Diary of a Drug Fiend

by Aleister Crowley

  “That’s the best trick of the lot,” explained Cyril; “It goes wonderfully with a great many men. It gets their powers of observation rattled; she can pull off the most obvious ‘miracles’, and get them to swear that the control was perfect. That’s how she fooled Oudouwitz; he was a very old man, and she proved to him that he was not as old as he thought he was. Great Harry Lauder! apart from any deception, a man in such circumstances might be willing to swear away his own reputation in order to assure her a career!”

  “It’s rather embarrassing,” said the Pasha, “especially to a Mohammedan like myself; but one must endure everything in the cause of Science. In a moment now she’ll be ready for the sitting.”

  Indeed, she changed suddenly into Personality Number Three, a very decorous young Frenchwoman named Annette, maid to the wife of a Jewish Banker. She went with rather stiff decorum to the table – she had to lay breakfast for her mistress, it appeared – but the moment she got there, she began to tremble violently all over, sank into the chair, and resumed the “Baby” personality, after a struggle. “Det away, bad Annette – naughty, naughty!” was the burden of her inspiring monologue for a few minutes. Then she suddenly became absorbed in the small objects before her – the Pasha had replaced them – and began to play with them, as intently as many children do with toys.

  “Now we must have the lights down!” said the Pasha. Cyril complied. “Light is terribly painful and dangerous to her in this state. Once she lost her reason for a month through some one switching on the current unexpectedly. But we shall make a close examination, for all that.” He took a thick silk scarf, and bound it over her eyes. Then, with an electric torch, he swept the table. He pulled back her sleeves to the shoulder and fastened them there; and he went over her hands inch by inch, opening the fingers and separating them, searching the nails, proving, in short, to demonstration, that there was no deception.

  “You see,” whispered Cyril, “we’re not preparing for a scientific experiment; we’re preparing for a conjuring trick. It’s the psychology of trickery. Not my idea; the master’s.”

  However, the attention of Lisa la Giuffria, almost despite herself, was drawn to the restless fingers on the table. They moved and twisted into such uncanny shapes; and there was something in the play of them, their intention towards the frail globe on which they converged, that fascinated her.

  The medium drew her fingers swiftly away from the ball; at the same instant it jumped three or four inches into the air. The Turk purred delight. “Quite evidential, don’t you think, sir?” he observed to Simon.

  “Oh, quite,” returned the old man, but in a tone that would have made any one who knew him well continue the conversation with these words “Evidential of WHAT?” But Akbar was fully satisfied. As a matter of form, he turned the torch on again, and made a new examination of the medium’s fingers; but no hairs were to be discovered.

  From this moment the phenomena became continuous. The articles upon the table hopped, skipped and danced like autumn leaves in a whirlwind. For ten minutes this went on, with constantly increasing energy.

  “The fun is fast and furious,” cried Lisa.

  Cyril adjusted his monocle with immense deliberation. “The epithet of which you appear to be in search,” he remarked, “is, possibly, ‘chronic’.”

  Lisa stared at him, while the pencils and balls still pattered on the table like dancing hail.

  “Doctor Johnson once remarked that we need not criticise too closely the performance of a whistling cabbage, or whatever it was,” he explained wearily, “the wonder being in the fact of the animal being able to do it at all. But I would venture to add that for my part I find wonder amply satisfied by a single exhibition of this kind; to fall into a habit appears to me utterly out of accord with the views of the late John Stuart Mill on Liberty.”

  Lisa always found herself whirled about like a Dervish by the strange twists which her lover continued to give to his conversation.

  Monet-Knott had told her in London of his famous faux pas at Cannon Street Station, when the railway official had passed along the train, shouting “All change! All change!” only to be publicly embraced by Cyril, who pretended to believe that he was a Buddhist Missionary, on the ground that one of the chief doctrines of Buddhism is that change is a principle inherent in all component things!

