Diary of a Drug Fiend Page 4

  The state of the girl was extraordinary; it was as if she possessed two personalities in their fullest possibilities – the divine and the human. She was intensely conscious of all that was going on around her, absolute mistress of herself and of her environment; yet at the same time she was lost in some unearthly form of rapture of a kind which, while essentially unintelligible to me, reminded me of certain strange and fragmentary experiences that I had had while flying.

  I suppose every one has read The Psychology of Flying by L. de Giberne Sieveking. All I need do is to remind you of what he says:

  “All types of men who fly are conscious of this very obscure, subtle difference that it has wrought in them. Very few know exactly what it is. Hardly any of them can express what they feel. And none of them would admit it if they could. . . . One realises without any formation into words how that one is oneself, and that each one is entirely separate and can never enter into the recesses of another, which are his foundation of individual life.”

  One feels oneself out of all relation with things, even the most essential. And yet one is aware at the same time that everything of which one has ever been aware is a picture invented by one’s own mind. The Universe is the looking-glass of the soul.

  In that state one understands all sorts of nonsense.

  “O Thou foursquare Crown of Nothing, that circlest the destruction of Worlds! I adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, I A O!”

  I flushed with rage, understanding enough to know what Lou must be feeling as she rolled forth those passionate, senseless words from her volcanic mouth. Gretel’s suggestion trickled into my brain.

  “This beastly alcohol brutalises men. Why is Lou so superb? She has breathed the pure snow of Heaven into her nostrils.”

  “O Thou snow-white chalice of Love, that art filled up with the red lusts of man! I adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, I A O!”

  I tingled and shivered as she sang; and then something, I hardly know what, made me turn and look into the face of Gretel Webster. She was sitting at my right; her left hand was beneath the table, and she was looking at it. I followed her glance.

  In the little quadrilateral of the veins whose lower apex is between the first and middle fingers, was a tiny heap of sparkling dust. Nothing I had ever seen before had so attracted me. The sheer bright infinite beauty of the stuff! I had seen it before of course, often enough, at the hospital; but this was quite a different thing. It was set off by its environment as a diamond is by its setting. It seemed alive. It sparkled intensely. It was like nothing else in Nature, unless it be those feathery crystals, wind-blown, that glisten on the lips of crevasses.

  What followed sticks in my memory as if it were a conjurer’s trick. I don’t know by what gesture she constrained me. But her hand slowly rose not quite to the level of the table; and my face, hot, flushed, angry and eager, had bent down towards it. It seemed pure instinct, though I have little doubt now that it was the result of an unspoken suggestion. I drew the little heap of powder through my nostrils with one long breath. I felt even then like a choking man in a coal mine released at the last moment, filling his lungs for the first time with oxygen.

  I don’t know whether this is a common experience. I suspect that my medical training and reading, and hearing people talk, and the effect of all those ghoulish articles in the newspapers had something to do with it.

  On the other hand, we must make a good deal of allowance, I think, for such an expert as Gretel Webster. No doubt she was worth her wage to the Boche. No doubt she had picked me out for part of “Die Rache”. I had downed some pretty famous flyers.

  But none of these thoughts occurred to me at the time. I do not think I have explained with sufficient emphasis the mental state to which I had been reduced by the appearance of Lou. She had become so far beyond my dreams – the unattainable.

  Leaving out of account the effect of the alcohol, this had left me with an intolerable depression. There was something brutish, something of the baffled rat, in my consciousness.

  “O Thou vampire Queen of the Flesh, wound as a snake around the throats of men! I adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, I A O!”

  Was she thinking of Gretel or of herself? Her beauty had choked me, strangled me, torn my throat out. I had become insane with dull, harsh lust. I hated her. But as I raised my head; as the sudden, the instantaneous madness of cocaine swept from my nostrils to my brain – that’s a line of poetry, but I can’t help it – get on! – the depression lifted from my mind like the sun coming out of the clouds.

  I heard as in a dream the rich, ripe voice of Lou.

