My old school-fellow skated away from the obnoxious topic.
“You didn’t let me finish,” he complained. “I was going to say I have no particular talent for finance and that sort of thing in the ordinary way, but I have an intuition that never lets me down – like the demon of Socrates, you remember, eh?”
I nodded. I had some faint recollection of Plato.
“Well,” said Feccles, tapping his cigar, with the air of a Worshipful Master calling the Lodge to order, “I said to myself when I met you last night, ‘It’s better to be born lucky than rich, and there’s a man who was born lucky.’”
It was perfectly true. I had never been able to do anything of my own abilities, and after all I had tumbled into a reasonably good fortune.
“You’ve got the touch, Pen,” he said, with animation. “Any time you’re out of a job, I’ll give you ten thousand a year as a mascot.”
Lou and I were both intensely excited. We could hardly find the patience to listen to the details of our friend’s plan. The figures were convincing; but the effect was simply to dazzle us. We had never dreamed of wealth on this scale.
I got the vision for the first time in my life of the power that wealth confers, and I realised equally for the first time how vast were my real ambitions.
The man was right, too, clearly enough, about my being lucky. My luck in the war had been prodigious. Then there was this inheritance, and Lou on the top of that; and here I’d met old Feccles by a piece of absolute chance, and there was this brilliant investment. That was the word – he was careful to point out that it was not a speculation, strictly speaking – absolutely waiting for me.
We were so overjoyed that we could hardly grasp the practical details. The amount required was four thousand nine hundred and fifty pounds.
Of course, there was no difficulty in getting a trifle like that, but as I told Feccles, it would mean my selling out some beastly stock or something which might take two or three days. There was no time to lose; because the option would lapse if it weren’t taken up within the week, and it was now Wednesday.
However, Feccles helped me to draft a wire to Wolfe to explain the urgency, and Feccles was to call on Saturday at nine o’clock with the papers.
Meanwhile, of course, he wouldn’t let me down, but at the same time he couldn’t risk pulling off the coup of his life in case there was a hitch, so he would get a move on and see if he couldn’t raise five thousand on his own somewhere else, in which case he’d let me have some of his own stock anyway. He wanted me in the deal if it was only for a sovereign, simply because of my luck.
So off he ran in a great hurry. Lou and I got a car and spent the afternoon in the Bois du Boulogne. It seemed as if the cocaine had taken hold of us with new force, or else it was the addition of the heroin.
We were living at the same terrific speed as on that first wild night. The intensity was even more extraordinary; but we were not being carried away by it.
In one sense, each hour lasted a fraction of a second, and yet, in another sense, every second lasted a lifetime. We were able to appreciate the minutest details of life to the full.
I want to explain this very thoroughly.
“William the Conqueror, 1066, William Rufus, 1087.”
One can sum up the whole period of the reign of the Duke of Normandy in a phrase. At the same time, an historian who had made a special study of that part of English History might be able to write ten volumes of details, and he might, in a sense, have both aspects of his knowledge present to his mind at the same moment.
We were in a similar condition. The hours flashed by like so many streaks of lightning, yet each discharge illuminated every detail of the landscape; we could grasp everything at once. It was as if we had acquired a totally new mental faculty as superior to the normal course of thought as the all-comprehending brain of a great man of science is to that of a savage, though the two men are both looking with the same optical instruments at the same black beetle.
It is impossible to convey, to any one who has not experienced it, the overwhelming rapture of this condition.
Another extraordinary feature of the situation was this; that we seemed to be endowed with what I must call the power of telepathy, for want of a better word. We didn’t need to explain ourselves to each other.
Our minds worked together like those of two first-class three-quarters who are accustomed to play together.
Part of the enjoyment, moreover, came from the knowledge that we were infinitely superior to anything we might happen to meet. The mere fact that we had so much more time to think than other people assured us of this.
We were like a leash of greyhounds, and the rest of the world so many hares, but the disproportion of speed was immensely increased. It was the airman against the wagoner.
We went to bed early that night. We had already got a little tired of Paris. The pace was too slow for us. It was rather like sitting at a Wagner opera. There were some thrilling moments, of course, but most of the time we were bored with long and monotonous passages like the dialogue between Wotan and Erde. We wanted to be by ourselves; no one else could keep up with the rush.
The difference between sleep and waking, again, was diminished, no, almost abolished. The period of sleep was simply like a brief distraction of attention, and even our dreams continued the exaltation of our love.
The importance of any incident was negligible. In the ordinary way one’s actions are to a certain extent inhibited. As the phrase goes, one thinks twice before doing so and so. We weren’t thinking twice anymore. Desire was transformed into action without the slightest check. Fatigue, too, had been completely banished.
We woke the next morning with the sun. We stood on the balcony in our dressing-gowns and watched him rise. We felt ourselves one with him, as fresh and as fervent as he. Inexhaustible energy!
We danced and sang through breakfast. We had a phase of babbling, both talking at once at the top of our voices, making plans for the day, each one as it bubbled in our brains the source of ecstatic excitement and inextinguishable laughter.
