My remarks were received with complete indifference. Even Lou merely shrugged her shoulders, and looked at Lamus as much as to say, “You see, I was right.”
Lamus slowly shook his head. As a matter of fact, I could hardly see. My eyesight was disturbed in some peculiar way which frightened me, and my heart began to protest. I took out the cocaine once more. To my astonishment, Lamus bounded from his chair and took the bottle from my hands. I wanted to get up and kill him; but a deathly faintness seized me. The room swam. Lamus returned to his chair, and once again silence fell on the studio.
I think I must have lost consciousness for a while for I do not remember who put an ice-cold towel round my head or how it came about that the freezing moisture dripped down my spine.
I came to myself with a heavily heaved sigh. Every one was in the same position as before, except that Lou had taken off her furs and curled herself up on the settee.
“If you feel well enough, Sir Peter,” said Lamus, “you may as well hear the end of the story.”
Lou suddenly choked with sobs and buried her head in the cushions. Lamus gave a gesture which Lala apparently understood. She came forward and stood in front of me with her hands behind her back like a child repeating a lesson.
“Sir Peter,” she said in a gentle voice, “Basil explained to Lady Pendragon that she was taking a very wrong view of the matter. He told her that when people are getting over drug-habits they were liable to say and do things entirely foreign to their characters. We all know how abundantly you have shown your courage and your sense of honour. We know your race, and we know your exploits. What happened at the interview with Mr. Platt didn’t count. You were a sick man. That was all. Maisie suggested that she should go round and fetch you; and thank heaven she got there in time!”
Lou twisted herself round, and turned savagely on King Lamus.
“I hold you to your promise,” she cried violently. “I hold you to your promise.”
“That, once more,” he said calmly, “is simply because you are a sick woman as much as he is a sick man.”
“So it’s honourable to break your word to a sick woman, is it?” she flashed back like a tigress.
A curious smile curled his lips.
“Well, what does Sir Peter say?” he asked with a kind of lazy humour.
I suddenly became acutely conscious of what a ridiculous figure I was cutting, sitting there like a sick monkey with a towel round my head. I tore it off – and dashed it to the ground.
Lala came forward immediately and picked it up. I felt the action as an insult. I was being treated as a person who is a nuisance making a mess in another man’s studio. The effect was to induce a surly mood.
“What I say doesn’t seem to matter,” I answered gruffly. “But since you ask, I say this. Take her and keep her and let me hear no more of her. And I’ll say thank you.”
My own voice made me wince. Could it really be I who was indulging in this vulgar repartee? It was an extraordinary thing the way everything that happened seemed to make my position less and less dignified.
The thought was interrupted by Lou’s gleaming tones.
“There, Basil, he sets me free. I come to you without a stain. You can keep your promise without breaking your faith.”
She got up from the sofa and went across to his chair. She threw herself at his feet, and buried her face in his knees; while her long arms reached up and groped for his face to stroke it.
He patted her head affectionately.
“Yes,” he said, “we’re free, and I’ll keep my promise. I’ll cure you, and I’ll take you away with me. But will you let me make one condition?”
She lifted her face to his. In spite of the physical wreckage of the last few months, love was able to transform her bodily. She was radiantly beautiful. She only waited for him to take her in his arms. She was trembling all over with ecstatic passion.
I gripped the arms of my chair in futile rage. Before my very face the only woman I had ever loved had disowned me, cast me off with contempt, and was offering herself to another man with the same impulsive ardour that she had once shown toward me. No, by all the powers of hell, it was worse! For I had wooed her rapturously; and he had made no effort.
“One condition?” her voice rang high and clear through the studio. “I’m giving you myself, my Lord and lover; body and soul to have and to hold. What do conditions matter to me?”
“Well,” said King Lamus, “it’s really only a small condition; and to prove that I keep my promises, I must keep them all round. You see, I promised to cure Sir Peter, too, and so my condition is that he comes with us.”
She sprang to her feet as if a cobra had struck her. Her long arms wrestled against the unresisting air. The humiliation was unspeakable. Lamus put his pipe away in his pocket, rose to his feet, and stretched himself like some great lazy lion. He took her in his arms and held her firmly, fixing his eyes upon her tortured face; the long jagged scarlet mouth stretched to a tragic square through which the scream refused to come.
He shook her shoulders gently. Her rigid muscles began to relax.
“It’s a deal, then, little girl,” he said.
Her mouth closed, and then curled itself into a smile of exquisite happiness. The sombre fire of lust died out of her eyes. They kindled with the light of understanding.
He put his arm around her waist, and brought her over to me, his right hand fastened under my armpit. And he lifted me bodily out of my chair as if he had reached down like Hercules into the darkest depths of hell, and dragged forth a damned soul into the light of heaven.
He put her hands in mine and closed his own over them.
“Whom God hath joined together,” he said solemnly, “let no man put asunder.”
He turned on his heel and became a man of quick decisive action.
