Magick Without Tears

55 Money Cara Soror, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. You ask me for the initiated view about the power of money. As the poet says: "O.k. oke; I'm yer bloke." F. Marion Crawford, a Victorian novelist, now (I think deservedly) obsolescent, though I saw one of his books last week on the shelves of a tuppenny shark-library,' wrote a tale Mr. Isaacs based on the life of one Mr. Jacobs, the Indian Rothschild of two generations ago, financing princes, little wars-everything. One night in Bombay the burden of his wealth broke his nerve; he stood at the window of his hotel, and flung masses of money to the mob. Soon after came a stranger, and said to him, "You have insulted the fourth of the great powers that rule this world; it shall be taken from you." It was so; he lost all. In the end he became, after a fashion, Sannyasi, and died (I suppose) in the usual odour. I thought of this incident in Paris in the twenties, when I saw American tourists plaster the bonnets of their cars with 1000 franc notes, or tear them up and strew the floors of banks with them. Grimly I prognosticated Twenty-Nine. And it was so. "Nice work!" you charmingly remark; "but hardly what I sought to know." Patience, child! 1. No money-lender in the drunkenness of guilt plus the delirium of cocaine fortified by buckets of hashish would dare dream of getting such interest on his capital as these vampires. 349