The Greatest Works of Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 was giggling all over with irrepressible excitement. I know " giggling all over" isn't English; but I can't express it any other way.

      She checked my rush as if she had been playing full back in an International Rugger match.

      "Get the scissors," she whispered.

      I understood in a second what she meant. It was perfectly true-we had been playing it a bit on the heavy side with that snow. I think it must have been about five sniffs. If you're curious, all you have to do is to go back and count it up-to get me to ten thousand feet above the poor old Straits of Dover, God bless them ! But it was adding up like the price of the nails in the horse's shoes that my father used to think funny when I was a kid. You know what I mean-Martin-gale principle and all that sort of thing. We certainly had been punishing the snow.

      Five sniffs ! it wasn't much in our young lives after a fortnight.

      Gwendolen Otter says:

      " Heart of my heart, in the pale moonlight, Why should we wait till to-morrow night ?"

      And that's really very much the same spirit.

      " Heart of my heart, come out of the rain, Let's have another go of cocaine."

      I know I don't count when it comes to poetry, and the distinguished authoress can well afford to smile, if it's only the society smile, and step quietly over my remains. But I really have got the spirit of the thing.

      "Always go on till you have to stop, Let's have another sniff, old top !"

      No, that's undignified.

      " Carry on ! over the top !"

      would be better. It's more dignified and patriotic, and expresses the idea much better. And if you don't like it, you can inquire elsewhere.

      No, I won't admit that we were reckless. We had substantial resources at our command. There was nothing whatever of the " long firm " about us.

      You all know perfectly well how difficult it is to keep matches. Perfectly trivial things, matchesalways using them, always easy to replace them, no matter at all for surprise if one should find one's box empty ; and I don't admit for one moment that I showed any lack of proportion in the matter.

      Now don't bring that moonlight flight to Paris up against me. I admit I was out of gas ; but every one knows how one's occupation with one's first love affair is liable to cause a temporary derangement of one's ordinary habits.

      What I liked about it was that evidently Gretel was a jolly good sport, whatever people said about her. And she wasn't an ordinary kind of good old sport either. I don't see any reason why I shouldn't admit that she is what you may call a true friend in the most early Victorian sense of the word you can imagine.

      She was not only a true friend, but a wise friend. She had evidently foreseen that we were going to run short of good old snow.

      Now I want all you fellows to take it as read that a man, if he calls himself a man, isn't the kind of man that wants to stop a honeymoon with a girl in a Japanese kimono of the variety described, to have to put on a lot of beastly clothes and hunt all around Paris for a dope peddler.

      Of course, you'll say at once that I could have rung for the waiter and have him bring me a few cubic kilometres. But that's simply because you don't understand the kind of hotel at which we were unfortunate enough to be staying, We had gone there thinking no harm whatever. It was right up near the Etoile, and appeared to the naked eye an absolutely respectable first-class family hotel for the sons of the nobility and gentry.

      Now don't run away with the idea that I want to knock the hotel. It was simply because France had been bled white ; but the waiter on our floor was a middle-aged family man and probably read Lamartine and Pascal and Taine and all those appalling old bores when he wasn't doing shot drill with the caviare. But it isn't the slightest use my trying to conceal from you the fact that he always wore a slightly shocked expression, especially in the way he cut his beard. It was emphatically not the thing whenever he came into the suite.

      I am a bit of a psychologist myself, and I know perfectly well that that man wouldn't have got us cocaine, not if we'd offered him a Bureau de Tabac for doing it.

      Now, of course, I'm not going to ask you to believe that Gretel Webster knew anything about that waiter-beastly old prig ! All she had done was to exhibit wise forethought and intelligent friendship. She had experience, no СКАЧАТЬ