looked more distractingly, deliriously glorious than ever.
I had never been particularly keen on women. The few love affairs which had come my way had been rather silly and sordid. They had not revealed the possibilities of love; in fact, I had thought it a somewhat overrated pleasure, a brief and brutal blindness with boredom and disgust hard on its heels.
But with cocaine, things are absolutely different. I want to emphasise the fact that cocaine is in reality a local anaesthetic. That is the actual explanation of its
action. One cannot feel one's body. (As every one knows, this is the purpose for which it is used in surgery and dentistry.)
Now don't imagine that this means that the physical pleasures of marriage are diminished, but they are utterly etherealised. The animal part of one is intensely stimulated so far as its own action is concerned ; but the feeling that this passion is animal is completely transmuted.
I come of a very refined race, keenly observant and easily nauseated. The little intimate incidents inseparable from love affairs, which in normal circumstances tend to jar the delicacy of one's sensibilities, do so no longer when one's furnace is full of coke. Everything soever is transmuted as by " heavenly alchemy " into a spiritual beatitude. One is intensely conscious of the body. But as the Buddhists tell us, the body is in reality an instrument of pain or discomfort. We have all of us a subconscious intuition that this is the case; and this is annihilated by cocaine.
Let me emphasise once more the absence of any reaction. There is where the infernal subtlety of the drug comes in. If one goes on the bust in the ordinary way on alcohol, one gets what the Americans call " the morning after the night before." Nature warns us that we have been breaking the rules; and Nature has given us common sense enough to know that although we can borrow a bit, we have to pay back.
We have drunk alcohol since the beginning of time; and it is in our racial consciousness that although " a hair of the dog " will put one right after a spree, it won't do to choke oneself with hair.
But with cocaine, all this caution is Utterly abrogated. Nobody would be really much the worse for a night with the drug, provided that be had the sense to spend the next day in a Turkish bath, and build up with food and a double allowance of sleep. But cocaine insists upon one's living upon one's capital, and assures one that the fund is inexhaustible.
As I said, it is a local amesthetic. It deadens any feeling which might arouse what physiologists call inhibition. One becomes absolutely reckless. One is bounding with health and bubbling with high spirits. It is a blind excitement of so sublime a character that it is impossible to worry about anything. And yet, this excitement is singularly calm and profound. There is nothing of the suggestion of coarseness which we associate with ordinary drunkenness. The very idea of coarseness or commonness is abolished. It is like the vision of Peter in the Acts of the Apostles in which he was told, " There is nothing common or unclean."
As Blake said, " Everything that lives is holy." Every act is a sacrament. Incidents which in the ordinary way would check one or annoy one, become merely material for joyous laughter. It is just as when you drop a tiny lump of sugar into champagne, it bubbles afresh.
Well, this is a digression. But that is just what cocaine does. The sober continuity of thought is broken up. One goes off at a tangent, a fresh, fierce, fantastic tangent, on the slightest excuse. One's sense of proportion is gone ; and despite all the millions of miles that one cheerily goes out of one's way, one never loses sight of one's goal.
While I have been writing all this, I have never lost sight for a moment of the fact that I am telling you about the box and the letter from Gretel.
We met a girl in Paris, half a Red Indian, a lovely baby with the fascination of a fiend and a fund of the foulest stories that ever were told. She lived on cocaine. She was a more or less uneducated girl ; and the way she put it was this : " I'm in a long, lovely garden, with my arms full of parcels, and I keep on dropping one ; and when I stoop to pick it up, I always drop another, and all the time I am sailing along up the garden."
So this was Gretel's letter.
" My DARLING Lou,-I could not begin to tell you the other day how delighted I was to see you My Lady and with such a splendid man for your husband. I don't blame you for getting married in such a hurry; but, on the other hand, you mustn't blame your old friends for not being prophets ! So I could not be on hand with the goods. However, I have lost no time. You know how poor I am, but I hope you will value the little present I am sending you, not for its own sake, but as a token of my deep affection for the loveliest and most charming girl I know. A word in your ear, my dear Lou : the inside is sometimes better than the outside. With my very kindest regards and best wishes to dear Sir Peter and yourself, though I can't expect you to know that I even exist at the present,
Yours ever devotedly,
" GRETEL."
Lou threw the letter across the table to me. For some reason or no reason, I was irritated. I didn't want to hear from people like that at all. I didn't like or trust her.
" Queer fish," I said rather snappily.
It wasn't my own voice ; it was, I fancy, some deep instinct of self-preservation speaking within me.
Lou, however, was radiant about it. I wish I could give you an idea of the sparkling quality of everything she said and did. Her eyes glittered, her lips twittered, her cheeks glowed like fresh blown buds in spring. She was the spirit of cocaine incarnate ; cocaine made flesh. Her mere existence made the Universe infinitely exciting. Say, if you like, she was possessed of the devil !
Any good person, so-called, would have been shocked and scared at her appearance. She represented the siren, the vampire, Mclusine, the dangerous, delicious devil that cowards have invented to explain their lack of manliness. Nothing would suit her mood but that we should dine up there in the room, so that she could wear the new kimono and dance for me at dinner.
We ate gray caviare, spoonful by spoonful. Who cared that it was worth three times its weight in gold ? It's no use calling me extravagant ; if you want to blame any one, blame the Kaiser. He started the whole fuss ; and when I feel like eating gray caviare, I'm going to eat gray caviare.
We wolfed it down. It's silly to think that things matter.
Lou danced like a delirious demon between the courses, It pleased her to assume the psychology of the Oriental pleasure-making woman. I was her Pasha-with-three-tails, her Samurai warrior, her gorgeous Maharaja, with a scimitar across my knee, ready to cut her head off at the first excuse.
She was the Ouled Ndil with tatooed cheeks and chin, with painted antimony eyebrows, and red smeared lips.
I was the masked Toureg, the brigand from the desert, who had captured her.
She played a thousand exquisite crazy parts.
I have very little imagination, my brain runs entirely to analysis ; but I revel in playing a part that is devised for me. I don't know how many times during that one dinner I turned from a civilised husband in Bond Street pyjamas into a raging madman.
It was only after the waiters had left us with the coffee and liqueurs-which we drank like water without being, affected-that Lou suddenly threw off her glittering garment.
She stood in the middle of the room, and drank a champagne glass half full of liqueur brandy. The entrancing boldness of her gesture started me screaming inwardly. I jumped up like a crouching tiger that suddenly sees a stag.
Lou
