The Grinding of the Brakes 185
emotion. We are resolved to stop taking H.; and there
the memory of Lamus’s letter was like a rope held by a
trustworthy leader for a novice on some crumbling crag.
If we could only have relied on that! But our minds
were shaken by panic.
Those cursed medical cowards! Those pompous
prophets of evil! Every time we came back to the
resolution to stop, they pulled us off the rock.
“It’s beyond human power.”
But they know which side their breaq’s buttered.
It’s their game to discourage their dupes.
But they had over-played their hand. They had
painted their picture in too crude colours. They
revolted us.
Again, the effect of Mabel’s death, and the fact that
our supplies were so short, combined to drive us into
the determination to stop at whatever cost. |
We struggled savagely hour by hour. There were
moments when the abstinence itself purged us by sheer
pain of the capacity to suffer. Our minds began to
wander. We were whirled on the wings of woe across
the flaming skies of anguish.
I remember Peter standing at the table, lost to all
sense of actuality. He cried in a shrill, cracked voice :—
‘** Her cranial dome is vaulted,
Her mad Mongolian eyes
Aslant with the ecstasies
Of things. immune, exalted .
Far beyond stars and skies,
Slits of amber and jet——”
I heard him across abysses of aching inanity. A
thrill of Satanic triumph tingled in my soul, and
composed a symphony from its screams. I leapt
with lust to recognise myselfin the repulsive Phantasm
pictured by the poet. :