Diary of a Drug Fiend

136 The Diary of a Drug Fiend the Caligula and hop so riture at the earliest possibile opportunity. Courier till attend to busines details.”’ It suddenly dawned on my mind that there was one scrap of fact imbedded in this fantastic farrago. The courier had attended to business details with an efficiency worthy of the best traditions of the profession. The thing seemed to sink into Lou’s mind like a person seeing his way through a chess problem. Her face was absolutely white with cold and concentrated rage. ‘He must have watched us in Paris,’ she said. “He must have known that we had spent the money we were going to put into his swindle, and made up his mind that his best course was to get the jewellery and the rest of the cash. _ She sat down suddenly, collapsed; and began to cry. It developed into violent hysterics, which became so alarming that the manager sent for the nearest doctor. A knot of servants and one or two guests had gathered in the atrium of the hotel. The outside porter had become the man of the moment. “Why, certainly,” he announced triumphantly in broken English. ‘‘ Mr. Laroche, he went off this morning on the seven o'clock boat. I tink you never catch him.” The events of the last few hours had got me down to my second wind, so to speak. I turned to the consul’s clerk; and I spoke. But my voice seemed to come not so much from me as from the animal inside me; the original Pendragon, if you know what I mean; the creature with blind instincts and an automatic apparatus of thought. “You see how it is,” I heard myself saying,‘ passports, no cash, no clothes—nothing!”’ | I was speaking of myself in the third person. The whole process of human life and action had stopped automatically as far as the hotel was concerned. The knot of babbling gossipers was like a swarm of mosquitoes.