accusers, put the question to them; whereupon one said that he had cut his purse eight, another six and a third four days agone, whilst some said that very day. Martellino, hearing this, said, 'My lord, these all lie in their throats and I can give you this proof that I tell you the truth, inasmuch as would God it were as sure that I had never come hither as it is that I was never in this place till a few hours agone; and as soon as I arrived, I went, of my ill fortune, to see yonder holy body in the church, where I was carded as you may see; and that this I say is true, the Prince's officer who keepeth the register of strangers can certify you, he and his book, as also can my host. If, therefore, you find it as I tell you, I beseech you torture me not neither put me to death at the instance of these wicked, men.' Whilst things were at this pass, Marchese and Stecchi, hearing that the judge of the Provostry was proceeding rigorously against Martellino and had already given him the strappado, were sore affeared and said in themselves, 'We have gone the wrong way to work; we have brought him forth of the frying-pan and cast him into the fire.' Wherefore they went with all diligence in quest of their host and having found him, related to him how the case stood. He laughed and carried them to one Sandro Agolanti, who abode in Treviso and had great interest with the Prince, and telling him everything in order, joined with them in beseeching him to occupy himself with Martellino's affairs. Sandro, after many a laugh, repaired to the Prince and prevailed upon him to send for Martellino.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  “As I observed Ron going through these changes—and the things he was saying were really freaking me out—all I could do was pray. I asked God, ‘Look, you know I will do whatever you want me to do. Should I stay with my brother and carry this thing out? Or should I separate from him and have nothing more to do with this?’ But the answer I got was to stay with Ron.” A few times during their trip, Ron and Dan decided to separate for a week or two. At one point Ron hopped a freight train east, while Dan took the Impala and kept to a different itinerary. Dan arrived at their rendezvous site in Wichita, Kansas, in mid-June, several days before Ron. While he waited for his brother to show up, he got a job as a day laborer through the local employment office, tearing down an old bank. During his brief tenure on this project, Dan met a twenty-four-year-old named Ricky Knapp who was wielding a shovel on the same demolition crew. According to Dan, he and Knapp “became good friends. He had just gotten out of jail, and we had some good conversations. And I really liked him.” After his release, Knapp had found himself without a roof over his head, so Dan invited Knapp to stay with him in the back of the Impala, and Knapp accepted. When Ron arrived in Wichita soon thereafter, Knapp decided to join the brothers for the remainder of their road trip. Knapp had an associate who was a small-time marijuana farmer. One afternoon before they left Wichita, Knapp took Dan to a field outside of town where this farmer had thrown away the “shake” from his most recent harvest— the leaves and stems discarded after the resinous buds had been trimmed and packaged for sale. Knapp and Dan filled a grocery bag with this poor-grade weed and stashed it in the Impala. It was foul stuff, Dan recalls, “but you could get a low-level buzz after smoking four or five big joints.” This wasn’t the first time Dan had smoked marijuana; he had actually been introduced to it fifteen years earlier. Ironically, it was the “Word of Wisdom”— Section 89 of The Doctrine and Covenants, famously prohibiting Mormons from using tobacco and “strong drink”—that had first aroused Dan’s curiosity about pot. Specifically, his interest was piqued by verse 10 of the revelation, which reads, “Verily I say unto you, all wholesome herbs God hath ordained for the constitution, nature, and use of man.”

