It was the small, still hours of the night that got me. I had to get some sleep and strength for the next day. Every particle of opium I cut off my daily dose cut off just that much sleep. For years in the jail I had slept away all the time I could; I had slept ten or twelve or fourteen hours a day. Now I had to pay back all that sleep I had stolen from myself.
I put in twenty-three hours a day waiting for the twenty-fourth, when I could take my little jolt of hop. Every day when the hour arrived I was tempted to take one more good jolt, so that I could have a decent night’s sleep and forget everything for a few hours.
But the last words of my friend who had rescued me were always in my ears. “Lay away from that stuff. It will make a bum of you.”
Hundreds of times it was just that memory that tipped the balance, and I would take only what I had allowed myself, no more. I believe now I quit because he said that to me. I felt that if I could not do that much, and it was the only thing he ever asked me to do, I wasn’t worthy of the friendship of such a man as he had shown himself to be.
Then I would go to bed and try to sleep. After several hours I would get up and go out for a walk, to get some exercise. I would walk as fast as I could for three or four hours in the darkness, always keeping watch for a policeman or for any one who knew me.
I would walk until I was tired out, because I was still pretty weak, and it did not take much to tire me. Then I would hope to sleep a little.
But in the long, still hours my nerves demanded opium. And I resisted and fought it out till my strength got down to the vanishing point.
Then I would get up and drench myself with whisky and wash it down with absinth. My room looked like a cross between a drug store and a distillery. I had bottles of tonics, invalid’s port wine, whisky and absinth.
I would take a drink out of every bottle in the room and fall down on the bed or on the floor in a stupor and sleep for a few hours.
In this manner I stuck it out. I took a small portion of hop each evening, reducing it daily according to the system I planned. Finally I got to the stage where I could skip one day’s portion and get two hours’ natural sleep.