We could go to Barley Grange, but it’s too much trouble. Besides, it might break the spell of our happiness. We’re both a little afraid about that.
It happened once before, and we don’t want to take any chances. It wants a lot of clever steering to keep the course. For instance, we took too much one night and made ourselves sick. It took three or four hours to get back, and that was absolute hell. My heart is a little fretful at times. It’s certainly great, Peter Pan having medical knowledge. He went out and got some strychnine and put me right.
Champagne helps H. quite a lot. You mustn’t drink it off. The thing to do is to sip it very slowly. It helps one to move one’s hands.
We sent out a boy and got in three dozen small bottles.
September 5
The world is a pig. It keeps on putting its nose where it isn’t wanted. We are overdrawn at the bank. Cockie had to write to Mr. Wolfe.
“It ought to be stopped,” he cried, “it amounts to brawling in church!”
A flash of the old Peter Pan!
September 8
The woman says it’s Tuesday, and we’re running awfully short. Why can’t people keep their promises? I’m sure Mabel said Sunday.
Chapter III
THE GRINDING OF THE BRAKES
September
Peter and I have had a long, nasty quarrel, and I had to pull his hair for him. It broke one of my nails. I’ve let them go very long. I don’t know when I was manicured last.
For some reason, they’re dry and brittle. I must have them done. I’d send the boy out, but I don’t like the idea of a strange girl coming here. One never knows what may go wrong. It doesn’t really matter, either. The body is merely a nuisance, and it hurts.
“So blood wrenches its pain
Sardonic through heart and brain.”
I am beginning to hate that horrible poem. It haunts me. I don’t know why I should remember it like I do.
Have I been reading it, I wonder? Or perhaps it is the incredible access of intellectual power which heroin gives that has improved my memory. Anyhow, the fact is that odd bits of it come swimming into my mind like goldfish darting in and out among streaming seaweed.
Oh, yes, my quarrel with Cockie. He said we mustn’t risk being absolutely short of the suit; and I must go and get a new supply from Mabel before we ran clean out. I can’t help seeing that Cockie is degenerating morally. He ought to be ashamed of himself. He ought to have made proper arrangements for a regular supply instead of relying on me.
He lies there all the time perfectly useless. He hasn’t washed or shaved in a month, and he knows perfectly well that I detest dirt and untidiness. One of the things that attracted me most about him was his being so spruce and well-groomed and alert. He has changed altogether, since we came to London. I feel there is some bad influence at work on him. . . .
This place is full of vermin. I found what had been annoying me. I think I shall bob my hair. I’m awfully proud of its length, but one must be practical. . . .
I am lying down for a bit. It was a frightful nuisance getting ready to go out. Cockie nagged and bullied all the time.
I’m stiff all over, and it seems such waste of time to wash and dress, besides, the irritation of the interruption, and my clothes are impossible. I’ve been sleeping in them. I wish we’d brought some trunks from the Savoy. No, I don’t, it would have been a lot of trouble, and interfered with our heroin honeymoon.
It’s best the way it is. I wish I had Jacqueline here all the same. I need a maid, and she could have gone out and got things. But we both felt that any one at all would be a pill. The old woman doesn’t bother us, thank goodness. I’m sure she still thinks we’re spies. Bother, what’s this? . . .
Damn! It’s a letter from Basil!
(Note. The original of this letter was destroyed. It is now printed from the carbon copy in the files of Mr. King Lamus. Ed.)
“Dear Unlimitted Lou, – Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. You will, I am sure, forgive me for boring you with a letter; but you know what a crank I am, and it is my mania just now to collect information about the psychology of people who are trying to advance spiritually in the way we spoke about when you so charmingly dawned on my studio the other morning.”
“Do you find, in particular, that there is any difficulty in calling a halt? If so, is it not perhaps because you hear on all sides – especially from people quite ignorant of the subject, such as journalists, doctors and parrots – that it is in fact impossible to do so? Of course, I don’t doubt that you immediately killed any such ‘pernicious suggestion’ by a counter-suggestion based on my positive statement, from experience, that people of strong character and high intelligence like yourself and Sir Peter – to whom please give my most cordial greetings! – were perfectly well able to use these things in moderation as one does soap.”
“But, apart from this, do you find that the life of a ‘Heroine’ makes you abnormally ‘suggestible’?”
“As you know, I object to the methods of Coué and Baudouin. They ask us deliberately to abandon free will and clear mentality for the semi-hypnotic state of the medieval peasant; to return like ‘the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire’ from which we have been extricated by evolution.”
“Now, doesn’t waltzing with the Hero’s Bride or making Snow Men tend to put you into a state of mind which is too dreamy to resist the action of any strenuous idea which is presented to it strongly enough, is too dead to feeling to wish to resist, or so excitable that it is liable to be carried away by its admiration for any fascinatingly forceful personality?”
