Diary of a Drug Fiend

by Aleister Crowley

  I said, with more confidence than before, that our courier had arranged to take us to see some of the shows in Naples that the ordinary tourist knows nothing about, and in order to avoid any possible annoyance, he had advised us to adopt this disguise – and so on for the rest of the story.

  The vice-consul smiled – indulgently, as I thought. “I admit we have some experience,” he said slowly, “of young people like yourselves getting into various kinds of trouble. One can’t expect every one to know all the tricks; and besides, if I understand correctly, you’re on your honeymoon.”

  I admitted the fact with a somewhat embarrassed smile. It occurred to me that honeymoon couples were traditionally objects of not unkindly ridicule from people in a less blessed condition.

  “Quite so,” replied the vice-consul. “I’m not a married man myself; but no doubt it is very delightful. How do you like it in Norway?”

  “Norway?” I said, completely flabbergasted.

  “Yes,” he said. “How do you like Norway; the climate, the lax, the people, the fiords, the glaciers?”

  There was some huge mistake somewhere.

  “Norway?” I said, with a rising inflection.

  I was on the brink of hysteria.

  “I’ve never been to the place in my life. And if it’s anything like Naples, I don’t want to go!”

  “This is a rather more serious matter than you seem to suppose,” returned the consul, “If you’re not in Norway, where are you?”

  “Why, I’m here, confound it,” I retorted with another weak flush of anger.

  “Since when, may I ask?” he replied.

  Well, he rather had me there. I didn’t know how long I’d been away from England. I couldn’t have told him the day or the month on a bet.

  Lou helped me out.

  “We left Paris three weeks ago tomorrow,” she said positively enough, though the tone of her voice was weak and weary, with a sub-current of irritation and distress. I hardly recognised the rich, full tones that had flooded my heart when she chanted that superb litany in the “Smoking Dog”.

  “We spent a couple of days here,” she said, “at the Museo-Palace Hotel. Since then, we’ve been staying at the Caligula at Capri; and our clothes, our passports, our money, and everything are there.”

  I couldn’t help being pleased by the way in which she rose to the crisis; her practical good sense, her memory of those details that are so important in business, though the male temperament regards them as a necessary nuisance.

  These are the things that one needs in an official muddle.

  “You don’t know any Italian at all?” asked the consul.

  “Only a few words,” she admitted, “though, of course, Sir Peter’s knowledge of French and Latin help him to make sense out of the newspapers.”

  “Well,” said the consul, rising languidly, “as it happens, that’s just the point at issue.”

  “I know the big words,” I said. “It’s the particles that bother one.”

  “Perhaps then it will save trouble,” said the consul, “if I offer you a free translation of this paragraph in this morning’s paper.”

  He reached across, took it from the commissario, and began a fluent even phrasing.

  “England is always in the van when it comes to romance and adventure. The famous ace, Sir Peter Pendragon, V.C., K.B.E., who recently startled London by his sudden marriage with the leading society beauty, Miss Louise Laleham, is not spending his honeymoon in any of the conventional ways, as might be expected from the gentleman’s bold and adventurous character. He has taken his bride for a season’s guideless climbing on the Jostedal Brae, the largest glacier in Norway.”

  I could see that the commissario was drilling holes in my soul with his eyes. As for myself, I was absolutely stupefied by the pointless falsehood of the paragraph.

  “But, good God!” I exclaimed. “This is all absolute tosh.”

  “Excuse me,” said the consul, a little grimly, “I have not finished the paragraph.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” I answered curtly.

  “Taking advantage of these facts,” he continued to read, “and of a slight facial resemblance to Sir Peter and Lady Pendragon, two well-known international crooks have assumed their personalities, and are wandering around Naples and its vicinity, where several tradesmen have already been victimised.”

  He dropped the paper, put his hands behind his back, and stared me square in the eyes.

  I could not meet his glance. The accusation was so absurd, so horrible, so unexpected! I felt that guilt was written on every line of my face.

  I stammered out some weakly, violent objurgation. Lou kept her head better than I.

  “But please, this is absurd,” she protested. “Send for our courier. He has known Sir Peter since he was a boy at school. The whole thing is shameful and abominable. I don’t see why such things are allowed.”

  The consul seemed in doubt as to what to do. He played with his watch-chain nervously.

  I had sunk into a chair – I noticed they hadn’t offered us chairs when we came in – and the whole scene vanished from my mind. I was aware of nothing but a passionate craving for drugs. I wanted them physically as I had never wanted anything in my life before. I wanted them mentally, too. They, and they only, would clear my mind of its confusion, and show me a way out of this rotten mess. I wanted them most of all morally. I lacked the spirit to stand up under this sudden burst of drum fire.

  But Lou stuck to it gamely. She was on her mettle, though I could see that she was almost fainting from the stress of the various circumstances.

  “Send for our courier, Hector Laroche,” she insisted. The consul shrugged his shoulders. “But where is he?”

  “Why,” she said, “he must be looking for us all over the town. When he got to the Fauno Ebbrio and found we weren’t there, and heard what had happened, he must have been very anxious about us.”

