The Big Smoke.

 

 

Free-Spirited Journalist. Adventurous author of more than 50 books on subjects ranging from seduction to apes to cooking.  She wrote for New Yorker throughout her life, becoming its China correspondent in 1935.  In China she became temporarily addicted to opium, befriended Mao Zedong and met her future husband, a British intelligence officer by whom she proudly had a child out of wedlock.

The Big Smoke
from Times and Places
New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, 1937-1970.
This material first appeared in The New Yorker.

 

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THOUGH I HAD always wanted to be an opium addict, I can't claim that as the reason I went to China. The opium ambition dates back to that obscure period of childhood when I wanted to be a lot of other things, too--the greatest expert on ghosts, the world's best ice skater, the champion lion tamer, you know the kind of thing. But by the time I went to China I was grown up, and all those dreams were forgotten.

Helen kept saying that she would go home to California, where her husband was waiting, as soon as she'd seen Japan, but as the time for her departure drew near she grew reluctant and

looked around for a good excuse to prolong the tour. As she pointed out to me, China was awfully close by and we knew that an old friend was living in Shanghai. It would be such a waste to let the chance slip. Why shouldn't we go over and take just one look, for a weekend? I was quite amenable, especially as, for my part, I didn't have to go back to America. My intention was to move on south in leisurely fashion, after Helen had gone home, and land someday in the Belgian Congo, where I planned to find a job. All this wasn't going to have to be done with speed, be cause I still had enough money to live on for a while. My sister accepted these plans as natural, for she knew that a man had thrown me over. Officially, as it were, I was going to the Congo to forget that my heart was broken; it was the proper thing to do in the circumstances. My attitude toward her was equally easy going. If she didn't want to go home just yet, I felt, it was none of my business. So when she suggested China I said, "Sure, why not?"

We went. We loved Shanghai. Helen shut up her conscience for another two months, staying on and cramming in a tremendous variety of activities--parties, temples, curio shops, having dresses made to order overnight, a trip to Peiping, embassy receptions, races. I didn't try to keep up with her. It had become clear to me from the first day in China that I was going to stay for ever, so I had plenty of time. Without a struggle, I shelved the Congo and hired a language teacher, and before Helen left I had found a job teaching English at a Chinese college. It was quite a while before I recollected that old ambition to be an opium smoker.

As a newcomer, I couldn't have known that a lot of the drug was being used here, there, and everywhere in town. I had no way of recognizing the smell, though it pervaded the poorer districts. I assumed that the odor, something like burning caramel or those herbal cigarettes smoked by asthmatics, was just part of the mysterious effluvia produced in Chinese cookhouses. Walking happily through side streets and alleys, pausing here and there to let a rickshaw or a cart trundle by, I would sniff and move on, unaware that someone close at hand was indulging in what the books called that vile, accursed drug. Naturally I never saw a culprit, since even in permissive Shanghai opium smoking was supposed to be illegal.

It was through a Chinese friend, Pan Heh-ven, that I learned at last what the smell denoted. I had been at a dinner party in a restaurant with him, and had met a number of his friends who were poets and teachers. Parties at restaurants in China used to end when the last dish and the rice were cold and the guests had drunk their farewell cup of tea at a clean table. That night, though, the group still had a lot to say after that--they always did--and we stood around on the pavement outside carrying on a discussion of modern literature that had started at table. We were in that part of town called the Chinese city, across Soochow Creek, outside the boundaries of the foreign concessions. It was hot. A crumpled old paper made a scraping little sound like autumn leaves along the gutter, and the skirts of the men's long gowns stirred in the same wind. During dinner, they had spoken English out of courtesy, but now, in their excitement, they had long since switched to the Chinese language, and I stood there waiting for somebody to remember me and help me find a taxi, until Heh-ven said, "Oh, excuse us for forgetting our foreign guest. We are all going now to my house. Will you come?"

Of course I would. I'd been curious about his domestic life, which he seldom mentioned. So we all moved off and walked to the house--an old one of Victorian style, with more grounds than I was used to seeing around city houses in America. I say Victorian, but that was only from the outside, where gables and a roughcast front made it look like the kind of building I knew. Indoors was very different. It was bare, as one could see at a glance because the doors stood open between rooms--no carpets, no wallpaper, very little furniture. Such chairs and sofas and tables as stood around the bare floor seemed as impersonal as lost articles in a vacant shop. Yet the house wasn't deserted. A few people were there in the rooms--a man who lounged, as if defiantly, on the unyielding curve of a sofa, four or five children scampering and giggling in whispers, an old woman in the blue blouse and trousers of a servant, and a young woman in a plain dark dress.

