She nodded serenely.
" I had no idea," she said, " that those people had got so much sense. I've always thought of them as tangled up with religious ideas. I understand now. Yes, it's the life of holiness, if you have to go to the trouble of putting it in the terms of morality, as I suppose you English people have to. I feel that contact of any sort, even with myself, contaminates me. I was the chief of sinners in my time, in the English sense of the word. Now I've forgotten what love means, except for a faint sense of nausea when it comes under my notice. I hardly eat at all-it's only brutes that want to wallow in action that need three meals a day. I hardly ever talk-words seem such waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view. Human life or heroin life ? I've tried them both ; and I don't regret having chosen as I did."
I said something about heroin shortening life. A wan smile flickered on her hollow cheeks. There was something appalling in its wintry splendour. It silenced us.
She looked down at her hands. I noticed for the first time with extreme surprise that they were extraordinarily dirty. She explained her smile.
"Of course, if you count time by years, you're very likely right. But what have the calculations of astronomers to do with the life of the soul ? Before I started heroin, year followed year, and nothing worth while happened. It was like a child scribbling in a ledger. Now that I've got into the heroin life, a minute or an hour-I don't know which and I don't carecontains more real life than any five years' period in my unregenerate days. You talk of death. Why shouldn't you ? It's perfectly all right for you. You animals have got to die, and you know it. But I am very far from sure that I shall ever die ; and I'm as indifferent to the idea as I am to any other of your monkey ideas."
She relapsed into silence, leaned back and closed her eyes once more.
I make no claim to be a philosopher of any kind but it was quite evident to the most ordinary common sense that her position was unassailable if any one chose to take it. As G. K. Chesterton says, " You cannot argue with the choice of the soul."
It has often been argued, in fact, that mankind lost the happiness characteristic of his fellow-animals when he acquired self-consciousness. This is in fact the meaning of the legend of " The Fall." We have become as gods, knowing good and evil, and the price is that we live by labour, and-" In his eyes foreknowledge of death."
Feccles caught my thought. He quoted with slow emphasis -
" He weaves and is clothed with derision, Sows and he shall not reap.
His life is a watch or a vision,
Between a sleep and a sleep."
The thought of the great Victorian seemed to chill him. He threw off his depression, lighting a cigarette and taking a strong pull at his brandy.
" Haide'," he said, with assumed lightness, " lives in open sin with a person named Baruch de Espinosa. I think it's Schopenhauer who calls him 'Der Gottbetrunkene Mann.' "
" The God-intoxicated man," murmured Lou faintly, shooting a sleepy glance at Haide' from beneath her heavy blue-veined eyelids.
" Yes," went on Feccles. " She always carries about one of his books. She goes to sleep on his words ; and when her eyes open, they fall upon the page."
He tapped the table as he spoke. His quick intuition had understood that this strange incident was disquieting to us. He wriggled his thumb and forefinger in the air towards the waiter. The man interpreted the gesture as a request for the bill, and went off to get it.
" Let me drive you and Sir Peter back to your hotel," said our host to Lou. " You've had a rather rough time. I prescribe a good night's rest. You'll find a dose of H. a very useful pick-me-up in the morning, but, for Heaven's sake, don't flog a willing horse. just the minutest sniff, and then coke up gradually when you begin to feel like getting up. By lunch time you'll be feeling like a couple of two-year-olds."
He paid the bill, and we went out. As luck would have it, a taxi had just discharged a party at the door. So we drove home without any trouble.
Lou and I both felt absolutely washed out. She lay upon my breast and held my hand. I felt my strength come back to me when it was called on to support her weakness. And our love grew up anew out of that waste of windy darkness. I felt myself completely purged of all passion ; and in that lustration we were baptised anew and christened with the name of Love.
But although nature had done her best to get rid of the excess of the poison we had taken, there remained a residual effect. We had arrived at the hotel very weary, though as a matter of course we had insisted on Feccles and Haide' coming upstairs for a final drink. But we could hardly keep our eyes open; and as soon as they were gone we made all possible haste to get between the sheets of the twin beds.
I need hardly tell my married friends that on previous nights the process of going to bed had been a very elaborate ritual. But on this occasion it was a mere attempt to break the record for speed. Within five minutes from the departure of Feccles and Haide' the lights were out.
I had imagined that I should drop off to sleep instantly. In fact, it took me some time to realise that I had not done so. I was in an anaesthetic condition which is hard to distinguish from dreaming. In fact, if one started to lay down definitions and explained the differences, the further one got the more obscure would the controversy become.
But my eyes were certainly wide open ; and I was lying on my back, whereas I can never sleep except on my right side, or else, strangely enough, in a sitting position. And the thoughts began to make themselves more conscious as I lay.
You know how thoughts fade out imperceptibly as one goes to sleep. Well, here they were, fading in.
I found myself practically deprived of volition on the physical plane. It was as if it had become impossible for me to wish to move or to speak. I was bathed in an ocean of exceeding calm. My mind was very active, but only so within peculiar limits. I did not seem to be directing the current of my thoughts.
In an ordinary way that fact would have annoyed me intensely. But now it merely made me curious. I tried, as an experiment, to fix my mind on something definite. I was technically able to do so, but at the same time I was aware that I considered the effort not worth making. I noticed, too, that my thoughts were uniformly pleasant.
Curiosity impelled me to fix my mind on ideas which are normally the source of irritation and worry. There was no difficulty in doing so, but the bitterness had disappeared.
I went over incidents in the past which I had almost forgotten by virtue of that singular mental process which protects the mind from annoyance.
I discovered that this loss of memory was apparent, and not real. I recollected every detail with the most minute exactitude. But the most vexatious and humiliating items meant nothing to me any more. I took the same pleasure in recalling them as one has in reading a melancholy tale. I might almost go so far as to say that the unpleasant incidents were preferable to the others.
The reason is, I think, that they leave a deeper mark on the mind. Our souls have invented our minds, so to speak, with the object of registering conscious experiences, and therefore the more deeply an experience is felt the better our minds are carrying out the intention of our souls.
" Forsitan haec olim meminisse juvabit," says AEneas in Virgil when recounting his hardships. (Quaint, by the way I I haven't thought of a Latin tag a dozen times since I left school. Drugs, like old age, strip off one's recent memories, and leave bare one's forgotten ideas.)
The most deeply seated instinct in us is our craving for experience. And that is why the efforts of the Utopians to make life a pleasant routine always arouse subconscious revolt in the spirit of man.
It was the progressive