Confessions of Aleister Crowley

498 coincidence. There was, of course, no way by which he could warn me of his visit. One morning there came to me a quite irrational wish. I found myself thinking, "How I wish I had prawns for lunch!" The thought recurred despite indignant attempts to banish it. An hour or so later, I heard my name shouted. I jumped up and found no trace of the shouter. I knew the voice must come from a boat, and ran up and down the island furiously. Still nothing in sight. It must have been half an hour before we found each other, though looking everywhere, and the island being quite small. Whitehead had brought his wife and her sister with various luxuries to mitigate the austerity of the fare traditionally proper to hermits, and one of these was --- prawns! On August 19th, I was obliged to go to New York for two days on O.T.O. business. The result was amusing. I called on my old friend Tony Sarg, the artist, and gave him an enthusiastic description of my holiday. "There is only one fly," I said, "in the apothecary's ointment. Like Adam in Eden, I lack an Eve." He laughed. "Don't worry! I know a girl game for any adventure. She has wonderful hair --- orange-red curls, calculated to produce delirium tremens at a moment's notice. Here's her name and address." At that moment a small crowd called and for the next half hour we rocked with laughter at the astounding imitation which Tony gave of me wooing a woman. I left a note for the girl --- Madeleine was her name --- at her hotel, asking her to drop in to lunch any day she felt like it. I didn't expect her to come and once more I was wrong. I went back to Oesopus the following day, supplied with several large cans of red paint. On both the east and west shores of the island are wide {784} steep cliffs of smooth rock, obviously provided by Providence for my convenience in proclaiming the Law. I devoted a couple of days to painting "Do that thou wilt" on both banks for the benefit of passing steamers. The little paint left over was dedicated to Madeleine. I barked a tree in front of my tent for the name of the beloved, and again on a convenient rock hard by. No sooner was this done than a man came off from the mainland in a boat with a telegram from Madeleine to meet her at Hyde Park Station, a few miles below the island. I went down. As I paced the platform I noticed a tall, distinguished, military-looking man, who seemed to be eyeing me strangely. He finally made up his mind to speak. "Are you Mr Crowley?" he said. In my surprise I nearly forgot to say, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." We then got into conversation. It appeared that he was in charge of the "Intelligence" of Dachers County, New York; whereupon I confided to him that the Department of Justice had instructed me to keep my eyes open for any suspicious incidents. He requested me to to report anything of the sort also to him, to which, of course, I gladly agreed. He then confided that my own behaviour had turned the country upside down. The mysterious stranger, the fact of my having no companion, had aroused suspicion, as also my habit of sitting for hours in an apparently uncomfortable attitude and absolutely motionless. Reports had been made to him. He had set inquiries on foot. The mystery only grew deeper. Nobody seemed to know anything definite. He had had all Staatsburg "on the grill". He had found it impossible to identify me, until at last one of the girls in the post office, evidently in a class by herself in the matter of intelligence, supplied a clue. She knew me by the scarlet tassels of my golf stockings. He had had me watched, and of course found nothing wrong, but on asking New York City if they could supplement the information, he learned to his intense amazement that I was myself working for the Department of Justice. He told me of various sinister rumours about spies. "Hang it," said I, "what could a spy possibly do in a section like this?" "Well," said he, "there are rumours of flashes of light on the west shore at night which suggest signalling. It might mean serious mischief. We are sending the troops to New York by night train. A spy might easily estimate our numbers, send the news east by a chain of flashed signals and have it wirelessed to Berlin!" I promised to keep watch, and then the train came in. There was no difficulty in recognizing Madeleine in that background of barbarism. She stood out like a strawberry among a heap of hips and haws; a short sturdy figure trimly tailored, with a round smiling face, and an ivory complexion framed in that pyrotechnic display of hair. Sarg's eloquence had failed to do her justice. She had brought a huge trunk. My face dropped. What would the canoe say? We managed to get it aboard and started upstream, reaching camp without incident bar a narrow squeak of being swamped by the wash of a