We were out of time and space. We were living according to the instruction of our Saviour “Take no thought for the morrow.”
A great restlessness gripped us. Paris was perfectly impossible. We had to get to some place where time doesn’t count.
The alternation of day and night doesn’t matter so much; but it’s absolutely intolerable to be mixed up with people who are working by the clock.
We were living in the world of the Arabian Nights; limitations were abhorrent, Paris was always reminding us of the Pigmies, who lived, if you call it living, in a system of order.
It is monstrous and ridiculous to open and close by convention. We had to go to some place where such things didn’t annoy us. . .
An excessively irritating incident spoilt our lunch at the Cascade. We had made a marvellous impression when we came in. We had floated in like butterflies settling on lilies. A buzz went round the tables. Lou’s beauty intoxicated everybody. Her jewellery dazzled the crowd.
I thought of an assembly of Greeks of the best period unexpectedly visited by Apollo and Venus.
We palpitated not only with our internal ecstasy but with the intoxicating sense that the whole world admired and envied us. We made them feel like the contents of a wastepaper basket.
The head waiter himself became a high priest. He rose to the situation like the genius he was. He was mentally on his knees as he ventured to advise us in the choice of our lunch.
It seemed to us the tribute of inferior emperors. And there was that fellow King Lamus five or six tables away!
The man with him was a Frenchman of obvious distinction, with a big red rosette and a trim aristocratic white moustache and beard. He was some minister or other. I couldn’t quite place him but I’d seen him often enough in the papers: somebody intimate with the president. He had been the principal object of interest before we came in.
Our arrival pricked that bubble.
Lamus had his back to us, and I supposed he didn’t see us, for he didn’t turn round, though everyone else in the place did so and began to buzz.
I didn’t hate the man any more; he was so absurdly inferior. And this was the annoying thing. When he and his friend got up to leave, they passed our table all smiles and bows.
And then, the deuce! The head waiter brought me his card. He had scribbled on it in pencil: “Don’t forget me when you need me.”
Of all the damned silly impertinence! Absolutely gratuitous insufferable insolence! Who was going to need Mr. Gawd Almighty King Lamus?
I should have handed out some pretty hot repartee if the creature hadn’t sneaked off. Well, it wasn’t worth while. He didn’t count any more than the grounds in the coffee.
But the incident stuck in my mind. It kept on irritating me all the afternoon. People like that ought to be kicked out once and for all.
Why, hang it, the man was all kinds of a scoundrel. Every one said so. Why did he want to butt in? Nobody asked him to meddle.
I said something of the sort to Lou, and she told him off very wittily.
“You’ve said it, Cockie,” she cried. “He’s a meddler, and his nature is to be rotten before he’s ripe.”
I remembered something of the sort in Shakespeare. That was the best of Lou; she was brilliantly clever, but she never forced it down one’s throat.
At the same time, as I said, the man stuck in my gizzard. It annoyed me so much that we took a lot more cocaine to get the taste out of our mouths.
But the irritation remained, though it took another form. The bourgeois atmosphere of Paris got on my nerves.
Well, there was no need to stay in the beastly place. The thing to do was to hunt up old Feccles and pay him the cash, and get to some place like Capri where one isn’t always being bothered by details.
I was flooded by a crazy desire to see Lou swim in the Blue Grotto, to watch the phosphorescent flames flash from her luminous body.
We told the chauffeur to stop at Feccles’s hotel, and that was where we hit a gigantic snag.
Monsieur Feccles, the manager said, had left that morning suddenly. Yes, he had left his heavy baggage. He might be back at any moment. No, he had left no word as to where he was going.
Well, of course, he would be back on Saturday morning to get the five thousand. It was obvious what I was to do. I would leave the money for him, and take the manager’s receipt, and tell him to send the papers on to the Caligula at Capri.
I started to count out the cash. We were sitting in the lounge. A sense of absolute bewilderment and helplessness came over me.
“I say, Lou,” I stammered, “I wish you’d count this. I can’t make it come right. I think I must have been going a bit too hard.”
She went through the various pockets of my portefeuille.
“Haven’t you some money in your pocket?” she said.
I went through myself with sudden anxiety. I had money in nearly every pocket; but it only amounted to so much small change. A thousand francs here and a hundred francs there, a fifty-pound note in my waistcoat, a lot of small bills –
In the meanwhile, Lou had added up the contents of my portefeuille. The total was just over seventeen hundred.
“My God! I’ve been robbed,” I gasped out, my face flushing furiously with anger.
Lou kept her head and her temper. After all, it wasn’t her money! She began to figure on a scrap of the hotel note paper.
“I’m afraid it’s all right,” she announced, “you dear, bad boy.”
I had become suddenly sober. Yes, there was nothing wrong with the figures. I had paid cash to the jeweller without thinking.
By Jove, we were in a hole! I felt instinctively that it was impossible to telegraph to Wolfe for more money. I suppose my face must have fallen; a regular nose dive. Lou put her arm around my waist and dug her nails into my ribs.
