Over the Top ! 29
can hardly even say that I felt. I was Feeling itself !
I was all the possibilities of Feeling fulfilled to the
uttermost. Yet, coincident with this, my body went
on automatically with its own private affairs.
She was escaping me. Her face eluded mine.
“O Thou storm-drunk breath of the winds,
that pant in the bosom of the mountains! I
adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, I A O!”
Her breast sobbed out its song with weird intensity.
I understood in a flash that this was her way of
resistance. She was trying to insist to herself that she
was a cosmic force; that she was not a woman at all ;
that a man meant nothing to her. She fought desper-
ately against me, sliding so serpent-like about the
bounds of space. Of course, it was really the taxi—
but I didn’t know it then, and I’m not quite sure of it
now.
“T wish to God,” I said to myself in a fury, “ I had
one more sniff of that Snow. I’d show her!”
At that moment she threw me off as if I had been
a feather. I felt myself all of a sudden no more good.
Quite unaccountably I had collapsed, and I found
myself, to my amazement, knocking out a little pile of
cocaine from a ten-gramme bottle which had been
in my trousers’ pocket, on to my “and, and sniffing it
up into my nostrils with greedy relish.
Don’t ask me how it got there. I suppose Gretel
Webster must have done it somehow. My memory is
an absolute blank. That’s one of the funny things
about cocaine. You never know quite what trick it is
going to play you.
I was reminded of the American professor who
boasted that he had a first-class memory whose only
defect was that it wasn’t reliable.
I am equally unable to tell you whether the fresh
supply of the drug increased my powers, or whether
Lou had simply tired of teasing me, but of her own