We had just decided to spend the morning shopping when a card was brought up to the room.
I had a momentary amazement as I read that our visitor was the confidential clerk of Mr. Wolfe.
“Oh, bother the fellow,” said I, and then remembered my telegram of the day before.
I had a swift pang of alarm. Could something be wrong? But the cocaine assured me that everything was all right.
“I’ll have to see the fellow, I suppose,” I said, and told the hall-boy to send him upstairs.
“Don’t let him keep you long,” said Lou, with a petulant pout, and ran into the bedroom after a swift embrace, so violent that it disarranged my new Charvet necktie.
The man came up. I was a little bored by the gravity of his manner, and rather disgusted by its solemn deference. Of course, one likes being treated as a kind of toy emperor in a way, but that sort of thing doesn’t go with Paris. Still less does it go with cocaine.
It annoyed me that the fellow was so obviously ill at ease, and also that he was so obviously proud of himself for having been sent to Paris on important business with a real live knight.
If there’s one thing flying teaches one more than another, it is to hate snobbery. Even the Garter becomes imperceptible when one is flying above the clouds.
I couldn’t possibly talk to the man till he was a little more human. I made him sit down and have a drink and cigarette before I would let him tell me his business.
Of course, everything was perfectly in order. The point was simply this, that the six thousand pounds wasn’t immediately available, so, as I needed it urgently, it was necessary for me to sign certain papers which Mr. Wolfe had drawn up at once, on receipt of my wire, and it would be better to have it done at the consulate.
“Why, of course, g
et a taxi,” I said; “I’ll be down in a minute.”
He went downstairs. I ran in to Lou and told her that I had to go to the consul on business: I’d be back in an hour and we could do our shopping.
We took a big sniff of snow and kissed goodbye as if I were starting on a three years’ expedition to the South Pole. Then I caught up my hat, gloves, and cane, and found my young man at the door.
The drink and the air of Paris had given him a sense of his own dignity. Instead of waiting humbly for me to get into the car, he was sitting there already; and though his greeting was still solemnly deferential, there was a little more of the ambassador about it. He had repressed the original impulse to touch his hat.
I myself felt a curious sense of enjoyment of my own importance. At the same time, I was in a violent hurry to get back to Lou. My brain was racing with the thought of her. I signed my name where they told me, and the consul dabbed it all over with stamps, and we drove back to the hotel, where the clerk extracted a locked leather wallet from a mysterious inside hip pocket and counted me out my six thousand in hundred-pound notes.
Of course, I had to ask the fellow to lunch, it was only decent, but I was very glad when he excused himself. He had to catch the two o’clock train back to town.
“Good God, what a time you’ve been,” said Lou, and I could see that she had been filling it in in a wonderful way. It was up to her neck. She danced about like a crazy woman with little jerky movements which I couldn’t help seeing signified nervous irritability. However, she was radiant, beaming, glowing, bursting with excitement.
Well, you know, I don’t like to be left in the lurch. I had to catch up. I literally shovelled the snow down. I ought to have been paid a shilling an hour by the County Council. The world is full of injustice.
However, we certainly didn’t have any time to have questions asked in Parliament. There was Lou almost in tears because she had nothing to wear; practically no jewellery – the whole idea of being a knight is that when you see a wrong it is your duty to right it.
Fortunately, there was no difficulty at the present moment. All we had to do was to drive down to the Rue de la Paix. I certainly almost fell down when I saw all those pearls on her neck. And that cabochon emerald! By George, it did go with her hair!
These shop men in Paris are certainly artists. The man saw in a moment what was wrong. There was nothing to match the blue of her dress, so he showed us a sapphire and diamond bracelet and a big marquise ring that went with it in a platinum setting. That certainly made all the difference! And yet he seemed to be very uneasy. He was puzzled; that’s what it was.
Then his face lightened up. He had got the idea all right. You can always trust these chaps when you strike a really good man. What was missing was something red!
I told you about Lou’s mouth; her long, jagged, snaky, scarlet streak always writhing and twisting as if it had a separate life of its own and were perpetually in some delicious kind of torture!
The man saw immediately what was necessary. The mouth had to be repeated symbolically. That’s the whole secret of art. So he fished out a snake of pigeon’s blood rubies.
My God! it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life, except Lou herself. And you couldn’t look at it without thinking of her mouth, and you couldn’t think of her mouth without wanting to kiss it, and it was up to me to prove to Paris that I had the most beautiful woman in the world for my wife, and that could only be done in the regular way by showing her off in the best dresses and the most wonderful jewellery. It was my duty to her as my wife, and I could afford it perfectly well because I was a tolerably rich man to start with anyhow, and besides, the five thousand I was putting into Feccles’ business would mean something like a quarter of a million at least, on the most conservative calculations, as I had seen with my own eyes.
And that was all clear profit, so there was no reason in the world why one shouldn’t spend it in a sensible way. Mr. Wolfe himself had emphasised the difficulty of getting satisfactory investments in these times.
