I took the Indian hemp with certain followers of St. Martin on the
ground floor of a house in the Latin Quarter. I had never taken it
before, and was instructed by a boisterous young poet, whose English was
no better than my French. He gave me a little pellet, if I am not
forgetting, an hour before dinner, and another after we had dined
together at some restaurant. As we were going through the streets to the
meeting-place of the Martinists, I felt suddenly that a cloud I was
looking at floated in an immense space, and for an instant my being
rushed out, as it seemed, into that space with ecstasy. I was myself
again immediately, but the poet was wholly above himself, and presently
he pointed to one of the street lamps now brightening in the fading
twilight, and cried at the top of his voice, 'Why do you look at me with
your great eye?' There were perhaps a dozen people already much excited
when we arrived; and after I had drunk some cups of coffee and eaten a
pellet or two more, I grew very anxious to dance, but did not, as I
could not remember any steps. I sat down and closed my eyes; but no, I
had no visions, nothing but a sensation of some dark shadow which seemed
to be telling me that some day I would go into a trance and so out of my
body for a while, but not yet. I opened my eyes and looked at some red
ornament on the mantelpiece, and at once the room was full of harmonies
of red, but when a blue china figure caught my eye the harmonies became
blue upon the instant. I was puzzled, for the reds were all there,
nothing had changed, but they were no longer important or harmonious;
and why had the blues so unimportant but a moment ago become exciting
and delightful? Thereupon it struck me that I was seeing like a painter,
and that in the course of the evening everyone there would change
through every kind of artistic perception.
After a while a Martinist ran towards me with a piece of paper on which
he had drawn a circle with a dot in it, and pointing at it with his
finger he cried out, 'God, God!' Some immeasurable mystery had been
revealed, and his eyes shone; and at some time or other a lean and
shabby man, with rather a distinguished face, showed me his horoscope
and pointed with an ecstasy of melancholy at its evil aspects. The
boisterous poet, who was an old eater of the Indian hemp, had told me
that it took one three months growing used to it, three months more
enjoying it, and three months being cured of it. These men were in their
second period; but I never forgot myself, never really rose above myself
for more than a moment, and was even able to feel the absurdity of that
gaiety, an Herr Nordau among the men of genius, but one that was abashed
at his own sobriety. The sky outside was beginning to grey when there
came a knocking at the window shutters. Somebody opened the window, and
a woman in evening dress, who was not a little bewildered to find so
many people, was helped down into the room. She had been at a students'
ball unknown to her husband, who was asleep overhead, and had thought to
have crept home unobserved, but for a confederate at the window. All
those talking or dancing men laughed in a dreamy way; and she,
understanding that there was no judgment in the laughter of men that had
no thought but of the spectacle of the world, blushed, laughed and
darted through the room and so upstairs. Alas that the hangman's rope
should be own brother to that Indian happiness that keeps alone, were it
not for some stray cactus, mother of as many dreams, immemorial
impartiality.