Olive oil isn’t bad, but coconut oil is better.” He lighted a tiny lamp and said, “This is coconut oil. Oh yes, De Quincey is right, so potent is that drug. Hawtrey said, “You lie there is the pillow high enough? I know how your leg must hurt, but now I will make you a magic to conjure the pain away.”
The place had a curious smell, like toasted nuts and chocolate. One big, soft Chinese picture, a tiger in the snow, with trees and a hill behind it, and small, gay Chinese pictures of ugly dancing monkeys and slim delightful girls. In his house was a little room with two mattresses on the floor. Put then I thought it would never - I thought it would never get healed and let me live like a man and have freedom once more from pain. It left me with a limp, and sometimes hurts me now when the weather is damp and chill. He took my arm and helped me to his car - it’s not fun to hobble on crutches, when the damned bone won’t unite and link and get strong again, and that monstrous sciatic nerve- It did, of course, get better, just as the doctor said, after a lapse of time. Let us see, it is four o’clock - another fifteen minutes. I said, “There is nothing that can help me.” He sipped his glass of milk and said, “You know, whiskey won’t help you.” I said, “Yes, it hurts like hell and is hurting at this minute.” He said, “Please don’t think me impertinent, but you suffer rather, don’t you?” I didn’t like his hands, and I thought what he said was silly, but I rather liked his voice. I thought, “What a bloody fool to tell me such nonsense!” His hands were withered and thin, with the dryness that comes from age. I thought I could kill this old man who talked such nonsense as that. My leg was aching like hell, and I felt very sad and low.
But now I wish I had loved them I wish I had loved eighty women and had sons by every one of them, so that now they could fight for England.” I hate the smell of women and their affected ways, and the clothes they wear and their looks. He said, “I am sixty-five and always have hated women. He was English and fiercely patriotic, and told me something which stunned me. I met him one day in the bar that abuts on the mole of the harbor. A tall, bent, wraithlike man with a white beard and pale blue eyes. Hawtrey lived up on the hill, in a villa with two old servants.
It looked more Italian than French, the little square port and its harbor, with houses clustered around, more like Rapallo than France. I was living in Saint-Tropez, at that time a little port unknown to tourists or kings. This Atlantic memoir deals with a bizarre episode of his earlier days in France. He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, and he tells us that he might have become a dealer in rare china had the pull of newspapering been less insistent. Globe-trotter, raconteur, his I Write as I Please was something of a landmark in the journalistic field. WALTER DURANTY was distinguished for his correspondence from Soviet Russia in the early days of the post-war regime. Pain can destroy your pride and sap your resolution and that was what happened to me when Clifford Hawtrey suggested the thing which De Quincey called “just, subtle, and potent opium.” When you know that death would be rest but somehow you don’t want to die. To lose money and comfort and hope, and your friends and the golden girl, all that is sorry and hard but not so cruel as pain when it aches and goes on aching, and there is nothing to do when your monstrous sciatic nerve - which is thinner than a thread - pulses and beats and burns and you don’t know what to do. To lose a child that you love, or a mother who loved you, yes indeed, that is bitter and sad.
#CLOUD NINE MEANING OPIUM DRIVER#
And then, in a Paris taxi, there in the Rue Montmartre, one morning about eleven, the silliest of things: my taxi driver was killed as the big truck thundered upon us. I’d ordered my uniform and even tried it on it was ready for me to wear. I ought to have seen it all my credentials were accepted to go to French Headquarters as a regular correspondent. I WISH I had seen those days, those wonderful hundred days when the armies of America and Britain with its Dominions and the French stormed on to their goal, the battle of August 8 which Ludendorff said was the one that decided the German defeat, because then for the first time the Allied troops in line broke German troops in line without any great bombardment it was then that our troops broke deep through the German lines.
0 kommentar(er)
