After the tenth pipe, the patient began to complain of a bitter taste in his mouth, and said he felt giddy. The doctor at once grasped his hand; but pulse and respiration both remained unaltered.
After the eleventh, Grenits could no longer raise himself unaided from the divan, and, when he tried to walk had to be supported, so tottering and uncertain were his steps.
After the twelfth pipe, which he smoked very slowly, a remarkable change came over the patient. Theodoor was now lying with his eyes closed; but every now and then he opened them and there was now a brightness in his look which offered a strange contrast to his former dull and heavy expression. His sensations, he declared, were highly pleasurable; but he could give no description of his feelings.
“Charles, Charles,” he faintly cried, “give us a little music,” and he turned slightly to van Nerekool. The latter at once sat down at the piano and began very softly to play Chopin’s variations on airs from Don Giovanni. The ecstatic expression on the smoker’s face showed that he took in every chord and every note.
“Go on playing,” he murmured, as soon as Charles left off, “more music—more smoke—give me the pipe.”
This ecstatic state went on increasing with the thirteenth pipe and with it also the craving for opium grew more intense.
Theodoor now began to laugh; he stretched out and waved his arms—the most pleasant pictures were evidently floating through his brain. When Murowski asked him what made him laugh he replied, with a fresh burst of unnatural merriment: “I don’t know, I don’t know!”
Presently he requested van Nerekool to play him a certain passage from Schumann’s Manfred. In this state of ecstasy the patient remained while he smoked his fourteenth and fifteenth pipes. The fixed smile did not leave his features; but now he ceased to reply to the questions of his friends. He also grew restless by degrees and no longer lay still as before.
After the sixteenth pipe Grenits complained of having to leave off smoking while the pipe was being refilled. He grew fretful and found fault with van Rheijn for not having supplied another bedoedan, for then, he said, the experiment might have gone on without interruption. Dr. Murowski observed that the pulse was at 72 and the respiration at 28; that the conjunctiva was much bloodshot and the eyelids heavy and drooping.
After the seventeenth pipe the smoker suddenly started up and attempted to walk; but, after a few steps, fell down and was unable to rise. His friends carried him back to the divan. He begged hard to be allowed to go on smoking and, as the doctor declared there was no danger whatever, the request was complied with.