The excitement kept our minds off heroin very successfully; but it obtruded itself constantly on our notice none the less by insistent physical attacks. Of course, we warded them off at once by taking suitable doses. I cannot say that there was any real diminution. For one thing, taking the stuff by the nose, you can’t tell exactly how much you are getting, and a good deal of what you take is wasted.
But the whole atmosphere had changed. We had been taking it till now in a steady, regular manner. It had become a continuous performance. But this morning each patch of craving and each dose were definite incidents. The homogeneity of the vice had been broken up into sections. The dull monotony of the drug had developed dramatic qualities. We were reminded of our early experiences with it. We had, to a certain extent, recovered what addicts call “drug virginity”. That alone was sufficient to fill us with a keen sense of exhilaration. We had regained the possibility of hope.
On the other hand, we were brought very sharply up against ourselves by the efforts of the hairdresser and the haberdasher. The smart new dressing-gowns contrasted so strikingly with the deadly illness of our appearance!
However, we could see the daylight afar off, and we sat down to lunch with a certain pleasure. Our appetites had not returned, of course, and we ate very little of the light and exquisite food we had ordered. But at least the idea of food did not disgust us, as had been too long the case.
Lamus came in in time to join us at coffee. It was easy to see that he was pleased at the result so far obtained. Lala was not with him. Instead, he had brought Maisie Jacobs.
I found myself wondering acutely whether there was any serious reason for the change. I had got to the state where I suspected the man’s slightest action of having some occult significance, especially as he gave no explanation. Decidedly his manners were not calculated to reassure the unwary. It was easy to understand why his name had become the focus for a host of ridiculous inventions.
After all, it is not pleasant to feel oneself in the presence of an intelligence capable of out-manoeuvring one’s own at every point without even taking the trouble to do so. The way he took everything for granted was in itself annoying.
He strolled over to the charts, and stood studying them for a long time while he puffed at a cigar. Even the cigar was offensive. It was the kind that millionaires have specially made for themselves. Lamus smoked no other kind; and yet he was a comparatively poor man.
Of course, the explanation was perfectly simple. He really understood and really appreciated good tobacco, and preferred to indulge in cigars disproportionately.
It was the man’s own business what he smoked; and yet he had managed to get himself an absolutely bad name in London on that one trait alone. People felt that it was monstrous for him to dine on a mutton chop and a piece of Stilton, and then pull out a cigar that cost half as much again as his dinner.
He studied our charts as if they had been maps and he was trying to work out his overland route from Bokhara to Khatmandu!
Ultimately he said, “There seems a very long gap here – fifteen hours – 9 to 12, that’s right, isn’t it?”
He turned to Maisie for confirmation. He was, so he said, quite unable to trust himself to calculate.
Maisie entered into the spirit of the absurdity and counted it solemnly out on her fingers.
The tone of his voice had been mournful, as if his plans had been seriously disconcerted. That was another trick of his that put people off. It was Lou’s sparkling eyes that told me what he meant.
And then I was brought up with a tremendous shock to realise what it meant to me. I went to the chart myself with excited curiosity, quite as if I had never seen it before.
It did not need a mathematician to put the situation into English. The crosses for the last thirty-six hours were crowded into a few spaces, leaving large empty gaps. In other words, the indulgence had become irregular. I stared at the chart as if it had been a ghost.
Lamus turned his head and looked down at me over his shoulder with a queer grin. Then he uttered the extraordinary word: “Kriegspiel”.
I was completely taken aback. What in the name of thunder was the man talking about? And then it slowly dawned upon me that there was an analogy between the chart and the distribution of the troops in the war. It was obvious as soon as the idea struck one.
As long as the armies were evenly distributed along the line, it was a matter of trench warfare. Great victories and defeats were impossible in the nature of things. But once the troops were massed at points of vantage, aggregated in huge mobile units, it became possible to destroy them on the large scale.
When a British square is broken, the annihilation of its defenders does not come from any diminution in the fighting power of the individual soldiers; its military value is not sensibly diminished by the loss of the few men at the point of attack. It has become worthless because their regular arrangement has been thrown into disorder.
“At the Battle of Waterloo,” said King Lamus, turning from the wall and going back to his coffee, “Napoleon sent forward the Old Guard. A few minutes later he cried, ‘They are mixed,’ and drove in despair from the field. He did not have to wait to see them destroyed.”
Lou’s breath was coming in great gasps. She had understood the essence of our friend’s tactics.
We looked abominably ill; we were actually suffering at the moment from the craving, and embarrassed by the presence of Maisie Jacobs. We did not want to take it in front of her. And yet we knew that we had won the victory. It might be a matter of weeks or months; we didn’t even care. We were content to have mastered the principle of the thing. It would be easy to attack those clusters of crosses, and eliminate them little by little.
King Lamus asked Maisie to sing. Luckily there was a baby grand in the room. He sat down and began to accompany her. I found myself enthralled by watching the man’s mind work. It taught me something constantly.
