The Greatest Works of Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley

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СКАЧАТЬ doubt, bushels of it, barrels of it, hogsheads of it, all those measures that I couldn't learn at school.

      She had said to herself, in perfectly general terms, without necessarily contemplating any particular train of events as follows :

      " From one cause or another, those nice kids may find themselves shy on snow at a critical moment in their careers, so it's up to me to see that they get it."

      While these thoughts were passing through my mind, I had got the manicure scissors, and Lou was snipping the threads of her kimono lining round those places where those fiercely fascinating fingers of hers had felt what we used to call in the hospital a foreign body.

      Yes, there was no mistake. Gretel had got our psychology, we had got her psychology, everything was going as well as green peas go with a duck.

      Don't imagine we had to spoil the kimono. It was just a tuck in the quilting. Out comes a dear little white silk bag ; and we open that, and there's a heap of snow that I'd much rather see than Mont Blanc.

      Well, you know, when you see it, you've got to sniff it. What's it for ? Nobody can answer that. Don't tell me about " use in operations on the throat." Lou didn't need anything done to her throat. She sang like Melba, and she looked like a peach ; and she was a Peche-Melba, just like two and two makes four.

      You bet we sniffed ! And then we danced all round the suite for several years-probably as much as eight or nine minutes by the clock-but what's the use of talking about clocks when Einstein has proved that time is only another dimension of space ? What's the good of astronomers proving that the earth wiggles round 1000 miles an hour, and wiggles on 1000 miles a minute, if you can't keep going ?

      It would be absolutely silly to hang about and get left behind, and very likely find ourselves on the moon, and nobody to talk to but Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and that crowd.

      Now I don't want you to think that that white silk packet was very big.

      Lou stooped over the table, her long thin tongue shot out of her mouth like an ant-eater in the Dictionary of National Biography or whatever it is, and twiddled it round in that snow till I nearly went out of my mind.

      I laughed like a hyena, to think of what she'd said to me. " Your kiss is bitter with cocaine." That chap Swinburne was always talking about bitter kisses. What did he know, poor old boy ?

      Until you've got your mouth full of cocaine, you don't know what kissing is. One kiss goes on from phase to phase like one of those novels by Balzac and Zola and Romain Rolland and D. H. Lawrence and those chaps. And you never get tired ! You're on fourth speed all the time, and the engine purrs like a kitten, a big white kitten with the stars in its whiskers. And it's always different and always the same, and it never stops, and you go insane, and you stay insane, and you probably don't know what I'm talking about, and I don't care a bit, and i'm awfully sorry for you, and you can find out any minute you like by the simple process of getting a girl like Lou and a lot of cocaine.

      What did that fellow Lamus say ?

      " Stab your demoniac smile to my brain, Soak me in cognac, kisses, cocaine."

      Queer fish, that chap Lamus ! But seems to me that's pretty good evidence he knew something about it. Why, of course he did. I saw him take cocaine myself. Deep chap! Bet you a shilling. Knows a lot. That's no reason for suspicion. Don't see why people run him down the way they do. Don't see why I got so leary myself. Probably a perfectly decent chap at bottom. He's got his funny little ways-man's no worse for that.

      Gad, if one started to get worried about funny little ways, what price Lou I Queerest card in the pack, and I love her.

      " Give me another sniff off your hand."

      Lou laughed like a chime of bells in Moscow on Easter morning. Remember, the Russian Easter is not the same time as our Easter. They slipped up a fortnight one way or the other-I never can remember whichas long as you know what I mean.

      She threw the empty silk bag in the air, and caught it in her teeth with a passionate snap, which sent me nearly out of my mind again. I would have loved to be a bird, and have my head snapped off by those white, small, sharp incisors.

      Practical girl, my Lady Pendragon ! Instead of going off the deep end, she was cutting out another packet, and when it was opened, instead of the birds beginning to sing, she said in shrill excitement, " Look here, Cockie, this isn't snow."

      I ought to explain that she calls me Cockie in allusion to the fact that my name is Peter.

      I came out of my trance. I looked at the stuff with what I imagine to have been a dull, glazed eye. Then my old training came to my rescue.

      It was a white powder with a tendency to form little lumps rather like chalk. I rubbed it between my finger and thumb. I smelt it. That told me nothing. I tasted it. That told me nothing, either, because the nerves of my tongue were entirely anaesthetised by the cocaine.

      But the investigation was a mere formality. I know now why I made it. It was the mere gesture of the male. I wanted to show off to Lou. I wished to impress upon her my importance as a man of science ; and all the time I knew, without being told, what it was.

      So did she. The longer I have known Lou, the more impressed I am with the extent and variety of her knowledge.

      " Oh, Gretel is too sweet," she chirped. " She guessed we might get tired of coco, 'grateful and comforting' as it is. So the dear old thing sent us some heroin. And there are still some people who tell us that life is not worth living ! "

      " Ever try it ? " I asked, and delayed the answer with a kiss.

      When the worst was over, she told me that she had only taken it once, and then, in a very minute dose, which had had no effect on her as far as she knew.

      "That's all right," I said, from the height of my superior knowledge. " It's all a question of estimating the physiological dose. It's very fine indeed. The stimulation is very much better than that of morphine. One gets the same intense beatific calm, but without the languor. Why, Lou, darling, you've read De Quincey and all those people about opium, haven't you ? Opium's a mixture, you know-something like twenty different alkaloids in it. Laudanum : Coleridge took it, and Clive-all sorts of important people. It's a solution of opium in alcohol. But morphia, is the most active and important of the principles in opium. You could take it in all sorts of ways. Injection gives the best results ; but it's rather a nuisance, and there's always danger of getting dirt in. You have to look out for blood-poisoning all the time. It stimulates the imagination marvellously. It kills all pain and worry like a charm. But at the very moment when you have the most gorgeous ideas, when you build golden palaces of what you are going to do, you have a feeling at the same time that nothing is really worth doing, and that itself gives you a feeling of terrific superiority to everything else in the world. And so, from the objective point of view, it comes to nothing. But heroin does all that morphia does. It's a derivative of morphia, you know-Diacetyl-Morphine is the technical name. Only instead of bathing you in philosophical inertia, you are as keen as mustard on carrying out your ideas. I've never taken any myself. I suppose we might as well start now."

      I had a vision of myself as a peacock strutting and preening. Lou, her mouth half open, was gazing at me fascinated with enormous eyes; the pupils dilated by cocaine. It was just the male bird showing off to his mate. I wanted her to adore me for my little scraps of knowledge ; the fragments I had picked up in my abandoned education.

      Lou is always practical; and she puts something of the priestess into everything she does. There was СКАЧАТЬ