  “In fact, I don’t see why he isn’t here now,” said the consul. “He must have known that you were arrested.”

  “Perhaps something’s happened to him,” suggested Lou. “But that would really be too curious a coincidence.”

  “Well, these things do happen,” admitted the consul. He seemed somehow more at his ease with her, and better disposed, than when he was talking to me. Her magnetic beauty and her evident aristocracy could not help but have their effect.

  I found myself admiring her immensely, in quite a new way. It had never occurred to me that she could rise to a situation with such superb aplomb.

  “Won’t you sit down?” said the consul, “I’m sure you must be very tired.”

  He put a chair for her, and went back to his seat on the sofa.

  “It’s a little awkward, you see,” he went on. “I don’t, as a matter of fact, believe all I read in the papers. And there are several very curious points about the situation which you don’t seem to see yourself. And I don’t mind admitting that your failure to see them makes a very favourable impression.”

  He paused and bit his lip, and pulled at his neck.

  “It’s very difficult,” he continued at last. “The facts of the case, on the surface, are undeniably ugly. You are found in disguise in one of the worst places in Naples, and you have actually arms in your hands, which is strengst verboten, as they say in Germany. On the other hand, you give an account of yourself which makes you out to be such utter fools, if you will forgive the frankness of the expression, that it speaks volumes for your innocence, and there’s no doubt about your being British – ” he smiled amiably, “and I think I must do what I can for you. Excuse me while I talk to my friend here.”

  Lou turned on me with a triumphant smile; one of her old proud smiles, except that it was wrung, so to speak, out of the heart of unspeakable agony.

  Meanwhile, the commissario was gesticulatin
g and shouting at the consul, who replied with equal volubility but an apparently unsurmountable languor.

  Then the conversation stopped suddenly short. The two men rose to their feet.

  “I’ve arranged it with my friend here on the basis of his experience of the bold, bad, British tourist. You will come with me to the consulate under the protection of two of his men,” he smiled sarcastically, “for fear you should get into any further trouble. You can have your things back except the guns, which are forbidden.”

  How little he knew what a surge of joy went through us at that last remark!

  “I will send one of my clerks with you to Capri,” he said, “and you will get your passports and money and whatever you need, and come back to me at once and put the position on a more regular footing.”

  We got our things from the sergeant, and made excuses for a momentary disappearance.

  By George, how we did want it!

  Five minutes later we were almost ourselves again. We saw the whole thing as an enormous lark, and communicated our high spirits to our companion. He attributed them, no doubt, to our prospects of getting out of the scrape.

  Lou rattled on all the way about life in London, and I told the story – bar the snow part – of our elopement.

  He thawed out completely. Our confidence had reassured him.

  We shook hands amid all-round genial laughter when we left under the guidance of a very business-like Italian, who spoke English well.

  We caught the boat to Capri with plenty of time to spare, and regaled the consul’s clerk with all sorts of amusing anecdotes. He was very pleased to be treated on such a friendly footing.

  We went up to the Piazza in the Funicular with almost the sensation of soaring. It had been a devil of a mess; but five minutes more would see it at an end. And, despite my exaltation, I registered a vow that I would never do anything so foolish again.

  Of course, it was evident what had happened to Feccles. He had somehow failed to learn of our arrest, and was waiting at the hotel with impatient anxiety for our return.

  At the same time, it was rather ridiculous in that costume in broad daylight to have to ask the porter for one’s key.

  I could not at all understand his look of genuine surprise. That wasn’t simply a question of clothes – I felt it in my bones. And there was the manager, bowing and scraping like a monkey. He seemed to have lost his self-possession. The torrent of his words of welcome ran over a very rough bed.

  I couldn’t really grasp what he was saying for a moment, but there was no mistaking the import of his final phrase.

  “I’m so delighted that you’ve changed your mind, Sir Peter, but I felt sure you could never bear to leave Capri so soon. Our beautiful Capri!”

  What the deuce was the fellow talking about? Change my mind? What I wanted to do was to change my clothes!

  The consul’s clerk made a few rapid explanations in Italian, and it almost hit me in the eye to watch the manager’s face as he lifted his eyes and saw the two obvious detectives in the doorway.

  “I don’t understand,” he said with sudden anxiety. “I don’t understand this at all,” and he bustled round to his desk.

  “Where’s our courier?” called out Lou. “It’s for him to explain everything.”

  The manager became violently solemn.

  “Your Ladyship is undoubtedly right,” he broke out.

  But the conventional words did not conceal the fact that his mental attitude was that of a man who has suddenly fallen through a trap-door into a cellar full of something spiky.

  “There’s some mistake here,” he went on. “Let me see.”

  He called to the girl at the desk in Italian. She fished about in a drawer and produced a telegram.

  He handed it over to me. It was addressed to Laroche.

  “Urgent bisnes oblige live for Roma night. Pay bill packup join me Museo Palace Hotel Napls in time to cach miday train. Pendragon.”

  The words were mostly mis-spelt; but the meaning was clear enough. Some one must be playing a practical joke. Probably that paragraph in the paper was part of the same idea. So I supposed Laroche was in the hotel in Naples wondering why we didn’t turn up.

