The Greatest Works of Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley

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СКАЧАТЬ head about any such theories. He simply laughed in my face and called me his favourite nightingale. 'Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird,' he chuckled, 'but neither wast thou born to take a course of Neo-Platonism.' His whole point is that one mustn't leave the rails. If I had convinced myself that I was a singer, would I kindly refrain from meddling with other affairs ? "

      " I know," I put in, " as the captain said when the first officer interrupted him, - What I want from you, Mr. Mate, is silence, and precious damned little of that ! ' "

      Again we found ourselves laughing together. It was really very extraordinary the way in which talking to Basil or his pupils exhilarated the mind. I began to see why he was so distrusted and disliked. People always pretend to want to be lifted out of themselves, but in reality they're terribly afraid of anything happening to them. And Basil always strikes at the root of one's spiritual oak. He wants one to be oneself, and the price of that is to abandon the false ideas that one has of oneself. People like the sham teachers that soothe them with narcotic platitudes. They dread having to face reality in any form. That is the real reason for persecuting prophets.

      Of course, I was full of H., but Maisie had made me forget all about it for a moment.

      "Who's that thin girl that's always there?" I asked her.

      It was an automatic spurt of jealousy.

      " Oh, Lala," said Maisie, " she's rather a dear. She's a queer girl, one of the queerest ever. Swiss or something, I fancy. He's trained her for the last three years. He met her, I don't know how, and asked her to pose for him. She told me once how startled she was at the reason he gave. 'Did you write that psalm,' he asked her, '" I can tell all my bones, they look and stare upon me ? "' You know the girl hasn't got an ounce of flesh on her body. She's perfectly healthy ; she's just a freak of nature. And while he sketched her he asked her to suggest a title for the picture. 'Paint me as a dead soul,' she answered. He caught up the phrase with fiery enthusiasm, and began to work on an enormous screen, a triptych with the strangest beasts and birds and faces, all arranged to lead up to her as the central figure. She is standing naked with a disproportionately large head grinning detestably. The body is almost a skeleton covered with greenish skin. It made a perfectly grisly sensation. I wonder you haven't seen it."

      As a matter of fact, I had seen a photograph of it in some newspaper, and now I remembered that Bill Waldorf had pointed her out, roaring with laughter, as the Queen of the Dead Souls. Basil had said that London was full of dead souls.

      " It's nothing to do with that story of Gogol's," said Maisie. " Basil thinks-and it's only too ghastly true-that most of the people we see walking about, and eating and drinking and dancing, are really dead'dead in trespasses and sins,' as my old uncle used to say-in the sin of not knowing themselves to be Stars, True and Living Gods Most High--"

      I sighed with sadness. I, too, was a dead soul-and I had given up the Lord of Resurrection that morning out of loyalty to another dead soul. And-the same afternoon ! Faugh! what a charnel-house Life is! How chill and damp and poisonous is the air! How the walls sweat the agony of the damned!

      " And look at Lala now! " Maisie went on. " He had to put her through the most frightful ordealsfor she was very dead indeed-but she got to the other end of the tunnel all right. She's a Great Soul, if ever there was one in the world, and he has raised her mortal into immortality. Her corruptibility has put on incorruption-and she radiates light and life and love, leaping through the years in utter liberty-"

      " But what does she do now ? " I asked with a dull pain at my heart.

      " Why, her True Will, of course came back the flaming answer. " She knows that she came to this planet to bear witness to the Law of Thelema in her own person, and to help her Titan in his task ! "

      Maisie was really stupefying. Every one knows that she was in love with Basil from the first, and is, and always will be. How was it that she could speak of another woman who loved him without jealousy, and, as things were, without envy ? It was true, perhaps, after all, that he had some huge hypnotic power, and held them helpless, filed away like so many letters. But Maisie was bubbling over with energy and joy; it was absurd to think of her as vampirised, as a victim. I asked her about it point-blank.

      " My dear Lou," she laughed, " don't be too utterly gaga I My Will is to sing, and Lala's is to help him in his work-why should we clash ? Why should there be any ill-feeling ? She's helping me by helping him to help me; and I'm helping her by showing that his Law has helped me, and can help others. We're the best friends in the world, I and Lala; how could anything else be possible ? "

      Well, of course, she was herself doing a notoriously impossible feat. The point of view of Basil and his crowd is simply upside down to all ordinary people. At the same time, one can't deny that the result is amazingly invigorating to contemplate. I could quite understand his idea of developing mankind into what is practically a new species, with new faculties, and the old fears, superstitions, and follies discarded for ever.

      I couldn't stand it another second. Maisie had given him-and herself-up, and yet she possessed both herself and him : I had clung to him and to myself, and I had lost both-Lost, lost for ever ! I got up to go home ; and before I reached the street I realised with desolate disgust and despair the degree of my degradation, of my damnation ; and I hugged desperately my hideous perverse pride in my own frightful fate, and rejoiced as the horrible hunger for heroin made itself known once more, gnawing at my entrails. I licked my lips at the thought that I was on my way to the man whom my love had done so much to destroyand myself with him.

      To begin with, no more of this diary why should I put myself out for King Lamus ? " Every step he treads is smeared with blood," as Gretel once said. Yes, in some infernal way he had made me one of his victims. " All right-you shall get enough magical diary to let you know that I'm out of your clutchesI'll put down just those things which will tell you how I hate you-how I have outwitted you-and you shall read them when my Dead Soul has got a Dead Body to match it."

      september 14

       I expected Peter would be in ; impatient to know if I'd wangled McCall. Instead, he turned up after

      twelve, full of champagne and-SNOW !

      My aunt, what a lucky day !

      He was boiling with passion, grabbed me like a hawk.

      "Well, old girl," he shouted, "what luck with McCall ? "

      I produced my package.

      " Hurrah, all our troubles are over !"

      We opened our last three half-bottles of fizz to celebrate the occasion, and he gave me some coke. And I thought I didn't like it ! It's the finest stuff there is. A sniff to the right and a sniff to the left and a big heap right on my tongue; and that wasn't all.

      " I tell you what's been wrong," he said in the morning. " Who the hell could expect to be right in a place like this ? I've got right on to the ropes. We need never run short any more. We'll go down to Barley Grange and have another honeymoon. You're my honeysuckle, and I'm your bee."

      He went and flung open the door and shouted for the woman to pack our things while we went out to breakfast, and have the bill ready.

      " What infernal fools we are," he cried as we went sailing down the street to the Wisteria where you can get real French coffee and real Englil bacon.

      We looked at ourselves in the long mirror. We could see how ill we had been, but all that was gone.

      Decision and self-confidence had come back; and love had come back with them. СКАЧАТЬ