Diary of a Drug Fiend

248 The Diary of a Drug Fiend I believe it was this alone that dragged us up from the dirty bed from which we had not moved for weeks, sunk in a state which was neither sleep nor waking. It was by a gigantic effort that I got up and put some clothes on, and went out and got shaved. Nothing but excitement and the idea of death enabled me to do it. I found the same thing in the war; and so did lots of men. It seems as if the soul is tired of the body, and welcomes the chance to be done with it once and for all. But it wants to offer itself gallantly in a flight or a charge. It objects to dyingin a ditch passively. I am sure that .nothing less would have got us up from that foetid stupor. | We had some champagne before starting, and then tottered giddily over the unfamiliar streets. There was something faintly attractive about the bustle of humanity. There was a momentary regret about leaving it. Yet we had already left it so long, so long ago, in every intelligible sense of the word. We should, I suppose, have been classed as human beings by statisticians, but surely by nobody else. We could never return to their midst. And even in the midst of our wretchedness, we felt a repulsion of contempt for the ruck of humanity which made us content to widen the gap between them and ourselves. Why preserve the outward semblance of these futile insects? Even their happiness disgusted us; it was so stupidly aewstiallow. We could see that the people of the Wisteria were shocked at our appearance. The mattre d’hotel bustled over and made some sympathetic remarks about our not having been there for a (long time. I told him that we had both been very ill; |and-then-Eow put in;-in. a “ We shall -be-better-te-night,” der intonation was so sinister that the man almost d. I was afraid for the moment that everything be spoilt, but I saved the situation by some silly