He told me how many people were putting their money into diamonds and furs which always keep their value, whereas government securities and that sort of thing are subject to unexpected taxation, for one thing, depreciation for another, with the possibility of European repudiation looming behind them all.
As a family man, it was my duty to buy as many jewels for Lou as I could afford. At the same time, one has to be cautious.
I bought the things I mentioned and paid for them. I refused to be tempted by a green pearl tie pin for myself, though I should have liked to have had it because it would have reminded me of Lou’s eyes every time I put it on. But it was really rather expensive, and Mr. Wolfe had warned me very seriously about getting into debt, so I paid for the rest of the stuff, and we went off, and we thought we’d drive out to the Bois for lunch, and then we took some more snow in the taxi and Lou began to cry because I had bought nothing for myself. So we took some more snow, we had plenty of time, nobody lunches before two o’clock. We went straight back to the shop and bought the green pearl, and that got Lou so excited that the taxi was like an aeroplane; if anything, more so.
It’s stupid to hang back. If you start to do a thing, you’d much better do it. What’s that fellow say? “I do not set my life at a pin’s fee.” That’s the right spirit. “Unhand me, gentlemen, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me.”
That’s the Pendragon spirit, and that’s the flying man’s spirit. Get to the top and stay at the top and shoot the other man down!
Chapter VII
The Wings Of The Oof-bird
The lunch at the Restaurant de la Cascade was like a lunch in a dream. We seemed to be aware of what we were eating without actually tasting it. As I think I said before, it’s the anaesthesia of cocaine that determines the phenomena.
When I make a remark like that, I understand that it’s the dead and gone medical student popping up.
But never you mind that. The point is that when you have the right amount of snow in you, you can’t feel anything in the ordinary sense of the word. You appreciate it in a sort of impersonal way. There’s a pain, but the pain doesn’t hurt. You enjoy the fact of the pain as you enjoy reading about all sorts of terrible things in history at school.
But the trouble about cocaine is this; that it’s almost impossible to take it in moderation as almost any one, except an American, can take whisky. Every dose makes you better and better. It destroys one’s power of calculation.
We had already discovered the fact when we found that the supply we had got from Gretel, with the idea that it would last almost indefinitely, was running very short, when the dressing-gown came to solve the problem.
We had only been a few days on the stunt, and what we had got from three or four sniffs, to begin with, meant almost perpetual stoking to carry on. However, that didn’t matter, because we had an ample supply. There must have been a couple of kilograms of either C. or H. in that kimono. And when you think that an eighth of a gain is rather a big dose of H., you can easily calculate what a wonderful time you can have on a pound.
You remember how it goes – twenty grains one penny-weight, three penny-weights one scruple – I forget how many scruples one drachm, eight drachms one ounce, twelve ounces one pound.
I’ve got it all wrong. I could never understand English weights and measures. I have never met any one who could. But the point is you could go on a long time on one-eighth of a grain if you have a pound of the stuff.
Well, this will put it all right for you. Fifteen grains is one gramme, and a thousand grammes is a kilogramme, and a kilogramme is two point two pounds. The only thing I’m not sure about is whether it’s a sixteen-ounce pound or a twelve-ounce pound. But I don’t see what it matters anyway, if you’ve got a pound of snow or H. you can go on for a long while, but apparently it’s rather awkward orchestrating them.
Quain says that people accustomed to opium and its derivatives can take an enormous amount of cocaine without any bother. In the ordinary way, half a grain of cocaine can cause death, but we were taking the stuff with absolute carelessness.
One doesn’t think of measuring it as one would if one took it by hypodermic. One just takes a dose when one feels one needs it. After all, that’s the rule of nature. Eat when you’re hungry. Nothing is worse for the health than settling down to a fixed ration of so many meals a day.
The grand old British principle of three meat meals has caused the supply of uric acid to exceed the demand in a most reprehensible manner.
Physiology and economics, and, I should think, even geology, combine to protest.
Now we were living an absolutely wholesome life. We took a sniff of cocaine whenever the pace slackened up, and one of heroin when the cocaine showed any signs of taking the bit in its teeth.
What one needs is sound common sense to take reasonable measures according to the physiological indications. One needs elasticity. It’s simply spiritual socialism to tie oneself down to fixed doses whether one needs them or not. Nature is the best guide. We had got on to the game.
Our misadventure at the Petit Savoyard had taught us wisdom. We were getting stronger on the wing every hour.
That chap Coué is a piker, as they say in America. “Every day, in every way, I get better and better,” indeed? The man must simply have been carried away by the rhyme. Why wait for a day? We had got to the stage where every minute counted.
As the Scotchman said to his son, halfway through the ten-mile walk to kirk, when the boy said, “It’s a braw day the day.” “Is this a day to be ta’king o’ days?”
Thinking of days makes you think of years, and thinking of years makes you think of death, which is ridiculous.
Lou and I were living minute by minute, second by second. A tick of the clock marked for us an interval of eternity.
We were the heirs of eternal life. We had nothing to do with death. That was a pretty wise bird who said, “Tomorrow never comes.”
Diary of a Drug Fiend Page 10