This last, it appeared, was Heh-ven's wife, and at least some of the children were theirs. I was embarrassed because the whole household gawked at me; one small boy who looked like a miniature Heh-ven said something that made the others giggle louder. Heh-ven spoke briefly to his family and told us to follow him upstairs, where we emerged on a cozier scene. Here the rooms were papered, and though everything still seemed stark to my Western eyes, there was more furniture around. We trooped into a bedroom where two hard, flat couches had been pushed together, heads against a wall and a heap of small pillows on each. In the center of the square expanse of white sheet that covered them was a tray that held several unfamiliar objects--a little silver oil lamp with a shade like an inverted glass tumbler, small boxes, and a number of other small things I didn't recognize. I sat on a stiff, spindly chair, and the men disposed themselves here and there in the room, very much at home as they chattered away, picked up books and riffled through them, and paid no attention to what was going on the double couch. I found the proceedings there very odd, however, and stared in fascination.

Heh-ven had lain down on his left side, alongside the tray and facing it. He lit the lamp. One of his friends, a plump little man named Hua-ching, lay on his right side on the other side of the tray, facing Heh-ven, each with head and shoulders propped on the pillows. Heh-ven never stopped conversing, but his hands were busy and his eyes were fixed on what he was doing--knitting, I thought at first, wondering why nobody had ever mentioned that this craft was practiced by Chinese men. Then I saw that what I had taken for yarn between the two needles he manipulated was actually a kind of gummy stuff, dark and thick. As he rotated the needle ends about each other, the stuff behaved like taffy in the act of setting; it changed color, too, slowly evolving from its earlier dark brown to tan. At a certain moment, just as it seemed about to stiffen, he wrapped the whole wad around one needle end and picked up a pottery object about as big around as a teacup. It looked rather like a cup, except that it was closed across the top, with a rimmed hole in the middle of this fixed lid. Heh-ven plunged the wadded needle into this hole, withdrew it, leaving the wad sticking up from the hole, and modelled the rapidly hardening stuff so that it sat on the cup like a tiny volcano. He then picked up a piece of polished bamboo that had a large hole near one end, edged with a band of chased silver. Into this he fixed the cup, put the opposite end of the bamboo into his mouth, held the cup with the tiny cone suspended above the lamp flame, and inhaled deeply. The stuff bubbled and evaporated as he did so, until nothing of it was left. A blue smoke rose from his mouth, and the air was suddenly full of that smell I had encountered in the streets of Shanghai. Truth lit up in my mind.

"You're smoking opium !" I cried. Everybody jumped, for they had forgotten I was there.

Heh-ven said, "Yes, of course I am. Haven't you ever seen it done before?"

"No. I'm so interested."

"Would you like to try it?"

"Oh, Yes."

Nobody protested, or acted shocked or anything. In fact, no body but Hua-ching paid any attention. At Heh-ven's request, he smoked a pipe to demonstrate how it was done, then relaxed against the pillows for a few minutes. "If you get up immediately, you are dizzy," explained Heh-ven. I observed his technique carefully and, by the time I took my place on the couch, had a reasonable notion of how it was done. You sucked in as deeply as possible, and held the smoke there as long as you could before exhaling. Remembering that I'd never been able to inhale cigarette smoke, I was worried that the world of the opium addict might be closed to me. In daydreams, as in night dreams, one doesn't take into account the real self and the failings of the flesh. The romantic is always being confronted by this dilemma, but that night I was spared it. When I breathed in I felt almost sick, but my throat didn't close, and after a moment I was fine. I couldn't dispose of the tiny volcano all in one mighty pull, as the others had done, but for a beginner I didn't do badly--not at all. Absorbed in the triumph of not coughing, I failed to take notice of the first effects, and even started to stand up, but Heh ven told me not to. "Just stay quiet and let's talk," he suggested. We all talked--about books, and books, and Chinese politics. That I knew nothing about politics didn't put me off in the least. I listened with keen--interest to everything the others had to say in English, and when they branched off into Chinese I didn't mind. It left me to my thoughts. I wouldn't have minded any thing. The world was fascinating and benevolent as I lay there against the cushions, watching Heh-ven rolling pipes for him self. Pipes--that's what they called the little cones as well as the tube, I suppose because it is easier to say than pipefuls. Anyway, the word "pipeful" is not really accurate, either. Only once, when Hua-ching asked me how I was, did I recollect the full significance of the situation. Good heavens, I was smoking opium! It was hard to believe, especially as I didn't seem to be any different.

