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.