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 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.
"