If you make up your mind to endure the disgusting symptoms, the demon soon proceeds to more serious measures.
Lou has explained in her diary more or less what these are. But even with the help of the poet, one cannot give any idea of what it is like. For example, the question of cold. The reader thinks at once of the cold of winter. If he has travelled a little and has some imagination, he may think of the chill spells of fever. But neither of these give much idea of the nature of the cold produced by abstinence.
Our poet, whoever he is (his name is not given in the magazine) certainly succeeds in conveying to his reader the truth, that is, provided his reader already knows it. I can’t imagine how it would strike any one who had not experienced it. For he conveys his meaning, so to speak, in spite of the words. This business of expression is very curious.
How could one describe, say, a love affair to a person who had never had one or imagined one? All expression does is to wake up in the reader the impressions in his own experience which are otherwise dormant. And he will interpret what is said or written only in terms of that experience.
Lamus said the other day that he had given up trying to communicate the results of his researches to people. They couldn’t even be trusted to read words of one syllable, though they might have taken the best degrees in Humane Letters at Oxford. For example, he would write, “Do what thou wilt” to somebody, and would be attacked by return of post for having written “Do as thou wilt.”
Every one interprets everything in terms of his own experience. If you say anything which does not touch a precisely similar spot in another man’s brain, he either misunderstands you, or doesn’t understand you at all.
I am therefore extremely depressed by the obligation under which King Lamus has put me to write this section, with the avowed object of instructing the world in the methods of overcoming the craving for drugs.
He admits frankly that he feels it quite useless to do it himself, for the very reason that he is so abnormal a man. He even distrusts me, on the ground that he has had so much influence on my life and thought.
“Even a mediocrity like yourself, Sir Peter,” he said to me the other day, “dull as you are, cannot be trusted in my neighbourhood. Your brain unconsciously soaks up the highly charged particles of my atmosphere. And before you know where you are, instead of expressing yourself – what little self you have to express – you will be repeating, in a debased currency, the words of wisdom that from time to time have dropped from my refined lips.”
There was a time when I should have resented a remark like that. If I don’t do so now, it isn’t because I’ve lost my manhood, it isn’t because I feel such gratitude to the man who pulled me through; the reason is that I have learned what he means when he talks like that. He has completely killed out in himself the idea of himself. He takes no credit for his marvellous qualities, and has even got over kicking himself for his weaknesses. And so he says the most serious things in the language of absurdity and irony. And when he talks in a serious strain, his language merely accentuates the prodigious sense of humour which, as he says himself, saves him from going insane with horror at the mess into which humanity has got itself. Just as the Roman Empire began to break down when it became universal, when it was so large that no individual mind could grasp the problems which it postulated, so today, the spread of vulgar education and the development of facilities for transport have got ahead of the possibilities of the best minds. The increase of knowledge has forced the thinker to specialise, with the result that there is nobody capable to deal with civilisation as a whole.
We are playing a game of chess in which nobody can see more than two or three squares at once, and so it has become impossible to form a coherent plan.
King Lamus is trying to train a number of selected people to act as a sort of brain for the world in its present state of cerebral collapse. He is teaching them to co-ordinate the facts in a higher synthesis. The suggestion is that of his old teacher, Prof. Henry Maudsley, with whom he studied insanity. Herbert Spencer, too, had a similar idea. But King Lamus is the first to endeavour to make a practical effort to embody this conception in a practical way.
I seem to have wandered a long way from our farewell dinner party; but my mind is still unable to concentrate as it should. Heroin and cocaine enable one to attain a high degree of concentration artificially, and this has to be paid for by a long period of reaction in which one cannot fix one’s mind on a subject at all. I am very much better than I was, but I get impatient at times. It is so tedious to build oneself up on biological lines, especially when one knows that a single dose of heroin or even morphine would make one instantly the equal of the greatest minds in the world.
We had decided to take the prussic acid in our coffee. I do not think we were afraid of death; life had become such an infinitely boring alternation between a period of stimulation which failed to stimulate and of depression which hardly even depressed.
There was no object in going on. It was simply not worthwhile. On the other hand, there was a certain hesitation about stopping because of the effort required. We felt that even to die required energy. We tried to supply this with Dutch courage, and we even succeeded in producing a sort of hilarity. We never had a moment’s doubt about carrying out our programme.
The waiter brought two Pêches Melba; and as he retired we found that King Lamus, was standing at our table.
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” came his calm voice.
A sudden flush of hostility suffused my face.
“We’ve been doing it,” I answered with a sort of surly anger, “and I suppose the great psychologist can see what’s come of it.”
He shook his head very sadly; and sat down without being invited on the chair opposite to us.
“I’m afraid not,” he said. “I’ll explain what I mean on a more convenient occasion. I can see you want to get rid of me; but I know you won’t refuse to help a man out when he’s in trouble like I am.”