“Maisie,” he said, “you have the key. Go over and have their things packed and leave them in the cloak room at Victoria. Lala, ’phone for reserve places and a cabin for these good people on the boat. London’s no place for us – too many philanthropists about seeking whom they may devour. Ring up Dupont and have him send in dinner for five for seven o’clock. We’ll catch the ten o’clock and be in Telepylus sabse jeldi.”
Maisie was already out of the studio and Lala at the telephone before he had finished talking. He turned to us with the same affectation of hustle.
“Here, young people,” he said breezily. “Your nerves are all shot to pieces, and no wonder. White tablets for two and a little H. to sweeten them. And you’ve missed your lunch! That’s too bad. We’ll have an old-fashioned high tea. I know there’s something to eat in the coal scuttle or somewhere, and Lala can cook something while I make the buttered toast.
“You sit down and talk and make your plans for honeymoon number eight, or whichever it is. And don’t get in my way, because I’m going to be a very busy man. In fact, it’s rather lucky that I’ve acquired the habit of starting for three years’ trips around the world at three minutes notice.”
It was half an hour before tea was ready. Lou and I sat on the sofa, shaken and sore by what we had gone through. Morally, mentally, physically – we were both aching with the most cruel fatigue. And yet its waves surged vainly against the silent and immovable rock of our sublime felicity. It did not find expression. We were far too weary. And yet we were aware in some deepest part of our consciousness, laid bare for the first time by the remorseless stripping off of all its upper layers, that it existed. It always had existed “before the beginning of years,” and always would exist. It had nothing to do with conditions of time and space. It was an ineffable union, in infinity, of our individualities.
I must not describe our journey to Telepylus in any detail. If once the beauty of the place were discovered, it would soon be spoilt. There is no harm, however, in indicating what the place itself is like, especially as not l
ess than three thousand years ago it became one of the most famous places in the world. And one of its chief claims was that even then it was famous for the ruins of forgotten civilisations. Today, the hand of man has left ephemeral scribbles all over the great rock which dominates the city.
Approaching Telepylus from the west, we were astounded when that mighty crag burst into view as the train rounded a corner. Like another Gibraltar, it stood out against a background of sky twelve hundred feet above the sea. It stretched out two great paws over the city like a crouching lion playing with its prey which it was about to devour – as indeed it is.
The biggest morsel there is a magnificent cathedral dating from the Normans. It stands on an eminence below the edge of the overhung cliff, and beneath it the town is spread like a fan. It is reduced to insignificance by the cathedral as the cathedral is by the rock; and yet one’s familiarity with the size of an ordinary house makes one run up the scale instead of down it.
The town is witness to the stupendous size of the cathedral; and as soon as one has realised the cathedral, it, in its turn, becomes a measure of the grandeur of the rock.
We walked up from the station to the residence of King Lamus, high on the hillside above the neck of land which joins it to the rock. The cliffs towered above us. They were torn into huge pinnacles and gullies; but above the terrific precipices we could see the remains of successive civilisations; Greek temples, Roman walls, Saracen cisterns, Norman gateways, and houses of all periods were perishing slowly on the gaunt, parched crags.
It was very hard work for Lou and myself to climb the hill in the wretched condition of our health. We had to sit down repeatedly on the huge boulders which lined the paths that wound among the well-tilled fields dotted with gnarled grey olives.
The air of the place was a sublime intoxication, and yet its enchantment merely rubbed into our souls the shame of our wretched physical condition. We had to take several goes of heroin on the way. We didn’t see why we couldn’t have had a carriage part of the way. But it was part of King Lamus’s plan, no doubt that we should be stung with the realisation of our impotence in so divine a spot, where every voice of nature swelled the chorus that spurred us to physical activity. Our invalidism had not seemed so horribly unnatural in London as it did in this consecrated temple of beauty.
Lamus himself seemed invigorated to an extraordinary degree by his home-coming. He gambolled like a young goat while we plodded gaspingly up the slope. And while we rested he told us the history of the monuments that crumbled on the crags.
“This place will help you to correct your ideas,” he said, “of what is permanent, so far as anything is permanent.”
We were indeed filled with a feeling of the futility of human effort as we contemplated the layers of civilisations, and looked down upon that last of them which was still flourishing, although the signs of decay were only too obvious. The modern town was not even built with the idea of defying the centuries. It was essentially flimsy and ramshackle, and the events of the last few hours had given repeated evidence not only of the state of social unrest which was likely at any moment to lay the modern structure in ruins, but of general lassitude and lack of energy on the part of everybody with whom we came into contact.
Our little party obviously represented undreamed-of possibilities of doing good business. But no one seemed to want to fulfil even that last of human ambitions: the acquiring of the good will of prosperous travellers.
“Don’t be downhearted,” laughed Lamus. “Your trouble is that you are looking for permanence in the wrong place. Do you see those two men?”
On the road below us were two goatherds, one driving his flock up from the town after having been milked, the other driving them down for that purpose.
Lamus quoted two lines of Greek poetry. I did not remember enough to be able to translate them, but the words had an extraordinarily familiar ring. Lamus translated.
“‘The city Telepylus, where the shepherd who drives his flock into the town salutes another who is driving them out, and the other returns his salute. A man in that country could earn double wages if he could do without sleep, for they work much the same by night as they do by day.’