  And unless you knew beforehand what Cyril was thinking, his words gave you no clue. You could never tell whether he were serious or joking. He had fashioned his irony on the model of that hard, cold, cruel, smooth glittering black ice that one finds only in deep gullies of the loftiest mountains; it was said in the clubs that he had found seventy-seven distinct ways of calling a man, to his face, something which only the most brazen fish-wives of Billingsgate care to call by its name, without his suspecting anything beyond a well-turned compliment.

  Fortunately his lighter side was equally prominent. It was he who had gone into Lincoln Bennett’s – Hatters to his Majesty since helmets ceased to be the wear – had asked with diffidence and embarrassment to see the proprietor on a matter of the utmost importance; and, on being deferentially conducted to a private room, had enquired earnestly: “Do you sell hats?”

  The mystery of the man was an endless inquietude to her. She wished to save herself from loving, him, but only because she felt that she could never be sure that she had got him. And that intensified her determination to make him wholly and forever hers.

  Another story of Monet-Knott’s had frightened her terribly. He had once put himself to a great deal of trouble to obtain a walking-stick to his liking. Ultimately he had found it, with such joy that he had called his friends and neighbours together, and bidden them to a lunch at the Carlton. After the meal, he had walked down Pall Mall with two of his guests – and discovered that he had forgotten the walking-stick. “Careless of me!” had been his only remark; and nothing would persuade him to stir a step towards its recovery.

  She preferred to think of that other side of his character which she knew from the Titanic episode, and that other of how his men had feared to follow him across a certain snow-slope that hung above a Himalayan preci­pice – when he had glissaded on his back, head foremost, to within a yard of the brink. The men had followed him then; and she knew that she too would follow him to the end of the world.

  Lost in these meditations, she hardly noticed that the seance was over. The medium had gradually fallen “asleep” again, to wake up in her Number One personality. But as the others rose from the table, Lisa too rose, more or less automatically, with them.

  The foot of Akbar Pasha caught in the edge of a bearskin; and he stumbled violently. She shot out an arm to save him; but the young magician was quicker. He caught the Turk’s shoulder with his left hand, and steadied him; at the same moment she felt his other hand crushing her wrist, and her arm bent back with such suddenness that she wondered that it did not snap.

  The next moment she saw that Cyril, with his hand on the Pasha’s arm, was begging permission in his silkiest tones to examine a signet-ring of very beautiful design. “Admirable!” he was saying, “but isn’t the edge too sharp, Pasha? One could cut oneself if one drew one’s hand across it sharply, like this.” He made a swift gesture. “You see?” he remarked. A stream of blood was already trickling from his hand. The Turk looked at him with sudden black rage, of which she could not guess the cause. Cyril had expressly told her that a scratch might be death. Yet he had courted it; and now he stood exchanging commonplaces, with his blood dripping upon the floor. Impulsively she seized his hand and bound it with her handkerchief.

  The Countess had wrapped her furs about her; but suddenly she felt faint. “I can’t bear the sight of blood,” she said, and collapsed upon the divan. Simon Iff appeared at her side with a glass of brandy. “I feel better now; do give me my hat, Marquise!” Again Cyril intervened. “Over my dead body!” he cried, feigning to be a jealous lover; and ad
justed it with his own hands.

  Presently the visitors were at the door. The Turk became voluble over the seance. “Wonderful!” he cried; “one of the most remarkable I was ever present at!”

  “So glad, Pasha!” replied Grey, with his hand on the door, “one can’t pick a winner every time at this game, can one?”

  Lisa La Giuffria saw that (somehow) the courteous phrase cut like a whip of whalebone.

  She turned as the door closed. To her surprise she saw that Simon Iff had sunk on the divan, and that he was wiping the sweat from his brows.

  Behind her, her lover took a great breath, as one who comes out of deep water.

  And then she realised that she had been present not at a seance, but at a battle. She became conscious of the strain upon herself, and she broke into a flood of tears.

