Diary of a Drug Fiend Page 8

  The patron appeared to know our friends very well. He welcomed them with even more than the usual French fussiness. We sat down by the window.

  The restaurant overhangs the steep slopes of the Montmartre like an eyrie. We ordered supper, Feccles with bright intelligence, the rest of us with utter listlessness. I looked at Lou across the table. I had never seen the woman before in my life. She meant nothing whatever to me. I felt a sudden urgent desire to drink a great deal of water. I couldn’t trouble to pour myself out a glass. I couldn’t trouble to call the waiter, but I think I must have said the word “water”, for Haidé filled my goblet. A smile wriggled across her face. It was the first sign of life she had given. Even the shaking hands had been in the nature of a mechanical reflex rather than of a voluntary action. There was something sinister and disquieting in her gesture. It was as if she had the after-taste in her mouth of some abominable bitterness.

  I looked across at Lou. I saw she had changed colour.

  She looked dreadfully ill. It mattered nothing to me. I had a little amusing cycle of thoughts on the subject. I remembered that I loved her passionately; at the same time she happened not to exist. My indifference was a source of what I can only call diabolical beatitude.

  It occurred to me as a sort of joke that she might have poisoned herself. I was certainly feeling very unwell. That didn’t disturb me either.

  The waiter brought a bowl of mussels. We ate them dreamily. It was part of the day’s work. We enjoyed them because they were enjoyable; but nothing mattered, not even enjoyment. It struck me as strange that Haidé was simply pretending to eat, but I attributed this to preoccupation.

  I felt very much better. Feccles talked easily and lightly about various matters of no importance. Nobody took any notice. He did not appear to observe, for his own part, any lack of politeness.

  I certainly was feeling tired. I thought the Chambertin would pick me up, and swallowed a couple of glasses.

  Lou kept on looking up at me with a sort of anxiety as if she wanted advice of some kind and didn’t know how to ask for it. It was rather amusing.

  We started the entré. Lou got suddenly up from her seat. Feccles, with pretended alarm on his face, followed her hastily. I saw the waiter had hold of her other arm. It was really very amusing. That’s always the way with girls – they never know what’s enough.

  And then I realised with startling suddenness that the case was not confined to the frailer sex. I got out just in time.

  If I pass over in silence the events of the next hour, it is not because of the paucity of incident. At its conclusion we were seated once more at the table.

  We took little sips of very old Armagnac; it pulled us together. But all the virtue had gone out of us; we might have been convalescents from some very long and wasting illness.

  “There’s nothing to be alarmed about,” said Feccles, with his curious little laugh. “A trifling indiscretion.”

  I winced at the word. It took me back to King Lamus. I hated that fellow more than ever. He had begun to obsess me. Confound him!

  Lou had confided the whole story to our host, who admitted that he was familiar with these matters.

  “You see, my dear Sir Peter,” he said, “you can’t take H. like you can C., and when you mix your drinks there’s the devil to pay. It’s like everything else in life; you’ve got to find out your limit. It’s very dangerous to move about when you’re working H. or M., and it’s almost certain disaster to eat.”

  I must admit I felt an awful fool. After all, I had studied medicine pretty seriously; and this was the second time that a layman had read me the Riot Act.

  But Lou nodded cheerfully enough. The brandy had brought back the colour in her cheeks.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’d heard that all before, but you know it’s one thing to hear a thing and another to go through it yourself.”

  “Experience is the only teacher,” admitted Feccles. “All these things are perfectly all right, but the main thing is to go slow at first, and give yourself a chance to learn the ropes.”

  All this time Haidé had been sitting there like a statue. She exhaled a very curious atmosphere. There was a certain fascination in her complete lack of fascination.

  Please excuse this paradoxical way of putting it. I mean that she had all the qualities which normally attract. She had the remains of an astonishing, if bizarre, beauty. She had obviously a vast wealth of experience. She possessed a quiet intensity which should have made her irresistible; and yet she was absolutely devoid of what we call magnetism. It isn’t a scientific word – so much the worse for science. It describes a fact in nature, and one of the most important facts in practical affairs. Everything of human interest, from music hall turns to empires, is run on magnetism and very little else. And science ignores it because it can’t be measured by mechanical instruments!

  The whole of the woman’s vitality was directed to some secret interior shrine of her own soul.

  Now she began to speak for the first time. The only subject that interested her in this wide universe was heroin. Her voice was monotonous.

  Lou told me later that it reminded her of a dirge droned by Tibetan monks far off across implacable snow.

  “It’s the only thing there is,” she said, in a tone of extraordinary ecstatic detachment. One could divine an infinite unholy joy derived from its own sadness. It was as if she took a morbid pleasure in being something melancholy, something monstrous; there was, in fact, a kind of martyred majesty in her mood.

  “You mustn’t expect to get the result at once,” she went on. “You have to be born into it, married with it, and dead from it before you understand it. Different people are different. But it always takes some months at least before you get rid of that stupid nuisance – life. As long as you have animal passions, you are an animal. How disgusting it is to think of eating and loving and all those appetites, like cattle! Breathing itself would be beastly if one knew one were doing it. How intolerable life would be to people of even mediocre refinement if they were always acutely conscious of the process of digestion.”

