What followed sticks in my memory as if it were a conjurer's trick. I don't know by what gesture she constrained me. But her hand slowly rose not quite to the level of the table ; and my face, hot, flushed, angry and eager, had bent down towards it. It seemed pure instinct, though I have little doubt now that it was the result of an unspoken suggestion. I drew the little heap of powder through my nostrils with one long breath. I felt even then like a choking man in a coal mine released at the last moment, filling his lungs for the first time with oxygen.
I don't know whether this is a common experience. I suspect that my medical training and reading, and hearing people talk, and the effect of all those ghoulish articles in the newspapers had something to do with it.
On the other hand, we must make a good deal of allowance, I think, for such an expert as Gretel Webster. No doubt she was worth her wage to the Boche. No doubt she had picked me out for part of " Die Rache." I had downed some pretty famous flyers.
But none of these thoughts occurred to me at the time. I do not think I have explained with sufficient emphasis the mental state to which I had been reduced by the appearance of Lou. She had become so far beyond my dreams-the unattainable.
Leaving out of account the effect of the alcohol, this had left me with an intolerable depression. There was something brutish, something of the baffled rat, in my consciousness.
" O Thou vampire Queen of the Flesh, wound as a snake around the throats of men ! I adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, I A O ! "
Was she thinking of Gretel or of herself ? Her beauty had choked me, strangled me, torn my throat out. I had become insane with dull, harsh lust. I hated her. But as I raised my head ; as the sudden, the instantaneous madness of cocaine swept from my nostrils to my brain-that's a line of poetry, but I can't help it-get on !-the depression lifted from my mind like the sun coming out of the clouds.
I heard as in a dream the rich, ripe voice of Lou
" O Thou fierce whirlpool of passion, that art sucked up by the mouth of the sun ! I adore Thee, Evoe ! I adore Thee, I A O ! "
The whole thing was different-I understood what she was saying, I was part of it. I recognised, for one swift second, the meaning of my previous depression. It was my sense of inferiority to her Now I was her man, her mate, her master !
I rose to catch her by the waist but she whirled away down the floor of the club like an autumn leaf before the storm. I caught the glance of Gretel Webster's eyes. I saw them glitter with triumphant malice ; and for a moment she and Lou and cocaine and myself were all inextricably interlocked in a tangled confusion of ruinous thought
But my physical body was lifting me. It was the same old, wild exhilaration that one gets from rising from the ground on one's good days. I found myself in the middle of the floor without knowing how I had got there. I, too, was walking on air. Lou turned, her mouth a scarlet orb, as I have seen the sunset over Belgium, over the crinkled line of shore, over the dim blue mystic curve of sea and sky; with the thought in my mind beating in tune with my excited heart. We didn't miss the arsenal this time. I was the arsenal too. I had exploded. I was the slayer and the slain And there sailed Lou across the sky to meet me.
"O Thou outrider of the Sun, that spurrest the bloody flanks of the wind ! I adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, I A O ! "
We came into each other's arms with the inevitableness of gravitation. We were the only two people in the Universe-she and I. The only force that existed in the Universe was the attraction between us. The force with which we came together set us spinning, We went up and down the floor of the club; but, of course, it wasn't the floor of the club, there wasn't the club, there wasn't anything at all except a delirious feeling that one was everything, and had to get on with everything. One was the Universe eternally whirling. There was no possibility of fatigue ; one's energy was equal to one's task.
"O Thou dancer with gilded nails, that unbraidest the star hair of the night ! I adore Thee, Evoe ! I adore Thee, I A 0 !"
Lou's slim, lithe body lay in my arm. It sounds absurd, but she reminded me of a light overcoat. Her head hung back, the heavy coils of hair came loose. All of a sudden the band stopped. For a second the agony was indescribable. It seemed like annihilation. I was seized with an absolute revulsion against the whole of my surroundings. I whispered like a man in furious haste who must get something vital done before he dies, some words to the effect that I couldn't stick this beastly place any longer-"
" Let's get some air."
She answered neither yes nor no. I had been wasting words to speak to her at all.
" O Thou bird-sweet river of Love, that warblest through the pebbly gorge of Life ! I adore Thee, Evoe ! I adore Thee, I A O! "
Her voice had sunk to a clear murmur. We found ourselves in the street. The chucker-out hailed us a taxi. I stopped her song at last. My mouth was on her mouth. We were driving in the chariot of the Sun through the circus of the Universe. We didn't know where we were going, and we didn't care. We had no sense of time at all. There was a sequence of sensations ; but there was no means of regulating them. It was as if one's mental clock had suddenly gone mad.
I have no gauge of time, subjectively speaking, but it must have been a long while before our mouths separated, for as this happened I recognised the fact that we were very far from the club.
She spoke to me for the first time. Her voice thrilled dark unfathomable deeps of being. I tingled in every fibre. And what she said was this :
" Your kiss is bitter with cocaine."
It is quite impossible to give those who have no experience of these matters any significance of what she said.
It was a boiling caldron of wickedness that had suddenly bubbled over. Her voice rang rich with hellish glee. It stimulated me to male intensity. I caught her in my arms more fiercely. The world went black before my eyes. I perceived nothing any more. I can hardly even say that I felt. I was Feeling itself ! I was O the possibilities of Feeling fulfilled to the uttermost. Yet, coincident with this, my body went on automatically with its own private affairs.
She was escaping me. Her face eluded mine.
" O Thou storm-drunk breath of the winds, that pant in the bosom of the mountains! I adore Thee, Evoe ! I adore Thee, I A O !"
Her breast sobbed out its song with weird intensity. I understood in a flash that this was her way of resistance. She was trying to insist to herself that she was a cosmic force; that she was not a woman at all ; that a man meant nothing to her. She fought desperately against me, sliding so serpent-like about the bounds of space. Of course, it was really the taxibut I didn't know it then, and I'm not quite sure of it now.
"I wish to God," I said to myself in a fury, " I had one more sniff of that Snow. I'd show her! "
At that moment she threw me off as if I had been a feather. I felt myself all of a sudden no more good. Quite unaccountably I had collapsed, and I found myself, to my amazement, knocking out a little pile of cocaine from a ten-gramme bottle which had been in my trousers' pocket, on to my hand, and sniffing it up into my nostrils with greedy relish.
Don't ask me how it got there. I suppose Gretel Webster must have done it somehow. My memory is an absolute blank. That's one of the funny things about cocaine. You never know quite what trick it is going to play you.
I was reminded of the American professor who boasted that he had a first-class memory whose only defect was that it wasn't reliable.
I am equally unable to tell you whether the fresh supply of the drug increased my powers, or whether Lou had simply tired of teasing me, but of her own accord she writhed into my arms; her hands and mouth were heavy on my heart. There's some more poetry-that's the way it takes