ticular little scrap of history may as well be told briefly at once and done with.
The suggestion that I could "stop anything," combined with my own desire, was potent. There was another way in which the insidious poisoning also worked: I became so "interesting," and entertained the old doctor so successfully, that he found himself able to do without his own dose. The stern injunction "nur ausnahmsweise" was forgotten. Without the stuff in my blood I was gloomy, stupid, dull; with it, I became alive and helped him. But the headache and depression, the nausea, the black ultimate dejection of the "day after" could be removed by one thing only. Nothing else had the slightest effect, and only another dose could banish these after-effects--a stronger dose. While the old man was soon able to reduce not only the quantity he took, but the number of injections as well, my own dose, to produce the desired effect, had to be doubled.
Every night for four weeks that needle pricked me. In my next incarnation--if it takes place--I shall still see the German doctor slouching across the room at me with the loaded syringe in his poised hand, and the strange look in his eyes. It seems an ineradicable memory.... By the end of the four weeks, I was working again on the newspaper; my visits to the wooden house I cut down to two a week, then one a week. It was a poignant business. He needed me. Desire for the "balm that assuaged," desire to help the friend who was slowly dying, desire to save myself from obvious destruction, these tugged and tore me different ways. For the full story I should have to write another book.... Three things saved me, I think--in the order of their value: my books and beliefs; Nature--my Sundays in Bronx Park or the woods of the Palisades in New Jersey; and, lastly, the power of the doctor's own suggestion, "you could stop anything!"...
When May came, with her wonder and her magic, I was free again, so free that I could play the fiddle and talk to the old man by the hour, and feel even no desire for the drug. Nor has the desire ever returned to me from