"I don't feel a thing," I told him. "I mean, I'm enjoying my self with all of you, of course, but I don't feel any different. Perhaps opium has no effect on me?"

Heh-ven pulled at the tiny beard he wore and smiled slightly. He said, "Look at your watch." I cried out in surprise; it was three o'clock in the morning.

"Well, there it is," Heh-ven said. "And you have stayed in one position for several hours, you know--you haven't moved your arms or your head. That's opium. We call it Ta Yen, the Big Smoke."

"But it was only one pipe I had. And look at you, you've smoked four or five, but you're still all right."

"That's opium, too," said Heh-ven cryptically.

Later that morning, in my own bed, I tried to remember if I'd had drug--sodden dreams, but as far as I could recall there hadn't been dreams at all, which was disappointing. I didn't feel any craving, either. I simply wasn't an addict. I almost decided that the whole thing was just a carefully nurtured myth. Still, I gave it another chance a few days later, and again a third time, and so on. To make a surprisingly long story short, a year of earnest endeavor went by. It's impossible now to pinpoint the moment in time when I could honestly claim to be an addict, but I do remember the evening when Heh-ven's wife, Pei-yu, said I was. I had arrived at their house about six in the evening, when most of the family was in the smoking room. It was a nice domestic scene, the children playing on the floor, Pei-yu sitting on the edge of the couch really knitting, with wool, and Heh-ven lying on his side in the familiar position, idly stocking up opium pellets to save time later, now and then rolling a wad on his second finger to test the texture. A good pellet should be of just the right color, and not too dry, but not too sticky, either. These refinements added a lot to one's pleasure. I suppose people who are 'fussy about their tea have the same impulse.

I was feeling awful that evening. I had a cold and I'd been up too late the night before. I was also in a tearing rage with Heh-ven. By this time, I was publishing a Chinese-English magazine at a press he owned in the Chinese city--or, rather, I was trying to publish it, and Heh-ven was maddeningly unbusinesslike about the printing. That day, I'd waited at home in vain for hours because he had faithfully promised that some proofs would be delivered before three o'clock. When I marched in on the peaceful scene in the smoking room, only a fit of sneezing prevented my delivering him a stinging scolding. At the sound of the sneezes, Pei-yu looked up at me sharply. Then she started scolding Heh-ven. I hadn't learned any of the Shanghai dialect it was Mandarin I was studying--but the spirit of her speech was clear enough.

"Pei-yu says you are an addict and it's my fault," interpreted Heh-ven cheerfully.

I felt rather flattered, but my feelings about Heh-ven's lack of performance on the press made me sound surly as I replied, "Why should she say that?" I lay down in the accustomed place as I spoke, and reached for the pipe.

"Because your eyes and nose are running."

"So? Is that a symptom?" I looked at Pei-yu, who nodded hard. I inhaled a pipe and continued, "But that isn't why my nose is running. I've got the most awful cold."

"Oh yes, opium smokers always have colds." Heh-ven prepared another pipe. "When you don't get the Big Smoke, you weep. Still, in your case, I think my wife is mistaken. You are not yet an addict. Even I am not an addict, really--not very much addicted, though I smoke more than you. People like us, who have so much to do, are not the type to become addicted."

No, I reflected, Pei-yu was certainly exaggerating to a ridiculous degree. Of course I could do without it. I liked it, of course--I liked it. I had learned what was so pleasant about opium. Gone were the old romantic notions of wild drug orgies and heavily flavored dreams, but I didn't regret them, because the truth was much better. To lie in a quiet room talking and smoking--or, to put things in their proper order, smoking and talking--was delightfully restful and pleasant. I wasn't addicted, I told myself, but you had to have a bit of a habit to appreciate the thing. One used a good deal of time smoking, but, after all, one had a good deal of time. The night clubs, the cocktail and dinner parties beloved of foreign residents in Shanghai would have palled on me even if I'd kept up drink for drink with my companions. Now I hardly ever bothered to go to these gatherings. Opium put me off drinking, and people who didn't smoke seemed more and more remote, whereas smokers always seemed to have tastes and ideas compatible with mine. We would read aloud to each other a good deal--poetry, mostly. Reading and music and painting were enough to keep us happy. We didn't care for eating or drinking or voluptuous pleasures.... I seem to fall into a kind of fin-de-siécle language when I talk about opium, probably because it was rather a fin-de-siéle life I led when I was smoking it, and in a social as well as a literary sense. The modern, Westernized Chinese of Shanghai frowned on smoking--not on moral grounds but because it was considered so lamentably old-fashioned. My friends, in their traditional long gowns, were deliberately, self-consciously reactionary, and opium was a part of this attitude, whereas modern people preferred to stun themselves with whiskey or brandy. Opium was decadent. Opium was for grandfathers.

