I began to realise what my governess used to call Weltschmertz; the universal sorrow wherein “Creation groaneth and travaileth until now.”
I understood Basil’s wish that we should undertake the fearful experiment which had brought us to such extremity. My insanity had been the result of my selfish vanity. I was not singled out for a unique destiny. The realisation of my own suffering had led me to understand that every one else was in the same boat. I could see even the false note of the contempt of the poet for those who had not experienced his own sublimity of horror.
“And you, you puritan others,
Who have missed the morphia. craving,
Cry scorn if I call you brothers,
Curl lip at my maniac raving,
Fools, seven times beguiled,
You have not known her? Well!
There was never a need she smiled
To harry you into hell!”
The pride of Satan, in the deepness of damnation, has a fall when he realises that others are in a same calamity – without having been at such perverse pains to get there. He only attains the truth when he becomes wholly impersonal, in the final paragraph.
“Morphia, is but one Spark of its secular fire.
She is the single sun –
Type of all desire!
All that you would you are –
And that is the crown of a craving.
You are slaves of the wormwood star.
Analysed, reason is raving.
Feeling, examined, is pain.
What heaven were to hope for a doubt of it!
Life is anguish, insane;
And death is – not a way out of it.”
I saw that all feeling, however it might seem to casual scrutiny, must be of the nature of pain, because it implied duality and imperfection; and that the nature of thought of whatever kind, must ultimately be insanity, because it expresses the relations between things, and never the things in themselves.
It became evident that the sorrow of the Universe was caused by the desire of manifestation, and that death could not do more than suppress one form of existence in favour of another. Of course, the impasse is complete. There seems to be no solution of the problem. It is a vicious circle.
At the same time, by acquiescence in actuality, the insane insistence on one’s individual anguish is abated. Sympathy with universal suffering brings one into a certain sombre serenity. It does not show us the way of escape, if such there be, but at least it makes the idea of escape thinkable. As long as one is trying to get out of the burning theatre for one’s own sake, the panic makes concerted action impossible. “Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost” is not the kind of order that is likely to secure victory. It does not even ensure the safety of any one man.
How quickly I had recovered my own well-being when I was forced to forget about it!
Peter is still desperately striving to save himself. “He that loveth his life shall lose it.” I must dedicate my miraculously restored faculties to his salvation. Only I don’t see how to set to work.
If only Basil were here. He would know. He has worked out the technique. All I can do is to love and labour blindly. After all, there must have been angels looking after me in some sense which I don’t pretend to understand. Why should they not be even more vigilant on his behalf?
I am only a foolish flapper not worth throwing into the waste-paper basket. He is a splendid man with a glorious past and endless possibilities for the future.
It won’t do to let him go under; and they must know that.
I won’t trouble my silly head about it, I’ll keep on loving and trusting.
October 26
I have forgotten about my diary all this time. I have been too busy with Peter. My memory is frightfully bad. I don’t seem able to fix things at all. Peter got stronger all the time. He is practically quite well now, and took me out and taught me to shoot pheasants this morning. It was terribly exciting. I actually got one, my very first day. I got a man and wife and their daughter to come in and do for us, so we’re really very comfortable, in a countrified way. I couldn’t have any one while Peter was raving.
The waiter from the inn is a Swiss. He kept his mouth shut; and I saw to it that he had no reason to regret the policy.
What I can’t remember is how Peter began to get better: mentally, I mean. I ought to have kept this diary properly, I know; but as he improved, he took up more and more of my time, and then I had to do so many things to have things ready for him when he was able to get up.
And now, I can’t think how it came about; but I believe the first sign of improvement was that the poem dropped out. He began to talk naturally about ordinary affairs. He was terribly weak and ill, and it had scared him. He was like an ordinary convalescent, I suppose signs of returning interests in the affairs of life. I had ceased to be a symbol. I was just his nurse.
Part of the time he had forgotten who I was. He was back in the base hospital; the time they winged him.
Our honeymoon and its sequel is mostly blotted out. I can’t say how much he knows. He says things sometimes which make me think it’s quite a lot.
And then again, other things which make me think he doesn’t even remember that I am his wife. This morning, for instance, he said: “I must go to London to see about a settlement I’m making in case I ever get married.”
And then, not half an hour afterwards, he referred to an incident of our life in Capri. I am careful not to contradict him or alarm him about the state of his mind, but it’s very difficult to know what to do. There are so many things I forget myself.
“How did we get down here?” Then again, “Where is Alice?” The name keeps on popping up, and yet I don’t know any one at all intimately or importantly with that name.
I had forgotten this diary – I found it by accident and immediately began to read it through to refresh my memory.
Most of the handwriting is unreadable. I puzzled and puzzled before I could make out the words. And then when I got the words, they were so senseless. I can’t believe that all that happened to me. Some of it came back slowly; curiously, the unimportant things came first.
