Diary of a Drug Fiend

Au Pays de Cocaine 53 most early Victorian sense of the word you can imagine. She was not only a true friend, but a wise friend. She had evidently foreseen that we were going to run short of good old snow. Now I want all you fellows to take it as read that a man, if he calls himself a man, isn’t the kind of man that wants to stop a honeymoon with a girl in a Japanese kimono of the variety described, to have to put on a lot of beastly clothes and hunt all around Paris for a dope peddler. Of course, you'll say at once that I could have rung for the waiter and have him bring me a few cubic kilometres. But that’s simply because you don’t under- stand the kind of hotel at which we were unfortunate enough to be staying. We had gone there thinking no harm whatever. It was right up near the Etoile, and appeared to the naked eye an absolutely respectable first-class family hotel for the sons of the nobility and gentry. Now don’t run away with the idea that I want to knock the hotel. It was simply because France had been bled white; but the waiter on our floor was a middle-aged family man and probably read Lamartine and Pascal and Taine and all those appalling old bores when he wasn’t doing shot drill with the caviare. But it isn’t the slightest use my trying to conceal from you the fact that he always wore a slightly shocked expression, especially in the way he cut his beard. It was emphati- cally not the thing whenever he came into the suite. I am a bit of a psychologist myself, and I know perfectly well that that man wouldn’t have got us cocaine, not if we’d offered him a Bureau de Tabac for doing it. Now, of course, I’m not going to ask you to believe that Gretel Webster knew anything about that waiter— beastly old prig! All she had done was to exhibit wise forethought and intelligent friendship. She had experience, no doubt, bushels of it, barrels of it,