Lou was all sympathy and tenderness at once; and even in the state in which I was, I was aware of a feeble movement of hate both towards her and him. The fact is that the man’s mere presence acted as a powerful stimulant.
“It’s only a trifle,” he said, with a curious smile, “just a little literary difficulty in which I find myself. I was hoping you might remember my giving you a poem to read a little while ago.”
His tone was airy and supercilious; but yet there was an undercurrent of earnestness in his voice which compelled the attention.
Lou nodded easily enough; but I could see that in her heart, no less than in mine, an arrow had struck, charged with acid venom. The reference recalled the dreadful days at Barley Grange; and even the Bottomless Pit of Nothingness into which we had since fallen seemed less outrageous than the lake of fire through which we had passed.
The poem rang through my brain, snatches of the anthem of the damned.
His elbows were upon the table, his head between his hands; he watched us intently for a few moments.
“I want to quote that poem in something I’m writing,” he explained, “and can you tell me the last line of it?”
Lou answered mechanically, as if he had pressed a button:
“Death is not a way out of it!”
“Thank you,” he said. “It’s a great help to me that you should have been able to remember.”
Something in his tone caught my imagination vividly. His eyes burnt through me. I began to wonder whether there were any truth in what was said about the diabolical powers of the man.
Could he have divined the reason for our coming to the cafe? I had the absolute certainty that he knew all about it, though it was humanly impossible that he should.
“A very strange theory, that about death,” he said. “I wonder if there’s anything in it. It would really be too easy if we could get out of our troubles in
so simple a fashion. It has always seemed to me that nothing can ever be destroyed. The problems of life are really put together ingeniously in order to baffle one, like a chess problem. We can’t untie a real knot in a closed piece of string without the aid of the fourth dimension; but we can disentangle the complexities caused by dipping the string in water – and such things,” he added, with an almost malicious gravity in his tone.
I knew what he meant.
“It might very well be,” he continued, “that when we fail to solve the puzzles of life, they remain with us. We have to do them sooner or later; and it seems reasonable to suppose that the problems of life ought to be solved during life, while we have to our hands the apparatus in which they arose. We might find that after death the problems were unaltered, but that we were impotent to deal with them. Did you ever meet any one that had been indiscreet about taking drugs? Presumably not. Well, take my word for it, those people get into a state which is in many ways very like death. And the tragic thing about the situation is this; that they started taking the drugs because life, in one way or another, was one too many for them. And what is the result? The drugs have not in the least relieved the monotony of life or whatever their trouble was, and yet they have got into a state very like that of death, in which they are impotent to struggle. No, we must conquer life by living it to the full, and then we can go to meet death with a certain prestige. We can face that adventure as we’ve faced the others.”
The personality of the man radiated energy. The momentary contact with his mind had destroyed the current of thought which had been obsessing ours. Yet it was a fearful pang to be torn away from the fixed idea which had imposed itself as the necessary conclusion of a course of thought and action extending over so long a period.
I can imagine a man reprieved at the foot of a scaffold experiencing an acute annoyance at being wrenched away from the logical outcome of his tendencies.
“Cowards die many times before their death.” And those who have decided whether with their will or against it, to put an end to their lives, must resent interference. As Schopenhauer says, the will to die is inherent in all of us, as much as the will to live.
I remember a lot of fellows in the trenches saying that they dreaded being sent to the base; they would rather have it over than take a temporary respite. Life had ceased to be precious. They had become accustomed to face death, and had acquired a fear of life of just the same quality as the fear of death that they had had at first. Life had become the unknown, the uncertain, the dreadful.
A hot, fierce wave of annoyance went through me like a flush of fever.
“Damn the fellow,” I muttered, “why must he always butt in like this?”
And then I noticed that Lou had taken the little bottle from my waistcoat pocket, and handed it to King Lamus.
“I believe you’re right, Basil,” she said. “But if you take that bottle away from us, the responsibility lies with YOU.”
“Is that calculated to frighten me?” he answered smiling, and rose to his feet. He dropped the bottle to the ground, and stamped his heel deliberately on it.
“Now,” he said, “let’s get down to business,” resuming his seat.
The fumes of the acid enveloped the table.
“Hydrocyanic acid,” he remarked, “is an excellent pick-me-up when absorbed into the system in this diluted form, but to take it in large doses is an indiscretion.”
There is no doubt that the man had a tendency to what in a woman is called nagging. He constantly used the word “indiscretion” as if it were a weapon.
We both winced.
“You accept me,” he went on, “as responsible for getting you out of this mess?”
There was nothing else to do. It went against the grain. However, I blurted out something about being grateful.
“You needn’t talk that nonsense,” he retorted severely. “It’s my business to help people to do their wills. The gratitude is on my side. I want you to understand from the beginning that you are helping me to justify my existence by allowing me to do what I can to straighten out this tangle. But my conditions are that you give me a fair chance by doing what I say.”
He did not even wait for acquiescence.
