The Diary of a Drug Fiend by Aleiser Crowley

Author:Aleiser Crowley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781578634941
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser Conari

CHAPTER IV

BELOW THE BRUTES

September 13

I WONDER how I have lived through this. Peter came in last night just after I had closed my diary. I had never seen him like it before; his eyes were half out of his head, bloodshot and furious. He must have been drinking like a madman. He was trembling with rage. He came straight up to me, and hit me deliberately in the face.

“That'll teach you,” he shouted, and called me a foul name.

I couldn't answer. I was too hurt, not by the blow, but by the surprise. I had pictured it so differently.

He staggered back into the middle of the room and pointed to the blood that was running down my face. The edge of his ring had cut the corner of my eye. The sight sent him into fits of hysterical laughter.

The only feeling in my mind was that he was ill; that it was my duty to nurse him. I tried to go to the door to get help. He thought I was escaping, and flung me back right across the room on to the bed, howling with rage.

“You can get away with it at once,” he said, “but that's enough. You wait right here, and see whether Mr. Bloody King Lamus will come to fetch you. Don't fret; I expect he will. He likes dirt, the filthy beast!”

I burst out crying. The contrast between the two men was too shocking. And I belonged to this screaming swearing bully with his insane jealousy and his senseless brutality!

I would rather have swept out Basil's studio for the rest of my life than be Lady Pendragon.

What masters of irony the gods are! I had been swimming in a glowing flood of glory; I had been almost delirious to think I was the wife of a man in whose veins ran the blood of England's greatest king; of him whose glamour had gilded the centuries with romance; to think that I might hold such royal heirship under my heart. What radiant rapture!

And Peter himself had shown himself worthy of his ancestry. Had not he too beaten back the heathen and saved England?

So this was the end of my dream! This brawling ruffian was my man!

I sat stupefied while his incoherent insults battered my brain; but my indignation was not for myself. I had deserved all I was getting; but what right had this foul-mouthed coward to take in his mouth the name of a man like King Lamus?

My silence seemed to exasperate him more than if I had taken up the quarrel. He swayed and swore with blind ferocity. He didn't seem to know where I was. It was getting dark. He groped his way round the room looking for me; but he passed me twice before he found me. The third time he stumbled up against me, gripped me by the shoulder, and began to strike.

I sat as if I were paralysed. I could not even scream. Again and again he swore and struck me savagely, yet so weakly that I could not feel the blows.

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