Diary of a Drug Fiend

Au Pays de Cocaine 55 _Now I don’t want you to think that that white silk packet was very big. Lou stooped over the table, her long thin tongue shot out of her mouth like an ant-eater in the Dictionary of National Biography or whatever it is, and twiddled it round in that snow till I nearly went out of my mind. I laughed like a hyena, to think of what she’d said tome. “ Your kiss is bitter with cocaine.” That chap Swinburne was always talking about bitter kisses. What did he know, poor old boy? Until you’ve got your mouth full of cocaine, you don’t know what kissing is. One kiss goes on from phase to phase like one of those novels by Balzac and Zola and Romain Rolland and D. H. Lawrence and those chaps. And you never get tired! You're on fourth speed all the time, and the engine purrs like a kitten, a big white kitten with the stars in its whiskers. And it’s always different and always the same, and it never stops, and you go insane, and you stay insane, and you probably don’t know what I’m talking about, and I don’t care a bit, and I’m awfully sorry for you, and you can find out any minute you like by the simple process of getting a girl like Lou and a lot of cocaine. What did that fellow Lamus say? “Stab your demoniac smile to my brain, Soak me in cognac, kisses, cocaine.” Queer fish, that chap Lamus! But seems to me that’s pretty good evidence he knew something about it. Why, of course he did. I saw him take cocaine myself. Deep chap! Bet you a shilling. Knows a lot. That’s no reason for suspicion. Don’t see why people run him down the way they do. Don’t see why I got so leary myself. Probably a perfectly decent chap at bottom. He’s got his funny little ways—man’s no worse for that. Gad, if one started to get worried about funny little D.D.F, &