  Cyril Grey, with a pale smile, was bending upon her face, kissing away the drops even as they issued; and, beneath her, his strong arm bore her whole weight without a tremor.

  Chapter IV

  LUNCH, AFTER ALL;

  AND A LUMINOUS ACCOUNT OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION

  “I CONFESS to hunger,” said Simon Iff, after a few moments. Cyril kissed Lisa on the mouth, and walked with his arm still circling her, to the sideboard. “You are hostess here now you know,” he said quite simply. All his affectations dropped from him at that moment, and Lisa understood that he was just a simple-minded, brave, and honest man, who, walking in the midst of perils, had devised a formidable armament both for attack and defence.

  She felt a curious pang of pain simultaneously with a sense of exaltation. For she was no longer merely his mistress; he had accepted her as a friend. It was no longer a purely sexual relation, which is always in the nature of a duel; he might cease to love her, in the crude savage sense; but he would always be a pal – just as if she were a man. And here was the pang: was he sure to return to the mood that her whole body and soul were even at that moment crying out for?

  The story of his “Judgment of Paris”, as they called it, came into her mind. Some years before, he had had three women in love with him at once. It seemed to each that she was the only one. But they discovered the arrangement – he never took pains to hide such things – and they agreed to confront him. They called at his studio together, and told him that he must choose one of them. He smoked a full pipe before replying; then went to his bedroom and returned with a pair of socks – in need of attention. “Simon, Son of Jonas, lovest thou me? – Yea, Lord, thou knowest that I love thee. Mend my socks,” he misquoted somewhat blasphemously, and threw the socks to the one he really loved.

  Lisa meant to lay the table in that sense of the word, so to speak. She remembered that the only words spoken by Kundry after her redemption were “Dienen! Dienen!”

  “Is this your fast?” she cried gaily, discovering the contents of the sideboard. For her gaze fell upon a lobster salad of surprising glory flanked by a bowl of caviar in ice on one side, and one of those foie gras pies – the only kind really worth eating which you have to cut with a spoon dipped in hot water. On an upper shelf was a pyramid of woodcock, prepared for the chafing dish which stood beside them; there was a basket of pears and grapes of more value than a virtuous woman – and we know that her price is above rubies! In the background stood the wines in cohorts. There was hock from the cellars of Prince Metternich; there was Burgundy – a Chambertin that could have given body to a ghost, and hardly lost its potency; there was a Tokay that really was Imperial; there was 1865 brandy made in 1865 – which is as rare as radium in pitchblende.

  Simon Iff took it upon himself to explain his apparent lack of hospitality toward the visitors.

  “Akbar Pasha came here for blood: a drop of your blood, my dear; Cyril’s and mine are not in his power – you saw how contemptuously the boy played up to his trick! So I persisted in offering him salt, and nothing but salt.”

  “But why should he want my blood? And why should you give him salt?”

  “If he accepts salt it limits his powers to injure the house where he accepts it, or its inmates; and it exposes him to a terrible riposte. Why he should want your blood – that is another question, and a very serious one. Unfortunately, it implies that he knows who you are, and what we purpose for you. If he had it, he could influence you to do his will; we only wish that you should be free to do your own. I won’t insult you by telling you that you can go scatheless by the simple process of returning to your ordinary life. I’ve been watching you, and I know you would despise me for suggesting it. I know that you are ignorant of what may lie before you, but that you judge it to be formidable; and that you embrace the adventure with both hands.”

  “I mustn’t contradict the famous expert in psychology!” she laughed back at him. “I ought to deny it indignantly. And I surely am crazy to leap in the dark – only it isn’t dark when Love is the lamp.”

  “Be careful of love!” the old magician warned her. “Love is a Jack o’ Lantern, and hovers over bogs and graves; it’s but a luminous bubble of poisonous gas. In our Order we say, ‘Love is the law, love under will.’ Will is the iron signal staff. Fix love on that, and you have a lighthouse, and your ship comes safe to harbour!”

