Diary of a Drug Fiend Page 6

  Of course, Paris lays herself out especially to deal with people in just that state of mind. We were living at ten times the normal voltage. This was true in more senses than one. I had taken a thousand pounds in cash from London, thinking as I did so how jolly it was to be reckless. We were going to have a good time, and damn the expense!

  I thought of a thousand pounds as enough to paint Paris every colour of the spectrum for a quite indefinitely long period; but at the end of the week the thousand pounds was gone, and so was another thousand pounds for which I had cabled to London; and we had absolutely nothing to show for it except a couple of dresses for Lou, and a few not very expensive pieces of jewellery.

  We felt that we were very economical. We were too happy to need to spend money. For one thing, love never needs more than a pittance, and I had never before known what love could mean.

  What I may call the honeymoon part of the honeymoon seemed to occupy the whole of our waking hours. It left us no time to haunt Montmartre. We hardly troubled to eat, we hardly knew we were eating. We didn’t seem to need sleep. We never got tired.

  The first hint of fatigue sent one’s hand to one’s pocket. One sniff which gave us a sensation of the most exquisitely delicious wickedness, and we were on fourth speed again!

  The only incident worth recording is the receipt of a letter and a box from Gretel Webster. The box contained a padded kimono for Lou, one of those gorgeous Japanese geisha silks, blue like a summer sky with dragons worked all over it in gold, with scarlet eyes and tongues.

  Lou looked more distractingly, deliriously glorious than ever.

  I had never been particularly keen on women. The few love affairs which had come my way had been rather silly and sordid. They had not revealed the possibilities of love; in fact, I had thought it a somewhat overrated pleasure, a brief and brutal blindness with boredom and disgust hard on its heels.

  But with cocaine, things are absolutely different.

  I want to emphasise the fact that cocaine is in reality a local anaesthetic. That is the actual explanation of its action. One cannot feel one’s body. (As every one knows, this is the purpose for which it is used in surgery and dentistry.)

  Now don’t imagine that this means that the physical pleasures of marriage are diminished, but they are utterly etherealised. The animal part of one is intensely stimulated so far as its own action is concerned; but the feeling that this passion is animal is completely transmuted.

  I come of a very refined race, keenly observant and easily nauseated. The little intimate incidents inseparable from love affairs, which in normal circumstances tend to jar the delicacy of one’s sensibilities, do so no longer when one’s furnace is full of coke. Everything soever is transmuted as by “heavenly alchemy” into a spiritual beatitude. One is intensely conscious of the body. But as the Buddhists tell us, the body is in reality an instrument of pain or discomfort. We have all of us a subconscious intuition that this is the case; and this is annihilated by cocaine.

  Let me emphasise once more the absence of any reaction. There is where the infernal subtlety of the drug comes in. If one goes on the bust in the ordinary way on alcohol, one gets what the Americans call “the morning after the night before”. Nature warns us that we have been breaking the rules; and Nature has given us common sense enough to know that although we can borrow a bit, we have to pay back.

  We have drunk alcohol since the beginning of time; and it is in our racial consciousness that although “a hair of the dog” will put one right after a spree, it won’t do to choke oneself with hair.

  But with cocaine, all this caution is utterly abrogated. Nobody would be really much the worse for a night with the drug, provided that he had the sense to spend the next day in a Turkish bath, and build up with food and a double allowance of sleep. But cocaine insists upon one’s living upon one’s capital, and assures one that the fund is inexhaustible.

  As I said, it is a local anaesthetic. It deadens any feeling which might arouse what physiologists call inhibition. One becomes absolutely reckless. One is bounding with health and bubbling with high spirits. It is a blind excitement of so sublime a character that it is impossible to worry about anything. And yet, this excitement is singularly calm and profound. There is nothing of the suggestion of coarseness which we associate with ordinary drunkenness. The very idea of coarseness or commonness is abolished. It is like the vision of Peter in the Acts of the Apostles in which he was told, “There is nothing common or unclean.”

