The reaction of our reading was terrific. We venomously contrasted the calm confidence of King Lamus with the croaking clamour of the “authorities”.
Cockie summed up the situation with a quotation.
“Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore!”’
Our thoughts splashed to and fro like an angry sea in a cave. These three days have been a flux of fugitive emotion. We are resolved to stop taking H.; and there the memory of Lamus’s letter was like a rope held by a trustworthy leader for a novice on some crumbling crag.
If we could only have relied on that! But our minds were shaken by panic.
Those cursed medical cowards! Those pompous prophets of evil! Every time we came back to the resolution to stop, they pulled us off the rock.
“It’s beyond human power.”
But they know which side their bread’s buttered. it’s their game to discourage their dupes.
But they had over-played their hand. They had painted their picture in too crude colours. They revolted us.
Again, the effect of Mabel’s death, and the fact that our supplies were so short, combined to drive us into the determination to stop at whatever cost.
We struggled savagely hour by hour. There were moments when the abstinence itself purged us by sheer pain of the capacity to suffer. Our minds began to wander. We were whirled on the wings of woe across the flaming skies of anguish.
I remember Peter standing at the table, lost to all sense of actuality. He cried in a shrill, cracked voice:
“Her cranial dome is vaulted,
Her mad Mongolian eyes
Aslant with the ecstasies
Of things immune, exalted
Far beyond stars and skies,
Slits of amber and jet –”
I heard him across abysses of aching inanity. A thrill of Satanic triumph tingled in my soul, and composed a symphony from its screams. I leapt with lust to recognise myself in the repulsive phantasm pictured by the poet.
“Her snout for the quarry set
Fleshy and heavy and gross,
Bestial, broken across,
And below it her mouth that drips
Blood from the lips
That hide the fangs of the snake,
Drips on venomous udders
Mountainous flanks that fret,
And the spirit sickens and shudders
At the hint of a worse thing yet.”
We had, on the other side, some spasms of weakness; a ghastly sensation of the sinking of the spirit. It’s the same unescapable dread that seizes one when one is in a lift which starts down too quickly, or when one swoops too suddenly in a ’plane. Waves of weakness washed over us as if we were corpses cast up by the sea from a shipwreck. A shipwreck of our souls.
And in these hideous hours of helplessness, we drifted down the dark and sluggish river of inertia towards the stagnant and stinking morass of insanity.
We were obsessed by the certainty that we could never pull through. We said nothing at first. We were sunk in a solemn stupor. When it found voice at last, it was to whimper the surrender. The Unconditional Surrender of our integrity and our honour!
We eked out our small allowance of H. with doses of strychnine to ward off the complete collapse of all our physical faculties, and we picked ourselves up a bit on the moral plane by means of champagne.
In these moments of abdication we talked in fragile whispers, plans for getting supplies. We had both of us a certain shame in admitting to each other that we were renegades. We felt that in future we should never be able to indulge frankly and joyously as we had hitherto done. We should become furtive and cunning; we should conceal from each other what we were doing, although it was obvious to us both.
I slipped out this afternoon on tiptoe, thinking Peter was asleep, but he turned like a startled snake just as I made for the door.
“Where are you going, Lou?”
His voice was both piteous and harsh. I had not thought of inventing a pretext; but a lie slipped ready-made from my tongue.
“I am going to Basil, to see if he can’t give me something to help us out.”
I knew he didn’t believe me, and I knew he didn’t care where I went or what I did. He was not shocked at my lying to him – the first time I had ever done so.
I took a taxi round to the studio. My lie was half truth. I was going to ask him to help in the cure; but my real object was to induce him, no matter how, to give me at least one dose. I didn’t care how I got it. I would try pretending illness. I would appeal to our old relations, and I would look about slyly to see if I couldn’t find some and steal it. And I didn’t mean to let Peter know.
On the top of everything else was the torture of shame. I had always been proud of my pride. A subtle serenity made my brain swim when I got into the street. It delighted me to be alone – to have got rid of Peter. I felt him as a restraining influence, and I had shaken him off. I despised myself for having loved him. I wanted to go to the devil my own way.
I found Basil in, and alone. What luck! That hateful tall thin girl was out of the way.
Basil received me with his usual greeting. It stung me to the quick like an insult. What right had he to reproach me? And why should “Do what thou wilt” sound like a reproach?
As a rule he added something to the phrase. He slid into ordinary conversation with a kind of sinuous grace. There was always something feline about him. He reminded me of a beautiful, terrible tiger winding his way through thick jungle.
But today, he stopped short with dour decision. It was as if he had fired a shot, and was waiting to see the effect. But he motioned me silently into my usual armchair, lit a cigarette for me and put it into my mouth, switched in the electric kettle for tea, and sat on the corner of his big square table swinging his leg. His eyes were absolutely motionless; yet I felt that they were devouring my body and soul inch by inch.
I wriggled on my chair as I used to do at school when I didn’t feel sure whether I had been found out in something or not.