This last act, for example. We couldn’t go out as we were, and the singing would be an alternative distraction. At the same time, he wanted Maisie’s back turned so that we could take our heroin.
We wanted it very badly indeed; and yet – so strange is nature! – we were just as ashamed to take it secretly as a moment before we had been to take it openly.
The thought hit me between the eyes.
It has already been mentioned that Lou and I both had the impulse to conceal the act from each other even while we were taking it openly together. We wanted to pretend that we were taking less than we were. The use of drugs develops every morbid kink in the mind.
Meanwhile, Maisie was singing in her rich contralto voice an English translation of one of Verlaine’s most exquisite lyrics: “With muted strings”.
“Calm in the twilight of the lofty boughs
Pierce we our love with silence as we drowse”
“Melt we our souls, hearts, senses in this shrine,
Vague languor of arbutus and of pine!”
“Half-close your eyes, your arms upon your breast
Banish for ever every interest!”
“The cradling breeze shall woo us, soft and sweet,
Ruffling the waves of velvet at your feet.”
“When solemn night of swart oaks shall prevail
Voice our despair, musical nightingale!”
The exquisite images, so subtle and yet so concrete, filled my mind with memories of all my boyhood’s dreams. They reminded me of the possibilities of love and peace. All this was familiar to me, familiar in the most intense and alluring form. That was what nature had to offer; this pure and ecstatic rapture was the birthright of mankind. But I, instead of being content with it as it was, had sought an artificial Paradise and bartered the reality of heaven for it. In nature, even melancholy is subtly enthralling. I thought of Keats’ ode to her, and even of James Thomson’s “Melancholia that transcends al
l wit”, whom he adored, and on whose altar lay his bleeding heart. Well might Verlaine say: “Voice our despair, musical nightingale!”
But in our chemical substitute for natural stimulus, our despair could be sung by no nightingale. Could even the carrion buzzard give any idea of the hoarse and horrible discord of our disenchantment? The shreds of our souls were torn by filthy fish-hooks, and their shrieks were outside the gamut of merely human anguish.
Was it still possible to return? Had we forfeited for ever our inheritance “for a mess of beastlier pottage than ever Esau guzzled”?
Lamus had been watching us intently while Maisie sang. Lou’s eyes were full of tears. They ran down her thin, worn face. She made no effort to wipe them away. I do not know whether she felt them. Heroin dulls all physical sensation, leaving only the dull intolerable craving, the acrid irritation, to break in upon the formless stupor which represents the height of well-being.
But I had no inclination to weep; mine was the bitter black remorse of Judas. I had sold my master, my True Will, for thirty pieces of poisonous copper, smeared with the slime of quicksilver. And all I had bought was a field of blood in which I might hang myself and – all my bowels gushed out.
King Lamus rose from the piano with a heavy sigh.
“Forgive me for nagging,” he said slowly, “but you spoilt your enjoyment of the song by being ashamed to put yourself in the proper condition to do so by taking the heroin that you need. How often must I tell you that there is nothing to be ashamed of, and everything to be proud of? You know yourself that you are running a greater risk than you ever did when you flew over the Boche lines. I don’t want you to swank about it, of course; but you certainly don’t want to act like a schoolboy puffing his first cigarette behind a hedge. For God’s sake, man, can’t you see that half the danger of this business lies in the secrecy and duplicity which go with it?
“Suppose we made all the fuss about eating that we do about drinking and loving, can’t you see what evils would immediately arise? Remember the food restrictions during the war.”
“By Jove, I never thought of that,” I said, as a hundred half-forgotten incidents bounced into my mind. There were all sorts of stratagems for dodging the regulations, on the part of people who in the ordinary way were plain straightforward law-abiding citizens.
“Of course, we must have restrictions about love and drink and drugs. It is quite obvious how frightfully people would abuse their liberty if they had it.”
“I’m sorry to have to disagree,” said Lamus. “And as you know, I’ve got into endless trouble of one sort or another for holding the views I do. But I’m afraid I do honestly think that most of the troubles spring directly from the unnatural conditions set up by the attempts to regulate the business. And in any case, the state of mind brought about by them is so harmful indirectly to the sense of moral responsibility that I am really not sure whether it would not be wiser in the long run to do away with the Blue laws and the Lizzie laws altogether. Legislative interference with the habits of the people produces the sneak, the spy, the fanatic, and the artful dodger. Take finance! Swindling has become a fine art, and is practised on a gigantic scale in ways which would have been impossible when there were no laws intended to protect the public.”
It was a very strange view to take. I could hardly believe that Lamus was serious; and yet it did seem to me that the modern criminal millionaire was actually assisted by the complexity of the Company laws. It is impossible for the plain man to understand them, so that an unscrupulous man armed with expert knowledge is much more likely to get the better of his unwary fellows than in the old days when his activities were confined to thimble-rigging and pulling favourites.
“Oh, Basil,” put in Maisie, “do tell our friends what you were saying the other day about the South Sea Islands.”
Lamus laughed merrily.
“Good for you, kid, very much to the point!
