It took three days to telegraph money from England. It was utterly humiliating to walk about Naples. We felt that we were being pointed at as the comic relief in a very low-class type of film.
We borrowed enough money to get on with, and, of course, we had only one use for it. We stayed in our room in a little hotel unfrequented by English, and crawled out by night to try to buy drugs.
That in itself is a sordid epic of adventure and misadventure. The lowest class of so-called guide was our constant companion. Weary in spirit, we dragged ourselves from one dirty doubtful street to another; held long whispered conferences with the scavenger type of humanity, and as often as not bought various harmless powders at an exorbitant price, and that at the risk of blackmail and other things possibly worse.
But the need of the stuff drove us relentlessly on. We ultimately found an honest dealer, and got a small supply of the genuine stuff. But even then we didn’t seem to pick up. Even large doses did hardly more than restore us to our normal, by which I mean, our pre-drug selves. We were like Europe after the war.
The worst and the best we could do was to become utterly disgusted with ourselves, each other, Naples, and life in general.
The spirit of adventure was dead – as dead as the spirit of love. We had just enough moral courage after a very good lunch at Gambrinus, to make up our minds to get out of the entire beastly atmosphere.
Our love had become a mutual clinging, like that of two drowning people. We shook hands on the definite oath to get back to England, and get back as quick as we could.
I believe I might have fallen down even on that. But once again Lou pulled me through. We got into a veittura and took our tickets then and there.
We were going back to London with our tails between our legs, but we were going back to London!
BOOK II
inferno
Chapter I
SHORT COMMONS
August 17
We are at the Savoy. Cockie has gone to see his lawyer. He is looking awfully bad, poor boy. He feels the disgrace of having been taken in by that Feccles. But how was he to know?
It was all really my fault. I ought to have had an instinct about it.
I feel rotten myself. London is frightfully hot; much hotter than it was in Italy. I want to go and live at Barley Grange. No, I don’t; what I want is to get back to where we were. There’s frightfully little H. left. There’s plenty of C.; only one wants so much.
I wonder if this is the right stuff. The effect isn’t what it used to be. At first everything went so fast. It doesn’t any more.
It makes one’s mind very full; drags out the details; but it doesn’t make one think and talk and act with that glorious sense of speed. I think the truth is that we’ve got tired out.
Suppose I suggest to Cockie that we knock off for a week and get our physical strength back and start fresh.
I may as well telephone Gretel and arrange for a really big supply. If we’re going to live at Barley Grange, we’ll have to be cocaine hogs and lay in a big stock. There wouldn’t be any chance of getting it down there; and besides one must take precautions. . . .
Bother August! Of course Gretel’s out of town – in Switzerland, the butler said. They don’t know when she’ll be back. I wonder when Parliament meets.
Cockie came back for lunch with a very long face. Mr. Wolfe gave him a good talking-to about money. Well, that’s perfectly right. We had been going the pace.
Cockie wanted to take me out and buy me some jewellery to replace what was stolen; but I wouldn’t let him, except a new watch and a wedding ring.
I’ve got a horrid feeling about that. It’s frightfully unlucky to lose your wedding ring. I feel as if the new one didn’t belong to me at all.
We had a long talk about Gretel being away. We tried one or two places, but they wouldn’t give us any. I wish Cockie had taken out his diploma.
The papers are disgusting. It’s the silly season, right enough. Every time one picks one up, there’s something about cocaine. That old fool Platt is on the war-path. He wants to “arouse public opinion to a sense of the appalling danger which threatens the manhood and womanhood of England.”
One paper had a long speech of his reported in full. He says it’s the plot of the Germans to get even with us.
Of course, I’m only a woman and all that; but it sounds to me rather funny.
We went to tea with Mabel Black. Every one was talking about drugs. Every one seemed to want them; yet Lord Landsend had just come back from Germany and he said you could buy it quite easily there, but nobody seemed to want to.
Then is the whole German people in a silent conspiracy to destroy us? I never took much stock in all those stories about the infernal cunning of the Hun.
We heard a lot about the underground traffic, though, and I think we ought to be able to get it pretty easily. . . .
I don’t know what’s the matter with us both. It made us a bit better to meet the old crowd, and we thought we’d celebrate.
It didn’t come off.
We had a wonderful dinner; and then a horrible thing happened, the most horrible thing in my life. Cockie wanted to go to a show! You might have hit me on the head with a poker. I don’t attract him any more; and I love him so much!
He went to the box office to see about tickets, and while he was gone – this was the really horrible thing – I found I was simply telling myself, “I love him so much.”
Love is dead. And yet that’s not true. I do love him with all my heart and soul; and yet, somehow, I can’t. I want to be able to love until I get back. Oh, what’s the good of talking about it!
I know I love him, and yet I know I can’t love any one.