I tried to cover my confusion by starting a light conversation; but I soon gave it up. He was taking no notice of my remarks. To him they were simply one of my symptoms.
I realised with frightful certitude that my plans were impossible. I couldn’t fool this man, I couldn’t play on his passions, I couldn’t steal in his presence.
Despite myself, my lie had become the truth. I could only do what I said I was coming to do; to ask him to help me out. No, not even that. I had not got rid of Peter after all.
With King Lamus, I found I couldn’t think of myself. I had to think of Peter. I was absolutely sincere when I said with a break in my voice, “Cockie’s in an awful mess.”
I had it in my mind to add, “Can’t you do something to help him?” and then I changed it to “Won’t you?” and then I couldn’t say it at all. I knew it was wasting words. I knew that he could and he would.
He came over and sat on the arm of my chair, and took down my hair, and began playing with the plaits. The action was as absolutely natural and innocent as a kitten playing with a skein of wool.
It stabbed my vanity to the heart for a second to realise that he could do a thing like that without mixing it up with sexual ideas. Yet it was that very superiority to human instincts that made me trust him.
“Sir Peter’s not here,” he said lightly and kindly,
I knew that it had pleased him that I had not mentioned my own troubles.
“But it’s you, my dear girl, that I see in my wizard’s spy-glass, on a lee shore with your masts all gone by the board, and the Union Jack upside down flying from a stump, and your wireless hero tapping out S.O.S.”
He dropped my hair and lighted his pipe. Then he began to play with it again.
“And some on boards, and some on broken pieces of the ship, they all came safe to land.�
��
One’s familiarity with the New Testament makes a quotation somehow significant, however little one may believe in the truth of the book.
I felt that his voice was the voice of a prophet. I felt myself already saved.
“You take some of this,” he went on, bringing a white tablet from a little cedar cabinet, and a big glass of cold water. “Throw your head back, and get it well down, and drink all this right off. Here is another to take home to your husband, and don’t forget the water. It will calm you down; your nerves have all gone west. I’ve got some people coming here in a few minutes. But this will help you through the night, and I’m coming round in the morning to see you. What’s the address?”
I told him. My face blazed with the disgrace. A house where the top social note was a fifth-rate musician in a jazz-band, and the bottom where we don’t give it a name.
He jotted it down as if it had been the Ritz. But I could feel in my over-sensitive state the disgust in his mind. It was as if he had soiled his pencil.
The tablet made me feel better; but I think that the atmosphere of the man did more than its share of the work. I felt nearly normal when I got up to go.
I didn’t want his friends to see me. I knew too well what I was looking like.
He stopped me at the door.
“You haven’t any of that stuff, I take it?” he said.
And I felt an inexpressible sense of relief. His tone implied that he had taken charge of us.
“No,” I said, “we used up the last grain some time ago.”
“I won’t ask you to remember when,” he replied.
“I know too well how muddled one gets. And besides, when one starts this experiment, the clock doesn’t tell one much, as you know.”
My self-respect came back to me with a rush. He insisted on our regarding ourselves as pioneers of science and humanity. We were making an experiment; we were risking life and reason for the sake of mankind.
Of course, it wasn’t true. And yet, who can tell the real root of one’s motives? If he chose to insist that we were doing what the leaders of thought have always done, how could I contradict him?
A buoyant billow of bliss bounded in my brain. It might not be true; but, by God, we’d make it come true.
I suppose a light leapt in my eyes, and enabled him to read my thought.
“Respice finem! judge the end;
The man, and not the child, my friend!”
he quoted gaily.
And then, to my absolute blank amazement, he took me back into the studio, got a bottle of heroin from the cedar cabinet and shook out a small quantity on to a scrap of paper. He twisted it up, and put it in my hand.
“Don’t be surprised,” he laughed, “your face tells me that it’s all right. You hadn’t got that look of a dying duck in a thunderstorm which shows that you’re wholly enslaved. As Sir Peter very cleverly pointed out the other day, you can’t stop unless you’ve got something to stop with. You’re keeping your magical diary, of course.”
“Oh, yes,” I cried gladly; I knew how important he thought the record was.
He shook his head comically.
“Oh, no, Miss Unlimited Lou, not what I call a magical diary. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for not knowing the hours, minutes, and seconds since the last dose. Nous allons changer tout cela. You can take this if you like, and when you like. I merely put it up to you as a sort of sporting proposition that you should see how long you can manage to keep off it. But I trust you to make a note of the exact time when you decide on a sniff, and I trust you to tell me the truth. Get it out of your mind once and for all that I disapprove of your taking it. It’s entirely your business, not mine. But it’s every one’s business to be true to himself; and you must regard me as a mere convenience, an old hand at the game whose experience may be of use to you in training for the fight.”
I hurried home a different woman. I didn’t want to save myself. I felt myself as a suit of armour made for the purpose of protecting Peter. My integrity was important not for my own sake but for his.
Peter is out, so I have written this up. How surprised he will be. . . .
