A Heroin Heroine 69
was a certain fascination in her complete lack of
fascination.
Please excuse this paradoxical way of putting it.
I mean that she had all the qualities which normally
attract. She had the remains of an astonishing, if
bizarre, beauty. She had obviously a vast wealth of
experience. She possessed a quiet intensity which
should have made her irresistible; and yet she was
absolutely devoid of what we call magnetism. It
isn’t a scientific word—so much the worse for science.
It describes a fact in nature, and one of the most
important facts in practical affairs. Everything of
human interest, from music-hall turns to empires, is
run on magnetism and very little else. And science
ignores it because it can’t be measured by mechanical
instruments|
The whole of the woman’s vitality was directed to
some secret interior shrine of her own soul.
Now she began to speak for the first time. The only
subject that interested her in this wide universe was
heroin. Her voice was monotonous.
Lou told me later that it reminded her of a dirge
droned by Tibetan monks far off across implacable snow.
“It’s the only thing there is,” she said, in a tone of
extraordinary ecstatic detachment. One could divine
an infinite unholy joy derived from its own sadness.
It was as if she took a morbid pleasure in being some-
thing melancholy, something monstrous; there was,
in fact, a kind of martyred majesty in her mood.
“You mustn’t expect to get the result at once,”
she went on. ‘“‘ You have to be born into it, married
with it, and dead from it before you understand it.:
Different people are different. But it always takes some
months at least before you get rid of that stupid
nuisance—life. As long as you have animal passions,
you are an animal. How disgusting it is to think of
eating and loving and all those appetities, like cattle |
Breathing itself would be beastly if one knew one were
doing it. How intolerable life would be to people of