Diary of a Drug Fiend

282 The Diary of a Drug Fiend It was our fault, of course, for trying to outwit nature. But at the same time, one couldn't shut one’s eyes to the facts, and I knew Lamus would have had no hesitation in giving us a little snow, feeling the way I was. I don’t know why I felt such a disinclination to go back and ask him. It may have been the instinctive dislike of bothering him; and besides, it was rather humiliating to have to admit. There was also a trace of sturdy British feeling that the thing to do was to stick it out and trust a night’s rest to tone up my nerves. Lamus had advised us to take Turkish baths if we felt unduly depressed. We had found them very useful. We had got down to three goes a day two days running, chiefly by following his advice to take one of the white tablets instead of the heroin whenever the craving became irresistible. He made rather a point of that, by the way. . It was a bad thing, he said, to yield to stress. It wasn’t nearly so harmful to take the heroin when one didn’t feel so badly in need of it. Even after all this time I hadn’t quite got on to the peculiarities of the man’s mind. I had never reached the stage where I could be sure what he could say next. One day we were talking about Lou’s Chinese appearance; and he said quite seriously that he must have some Chinese blood in him or was the reincarnation of a Chinese philosopher. Ko Yuen, I think he said the name was. He said that he owed it to his European reason to explain categorically why his thoughts had such an Asiatic cast. They certainly had. From our point of view it was simply perversity. And yet, as a rule, it seemed to work out all right in the end. But it gives one a pain in the neck to try to follow the way. his mind works. And he takes a Satanic pleasure in taking hold of one’s most obviously reasonable ideas and putting up a series of paradoxes which bewilder one with their strangeness, yet to which there seems to be no answer.