“You are a bit excited nervously,” he went on. “Depression is only another form of excitement. It means a variation from normal tone. So when you have had your coffee, I will join you in a cup, we will go around to my studio and try what some of those tablets will do. Then, where are you living?”
We told him we had gone back to our old place in Greek Street.
“Hardly a salubrious neighbourhood,” he remarked. “I think we ought to celebrate the occasion by making a night of it in my studio, and tomorrow morning we must see about getting you some decent rooms.”
I remembered that our supply of heroin was in Greek Street.
“You know, Lamus,” I stammered, “I’m ashamed to admit it, but we really can’t get on without H. We tried – in fact, once we got clean away – but we couldn’t possibly go through that again.”
“Nothing to be ashamed of, my dear man,” returned our physician. “You can’t get on without eating. That’s no reason for stopping. All I ask you to do is to do it sensibly.”
“Then you won’t cut us off?” put in Lou.
“Certainly not, why should I? You take as much as you want, and when you want, and how you want. That’s no business of mine. My business is to remove the want. You say you cured yourselves, but you didn’t. You only cut off the drug; the want remained. And as soon as the opportunity for starting again arrived, you started again. Perhaps, in fact, you made the opportunity.”
The man was really uncanny. I must confess it put me off, being hit every time like that when I wasn’t expecting it. But Lou took it in quite a different way. She was glad to be so thoroughly understood. She clapped her hands. I was amazed. It was the first time in months that I had ever seen her make the slightest movement that wasn’t absolutely necessary.
“You’re quite right,” she said. “We said nothing to each other about it, and I hadn’t the slightest conscious intention of doing what I did. But the moment I got to London I drove to the place where I knew I could get heroin. And when I got back, I found that Peter had been out trying to find the man who had sold him the cocaine before. I assure you it wasn’t deliberate.”
“That’s exactly the trouble,” retorted Lamus. “It leads you by the nose, and prevents your doing your will. I remember once when I was making experiments with it myself, how I would go out with the intention of keeping away from the stuff all day, and how, without my knowing it, I took advantage of all sorts of little incidents that cropped up to get back to the studio some hours before I had intended. I found myself out at once, of course, having learnt some of the tricks of the mind. And I sat and watched myself finding excuses for starting in. One gets into an absolutely morbid state, in which everything that happens has some bearing on the question, ‘Shall I or shall I not take it?’; and one gets so pleased with oneself for saying ‘no’ so often that one is emptied to reward oneself by saying ‘yes’ just once. I can promise you a very interesting time watching your minds and spotting all the little dodges. The great thing I want you to remember is that you have to learn to take pleasure in what is really the most pleasurable thing in the world – introspection. You have got to find amusement in observing the details of the discomfort of being without the drug. And I don’t want you to overdo it, either. When the discomfort becomes so acute that you can’t enjoy it properly, then is the time to take a small dose and notice the effects. I hope, by the way, you’ve been a good little girl and kept that magical diary.”
Lou was astonishingly pleased to be able to say it, “Yes.”
“Some of it’s done very fully,” she said, “but you know there were days and weeks when I couldn’t think, I couldn’t move. Life was a perpetual str
uggle to get back to –” she hesitated for a word, and then ended with a pained little laugh, “oh, to anywhere.”
King Lamus nodded gravely. We had finished our coffee.
“Now,” said he, “to business,” and led the way to the door.
I stayed behind for a moment to pay the bill. There was still a faint smell of bitter almond in the air. It reminded me of how the dinner might have ended, and I trembled all over like a man in an ague fit.
What was happening in me? Had I suddenly fallen in love with life, or had I simply become aware of the fear of death?
When we reached the fresh air, I knew it was the former. Lamus had made me feel. The effect of the drug had been to kill all feeling in me. My impulse to kill myself had not been so wholly negative as I had thought. It was a positive craving for what I supposed to be the anaesthesia of death. The pain of life had been too much to endure, and the influence of King Lamus had been to brace me to meet life face to face, whatever it might have in store, and conquer it.
I did not fear death any more than I had done in the old days, flying over the lines. I didn’t mind dying at all; but I wanted to die fighting.
Lou was talking quite briskly to King Lamus on the steps of the restaurant while the commissionaire called a taxi. And I realised too that I loved her, that she was worth fighting to recover, that I had been a cad to drag her down with me. I understood my jealousy of King Lamus. His colossal strength, even his callousness about women, attracted them. The man himself had made me sit up and match myself against him.
I wasn’t going to have Lou see me constantly at a disadvantage.
We drove around to the studio.
The atmosphere invigorated us. I got an entirely new point of view about Lala. Before, she had seemed to me little more than part of the furniture, but tonight she was the resident spirit of the place. She informed it, gave it a meaning. The intimacy between her and her master was not in any way personal. She was the medium by which his thoughts became perceptible.
Diary of a Drug Fiend Page 25