We used to read Cocteau's book on opium and discuss it. Hua ching loved the drawings that represent the feelings of a man under cure, in which the pipe grows progressively larger and the man smaller. Then the pipe proliferates--his limbs turn into pipes--until at last he is built up completely of pipes. During such talks, Heh-ven sometimes spoke of himself frankly as an addict but at other times he still said he wasn't. I never knew what sort of statement he was going to make on the subject. "My asthma caused it, you know," he said once. "My father is asthmatic, so he smokes. I, too, am asthmatic, and so is Pei-yu. Now and then, when hers is very bad, she will take a pipe, because it is a good medicine for that disease."

One day, after he had been even more contradictory than was his custom, I drew up a table of the smoker's creed:

1. I will never be an addict.

2. 1 can't become addicted. I am one of those people who take it or let it alone.

3. I'm not badly addicted.

4. It's a matter of will power, and I can stop any time.

Any time. Time. That was something that had lost its grip on me. It was amazing how watches varied their rate of running, sometimes galloping, at other times standing still. To keep up with my job, I had to look at my watch often; it had a trick of running away when I didn't notice, causing me to forget dates or arrive at appointments incredibly late. I appeared sleepy. I know this from what outsiders told me about myself)--"You need sleep," they would say--but I never felt sleepy, exactly; inside, my mind was unusually clear, and I could spend a whole night talking without feeling the need of rest. This was because I was an addict. I admitted it now, and was pleased that I could feel detached. We opium smokers, I reflected, are detached, and that is one of our advantages. We aren't troubled with unpleasant emotions. The alcoholic indulges in great bouts of weeping sentiment, but the smoker doesn't. You never find a smoker blubbering and blabbing his secrets to the opium seller. We are proud and reserved. Other people might think us drowsy and dull; we know better. The first reaction to a good long pull at the pipe is a stimulating one. I would be full of ideas, and as I lay there I would make plans for all sorts of activity. Drowsiness of a sort came on later, but even then, inside my head, behind my drooping eyes, my mind seethed with exciting thoughts.

Still, I couldn't ignore the disadvantages. If I had, I would have been unworthy of the adjective "detached." Being an addict was awfully inconvenient. I couldn't stay away from my opium tray, or Heh-ven's, without beginning to feel homesick. I would think of the lamp in the shaded room, the coziness, the peace and comfort with great longing. Then my nose would start to run and I was afraid somebody from outside would have the sense to understand what was the matter with me. When I say afraid, that is what I mean--for some reason, there was dread in the idea of being spotted. This was strange. True, smoking was against the law in Shanghai, but only mild penalties were likely to have been visited on me. Still, I was afraid. I think it may have been a physical symptom, like the running nose.

All of these little points we discussed at great length, lying around the tray. Hua-ching had a theory that addiction lay not so much in the smoking itself as in the time pattern one got used to. "If you vary your smoking every day, you have far less strong a habit," he assured us earnestly. "The great mistake is to do it at the same hour day after day. I'm careful to vary my smoking times. You see, it's all in the head."

Jan, a Polish friend who sometimes joined us, disputed this. "It's the drug itself," he said. "If it's all in the head, why do I feel it in my body?" The argument tailed off in a welter of definitions. A smoker loves semantics. However, I resolved one day to test myself and see who was master, opium or me, and I accepted an invitation to spend the weekend on a houseboat up river with an English group. In the country, among foreigners, it would be impossible to get opium.

Well, it wasn't as bad as I'd expected. I was bored, and I couldn't keep my mind on the bridge they insisted that I play, but then I never can. I had an awful cold, and didn't sleep much. My stomach was upset and my legs hurt. Still, it wasn't so bad. I didn't want to lie down and scream--it could be borne. On the way home, my cold got rapidly worse--but why not? People do catch cold. The only really bad thing was the terror I felt of being lost, astray, naked, shivering in a world that seemed imminently brutal.... Half an hour after I got back, I was at Heh-ven's, the cronies listening to my blow-by-blow report, expressing, according to their characters, admiration, skepticism, or envy. I was glad that none of them failed to understand my impulse to flee the habit. Every one of them, it seemed, had had such moments, but not everyone was as stubborn as I.