I took a whole lot of cocaine. It dulled what I felt. I was able to fancy I loved him.
We went to the show. It was awfully stupid. I was thinking all the time how I wanted to love, and how I wanted dope, and how I wanted to stop dope so that the dope might do me some good.
I couldn’t really feel. It was a dull, blind sense of discomfort. I was awfully nervous, too. I felt as if I were somehow caught in a trap; as if I had got into the wrong house by mistake and couldn’t get out again. I didn’t know what might be behind all those doors; and I was quite alone. Cockie was there; but he couldn’t do a thing to help me. I couldn’t call to him. The link between us was broken.
And yet apart from all the fear I had for myself, there was an even deeper fear on his account. There is something in me that loves him, something deeper than life; but it won’t talk to me.
I sat through the show like being in a nightmare. I was clinging desperately to him; and he didn’t seem to understand me and my need. We were strangers.
I think he was feeling rather good. He talked in a charming, light, familiar way; but every smile was an insult, every caress was a stab.
We got back to the Savoy, utterly worn out and wretched. We kept on taking H. and C. all night; we couldn’t sleep, we talked about the drugs. It was just a long argument about how to take them. We felt we were somehow doing it wrong.
I had been so proud of his medical knowledge, and yet it didn’t seem to throw any light.
It seems that in the medical books, they speak of what they call “Drug virginity”. The thing was to get it back; and according to the books the only way to do it is to take nothing for a long time.
He said it was really just the same as any other appetite. If you have a big lunch, you can’t expect to be hungry at tea-time.
But then, what is one to do in the meanwhile?
August 18
We lay in bed very late. I didn’t seem to miss my sleep; but I was too weak to get out of bed.
We had to buck ourselves up in the usual way, and manage to get downstairs for lunch.
London is quite empty and terribly dull. We met Mabel Black by accident
walking in Bond Street. She is looking frightfully ill. I can see she dopes too hard. Of course, the trouble with her is she hasn’t got a man. She has a lot of men round her. She could marry any day she liked.
We talked about it a bit. She hasn’t got the energy, she said, and the idea of men disgusts her.
She wears the most wonderful boots. She has a new pair almost every day, and hardly ever puts the same pair on twice. I think she’s a little bit crazy. . . .
London seems different somehow. I used to be interested in every funny little detail. I want to get back to myself. Drugs help me to get almost there; but there is always one little corner to turn and they never take one round. . . .
August 19
We got back from Bond Street bored and stupefied. We went off unexpectedly to sleep; and when we woke it was this morning. I can’t understand why a long sleep like that doesn’t refresh one. We’re both absolutely fagged.
Cockie said a meal would put us right, and he rang down for breakfast in bed. But when it came, we couldn’t either of us eat it.
I remember what Haidé said about the spiritual life. We were being prepared to take our places in the new order of Humanity. It’s perfectly right that one should have to undergo a certain amount of discomfort. You couldn’t expect anything else. It’s nature’s way. . . .
We picked ourselves up with five or six goes of heroin. It’s no use taking cocaine unless you’re feeling pretty good already. . . .
The supply is really awfully small. Confound this silly holiday habit. It really isn’t fair of Gretel to let us down like this.
We went to the Cafe Wisteria. Somebody introduced us to somebody that said he could get all he wanted.
But now there was a new nuisance. The police find it troublesome and dangerous to attend to the crime wave. Besides they’re too busy enforcing regulations. England’s altogether different since the war. You never know where you are. Nobody takes any interest in politics in the way they used to, and nobody bothers any more about the big ideas.
I was taught about Magna Charta and the liberty of the individual, and freedom slowly broadening down from precedent to precedent, and so on and so forth.
All sorts of stupid interference with the rights of the citizen gets passed under our noses without our knowing what it is. For all I know, it may be a crime to wear a green hat with a pink dress.
Well, it would be a crime; but I don’t think it’s the business of the police.
I read in a paper the other day that a committee of people in Philadelphia had decided that a skirt must be not less than seven and a half inches from the ground – or not more. I don’t know which and I don’t know why. Anyhow, the net result is that the price of cocaine has gone up from a pound an ounce to anything you like to pay. So of course everybody wants it whether they want it or not, and anybody but a member of parliament would know that if you offer a man twenty or thirty times what a thing is worth in itself, he’ll go to a lot of trouble to make you want to buy it. . . .
Well, we found this man was a fraud. He tried to sell us packets of snow in the dark. He tried to prevent Cockie examining the stuff by pretending to be afraid of the police.
But as it happened, Cockie’s long suit was chemistry. He was the wrong man to try to sell powdered borax to at a guinea a sniff. He told the man he’d rather have Beecham’s Pills.
What I love about Cockie is the witty way he talks. But somehow or other, the flashes don’t come like they did – not so often, I mean. Besides which, he seems to be making his jokes to himself.