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Two bullets ripped through the door panel; the second one smashed into Hyrum’s neck, severing his spinal cord, and he dropped to the floor, dead, where four more balls immediately struck his body. Joseph responded by reaching around the doorjamb and blindly firing all six rounds of his revolver, wounding at least one of the Warsaw Dragoons. The attackers had succeeded in forcing the door open, however, and a lethal rain of bullets now sprayed into the room. Taylor, in desperation, attempted to jump out of an open window but was shot first in the left thigh and then in the chest; although the latter bullet struck a watch in his vest pocket and therefore wasn’t lethal, the impact knocked the wind out of him and sent him sprawling onto the floor. Frantically trying to escape the flying bullets, he crawled under a bed, where another ball tore into his forearm and yet another hit his pelvis, “cutting away a piece of flesh from his left hip as large as a man’s hand.” Seeing no alternative, Joseph also tried to spring from the window, but as he crouched above the sill in silhouette, two shots from inside the room pierced his back and a third bullet, fired from a musket on the ground outside, exploded into his chest. Uttering a plaintive “Oh Lord, my God!” he pitched forward out of the window. The prophet dropped twenty feet, slammed into the earth with a dull thud, and lay motionless, twisted on his left side. A second lieutenant in the Carthage Greys who witnessed Joseph’s fall reported that as soon as he hit the ground, he was “shot several times and a bayonet run through him.” After a few moments, another militiaman cautiously approached the body, prodded it, and announced to the crowd that Joe Smith was dead. Willard Richards, meanwhile, emerged tentatively from behind the door, unharmed except for slight wounds where a ball had grazed his throat and earlobe. When the Dragoons had initially forced their way into the room, Richards was standing on the hinge side of the doorway, and as the door flew open he was inadvertently squeezed between it and the wall. He remained there, standing unnoticed behind the door, until the shooting stopped. After determining that all the militiamen had departed, he left his hiding place and walked to the window. On the ground below he saw “a hundred men near [Joseph’s] body, and more coming round the corner of the jail.” Then Richards noticed John Taylor lying on the floor, awash in his own blood but still breathing. Taylor’s watch, struck by the bullet that would otherwise

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The women, hearing this, began to say, 'Who is there?' But Ruggieri, knowing not the voice, answered not; whereupon they proceeded to call the two young men, who, for that they had overwatched themselves, slept fast and heard nothing of all this. Thereupon the women, waxing more fearful, arose and betaking themselves to the windows, fell a-crying, 'Thieves! Thieves!' At this sundry of the neighbours ran up and made their way, some by the roof and some by one part and some by another, into the house; and the young men also, awaking for the noise, arose and seized Ruggieri, who finding himself there, was in a manner beside himself for wonderment and saw no way of escape. Then they gave him into the hands of the officers of the governor of the city, who had now run thither at the noise and carried him before their chief. The latter, for that he was held of all a very sorry fellow, straightway put him to the question and he confessed to having entered the usurers' house to steal; whereupon the governor thought to let string him up by the neck without delay. The news was all over Salerno by the morning that Ruggieri had been taken in the act of robbing the money-lenders' house, which the lady and her maid hearing, they were filled with such strange and exceeding wonderment that they were like to persuade themselves that they had not done, but had only dreamed of doing, that which they had done overnight; whilst the lady, to boot, was so concerned at the news of the danger wherein Ruggieri was that she was like to go mad. Soon after half tierce[258] the physician, having returned from Malfi and wishing to medicine his patient, called for his prepared water and finding the flagon empty, made a great outcry, saying that nothing could abide as it was in his house. The lady, who was troubled with another great chagrin, answered angrily, saying 'What wouldst thou say, doctor, of grave matter, whenas thou makest such an outcry anent a flagonlet of water overset? Is there no more water to be found in the world?' 'Wife,' rejoined the physician, 'thou thinkest this was common water; it was not so; nay, it was a water prepared to cause sleep'; and told her for what occasion he had made it. When she heard this, she understood forthright that Ruggieri had drunken the opiate and had therefore appeared to them dead and said to her husband, 'Doctor, we knew it not; wherefore do you make yourself some more'; and the physician, accordingly, seeing he might not do otherwise, let make thereof anew. [Footnote 258: _i.e._ about half-past seven a.m.]