"You could have given her pills," said Hua-ching reproach fully to Heh-ven. I asked what he meant, and he said that addicts who had to leave the orbit of the lamp for a while usually took along little pellets of opium to swallow when things got bad. A pellet wasn't the same thing as smoking, but it alleviated some of the discomfort.

Heh-ven said, "I didn't give them on purpose. She wanted to see what it was like, and the pills would have spoiled the full effect. Besides, they are somewhat poisonous. Still, if she wants them, next time she can have them."

Snuggling luxuriously on a pillow, I said, "There won't be a next time."

Some weeks later, I got sick. I must have smoked too much. In a relatively mild case of overindulgence, one merely gets nightmares, but this wasn't mild. I vomited on the way home from Heh-ven's, and went on doing it when I got in, until the houseboy called the doctor. This doctor was an American who had worked for years in the community, but I didn't know him well. Of course, I had no intention of telling him what might be wrong, and I was silent as he felt my pulse and looked at my tongue and took my temperature. Finally, he delivered judgment. "Jaundice. Haven't you noticed that you're yellow?"

"No."

"Well, you are--yellow as an orange," he said. "How many pipes do you smoke in a day?"

I was startled, but if he could play it calm, so could I. "Oh, ten, eleven, something like that," I said airily, and he nodded and wrote out a prescription, and left. No lecture, no phone call to the police, nothing. I ought to have appreciated his forbearance, but I was angry, and said to Heh-ven next day, "He doesn't know as much as he thinks he does. People don't count pipes one man's pipe might make two of another's." The truth was that I resented the doctor's having stuck his foot in the door of my exclusive domain.

All in all, if I'd been asked how I was faring I would have said I was getting on fine. I had no desire to change the way I was living. Except for the doctor, foreign outsiders didn't seem to guess about me; they must have thought I looked sallow, and certainly they would have put me down as absentminded, but nobody guessed. The Chinese, of course, were different, because they'd seen it all before. I annoyed one or two people, but I managed to pass, especially when the war between China and Japan flared up just outside the foreign-occupied part of the city. Shells fell all around our little island of safety, and sometimes missed their mark and bounced inside it. It is no wonder that the American doctor didn't take any steps about me--he had a lot of other things to occupy his mind. The war didn't bother me too much. I soon got used to the idea of it. Opium went up in price--that was all that mattered.

But the war cut me off definitely from the old world, and so, little by little, I stopped caring who knew or didn't know. People who came calling, even when they weren't smokers, were shown straight into the room where I smoked. I now behaved very much like Heh-ven; there was even an oily smudge on my left forefinger, like the one on his, that wouldn't easily wash off. It came from testing opium pellets as they cooled. Heh-ven, amused by the smudge, used to call the attention of friends to it. "Look," he would say, "have you ever before seen a white girl with that mark on her finger?"

I wasn't the only foreign opium smoker in Shanghai. Apart from Jan, there were several others I knew. One was connected with the French diplomatic service. He and his wife had picked up their habit in Indo-China. It was through them that I met Bobby--a German refugee, a doctor who had built up enough of a practice in Shanghai to live on it. He wasn't an addict--I don't think I ever saw him touch a pipe--but he seemed to spend a lot of time with addicts. Sometimes I wondered why he dropped in at Heh-ven's so often. I rather wished he wouldn't, because he was dull. Still, it didn't matter much whether outsiders were dull or bright, and as he happened to call on me one afternoon when I had received a shattering letter, I confided in him.

"It's about this silly magazine I've been publishing," I said. "They want to expand its circulation--the people who own it, that is--and they say I've got to go to Chungking to talk to them." "And you can't go, of course," said Bobby.

"I can, too," I lifted myself up on my elbow and spoke in dignantly. "Certainly I can go. What do you mean, I can't? Only, it's a bother." I lay down again and started rolling a pellet fast. My mind buzzed with all the things that would have to be done--arranging about my house, getting a permit to travel. And I'd have to go through Hong Kong, taking a boat down there and then flying inland. It was tiring just to think about it, and here was Bobby talking again.