“I’ve wandered a good deal through queer parts of the world, as you know, and in some of those places there are still taboos about eating and hunting and fishing – all sorts of things which we in England take quite simply, in consequence of which they give no trouble.
“But where a man has to think of a thousand things before he has his dinner: what he eats, and how it was killed, and who cooked it, and so on for ever and ever, he gets no chance to develop his mind in more important ways. Taboo is responsible for the low mental and moral development of the peoples whom it afflicts, more than anything else. An appetite should be satisfied in the simplest and easiest way. Once you begin to worry about the right and wrong of it, you disturb the mind unnaturally, and begin to think awry in all sorts of ways that have apparently nothing to do with it.
“Think of the Queen of Spain who was being dragged by her horse, and lost her life because of the absence of the official appointed by etiquette to assist her to dismount!”
We all laughed; the girls frankly, but I with an ill-defined, uncomfortable feeling that Lamus was getting on to dangerous ground.
“What is modern fiction?” he asked, “from Hardy and Dostoevski to the purveyors of garbage to servant girls, but an account of the complications set up by the exaggerated importance attached by themselves or their neighbours to the sexual appetites of two or more bimanous monkeys.
“Most sexual troubles and offences so-called would do very little harm if nobody attached any importance to what was or was not going on.”
Of course, there is an answer to this type of argument but I don’t know what it is. I felt very uneasy. He was laying his axe to the root of the tree of civilisation. That was evident.
Lou must have caught my thought. She quoted sarcastically:
“O woodman, spare that tree,
Touch not a single bough,
In youth it sheltered me
And I’ll protect it n-yow!”
Since the war, women are taking a very peculiar attitude. I didn’t like the tone of the conversation. I instinctively looked to Maisie Jacobs for support.
The Jewish tradition, which is, after all, the foundation of the so-called Christian point of view, could surely be trusted. But Maisie merely retorted with some verses from Heine which showed that she was entirely on the enemy’s side.
Lamus noticed my annoyance, and hastily changed the conversation.
“I’m afraid the only thing you can do,” he said to me, “is to chain yourself to Buckingham Palace and then go on hunger-strike, until they give you permission to vote more early and often than ever, after which you won’t care to go to the polls at all. That’s another example of the same old story. However little we want a thing, we howl if we discover that we can’t get it; and the moment we’ve got it the whole business drops out of sight.
“You’ll find it’s the same with your drugs. You’ve practically hypnotised yourself into thinking you can’t do without them. It’s not a real need, as you know. It’s a false and perverse appetite; and as soon as you get out of the way of thinking that it’s vitally important, you’ll begin to forget how much you depend on it.”
Well, of course, I could see the sense of that; and I was glad to see how gay and light-hearted Lou had become under the influence of the idea.
Maisie called Lamus away to the piano to sing another song.
“I love you because you’re as crazy as I,
Because all the shadows and lights of the sky
Of existence are centred in you;
The cross-jagged lightning, the roar of typhoon
Are as good as the slumber of time as we swoon
With the sun half asleep in the blue.
You’re a dream, you’re a mystery, empress and slave,
You’re like life, the inscrutable beat of its wave,
You are always the all – unexpected!
When you’ve promised yourself, then you push me away;
<
br /> When you scorn me, you suddenly kindle and slay;
You hate truth as the lies She rejected!
I love you because you are gallant and proud,
(Your soul is a sun and your body a cloud)
And you leap from my arms when I woo you;
Because you love earth and its worms, you caress
The stars and the seas, and you mock my distress
While the sorrows of others thrill through you!
I love you because my life’s lost in your being;
You burn for me all the night long, and on seeing
Me, jest at your tears – and allot mine!
Because you elude me, a wave of the lake,
Because you are danger and poison, my snake,
Because you are mine, and are not mine!”
Just as she had finished, Elsie arrived from Barley Grange with our trunks. Maisie and Lamus said they would leave us to unpack, and went off.
She and Lala dropped in from time to time in the course of the next five days to take us motoring, or to dinner, or the theatre, or to parties.
I thought they made rather a point of keeping off the subject which was the real reason of their visits.
Chapter III
THE VOICE OF VIRTUE
Basil had gone out of town; but he turned up on the fifth day at eleven o’ clock in the morning, and he came in his most serious professional manner. After a very brief greeting, he went straight to the charts and inspected them attentively.
Lou and I both felt very uncomfortable. He noticed it at once.
“You’ve still got heroin on the brain, I see,” he remarked severely. “You insist on considering yourselves as naughty children instead of as pioneers of humanity undertaking a desperate adventure for the good of the race.”
I began a sort of apology; I don’t quite know for what.
“Nonsense,” he interrupted. “I know perfectly well why you’re ashamed of yourself. You’ve had what you call a relapse. After getting down to five, six and seven doses, you’ve suddenly gone back. Yesterday, I see, Lou had fourteen and you sixteen – more than you were taking ever since you have been in this place. You think that’s a bad sign. I don’t.
Diary of a Drug Fiend Page 27