  As Blake said, “Everything that lives is holy.” Every act is a sacrament. Incidents which in the ordinary way would check one or annoy one, become merely material for joyous laughter. It is just as when you drop a tiny lump of sugar into champagne, it bubbles afresh.

  Well, this is a digression. But that is just what cocaine does. The sober continuity of thought is broken up. One goes off at a tangent, a fresh, fierce, fantastic tangent, on the slightest excuse. One’s sense of proportion is gone; and despite all the millions of miles that one cheerily goes out of one’s way, one never loses sight of one’s goal.

  While I have been writing all this, I have never lost sight for a moment of the fact that I am telling you about the box and the letter from Gretel.

  We met a girl in Paris, half a Red Indian, a lovely baby with the fascination of a fiend and a fund of the foulest stories that ever were told. She lived on cocaine. She was a more or less uneducated girl; and the way she put it was this: “I’m in a long, lovely garden, with my arms full of parcels, and I keep on dropping one; and when I stoop to pick it up, I always drop another, and all the time I am sailing along up the garden.”

  So this was Gretel’s letter.

  “My DARLING Lou, – I could not begin to tell you the other day how delighted I was to see you My Lady and with such a splendid man for your husband. I don’t blame you for getting married in such a hurry; but, on the other hand, you mustn’t blame your old friends for not being prophets! So I could not be on hand with the goods. However, I have lost no time. You know how poor I am, but I hope you will value the little present I am sending you, not for its own sake, but as a token of my deep affection for the loveliest and most charming girl I know. A word in your ear, my dear Lou: the inside is sometimes better than the outside. With my very kindest regards and best wishes to dear Sir Peter and yourself, though I can’t expect you to know that I even exist at the present,

  Yours ever devotedly,

  “GRETEL.”

  Lou threw the letter across the table to me. For some reason or no reason, I was irritated. I didn’t want to hear from people like that at all. I didn’t like or trust her.

  “Queer fish,” I said rather snappily.

  It wasn’t my own voice; it was, I fancy, some deep instinct of self-­preservation speaking within me.

  Lou, however, was radiant about it. I wish I could give you an idea of the sparkling quality of everything she said and did. Her eyes glittered, her lips twittered, her cheeks glowed like fresh blown buds in spring. She was the spirit of cocaine incarnate; cocaine made flesh. Her mere existence made the Universe infinitely exciting. Say, if you like, she was possessed of the devil!

  Any good person, so-called, would have been shocked and scared at her appearance. She represented the siren, the vampire, Mclusine, the dangerous, delicious devil that cowards have invented to explain their lack of manliness. Nothing would suit her mood but that we should dine up there in the room, so that she could wear the new kimono and dance for me at dinner.

  We ate grey caviare, spoonful by spoonful. Who cared that it was worth three times its weight in gold? It’s no use calling me extravagant; if you want to blame any one, blame the Kaiser. He started the whole fuss; and when I feel like eating grey caviare, I’m going to eat grey caviare.

  We wolfed it down. It’s silly to think that things matter.

  Lou danced like a delirious demon between the
courses. It pleased her to assume the psychology of the Oriental pleasure-making woman. I was her Pasha-with-three-tails, her Samurai warrior, her gorgeous Maharaja, with a scimitar across my knee, ready to cut her head off at the first excuse.

  She was the Ouled Ndil with tatooed cheeks and chin, with painted antimony eyebrows, and red smeared lips.

  I was the masked Toureg, the brigand from the desert, who had captured her.

  She played a thousand exquisite crazy parts.

  I have very little imagination, my brain runs entirely to analysis; but I revel in playing a part that is devised for me. I don’t know how many times during that one dinner I turned from a civilised husband in Bond Street pyjamas into a raging madman.

  It was only after the waiters had left us with the coffee and liqueurs – which we drank like water without being affected – that Lou suddenly threw off her glittering garment.