I wonder why he is so long, and where he has gone. It is very uncomfortable, waiting, with nothing to do. I should like a dose. The tablet has not made me sleepy; it seems to have calmed me. It has taken the edge off that hateful restlessness. I can bear it as far as that goes, if only I had something to do to take my mind off things. My mind keeps prowling around the little packet of paper in my bag. I turn a thousand corners; but it is always waiting behind all of them. There is something terrifying about the fatality of the stuff. It seems to want to convince you that it’s useless to try to escape. One’s thoughts always recur to lots of other subjects which we don’t think of as obsessing. Why should we have this idea in connection with dope and be unable to do anything to throw it off? What’s the difference?
Chapter IV
BELOW THE BRUTES
September 13
I wonder how I have lived through this. Peter came in last night just after I had closed my diary. I had never seen him like it before; his eyes were half out of his head, bloodshot and furious. He must have been drinking like a madman. He was trembling with rage. He came straight up to me, and hit me deliberately in the face.
“That’ll teach you,” he shouted, and called me a foul name.
I couldn’t answer. I was too hurt, not by the blow, but by the surprise. I had pictured it so differently.
He staggered back into the middle of the room and pointed to the blood that was running down my face. The edge of his ring had cut the corner of my eye. The sight sent him into fits of hysterical laughter.
The only feeling in my mind was that he was ill that it was my duty to nurse him. I tried to go to the door to get help. He thought I was escaping, and flung me back right across the room on to the bed, howling with rage.
“You can get away with it at once,” he said, “but that’s enough. You wait right here, and see whether Mr. Bloody King Lamus will come to fetch you. Don’t fret; I expect he will. He likes dirt, the filthy beast!”
I burst out crying. The contrast between the two men was too shocking. And I belonged to this screaming swearing bully with his insane jealousy and his senseless brutality!
I would rather have swept out Basil’s studio for the rest of my life than be Lady Pendragon.
What masters of irony the gods are! I had been swimming in a glowing flood of glory; I had been almost delirious to think I was the wife of a man in whose veins ran the blood of England’s greatest king; of him whose glamour had gilded the centuries with romance; to think that I might hold such royal heirship under my heart. What radiant rapture!
And Peter himself had shown himself worthy of his ancestry. Had not he too beaten back the heathen and saved England?
So this was the end of my dream! This brawling ruffian was my man!
I sat stupefied while his incoherent insults battered my brain; but my indignation was not for myself. I had deserved all I was getting; but what right had this foul-mouthed coward to take in his mouth the name of a man like King Lamus?
My silence seemed to exasperate him more than if I had taken up the quarrel. He swayed and swore with blind ferocity. He didn’t seem to know where I was. It was getting dark. He groped his way round the room looking for me; but he passed me twice before he found me. The third time he stumbled up against me, gripped me by the shoulder, and began to strike.
I sat as if I were paralysed. I could not even scream. Again and again he swore and struck me savagely, yet so weakly that I could not feel the blows. Besides, I was dulled to all possible pain. Presently he collapsed, and rolled over on the bed. I thought for a moment he was dead, and then he was seized by a series of spasms; his muscles twisted and twitched; his hands clawed at the air; he began to mutter rapidly and unintelli
gibly. I was horribly frightened.
I got up and lit the gas. The poor boy’s face was white as death; but small, dark crimson flushes burnt on the cheek-bones.
I sat at the table for some time and thought. I didn’t dare send for a doctor. He might know what was the matter and take him away from me; take him to one of those torture-traps, and he’d never get out.
I knew what he wanted, of course; a little heroin would bring him round all right. I told him I had some. I had to tell him several times before he understood.
When he did, the mere thought helped to restore him but there remained an ort of rage, and he told me to give it him, with a greedy snarl. If I had wanted to keep it from him, I shouldn’t have let him know I had it.
I brought him the stuff, sitting down by his side and lifting his head with one hand while I gave it to him on the back of the other. My heart sank like a stone in deep water. The old familiar attitude, the old familiar act! – and yet how different in every point!
The convulsive movements stopped immediately. He sat up almost at once on one elbow. The only sign of distress was that he still breathed heavily. All his anger, too, had disappeared. He seemed tired, like a convalescent, but as tractable as a child. He smiled faintly. I don’t know if he had any consciousness or memory of what had passed. He talked as if there had been no quarrel at all. The colour came back to his face, the light to his eyes.
“One more go like that, Lou,” he said, “and I’ll be all right.”
I wasn’t at all sure what King Lamus would have said; but it was my own responsibility, and I couldn’t refuse him.
He went off to sleep very soon after. In the morning I found out what had happened to him. He had been round to some of the men he used to know in the hospital to get them to give him some H., but they hadn’t dared to do it. They were suffering from a sense of insult about the new law, the Diabolical Dope Act. They had undergone a long and expensive training and had diplomas which made them responsible for the health of the community; and now they weren’t allowed to prescribe for their own patients. It was natural enough that they should be indignant.
Diary of a Drug Fiend Page 19