FOLLOW A WORD THROUGH THE COLLECTION
Search the corpus.
Phrase search ignores case and repeated whitespace. All-words search finds whole words anywhere on the same page. OCR errors can affect results.
73 matching pages
Page 1 of 41922 · PDF PAGE 69
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 d…
1922 · PDF PAGE 47
…As if in answer to my thought, Lou took a small cut-glass bottle with a gold-chased top from her pocket, unscrewed it and shook out some cocaine on the back of her hand. She flashed a provocative glance in my direction. The studio suddenly filled with the reverberation of her chant :— ‘“O Thou naked virgin of love, that art caught in a net of wild roses! I adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, I A O!” ‘‘ Quite so,” agreed King Lamus cheerfully. “ You'll excuse me, I know, if I ask whether you have any great experience of the effects of cocaine.” Lou …
1922 · PDF PAGE 306
…blubbering, “‘ and I feel sure you understand.” I am not altogether a man of the world, as a matter of fact ; but, whether helped by the cocaine or not, I really did think I understood fairly well what had happened. ““ But why not go to the City?” I repeated, “ they ought to fight like wolves over such a plump little doe as the Schneezug!”’ “My dear Sir Peter!’”’ He raised his hands in ‘horrified surprise. ‘‘ Surely, surely you realise that it ‘may take years and years to educate the public to appreciate the difference between our Pure Cocaine,…
1922 · PDF PAGE 110
…ly it’s rather awkward orchestrating them. Quain says that people accustomed to opium and its derivatives can take an enormous amount of cocaine without any bother. In the ordinary way, half a grain of cocaine can cause death, but we were taking the stuff with absolute carelessness. One doesn’t think of measuring it as one would if one took it by hypodermic. One just takes a dose when one feels one needs it. After all, that’s the rule of nature. Eat when you're hungry. Nothing is worse for the health than settling down to a fixed ration of sO m…
1922 · PDF PAGE 59
… the witches had said. Coriolanus only failed when he stopped tothink. As the poet says, ‘‘ The love of knowledge is the hate of life.”’ Cocaine removes all hesitation. But our forefathers owed their freedom of spirit to the real liberty which they had won; and cocaine is merely Dutch courage. However, while it lasts, it’s all right.
1922 · PDF PAGE 61
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 aff…
1922 · PDF PAGE 57
…he evil of drugs. We smiled our sympathefic assent, with sly glances at our hostess. If the old fool had only known that we were full of cocaine, as we sat and applauded his pompous platitudes ! We laughed our hearts out over the silly incident as we sat in the train. It doesn’t appear particularly comic in perspective; but it’s very hard to tell, at any time, what is going to tickle one’s sense of humour. Probably anything else would have done just as well. We were on the rising curve. The exaltation of love was combined with that of cocaine; …
1922 · PDF PAGE 72
…elf as a peacock strutting and preening. Lou, her mouth half open, was gazing at me fascinated with enormous eyes; the pupils dilated by cocaine. It was just the male bird showing off to his mate. I wanted her to adore me for my little scraps of knowledge; the fragments I had picked up inmy .- abandoned education. Lou is always practical; and she puts something of the priestess into everything she does. There was a certain solemnity in the way in which she took up the heroin on the blade of a knife and put it on to the back of her hand. “My Kni…
1922 · PDF PAGE 63
Au Pays de Cocaine 49 cocaine does. The sober continuity of thought is broken up. One goes off at a tangent, a fresh, fierce, fantastic tangent, on the slightest &kcuse. One’s sense of proportion is gone; and despite all the millions of miles that one cheerily goes out of one’s way, one never loses sight of one’s goal. While I have been writing all this, I have never lost sight for a moment of the fact that I am telling you about the box and the letter from Gretel. We met a girl in Paris, half a Red Indian, a lovely baby with the fascination of…
1922 · PDF PAGE 62
48 The Diary of a Drug Fiend that this is the case; and this is annihilated by cocaine. Let me emphasise once more the absence of any reaction. There is where the infernal subtlety of the drug comes in. If one goes on the bust in the ordinary way on alcohol, one gets what the Americans call “the morning after the night before.” Nature warns us that we have been breaking the rules; and Nature has given us common sense enough to know that although we can borrow a bit, we have to pay back. We have drunk alcohol since the beginning of time; and it …
1922 · PDF PAGE 13
HI. IV. VII. Vill. IX, II, Ill. IV. VII. CONTENTS BOOK I—PARADISO A KNIGHT OUT OVER THE TOP! PHAETON AU PAYS DE COCAINE A HEROIN HEROINE THE GLITTER ON THE SNOW THE WINGS OF THE OOF-BIRD VEDERE NAPOLI E POI-—-PRO PATRIA—MORI THE GATTO FRITTO THE BUBBLE BURSTS BOOK II—INFERNO SHORT COMMONS INDIAN SUMMER THE GRINDING OF THE BRAKES BELOW THE BRUTES TOWARDS MADNESS COLD TURKEY THE FINAL PLUNGE ix 102 115 128 143 162 175 192 205 220 235
