The Greatest Works of Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley
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A sense of absolute bewilderment and helplessness came over me.
" I say, Lou," I stammered, " I wish you'd count this. I can't make it come right. I think I must have been going a bit too hard."
She went through the various pockets of my portefeuille.
" Haven't you some money in your pocket ? " she said.
I went through myself with sudden anxiety. I had money in nearly every pocket ; but it only amounted to so much small change. A thousand francs here and a hundred francs there, a fifty-pound note in my waist-coat, a lot of small bills
In the meanwhile, Lou had added up the contents of my porte-feuille. The total was just over seventeen hundred.
" My God ! I've been robbed," I gasped out, my face flushing furiously with anger.
Lou kept her head and her temper. After all, it wasn't her money ! She began to figure on a scrap of the hotel note paper.
" I'm afraid it's all right," she announced, " you dear, bad boy."
I had become suddenly sober. Yes, there was nothing wrong with the figures. I had paid cash to the jeweller without thinking.
By Jove, we were in a hole ! I felt instinctively that it was impossible to telegraph to Wolfe for more money. I suppose my face must have fallen ; a regular nose dive. Lou put her arm around my waist and dug her nails into my ribs.
"Chuck it, Cockie," she said, " we're well out of a mess. I always had my doubts about Feccles, and his going off like this looks to me as if there were something very funny about it."
My dream of a quarter of a million disappeared without a moment's regret. I had been prudent after all. I had invested my cash in something tangible. Feccles was an obvious crook. If I had handed him that five thousand, I should never have heard of him or of it again.
I began to recover my spirits.
"Look here," said Lou, " let's forget it. Write Feccles a note to say you couldn't raise the money by the date it was wanted, and let's get out. We ought to economise, in any case, Let's get off to Italy as we said. The exchange is awfully good, and living's delightfully cheap. It's silly spending money when you've got Love and Cocaine."
My spirit leapt to meet hers. I scribbled a note of apology to Feccles, and left it at the hotel. We dashed round to the Italian consulate to have our passport vise'd, got our sleeping cars from the hotel porter, and had the maid pack our things while we had a last heavenly dinner.
Chapter VIII.
Vedere Napoli E Poi-Pro Patria-Mort
We had just time to get down to the Gare de Lyon for the train de luxe. A sense oi infinite relief enveloped us as we left Paris behind ; and this was accompanied with an overwhelming fatigue which in itself was unspeakably delicious. The moment our heads touched the pillows we sank like young children into exquisite deep slumber, and we woke early in the morning, exhilarated beyond all expression by the Alpine air that enlarged our lungs ; that thrilled us with its keen intensity ; that lifted us above the pettiness of civilisation, exalting us to communion with the eternal ; our souls soared to the primaeval peaks that towered above the train. They flowed across the limpid lakes, they revelled with the raging Rhone.
Many people have the idea that the danger of drugs lies in the fact that one is tempted to fly to them for refuge whenever one is a little bored or depressed or annoyed. That is true, of course ; but if it stopped there, only a small class of people would stand in real danger.
For example, this brilliant morning, with the sun sparkling on the snow and the water, the whole earth ablush with his glory, the pure keen air rejoicing our lungs; we certainly did say to ourselves, our young eyes ablaze with love and health and happiness, that we didn't need any other element to make our poetry perfect.
I said this without a hint of hesitation. For one thing, we felt like Christian when the burden of his sins fell off his back, at getting away from Paris and civilisation and convention and all that modern artificiality implies.
We had neither the need to get rid of any depression, nor that to increase our already infinite intoxication; ourselves and our love and the boundless beauty of the ever changing landscape, a permanent perfection travelling for its pleasure through inexhaustible possibilities !
Yet almost before the words were out of our mouths, a sly smile crept over Lou's loveliness and kindled the same subtly secret delight in my heart.
She offered me a pinch of heroin with the air of communicating some exquisitely esoteric sacrament and I accepted it and measured her a similar dose on my own hand as if some dim delirious desire devoured us. We took it not because we needed it ; but because the act of consummation was, so to speak, an act of religion.
It was the very fact that it was not an act of necessity which made it an act of piety.
In the same way, I cannot say that the dose did us any particular good. It was at once a routine and a ritual. It was a commemoration like the Protestant communion, and at the same time a consecration like the Catholic. It reminded us that we were heirs to the royal rapture in which we were afloat. But also it refreshed that rapture.
We noticed that in spite of the Alpine air, we did not seem to have any great appetite for breakfast, and we appreciated with the instantaneous sympathy which united us that the food of mortals was too gross for the gods.
That sympathy was so strong and so subtle, so fixed in our hearts, that we could not realise the rude, raw fact that we had ever existed as separate beings. The past was blotted out in the calm contemplation of our beatitude. We understood the changeless ecstasy that radiates from statues of the Buddha ; the mysterious triumph on the mouth of Morma Lisa, and the unearthly and ineffable glee of the attitude of Haide' Lamoureux.
We smoked in shining silence as the express swept through the plains of Lombardy. Odd fragments of Shelley's lines on the Euganean hills flitted through my mind like azure or purple phantoms.
" The vaporous plain of Lombardy Islanded with cities fair."
A century had commercialised the cities for the most part into cockpits and cesspools. But Shelley still shone serene as the sun itself.
" Many a green isle needs must be In this wide sea of misery."
Everything he had touched with his pen had blossomed into immortality. And Lou and I were living in the land which his prophetic eyes had seen.
I thought of that incomparable idyll, I will not call it an island, to which he invites Emilia, in Epipsychidion.
Lou and I, my love and I, my wife and I, we were not merely going there ; we had always been there and should always be. For the name of the island, the name of the house, the name of Shelley, and the name of Lou and me, they were all one name-Love.
" The winged words with which my song would pierce Into the heights of love's rare universe
Are chains of lead about its flight of fire,
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire."
I noticed, in fact, that our physical selves seemed to be acting as projections of our thought. We were both breathing rapidly and deeply. Our faces were flushed, suffused with the sunlight splendour of our bloods that beat time to the waltz of our love.
Waltz ? No, it was something wilder than a waltz. The Mazurka, perhaps. No, there was something still more savage in our souls.
I thought of the furious fandango of the gypsies of Granada, of the fanatical frenzy of the religious Moorish rioters chopping at themselves with little sacred axes till the blood streams down their bodies, crazily crimson in the stabbing sunlight, and making little scabs of mire upon the torrid trampled sand.
I thought of the mcenads and Bacchus ; I saw them through the vivid eyes of Euripides and Swinburne. And still unsatisfied, I