Diary of a Drug Fiend

120 The Diary of a Drug Fiend strolling lovers, parties of peasants singing as they walked to the guitar, and two or three tired happy fishermen strolling home from the wine-shop. We found the motor-boat at the quay, and lay lapsed in delight. It seemed hardly a minute later when we found ourselves in Sorrento couched in a huge roadster. Without a word spoken, we were off at top speed. The beauty of the drive is notorious; and yet :— “We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea.” The world had been created afresh for our sakes. It was an ever-changing phantasmagoria of rapturous sounds and sights and scents; and it all seemed a mere ornamentation for our love, the setting for the jewel of our sparkling passion. _ Even the last few miles into Naples, where the road runs through tedious commercialised suburbs, took on a new aspect. The houses were a mere irregular sky- line. Somehow they suggested the jagged contour of a score of Debussy. But all this, exquisite as it was, gripping as it was, was in a way superficial. At the bottom of our hearts there seethed and surged a white hot volcanic lake of molten, of infernal, metal. We did not know what hideous, what monstrous abominations were in store for us at the Gatto Fritto. - I have set down how the action of the drugs had partially stripped off the recent layers of memory. It had achieved a parallel result much more efficiently on the moral plane. The toil of countless generations of evolution had been undone in a month. We still preserved, to a certain extent, the conventions of decency; but we knew that we did so only from ape- like cunning. We had reverted to the gorilla. No action of violence and lust but seemed a necessary outlet for our energies !