through the pebbly gorge of Life ! I adore Thee, Evoe ! I adore Thee, I A O! "
Her voice had sunk to a clear murmur. We found ourselves in the street. The chucker-out hailed us a taxi. I stopped her song at last. My mouth was on her mouth. We were driving in the chariot of the Sun through the circus of the Universe. We didn't know where we were going, and we didn't care. We had no sense of time at all. There was a sequence of sensations ; but there was no means of regulating them. It was as if one's mental clock had suddenly gone mad.
I have no gauge of time, subjectively speaking, but it must have been a long while before our mouths separated, for as this happened I recognised the fact that we were very far from the club.
She spoke to me for the first time. Her voice thrilled dark unfathomable deeps of being. I tingled in every fibre. And what she said was this :
" Your kiss is bitter with cocaine."
It is quite impossible to give those who have no experience of these matters any significance of what she said.
It was a boiling caldron of wickedness that had suddenly bubbled over. Her voice rang rich with hellish glee. It stimulated me to male intensity. I caught her in my arms more fiercely. The world went black before my eyes. I perceived nothing any more. I can hardly even say that I felt. I was Feeling itself ! I was O the possibilities of Feeling fulfilled to the uttermost. Yet, coincident with this, my body went on automatically with its own private affairs.
She was escaping me. Her face eluded mine.
" O Thou storm-drunk breath of the winds, that pant in the bosom of the mountains! I adore Thee, Evoe ! I adore Thee, I A O !"
Her breast sobbed out its song with weird intensity. I understood in a flash that this was her way of resistance. She was trying to insist to herself that she was a cosmic force; that she was not a woman at all ; that a man meant nothing to her. She fought desperately against me, sliding so serpent-like about the bounds of space. Of course, it was really the taxibut I didn't know it then, and I'm not quite sure of it now.
"I wish to God," I said to myself in a fury, " I had one more sniff of that Snow. I'd show her! "
At that moment she threw me off as if I had been a feather. I felt myself all of a sudden no more good. Quite unaccountably I had collapsed, and I found myself, to my amazement, knocking out a little pile of cocaine from a ten-gramme bottle which had been in my trousers' pocket, on to my hand, and sniffing it up into my nostrils with greedy relish.
Don't ask me how it got there. I suppose Gretel Webster must have done it somehow. My memory is an absolute blank. That's one of the funny things about cocaine. You never know quite what trick it is going to play you.
I was reminded of the American professor who boasted that he had a first-class memory whose only defect was that it wasn't reliable.
I am equally unable to tell you whether the fresh supply of the drug increased my powers, or whether Lou had simply tired of teasing me, but of her own accord she writhed into my arms; her hands and mouth were heavy on my heart. There's some more poetry-that's the way it takes one-rhythm seems to come natural-everything is one grand harmony. It is impossible that anything should be out of tune. The voice of Lou seemed to come from an enormous distance, a deep, low, sombre chant -
" O Thou low moan of fainting maids, that art caught up in the strong sobs of Love I I adore Thee, Evoe ! I adore Thee, I A O ! "
That was it-her engine and my engine for the first time working together! All the accidents had disappeared. There was nothing but the unison of two rich racing rhythms.
You know how it is when you are flying-vou see a speck in the air. You can't tell by your eyes if it is your Brother Boche coming to pot you, or one of our own or one of the allied 'planes. But you can tell them apart, foe from friend, by the different beat of their engines. So one comes to apprehend a particular rhythm as sympathetic-another as hostile.
So here were Lou and I flying together beyond the bounds of eternity, side by side; her low, persistent throb in perfect second to my great galloping boom.
Things of this sort take place outside time and space. It is quite wrong to say that what happened in the taxi ever began or ended. What happened was that our attention was distracted from the eternal truth of this essential marriage of our souls by the chauffeur, who had stopped the taxi and opened the door.
" Here we are, sir," he said, with a grin.
Sir Peter Pendragon and Lou Lalcham automatically reappeared. Before all things, decorum!
The shock bit the incident deeply into my mind. I remember with the utmost distinctness paying the man off, and then being lost in absolute blank wonder as to how it happened that we were where we were. Who had given the address to the man, and where were we ?
I can only suppose that, consciously or subconsciously, Lou had done it, for she showed no embarrassment in pressing the electric bell. The door opened immediately. I was snowed under by an avalanche of crimson light that poured from a vast studio.
Lou's voice soared high and clear:
"O Thou scarlet dragon of flame, enmeshed in the web of a spider ! I adore Thee, Evoe ! I adore Thee, I A O ! "
A revulsion of feeling rushed over me like a storm for in the doorway, with Lou's arms round his neck, was the tall, black, sinister figure of King Lamus.
" I knew you wouldn't mind our dropping in, although it is so late," she was saying.
It would have been perfectly simple for him to acquiesce with a few conventional words. Instead, he was pontifical.
There are four gates to one palace ; the floor of that palace is of silver and gold ; lapis-lazuli and jasper are there ; and all rare scents ; jasmine and rose, and the emblems of death. Let him enter in turn or at once the four gates ; let him stand on the floor of the palace."
I was unfathornably angry. Why must the man always act like a cad or a clown ? But there was nothing to do but to accept the situation and walk in politely.
He shook hands with me formally, yet with greater intensity than is customary between well-bred strangers in England. And as he did so, he looked me straight in the face. His deadly inscrutable eyes burned their way clean through to the back of my brain and beyond. Yet his words were entirely out of keeping with his actions.
" What does the poet say ? " he said loftily-" Ratker a joke to fill tip on coke-or words to that effect, Sir Peter."
How in the devil's name did he know what I had been taking ?
" Men who know things have no right to go about the world," something said irritably inside myself. But something else obscurely answered it.
" That accounts for what the world has always done
-made martyrs of its pioneers."
I felt a little ashamed, to tell the truth ; but Lamus put me at my ease. He waved his hand towards a huge arm-chair covered with Persian tapestries. He gave me a cigarette and lighted it for me. He poured out a drink of Benedictine into a huge curved glass, and put it on a little table by my side. I disliked his easy hospitality as much as anything else. I had an uncomfortable feeling that I was a puppet in his hands.
There was only one other person in the room. On a settee covered with leopard skins lay one of the strangest women I had ever seen. She wore a white evening dress with pale yellow roses, and the same flowers were in her hair. She was a half-blood negress from North Africa.
" Miss Fatma Hallaj," said Lamus.
I rose and bowed. But the girl took no notice. She seemed in utter oblivion of sublunary matters. Her skin was of that deep, rich night-sky blue which only very vulgar eyes imagine to be black. The face was gross and sensual, but the brows wide and commanding.
There is no type of intellect so essentially aristocratic as the Egyptian when it happens to be of the rare right strain.
" Don't be offended," said Lamus, in a soft voice, " she includes us all in her sublime disdain."