  She gave a little shiver.

  “You’ve read the Mystics, Sir Peter?” interrupted Feccles.

  “I’m afraid not, my dear man,” I replied. “Fact is, I haven’t read anything much unless I had to.”

  “I went into it rather for a couple of years,” he returned, and then stopped short and flushed.

  The thought had apparently called up some very unpleasant memories. He tried to cover his confusion by volubility, and began an elaborate exposition of the tenets of St. Teresa, Miguel de Molinos, and several others celebrated in that line.

  “The main point, you see,” he recapitulated finally, “is the theory that everything human in us is before all things an obstacle in the way of holiness. That is the secret of the saints, that they renounce everything for one thing which they call the divine purity. It is not simply those things which we ordinarily call sins or vices – those are merely the elementary forms of iniquity, exuberant grossness. The real difficulty hardly begins till things of that sort are dismissed for ever. On the road to saintship, every bodily or mental manifestation is in itself a sin, even when it is something which ordinary piety would class as a virtue. Haidé here has got the same idea.”

  She nodded serenely.

  “I had no idea,” she said, “that those people had got so much sense. I’ve always thought of them as tangled up with religious ideas. I understand now. Yes, it’s the life of holiness, if you have to go to the trouble of putting it in the terms of morality, as I suppose you English people have to. I feel that contact of any sort, even with myself, contaminates me. I was the chief of sinners in my time, in the English sense of the word. Now I’ve forgotten what love means, except for a faint sense of nausea when it comes under my notice. I hardly eat at all – it’s only brutes that want to wallow in acti
on that need three meals a day. I hardly ever talk – words seem such waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view. Human life or heroin life? I’ve tried them both; and I don’t regret having chosen as I did.”

  I said something about heroin shortening life. A wan smile flickered on her hollow cheeks. There was something appalling in its wintry splendour. It silenced us.

  She looked down at her hands. I noticed for the first time with extreme surprise that they were extraordinarily dirty. She explained her smile.

  “Of course, if you count time by years, you’re very likely right. But what have the calculations of astronomers to do with the life of the soul? Before I started heroin, year followed year, and nothing worthwhile happened. It was like a child scribbling in a ledger. Now that I’ve got into the heroin life, a minute or an hour – I don’t know which and I don’t care – contains more real life than any five years’ period in my unregenerate days. You talk of death. Why shouldn’t you? It’s perfectly all right for you. You animals have got to die, and you know it. But I am very far from sure that I shall ever die; and I’m as indifferent to the idea as I am to any other of your monkey ideas.”

  She relapsed into silence, leaned back and closed her eyes once more.

  I make no claim to be a philosopher of any kind but it was quite evident to the most ordinary common sense that her position was unassailable if any one chose to take it. As G. K. Chesterton says, “You cannot argue with the choice of the soul.”

  It has often been argued, in fact, that mankind lost the happiness characteristic of his fellow-animals when he acquired self-consciousness. This is in fact the meaning of the legend of “The Fall”. We have become as gods, knowing good and evil, and the price is that we live by labour, and “In his eyes foreknowledge of death.”

  Feccles caught my thought. He quoted with slow emphasis:

  “He weaves and is clothed with derision,

  Sows and he shall not reap.

  His life is a watch or a vision,

  Between a sleep and a sleep.”

  The thought of the great Victorian seemed to chill him. He threw off his depression, lighting a cigarette and taking a strong pull at his brandy.

  “Haidé,” he said, with assumed lightness, “lives in open sin with a person named Baruch de Espinosa. I think it’s Schopenhauer who calls him ‘Der Gott-betrunkene Mann’.”

  “The God-intoxicated man,” murmured Lou faintly, shooting a sleepy glance at Haidé from beneath her heavy blue-veined eyelids.

  “Yes,” went on Feccles. “She always carries about one of his books. She goes to sleep on his words; and when her eyes open, they fall upon the page.”

  He tapped the table as he spoke. His quick intuition had understood that this strange incident was disquieting to us. He wriggled his thumb and forefinger in the air towards the waiter. The man interpreted the gesture as a request for the bill, and went off to get it.

  “Let me drive you and Sir Peter back to your hotel,” said our host to Lou. “You’ve had a rather rough time. I prescribe a good night’s rest. You’ll find a dose of H. a very useful pick-me-up in the morning, but, for Heaven’s sake, don’t flog a willing horse. Just the minutest sniff, and then coke up gradually when you begin to feel like getting up. By lunch time you’ll be feeling like a couple of two-year-olds.”

  He paid the bill, and we went out. As luck would have it, a taxi had just discharged a party at the door. So we drove home without any trouble.

  Lou and I both felt absolutely washed out. She lay upon my breast and held my hand. I felt my strength come back to me when it was called on to support her weakness. And our love grew up anew out of that waste of windy darkness. I felt myself completely purged of all passion; and in that lustration we were baptised anew and christened with the name of Love.