“I should be so glad to have your views on these points; and, of course, your personal confirmation of my theory that people like you and Sir Peter can use these substances with benefit to yourselves and others, without danger of becoming slaves. I have trained myself and many others to stop at Will; but every additional affidavit to this effect is of great value to me in my present campaign to destroy the cowardly superstition that manhood and womanhood are incapable of the right and proper use of anything whatever in nature. We have tamed the wild lightning, after all; shall we run away from a packet of powder?”
Love is the law, love under will.
With my kind regards to Sir Peter, Yours ever,
“BASIL KING LAMUS.”
Satirical, sneering stupidity – or is he a devil incarnate, as Gretel told us he was? Does he gloat? I loathe the beast – and I thought – once – well, never mind! Peter took the letter. Anything, anything to distract the mind from its boredom! Yet we haven’t the energy to do anything: we take whatever comes to us, and clutch at it feebly. “It’s true,” said Cockie, to my amazement, “and we’ve got to be able to tell him we’ve won.” There was a long quarrel – as there is over every incident of any sort. That is natural, with this eternal insomnia and sleeping at the wrong time. I hated Peter (and K.L.) the more because I knew all the time he was right. If K.L. is a Devil, it’s up to us to get the last laugh. I tore the beastly letter into shreds. Peter has gone out – I hope he has gone to kill him. I want to be thrilled – just once more – if I had to be hanged for it myself.
Our watches have run down. It doesn’t matter. I can call on Mabel any time I like. I may as well go now. I’ll drink a small bottle and go along. . . .
It is night. Cockie has not returned. just when I needed him most! I’m frightened of myself. I’m stark staring sober. I went to the glass to take my hat off. I didn’t know who I was. There is no flesh on my face. My complexion’s entirely gone. My hair is lustreless and dry, and it’s coming out in handfuls. I think I must be ill. I’ve a good mind to send for a doctor. But I daren’t. It has been a frightful shock!
I must pull myself together and write it up.
It was about five o’ clock when I got to Mount Street. If Mabel wasn’t in, I could wait.
A strange man answered the door. It annoyed me. I felt frightened. Why had she changed Cartwright? I felt faint. Had something told me?
It embarrassed me to ask “Is Mrs. Black at home?” The man answered as if he had been asked the time.
“Mrs. Black is dead.”
Something inside me screamed. “But I must see her,” I cried insanely, feeling the ground cut suddenly from under my feet.
“I’m afraid it’s impossible, madame,” he said, misunderstanding me altogether. “She was buried yesterday morning. “
So that was why she hadn’t sent the stuff! I stood as if I was in a trance. I heard him explaining, mechanically. I did not take in what he was saying. It was like a record being made on a gramophone.
“She was only ill two days,” the man said. “The doctors called it septic pneumonia.”
I suppose I thanked him, and went away automatically. I found myself at home without knowing how I got here. Something told me that the real cause of her death was heroin, though, as a matter of fact, septic pneumonia can happen to any one at any moment.
I’ve known two or three people go off like that.
As my Uncle John used to say, conscience makes cowards of us all.
King Lamus was always saying that as long as one has any emotion about any thing, love or fear or anything else, one can’t observe things correctly. That’s why a doctor won’t attend his own family, and I can see coldly and clearly like a drowning man that whenever the idea of H. comes into my mind, I begin to think hysterically and come to the most idiotic conclusions; and heroin has twined itself about my life so closely that everything is connected with it one way or another.
My mind is obsessed by the thought of the drug. Sometimes it’s a weird ecstasy, sometimes a dreadful misgiving.
“Not thirst in the brain black-bitten
In the soul more sorely smitten!
One dare not think of the worst!
Beyond the raging and raving
Hell of the physical craving,
Lies, in the brain benumbed,
At the end of time and space,
An abyss, unmeasured, unplumbed –
The haunt of a face.”
September 12
Peter came in just as I had finished writing this account. He seemed much more cheerful, and his arms were full of books.
“There,” he said, throwing them on the bed, “that will refresh my memory, in case we have any trouble in stopping. I’ll show Mr. King Lamus what it means to be a Pendragon.”
I told him about Mabel. And now a strange thing happened. Instead of being depressed, we felt a current of mysterious excitement, rippling at first, then raging and roaring in every nerve. It was as if the idea of her death exhilarated us. He took me in his arms for the first time in – is it weeks or months? His hot breath coiled like a snake about my ear, and thrilled my hair like an electric machine. With a strange ghastly intensity his voice, trembling with passion, strummed the intoxicating words:
“Olya! the golden bait
Barbed with infinite pain,
Fatal, fanatical mate
Of a poisoned body and brain!
Olya, the name that leers
Its lecherous longing and knavery,
Whispers in crazing ears
The secret spell of her slavery.”
The room swam before my eyes. We were wreathed in spirals of dark blue smoke bursting with crimson flashes.
He gripped me with epileptic fury, and swung me round in a sort of savage dance. I had an intuition that he was seeing the same vision as I was. Our souls were dissolved into one; a giant ghost that enveloped us.
I hissed the next lines through my teeth, feeling myself a fire-breathing dragon.