  “But where’s our luggage?” cried Lou.

  “Why,” said the manager, “your Ladyship’s courier paid the bill as usual. The servants helped him to pack your luggage, and he just managed to catch the morning boat.”

  “But what time was this?” cried Lou, and scanned the telegram closely.

  It must have been received within a few minutes of our leaving the hotel.

  The girl handed over another telegram addressed to the manager.

  “Sir Petre add Lady Pendragom espress ther regrets at having so leve so sudenl and will always have the warmest remebrances of the hapy times they had at the Caligula and hop so riture at the earliest possibile opportunity. Courier till attend to busines details.”

  It suddenly dawned on my mind that there was one scrap of fact imbedded in this fantastic farrago. The courier had attended to business details with an efficiency worthy of the best traditions of the profession.

  The thing seemed to sink into Lou’s mind like a person seeing his way through a chess problem. Her face was absolutely white with cold and concentrated rage.

  “He must have watched us in Paris,” she said.

  If he must have known that we had spent the money we were going to put into his swindle, and made up his mind that his best course was to get the jewellery and the rest of the cash.

  She sat down suddenly, collapsed; and began to cry. It developed into violent hysterics, which became so alarming that the manager sent for the nearest doctor.

  A knot of servants and one or two guests had gathered in the atrium of the hotel. The outside porter had become the man of the moment.

  “If why, certainly,” he announced triumphantly in broken English. “If Mr. Laroche, he went off this morning on the seven o’ clock boat. I tink you never catch him.”

  The events of the last few hours had got me down to my second wind, so to speak. I turned to the consul’s clerk; and I spoke. But my voice seemed to come not so much from me as from the animal inside me, the original Pendragon, if you know what I mean, the creature with blind instincts and an automatic apparatus of thought.

  “You see how it is,” I heard myself saying, “no passports, no cash, no clothes – nothing!”

  I was speaking of myself in the third person. The whole process of human life and action had stopped automatically as far as the hotel was concerned. The knot of babbling gossipers was like a swarm of mosquitoes.

  The consul’s clerk had taken in the situation clearly enough; but I could see that the detectives had become highly suspicious. They were itching to arrest me on the spot.

  The clerk argued with them garrulously for an interminable time. The manager seemed the most uncomfortable man in Capri. He protested silently to heaven – there being nobody on earth to listen to him.

  The situation was set going again by the reappearance of Lou on the arm of a chambermaid, followed by the doctor, who wore the air of a man who has once more met the King of Terrors in open combat, and knocked the stuffing out of him.

  Lou was exceedingly shaky, paling and flushing by turns. I hated her. It was she who had got me into all this mess.

  “Well,” said the clerk, “we must simply go back to the consulate and explain what has happened.”

  “Don’t be distressed, Lady Pendragon,” he said. “There can be no doubt at all that this man will be caught in a very few hours, and you’ll have all your things back.”

  Of course I had sense enough to know that he didn’t believe a word of what he was saying. The proverb, “Set a thief to catch a thief”, doesn’t apply to Italy. If a thief were worth stealing, that would be another story.

  There
was no boat back to Naples that night. There was nothing to do but to wait till the morning. The manager was extremely sympathetic. He got us some clothes, if not exactly what we were accustomed to, at least better than the horrible things we were wearing. He ordered a special dinner with lots of champagne, and served it in the best suite but one in the house.

  His instinctive Italian tact told him not to put us in the rooms we had had before.

  He looked in from time to time with a cheery word to see how we were, and to assure us that telegraphic arrangements had been made to catch Mr. Laroche Feccles.

  We managed to get pretty drunk in the course of the evening; but there was no exhilaration. The shock had been too great, the disillusion too disgusting. Above all, there was the complete absence of what had, after all, been the mainspring of our lives; our love for each other.

  That was gone, as if it had been packed in our luggage. The only approach to sympathetic communion between us was when Lou, practical to the last, brought out our pitifully small supply of heroin and cocaine.

  “That’s all we’ve got,” she whispered in anguish of soul, “till God knows when.”

  We were frightfully afraid, into the bargain, of its being taken from us. We were gnawed by fierce anxiety as to the issue of our affair with the police. We were even doubtful whether the consul wouldn’t turn against us and scout our story as a string of obvious falsehoods.

  The morning was chill. We were shaking with the reaction. Our sleep had been heavy, yet broken, and haunted by abominable dreams.

  We could not even stay on deck. It was too cold, and the sea was choppy. We went down in the cabin, and shivered, and were sea-sick.

  When we reached the consulate we were physical wrecks. One bit of luck, however, was waiting for us. Our luggage had been found in a hotel at Sorrento. Everything saleable had, of course, been removed by the ingenious Mr. Feccles, including our supply of dope.

  But at least we had our passports, and some clothes to wear; and the finding of the luggage in itself, of course, confirmed our story.

  The consul was extremely kind, and returned with us himself to the commissario, who dismissed us genially enough, obviously confirmed in his conviction that all English people were mad, and that we in particular ought to travel, if travel we must, in a bassinette.