The Greatest Works of Aleister Crowley. Aleister CrowleyЧитать онлайн книгу.
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" I should be so glad to have your views on these points ; and, of course, your personal confirmation of my theory that people like you and Sir Peter can use these substances with benefit to yourselves and others, without danger of becoming slaves. I have trained myself and many others to stop at Will ; but every additional affidavit to this effect is of great value to me in my present campaign to destroy the cowardly superstition that manhood and womanhood are incapable of the right and proper use of anything whatever in nature. We have tamed the wild lightning, after all ; shall we run away from a packet of powder ? "
Love is the law, love under will.
With my kind regards to Sir Peter, Yours ever,
" BASIL KING LAMUS."
Satirical, sneering stupidity-or is he a devil incarnate, as Gretel told us he was ? Does he gloat ?
I loathe the beast-and I thought-once-well, never mind! Peter took the letter. Anything, anything to distract the mind from its boredom! Yet we haven't the energy to do anything: we take whatever comes to us, and clutch at it feebly. " It's true," said Cockie, to my amazement, " and we've got to be able to tell him we've won." There was a long quarrel-as there is over every incident of any sort. That is natural, with this eternal insomnia and sleeping at the wrong time. I hated Peter (and K.L.) the more because I knew all the time he was right. If K.L. is a Devil, it's up to us to get the last laugh. I tore the beastly letter into shreds. Peter has gone out-I hope he has gone to kill him. I want to be thrilled-just once moreif I had to be hanged for it myself.
Our watches have run down. It doesn't matter. I can call on Mabel any time I like. I may as well go now. I'll drink a small bottle and go along....
It is night. Cockie has not returned. just when I needed him most ! I'm frightened of myself. I'm stark staring sober. I went to the glass to take my hat off. I didn't know who I was. There is no flesh on my face. My complexion's entirely gone. My hair is lustreless and dry, and it's coming out in handfuls. I think I must be ill. I've a good mind to send for a doctor. But I daren't. It has been a frightful shock !
I must pull myself together and write it up.
It was about five o'clock when I got to Mount Street. If Mabel wasn't in, I could waft.
A strange man answered the door. It annoyed me. I felt frightened. Why had she changed Cartwright ? I felt faint. Had something told me ?
It embarrassed me to ask " Is Mrs. Black at home ? The man answered as if he had been asked the time.
" Mrs. Black is dead."
Something inside me screamed. " But I must see her, " I cried insanely, feeling the ground cut suddenly from under my feet.
" I'm afraid it's impossible, madame," he said, misunderstanding me altogether. " She was buried yesterday morning. "
So that was why she hadn't sent the stuff ! I stood as if I was in a trance. I heard him explaining, mechanically. I did not take in what he was saying. It was like a record being made on a gramophone.
" She was only ill two days," the man said. " The doctors called it septic pneumonia."
I suppose I thanked him, and went away automatically. I found myself at home without knowing how I got here. Something told me that the real cause of her death was heroin, though, as a matter of fact, septic pneumonia can happen to any one at any moment. I've known two or three people go off like that.
As my Uncle John used to say, conscience makes cowards of us all.
King Lamus was always saying that as long as one has any emotion about any thing, love or fear or anything else, one can't observe things correctly. That's why a doctor won't attend his own family, and I can see coldly and clearly like a drowning man that when-ever the idea of H. comes into my mind, I begin to think hysterically and come to the most idiotic conclusions; and heroin has twined itself about my life so closely that everything is connected with it one way or another.
My mind is obsessed by the thought of the drug. Sometimes it's a weird ecstasy, sometimes a dreadful misgiving.
Not thirst in the brain black-bitten In the soul more sorely smitten I One dare not think of the worst I Beyond the raging and raving Hell of the physical craving,
Lies, in the brain benumbed,
At the end of time and space, An abyss, unmeasured, unplumbedThe haunt of a face
September 12
Peter came in just as I had finished writing this account. He seemed much more cheerful, and his arms were full of books.
" There," he said, throwing them on the bed, " that will refresh my memory, in case we have any trouble in stopping. I'll show Mr. King Lamus what it means to be a Pendragon."
I told him about Mabel. And now a strange thing happened. Instead of being depressed, we felt a current of mysterious excitement, rippling at first, then raging and roaring in every nerve. It was as if the idea of her death exhilarated us. He took me in his arms for the first time in-is it weeks or months ? His hot breath coiled like a snake about my ear, and thrilled my hair like an electric machine. With a strange ghastly intensity his voice, trembling with passion, strummed the intoxicating words:
" Olya ! the golden bait
Barbed with infinite pain, Fatal, fanatical mate
Of a poisoned body and brain I Olya, the name that leers
Its lecherous longing and knavery, Whispers in crazing ears
The secret spell of her slavery."
The room swam before my eyes. We were wreathed in spirals of dark blue smoke bursting with crimson flashes.
He gripped me with epileptic fury, and swung me round in a sort of savage dance. I had an intuition that he was seeing the same vision as I was. Our souls were dissolved into one; a giant ghost that enveloped us.
I hissed the next lines through my teeth, feeling myself a fire-breathing dragon.
Horror indeed intense,
Seduction ever intenser,
Swinging the smoke of sense
From the bowl of a smouldering censer !
We were out of breath. My boy sat on the edge of the bed. I crept up behind him. I shook out my hair all over his face, and dug my nails into his scalp.
We were living the heroin life, the life of the world of the soul. We had identified ourselves with the people of the poem. He was the poet, wreathed with poppies, with poisonous poppies that corrupted his blood, and I was the phantom of his delirium, the hideous vampire that obsessed him.
Little drops of blood oozed from his scalp and clotted to black under my greedy nails. He spoke the next lines as if under some cruel compulsion. The words were wrenched from him by some overwhelming necessity. His tone was colourless, as if the ultimate anguish had eaten up his soul. And all this agony and repulsion exercised a foul fascination. He suffered a paroxysm of pleasure such as pleasure itself had never been able to give him. And I was Olya, I was his love, his wife, world without end, the demon whose supreme delight was to destroy him.
" Behind me, behind and above, She stands, that mirror of love. Her fingers are subtle-jointed Her nafls are polished and pointed, And tipped with spurs of gold: With them she rowels the brain. Her lust is critical, cold ;
And her Chinese cheeks are pale, As she daintily picks, profane With her octopus lips, and the teeth jagged and black beneath,
Pulp and blood from a nail."
I jerked his head back, and fastened my mouth on his. I sucked his breath into my lungs. I wanted to choke him ; but there was time enough for that. I would torture him a few years longer first.
I leapt away from him. He panted heavily. When he got his breath back, he glared at me horribly with the pin-point pupils of his sightless eyes.
He began with romantic sadness, changing to demoniac glee.
" She was incarnate love