"Listen to me. Listen carefully. You can't do it--you can't."

This time he managed to worry me. "Why not?"

"Because of the opium. Your habit," said Bobby.

I laughed. "Oh, that's what it is, is it? No, that'll be all right." The pellet was ready, shaped into a cone, and I smoked it, then said, "I can stop whenever I want to. You don't know me well, but I assure you I can stop any time."

"How recently have you tried?" he demanded, and paused. I didn't reply because I was trying to reckon it. He went on, "It's been some time, I'm sure. I've known you myself for a year, and you've never stopped during that period. I think you'll find you can't do it, young lady."

"You're wrong," I said violently. "I tell you, you're all wrong--you don't know me."

"And in the interior it's not so funny if you're caught using it, you know. If you're caught, you know what happens." He sliced a stiff hand across his throat. He meant that the Kuomintang had put a new law into effect; people they caught smoking were to be decapitated. But surely that couldn't happen to me.

I looked at him with new uncertainty and said, "What will I do?"

"You'll be all right, because I can help you," said Bobby, all of a sudden brisk and cheerful. "You can be cured quite easily. Have you heard of hypnosis?"

I said that of course I'd heard of it, and even witnessed it. "There was a medical student at school who put people to sleep--just made them stare at a light bulb and told them they were sleepy."

Bobby made a call on my telephone, talking in German. He hung up and said, "We start tomorrow morning. I have a bed for you at my little hospital--a private ward, no less. Get up early if you can and do what you usually do in the morning--smoke if you like, I have no objections--but be there at nine o'clock. I'll write down the directions for the taxi-driver." He did so. Then, at the door, he added, "Heh-ven will try to talk you out of it, you know. Don't let him."

I said, "Oh no, Bobby, he wouldn't do that. This is my own affair, and he'd never interfere."

"Just don't let him, that's all. Don't forget a suitcase with your night things. You'll probably bring some opium pills, but if you do I'll find them, so save yourself the trouble."

Before I became an addict, I used to think that a confirmed smoker would be frantically afraid of the idea of breaking off. Actually, it isn't like that--or wasn't with me. At a certain stage, a smoker is cheerfully ready to accept almost any suggestion, including the one of breaking off. Stop smoking? Why, of course, he will say--what a good ideal Let's start tomorrow. After a couple of pipes, I was very pleased about it, and rang up Heh-ven to tell him. He, too, was pleased, but couldn't see why I was in such a hurry.

"Oh, wonderful!" he said. "But why tomorrow? If you wait, we can do it together. It's always easier with somebody else. Wait, and I'll ask Bobby to fix me up, too."

"I'd like to, Heh-ven, but he's got everything arranged for me at the hospital, and I can hardly change things around now. And, as he said, I haven't got much time--only a couple of weeks before I have to go to Chungking. It'll be easier when your turn comes."

The high sweetness in his voice when he replied was significant, I knew, of anger. "Of course, since you are so happy to take the advice of a man you hardly know . . ."

It was a struggle, but I hadn't given in by the time I hung up. Full of opium or not, I knew all too well what would happen if I consented to wait for Heh-ven for anything at all--a tea party or a cure. He'd put it off and put it off until it was forgotten. I shrugged, and had another pipe, and next morning I almost overslept, but didn't. The old man who took care of the house carried my bag out to the taxi, talking to himself, and stood there as I climbed in, a worried look on his face. He didn't trust anything about the project. "I come see you soon," he promised.

I had never heard of Bobby's hospital. We drove a long way through the shops and hovels that ringed the foreign town, so that I half expected we would enter the Japanese lines, but before we got that far we found it--a building about as big as most middle-class Shanghai houses and only a little shabbier. Over the entrance hung a dirty white flag and a red cross on it. Bobby was at the door, his teeth gleaming in a relieved smile, his spectacles flashing in the morning sun. Clearly, he hadn't been quite sure I would turn up, and he asked how Heh-ven had taken the news.

"He wants you to fix him up, too--someday," I told him. "Whenever he's ready. Come in here. The nurse will look after your suitcase."

I followed him to a flimsily walled office filled with, among other things, filing cases, a heavy old desk, and one overstuffed chair, in which he told me to sit. He gave me a pill, and a tin cup of water to help it down. I stared around curiously. There were cardboard boxes piled against the walls, and an instrument cabinet. A patch of sunlight lay on the floor matting. The room was very hot. Sweat rolled down Bobby's face. Though smokers have little sense of smell, I could distinguish a reek of disinfectant. I asked what kind of cases the hospital cared for, and Bobby said it took in everything. He spoke absently, pacing up and down, waiting for the pill to work on me.