“That was written three thousand years ago, and even the name of the woman who wrote that poem, albeit it is one of the most famous poems in the world, is lost. But there are the shepherds saluting each other today as they did then. IIANTA PEI said Heracleitus, ‘all things flow.’ And everything that tries to escape that law, that relies on its strength, that becomes rigid, that endeavours to call a halt, is broken up by the irresistible waves of time. We think steel stronger than water; but we cannot build a ship to resist its action. Compare the soft-flowing winds with the inflexible rock. We breathe those winds into our lungs today – the air is as fresh as ever. But see how those temples and strongholds, nay, the very crags themselves, have been worn down by the languorous caresses of this invigorating breeze. That is one of the reasons why I came to live here, though one hardly needs support after one glance at the incomparable beauty of the place; a beauty which varies every day and never tires. Look at the sunset every night. It is good for two hours of grand opera. It is almost stupefying to sit on the terrace of the villa and watch the ever-changing glories of night-fall. And night itself! There stands the Pole Star over the rock. As the months move the Great Bear wheels about its stable splendour, and one’s mind begins to work on a totally different scale of time. Each revolution of the heavens about the Pole is like the second hand of one’s spiritual watch.”
We listened with enthralled attention. The beauty of the place beat hard upon our brains. It was unbelievable. Patches of cancer like London and Paris were cut ruthlessly out of our consciousness. We had come from the ephemeral pretentiousness of cities to a land of eternal actuality. We were re-born into a world whose every condition was on a totally different scale to anything in our experience. A sense of innocence pervaded us. It was as if we had awakened from a nightmare; our sense of time and space had been destroyed; but we knew that our old standards of reality had been delusions, clocks and watches were mechanical toys. In Telepylus, our time-keeper was the Nature of which we were part.
We walked on for another five minutes; but again weakness overcame us. The scenery was blotted out by the persistent ache for heroin. We satisfied the craving, but the act now seemed abominable. There was no one to see us; and yet we felt as if Nature herself were offended by the presence of a monstrosity.
“I’ll go on to the Abbey,” said Lamus. “You’d better take it easy. I’ll tell them to get some refreshments ready and send some one down to bring you along.”
He waved his hand and strode up the hill with the steady swinging step of the practised mountaineer.
Lou’s hand crept into mine. We were alone with nature. A new feeling had been born in us. The sense of personality had somehow faded out. I drew her gently into my arms; and we exchanged a long kiss such as we had never done before. We were not kissing each other. We were parts of the picture, whose natural expression it was to kiss.
“Hadn’t we better go on?” said Lou after a while, releasing herself.
But at this moment we found ourselves confronted by a very extraordinary person indeed. It was a fair-haired boy of five years old, bare-footed but dressed in a short robe of rich blue with wide sleeves and a hood; the lining was of scarlet. He had a very serious face, and accosted us with a military salute –
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” said the little fellow stoutly, and held out his hand. “I’ve come to take you up to the Abbey.”
Even Lou realised that it was quite impossible to pick up such an important little person and kiss him. We entered into the solemnity of the occasion with proper dignity, and got up and shook hands.
Then, running down behind him, came an even smaller boy.
“Love law, love will,” he said. It was o
bviously a point of politeness.
“They don’t know what to say,” explained the elder boy in a lenient tone. “My name is Hermes,” he said to Lou, “and this is my friend Dionysus.”
We broke into a fit of uncontrollable laughter which Hermes evidently thought highly improper. But Dionysus said to Lou, “I’ll dive you a bid tiss.”
She caught up the astonishing brat, and returned his salute with interest. When she put him down, he gave each of us one of his hands while Hermes led the way up the hill in an extremely business-like manner, looking back from time to time to make sure that we were all right.
Dionysus seemed to think it his business to entertain us with an account of the various objects along the road.
“That’s the nice man’s house down there,” he said,
“I’ll take you to lunch with him if you promise to behave properly. And that’s where the goat-woman lives,” he went on, apparently assured by our guarantees of proper conduct.
The solemnity of the elder boy and the rollicking disposition of the other carried us from spasm to spasm of suppressed laughter.
“We seem to have walked straight into a fairy tale,” said Lou.
“The Big Lion says that that’s the only true kind of tale,” replied Hermes, evidently prepared to argue the subject at great length if necessary. But I admitted the truth of his statement without difficulty.
“That’s the Abbey,” he went on, as we turned the corner of the hillside. And a long, low, white building came into sight.
“But that isn’t an Abbey,” I protested. “That’s a villa.”
“That’s because you’re looking with the wrong kind of eyes,” objected Hermes. “I used to think the same myself before I was educated.”
“Do you think Mr. Lamus will be able to educate us?” I asked, overpowered by a sense of the comicality of the situation.
“Oh, he isn’t Mr. Lamus here,” retorted Hermes loftily. “Here he’s the Big Lion, and of course he can train anybody that isn’t too old or too stupid. I was very stupid myself when I first came here,” he continued in an apologetic tone. “It was the turning point of my career.”
Diary of a Drug Fiend Page 30