Episodes Before Thirty/Chapter 21
CHAPTER XXI
A few days after the doctor's secret had been laid bare I received a brief, curt letter from McCloy to say he could not keep my place open for ever; how soon was I coming back? Six weeks had passed already. The doctor convinced me I was not yet in a condition to face ten hours' hard reporting a day. I answered McCloy as best I could, thanking him, and telling the facts. Dr. Huebner also wrote him a line.
I was distressed and anxious, none the less, and that evening I was certainly not at my best. I gave the old man but little help. His method of using me was simple: if I could manage to interest him, by talk, by music, by books, by anything at all, it enabled him to postpone the hour of injection. Each time we tried to make this interval longer; each time, he told me, he took a smaller quantity.
On this particular evening, hungry and depressed as I was, I failed to be "interesting," and no forced attempt could make me so. My own condition, in any case, was pretty low; my friend's dejection and excessive irritability proved the last straw. We disagreed, we hurt each other's feelings a little, I relapsed into silence finally, the gloom was dreadful. My own troubles just then were uppermost in my mind. If I lost my job, I kept thinking, what on earth would happen to me? . . .
The old man presently, and long before his time, got up in silence and went to the glass cabinet where now the Majendie bottle stood. He no longer kept it in his workshop out of sight. His face was black as thunder. Conscience pricked me; I roused myself, saying something by way of trying to prevent, whereupon he turned and said savagely: "Do you want to see me die? Or lose my reason?"
As already mentioned, I was totally ignorant of drugs and their effect. His words, which I took literally, frightened me. I watched him mix the solution, fill his syringe slowly with shaking hands, then unfasten his clothes. I found the place and rubbed the skin as usual, while he sat back in his big chair, in sullen silence. He drew the needle out; his face was awful; he sighed and groaned; I really thought he was going to collapse before my eyes, perhaps to die. I rubbed and rubbed . . . while the magical change stole slowly over him. His face cleared, his smile came back, he looked younger, his very voice became mellow instead of harsh and rough, his eyes lit up with happiness.
The contrast was astonishing, the effect so rapid. And, for the first time, a longing rose in me: if only I could have some of this bewitching panacea! My troubles would all melt away. I should feel happy. Hunger also would disappear. Was it so terrible and dangerous after all?
The thought went through me like a burning flame.
It was a thought, merely. I had no intention of asking, not even of suggesting, such a thing. I would not have dared to; the old man, I knew, besides, would never, never consent; his obstinacy was beyond any power of mine to modify. None the less, the thought and desire were distinctly in me at that moment. It even crossed my mind that he was selfish, inconsiderate, unkind, not to realize that a little, oh, just a tiny dose, would help me and make me happy too.
The change in him was now complete, he settled back in his deep chair. I heard him asking for the fiddle. I remember the effort it cost me to say something about being ready to try, and how I concealed my sulky face as I crossed the room to open my case. I felt disappointed, rather sore, a trifle angry too; he could so easily open the gates of heaven for me. I fumbled with the case, delaying on purpose, for no music lay in me, and I did not want to play, I felt miserable all over. My back was turned to him. And then I heard my name softly spoken close behind me.
I turned with a start, it was the doctor's voice, its peculiar softness struck me. He was coming slowly across the room, a curious smile on his face, peering at me over the top of his spectacles, the shoulders bent forward a little, his gait slouching, his slippers dragging along the carpet, his white hair tumbling about his forehead, moving slowly at me—and in his raised right hand was a needle poised to strike.
I knew what it meant: he was going to give me morphia without even being asked. A queer revulsion of feeling came over me. He was saying something, but I did not hear the words properly, nor understand them, at any rate; his voice, too, was so low and soft. My brain was in a whirl. Something in the old man's appearance frightened me. The idea of the drug now also frightened me. Then, suddenly, a complete recklessness rushed over me.
"Take off your coat," I heard him say. "And now roll your sleeve up. So! Nun, jetzt"—he gazed hard into my eyes—"aber—nur—ausnahmsweise!" With slow earnest emphasis he repeated the words: "As an exception—only!"
I watched him choose the place on my arm, I watched the needle go in with its little prick, I watched him slowly press the small piston that injected the poison into my blood. He, for his part, never once moved his eyes from mine till the operation was ended, and my coat was on again. He wore that curious smile the whole time.
"You needed it to-night," he said, "just a little, a very weak dose—aber—nur—ausnahmsweise!" He walked over and put the little Majendie phial back upon the shelf. Then he filled his pipe and drew up the operating chair for me to lie on. His eye was constantly on me. The music was forgotten. He wanted to talk.
Whether he had done this thing really to give me a little happiness, or whether his idea was to make me "interesting" for his own sake, I do not know. The fact is that within three minutes of the needle's prick I was in a state of absolute bliss.
A little warm sensation, accompanied by the faintest possible suggestion of nausea which was probably my own imagination, passed up the spine into the head. Something cleared in my brain, then burst. A sense of thawing followed, the melting away of all the things that had been making me unhappy. I began to glow all over. Hope, happiness and a gorgeous confidence flowed in; benevolence, enthusiasm, charity flooded me to the brim. I wanted to forgive Boyde everything to the end of time, sacrifice my entire life to cure my old German friend; everything base, unworthy, sordid in me, it seemed, had dropped away....