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Immediately thereafter, on December 29, Ron hung himself from a towel rack when Dan was taken away from his cell for questioning; Ron would certainly have died if Dan had returned to find him even a few minutes later. By the time paramedics got to Ron he wasn’t breathing and had no pulse. “His recovery in the hospital was rather miraculous, apparently, which caused a lot of talk,” Dan says. “I also wondered about it. . . . Now, these many years later, I believe I understand at least part of why things have happened the way they have.” During Ron’s 1996 retrial, the state convinced a twelve-person jury that Ron wasn’t psychotic—that he was fully aware of what he was doing when he participated in the murders of Brenda and Erica Lafferty and was thus mentally competent to stand trial. “Is Ron crazy?” asks Utah Assistant Attorney General Michael Wims, six years after that conviction. “Yeah, sure, he’s crazy. Crazy like a fox.” Many Utahans share Wims’s view that Ron’s outbursts in court and his weird religious pronouncements were less than sincere. People think he was merely acting crazy to avoid a death sentence. And they likewise speculate that Ron’s claims to have received revelations from God were a cynical attempt to manipulate and deceive. But almost nobody doubts the sincerity of his brother’s religious faith. Most folks in Utah regard Dan Lafferty’s theology as both preposterous and horrifying, but they concede that he seems to be a true believer. As it happens, what Dan believes today is not exactly what he believed when he killed Brenda and Erica. “After I arrived in the monastery—after I arrived here in prison—my beliefs went through this major evolution,” he says. No longer does he subscribe to the tenets of Mormon Fundamentalism. “I changed Gods,” he says. “I’d forsaken the LDS Church to go into fundamentalism, and now I’ve forsaken fundamentalism.” These days his theology is a disturbing potpourri assembled from the Old Testament, the New Testament, The Book of Mormon, fundamentalist scripture, and the hyperkinetic machinations of Dan’s own mind. “When you put your whole heart into a search for the truth,” Dan says, “in due

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  They made me stay overnight at the hospital in case I had a concussion. I was awakened by the public-safety officer who had brought me in. She had remembered my keys. “You still here?” she said loudly, dropped them on the bed, and left. I was doped up and couldn’t string words together quick enough to ask her for help. Besides, the stitches and the swelling in my mouth would have made me unintelligible. I finally did it myself. Luckily, they were English cuffs with a very large, screw-in-key which I could grip between my knees. I would turn the cuffs a notch, get a new grip on the key, and turn again. It took a long time. Once liberated from their grip, I realized it was rather late, and no one had come to check on me or feed me. I got out of bed, dressed, and ransacked the room. The woman on the other side of the curtain was unconscious. She had a whole rack full of medicine. I took it all. Nobody tried to stop me from leaving, even though I staggered down the corridors like a drunk, banging into walls. I even tripped over a mop bucket and overturned it, flooding the floor with grimy water. When I got home, I sold some of the pills to buy me time off the street so I could heal. I kept a few for a little relief from the pain. A couple of days later, I thought to check my secret pocket. The money from my outcall was still there. It shook me to the bone. They hadn’t even wanted to rob me. The rape and the beating were motivated by sheer hatred, not greed. The streets are nearly empty. Most people are at home, eating dinner with their collectives or their biofamilies. This is a nice part of town. Everybody goes to work while the sun is shining and stays home at night. You’d think they wouldn’t be able to resist getting out of doors at some point during the day, but life is apparently too scary outside of four walls. The few people I see are wearing long, loose robes of soft colors, and straw sandals. A group of teenage girls passes, going the other way on the opposite side of the street. “It’s a man!” they shout. “Show us your dick, boy!” I force myself to stand up straight and walk past them. They don’t throw rocks or turn around and follow me, so I tell myself, ignore it, you’re safe. But my mouth tastes like metal.