Most of the time, I don’t get what he means. He talks to himself a great deal, for another thing. I get a feeling of absolute repulsion.
I don’t know why it is. The least thing irritates me absurdly. I think it’s because every incident, even the things that are pleasant, distracts my mind from the one thing that matters – how to get a supply and go down to Kent and lay off for a bit and have a really good time like we used to last month. I am sure love would come back if we did, and love’s the only thing that counts in this world or the next.
I feel that it’s only round the corner; but a miss is as good as a mile. It makes it somehow worse to be so near and yet so far. . . .
A very funny thing has just struck me. There’s something in one’s mind that prevents one from thinking of the thing one wants to.
It was perfectly silly of us to be hunting round London for dope and getting mixed up with a rotten crowd like we did in Naples. It never struck us till tonight that all we had to do was to go round to King Lamus. He would give us all we needed at the proper price.
Funny, too, it was Cockie that thought of that. I know he hates the man, though he never said so except in an outburst which I knew didn’t mean anything. . . .
We went to the studio in a taxi. Curse the luck, he was out! There was a girl there, a tall, thin woman with a white face like a wedge. We gave several hints; but she didn’t rise, and wretched as we were, we didn’t want to spoil the market by telling her outright.
Lamus would be there in the morning, she said.
We said we’d be there at eleven o’ clock.
We drove back. We had a rotten night economising. We didn’t dare tell each other what we really feared: that somehow he might let us down. . . .
I can’t sleep. Cockie is lying awake with his eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. He doesn’t stir a muscle. It maddens me that he takes no interest in me. But after all, I take no interest in him. I am as restless as the wandering Jew. At the same time, I can’t settle down to anything. I keep on scribbling this stuff in my diary. It relieves me somehow to write what I feel.
What is so utterly damnable is that I understand what I am doing. This complaining rambling rubbish is the substitute which has taken the place of love.
What have I done to forfeit love? I feel as if I had died and got forgotten in some beastly place where there was nothing but hunger and thirst. Nothing means anything any more except dope, and dope itself doesn’t really mean anything vital.
August 20
I am so tired, so tired, so tired I . . .
My premonition was right about Lamus. There was a very unpleasant scene. We were both frightfully wretched when we got there. (I can’t get my hands and feet warm, and there’s something wrong with my writing).
Peter Pan thought it best to remind him in a jocular way about his remark that we were to come when we needed him, and then introduced the subject of what we needed.
But he took the words brutally out of our mouths.
“You needn’t tell me what you need,” he said. “The lack is only too obvious.”
He said it in a non-committal way so that we couldn’t take offence; but we knew instinctively he meant brains.
However, Peter stuck to his guns, like the game little devil he is. That’s why I love him.
“Oh, yes, heroin,” said Lamus, “cocaine. We regret exceedingly to be out of it for the moment.”
The brute seemed unconscious of our distress. He gave an imitation of an apologetic shop-walker.
“But let me show you our latest lines on morphine.”
Cockie and I looked at each other wanly. Morphine would no doubt be better than nothing. And then, if you please, the beast pulled a review with a blue cover out of a revolving bookcase and read aloud a long poem. His intonation was so dramatic, he gave so vivid a picture that we sat spell-bound. It seemed as if he had long pincers twisted in our entrails, and were wrenching at them. He gave me the verses when he had finished.
“You ought to paste these,” he said, “in your Magical Diary.”
So I have. I hardly know why. There’s a sort of pleasure in torturing oneself. Is that it?
Thirst!
Not the thirst of the throat
Though that be the wildest and worst
Of physical pangs –
that smote
Alone to the heart of Christ,
Wringing the one wild cry
“I thirst!” from His agony,
While the soldiers drank and diced:
Not the thirst benign
That calls the worker to wine;
Not the bodily thirst
(Though that be frenzy accurst)
When the mouth is full of sand,
And the eyes are gummed up, and the ears
Trick the soul till it hears
Water, water at hand,
When a man will dig his nails
In his breast, and drink the blood
Already that clots and stales
Ere his tongue can tip its flood,
When the sun is a living devil
Vomiting vats of evil,
And the moon and the night but mock
The wretch on his barren rock,
And the dome of heaven high-arched
Like his mouth is and and parched,
And the caves of his heart high-spanned
Are choked with alkali sand!
Not this! but a thirst uncharted
Body and soul alike
Traitors turned black-hearted,
Seeking a space to strike
In a victim already attuned
To one vast chord of wound
Every separate bone
Cold, an incarnate groan
Distilled from the icy sperm
Of Hell’s implacable worm;
Every drop of the river
Of blood aflame and a-quiver
With poison secret and sour –
With a sudden twitch at the last
Like certain jagged daggers.
(With bloodshot eyes dull-glassed
The screaming Malay staggers
Through his village aghast).
Diary of a Drug Fiend Page 15