  “I may now apologise,” remarked Cyril, as they seated themselves at the table, “for leaving you the other night to dine at Miss Badger’s. I had given my word to her, and nothing but physical inability would have stopped me from going. I didn’t want to go, any more than I wanted to drown myself; and that is a great compliment to you, for she is one of the two nicest women in London; but I would have faced a thousand deaths to get there.”

  “It is right to be so stern about a trifle?”

  “Keeping one’s word is no trifle. False in one, false in all. Can’t you see how simple it makes life for me, never to have to worry about a decision, always to be able to refer everything to a simple standard, my Will? And can’t you see how simple it makes life for you, to know that if I once say a thing, I’ll do it?”

  “Yes. I do see. But, oh, Cyril, what agony I passed through that evening!”

  “That was ignorance,” said Simon Iff, “the cause of all suffering. You failed to read him, to be assured that, just as he was keeping his word to Miss Badger about the dinner, he would keep his to you about the telephone.”

  “Now, tell me about the Battle. I see that I am in the thick of the fight; but I haven’t got a ghost of a notion why!”

  I’m sorry, dear child, but this Knowledge is unsuited to your exalted grade,” he answered playfully. “We must get up to it slowly by telling you exactly what we want to do, and why. Then you will see why others should try to thwart us. And I deeply regret to have to inform you that our road lies through somewhat hilly country. You will have to listen to a lecture on the Fourth Dimension.”

  “Whatever in the world is that?”

  “I think we had better talk of simpler matters until lunch is over.”

  They began to discuss their private affairs. There was no reason at all why Lisa should not take up her residence with Cyril from that moment. She had merely to telephone her maid to pack, and come along. She offered to do so when Simon Iff said that he thought they ought to leave Paris without a day’s delay. But he said: “I don’t think it quite fair on the girl. It’s a battle, and no call for her to fight. Besides” – he turned to Cyril – “she would probably be obsessed in twenty-four hours.”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that they were after her already. Let’s try! Call her, Lisa, and say you’ll not be back tonight; tell her to await further instructions.”

  Lisa went to the telephone. Instead of getting her room, she was connected with the manager of the hotel. “I much regret to have to tell you, madame, that your maid was seized with epileptic fits shortly after you left this morning.”

  Lisa was too stunned to reply. She dropped the receiver. Cyril crossed to her instantly, a
nd told the man that his news had upset Madame; she would telephone again later.

  Lisa repeated what the manager had said.

  “I thought as much,” said Cyril.

  “I didn’t,” said Iff frankly, “and it worries me. I’m not guessing, like you are – and it’s no credit to guess right, my young friend, but a deceit of the devil, like winning at roulette. I’m deducing from what I know. Therefore, the fact that I’m wrong proves that there is something I don’t know – and it worries me. But, clearly, we must get into a properly protected area without a moment wasted. That is, you must. I’ll watch at the front. There must be somebody big behind that clumsy fool Akbar Pasha.”

  “Yes; I’ve been guessing,” admitted Cyril, with some shame. “Or, perhaps worse, I’ve let my ego expand, and taken the largest possible view of the importance of our project.”

  “Well, tell me the project!” said Lisa. “Can’t you see I can hardly bear this any more?”

  “You’re safe within these walls,” said Simon, “now that there is no enemy within the gates; and tonight we shall take you under guard to a protected area. Tomorrow the fun will begin in good earnest. Meanwhile, here is the preliminary knowledge with regard to the project. Before you start, you have to take a certain vow; and we cannot allow you to do that in ignorance of all that it implies, down to the tiniest iota.”

  “I am ready.”

  “I am going to make everything as simple as I possibly can. You have a good imagination, and I think you should be able to follow.

  “See here: I take a pencil and a piece of paper. I make a point. It stays there. It doesn’t go in any direction. In mathematics we say: ‘It is extended in no dimension.’ Now I draw a straight line. That goes in one direction. We say, it is extended in one dimension.