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 !