  “O Thou fierce whirlpool of passion, that art sucked up by the mouth of the sun! I adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, I A O!”

  The whole thing was different – I understood what she was saying, I was part of it. I recognised, for one swift second, the meaning of my previous depression. It was my sense of inferiority to her. Now I was her man, her mate, her master!

  I rose to catch her by the waist but she whirled away down the floor of the club like an autumn leaf before the storm. I caught the glance of Gretel Webster’s eyes. I saw them glitter with triumphant malice; and for a moment she and Lou and cocaine and myself were all inextricably interlocked in a tangled confusion of ruinous thought.

  But my physical body was lifting me. It was the same old, wild exhilaration that one gets from rising from the ground on one’s good days. I found myself in the middle of the floor without knowing how I had got there. I, too, was walking on air. Lou turned, her mouth a scarlet orb, as I have seen the sunset over Belgium, over the crinkled line of shore, over the dim blue mystic curve of sea and sky; with the thought in my mind beating in tune with my excited heart. We didn’t miss the arsenal this time. I was the arsenal too. I had exploded. I was the slayer and the slain. And there sailed Lou across the sky to meet me.

  “O Thou outrider of the Sun, that spurrest the bloody flanks of the wind! I adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, I A O!”

  We came into each other’s arms with the inevitableness of gravitation. We were the only two people in the Universe – she and I. The only force that existed in the Universe was the attraction between us. The force with which we came together set us spinning. We went up and down the floor of the club; but, of course, it wasn’t the floor of the club, there wasn’t the club, there wasn’t anything at all except a delirious feeling that one was everything, and had to get on with everything. One was the Universe eternally whirling. There was no possibility of fatigue; one’s energy was equal to one’s task.

  “O Thou dancer with gilded nails, that unbraidest the star hair of the night! I adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, I A O!”

  Lou’s slim, lithe body lay in my arm. It sounds absurd, but she reminded me of a light overcoat. Her head hung back, the heavy coils of hair came loose. All of a sudden the band stopped. For a second the agony was indescribable. It seemed like annihilation. I was seized with an absolute revulsion against the whole of my surroundings. I whispered like a man in furious haste who must get something vital done before he dies, some words to the effect that I couldn’t stick this beastly place any longer –

  “Let’s get some air.”

  She answered neither yes nor no. I had been wasting words to speak to her at all.

  “O Thou bird-sweet river of Love, that warblest through the pebbly gorge of Life! I adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, I A O!”

  Her voice had sunk to a clear murmur. We found ourselves in the street. The chucker-out hailed us a taxi. I stopped her song at last. My mouth was on her mouth. We were driving in the chariot of the Sun through the circus of the Universe. We didn’t know where we were going, and we didn’t care. We had no sense of time at all. There was a sequence of sensations; but there was no means of regulating them. It was as if one’s mental clock had suddenly gone mad.

  I have no gauge of time, subjectively speaking, but it must have been a long
while before our mouths separated, for as this happened I recognised the fact that we were very far from the club.

  She spoke to me for the first time. Her voice thrilled dark unfathomable deeps of being. I tingled in every fibre. And what she said was this:

  “Your kiss is bitter with cocaine.”

  It is quite impossible to give those who have no experience of these matters any significance of what she said.

  It was a boiling cauldron of wickedness that had suddenly bubbled over. Her voice rang rich with hellish glee. It stimulated me to male intensity. I caught her in my arms more fiercely. The world went black before my eyes. I perceived nothing any more. I can hardly even say that I felt. I was Feeling itself! I was O the possibilities of Feeling fulfilled to the uttermost. Yet, coincident with this, my body went on automatically with its own private affairs.

  She was escaping me. Her face eluded mine.

  “O Thou storm-drunk breath of the winds, that pant in the bosom of the mountains! I adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, I A O!”

  Her breast sobbed out its song with weird intensity. I understood in a flash that this was her way of resistance. She was trying to insist to herself that she was a cosmic force; that she was not a woman at all; that a man meant nothing to her. She fought desperately against me, sliding so serpent-like about the bounds of space. Of course, it was really the taxi – but I didn’t know it then, and I’m not quite sure of it now.

