"
When I reached my hotel, thought, intelligent thought, seemed
collapsing, and my brain spinning round and round within my skull.
"The end of me," I muttered, "at this rate will certainly be a cell
in a lunatic asylum."
For the first time, I released my rule against drugs. I sent the
hotel porter for a draught of chloral. When it came I drank it, and,
in the middle of the brilliant afternoon sunshine, threw myself on
the bed, conscious of nothing but a longing for oblivion.
Unaccustomed to it, the drug seized well upon me. For long,
merciful, quiet hours I knew nothing.
After this there came a blank of many days: idle, barren days, in
which I did nothing, knew nothing except that I suffered. My brain
seemed blank, empty, like a quarry of black slate. The power that
seemed to dwell there at times was gone now; crushed all that
impersonal emotion of the writer's mind by the blighting personal
emotion of the man.
A fortnight passed, and at the end of it I had done nothing; another
week, and then another, and I had still not written a line.
At last one night, sitting idle in the cafe after dinner, I felt the
old impulse stir in me, a rush of eager inclination to write went
through me. A sudden sense of power filled me. The brain, empty and
idle a few minutes before, became charged with energy and desire to
expend it.
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