“Horror indeed intense,
Seduction ever intenser,
Swinging the smoke of sense
From the bowl of a smouldering censer!”
We were out of breath. My boy sat on the edge of the bed. I crept up behind him. I shook out my hair all over his face, and dug my nails into his scalp.
We were living the heroin life, the life of the world of the soul. We had identified ourselves with the people of the poem. He was the poet, wreathed with poppies, with poisonous poppies that corrupted his blood, and I was the phantom of his delirium, the hideous vampire that obsessed him.
Little drops of blood oozed from his scalp and clotted to black under my greedy nails. He spoke the next lines as if under some cruel compulsion. The words were wrenched from him by some overwhelming necessity. His tone was colourless, as if the ultimate anguish had eaten up his soul. And all this agony and repulsion exercised a foul fascination. He suffered a paroxysm of pleasure such as pleasure itself had never been able to give him. And I was Olya, I was his love, his wife, world without end, the demon whose supreme delight was to destroy him.
“Behind me, behind and above,
She stands, that mirror of love.
Her fingers are subtle-jointed
Her nails are polished and pointed,
And tipped with spurs of gold:
With them she rowels the brain.
Her lust is critical, cold;
And her Chinese cheeks are pale,
As she daintily picks, profane
With her octopus lips, and the teeth
Jagged and black beneath,
Pulp and blood from a nail.”
I jerked his head back, and fastened my mouth on his. I sucked his breath into my lungs. I wanted to choke him; but there was time enough for that. I would torture him a few years longer first.
I leapt away from him. He panted heavily. When he got his breath back, he glared at me horribly with the pin-point pupils of his sightless eyes.
He began with romantic sadness, changing to demoniac glee.
“She was incarnate love
In the hours when I first awoke her.
Little by little I found
The truth of her, stripped of clothing,
Bitter beyond all bound,
Leprous beyond all loathing.”
We shouted with delight, and fell into a fit of hysterical laughter. We came out of it completely exhausted.
I must have slept for a while.
When I woke he was sitting at the table under the yellow gas jet, reading the books he had bought.
Somehow, the past had been washed out of us. We found ourselves intent on the idea of stopping H.; and the books didn’t help very much. They were written in a very positive way. The writers quarrelled among themselves like a Peace Conference.
But they all agreed on two points: that it was beyond the bounds of human possibility to break off the habit by one’s own efforts. At the best, the hope was pitifully poor. The only chance was a “cure” in a place of restraint. And they all gave very full details of the horrors and dangers of the process. The physician, they said, must steel his heart against every human feeling, and refuse inexorably the petitions of the patient. Yet he must always be ready with his syringe, in case of a sudden collapse threatening life itself.
There were three principal methods of cure: Cutting the drug off at once, and trust to the patient’s surviving; then there was a long tedious method of diminishing the daily dose. It was a matter of months. During the whole of the time, the agony of the patient continues in a diluted form. It was the choice between plunging into boiling oil and being splashed with it every day for an indefinite period. Then there was an intermediate method in which the daily amount was reduced by a series of jerks. As Peter said, one was to be sentenced to be flogged at irregular intervals without knowing exactly when. One would be living in a state of agonising apprehension which would probably be more morally painful than in either of the other ways.
In all cases alike there was no hint of any true comprehension of the ac
tual situation. There was no attempt to remove the original causes of the habit; and they all admitted that the cure was only temporary, and that the rule was relapse.
There was also a horribly disquieting impression that the patient could not trust the honesty of the doctor. Some of them openly advocated attempts to deceive the patient by injecting plain water. Others had a system of giving other drugs in conjunction with the permitted dose, with the deliberate intention of making the patient so ill that he would rather bear the tortures of abstention than those devised by his doctor.
I felt too, that if I went to one of those places, I should never know what trick might be played on me next. They were cruel, clumsy traps set by ignorant and heartless charlatans. I began to understand the intensity of jealousy with which the regular physician regards the patent-medicine vender and the Christian scientist.
They were witch-doctors with a licence from government to torture and kill at extravagant prices. They guarded their prerogatives with such ferocity because they were aware of their own ignorance and incompetence; and if their victims found them out their swindle would be swept away. They were always trying to extend their tyranny. They were always wanting new laws to compel everybody, sick or well, to be bound to the vivisection table, and have some essential organ of the body cut out. And they were brazen enough to give the reason. They didn’t understand what use it was! And everybody must be injected with all sorts of disgusting serums and vaccines ostensibly to protect them against some disease which there was no reason whatever to suppose they were likely to get. . . .
The last three days have been too dreadful. This is the first time I have felt like writing, and yet I have been itching insanely to put down that hideously luxurious scene when our love broke out like an abscess. All the old fantastic features were there. They had assumed a diabolical disguise; but my mind has been in abeyance. We shut the medical books with a shudder, and slung them out of the window into the street. A little crowd gathered; they were picked up, and the passers-by began talking about what was to be done. We realised the rashness of our rage. The last thing was to attract attention! We pulled the frowsy old curtains across, and put out the light.
Diary of a Drug Fiend Page 18