I said, "I don't see why you need to use a pill. The medical student just used a light bulb."

"Oh, I could do that, too, but it takes too long," Bobby re torted. "In the future, I want to cure whole roomfuls of addicts all at once, hypnotizing them in groups, and how far do you think I'd get if I tried to put each one under by making him stare at a light? No, barbiturates are quicker. Aren't you sleepy yet?"

"No. Why roomfuls of addicts?"

He explained. There were far too many for one man to cope with unless he employed such methods. In fact, he said, my case was being used to that end. If it worked--and it was going to work, it was bound to work, he assured me--he wanted me to exert all the influence I might have to persuade the authorities involved to hire him as a kind of National Grand Curer-in-Chief of opium addiction. He talked warmly and hopefully of these plans, until, as through a glass brightly, I saw a schoolroom full of white-clad Chinese, row on row, all exactly alike, with their faces lifted toward Bobby on a very high dais. He was saying ... was...

"Will you permit me, while you are under, to make a little psychoanalysis also?" He really was saying it, and to me, not to the white-clad Chinese.

I stirred, and forced my tongue to answer. "Yes, if you'll promise to tell me all about it afterward. Do you promise?"

"Yes, yes." He was pacing again, and said it impatiently, over his shoulder. "You are now getting sleepy. You will sleep. In a few minutes . . ."

It was less than a few minutes, however, before I felt fully awake again, and sat up, saying in triumph, "Your pill didn't work."

Bobby, still pacing, was now rubbing his hands, saying over and over, as if to himself, "Very interesting, ve--ry interesting." Suddenly the room had become dark again. I said, "It didn't work," and now I felt disappointed. All those preparations had been wasted. Bobby came to a halt in front of me.

"Do you know what time it is?" he asked. Once long ago, I dimly recollected, Heh-ven had asked the same question. But Bobby answered himself. "It's five o'clock in the afternoon, and you went under before ten this morning."

"But what's been going on?" I rubbed my forehead.

"You've been talking almost the whole time. I stopped for lunch."

I was staggered, but Bobby gave me no time to discuss the strangeness of the situation. He looked at me intently and said, "Do you feel any desire to smoke?"

I shook my head. It was true that the picture of the tray and the lighted lamp was no longer there in the middle of my mind. His question, in fact, surprised me. Why should I want to smoke?

"You have no wish, no thought of wanting it?" he insisted, and again I shook my head.

Bobby said, "Good. You will go to bed now, and eat something if you like. For tomorrow I've given orders that you're not to have visitors. That will be best for a little, but I'll be coming in later tonight to check up."

I started to stand, but paused as a sneeze overtook me. "I've caught cold," I declared. "Oh, Bobby--the analysis. What did you find out?"

"You are very interesting," he said enthusiastically. "Here is Nurse Wong to take care of you." He walked out.

Nurse Wong led me down the passage as fussily as a tug conveying a liner to its berth. She showed me into a first-floor room with an army cot in it, with whitewashed walls and a French window looking out on a wildly overgrown garden. The bed linen was worn and stained with rust. Nurse Wong had already unpacked my things and hung them on a couple of nails stuck in the wall. Of course, I thought drowsily after I got into bed, Chinese don't hang up their clothes but fold them away in boxes. . . . Later, a supper tray lay on my chest. I had no desire to eat the rice covered with brown goo, and after a while it was taken away. Bobby must have come in that night, but I don't remember him. There was no reason why I should have been so sleepy, I told myself when I woke up in the small hours. I wasn't any longer. I was uncomfortable, though I couldn't say just where the discomfort was. Throat? Arms? Legs? Stomach? It wandered about. The only place it seemed to settle for good was in the conscience. I felt very guilty about everything in the world, but it was not agony. It was supportable. Still, I was glad when the sun rose. Jan had once expressed the feeling of opium very well, I reminded myself; he had a bad leg, and after he'd smoked a pipe or two he'd said, "The pain is still there, but it no longer hurts." Well, I said to myself, that's what's happening. The pain has always been there, and now it hurts again. That is all. It is supportable. It is supportable.