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "Eh, but tha'rt nice, tha'rt nice!" he said, suddenly rubbing his face with a snuggling movement against her warm belly. And she put her arms round him under his shirt, but she was afraid, afraid of his thin, smooth, naked body, that seemed so powerful, afraid of the violent muscles. She shrank, afraid. And when he said, with a sort of little sigh: "Eh, tha'rt nice!" something in her quivered, and something in her spirit stiffened in resistance: stiffened from the terribly physical intimacy, and from the peculiar haste of his possession. And this time the sharp ecstacy of her own passion did not overcome her; she lay with her hands inert on his striving body, and do what she might, her spirit seemed to look on from the top of her head, and the butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed farcical. Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor insignificant, moist little penis. This was the divine love! After all, the moderns were right when they felt contempt for the performance; for it was a performance. It was quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humour, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance. Even a Maupassant found it a humiliating anticlimax. Men despised the intercourse act, and yet did it. Cold and derisive her queer female mind stood apart, and though she lay perfectly still, her impulse was to heave her loins, and throw the man out, escape his ugly grip, and the butting overriding of his absurd haunches. His body was a foolish, impudent, imperfect thing, a little disgusting in its unfinished clumsiness. For surely a complete evolution would eliminate this performance, this "function." And yet when he had finished, soon over, and lay very very still, receding into silence, and a strange, motionless distance, far, farther than the horizon of her awareness, her heart began to weep. She could feel him ebbing away, ebbing away, leaving her there like a stone on a shore. He was withdrawing, his spirit was leaving her. He knew. And in real grief, tormented by her own double consciousness and reaction, she began to weep. He took no notice, or did not even know. The storm of weeping swelled and shook her, and shook him. "Ay!" he said, "It was no good that time. You wasn't there." So he knew! Her sobs became violent. "But what's amiss?" he said. "It's once in a while that way." "I ... I can't love you," she sobbed, suddenly feeling her heart breaking. "Canna ter? Well, dunna fret! There's no law says as tha's got to. Ta'e it for what it is."

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  Then one afternoon came Leslie Winter, Squire Winter, as everybody called him: lean, immaculate, and seventy: and every inch a gentleman, as Mrs. Bolton said to Mrs. Betts. Every millimetre indeed! And with his old-fashioned, rather haw-haw! manner of speaking, he seemed more out-of-date than bag wigs. Time, in her flight, drops these fine old feathers. They discussed the collieries. Clifford's idea was, that his coal, even the poor sort, could be made into hard concentrated fuel that would burn at great heat if fed with certain damp, acidulated air at a fairly strong pressure. It had long been observed that in a particularly strong, wet wind the pit-bank burned very vivid, gave off hardly any fumes, and left a fine powder of ash, instead of the slow pink gravel. "But where will you find the proper engines for burning your fuel?" asked Winter. "I'll make them myself. And I'll use my fuel myself. And I'll sell electric power. I'm certain I could do it." "If you can do it, then splendid, splendid, my dear boy. Haw! Splendid! If I can be of any help, I shall be delighted. I'm afraid I am a little out of date, and my collieries are like me. But who knows, when I'm gone, there may be men like you. Splendid! It will employ all the men again, and you won't have to sell your coal, or fail to sell it. A splendid idea, and I hope it will be a success. If I had sons of my own, no doubt they would have up-to-date ideas for Shipley: no doubt! By the way, dear boy, is there any foundation to the rumour that we may entertain hopes of an heir to Wragby?" "Is there a rumour?" asked Clifford. "Well, my dear boy, Marshall from Fillingwood asked _me_, that's all I can say about a rumour. Of course I wouldn't repeat it for the world, if there were no foundation." "Well, Sir," said Clifford uneasily, but with strange bright eyes. "There is a hope. There is a hope." Winter came across the room and wrung Clifford's hand. "My dear boy, my dear lad, can you believe what it means to me, to hear that! And to hear you are working in the hopes of a son: and that you may again employ every man at Tevershall. Ah my boy! to keep up the level of the race, and to have work waiting for any man who cares to work!--" The old man was really moved. Next day Connie was arranging tall yellow tulips in a glass vase. "Connie," said Clifford, "did you know there was a rumour that you are going to supply Wragby with a son and heir?" Connie felt dim with terror, yet she stood quite still, touching the flowers. "No!" she said. "Is it a joke? Or malice?" He paused before he answered: "Neither, I hope. I hope it may be a prophecy." Connie went on with her flowers.