“Chuck it, Cockie,” she said, “we’re well out of a mess. I always had my doubts about Feccles, and his going off like this looks to me as if there were something very funny about it.”
My dream of a quarter of a million disappeared without a moment’s regret. I had been prudent after all. I had invested my cash in something tangible. Feccles was an obvious crook. If I had handed him that five thousand, I should never have heard of him or of it again.
I began to recover my spirits.
“Look here,” said Lou, “let’s forget it. Write Feccles a note to say you couldn’t raise the money by the date it was wanted, and let’s get out. We ought to economise, in any case, Let’s get off to Italy as we said. The exchange is awfully good, and living’s delightfully cheap. It’s silly spending money when you’ve got Love and Cocaine.”
My spirit leapt to meet hers. I scribbled a note of apology to Feccles, and left it at the hotel. We dashed round to the Italian consulate to have our passport vise’d, got our sleeping cars from the hotel porter, and had the maid pack our things while we had a last heavenly dinner.
Chapter VIII
Vedere Napoli E Poi – Pro Patria – Mori
We had just time to get down to the Gare de Lyon for the train de luxe. A sense of infinite relief enveloped us as we left Paris behind; and this was accompanied with an overwhelming fatigue which in itself was unspeakably delicious. The moment our heads touched the pillows we sank like young children into exquisite deep slumber, and we woke early in the morning, exhilarated beyond all expression by the Alpine air that enlarged our lungs; that thrilled us with its keen intensity; that lifted us above the pettiness of civilisation, exalting us to communion with the eternal; our souls soared to the primaeval peaks that towered above the train. They flowed across the limpid lakes, they revelled with the raging Rhone.
Many people have the idea that the danger of drugs lies in the fact that one is tempted to fly to them for refuge whenever one is a little bored or depressed or annoyed. That is true, of course
; but if it stopped there, only a small class of people would stand in real danger.
For example, this brilliant morning, with the sun sparkling on the snow and the water, the whole earth ablush with his glory, the pure keen air rejoicing our lungs; we certainly did say to ourselves, our young eyes ablaze with love and health and happiness, that we didn’t need any other element to make our poetry perfect.
I said this without a hint of hesitation. For one thing, we felt like Christian when the burden of his sins fell off his back, at getting away from Paris and civilisation and convention and all that modern artificiality implies.
We had neither the need to get rid of any depression, nor that to increase our already infinite intoxication; ourselves and our love and the boundless beauty of the ever changing landscape, a permanent perfection travelling for its pleasure through inexhaustible possibilities!
Yet almost before the words were out of our mouths, a sly smile crept over Lou’s loveliness and kindled the same subtly secret delight in my heart.
She offered me a pinch of heroin with the air of communicating some exquisitely esoteric sacrament and I accepted it and measured her a similar dose on my own hand as if some dim delirious desire devoured us. We took it not because we needed it; but because the act of consummation was, so to speak, an act of religion.
It was the very fact that it was not an act of necessity which made it an act of piety.
In the same way, I cannot say that the dose did us any particular good. It was at once a routine and a ritual. It was a commemoration like the Protestant communion, and at the same time a consecration like the Catholic. It reminded us that we were heirs to the royal rapture in which we were afloat. But also it refreshed that rapture.
We noticed that in spite of the Alpine air, we did not seem to have any great appetite for breakfast, and we appreciated with the instantaneous sympathy which united us that the food of mortals was too gross for the gods.
That sympathy was so strong and so subtle, so fixed in our hearts, that we could not realise the rude, raw fact that we had ever existed as separate beings. The past was blotted out in the calm contemplation of our beatitude. We understood the changeless ecstasy that radiates from statues of the Buddha; the mysterious triumph on the mouth of Mona Lisa, and the unearthly and ineffable glee of the attitude of Haidé Lamoureux.
We smoked in shining silence as the express swept through the plains of Lombardy. Odd fragments of Shelley’s lines on the Euganean hills flitted through my mind like azure or purple phantoms.
“The vaporous plain of Lombardy
Islanded with cities fair.”
A century had commercialised the cities for the most part into cockpits and cesspools. But Shelley still shone serene as the sun itself.
“Many a green isle needs must be
In this wide sea of misery.”
Everything he had touched with his pen had blossomed into immortality. And Lou and I were living in the land which his prophetic eyes had seen.
I thought of that incomparable idyll, I will not call it an island, to which he invites Emilia, in Epipsychidion.
Lou and I, my love and I, my wife and I, we were not merely going there; we had always been there and should always be. For the name of the island, the name of the house, the name of Shelley, and the name of Lou and me, they were all one name – Love.
“The winged words with which my song would pierce
Into the heights of love’s rare universe
Are chains of lead about its flight of fire,
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire.”
I noticed, in fact, that our physical selves seemed to be acting as projections of our thought. We were both breathing rapidly and deeply. Our faces were flushed, suffused with the sunlight splendour of our bloods that beat time to the waltz of our love.
Waltz? No, it was something wilder than a waltz. The Mazurka, perhaps. No, there was something still more savage in our souls.
