the open half over the edge of the lake.
I made a million arrangements in a kind of whirling wisdom. Before forty-eight hours had passed we were packed and off for Paris.
I did not remember anything in detail. All events were so many base metals fused into an alloy whose name was Excitement. During the whole time we only slept once, and then we slept well and woke fresh, without one trace of fatigue.
We had called on Gretel and obtained a supply of cocaine. She wouldn't accept any money from her dear Sir Peter, and she was so happy to see Lou Lady Pendragon, and wouldn't we come and see her after the honeymoon ?
That call is the one thing that sticks in my mind. I suppose I realised obscurely somehow that the woman was in reality the mainspring of the whole manceuvre.
She introduced us to her husband, a heavy, pursy old man with a paunch and a beard, a reputation for righteousness, and an unctuous way of saying the right kind of nothing. But I divined a certain shrewdness in his eyes ; it belied his mask of ostentatious innocence.
There was another man there too, a kind of half-baked Nonconformist parson, one Jabez Platt, who had realised early in life that his mission was to go about doing good. Some people said that he had done a great deal of good-to himself. His principle in politics was a -very simple one : If you see anything, stop it ; everything that is, is wrong ; the world is a very wicked place.
He was very enthusiastic about putting through a law for suppressing the evil of drugs.
We smiled our sympathetic assent, with sly glances at our hostess. If the old fool had only known that we were full of cocaine, as we sat and applauded his pompous platitudes !
We laughed our hearts out over the silly incident as we sat in the train. It doesn't appear particularly comic in perspective ; but it's very hard to tell, at any time, what is going to tickle one's sense of humour. Probably anything else would have done just as well. We were on the rising curve. The exaltation of love was combined with that of cocaine ; and the romance and adventure of our lives formed an exhilarating setting for those superb jewels.
" Every day, in every way, I get better and better."
M. Coue's now famous formula is the precise intellectual expression of the curve of the cocaine honey-moon. Normal life is like an aeroplane before she rises.
There is a series of little bumps ; all one can say is that one is getting along more or less. Then she begins to rise clear of earth. There are no more obstacles to the flight.
But there are still mental obstacles ; a fence, a row of houses, a grove of elms or what not. One is a little anxious to realise that they have to be cleared. But as she soars into the boundless blue, there comes that sense of mental exhilaration that goes with boundless freedom.
Our grandfathers must have known something about this feeling by living in England before the liberty of the country was destroyed by legislation, or rather the delegation of legislation to petty officialdom.
About six months ago I imported some tobacco, rolls of black perique, the best and purest in the world. By-and-by I got tired of cutting it up, and sent it to a tobacconist for the purpose.
Oh, dear no, quite impossible without a permit from the Custom House!
I suppose I really ought to give myself up to the police.
Yes, as one gets into the full swing of cocaine, one loses all consciousness of the bumpy character of this funny old oblate spheroid. One is really very much more competent to deal with the affairs of life, that is, in a certain sense of the word.
M. Coue' is perfectly right, just as the Christian Scientists and all those people are perfectly right, in saying that half our troubles come from our consciousness of their existence, so that if we forget their existence, they actually cease to exist !
Haven't we got an old proverb to the effect that " what the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over ? "
When one is on one's cocaine honeymoon, One is really, to a certain extent, superior to one's fellows. One attacks every problem with perfect confidence. It is a combination of what the French call elan and what they call insouciance.
The British Empire is due to this spirit. Our young men went out to India and all sorts of places, and walked all over everybody because they were too ignorant to realise the difficulties in their way. They were taught that if one had good blood in one's veins, and a public school and university training to habituate one to being a lord of creation, and to the feeling that it was impossible to fail, and to not knowing enough to know when one was beaten, nothing could ever go wrong.
We are losing the Empire because we have become "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." The intellectuals have made us like " the poor cat in the adage." The spirit of Hamlet has replaced that of Macbeth. Macbeth only went wrong because the heart was taken out of him by Macduff's interpretation of what the witches had said.
Coriolanus only failed when he stopped to think. As the poet says, " The love of knowledge is the hate of life."
Cocaine removes all hesitation. But our forefatbers owed their freedom of spirit to the real liberty which they had won ; and cocaine is merely Dutch courage. However, while it lasts, it's all right.
Chapter IV.
Au Pays De Cocaine
I CAN'T remember any details of our first week in Paris. Details had ceased to exist. We whirled from pleasure to pleasure in one inexhaustible rush. We took everything in our stride. I cannot begin to describe the blind, boundless beatitude of love. Every incident was equally exquisite.
Of course, Paris lays herself out especially to deal with people in just that state of mind. We were living at ten times the normal voltage. This was true in more senses than one. I bad taken a thousand pounds in cash from London, thinking as I did so how jolly it was to be reckless. We were going to have a good time, and damn the expense !
I thought of a thousand pounds as enough to paint Paris every colour of the spectrum for a quite indefinitely long period; but at the end of the week the thousand pounds was gone, and so was another thousand pounds for which I had cabled to London ; and we had absolutely nothing to show for it except a couple of dresses for Lou, and a few not very expensive pieces of jewellery.
We felt that we were very economical. We were too happy to need to spend money. For one thing, love never needs more than a pittance, and I had never before known what love could mean.
What I may call the honeymoon part of the honeymoon seemed to occupy the whole of our waking hours. It left us no time to haunt Montmartre. We hardly troubled to eat, we hardly knew we were eating. We didn't seem to need sleep. We never got tired.
The first hint of fatigue sent one's hand to one's pocket. One sniff which gave us a sensation of the most exquisitely delicious wickedness, and we were on fourth speed again !
The only incident worth recording is the receipt of a letter and a box from Gretel Webster. The box contained a padded kimono for Lou, one of those gorgeous Japanese geisha silks, blue like a summer sky with dragons worked all over it in gold, with scarlet eyes and tongues.
Lou