  “I wish to God,” I said to myself in a fury, “I had one more sniff of that Snow. I’d show her!”

  At that moment she threw me off as if I had been a feather. I felt myself all of a sudden no more good. Quite unaccountably I had collapsed, and I found myself, to my amazement, knocking out a little pile of cocaine from a ten-gramme bottle which had been in my trousers’ pocket, on to my hand, and sniffing it up into my nostrils with greedy relish.

  Don’t ask me how it got there. I suppose Gretel Webster must have done it somehow. My memory is an absolute blank. That’s one of the funny things about cocaine. You never know quite what trick it is going to play you.

  I was reminded of the American professor who boasted that he had a first-class memory whose only defect was that it wasn’t reliable.

  I am equally unable to tell you whether the fresh supply of the drug increased my powers, or whether Lou had simply tired of teasing me, but of her own accord she writhed into my arms; her hands and mouth were heavy on my heart. There’s some more poetry – that’s the way it takes one – rhythm seems to come natural – everything is one grand harmony. It is impossible that anything should be out of tune. The voice of Lou seemed to come from an enormous distance, a deep, low, sombre chant –

  “O Thou low moan of fainting maids, that art caught up in the strong sobs of Love! I adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, I A O!”

  That was it – her engine and my engine for the first time working together! All the accidents had disappeared. There was nothing but the unison of two rich racing rhythms.

  You know how it is when you are flying – you see a speck in the air. You can’t tell by your eyes if it is your Brother Boche coming to pot you, or one of our own or one of the allied ’planes. But you can tell them apart, foe from friend, by the different beat of their engines. So one comes to apprehend a particular rhythm as sympathetic – another as hostile.

  So here were Lou and I flying together beyond the bounds of eternity, side by side; her low, persistent throb in perfect second to my great galloping boom.

  Things of this sort take place outside time and space. It is quite wrong to say that what happened in the taxi ever began or ended. What happened was that our attention was distracted from the eternal truth of this essential marriage of our souls by the chauffeur, who had stopped the taxi and opened the door.

  “Here we are, sir,” he said, with a grin.

  Sir Peter Pendragon and Lou Laleham automatically reappeared. Before all things, decorum!

  The shock bit the incident deeply into my mind. I remember with the utmost distinctness paying the man off, and then being lost in absolute blank wonder as to how it happened that we were where we were. Who had given the address to the man, and where were we?

  I can only suppose that, consciously or subconsciously, Lou had done it, for she showed no embarrassment in pressing the electric bell. The door opened immediately. I was snowed under by an avalanche of crimson light that poured from a vast studio.

  Lou’s voice soared high and clear:

  “O Thou scarlet dragon of flame, enmeshed in the web of a spider! I adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, I A O!”

  A revulsion of feeling rushed over me like a storm for in the doorway, with Lou’s arms round his neck, was the tall, black, sinister figure of King Lamus.

  “I knew you wouldn’t mind our dropping in, although it is so late,” she was saying.

  It would have been perfectly simple for him to acquiesce with a few conventional words. Instead, he was pontifical.

  “There are four gates to one palace; the floor of that palace is of silver and gold; lapis-lazuli and jasper are there; and all rare scents; jasmine and rose, and the emblems of death. Let him enter in turn or at once the four gates; let him stand on the floor of the palace.”

  I was unfathomably angry. Why must the man always act like a cad or a clown? But there was nothing to do but to accept the situation and walk in politely.

  He shook hands with me formally, yet with greater intensity than is customary between well-bred strangers in England. And as he did so, he looked me straight in the face. His deadly inscrutable eyes burned their way clean through to the back of my brain and beyond. Yet his words were entirely out of keeping with his actions.

  “What does the poet say?” he said loftily. “Rather a joke to fill up on coke – or words to that effect, Sir Peter.”

  How in the devil’s name did he know what I had been taking?

  “Men who know things have no right to go about the world,” something said irritably inside myself. But something else obscurely answered it.

