Au Pays de Cocaine 47
pocket. One sniff which gave us a sensation of the
most exquisitely delicious wickedness, and we were
on fourth speed again |!
The only incident worth recording is the receipt of
a letter and a box from Gretel Webster. The box con-
tained a padded kimono for Lou, one of those gorgeous
Japanese geisha silks, blue like a summer sky with
dragons worked all over it in gold, with scarlet eyes
and tongues.
Lou looked more distractingly, deliriously glorious
than ever.
I had never been particularly keen on women. The
few love affairs which had come my way had been
rather silly and sordid. They had not revealed the
possibilities of love ; in fact, I had thought it a somewhat
overrated pleasure, a brief and brutal blindness with
boredom and disgust hard on its heels.
But with cocaine, things are absolutely different.
I want to emphasise the fact that cocaine is in reality
a local anesthetic. Thatis the actual explanation of its
action. One cannot feel one’s body. (As every one
knows, this is the purpose for which it is used in surgery
and dentistry.)
Now don’t imagine that this means that the physical
pleasures of marriage are diminished, but they are
utterly etherealised. The animal part of one is intensely
stimulated so far as its own action is concerned; but
the feeling that this passion is animal is completely
transmuted.
I come of a very refined race, keenly observant and
easily nauseated. The little intimate incidents in-
separable from love affairs, which in normal circum-
stances tend to jar the delicacy of one’s sensibilities,
do so no longer when one’s furnace is full of coke.
Everything soever is transmuted as by “heavenly
alchemy ” into a spiritual beatitude. One is intensely
conscious of the body. But as the Buddhists tell us,
the body is in reality an instrument of pain or dis-
comfort. We have all of us a subconscious intuition