The Opium Habit | Page 9

of the
struggle would, I supposed, be enhanced, the self-respect and
self-reliance, the opposition and even obduracy of the will would, I
hoped, be enough increased as not seriously to hazard the one great
object of leaving off opium forevcr. Still I dreaded the experiment of
adding a feather's weight to the sufferings I was then enduring. An
accidental circumstance, however, determined me upon making the
trial; but to my surprise, no inconvenience certainly, and scarce a
consciousness of the deprivation accompanied it. The opium suffering
was so overwhelming that any minor want was aimost inappreciable.
The next day brought me down to nine grains of Opium. It was now the
sixteenth day of December, and I had still fifteen days remaining before
the New Year would, as I had resolved, bring me to the complete
relinquishment of the drug. The three days which succeeded the disuse
of tobacco caused no apparent intensification of the suffering I had
been experiencing. On the fourth day, however, and for the fortnight
which succeeded, the agony of pain was inexpressibly dreadful, except
for the transient intervals when the effects of the opium were felt.
For a few days I had been driven to the alternative of using brandy or
increasing the dose of opium. I resorted to the former as the least of the
two evils. In the condition I was now in it caused no perceptible
exhilaration. It did however deaden pain, and made endurance possible.
Especially it helped the weary nights to pass away. At this time an
entirely new series of phenomena presented themselves. The alleviation
caused by brandy was of short continuance. After a few days' use, sleep

for any duration, with or without stimulants, was an impossibility. The
sense of exhausting pain was unremitted day and night. The irritability
both of mind and body was frightful. A perpetual stretching of the
joints followed, as though the body had been upon the rack, while acute
pains shot through the limbs, only sufficiently intermitting to give place
to a sensation of nerveless helplessness. Impatience of a state of rest
seemed now to have become chronic, and the only relief I found was in
constant though a very uncertain kind of walking which daily
threatened to come to an end from general debility. Each morning I
would lounge around the house as long as I could make any pretext for
doing so, and then ride to the city, for at this time the mud was too deep
to think of walking. Once on the pavements, I would wander around the
streets in a weary way for two or three hours, frequently resting in
some shop or store wherever I could find a seat, and only anxious to get
through another long, never-ending day.
The disuse of tobacco, together with the consequences of the
diminished use of opium, had now induced a furious appetite. Dining
early at a restaurant of rather a superior character, where bread,
crackers, pickles, etc., were kept on the table in much larger quantities
than it was supposed possible for one individual to need, my hunger
had become so extreme that I consumed not only all for which I had
specially called, but usually every thing else upon the table, leaving
little for the waiter to remove except empty dishes and his own very
apparent astonishment. This, it should be understood, was a
surreptitious meal, as my own dinner-hour was four o'clock, at which
time I was as ready to do it justice as though innocent of all food since
a heavy breakfast. The hours intervening between this first and second
dinner it was difficult to pass away. The ability to read even a
newspaper paragraph had ceased for a number of days. From habit,
indeed, I continued daily to wander into several of the city book-stores
and into the public library, but the only use I was able to make of their
facilities consisted in sitting, but with frequent change of chairs, and
looking listlessly around me. The one prevailing feeling now was to get
through, somehow or anyhow, the experiment I was suffering under.
Early in the trial my misgivings as to the result had been frequent; but
after the struggle had become thoroughly an earnest one, a kind of
cast-iron determination made me sure of a final triumph. The more the

agony of pain seemed intolerable, the more seemed to deepen the
certainty of my conviction that I should conquer. I thought at times that
I could not survive such wretchedness, but no other alternative for
many days presented itself to my mind but that of leaving off opium or
dying. I recall, indeed, a momentary exception, but the relaxed
resolution lasted only as the lightning-flash lasts, though like the
lightning it irradiated for a brilliant instant