1922 · PDF PAGE 52
…ould hear the beat of my heart. It was one with the beat of the engine. I took the pure unsullied air into my lungs. It was an octave to cocaine; the same invigorating spiritual force expressed in other terms. , The magnificently melodious words of Sieveking sprang into my mind. I repeated them rapturously. It is the beat of the British engine. : “Deep lungfuls! Deep mouthfuls! Deep, deep mental mouthfuls ! ” The wind of our speed abolished all my familiar bodily sensations. The cocaine combined with it to anesthetise them. I was disembodied; a…
1922 · PDF PAGE 235
…ody, and put him against me somehow. .. . He was lying on the sofa in his pyjamas. I wanted to be kissed, and went over to him with some cocaine. But he didn’t move. He looked at me with wide open eyes. There was some dreadful fear in them, and he said,— “‘ Black, the plague of the pit, Her pustules visibly fester.”’ Of course, I knew he didn’t mean it, but I was hurt. I gave him the cocaine. It roused him. He sat up and then he held me by the shoulders and looked straight at my face and said:— “Dragon of lure and dread, Tiger of fury and lust,…
1922 · PDF PAGE 109
…h in a dream. We seemed to be aware of what we were eating without actually tasting it. As I think I said before, it’s the anesthesia of cocaine that deter- mines the phenomena. When I make a remark like that, I understand that it’s the dead and gone medical student popping up. But never you mind that. The point is that when you have the right amount of snow in you, you can't feel anything in the ordinary sense of the word. You appreciate it in a sort of impersonal way. There’s a pain, but the pain doesn’t hurt. You enjoy the fact of the pain a…
1922 · PDF PAGE 55
…l of hearty chaff. Dripping, in evening dress, at four o’clock in the morning! Like Hedda Gabler, “one doesn’t do these things.” But the cocaine helped me again. Why the devil should I care what anybody thought? | “Where can I get gas?” I said to the captain of the smack. He smiled grimly. “ She’ll want a bit more than gas.” I glanced at the ’plane. The man was perfectly right. A week’s repairs, at the least. “You'd better go to the hotel, sir, and get some warm clothes. Look how the lady’s shivering.” It was perfectly true. There was nothing e…
1922 · PDF PAGE 40
…throat out. I had become insane with dull, harsh lust. I hated her. But as I raised my head; as the sudden, the instantaneous madness of cocaine swept from my ‘nostrils to my brain—that’s a line of poetry, but I can’t help it—get on !—the depression lifted from my mind like the sun coming out of the clouds. I heard as in a dream the rich, ripe voice of Lou :— “‘O Thou fierce whirlpool of passion, that art sucked up by the mouth of the sun! I adore Thee, Evoe! I adore Thee, I A O!” The whole thing was different—I understood what she was saying, …
1922 · PDF PAGE 58
…ithout a permit from the Custom House! I suppose I really ought to give myself up to the police. Yes, as one gets into the full swing of cocaine, one loses all consciousness of the bumpy character of this funny old oblate spheroid. One is really very much more competent to deal with the affairs of life, that is, in a certain sense of the word. M. Coué is perfectly right, just as the Christian Scientists and all those people are perfectly right, in saying that half our troubles come from our conscious- ness of their existence, so that if we forg…
1922 · PDF PAGE 64
…thing she said and did. Her eyes glittered, her lips twittered, her cheeks glowed like fresh blown buds in spring. She was the spirit of cocaine incarnate ; cocaine made flesh. Her mere existence made the Universe infinitely exciting. Say, if you like, she was possessed of the devil ! . Any good person, so-called, would have been shocked and scared at her appearance. She represented the siren, the vampire, Melusine, the dangerous, delicious devil that cowards have invented to explain their lack of manliness. Nothing would suit her mood but that…
1922 · PDF PAGE 104
…e fellow,” said I, and then remem- bered my telegram of the day before. I had a swift pang of alarm. Could something be wrong ?. But the cocaine assured me that everything was all right. “Tl have to see the fellow, I suppose,’ I said, and told the hall-boy to send him upstairs. “Don’t let him keep you long,” said Lou, with a petulant pout, and ran into the bedroom after a swift embrace, so violent that it disarranged my new Charvet necktie. The man came up. I was a little bored by the gravity of his manner, and rather disgusted by its solemn de…
1922 · PDF PAGE 75
Au Pays de Cocaine 61 “This is perfectly wonderful stuff,” I said to Lou as we passed the Arc de Triomphe. ‘I don’t know what you meant by saying the stuff didn’t have any special effect upon you. Why, you're perfectly gorgeous | ”’ “You bet Iam,” laughed Lou. “ The king’s daughter is all-glorious within ; her raiment is of wrought gold, and she thrusts her face out to be kissed, like a comet pushing its way to the sun. Didn’t you know I was the king’s daughter ? ” she smiled, with such seductive sublimity that something in me nearly fainted wi…