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  The church was away to the left, among black trees. The car slid on downhill, past the Miners' Arms. It had already passed the Wellington, the Nelson, the Three Tunns and the Sun, now it passed the Miners' Arms, then the Mechanics' Hall, then the new and almost gaudy Miners' Welfare and so, past a few new "villas," out into the blackened road between dark hedges and dark green fields, towards Stacks Gate. Tevershall! That was Tevershall! Merrie England! Shakespeare's England! No, but the England of today, as Connie had realised since she had come to live in it. It was producing a new race of mankind, over-conscious in the money and social and political side, on the spontaneous, intuitive side dead, but dead. Half-corpses, all of them: but with a terrible insistent consciousness in the other half. There was something uncanny and underground about it all. It was an underworld. And quite incalculable. How shall we understand the reactions in half-corpses? When Connie saw the great lorries full of steelworkers from Sheffield, weird, distorted, smallish beings like men, off for an excursion to Matlock, her bowels fainted and she thought: Ah God, what has man done to man? What have the leaders of men been doing to their fellow men? They have reduced them to less than humanness; and now there can be no fellowship any more! It is just a nightmare. She felt again in a wave of terror the grey, gritty hopelessness of it all. With such creatures for the industrial masses, and the upper classes as she knew them, there was no hope, no hope any more. Yet she was wanting a baby, and an heir to Wragby! An heir to Wragby! She shuddered with dread. Yet Mellors had come out of all this!--Yes, but he was as apart from it all as she was. Even in him there was no fellowship left. It was dead. The fellowship was dead. There was only apartness and hopelessness, as far as all this was concerned. And this was England, the vast bulk of England: as Connie knew, since she had motored from the centre of it. The car was rising towards Stacks Gate. The rain was holding off, and in the air came a queer pellucid gleam of May. The country rolled away in long undulations, south towards the Peak, east towards Mansfield and Nottingham. Connie was travelling South.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "They don't!" he replied. "And don't fall into errors: in your sense of the word, they are _not_ men. They are animals you don't understand, and never could. Don't thrust your illusions on other people. The masses were always the same, and will always be the same. Nero's slaves were extremely little different from our colliers or the Ford motorcar workmen. I mean Nero's mine slaves and his field slaves. It is the masses: they are the unchangeable. An individual may emerge from the masses. But the emergence doesn't alter the mass. The masses are unalterable. It is one of the most momentous facts of social science. _Panem et circenses!_ Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus. What is wrong today, is that we've made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and poisoned our masses with a little education." When Clifford became really roused in his feelings about the common people, Connie was frightened. There was something devastatingly true in what he said. But it was a truth that killed. Seeing her pale and silent, Clifford started the chair again, and no more was said till he halted again at the wood gate, which she opened. "And what we need to take up now," he said, "is whips, not swords. The masses have been ruled since time began, and till time ends, ruled they will have to be. It is sheer hypocrisy and farce to say they can rule themselves." "But can you rule them?" she asked. "I? Oh yes! Neither my mind nor my will is crippled, and I don't rule with my legs. I can do my share of ruling: absolutely, my share; and give me a son, and he will be able to rule his portion after me." "But he wouldn't be your own son, of your own ruling class; or perhaps not," she stammered. "I don't care who his father may be, so long as he is a healthy man not below normal intelligence. Give me the child of any healthy, normally intelligent man, and I will make a perfectly competent Chatterley of him. It is not who begets us, that matters, but where fate places us. Place any child among the ruling classes, and he will grow up, to his own extent, a ruler. Put kings' and dukes' children among the masses, and they'll be little plebians, mass products. It is the overwhelming pressure of environment." "Then the common people aren't a race, and the aristocrats aren't blood," she said.

