Diary of a Drug Fiend

CHAPTER I A KNIGHT OUT Yes, I certainly was feeling depressed. I don’t think that this was altogether the reaction of the day. Of course, there always is a reaction after the excitement of a flight; but the effect is more physical than moral. One doesn’t talk. One lies about and smokes and drinks champagne. No, I was feeling quite a different kind of rotten. I looked at my mind, as the better class of flying man soon learns to do, and I really felt ashamed of myself. Take me for all in all, I was one of the luckiest men alive. War is like a wave; some it rolls over, some it drowns, some it beats to pieces on the shingle; but some it shoots far up the shore on to glistening golden sand out of the reach of any further freaks of fortune. Let me explain. My name is Peter Pendragon. My father was a second son; and he had quarrelled with my Uncle Mortimer when they were boys. He was a struggling general practitioner in Norfolk, and had not made things any better for himself by marrying. However, he scraped together enough to get me some sort of education, and at the outbreak of the war I was twenty-two years old and had just passed my Intermediate for M.D. in the University of London. Then, as I said, the wave came. My mother went out for the Red Cross, and died in tbe first year of the war. Such was the confusion that I did not even know about it till over six months later. My father died of influenza just before the Armistice. 3 ,