One thing helped a lot. Never through the week that was worst did I have the thought that I would feel a lot better if only I could get to a pipe. That was where the hypnotism came in, I realized. Knowing it, however, didn't spoil the effect. It worked. I wasn't locked in my room, and there was no guard at the front door. If I'd wanted to, I could have dressed and walked out and gone home, or to Heh-ven's, but I didn't want to. Of all my urges, that one was missing. I counted the days after which Bobby said I would feel better. I fidgeted and yawned and sneezed, and my eyes wept torrents, and my watch simply refused to run, but I never tried to get out of the hospital.

For a while, whenever Bobby came and I tried to talk, my voice quivered and I wept. "Just nerves. I can't manage words," I sobbed, but he said I was getting on fine. He added that he realized I really wanted to stop smoking, because I hadn't brought in any pills. He said he knew that because he'd searched my things while I was hypnotized. The night after he said that, I had cramps. Cramps are a well-known withdrawal symptom. They might make themselves felt anywhere in the addict's body, but most people get them in the arms--they feel as if all the bones have broken. I had mine in the legs, all the way up to the hips, and at four in the morning I figured out that this was be cause I'd had to wear braces on my legs as a baby. I had never been able to remember the braces, but now, I said to myself, my legs were remembering. Then, as if I'd pleased the gods with this decision, I actually fell asleep for a full hour. It was probably the worst night of all.

Bobby let a few friends in to see me after that. I could go out into the overgrown garden with them and walk a little, taking shaky steps to the creek where ducks swam, and then we would drink tea under a tree. They helped the time pass, which was good, because without distraction it dragged terribly. "The mortal boredom of the smoker who is cured" wrote Cocteau. Most vivid of all, though, was the way I felt about the bed. Night after night, I had to lie on it without sleeping, until I detested it with a bitter, personal spite. I hated the very smell of the mattress. I don't suppose it was really bad, being kapok and nothing else, but for the first time in some years my numbed nose was working, and any scent would have had an unpleasant effect on newly sensitive nerves. To me the mattress stank, and it was lumpy, besides. I knew every lump. I resolved to settle that bed's hash as soon as I was my own master. One morning, I asked Bobby what it would cost to replace it.

"Oh, I don't know. Twenty dollars, I suppose. Why?" he said.

"I want to buy this one when I'm through with it, and burn it in the garden. I hate it."

"If you still want to by then, you may," he said solemnly. "Heh-ven telephoned me today." He paused, looking at me with a cautious expression. "It is not the first time he has tried to reach you," he added, "but I didn't tell you before. Now I think I can trust you to see him. He's coming this afternoon. In fact, he's here now."

"Good." I must have sounded indifferent, because that was the way I felt. I'd almost forgotten Heh-ven. When he walked in, though, I remembered how well I knew him, and how many hours we'd spent smoking together. His eyes looked cloudy, I observed, and his teeth were dirty.

He said, "I'm taking you out."

Bobby said swiftly, "Only for a drive, remember," and looked hard at him.

Heh-ven laughed, and held up his hand reassuringly. "Certainly I'll bring her back. I do not want your patient, Doctor." "You are not going to smoke," said Bobby, "and you are not taking her anywhere where she can smoke. Is that clear?"

"Perfectly clear," said Heh-ven. We walked out the front door--which I hadn't gone out of for a week--and into his car, and drove away. He was faithful to his promise. We went to a tea room and sat there and looked at each other, and he said, "You look all right. How are you?"

"I'm all right," I said, "but Cocteau was telling the truth--you know, about the boredom. Still, I'm glad I did it." I was warming up, though Heh-ven still sounded and looked like a stranger.

"I tried, while you were out there," he admitted, "and I couldn't. It didn't last more than about thirty-six hours. I missed the lamp most of all. I find the lamp very nice."

"Well, that's easy," I answered. "Just light it and lie there." We both giggled. It was the first time I'd been able to make a joke about opium. Then he took me back to the hospital. His eyes when he said goodbye were wet, because he needed his tray. I felt smug.

The afternoon I was formally discharged, three days before I was to go to Chungking, Bobby said, "Well, goodbye. You're free. You're all right now. You can go anywhere you like. I don't want any pay, but remember--if you get the chance to convince some higher-up, tell him my method is effective. You'll do that, won't you? I would like to have that job."

I promised, and thanked him, and we shook hands. My bag was packed, and a car waited outside, but I hesitated. "There's one more thing," I said. "The analysis, remember? I've asked you more than once, but you haven't told me what you found out the day you did it."

All Bobby said was "Oh, yes, that. Very interesting."

What's more, I forgot all about burning the mattress.