I was amazed to find that Mabel Black was dead. I wrote her a letter only yesterday. Poor old girl!
The part, too about Dr. McCall. I could swear quite honestly that never happened. And yet it must have; for I found scraps of the dress in the cushions of the blue Chesterfield chewed to a pulp......
October 27
We have been shooting again; but it was cold and damp. We were neither of us interested and we were too weary to walk. Peter said nothing; but all the time I can feel how disgusted he is. We’re so rottenly let down. This afternoon I picked up the article of Sieveking’s. He is talking about the sensation of walking after a flight.
“One has an infinitely distressing sensation of being clamped down to the ground – manacled by the very grass-blades!”
We have been living so long at such a terrific bat, life is intolerable on any other terms.
I don’t feel any physical need of drugs any more. On the contrary, I feel a delightful bodily buoyancy at having got free. It’s an extraordinary thing, too, how normal appetite has returned. We’ve been eating five meals a day, one feeding like forty instead of Wordsworth’s forty feeding like one. We had been starving ourselves for months, and we had to make up for it. The most delicious sensation of all is the re-birth of healthy human love. Spring coming back to the earth!
But it doesn’t satisfy, even so. The intervals between one’s emotions are appallingly long. I think drugs intensify the high lights for one thing; but for another, and this is really more important, they fit up the interstices of shadow.
It’s hard, I imagine, in the ordinary way, to come off one’s honeymoon back into regular life. I often wonder how a poet feels when he is
n’t absorbed in the ecstasy of inspiration. That may be why so many of them go off the deep end, the interstices bore them.
I may as well face the facts. We’ve had a pretty narrow escape. We’ve got out of the mess more by good luck than by good judgment. But if it weren’t for that, I’m not sure that we shouldn’t be inclined to take another chance. Of course, as things are, it’s quite out of the question. It may not be the least of our luck that the lesson was so severe at it was.
October 30
The fact is, we’re too young. We don’t think of the obvious thing. Of course we’re bored stiff down here with the leaves all fallen, and the mist steaming up from the lake and swamping the house like a gas attack. We ought to be in London, and do the theatres, and look up a few of the old crowd. I ought really to see Maisie Jacobs and tell her how grateful I am.
Funny, I can’t think what I have to be grateful about. But luckily it’s in the diary.
Peter has got more silent and morose every day, like the weather. He seems to have something on his mind. I wish he’d tell me what it is.
He brightened up at dinner. “Let’s go to town tomorrow, Lou,” he said. “We’ll just take small bags. We needn’t be away more than two or three days. What we need is a few decent meals in a restaurant, and take in a show or two, and perhaps get a bunch down here to liven us up a bit. The birds are pretty good this year after all.”
October 31
It only struck us when we got into the train that we couldn’t possibly go to the Savoy with no clothes. Peter thought it would be a joke to go round to that place of ours in Greek Street.
It certainly will be amusing to look at it from the new point of view. He will take the bags on there, while I get one or two nice people together. We ought to give a little dinner to celebrate.
Here’s London at last. I’ll lock this up in my dressing case. . . .
Later – I can pocket the creature’s insolence at the price. It must have been on my mind. The first address I gave to the chauffeur was McCall’s. He looked shocked when I was announced.
“My dear Lady Pendragon,” he almost shouted at me very fast. “I know you’ll forgive me. I’m frightfully busy this afternoon.”
(There wasn’t a soul in his waiting-room.)
“If you’ll allow me, I think this is what you want, and I hope you will come and see me again soon. Always at your service, dear Lady Pendragon.”
While he was talking he half emptied a ten-gramme bottle into a piece of paper, twisted it up like a grocer, thrust it almost rudely into my hand, and bowed me out volubly and effusively into the street.
I went faint all over. The taxi was still there. I called him, and drove to Mme. Daubignac’s. I don’t know why, but I felt that I needed a treatment. I was trembling all over. It was worse when I went in: for I could see that she was as shocked as McCall.
Then I got in front of a glass. How is it that in all the times I’ve looked at myself in these months I’ve never seen what they see in a second?
Good God! it’s too awful to talk about. My face is drawn and haggard and pale and wrinkled. I might be sixty. Well, what do I care? I’ve had three beautiful sniffs!
Madame dolled me up as well as she could. Already I looked much better, and I felt superb.
Peter was out when I got to Greek Street; so I opened my dressing case and wrote this up, and had a few more sniffs. The only trouble before was simply our own foolishness. We didn’t take ordinary precautions. This time we’re going to watch out. . . .
Peter is back, furious. His pedlar has been pinched. So I came to the rescue.
“We’ll go out to dinner and make a night of it.”
We’ve arranged for a regular supply; but the hellish thing is that the stuff doesn’t work any more. We get the insomnia and those things all right, but we can’t get any fun out of it. We’ve tried all sorts of dodges. It’s no good. Being with it simply dulls the pain of being without. That’s the best I can say. What are we to do?
