Diary of a Drug Fiend

The Final Plunge 237 All the time he has been able to realise dimly that he was slipping down the dark slope to insanity. He has mixed it all up with the idea of me. He had begun to identify me with the phantom of murderous madness which he recognised as destroying him. A look of trouble comes into his face every now and then; and he begins to repeat plaintively in a puzzled voice with his eyes fixed on mine :-— “Know you now why her eyes So fearfully glaze, beholding Terrors and infamies Like filthy flowers unfolding? Laughter widowed of ease, Agony barred from sadness, Death defeated of peace, Is she not madness ? ” Over and over again he said it, and over and over again I told him the answer. I had indeed been a personifica- tion of the seductress, of the destroying angel. But it had been a nightmare. I had awakened, and he must awake. But he saw not me any more, but his ideal enveloping me congealed into my form. No matter what I said, his fixed idea became constantly stronger as his physical strength came back. “She waits for me, lazily leering, As moon goes murdering moon ; The moon of her triumph is nearing ; She will have me wholly soon.” The rhythm of the poem was still in my own blood ; but it seemed to have worked itself out into another channel. I had forgotten the acute personal anguish of the earlier part of the poem. I could not even remember the lines any more. I was wholly occupied by the last two paragraphs where the subject changes so suddenly. I began to realise what my governess used to call