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  Perhaps by now this sort of sensitivity to disorder had come to absorb the largest part of the feelings Sonoko and I shared in common. I too was still far from the age when one is willing to accept things the way they are. And yet it seemed as though I had suddenly been confronted with clear proof that my nameless fear had infected Sonoko unawares and, moreover, that the sole possession we shared in common was the sign of fear. Sonoko again gave voice to this fear. I tried not to listen. But my mouth made flippant replies. "If we go on like this," she said, "what do you think will happen? Won't we be driven into some corner we can't escape from?" "I think that I respect you and that there's nothing to be ashamed of before anybody. Why is it wrong for two friends to meet?" "That's the way it's been up to now. It's been just like you say. I think you've acted very honorably. But I don't know about the future. Even though we don't do the slightest thing to be ashamed of, I still somehow have terrible dreams. Then I feel as though God is punishing me for future sins." The solid sound of this word future made me shudder. "If we keep on like this," she continued, "I'm afraid that one day something will happen that will hurt us both. And after we're hurt won't it be too late? Because isn't what we're doing the same as playing with fire?”“What kind of thing do you mean when you say playing with fire?" "Oh, all sorts of things." "But you can't regard what we're doing as playing with fire. It's just like playing with water." She did not smile. During the occasional pauses in our conversation she had been pressing her lips together fiercely. "Lately I've begun to think I'm an awful woman. I can't think of myself as anything but a bad woman with a filthy soul. Even in my dreams I oughtn't think about anyone except my husband. I've made up my mind to be baptized this fall." I guessed that in this idle sort of confession, due partly to an intoxication with the sound of her own words, Sonoko was approaching the feminine paradox of meaning the opposite of what she said and was unconsciously wanting to say what must not be said. As for me, I had the right neither to rejoice at this nor to lament it. In the first place, how could I, who felt not the slightest jealousy of her husband, have exercised these rights either by claiming or refusing them? I was silent. The sight of my own hands, white and frail at the height of summer, filled me with despair. "And right now?" I said at last. "Now?" She lowered her eyes. "Yes, who is it you're thinking about right now?" ". . .

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  She could only see part of the bed. Joe’s hands were twined in Mike’s hair, and he was urging Mike to suck harder. Sweat ran down his thickly furred chest and made his abs glisten. Mike’s hands were busy below his waist, and Joe growled, “If you come in your hand, I’m going to make you eat it off your fingers.” Her jailer examined her through the bars. He prodded her experimentally with the smooth, rounded end of a wooden truncheon. She moved a little, but the tug on her nipples made her wish immediately that she had not. “You are my prisoner,” he said softly. “Cop-meat. And I’m going to fuck you. Guess where.” His gloved hand fondly squeezed her buttocks. “This is something I’ve wanted for a long time. But I really do want you to enjoy it. That makes it better for me, and more embarrassing for you. So I’m going to get you ready.” He showed her the well-greased butt plug. She averted her eyes. She always found the bright punk rubber they made sex toys out of garish, even offensive. It made them seem silly. Well, she wouldn’t have to look at it, because he was pushing it into her. True to his word, it didn’t hurt—just discomfited. Once she felt her anus close around the small neck of the plug, he moved her rear end over a little, so that a cold steel bar pressed into the cleft of her buttocks. “If you wiggle up against that,” he said, “you should get yourself warmed up real nice.” He regarded her in silence for a few seconds, then said, “What’s the matter? I’ve got two more, size large and extra-large, if you need any more encouragement.” It’s odd, she reflected, how you can get into a scene and lose some of your inhibitions and go crazy, and while it’s happening, you think you’ll do anything, but of course you won’t. There’s always a hitch, always another barrier you don’t want to cross, another step that somebody has to push you down. I hate his guts, and I will not squirm around on this horrid thing while he stands there staring at me and jerking off. Fuck him. “You stubborn, stupid, ungrateful, ill-trained bitch,” he cursed. “I don’t know why I bother. But if you think you’re going to start holding out on me at this stage of the game, shit-head, you better think again.” A puff of air cooled her backside, and she realized she was dripping with sweat and that both of her shining, wet ass cheeks protruded slightly outside the frame of the cell. Then the source of the cool breeze—the doubled-up belt—landed on her butt, and there was no thinking, only pain. Not only was she crying out with each solid, flat impact of the belt, she was moving her ass provocatively, helplessly.