The experience is too well-known to bear another description; it varies, of course, with individuals; varies, too, according to the state of health or sickness, according to whether it is needed or not really needed; and while some feel what I felt, others merely sleep, or, on the contrary, cannot sleep at all. The strength of the dose, naturally, is also an important item. Individual reactions, anyhow, are very different, and with Kay, to whom later the doctor gave it too, three doses produced no effect whatever, while the fourth brought on the cumulative result of all four at once, so that we had to walk him up and down, pouring strong black coffee down his unwilling throat, urging him violently not to sleep--the only thing he wanted to do--or he would, old Huebner assured him--never wake again.... In my case, at any rate, wasted physically as I was, empty of food, under-nourished for many weeks, below par being a mild description of my body, the result seemed a radiance that touched ecstasy. It was, of course, an intensification of consciousness.
Such intensification, I well knew, could be produced by better if more difficult ways, ways that caused no reaction, ways that constructed instead of destroyed ... and the first pleasure I derived from my experience, the interest that first stirred flashingly and at once through my cleared mind, was the absolute conviction that the teaching and theories in my books were true....
The doctor sat, smiling at me from his chair. "I would not do this for many," he said in German, "but for you it has no danger. You could stop anything. You have real will." After a pause he added: "Now we are happy; we are both happy. Let us dream without thinking. Let us realize our happiness!..."
The hours passed while we talked, and my hunger was forgotten. I only wanted one thing to complete my happiness--I wanted Kay, I wanted Boyde, and I wanted one figure from across the sea, my brother. Had these three come to join the circle in that dingy consulting-room, my heaven, it seemed to me, would have been made perfect....
The passing of time was not marked. I played the fiddle, and we chanted the old man's favourite passage: "O just, subtle and mighty opium!" ... its full meaning, with the appeal it held, now all explained to me at last. As I laid the instrument down, I saw the white face of the little girl just inside the half-opened door. She caught my eye, ran up to me, and climbed upon my knee.
"Oh, Uncle Diedel," she cried, "how big your eyes are! I do believe Otto has given you some of his Majendie medicine. Are you going to die, too, unless you have it?"
Nothing, it seemed, was hidden from the clear vision that lay in me then; the appalling truth flashed into me on the instant. The little, stunted figure, the old expression in the pallid child-face, the whiteness of the skin, the brilliant eyes, all were due to the same one thing. Did the doctor, her own father, give her the needle too?
It was on this occasion, this night of my first experience with morphine, that I found my letters with the stamps torn off. I reached home, as described, about two in the morning, still in a state of bliss, although the effect of the drug was waning a little then. But there was happiness, affection, forgiveness and charity in my heart, I thought. This describes my feelings of the moment certainly. How they were swept away has been already told. So much for the pseudo-exaltation of the drug! And, while on this subject, the part played by the drug in this par-* ticular little scrap of history may as well be told briefly at once and done with.
The suggestion that I could "stop anything," combined with my own desire, was potent. There was another way in which the insidious poisoning also worked: I became so "interesting," and entertained the old doctor so successfully, that he found himself able to do without his own dose. The stern injunction "nur ausnahmsweise" was forgotten. Without the stuff in my blood I was gloomy, stupid, dull; with it, I became alive and helped him. But the headache and depression, the nausea, the black ultimate dejection of the "day after" could be removed by one thing only. Nothing else had the slightest effect, and only another dose could banish these after-effects--a stronger dose. While the old man was soon able to reduce not only the quantity he took, but the number of injections as well, my own dose, to produce the desired effect, had to be doubled.
Every night for four weeks that needle pricked me. In my next incarnation--if it takes place--I shall still see the German doctor slouching across the room at me with the loaded syringe in his poised hand, and the strange look in his eyes. It seems an ineradicable memory.... By the end of the four weeks, I was working again on the newspaper; my visits to the wooden house I cut down to two a week, then one a week. It was a poignant business. He needed me. Desire for the "balm that assuaged," desire to help the friend who was slowly dying, desire to save myself from obvious destruction, these tugged and tore me different ways. For the full story I should have to write another book.... Three things saved me, I think--in the order of their value: my books and beliefs; Nature--my Sundays in Bronx Park or the woods of the Palisades in New Jersey; and, lastly, the power of the doctor's own suggestion, "you could stop anything!"...
When May came, with her wonder and her magic, I was free again, so free that I could play the fiddle and talk to the old man by the hour, and feel even no desire for the drug. Nor has the desire ever returned to me from that day to this. An experiment with haschisch, a good deal later, an account of which I wrote for my paper at the time, had no "desire" in it. Foolish and dangerous though the experiment was, of course, the cannabis indica was not taken for indulgence, nor to bring a false temporary happiness into a life I loathed. I did it to earn a little extra money; Kay did it with me; three times in all we took it. Some of the effects I tried to describe years later in the first story of a book, "John Silence."
My decision, with the steps I had taken, to arrest Boyde, I told to the doctor on the afternoon following the discovery of his treachery with my letters. He approved. This time even his Jekyll personality approved.
"You'll never catch him though," he growled. "He's too clever for you. He'll hear about the warrant and be out of the State in a day, if not out of the country. In Canada they can't touch him. Besides, the police won't stir a finger. Oh, you'll never catch him."
I felt otherwise, however, I meant to catch him, while at the same time I did not want to. The horrible man-hunt began that very night.