I thought of the furious fandango of the gypsies of Granada, of the fanatical frenzy of the religious Moorish rioters chopping at themselves with little sacred axes till the blood streams down their bodies, crazily crimson in the stabbing sunlight, and making little scabs of mire upon the torrid trampled sand.
I thought of the maenads and Bacchus; I saw them through the vivid eyes of Euripides and Swinburne. And still unsatisfied, I craved for stranger symbols yet. I became a Witch-Doctor presiding over a cannibal feast, driving the yellow mob of murderers into a fiercer Comus-rout, as the maddening beat of the tom-tom and the sinister scream of the bull-roarer destroy every human quality in the worshippers and make them elemental energies; Valkyrie-vampires surging and shrieking on the summit of the storm.
I do not even know whether to call this a vision, or how to classify it psychologically. It was simply happening to me – and to Lou – though we were sitting decorously enough in our compartment. It became increasingly certain that Haidé, low-class, commonplace, ignorant girl that she was, had somehow been sucked into a stupendous maelstrom of truth.
The normal actions and reactions of the mind and the body are simply so many stupid veils upon the face of Isis.
What happened to them didn’t matter. The stunt was to find some trick to make them shut up.
I understood the value of words. It depended, not on their rational meaning, but upon their hieratic suggestion.
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-house decree.”
The names mean nothing definite, but they determine the atmosphere of the poem. Sublimity depends upon unintelligibility.
I understood the rapture of the names in Lord Dunsany’s stories. I understood how the “barbarous names of evocation” used by magicians, the bellowings and whistlings of the Gnostics, the Mantras of Hindoo devotees, set their souls spinning till they became giddy with glory.
Even the names of the places that we were passing in the train excited me just as far as they were unfamiliar and sonorous.
I became increasingly excited by the sight of the Italian words, “E pericoloso sporgersi”. That wouldn’t mean much, no doubt, to any one who spoke Italian. To me, it was a master-key of magic. I connected it somehow with my love for Lou. Everything was a symbol of my love for Lou except when that idiotic nuisance, knowledge, declared the contrary.
We were whirling in this tremendous trance all the morning. There kept on coming into my mind the title of a picture I had once seen by some crazy modern painter: “Four red monks carrying a black goat across the snow to Nowhere.”
It was obviously an excuse for a scheme of colour but the fantastic imbecility of the phrase, and the subtle suggestion of sinister wickedness, made me pant with suppressed exaltation.
The “first call for lunch” came with startling suddenness. I woke up wildly to recognise the fact that Lou and I had not spoken to each other for hours, that we had been rushing through a Universe of our own creation with stupendous speed and diabolical delight. And at the same time I realised that we had been automatically “coking up” without knowing that we were doing so.
The material world had become of so little importance that I no longer knew where I was. I completely mixed up my present journey with memories of two or three previous Continental excursions.
It was the first time that Lou had ever been farther than Paris, and she looked to me for information as to time and place. With her, familiarity had not bred contempt, and I found myself unable to tell her the most ordinary things about the journey. I didn’t even know in which direction we were travelling, whether the Alps came next, or which tunnel we were taking; whether we passed through Florence, or the difference between Geneva and Genoa.
Those who are familiar with the route will realise how hopelessly my mind was entangled. I hardly knew morning from evening. I have described things with absolute confidence which could not
possibly have taken place.
We kept on getting up and looking at the map on the panels of the corridor, and I couldn’t make out where we were. We compared times and distances only to make confusion worse confounded.
I went into the most obstruse astronomical calculations as to whether we ought to put our watches on an hour or back an hour at the frontier; and I don’t know to this day whether I came to any correct conclusion. I had an even chance of being right; but there it stopped.
I remember getting out to stretch our legs at Rome, and that we had a mad impulse to try to see the sights during the twenty minutes or so we had to wait.
I might have done it; but on the platform at Rome I was brought up with a shock. An impossible thing had happened.
“Great Scot,” cried a voice from the window of a coach three ahead of our own. “Of all the extraordinary coincidences! How are you?”
We looked up, hardly able to believe our ears. Who should it be but our friend Feccles!
Well, of course, I’d rather have seen the devil himself. After all, I’d behaved to the man rather shabbily; and, incidentally, made a great fool of myself. But what surprised me on second glance was that he was travelling very much incognito. He was hardly recognisable.
I don’t think I mentioned he had fair hair with a bald patch, and was clean shaven. But now his hair was dark; and a toupe silently rebuked Nature’s inclemency. A small black moustache and imperial completed the disguise. But in addition, his manner of dressing was a camouflage in itself. In Paris he had been dressed very correctly. He might have been a man about town of very good family.
But now he was dressed like a courier, or possibly a high-class commercial traveller. His smartness had an element of commonness very well marked. I instinctively knew that he would prefer me not to mention his name.
At this moment the train began to move, and we had to hop on. We went at once to his compartment. It was a coupé, and he was its sole occupant.
Diary of a Drug Fiend Page 11