• From Enchanted: Erotic Bedtime Stories for Women (Erotic Fiction) (2006)

  The Beast opened the door to my bedchamber but did not step over the threshold. Through the dim light of the hallway, I could clearly see his physical outline, which would have been terrifying if not for his gentlemanly demeanor. I waited for him to speak. “I only wished to inquire if all was satisfactory, My Lady,” he said, remaining just outside the doorway. “Satisfactory?” I echoed, suddenly amused. “Good heavens, no! I would never in my wildest imaginings have dared to describe these accommodations as ‘satisfactory.’” I smiled happily at my little joke, as I flung the extravagant bedclothes aside, and reached toward the nightstand to light the lantern. The Beast remained silent and stared at me as if stunned. Upon seeing his expression, I realized my flippant reply must have insulted him and immediately tried to put matters right. “Oh, Beast! What I meant to say…well, of course every thing is quite satisfactory. Why, it is more than satisfactory! That is what I meant of course.” But something was terribly wrong. It was as if the Beast had not even heard me. Without thinking I leaped from my bed to approach him as I made another effort to explain. But I only managed a few steps before freezing in horror. Had I heard a growl? My mind reeled between shock and disbelief. It was impossible! And yet, his eyes had a most unnatural glow. He stood perfectly still, like an animal that is poised for an attack. “Beast?” I whispered, as much a plea as a question. And then all of a sudden he was gone. I stood there many moments afterward, trying to collect my shattered wits. I glanced down at my trembling hands, and it was then that I noticed my dressing gown. It was completely sheer, from head to foot! The lantern I had lit only served to emphasize my nakedness beneath the cloth! I did not see the Beast again until suppertime the following day. There, he was as gentle and refined as I had remembered him being at the previous meal we had shared. I blushed and shivered whenever his eyes met mine, but he never gave any indication that he noticed, or that anything had transpired that warranted such an attitude. His demeanor eventually lulled me out of my suspicions and fears, and I was once again at ease, and even enjoying his conversation and friendly manner. Afterward, he stood up and asked me the same question he had asked on the previous night, and the one he would ask every night thereafter. “Beauty, will you marry me?” To which I always replied, “No, Beast.” Our friendship blossomed. And yet, every noise I heard from within my bedchamber at night would leave me anxious and sleepless, waiting breathlessly for that light tap on my chamber door. But the Beast never ventured near my bedchamber again.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  The idea of a new concentrated fuel that burnt with a hard slowness at a fierce heat was what first attracted Clifford. There must be some sort of external stimulus to the burning of such fuel, not merely air supply. He began to experiment, and got a clever young fellow who had proved brilliant in chemistry, to help him. And he felt triumphant. He had at last got out of himself. He had fulfilled his life-long secret yearning to get out of himself. Art had not done it for him. Art had only made it worse. But now, now he had done it. He was not aware how much Mrs. Bolton was behind him. He did not know how much he depended on her. But for all that, it was evident that when he was with her his voice dropped to an easy rhythm of intimacy, almost a trifle vulgar. With Connie, he was a little stiff. He felt he owed her everything, everything, and he showed her the utmost respect and consideration, so long as she gave him mere outward respect. But it was obvious he had a secret dread of her. The new Achilles in him had a heel, and in this heel the woman, the woman like Connie his wife, could lame him fatally. He went in a certain half-subservient dread of her, and was extremely nice to her. But his voice was a little tense when he spoke to her, and he began to be silent whenever she was present. Only when he was alone with Mrs. Bolton did he really feel a lord and a master, and his voice ran on with her almost as easily and garrulously as her own could run. And he let her shave him and sponge all his body as if he were a child, really as if he were a child. CHAPTER X Connie was a good deal alone now, fewer people came to Wragby. Clifford no longer wanted them. He had turned against even the cronies. He was queer. He preferred the radio, which he had installed at some expense, with a good deal of success at last. He could sometimes get Madrid or Frankfurt, even there in the uneasy Midlands. And he would sit alone for hours listening to the loud-speaker bellowing forth. It amazed and stunned Connie. But there he would sit, with a blank entranced expression on his face, like a person losing his mind, and listen, or seem to listen, to the unspeakable thing. Was he really listening? Or was it a sort of soporific he took, whilst something else worked on underneath in him? Connie did not know. She fled up to her room, or out of doors to the wood. A kind of terror filled her sometimes, a terror of the incipient insanity of the whole civilised species.