  She stood in the middle of the room, and drank a champagne glass half full of liqueur brandy. The entrancing boldness of her gesture started me screaming inwardly. I jumped up like a crouching tiger that suddenly sees a stag.

  Lou was giggling all over with irrepressible excitement. I know “giggling all over” isn’t English; but I can’t express it any other way.

  She checked my rush as if she had been playing full back in an International Rugger match.

  “Get the scissors,” she whispered.

  I understood in a second what she meant. It was perfectly true – we had been playing it a bit on the heavy side with that snow. I think it must have been about five sniffs. If you’re curious, all you have to do is to go back and count it up – to get me to ten thousand feet above the poor old Straits of Dover, God bless them! But it was adding up like the price of the nails in the horse’s shoes that my father used to think funny when I was a kid. You know what I mean – Martingale principle and all that sort of thing. We certainly had been punishing the snow.

  Five sniffs! it wasn’t much in our young lives after a fortnight.

  Gwendolen Otter says:

  “Heart of my heart, in the pale moonlight, Why should we wait till tomorrow night?”

  And that’s really very much the same spirit.

  “Heart of my heart, come out of the rain, let’s have another go of cocaine.”

  I know I don’t count when it comes to poetry, and the distinguished authoress can well afford to smile, if it’s only the society smile, and step quietly over my remains. But I really have got the spirit of the thing.

  “Always go on till you have to stop, Let’s have another sniff, old top!”

  No, that’s undignified.

  “Carry on! Over the top!” – would be better. It’s more dignified and patriotic, and expresses the idea much better. And if you don’t like it, you can inquire elsewhere.

  No, I won’t admit that we were reckless. We had substantial resources at our command. There was nothing whatever of the “long firm” about us.

  You all know perfectly well how difficult it is to keep matches. Perfectly trivial things, matches – always using them, always easy to replace them, no matter at all for surprise if one should find one’s box empty; and I don’t admit for one moment that I showed any lack of proportion in the matter.

  Now don’t bring that moonlight flight to Paris up against me. I admit I was out of gas; but every one knows how one’s occupation with one’s first love affair is liable to cause a temporary derangement of one’s ordinary habits.

  What I liked about it was that evidently Gretel was a jolly good sport, whatever people said about her. And she wasn’t an ordinary kind of good old sport either. I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t admit that she is what you may call a true friend in the most early Victorian sense of the word you can imagine.

  She was not only a true friend, but a wise friend. She had evidently foreseen that we were going to run short of good old snow.

  Now I want all you fellows to take it as read that a man, if he calls himself a man, isn’t the kind of man that wants to stop a honeymoon with a girl in a Japanese kimono of the variety described, to have to put on a lot of beastly clothes and hunt all around Paris for a dope peddler.

  Of course, you’ll say at once that I could have rung for the waiter and have him bring me a few cubic kilometres. But that’s simply because you don’t understand the kind of hotel at which we were unfortunate enough to be staying, We had gone there thinking no harm whatever. It was right up near the Etoile, and appeared to the naked eye an absolutely respectable first-class family hotel for the sons of the nobility and gentry.

  Now don’t run away with the idea that I want to knock the hotel. It was simply because France had been bled white; but the waiter on our floor was a middle-aged family man and probably read Lamartine and Pascal and Taine and all those appalling old bores when he wasn’t doing shot drill with the caviar. But it isn’t the slightest use my trying to conceal from you the fact that he always wore a slightly shocked expression, especially in the way he cut his beard. It was emphatically not the thing whenever he came into the suite.

  I am a bit of a psychologist myself, and I know perfectly well that that man wouldn’t have got us cocaine, not if we’d offered him a Bureau de Tabac for doing it.

  Now, of course, I’m not going to ask you to believe that Gretel Webster knew anything about that waiter – beastly old prig! All she had done was to exhibit wise forethought and intelligent friendship. She had experience, no doubt, bushels of it, barrels of it, hogsheads of it, all those measures that I couldn’t learn at school.

