The Greatest Works of Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley
In the hours when I first awoke her. Little by little I found
The truth of her, stripped of clothing, Bitter beyond all bound,
Leprous beyond all loathing."
We shouted with delight, and fell into a fit of hysterical laughter. We came out of it completely exhausted. I must have slept for a while.
When I woke he was sitting at the table under the yellow gas jet, reading the books he had bought.
Somehow, the past had been washed out of us. We found ourselves intent on the idea of stopping H.; and the books didn't help very much. They were written in a very positive way. The writers quarrelled among themselves like a Peace Conference.
But they all agreed on two points : that it was beyond the bounds of human possibility to break off the habit by one's own efforts. At the best, the hope was pitifully poor. The only chance was a " cure " in a place of restraint. And they all gave very full details of the horrors and dangers of the process. The physician, they said, must steel his heart against every human feeling, and refuse inexorably the petitions of the patient. Yet he must always be ready with his syringe, in case of a sudden collapse threatening life itself.
There were three principal methods of cure: Cutting the drug off at once, and trust to the patient's surviving ; then there was a long tedious method of diminishing the daily dose. It was a matter of months. During the whole of the time, the agony of the patient continues in a diluted form. It was the choice between plunging into boiling oil and being splashed with it every day for an indefinite period. Then there was an intermediate method in which the daily amount was reduced by a series of jerks. As Peter said, one was to be sentenced to be flogged at irregular intervals without knowing exactly when. One would be living in a state of agonising apprehension which would probably be more morally painful than in either of the other ways.
In all cases alike there was no hint of any true comprehension of the actual situation. There was no attempt to remove the original causes of the habit ; and they all admitted that the cure was only temporary, and that the rule was relapse.
There was also a horribly disquieting impression that the patient could not trust the honesty of the doctor. Some of them openly advocated attempts to deceive the patient by injecting plain water. Others had a system of giving other drugs in conjunction with the permitted dose, with the deliberate intention of making the patient so ill that he would rather bear the tortures of abstention than those devised by his doctor.
I felt too, that if I went to one of those places, I should never know what trick might be played on me next. They were cruel, clumsy traps set by ignorant and heartless charlatans. I began to understand the intensity of jealousy with which the regular physician regards the patent-medicine vender and the Christian scientist.
They were witch-doctors with a licence from government to torture and kill at extravagant prices. They guarded their prerogatives with such ferocity because they were aware of their own ignorance and incompetence; and if their victims found them out their swindle would be swept away. They were always trying to extend their tyranny. They were always wanting new laws to compel everybody, sick or well, to be bound to the vivisection table, and have some essential organ of the body cut out. And they were brazen enough to give the reason. They didn't understand what use it was ! And everybody must be injected with all sorts of disgusting serums and vaccines ostensibly to protect them against some disease which there was no reason whatever to suppose they were likely to get....
The last three days have been too dreadful. This is the first time I have felt like writing, and yet I have been itching insanely to put down that hideously luxurious scene when our love broke out like an abscess. All the old fantastic features were there. They had assumed a diabolical disguise; but my mind has been in abeyance. We shut the medical books with a shudder, and slung them out of the window into the street. A little crowd gathered; they were picked up, and the passers-by began talking about what was to be done. We realised the rashness of our rage. The last thing was to attract attention ! We pulled the frowsy old curtains across, and put out the light.
The reaction of our reading was terrific. We Venomously contrasted the calm confidence of King Lamus with the croaking clamour of the " authorities."
Cockie summed up the situation with a quotation.
"Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore !"'
Our thoughts splashed to and fro like an angry sea in a cave. These three days have been a flux of fugitive emotion. We are resolved to stop taking H. ; and there the memory of Lamus's letter was like a rope held by a trustworthy leader for a novice on some crumbling crag.
If we could only have relied on that ! But our minds were shaken by panic.
Those cursed medical cowards! Those pompous prophets of evil ! Every time we came back to the resolution to stop, they pulled us off the rock.
" It's beyond human power."
But they -know which side their bread's buttered. it's their game to discourage their dupes.
But they had over-played their hand. They had painted their picture in too crude colours. They revolted us.
Again, the effect of Mabel's death, and the fact that our supplies were so short, combined to drive us into the determination to stop at whatever cost.
We struggled savagely hour by hour. There were moments when the abstinence itself purged us by sheer pain of the capacity to suffer. Our. minds began to wander. We were whirled on the wings of woe across the flaming skies of anguish.
I remember Peter standing at the table, lost to all sense of actuality. He cried in a shrill, cracked voice
" Her cranial dome is vaulted, Her mad Mongolian eyes Aslant with the ecstasies Of things immune, exalted Far beyond stars and skies, Slits of amber and jet-"
I heard him across abysses of aching inanity. A thrill of Satanic triumph tingled in my soul, and composed a symphony from its screams. I leapt with lust to recognise myself in the repulsive phantasm pictured by the poet.
" Her snout for the quarry set Fleshy and heavy and gross,
Bestial, broken across,
And below it her mouth that drips Blood from the lips
That hide the fangs of the snake, Drips on venomous udders '
Mountainous flanks that fret, And the spirit sickens and shudders At the hint of a worse thing yet."
We had, on the other side, some spasms of weakness; a ghastly sensation of the sinking of the spirit. It's the same unescapable dread that seizes one when one is in a lift which starts down too quickly, or when one swoops too suddenly in a 'plane. Waves of weakness washed over us as if we were corpses cast up by the sea from a shipwreck. A shipwreck of our souls.
And in these hideous hours of helplessness, we drifted down the dark and sluggish river of inertia towards the stagnant and stinking morass of insanity.
We were obsessed by the certainty that we could never pull through. We said nothing at first. We were sunk in a solemn stupor. When it found voice at last, it was to whimper the surrender. The Unconditional Surrender of our integrity and our honour !
We eked out our small allowance of H. with doses of strychnine to ward off the complete collapse of all our physical faculties, and we picked ourselves up a bit on the moral plane by means of champagne.
In these moments of abdication we talked in fragile whispers, plans for getting supplies. We had both of of us a certain shame in admitting to each other that we were renegades. We felt that in future we should never be able to indulge frankly and joyously as we had hitherto done. We should become furtive and cunning; we should conceal from each other what we were doing, although it was obvious to us both.
I slipped out this afternoon on tiptoe, thinking Peter was asleep, but he turned like a startled snake just as I made for the door.
" Where are you going, Lou ? "
His voice was both piteous and harsh. I had not thought of inventing a pretext; but a lie slipped readymade