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  She found a place for the candle on a table by the bed. Then she drew closer, stood between my legs. “How do you like them?” she asked, gesturing at the mirrors. “Does it excite you? Shame you? It’s meant to do both. I want you to be able to see everything that’s done to you, so you can’t close your eyes and say it never happened.” She drew her fingernail down the inside of my thigh. “Such delicate skin. Even the gentlest lover would leave her mark on you. And now I have my chance.” She moved again outside the range of my vision, back toward the wardrobe. “Did you see anything over here to tickle your fancy?” She returned with a handful of whips, and made a mock presentation of them to me. “A masochist’s bouquet,” she jeered, bowing. “How about this one?” She held up the most grisly one of the lot. It had several tails that ended in sharp bits of metal. My courage failed me. “Actually, it’s only good for quickies,” she said, “and making hamburger.” I slumped with relief, then saw she was only teasing me. The monologue continued. “Now, this one was given to me as a name day present by a little old nun who only used it on Sundays—and then only on herself.” That one was made of hemp cords, each one ending in three thick knots. She tossed it away, too. “Actually,” she said, discarding the rest, “I want to use something a little more personal.” She stuck her cigarette in her mouth and talked around it as she shrugged out of the kimono. “Something you can remember me by.” Under the kimono, she was wearing blue jeans with a broad leather belt and no T-shirt. I stared at her small, brown breasts, seeing something I couldn’t believe. She smiled at me and traced the criss-cross scars with a forefinger, then turned so I could follow them onto her back. “I wanted you to see these,” she said, “so you’ll know that whatever I do to you has been done to me. I know what you feel, laying there bound, awaiting punishment at my hand. I know.” She unbuckled her belt and drew it slowly through the loops of her Levis. I tried to relax, to stop the tension building in my body, but instead my muscles began to quiver and jerk. She doubled the belt in her hand and drew her arm back, held it poised above me. I cringed, trying to flatten myself against the bed, as it came singing down—to hit the mattress. “Ahh—surprised you.” She trailed it down my body, brought it up again, struck suddenly—and the belt smacked the bed between my legs. I was breathing hard. “Scared?” she asked sympathetically. And did it again.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Alex’s crooked smile promised one hell of a payback for all this teasing. “Kay is going to stay in your ass while EZ puts her hand in your cunt,” Alex said. “Then I bet they make you come. Come while you get double-fucked, both holes at once. And I’m gonna watch it all.” “Oh God! Daddy, it’ll tear me apart. I’m just a little girl.” “God has nothing to do with this. Look at me.” Alex slapped her several times. “If you are mine, I’ll give you to whoever I please. If you don’t belong to me, why are we here? Don’t give me any of that shit about getting split open, I know how you make your living, fucking your own little pussy while all those men watch from behind the windows and drop quarters in the slot and jerk themselves off. They ought to come all over your face. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Almost as much as you like the idea of being filled so full you can’t help but pop. Gotta make sure my little girl gets enough fucking so she can sit still for five minutes, that’s the only problem I got.” Kay had adopted a more insistent, driving rhythm. Roxanne moaned, shouted, rocked in the sling. Then Kay froze, and she felt EZ slithering into her cunt, her fingers splayed out along Kay’s forearm. When she finally slid home, they were practically holding hands inside her. Only a thin membrane kept them apart. She could feel them flexing their muscles, turning; even an eighth of an inch of motion made her eyes roll back and her nerve endings sing. There was no way to come on this rollercoaster of sensation. It was an experience more like an orgasm than any other part of sex, but it just kept on happening, peaking, cresting, climbing higher and peaking again. When Roxanne felt a real climax coming, she sneaked a glance at it, and got scared by how big it was. Alex magically knew all about it, grabbed her head and slammed it into the sling. “Bullshit,” she said. “Aren’t you the cunt who was going to wear it all out? Now you’re holding out on us, you little coward. I won’t stand for this shit.” Alex stuffed one of her gloves into Roxanne’s mouth. “Bite down on that if you get scared. Now come!”