  She had said to herself, in perfectly general terms, without necessarily contemplating any particular train of events as follows:

  “From one cause or another, those nice kids may find themselves shy on snow at a critical moment in their careers, so it’s up to me to see that they get it.”

  While these thoughts were passing through my mind, I had got the manicure scissors, and Lou was snipping the threads of her kimono lining round those places where those fiercely fascinating fingers of hers had felt what we used to call in the hospital a foreign body.

  Yes, there was no mistake. Gretel had got our psychology, we had got her psychology, everything was going as well as green peas go with a duck.

  Don’t imagine we had to spoil the kimono. It was just a tuck in the quilting. Out comes a dear little white silk bag; and we open that, and there’s a heap of snow that I’d much rather see than Mont Blanc.

  Well, you know, when you see it, you’ve got to sniff it. What’s it for? Nobody can answer that. Don’t tell me about “use in operations on the throat”. Lou didn’t need anything done to her throat. She sang like Melba, and she looked like a peach; and she was a Pêche-Melba, just like two and two makes four.

  You bet we sniffed! And then we danced all round the suite for several years – probably as much as eight or nine minutes by the clock – but what’s the use of talking about clocks when Einstein has proved that time is only another dimension of space? What’s the good of astronomers proving that the earth wiggles round 1000 miles an hour, and wiggles on 1000 miles a minute, if you can’t keep going?

  It would be absolutely silly to hang about and get left behind, and very likely find ourselves on the moon, and nobody to talk to but Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and that crowd.

  Now I don’t want you to think that that white silk packet was very big.

  Lou stooped over the table, her long thin tongue shot out of her mouth like an ant-eater in the Dictionary of National Biography or whatever it is, and twiddled it round in that snow till I nearly went out of my mind.

  I laughed like a hyena, to think of what she’d said to me. “Your kiss is bitter with cocaine.” That chap Swinburne was always talking about bitter kisses. What did he know, poor old boy?

  Until you’ve got your mouth full of cocaine, you don’t know what kissing is. One kiss goes
on from phase to phase like one of those novels by Balzac and Zola and Romain Rolland and D. H. Lawrence and those chaps. And you never get tired! You’re on fourth speed all the time, and the engine purrs like a kitten, a big white kitten with the stars in its whiskers. And it’s always different and always the same, and it never stops, and you go insane, and you stay insane, and you probably don’t know what I’m talking about, and I don’t care a bit, and I’m awfully sorry for you, and you can find out any minute you like by the simple process of getting a girl like Lou and a lot of cocaine.

  What did that fellow Lamus say?

  “Stab your demoniac smile to my brain,

  Soak me in cognac, kisses, cocaine.”

  Queer fish, that chap Lamus! But seems to me that’s pretty good evidence he knew something about it. Why, of course he did. I saw him take cocaine myself. Deep chap! Bet you a shilling. Knows a lot. That’s no reason for suspicion. Don’t see why people run him down the way they do. Don’t see why I got so leary myself. Probably a perfectly decent chap at bottom. He’s got his funny little ways – man’s no worse for that.

  Gad, if one started to get worried about funny little ways, what price Lou! Queerest card in the pack, and I love her.

  “Give me another sniff off your hand.”

  Lou laughed like a chime of bells in Moscow on Easter morning. Remember, the Russian Easter is not the same time as our Easter. They slipped up a fortnight one way or the other – I never can remember which – as long as you know what I mean.

  She threw the empty silk bag in the air, and caught it in her teeth with a passionate snap, which sent me nearly out of my mind again. I would have loved to be a bird, and have my head snapped off by those white, small, sharp incisors.

  Practical girl, my Lady Pendragon! Instead of going off the deep end, she was cutting out another packet, and when it was opened, instead of the birds beginning to sing, she said in shrill excitement, “Look here, Cockie, this isn’t snow.”

  I ought to explain that she calls me Cockie in allusion to the fact that my name is Peter.