(There are three more entries in this diary; but they are illegible, quite beyond conjecture. The only words decipherable are “sleep” near the beginning of the first; the name “Basil” in the second; and the word “poison” in the third.)
BOOK III
purgatorio
[NOTE.-The Abbey of Thelema at “Telepylus” is a real place. It and its customs and members, with the surrounding scenery, are accurately described. The training there given is suited to all conditions of spiritual distress, and for the discovery and development of the “True Will” of any person. Those interested are invited to communicate with the author of this book.]
Chapter I
KING LAMUS INTERVENES
It is only three months ago; but it seems a lifetime. My memory is now very good, and I remember more details of the past every day. I am writing this account of the past three months, partly because my best friend tells me that it will strengthen it if I exercise it by putting down what has occurred in sequence. And you know, even a month ago, I couldn’t have recalled anything at all with regard to certain periods.
My friend tells me that memory fails me in part because nature mercifully wishes to hide from us things which are painful. The spider-web of protective forgetfulness is woven over the mouth of the cave which conceals the raw head and bloody bones of our misfortunes.
“But the greatest men,” says King Lamus, “are those that refuse to be treated like squalling children, who insist on facing reality in every form, and tear off ruthlessly the bandages from their own wounds.”
But I have to think very hard to write down the incidents of the dinner at the Wisteria when Lou and I had made up our minds to end our lives.
I had got some prussic acid from the chemist’s more than a week before. It took us that time to make up our minds to get up and to acquire Dutch courage enough to take the plunge.
Some instinct prevented us dropping out of existence in a place like those lodgings in Greek Street. When all one’s moral sense is gone, there remains a racial instinct in men and women of good blood which tells them, like Macbeth and Brutus, to die positively and not negatively.
I believe it was this alone that dragged us up from the dirty bed from which we had not moved for weeks, sunk in a state which was neither sleep nor waking.
It was by a gigantic effort that I got up and put some clothes on, and went out and got shaved. Nothing but excitement and the idea of death enabled me to do it. I found the same thing in the war; and so did lots of men.
It seems as if the soul is tired of the body, and welcomes the chance to be done with it once and for all. But it wants to offer itself gallantly in a flight or a charge. It objects to dying in a ditch passively. I am sure that nothing less would have got us up from that foetid stupor.
We had some champagne before starting, and then tottered giddily over the unfamiliar streets. There was something faintly attractive about the bustle of humanity. There was a momentary regret about leaving it. Yet we had already left it so long, so long ago, in every intelligible sense of the word. We should, I suppose, have been classed as human beings by statisticians, but surely by nobody else. We could never return to their midst. And even in the midst of our wretchedness, we felt a repulsion of contempt for the ruck of humanity which made us content to widen the gap between them and ourselves. Why preserve the outward semblance of these futile insects? Even their happiness disgusted us; it was so stupidly shallow.
We could see that the people of the Wisteria were shocked at our appearance. The maitre d’hotel bustled over and made some sympathetic remarks about our not having been there for a long time. I told him that we had both been very ill; and then Lou put in, in a hollow voice:
“We shall be better tonight.”
Her intonation was so sinister that the man almost jumped. I was afraid for the moment that everything would be spoilt, but I saved the si
tuation by some silly joking remark. However, I could see that he was very uncomfortable and glad to get away from our table.
We had ordered a wonderful dinner; but, of course, we couldn’t eat anything. The mockery of having all those expensive dishes brought, one after the other, and taken away again untouched, was irritating at first, and then it began to be amusing. I vaguely remember something in history about funeral feasts. It seemed singularly appropriate to start west in such conditions.
Yes, we were participating in some weird ceremony such as delighted the ancient Egyptians. The thought even came to my mind that we had already died, that this was our mocking welcome to Hades, the offering of dishes of which we were unable to partake. And yet, between us and the unknown was the act of drinking the contents of the little bottle in my waistcoat pocket.
It was nearly an hour and a half since we had some heroin, and already the loathsome fumes of abstention were suffocating us. We had as much as our bodies could tolerate. We didn’t want any more actively. It would do us no good to take more, but nature had already begun her process of eliminating the poison.
In the body, morphine and heroin become oxydised, and it is the resulting poisons, not the drugs themselves, that are responsible for the appalling effects. Thus the body begins to give off these products through the secretions; therefore the nose begins to run; there are prolonged foul sweats; there is a smell and a taste which cannot be called unpleasant even, it can only be called abominable in the proper sense of that word: that which is repugnant to man. It is so detestable as to be unendurable. One might get relief by cleaning one’s teeth or by having a Turkish bath, but the energy to do such things is lacking.
But if you take a fresh dose of the drug, it puts a temporary stop to the efforts of nature to eliminate it. That is why it is such a vicious circle; and these premonitory symptoms of abstinence are merely the foetor of the foul breath of the dragon who is on his way to crunch you.
Diary of a Drug Fiend Page 24