  “That accounts for what the world has always done – made martyrs of its pioneers.”

  I felt a little ashamed, to tell the truth; but Lamus put me at my ease. He waved his hand towards a huge arm chair covered with Persian tapestries. He gave me a cigarette and lighted it for me. He poured out a drink of Benedictine into a huge curved glass, and put it on a little table by my side. I disliked his easy hospitality as much as anything else. I had an uncomfortable feeling that I was a puppet in his hands.

  There was only one other person in the room. On a settee covered with leopard skins lay one of the strangest women I had ever seen. She wore a white evening dress with pale yellow roses, and the same flowers were in her hair. She was a half-blood negress from North Africa.

  “Miss Fatma Hallaj,” said Lamus.

  I rose and bowed. But the girl took no notice. She seemed in utter oblivion of sublunary matters. Her skin was of that deep, rich night-sky blue which only very vulgar eyes imagine to be black. The face was gross and sensual, but the brows wide and commanding.

  There is no type of intellect so essentially aristocratic as the Egyptian when it happens to be of the rare right strain.

  “Don’t be offended,” said Lamus, in a soft voice, “she includes us all in her sublime disdain.”

  Lou was sitting on the arm of the couch; her ivory-white, long crooked fingers groping the dark girl’s hair. Somehow or other I felt nauseated; I was uneasy, embarrassed. For the first time in my life I didn’t know how to behave.

  A thought popped into my mind: it was simply fatigue – I needn’t bother about that.

  As if in answer to my thought, Lou took a small cut-glass bottle with a gold-chased top from her pocket, unscrewed it and shook out some cocaine on the back of her hand. She flashed a provocative glance in my direction.

  The studio su
ddenly filled with the reverberation of her chant:

  “O Thou naked virgin of love, that art caught in a net of wild roses! I adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, I A O!”

  “Quite so,” agreed King Lamus cheerfully. “You’ll excuse me, I know, if I ask whether you have any great experience of the effects of cocaine.”

  Lou glowered at him. I preferred to meet him frankly. I deliberately put a large dose on the back of my hand and sniffed it up. Before I had finished, the effect had occurred. I felt myself any man’s master.

  “Well, as a matter of fact,” I said superciliously, “tonight’s the first time I ever took it, and it strikes me as pretty good stuff.”

  Lamus smiled enigmatically.

  “Ah, yes, what does the old poet say? Milton, is it?”

  “Stab your demoniac smile to my brain, Soak me in cognac, love, and cocaine.”

  “How silly you are,” cried Lou. “Cocaine wasn’t invented in the time of Milton.”

  “Was that Milton’s fault?” retorted King Lamus. The inaptitude, the disconnectedness, of his thought was somehow disconcerting.

  He turned his back on her and looked me straight in the face.

  “It strikes you as pretty good stuff, Sir Peter,” he said, “and so it is. I’ll have a dose myself to show there’s no ill-feeling.”

  He suited the action to the words.

  I had to admit that the man began to intrigue me. What was his game?

  “I hear you’re one of our best flying men, Sir Peter,” he went on.

  “I have flown a bit now and then,” I admitted.

  “Well, an aeroplane’s a pretty good means of travel, but unless you’re an expert, you’re likely to make a pretty sticky finish.”

  “Thank you very much,” I said, nettled at his tone. “As it happens, I’m a medical student.”

  “Oh, that’s all right, then, of course.”

  He agreed with a courtesy which somehow cut deeper into my self-­esteem than if he had openly challenged my competence.

  “In that case,” he continued, “I hope to arouse your professional interest in a case of what I think you will agree is something approaching indiscretion. My little friend here arrived tonight, or rather last night, full up to the neck with morphia. Dissatisfied with results, she swallowed a large dose of Anbalonium Lewinii, reckless of the pharmaceutical incompatability. Presumably to pass away the time, she has drunk an entire bottle of Grand Marnier Cordon Rouge; and now, feeling herself slightly indisposed, for some reason at which it would be presumptuous to guess, she is setting things right by an occasional indulgence in this pretty good stuff of yours.”