  But although nature had done her best to get rid of the excess of the poison we had taken, there remained a residual effect. We had arrived at the hotel very weary, though as a matter of course we had insisted on Feccles and Haidé coming upstairs for a final drink. But we could hardly keep our eyes open; and as soon as they were gone we made all possible haste to get between the sheets of the twin beds.

  I need hardly tell my married friends that on previous nights the process of going to bed had been a very elaborate ritual. But on this occasion, it was a mere attempt to break the record for speed. Within five minutes from the departure of Feccles and Haidé the lights were out.

  I had imagined that I should drop off to sleep instantly. In fact, it took me some time to realise that I had not done so. I was in an anaesthetic condition which is hard to distinguish from dreaming. In fact, if one started to lay down definitions and explained the differences, the further one got the more obscure would the controversy become.

  But my eyes were certainly wide open; and I was lying on my back, whereas I can never sleep except on my right side, or else, strangely enough, in a sitting position. And the thoughts began to make themselves more conscious as I lay.

  You know how thoughts fade out imperceptibly as one goes to sleep. Well, here they were, fading in.

  I found myself practically deprived of volition on the physical plane. It was as if it had become impossible for me to wish to move or to speak. I was bathed in an ocean of exceeding calm. My mind was very active, but only so within peculiar limits. I did not seem to be directing the current of my thoughts.

  In an ordinary way that fact would have annoyed me intensely. But now it merely made me curious. I tried, as an experiment, to fix my mind on something definite. I was technically able to do so, but at the same time I was aware that I considered the effort not worth making. I noticed, too, that my thoughts were uniformly pleasant.

  Curiosity impelled me to fix my mind on ideas which are normally the source of irritation and worry. There was no difficulty in doing so, but the bitterness had disappeared.

  I went over incidents in the past which I had almost forgotten by virtue of that singular mental process which protects the mind from annoyance.

  I discovered that this loss of memory was apparent, and not real. I recollected every detail with the most minute exactitude. But the most vexatious and humiliating items meant nothing to me any more. I took the same pleasure in recalling them as one has in reading a melancholy tale. I might almost go so far as to say that the unpleasant incidents were preferable to the others.

  The reason is, I think, that they leave a deeper mark on the mind. Our souls have invented our minds, so to speak, with the object of registering conscious experiences, and therefore the more deeply an experience is felt the better our minds are carrying out the intention of our souls.

  “Forsitan haec olim meminisse juvabit,” says Aeneas in Virgil when recounting his hardships. (Quaint, by the way! I haven’t thought of a Latin tag a dozen times since I left school. Drugs, like old age, strip off one’s recent memories, and leave bare one’s forgotten ideas.)

  The most deeply seated instinct in us is our craving for experience. And that is why the efforts of the Utopians to make life a pleasant routine always arouse subconscious revolt in the spirit of man.

  It was the progressive prosperity of the Victorian age that caused the Great War. It was the reaction of the schoolboy against the abolition of adventure.

  This curious condition of mind possessed an eternal quality; the stream of thoughts flowed through my brain like a vast irresistible river. I felt that nothing could ever stop it, or even change the current in any important respect. My consciousness had something of the quality of a fixed star proceeding through space by right of its eternal destiny. And the stream carried me on from one set of thoughts to another, slowly and without stress; it was like a hushed symphony. It included all possible memories, changing imperceptibly from one to another without the faintest hint of jarring.

  I was aware of the flight of t
ime, because a church clock struck somewhere far off at immense incalculable intervals. I knew, therefore, that I was making a white night of it. I was aware of dawn through the open French windows on the balcony.

  Ages, long ages, later, there was a chime of bells announcing early Mass; and gradually my thought became more slow, more dim; the active pleasure of thinking became passive. Little by little the shadows crept across my reverie, and then I knew no more.

  Chapter VI

  The Glitter On The Snow

  I woke to find Lou fully dressed. She was sitting on the edge of my bed. She had taken hold of my hand, and her face was bending over mine like a pallid flower. She saw that I was awake, and her mouth descended upon mine with exquisite tenderness. Her lips were soft and firm; their kiss revived me into life.

  She was extraordinarily pale, and her gestures were limp and languid. I realised that I was utterly exhausted.

  “I couldn’t sleep at all,” she said, “after what seemed a very long time in which I tried to pull myself together. My mind went running on like mad – I’ve had a perfectly ripping time – perfectly top-hole! I simply couldn’t get up till I remembered what that man Feccles said about a hair of the dog. So I rolled out of bed and crawled across to the H. and took one little sniff, and sat on the floor till it worked. It’s great stuff when you know the ropes. It picked me up in a minute. So I had a bath, and got these things on. I’m still a bit all in. You know we did overdo it, didn’t we, Cockie?”

  “You bet,” I said feebly. “I’m glad I’ve got a nurse.”

  “Right-o,” she said, with a queer grin. “It’s time for your majesty’s medicine.”

  She went over to the bureau, and brought me a dose of heroin. The effect was surprising! I had felt as if I couldn’t move a muscle, as if all the springs of my nerves had given way. Yet, in two minutes, one small sniff restored me to complete activity.